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What Constant Surveillance Is Doing to Children

2026-11-09T07:30:00-05:00

Illustrations by Miguel Porlan

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No one warned me, when I became a parent, about all the apps that would colonize my phone: the app for the baby monitor where I could gaze at my daughter, even when my husband and I finally had a night out. The app for the Snoo smart bassinet we rented in bleary-eyed desperation, which logged her sleep by the minute. The app where I logged her sleep manually because the Snoo was not accurate enough. And still, I remember thinking that I had been quite restrained. I mean, I didn’t buy the $299 Owlet smart sock, which would send her pulse rate and oxygen saturation directly to my phone, or the $290 Nanit monitor, which would track her every breath.

Our day care did not have a livestream—see? restraint⁠—but that is indeed a service some now offer. Preschool required its own app, though, as did summer camp. Soon my phone began pinging with messages about playground spats and injuries as minor as paper cuts. As I write this, I’ve learned that my daughter woke from her nap at 2:17 p.m.

The panopticon doesn’t end with babies and toddlers. Parents with children older than mine tell me they obsess over grades, which are updated instantly with each new assignment or quiz. They watch their kids via the camera on their Ring doorbell; they monitor text messages. They scrutinize daily photos from sleepaway camp—once a time of complete disconnection—for evidence of sunburns or social ostracism. Why is he standing apart from everyone else? Why isn’t he smiling?

But most of all, parents track their kids everywhere they go. Location tracking might start, for younger kids, with an AirTag slipped into a backpack, jacket, or shoe. (Skechers now makes shoes with a dedicated compartment in the sole.) For kids old enough to have their own smartwatch or phone, the GPS is built right in—and so parents keep tracking them into adolescence and even beyond. Three-quarters of parents with teenagers ages 14 to 17 had access to their kids’ location data, according to one study.

[From the April 2014 issue: Hanna Rosin on the overprotected kid]

Even among college students, one-third were being tracked by their parents, according to another study, conducted in 2021 by Michaeline Jensen, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Five years later, Jensen says, that number is even higher: More than half of college students are being tracked, per her unpublished data. In her own lab, she’s learned that even her graduate students continue to be tracked; she told me about one student, 29, who recently defended her dissertation but whose mom still checks—and calls about—her location.

If watching your kid’s real-time location isn’t enough, there is Life360, a tracking app that allows parents to review up to 30 days of time-stamped location history, monitor driving to make sure their kids stay within the speed limit, and get alerts when they arrive at or leave saved locations, such as home, school, and, yes, a college dorm. “Holy sh—,” a psychologist who studies kids’ resilience started to say when I described the app to him. But a college psychiatrist whose patients include undergrads needed no introduction to Life360. “Students spend so much time complaining to me about that thing,” she said. The app has 102 million active monthly users and counting.

What is all of this tracking doing to us? Lately, I have been posing a version of this question to child-development experts as well as parents and teens themselves. “It’s funny,” Kaitlyn Burnell, a psychologist at UNC Chapel Hill who has studied digital tracking, remarked when I asked her the question. “As you’re saying that, I literally got a notification from my 1-year-old’s day care saying that she ate a graham cracker.”

I have not yet found a randomized controlled trial parsing the effects of parental notifications about graham crackers—nor, to be more serious, are there any long-term data on outcomes for parents who use these apps to monitor their babies from birth. But while it’s hard to argue that newborns are suffering from overattentive parenting, developmental psychology does suggest that constant monitoring eventually becomes unhealthy. One of the primary developmental tasks of adolescence, Burnell told me, is achieving a measure of independence. “If you have this metaphorical umbilical cord,” she asked, “is that sense of independence going to be adequately developed?”

[From the May 2020 issue: Kate Julian on childhood in an anxious age]

The more I probed what constant monitoring is doing to kids, the more I also started to wonder what it is doing to parents, on the other end of the umbilical cord. Our phones promise us a kind of omniscience from the moment a kid is born. Even when we are physically apart, we remain digitally tethered. But as parents, we are supposed to undergo our own transformation as our children grow, relinquishing the knowledge and control we once held. “That’s an important developmental task for parents too,” Burnell said.

And here, we parents might be failing ourselves. We are certainly not thriving. In 2024, the U.S. surgeon general issued a public-health advisory about the mental health of parents, echoing a similar advisory about youth mental health three years earlier. In a national survey in which 18 percent of teens reported anxiety, so did 18 percent of parents. For all the recent concern about a crisis in teen mental health, parents are clearly struggling too.

I think of the immortal words of my 3-year-old this morning: “Calm down, Mom!”

When Maureen Paschal, a college counselor in North Carolina, sent her daughter off to college a few years ago, she was promptly invited to join a group chat for moms of the girls living on the same floor. The moms, she recalls, tracked their daughters’ location during sorority rush, watching as they moved from house to house. But the incident that stuck in her mind came one fall morning, when a mom messaged the group chat that her daughter was still in her dorm room. She had a math test in 10 minutes. Could someone ask their kid to go knock on her door?

Miguel Porlan

“I just was like, This is too much. It’s just too much,” Paschal told me. But not everyone thought so. Another mom soon replied: My daughter is on her way.

In a sense, the scene that Paschal described was nothing new. Helicopter parenting came into popular use some 20 years ago, and articles about parents who trail their kids, metaphorically and literally, on campus still drop every fall, like acorns from an oak tree. But what stood out to me about this anecdote were all the phones—and how frictionless they make it to indulge every parental anxiety that pops in your head.

[Read: Russell Shaw’s Raising Resilient Children newsletter]

One step leads so easily to another: If you’re invited to a group chat for parents, why not join? If you can see where your kid is on campus, why not look? If they’re not where they are supposed to be, why not say something? All it takes is a few taps on your phone, which you pull out reflexively anyway whenever you sit on the couch.

Back in the dumbphone era, my own mother could not have spent all day messaging the moms of my freshman dormmates even if she’d wanted to. And I feel quite confident that zero of my teenage friends’ parents tracked their location—again, because they couldn’t, at least not without an alarming amount of effort.

Then, in 2015, Apple made a software change that may have done more to normalize location tracking than anything else: The company began shipping iPhones preloaded with Find My Friends, allowing people to share their location with one another. As the name implies, the app was not originally created for families, but it’s since become a default option for parents tracking their kids. (The app merged with Find My iPhone in 2019 to become just Find My.) Life360, which launched in 2008 after one of its founders saw families trying to find one another in Hurricane Katrina’s chaotic aftermath, has taken off in recent years too. Its monthly active users have quadrupled since 2020, with revenue totaling almost half a billion dollars last year. These are the two most popular location-tracking apps. Both are effortless to use.

When I first talked with teens and young adults about location tracking, I would start by asking when their parents began tracking them. I soon realized that this was like asking when they began eating solid foods. Like, always? For many kids, location tracking came automatically with their first smartwatch or phone, without much ado. For many parents, too, location tracking eased into their lives because it was available.

“Once we had that tool,” a mom of four told me, “it felt like we were irresponsible if we didn’t use it.” I remember this feeling as well, when I first saw neighborhood moms discussing how to attach an AirTag to a 3-year-old. Wait, was I supposed to be doing that? Had I been cavalier—irresponsible—by sending my kid off to preschool without one?

Let’s first say this: Location tracking is so useful! Convenience and coordinating logistics are the main reasons cited by about a third of parents who use it, according to preliminary data collected by William Pelham III, a UC San Diego psychologist who last year began a nearly 1,000-family study about location tracking during adolescence. Pelham, who came to this topic after studying substance use and delinquency in teens, told me his original interviews were geared toward asking about behaviors such as breaking curfew, having sex, and taking drugs. The third parent who came in tried to stop the interview, telling the researchers, “You guys don’t get it. I use these apps purely for logistics. I use it to figure out when I’m picking him up at high school: Is he at the east door or the west door? ”

For parents who use location tracking only like this, it’s not that complicated⁠—no need to overthink it. But safety is another big motivation, cited as the primary reason by 40 percent of parents in Pelham’s data. And Pelham is interested in how parents ensure safety through location tracking: “What is the behavior? Does that mean checking every single day?” Multiple times a day? Calling—or even driving over if the parent sees something they don’t like?

Faith, a recent college graduate, told me her mom watched her closely on Life360 in high school. (I’m using only first or middle names for some of the people I interviewed, so they can speak candidly about their family life.) “She would call me when I’m on the highway, lecturing me about how fast I was going,” she said. “Or there was this one time that I was at a friend’s house and she didn’t recognize the address. And she went to that friend’s house from my location and knocked on the door.” It was embarrassing, Faith said, but her friend wasn’t particularly shocked; this kind of thing happens when everyone is being tracked. When the app glitched, as it sometimes does, her mom would drive out to the random location she saw on Life360. Faith’s relationship with her mom was rocky to start with in high school, which made Faith closed off, which made her mom more dependent on Life360, which made Faith feel even less trusted—a downward spiral that many experts I spoke with warned about.

The handful of studies on location tracking of teens have found mixed or only very small effects on the teen-parent relationship, though they also have not probed too deeply into how the parents use it. (Nor have they, altogether, found a consistent relationship between tracking and socioeconomic class.) In general, the studies don’t distinguish between the parent who looks at their teen’s location only during pickup and the parent driving out to any unknown location on Life360.

Many parents who use location tracking, I suspect, fall somewhere between these two extremes. Watching their kid’s location dot is not about control so much as peace of mind. The apps offer a “perception of safety,” Gregory Chase, who studied location tracking of teens as a Ph.D. student in Jensen’s lab at UNC Greensboro, told me. He elaborated on the difference: “When you know someone’s location, you don’t necessarily know who they’re with or what kind of behavior they could be engaging in.” You can see your son in his dorm room and not know he’s binge drinking; you can see your daughter at a friend’s and not know about a sexual assault, the majority of which are perpetrated by someone known to the victim. But at least you can rule out your kid lying in a ditch somewhere?

A persistent theme in my conversations, and in conversations that experts say they have with parents, is the sense that the world has become more dangerous and too many risks lurk out there. This is not borne out in the statistics: In just about every way, teenagers are living safer lives than ever. They are not only less likely to be victims of violence than in the 1990s, when crime peaked; they are also less likely to smoke, drink, use hard drugs, or get pregnant. The rates of all these behaviors have plummeted by more than half. “There’s some kind of risk-taking dimension that’s definitely down in teens,” Pelham said.

The pendulum swing toward safety has real benefits, but it may have costs too. Teenagers today are also less likely to get a job, go on a date, or drive—all of which involve some small but tangible risk or uncertainty in the physical world. Their lives have turned inward, and when they do venture out, they’re tracked.

By coincidence or not, the rates of depression and anxiety in teenagers have steadily increased. These trends “feel intuitively connected, right?” Pelham said. He is careful to acknowledge that this observation is more inference than empirical fact. The cause of the teen mental-health crisis is a topic of debate, much of it recently centered on the role of social media. But it’s hard to imagine that a diminished tolerance for risk and uncertainty in teenagers is not affecting their well-being.

And perhaps parents feel it on some level too, because even those who closely track their kids spoke to me with evident nostalgia about their own freer, wilder youth—the opposite of what they are giving their children. “A lot of parents today are just super hypocritical,” Henry Stuart, a college junior, told me. His dad still tracks him. “This is the same generation that talks all the time about Oh, it was so great in the ’80s; like, we could just ride our bikes all around the neighborhood, and, you know, we would come home when the sun goes down,” Stuart said. “But then these are the same parents that are on Life360, stalking their kids and watching their every move.”

Miguel Porlan

Thomas Parker, a dad of two and stepdad of four, encountered location tracking before he had teens of his own. (He doesn’t track but his ex-wife does.) He had used a version of it, called Blue Force Tracking, while deployed in the military. “Everybody hated it,” he told me. Well, clarified Parker, now a mental-health counselor in Arkansas, “we loved it, in that if we were ambushed or something and we needed help, they could tell exactly where we were—but it also turned into a nanny state. Like, You’re only supposed to be driving 30 and you’re driving 35. You have to slow down.” Even in a war zone, it could be too much.

Russell Shaw told me a story about getting lost on a family vacation when he was 7 years old. He had gone to a video arcade with his older brother, who left first, after asking if Shaw knew the way back to the motel. “I said, ‘Uh huh.’ ” His brother left. “Then I walked out of the place and I had no idea where to go.” What next? This was the 1970s: no cellphones, no GPS. In truth, he was not far, perhaps a block away, but in his little-kid brain, he was utterly, deeply lost. He wandered. He eventually found an adult, who took him to the police, who drove him around until he spotted his parents walking down the street in search of him. “It sucked at the time,” he said, “and then the next time something like that happened, I thought, Oh, I can get through this.”

In his telling some half a century later, this story is not about the traumatic experience of getting lost but about how his younger self overcame it. What if his parents had been able to immediately swoop in because they saw his coordinates on their phone? There would have been no getting lost, no “it sucked,” but also no eventual triumph. Shaw, who until recently was the head of Georgetown Day School, in Washington, D.C., has written a newsletter for The Atlantic about raising resilient kids and is working on a book about the topic. He wonders what all of this location tracking means for kids’ resilience. “If we are being tracked or surveilled, and there is a ubiquitous sense that we can be rescued, are we not fully internalizing that sense of our own capacity?” he said. “And ultimately, there will come a time when we do need to stand on our own two feet.”

Shaw’s story of getting lost stayed with me because I did, in fact, hear the inverted version from parents who track their kids. The modern tale goes something like this: A teen makes a mistake while driving or taking the subway; in a panic, they call their parents, who look up their location and coach them back to where they need to be—thank goodness for tracking.

One parent who recounted such a scenario is Louise Barkhuus, who actually studies location tracking as part of her research at NYU on human-computer interaction. She has been interested in the topic since 2003; early on, she found it difficult to recruit volunteers willing to install location-tracking apps, so unusual—even invasive—was the technology back then. (These days, she says, “it’s so easy.”) In her own life, when Barkhuus’s daughter first started taking the subway alone, she kept a close eye on her location, and would text if the app showed her on a train going in the wrong direction. Several times, her daughter called her mom lost, asking where to go.

I wasn’t sure, at first, how Barkhuus felt about micromanaging her daughter’s subway rides. But when I told her about Shaw’s story of getting lost at 7, and his worry that parents are no longer giving kids the opportunity to navigate these situations on their own, she responded, “I think it’s completely correct.” In the moment, though, what mother is going to hang up on her panicking daughter? “We’re oversurveilling our children in a way that’s not necessary,” Barkhuus said, “but I don’t know how to take it away.”

Barkhuus’s own research has chronicled how location tracking has become normalized, even among kids themselves. Sure, teens and young adults with particularly intrusive parents resent the stalking—some have learned to get around tracking, by tinkering with the settings or leaving their phone behind in a friend’s mailbox—but many find reassurance in being tracked. (They are also all sharing their location with their friends.) Some of the college students she interviewed actually initiated it with their less tech-savvy parents. They’ve internalized the idea that they need it. Even Faith, who hated her mom’s use of Life360, nevertheless said she understood the underlying motivation: “The world was getting more dangerous and it’s just a safety thing, which I agree with fully.”

Where might teenagers be hearing that the world is now so dangerous, other than from their parents? Over the past half century, the norms of parenting have veered hard toward safetyism. My colleague Hanna Rosin wrote about this shift in her 2014 Atlantic article “The Overprotected Kid,” in which she observed that the independence of her own childhood seemed unbelievable a generation later. From 1971 to 2010, in one large U.K. study, the percentage of parents who allowed their 7- and 8-year-olds to walk home from school alone fell from 80 percent to 6 percent. Children absorb the sense that danger can lurk around every street corner, because it’s what their parents taught them. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when researchers look at the risk factors for anxiety in children, one of the strongest is having an anxious parent; genetics plays a role, but so does parenting.

Barkhuus told me another story, about a time she took the train on her own as a girl of 12. She grew up in Denmark in the ’80s, but the freedom with which she remembers moving through the world is not so different from what Americans of the same generation recall. One day, there was a big train accident. Barkhuus was fine, but the trains were delayed on the way home, and she was an hour late to her brother’s birthday party.

I imagined how this would play out in 2026, if a 12-year-old spent an hour unaccounted for: Mom calling, calling, calling; checking the news and seeing that there was a train accident; calling; fearing the worst; calling, calling, calling until her kid finally showed up or called back. When Barkhuus got home, she remembers, her mom had simply assumed that her daughter was off doing her thing. She was annoyed, initially, at Barkhuus’s tardiness to the party, but she had not constructed a whole scary scenario in her head. “She didn’t think about an accident. She wasn’t worried.”

Without the expectation of being constantly connected, her mother had simply gone on with the birthday party. She trusted that her daughter would eventually show up, and she did.

But what if something had happened—outside the video arcade, or on the train? If you, like me, have a tendency to worry, perhaps this shadow of doubt also appeared unbidden in your brain, in which case, boy, do I have a Life360 commercial for you. It opens in a kitchen as a mother sings to her teenage daughter:

You are my whole wide world,
My heart, my joy, my baby girl.
You’ll never know how much I love you!
When you’re gone I just think of you …
Dying.

Her voice drops. The live-action commercial turns into a cartoon enacting her words.

Every time you leave my sight,
When you drive to school or stay out at night,
This is where I go,
To the million ways inside my brain
In which you could die at any given time.
You could bleed out on the street or get stuck in a mine.
You could get kidnapped by bandits.
Some creep could harvest all your organs and then sell them online.
There are a million ways inside my brain
In which you could die at any given time.
You could be flattened like a pancake by hydraulic machines,
Or be sucked into a wood chipper by the leg of your jeans …

And so it continues, with more and more outlandish scenarios for a whole minute, as the daughter rolls her eyes.

It’s a funny ad, very tongue-in-cheek, I remarked to Lenore Skenazy, who quickly interjected. “You laugh, a little ruefully, but they normalize the idea that catastrophizing—‘worst-first thinking,’ I call it—imagining your kid dead is just the normal,” she said. “And the only way to assuage it is to check, check, check, check your phone.” The commercial ends with the daughter handing her mom a phone installed with Life360. “There,” the daughter says. “No more freaking out.” Just check Life360.

Skenazy is one of the foremost public advocates against this need to “check, check, check, check” on your kids, a position she held long before their phones were beaming their location into our pockets. In 2008, as a columnist for The New York Sun, she wrote about leaving her 9-year-old at a Manhattan Bloomingdale’s with a subway map, a MetroCard, and $20 to find his way home alone. He made it, “ecstatic with independence,” she wrote, but her actions provoked such hostile backlash, she was inspired to a new life’s mission. She came out with a book, Free-Range Kids, and a reality-TV show, World’s Worst Mom, where she coaxed overprotective parents to, for example, let their tween daughter use a public bathroom by herself. Skenazy also co-founded the nonprofit Let Grow to promote kids’ independence, along with Daniel Shuchman, a private investor and philanthropist; Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist best known as the author of the anti-phone treatise The Anxious Generation; and Peter Gray, an evolutionary psychologist who recently came out with his own book blaming the decline in teen mental health on schools, rather than phones. Let Grow’s founders may disagree on why, but they do all agree that society is squelching kids’ independence—to their detriment.

I mention all of this to suggest that, on one hand, Skenazy’s message of child independence has found a receptive audience, at least in certain circles. She is an excellent messenger too, by turns funny and unsparing. Skenazy and her co-founders at Let Grow are frequently featured in magazines such as this one. And parents who inhabit brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods like mine talk often of aspiring to some flavor of free-range parenting.

On the other hand, the past 20 years have been a long, exhausting march toward more parental surveillance—and surveillance in general. Since Free-Range Kids was published, the percentage of parents tracking their kids’ location has risen from approximately zero to 100 percent. (I exaggerate, but not that much.) And as I discovered when I had a baby, the products for monitoring your kids at a young age have multiplied with technological progress. When Skenazy’s kids were small, baby monitors were more or less audio-only affairs. In this age of smart monitors, she said, imagine what monitoring a baby’s every breath does to a parent. “You’re supposed to be holding your own breath to say, ‘Okay, she breathed. [Gasp.] She breathed. [Gasp.] She breathed. [Gasp.] She breathed. [Gasp.]’ And so you’re turning regular life into a near disaster that you must be alerted to all the time.” An app like this sells short-term peace of mind, she argued, “but it delivers the opposite. It delivers the impression that your child is only safe because you are in control.”

And if hypervigilance is the only way to keep your kid safe, how can you ever stop watching? Today, it’s monitoring your newborn’s every breath; tomorrow, it’ll be physically hovering over your toddler’s every step; in 20 years, it’ll still be tracking their every step, now from afar. Anxiety becomes a form of caring, surveillance a form of love.

Most parents agree—in the abstract—that kids need to confront their own challenges and make their own mistakes as they grow up. They need to learn how to ask for help when lost. They need to face the consequences of oversleeping for a math test before they oversleep for a job interview. But when you’re hovering digitally, phone in hand, it is so natural to want to help and so easy to intervene.

Miguel Porlan

Skenazy argues that the apps deprive parents of the opportunity to develop their own muscles: “There’s no reps of your letting go of your kid, living without knowledge for a little while, and then them returning safe and sound. And you’re realizing, Wow, I don’t have to worry every single second.” Instead we have been trained to check and check again, as if reassurance can be found only on our phones.

Perhaps the last person I expected to endorse Skenazy’s views was Chris Hulls, co-founder, executive chairman, and until last year also CEO of Life360. “I really like her,” he told me. “I agree with her on so much.” Hulls grew up in Marin County, California, as a free-range kid himself—very free-range, in fact. At age 11, he told me, he traveled to Kenya on his own, where he lived with the family of an Episcopal priest whom he had recently met. “It was out in the bush with no power, no water, not only no cellphones, but no phones period, so I was completely, completely unfindable.” He could call his parents only on a weekly trip to Nairobi. “If something bad happened, it would have taken probably days for my parents to find out, and I almost got bitten by a puff adder out there,” he said. “That could have killed me.”

Hulls didn’t die, obviously, and the experience was a formative one; after high school, he joined the Air Force, then studied business at UC Berkeley, and then founded Life360, which began as a school project after Hurricane Katrina. The early years of running the app were a grind—he lived in a friend’s closet—until it finally took off. Hulls has not chosen the risk-averse path in life.

He agrees with Skenazy about the importance of kids’ independence. And he agrees that “safetyism is a thing, and it’s not a good thing.” But in a world where parents are already preoccupied with safety, he argues, Life360 actually grants teenagers more independence, by giving parents the peace of mind to allow activities they otherwise would not. “Absolutely some parents do go over the top,” he said. “But I think the average teen is getting more freedom and autonomy, not less.” Life360’s current CEO, Lauren Antonoff, told me the average user opens the app five times a day; a spokesperson later added that less than 4 percent open it 10 times a day and less than 1 percent more than 20 times a day. Most app usage, Antonoff said, is driven by people managing school pickup and other day-to-day logistics, not monitoring for safety.

Safety is core to the company’s business, though. Life360 is a freemium app: Basic location tracking is free, but extra safety functions, such as individual driver reports and additional days of location history, can be unlocked for $9.99 to $24.99 a month. (Like all freemium apps, it is constantly nudging you to upgrade.) Safety “drives a lot of our retention and our revenue,” Hulls told me. So what was the intent of the ad, I asked, where the mom sings about her daughter dying? “I thought it was the opposite of fearmongering,” he said. “It’s making fun of fearmongering.” But perhaps the real genius is that it does both. The ad has been viewed nearly 9 million times on YouTube.

Maureen Paschal, the mom who told me about the parent group chat for her daughter’s dorm, recounted that story because she herself understood the impulse to track. “I knew I would be obsessed,” she said, if she had her daughter’s location. Paschal’s solution was to make her husband use the app on his phone. She could ask for her daughter’s location in a real emergency, but by placing a big obstacle—her husband—in the way, she could not check all the time.

Other moms (yes, it is mostly moms who track) also told me about how they came to check the apps out of compulsion, habit, or simple longing. When Julie Bohannon-Wyczynski’s daughter went to college, she would open up Life360 every day. “Everything in me wants to check and text her,” she recalls thinking. “I need to let it go.” She found herself similarly obsessed with her younger sons’ grades in their school app, questioning them about any suspicious zeros she saw. “Mom, the teacher has not put in the grades yet,” her sons would say, rolling their eyes. Bohannon-Wyczynski, who is a therapist herself, soon realized that checking whenever she had 10 minutes free at work was not healthy behavior.

[From the July/August 2011 issue: Lori Gottlieb on how to land your kid in therapy]

Indeed, to psychologists, repeatedly checking an app is the opposite of how you’re supposed to deal with anxiety. This behavior is called reassurance seeking. “It is a trap,” Camilo Ortiz, a clinical psychologist on Long Island, told me. “You feel better immediately, and then you need it again.” Or sometimes, you feel worse. Several years ago, Ortiz said, he saw his daughter’s location in the middle of a wooded park during the school day. “I called her and I couldn’t get through to her, and I became panicked,” he said. “I drove home 100 miles an hour because I was convinced she was kidnapped in a park.” (She had actually gone on the subway, and the app had glitched.) “If I were to do it over again, I would track much less.”

Recently, Ortiz, who is on Let Grow’s advisory board, started piloting what he calls independence therapy for anxious kids. The therapy has kids brainstorm and carry out a series of activities unsupervised, such as taking the bus or walking to the deli to buy cold cuts. These activities are meant to expose kids to small doses of uncertainty and discomfort in scenarios that are not the direct source of their anxieties. (By analogy, Ortiz pointed to a small study where participants who were treated with exposure therapy to spiders became less fearful of heights too.)

One of the first participants, Ortiz said, was a 9-year-old girl who was afraid to sleep in her own bed. She chose to ride the city bus by herself. The girl actually missed her stop, but she found a grown-up, who helped her get off and backtrack the extra blocks home. That night, she slept in her own bed for the first time. “I can’t know for sure, but I think the getting-lost part and realizing, Oh, even if the worst thing happens, I can figure it out was crucial for her in terms of her own sense of self-efficacy,” Ortiz said. Hers is one of four cases that he published in a 2024 study.

When Ortiz pitches independence therapy to parents, “the first question is: But I can still track them, right?” Sure, he tells them, but the ultimate goal is no tracking at all. Just as the therapy teaches kids to tolerate uncertainty and discomfort, it’s meant to teach parents the same. “We think this is a stealth treatment for parents,” he said.

Recently, he’s been experimenting with a version of independence therapy for just parents. They meet as a group over Zoom before having their kids carry out a daily unsupervised activity for three weeks. Can treating parents indirectly treat kids? (This basic idea also underlies a more established treatment program called SPACE, or Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions, which has generated enormous interest lately; it teaches parents to stop accommodating their child’s anxieties.) One dad who went through Ortiz’s program last year, whom I’ll call by his middle name, Thomas, told me he had never considered himself anxious. He let his 12-year-old son walk to school and to the park with a friend—albeit while tracking his son’s location and sometimes even following on foot “like a private investigator, just to, I don’t know, make sure they didn’t die.”

In therapy, Thomas learned that he was supposed to eventually give up tracking. “Well, that’s insane,” he recalls thinking. “I must know at all times where he is. When he’s 25, I’m going to want to know where he is.” He described that moment as “a turning point when I was like, Oh fuck, I’m just as crazy as all these other parents.” Thomas did stop following his son on foot—but the tracking, well, he hasn’t been able to turn that off yet.

Other parents told me about learning to counter not just their own anxieties but those of other adults as well, now that everyone’s unused to seeing children walking around alone. “Are you really going to let Casey go into Walmart by herself?” Darleen Smith remembers her family asking about her 11-year-old daughter. Smith did let her daughter go to Walmart, and also to CVS and the nail salon and a movie and to set up a lemonade stand, which became six or seven lemonade stands. “She lasted, like, three, four hours some days, and she wasn’t complaining at all. That surprised me,” she said. Things didn’t always work out perfectly; her daughter asked neighbors if she could walk their dog and no one took her up on it. But in giving her daughter the space to fail, she also gave her the space to exceed her expectations. Casey made more than $1,000 at her lemonade stands.

You don’t need to sign up for independence therapy to let your kid take the bus or walk through Walmart untracked. You can just do it. You can just do things. But the program, I noticed in my conversations, gave parents much-needed permission to break social norms, however uncomfortable that made everyone involved. It almost always went better than they expected.

When Courtney Perrone, another parent in the group therapy, started having her 9- and 10-year-old daughters plan dinner and buy groceries by themselves, other parents in her small town realized that their kids could do this too. “It ended up sparking even a little bit more independence, I would say, around the neighborhood,” she told me. “You now have multiple kids at the grocery store by themselves.” And that’s the thing about social norms: We create them, and we can re-create them too.

This article appears in the December 2026 print edition with the headline “The Geo-Located Generation.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Biden: What Trump Did on January 6 ‘Should Follow Him to His Grave’

2026-11-09T05:00:00-05:00

Eight days after the 2024 election, I honored a presidential tradition by hosting a visit from the president-elect. Jill and I met President Trump and his entourage in the Diplomatic Reception Room, and then I escorted him into the Oval Office for our formal meeting, accompanied only by our chiefs of staff, Jeff Zients and Susie Wiles. He and I sat in chairs near a roaring fire; Jeff and Susie sat on sofas. Trump was immediately chatty and surprised me by adopting a tone so friendly that I thought he might be putting me on. It bordered on fawning.

“You know, Joe, if it weren’t for politics, I believe we’d be good friends.” I think I blinked, too stunned to respond. Then he kept going, as if intoxicated by the curious conversational path he had chosen. “Yes, if it weren’t for politics, we’d spend all our time golfing together.” He said my performance on job creation had been “extraordinary.” He added that he’d been relieved he didn’t have to run against me. I didn’t really understand why he was buttering me up, so I cut off his compliments to move on to the business at hand. I wanted to give him a wide-ranging overview of the issues that I thought would dominate his presidency. It was essentially a tour of the world, including Ukraine, NATO, Russia, Gaza and the Middle East, China, the Americas, and Africa. He nodded appreciatively. But I noticed a curious pattern: He focused on the personalities of the leaders, as if we were sharing gossip about people at a dinner party, not discussing issues of global significance. Still, I had a lot to share with him, and our conversation, scheduled for 30 minutes, ran for close to two hours.

Despite that meeting, I was worried that the successful policies pursued by my administration would be on the chopping block. All presidents must confront a feeling that their legacy is vulnerable to the pendulum of politics and the whims of their successors. In my case, that feeling was magnified by the dismissive and destructive nature of Donald Trump, who seemed unable to tolerate the idea that someone else’s accomplishments might be worth building on rather than tearing down.

This article has been adapted from Joe Biden’s forthcoming book, Promise Me, America.

On day one, Trump reversed many of my decisions. I had rejoined the Paris climate accord on my first day in office; he canceled our participation, again, on his. That meant we were one of four countries outside the treaty; the other three were Iran, Libya, and Yemen. That was not a great look to the rest of the world. After that, it was like a bonfire, as one climate measure after another went up in smoke. That first day, he also signed executive orders to open up public lands to drilling for oil, to end support for electric vehicles, and to cancel projects for wind and solar energy. Not only was that going to accelerate climate change; it would cripple our ability to compete with China in some of the biggest industries of the future. Trump announced these policies at a rally as, at a five-star hotel across from the White House, oil and gas executives sipped champagne and nibbled on Pop-Tarts emblazoned with his image.

He also pardoned nearly 1,600 insurrectionists who had been convicted for their violent acts on January 6, 2021. In the new regime, it was as if that terrible day had never happened at all. Indeed, that seemed to be the point. When a plaque was finally placed in the Capitol to honor the Capitol’s defenders, it was installed at 4 a.m., with no ceremony. That was an insult to the Capitol Police, and to all Americans who believe in the sanctity of our democratic elections.

[Alex Kalman: The letters that outgoing presidents wrote to their successors]

And we know the truth. Donald Trump led an insurrection. His goal was to remain in power after the American people had voted him out of office. That’s the truth. It was a violent assault. The rioters weren’t “peaceful protesters.” They came armed to stop the official certification of a legitimate election. The criminals who attacked law-enforcement officers that day didn’t deserve pardons. They deserved prison terms. To this day, Trump and his supporters continue to preen and posture like they’re supporters of law enforcement. Here’s my view: You don’t get to turn a blind eye to cops being punched, speared, sprayed, and brutalized and call yourself a friend of law enforcement. What Trump did on January 6, 2021, should never be forgotten. It should follow him to his grave.

In the days and weeks that followed Trump’s inauguration, the damage deepened. As before, the lies kept coming. They began on his first day, with the utterly discredited claim that he had defeated me in 2020. And they gained momentum as Trump took a wrecking ball to our traditions and institutions—at times literally, as when he tore down the East Wing of the White House (after promising that he would not).

Although Trump had won only a narrow victory, with less than half of the American people behind him, he was set to govern divisively. The 19th-century French diplomat and writer Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans lived out the daily miracle of democracy—listening to one another’s concerns at town meetings, stepping forward to run for office, accepting defeats and moving on. He called these values and behaviors our “habits of the heart.” I was worried that these precious habits could quickly corrode under a government that tried to tear down institutions and inflame hatreds.

It was clearly going to be a crueler government. We were the richest society in history, and considerably richer than we’d been four years earlier. But now it seemed like anyone who worked for the federal government in a job that helped the disenfranchised or the disabled or the needy was on the chopping block—especially after Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency began to cut hundreds of thousands of jobs.

It was also going to be a government that stoked racial tensions instead of calming them. The new administration would launch a campaign to end the birthright-citizenship protections of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, a proud legacy of the Civil War. ICE officers would comb American cities, using expanded police powers to round up brown and Black people and detain them far from the courts and local police.

We would be a less tolerant society, with raging conspiracy theories actively promoted by the White House and Trump’s constant and increasingly unhinged social-media feed. We would be a sicker society. MAGA anger over COVID meant that the government would drastically pull back its support for vaccines, leaving the country vulnerable to higher rates of measles and other diseases. We also withdrew from the World Health Organization, a decision that removed us from essential international coordination against disease outbreaks.

We would be a less democratic society, with a supine Congress, less balance among the branches of government, and an executive largely impervious to any guardrails, especially after the 2024 Supreme Court decision that ruled that presidents have immunity from prosecution for nearly any act that falls within their official duties. There was no precedent for that ruling. Common sense didn’t support it. There was no constitutional basis for it. It was inexplicable. Indefensible. And a death knell for accountability. Donald Trump was a convicted felon and a sexual abuser. He had mishandled classified documents. He had led an insurrection. Now the Supreme Court seemed to grant Trump blanket immunity. No nation can survive character-free leadership for long. And we’re no exception to that rule.

Democratic states would see their federal funding cut with no explanation. The administration would also try to gut newspapers, nonprofits, and civil-society organizations—the lifeblood of democracy. It would do these things despite winning less than 50 percent of the popular vote in the 2024 election. Voting, too, would become more difficult, with threats of soldiers patrolling polling stations, and a constant drumbeat of false accusations about election fraud.

[Watch: Biden’s farewell]

We would be a more fearful society, looking over our shoulders at one another, worried about dropping our kids off at school, worried about going to the voting booth, nervous about government surveillance and the increasing presence of masked government agents, heavily armed, in our streets. Franklin D. Roosevelt was wise to establish freedom from fear as a core human right.

And we would be increasingly on our own. I had worked constantly to strengthen our alliances, NATO above all but also AUKUS, the Quad, and the United States–Japan–South Korea friendship in the Indo-Pacific. They would all languish in a world of “America First.” That would make us that much more vulnerable in any competition with China or Russia. To make matters worse, global confidence in the United States to do the right thing was once again plummeting. After years of principled diplomacy, at the head of the world’s community of democracies, we were launching wars of aggression with incoherent and contradictory motives that alienated our allies and did nothing to promote the rule of law—quite the opposite.

In all of these ways, I am troubled by my successor, and find myself asking: How can we reclaim our better angels? It will surely take time; it may be the work of a generation or more. But we are not condemned to lives of blind acceptance. We are built for lives of purpose. We can reject efforts to define us by our differences and divide us. I believe in the young people I met throughout my four years in office. And I take heart from the knowledge that we have been in dark places before.

