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I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America

2026-04-14T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Hugo Yu

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Here is the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow: At some point within this text, I will reveal to you what—after 555 responses, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of monomaniacal research—I have determined to be the best free restaurant bread in America. I will not attempt to slither to the moral high ground, arguing that best is a meaningless measure, or insisting that all bread is dear in its own way. Even if you attempt to betray me—for instance, by merely scanning the text that follows for the phrase Here it is: the best free restaurant bread in America—I will uphold my end of the bargain.

I encounter on this quest three types of Americans, because only three types exist. The type that you are—or the type that you are dealing with—is revealed in response to the question “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?”

The American people, alas, have grown skittish about answering plain questions. An unconscionable number ask what I mean by this, as if the words might have an obscure double meaning. To be clear: Any bread from any restaurant in America is eligible, so long as it is free to all customers. The contents of the basket set on the table before the meal arrives, the cost of which is invisibly diffused throughout other menu items. Rolls that arrive unbidden. Popovers, if everyone gets a popover no matter what. You know what I’m talking about. Free restaurant bread.

The first type of American: people who joyride the day’s updrafts like marvelous, glossy crows. They easily recall the locations of treats encountered over their lifetime. They answer this question Glock-shot fast, as if they have been waiting to be asked it. They are happy.

The second type: fairly certain that they have consumed bread at some point; allows that a portion of that consumption could have occurred within the confines of a restaurant, or a restaurant-like environment; will grant that some pieces of said bread were perhaps free and/or enjoyable to ingest. But they profess to have retained no specifics. Their personal histories are inscribed in chalk, regularly power-washed with jets of deterging Time. They resent the implication that they could ever derive meaning from the pale, abstract remnants of narrative that constitute their internal autobiographies, and, with a few kindhearted exceptions, will not attempt to. Many, in fact, will appear oddly furious to have been asked this question, and will invent wafer-thin excuses as to why they are unable to spend two seconds considering it.

The third type: a tragic, paranoid (though occasionally brilliant) figure. Ask this person, “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?” and their eyes shimmer with panic. These individuals live with the terrific knowledge that there is a best free restaurant bread in America, and the awful conviction that they are incapable of identifying it. It is not a lack of contenders that prevents them from volunteering an answer—the prison of their mind teems with memories of free restaurant breads—rather, they are silenced by a hallucinatory fear of nebulous consequences that could befall them should they personally misidentify the best free restaurant bread in America, even in private conversation. Asked this question, such people refuse to answer. “It’s too much pressure!” they insist. Whence this pressure, of what force, applied to what possible end, is never explained. Men and women with advanced degrees are overrepresented in this type.

Though it strikes the ear as an insoluble query, there is a correct answer—right now, known only to God (and to me, an agent of his will), but erelong to the steadfast reader.

Here is where the notion for the undertaking came from: Tucked within the viscera of the continental United States is a restaurant that gives away superb free bread. Every time I have eaten it (before this past year, three times total), I have said aloud (to my husband, who did not care), “This is the best free restaurant bread in America.” The thought made me feel the way you do when you realize you were just a half a moment away from being plowed by a car, and were spared only by a chance nanosecond of dawdling before stepping into the street: giddy and flabbergasted and grateful to be alive. It seemed incredible, but also possible, that this really could be the best free restaurant bread in America. What if it was? Even more dizzyingly, what if it wasn’t? What if—unfathomable—someone else was giving away an even better bread for free? The thought drove me crazy. I begged for the opportunity to investigate.

[From the November 2025 issue: Caity Weaver on what it takes to be a Revolutionary War reenactor]

Naturally, I told my superiors, this investigation would bring me into contact with the entire arc of human history. People have been eating bread—in many places, eating mostly bread—for millennia. We can’t say for certain that the individuals who fled their burning homes on the shore of the Sea of Galilee 23,000 years ago (leaving behind baskets they’d woven, tools they’d carved from bones, and sleeping areas they’d turned snug and cozy) ate bread, but we know from microscopic barley and oat remnants embedded in a grindstone abandoned to the flames that they were, at least, processing flour. (To situate these folks in time: Cats would not be domesticated for another 14,000 years or so.)

Once people began munching bread, they never stopped. (Or, at least, they never stopped until very recently.) The word bread can also refer more generally to food, sustenance, or livelihood—not just in English, but in languages from Russian to Hindi. Breadcrumbs are scattered throughout our language. The word lord is derived from a compound word in Old English—hlāfweard—translating, roughly, to “loaf guard” or “loaf keeper” (breadwinner could be seen as a modern fraternal twin); lady comes from hlæfdige : “loaf kneader.” The arm bones of Neolithic women, researchers have found, were 11 to 16 percent stronger than those of the women’s rowing team at the University of Cambridge, likely from grinding grain for hours every day.

[Read: What bread tasted like 4,000 years ago]

(Of course, eventually, my investigation would lead me back to the site of the bread that inspired it, thereby accomplishing my secret personal mission: procuring a fourth basket of free bread from that restaurant. Unfortunately, what happened to me on my return visit was so shocking and abominable, I was tempted to re-pitch this article as “What Is the Restaurant in America That I Hate, That I Will Never Go Back to, That Has Made of Me an Enemy for Life Due to Its Psychotic Soda Policy”—on which, more upsetting details to follow.)

How would I determine the best free restaurant bread in America? Simple: I would ask every single person I encountered, “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?”; travel to the most likely candidates; and try the bread myself.

The $725.32 Free Bread

Sixteen splendorous bread varieties are yours for claiming off the three-tiered lacquered rolling cart at Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas. You can have as many as you want, all for free, with your meal. My meal was the Degustation Menu, which costs $525 per guest. The breads range from the fanciful (surprisingly pointy bacon-and-mustard pods, heart-stoppingly yellow saffron focaccia) to the nearly indistinguishable (classic baguettes, traditional baguettes). There are flaky spirals and poofy cubes and bread with the gently rounded profile of a tasteful breast implant. There is olive bread; rosemary brioche; basil focaccia; walnut raisin; one miniature croissant; two cheese breads; a third kind of baguette that is exactly the same as one of the other baguettes, only smaller. There is country loaf. Sixteen.

The three-Michelin-star Joël Robuchon is located within the abyss of the MGM Grand Las Vegas, directly adjacent to a Cirque du Soleil–themed gift shop, though it seems determined to ignore this fact. The MGM’s more than 5,000 rooms colluded to make it the Earth’s largest hotel when it opened in 1993; it has since lost that ominous distinction without shrinking in square footage. Roaming its purgatorial interior, you could be wandering a mega–cruise ship beached in the desert, or vacationing amid the elevator banks of a parking garage containing every car in the world. It is as all-encompassing as the world of a nightmare. In addition to Joël Robuchon, at the time of my visit, the MGM’s droves of restaurants included a Netflix-themed chow palace, Netflix Bites—where screens over the bar silently flashed random trailers for Netflix original programming, interspersed with Stranger Things and Bridgerton screen savers (Netflix Bites has since closed)—and a restaurant inspired by the Jonas Brothers’ great-grandmother, Nellie’s Southern Kitchen: A Jonas Family Restaurant.

Unlike at Netflix Bites, there are no hot-pink signs reading I’D BON APPETIT HIM inside Joël Robuchon; it is a refined place, its cream facade evoking the stately grandeur of Haussmann’s Paris. Chandeliers, plural, are visible through the glass doors. The Robuchon dining room is peculiar within the MGM in that it was built to human scale; it feels like a rich person’s living room, down to the smattering of black-and-white framed snapshots of Nicolas Cage and Celine Dion. I am seated on a velvet couch of Tyrian purple, opposite a tabletop trio of pink roses and in front of a Nic Cage photo. My black napkin is of a material lovelier than my dress; to sleep beneath sheets stitched from such napkins would be the apex of indulgence.

The concept of an elegant chuck wagon buckling beneath the weight of its cargo of bread is not unique in Las Vegas to Joël Robuchon, but the Robuchon grain trolley is esteemed as one of the finest. To ensure that I will be hungry enough to sample the totality of its breads at my 9:15 p.m. reservation, I consume nothing after a modest breakfast. This will prove to be a mistake. By afternoon, counting down the hours in my MGM hotel room ($39.20 a night before fees, a little more than 5 percent of my dinner bill), I pay more serious consideration to a can of Sour Cream & Onion Pringles—which I do not even like—than I did to the paperwork when I bought my car. I gaze, too, upon a lavender can next to the potato chips, envisioning the sugarplum delights it might enclose. Upon closer inspection, it turns out to contain a vibrator, two condoms, and personal lubricant (could this be edible as a kind of syrup?). By the time I am shown to my purple couch, I am hungry enough to eat the tablecloth.

The army of waitstaff who attend to each patron at Joël Robuchon is classy. When I confess to my headwaiter that I would, if possible, prefer not to have lamb for one course, he thanks me as if I have paid him a compliment. These professionals, many of whom have worked here for decades, would never make a woman eating a $525 meal alone at 9:15 on a Monday night feel bad for any request. But still. It is impossible to lock eyes with a Frenchman, after he has just spent minutes delicately extolling the virtues of 16 different breads, and ask, “Could I do one of each?” without feeling ridiculous, no matter how evenly he responds, “Absolutely!”

A selection of the 16 varieties of bread presented to the writer on a three-tiered rolling cart at Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas (Hugo Yu for The Atlantic)

Unaware that every passing second escalates the odds that they will lose a silver button, a finger, or even a limb to my ravenous maw, the waiters continue the pageantry of the bread service. “Butter from France!” one trumpets as he wheels over a second cart, this bearing a hoodoo of butter beneath a spotless glass cloche large enough to contain a human head. A spoon in each hand, he shaves off a translucent spiral, which he confetties with salt. I am so dangerously close to eating the butter plain, like a scoop of ice cream, that I hear him announce, “Olive oil from Alicante!” only faintly, as a cry from a distant ship.

At last, 20 impeccably choreographed minutes after my arrival, my first round of breads is placed before me: 12 oven-warmed rolls crammed into a silver bowl. For one light-flooded second, I am a doe in high beams, paralyzed by everything that could happen next. Then I grab the bacon-and-mustard roll and throw it into my mouth so fast that I forget to taste it. I am about to snatch a second roll, any roll, when a waiter materializes at my elbow to tell me a story.

It is the history of what he calls “a beautiful dish”—a beautiful dish he has recklessly placed between myself and my breads. It is a shallow bowl of mesmerically arranged dots: three concentric rings of molar-size white dots, each topped with a little green dot, converging, as if in worship, upon a perfect circle that is itself an agglomeration of still smaller black dots—all suspended in straw-colored jelly. It looks like something from the biology lab at Liberace University. These, I am informed, are chlorophyll-kissed cauliflower pearls surrounding a caviar disc. The caviar is flecked with 24-karat gold leaf. I scarf it down like my dog inhales breakfast, in order to get back to the bread.

The saffron roll tastes of nothing. The pale-green basil focaccia looks like bread from the morgue. Some of the pickings are quite tasty, but the sheer number of rolls dilutes the impact of each. When the headwaiter asks if I have a favorite “so far,” I humiliate myself by describing a square bread covered in cheese that does not exist. He instantly identifies the two rolls I have conflated—an ethereal marshmallow-size cube made with milk instead of water, and a sphere crowned with crunchy, oven-toasted Gruyère that tastes like cheese-flavored air—and brings out more of these for me to confirm. I accept; I could eat 60 to 600 more!