The phrase better angels comes from such a moment. Lincoln’s first inaugural address may have struck some listeners as naive, calling on Americans to treat one another with more respect, when so much anger was in the air and seven states had already seceded (to be followed by four more). But Lincoln was right that rank-and-file citizens, from all walks of life, would stand up to defend a certain vision of their country against an alien project being imposed on them. That included more than half a million immigrants, proud to serve their adopted country by enlisting in the Union Army. The result was a stronger republic that more truly lived up to the aspirations of the Founders.

As Americans, we are the beneficiaries of 10 generations of principled leadership, going back to the Founders, who wrote the words we still live by. Our problems are formidable—but we already possess the skills needed to solve them. In my speeches, I have often said that we lead not just by the example of our power but by the power of our example. I have always believed in the idea of America—not just in our talented people and our glorious land but in a certain generosity of spirit, easily found in our great documents. The national epic begins with Jefferson’s immortal language about rights and respect, embedded within the Declaration of Independence. It deepens with the delicate balance between the branches outlined by the Constitution, and the legal protections afforded by the Bill of Rights. These sentences are not random platitudes; they offer a precise blueprint for self-government, based on lifting people up, not keeping them down.

That vision gained strength over the centuries. Lincoln improved the blueprint, putting down a racist rebellion and preparing the way for citizenship for all Americans. FDR improved it further, using the full powers of the state to fight poverty and economic depression, and to widen the field of opportunity. Many other presidents, Republicans and Democrats, built on these achievements and improved the blueprint again. Many nonpresidents did the same, including someone who never ran for office, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and someone who died as he was seeking the presidency, Robert F. Kennedy. Binding our nation’s wounds, as King and Kennedy tried to do, has always been foremost in my mind, even decades after their deaths.

[Kamala Harris: The constant battle]

Of course, not all of our presidents listened to their better angels. During the last Gilded Age, in the late 19th century, the presidency often seemed like a revolving door for politicians who presided over a party system that rewarded wealthy donors, embraced corruption, and did little to constrain the brutal economic forces that were dividing the haves and have-nots. We face a version of that challenge today. When the powerful write the rules to benefit themselves—or sell access to power while silencing those who blow the whistle—people lose faith, not just in politicians, but in the whole idea of self-government.

But history also offers a form of consolation, because we tend to use our crises constructively and build back better than before. The Civil War was followed by Reconstruction and a time—admittedly brief—of greater racial justice. The Gilded Age was followed by a period of vigorous progressivism, guided by principled Republicans as well as Democrats, and talented leaders at the state and local levels. The Great Depression led to the New Deal, which, by deepening democracy at home, allowed the United States to stand up for it around the world when it came time to defeat fascism. That immense struggle was followed, in turn, by an enlightened Pax Americana that has held for 80-plus years. It is still going, although now gravely endangered by the Trump administration’s disdain for alliances.

Can we find our way back to the national story, in a way that unites instead of divides us? Let’s begin with the Declaration of Independence. Personally, I find that it still speaks to us. It not only created a new country; it defined that country’s characteristics. America would be infused with a radical decency—the phrase a decent respect appears near the beginning. It would promote local democracy—legislatures and courts—against a distant monarch who was trying to snuff them out. It would reject the idea of standing armies in cities, sent “to harass our people.” It would oppose “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world.” It would, in short, let people live their lives, at peace with one another, free to try, and perhaps to fail, but then to try again.

The Declaration concludes with a sentence that still speaks of that mutual respect so vital—and so necessary—for any democracy worthy of the name. As candidates, as voters, and as citizens, we must accept the setbacks that are inevitable in politics. We win some campaigns, and we lose others. But we must never relinquish our fundamental faith in the country, and in one another.

This article has been adapted from Joe Biden’s forthcoming book, Promise Me, America.

Pete Hegseth Lashes Out

2026-11-09T15:32:00-05:00

Pete Hegseth was in my neighborhood today. I live just up the road from the Naval War College, where I taught for 25 years, and where Hegseth gave a speech this morning about the future of military education.

But “speech” may be too generous. What he delivered was more like an early Festivus “Airing of Grievances,” in which the secretary of defense unburdened himself about academics, academic credentials, term papers, and education in America in general. He seemed rather stressed and in a hurry to sock it to the assembled faculty. Students and administrators attended the talk as well, but he had relatively less to say to them—and in any case, instructors and students alike were advised to maintain decorum and not to clap for any of his lines unless the president of the Naval War College clapped first.

Two things were clear at the end of Hegseth’s speech: First, the secretary has no real idea what goes on in war colleges. Second, Hegseth is very angry that the war colleges are not incorporating his personal political vendettas into their curricula.

If Hegseth had been accurate in his account of what happens in professional military education, I might have walked out on my first day teaching at the Naval War College and become a local lobsterman. (I retired in 2022.) I came to Newport after teaching at Dartmouth, and although I think that the secretary is right about some of the lunacy that has overtaken American college campuses, I did not recognize his bizarre depiction of the war colleges.

The secretary went on, at length, about how the war colleges have substituted airy academic talk for “victory,” because they have become “dangerously civilianized.” These academics, he said, have imported the “worst pathologies” of civilian education to the war colleges. He believes that this has been done to satisfy “outside accreditors” who apparently will not certify a degree without rigorous studies in wokeism as part of the curriculum.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Pete Hegseth’s magic marker]

Hegseth also believes that the ideologies of the Frankfurt School have made their way into the war colleges and undermined the schools’ mission to recognize that “intellect” is a “weapons system.” He took special pride in noting that he had ended the relationship between the Naval War College and Brown University, describing Brown as even worse than that nest of leftists at Columbia. He seemed unaware that the relationship was with Brown’s Watson Center, an organization dedicated to foreign and security affairs, and not the program in gender studies.

“What a caricature of what we do,” one faculty member told me after the address. For one thing, civilian accreditors generally couldn’t care less about what’s in the curriculum. Unlike Hegseth and his coterie, I’ve been through accreditations at the Naval War College; mostly, accreditors ask about funding and internal governance, and how the schools deal with having new administrators sent to them every few years. Nothing on the syllabus in Newport is there because of accreditors, but it’s an easy mistake to make if you don’t know anything about military education.

Also, I’m fairly certain that very few of the faculty in the auditorium could explain the Frankfurt School in any way that would hold water. It is not in the curriculum.

Hegseth claims that his perspective on military education came from a “comprehensive” review led by a team that reported to Anthony Tata, the Defense Department’s undersecretary for personnel. It’s worth pausing here for a moment to note that Tata is such an extreme character—a conspiracy theorist, among other things—that the GOP Senate, back when it still had a spine, declined to confirm him to a Pentagon post in President Trump’s first term.

The “review team” was a group of three retired colonels, all of them far-right social-media personalities. One was Thomas Anderson, a lawyer who posts on X under the name “Cynical Publius”; another was Rob Maness, a right-wing podcaster and failed political candidate; and the third was Kurt Schlichter, another lawyer who mostly publishes Second Civil War fan fiction. (I knew Kurt and worked with him occasionally in the days before Trump, and even co-authored a short article with him. We often disagreed, but I find many of his views unrecognizable now; I’m sure he’d say the same of mine.)

This cobbled-together team of retirees, none of whom have experience in military education, were given 90 days to review all of America’s senior war colleges. Their report remains a mystery because it hasn’t been released. But judging from the reviewers’ online comments, they came into the process believing that the war colleges had been taken over by Marxist DEI commissars.

Much of the speech amounted to Hegseth’s usual culture-war performance art. But things got more interesting when he castigated the faculty for being “passive-aggressive.” He accused them of trying to “wait out President Trump” and “preserve false and sinister progressive frameworks until the political winds shift.”

Specifically, he was very angry that the Naval War College refused to study “failure.” This mystified me and some of the people who still teach there, because the college studies both historical failures (such as Napoleon in Russia) as well as modern American disasters, including Vietnam, the Iraq War, and the global War on Terror. They do this as Hegseth claims he wants them to do: dispassionately, much like pathologists talking about what killed a patient, what might have worked as alternatives, and lessons for the future.

What, then, could Hegseth have been talking about? Trump’s political enemies.

For example, the secretary wants a case study on the Biden administration’s COVID-vaccine mandate. (How this squares with his insistence that every case be about war and victory is unclear.) The goal, apparently, is to lend the credibility of military-education institutions to the administration’s descent into anti-vaccine nuttery, and to support the subsequent decision to restore to duty military people who had refused orders to add the vaccine to the many they had already been required to take.

More important, Hegseth castigated the faculty for not making a case study out of the evacuation of Afghanistan. What he means, apparently, is that the faculty should be doing what the Pentagon is already doing—conducting a classified after-action—and assigning blame. Hegseth isn’t interested in lessons; he’s looking for revenge on the previous administration.

As a rule, the Naval War College tries to stay away from very recent cases, because the students are too emotionally invested in them. Hegseth finds this unacceptable, but this reasoning is why, during Vietnam, Vice Admiral Stansfield Turner made students study the Sicilian Expedition in the Peloponnesian War (a case still taught today). Student seminars on Vietnam in the early 1970s were literally turning into fistfights in the hall, and Turner wanted them to focus on the larger lesson about how an empire could get itself into a jam far from home.

The college does, in fact, study the Afghan War—just not as the kind of blame-storming session that Hegseth clearly desires. If that seems uncharitable, consider that Hegseth also wants a case study on Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, apparently for his actions on January 6, 2021. Milley, at the time, called his Chinese counterpart to reassure him that the government of the United States was not in chaos. (Milley made a similar call in late October 2020 at the direction of then–Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.)

Hegseth called this the worst crisis in civil-military affairs since Douglas MacArthur’s defiance of President Harry Truman during the Korean War. That’s not only a partisan claim; it’s silly. (Hegseth’s nickname in the Pentagon is “Dumb McNamara”; comments like this reaffirm why it has stuck.) “Just because some of you know Mark Milley,” he said, “does not mean you should not study his failures.”

[Read: Democrats are ready to run Hegseth ‘out of town’]

I’m not sure how many of the people in the room know Milley; when I retired, most of my colleagues were fairly young civilians who’d never met any senior officers. (I’m so old that I met Milley: He was apparently in one of my seminars back in the 1990s, when he was a young major, but I don’t remember him.) But no matter: Hegseth’s point was to make a personal and cheap accusation that the current members of a professional school are refusing to study something not because they made a judgment about the merits of the case, but because they were covering for a buddy.

Insofar as Hegseth said anything of substance, it was to insist that the faculty ditch what he sees as an artificial distinction between “education” and “training.” This is odd because the remit of the war colleges has long been the opposite: to wrench students out of the comfort zones of their previous jobs, acclimating them to uncertainty and ambiguity. Their time flying helicopters or driving ships is over. They’re in a classroom to learn how to become officers capable of advising civilians, able to see the links between national goals and military strategy and navigate the policy world.

Understandably, a man whose Army career topped out at major does not like that idea. Very few majors do, until they’ve spent a year studying at a war college.

Hegseth also complained that the word victory does not appear anywhere at war colleges. It is, in fact, everywhere on the Newport campus: It is in the syllabi, the lectures, and the seminar case studies. But it was also right in front of Hegseth as he entered the halls of the Naval War College—had he bothered to notice—on the school’s crest with its motto under a trident: Victory Through Seapower.

A Scandal at the Center of the Economy

2026-11-09T19:28:50-05:00

Given the obsession over the AI race between the United States and China, you might imagine that news of the man leading the most important company in AI being caught in an extramarital relationship with a woman believed to be a Chinese spy would spark outrage and excoriation without parallel. You could suppose that such reckless behavior, upon discovery, might lead to widespread calls for immediate resignation and for deep investigation—not just of the executive, but the entire company. Pitchforks, et cetera.

It is curious, then, that, as news came out that the Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, had had a romantic relationship with a Chinese businesswoman who was also an asset of Beijing’s Ministry of State Security, notable factions of Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., seemed nonplussed. “Even incredible humans make mistakes,” Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, posted on X yesterday. “We should all support him and his family. Onward.” The venture capitalist Shaun Maguire offered a five-point analysis of Huang’s situation, noting that the CEO did something “incredibly dumb” and “bad for America,” but that “my guess is there was no bad intention.” He then argued, “I believe Jensen is irreplaceable for America’s AI leadership.” Elon Musk agreed. From there, the posts, written before we know all the facts of the scandal, got only more absurd, including defending Huang’s affair on the grounds that his kids are adults now.

[Read: America can’t afford an AI recession]

Later in the day, Donald Trump echoed calls for Huang to stay on as CEO. He called Huang “an honorable guy.” The president, who has had extramarital affairs of his own and is credibly accused of sexual crimes by numerous women, sounded unbothered. “I think he probably has an excuse for it,” Trump added. Nvidia’s board of directors seemed equally deferential. It announced an independent investigation into the incident but also stressed that it has “no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised” and that it “has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team.” Huang, for his part, issued a statement yesterday acknowledging the affair and noting that he would cooperate with the investigation.

It’s tempting to see this as little more than powerful men defending their kind—a classic example of bros before pressing technological-geopolitical security imperatives. But that explanation misses both Huang’s and Nvidia’s centrality in American politics and the global financial system. Nvidia’s chips are arguably the most important infrastructure component of the AI boom; without the tech, the OpenAIs and Anthropics of the world would be unable to train or power their models—reporting suggests that billionaires have begged Huang for greater allocations of Nvidia chips. This intense demand has made Nvidia a financial juggernaut; in May, its market capitalization was $5.7 trillion, which made it larger than every economy except that of the U.S. and China.

Last year, my colleague Matteo Wong and I described the U.S. as an Nvidia-state, much like Saudi Arabia is a petrostate. That’s because, in recent years, the company has become one of the biggest investors of other AI companies; As of July, Nvidia announced that its equity investments valued roughly $99 billion, including in companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and data-center providers like CoreWeave. It’s a circular style of investment where companies pay Nvidia enormous sums of money for its chips and then Nvidia reinvests some of that money back into those companies and their competitors, in part so that they can continue to buy chips. You could make a strong case that Nvidia helps support big chunks of the Magnificent Seven ecosystem, the tech companies that are responsible for roughly a third of the S&P 500’s current value. According to The Economist, Nvidia stock has produced “15 cents of every dollar the American stock market has returned since 2023.”

Huang, who founded Nvidia in 1993, is the company’s key figure, praised by many in the tech industry as one of the visionaries responsible for the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence. He’s instrumental in the company’s engineering decisions, its allocation of chips, and other investments. He also has no clear successor. Outside of Silicon Valley, Huang has become a trusted adviser and ally to Trump on AI policy. Huang’s thinking on issues such as AI doomerism (he’s anti-doom) and chip allocation in China (he’s for it—a position that warrants examining, given this weekend’s revelations) influences U.S. policy. This centrality is why one tech analyst on CNBC this morning implied that replacing Huang was a comical suggestion. Huang is a singular figure: the linchpin of the company that is arguably the linchpin of the American economy. Framed another way, Nvidia has much of the financial system in a hostage situation. Huang is too big to fail. Which may be why so many people seem motivated to downplay or protect him right now.

How else would one describe the prolific excuse-making for him? The information that has come out around Huang’s involvement with the alleged Chinese spy is alarming. Concerns about the relationship have been mounting for more than a year. Alice Huang (no relation to Jensen) worked for the Singaporean data-center company Megaspeed, an Nvidia client the government had been investigating regarding its potential connections to the Chinese government. As The New York Times reported today, Nvidia intervened in the U.S. Department of Commerce’s investigation of Megaspeed; the probe was subsequently halted and transferred to the Justice Department. According to the Times, Trump was briefed about Huang’s relationship roughly a year ago, including the presumption that Alice may be a spy, and “chose not to do anything with that intelligence.”

In recent weeks, the Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo and Huang himself both dismissed claims that the relationship with the woman in question was unusual or romantic in any way—we now know this was untrue. It’s still unclear whether Huang disclosed any pertinent corporate or national-security secrets or whether his relationship with an alleged spy had any impact on Nvidia’s opposition to semiconductor export controls in China. But everything we know so far paints Huang, Nvidia, and government officials in a terrible light, at every turn either ignoring or obfuscating a national-security problem.

As more information about the relationship comes out, lawmakers will have to choose whether to take their cues from the markets (Nvidia shares dropped 8.8 percent at one point today—a $400 billion drop in the company’s valuation) or push for more investigation. Trump, who has been reliably motivated in his presidency by the stock market, seems indebted to Nvidia’s performance in the market, as well as to AI investment in general. He’s unlikely to do anything to jeopardize that. Democrats are in a particularly interesting position, fresh off a midterm rout centered on taking a strong stance against tech oligarchs, AI, and data centers and in favor of corporate accountability. Earlier today, Senator Chris Coons said on X that he would push for an investigation into Huang and Nvidia. To press hard on Huang to resign, or to dig deeper into what he and the company knew about the relationship and when, will inevitably risk adding volatility to Nvidia’s share price and, by virtue, the larger Gordian knot of AI investment that is predicated on relentless growth and continued scale. All of this is to say that the moral case regarding Huang is much different from the one that Trump and those with a financial interest in Nvidia’s success will likely consider.

This scandal holds an irony that’s especially befitting of the AI moment. Huang seemingly has cozied up to his industry’s No. 1 foe, China, the boogeyman that, by the professed logic of Silicon Valley’s AI executives, is forcing many of his peers to build a product that they fear. Instead of denouncing him, Washington and Silicon Valley are motivated to circle the wagons around Huang, in part because doing so keeps the system moving and the money flowing. The build at all costs rationale that dictates treating China’s AI prowess as an existential threat is also driving the same people to brush past an egregious dalliance with that enemy.

This is the type of warped incentives that the AI race produces. Playing the game necessitates embracing preposterous risk to justify an idealized future outcome. To run this race requires its participants to withstand intense cognitive dissonance and behave in ways that make them appear ever more inscrutable and reckless to those who are not involved. If nothing else, Huang is a useful example to understand what happens when the fortunes of countries and many of its most powerful citizens are all tied up in one progressively intricate technological and financial bet. In this way, Huang is the AI boom personified, a hyperobject of a man who has wound his way into the center of the economy and whose influence, depending on how you look at it, may usher in either prosperity or untold doom.

The Inconvenient Truth at the Center of the Immigration Debate

2026-11-09T18:52:00-05:00

Have liberals learned anything from the border crisis that helped return Donald Trump to office two years ago? Many have not, if a recent report from the American Civil Liberties Union is any indication. The group claims to offer a “way forward” for the country’s asylum system, which has become a back door for economic migrants. But the ACLU instead recycles arguments that immigration advocates have made for decades. Too many progressives fail to understand, or acknowledge, the real reason migrants, including those intending to seek asylum, cross the border illegally: People come when they think they can stay.

I have been working on border and immigration policy for more than 20 years, serving in senior roles at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security as well as Senate staff. I have seen, up close, surges in illegal immigration under both Democratic and Republican presidents. Again and again, the loudest and most extreme voices have set the immigration agenda for each party, to the detriment of the country. Despite Trump’s concession in yesterday’s 60 Minutes interview that his administration’s handling of immigration was “too tough,” his elevation of the anti-immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller as his chief of staff suggests that this trend will continue. Immigration advocates who deplore the Trump administration’s aggressive tactics have an obligation to propose realistic, constructive alternatives.

Yet on the left, the ACLU and other immigration advocates continue to argue that enforcement at the border, including restrictions on asylum eligibility, do not prevent or deter illegal immigration; they simply create pent-up demand and encourage migrants to attempt more dangerous routes. As a result, according to advocacy groups, the only way to stem the tide of illegal immigration is to address the underlying problems that push people to leave their countries, and to provide more legal pathways for these migrants to come to the United States.

[From the November 2026 issue: The babies left behind in America]

In reality, the United States’ inability to promptly remove those who lack a legal basis to remain in the country has been the driving force behind every major surge in illegal immigration since the Obama administration.

The U.S. asylum system, created by Congress at the height of the Cold War, presumes that almost everyone who passes an initial screening deserves legal protection. As a result, more than 80 percent of people who claimed asylum at the border from 2014 to 2019 were released into the country, yet immigration judges ultimately granted asylum in less than a fifth of these cases. This legal process can take years, during which seekers are allowed to apply to work, which makes it easy for economic migrants to game the system. Nobody would spend $15,000 in smuggling fees and experience the mortal dangers of the journey north if they didn’t believe that they could stay and get a job.

Before 2011, only about 2 percent of people who crossed the border illegally claimed asylum. But as word got out that most people who claim asylum at the border are let in, the percentage of undocumented border crossers who claimed asylum steadily increased, to 16 percent in 2013 and then to 59 percent in 2023––far outstripping the U.S. government’s capacity to process applications in a timely manner.

The Obama administration experienced its first surge in migration from Central American families claiming asylum at the border. At the time, advocacy groups persuaded senior officials and key members of Congress to focus on the root causes of illegal immigration—such as violence, corruption, and political instability in other countries—instead of tackling the incentives in the asylum system that encouraged migrants to come here. In 2016, the U.S. invested a record $750 million in aid in projects to create jobs, enhance governance, and improve security in the region. The initiative made modest improvements, but could not fix the problems that were encouraging so many people to flee. What kept illegal border crossings at manageable levels on President Obama’s watch was an increase in border security, a more stringent enforcement of immigration laws within the country, and record-high deportation numbers—for which immigration advocates gave the president the not-so-flattering title of “Deporter-in-Chief.”

At the start of Trump’s first term, the new president’s tough talk about the “invasion” at the border seemed to have deterred some would-be migrants and so further reduced illegal crossings. But migrants soon realized that they could still game America’s asylum system. By 2019 Border Patrol apprehensions along the southwest border exceeded 850,000, up 115 percent from 2018. Trump’s initial response—to separate the families of asylum seekers at the border—was both ineffective at deterring migration and abhorrent to many Americans. Other restrictions on asylum that his administration introduced in 2019, such as the “Remain in Mexico” program that required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico as their cases played out in U.S. court, had inhumane consequences but did curb border crossings. Emergency measures during the coronavirus pandemic cut the number of crossings even more. But as the pandemic eased, people began moving north again.

When President Biden took office in January 2021, illegal crossings had already begun to surge, averaging 70,000 a month from October 2020 through his inauguration. Instead of addressing this problem, Biden spent his first days in office fulfilling campaign promises to immigration advocates. He announced a moratorium on deportations and ended Trump’s asylum restrictions, sending a clear message that the U.S. border was going to be open. He also put Vice President Harris in charge of a strategy to invest more than $5.2 billion in private-sector funds to create more economic opportunities in Central America, which once again did not reduce immigration from the region.

Another common argument among immigration advocates is that expanding access to legal immigration will take pressure off the border. The problem is that no realistic amount of legal pathways will satisfy global demand to immigrate to the United States. When I was in the Biden administration, we oversaw the largest expansion of lawful pathways for migrants in a generation, explicitly to reduce illegal immigration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. What we found was that illegal crossings dropped only when they triggered clear consequences at the border, such as repatriation of ineligible asylum seekers to Mexico. The United States can and should increase legal pathways for immigrants, but the goal should be to enhance economic growth and reunite families—not to prevent illegal immigration.

There is a cruel irony in the fact that, by pushing policies that enable economic migrants to gain entry into the United States via the asylum system, human-rights advocates have encouraged migrants to put their lives at risk on their way to the U.S. border. In 2023, I was part of a delegation to Colombia and Panama to urge those governments to close the Darién Gap—a treacherous and sometimes lethal route between the two countries through which migrants trekked to the United States. From a helicopter, I saw thousands of people streaming out of the jungle after a week-long ordeal. On the ground, we met children who survived the journey but were alarmingly weak from exhaustion and dehydration. We learned that human-rights groups were providing migrants with supplies—including birth control for women, many of whom would be sexually assaulted by smugglers during the illegal crossing. I believe that none of those migrants would have risked these dangers if they didn’t think that the United States would let them stay.

[Read: The problem with shutting down ICE in blue states]

The Biden administration learned the hard way that the only reliable way to deter illegal immigration was to restrict asylum—such as by setting more stringent screening criteria and requiring asylum seekers to set up interview appointments in advance and use a designated port of entry—and increase resources to enforce these laws at the border. In 2023, these curbs on asylum-seeking worked initially, but encounters at the border with Mexico surged when enforcement by Mexican authorities waned, and fell sharply when this enforcement expanded in concert with U.S. efforts in early 2024. By mid-2024, when Biden introduced more asylum restrictions at the border, encounters dropped by roughly 55 percent—from about 120,000 in May to about 56,000 in July.

But by then, the perception that his party couldn’t or wouldn’t keep the border under control had helped doom Democrats’ prospects in the November election. Following the advice of immigration advocates when he took office and waiting too long to change course were among Biden’s biggest mistakes.

At least some progressive leaders seem keen to avoid these mistakes. “I think we’ve learned the lesson,” Michigan Senator-Elect Abdul El-Sayed said about the chaos at the border under Biden in a preelection 60 Minutes interview with Ross Douthat. “You can humanely enforce the border.”

Voters are plainly tired of the wild swings in policy between permissiveness and cruelty. The Trump administration’s poll numbers on immigration suggest that the president’s merciless approach to migrants—which led to the fatal shootings of people protesting enforcement actions—contributed to his party’s stunning electoral defeat last week. Trump promised a crackdown on the “worst of the worst.” Instead, his administration has redeployed federal resources that were once used to address and prevent more serious crimes, such as terrorism, fentanyl smuggling, and child sex trafficking, to deport otherwise law-abiding people in the United States.

The Trump administration has also waged an all-out war on legal immigration, rescinding the lawful status of about 1.8 million immigrants, restricting access to green cards, halting visa processing in mostly nonwhite countries, and cutting naturalizations of new U.S. citizens by 75 percent. This despite the warnings of economists that these policies would measurably harm economic growth. American agricultural producers now say that ICE’s indiscriminate raids are hurting domestic farmers and threaten to raise grocery prices even further.

Like Biden, Trump is listening too closely to the most radical voices in his coalition—and he has paid a political price for it. Every single congressional district on the U.S. border with Mexico is projected to be held by a Democrat next year. But his promotion of Miller, the architect of his cruel and nativist approach to immigration, suggests that he has not learned from this electoral rebuke.

Most Americans hold heterodox views on border and immigration policies: They want strong enforcement at the border, but they want this enforcement to be fair and humane, and for people who have otherwise lawfully contributed to their communities for years to be able to stay. Immigration policy shouldn’t be just the province of ACLU-style progressives and hard-liners such as Miller. Lawmakers should stop pandering to the extremes of their bases and step up to fix America’s broken immigration and asylum system once and for all.

The End of Stephen Miller’s Recusals

2026-11-09T18:52:00-05:00

Stephen Miller spent his first weekend as White House chief of staff on the patio at Mar-a-Lago, huddling with President Trump and Natalie Harp, his executive assistant, about how to approach the next two years with the House and Senate under Democratic control. Katie Miller—the podcaster, political consultant, and wife of Stephen—spent the weekend in the Washington area, rearranging her own life. “I make every decision based on what’s best for my children and our family,” she wrote yesterday on X, before announcing that she had decided to wind down her podcast.

But that was not all that was changing. For months, Stephen Miller has recused himself from matters of policy that involve Katie Miller’s other financial interests at the direction of the White House counsel. That meant that Stephen did not work on issues involving the media company Paramount, where his wife had been seeking a podcast deal, or anything to do with space policy or artificial intelligence, because his wife, a longtime adviser to Elon Musk, also worked for SpaceX, the owner of the Grok artificial-intelligence assistant. All of that changed today.

Katie Miller severed her employment with SpaceX, sold her stock in the company, and forfeited her right to future equity that had not yet vested under her contract, according to a person familiar with the moves. Over the weekend, she also ended a separate contract with Paramount for a planned podcast deal. As a result, a White House official told me this afternoon, “Stephen Miller is no longer subject to any recusals and may fully participate in all meetings and policy matters.” Katie declined to comment.

White House lawyers had previously ruled that Katie Miller’s podcast advertising sponsorships from companies seeking official favor from her husband did not require recusals, because sponsorships carry a different ethical significance than consulting arrangements. Sugar-soda boosters at the American Beverage Association, the utility Southern Company, and the Merchants Payments Coalition, a group pushing for legislation to reduce credit-card swipe fees, had all purchased time on her show. But now even those potential conflicts will not be an issue, after a couple more already-recorded episodes from her podcast are released. “Nothing is more important than raising our four kids,” she wrote. “While I’ve loved the podcast, the time commitment is too great and now is the time to step away.”

[Read: A chief of staff who ‘will crack skulls’]

The Millers met during the first Trump term, when both were working for the administration. Katie Miller later worked as a press secretary and communications director for Vice President Pence, before becoming an adviser to Musk, the founder of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla. During the transition following the 2024 presidential election, Katie Miller worked as an adviser to future Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., before joining the White House as a special government employee who advised Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency. When she left the White House, she maintained her consulting work for Musk and SpaceX, leading the White House counsel to advise that Stephen Miller recuse himself on related issues. When Katie Miller began working closely with Paramount, offering to help arrange a company party for Trump before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Stephen Miller expanded his recusals to cover related issues.

Katie Miller’s career change comes amid a public uproar over possible improper influence in the White House, after the former adviser Calley Means went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to allege “demonic” efforts to influence White House policy by lobbyists with close ties to senior officials. Concern about corruption, often focused on the president’s own for-profit efforts in office and the business deals of his children, became a significant issue in the recent midterm elections. Gallup found in September that 89 percent of U.S. adults believed that corruption was widespread in the government, a proportion that had risen 10 points in just one year to the highest level in the two decades that the polling question had been asked.

After Trump announced his new chief of staff on Friday afternoon, Katie Miller responded on X: “Watching your best friend and spouse achieve their dreams is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” She kept the commentary going through the weekend. When Politico published an article about how she had lobbied for the promotion, Miller responded: “BREAKING: Wife supports husband. If your wife doesn’t do this, find a new one.”

How to Talk to Your Child About the Cybertruck’s Demise

2026-11-09T15:05:00-05:00

Join Alexandra Petri for a live Q&A on Tuesday, November 10, at 11 a.m. ET at theatlantic.com.

Sit down with your child in a quiet place. He or she may have many questions, such as, “Those big silver trucks that looked like a kid drew them, they are not making them anymore?” and “But if there are no Cybertrucks anymore, how will I know whom not to date when I grow up?”

Be warm and calm. Explain that the trucks were in pain, and had been in pain for a long time, because their bodies were not properly designed for the job they were doing. Explain that they are not going to a farm upstate, because they would be unable to deal with the terrain there.

Explain that, yes, these were supposed to be the trucks of the future. But then people took a look at that future and said, “No. Bring us another future, please.”

Use short words, pausing frequently. Sometimes basic concepts can be difficult to grasp, especially if you have a strong, incorrect idea in your head already. This unfortunate fact explains much of the design of the Cybertruck.

A simple script can be best. Say something like, A truck is a special kind of vehicle for carrying large loads. Some trucks are big rigs. Some trucks are tow trucks. Some trucks are abominations in the eyes of God and Man and should never have been brought into existence. This truck was the third kind of truck, and people didn’t like that.

I know the car looked cool, like a refrigerator that was trying to puff itself up to intimidate a predator. But people prefer it when their wheels don’t fall off. Actually, it is not “normal” or “cool” for the wheels to fall off, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is mistaken.

No, not all trucks like to drink gasoline. That was not what was wrong with the truck. What was wrong with the truck was everything else.

If you want to, take time to explain. Usually, stainless steel does not rust. Usually, a truck’s doors respond to your commands. Usually, trucks have brakes that work.

Explain that the Cybertruck would be driving off into the sunset, but its wheels have fallen off, so it will sit there into the sunset instead. Explain that you don’t know what the Cybercab is either, and it is okay not to know. Tell your child not to worry. All of the other Monster Trucks are still okay.

And if your child asks, “Was the truck bad?” Be honest. Say yes.

Trump Slides Into His Lame-Duck Era

2026-11-09T16:45:00-05:00

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.

When President Trump posted on Saturday that he’d asked Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, to be the new White House press secretary, it felt like a callback to the freewheeling first-term Trump.

“I am pleased to announce that the Great Dana White, a violent Fighter and Warrior, has been offered the job of Press Secretary of the United States,” the president wrote on Truth Social, adding that he needed White and his band of mixed-martial-arts fighters “to defend us against the Lunatic Left. Dana will be a Press Secretary like none other. Dana, please take the job!”

By weekend’s end, the possibility of the appointment had dissolved, though not without a subplot of speculation that Trump was confusing the impresario with another Dana White who had actually served as a Pentagon spokesperson during his first term. CNN reported that White had declined, and last night, Trump told reporters he never meant it anyway. “I was only kidding, but Dana loves the idea,” he said.

Perhaps. Trump has a long record of launching outlandish ideas and then playing them off as jokes when they don’t work out. If it was all a jape, then the weak stab at humor seems to underestimate the electorate’s frustration with his antics. If he was serious and got rejected, it’s even worse. An old maxim goes that when the president of the United States asks you to do something, you do it. But Trump no longer has the juice he did in the early days of this administration, when billionaire tech CEOs were showering him with attention and the odd bauble. Last Tuesday evening, as election results rolled in, my colleague Jonathan Lemire wrote that “Donald J. Trump is now officially, thoroughly a lame duck.” Now we’re getting a glimpse of what that looks like in practice.

Start with the cool reception that Trump’s elevation of Stephen Miller to White House chief of staff received among Republicans. Representative Marlin Stutzman called it a “horrible decision.” Another legislator told Fox News that his reaction was “utter disbelief.” When a Politico reporter informed one member of the choice, they replied, “Please tell me you’re lying to me right now, just to get a reaction.” Take these statements with a grain of salt—Republicans have often been happy to talk trash about Trump anonymously while going along with him publicly—but whether or not they acquiesce with the president matters less now that the GOP is so outnumbered in Congress.

One test of where House Republicans actually stand will come this week. Thomas Massie, a renegade GOP member who Trump helped defeat in a primary earlier this year, refiled articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth today. Although Speaker Mike Johnson (speaking of lame ducks) had temporarily stymied Massie’s impeachment efforts in September by sending members home until after the midterms, the House is now back in session. Rounding up enough Republican votes to move the articles forward will be difficult but not impossible; a significant number of GOP members lost their seats last week, including many of the more moderate representatives, which means they are less in Trump’s thrall. Assuming that Hegseth is not impeached this month, it seems all but inevitable once Democrats take over. This weekend, presumptive Speaker Hakeem Jeffries said he’s a “hard yes” on impeachment.

Republicans’ losses have produced infighting elsewhere in the party too. As Miller moves to take over, fallout from his predecessor Susie Wiles’s tenure continues. Calley Means, a former aide to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where he accused Wiles and James Blair, a top Trump political adviser, of selling the MAHA movement out to corporate interests. The Wall Street Journal reports that, ahead of their public social-media fight, Blair texted Means, “If you are gonna try to knife me, I’m happy to return the favor.” Meanwhile Senator Ron Johnson, a hard-right figure from Wisconsin, has picked up on Means’s comments to accuse the Trump administration of “corruption.”

One person in particular left somewhat unmoored by the results is Vice President Vance, who built his entire profile on closeness to a politician whose toxicity is now made plain. In a long post-election X post, Vance pinned the midterm defeat on the Iran war. This was widely seen as a swipe at the president and an attempt to position himself for 2028, but as The New Yorker’s Jason Zengerle observed, Vance “didn’t so much throw Trump under the bus as try to bring him on board his bandwagon by essentially putting words in Trump’s mouth.”

But Trump does not seem inclined to cooperate. For one thing, he continues to defend the war. On 60 Minutes last night, he acknowledged the political fallout but said, “I think, historically, this will be a very good decision. Is it a good decision for today and tomorrow? Maybe not.” Speaking with reporters last night, he once again declared victory in the unresolved war with Iran and then claimed, falsely and callously, that “we haven’t lost anybody. No soldiers.”