Another mistake. I had meant to merely sample the breads; instead I am consuming each in toto. The remaining 13 courses are whisked out to me at a relentless pace. There are triangles of many colors; foam; a leaf that is a cake; a ladybug that is candy; gold foil distributed with such apparent abandon—festooning a truffle; smeared on the rim of a glass—that it may simply be drifting through the kitchen’s HVAC system like ash from a phoenix’s nest. “I’m eating so much gold,” read my notes.

As I challenge the elastic limits of my gastric wall, distending it with hundreds of dollars’ worth of fabulous things in rare shapes, and also rolls, I rely more and more on the chemical burn of Diet Coke to excoriate my palate between bites. Joël Robuchon’s Diet Coke is crisp and cold, and swims right up to the brim of the voluptuously curved glasses they serve it in; it devours my tongue like a cleansing fire. Feeling sheepish, and also sluggish, and also like I will never be hungry again, I ask the maestro of the bread cart if I might have my second round. It is time for the loaves.

At 10:46 p.m.—90 minutes after my arrival; I’m exhausted, unable to eat another bite of anything—I calculate how many courses I have left. Five?! I am given a plate of Ibérico ham. It tastes exquisite: nutty, salty, rich. I force it down like I am eating packing peanuts. I notice that I have begun shivering slightly, probably because of the frosty Diet Cokes. “I love Diet Coke!” I write in my notes. Tendrils of conversation from other diners drift to my table. “This was such a good dinner!” one woman declares—a demented way to describe what has happened here tonight; this is dinner in the same way that Australia is an isle. I impel myself to eat all of the foie gras I am served, because I know it is made inhumanely. It is 20 minutes to midnight by the time my posh experience draws to a close. I prefer the traditional baguette to the classic baguette.

What’s the Point of the Article?

“What’s the point of the article?”

This is the question an exasperated William Rubel, the author of Bread: A Global History, demands of me. Rubel is an American who was made a Chevalier of the Ordre National du Mérite Agricole by France’s minister of agriculture for contributions to agricultural knowledge. He is a scholar affiliated with no university. His objective is the total comprehension of a small portion of culinary history—aptly, because, with his untamed thatch of shoulder-length white hair and woolly-caterpillar brows, he looks like someone who could have been alive at any point in the era of man. He also founded a children’s literary magazine.

“Fun article for people to read,” I tell him glumly.

Rubel’s knowledge of bread is so comprehensive—and mine so nonexistent—that he is quickly, if cantankerously, becoming my own hlāfweard : the curmudgeonly warden of all loaf understanding. I came to him originally with a question to which I could find no answer: Why did restaurants start giving away bread for free?

“It’s the opposite of what you asked,” Rubel says. “It’s not ‘When did they begin giving away bread for free?’ Because no one could have imagined sitting down at the meal and not eating bread. It was not possible.”

In the timeline of Western civilization, restaurants are a brand-new trend. The United States had batteries before it had a restaurant. Delmonico’s began operating in New York City in 1837 as a novel kind of dining space: one where patrons could purchase individually priced items off a menu. Prior to the importation of this French-style concern, a person who wished to be served a meal away from home was pretty much restricted to an oyster saloon (where they could have oysters) or an inn or a tavern (where a flat fee purchased whatever meal everyone else was getting—not necessarily oysters). To say that a 19th-century American tavern meal included bread would be like remarking that a 21st-century restaurant meal includes cutlery. We know that America’s first restaurants offered bread to patrons because it would have been unthinkable not to.

People have judged restaurants on the quality of their free bread from the institutions’ earliest days. In what is possibly America’s first restaurant review (a madcap meta-account published in The New York Times in 1859), the bread at New York’s Astor House is deemed “the best bread in the universe.” And although dozens of poll respondents insisted to me that complimentary bread, as a concept, has been lately abandoned in this country—that “every” restaurant charges for bread “now” (not true)—in fact, people have been complaining about vanishing complimentary rolls for at least a century. In 1912, the Times devoted days of coverage to outrage over a new 10-cent charge for bread and butter: “HOTEL DINER BRINGS IN HIS OWN BREAD,” read the headline of an article that described one man’s attempt to skirt the fee.

In the days of tavern dining, proprietors would have wanted customers to fill up on as much bread as possible, so that they would consume less of the more expensive ingredients to which they were entitled. À la carte restaurants perhaps felt themselves grandfathered into what had become a mark of hospitality. Chefs I consult attest to free bread’s ability—a finite ability—to make kitchens run more smoothly (by slowing down orders). It also makes customers less whiny: Restaurants give you free bread “just so that you have something to do with your hands and your mouth,” Richard Horner, a New Orleans chef and restaurateur, tells me.

Horner lays bare the strategic timing of this generosity. Ideally, free bread should not hit the table until after customers have ordered their meal, “because then they order from a position of maximum hungriness,” he says. Plus, the delay builds anticipation: “Will there be bread? I see other people with bread. We haven’t got bread yet.” And then, once the bread is bestowed: “Oh! There is bread! What a fun surprise.”

Horner’s demonic calculation for how many slices or rolls each table’s basket should contain is [Number of diners] + 1. Unevenly divisible bread creates “a tension that I really enjoy.”

But Horner describes himself as “anti–free bread”—a common position among restaurant professionals. A premature breadbasket can gut the total bill. Also, the bread intended to placate customers can just as often be something else for them to complain about. “They get really, really particular about this thing you’re giving them for free,” Horner says. “ ‘This isn’t hot’ or ‘Bring me more stuff ’; ‘I need more bread’; ‘I need more oil and vinegar for some reason’; or ‘This butter is wrong.’ ” He sees the decline of free bread as a consequence of restaurants being stretched so thin during the pandemic. They just got fed up: “You know what? You don’t get bread anymore! ”

Several chefs, including the author Alison Roman, make the case that customers, by demanding bread that is free, deprive themselves of bread that is worth eating. “It’s either good and you pay,” Roman tells me, “or it’s free and bad. Bread costs money to make. It takes skilled labor, and it shouldn’t be free.”

Horner echoes her point. When free bread is “an afterthought”—provided only because free bread is expected—“I would rather just not have it on the table,” he says. If you’re going to give customers bread, “it should be as good as the rest of your food. And if that’s the case, you should charge for it.”

(No one outside the food industry ever tells me they’d prefer paying for excellent bread to receiving mediocre bread for free. Most people just want to be given bread they have not paid for. That bread being good constitutes a rare and wonderful possibility—certainly not an expectation. Nothing tastes as good as free costs.)

My primary means of determining the best free restaurant bread in America is to demand answers from people—my father and friends, yes, but also anyone else I can think of. Strangers encountered on errands. Everyone who sends me an email during the month of October. “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?” I amass several hundred answers.

In harvesting this knowledge, I am exposed to countless novel methods through which humans might delight, disappoint, irritate, and surprise one another. Some people invent their own question on the spot and answer that instead: Asked to identify the best free restaurant bread in America, they tell of a great bakery where bread can be purchased for money, or the worst free restaurant bread in America. Others imagine that the question contains some hidden constraint, which they undertake to expose—“It can’t be a chain restaurant,” they declare, or “It has to be a chain restaurant.” The fixins’-dazzled deliver monologues about butter and olive oil, forgetting that bread exists. One smug stranger in a hot tub tells me that she cannot answer, because she makes her own bread. (Does she bring it to restaurants?) A number decline to consider the question, because they no longer eat gluten. (I don’t require anyone to eat the bread they mention.) (Unrelated warning—not a threat: Gluten-free bread is unable to transubstantiate into the body of Christ, according to Catholic law.) Some folks itch to argue with me about what I mean by bread, daring me to reject their votes for pitas, sopaipillas, corn tortilla chips, or hush puppies. They are disgruntled to learn that I let each person define bread as he or she wishes, desiring only that it incorporate a non-raw staple starch.

[From the March 1989 issue: Corby Kummer on the ideal panettone]

I am astonished that only a minority of people can summon an answer quickly. My mental filing cabinet devoted to cataloging free restaurant breads is one of the largest and most scrupulously maintained in my neocortex; I’ve discarded the contents of other filing cabinets (“Visuospatial Reasoning,” “First Aid”) to make room for it. What occupies the free-bread space in others’ minds? Americans of the second type—those who don’t have an immediate answer to the best-free-bread question—are certainly not charmed by being asked. They seem to resent being pulled out of the swift current of their life and forced to ponder restaurant bread for a few seconds. But aggression is not limited to such people. A man from Boston overhears me asking another stranger the question in an elevator, and cuts in: “Any restaurant you walk in, in the North End, is the best bread.” I ask him to name one. “Any of them,” he says. “Pick one,” I encourage. The man grows furious: “Any of them!”

My father’s answer surprises me. When I was growing up, he, my mother, and I were all serious eaters (not in the sense of being discerning, but of deriving satisfaction from doggedly plowing through any volume of food) with a special penchant for free items. At 81, he tells me, he possesses a single vivid memory of free restaurant bread: He ate it on one of the handful of days in his life that he saw his father. “He would show up occasionally and try to act like the big dad,” my father recalls, bringing Christmas presents to his wife and sons in South Philly. Once, in 1962, my grandfather bought his sons—one in the Air Force, the other (my father) a teenage gang member—lunch at the Four Seasons in Manhattan.

I am stunned to learn that my father—an indefatigable storyteller who I thought had long since frog-marched me through everything that had ever happened to him—once went to a restaurant as nice as the Four Seasons. I’d thought he might say the biscuits at Red Lobster, a restaurant that was the setting for so many jubilant meals with my parents, grandparents, and cousins that I struggle to recall a distinct memory from it; every meal blurs together in a montage of steaming biscuits and laughing faces, not unlike a commercial for Red Lobster. I ask my dad if he has any happy memories of his father. “None that I can think of,” he says. But he remembers that the bread was warm.

What Celebrities Don’t Want You to Know

Hear me when I say this: Irrespective of the vibrant plausibility of your parasocial fantasies, America’s celebrities are not your friends. There is only one good celebrity in this world: the author Stephen King. According to Mr. King, the best free bread in America is “crusty and warm” and served at Hyde Park Prime Steakhouse in Sarasota, Florida. Given the fact that no other star, out of the scores I contact via their representatives, successfully manages to answer this question, I can conclude only that America’s celebrities consider it their unholy mission to ensure that her masses—their fans—die ignorant of the identity of her best free restaurant bread.

Publicists demand to know which other celebrities are telling me their favorite free restaurant bread before they will even consider passing along this question. LeBron James cannot devote one minute to contemplating the best free restaurant bread in America, a representative confides in October, because the totality of his “focus” is “on preparing for the upcoming season”—a frightening and lonely thought. (A few weeks later, James will shatter the tempered-glass backboard of his concentration at 6:32 a.m. Los Angeles time, confessing on social media: “I love watching YouTube golf ⛳ videos!! Random I know. lol. SO COOL!” I email his rep a plea to slip the question to James while a YouTube golf video is loading. Do not hear back.) Ben Affleck cannot answer due to being “in the midst of a project”—aren’t we all? Jennifer Lopez is likewise “filming a movie right now” and therefore totally unreachable by terrestrial communication.

Do you want to know how abjectly I debase myself, attempting to divine this forbidden knowledge from the impenetrable minds of celebrities? I contact Chris Pratt’s publicist to seek Pratt’s answer, even though—since we’re all being so honest—I don’t especially care to know it. (I am merely asking to be polite.) “We need to politely hold off as there isn’t interest,” comes the reply. Excuse me! That is actually not polite! I don’t need to know that Chris Pratt isn’t interested; and also, how can he not be interested in such an interesting topic? And also, I am the one who is not interested! But this is not even my lowest moment. That nadir is struck when I am forced to reach out to my nemesis: a celebrity publicist I have previously sworn never to speak to again, because several years ago she lied to me—did not refuse to comment; flat-out lied—when I asked her a direct question. Typing my query about the best free restaurant bread in America to this individual feels like dragging my raw, bleeding fingertips across a gravestone that has been scorched by lightning. And would you believe that not only does this publicist fail to provide an answer to my fun and fascinating question; she does not even acknowledge receipt of my email or my follow-up email ? And so now I am forced to put into writing my new vow, a vow I will keep, even if it one day destroys my life, even if it kills me: Ashley, the next time you and I cross paths, it will be in hell.

(“What a nice article this will be to read,” Oprah Winfrey’s ultra-classy publicist writes, while unequivocally declining her client’s participation.)

On a handful of occasions, my interactions with public-relations professionals are at least moderately helpful. When pressed, Buzz Aldrin’s and Tyler Perry’s publicists reveal what they (these men’s publicists) consider to be the best free restaurant bread in America, though they will not ask their principals; I duly log their data.

More often, the exchanges are vexing. The senior director of media relations for the country’s largest food-service lobbying group, the National Restaurant Association—the other NRA—tells me that no one from the group will be able to speak with me about free restaurant bread in any capacity, because it “isn’t a trend that we track.” I ask if someone might be able to chat with me about free restaurant bread anecdotally. “It’s not even something we could talk about anecdotally,” she responds. I ask if she will tell me what, in her personal opinion, is the best free restaurant bread in America. She never replies to me again. (Neither here nor there, but in 2023, an investigation by The New York Times revealed that this NRA used the $15 fee that restaurant workers pay to attend its mandatory food-safety course to fund a nationwide lobbying campaign against minimum-wage increases.)

Almost but Not Actually the Best Free Restaurant Bread in America

Here it is: the best free restaurant bread in America are words that, in deference to the integrity of this investigation, I am unable to print immediately followed by the cymbal-washed, experimental-jazz phrase Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits. But such an announcement would be very nearly true. Raw poll numbers situate Red Lobster’s signature bread offering—knobbly, crimpled clods, butter-radiant and freckled with parsley—comfortably in second place. I have personally enjoyed these rolls (introduced in 1992 under the straightforward name Hot Cheese Garlic Bread) so many times that I worry I will struggle to evaluate the biscuits impartially, the same way a friend’s beauty seems to increase over time as your love for her deepens. And so I beg my friend Alice, an Englishwoman for whom Cheddar Bay is mare incognitum, to let me watch her sample her first at our local Red Lobster in Santa Fe.

Red Lobster’s butter-radiant Cheddar Bay Biscuit. (The culinary historian William Rubel denies the possibility that any chain restaurant might have the “best” bread.) (Hugo Yu for The Atlantic)

Our Ultimate Feast is not without some painful moments, such as when, one second before tasting the milky-slurry piña-colada dipping sauce for our Parrot Isle Coconut Shrimp, Alice asks, “What is this?” and then, at the exact same moment I gaily sing, “You’re gonna like it!,” gasps, “Oh my God—that is disgusting.” But her verdict on the Cheddar Bay Biscuits is effusive: “Americans have got a lot of things right regarding the texture of foodstuffs,” she says. “Outstanding.”

The problem is that I want to examine the nubiform texture of these foodstuffs at Red Lobster’s culinary-development center, in Orlando.

My email inquiry is answered by a representative from the PR firm that fields press requests for Red Lobster. I express my desire to visit the offices of the company that purchases a quarter of the lobster and crab caught on boats in North America; she tells me she will “check in with the brand to see what is possible.” What is not possible, I am informed a few days later, is setting foot anywhere inside the corporate lobster den, let alone its gleaming test kitchen. I can enjoy no audience with Damola Adamolekun—who at 35 became the youngest Red Lobster CEO in company history and has spent recent months in a media blitz, promoting the brand’s determination to claw its way back into the hearts of young Black Americans as part of a post-bankruptcy revitalization strategy. Instead, I am invited to submit some questions via email or Zoom to ancillary executives.

By coincidence, in the midst of these faltering negotiations, I meet someone who previously worked with Adamolekun. She says he’s “really cool,” “actually quite lovely”; I should just email him directly, rather than becoming ensnared in PR red tape, like the hundreds of thousands of dolphins, whales, seals, etc. that perish in the Earth’s oceans each year, tangled in trash and fishing gear; here is his email address. I send Adamolekun a short email, in which I attempt to make it clear that I am likewise really cool and actually quite lovely. “I’d like to figure out a fun way to feature Red Lobster in the story,” I say. “I have a couple ideas that would involve you directly.” (Ideas like: eat the biscuits with him, and many other ideas that will hopefully occur to me if he writes back.)

And that is how I learn that Damola Adamolekun is a snitch.

The next day, I receive an email from the same PR rep. “The brand and I connected following your email to Damola,” she writes. “To keep things streamlined and to spare Damola’s inbox, feel free to continue corresponding through me. 😊”

This PR representative is made of steel. Googling her name unearths a YouTube assignment recorded for a college public-relations class a few years ago. In it she coolly addresses the camera while expressing regret for a factory collapse in which, “so far, 1,100 people have lost their lives.” (The crisis-video exercise was apparently inspired by the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh, in which 1,134 people were killed while working in a building where clothing was manufactured for retailers including the Children’s Place and Benetton. “I cannot express how sorry I am that this had to happen,” she tells the camera calmly.) I give up trying to penetrate the Red Lobster carapace.

What Is the “Best”?

Let us acknowledge that the “best” bread is influenced by current fashions. Soft white bread was, for much of human history, a yearned-for extravagance. Today, Americans generally regard it as the nastiest, lowest form of bread and stock it in their cheapest grocery stores. Tastes change.

The late 19th century in New York City—soot-blackened, ammoniac with horse urine—spawned a frenzy for breads baked in sanitary conditions. Under the headline “Bread and Filth Cooked Together,” an 1894 exposé by The New York Press devoted several lurid paragraphs to the cockroach kingdoms of cellar kitchens, where, according to state inspectors, vermin “abounded, and as chance willed became part of the salable products.” One baker recounted how an employer had forced him to mix worm-infested, “green and rotten” old pumpernickel into new dough to add volume. The English language “is not sturdy enough,” the article insisted, to convey “the animate and inanimate horrors” that its reporters had uncovered. (“Unclean Men Mix the Dough and Sleep in the Same Rooms”!) Within eight months, public outcry fast-tracked a law implementing minimum hygiene standards, including housing toilets in rooms separate from the ones where dough was kneaded.

By the early 1900s, basement bakeries were being replaced by aboveground factories. The new operations began packaging bread in waxed paper as a visual marker of sanitation. The paraffin-coated paper, moreover, helped bread go stale more slowly by delaying moisture evaporation; new additives incorporated directly into the dough delayed staleness further. Soft white bread that stayed fresh for days, once a product of wild fantasy, became commonplace.

[From the November 1935 issue: Ready-sliced bread]

The rolls served at Texas Roadhouse (third place in the best-free-restaurant-bread contest by raw votes) are indisputably soft and white, roundly square, and immaculate enough to have possibly made themselves with no outside aid. Seven hundred years ago, a king might have eaten such satin-smooth bread on Easter; the Roadhouse gives it out for free, in portions that are infinite. (The first basket accompanies you to your table, like a fellow guest.) The menu items my husband and I order during our visit are remarkable in their own way—no rabbits stealing the last of the November lettuces by moonlight ever chewed a colder salad than our Caesar—but without question, the free rolls, accompanied by honey-cinnamon butter, are the only items really worth paying for (besides the lovely, big Diet Cokes).

If the paschal king were served the bread now in vogue in the United States, he would be apoplectic. People might die. Our most au courant breads would be, to him, peasant fodder—dun-colored, chewy, whole-grain bricks or, even more inexcusable, loaves rendered intentionally sour.

That the “best” bread is prescribed by trend is demonstrated by no bread better than sourdough. Before the 20th century, William Rubel points out, it was considered unwise to eat bread that tasted acidic, biting, or in some way off: “Eating sour foods was credited with the reason that your family had diarrhea.” But, he says, in the 21st century, “the high-end culinary elite in this country is very aggressively against any bread that’s not sourdough.”

After an explosion of interest in the United States during the first spring of COVID, the obsession has continued to flourish, borne, Rubel says, on a memory mirage. In contrast with, say, grits (a dish that has, more or less, been eaten continuously in North America for more than a thousand years), there is, he insists, “no sourdough tradition in the United States.”

In this country, sourdough gained widespread usage in the days of the Gold Rush—as a term to refer not to bread but to people. According to legend, fortune hunters in the western hinterlands, far from a steady supply of baker’s yeast, kept their starters (a bit of fermented dough that could be added to the next day’s mix) warm by sleeping with them, which caused the miners to reek of sour dough.

As a term referring to a type of bread, rather than a type of person, sourdough did not take off before the 1960s, when it was presented as a kitschy, tough-to-chew wilderness food. Alice Waters—the farm-to-table divinity whose altar is every traffic-thronged urban farmers’ market—brought a craving for French-style sourdough back to California after she had it in Paris, where levain has a much longer history. Americans have now “fetishized the sourdough,” Rubel says, so much so that, in their pursuit of tradition, they have bolted out beyond it, into an ahistoric gastronomic delusion: American sourdough, Rubel says, is uniquely astringent. “In France, they don’t want it to taste sour.”

Rubel also tells me that the whole premise of my article is flawed. “I think you need to think about favorite versus best,” he says. He objects to the fact that I am using the terms, essentially, interchangeably: “Obviously, those can be really different.”

Rubel’s pronouncement severs the tether that has been weakly holding me to reality as I attempt to determine the best free restaurant bread in America. I spend an afternoon losing and evading my own mind across a kaleidoscopic astral plane of axiological and epistemological contemplation. What if the true criteria for what makes one bread the best are unknown, not just to me, but to everyone on Earth? What are the chances that my 555 poll takers represent, exclusively, morons and deviants, whose tastes in no way reflect those of normal people? Wouldn’t many people citing the same thing as their favorite necessarily make it, at least in some way, the best?

The Bread That Flies Through the Air

While I attempt to ask as many different sorts of people “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?” as possible, my sample—though it encompasses respondents of diverse ages, races, incomes, political persuasions, formal-education levels, points of geographic origin, etc.—is inevitably limited.

Lambert’s Cafe is a remarkable contender for several reasons. Although it has only three locations, in Missouri and Alabama, its bread is among the 10 most-named by respondents: four strangers from the internet, two members of my husband’s family, a museum curator my friend knows, and the chef of another restaurant I visited on my quest. But the most noteworthy thing about Lambert’s Cafe is that it distributes its free bread to diners by lobbing it at them from across the room, forcing them to catch it in their bare hands. It is, as its shockingly robust gift shop makes clear 20 million times over, the “Home of Throwed Rolls.”

I make my pilgrimage to Lambert’s a few days after last Christmas; in Foley, Alabama, families are milling around outside at night in T-shirts and shorts. The restaurant sprawls like a commercial ag shed. Its furnishings are psychotropic, but devoid of the gentle embrace of tranquilizers. Above my booth hang several wooden birdhouses and one birdcage (all vacant), an Alabama license plate, a lithograph of a magician, signs advertising gasoline and Coca-Cola, an illustration of mules in a river, a T-shirt for a wheelchair basketball team framed behind cracked glass, and a metal pictogram that appears to warn of ducks.