At other times, though, Trump has sounded unusually chastened since Election Day. He told The New York Times that he looks forward to working with the Democrats. He also acknowledged on 60 Minutes that his deportation policy, which “might be too tough,” could explain the GOP’s shellacking. “I think I got an A-plus for closing up the border,” he said, “but I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally.” A deescalation on immigration enforcement seems unlikely with Miller as chief of staff, given his role in implementing that policy, but the fact that Trump was willing to offer conciliatory remarks suggests that he is beginning to recognize the challenges of life as a lame duck.

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Nvidia’s board is investigating whether the company’s CEO, Jensen Huang, shared sensitive information with an executive suspected of having ties to Chinese intelligence. This comes after Huang confirmed yesterday that he had an affair with the executive, who worked for a Singapore-based data-center company. Nvidia said it has no reason to believe any secrets were compromised.
Republican Representative Thomas Massie introduced articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, setting up a House vote by Wednesday. Hegseth dismissed the effort and said he agreed with President Trump’s decision to launch the war with Iran and would “do it again.”
Stephen Miller, a longtime Trump adviser and the architect of the administration’s mass-deportation campaign, officially became White House chief of staff today, replacing Susie Wiles.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Rafaela Jinich explores a collection of stories about the value of friendship.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Woodward in the “Washington Post” newsroom, 1973 Paul Slade / Paris Match / Getty

The One Source Bob Woodward Can’t Get to Talk

By George Packer

Bob Woodward has published a book roughly every two years since the Watergate scandal, 24 in all. Taken together, they comprise a running narrative of almost every administration from Richard Nixon’s to Donald Trump’s. The genre of the Washington book—a sequence of scenes inside rooms where important things happen, based on a convention called “deep background,” with riches of information traced to no sources—is so familiar that it’s easy to forget that Woodward practically invented it. Decade after decade, he has kept turning up in the Oval Office, at Georgetown parties, on the doorsteps of government officials—always on the job, the hunt. His approach from across a crowded room or the sudden appearance of his name on a cellphone screen has surely sunk the heart of countless sources. And yet, though they know better, they always talk, as if transfixed by a predatory stare—like the frog that agrees to carry the scorpion on its back across the lake. “Why?” the frog cries as it drowns from the inevitable sting, to which the scorpion replies: “It’s my nature.”

Read the full article.

An Electoral Mess in Mississippi

2026-11-09T14:22:18-05:00

Last summer, Mississippi began an effort to “continue to build on the accuracy of Mississippi’s voter rolls and strengthen the integrity of elections,” as Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson put it. Using data from the credit-reporting agency Experian, the state scrutinized its list of registered voters, searching for anyone who may have moved, left the state, or died. Tens of thousands of Mississippians had their active registrations shifted to inactive—a crucial step toward purging them from the rolls.

On Tuesday, many of those inactive voters showed up at the polls, only to be told that they were not properly registered. Their best option was to fill out an affidavit ballot, a more involved process that increases the likelihood that a vote will not count. Now a Senate seat is on the line, and the Democratic challenger, Scott Colom, leads the Republican incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith, by just about 2,500 ballots. And voting-rights advocates say that Mississippi, a state with a long history of voter suppression and discrimination, has once again undermined one of its citizens’ most sacred rights.

Experian now says that its data were never supposed to be used to scrub Mississippi’s voter rolls in this way. Watson said in a social-media post that the inconvenience of having to fill out an affidavit ballot was “well worth the election integrity added by having cleaner voter rolls!” A postelection legal battle over the affidavit ballots is intensifying, as lawyers from the campaigns and voting-rights groups argue over how those ballots should be treated. Hyde-Smith’s campaign has called for affidavit ballots to be separated from regular ballots, suggesting that it may attempt to challenge their validity in the days ahead. Colom’s campaign has said there is no legal basis for treating affidavit ballots any differently once they are processed. The back-and-forth could be a precursor to a legal battle in which the courts could ultimately decide whether Colom or Hyde-Smith prevails.

The situation is already drawing comparisons to Mississippi’s past efforts to systematically disenfranchise Black voters. In DeSoto County, inactivations surged in recent months, and the number of active voters declined by nearly 10,000 from September to October, according to state data. The county, just south of Memphis, is home to one of Mississippi’s largest concentrations of Black voters. A 2025 review of Experian’s voter-roll-maintenance data by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the bipartisan federal agency that supports election administration, found that zip codes with higher proportions of Black residents were more likely to be flagged for “new addresses,” potentially leading to voter inactivations.

Because Experian has a national database that can be used to surface evidence that a person may have moved to a new address, officials in a handful of states have turned to it, and other similar commercial sources, to try to keep their voter rolls up-to-date. Some election officials used the data to contact voters and encourage them to update their voter registrations, or to send postcards to a subset of voters they’d had trouble reaching. But Mississippi used the data far more aggressively. Scott Anderson, Experian’s vice president for corporate communications, told us that the company has not provided services to Mississippi since early 2025. “The solution provided at that time consisted of supplemental address information and was not designed or intended to validate voter records.”

Mississippi plowed ahead, despite warnings that the data were error-prone and could introduce far more problems than they solved, multiple officials and voting-rights advocates told us. One of those officials, Jim Hood, a Democrat who served as Mississippi’s attorney general from 2004 to 2020, sued Experian in 2014 over errors in its credit reports, eventually settling with the company and two other credit-reporting bureaus for $7.2 million. “I’d be leery of doing any business with them, especially on something as sensitive as somebody’s constitutional right to vote,” he told us. Hood said that his daughter was among those told on Tuesday that she was not an active voter, despite showing up at the same precinct she has always gone to. She ended up having to fill out an affidavit ballot.

Just how many other Mississippians showed up to vote only to learn that they had been inactivated is unclear. Some advocates on both sides of the contest estimated last week that 10,000 to 25,000 affidavit ballots remained uncounted, a number that could easily swing the race. Half a dozen voters who’d had to fill out affidavit ballots told us that they are unsure their votes will count; the state says that nearly a quarter of these ballots are being rejected. Watson said in a statement last week that his office had received “multiple calls” about inactive voters on Election Day, but he seemed to downplay the impact. “Voter roll maintenance is the cornerstone of election integrity,” he wrote on X. He has since assured Mississippians that every legal vote will be counted, calling the affidavit-ballot process a “safety net for errors.” Our emails and calls to his office and cellphone went unanswered.

If there was one thing Virginia Gordon-Lang’s mother had taught her, it was how to vote. The 38-year-old recounted to us the times her mom took her hand as they walked into a church or school to cast a ballot. On Election Day this year, however, she showed up to three different locations, attempting to vote for Colom. She didn’t appear on the rosters of eligible voters at any of the locations, she said. When she finally made it to the front of the line at the last precinct, Gordon-Lang said, a poll worker told her that she was not on the active-voter list. Gordon-Lang, a Marine Corps veteran who had moved in April, said that she told the worker that she had filled out required paperwork weeks ago confirming her home address, and that she had never missed an election. She filled out an affidavit ballot.

Gordon-Lang said that a Hinds County election official had called a few days after the election to tell her that she was no longer a registered voter and that her ballot was going to be thrown out. (Hinds County officials did not respond to our phone calls.) After spending 15 years on active duty—including time in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Germany—Gordon-Lang was devastated. “It’s like a slap in the face,” she said. “That’s what makes me so angry.” She contacted the Meridian Lauderdale County NAACP branch, which is trying to make sure that all eligible votes are tallied. “I want my vote to count,” she told us. “I want my vote back—that’s what I want.”

[Read: The arc of the Voting Rights Act]

Whether Gordon-Lang represents a singular case or a broader trend could determine the ultimate outcome of one of the most watched races in the country. Voting-rights groups, attorneys, and campaign staff are fanning out across the state, gathering stories of people who may have been wrongly turned away or made to cast a ballot provisionally through the affidavit process. They are also holed up watching the county-by-county process determine which votes will be counted. As of this afternoon, Mississippi reported that 14,239 affidavit ballots had been processed, and 23 percent of them had been rejected. Civil-rights groups that sent Watson a letter a few days before the election, warning about the unreliability of Experian data, say that rightful voters have now been limited in their ability to cast a ballot. “It shows how antiquated and broken our system is,” Amir Badat, the southern-states director and senior director of Fair Fight Action, a national voting-rights organization based in Georgia, told us. “This is what modern-day voter suppression looks like.”

Representatives from several groups told us stories about ballots being rejected because poll workers—not voters—failed to adhere to strict procedures that required them to sign affidavits, and stories about voters whose registration should not have been affected but were somehow categorized as inactive. Tonya Rivers, a Rankin County election commissioner, told us that commissioners were urgently trying to verify “questionable” data from Experian as it processes affidavit ballots. “I want clean voter rolls just as much as anybody,” she said. “But cleaning up voter rolls shouldn’t mean creating problems for legitimate voters in the process.”

Although most states and counties rely primarily on government data to maintain and update their voter lists, some states have begun to use private credit-reporting data as well. But not everyone is using it as Mississippi has. The West Virginia secretary of state’s office participated in a federal pilot program with Experian but opted to use the company’s data in a far more limited way than Mississippi did, officials there told us. They analyzed data from the company’s True Trace program specifically to identify about 15,860 voters who may have moved without updating their voter registration.

“Postcards were mailed to the folks identified only through Experian data, but we did not inactivate any nonresponding voters or place them in a queue for future cancellation,” West Virginia’s deputy secretary of state, Donald Kersey III, told us in an email. “It was used only as outreach.” West Virginia decided not to continue using Experian after the pilot, officials there told us, citing costs and other factors. El Paso County, Colorado, also used the data to reach out to voters rather than automatically inactivating them, County Clerk Steve Schleiker told us.

Mississippi, by contrast, used Experian’s data to run 1.9 million checks of voters’ data, roughly equivalent to the state’s total number of active registered voters, allowing county officials to begin a process that culminated in thousands of people being shifted to “inactive” status. An April report in Mississippi Today found that at least 50,000 voters had been inactivated over address issues from July 2025 to March 2026. Those changes were made even though Experian told Mississippi, in disclaimers in an initial contract, that it could not guarantee that its data were accurate, and local officials warned the state that the credit agency was prone to reporting inaccurate addresses, the report said. The outlet reported last Monday that by the time of Tuesday’s election, the list of inactive voters had surged to 230,000, accounting for about one in nine of the state’s registered voters.

Some of them supported Hyde-Smith. Michelle Pratt, a Republican, was told that her name wasn’t on the voting list when she tried to cast a ballot at a church near her home in Meridian. She said a poll worker asked whether she had moved recently; she has lived in the same home for eight years. Pratt voted by affidavit ballot for Hyde-Smith and said the experience left her suspicious about the process: “It makes you wonder: How do I know if my vote was counted—you know, mine or anybody’s?”

De’Angelo Houston, the president of the Meridian Lauderdale County NAACP branch, told us that he and other observers are gathering information from people who had not moved over the past decade, yet were told on Election Day that their registration was not active. He said last week that observers were watching as Lauderdale County election commissioners sifted through piles of affidavit ballots to either reject or accept them. “We are documenting the reasons why they are refusing,” he said. Houston said he watched as one election official rejected 21 affidavit ballots for missing signatures, either from the voter or a poll worker.

In DeSoto County on Friday, observers from the Democratic Party were watching through a window as election officials determined, precinct by precinct, which affidavit ballots would be accepted and which would be rejected. Every now and then, officials gave updates to observers about how many affidavit ballots were rejected, and why, Deborah Williams, the chair of the DeSoto County Democratic Executive Committee, told us. She said that a lot of voters “are going to end up being disenfranchised.”

The Mississippi secretary of state’s office told the local-news outlet 16 WAPT last month that it no longer uses Experian’s data and is now contracting with a different commercial company, IDI Data, to help maintain its voter rolls. The state has been experimenting with options for maintaining its voter list in recent years but has not joined a bipartisan, multistate compact that shares information about voters. Spurred by conspiracy theories suggesting that the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center was part of a left-wing plot, a number of Republican-led states ditched the group in 2023.

[Read: The election deniers’ long game]

Former Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Gabriel Sterling told us that commercial data can be useful for voter-roll maintenance “if it’s part of a broader ecosystem of data you’re working with.” But he cautioned against efforts to deactivate voters based on potentially flawed data that are not corroborated, and he criticized Mississippi’s rule requiring voters who show up with valid identification to fill out an affidavit ballot if they are not on the active-voters list. In Georgia and other states, inactive voters can fill out a normal ballot—and be automatically reactivated—if they show up at a voting precinct with appropriate identification.

There is good reason for states such as Mississippi to keep a close eye on their voter rolls. Federal and state data indicate that people regularly move or change their name without updating their voter registration. Watson, the Mississippi secretary of state, has pointed out that in at least three counties, the population of registered voters is larger than the estimated number of citizens older than 18.

But there is little evidence of the kind of voter fraud that would justify the mass purges of voter rolls that Republicans aligned with President Trump support. Hood told us that during his 16 years as attorney general, and eight years as a district attorney prior to that, he hunted for true evidence of widespread voter fraud—and always came up short. The idea that fraudsters would go through the trouble of trying to vote using registrations of people who have died or left Mississippi—a state without early in-person voting and with limited voting by mail—is detached from reality, he said.

“We have a system that works, and they’re just looking for a problem to fix that’s not there,” Hood said. “It’s not a lot of people going in there voting that are not legit. The problem is getting people to go vote that are legit.”

As the country awaits the results of what may be the most narrowly decided Senate contest in decades in Mississippi, Americans are also seeing the fallout of experimenting with unreliable tools to satisfy the ever-evolving demands of election activists.

How Ugly Metro Sweaters Became Chic

2026-11-09T13:01:00-05:00

The nation’s transit systems have an unlikely side hustle. The Los Angeles Metro is selling T-shirts that label its riders a Bus Baddie and a Metro Mamí and encourage locals to Ride the D (a suggestive reference to a recent line extension). The NYC Ferry offers hats and shirts that read The People’s Yacht. In Washington, D.C., locals have started wearing the Metro system’s merch like it’s their alma mater. A recent pop-up shop drew some 10,000 visitors with so many offerings that a patron could emerge decked out from head to toe in Metro. “It was mobbed,” Emily Wasek, a think-tank staffer and self-described devotee of D.C.’s Yellow Line, told me. “People were running against traffic in the street to cut in front of people.”

The appetite for transit wear appears to be huge (or at least hugely noticeable on social media). When Amtrak announced a new, limited-edition T-shirt last week featuring trains in the style of superheroes on a movie poster, commenters praised the national rail system for “giving the people what they want.” Then they demanded more.

At their best, transit systems can weave a city’s culture together. As basic public services, however, they are not typically fodder for fashion. But then again, people aren’t ordinarily so isolated from one another, the cost of living isn’t normally this high, and subway systems aren’t usually this savvy at marketing. From talking with transit-wear enthusiasts, I got the sense that a mix of economic and social circumstances has sparked their desire to elevate public transit, an anti-status symbol of sorts, to the front of their clothes. The fact that transit branding tends to have sleek designs and a retro look certainly helps.

Consumers have long made themselves billboards for various brands that don’t necessarily need their help, be it Nike or Costco, and a more cynical take might be that today’s transitphilia really just shows that anything can be commodified.

At the same time, people are not lining up around the block for ride-sharing T-shirts or rental-car Christmas sweaters. Something more substantial is happening here, even if some of the hype might be closer to virtue signalling with an urban-planning bent. Public-transit fans and marketing and design professors I spoke with repeatedly likened transit merch to sports-team apparel: a way for people to signal their ties to a community. With so much talk about affordability and loneliness, a public amenity that physically binds a city together may be the perfect mascot for 21st-century urban life. When people are cheering for a metro system, they’re cheering for connection—even if that connection comes in the form of strangers bumping into one another on rattling cars, 100-something feet beneath the earth.

[Read: Do yourself a favor and go find a ‘third place’]

This may sound like a lot to put on a mere transit system, but conversations about public transportation have a way of getting deep. Samuel Littauer, a 28-year-old in D.C., told me that he sees the subway system as the “great unifier.” At the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority sale, Littauer bought one T-shirt highlighting the system’s modernist architecture and another that shows a vintage Metro bus. He said he hopes that wearing them will allow him to connect with people who love the region like he does. Georgetta Nicol, the director of marketing at WMATA, suggested that the rush for Metro products is linked to a post-pandemic craving to be around others. She (and others I spoke with) were even willing to stretch the definition of third place—which describes spaces outside of home and work where people socialize and build community—to include public transit. One of WMATA’s hats is a bid for social interaction: Ask me about Metro.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Bay Area Rapid Transit; DC Metro Store; Official Los Angeles Metro Shop.

For some, an affection for public transit is already a lifestyle of sorts. Wasek hosts a “Metro Gala” each year, where friends dress up as interpretations of Metro stops. The winners for best dressed receive Metro merch. Jerome Horne, who works at the Maryland Transit Administration, owns nearly a dozen public-transit Christmas sweaters (and counting) and maintains a wider collection of transit items that he calls the “International Micro Museum of Transit.” He sees the broad affinity for public transit as part of a resurgence in esteem for public institutions. Transit is also “one of the last places you could go if you’re anyone and just exist,” he told me.

Such appreciation may also be born of changes to how Americans get around: Fewer young people want to drive, cars are expensive, and there may be no more consequential political issue right now than the price of gas. There’s a way in which the rise of transit chic could parallel how recessions can make vintage clothes popular. People are making what they can have trendy. Still, “I think there was always a ‘cool’ there, even if not everyone recognized it,” Horne said.

Public transit occupies a strange, contradictory place in the American psyche. In cities where cars reign, it can be heavily stigmatized. In a few major urban centers, though, it has a kind of cultural cachet. Images of the New York subway are as ingrained in the city’s identity as the Statue of Liberty. The NYC subway map decorates dorm rooms and apartments. Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 redesign, which smoothed the map into a minimalist artwork of straightforward lines and simple labels, is even included in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection, cementing it in design history. The license that Lynne Lambert obtained in the ’90s to produce merchandise with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s recognizable colored circles and other logos made the aesthetic into a business (one that’s still running today).

This most recent wave of transit-clothes hype might be traced back to 2021, when Bay Area Rapid Transit, in the San Francisco Bay Area, offered 150 ugly Christmas sweaters for sale online. They were gone in 40 minutes. Eventually, the endeavor earned the transportation authority more than $100,000 in one season. Every year since, BART has offered the signature holiday product and has been joined by a growing number of transit lines in Philadelphia, Toronto, Milwaukee, Chicago, Portland, and more. “It’s now almost become a competition between agencies,” Horne, the sweater connoisseur, said.

Success doesn’t always require tapping the holiday spirit. Many of the items at the D.C. Metro’s recent pop-up were hyperlocal—station-specific hats or quarter-zips color-coded by subway line. Often, systems adapt wayfinding features, such as signs and arrows, into clothing patterns. In Atlanta, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority sells “pylon” winter hats that match the blue-yellow-and-orange color scheme used within the system.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Chicago Transit Authority Shop; DC Metro Store; ItsMARTAMerch; NYC Ferry.

Marc Choi, a graphic-design professor at the George Washington University, told me that although wayfinding signs are supposed to be functional and “there but not there,” people build a subconscious relationship with them. In this way, a system’s design features become almost as recognizable as a city’s skyline, but they’re also more personal: They’re the city’s visual language. If you take transit, you’re fluent in it. “People have a very strong relationship with their day-to-day commute,” Choi said. “I think pop-up shops and this merch is just a fun way to channel that.” Sometimes, the offerings go heavy on the fun: Metro sells swimsuits that read Foggy Bottom across the butt. (It’s the name of a station.)

A little personality can give some verve to well-worn systems. But no one is going to buy transit merch if they don’t first enjoy using the system. I was surprised, for instance, to stumble upon a cheerful Christmas sweater for a regional train line that I can describe only as my locomotive nemesis (no thank you). But when the strategy works, it really works. I’ve been given a T-shirt that features a photo of the D.C. Metro’s brutalist “waffle” ceilings not once, but twice. I kept even the second one because I didn’t know how to say I already had it—and because they are both, to use the shirts’ coinage, brutiful.

Perhaps Connecting Fridges to the Internet Was a Bad Idea

2026-11-08T14:19:00-05:00

Bags of frozen blueberries and Swedish meatballs, packets of waffles and pizzas, and tub after tub of ice cream: all melted, floppy, spoiled, and stinking. This has been the scene at grocery stores across Europe after their fridges and freezers have been hacked.

Last month, employees at hundreds of supermarkets in France came into work to find they had to trash millions of dollars’ worth of food. The machines were not simply deactivated; they had been remotely hijacked and reprogrammed to hit temperatures as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Last Monday, grocery outlets in at least seven more countries, including Estonia, Belgium, and Sweden, experienced a near-identical incident. The same day, freezers at the French national blood bank were also hacked (though staffers were able to intervene before any samples were corrupted). Depending on who you talk with, America is either next or has already been hit: In August, the Pentagon quietly revealed that freezers at commissaries on several U.S. military bases had malfunctioned in a suspected attack.

No one has claimed responsibility for any of these exploits, and it’s not even clear whether they are connected. The hackers seemingly didn’t have a goal besides sowing chaos and wasting an enormous amount of food. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of these widespread fridge attacks is that they haven’t happened sooner. For hackers, these appliances make perfect targets.

The basic problem is that many fridges and freezers are now connected to the internet. “The attacks are very simple,” Nadiya Kostyuk, a cybersecurity researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, told me. Each unit has a microcontroller that is connected to the local network, so even someone sitting at a computer thousands of miles away can theoretically access it. These devices are typically password-protected, but they still tend to be pretty easy to crack, Kostyuk explained. “Usually it’s done by brute force,” which is to say the devices are spammed with password after password until one works. Some of the recent attacks were made simpler because usernames and passwords had never been changed from the manufacturer’s defaults. Once the hackers remotely broke into a system, they were able to take control of a heating element that can be periodically switched on to prevent frost from building up on the evaporator coils, which stops the freezer from working as effectively. Instructed to run repeatedly, that heating element has proved capable of cooking perishable food.

For a home fridge, the benefits—a touchscreen that can show family photos, an interior camera so you can see what you already have while you’re at the grocery store—may not outweigh the security risks. In the aftermath of the recent attacks, people have assumed the same is true for industrial fridges: Why on earth does a supermarket fridge need to be online? But for the millions of supermarket chill cabinets, refrigerated trucks and shipping containers, and gigantic cold-storage warehouses that our food sits in on its way from farm to table, the calculus is quite different.

Logistics companies are often required to demonstrate that food has stayed within a narrow temperature range while in their custody; the ability for a freezer to broadcast an alert if its temperature deviates from a set point at 2 a.m. is an extremely useful feature. Refrigeration units are always on—they have to run 24/7 by design—and a lot of today’s smartest devices provide the diagnostics that allow companies to perform predictive maintenance to preempt any potential issues. “The risk of loss is so high if the unit goes down,” Chris Gaffney, a supply-chain expert at Georgia Tech who previously ran logistics for Coca-Cola, told me.

The food that our fridges are protecting is extremely fragile; the machines themselves are quite complex; and qualified technicians are in short supply. A refrigerated warehouse, let alone a supermarket, won’t have a person with that kind of specialist skill set on-site, Gaffney said. But when connected to the internet, a scattered portfolio of freezers can be managed and sometimes even fixed remotely. And, as politicians push legislation to make food traceable, the entire supply chain is being digitized. “There are a lot of positives that come with that—ways to increase our food security and understanding where food is coming from,” Sara Stickler, the president of the Global Cold Chain Alliance, an industry trade group, told me. “But with digitization, there also comes risks.”

The food business isn’t like banking, where online security is central to a company’s value proposition. In perishable logistics, where the mission is keeping food cold, warehouse operators and grocery stores have not typically seen the value in spending extra on cybersecurity. “Margins are tough,” Gaffney said. When it comes to adopting sophisticated new technology, he told me, “logistics is a laggard, and within logistics, cold is a laggard.”

The genius and horror of hacking refrigeration is that although the cold chain is essential infrastructure, it’s not treated as such. As I quickly learned while writing Frostbite, my recent book on the topic, almost no one has a complete picture of refrigeration’s scope and scale. Nearly three-quarters of everything on the American plate passes through the cold chain on its way to our tables. Thousands of chilled warehouses, refrigerated containers and trucks, meat lockers, and banana-ripening rooms are located out of sight, underground, at ports, near freeway intersections or cattle ranches: Added together, these pockets of artificial winter form the invisible backbone of our food system.

Meanwhile, refrigeration is somehow different from other crucial infrastructure—water-treatment plants, say, or power stations—where the public may be ignorant, but at least industry members and government officials are on top of how many facilities we have and where they are. As supermarket shelves emptied during the early days of COVID, one industry expert told me that he received a frantic call from a senior official in the government asking how many refrigerated trucks and warehouses the country’s food supply depended on.

If there is a silver lining to these attacks, it is that they could serve as a wake-up call. “With these cyberattacks, it totally redefines what ‘critical infrastructure’ is,” Kostyuk said. After all, cyberattacks are not the only threat facing our food-supply chain: Dozens of supermarket refrigerators across the U.K. failed this summer during a heat wave that pushed them beyond their limits, and severe-weather-induced blackouts are a constant threat. Whether the culprit is a hacker or the weather, the outcome remains the same. Get used to seeing more empty supermarket shelves.

The Used-Battery Gold Rush Is Coming

2026-11-09T09:30:00-05:00

Updated at 4:42 p.m. ET on November 9, 2026

Like all batteries, the giant lithium-ion ones in electric cars eventually fade. Once they can muster just 70 to 80 percent of their original charge, they’re not very useful as car batteries anymore: They simply can’t get a vehicle far. But even a fraction of the energy needed to move a car is still a lot of energy—enough to, say, power the average house.

Go on Discord, Reddit, or GitHub, and hobbyists are sharing tips to revamp car hardware for exactly this purpose. Andrew Austin, who goes by Battery Man on YouTube, recently filmed himself connecting an old Nissan battery to the solar array at his parents’ U.K. home. “I’m not necessarily saying that everybody should hijack their parents’ house and stick an EV battery on the side,” he told me. But in this case, it worked. His parents collected enough energy to meet their own needs, and then sold some back to the grid.

Experts on car-battery reuse also are not saying that everybody should hijack their parents’ house and stick an EV battery on the side. (In fact, most of the ones I talked with cautioned against it.) But for the better part of a decade in Europe, whole rafts of EV batteries have been repurposed—with more formal technical and engineering support—to store energy that can power homes, businesses, and factories. As the EV fleet in the United States ages, more buildings here could soon be hooked up to old car batteries too.

Wearing out an EV battery can take 15 to 20 years, which means that, by the mid-2030s, millions of EV batteries in the U.S. will be past their prime and ready for reuse. Connected to a building instead of a car, they can provide power during an outage, relieve strain on the electricity grid, and cut down utility bills by storing cheaper energy to pull from during hours of peak demand.

These kinds of projects can take many forms. In 2017, for instance, a green-energy company installed used batteries from the car manufacturer Renault in U.K. homes that already had solar panels, so they could store energy from the sunniest hours for later. In 2019, a German Audi factory equipped its forklifts with retired batteries from its own cars. A soccer arena in Amsterdam has a backup power system made of new and used Nissan batteries, as does the city of Melilla, Spain. One reason Europe capitalized on aging car batteries before America is simply that EVs achieved popularity there first. The European Union also has laws requiring automakers to trace, repossess, and dispose of old batteries, which encourages reuse.

In the U.S., the standard practice is to recycle EV batteries or send them to landfills, where toxins can leak into soil and water. But conditions are gradually becoming more favorable for reuse. Colorado and New Jersey both recently passed producer-responsibility laws resembling the EU’s. Over the past 10 years, the number of Americans with solar panels, who might therefore want a giant battery installed on their property, has soared. At the same time, new batteries have become more expensive to manufacture, partly because of President Trump’s steep tariffs on materials such as graphite. So reusing existing batteries makes economic sense. The AI industry is also investing in EV-battery reuse to meet the massive energy demands of data centers, which can burden the grid and saddle nearby residents with higher electricity bills.

At least a handful of start-ups are eager to sell Americans old batteries as a backup energy source, especially with weather-induced outages on the rise. “We literally have hundreds of gigawatts of battery supply driving on our roads today,” says Eddy Chiang, the CEO of Moment Energy, a company that prepares EV batteries for reuse and installs them for clients such as hospitals and airports. In 2024, for instance, the company installed a system using retired EV batteries to fast-charge cars at Vancouver International Airport.

Moment, like its fledgling competitors, is building on its close ties to the car industry: Its chief technology officer previously worked at Tesla, as did one of its strategic advisers. Last month, Redwood Materials, a company that recycles old EV batteries and builds reused-battery storage systems for data centers, declared that it was working to deploy used batteries from the electric-car maker Rivian at its own manufacturing facilities. Redwood also recently erected a microgrid in Nevada to power four data centers and plans to expand the operation to 20 more. A spokesperson told me the company anticipates that retired EV batteries will power half of the energy-storage market by 2030.

That estimate may be optimistic. A Stanford study from 2024 found that lithium-ion EV batteries might have a longer life than previously thought. Carmakers also purposely design batteries to be difficult to take out for liability reasons, Asaad Kaadan, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Tulsa, told me, so prying them out can be more of a hassle than it’s worth. After all, lithium-ion batteries aren’t risk-free. Last year, thousands of them (not sourced from EVs) burst into flames at a California energy-storage facility.

For now, companies installing giant batteries at people’s homes tend to rely on new ones. Vermont’s largest utility provider, Green Mountain Power, offers home-battery installation using Tesla Powerwalls and other similar systems, Mari McClure, the CEO, told me, although she would be open to working with companies such as Moment and Redwood in the future to outfit houses with old EV batteries. No one in the U.S. is yet marketing old EV batteries straight to homeowners. “It is one thing if a dedicated battery facility burns down, but it’s a whole other thing if someone’s home burns down,” Kenneth Gillingham, a Yale economist specializing in environmental and energy issues, told me. If you have an aging EV and a DIY spirit, though, no one can stop you from trying.

This article has been updated to clarify details about Green Mountain Power’s home-battery-installation program.

Congress vs. Hegseth

2026-11-09T18:33:06-05:00

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Back in February, when the United States and Israel first attacked Iran, President Trump said that it would be a “short-term excursion.” Now, eight months later, as the war with Iran remains without conclusion, the president and his party are dealing with its consequences. As Vice President Vance put it last Tuesday, when Republicans were ousted from their seats in the House and the Senate—not to mention governor’s mansions and statehouses—in a fierce rebuke to the administration’s policies: “The reason we lost is the war.”

If voters swung Congress to Democrats in response to the war and its effects, what comes next? Democrats have said that they will vote to end the war; they’ve said, with some Republican support, that they will begin impeachment hearings for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. But after naming the hard-line adviser Stephen Miller, the architect and champion of some of the president’s most aggressive domestic and foreign policies, as his chief of staff, Trump may as well double-down on the agenda he’s chased for the past two years. This week on Radio Atlantic, our staff writers Nancy Youssef and Tom Nichols discuss where the administration goes from here, what options exist to get out of Iran, what to make of Hegseth’s potential impeachment, and how the Defense Secretary has changed the relationship between American democracy and the American military.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Nancy Youssef: The most enduring impact [Pete] Hegseth has had, in addition to the war, is on personnel. These are people with 20, 30 years experience, and then there’s all the impacts you don’t see—the captains and the majors who are looking at what’s happened to those ahead of them and saying, I’m not gonna stick around. That’s years and years of investment that has been lost, and will take years and years and years to replace.

Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris, and today, we need to talk about the war in Iran.

Voters cared about the war in this election. An AP poll showed that seven in 10 registered voters wanted to see it end. After Democrats rode a blue wave back to power last Tuesday, Vice President J. D. Vance wrote on social media, “The reason we lost is the war.”

Now Democrats are exploring the legislative tools they have to act as a check on the administration: They have the War Powers Act, they could withhold military funds through appropriations. But as hard-line adviser Stephen Miller takes over as the new White House chief of staff and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth continues to enthusiastically defend his position and the war, the question remains: Where does the administration go from here in a war of their own making?

Joining me to discuss are my colleagues Nancy Youssef and Tom Nichols. Let’s get to questions.

Harris: Tom, welcome back to the show.

Tom Nichols: Thanks, Adam.

Harris: Nancy, great to see you.

Nancy Youssef: Great to be with you.

Harris: Nancy, right after the election, we saw Republicans across the spectrum jump to blaming Iran and the Iran war for their loss. Vice President J. D. Vance quickly tried to distance himself from the conflict, and then Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth released a video in support of the war, saying:

Pete Hegseth: Peace through strength is once again American military policy. Our commander in chief demands it, and so we deliver it.

Harris: What does his reaction tell us about the discord within the administration?

Youssef: Well, Pete Hegseth was the most vocal advocate of this war, not only internally within the administration, but publicly as well, arguing that this was a just fight, that the United States was stopping Iran from having a nuclear weapon—all without releasing key details about what precisely was happening on the ground or at what cost it was coming to the United States in terms of munitions.

And so I think the five-minute video was as much about Iran as it was about threats of an impeachment hearing that Tom Massie put forth before the last session, and Speaker [Mike] Johnson notably relieved Congress so that they wouldn’t have that hearing. There’s at least six charges, some of them related to the war as well as to the boat strikes and some of the other actions that the secretary’s taken.

Hegseth: A disgruntled, defeated congressman, along with all his Democrat allies has also dropped sham articles of impeachment against yours truly.

Youssef: And so in a weird way, the secretary’s sort of conceding that he faced impeachment by putting out this video and saying that the military needed to come to defense and fight the fight. He didn’t say exactly against whom, but there you go. But he launched a very forceful defense for an impeachment that hasn’t happened yet.

But I think more than anybody, he is personally tied to this war because of his advocacy for it. I think if you’re a legislator thinking about impeachment, that video also signaled what he will do if impeached, which is to try to use it as a form of leverage with the president and potentially for his future political career and say that he’s being targeted much in the same way that [Donald] Trump has felt that he got targeted with some of the previous impeachments against him.

And so the question becomes, I think, if you’re in Congress, is this the best way to do it, and is this the best time to do it, particularly if the impeachment itself might not lead to a conviction in the Senate?

Harris: Tom, we’re seeing this post-midterms shakeup. Stephen Miller is the new chief of staff. Pete Hegseth is under fire from Congress. What does the last week mean for what we can expect out of the White House after the midterms?

Nichols: Well, for one thing, the president’s already set the tone: It wasn’t my fault. Had I been on the ballot—which he was, in a way—we would’ve won these things. And so, there’s gonna be a lot of blame-storming going on.

Harris: I guess I should say too: What does it mean for the war in Iran? What does it mean for the White House strategy in the war with Iran?

Nichols: Well, for the war in Iran, that’s really hard to say because, in theory, Miller has told the president that they have to get out. But that requires Donald Trump admitting a mistake, giving a W to the regime in Tehran, because it will survive and just washing his hands of it.

So I suspect that, at least in the short term, it’s gonna be more of what we’re seeing now, that the president acts as if the war is pretty much over. In his interview with Ross Douthat, he said when Ross asked him, What about the strait being closed? And he said, But it’s open.

To which, you know, yes, it’s open because there are U.S. Navy ships right now staying there at great expense and a certain amount of risk.

And I suspect that you’ll have this kind of phony war going on, where it’s neither peace nor war but it’s to get it out of the public eye and somehow be able to claim what Trump has always wanted to claim. Since the first few weeks of the war, when regime change didn’t happen, what Trump’s really wanted is: Give me a way to say that I won so that I can get out of this thing. And of course that wasn’t helped—I mean, to bring it back to Pete Hegseth—it didn’t help that Pete Hegseth, at least until May, was going out there and saying: We’re killing it. We’re winning. We’re going gangbusters.

Important to note that it’s been now six months since the Defense Department has bothered to give a press briefing. And I think that’s what to expect from the war. That there will be stories about a strike here or there, kind of the way maybe—and it’s an imperfect analogy—but kind of the way that the second Iraq war kind of trailed off. You’d open the paper and say, Oh, we struck some targets in northern Iraq, or, Our planes were fired on as they flew over southern Iraq.