Not since stoop-shouldered Irish monks illuminated miracles on vellum in aureate arsenic have more densely inscribed materials than the Lambert’s Cafe menu been produced in the Western Hemisphere. Each page bears more rules and explanations than I have ever seen on a menu or legal document—all the more impressive because each page also contains more pictures. There are portraits of Lambert forebears; cartoons of farm animals making dry allusion to the fact that they are subject to slaughter for their protein; a Zodiac Killer cipher key, elucidating the 12 abbreviations for common allergens that speckle the menu; edicts governing plate sharing and doggie bags; an exhortation to visit the gift shop; a list of salads, all of which contain meat; the yowl “SLICE O’HOG From the left side and cut fresh every day!”; and many other elements, besides.

The one that soothes me so totally that it sends all the adrenaline molecules in my body drifting away on a blood lazy river is a red-text promise: “ALL YOU CAN DRINK” soft drinks. My Diet Coke is served in the restaurant’s signature mug, which, I learn later, while typing these very words, holds 64 ounces of liquid, and which, I also learn—upon Googling 64 oz x 2 to gallons—means I drank an entire gallon of Diet Coke in one sitting? No???

Lambert’s Cafe ovens turn out an average of 520 dozen rolls a day, for a total of more than 2 million five-inch rolls a year. On the night of my visit, the roll warden—the hlāfweard—is a young man in heatproof gloves with the salient biceps and keen sight of a baseball player. Patrons signal that they would like a roll to be hurled at them by raising a hand in the air. The accuracy of the bread thrower’s aim is spectacular, especially considering that his mental calculations must incorporate a flash assessment of each customer’s degree of hand-eye coordination. In the nearly two hours I spend in the restaurant, I see only one roll miss its mark, obviously due to catcher error.

These rolls are, I discover when one collides with my chest cavity, as hot as meteorites slamming into the Earth. They are, by far, the hottest part of my meal, which includes numerous cooked items. The rolls—big and bulbous, with a dense and super-soft interior; faintly sweet and just east of gummy; the tranquil hue of hot-dog buns—are fine but not great. I would absolutely go back. Terrific big sodas!

The Bread of the Appalachian Dancing Bear

Do you know what I love most about my spreadsheet containing 555 replies to the question “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?” (Apart from the fact that it has revealed to me, and soon to you, the hitherto hidden knowledge of what is quite possibly—and in fact I really do believe—the best free restaurant bread in America.)

I love seeing what 555 people said. I love the American optimism, which even more American confidence transforms into certainty, that every respondent is, or at least could be, possessed of the knowledge of the best free restaurant bread in America. I love the fact that no matter where you travel within the 50 states and Washington, D.C., you are never far from what at least one person considers the best free restaurant bread in America.

I love the town names—Big Indian, New York (named for a Munsee Lenape man, allegedly more than 7 feet tall, who lived there); Bee Cave, Texas (named for the honeybees—Mexican honeybees, allegedly—who lived there). I love the chance that the best free restaurant bread in America is to be found on an island off the coast of South Carolina with a population of 130. I love contemplating the food court inside the Pentagon—site of a Lebanese Taverna, whose warm pita is nominated as the best free restaurant bread in America by a man eating at Netflix Bites, and by the chef José Andrés. I love the outrageous-but-not-impossible prospect that the best free restaurant bread in America might be handed out by an oyster bar in Omaha, which is almost as far from an oyster bed as it is physically possible to be in America.

Cafe Capriccio. Sanitary Fish Market and Restaurant. Silver Saddle. Spindleshanks. Because I lack the budget and employer patience to journey to each of the 226 restaurants that received only a single vote, I determine, instead, to visit just one. This will serve as a spot check, to assess the quality of random strangers’ nominations. Having no better means of selecting the spot, I pick the one that has the most charming name. This is how I end up driving into the woods—fully into the woods—of Townsend, Tennessee, to dine at Dancing Bear Appalachian Bistro.

Dancing Bear’s entrance is an illusion of carved pine and glass. On approach, its doors appear to depict the arches and stained-glass windows of a Gothic cathedral; close up, the woodwork resolves into the sloping tree branches of a humble forest scene. The dining room, on a cold winter night, is a cozy hall abundant with wood, lit and warmed by an immense stacked-stone fireplace.

The free bread arrives on a slate slab: two wedges of corn bread drizzled with sorghum syrup, next to a ruffled dollop of whisper-light butter. The bad news: Corn bread is just not my favorite. Therefore, I do not believe Dancing Bear’s corn bread is the best free restaurant bread in America. The good news: If you love corn bread, this might well be the best free restaurant bread in America, to your misguided taste. It is fathoms above other corn breads. It does not crumble into infinite particles when I bite it. The wedges leave wet sorghum smacks on the slate. In fact, I am dribbling sorghum all over the table. What decadent madness, to entrust every diner with such a sticky substance. I request more bread and, using my trowel-shaped knife, coat it in butter as thickly as a mason mortaring a chimney. I eat a knifeful of the salty butter alone because I am a wild animal. The bread is so good, it makes me giddy. Is corn bread my favorite?

The corn bread from Dancing Bear Appalachian Bistro, in Townsend, Tennessee, might be the best free restaurant bread in America, but only if corn bread is your favorite. (Hugo Yu for The Atlantic)

(Eventually, I learn that I just happened to be there on a corn-bread evening. The restaurant also serves two varieties of focaccia.)

The rest of my meal—roasted-garlic-and-herb-crusted beef-tenderloin tips with local mushrooms, apple-cider gelée, Granny Smith apples, and pickled cranberries; steamed Moosabec mussels—is so delicious as to border on the hallucinatory. The room thrums with conviviality, pierced, now and then, by shrieks of intoxicated laughter. I cannot shake the thought that, when people imagine a perfect little restaurant, this dining room is what they are searching for. When, as I mull dessert options, my waiter tells me that I may also just help myself to free s’mores outside, I wonder how this reasonably priced restaurant (my meal, with dessert—and free s’mores—comes to just over $60 before tip) can possibly make money.

Datassential, an analytics company that monitors the food-and-beverage industry, uses a representative sample of 4,800 establishments to keep tabs on restaurant-menu trends across the United States. In 2012, when the company began tracking the practice of charging for bread, 6 percent of restaurants did it. Last year, 36 percent of restaurant menus in the sample offered some form of bread as an appetizer, and 41 percent of menus listed it as a side. Seemingly every newspaper or magazine story about the increasing popularity of “bread courses” features at least one chef, owner, or manager explaining that a restaurant can no longer afford to give bread away. I want to know how Dancing Bear pulls it off.

The restaurant’s bread cost per table is “really not that much,” says Dancing Bear’s executive chef, Jeff Carter—about 40 cents, he estimates. The vice president of operations, Houston Oldham, tells me that has “very little effect on our bottom line.”

“If somebody’s telling you that they are scared of having bread on their menu because it costs too much,” Oldham says, “there is a cost of pain for your guests too: a cost of a bad experience when you don’t have a way to fill the gaps between courses.”

And, Carter says, the bread enhances the festive atmosphere. “We kind of consider this our gift to the guest.”

The other thing that Dancing Bear gets just right: nice big Diet Cokes in stout glass jars. And they keep them coming.

The Restaurant in America That I Hate, That I Will Never Go Back to, That Has Made of Me an Enemy for Life Due to Its Psychotic Soda Policy

A confession: Throughout this investigation, I nurture an unscientific—though, I am fairly certain, forgivable because ultimately correct—bias. Although it receives just one vote (mine), I remain confident that the bread that inspired this quest truly is the best free restaurant bread in America. A week after my trip to the earthly paradise known as Dancing Bear Appalachian Bistro, I fly to Atlanta—to the steak house Bones—to eat it.

Here is what the restaurant does beautifully on my visit: the bread. It is a boule cut into four wedges. Every possible shade of golden retriever, from pale cream to the deepest cognac orange, is represented by some centimeter of this rotund loaf; its floured bottom is the dark brown of all of their paw pads. Its crust is a texture known to old-fashioned Yankees as cat ice—the brittle sheet, so thin that a cat’s paw could shatter it, of an iced-over puddle. On very close inspection, the irregular latticework of air pockets inside the chewy crumb resembles a network of semi-translucent cobwebs. It has no dominant taste other than the flavor of the verriest bread—simple, warm, perfect bread—which it possesses in extraordinary quantity.

Here is what the restaurant does poorly: serves Diet Cokes in glasses that are, I’m going to say, no bigger than a thimble inside a sewing kit inside a dollhouse and, I am astounded and appalled to discover upon receiving my bill, charges you $4 for each and every single one you drink. (Having previously dined here only as my husband’s brilliant and visually stunning dream date, I had apparently never looked at a bill at this restaurant.) Over the course of one evening, I spend a total of $16 on Diet Cokes. Worth every penny, of course—1,600 of them—but I’ll never go back.

I award this restaurant negative 10 million stars.

The boule from the steak house Bones, in Atlanta, is simple and perfect—
unlike the restaurant’s contemptible Diet Coke–pricing strategy. (Hugo Yu for The Atlantic)

The Chain-Restaurant Popularity Paradox

Can the best free restaurant bread in America come from a chain restaurant? According to raw poll votes, the answer is yes. Chain restaurants claim nearly every spot in the top 10 of my poll. On the one hand, this is to be expected; people are more likely to have been exposed to the bread at a restaurant with 940 locations than at a restaurant with just one. On the other hand, although chains are named most often in the responses, the number of a restaurant’s locations do not predict its overall popularity; Olive Garden, with the most locations, receives the fifth-most votes.

I email Sir David Spiegelhalter, a professor emeritus of statistics at the University of Cambridge and a former president of the Royal Statistical Society, to see if he might suggest a math equation to derive meaning from my helter-skelter data. “If a restaurant had 10 customers, and 8 thought it had the best bread, this would seem more impressive than if another restaurant had 100 customers, and 10 thought it had the best bread,” he writes back. I concur with my associate. The problem: To weigh the number of votes a restaurant received against the number of that restaurant’s customers, I would need to find reliable estimates of each restaurant’s customers per year. “But I don’t know where you get the footfall data from!” replies Sir David, now as hopelessly lost as I.

I decide to calculate the rate of bestness by analyzing the two variables I know for certain: the number of each bread slinger’s locations and the number of nominations it received.

Dividing votes (40) by location (215) gives the Cheesecake Factory—the restaurant that received the most total votes—a bestness rate of 0.19, or the equivalent of 19 votes per 100 restaurants. Lambert’s Cafe earns a bestness rate of 2.66—the equivalent of 266 votes per 100 restaurants. While imperfect, this method at least does not penalize restaurants for failing to be national chains—though, for the purposes of the poll, I accept all nominations at face value. If a person tells me they believe the best free restaurant bread in America can be had at Olive Garden, I believe them. I am open to the possibility.

William Rubel is not open to the possibility. When I mention that table bread, these days, is most reliably found at restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory and Texas Roadhouse, he is staggered that I’m even considering them as possible purveyors of the best free restaurant bread in America. “It never occurred to me that that’s what you’d be referring to,” he says.

“There is no best bread, in an elite cultural sense, at these places you’ve mentioned—which are places that people like me have never been.” He “cannot imagine why I would ever walk through the door” of such a place. He would “never go to” them “under any circumstances.”

I imagine a circumstance: What if a Red Lobster is all that’s around?

“I don’t eat at chain restaurants,” he says. “I eat at artisan restaurants.”

What if he were driving, I insist, and there were no other options. Would he starve?