But I think that will suit the Iranians just fine. The president again was asked what is in the future, and he said, All those countries are gonna pay every penny that we’ve spent on this war. That’s not going to happen. So, who knows?

Harris: You mentioned the interview with Ross where he’s like, Well, the ships are passing through the strait. The strait is open. And he says it’s at great expense, and he’s like, Well, it’s not at great expense. Nancy, can you talk about the expense to this point of the war and what’s necessary in order to keep it over there, as it were?

Youssef: So the expense is that naval blockade, which is a very heavy military effort. It takes a number of ships. There are two aircraft-carrier groups in the region right now. There is talk of a third one joining in the coming weeks, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which is currently near Singapore. When you have that many ships in the region, it means you cannot have naval assets in Europe, in Asia, in the area that Stephen Miller’s particularly interested in, the Western Hemisphere.

There just aren’t enough assets to have that kind of lift in the strait and do missions in other places. Moreover, it comes at great risk to not only the ships that are there because the Iranians are targeting them, but ground forces in the region as well, and we’ve seen that happen. And so we’ve seen an extra supplement of air defenses in the region and at the expense again of other parts in the region.

We see this, for example, in the inability of the United States to provide further munitions to Ukraine. The U.S. simply doesn’t have it. And remember, the Iranians are firing cheaply made drones and in some cases even ballistic missiles against the United States. It’s much more expensive, much more costly, much longer to resupply air defense capabilities like the THAAD and the Patriot.

So that’s sort of the immediate cost. But I think Tom’s point is an important one, in terms of where we are in the war.

I think right now we’re seeing sort of three options, in terms of what the president is trying to do. We heard him yesterday say that it was highly unlikely that the U.S. would go back to war, and I think he’s saying that for one of three reasons.

Either it’s a head fake and the United States is gonna resume strikes. Or he thinks it’s part of a negotiation tactic. Or he’s just saying it. But whatever it is, he has signaled he does not want to go back. The big change, though, for the Iranians, is twofold: One, Iran thinks that they have leverage in this conflict and don’t need to make any capitulations. And two, that midterm election has bolstered their confidence and their ability to negotiate.

And so while the president may try to kind of punt making this decision, at some point, both the cost of the blockade to the U.S. military and the Iranians’ unwillingness to hold this position or to stick to it will make that position untenable. There is a clock ticking in all this. And so while the president wants to keep it in the distance, at some point—I can’t tell you when or how—that will not be a sustainable position.

Harris: When we’re back, how the Democratic wins in the midterms might affect the path of the war.

[Break]

Harris: Nancy, Democrats now have an opportunity to do what they said they wanted to do: rein in the war. What are you all hearing now from Democrats, now that they’ve won the election, about possibilities for reining in the war?

Youssef: So I think a couple things. One is the impeachment hearing, because if you have an impeached secretary of defense, that certainly—even if he’s not convicted—that certainly puts a spotlight on the war itself. Because even if it’s not the only reason, it’s one of several reasons, and it requires a reexamination.

I think the second thing you’re hearing is questions about funding for the Pentagon. One of the problems that the Pentagon’s facing now is: It’s running out of funding. Hegseth is asking for $1.5 trillion, and we’ve heard bipartisan concern about that level of spending without getting any transparency, in terms of what’s happening in terms of the war.

Harris: How abnormal is that level of spending, $1.5 trillion?

Youssef: We’ve never had that. So usually, defense spending, if you were to make a chart, it kinda goes up and down. So World War II spikes, then it goes back down. Then it goes back up again for Korea, then goes back down. Then it goes up for Vietnam, then it goes back down.

And then after 9/11, it just steadily increased. And so what we’ve seen is a growing and growing defense budget. What’s interesting is that they’re talking about increasing defense spending while reducing the number of troops in Europe; while reducing the number of troops in the Middle East, potentially; while sort of focusing on this hemisphere, and yet asking for a larger defense budget.

So it’s not just the number, but it’s incongruent with what they’re saying they want to use the Pentagon for. And so they’re running low on funds as it is, and I think Hegseth might be a form of leverage that they try to use to say: If you want us to continue to approve funding, we need to see a change at the top.

The other thing I think you’re gonna see a push for is a lot more access to information that legislators and the public used to have about the conduct of war. We don’t know with any fidelity what the stockpile situation is in terms of munitions, what damage happened to the bases, how much it’ll cost to fix, which bases will be fixed, what that means for the future of U.S. military posture.

How do you continue to have naval forces in the Middle East when you’ve lost the basing access you need to restock those ships and have liberty visits for the troops? Very basic questions haven’t been answered. And I think one of the things you’ll see, if nothing else, is a push for more of that.

Now, whether they get it is something else because there’s been a real tension between the Hill and the secretary. But those answers, I think, are necessary to understand and really hold the department accountable for its conduct of the war. You can’t do it if you don’t have basic facts about what it’s done so far and at what cost.

Harris: Earlier this month, Military.com released a poll saying that 53 percent of active service members say they want to separate from the military sooner because the military is becoming more politicized.

This is a lot. Tom, how is the administration affecting this decline in morale among service members?

Nichols: From the first day of his first term, Donald Trump has attacked the traditions of American civil-military relations. All presidents have done—you know, when they show up at military academies or they go to a military base ostensibly for a nonpartisan event—all presidents skate that line every now and then because they like to have the military as kind of a backdrop to what they’re doing.

Donald Trump has left that line in the dirt miles behind him. He has tried actively to tell the military: You are a constituency of the Republican Party and of my support group personally. You are part of me, rather than America. And that hurts morale. I taught for 25 years at the Navy War College, and I taught hundreds of officers.

And they all have very—you know, these are men and women of strong political opinions. Have a drink at the O Club, the Officers’ Club, you’ll hear them. But in a way, they took great pride in what I always called the “miracle” of American civil-military relations, which is that we are the most powerful military in the world, and yet no threat to our democracy whatsoever.

I think people don’t realize how amazing that is: that a massively powerful military that is absolutely contained within the democratic structure of a large and vibrant and diverse country. And I think that, for many of them, the military is a refuge from politics; that when they go to work and they fly a helicopter or, they’re leading PT, whatever they’re doing, it’s not political.

They’re one organization, one mission. And Donald Trump has really divided them about that. And when you start introducing that suspicion—about promotions, about people kind of getting the side eye because of something you might have said—that turns us into a Soviet military, not an American military. That turns us into a Third World military. And that serves Donald Trump’s purposes just fine because, again, he wants the military to be actively engaged in politics.

I wrote a piece a while back where I was sort of desperately yelling for somebody to do something about Trump going to Fort Bragg and saying, Come on, let’s all talk about how much Joe Biden sucked.

And I said, “Where’s the Army chief of staff? Where’s Randy George?” And of course, Randy George probably—I never spoke to General George about it, but he was soon to be fired. And I think that’s the other problem with morale, is that all of these men and women are looking up the chain and saying, All the day that I do things—I was never in the military; this is something I learned from observing and talking with officers over a quarter of a century—that they look up the chain and they say, Whatever happens in politics, we have this very stable community, this very stable chain of command. People are promoted; they retire; they come up the ranks.

When Pete Hegseth inserts himself into those processes and says, All you people on this promotion list, you’re fine except for you, you, you, and you, and those four people are Black, female, disfavored groups in Hegseth’s eyes, because he thinks they were DEI hires, people start to wonder: How stable is that chain of command? What’s happening here?

And so it doesn’t surprise me at all that a lot of people would say, You know what? If I’m going to be living in a very politicized, messed-up situation where people are promoted because of politics or demoted because of how they look, I could do that and not have to wear uncomfortable boots every day.

And I think that’s really unfortunate. I think the damage to the civil-military relationship in America is a lot deeper than—we’ll realize in a few years just how much Pete Hegseth has damaged the institution of the United States military.

Youssef: You know, it’s funny: The question you were asking about the politicization of the military, it actually ties to the Iran war as well, because when you tell people that your promotion is contingent on your loyalty, politically, or your loyalty to the president or the perception [of] that, what it leads to is people less willing to give their best military advice, which they are supposed to do.

They’re not supposed to just salute and follow orders, whatever they are. They are supposed to bring forth their best military advice, and I think you saw that in the run-up to the decision to launch these strikes on Iran. So many people had been fired or demoted or pushed out—an unprecedented number—that the lesson people took was not to give their advice, but to salute even when they thought maybe the decision was less than ideal, because to do otherwise risked their jobs, and they’d seen their predecessors leave before them.

Moreover, the people who came in afterwards often had less experience than those before them because the system was not designed for this many people to be fired in this way. And so younger and younger people were coming up the chain.

The only thing I want to add—and I think it’s an important thing to note—U.S. service members do not take a personal pledge to a person or a president. They take an oath to defend the Constitution, and that is by design because we as a nation have decided we don’t want militaries loyal to any person. That has been a basic foundational principle of the United States military that begins all the way to the oath. And the more we’ve deviated from that—in many ways, the Iran war offers an example of the perils of that—that you get a military that offers different advice than it would, if it believed that it was protected.

And so back to your original question: what does Congress do? I’m curious if the Congress, both lame-duck and afterwards, starts to back some of these officers more. I think what’s been striking to me is we’ve seen so many people fired, demoted, pushed out, and, really, almost silenced from the Hill about it.

Even though these guys are signed off by the Hill, we haven’t heard anything. Are there going to be hearings in which some of these fired generals and admirals are called back? Is there going to be a public discussion about the impact of this? Because the most enduring impact Hegseth has had, in addition to the war, is on personnel. These are people with 20, 30 years experience. And then there’s all the impacts you don’t see—the captains and the majors who are looking at what’s happened to those ahead of them and saying, I’m not gonna stick around. That’s years and years of investment that has been lost, and will take years and years and years to replace.

Harris: How big of a deal would it be if Defense Secretary Hegseth were impeached?

Youssef: Well, it’d be a huge deal. We’ve only had two Cabinet secretaries in the history of the country impeached, neither one of them convicted. Certainly not the person in charge of the largest government organization, the one asking for more than a trillion dollars in government funding, the one responsible for 2 million troops and part of the chain of command.

It would be extraordinary, and an incredible condemnation of the top civilian at the Pentagon while the United States has forces deployed and a blockade happening in the Strait of Hormuz. And so it would be an unprecedented thing to happen, in many ways. But by itself, it doesn’t—I don’t think—lead to the sort of foundational questions that need to be asked and answered in terms of: What kind of Defense Department do we want, moving forward?

Nichols: It’s a huge deal because Pete Hegseth’s gonna make it a huge deal. A better secretary of defense—and by that I mean almost any secretary of defense—would say, All right, I’m impeached, but we get back to work. You know, life goes on. He would say to the troops: This is not about you. This is something happening in Washington. We’ve got this.

But two things will happen, I suspect. One is it will send a message—and I think this is necessary—from the Congress to a lot of people in the high command, the senior command of the United States, that says: Look, we haven’t forgotten that you’re doing things like extrajudicial murders of people in the Caribbean. Just because it’s off the newspapers doesn’t mean that we, the representatives and the people of the United States, have forgotten that you guys were doing this.

So that’s a salutary effect, because I think it’s been a tragedy that somehow that just went on and we said, Well, I guess that’s just the way it is.

The worst part is that Pete Hegseth will—he’s already done it. He’s going to try to drag the troops into this. These ads where he has himself posing with Stephen Miller and saying, “Stand and fight,” that’s not about the mission of the Defense Department. That’s Pete Hegseth doing an ad for himself that he’s putting out and hoping that the president sees it and doesn’t fire him, but also a message to the troops. It’s us against them. I’m your secretary of defense. These terrible civilian leaders—the ones in the Constitution that, as Nancy points out, that you’re sworn to protect—they’re the enemy now.

And so I think it’s necessary. I think it’s important that it happened. But I think that Pete Hegseth will use it to divide the troops even more than he has tried to in the past. And I think that, strangely enough, that’s a good reason to do it. Because that kind of secretary of defense should be impeached and removed.

Harris: Well, we’ll have to leave it there. Tom, Nancy, thank you so much for joining me and helping us understand this better and sharing your reporting.

Youssef: Thanks for the great conversation.

Nichols: Thank you.

Harris: That’s all for today’s show. This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli and edited by Kevin Townsend. It was engineered by Miguel Carrascal and has original music by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of podcasts, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

If you like what you saw here, new episodes of Radio Atlantic drop every Monday and Thursday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, on Apple or Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues at The Atlantic, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.

A Monster of His Time

2026-11-06T16:18:00-05:00

The criminal trial of Russell Brand took less than four weeks, at the end of which the comedian turned spiritual influencer was found guilty of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. (The jury in London declared him not guilty of three other charges, two of rape and one of attempted indecent assault.) The accounts detailed by Brand’s accusers were harrowing. The Christianity-themed podcast episodes broadcast by Brand and his wife, Laura, before and during the trial—their regular series is titled Sunday Service With the Brands—were so audacious that they were hard to process. In one installment, Brand interrupted his own monologue on how a Bible passage from Ephesians helped him prepare for court each day (“Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled round your waist”) so that he could read a sponsored ad for Polymarket.

Still, what shocked me most during the trial was how many of the women detailed assaults that they said happened to them while they were at work. One complainant testified that while she was employed at MTV in 2001, Brand had tried to drag her into the office bathroom for sex, becoming a “wild-eyed maniac,” in her words. (Brand was found not guilty on this charge.) Another complainant stated that Brand had squeezed her breasts and kissed her in broad view of his entourage while she was working at the radio station Choice FM in the mid-2000s, a charge on which he was convicted. A woman working for the British national TV broadcaster Channel 4 in 2009 testified that Brand had refused to film one day unless she gave him a massage, and when she’d acquiesced, he’d buried his face in her crotch while two of his associates watched and laughed. (Brand was also found guilty of this charge.)

In court, Brand’s accusers were asked whether they’d told anyone else what had happened to them at the time (yes, they had told colleagues, two out of three of the above women said), and what had happened in response (nothing). The line of questioning was perhaps necessary in a court of law but seemed ironic given that Brand’s entire career throughout the 2000s was built on transgressions very like the ones detailed in court, broadcast as national entertainment.

[Read: The unspeakable, enabled]

It’s easy to forget, deep into Brand’s third and fourth professional reincarnations as an online conspiracy theorist and an evangelist, that he became famous for relentless provocation. His persona—a mix of lolloping Dickensian scoundrel, glam-rock dandy, and grinning sexual deviant—was unique when he broke out as a comic in 2000. In a moment when the cheerful sexism of 1990s British culture was edging toward a darker mode, Brand’s willingness to violate every moral and social code was the core of his identity.

In 2001, the day after 9/11, he was fired by MTV after showing up to work dressed as Osama bin Laden, with his own drug dealer in tow. In 2002, he filmed scenes for his satellite-TV show, Re:Brand, during which he took baths with an unhoused person and masturbated a man in a pub bathroom. (In his defense, he later specified, he was on crack and heroin at the time.) That year, Brand was also fired from his XFM radio show for reading pornographic material on the air. But every time he lost a job, he gained a better and more prestigious one.

One woman testified in court that at a party in Soho in 2004—the same year that Brand was hired for his most high-profile gig yet, as the host of a show spun off from the smash reality series Big Brother—he’d grabbed her breasts and forced his penis into her mouth (he was convicted of only the former act). In 2006, the same year that he began hosting a BBC Radio Six show, Brand asked the TV presenter Vanessa Feltz, on another of his shows, whether he could “have it off” with her daughters, and harassed the singer Dannii Minogue so committedly that she described him as a “vile predator” who “wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

All of this—the ritualistic diminishment of women doing their jobs, the ironic cruelty, the swaggering priapism—was so much a part of Brand’s schtick that it must have been what producers and commissioners liked about him. British culture was deeply confused about sex at the time: The waning anxiety of the AIDS era and the nascent force of the internet meant that sexual imagery was suddenly everywhere, and no one seemed to know the rules anymore. As a teenager in 1999, just home from school, I watched the pop stars Geri Halliwell and Kylie Minogue arm-wrestle and then make out on camera for the Channel 4 series TFI Friday, while the host, Chris Evans, cheered them on and replayed the footage, eyes darting out of his head like a cartoon coyote. In 2008, the BBC TV presenter Jonathan Ross simply told Gwyneth Paltrow on his talk show that he “would fuck her.”

Brand could only have emerged in this postfeminist moment, when people were still sanguine about objectifying women for sport, and not yet jaded by the extremities of the internet. What do people commonly do when they’re shocked? They laugh. Brand’s body of comedic work is made up of so many offenses, detailed by Brand himself in baroque and head-spinning verbiage, that to try to take stock of them all now feels like trying to compile the dictionary. In his 2007 memoir, My Booky Wook (supposedly titled after the Nadsat dialect spoken by the rapist marauders in A Clockwork Orange), Brand describes, during high school, badgering a teenage girl named Penny for sex: “I painted verbal pictures and begged until she kissed me, I lied and danced and evoked the spirit of Pan till reluctantly she removed her bra, I used tears and emotional blackmail to secure the immolation of her knickers.”

[Read: No, women aren’t the problem]

Early in the days of his BBC radio show, Brand called a female newscaster “erotic,” saying, “We’re going to get under that desk and we’re gonna unleash hell on your thighs, woman.” (The woman complained to colleagues, causing Brand to further mock her on the air. “The producer just told me that we’ve upset her,” he said on another show. “They go, ‘She ain’t got the right to reply.’”) To Piers Morgan, in a 2006 GQ interview, Brand said that although he’d likely slept with close to 2,000 women, “I resent the word ‘predator.’ I like to think of myself as a conduit of natural forces. After all, the most natural thing in the world for people to do is f*, isn’t it? And people want to do it, so all you have to do is remove all the reasons why women don’t actually go through with it.”

Brand’s defense lawyers, and his own testimony in court, maintained throughout that although he’d been an admitted—and eventually repentant—philanderer during the height of his fame, he had never had sex with a woman without her consent. The jury disagreed. The judge said yesterday that Brand will likely face “significant” time in prison, given the gravity of the offenses of which he was found guilty.

It’s notable that in the years following 2010, as Brand’s acting roles puttered out and rumors circulated about what he was like to work with, he had to constantly reinvent himself to try to keep people’s attention. But his role at the beginning of the 21st century as the glinty-eyed, chaotic, intensely self-obsessed purveyor of sexual discomfort made him a mascot for his era, and he was enabled by far more people than will ever admit to it. “There was a culture of fear,” one of the complainants said in court about Channel 4, her workplace when Brand assaulted her. “Russell Brand was an A-lister star, it was Big Brother, people were watching it, we all watched it.”

50 Unforgettable Love Stories

2026-10-21T08:00:00-04:00

Centuries before bookstores had shelves labeled ROMANCE and fictional hockey players locked eyes across the ice, the love story, with all of its attendant joys and sorrows, was an organizing principle of life—and of literature. The sentiment that another person might “complete” us enchanted both Plato and Jerry Maguire, and the search for that someone, along with the desire to understand why it can hurt so bad, has animated fiction from the beginning. The list below is an effort to name those love stories: novels, of course, but also poetry, plays, and short stories—that we consider to be the most enduring. We asked a jury of scholars, librarians, critics, and authors across genres, as well as many colleagues, to name their favorite titles that were originally written in English. We thought of our own personal touchstones, deliberated over the choices, and emerged with a group of standouts: 50 titles you won’t soon forget.

English is not reputed to be the most romantic language, but it is the most widely spoken. (Focusing on these particular love stories was also a practical way to narrow things down.) Since the end of the Renaissance, when modern English began to take shape, poets and playwrights wrote tales of wooing and marriage, infatuation and betrayal. Their words gave rise to some of our language’s most powerful aphorisms, idioms, and, yes, clichés—think of hearts on sleeves and matches made in heaven. Today, fictional love is associated with the romance genre and its proliferating subcategories, and you’ll find examples of those books here, but we aimed to think more expansively about its literary manifestations. The love story belongs as much to Arundhati Roy as to Jane Austen; its pulse beats as strongly in the knotty poetry of Anne Carson as it does in the steamy historicals of Beverly Jenkins. It is by turns ecstatic, tragic, cerebral, enthralling, and enlightening. For so many of us, it’s a reason to live and to read.

Explore the unforgettable love stories

Astrophil and Stella

by Philip Sidney

1591

Well before the novel existed to plot out the course of infatuation and heartbreak, grand sequences of sonnets chronicled the rise and fall of great loves. One of the most radical of these was Sidney’s, which follows Astrophil (“star lover” in Greek) and his beloved, the celestial Stella, across 108 sonnets and a handful of songs. To woo her, Astrophil displays his wit via the wordplay that poets have long used to capture the messy states of the heart—and show off the dexterity of the writer. But Sidney’s sequence stands out because of his awareness that the formal devices peppered across his poems are “stol’n goods.” And he wrote a truly compelling story, one that keeps us in suspense until the middle of the series, when Astrophil’s eyes meet Stella’s. Although his paradoxical blandishments may not win him his star in the end, they are a triumph in their own right, seducing and amusing us in a portrait of love-tossed misery.

Walt Hunter

Romeo and Juliet

by William Shakespeare

1597

Shakespeare’s tragedy about young lovers from rival families remains, four centuries later, one of the most adapted plays in the English language. In just the past 30 years, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jet Li, Aaliyah, and Angelina Jolie have all played versions of Romeo or Juliet. There’s been a zombie version and several Bollywood ones. The play was even, if you’ll believe it, reinterpreted with gnomes. (His name becomes Gnomeo, obviously.) The story is inescapable but persists, I think, because of its tantalizing core premise: that you could find a love so passionate, so all-consuming, that you’d rather die than be without it.

Serena Dai

Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister

by Aphra Behn

1684

Behn, best known for her plays and her later novel Oroonoko, was the rare woman to make a living as a writer in the 17th century. This epistolary saga endures, in part, because of its salaciousness. The passion between the aptly named Philander and Silvia, his wife’s sister, is absolutely cursed; their most significant shared interest appears to be bringing upheaval and misery into the lives of everyone they meet. Although the central affair may be unenviable, the book is notable for the sheer range of romantic literary tropes that it helped enshrine—including the wayward lover who only wants what he can’t have, the once-pure soul corrupted by sexual liberty, and the fake relationship that gives rise to real feelings. Above all, it proves that swooning language, nonstop drama, and a tinge of the illicit can make a romance an addictive read, even (and sometimes especially) when its characters are offputting.

Talya Zax

Evelina

by Frances Burney

1778

Burney’s novel is a romance in every sense of the word. Yes, it’s a book about the golden-hearted young woman of the title, Evelina, falling in love with a wealthy, dashing young man—a preview of the marriage plots of Jane Austen, who counted Burney as one of her favorite authors. But it’s also a romantic novel in the older literary sense, the kind of mildly fantastical tale in which an impoverished Scottish poet considers turning to a life of crime, only to wed an heiress once it becomes apparent that she is not, as was previously suspected, his half sister. Evelina’s blissfully unrealistic quest for both love and personal recognition—spoiler: she turns out to be an heiress too—is both sharply observant and a lark. It deserves more love from a literary culture that adores Austen but often ignores her predecessors.

Talya Zax

Persuasion

by Jane Austen

1817

Austen is the empress of romance, and her work sets the bar for all of the love stories patterned after hers. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma each could rightfully claim a spot on this list. But Persuasion is Austen’s most mature and realistic novel. It tells the story of a single, not-so-young woman who is reunited after many years with the man she rejected at 19. Its prose is calmer and less intent on cleverness than Austen’s other works, and it is suffused with the disappointments and hardships that accompany any life lived past the age of 20. So the happy ending, when it inevitably comes—this is still a classic romance, after all—feels especially well-earned.

Eleanor Barkhorn

Jane Eyre

by Charlotte Brontë

1847

The full title of this coming-of-age novel is Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. That deliberate move emphasizes the authority of the titular heroine—a governess who is poor, orphaned, and unbeautiful—to narrate the story of her life. So it is impossible to discuss the soul-cracking love story between Jane and her employer, Edward Rochester of Thornfield Hall, without paying heed to Jane’s assertion of control when she learns, to her horror, that Rochester is already married to a Creole woman named Bertha Mason. Bertha is treated cruelly by both Rochester and the author, and Jane ultimately profits from her suffering. Whether one blames Jane is another topic. But this famous book’s famous line toward the end—“Reader, I married him”—states her case: Jane’s allegiance is not the passive sort. She owns her decision.

Rachel Vorona Cote

Wuthering Heights

by Emily Brontë

1847

Few, if any, books on this list should be read as a how-to guide for the romantically inclined. That said, you really, really, really shouldn’t model your affairs on the doomed relationship that propels Brontë’s only novel. Wuthering Heights conjures a vision of love as despair and longing, not a living thing to be nurtured but a cold, hard object clutched fervently to your chest. When Victorian-era social mores keep the childhood sweethearts Cathy and Heathcliff apart, Heathcliff decides that nobody in their vicinity should ever be happy, and drafts a revenge plot to upend an already-miserable family. Also, everyone is constantly dying of consumption or trying to kill a dog. Nonetheless, this is the stuff of messy myth, the sort of lifelong obsession that makes all other entanglements seem paltry and cheap. Naturally, the pair is reunited only in death, as their specters meet again on the windswept moorlands.

Jeremy Gordon

North and South

by Elizabeth Gaskell

1854

With the rise of industry in mid-19th-century England came the industrial novel, an improbably romantic genre. In Gaskell’s version, a rocky courtship mirrors the country’s labor wars. The cultured, genteel Margaret Hale is forced to leave a village in the agrarian south for a squalid city in the industrial north (a thinly disguised Manchester), where she gets caught up in the lives of desperately poor workers. Meanwhile, she is befriended by a Byronic, self-made cotton-mill owner, John Thornton. The novel tracks her sentimental education—and his—as they overcome class prejudices and hotly debate Thornton’s obligations to his employees. A strike and near riot lead to a shocking, at least by the standards of the day, public display of affection; the greater the threat of violence becomes, the more the book swoons. Imagine Pride and Prejudice updated for a more political age, and you’ll get a sense of the pleasures of North and South.

Judith Shulevitz

Middlemarch

by George Eliot

1871

Eliot wrote novels about marriages both good and bad, usually bad. In Middlemarch, these unions function as worlds unto themselves—created by, but larger than, the couples inside of them—and the bad ones crush the soul. Two of this novel’s several protagonists, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, suffer from romantic illusions, and each chooses an utterly unsuitable partner: The idealistic Dorothea thinks she’s marrying a great scholar, but he turns out to be spectacularly mediocre, so tyrannical and small-minded that his last name, Casaubon, has become shorthand for “pettifogging pedant.” Lydgate has a brilliant future as a doctor but falls for a beautiful, vain woman with expensive social aspirations. One of these two will be trapped for life, and the other freed only by an act of God. Eliot is willing to give characters a chance at love, though, and the horribleness of the bad marriages makes the good ones feel like a major spiritual achievement.

Judith Shulevitz

The Portrait of a Lady

by Henry James

1881

Should The Portrait of a Lady be considered one of James’s ghost stories? The characters are alive but their choices linger like a haunting, and when I think of this classic, I feel as though I’m encountering a phantom. The story of Isabel Archer, a young woman who wants to believe that her life is her own to determine, is classic James, down to its settings and psychological contradictions. The friends Isabel encounters are taken with who she is and ache to see her get what she wants, just as the reader will; the men and women who want to use her for their own needs are villains unlike any other—their machinations are what haunt me. This is all to say it’s the most romantic book I’ve ever read, one that understands how dangerous it is to be a woman who believes in love’s powers—and yet how necessary it is to retain that belief, no matter the fears that hang over us.

Haley Mlotek

Anne of the Island

by L. M. Montgomery

1915

When readers meet Anne Shirley, she’s an irresistible mess of contradictions: an 11-year-old tomboy who’s vain about her looks, an occasional liar who is also capable of searching honesty. These qualities make her unforgettable to those around her, not least to Gilbert Blythe, the boy in class who teases her, competes with her, befriends her, and ultimately becomes her lifelong love. The joy of the Anne of Green Gables series lies in the specific delights of watching Anne grow up—and in how affectionately it widens its lens to show us Gilbert growing up next to her. Anne of the Island, the third book, is where this happens in earnest, as the two head to college and wrestle with what they want from the wider world. As almost-adults, Anne and Gilbert look for love with other people, get jobs as teachers, and learn about sacrifice and (on one particular night) the possibility of loss. The twists and turns are classic, but you’ll thrill at seeing both of them wend their way toward the other, because you know how lively a partnership theirs will be: These two friends, who know each other better than anyone else, are idiosyncratic as individuals and will be no less so as a couple.

Jane Yong Kim

The Age of Innocence

by Edith Wharton

1920

Wharton’s magnum opus is a voyeur’s novel, written for those who love to gawk, by a woman who invited her readers to gape at New York’s “small and slippery pyramid” of Gilded Age high society. Among its velvet-caped, silver-spooned denizens, someone is always, always watching. The Age of Innocence is an agonizing tale of the rigors of unconsummated love. The dutiful Newland Archer is blissfully engaged to the demure May Welland until he spies her cousin, Ellen Olenska—who has just returned from a broken, ruinous marriage—at the opera. Ellen is everything Newland craves: cultured, candid, independent. She’s simultaneously drawn to him and hobbled by guilt. But being together would mean betraying May. So how will they exist—and coexist—in stifling, closely surveilled Manhattan? The novel’s last image, a gaze at a closing window, is as heartbreaking as any of literature’s most dramatic deaths.

Hillary Kelly

The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

1925

I know, I know: The Great Gatsby is a love story in the way that Jaws is a nature documentary. But the romance between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan—slow-burning, explosive, doomed—endures precisely because it is so richly unromantic. This affair, as it picks up speed, threatens everyone in its path. Gatsby pines for Daisy and waits for Daisy and reinvents himself for Daisy. He builds, and then takes residence in, a Daisy-centric universe. In another novel, that kind of devotion would be something to be celebrated—desire as a physical force, passion as the ultimate plot device. In Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, though, passion is also an omen; like Chekhov’s gun, or George Wilson’s, it is always lying in wait. But the novel, having stripped romance of its giddiness, offers something far more compelling in return: ambivalence. Is this devotion? Is it delusion? Or is it one more party, glittering and wild, that will have to come to an end?

Megan Garber

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

by Thornton Wilder

1927

When a rope bridge in Peru collapses in July 1714, killing five people, the Franciscan friar Brother Juniper wants to know: Why did these five souls perish—was it an accident or divine intention? This simple question propels Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel into a brilliant exploration of attachment and its flawed, human expressions—the suffocating love of the Marquesa for her daughter; the self-sacrificing love of young Pepita for the abbess who raised her; the codependent love between the twin brothers Esteban and Manuel, which leaves no room for romance; and the manipulative love of Uncle Pio for the great actor La Perichole. Almost 100 years after The Bridge of San Luis Rey was first published, its last sentence still feels like a surprise ending, somehow striking a hopeful note: “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

Molly Roden Winter

Their Eyes Were Watching God

by Zora Neale Hurston

1937

Janie Crawford is a freethinking Black woman who yearns for a steady love, but her quest for it ultimately leads her toward her own highest self. Marriage, in this novel, can be disfiguring, and it forces women to shrink parts of themselves. Before she’s 40, Janie has been through two painful relationships with men who harm her, belittle her, and control her. But even when she’s curled in on herself, Hurston’s microscopic gaze manages to show us the fine grooves of Janie’s heart. Finally, approaching middle age, she meets and marries a younger man named Tea Cake; her feelings for him are so intense that she experiences a “self-crushing love.” But the line that shook me is as follows: “So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.” She genuinely adores Tea Cake, but their marriage, too, will end—and, wisely, she’ll have saved an ounce more of that love for herself.

Jenisha Watts

Arabella

by Georgette Heyer

1949

Arabella is the blueprint for modern Regency romances—the whole etiquette-driven Bridgerton-esque subgenre. The title character is the eldest daughter of a poor country vicar, and she must marry well for the sake of her younger siblings. Mr. Beaumaris is the richest, most eligible local bachelor—and he’s committed to staying single and away from scheming women. To save her pride, Arabella tells Mr. Beaumaris a string of lies. Amused and intrigued, he stays in her endearing orbit, content to watch her navigate the ridiculous situations these lies get her into, until they both fall madly for each other. Hilarious and deeply romantic, the 1949 novel offers historical detail and sharp commentary on the era’s social conventions that make it feel as if Heyer was writing alongside Jane Austen in 1817.

Danica Nava

The End of the Affair

by Graham Greene

1951

The End of the Affair is the fourth and final of Greene’s “Catholic novels.” The book’s autofictional protagonist, Maurice Bendrix, has a passionate affair with the married Sarah Miles. Their union is plagued by his jealousy; after Bendrix’s London apartment is bombed during World War II, Sarah ends things abruptly. A private investigator reveals that Sarah had promised God that she would quit the affair if Bendrix survived. More drama ensues, but the book’s real accomplishment is its close examination of the nature of ardor. I first read it at 19, and although I am not a Catholic, I was raised by one, and I inherited something of his tormented relationship to devotion. The question the book left me with was one that I had wondered before, if cautiously: What if all love derives, ultimately, from the divine?

Melissa Febos

The Price of Salt

by Patricia Highsmith

1952

When Highsmith’s 1952 novel opens, the 19-year-old Therese Belivet is working the Christmas rush at a Manhattan department store. With its crowded workers’ canteen and lonely employees, the store is likened to a prison. One day, a blond woman with a fur coat and gray eyes approaches Therese’s counter, and Highsmith leaves the administered world of the department store for the open road. Compared with Todd Haynes’s ravishing 2015 film adaptation, Carol, the novel is spikier, more political, and attentive to the repression and surveillance of Cold War America. Highsmith’s eye for quotidian detail gives the writing a lived-in quality: When, two-thirds of the way through, the two women share their first kiss, Therese notices the lock of hair toppling over Carol’s scarf, the scratch on the toe of her moccasin. Their devotion is ordinary, anchored in everyday things—but it is this kind of love, the book suggests, that might set us free.

Charlie Tyson

Giovanni’s Room

by James Baldwin

1956

Giovanni’s Room is a novel of terrible romantic abjection. David, an idle American in Paris, frightened and ashamed of his attraction to men, meets Giovanni, an Italian who has fled his country and works at a gay bar. Their love is, from the beginning, doomed by David’s unremitting self-hatred—his imprisonment in his own “dirty body” and his fear of its uncontrollable, irresistible longings. Desire is always shadowed by disgust, which casts a tragic pall over these two lovers in the city of lights.

Merve Emre

Maurice

by E. M. Forster

1971

In 1913, Forster had a life-changing experience: A man touched his “backside—gently and just above the buttocks,” as he described it later. Forster was 34 years old and already established as one of England’s best novelists, but he had never come to terms with his homosexuality, much less written about it. Now he set to work on a love story about two men. What made Maurice revolutionary was Forster’s insistence that Maurice Hall, the repressed, middle-class protagonist, not meet with a tragic ending—the usual fate of gay characters in fiction at the time. Instead, he and Alec Scudder, a working-class gamekeeper, fall in love and, as Alec declares, decide that they “shan’t be parted no more, and that’s finished.” Even after completing the novel, Forster felt it was too radical to publish. When it finally appeared in 1971, after his death, Maurice already seemed a little old-fashioned to critics. But even today, there is great power in the novel’s undefended emotion—the tremulous happiness of a wish fulfilled.

Adam Kirsch

The Flame and the Flower

by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

1972

This is the godmother of all bodice rippers. As might be expected of a ’70s novel set in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina, the modern reader may want a heads up: It includes sexual assault, slavery, and kidnapping—but contemporary objections can’t override its compelling central pairing. Heather Simmons, an innocent British orphan, and Brandon Birmingham, a stubborn American ship captain, overcome their harrowing first encounter and cultural differences to give themselves permission to love. Heather learns to take control of her life, and Brandon promises to spend the rest of his making up for any pain she’s suffered. Explicit sex scenes, rare in books of the time, reveal the intimacy usually elided by “fade to black” paragraphs, and their influence can still be found today in heaps of romantic subgenres. Woodiwiss’s detailed, lush prose inspires both wistful admiration and, however begrudging, real respect.

Nichole Perkins

Corregidora

by Gayl Jones

1975

Has Ursa Corregidora ever really been loved? She was a deeply wanted daughter, yes—in part so she could fill the role of a Corregidora woman. From a young age, she has known that her job is to remember the violence done to their family during slavery and to “make generations” that will pass down that memory. Her husband, Mutt, courted her, praised her, and bedded her—then he threw her down the stairs, leading to an emergency hysterectomy that left her childless. Men and women constantly paw at her, demanding affection, fidelity, and sex. So Ursa has a hard shell, and she knows how to hate. She’s scared, though, that she doesn’t know what love looks like. In the course of this short, bleak, transportive book, no one will sweep her off her feet to show her. But she’ll be able to recognize what it’s not: “You can’t kiss where you scratched anymore,” she resolves. “You don’t treat love that way.”

Emma Sarappo

Endless Love

by Scott Spencer

1979

After 45 years, I can still recite this novel’s intense opening lines. I wasn’t 17, as the narrator is—I read the novel during my junior year of college—but I wanted to be, like him, in full obedience to my heart’s most urgent commands. This is the kind of book that, if you allow it, will seize you from the first and never let you go, then consume your imagination long after you finish. Endless Love is an unashamed dive into the monomania of romantic obsession. It contains one of the most honest, longest, bloodiest sex scenes in all of literature. It also conveys the pain and sadness of being that young, wanting that much, and running up hard against the limits of your world and your self. I haven’t read Endless Love since I was 20. Today I might find it marred by its excesses, but that might be a sign of something lacking in myself.

George Packer

The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

1980

Midway through The Transit of Venus, the awkward, brilliant scientist Ted Tice learns that Caroline Bell—the object of his unrequited passion and the heroine of the novel—has married. In his subsequent daze, he finds that “grief had a painter’s eye, assigning arbitrary meaning at random—like God.” Has personal tragedy ever sounded more enthralling? Hazzard’s masterpiece follows the orphaned Caroline and her sister, Grace, through the decades of profound change that followed World War II, as each discovers how love can circumscribe a life. Few of the relationships in this novel are happy, but all of them are so finely wrought that to read them is almost to live them—to feel, as Ted does, with an intensity that is both painful and enlightening.

Talya Zax

Love Medicine

by Louise Erdrich

1984

The titular potion in Love Medicine does not work as planned. In fact, the overriding theme of Erdrich’s debut novel, a prismatic saga following one Chippewa family, is that love can be neither predicted nor controlled. The Kashpaws form a giant tumbleweed of a family tree, whose complexity owes to a love triangle in the early 20th century. The progenitors are the handsome, passive Nector; his headstrong wife, Marie; and the wandering Lulu, who goes on to have a brood of children with different fathers. Erdrich’s panorama makes room for dozens of fascinating characters, but the love story sets everything in motion, and decades later it comes to a perfectly fitting conclusion. Love Medicine is, among many things, a brief against shame. As Lulu says when she gets to plead her case, “When they tell you that I was heartless, a shameless man-chaser, don’t ever forget this: I loved what I saw.”

Boris Kachka

Beloved

by Toni Morrison

1987

Beloved asks readers to imagine something as pure and perfect as love—a mother caring for her child; two broken people trying to make something beautiful—in the face of absolute misery and ugliness. That’s where the book’s potency comes from: the tension between the darkness and the light. Sethe, its main character, has committed unspeakable violence toward her own daughter, but she was motivated by maternal devotion. Having survived that transformational tragedy, she has to decide whether she can allow anyone to love her again. Beloved evokes both the peril of motherhood and its singular power. Reading it, I wanted to fold myself into the pages and then fall out of my skin. It’s painful, but what’s even more devastating is that the novel is one of the most banned books in America. How dare we rob the next generation of its greatness?

Jenisha Watts

The Remains of the Day

by Kazuo Ishiguro

1989

This novel is, to borrow a term from Saint Augustine, a story of disordered love. Stevens, the narrator, is an impeccably mannered British butler who loves his country, his profession, and his master—all worthy enough objects of devotion, in the abstract. His fidelity blinds him, however, to the cruelty and fecklessness that his nation and employer are capable of—and to just how humiliating some of his work can be. Even more tragically, his sense of duty compels him to deny love to the flesh-and-blood humans in his midst: He abandons his dying father so that he can better tend to a dinner his master is hosting; he refuses to acknowledge, let alone reciprocate, the clear affection of a fellow servant. The anguish of reading this novel lies in watching a man with such a deep capacity for love direct it to exactly the wrong places.

Eleanor Barkhorn

Possession

by A. S. Byatt

1990

Possession opens in 1986, in the reading room of the London Library, where mysterious letters discovered by a young academic jolt the plot into action. It ends in the 19th century, with a devastating scene in which the letters’ author stops to chat with a child. In between is a detective story about two sets of prospective lovers more than 100 years apart: In the 1980s, a dueling pair of scholars—one the careful, if old-fashioned, philologist who finds the letters and the other a glamorous, feminist critic—seek to understand a secret romance through notes and correspondence. In the past, we meet the Victorian poets who are the subjects of that search as they leave behind the traces that will be puzzled over and plumbed. The book is extravagant, high-concept, and a total tearjerker, distinctive for its empathy toward its characters and their sense of the possible—and for its many passages of people falling head over heels for each other’s writing.

Hillary Chute

Mating

by Norman Rush

1991

“Why do we yield” to love, asks this novel’s narrator, “when we don’t have to?” She’s an intellectually voracious anthropologist overwhelmed by a new romance—and she’d “like to know as a woman and a human being, both.” Mating is Rush’s effort to get to the bottom of that unanswerable question: Why is it that sex and love make the smartest, most confident, and most in-control of us fall apart? But the novel isn’t just intellectual; far from it. Rush gives his book every possible kind of drama, from the erotic to the geopolitical—and, what’s more, he imbues his writing with a real (if wry) optimism that has turned Mating into a cult classic of our sometimes-pessimistic age.

Lily Meyer

The Blue Flower

by Penelope Fitzgerald

1995

When the German Romantic poet Novalis, real name Friedrich “Fritz” von Hardenburg, was in his early 20s, he fell in love with a 12-year-old named Sophie von Kühn. (This utterly inappropriate match was thankfully never consummated, owing to her early death.) In his grief, Novalis wrote a fragmentary novel about a man who longs to see a mysterious “blue flower,” which would provide the material for Fitzgerald’s gently comic, subtly insightful book. Here, Fritz’s idolization of the distinctly ordinary Sophie, whom he calls “my wisdom” and “my Philosophy,” is clearly the ridiculous acting-out of a young man who wants drama—but in Fitzgerald’s skillful hands, it’s also an idealistic, even beautiful, pursuit of the self-abnegation that can come with love.

Lily Meyer

“Brokeback Mountain”

by Annie Proulx

1997

The source material for the film that won Ang Lee an Oscar and became pop-culture shorthand is only about 10,000 words long. How, in just one short story, did Proulx manage to fit in one of the most stirring depictions of romantic ecstasy that I’ve ever read? Her measured, inventive sentences follow Jack and Ennis, who meet in the summer of 1963 while herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain, in Wyoming, and experience a lightning-strike intimacy that keeps them tied together for decades. Proulx wrote what became the film’s most memorable line—“I wish I knew how to quit you”—but much of the story’s prose should be equally famous. Chronology is dictated here only by desire—years go by in a paragraph; a single embrace oozes across a page. Love, Proulx shows, warps the minutes: Every meeting both lasts forever and ends in an agonizing second.

Valerie Trapp

The God of Small Things

by Arundhati Roy

1997

In her Booker Prize–winning novel about the tragic fallout of a taboo-breaking liaison, Roy repeats a few distinct phrases again and again. One is the image of a “hole in the Universe” that takes various shapes: a person, or a cat, or “History.” Although The God of Small Things overflows with monsoon-drenched flora, industrial pollutants, bitterness, and scheming, it has a love-shaped hole in its center that is filled only at the very end. From the first pages, we know that Estha and Rahel, fraternal twins in a prosperous but dissipated family in India’s Kerala region, have seen their lives ruined after a blurry sequence of events that led to death and exile. Slowly, inevitably, Roy closes in on a brief, forbidden dalliance that defies India’s caste system. Romance, in this story, is usually defined by its absence, and yet passion is everywhere. Sometimes desire blooms beautifully; more often, it remains untended, left to rot.

Boris Kachka

I Love Dick

by Chris Kraus

1997

When this book was first published, the Dick of the title, a real-life sociologist, was quoted in New York magazine denigrating the work as “a bad review of my presence in the world.” This revealed his identity, even though Kraus had tried partly to obscure it—after all, the book isn’t a memoir. It’s instead a species of autofiction, a collection of billets-doux to Dick written by Kraus’s protagonist, also named Chris, with her husband, named Sylvère, like Kraus’s actual then-husband. Her aim is to “take an experience that was so completely female”—the private, abject state of unrequited romantic obsession—and treat it seriously, like material for academic study. What results is a genre-bending feminist work powered by the engine of infatuation. As Chris puts it: “Desire isn’t lack, it’s surplus energy.” Dick is right that he doesn’t come out looking so great, but the book is only nominally about him anyway.

Christina McCausland

Tipping the Velvet

by Sarah Waters

1998

Waters’s moving portrait of the anguish that follows falling in and out of love is as erotic as it is engrossing. After a young girl named Nan becomes smitten with Kitty, a “masher” (or male impersonator), she follows her new flame to London, only to endure a terrible betrayal. The Victorian capital has never been as alive as it is in Tipping the Velvet: The 19th-century theater world gives way to the city’s seedy underground before the book peeks in on socialist organizing. Every plot thread is loaded with commentary on class, sexuality, and gender. Beautiful, passionate, and historically clever, this is no ordinary bildungsroman.

Chinelo Okparanta

Autobiography of Red

by Anne Carson

1998

A little red monster with wings falls in love with the Greek hero Herakles. The two go to hell to visit Herakles’s grandmother, break up, and reunite years later at a Peruvian volcano. Autobiography of Red claims to have recovered this improbable plot from bits of writing by Stesichoros, a Greek poet from the sixth century B.C.E.; Carson begins with invented “fragments” from Stesichoros and three scholarly looking appendixes before starting her original, woozy love story in earnest. Early on, Geryon is 14, abused by his brother and adored by his mother. A chance encounter with Herakles at a bus station leads to a teenage romance and some of the most transcendent love poetry of the late 20th century. Geryon ultimately finds his calling as a photographer; the book concludes with a description of his snapshots, which arrest the characters in a state of longing—with “immortality on their faces, night at their back.”

Walt Hunter

Peel My Love Like an Onion

by Ana Castillo

1999

Flamenco isn’t just a dance for Carmen Santos, she reminds us frequently. It’s a way of life. It gave her the ability to walk without crutches when she was a child, her leg withered by polio; it gave her a living in her 20s; it allowed her to make art when no one believed that she could. And it introduced her to the two great loves of her life: her older mentor, Agustín, who brought her into his company and made her his mistress for 17 years, and the young dancer Manolo, who gave her a year of passion unlike any she’d known before. Now Carmen is approaching 40, living at home in Chicago, and unable to dance—post-polio syndrome is taking away her hard-earned dexterity. Her mother wishes she’d married and had children, but Carmen regrets nothing. And when both Agustín and Manolo come back into her life, she won’t pretend that her heart is closed—but she knows there are things she won’t give up for love.

Emma Sarappo

Atonement

by Ian McEwan

2001

In one sense, Atonement is a classic love story: a sweeping, romantic account of two people pulled to each other with inexplicable, magnetic force. Yet few interactions between Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis actually occur in these pages; their relationship is a specter, mostly present in the hovering question of what could have been. Early on, Briony—a precocious 13-year-old writer—walks in on Cecilia, her older sister, having sex with Robbie, their housekeeper’s son. Misunderstanding what she’s seen, or perhaps motivated to puppet-master reality as she does in her stories, Briony makes a false accusation that lands Robbie in prison. The rest of the book is about her decision’s ruinous repercussions. Some novels cast love as a type of fiction, a comforting yarn spun by humans who can never really access one another’s internal worlds. In Atonement, love is a fact—and the cruelest thing that a story can do is endanger it.

Faith Hill

Call Me by Your Name

by André Aciman

2007

Readers familiar only with the film might be surprised by the elegance and interiority of Aciman’s writing. No author since Proust has given readers such a nuanced understanding of the human heart—not just the forward arrow of reciprocated desire but also the insecurities, crossed signals, ambiguity, and doubt. Call Me By Your Name is a novel that, at last, tells the truth about love.

Andrew Sean Greer

The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

2011

Almost 15 years after The Song of Achilles was first published, the bookstore I co-own, the Ripped Bodice, still sells dozens of copies every month. Few other books have this kind of staying power. Miller’s lyrical retelling of The Iliad, focused on Patroclus and Achilles’s romance, is tender, intimate, achingly sentimental, and—because readers know from the beginning where their story is headed—completely devastating. This is one of those rare stories that seems to become more beloved with every passing year.

Leah Koch

The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

2011

Eugenides’s love triangle between three brilliant but naive recent college graduates captures the angst and tumult of having one’s ideals tested by disappointment. His characters exit school steeped in 19th-century novels, semiotics, and the academic-seminar trends of the 1980s, which give grammar and form to their fizzing fantasies but also set them up for hard lessons when they inevitably crash into reality. As both a fan of Eugenides and a recovering English major, I ate this up when it came out, in 2011, and revisit it every couple of years out of affectionate nostalgia.

Jon Hickey

Americanah

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

2013

Ifemelu, a feisty, fiercely intelligent fellow at Princeton and a prolific blogger, is considering returning home, to Lagos, after living in America for many years. Her story is juxtaposed with that of her high-school sweetheart, Obinze, who is now married and a successful businessman. They had lost touch in their youth, when Ifemelu migrated to America and Obinze headed to London—but as the book fills us in on their formative years as a teenage couple and the diverging paths that followed, circumstances lead them back to Nigeria and back to each other. In the past, Adichie has objected to the book being classified as a love story, but even she admits that in the end, it is. I agree: Not only is this a love story; it’s an epic one.

Nicole Dennis-Benn

Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

2015

The best love stories suggest something about how all relationships function—even when they imply something dark. Fates and Furies concerns the charming and lucky Lotto and his reserved, mysterious wife, Mathilde. First, we hear Lotto’s account of their life together; it’s a compelling drama, if curiously devoid of details about Mathilde’s background. Then we get Mathilde’s version, which reveals how much Lotto never understood, how willing he was to accept a convenient, two-dimensional idea of his wife. Some of the plot details stretch credulity, resulting in a sort of twisted fable of matrimony. Even then, Groff leaves the reader with the chilling suspicion that every ordinary marriage will end, by death or divorce, with its two partners never having grasped the person they’re meant to know best.

Faith Hill

Forbidden

by Beverly Jenkins

2016

Jenkins is one of the most important voices in modern romance, and Forbidden is a perfect example of what she does best. Set during Reconstruction, the novel follows Black characters building lives, communities, and futures in the aftermath of slavery. Yet the weight of that history never overwhelms Rhine and Eddy’s sharp, funny courtship or the rich world that surrounds them. Jenkins has spent decades showing us that Black history is also a story of joy, ambition, and friendship. Forbidden expands our understanding of who gets to be at the center of the American conversation—and it’s also incredibly fun to read.

Leah Koch

Normal People

by Sally Rooney

2018

Rooney is a master of miscommunication. Her two protagonists here, Marianne and Connell, are as star-crossed as Shakespeare’s doomed lovers, and not only because they, too, come from tragically incompatible homes. The main problem, rather, is that they cannot speak plainly about their desires. A classic example: Connell asks Marianne if she wants to see other people, hoping she’ll say no; she thinks that he’s breaking up with her and coldly replies, “Sure.” Revisiting the book recently, I felt the desperate need to ask them to please use their words. But Normal People is about being young—really young—and navigating feelings that are more powerful than your expressive abilities. I found the novel painfully effective at transporting me back to my teens: a time when everything happens in high definition, someone can feel both made for you and completely inscrutable, and the stakes seem paralyzingly high even when they’re patently low. That’s a bit how falling in love feels at any age.

Faith Hill

An American Marriage

by Tayari Jones

2018

Jones’s breakout fourth novel is set in Atlanta—and, like much of her work, it’s an ode to her hometown. It also has more to say about the contemporary American justice system than almost any other novel written in this century. At the start of the book, Celestial, its artist heroine, is newly, happily married to a striver named Roy, a former small-town boy thrilled to take his place among Atlanta’s Black bourgeoisie. But when Roy is wrongfully arrested and incarcerated, Celestial discovers that even her family wants her to perform a stifling public role as his loyal wife that, no matter how much she loves him, leaves no room for the complexity of her grief and loneliness. When her longtime friendship with her childhood neighbor Andre turns romantic, the position that Roy’s imprisonment has put her in is revealed to be untenable—and Jones reveals Celestial to be a heroine for the ages.

Lily Meyer

This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

2019

In this otherworldly novella, love spans time—and then breaks it. Red and Blue are two futuristic agents embroiled in a war fought across universes and decades; their job is to warp world events in order to benefit their opposing governments. Their correspondence begins with taunts before morphing into mutual curiosity, fascination, and, finally, a passionate and forbidden alliance. Their letters explore yearning with such beauty that I challenge any reader to be unaffected. Red’s and Blue’s very essences are at odds, yet they find each other through battle, through centuries, and through twists in their own timelines that hint of betrayal—but are actually proof of a selfless commitment to a dreamed-of future. El-Mohtar and Gladstone’s deft epistolary romance is, in every sense of the word, timeless.

Ashley Herring Blake

Before I Let Go

by Kennedy Ryan

2022

When we first meet the central couple in Before I Let Go, they are already divorced. A series of tragedies have pushed Yasmen and Josiah apart, and they’re separately navigating grief while still co-parenting and working together. Heartbreak and second chances are familiar territory in romance novels, but Ryan’s novel transcends the commonplace. Her story starts with intense passion and adoration—and then, when the unrelenting stressors and crises of the real world interfere, Ryan asks: Is love alone enough to sustain a marriage? Through Yasmen and Josiah, the reader experiences tender moments of self-doubt and self-loathing, the pride of watching someone build themself up, and the spark of desire reigniting after years of being swept aside. Their reconciliation isn’t wrapped in a perfect bow; it’s messy, mercurial, and imperfect—as Ryan writes, “the stuff real happily ever afters were made of.”

Krystle Champagne-Norwood

You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty

by Akwaeke Emezi

2022

Feyi, a Nigerian American artist living in Brooklyn, is dealing with the death of her husband in complicated ways. She pushes for a risky hookup in a bathroom at a party; she paints canvases with animal blood. None of it stops her from having vivid nightmares about how Jonah died—but she’s still trying to move on. She has a not-quite-boyfriend, Nasir, who sweeps her off to his family’s luxurious Caribbean-island estate. Once there, she finds herself drawn to Nasir’s father, Alim, who recognizes Feyi’s sadness. The resulting entanglement is tense, chaotic, and, it must be said, pretty sexy. But the novel isn’t just about the thrill and devastation of an inconvenient attraction. Emezi considers the ways that loss can reshape desire—and the relief that comes from not only being wanted by someone, but also being understood by them.

Elise Hannum

Little Rabbit

by Alyssa Songsiridej

2022

That title is what he calls her—no real names here. He’s “the choreographer,” and she’s just “Rabbit.” They meet in Maine, at an artist’s residency, where nothing happens between them. When they catch up in New York, she’s pulled to him like a dowsing rod to water. She’s queer and hasn’t been with a man in ages. He’s an established artist—rich, powerful, and two decades her senior. At 30, she feels that she knows herself well enough, as a writer and a woman, to indulge her erotic curiosity. Then, before she realizes it, she’s caught in his rip current, being pulled further and further away from everything she knows. The only part that terrifies her: She likes it. Adores it, even. Their partnership remakes everything she’d taken for granted, and Little Rabbit is the story of a person learning to accept what her body’s already decided.

Emma Sarappo

The Safekeep

by Yael van der Wouden

2024

At the beginning of the 1960s, Isabel lives alone in her family home, a house she doesn’t own but has nonetheless burrowed into and absorbed as her whole way of life. One night at dinner, her brother and landlord, Louis, introduces Eva, his girlfriend, who repulses the tightly wound Isabel with her “violently peroxided bob” and overt sexuality. When Louis suggests that Eva move in with Isabel for the summer, Isabel’s furious suspicion turns into erotic obsession. Van der Wouden builds the revelations so elegantly that to spoil them would feel like critical malpractice. The house is more than a house; Isabel’s sour, anxious misanthropy is more than simple repression. And Eva is so much more than a vehicle for sexual awakening—she’s also a puzzle, and she inspires a reckoning. But the ferocious connection between the two women seems to incinerate all of the layers of history and conflict that engulf them, creating space for something new.

Sophie Gilbert

How to Be an Ethical Russophile

2026-11-09T14:00:00-05:00

Ask someone to name a few Russian novels, and they might rattle off the greatest hits: Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov. Maybe they’ve read these classics and love them; maybe they just know they’re supposed to know them. Now ask the same person to name some Ukrainian novels: probably nothing. Even native Ukrainians might be more familiar with Russian books and writers than with their own literature; after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a pedestrian in Kyiv could still pass by Leo Tolstoy Square, or any number of gilded monuments to the poet Alexander Pushkin.

That changed in 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Pushkin statues were razed; Tolstoy’s name was made verboten. A group of Ukrainian writers proposed a worldwide boycott of books by Russian authors. One proponent of the ban argued that “every prominent Russian name” was a way to exclude a Ukrainian. In May 2023, the free-speech nonprofit PEN America seemed to be swayed by this argument, abruptly canceling a festival panel of Russian dissident writers after protests from Ukrainian attendees. Books that merely had something to do with Russia became suspect too. Later that year, the American writer Elizabeth Gilbert announced that she’d asked her publisher to pull her forthcoming novel—a historical drama set in Siberia with no apparent relevance to the current conflict—after hearing from aggrieved readers in Ukraine.

Today, such dramatic displays of solidarity are no longer in vogue. As the war grinds on and international outrage recedes, debate over cultural boycotts seems to be focused elsewhere. In May, Cannes awarded one of its top prizes to a Russian director whose anti-war film has been criticized by Ukrainians for going too easy on President Vladimir Putin. Theaters across Europe are welcoming back Russian musicians—even some with Kremlin ties—who had their performances yanked in 2022. But for the French writer Emmanuel Carrère, Russia’s cultural dominance is still a vexed subject—and a profoundly personal one. “I know, in starting this book,” he writes in the opening pages of his new memoir, Kolkhoz, “that it will deal in no small part with Ukraine and the brutal war Russia is waging there, because for me Russia, for better or worse, is a family affair.” Kolkhoz renders the history of Carrère’s Russian-émigré family in fine detail, skittering backward and forward in time, and from one vantage point to another. Throughout, he picks his way toward his major question: Is it possible for him to oppose the war and still love Russia?

Carrère is best known in France for his lancing, digressive nonfiction, which often takes on controversial subjects: the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, the lives of outlaws, his own experiences with bipolar disorder. He’s a memoirist, not a polemicist—“I prefer to rely on my experience,” he has said—but he has an abiding interest in how individuals come to believe grand narratives and insulate themselves from truth.

The 68-year-old’s “everything is copy” approach to writing has led to a few well-publicized imbroglios—as when he broke a legal agreement to write about his ex-wife in his 2020 book, Yoga, or when, in 2007’s My Life as a Russian Novel, he defied his mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, a right-wing intellectual and historian of Russia, to reveal that her Georgian-born father had been a Nazi collaborator. Kolkhoz—published in France last year and newly translated into English by the discerning John Lambert—picks up on some of the threads of that family drama.

This time around, he’s focused more narrowly on Hélène and her maternal relatives, whose life stories, pieced together with the help of family records collected by his father, an avid Russophile, make up the heft of the book. (Its title refers to a type of Soviet collective farm, a word that Hélène used as a playful nickname for their family unit.) Hélène was descended from a family of aristocratic “White Russians” (named for their ties to the anti-Bolshevik White Army) who were living abroad in Italy before the Russian Revolution, cosseted among servants and gardens. Carrère’s portraits of these unrepentantly bourgeois people are lively and tinged with affection—they’re Tolstoyan, in that way—but as he recounts their ordeals, he’s struck by their apparent myopia. Insurgents had been agitating against them for decades, and yet they “hadn’t seen anything coming”; the revolution arrived as a sucker punch.

Once the Bolsheviks seized the family’s lands back in Russia, their fortunes evaporated. Hélène’s mother, Nathalie, ended up in Paris, along with a wave of other White Russian resettlers, defunct titles in tow. Someday, they assured one another, the Bolsheviks would be routed, and they’d be shuttled back into the highest echelons of Russian society, at the helm of a sprawling Slavic empire.

Hélène, born in Paris, grew up to be a scholar of Russia’s imperial past. But she also took an interest in its trajectory after the fall of the Iron Curtain. When it became clear, in the 1990s, that a squeaky-clean republic was unlikely to magically emerge, diplomacy between Europe and the Russian Federation flagged, and Hélène saw an opening for herself. She became France’s most prominent advocate for Russia, a “regular visitor to the Kremlin” who rubbed shoulders with President Boris Yeltsin, then Vladimir Putin (she loved the perpetually drunk Yeltsin and found Putin cold but respectable), and served on the “ethics committee” for Russia Today, the state-run news network.

From her perch on the French-talk-show circuit, Hélène routinely upbraided American and European leaders for humiliating Russia, which she claimed was well on its way to becoming a modern social democracy. Corruption, cronyism, a protester disappeared here or there: These were merely growing pains. Russia’s culture of hard-edged resilience would help it rightfully reassume its place among the great world powers. As for the “little people” who lived in the other post-Soviet states, including her father’s relatives in Georgia, they were “archaic, folkloric,” and largely deserving of their ancillary status.

Still, Carrère notes, she never expected Russia to invade Ukraine. Just a week before the attack, with Russian troops already congregating in the Donbas, Hélène assured a TV interviewer that the country was safely off-limits. Putin, she said, was “a rational man, aware of the risks, who would never take reckless action.” Then reality proved her wrong. “I’d never heard this woman, so optimistic by nature and principle, sounding so distraught,” Carrère writes. “She kept repeating: ‘I don’t understand. I just don’t get it.’”

Eventually, Hélène acknowledged the unfolding conflagration, but only to explain away her faulty reasoning—not to renounce her past statements. Putin’s motives were simply inscrutable, she insisted, even to an expert such as herself. The French media excoriated her, but she retorted that they were merely under the influence of le wokisme. Carrère returns continually to this episode throughout Kolkhoz, trying to make sense of Hélène’s intransigence. How could a woman who “prided herself on understanding the Russians” have missed the mark by so much? Why had she never interrogated her own beliefs?

Yet Carrère, too, had mostly shrugged off the possibility of an invasion. He’d inherited his mother’s love of Russia—or a skewed image of it. Growing up, Dostoyevsky’s propulsive stories about a murky, multifarious world astonished him, serving as a “rite of passage into adulthood.” From years of writing about Russia’s underworld, he’d amassed a collection of friends in Moscow: Putinists, mainly, and “adventurous foreigners” partial to the “libertarian” flavor of Russian gangsterism. Neither he nor his mother had ever made the time to visit Georgia—even though one of his Georgian cousins had been elected president, on a pro-Europe, anti-Russia platform, in 2018. “Russia remained my main focus,” he confesses, just as it had for Hélène.

Emmanuel Carrère at the Kiyevskaya metro station in Moscow, March 2022 (Nanna Heitmann / Magnum Photos)

The invasion throws all of this into question, and forces Kolkhoz away from family history. Carrère introduces a series of vignettes from the early days of the war. First up is a trip to Russia, planned before the “special military operation” was announced. He arrives in Moscow, where he is supposed to shoot a cameo for a film adaptation of one of his books, on February 24, 2022, as tanks are rolling across the border. Almost immediately, the production is halted. Carrère is unsettled, but instead of returning home, he asks to stay and do some journalism; he wants to understand how Muscovites are reacting.

Over the next few days, he’s startled by what he hears from his friends, whom he’d considered reasonable people—“not very respectable,” sure, but not outright ideologues. The war could be “the end of the world,” they say, but it’s not the cost to human lives that frightens them: It’s the loss of their material comfort. For them, Carrère notes acerbically, news of sanctions rains down “like the missiles on Kyiv,” portending an end to foreign luxuries—“Disney, Netflix, Nike.” Russian TV, Carrère observes, broadcasts messages of hatred and hegemony on a loop.

With these experiences in mind, he is not exactly surprised when he learns about the Ukrainians who have begun advocating for a boycott of “everything Russian”—matching Russia’s programmatic efforts to overwrite their culture with hard lines of their own. By that point, he’s already begun an early version of Kolkhoz, and he visits Ukraine again in 2023 to gather material. On a trip to Kherson, he meets with the president of PEN Ukraine, Volodymyr Yermolenko—one of the people who objected to the Russian PEN America panel—who tells him, as Carrère summarizes, that “every Russian that’s honoured means a Ukrainian who’s forgotten.” Carrère is sympathetic, but he still tries to defend the literature that’s been central to his life. Dostoyevsky is worth preserving, he tells Yermolenko and his Ukrainian colleagues, because his novels allow “contradictory voices to unfold,” without privileging or co-signing any one of them. “Isn’t it the opposite of ideology?” he wonders. “Isn’t it the triumph of complexity?”

An academic in the group swiftly lights into him. “She’s had it,” Carrère writes, “with the eternal glorification of complexity as the alpha and omega of literature.” War, she argues, gives the lie to “complexity”; it cuts through gray areas and cleaves right from wrong. When his interlocutors ignore his trollish request to speak Russian, though it’s the one language in which they’re all fully fluent, he’s impressed—by the strength of their convictions, their willingness to engage in reasoned debate, and even their distaste for Dostoyevsky.

But has his relationship to Russia actually changed in any meaningful way? Although he’s intrigued by the Ukrainians’ commitment, it’s clear that he won’t be joining their boycott. Carrère soon returns to his comfortable life in France, chastened by the violence he’s seen, and less convinced that Russia’s defeat is inevitable. The last part of Kolkhoz is a painfully specific account of his mother’s death from cancer in 2023; apart from the offhand complaints about “sniveling” Ukrainians on TV that she offers from her sickbed, the war hardly plays a role. This is a tragic and affecting way to conclude the book, but an evasive one too; it reveals a limitation of Carrère’s fragmentary, distractible style. Historical pain, unbroken generational cycles, the endless struggles of nations: How much does all of this matter, Carrère seems to be saying, when one’s mother is dying? This line of thought might have been more convincing had he not spent the last 300-odd pages reflecting on those very matters—and describing a woman whose life was utterly bound up in them.

Carrère has one last swerve in store, however. He leaves us with a surprising postscript of sorts: an ode to his father, Louis, the Russophile who provided him with all of his material for the book, and who occupies a more shadowy place in it. Louis, a taciturn insurance executive, always played second fiddle to Hélène; he had no Russian roots, but he grew to love the country because he loved his wife. Later, when their marriage “deteriorated to the point of no return”—because this is France, they each had affairs but did not divorce—he retreated into his research and made his wife’s family history his “great passion.” Louis compiled exhaustive dossiers of documents, mapping out the cataclysms suffered by Hélène’s ancestors (including the neglected Georgian side of the family). In doing so, Carrère suggests, he confronted the darkness of Russian life—and the consequences of unfettered imperialism—in a way she never could.

If there’s a proper way to love Russia and still oppose the war, it might look something like this: a rigorous, sustained process of trying to understand. Such an approach would involve preserving history in its totality and rejecting any narrative that jettisons the unsavory bits. Kolkhoz is Carrère’s attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps, but he doesn’t quite have the attention span for it; for all of its maximalism, the project feels curiously truncated. Perhaps it’s up to readers, then, to pick up where he left off—to forge a pathway through the culture wars toward a fuller, clearer reading of history.

On SNL, the Struggle (For Power) Was Real

2026-11-08T12:59:58-05:00

This season of Saturday Night Live has gotten a lot of mileage from inaction. Week after week, sketch after sketch—as James Austin Johnson’s version of Donald Trump interrupts whatever comedy might be at play—the show’s performers have done more than merely step aside as the president storms the stage. Instead, his presence leaves them comically petrified: frozen, at pretty much the moment of his entrance, unable to do anything else.

Like much of what plays out on live TV, the gag works because, so often, it doesn’t quite; half the fun is watching stars such as Kenan Thompson, temporarily transformed into audience members, trying to stifle their laughter while Johnson Trumps it up. The freeze-frame device also works, though, because of its upstager in chief. Few jokes capture the president’s scene-stealing capabilities better than ones that find Trump like a modern-day Medusa, turning everyone in his path to stone. There’s a fine line, however, between running joke and crutch—and it’s one that SNL has frequently crossed. Only five episodes into the current season, the freeze-frame bits have become notably tepid.

But on last night’s episode, the freeze frames were not just the point; they made a point. The cold open was an inevitable recap of the midterm elections: the blue wave that, on Tuesday, swept the country. The sketch’s action began in expected fashion, with the Senate Democrats Hakeem Jeffries (played by Thompson) and Chuck Schumer (Sarah Sherman) celebrating, and analyzing, their party’s landslide victory. How did they do it? What was the source of their historic rebuke to Trump, the MAGA coalition, and the political status quo?

“Me!” said Trump, storming the stage. Johnson’s version of the president blathered (about Millennial cringe, about the long-gone sitcom New Girl, about men’s backsides); Colin Jost, as Pete Hegseth, at one point smarmed onto the scene. All along, Jeffries and Schumer were relegated to the background, present but vacant: two power players rendered awkwardly inert.

The staging made sense—because the upstaging made sense. The sketch, dominated by Trump even in his moment of loss, hinted at Democrats’ famed ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It also visualized the fickle workings of American party politics. Power, particularly in this moment, is largely a function of attention: a matter of which politician can occupy the forefront of voters’ screens and minds. The sketch, as each character jockeyed for eyeballs, managed to turn that reality into comedy. American politics is a battle of attrition; last night, on SNL, the (power) struggle was real.

The episode’s host made that opening salvo especially apt. The comedian Druski has made a specialty out of skewering the politics of race (which he brought with him to the show, including to a sketch co-starring Andrew Dismukes as a fictional Atlantic reporter) and rose to fame posting comedy videos to Instagram. He is the first digital creator to host SNL. His episode’s cold open fittingly, and elegantly, mimicked the workings of the phone screen and the brute dynamics of the digital economy. Images, vying for primacy: That’s how information works now. It’s how culture works now. It’s how politics work now. Candidates battle not just to convince voters that their way is the right way but also to simply be there, crowding out the other contenders—undeniable, unavoidable, and ever in the foreground.

The sketch, in recognition of that, anointed a new scene stealer: Senator-Elect James Talarico, whose victory this week helped turn Texas blue. Operating in another long-standing SNL tradition, Talarico made a surprise cameo, closing out the sketch by upstaging everyone else, literally and symbolically. The lame-duck executive, the leaders of the legislative establishment—for the first time in a long time, they were relegated to the background as the young politician talked about a new day in American politics.

“It’s clear people want something new,” Talarico announced, grinning, as SNL’s live audience whooped in approval. But true change—real transformation—is more easily scripted than done. And before Talarico shouted the customary “Live from New York” tagline, he ended his appearance with a joke that, ironically but perhaps appropriately, upstaged his own message. Americans want something different, he said, before getting to the punch line: “I’m talking, of course, about SNL’s cold opens.”

The Color and Lights of Diwali 2026

2026-11-09T15:44:30-05:00

Thein Zaw / AP

A devotee lights candles during Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, at a temple in Yangon, Myanmar, on November 8, 2026.

Indranil Mukherjee / AFP / Getty

Visitors are immersed in the projections at an installation celebrating Diwali at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Center, in Mumbai, on November 6, 2026.

Yanni Rawat / JNA / ZUMA / Reuters

People celebrate Diwali by lighting fireworks on roadsides and outside residential homes in New Delhi.