“That’s why I don’t travel the United States,” he says.

Red Lobster, Rubel explains, is “what I would read as sort of down-market. I’m sorry—you go there.” (Only when it’s open!) “But it’s not going to Chez Panisse.” The amount of money possessed by the average Red Lobster patron is likely less than the average diner at a restaurant evaluated by the James Beard Foundation, he observes. Therefore, he points out—not unreasonably—their concepts of “value” may differ.

It will be impossible, Rubel thinks, for me to identify the best free restaurant bread in America if I’m willing to entertain nominations for chain restaurants. “Because, I’m sorry, those factories are not producing anything that would be called ‘best’ by any objective standard—probably,” he says.

However, “brown bread” from the Cheesecake Factory is not only the most popular answer in the poll; it also tends to come to people quickly. Helen Rosner, a food correspondent for The New Yorker, sums up the tastes of the nation even without being privy to the polling data. “Obviously the Cheesecake Factory’s brown bread is the gold standard of free restaurant bread,” she writes to me in an email—and, in the same heartbeat, presents a bang-on psychological profile of the country’s citizens. “It’s distinct,” she writes. “Dark brown bread shows up pretty rarely in most people’s daily lives, so it both feels special, and has the competitive advantage of not being subconsciously compared to near-infinite other breads of similar complexion.”

One January afternoon, I travel to the smallest Cheesecake Factory in America—the flagship location, in Beverly Hills—to break brown bread with Jay Hinson, the company’s senior vice president of restaurant-kitchen operations. The average Cheesecake Factory location serves about 7,500 “brown breads”—they are “whole-wheat baguettes,” technically, drearily—a week, plus 6,800 of the less-remarked-upon sourdough baguettes that accompany them in the same basket. All of the bread is baked off-site—the sourdough at facilities in New Jersey and Los Angeles, the brown bread in Chicago—frozen, and shipped to the restaurants, where it is rebaked to order. The Cheesecake Factory declined to share any details about the amount of money it spends creating thousands of breads for hundreds of restaurants every week, but at one point in our conversation, Hinson observes, “It is very expensive to have a bread program that is free.” At another, he tosses out a hypothetical scenario in which a restaurant company might spend “$10 million” on bread, which seems like an absurd number to chance upon as a totally random example; make of that what you will.

The miniature whole-wheat baguette from the Cheesecake Factory is firm, marginally sweet, speckled with oats for texture, and memorably brown. (Hugo Yu for The Atlantic)

Hinson, an amiable man with six daughters, began working at the Cheesecake Factory as a line cook in Westbury, New York, 28 years ago, and now flies to Chile to meet salmon vendors, and Turkey to meet branzino vendors, and Sweden to watch German-made ovens churn out pasta and steak simultaneously, with an eye ever fixed on the horizon of potential Cheesecake Factory refinements. He is loquacious only about the science of cooking, but also possessed of a striking corporate verbal tic, in which he substitutes the word opportunities for problems : “If your equipment, after five years, has opportunities, you have to place service calls.” “We’ll meet with my team and discuss any opportunities that happened the week prior. Did we solve them all?” Many customers “had some opportunities with” a previous sourdough iteration that was unacceptably crusty.

The miniature whole-wheat baguette placed on our table is the rich brown of life-giving Diet Coke. It is warm, of course; soft, but with a firm crust; covered in a dense constellation of oats, for “a little bit of texture,” Hinson says. It is sweet in the way that adults like things to be—marginally—and mellowed further with the addition of salted Grassland butter. I sample it as I sample everything: like a black hole. I consume two baskets of baguettes solo; Hinson seldom eats free restaurant bread. I would like it to be sweeter, or saltier, or both. But it feels virtuous to be eating something at least moderately healthy, and so blatantly brown.

Except, Rubel informs me (of course), brown bread is not especially healthy. “It’s not?” I ask. “In real life?” Rubel replies. “No.”

I think of Rubel, and his self-sentenced ignorance of the delights of Red Lobster, a few weeks later, when I visit my father. Measured by the amount of joy it is capable of producing, I’d told Rubel, “a Cheddar Bay Biscuit at Red Lobster is pretty good.”

We moved my father cross-country to his apartment in Santa Fe a few years ago, after my mother died unexpectedly. I can tell before I’ve set one foot inside his door that the man has treated himself to a Red Lobster Ultimate Feast. “Ohhh, it smells like lobster in here!” I exclaim; he has been feeling poorly, and I have taken, recently, to entering his apartment with the verve of a cartoon character. My father is in his recliner, the Ultimate Feast sprawled out before him: A snow crab’s severed Jurassic limbs jut over the edge of his wooden tray alongside a half-eaten Cheddar Bay Biscuit.

I am happy to see that he’s summoned an Ultimate Feast for himself, because a couple of weeks earlier, he told me that food doesn’t “taste like food” to him lately. But I realize that he hasn’t made his characteristic dent in the spread.

“What does it taste like?” I ask.

“It kind of tastes like sawdust,” Dad says. “Even the biscuits didn’t taste good, and I love their biscuits.” He is so darkly fascinated by this—Cheddar Bay Biscuits’ novel flavorlessness—that he repeats the observation a minute later. “It’s amazing,” he says, “because I usually love their biscuits.” He encourages me to take the extra biscuit home, which of course I do.

My dad will die a few days later, while I am working on this story. This conversation about Cheddar Bay Biscuits will turn out to be one of our last.

The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America

Based on survey responses, Americans seem capable of genuinely convincing themselves that they have just eaten the best free restaurant bread in America anytime they are given gratis bread that is warm or hot. This is not just psychology, Kantha Shelke, a food scientist, tells me; “it’s actually thermodynamics.” Because aroma is “80 percent of the flavor,” Shelke explains, and warm bread releases volatile aroma compounds into the air, “the warm bread literally tastes better to us.” (She also tells me that, short of seizing a Cheesecake Factory and transforming it into your private residence, you will never, ever be able to re-create the exact taste of its brown bread at home. Commercial enterprises have access to oxidizing agents, dough-conditioning enzymes, and surfactants that “simply are not available to home bakers.”)

Apart from temperature, pillowy, soft, and sweet are the most common adjectives applied to favorite breads in people’s responses, followed by crispy and crusty. Small efforts to enhance presentation, plus novel shapes and flavors⁠—bread served on a black linen napkin, for example, or apple fritters—seem to pay off big in terms of memorability. There are some quirky regional trends: Many Californians are able to name the exact local bakery from which their favorite restaurant bread is sourced. Millennials from Massachusetts are inordinately likely to at least mention a pizza chain called Bertucci’s that, I am informed over and over again, gives young diners raw dough to play with at the table. Immediate family members frequently identify the same bread as their favorite, as if this has been determined by group vote. Many people can only recall breads eaten as children.

Two restaurants are named often enough in the poll to reach the top 10 without being chains: Parc, in Philadelphia, and Le Diplomate, in Washington, D.C. These restaurants, both operated by the Philadelphia restaurateur Stephen Starr, turn out to serve the exact same bread. If, for the purposes of calculation, we consider them a single restaurant with two outposts, they receive the equivalent of 1,150 votes per 100 restaurants. There are other, no doubt smarter ways to manipulate the data. And, of course, there remains the possibility that the poll has demonstrated only the peculiar tastes of morons and deviants—with the exception of the gracious Stephen King. But you can’t keep fiddling with the numbers of your bread poll forever. At a certain point, you have to rejoin the world.

The wicker baskets at Parc, a French bistro on Rittenhouse Square, contain three varieties of bread tucked into wax paper—but the only one people talk about is the cranberry-walnut loaf. It is fitting that the best free restaurant bread in America should contain cranberries; they are indigenous to North America. If you were going to design a restaurant bread specifically intended to appeal to 21st-century Americans, you might well create this exact foodstuff: It is a very chewy sourdough, with a thick, crispy crust that is chocolate brown in color—practically the same hue as the Cheesecake Factory bread. The dried cranberries add so much sweetness that some people mistake them for cherries, but oats and nuts check the suavity before it runs amok. In fact, the bread has an Everlasting Gobstopper–ish ability to harmoniously convey the sensation of eating an entire meal, with dessert, in every bite. It is assembled from familiar ingredients, but unusual enough to be memorable. The terrazzo arrangement of nut and berry is beautiful by candlelight; the crumb appears studded with gems.

Slices of the cranberry-walnut bread served at Parc, in Philadelphia, and Le Diplomate, in Washington, D.C. Each bite delivers the sensation of eating an entire meal. (Hugo Yu for The Atlantic)

Starr estimates that, at a cost of about 60 cents a basket, with 10,000 customers a week, Parc gives away slightly less than half a million dollars in free bread every year—a figure that does not include butter. The kitchen turns out about 1,500 loaves a day, of which 200 are the cranberry-walnut. The brief that Starr gave his chef and baker when the restaurant opened was: “Just come up with the greatest breadbasket ever.” The goal, he tells me, was to create a breadbasket so satisfying that “you didn’t have to spend any money. You could just come in here, order the breadbasket, a glass of wine, and you’re good for the next five, six hours. We just wanted it to be joyful.”

“From a financial standpoint, it was the dumbest move we ever made,” he says. “It costs so much and people eat so much of it.” He’s come close to charging for it, he says. But “the moment I think I’m going to do it, I go, ‘I can’t do it.’ ”

My visit to Parc, a few weeks after my father’s death, is the first time I go to Philly, his hometown, without his knowledge. I am seated near a family: a mother, father, and college-age daughter. I can hardly look at them, even as I can’t keep my eyes off them. Veiled by Parc’s low lighting, I allow myself to sink into a luxuriant, tear-flooded sadness. My parents will never again shout to be heard in a winter-crowded restaurant, or identify the cheapest (Mom) or most expensive (Dad) entrée. They will never again call, into a McDonald’s drive-through speaker, the beverage-order coda that I have never heard anyone outside my immediate family utter: “And a cup of free water.” Before my check arrives, I request a to-go box of just cranberry-walnut bread, and am floored by the quantity of pieces I receive in a swish brown bag. I wish I could tell my parents about it. Just knowing it was possible to receive so much bread for free would have delighted them.

William Rubel’s profoundest anxiety about my article, I learn, is that I will inadvertently denigrate another culture’s bread—by suggesting that a yeasted roll is inherently superior to, say, chapati. He fears this more than the possibility that I might assert in print that Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits taste better than the bread served at Chez Panisse. (“I guess I need to eat it,” he says, catching himself declaring, with no firsthand knowledge, that the table bread at Red Lobster could not possibly be superior. I will extend this same grace to the bread at Chez Panisse.) “You’ll need to find some way to clarify that you aren’t saying these are the best breads in the world,” he tells me. “These are what people you talked to in America at this time considered the best.”

“There’s no recipe for the best bread,” Rubel says. “The best bread is written in each person’s heart.”

I disagree. The best bread—at least the best free restaurant bread in America—is the aforementioned cranberry-walnut loaf.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

SpaceX Is Basically a Huge Meme Stock

2026-04-14T14:19:00-04:00

Elon Musk likes to do everything on a grand scale. When he takes SpaceX public in the coming months, it will likely be the biggest initial public offering in history. Although SpaceX’s recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing for the IPO was confidential, indications are that the conglomerate is looking for a valuation of $2 trillion. That would instantly make it the sixth-most-valuable U.S. company. By conventional standards, SpaceX isn’t worth anything close to $2 trillion. The company is in fact relatively small and losing money. Yet there is little doubt that Musk will get the valuation he wants. He is one of the finest corporate dream weavers we’ve ever seen, and he has a dedicated following of fanboy investors who will happily buy whatever he’s selling.

SpaceX has a collection of interesting businesses—its rocket business was responsible for more than 80 percent of all commercial rocket launches in the United States last year, its healthily profitable Starlink division provides high-speed satellite-internet service to more than 9 million subscribers, and after a merger in February, the company owns xAI, Musk’s artificial-intelligence firm, which owns X, formerly Twitter. But all of this adds up to what is still a modestly sized company: SpaceX’s annual revenue last year was less than $20 billion, and it lost nearly $5 billion, according to a new report from The Information, mostly because of xAI’s huge capital costs. At a $2 trillion valuation, then, SpaceX would be trading at more than 100 times its annual sales. By contrast, other trillion-dollar companies in the market have price-to-sales ratios of 21 (Nvidia), 10 (Alphabet), and nine (Apple) while also being enormously profitable. In other words, SpaceX will be, by a large margin, the most expensive big stock in the market.

[Ross Andersen: Why doesn’t anybody realize we’re going back to the moon?]

This is not how IPOs usually work. Historically, companies have gone public when they’re younger and growing very fast, and their resulting market capitalizations are relatively small. That’s changed some of late—companies are staying private longer, leading to a rise in the number of what are sometimes called mega-IPOs: Facebook, Airbnb, Snap, and Uber have all gone public at hefty valuations. But we’ve never seen anything like what SpaceX is trying to do.

So why is everyone so sure that Musk will be able to pull off this magic trick? In part because that is basically what he’s been doing with Tesla for years. Tesla is one of the world’s 10 most valuable companies today, despite earning less than $4 billion last year. (Alphabet, by way of comparison, earned $132 billion.) Instead of making more money year over year, which would seem to be what an investor would want, Tesla has been making less; its price-to-earnings ratio is now above 300, up from about 35 in December 2022. But the company is still worth well over $1 trillion, because investors believe in Musk’s vision of Tesla’s future, which includes tens of millions of electric vehicles sold annually, millions of self-driving robotaxis, and billions of Optimus robots in homes across the world. Tesla shareholders are essentially indifferent to the company’s current costs and benefits. Their eyes are entirely on what Musk is saying Tesla will become.

Musk is plainly assuming that SpaceX shareholders will feel the same way. Shares in hot IPOs are typically doled out mainly to big institutional investors such as banks and mutual funds, but SpaceX reportedly may allocate as much as 30 percent of the IPO shares to retail investors (i.e., fanboys). Individual investors are usually more volatile than institutions, not less, but when those individuals are true believers, they’re more likely to hold on to shares than flip them.

Such retail investors, Musk trusts, will also not be doing a rigorous discounted cash-flow analysis of SpaceX’s prospects. Instead, they’ll be betting on him and his wild visions of the future, which include, most notably, a plan for SpaceX to launch and run up to 1 million AI data centers in space, beaming the data back to Earth. Not one such data center exists yet, and even if Musk can solve the massive technical and cost hurdles involved, putting up 1 million of them would cost trillions of dollars. But the whole premise of the SpaceX IPO is that those are mere details—in the end, Musk will find a way to make it happen.

[Charlie Warzel and Matteo Wong: Elon Musk cannot get away with this]

And maybe he will. SpaceX’s rocket-launch and satellite-internet businesses are enormously profitable near-monopolies. The problem is that in taking SpaceX public at such a hefty valuation, Musk is setting himself an almost impossible task. All of the good news the company could possibly deliver for years to come will already be incorporated into the stock price, making it unlikely that Musk could ever give investors the kind of return he’s delivered in the past. Tesla’s stock, for instance, is up roughly 31,000 percent since it went public, in 2010; a similar rise for SpaceX would put its market cap at more than $600 trillion. Let’s just say that’s not going to happen. (Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, has a market cap of $4.6 trillion.) The track record of other recent mega-IPOs also instills little confidence. Snap, Uber, and Airbnb have all underperformed the S&P 500 since going public.

That doesn’t mean you should bet against Musk getting that $2 trillion valuation. He has an enormously powerful reality-distortion field, along with millions of true believers. But if, as Saint Paul wrote, faith is the “evidence of things not seen,” the SpaceX IPO will be the biggest act of faith in investing history.

The Guitar Sounds New Again

2026-04-14T14:59:15-04:00

Every now and then, music gets a guitar hero—a player who makes the instrument sound like something other than itself. Jeff Beck transformed it into something like the human voice singing; Jimi Hendrix, a psychedelic swirl. Fans are always looking for the next player who will make the same six-string instrument sound new again. And now Mk.gee has hit the scene.

A 29-year-old from New Jersey whose real name is Michael Gordon, Mk.gee released his debut album, Two Star & the Dream Police, in 2024. On it, his guitar sounds at various points like an orchestra, a snarling animal, a wildfire, a person shouting, and a radio playing at the bottom of the ocean. Critics declared Mk.gee a guitar hero; he played on a Bon Iver album and worked on two Justin Bieber records. This past weekend, he performed with Bieber at Coachella. Listen long enough, and you’ll realize that Mk.gee’s grungy extraterrestrial sound is everywhere.

The quest to achieve the “Mk.gee tone” spawned a series of “How Does He Make His Guitar Sound Like That?” YouTube videos; musicians compared notes on Discord servers and Reddit threads. They also did what they’ve always done—gone to concerts and looked at the stage floor to see what gear the other guy’s got—and eventually, someone posted a photo of Mk.gee’s stage setup. There on the ground, surrounded by cables, was a large black box adorned with knobs and sliders and, in a cheesy futuristic font straight out of a ’90s bowling alley, the name: VG-8.

That Reddit post was probably the most fame the Roland VG-8 (short for virtual guitar) had gotten since the ’90s. Released in 1995, the VG-8 was designed to be a toolbox filled with essentially every existing guitar sound, Chris Bristol, the former chair and CEO of Roland U.S., told me. Players could make their guitar sound like a different model, and electronically switch amplifiers, microphones, and even the acoustic environment. Push some buttons, and the guitar might sound like an Eric Clapton–style Fender Stratocaster played in a small club; push some others, and get a Jimi Hendrix–esque fuzz distortion in a stadium. The VG-8 also comes with dozens of synthy sounds and guitar effects—which, if Reddit and my ears are correct, are a big part of Mk.gee’s tone.

They were for Joni Mitchell’s too. My father, Fred Walecki, owned a musical-instrument shop, Westwood Music, where Mitchell was a customer, and he procured a VG-8 for her in 1995, when she told him that she was going to quit music. Her songbook uses more than 50 tunings, and she was tired of constantly retuning dozens of guitars on tour. Dad got her a VG-8 because with it, she could keep her guitar in standard tuning and let the device produce her more unusual ones. Because of the device, she kept touring, and the sounds of the VG-8 itself brought to her music “a freshness and distinctiveness that’s almost orchestral, it’s so rich,” she told a Billboard reporter at the time. “I wanted to blow chords up in size the way Georgia O’Keeffe blew up the flowers in her paintings, and now that’s possible.”

[Read: My father, guitar guru to the rock gods]

Other musicians followed: Reeves Gabrels used the VG-8 extensively in his work with David Bowie; Sting wrote most of his 1998 album, Brand New Day, on it. He told Revolver magazine that the device “gave me a shot in the arm about being creative on guitar.” But the VG-8 retailed for about $3,000, and “because of the price, it was a very elitist, expensive technological product,” Paul Youngblood, the former president of Roland’s U.S. BOSS division who helped develop the VG-8, told me. It also came with a 118-page document closer to a textbook than a user manual. A few influential musicians loved it for a while; then, for about 30 years, VG-8s collected dust.

Now they’re making a comeback. VG-8s were selling only occasionally, and for $200 or so, before Mk.gee released Two Star & the Dream Police, according to data provided to me by the music-gear marketplace Reverb. In the months following his debut, demand for the VG-8 rose—and so did its prices, reaching $1,200 in early 2025. Kevin Murrell, a musician who performs under the name kevm, has seen them for $2,000 and sometimes $3,000. (Accounting for inflation, that’s still roughly half the price it was in 1995.) The competition for VG-8s is steep enough that Murrell set up alerts on his phone for new listings—“Pray for me yall,” he wrote on the VG-8 channel of a Mk.gee Discord server. A caption on a Mk.gee-fan Instagram account reads, “Men want one thing and it’s a vg8.”

The VG-8’s appeal is as much about what it can’t do as what it can. Music technology in 1995 “wasn’t anywhere near what it is today,” Youngblood said. Play too hard or too loud, and the VG-8 will spit out something choppy and explosive; even though the device was advanced for the time, it still “had a lo-fi kind of sound to it.” The noise that the VG-8 makes, simply because it’s old, has become a genre in itself thanks to Mk.gee. The guitar track on Lorde’s 2025 song “Shapeshifter” sounds more like a gritty string quartet than it does a guitar—that’s Mk.gee’s touring band member Andrew Aged on the VG-8. (Mk.gee declined to comment for this article.)

Mk.gee himself plays a Fender Jaguar, which had a similar resurgence in the ’90s among players in the grunge scene, because “you could find one at a pawn shop for dirt cheap,” Cyril Nigg, the senior director of analytics at Reverb, told me. Gear revivals are part of the life cycle of music: A soon-to-be-famous player comes across forgotten equipment “and picks it up because it’s cool and inexpensive, and it ends up having a huge influence on their sound and then the culture at large,” Nigg said. In one way, though, the VG-8’s current popularity is a slightly newer phenomenon. Vintage-gear crazes are usually around analog devices, as a kind of rebellion against digitization and technology, Steve Waksman, a rock musicologist at the University of Huddersfield, told me. But the VG-8’s recent rise represents “nostalgia for a time when digital was still new.” Music sounds so digitized now that even just an earlier digital device feels like it has more character.

Roland recently came out with the VG-800, a modernized version of the VG-8. Marcus Hidalgo, a guitar player in Nashville who performs under the name toast, told me he’ll take it on tour because it’s more portable. The newer model, though, is a little too clean, a little too digital. When he saw a VG-8 for sale on Facebook Marketplace in Tampa, Florida, he texted his friend in Orlando, “Dude, I will give you all the gas money, I will give you lunch, whatever you need, if you just drive to Tampa for me and pick up this random old 90s unit from this random guy.” He prefers the VG-8 and the “weird noises” it makes. “I feel like I just started to learn how to play the guitar again,” he said. Like any tool, the VG-8 is only as good as the musician using it, but it holds the promise that there are still new sounds out there to find—even if they’re in a device from 1995.

A Blasphemous President

2026-04-14T15:16:00-04:00

Donald Trump’s recent outbursts at the pope—“WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” he said in one of his Truth Social posts—have renewed questions from observers about the president’s cognitive fitness and his apparently limitless capacity for blasphemy. His attacks also echoed old-fashioned fears about the Vatican as an insidious rival to American power. But more than anything, Trump’s post betrayed a gross and fundamental misunderstanding of who the pope is and what Catholics believe he is empowered to do.

The proximate cause of Trump’s ire was apparently a Saturday peace vigil the pope hosted at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, during which Leo—the first pope born in the United States—prayed for a kingdom of “dignity, understanding, and forgiveness,” to serve as “a bulwark against that delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us and is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive.” Although the pope did not mention Trump by name, his reference to delusions of omnipotence could be seen as a clear rebuke of the president’s hubris in launching war with no real explanation to the public and no clear end in sight.