Rajesh Kumar Singh / AP

A Gussadi dancer performs during a Deepotsav procession ahead of Diwali in Ayodhya, India, on November 7, 2026.

Saddman Zaman / ZUMA / Reuters

Hindu devotees gather to celebrate Diwali at Bashabo Kali Mandir in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on November 7, 2026.

Vishal Bhatnagar / NurPhoto / Getty

Priests perform aarti at the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Akshardham temple in Jaipur, India, on November 8, 2026, during the Diwali festival.

Channi Anand / AP

A child plays with fireworks on the eve of Diwali at an orphanage in Jammu and Kashmir, India, on November 7, 2026.

Firdous Nazir / NurPhoto / Reuters

A Hindu devotee lights diyas, traditional earthen oil lamps, during Diwali celebrations near the Ghanta Ghar (Clock Tower) in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India, on November 8, 2026.

Akhtar Soomro / Reuters

Women carry lit diyas as they celebrate Diwali at Shri Swaminarayan Temple in Karachi, Pakistan, on November 8, 2026.

Nick Lachance / Toronto Star / Getty

Sukshinder Shinda takes the stage as the headliner at the Diwali celebrations at Sesquicentennial Park in Brampton, Ontario, Canada, on November 8, 2026.

Sudipta Das / NurPhoto / Reuters

People enjoy Diwali celebrations in Kolkata, India, on November 8, 2026.

Himanshu Sharma / AFP / Getty

Smog shrouds an illuminated residential area as seen from the Taragarh Fort in Ajmer on November 8, 2026 on the occasion of Diwali.

Saddman Zaman / ZUMA / Reuters

Hindu devotees gather to celebrate Diwali in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on November 8, 2026.

Faisal Bashir / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty

A Hindu devotee lights traditional earthen oil lamps during Diwali celebrations in Srinagar.

Kevin R. Wexler / NorthJersey.com / USA Today / Reuters

People celebrate Diwali in the Little India section of Jersey City, New Jersey, on November 8, 2026.

Kevin R. Wexler / NorthJersey.com / USA Today / Reuters

People celebrate Diwali with fireworks in the Little India section of Jersey City on November 8, 2026.

Vishal Bhatnagar / NurPhoto / Getty

An illuminated view of the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Akshardham temple on the occasion of the Diwali festival in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, on November 8, 2026.

Mahesh Kumar A. / AP

A person celebrates after lighting Diwali firecrackers in Hyderabad, India, on November 8, 2026.

The Hidden Costs of Living Alone

2021-10-20T15:22:58-04:00

If you were to look under the roofs of American homes at random, it wouldn’t take long to find someone who lives alone. By the Census Bureau’s latest count, there are about 36 million solo dwellers, and together they make up 28 percent of U.S. households.

Even though this percentage has been climbing steadily for decades, these people are still living in a society that is tilted against them. In the domains of work, housing, shopping, and health care, much of American life is a little—and in some cases, a lot—easier if you have a partner or live with family members or housemates. The number of people who are inconvenienced by that fact grows every year.

Those who live alone, to be clear, are not lonely and miserable. Research indicates that, young or old, single people are more social than their partnered peers. Bella DePaulo, the author of How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century, reeled off to me some of the pleasures of having your own space: “the privacy, the freedom to arrange your life and your space just the way you want it—you get to decide when to sleep, when to get up, what you eat, when you eat, what you watch on Netflix, how you set the thermostat.”

The difficulties of living alone tend to lie more on a societal level, outside the realm of personal decision making. For one thing, having a partner makes big and small expenditures much more affordable, whether it’s a down payment on a house, rent, day care, utility bills, or other overhead costs of daily life. One recent study estimated that, for a couple, living separately is about 28 percent more expensive than living together.

[Read: If the nuclear family has failed, what comes next? ]

These efficiencies are an inherent feature of sharing costs with other people, but the barriers to living alone, for those who want to, would be much lower if housing (and health care, and education) weren’t so expensive. Moreover, the types of housing that are most commonly available for one person typically privilege privacy over togetherness, but the two don’t need to be mutually exclusive. DePaulo has studied communities where single residents have their own spaces, but also plentiful shared areas with “the possibility of running into other people.” If you need to, say, move heavy furniture or get a ride somewhere in an emergency, your neighbors are easy to reach. More such options would make solo life easier.

Many who live by themselves are effectively penalized at work too. “Lots of people I interviewed complained that their managers presumed they had extra time to stay at the office or take on extra projects because they don’t have family at home,” Eric Klinenberg, the author of the 2012 book Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone and a sociologist at NYU, told me. “Some said that they were not compensated fairly either, because managers gave raises to people based on the impression that they had more expenses, for child care and so on.”

And if many workers who live alone end up making less money, as consumers they face less favorable pricing options than other shoppers. Buying larger quantities of food at the grocery store is usually cheaper, but as DePaulo pointed out, people who live alone might not get through perishable items quickly enough. (She wishes more stores would let people buy only as much of something as they please, instead of locking them into certain packaging sizes.) Even when a consumer good such as paper towels can’t spoil, people with a small home might not have the space for a stockpile.

The bias against solo consumers runs deep: Recipes are rarely written for a single diner, and DePaulo said that she has heard from single people who have had trouble booking restaurant reservations for one. Also, some aspects of travel, particularly lodging, are much more expensive, per person, for single people. These all may seem like small annoyances, but in practice they are regular reminders that American society still assumes that the default adult has a partner and that the default household contains multiple people.

More concerning, some health-care protocols are essentially built on the assumption that a patient lives with someone who can support them. Certain medical procedures require patients to be dropped off or taken home by someone who could stay with them. A friend can fill this role for people who live alone, but they may not want to make a burdensome request or share sensitive information about their health. In the Facebook group that DePaulo created for single people, some members have reported paying a driver from a ride-hailing service extra to pose as a friend or just forgoing a procedure entirely.

And people who live alone don’t always get to take full advantage of government policies. For instance, the Family and Medical Leave Act, a (fairly meager) law that protects some workers’ jobs if they take unpaid leave to look after a loved one, covers care only for spouses, children, and parents. A person who lives alone and doesn’t have a spouse might want to look after a sibling or close friend, but the law doesn’t cover that.

According to the Pew Research Center, the share of American adults who aren’t married and don’t live with a romantic partner has also been growing, having jumped from 29 percent in 1990 to 38 percent in 2019. Many of these people live with others, such as their parents or other relatives, and some of these disadvantages apply to this group as well, depending on whom they share a home with. They may not be able to get a ride to the doctor from a homebound older relative, or may get treated differently at work if they don’t have a child. Some of them might want to live alone, but can’t afford to do so.

And many single people, whether they live alone or with others, constantly face the stigma associated with not being partnered. “It’s oppressive, always getting pitied,” DePaulo said. “People have bought into the ideology that having someone is better—[that] the more natural, normal, superior way of being is being coupled or having a family.”

She sees this norm in the political rhetoric around virtuous, “hardworking families,” and thinks that this cultural default can to some extent be blamed for the ways in which American society has been slow to adapt to people who are single or live alone. She also attributes the slowness to “cultural lag”: In the future, lots of Americans are going to live alone—tens of millions already do—and eventually, society will, with hope, catch up.

Want Closer Friendships? Move Away From Your Friends.

2022-06-22T17:15:00-04:00

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

Adult friendships can be tricky to maintain. People move away from their college town as schooling ends, careers begin and monopolize our time, socializing at happy hours can start to lose its appeal as you get older. And during the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of Americans moved from cities full of their friends to less populated areas. Consequently, the close friendships we’ve cultivated from early adulthood might seem more prone to ending as we lose convenient ways of staying in contact, such as living in the same locale. But Millennials and Gen Zers are getting married and having children later than previous generations (or eschewing these milestones altogether), as well as redefining their relationship to work, making friendships more important. Distance, as it turns out, isn’t the barrier it used to be, thanks in part to a way some of us are keeping these relationships alive: the friend vacation.

A trip to meet up with far-flung friends is typically born out of a desire to simply have some fun and maybe relive old memories. For Kathryn Stephenson, a 31-year-old executive recruiter in Atlanta, that used to be true. While living in Los Angeles in 2017, Stephenson met her sorority sisters from the University of Oregon for a weekend vacation in Las Vegas. “It was a very silly, totally ridiculous weekend,” she told me by phone. But the trip was about more than living out stereotypical Vegas debauchery—they found that traveling together was a way to stay authentically connected.

Since then, the trio have become more deliberate about nurturing their long-distance relationship. They’ve met up in Minneapolis and in Bend, Oregon, and are thinking about another trip soon. “In 10 years we’ve had a lot of life changes, from college to our early 30s, and our interactions have gotten deeper,” Stephenson said. And hanging on to those relationships helps her know herself better. “There’s some superficiality in the way we think of friendship these days; the Instagram or Facebook world gives us this feeling of needing more friends, more everything. But being able to travel to see good friends shows you don’t need a huge network; you need an intentional one.”

[Read: The six forces that fuel friendship]

The friend trip is a natural response to our technological advances, William Chopik, a social-personality psychologist who heads up the Close Relationships Lab at Michigan State University, told me. Thanks to social media and smartphones that allow us to text, email, and videochat anyone at will, “people are more accessible than ever before, but not necessarily closer to each other,” he said. Real closeness, Chopik’s research shows, often comes from opportunities for mutual disclosure—in other words, sharing and listening deeply. “If you’re going on trips once or twice a year, you’ll have many disclosure opportunities to update people about the big, important things in your life.”

So while you may see a friend who lives nearby more often, you may actually run out of stuff to talk about with them, according to Chopik. But when you see a friend rarely, and then you’ve invested energy and money to hang out, you’re likely going to have a more intense connection during that time: “That kind of intent listening often happens in person,” he said. Stephenson agrees: “I’m a terrible texter,” she told me, and she and her long-distance friends are “not in constant communication. But these trips are kind of the antidote to having to do that.”

[Read: What if friendship, not marriage, was at the center of life?]

Intentional travel with friends, where folks catch up on the more profound moments in life, can also foster the kinds of deep connections many of us may think are reserved for family reunions. Logan Rockmore, a 35-year-old software engineer in Brooklyn, first booked a vacation rental with a group of co-workers/friends when they all lived in San Francisco in 2014. The group went to the Russian River for the Fourth of July and had such a good time that they went on two more vacations later that year. Today Rockmore invites more than 30 people—who now live all across the country—to two trips annually, many of them in a new locale. Just one of the attendees still works at the company where the original group met. “Over the years, friends have started dating new people and brought them into the fold, and others have brought new friends who have been welcome additions,” Rockmore told me by email. While the large group includes some of Rockmore’s friends (and now his wife) and some people who, like him, currently live in New York, there are also folks whom he sees only on these trips. “But I even feel really close to [them] as we have a good chance to catch up and talk about ‘real’ things while we’re there … which I think helps contribute to the Family Reunion vibes and keeps us all really close.”

Many long-distance friendships also have the advantage of seeming like high-stakes engagements. When scheduling time with a friend nearby, for instance, canceling might not feel like a big deal. But coordinating vacation time and booking a rental house with someone is harder to flake on when the strains of daily life get in the way. That’s the case for Catherine Hovell and her best friend, Heather Ahearn, who have never once lived in the same city together. Hovell, a 39-year-old civil structural engineer in Seattle, has moved to several cities over the years because of her work, which has made it hard to maintain local friendships. She and Ahearn first met on a 2006 trip where they both played in a hockey tournament, which then became an annual occurrence for them. Still, their friendship took time to grow. When Hovell moved cities again in 2015 to Montreal, she made plans to see Ahearn, who lived a five-hour drive away in Salem, Massachusetts, more often. Since then they’ve been on weekend trips in New England and longer, more time-intensive vacations: Iceland for 10 days, Phoenix for six days, and the Caribbean twice. Hovell told me that Ahearn’s willingness to jump at varied travel opportunities and take on new experiences together has helped foster a deep relationship between the two. So much so that Ahearn’s become the person Hovell calls when she has a big life decision to make: “It’s basically my husband, my family, and her.”

Ultimately, though, just planning a trip with a friend won’t magically make them a bestie. Chopik says there’s one major predictor for whether a friendship will be a fulfilling one: “The convenience of having a friend a few blocks away, or if a friend is someone you’ve known for 20 years—none of that is as important as if you like spending time with them.” As Hovell put it, whether she and Ahearn are on a beach doing crossword puzzles or sightseeing abroad doesn’t matter. She’s willing to travel wherever to see Ahearn, because the important part is “just the person.” Chopik pointed to evidence from his research lab showing that more people say they’ll prioritize friends over finding a life partner. And though a friendship getaway can sometimes seem like a frivolous personal indulgence, Chopik can personally attest to these trips improving one’s well-being: He and his grad-school friends have been traveling together nearly every year for the past eight years.

Writers in Hollywood

1945-11-01T12:00:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: To the writing of his detective stories Raymond Chandler brings the experience and the skepticism of a newspaper reporter, the narrative gifts of a born storyteller, and a mastery of pungent American dialogue. His leading character, Philip Marlowe, is a professional detective who has held the spotlight thus far in four novels, all of which have been purchased by the movies. One of them, The Big Sleep, in which Lauren Bacall plays the lead, is soon to be released. In his screenplays as in his books, Mr. Chandler has scored a personal success, but he has done so without losing sight of the difficulties encountered by the creative writer in the studios. For this is the anomaly: the producers pay their authors large fees apparently for the purpose of disregarding their advice and their text.

Hollywood is easy to hate, easy to sneer at, easy to lampoon. Some of the best lampooning has been done by people who have never been through a studio gate, some of the best sneering by egocentric geniuses who departed huffily—not forgetting to collect their last pay check – leaving behind them nothing but the exquisite aroma of their personalities and a botched job for the tired hacks to clean up.

Even as far away as New York, where Hollywood assumes all really intelligent people live (since they obviously do not live in Hollywood), the disease of exaggeration can be caught. The motion picture critic of one of the less dazzled intellectual weeklies, commenting recently on a certain screenplay, remarked that it showed “how dull a couple of run-of-the-mill $3000-a-week writers can be.” I hope this critic will not be startled to learn that 50 per cent of the screenwriters of Hollywood made less than $10,000 last year, and that he could count on his fingers the number that made a steady income anywhere near the figure he so contemptuously mentioned. I don't know whether they could be called run-of-the-mill writers or not. To me the phrase suggests something a little easier to get hold of.

I hold no brief for Hollywood. I have worked there a little over two years, which is far from enough to make me an authority, but more than enough to make me feel pretty thoroughly bored. That should not be so. An industry with such vast resources and such magic techniques should not become dull so soon. An art which is capable of making all but the very best plays look trivial and contrived, all but the very best novels verbose and imitative, should not so quickly become wearisome to those who attempt to practice it with something else in mind than the cash drawer. The making of a picture ought surely to be a rather fascinating adventure. It is not; it is an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion.

Hollywood is a showman’s paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made. The publisher and the play producer are showmen too; but they exploit what is already made. The showmen of Hollywood control the making – and thereby degrade it. For the basic art of motion pictures is the screenplay; it is fundamental, without it there is nothing. Everything derives from the screenplay, and most of that which derives is an applied skill which, however adept, is artistically not in the same class with the creation of a screenplay. But in Hollywood the screenplay in written by a salaried writer under the supervision of a producer—that is to say, by an employee without power or decision over the uses of his own craft, without ownership of it, and, however extravagantly paid, almost without honor for it.

I am aware that there are colorable economic reasons for the Hollywood system of “getting out the script.” But I am not much interested in them. Pictures cost a great deal of money—true. The studio spends the money; all the writer spends is his time (and incidentally his life, his hopes, and all the varied experiences, most of them painful, which finally made him into a writer)—this also is true. The producer is charged with the salability and soundness of the project—true. The director can survive few failures; the writer can stink for ten years and still make his thousand a week—true also. But entirely beside the point.

I am not interested in why the Hollywood system exists or persists, nor in learning out of what bitter struggles for prestige it arose, nor in how much money it succeeds in making out of bad pictures. I am interested only in the fact that as a result of it there is no such thing as an art of the screenplay, and there never will be as long as the system lasts, for it is the essence of this system that it seeks to exploit a talent without permitting it the right to be a talent. It cannot be done; you can only destroy the talent, which is exactly what happens—when there is any to destroy.

Granted that there isn’t much. Some chatty publisher (probably Bennett Cerf) remarked once that there are writers in Hollywood making two thousand dollars a week who haven’t had an idea in ten years. He exaggerated—backwards: there are writers in Hollywood making two thousand a week who never had an idea in their lives, who have never written a photographable scene, who could not make two cents a word in the pulp market if their lives depended on it. Hollywood is full of such writers, although there are few at such high salaries. They are, to put it bluntly, a pretty dreary lot of hacks, and most of them know it, and they take their kicks and their salaries and try to be reasonably grateful to an industry which permits them to live much more opulently than they could live anywhere else.

And I have no doubt that most of them, also, would like to be much better writers than they are, would like to have force and integrity and imagination enough of these to earn a decent living at some art of literature that has the dignity of a free profession. It will not happen to them, and there is not much reason why it should. If it ever could have happened, it will not happen now. For even the best of them (with a few rare exceptions) devote their entire time to work which has no more possibility of distinction than a Pekinese has of becoming a Great Dane: to asinine musicals about technicolor legs and the yowling of night-club singers; to “psychological” dramas with wooden plots, stock characters, and that persistent note of fuzzy earnestness which suggests the conversation of schoolgirls in puberty; to sprightly and sophisticated comedies (we hope) in which the gags are as stale as the attitudes, in which there is always a drink in every hand, a butler in every doorway, and a telephone on the edge of every bathtub; to historical epics in which the male actors look like female impersonators, and the lovely feminine star looks just a little too starry-eyed for a babe who has spent half her life swapping husbands; and last but not least, to those pictures of deep social import in which everybody is thoughtful and grown-up and sincere and the more difficult problems of life are wordily resolved into a unanimous vote of confidence in the inviolability of the Constitution, the sanctity of the home, and the paramount importance of the streamlined kitchen.

And these, dear readers, are the million-dollar babies—the cream of the crop. Most of the boys and girls who write for the screen never get anywhere near this far. They devote their sparkling lines and their structural finesse to horse operas, cheap gun-in-the-kidney melodramas, horror items about mad scientists and cliffhangers concerned with screaming blondes and circular saws. The writers of this tripe are licked before they start. Even in a purely technical sense their work is doomed for lack of the time to do it properly. The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement. Such a technique requires experiment and elimination. The cheap pictures simply cannot afford it.

Let me not imply that there are no writers of authentic ability in Hollywood. There are not many, but there are not many anywhere. The creative gift is a scarce commodity, and patience and imitation have always done most of its work. There is no reason to expect from the anonymous toilers of the screen a quality which we are very obviously not getting from the publicized litterateurs of the best-seller list, from the compilers of fourth-rate historical novels which sell half a million copies, from the Broadway candy butchers known as playwrights, or from the sulky maestri of the little magazines.

To me the interesting point about Hollywood’s writers of talent is not how few or how many they are, but how little of worth their talent is allowed to achieve. Interesting—but hardly unexpected, once you accept the premise that writers are employed to write screenplays on the theory that, being writers, they have a particular gift and training for the job, and are then prevented from doing it with any independence or finality whatsoever, on the theory that, being merely writers, they know nothing about making pictures, and of course if they don’t know how to make pictures, they couldn’t possibly know how to write them. It takes a producer to tell them that.

I do not wish to become unduly vitriolic on the subject of producers. My own experience does not justify it, and after all, producers too are slaves of the system. Also, the term “producer” is of very vague definition. Some producers are powerful in their own right, and some are little more than legmen for the front office; some—few, I trust—receive less money than some of the writers who work for them. It is even said that in one large Hollywood studio there are producers who are lower than writers; not merely in earning power, but in prestige, importance, and aesthetic ability. It is, of course, a very large studio where all sorts of unexplained things could happen and hardly be noticed.

For my thesis the personal qualities of a producer are rather beside the point. Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur. In so far as the writing of the screenplay is concerned, however, the producer is the boss; the writer either gets along with him and his ideas (if he has any) or gets out. This means both personal and artistic subordination, and no writer of quality will long accept either without surrendering that which made him a writer of quality, without dulling the fine edge of his mind, without becoming little by little a conniver rather than a creator, a supple and facile journeyman rather than a craftsman of original thought.

It makes very little difference how a writer feels towards his producer as a man; the fact that the producer can change and destroy and disregard his work can only operate to diminish that work in its conception and to make it mechanical and indifferent in execution. The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences. There is little magic of word or emotion or situation which can remain alive after the incessant bone-scraping revisions imposed on the Hollywood writer by the process of rule by decree. That these magics do somehow, here and there, by another and even rarer magic, survive and reach the screen more or less intact is the infrequent miracle which keeps Hollywood’s handful of fine writers from cutting their throats.

Hollywood has no right to expect such miracles, and it does not deserve the men who bring them to pass. Its conception of what makes a good picture is still as juvenile as its treatment of writing talent is insulting and degrading. Its idea of “production value” is spending a million dollars dressing up a story that any good writer would throw away. Its vision of the rewarding movie is a vehicle for some glamorpuss with two expressions and eighteen changes of costume, or for some male idol of the muddled millions with a permanent hangover, six worn-out acting tricks, the build of a lifeguard, and the mentality of a chicken-strangler. Pictures for such purposes as these, Hollywood lovingly and carefully makes. The good ones smack it in the rear when it isn’t looking.

For all this too there are colorable economic reasons. The motion picture is a great industry as well as a defeated art. Its technicians are now in their third generation, its investments are world-wide, its demand for material is insatiable. Five hundred pictures a year must be made or the theaters will be dark, countless people will be thrown out of work, financial organizations will totter, and bankers will start jumping out of their office windows again. Hollywood does not possess enough real talent to make one tenth of five hundred pictures, even if it could find stories to base them on. But the rest must be made somehow, and they are made—with great effort and bitter struggle, with the hardening of many arteries and the graying of many hairs, and with the slow deadening of such real ability as could have been saved by happier tasks.

And the men who turn out this essentially dreary product are well paid by the standards of other industries. This reward is not, of course, due to any big-heartedness on the part of the financial big shots who control the working capital. The men with the money and the ultimate power can do anything they like with Hollywood—as long as they don't mind losing their investment. They can destroy any studio executive overnight, contract or no contract; any star, any producer, any director—as an individual. What they cannot destroy is the Hollywood system. It may be wasteful, absurd, even dishonest, but it is all there is, and no cold-blooded board of directors can replace it. It has been tried, but the showmen always win. They always win against mere money. What in the long run—the very long run—they can never defeat is talent, even writing talent.

It is, I am afraid, a very long run indeed. There is no present indication whatever that the Hollywood writer is on the point of acquiring any real control over his work, any right to choose what that work shall be (other than refusing jobs, which he can only do within narrow limits), or even any right to decide how the values in the producer-chosen work shall be brought out. There is no present guarantee that his best lines, best ideas, best scenes will not be changed or omitted on the set by the director or dropped on the floor during the later process of cutting—for the simple but essential reason that the best things in any picture, artistically speaking, are invariably the easiest to leave out, mechanically speaking.

There is no attempt in Hollywood to exploit the writer as an artist of meaning to the picture-buying public; there is every attempt to keep the public uninformed about his vital contribution to whatever art the movie contains. On the billboards, in the newspaper advertisements, his name will be smaller than that of the most insignificant bit-player who achieves what is known as billing; it will be the first to disappear as the size of the ad is out down toward the middle of the week; it will be the last and least to be mentioned in any word-of-mouth or radio promotion.

The first picture I worked on was nominated for an Academy award (if that means anything), but I was not even invited to the press review held right in the studio. An extremely successful picture made by another studio from a story I wrote used verbatim lines out of the story in its promotional campaign, but my name was never mentioned once in any radio, magazine, billboard, or newspaper advertising that I saw or heard—and I saw and heard a great deal. This neglect is of no consequence to me personally; to any writer of books a Hollywood by-line is trivial. To those whose whole work is in Hollywood it is not trivial, because it is part of a deliberate and successful plan to reduce the professional screenwriter to the status of an assistant picture-maker, superficially deferred to (while he is in the room), essentially ignored, and even in his most brilliant achievements carefully pushed out of the way of any possible accolade which might otherwise fall to the star, the producer, the director.

If all this is true, why then should any writer of genuine ability continue to work in Hollywood at all? The obvious reason is not enough; few screenwriters possess homes in Bel-Air, illuminated swimming pools, wives in full-length mink coats, three servants, and that air of tired genius gone a little sour. Money buys pathetically little in Hollywood beyond the pleasure of living in an unreal world, associating with a narrow group of people who think, talk, and drink nothing but pictures, most of them bad, and the doubtful pleasure of watching famous actors and actresses guzzle in some of the rudest restaurants in the world.

I do not mean that Hollywood society is any duller or more dissipated than moneyed society anywhere: God knows it couldn’t be. But it is a pretty thin reward for a lifetime devoted to the essential craft of what might be a great art. I suppose the truth is that the veterans of the Hollywood scene do not realize how little they are getting, how many dull egotists they have to smile at, how many shoddy people they have to treat as friends, how little real accomplishment is possible, how much gaudy trash their life contains. The superficial friendliness of Hollywood is pleasant—until you find out that nearly every sleeve conceals a knife. The companionship during working hours with men and women who take the business of fiction seriously gives a pale heat to the writer’s lonely soul. It is so easy to forget that there is a world in which men buy their own groceries and, if they choose, think their own thoughts. In Hollywood you don't even write your own checks—and what you think is what you hope some producer or studio executive will like.

Beyond this I suppose there is hope; there are several hopes. The cold dynasty will not last forever, the dictatorial producer is already a little unsure, the top-heavy director has long since become a joke in his own studio; after a while even technicolor will not save him. There is hope that a decayed and makeshift system will pass, that somehow the flatulent moguls will learn that only writers can write screenplays and only proud and independent writers can write good screenplays, and that present methods of dealing with such men are destructive of the very force by which pictures must live.

And there is the intense and beautiful hope that the Hollywood writers themselves—such of them as are capable of it—will recognize that writing for the screen is no job for amateurs and half-writers whose problems are always solved by somebody else. It is the writers’ own weakness as craftsmen that permits the superior egos to bleed them white of initiative, imagination, and integrity. If even a quarter of the highly paid screenwriters in Hollywood could produce a completely integrated and photographable screenplay under their own power, with only the amount of interference and discussion necessary to protect the studio's investment in actors and ensure a reasonable freedom from libel and censorship troubles, then the producer would assume his proper function of coordinating and conciliating the various crafts which combine to make a picture; and the director—heaven help his strutting soul -would be reduced to the ignominious task of making pictures as they are conceived and written—and not as the director would try to write them, if only he knew how to write.

Certainly there are producers and directors—although how pitifully few—who are sincere enough to want such a change, and talented enough to have no fear of its effect on their own position. Yet it is only a little over three years since the major (and only this very year the minor) studios were forced, after prolonged and bitter struggle, to agree to treat the writers according to some reasonable standard of business ethics. In this struggle the writers were not really fighting the motion picture industry at all; they were only fighting certain powerful elements in it—employees like themselves—who had hitherto glommed off all the glory and prestige and most of the money, and could only continue to do so by selling themselves to the world as the true makers of pictures.

This struggle is still going on; in a sense it will always go on, in a sense it always should go on. But so far the cards are stacked against the writer. If there is no art of the screenplay, the reason is at least partly that there exists no available body of technical theory and practice by which it can be learned. There is no available library of screenplay literature, because the screenplays belong to the studios, and they will only show them within their guarded walls. There is no body of critical opinion, because there are no critics of the screenplay; there are only critics of motion pictures as entertainment, and most of these critics know nothing whatever of the means whereby the motion picture is created and put on celluloid. There is no teaching, because there is no one to teach. If you do not know how pictures are made, you cannot speak with any authority on how they should be constructed; if you do, you are busy enough trying to do it.

There is no correlation of crafts within the studio itself; the average—and far better than average—screenwriter knows hardly anything of the technical problems of the director, and nothing at all of the superlative skill of the trained cutter. He spends his effort in writing shots that cannot be made, or which if made would be thrown away; in writing dialogue that cannot be spoken, sound effects that cannot be heard, and nuances of mood and emotion which the camera cannot reproduce. His idea of an effective scene is something that has to be shot down a stairwell or out of a gopher hole; or a conversation so static that the director, in order to impart a sense of motion to it, is compelled to photograph it from nine different angles.

In fact, no part of the vast body of technical knowledge which Hollywood contains is systematically and as a matter of course made available to the new writer in a studio. They tell him to look at pictures – which is to learn architecture by staring at a house. And then they send him back to his rabbit hutch to write little scenes which his producer, in between telephone calls to his blondes and his booze-companions, will tell him ought to have been written quite differently. The producer is probably correct; the scene ought to have been written differently. It ought to have been written right. But first it had to be written. The producer didn’t do that. He wouldn't know how. Anyway he's too busy. And he’s making too much money. And the atmosphere of intellectual squalor in which the salaried writer operates would offend his dignity.

I have kept the best hope of all for the last. In spite of all I have said, the writers of Hollywood are winning their battle for prestige. More and more of them are becoming showmen in their own right, producers and directors of their own screenplays. Let us be glad for their additional importance and power, and not examine the artistic result too critically. The boys make good (and some of them might even make good pictures). Let us rejoice together, for the tendency to become showmen is well in the acceptable tradition of the literary art as practiced among the cameras.

For the very nicest thing Hollywood can possibly think of to say to a writer is that he is too good to be only a writer.

The Atlantic’s December Cover: Sarah Zhang Reports on “The Geo-Located Generation”

2026-11-09T08:29:17-05:00

In The Atlantic’s December cover story, “The Geo-Located Generation,” staff writer Sarah Zhang explores how constant surveillance is stunting children and making parents paranoid. Parents today can functionally track their children 24/7 from the moment they’re born through adulthood, starting with products such as the Snoo Smart Bassinet and Apple’s AirTags sewn into toddler backpacks and moving to apps such as Find My Friends and Life 360. Zhang examines how this is affecting kids, and namely their resilience and independence––but also how it’s affecting their parents.

Although one of the primary developmental tasks of adolescence is achieving a measure of independence, this metaphorical umbilical cord can limit that development. Zhang writes that “as parents, we are supposed to undergo our own transformation as our children grow, relinquishing the knowledge and control we once held … And here, we parents might be failing ourselves.” She reports on seemingly extreme but all-too-common anecdotes of just how far perpetual tracking has gone: WhatsApp groups for parents of students on the same college-dorm floor, who text if they notice their child is late for class; adult children whose parents continue to track their location well into their 20s; and teens whose parents show up unannounced at their last-known location on Life360, when they don’t recognize the address.

And the tracking is extensive: Zhang reports that three-quarters of parents with teenagers ages 14 to 17 had access to their kids’ location data, according to one study. She writes: “Even among college students, one-third were being tracked by their parents, according to another study, conducted in 2021 by Michaeline Jensen, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Five years later, Jensen says, that number is even higher: More than half of college students are being tracked, per her unpublished data.”

In Zhang’s reporting, there is the sense that the world has become more dangerous and too many risks lurk out there, and thus the need for parents tracking their children. Zhang writes: “This is not borne out in the statistics: In just about every way, teenagers are living safer lives than ever. They are not only less likely to be victims of violence than in the 1990s, when crime peaked; they are also less likely to smoke, drink, use hard drugs, or get pregnant. The rates of all these behaviors have plummeted by more than half.” Zhang continues: “By coincidence or not, the rates of depression and anxiety in teenagers have steadily increased …The cause of the teen mental-health crisis is a topic of debate, much of it recently centered on the role of social media. But it’s hard to imagine that a diminished tolerance for risk and uncertainty in teenagers is not affecting their well-being.”

Zhang writes: “Most parents agree—in the abstract—that kids need to confront their own challenges and make their own mistakes as they grow up. They need to learn how to ask for help when lost. They need to face the consequences of oversleeping for a math test before they oversleep for a job interview. But when you’re hovering digitally, phone in hand, it is so natural to want to help and so easy to intervene.”

Sarah Zhang’s “The Geo-Located Generation” was published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests.

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The One Source Bob Woodward Can’t Get to Talk

2026-11-09T08:00:00-05:00

Bob Woodward has published a book roughly every two years since the Watergate scandal, 24 in all. Taken together, they comprise a running narrative of almost every administration from Richard Nixon’s to Donald Trump’s. The genre of the Washington book—a sequence of scenes inside rooms where important things happen, based on a convention called “deep background,” with riches of information traced to no sources—is so familiar that it’s easy to forget that Woodward practically invented it. Decade after decade, he has kept turning up in the Oval Office, at Georgetown parties, on the doorsteps of government officials—always on the job, the hunt. His approach from across a crowded room or the sudden appearance of his name on a cellphone screen has surely sunk the heart of countless sources. And yet, though they know better, they always talk, as if transfixed by a predatory stare—like the frog that agrees to carry the scorpion on its back across the lake. “Why?” the frog cries as it drowns from the inevitable sting, to which the scorpion replies: “It’s my nature.”

Throughout most of Woodward’s career, several criticisms of his journalism have recurred: It provides little or no analysis; he’s a pawn of his sources, telling the story they want told; and he’s dangerous to talk to, because he privileges scoops above all else. These might seem to contradict one another, but in fact few people can survive stenography. Long quoted scenes stripped of context and meaning are almost always the cause of the damaging controversies in Woodward’s books. Once, during a panel on Iraq War reporting, the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh—perhaps the only comparable figure in American journalism, Mr. Outside to Woodward’s Mr. Inside—was asked what he thought of Woodward’s latest book about George W. Bush. The questioner was clearly baiting Hersh to denounce Woodward for shilling for the president. Instead, Hersh replied that he valued Woodward’s books because they reliably told him what was going on in the inner sanctum from which he and the rest of us were shut out.

Like clockwork over the course of half a century, a Woodward book has appeared and Washington has descended into a temporary frenzy, which sometimes even resulted in political change, not least the end of a presidency. If his many best sellers endure beyond their historical moment, their relevance will be as an epic court chronicle, a contemporaneous record of an age of almost unbridled presidential power. But as his work nears an end, his kind of journalism is seeing its influence disappear. The taboos that once shamed his subjects have fallen.

At 83, Woodward has had an important and interesting life, so why not write about it? But a memoir is a treacherous undertaking. “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful,” Orwell warned. It requires an unnatural ability and willingness to explore your own dark corners, failures, humiliations. Half a century of hunting for presidential secrets didn’t prepare Woodward to be his own quarry. In Secrets: A Reporter’s Memoir, he tells a few unflattering truths about himself—major stories he missed, friends he burned. But he doesn’t always grasp their full significance. Scrupulous with facts but famously unable or unwilling to reflect, he’s not a completely satisfying narrator of his own story.

The best pages of VIP memoirs tend to be the early ones, before fame has arrived and revelations stiffen and grow stale. Woodward opens Secrets with scenes of self-exposure likely to startle the many sources and powerful subjects who have often experienced him as cold-blooded, risky company. Woodward was the first child of a successful lawyer and his homemaker wife in mid-century Wheaton, Illinois, strictly Republican, devoutly Christian—the most staid beginning imaginable. But his mother was emotionally unstable and unfaithful, and his father repressed his unhappiness in constant work. The atmosphere of tension and evasion gave their son a sense that his world might fall apart (since childhood, Woodward has had an acute fear of house fires). Anxiety turned him into a searcher for hidden facts: “I became a snoop. I would pry into cabinets and bedside tables, nosing through the top drawer of my father’s dresser.” At 11, Bob discovered among his father’s socks a letter from his mother referring to “our divorce”—a topic they had kept from their son. At 16, working as a janitor in his father’s law office, Bob would pilfer and pore over files of legal cases and discover scandals involving townspeople he knew. “Everybody had secrets, I realized.”

This origin story explains why Woodward became not a lawyer, a professional keeper of confidences, as his father had expected, but instead a reporter who exposes them while preserving every scrap of paper that falls into his hands. To know things that others wanted to conceal gave him a sense of tenuous control in an unpredictable and dangerous world.