Trump’s fury was predictable, but his assumption that Leo was merely offering political commentary revealed a lack of regard for Christian fundamentals. Pretensions to omnipotence that rival God’s unlimited powers underlie the faith’s narratives about sin: Satan fell from grace after trying to usurp God’s throne for himself; Adam and Eve conspired to steal divine wisdom reserved only for God. When Leo advised the faithful—in statements that were addressed to everyone, not just to the Trump administration—to reject the mistaken impression that they can assert boundless control over the world, he was advocating for spiritual humility, a foundational element of Christianity.

[Francis X. Rocca: The Iran war showed a new side of Pope Leo]

Perhaps no quality is more alien to Trump than humility, spiritual or otherwise. Trump reinforced this point by following his tirade against the pope with a Truth Social post containing an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, dressed in flowing robes and illuminated by a heavenly glow, ministering to a sick, bedridden man against a backdrop of soldiers and an American flag. Seemingly created to challenge the pope, this image handily insulted not just Catholics but Christians more broadly: Irreverently depicting oneself as Jesus is a fairly clear-cut instance of profaning the sacred. Even Trump’s religious backers have rushed to declare their sense of betrayal. Douglas Wilson, the Calvinist pastor who counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth among his followers, promptly called the image “blasphemy.”

The most generous reading of Trump’s decision to post the image is not that he intentionally dreamed up a fresh heresy, but that he acted without actually thinking about Christianity and its tenets whatsoever—despite the fact that Republicans have spent decades building political alliances with conservative Christians. Likewise, when Trump inveighed against the pope, he probably did not consider what this might mean for Catholics, including those who have doggedly supported him—such as Vice President Vance, who will soon release a book about his own Catholic faith. Trump has managed to alienate many of the Christians who brought him to power by revealing the limits of his understanding, not just of Catholicism but of Christian theology writ large. (Perhaps chastened by this response, the president quickly deleted the image and insisted he thought it depicted him as a doctor.)

Catholics believe we are governed by a hierarchy that takes its mandate directly from the word of God. The pope’s role is not to impose his personal will upon the masses, but to teach the faithful how to follow Jesus in their own life. Apostolic succession—the idea that the witness of the 12 apostles has been passed down by bishops in an unbroken chain, linking today’s Catholic leaders with the original leaders of the Church—is a core Catholic doctrine, and it directly links the pope back to those who knew Jesus personally and carried on his teachings. Trump may jealously lash out at any authority that rivals his own, but for Catholics the pope is not a king but a servant—the servus servorum Dei, or servant of the servants of God.

Teaching the faithful is an element of that service. Biblical texts supply principles for leading good lives and making good decisions, but those lessons are often abstract, and life presents innumerable situations in which the proper Christian choice is not clear. Part of the Church’s role is to help Christians understand how the dictates of the faith translate into concrete ethical matters, and politics is merely a branch of applied ethics. Therefore the pope is not only entitled to comment on political matters but obligated to, and indeed popes always have. Pope Leo XIII, who served at the turn of the 20th century and whose pontifical name inspired that of the current pope, famously wrote the encyclical Rerum Novarum, which addressed industrialization by rejecting unbridled capitalism and defending the needs of workers. In 2003, Pope John Paul II condemned the Iraq War as a “defeat for humanity.” Pope Leo XIV’s remarks follow in that tradition.

[Read: The parable of the president]

Trump probably could not predict just how profoundly insulting his posts were to the Christian faithful and Catholics in particular, but the leaders of the Catholic Church in America, including those who have loyally supported Trump, instantly saw that the president had crossed a line. Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued a statement saying that he was “disheartened that the President chose to write such disparaging words about the Holy Father” and defending the pope as “the Vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the Gospel and for the care of souls.” Bishop Robert Barron, a longtime supporter who smiled indulgently at a White House Easter gathering when Trump’s spiritual adviser, Paula White-Cain, favorably compared the president to Jesus, likewise condemned Trump’s outburst as “entirely inappropriate and disrespectful,” adding, “It is the Pope’s prerogative to articulate Catholic doctrine and the principles that govern the moral life.”

Pope Leo, for his part, responded to Trump’s tirade with composure. He told reporters aboard the papal plane yesterday that he does not fear the Trump administration and will not “shy away from announcing the message of the Gospel,” then invited all people to look “for ways to avoid war any time that’s possible.” He added that speaking out about the message of the Gospel “is what the Church works for.” This, he implied, is a battle that Trump won’t win.

Trump, accustomed to playing the bully to forge deals, is perhaps discovering that his tactics make little sense against a power that has little need for currying favor. The Vatican is a 2,000-year-old global institution with a divine remit. The 250-year-old United States is still only a footnote, and this president’s term is barely a thought.

Trump Pivots to ‘Least Bad Option’ On Iran

2026-04-13T18:14:31-04:00

President Trump may have reached the limits of what he can achieve by bombing targets in Iran—now he’s trying to use economic pressure to bring Tehran back to the negotiating table. After a six-week pummeling by U.S. and Israeli forces failed to force Iran to capitulate, and a marathon weekend negotiating session ended without a deal, the United States announced that it would be imposing a naval blockade on Iran. The latest strategy illustrates just how far the war has shifted from Trump’s original—albeit confusing—objectives. The principal American interest today is to walk into the next round of talks with a clear advantage, by making Iran’s economic life as difficult as possible.

That is, to reach a peace deal during the already declared cease-fire, the U.S. believes that it needs to wage a new kind of war, this time by targeting Iran’s economy—which depends heavily on energy exports through the Strait of Hormuz.

The blockade is “the least bad option” after the collapse of the talks in Islamabad last weekend, one former military official told us. Trump has repeatedly claimed victory in the war, but the regime remains in charge in Tehran and has used its control of the strait to impose steep economic costs on the world. Imposing a blockade will also draw the U.S. military deeper into the conflict, potentially putting Navy ships face-to-face with Iranian forces or proxies.

The war’s outcome may now be decided by whether the U.S. or Iran blinks first from the economic pain and returns to the negotiating table with concessions. U.S. intelligence suggests that Iran may be more economically fragile than it is letting on, and that the loss of oil revenue from the blockade might force its hand, U.S. officials told us. But regardless of who wins, there are already a couple of clear losers. One is the rest of the world, which will suffer prolonged economic pain while Washington and Tehran engage and stare each other down at sea. The second is Trump’s own reputation as a leader who has spent years calling the geopolitical shots by making maximalist threats.

Trump has had little luck in recent weeks turning his headline-grabbing rhetoric into substantive victories on the world stage. Trump and J. D. Vance made extensive and highly visible efforts to prod the Hungarian electorate into backing another term for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, but couldn’t prevent the resounding defeat of Trump’s ally at the polls yesterday. European allies, in the face of Trump’s hectoring, have declined to enter the war in Iran. And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so far not stopped his country’s war with Lebanon, a key Iranian demand, though he agreed to Trump’s request to rein in assaults and engage in direct talks with Lebanon this week in Washington, D.C.

[Read: There’s a message for MAGA in Viktor Orbán’s defeat ]

Even Trump’s recent trolling of Pope Leo XIV—which included posting a depiction of a Christlike Trump and an accusation that the head of the Roman Catholic Church was “WEAK on Crime”—was met with a papal riposte that encapsulates how more and more global leaders appear to be feeling: “I have no fear of the Trump administration.”

The blockade took effect today, but neither the White House nor the Pentagon provided much detail on how it will work. America’s allies and even officials within the military were scrambling to understand the scope of Trump’s order and how it would affect shipping through the strait and, by extension, the global economy.

The U.S. carried out what it called a naval “quarantine” against Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis. And the Trump administration conducted a limited blockade of Venezuela, targeting oil tankers, in the weeks leading up to the January capture of President Nicolás Maduro. But Washington rarely employs the tactic, because it is considered an act of war under international law; it’s complex to implement, demanding troops and materiel; and it’s inherently risky, current and former military officials told us. Speaking on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive operations details, they described for us what would be involved.

[Read: Venezuela seems to be going … well?]

A formal blockade of the Strait of Hormuz that prevents Iranian ships and any other nations’ ships leaving Iranian ports from transiting to the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea would begin with air power, the officials told us. At least two aircraft-carrier groups or land-based air forces would be tasked with providing cover for seaborne forces monitoring the waterway. P-8 Poseidon patrol aircraft would watch the water and attack targets at sea. E-2 Hawkeye radar planes would fly above the fleet to detect threats and other aircraft. The U.S. would also swarm the strait with drones.

Controlling access points would take roughly a dozen destroyers and littoral combat ships. These ships, along with autonomous systems that don’t require human navigation, could also be used to conduct de-mining operations. Regional partners, including the United Arab Emirates, might also contribute to the effort.

Once a suspected Iranian ship attempted to break the blockade, Marines or Navy SEALs would need to board the ship, arriving by helicopter or on small boats. One Marine Expeditionary Unit, which could provide three boarding parties at any given time, is already nearby. But after U.S. troops seize an Iranian vessel, where would it go and who would guard it? This scenario assumes that those aboard such a ship would peacefully comply with U.S. orders. What if Iran put armed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps members on its ships who resist the American operation? For riskier boarding operations, the military typically employs highly skilled Special Operations forces, but even then things can go awry. In 2024, two SEALs died during one such mission off Somalia.

How else might Iran respond to the blockade? The regime, as it did during the 39-day U.S.-led campaign, could hit back with asymmetrical tactics—laying mines or launching drones and missiles. Those attacks might target both U.S. naval forces and Persian Gulf partners, on land and at sea. A single mine would not destroy a tanker but could sink a U.S. destroyer. The Iranians could also ask the Houthis in Yemen to harass commercial-shipping vessels in the Red Sea, which the group has done before, choking off an alternate route.

In theory, the blockade will prevent Iran from exporting additional oil from its ports—a sharp reversal from the Trump administration’s effort earlier in the war to lower the global price of oil by easing restrictions on the Iranian supply already at sea. Trump’s social-media post announcing the blockade indicates that the United States would interdict any vessel in international waters that had paid Iran to transit the strait. “No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas,” he said on Truth Social. In the Venezuela blockade, the U.S. Navy pursued ships as far as the Indian Ocean. But Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, has suggested that it is pursuing a more narrow mission focused on blockading Iranian ports. The U.S. military is also beginning a mission to clear the area of Iranian mines—but how many are hiding in the strait remains unknown, making the endeavor all the more perilous.

A blockade offers the U.S. a flexible, coercive means of imposing economic damage while minimizing direct civilian casualties. Air strikes on a bridge or a power plant, unlike a blockade, create damage that is not easily reversed. Retired Vice Admiral Kevin Donegan, who commanded U.S. naval forces in the Middle East from 2015 to 2017, said that the Navy has long interdicted vessels suspected of carrying drugs or other illicit cargo from Iran, including weapons bound for allies in Yemen. U.S. sailors, he said, can manage the risk associated with unwilling crews and with anti-ship fire from shore. “If your idea is to keep up the pressure on Iran during negotiations, a blockade does that without having to resort to restarting air strikes,” he told us.

But even if the blockade is successful, a return to normalcy for shipping traffic and prewar energy prices remains a long way off. Trump, in an interview yesterday with the Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, said the price of oil might come down by November’s midterm elections—or “it could be, or the same or maybe a little bit higher, but it should be around the same.”

[Read: Iran out-trolled the troller in chief ]

Since the beginning of the conflict, commerce has slowed to a trickle in the strait, through which one-fifth of the world’s traded oil normally transits. Trump’s cease-fire nearly a week ago raised hopes that trade would soon resume. Now “that optimism has evaporated,” Chris Newton, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, told us. “If you take what Iran and the United States have said publicly, what you have is a double blockade, and no one wants to sail through that.”