After Wheaton came Yale, then five unhappy years in the Navy. On duty as a custodian of nuclear authentication codes, Woodward acquired the permanent fear that a nuclear war could easily happen by accident. He talked his way out of a tour in Vietnam by disingenuously claiming that, as a true Navy man, he was eager to keep serving aboard a ship. Wanting to defer law school, he talked his way into a tryout at The Washington Post. He failed in “a spectacular crash” (the concept of attribution—of identifying who said what to a reporter—was unfamiliar to him), but the speed and intensity of newspaper work were captivating. He had found the love of his life, and a year of minor-league ball with the Montgomery County Sentinel showed that he was a fast learner. In the summer of 1971, in an act of nerve that became his signature, he called the Post’s metropolitan editor, Harry Rosenfeld, at home; got yelled at; and was given a second chance.

Woodward’s account of his apprenticeship evokes the intoxicating fun of becoming a reporter with the license to go anywhere and talk with anyone. The boyish anxiety that made him spy on his parents became a professional ferocity to find out everything he could about his subjects. Woodward’s technique combines a glutton’s appetite for material, a wooer’s zeal to win over sources, and a priest’s respect for the seal of confession. The identity of “Deep Throat,” Woodward’s underground-parking-garage informant during Watergate, remained unknown to the public for more than 30 years. He turned out to be a top FBI official named Mark Felt, whom Woodward had met by chance when he was still a young Navy lieutenant, waiting in the West Wing in 1970 to deliver Pentagon documents to Henry Kissinger’s office. Felt was there on his own errand (perhaps, Woodward now speculates, to discuss Kissinger’s illegal wiretaps of aides and journalists). They chatted, and Woodward, already driven to “grab on” to anyone in Washington who might be useful, asked Felt for his phone number before they parted.

The Watergate story remains an irresistible tale of youthful luck and courageous persistence. It was the first news story I ever followed closely, and whatever Woodward’s subsequent faults, to me he will always be one of the two heroes of journalism who uncovered the crimes that ended Nixon’s presidency. Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men is still exhilarating—tense, vivid journalism noir, told in the third person, featuring two young reporters as its central characters. According to Secrets, this literary inspiration came from Robert Redford, who began pursuing Woodward for a movie about the pair in the fall of 1972, when the Watergate break-in was only a few months old and its historic implications unknowable.

Much of the memoir’s Watergate section simply quotes or paraphrases familiar scenes from All the President’s Men; perhaps 50 years of perspective couldn’t improve on the original. Bernstein was the better writer, as a wry line in the book makes clear: “One office rumor had it that English was not Woodward’s native language.” Woodward the elderly memoirist, though, might have explored the difficult relationship that led to his reportorial breakup with Bernstein (with whom he remains personally close); instead, he says little more than “We disagreed a lot.” He’s just as reticent later about how he tried to reconcile fatherhood with nonstop work.

Being a journalist for Woodward “is not just a job but who I am,” which means that Secrets is largely an account, book by book, of how he goes about that job. Because he broke his biggest story and co-authored his best book at the very start of his career, Woodward faces the danger of a long anticlimax. His purpose in Secrets is to share “some of my favorite reporting stories,” but also to reveal sources long concealed under the cloak of deep background. His uncheckable approach has aroused considerable skepticism about some of his more noteworthy scoops. In part to answer critics, he discloses the identities of “secret sources” who are now dead, as well as of some who are still alive and have given him permission. To Woodward, a secret is inherently valuable if it’s in his possession, all the more if it’s his alone. But not every secret is equally interesting, and the importance of even the biggest tends to fade with time.

For example, Woodward devotes three chapters to his pursuit of William J. Casey, President Ronald Reagan’s longest-serving CIA director, for a book about the agency’s covert wars. When Veil was published, in 1987, it provoked an uproar over a scene that described Casey, on his deathbed, nodding when Woodward asked if he was implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal. How could Woodward have slipped inside the closely watched hospital room? It turns out that he’d befriended Casey’s security agents. Elsewhere, we learn that, in 1979, a Senate lawyer named Stephen Breyer paid a visit to Woodward’s Georgetown house and read a prepublication copy of The Brethren, Woodward and Scott Armstrong’s inside look at the Supreme Court—15 years before Breyer himself joined the Court. I don’t see how this qualifies as “another secret that has a certain historic value today,” but maybe you have to live in Georgetown.

What these reporting tales lack in perspective, they compensate for in self-portraiture of a tireless, sometimes shameless reporter with a remarkable knack for getting people to give him what they don’t want to give. During work on The Brethren, Woodward hunted down scores of Supreme Court clerks, among them one Steven P. Goldberg. Over lunch, Goldberg mentioned to Woodward that he had written a “case history” of the Court’s unanimous 1974 decision requiring Nixon to release the Watergate tapes. This was the sort of casual discovery that excited Woodward’s animal spirits: “What are you doing tonight?” Goldberg had plans, but he finally told Woodward he could come by for a 15-minute talk, which went on for hours, as Woodward deployed all of his skills: attentiveness, coaxing, a deceptively gentle barrage of questions, all while pushing the limits of common decency. “I need your help,” he implored—a frequent refrain, along with “This is for history.” Goldberg repeatedly refused to hand over the case history, but he ultimately agreed to read it aloud while Woodward took frantic notes, his hand cramping as he wrote down every detail about a surprisingly contentious argument among the justices, pressing whenever Goldberg wanted to stop.

At last Goldberg fell asleep in his chair. Woodward saw his opportunity. Giving a nudge and clearing his throat, he said that he would borrow the document for the night and return it in the morning. Goldberg “stirred and squinted up at me with clear annoyance and absolute exhaustion. Okay, he mumbled.”

Woodward tells this story of extreme methods with an engaging mix of pride and self-mockery—which is not the same thing as true self-knowledge. Even as we admire his astonishing work ethic and dedication to prying loose the last fact, we recoil at his manipulations. Woodward is a killer. Does he see himself that way? He describes his technique and purpose with the earnest naivete of a boy from Wheaton, writing at one point, “I believe my approach is straightforward and my manner forthright,” and at another, “For me journalism has always been about getting the public the best obtainable version of the truth.” Yes—but it’s also about self-aggrandizement. Woodward’s readers and some of his sources understand this better than he does, and because a memoir depends so much on honest self-scrutiny, this gap is more damaging than an incorrect fact.

[From the November 2026 issue: Thomas Mallon the literary ruses of Janet Malcolm]

Janet Malcolm famously described the journalist as “a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” Woodward comes closest to bearing out this portrayal in the book’s most revealing and disturbing section. Richard Darman was a powerful, now mostly forgotten White House official in the administrations of Reagan and George H. W. Bush. He and Woodward maintained a close friendship for almost 20 years, until the end of the Bush presidency. “Darman was my best friend and a source,” Woodward writes. And not just any source—“my crown jewel,” “a reporter’s dream source,” always ready to talk and full of information and insight. The pleasure they took in each other’s company was heightened by the uses to which they put each other—Darman’s leaks to Woodward serving his own bureaucratic machinations as well as Woodward’s hunger for insider grist—so that affection and self-interest seemed almost indistinguishable. But Woodward, more than Darman, never lost sight of which came first.

This arrangement suited both men until the 1992 presidential campaign. Darman gave Woodward details of Bush’s botched economic program—including how Darman had persuaded Bush to renege on his “Read my lips: no new taxes” pledge—for a book that wasn’t to be published until after the election. But Woodward decided to use the material for a four-part Washington Post series, in which he would employ his “best friend,” then Bush’s budget director, as not just an obvious source but a central subject. The series, now scheduled to appear before Election Day, was bound to damage Bush’s campaign. When Darman learned that Woodward planned to go back on his word and publish before the election, he realized that he had deceived himself about the nature of their relationship. He accused Woodward of violating his trust and, Woodward recalls, pointed out devastatingly that “writing about personal conflicts within Bush’s team is counter to the serious purposes I claim in my journalism.” We are a long way from high crimes and misdemeanors; Washington politics and journalism have become entertaining blood sport.

Woodward refused to budge, piously insisting on his “obligation to publish.” The series came out, Bush lost the election, and a friendship that had also been a web of conflicting interests ended. Darman continues to haunt Woodward, and he tells this story with regret and a degree of self-loathing—not so much for betraying someone he considered his best friend, but for never trying to make amends before Darman’s death, in 2008. Even here there is a limit to Woodward’s self-awareness. He can’t quite bring himself to acknowledge what Darman learned: that personal harm was not just a sad consequence of mistakenly mixing friendship with work; that this confidence game was a part of Woodward’s trade, driven by a not entirely public-spirited determination to have a big story that no one else did.

I’ve found it possible to forgive Woodward’s opaque sourcing, betrayals of trust, and credulousness, but not the other fault for which he’s indicted: bad writing. This turns out to be a perplexing one. In Secrets we learn that he can write well; he just seems to choose not to. After interviews, Woodward would go home and immediately draft detailed accounts. He quotes a number of these memos in the book, and they are invariably more perceptive and original than his published work. Here is his description of the power in Bill Clinton’s eyes: “Not just the eyeball which is active and expressive but his eyelid which does its own dance and twists oddly at times, sending its own message. He is very attentive. Even drinking a Coke, he keeps his eyes focused on me. Once even staring out through the bottom of his glass at me.”

Why don’t we get to read prose like this in Bush at War or Fear: Trump in the White House ? “I present all the facts,” Woodward tells us, “but I do not speculate about underlying or greater cosmic meaning.” This self-erasure—perhaps an effect of a repressed midwestern childhood, or an old-fashioned code of reporting, or the absence of Carl Bernstein—accounts for the missing analytical context and the narrative non sequiturs that turn Woodward’s later books into stitched-together interview transcripts.

Secrets shows a professional doing essentially one thing through a long and prolific career—the Nolan Ryan of journalism, with a better rookie year. Woodward has always been a barometer of power in Washington, including his own. The Washington book he did so much to enshrine mattered as long as it belonged to a world with standards of truth and codes of conduct. Now, with a president who announces his abuses of power on Truth Social, there are no norms left to be broken, no scandals to be covered up or exposed.

As for journalism, Woodward believes that truth will always matter, but “when there is already so much dirt all over, nothing sticks.” A book as deeply reported, elegantly constructed, and damning as Regime Change, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s account of Trump’s first year back in the White House, may be a best seller, but it can’t give readers, as Woodward’s earlier books did, the startling experience of privileged glimpses into the dark heart of politics. The powerful don’t care anymore, and perhaps most of the people don’t either. Woodward’s achievement depended on a society that was still capable of being shocked.

This article appears in the December 2026 print edition with the headline “The Scorpion.”

The Democrats’ Fight Over Israel Is Just Beginning

2026-11-08T10:59:46-05:00

During a swing through Detroit in the final days of the midterm campaign, former President Obama invoked the kind of gauzy pluralism that Democrats were so proud of during his presidency. He pointed out that Michigan had the opportunity to pull off an improbable feat: By electing Abdul El-Sayed to join Elissa Slotkin in the Senate, the state could turn its delegation into a walking symbol of buried enmities and transcendent harmony. “You’ve got a Muslim man, you’ve got a Jewish woman fighting for you in the United States Senate,” Obama said. “That’s something, Michigan, you can be proud of.”

It took exactly a week for that optimism to run aground on the rougher shoals of modern Democratic politics. The following Sunday, Representative Haley Stevens withdrew her backing of El-Sayed and threw it to his opponent, the Republican Mike Rogers, citing, in part, El-Sayed’s stance on the issue that has divided Democrats more than any other this year: Israel. The abrupt reversal didn’t prevent El-Sayed from winning decisively. But that outcome masked the apprehensions that I heard again and again this week from Michigan Democrats about the potential for tensions over the Middle East to rupture the broad coalition that the party assembled to win in 2026.

By the time I sat down with a group of Democratic activists at a red-sauce joint in Ann Arbor, on Election Night, the first bottle of wine was already empty. Nearly everyone at the table had voted for El-Sayed, who, hours later, would go on to make history as the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate. But no one was gloating. If anything, the Jewish Democrats sharing bruschetta and pasta seemed a little shell-shocked, groggily emerging from a bitter Senate campaign and reckoning with what they described as one of the most difficult votes they had ever cast.

Rubini Naidu for The Atlantic

Annie Wolock, Cindy Bank, and Beth Bashert gathered on Election Night in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Everyone at the table wanted the same thing: to see Democrats retake control of the Senate and repudiate President Trump. None of them, however, was particularly excited to elect a senator who seeks to make Israel a pariah, who speaks about Zionism in a way that they said makes Michigan Jews unsafe, and who campaigned with Hasan Piker, the far-left streamer who has said that “America deserved 9/11.” In other words: They did not want to elect a senator like the candidate whom all but two of the people around the table had just voted for. “It’s hard to express the depth of heartache that’s happening here on the ground,” Decky Alexander, who organized the dinner of 11 people, told me. A theater professor, a vice chair of the state Democratic Party, and the leader of its Jewish caucus, Alexander voted for El-Sayed with certitude but not excitement. She views the far right as more of a problem to the country—and to American Jews—and her husband, Bruce Kutinsky, believes that the far left is a bigger threat. He reluctantly voted for Rogers, the Republican.

[Read: The Hasan Piker question]

Even as the group eagerly discussed the anticipated Democratic gains nationwide, there was a plaintive quality to their conversation about El-Sayed’s impending victory. Earlier that evening, the Ann Arbor–school–board member Rima Mohammad had none of that apprehension as she reflected on the Senate race outside a polling place across the street from Michigan Stadium. The 46-year-old pharmacist spoke softly, her voice scratchy after a long weekend of get-out-the-vote efforts. Mohammad, a Palestinian American whose grandparents were forcibly displaced from their homes in what is now Israel, in 1948, came to Ann Arbor for a residency at the University of Michigan, where she now teaches. Mohammad grew up poor in Cincinnati, part of the only family of color in a very conservative neighborhood. She told me that a victory by El-Sayed would be “life-changing,” especially for her four kids to see. “It’s not even about being Muslim,” Mohammad explained. A win would show that “elections are not gonna be bought” by corporations and groups such as AIPAC, she said, and “also that hate is not going to win.”

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been perhaps the biggest and ugliest point of division within the Democratic Party in the three years since the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the resulting war in Gaza. President Biden, a self-proclaimed Zionist who viewed Israel as both an essential security partner to the U.S. and a country with similar values, pledged American support for the war against Hamas—prompting a backlash by progressive activists. A protest movement led to more than 100,000 Democrats voting “uncommitted” in Michigan’s 2024 presidential primary to register their discontent. President Trump received more votes than Kamala Harris in Dearborn, the heart of Michigan’s Arab American community, which historically votes for Democrats.

Rubini Naidu for The Atlantic

McDonald Elementary School in Dearborn, Michigan

Rubini Naidu for The Atlantic

Rima Mohammad is running for Ann Arbor’s school board.

This year, the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan became the main battleground for the party’s internal fight over the U.S. relationship with Israel. Stevens defended Israel as an “imperfect” ally, one that is America’s “truest friend” in the Middle East. El-Sayed has made clear that he does not view Israel as an American partner. He called the country “bloodthirsty” and said that, like Iran, it is a threat to the United States—rhetoric that some Jewish Michiganders worry might open the door to anti-Semitic elements on the left. After El-Sayed won the primary and Stevens backed him, the issue faded and the party appeared to be united, particularly amid Republicans’ overtly Islamophobic attacks on El-Sayed. Stevens’s last-second pivot to Rogers resurfaced an issue that Democrats will not be able to ignore for much longer.

Democrats who are about to be in control of Congress now need to figure out how to handle divisions over Israel and Gaza that show no signs of being mended. There will be a “real battle for the soul of the party” as a number of Israel critics arrive in Washington, David Kramer, an insurance executive who served as chair of Stevens’s primary campaign, told me. El-Sayed is already talking about the issue. In his victory speech late Tuesday, he spoke about protecting Palestinian children from “being murdered by our tax dollars” and said that Michiganders “don’t want our money sent to do apartheid or genocide or war.” He took a moment to taunt AIPAC: “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to beat you twice.”

Jewish and Muslim voters alike told me this week that they see El-Sayed’s election as a pivotal moment in Democrats’ evolution on the once-marginal issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Democrats have indisputably moved left over the course of the Gaza war; all but seven Democratic senators voted earlier this year to block certain weapons transfers to Israel, a tally that would have once been unthinkable. (Republicans, though still more reliably pro-Israel than Democrats, have also shifted away.) The question is whether El-Sayed will succeed in moving Democrats even further to the left, or whether the party, with a slew of new lawmakers and a surprisingly large Senate majority, will be able to find room for a wide spectrum of beliefs.

[Read: The anti-Democrat]

Many Muslim officials and activists see El-Sayed’s election as a banner moment for pro-Palestine activism. On Tuesday morning, outside a 100-year-old redbrick elementary school in Dearborn that served as a polling place for many in the city’s large Arab American community, Alabas Farhat sprinkled his good mornings with Arabic phrases as he greeted voters. The 26-year-old state representative from Dearborn said he cared less about El-Sayed being the first Muslim senator than about him being an “‘America First,’ ‘Michigan First’ U.S. senator.” El-Sayed maintains that Washington’s financial support for Israel’s war in Gaza—which left tens of thousands dead after Hamas militants attacked Israel in 2023 and killed approximately 1,200 people—means less tax money is available for health care and education back home in America. The message resonates for Farhat, whose family is from southern Lebanon. “He’s going to speak out when something is wrong in a way that the status quo will not know how to handle,” Farhat told me.

Rubini Naidu for The Atlantic

State Representative Alabas Farhat

El-Sayed understands that Democrats’ attitudes toward Israel have shifted. In a June AP/NORC poll, 58 percent said that the U.S. was too supportive of Israel, up from 45 percent in early 2024; 62 percent of Democrats said that the U.S. was not supportive enough of Palestinians. Michigan Jews understand these trends too. They’re just divided about whether to cheer them—as a mostly young, progressive contingent has done—or try to reverse them. Hannan Lis, a businessman who splits his time between the Detroit metro area and Israel, has supported Democratic politicians for years. This year, he raised money for the Democrat Jocelyn Benson, the new governor-elect—and also held a fundraiser for Rogers. Lis believes that Israel faces “an existential threat,” and he worries that Democrats don’t care. “I’m not optimistic about how the party is going to deal with this,” he told me in a phone call from Israel this week.

Josh Whinston also does not feel hopeful. The Reform rabbi told me on Election Night in Ann Arbor that he worries that El-Sayed’s rhetoric—particularly when he calls Israel “bloodthirsty” and seems to pin the American cost-of-living crisis on U.S. support for the country—could lead people to take out their frustration on Jews, many of whom have deep personal and religious connections to Israel. “For me, this has only been about Jewish safety in Michigan,” Whinston, who declined to share whom he voted for, said. Several Jewish Democrats told me that they were alarmed by an anti-Rogers ad during the final days of the election that showed an American couple at a grocery store saying they can’t buy eggs, because that money has to be used for “killing Palestinians.” El-Sayed has said he does “not agree” with the ad, which was made by an outside group.

Rubini Naidu for The Atlantic

Election Day in Ann Arbor

El-Sayed has made other attempts to reassure his Jewish critics. Perhaps the lowest point for his relationship with skeptical Jewish Democrats came in March, when he condemned a terrorist attack at a synagogue near Detroit but also said that “hurt people hurt people,” noting that the perpetrator’s family had been killed by Israeli air strikes. To many Jewish voters here, the comment read as justification, or at least undue sympathy. Several months later, after the primary, he told Jewish Democrats that he regretted using those words. He also hired a Jewish outreach director toward the end of the campaign and met personally with many prominent Jewish Democrats, including some—such as Whinston and Decky Alexander—who were skeptical of him. The meetings didn’t necessarily help. Alexander said that El-Sayed told her that he could win without the Jewish vote, and that he would make up the votes from other minority communities. (A spokesperson for El-Sayed did not respond to a request for comment.)

[Read: What El-Sayed does next matters]

National polling consistently shows that more than two-thirds of Jews vote for Democrats. For many, their faith underscores their support for liberal values. And until recently, support for Israel was generally a no-drama, consensus issue. Jewish Democrats must now contend with the reality that something many of them consider a core belief—maintaining strong ties with the Jewish state—is no longer a given for the politicians in their party.

Jordan Acker, a Democratic attorney, called me on Tuesday morning as he drove to cast his ballot near his home, in Huntington Woods. Earlier this year, he lost the party’s nomination for a second term on the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents. Acker—whose home and law office were vandalized in 2024 by pro-Palestinian activists who were unhappy that he opposed divesting from Israel—would not tell me whom he planned to vote for. “Either way, tomorrow morning, we’re gonna wake up with a senator-elect who in some way is opposed to our interests and may actually be opposed to listening to our community about its interests,” he told me.

Rubini Naidu for The Atlantic

A voter in Ann Arbor

Rubini Naidu for The Atlantic

A voter in Ferndale, Michigan

Palestinian American voters say they can relate to the feeling of their opinions not being especially valued by their party. Amer Zahr, an adjunct law professor and comedian who lives in Dearborn, has been a Democrat his whole life. But he wasn’t particularly enthusiastic until Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign a decade ago marked “the first opportunity we had to have Palestine be visible in a national campaign,” Zahr told me. He pulled up to the Dearborn elementary school in an Audi with a license plate that said PLSTN48. His father was one month old in 1948, the year of Israel’s founding, when Zahr’s relatives were forced out—to Jordan, where Zahr was born. His parents brought him to America as a toddler.

In El-Sayed, Zahr sees a politician who can emulate Sanders’s ability to be the left-most voice on any particular issue, even if it’s lonely. “He’s going to have to be further than anyone else currently there. He’s going to have to be the standard bearer,” Zahr said. He wants to see an unconditional recognition of Palestinian self-determination from Washington. If El-Sayed needs to filibuster to stop funding weapons for Israel, then Zahr expects him to.

El-Sayed will join at least 10 freshman Democrats in the Senate in January, including several moderates from traditionally deep-red states such as Kansas and South Carolina. Conventional wisdom says El-Sayed’s new colleagues are more likely to follow the lead of more senior senators than that of a freshman from the Rust Belt when figuring out how to vote on foreign-spending packages. But in this new political reality, where wins for Democrats keep pouring in from the most unexpected places, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see El-Sayed push hard for his vision of the world—and for his new colleagues to listen.

Can Beauty Make Us Good?

2026-11-08T09:00:00-05:00

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What is beauty? Is it really “in the eye of the beholder,” or is it an objective quality that exists in the world? Is it a mere decorative feature of life, or does it have something important to tell us? These are enduring human questions, but ones that the art world and the academic humanities—the natural custodians of beauty—gave up answering for a long time. In this episode, David Brooks talks to the Harvard professor Elaine Scarry, whose now-classic book On Beauty and Being Just brought the subject back to serious attention 25 years ago. David and Scarry discuss the ladder of loves, the universal appeal of symmetry, and why even prisoners at Guantánamo want to look at pretty pictures.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Brooks: Today’s episode is about beauty. The basic thesis of this show is that in our society, we have massive forces of dehumanization trying to shrink us and beleaguered forces of humanization. Nothing could be more humanizing than beauty.

We’re going to talk about how to cultivate a taste for beauty, how to create beauty, and we’re going to entertain the question: Does experiencing beauty make you a better person?

My conversation partner today is Elaine Scarry, a very eminent literature professor, a humanist. She has a fancy title here at Harvard University, the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, which is a fantastic professor title.

Elaine wrote a very important book in 1999 called On Beauty and Being Just. It was an important moment because there was an assault on beauty and the very idea of beauty striking through the academy, through the art world. The idea is we shouldn’t create beauty. We should shock people into improving society. We should create ugly things to shock them.

In 1999, Elaine rose up to defend beauty, and I would say 26 years later, she has carried the day. Beauty is back on the agenda in the academy, in the artistic world.

You may notice that we are not at our usual set at Yale University today. We are at Harvard University. I want to reassure you that our podcast will not only be visiting colleges with gigantic endowments. We’ll be going to all sorts of places. I just happen to have a talk in Boston, so we thought we’d take advantage.

I’m David Brooks, and this is The Permanent Questions.

Brooks: Elaine Scarry, welcome to The Permanent Questions.

Today we’re gonna talk about beauty, which you have—I don’t know if you’ve single-handedly rescued it in the academy, but you’ve done your part. I have to confess to you: I am an aesthetic Philistine. I recall when I wrote my first book, which was published in 2000, I wrote it in a dank, unfinished basement of my home with mildew and the smell of mildew everywhere.

My desk was a plywood board, and my chair was a folding chair, and it was just me and my little laptop, and I was oblivious. I didn’t care. A lot of people were like, “I’m not working here.”

But even I occasionally have these moments when you’re undone by something tremendously beautiful. I think the thing that strikes you about them is they lift you out of everyday reality for at least a brief time.

You’ve done so much work on beauty; you must have had encounters of that sort with beauty.

Scarry: I have had many encounters. I think that over time, the longer one lives, the more encounters one has, not just because they can keep accumulating and adding up, but because one learns to see or one becomes aware of just the astonishing plenitude that’s all around one.

A kind of interesting analogy is what happens with color vision. John Dewey says that if you give small children the chance to learn color, it usually takes several years to be able to reliably identify a color.

Whereas now researchers say that as adults, the average number of colors we can all see is 26,000, and if you count gray tones, it’s closer to a million. I think that something like that happens with beauty. You may not be aware of it as a child, or it may be happening to you, but you don’t have words for it.

My partner and I often read books aloud. At one time, he was reading The Tale of Genji for about 20 minutes each morning. When he would begin to read, Lady Murasaki’s writing immediately lights up your mind. I would see pools of color that weren’t even directly prompted by what was said on the page.

She’s writing about the court in Japan, but at the same time, Genji is always discovering beauty anywhere, in the outskirts and among poor people, and so forth. That kind of experience with reading is one that I’m sure we both have.

Brooks: When you mentioned the ability to perceive more colors, there’s a neuroscientist at Northeastern named Lisa Feldman Barrett, who has a concept of emotional granularity. She says that some people can only experience very crude emotional categories. They know what’s an up state or a down state. But some people have the ability to distinguish between adjacent emotions like stress, anxiety, frustration, fear. They can make these fine gradations.

Emotional granularity helps you read your own body, and maybe color granularity helps you see the world.

I’m gonna quote you back to yourself: “Beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to perception, spurring lapsed alertness to its most acute level. Through its beauty, the world continually reconnects us to rigorous standard or perceptual care.”

I like that phrase “perceptual care.” Perception isn’t just a passive process of opening our eyes and things come in. There’s something you can do to make yourself more perceptive or receptive toward beauty.

Scarry: When you suddenly come face-to-face with something beautiful or it suddenly enters your world, you may have been thinking that you were fully awake and perceptive and listening and hearing and so forth, but one of the effects of beautiful things is to just really raise the level of perceptual acuity.

It sets a new standard or a new bar, so that you realize that you should be giving that kind of attention to other things in the world that don’t necessarily come to you with such glory but that nonetheless deserve your attention.

Brooks: It’s almost like an energy is being produced.

I took my favorite drive in America two summers ago, down from Missoula, Montana, down the Salmon River to Salmon, Idaho. It is astoundingly beautiful. When I got out of the car, my wife and I were at some crappy hotel or something, and I’m buzzing with energy. If you see bluebirds in love, they’re bouncing all around each other.

I look back almost with embarrassment at how excited I was to just have had this astonishing drive where you’re going through this valley, and every curve brings about a new scene. And it’s—you’re just energized, almost like puppy love or something.

Scarry: There’s a wonderful poem by Seamus Heaney, I think it’s called “Postscript,” where he describes driving with his wife, Marie, along, I think it’s the west coast of Ireland, and the beauty of the wind and the water. And he says: No use in stopping the car. I find that same kind of event happens even when you’re moving through the world. Seamus Heaney’s poem ends by saying, It blows the heart open. I think that’s a very good description.

Brooks: It’s a weird concept. It bleeds into everything. People perceive beauty in a million different forms. Yet we all call it one thing.

We have a mutual friend, Brandon Vaidyanathan, who’s a sociologist at Catholic University. He did this big study of beauty, talking to scientists: “Are you motivated by beauty?”

Some of them describe beauty in conventional terms, but some of them described beauty just as understanding. They are motivated by a beauty to understand, and they use that aesthetic language to describe just understanding an engineering problem or a math problem.

Scarry: I’ve talked to scientists, and they do have different accounts. My friend Barry Mazur, who’s a mathematician, says that every solved theory is beautiful. It’s not that it has to be beautiful. It just happens to be the case that it is beautiful. Somebody else in the physics department who works on electromagnetic subjects says that he counsels his students, “Just because you’ve got a pretty theory, don’t think it’s true.” Whereas somebody I once spoke with at Yale who was in chemistry told me that he thinks that if a hypothesis is pretty or beautiful, it increases the chances that it’s true.

So there’s really a wide range, from the one person who thinks, In every case, it’s beautiful, but there’s no reason why that should be, to somebody who actually thinks it predicts.

Brooks: When we talk about a beautiful landscape, a beautiful face, a beautiful equation, are we talking about the same thing? What is the core concept here?

Scarry: I think we’re definitely talking about the same thing, even though there’s tremendous variation, and certainly variation in the things that most strike people as beautiful.

But one thing that they all share, which is foregrounded in the math example, is the idea of symmetry or proportion. It’s just so deeply there. I think of a text that I love that really makes that clear, St. Augustine’s “De Musica,” where he’s talking about equality as a feature of God, and he talks about the fact that you can see it in human faces.

You can see it in dance steps. You can hear it in music. He even gives examples like a cake or feeling the softness of another person’s body—that what you’re feeling is equality, which isn’t normally how we would think of smooth skin, but he says that’s equality that you’re experiencing.

It’s startling. He’s not making a plea for democracy, but he is talking about proportion. He even says, by the way, that color—like the color of your jacket, the fact that it’s a uniform blue, or the sky is, at least in patches, a uniform blue—is an example of equality and the tremendous pleasure that brings.

When you hear scientists—like one scientist who’s written a book about beauty in science is named Mario Livio, and every example he gives has got startling symmetry in it.

There are other features as well. For example, intensity and vibrancy. I think that the quality of aliveness is absolutely key in all the examples.

Brooks: Do you think that our sense of beauty is somewhat evolutionarily baked in? Symmetry probably has some survival advantages. You want people who have symmetrical faces, and people look at body shapes for fertility signs. That suggests there’s some universal sense of what beauty is, that all humans would see the same face and think, “Oh, that’s beautiful.”

Scarry: I sometimes have people say to me, “Well, there are famous faces, famous models who have a kind of asymmetry in their face.”

That’s true, but it’s a .00001 asymmetry. The important thing to realize, as you said in your description, is that if a face is really nonsymmetrical, there’s no way that it can be in the neighborhood of beauty.

By the way, I think that is a partial answer to your question about evolution. Yes, it may be that we’re like butterflies and birds. It’s been said of butterflies and birds that they keep getting more and more extravagant because the females choose the males on the basis of their beauty and so forth.

There is probably some kind of reproductive bias, which might also be true of human beings. But I think that part of the reason that beauty is so important to us is because it is opposed to injury. It makes us deeply averse to injury. It acts on us so that when we see someone who’s injured, we know the first thing you have to do is try to repair it.

It makes us, or should make us, hesitant about inflicting injuries on others. How could you survive as a species if you didn’t, overall, have a kind of aversion to acts of inflicting injury?

Brooks: I want to get to the relationship between beauty and morality in a minute because I think that’s a central subject here. But I want to stay on the experience of beauty just a little longer. You use a word that I’d like to hear you expand upon. You say beauty is “lifesaving.” What do you mean by that?

Scarry: Here’s an amazing fact that I learned relatively recently. In the early ’80s, a researcher in Sweden looked at the people in hospital who were recovering from surgery, and half of them had a window that looked out onto a green grove, and the other half had a window that looked out onto a brick wall. And those in the room with the green window got better much more quickly.

It makes you realize that we might not have it right about what beauty is, but we better try and get it right, if it actually leads to people being able to more quickly recover.

Every couple of years, the American Society of Civil Engineers gives a report card to our bridges, our highways, our levies, and among other things, our public schools.

I just looked at the one for 2025 because I knew I was gonna be speaking with you. And though the general drift of the whole overall report card is to go up—I think the overall grade in 2025 went up from a C- to a C. The public school, and they’re talking not about teachers, but about the physical environment, they give the grade of D+.

Brooks: When I read that lifesaving line, I thought of someone I admire a great deal, which is Tina Turner, the singer.

Her story is really built around beauty. She really had this sense. She grew up in Nutbush, Tennessee, to a dad who left her and a mom who was somewhat narcissistic and also left her, and she could sing. And so this guy Ike Turner finds her; realizes, That’s my million dollars; and basically enslaves her.

He doesn’t pay her. He beats her savagely. He commits adultery on a mass scale, has mistresses living in their house with them. Just a brutal life. The wedding that he proposed—took her down to Tijuana, no dress, no kiss, just a civil ceremony, and then he took her to a whorehouse and made her watch a sex show.

Her life was just brutal under him. And at one point, she attempts suicide. She’s ready to go. She wakes up in the hospital. Ike is furious at her for upsetting his budgetary plans. But then she decides, “What did I want when I was a girl?”

She always loved beauty. And so she started doing these Buddhist practices and doing floral decorations and keeping a journal. She built herself up to be the kind of person who could stand up to Ike Turner, and it took her 14 years. But she eventually fought back, and eventually ran away, had her own career, became a superstar, age 60, a sexy rockstar lady.

Then she got remarried, and at her wedding, she insisted there be 100,000 roses. When I read 100,000, I went, “That’s a lot of roses.”

That must’ve cost a fortune. But she had rebuilt her life on the basis of creating beauty. And as a rebuttal to her first Tijuana wedding, she was gonna have 100,000 roses.

Scarry: You can destroy all fairness. It sounds like her husband had managed to completely eliminate any sense of fairness in their household. It’s hard to completely eliminate beauty. There’s often something flying by the window.

Once when I was in Geneva and talking with the International Red Cross, one of the Red Cross workers said that she had asked a prisoner at Guantánamo if there was anything she could bring him, because that’s often something the Red Cross offers. One prisoner said that he would like a photograph of a flower. Another example of Tina Turner’s solution to the problem she was in, where you’re really trying to make yourself believe that there still is symmetry and vivacity in the world.

I was once at a conference in England, and there was a young woman who had studied Romanian prisons. It was a women’s prison that she was studying. The women would take tiny little threads from their undergarments and weave little tapestries one inch by one inch and give them to each other. They treasured that and survived by means of it.

Brooks: Maybe this is wrong, but it seems to me it’s not quite controllable, that you can put yourself in the way of beauty, but you can’t say, “I am about to be overwhelmed by beauty the next time I walk down the street.”

Scarry: There are reliably beautiful sources that one can go to. Like returning to Tolstoy’s War and Peace or going to a particular street that you loved in your childhood. But often the beauty does also suddenly vanish.

I usually teach a graduate course on beauty, but occasionally I’ve taught a freshman seminar on beauty, and at one point one of the freshman who was very interested in the beauty of design, in an iPhone, for example, surmised that the fact that beauty often doesn’t last forever—it might last three seconds, it might last three years, but it often goes away—then leads us, as I wrote in the book On Beauty and Being Just, to the act of creation.

It’s a kind of instigation of creation and a kind of passing on of beauty. So you could say we compensate for the brevity of beautiful things or the short life of flowers, or you could say it’s actually an okay thing that it’s so short because that instigates our own acts of creation.

Brooks: One more piece of the perception of beauty that strikes me as incredibly important these days is amor mundi—love the world. Imagine if we were surrounded by nature that was hideously ugly.

We would feel alienated from the world; we would feel this is not a home. The fact that it is a beautiful place makes us feel at home and love the world.

You quoted Augustine. I love Augustine, so I’m going to quote him: “I asked the Earth, I asked the sea and the deeps. Among the living animals and the things that creep, I asked the winds that blow, I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and to all things that stand at the door of my flesh. My question was the gaze I turned to them. Their answer was their beauty.”

Augustine is such a poet, but one of the things that strikes me as important: I’ve been at three different colleges in the past week, and at each college, the students in front of me, not with my participation, got in an argument about how rotten the world is. A lot of them think it’s completely rotten, whether climate change, AI, or everything, just the whole world’s been ruined for them. Some think it only marginally rotten.

That rotten-world syndrome—they may be right, they may be wrong, but it’s not a positive way to go through life. If you want to change the world, it seems to me you want to love the world.

I think the beauty of the world makes us feel at home. There is a sort of homecoming feeling about beauty that makes you think, Yeah, this is my home. This is the beautiful place that I get to spend my life. Without that, it’s almost hard to have hope.

Scarry: One of my students, long ago, back in the 1990s, said, “Beauty restores your trust in the world.” So you can be attending to very harsh things, and suddenly you see something, and it restores your belief in the world.

Now, I do think students are really facing a triple decker of problems. And yet, like you, I think, How can we even have a planet this beautiful? Is it just that we’re designed to appreciate it? Those other planets, by the way—has anyone actually noticed what they look like? The Earth is almost incomprehensible in how beautiful it is. But I think that, gradually, students will be sensitive to that and will feel some kind of resilience about what’s happening.

Brooks: When I talk about the students, they’re always the hero in my story. Today’s students have been put in a very challenging circumstance, and they’re fighting back the best they can.

But I sometimes think they are too pessimistic about the world, and I say, “Read history.” What decade would you go back to? Things have always been pretty rotten. Before we leave this, I just want to ask you about one concept that I know very little about. I had a friend who was an opera singer who was a fan of duende, the kind of beauty that’s intermingled with sadness.

We can all think of songs and poems that embody this. What strikes me about this whole conversation—we’ve had the perception of beauty. You can go through life with a very utilitarian frame of mind. It’s all material. And what beauty does is it reminds you the world is not strictly a utilitarian, material place. There’s an enchantment, at least in our perception of it.

Scarry: Many, many poems, or the music you’re describing, might be about subjects that are sad. Like the passing of the year in Keats’s ode “To Autumn” that’s also so unbelievably gorgeous. Or many elegies that are obviously full of sadness, and yet are very beautiful.

Aquinas says that even something ugly if rendered in a beautiful artwork can be beautiful.

Brooks: I was at my folks’ home, and they had some guests coming over from France, and there was a woman from Paris. This was her first trip to New York. And they said, “How’d you find it?”

And I love New York. I’m a New Yorker. But she said, “Well, I didn’t realize it’d be so ugly.” And I was like, “It is kind if ugly, but the ugly parts are the parts I like.” If you love the ugly parts of your place, you love the place.

Scarry: I guess you have to find a good path in, because usually when I’m coming in, I get out at LaGuardia, and it just seems like I’m always coming down a very tree-lined street with brownstones, and I think, “This is a very beautiful city.”

But your story puts me in mind of a friend who always loved New York, who went to Rome, and suddenly would have nothing more to say good about New York.

Brooks: Washington, D.C., where I live, is supposed to be Paris. When we go to Paris, I think, Oh, we’ve got a long way to go. I’m not endorsing Donald Trump’s arch, by the way.

I ran across the work of an anthropologist named Ellen Dissanayake, and she wrote a book called Homo Aestheticus. She makes the claim that human beings have a natural desire to make special, and she means to make special sacred occasions, to—when you go to a fancy party, you dress up. You want to make it special. When my wife gets home, the first thing she does is get out her Trader Joe’s flowers, which she has just bought. She lights eight million candles. She sets the table even though she hasn’t cooked the meal yet. She wants to make the occasion special.

This is something in us. We want to have special occasions, rituals, and we use beauty to create them. It seems to me like that’s what a wedding is all about, or anything else. I don’t know what you make of this impulse towards specialness.

Scarry: Well, it sounds immediately convincing. One recognizes it in practice, and also, I think, I understand how it works. Given the tremendous pleasure that beauty brings, you just want people to have that pleasure when they can.

There’s a statement by Kant, who says that a lot of different things give pleasure, but they have an end point. You’re hungry, you have a good meal, and so forth. But he says that the pleasure of beauty is inexhaustible. You never get tired of it. You never have enough.

Brooks: This reminds me, you’ve also done some work in your career on Boethius. I was reading his book The Consolation of Philosophy. He’s got a passage on what you should orient your life toward.

If you want money, you’ll always feel poor. If you want power, you’ll always feel weak. If you want status, you will always be the victim of other people’s opinions. So he’s really saying, “Don’t want these finite goods. Want infinite goods.”

There’s a famous commencement address by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College, where he says, Everybody worships, but if you worship money and power and status, you’ll always feel inadequate. If you worship looks, you’ll die a thousand deaths before they bury you. When I read that David Foster Wallace speech, which I’ve read many times before, I thought, “He must have read Boethius.”

Scarry: He probably did.

Brooks: But it is a good way to orient our lives. If you orient toward finite things, you will run out. But beauty, belonging, competence, respect, significance, meaning—these things are infinite goods. It’s probably a good idea to orient your life toward the infinite ones, because you’ll never run to the end of them.

Scarry: I was just having a conversation with my brother Joe and his partner, Rachel, who’s a pastor, saying something kindred to what you were saying.

She quoted this passage that I didn’t know from Philippians chapter 4. Paul says: Finally, brothers and sisters, when you come upon something excellent or something kind or something lovely or something true, think on it and the peace of God will be with you.

Brooks: I think what your most daring claim may be, or one of them, is that beauty contributes to virtue and to better behavior.

Now, I desperately wanna believe this. But when I think on Italian Renaissance art, there’s a lot of beauty being produced, but I wouldn’t say when I go back to those city states, the history of it, that the people were necessarily living in a more just and fair and kind way.

Picasso produced a lot of beauty, but what I know of his life, he was a bit narcissistic. A lot of people who organize their lives around beauty don’t seem so great to me.

Scarry: The same problem can be seen in literature sometimes. There are cases where people are known to have been just good, kind people, like John Keats, but then there are other examples where they’re known to be closer to Picasso.

But I think that the way that beauty brings about morality is not necessarily so one-to-one: This person at this moment sees something or creates something beautiful; therefore, they’re good. However, there certainly are cases like that all the time. When I read that study that showed the way that your physical health is improved if you’re in the presence of beauty, I began to wonder, Is that also true for moral health?

Because certain places like in Denmark—they actually put prisoners in lovely spaces, very antithetical to the kinds of prisons that we often have in the United States. The assumption is that if you want people to be able to grow or to change, they have to be in a lovely space.

Which I think goes along with one of your favorite writers, Simone Weil, who says that you are decentered by beauty. That is a profound effect that you actually undergo this launch from what you thought was the center of the world off to the periphery, and you’re really happy about it.

That’s the amazing thing.

There are lots of things that make us feel ecstatic, and there are lots of things that make us feel subordinate. But usually, at the moment you’re being made to feel subordinate, you don’t feel ecstatic.

But back to the kind of example you give. I just think that it’s more a drifting process, that having beautiful things in the world has an overall effect of diminishing the urge to injure.

I’d have to really look at those specific periods to see if I agreed that they were ruthless, because sometimes people make that argument about historical periods where I just think it’s completely false.

For example, people will often say Hitler loved beauty. My own view is it’s a scandal that this many years from World War II any of us are saying Hitler liked beauty. That is not somebody who liked beauty. People seem to have accepted his self-definition. I use the metaphor of saying: If you had somebody who actually broke the legs of 100 ballerinas and then held up a postcard of Degas and said, “I really love ballet,” you wouldn’t for a moment say, “Ah, that person loved ballet.” You’d say, “I think the person didn’t love ballet.”

Brooks: Yeah, I would say, from what I know, his aesthetic sense, or Albert Speer, the architect, it was pretty representative of his belief system. The urge to dominate is in the architecture. It’s meant to be overpowering and not exactly subtle.

You mentioned Simone Weil, and we’ve taped I don’t know how many episodes so far, and her name has come up more than anybody else’s. It’s not only because I’m projecting out unconscious Simone Weil vibes that I want people to talk about her. It’s something about her attention to attention as the ultimate form of generosity, and then the way she inspired Iris Murdoch to see the act of attention as the primacy of morality.

She writes, “You can grow by looking.” The seeing is a moral act even though it is not an act. You’re not even touching anybody.

Scarry: That is a wonderful passage. There’s another moment where she talks about feeling self-absorbed, feeling that she’s not being treated well enough by her colleagues, and then seeing a bird, like the bird that came into the presence of your friend and suddenly just undergoing this un-self thing.

I think people don’t realize when they don’t see generously that they’re also doing themselves harm. They’re really hurting their own soul.

Brooks: I’ve always been struck by the fact that the philosophers and writers who emphasize attention most—obviously Weil and Murdoch, but I would also throw in Edith Stein as an example. I would also throw in Marilynne Robinson as an example, whose book Gilead is really a description of somebody looking.

And for those who haven’t read it, and I highly recommend you read it; it’s about a guy named John Ames who’s old and dying, and he’s married a much younger woman, and they have a little boy, a 9-year-old boy. He wants to leave a letter to the boy so he knows his dad, because John Ames knows he’s got weeks or months to go, but all he does is look at him.

The novel is really just John Ames looking at this wonderful creature, an ordinary 9-year-old boy. And there are two passages, quick passages, from John Ames, writing this letter to his son that he’ll get after he’s dead.

“I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder if you, what you’ve done with your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you’ve been God’s grace to me, a miracle. Something more than a miracle. I can tell you this, that if I’d married some rosy dame,”—I’m having trouble getting through this—“and she had given me 10 children, and they had each given me 10 grandchildren, I’d leave them all on Christmas Eve, on the coldest night of the world, and walk a thousand miles just for the sight of your face and your mother’s face.”

It’s just a description of: I’m looking at you, and I’m overwhelmed. It’s a beautiful book because of this guy’s capacity to look.

Scarry: That’s an extraordinary passage.

Brooks: But the question I have is: I’ve thrown out four names, Murdoch, Weil, Edith Stein, and Marilynne Robinson, and is it a coincidence they’re all women?

These bachelor male philosophers like Kant, they thought morality was action.

And the women had a quieter, “Oh, no, it’s perception.”

Scarry: The labor of perception.

Brooks: It doesn’t strike me obvious that it’s a mere coincidence. There were others among Irish Murdoch’s philosophy circle out there in England in that World War II era; they’re a big famous group of women philosophers.

Scarry: It doesn’t seem an accident that they’re women. Now, there are men who I think see in the same way. I’ve mentioned Seamus Heaney, and Thomas Hardy, I think, is another person whose perceptual acuity and recognition that perception is everything. I do have to report that some of the most ethical people I know in my life have been men.

So I always have to stop short of—

Brooks: —blanket condemnation. That’s my male self-loathing. I didn’t mean to imply that. But I think all generalizations go away.

So the first argument that it could make you a better person is the fact of decentering. You’re looking outward and, as you said, feeling marginal and wonderful at the same time.

But the second argument would be, and that you’ve made this argument, that there’s something about the shape of beauty, the symmetry. I think Aristotle has some concept of justice as a cube or something like that.

So there’s something almost about the shape of it that gives form to goodness.

Scarry: I think it is the symmetry issue. Every concept we have of justice, every theory I can think of that’s about justice, stresses that idea of symmetry.

The best-known theory today is John Rawls’s theory of justice, and he says that fairness requires a symmetry in all our relations with other people. Plato talks about how you have to have punishment that is symmetrical to the crime and here we are, hundreds and hundreds of years later, and we haven’t figured out yet what is the right kind of punishment for a crime. Or people talk about how you have to have a kind of equal pay for equal work, and it always involves that idea of symmetry. With beautiful things, it’s effortlessly there in many, many manifestations.

By the way, many people say to me: “Well, there are wonderful paintings that are asymmetrical, and so forth.” That’s certainly true. But there are two things about that. First, the fact that we can feel so secure that we can go on to discover beauty in something like an asymmetrical abstraction, that is a kind of celebration of how sturdy the foundation already is. And then the second thing is that—and here you may not agree—we’ve so lost the ability to think symmetrically in the United States.

I mean, the idea that we went after Iran for thinking about making a nuclear weapon when we have thousands of these. We have between 800 and 900 military bases in the world, and we report in our newspapers, “Oh, China’s getting another military base.”

And of course, wealth. I think that if we ever had to start stressing symmetry, and I believe we should start stressing symmetry, we would have to change a lot about what we do, the distance between the richest and the poorest people.

Brooks: So you’re saying that just the asymmetrical nature of American power, or of concentrated wealth, or I could say even of status in this country, you’re asking for trouble when you—

Scarry: You’re asking for trouble. You’re making it harder and harder for people to act well. Aristotle says, “A just society is a society that makes its population care to be just.”

You know, we can argue about whether the government in this country is just or not; probably, we wouldn’t have a big argument. But the real question is: Do we as a population care to be just? Do we really worry about the asymmetries?

Brooks: What about the argument that, say Sergey Brin or Larry Page, these Google guys, created a search engine that produced such an enormous amount of good for the world that the money they earn is symmetrical to the amount of good in the world that they’ve produced?

Scarry: Certainly you hear many variations of that. If somebody has made a great invention, it’s at least a momentarily plausible argument. But I guess you’d have to begin by saying there are many versions of that that just say, “I’m the one, who as the executive in this company, is putting in all the value.”

This was Marx’s argument, that the surplus value came from all the workers and yet was appropriated by the owner.

Brooks: When we talk about beauty, we’re not only talking about symmetry; we’re talking at some sense about reciprocity, proportion.

One other thing I’d mention: We love movement without change. I have a place on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, and I love to watch the water, and it moves, it ripples, but it doesn’t really change.

There’s something I find tremendously attractive about watching the ripples of the water stay the same, and it’s the same when you look into a fire. The flames of the fire are flickering, but they’re the same.

Scarry: I remember a passage in Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us. She of course talks about great movements of water and these big circulating tides. But also talks about whether in these wavelets, whether the water is actually moving or whether it’s passing something on. And I have kind of the equivalent for that. I don’t think I have the steady access to bodies of water, although I should. I live about a block from the Charles River, so I’ll have to rethink my daily habits.

But I have something the same with wind—just being amazed by the fact that in one willow tree, one rope of branches is doing a kind of motion like this, and another is doing a very different kind of thing like this, and there are about 15, even within the small micro world of individual pockets of branches, and it is extraordinary. And I guess it would fit your model, since the willow tree itself doesn’t move up the block.

Brooks: That would be scary.

Maybe we should hire artists to look at society and do an analysis of where the symmetries and reciprocities and proportions are.

You had said something a few minutes ago, which I find to be the most persuasive argument of how an aesthetic sense can lead to better behavior. What you said strikes me as very accurate. It’s not like you look at a Vermeer painting and then you go out and save a kid who’s drowning or whatever.

It has a gradual effect. You throw yourself in the way of beauty. You see a beautiful mountain, a sunset. You go to an art museum. I think it has a gradual ennobling effect. It would certainly seem obvious to me if you put crappy art in front of somebody for their whole life. It would have some degrading effect on their inner nature. That some beautiful effect would have a more illuminating effect. You’re looking upward, and you’re yearning for something that’s beautiful.

We use the phrase “moral beauty” just as much as we use the phrase “physical beauty.” And so it has a slowly ennobling effect, I would think.

Scarry: I think that’s absolutely right.

Brooks: You know, we say somebody has a beautiful soul. I think what we mean by that is somebody’s kind and forgiving and warm, and so it’s funny how we use this word across so many contexts.

Scarry: There’s a book by the historian Lynn Hunt that talks about the effect that novels had in the 18th century, when suddenly people would read a novel and realize that the maidservant had this whole inner life that had just never occurred to them before. A kind of real perceptual revolution came about by the widespread reading of novels.

Brooks: Harriet Beecher Stowe gets a lot of criticism these days for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but it did have a pretty amazing effect.

Scarry: It doesn’t get better than that in terms of trying to repair a massive asymmetry and a massive ongoing injury.

Brooks: I think also beauty can arouse a desire to lead a more beautiful life. If you surround yourself with beautiful things, you may not automatically become a deeper person, but beauty arouses, you keep using the word vitality. I wanna come back to that word. Beauty and desire go together.

Almost by definition of beauty is a thing we desire and take innate pleasure in. So to me, it would have a form of lifting your life up just because you’re used to looking upward, basically, at things you admire.

You mentioned how older people have maybe a more refined sense of sight sometimes.

Scarry: I don’t know if it’s more refined, but I think that they’re struck by beauty more often. When you’re my age, it’s hard to get from A to B without thinking, Oh my gosh; just you suddenly see something you hadn’t seen before.

For example, it’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve noticed that when leaves start turning, there are certain leaves that sort of recreate the shape of their own self in a little portrait of a different color on the leaf. It’s not every tree; it’s only certain species, but it’s heart-stopping when you come upon it.

Brooks: Do you think earlier in your life you were just in too much of a rush or …?

Scarry: Not a rush, no. I don’t know what it is. I think I liked beauty and sought beauty, and that’s what brought me to the humanities, no doubt. It’s what makes me love glass, beautiful colored glass, whether it’s in a cathedral window or in my own window in a little vase. As a gardener, I’m willing to be the servant, happy to be the servant of the flowers.

I’m just saying there are many more objects, many more people. I mean, sometimes I look at, you know, a room full of people or a class of people, and I just think, How can every face be this beautiful?

Brooks: There is research on where they have younger adults and older adults look at crowds, and they follow their eye saccades to see where they’re going. And the younger adults are looking at the threatening faces, and the older adults are looking at the happy faces. It sort of makes evolutionary sense.

The younger adults are out there to protect the community, and the older adults have passed that responsibility on. But it’s one of the reasons that emotional health improves with age. You’re much more open to positive emotions.

We’ve talked about the aspect of having taste, and we’ve talked a little about how it’s formed, probably influenced, anyway, by evolution—that we like symmetry, we like these things.

But it can’t only be that. There must be a way to educate your taste, Do you agree with that? Do you think there are ways to improve the way you see a piece of art or anything, or even taste a glass of wine—like sommeliers talk about wine. I’m like, “Well, I don’t know.” I don’t have that, the concepts that they have to describe what a nutty glass of wine is. So there must be a way to educate it.

Scarry: So many instances of beauty come, just as you described earlier, in a way that surprises you, come out of nowhere. But then there are things that are difficult. One of Plato’s dialogues called Greater Hippias, or we think it’s by Plato, ends by saying beauty is difficult.

There are a lot of forms of beauty or instances of beauty that are difficult. Not everyone can pick up Marilynne Robinson and immediately see the power of it. Many books, many classrooms are dedicated to that process of trying to discover the beauty of the thing.

By the way, I agree that somebody can teach me to actually taste what’s in the wine in a way that I can’t unless they begin to describe it to me. But one reason why I am a little uncomfortable with the word taste is just because it implies that there is a right way to respond.

And I think that the beautiful things in the world fall into two categories, which sounds like a ridiculous statement, but for the moment you have to allow it. There are some things that are universally beautiful; like there’s no one on Earth who has not noticed a sunrise or a sunset. Same with the moon.

They give us the idea that beautiful things are gonna be universally adored, whereas that simply isn’t the case. We each choose a different partner and therefore we’ve each come to see the beauty of that person’s face that other people won’t agree with. It wouldn’t be good if we all chose the same person.

I call all the plural objects “the myriad variables,” and ones that are universally shared, “the constants.” By educating one another’s taste, in addition to the sheer pleasure and whatever growth or care comes from that act, that it also is making us take one tiny step closer to believing that we could on Earth settle our differences that are causing so much strife. To find an object that I at first didn’t see and that you showed me or vice versa means that you’re restoring faith capacity for shared consent.

Brooks: It strikes me there’s two ways that might work, one of which I would support. The one I’d be skeptical of is just the statement: “Well, different strokes for different folks, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

It’s all subjectivity all the way down. And therefore we should be tolerant. I think that’s sort of an unrealistic way to think you’re gonna have a harmonious society.

If somebody came up to me and said, “You know, my garden gnome is a more beautiful work of art than your Vermeer,” I would have a negative view of them.

I’ve been trained by my culture to have a certain aesthetic standards that some things genuinely are more beautiful, that the beauty of a Vermeer painting is not in my eyes. It’s in the painting.

A community that has a shared aesthetic order is healthy in the way a community that has a shared moral order.

You know, we’re all different, but we agree on what’s right and what’s wrong. And it seems to me that’s a better way to regard aesthetics—as something which does have a hierarchy.

Scarry: But here’s the thing. Each little object along the way is just leading to a larger vision.

I’m also opposed to garden gnomes, but if somebody gets the next step by doing that—that’s Plato’s ladder, that eventually you go on to being able to see and to create laws and literature and all kinds of marvelous things.

Brooks: You mentioned one of my favorite concepts in philosophy: Plato’s ladder of loves. Could you just describe what Plato was saying there?

Scarry: This occurs at the end of Plato’s Symposium, where everybody who’s there has just given their account and a kind of written a praise poem to love. Toward the end, Socrates gives his account and shows that actually love often entails lack.

He then tells that his own teacher is a woman named Diotima, who explained to him that you begin by, through the beauty of your beloved, falling in love with one person, but that eventually you learn to see the beauty of all men and women. So you pass from eros to caritas.

Then you also love a lot of things like education and legal treatises and many other beautiful things.

Brooks: I’m a big Augustinian, and his whole moral system is built around that there’s an order of loves. If you tell me a story in private and I blab at a dinner party, I’m putting my love of popularity above my love of friendship, and that’s disordered love. If you lie to make money, you’re putting your love of money above your love of honesty. That’s disordered love. It’s a useful way to think about what wrong behavior actually is.

I’d like to talk to you a little about desire and beauty. There’s a couple, the Arens, they study relationships. One of their theories is that the thing that gives us greatest pleasure is self-transcendence, the idea that we incorporate otherness into ourselves and we grow. We have this fervent desire to keep growing.

Their theory is that the rush of excitement you get when you fall in love is from incorporating another person into your psyche. That process is intrinsically interesting and intrinsically exciting. I like this concept of desire as self-transcendence, because when you look around, whether people are reading a book or going to a museum, we’re trying to grow. There seems to be some intrinsic pleasure in that, aside from the beauty of whatever painting we see—the act of learning is its own aesthetic thing. I think it’s one of the most holy desires that we have.

Let’s take the problem of beautiful people. One could say we’ve been praising beauty, but we already overvalue beautiful people. We pay them more. We attribute all sorts of positive attributes which they may or may not possess. So beauty can be a seduction to overvalue something for superficial reasons. Would that be fair to say?

Scarry: That would be fair to say, but I think that probably we could develop a more positive picture of this. Only when you’re talking about the beauty of persons does it start feeling a little bit problematic.

Often there’s a kind of impatience with the person because he or she doesn’t have the same kind of inner beauty. That is, we assume the person will have inner beauty, and then if they don’t, we feel this is a sham.

But if you stop and think about it, the fact that the person is lovely—and by the way, I think that there’s a certain species benefit to the fact that we have great instances, like Helen of Troy or Dante’s Beatrice. When the elders of Troy are sitting on the wall and Helen comes out to describe the Greek soldiers, they all say, “It’s true. She was worth it.”

The fact of the matter is that often we feel very uncomfortable if it turns out the person does not have inner beauty. And yet, in some ways, it was his or her physical beauty that made us care about the person’s moral beauty. The fact that we are now recognizing that what we really want to see is inner moral beauty then might make us aware of another person who is incredibly kind and good and so forth.

It might be that that person does or does not have physical beauty. But in any case, we’ve learned that we really care about the inner beauty. I also think that we’re kind of incoherent on our objections to physical beauty. We say we don’t like it because the person was born with it and they don’t deserve credit for it. Yet people all the time have abilities that they were born with, and we don’t discount them just because there was no way for them to actually author it themselves.

On the other hand, if somebody is artificially beautiful, and it’s all through clothing and makeup and having an expensive hairstylist and so forth, we don’t like it because it’s artificial. Yet we have to, as human beings, have a deep reverence for the capacity for artifice. Of course, I myself share some of these feelings of, Wait, there’s something unfair here, and yet I think it is a little bit unfair to the person who has that physical beauty.

Brooks: As you were talking, I’m thinking of how so many children’s stories are about this problem of how to deal with beauty or ugliness. Like The Ugly Duckling, Beauty and the Beast, Shrek.

There are a lot of cold queens in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. So children are trying to figure out—oh, you can have a cold beauty or you can have Beauty and the Beast. The Beast or Shrek is an ugly thing, but has a beautiful inside.

Scarry: A really good example of that is the novel Jane Eyre, which has influenced many, many people and many first-generation feminism, second, third, et cetera. The book is very concerned with Jane Eyre’s plainness.

One of our students long ago in the ’90s did a senior thesis about the number of times the book remind you that Jane Eyre is plain. Even after she grows up, her former servant in the mean household in which she used to live comes to visit her, and Jane asks if “I improved in looks,” and Bessie says, “No, I’m sorry, you haven’t.”

As this student said, her name was Amanda Lydon, “Jane is not gonna give up her love of the beauty of the world just because she herself isn’t beautiful.” That is, I think, something that is reiterated in a number of novels. For example, Jane Austen’s Persuasion; it opens by telling us that Anne Elliot has lost her bloom.

Brooks: George Eliot was famously not that great-looking either, and she said, “There are beautiful things in the world, and we must love them.”

Scarry: That’s absolutely right.

Brooks: Let’s talk about the argument you make, which is not intuitive to me, of the connection between perceiving beauty and the urge to create beauty.

I have managed to resist this urge my entire life, because I don’t create beauty. Why did that point seem important to you?

Scarry: It’s something that philosophers say. Diotema in that ladder of love that we talked about certainly says that when you see your beloved, it gives rise to the wish to bring children into the world, but also to bring legal treatises and poems into the world.

So that’s a very direct statement that it leads to the urge to create. [Ludwig] Wittgenstein says, “When the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it,” which is probably a response we’ve all had. What the statement says is that it leads to the urge to create. Probably people would include some of the things you invent as beautiful, but even if that weren’t the case, even if we asked people and they said no—

Brooks: David’s writing is ugly.

Scarry: —I think that the idea of invention is a good. Hume said that, ordinarily, when you look at a virtue, you have to show that the virtue has some good outcome in order for it to be a virtue. But anything that awakens in you the capacity for creation is automatically a good in itself. Because we can’t bring about better relations in the world unless we’ve got the capacity for creation.

Brooks: That feeds into what I think you had said earlier, that it’s a glimpse of a better world. I grew up in New York City, where nobody had a lawn, and so I developed a weird passion for beautiful lawns. I moved to suburbia and I had a nice lawn, and I felt like I finally made it in America. I’ve got a garage door opener on my visor on my car, and I’ve got a beautiful lawn. I hungered for that when I was a kid growing up

Scarry: Well, don’t forget the hospital people who wanna see green. I think you should excuse yourself.

Brooks: I’m always excusing myself.

You had mentioned artifice in a nuanced way. So if you read a beautiful poem and then you learned it was written by AI, and that it was an artificial intelligence creation, would you enjoy the poem less having learned this?

Scarry: Absolutely.

Brooks: Why do you think that is?

Scarry: I think that the fact that it kind of feels dead in one’s heart shows that whether we realized it or not, the fact that this poem emanated from a human being is absolutely crucial to us. I was once asked by a philosopher in England, Michael Hauskeller—he cited to me a statement by Nick Bostrom that in the future things may be so good, so much beauty might be created, that Mozart will come to sound like department store music or something.

That’s just a very wrong idea, because we don’t give up objects of beauty. There’s endless room for more beauty. But I think it does have to have a live referent.

Brooks: Do you think there’s a danger that is: tThat belief which I share is a function of our generation? That if you grew up with replicant AI friends, you may have a different attitude toward AI art and AI poetry or whatever?

Scarry: That’s a very hard question. I suppose that if a young person were able to show to another young person the virtuosity the kind of nuances in the rhythm or the modifications of the metaphor as you go along, that they could really love it.

That’s an interesting thought experiment. I’d have to think a lot more about that.

Brooks: Maybe because I grew up before AI, I do think you need to feel the pain that went into Van Gogh’s paintings and that nobody wants to watch two AI bots play chess against each other. You need to have the human in there, but we could be the last of the Mohicans on that.

Now, I want to conclude with an argument that I think is really at the center of why you wrote the beauty book, which was that there had been a war on beauty in the humanities and in the arts too.

I put this topic toward the end because I don’t think this war on beauty ever hit the outside world. But I do think it hit the academy, and it hit the art world.

I have a friend named Makoto Fujimura, who’s a Japanese American painter. He creates these astonishingly beautiful paintings. He has been fighting this war in the art world as a professional painter to defend beauty, which he feels he’s lonely. You would think artists all love beauty. That’s why they become artists.

I was watching one of his shows at a gallery in New York, and he had a big blue wall-sized painting. And it just looked blue to me—just a canvas of blue. And he said to me, “David, stand there for 20 minutes. Look at it for 20 minutes.” And I was like, “I do the Louvre in 20 minutes. I’m not gonna stand in front of one painting for 20 minutes.” But I did, and by the end of the 20 minutes, I saw not a blue painting. I saw 800 different kinds of blue somewhere in there.

Somehow the eye adjusts or something. I just saw depth and depth and depth. But the fight he’s been fighting, and I suppose I haven’t talked about this specifically: There are certain artists of a slightly earlier generation who they produced ugly art. And so there really was this attack on beauty.

Scarry: By the way, I know your artist, and I met him shortly after I wrote this book. And you’re right that it isn’t just the universities. It was the art world. When I wrote the book, it was because of what was happening in the universities.

And then I was surprised to find Jim Cuno, who was the curator at the Fogg Museum at Harvard, invited in the directors of many museums, and we had these seminars about it. And they all talked about having been under a taboo. I think once when I gave a talk on beauty at MoMA, I was given, and still have, a lifetime pass.

Brooks: Oh, nice. I’ve got to get that invite.

Scarry: The other place was architecture schools. How could you not want beautiful architecture? Individual artists have said that they were under tremendous pressure not to succumb to trying to do something beautiful. So that is an important thing to stress because it can seem as though the complete source of it must have been the university. I’m not sure that’s the case.

Brooks: Summarize the argument that they were making against it and what you found objectionable about their arguments.

Scarry: One argument was that when you look at something beautiful you reify it. You turn it into an object.

And this has some true instances. Like if you’re an eagle and you focus on a rabbit, it is probably a prelude to some injurious act. But that isn’t what people are normally doing when they look at people. And so it was strange that it became the model, and even stranger was the fact that it began to be said even about inanimate objects.

You’re going to paint and you’re just reifying the paintings by standing there looking at them. You think, But aren’t the paintings made to be looked at?

Brooks: This must have grown to some degree out of feminist thinking that the male gaze was objectifying.

Scarry: Absolutely it grew out of that. And it’s not as though people who were complaining about the male gaze are necessarily wrong. But the effect, it was to begin to blanket everything. And you would be sitting in a seminar where of course you want to look at one another, and you’re talking about how lethal it is to look.

So that was one thing. The other thing was the idea that there’s a lot of problems in the world, and it’s diverting our attention away from those problems. And there’s no way that you could ever convince me that by attending to beauty you become less aware of problems. To me, they are opposite ends of a pole, and when you are in the presence of something beautiful, it’s helping to nourish your recognition of what is intolerable, and cruelty is intolerable. And vice versa. When you see cruelty, you long for, as at Guantánamo, the photograph of the flower. So I think they were incoherent arguments, and I think that they were also mutually exclusive.

On the one hand, one argument was saying, “Our acts of vision are destructive. You hurt the thing you’re looking at.” The other argument was that by not looking at something, by ignoring something, you produce harm in it. And even if you go to the locus of the problem, the idea that there are cases, let’s say, when the male gaze is used violently, even then it is something that can’t plausibly be generalized to males looking at women or women looking at men. Because if you go back through time, it’s the perceiver who’s always vulnerable.

It’s Dante whose knees are buckling when he sees Beatrice. That occurs all the way down the line. It’s like Sappho’s “Raise high the roof beam, carpenters.” You have to make the doorways taller to accommodate the person. You have to fill the hillside with flowers. It goes back to the earlier conversation we were having about the kind of growth or enlargement of perception that comes by being in the presence of beauty.

Brooks: There’s one other argument that the war on beauty folks could wage; I see it in my own profession in journalism. There are two things going on. One is middle-class Americans or the bourgeoisie are overly content, and you need to shock them out of their mediocrity.

And the other is that in the media, our theory of change is if we can explain what’s wrong, we’ve done our job. We have a strong bias toward negative news. And we don’t have to explain how to fix it. We just expose the sin. And I think it’s been proven that this approach to promoting social change by shocking people or by reminding them of how awful things are is a pretty rotten way to motivate people to do change.

You can’t just say, “This is rotten, this is hopeless, this is terrible.” You have to provide an alternative vision, which is what beauty is—literally an alternative vision.

Scarry: I agree with that. In fact, have you seen this new documentary called Josh’s Wedding? You watch the computer generate its own poem. Then you also see it give its opinion of human beings, which is that we’re contemptible, we’re small, we’re worthless.

Perhaps that is just one of 1,000 things that AI would say about human beings. But it suddenly began to make me and Philip Fisher, my life partner, worry: “Wait a minute, these computers are being trained on all these books and newspapers that report only the negative.”

For every act of cruelty, there are probably that day a million acts of kindness in the world. The kind of fear that AI might inflict cruelty by unleashing a nuclear weapon or whatever always seemed odd to me, only in the sense of: What would be the motive?

But if the picture we have of ourselves is so negative, that might be a reason.

Brooks: You published this book, 26 years ago? And when you did it, the anti-beauty movement was at full force.

Scarry: I think that’s right.

Brooks: What’s the update 26 years later?

Scarry: I think that gradually things have been restored. I mean, I see conferences on beauty. I think that students—you know, even in the ’90s I taught this course on beauty, in the ’90s, and certainly students took the course. There are lots of signs that that is much less of a problem.

Now, somebody who is in art history told me that that is still the case in art history departments. But I didn’t question him enough to know if that is absolutely the case. I just know that it’s something that I shouldn’t so blithely think, Yeah, we’re out of it now. We’re out of danger now. Maybe we’re not.

Brooks: These things take a while. As they say, intellectual history travels by hearse. You have to lose people to lose certain ideas.

Well, thank you for this time. I’m reminded of a friend of mine named Jenny McShane, who I’ve known since I was 10, made a movie called The Quilters about guys in a maximum-security prison who quilt. And that’s the center of their life. And they’re in there, they’re never coming out, and they just wanna create beauty.

Among people like that, beauty never went out of fashion.

Elaine Scarry, thank you so much for joining us on The Permanent Questions.

Scarry: Thank you so much for having me.

Brooks: I leave this conversation just reminded again that beauty is everywhere. We talk about moral beauty, physical beauty, intellectual beauty, mathematical beauty, a beautiful tennis shot, and I really was persuaded by Elaine that it is all one thing. Beauty is one thing, one sensation of symmetry, of reciprocity, of just something that’s innately pleasurable.

I’m also reminded that perception is so much of what we do. We used to have this idea that perception, you just open your eyes and reality floods in, and the real mental action up here was thinking, was cognition, cogitation. But I think we’re understanding as the cognitive sciences bring us along that perception is thinking, and most of our thinking is actually in our perceptions.

You don’t have to think about whether you’re seeing a morally admirable act or a morally degrading act. You just see it and you know immediately in the way you know a painting is beautiful or not beautiful. And so I think we got a little glimpse on that process. And then I really walk away persuaded that even though I can think of a lot of artists and poets who are not wonderful human beings, I do think the constant act of experiencing beauty over years, over decades, does enlarge the soul and does make us kinder toward others, more considerate toward others, and greater in our longing for the good.

So thanks so much for joining us for this week’s conversation with Elaine Scarry.

The Permanent Questions is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. New episodes of The Permanent Questions drop each Sunday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel, on Spotify, on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you wanna support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

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The Permanent Questions is edited by Christopher Beha and produced by Rebecca Davis. This episode was engineered by Miguel Carrascal. Our theme is by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.