The U.S. and Iran may yet return to their negotiations before the cease-fire expires next week. The 21 hours of meetings in Islamabad didn’t yield a breakthrough, but officials tell us that they did create some momentum. U.S. officials described the second stretch—nearly 10 hours—as the point when the friction between the two sides abated and they began to listen to each other. The result was a framework that would allow for future talks, though one official acknowledged that the cease-fire could still end with either a deal or a resumption of conflict.

The talks produced progress on the U.S. demand that Tehran abandon its nuclear-weapons ambitions, the official told us without providing specifics. But friction over the strait persists. After all of the ordnance that the U.S. and Israel have dropped in their effort to bring Iran to heel, the verdict of global markets might ultimately prove dispositive.

In the meantime, despite Trump’s threats and bluster, the U.S. may have to rely on other nations to find peace. Pakistan, Egypt, and Turkey continue to try to get the talks back on track. The foreign minister of China, a major importer of Iranian oil, today urged other nations to “unequivocally oppose any actions that undermine the cease-fire or escalate the confrontation.” (Trump is scheduled to travel to Beijing next month for high-level talks, which have already been postponed once because of the war.) And the United Kingdom and France this week will host talks that are intended to form a peaceful multinational mission to restore freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump’s Latest Meltdown

2026-04-14T13:16:47-04:00

On many recent nights, Donald Trump has been posting obsessively on his Truth Social site into the wee hours. The president, of course, has never been one for a solid night’s sleep—or restrained and temperate commentary on social media—but his emotional state seems to be fraying: This weekend, he attacked Pope Leo XIV, presented himself as Jesus Christ, and then jabbed at his phone until dawn.

Judging from those posts, the commander in chief is in distress. No one can say for sure what is causing the president’s bizarre behavior. Perhaps Trump’s narcissistic insistence that he is always successful in everything he undertakes is feeling the sting and strain of multiple public failures, including the collapse of his campaign to dislodge the Iranian regime, plummeting approval ratings, the decline of the U.S. economy, and, on Sunday, the crushing defeat of one of his favorite fellow authoritarians, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

But whatever is driving this decline in Trump’s self-control, Americans must not shrug off the president’s latest implosion. They should recover their ability to be outraged; more to the point, they must demand that their elected representatives ask questions about the course of the war and whether Trump still has the capacity to fulfill his constitutional duty as commander in chief. Too much is at risk to dismiss his outbursts as just another idiosyncrasy: U.S. forces have been at war for almost six weeks, and China is reportedly helping Iran rearm. Even if all other problems, including the economy, were holding steady—and they are not—America cannot keep ignoring the dysfunction of the commander in chief, the sole steward of the codes to a massive nuclear arsenal.

[David A. Graham: The parable of the president]

Trump has always gotten lost in his own public statements, splashing about like a poor swimmer trying to reach the shore of a fast-moving river. But the president is now flailing in blacker and deeper waters. Genocidal threats against the the Iranians, with whom America is at war, are bad enough, but his defenders will excuse them as part of the Trumpian bulldozer approach to international negotiation; aiming long screeds at the pope, as if he, too, is an enemy of the United States, is not only unhinged but entirely pointless. Trump’s fusillade against the first American pope was not only politically incomprehensible—20 percent of Americans are Catholics, and most of them voted for Trump—but it was yet more evidence that the president is sinking into rage and confusion.

Why was Trump angry with Pope Leo? For the same reason that Trump ever gets mad at anyone: The Holy Father dared to criticize him. Last week, the president of the United States posted an expletive-filled threat—on Easter Sunday, no less—to destroy the ancient civilization of Iran. His supporters wrote this off as a clever gambit to bring an end to the war (which it has not). Leo called the threat “unacceptable,” blasted the “delusion of omnipotence” that led to the war, and said: “Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!”

Of course, Trump wasn’t going to take that kind of talk from some former Chicago science teacher just because the guy is now the Bishop of Rome. So a few minutes after nine on Sunday night, Trump posted a salvo of more than 300 words on Truth Social. According to the White House’s official schedule, he had just landed at Joint Base Andrews after his trip to Miami, and was likely posting from the plane. His post was, in every way, bonkers. The president accused the pope of being “Weak on Crime” and “Weak on Nuclear Weapons.” He said that Leo “wasn’t on any list to be Pope” and that he likes Leo’s brother Louis much better because “Louis is all MAGA.”

And so it went, sentence after sentence of boorishness and whiny self-regard. Leo was only chosen, you see, to deal with Trump: If not for the 47th president, “Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” The president is not a Catholic (and neither am I), but he claims to be a Christian, and an ordinary follower of Christ might pause a moment before concluding that Trump, personally, motivated the Holy Spirit to guide Rome’s cardinals toward a particular successor to Saint Peter.

But Trump wasn’t finished. He had recommendations for the pontiff about how to be a better Vicar of Christ, saying he “should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.” Again, Trump is not a Catholic—he has referred to Communion as a “little wine” with some “little crackers”—and his track record both as a president and a person is replete with the seven deadly sins (and probably a few more that haven’t made the list yet). He is also now officially the most unpopular modern president ever, so the pope might understandably pass on accepting either his secular or spiritual advice.

This one screed against the leader of a billion and a half Catholics was worrisome enough, but for Trump, it was just the beginning of a long night. Only 45 minutes after flaming the pope, Trump—now back at the White House—posted an AI-generated image of himself as (apparently) Jesus Christ, healing a sick man while soldiers and nurses and other worshipful white people gaze in awe and military jets fly overhead. You have to see the image to really grasp its weirdness, and to take in how offensive, even heretical, it might be to Christians of any mainstream denomination. (Trump has since taken that post down, claiming that he thought it depicted him as wearing a doctor’s outfit—a denial that is not only laughable, but is also hardly reassuring about his cognitive health. “I do make people better,” he said yesterday, “and make people a lot better.”)

Five minutes after this sacrilegious nonsense, Trump posted a mock-up of a Trump Tower on the moon. (Sure, why not.)

Twenty minutes after that, at 10:10 p.m., Trump shared a silly meme about how Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden all look old after so many years in office, unlike himself. Twelve minutes later, he posted a clip from Newsmax’s Rob Carson Show. Twenty minutes later, he posted yet another Newsmax clip from the same show.

Relative calm then overtook Trump’s phone until 12:43 a.m., when he announced that the U.S. Navy would be blockading Iranian ports in the morning—as if it were just another stray factoid to share in his news feed.

Then, a bit more than two hours later—at 2:35 a.m.—he posted a link to a right-wing news site that approved of his Iran actions. At almost the same time, he posted another news story from the site about the Biden family and Ukraine. Two minutes later, he posted an article about Eric Swalwell leaving the California governor’s race. A few minutes later, he posted the same Biden story, again.

[Ali Breland: Iran out-trolled the troller in chief]

Within another minute, Trump posted a link about an appeals court ruling that he could keep building his beloved ballroom until April 17. Finally, after a brief pause, he wrapped things up by posting a laudatory article from the New York Post—at 4:10 a.m., not long before dawn.

This is not the behavior of a stable, healthy leader. Pope Leo, for his part, said he has “no fear” of the administration and will continue to preach the messages of the Gospel. The rest of us, however, should be very worried about a commander in chief who is trying to govern the country between social-media binges, who attacks religious leaders in narcissistic frenzy, and who imagines himself as a deity. If an elderly parent did such things, most people would be concerned. The president doing such things is far more alarming.

The American people must not look away, as they have done so often in the past. They must pay attention to the president’s deterioration, and insist that the House and Senate start acting like functioning branches of the government by asking the White House to explain what is happening, without insults or evasions, before the eyes of the country and the world.

What Does Lena Dunham Want to Tell Us?

2026-04-14T11:51:00-04:00

Recently, idly researching, I happened upon a Vanity Fair video from about a decade ago in which a 29-year-old Lena Dunham, wearing a shiny olive blazer with her cropped hair swept into a quiff, speculates what the future will bring. “In 2025, I think that feminism is no longer a dirty word,” she says confidently. “I think that we’re probably on our second female president? If our president’s not female, they’re definitely down with calling themselves a feminist because they recognize it’s the sexy thing to do and it’s gonna get them laid. Our first female president’s gonna be Hillary Clinton, unless there’s a real last-minute dash by Viola Davis.”

It might be enough to make you weep: the blithe optimism, the cutesy cheek, the Buzzfeed-esque title (“Lena Dunham: 8 Thoughts on Feminism”), the corporate–meets–Hot Topic styling, the ease with which Dunham proclaims that things will only get better. Were we ever so young?

When the video was published, Dunham’s precocious HBO show, Girls, was heading into its penultimate season, its creator having long since become an avatar for bratty, clumsy Millennial feminism in a way that obscured her talent. Her second memoir, Famesick, which is out this week, is a fascinating shift from her first, Not That Kind of Girl, which was published in 2014 and drew scorn from every imaginable direction: critics, who argued that the book failed to live up to its reported $3.5 million advance; Dunham’s feminist peers (“this vein of narcissism—every bit of the world existing only to make you feel some kind of way—would be unpleasant at any age and any gender,” a mixed Jezebel review argued); and, most cruelly, right-wing writers, who seized on confessions Dunham had made about her curiosity regarding her baby sibling to argue in the worst possible faith that she was a child molester. The internet of the 2010s was a shooting range for prominent and imperfect women, and Dunham was an impossibly popular target.

Why? Because she simply cannot contain herself. She’s unbridled id, pouring herself all over the page, the screen, the extended Instagram caption. “I want to tell my stories, and more than that, I have to in order to stay sane,” she wrote in the introduction to Not That Kind of Girl. I know more about her uterus, at this point in time, than I do my own. She’s unabashed about her appetites, her desires, her cravings. (Food is an underexplored feature in the first few episodes of Girls; never forget that Hannah Horvath’s erstwhile memoir in Season 1 is titled Midnight Snack.) Feminists have always abraded and enraged people, other feminists chief among them, and Dunham was an obvious stand-in during the 2010s for a confrontational frankness and joyful arrested development that many people found infuriating. Her public profile superseded her art, which is a shame, because her art can be sublime.

Rewatching Girls, as many people have been doing, is clarifying: Dunham’s show, which debuted when she was 25 years old, is sharp, profound, and acutely funny, confessionally tender about the state of 21st-century young adulthood. She has an extraordinary gift for observation, noting the specificity of her surroundings and drawing out the absurdity. She’s the native child of a scene that often comes close to parodying itself, and yet Dunham does it better than anyone else. (See Hannah in Girls, observing the shaggy, guitar-toting Desi: “He looks like someone in, like, the Pacific Northwest knit a man.”) Her goal as a writer, she noted in 2014, was to obliterate “the expectation that my femininity, my body, or my work should conform to any set of rules, any aesthetic other than my own.” More than a decade later, having endured a kind of mass apoplexy and even outright hate as a result, Dunham is now trying to share with us what that endurance cost.

“I’ve spent much of the last ten years sick,” she writes in the introduction to Famesick, which is not, she now knows, “a truth that anyone wants to hear.” (She’s referring to her diagnoses of endometriosis, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and fibromyalgia, and her experiences with chronic pain.) She’s also “spent the last ten years famous,” which even fewer people have been able to sympathize with. The rough thesis of Famesick, as the title implies, is that these two dominant conditions of her life have come hand in hand, equally toxic and equally debilitating. Once again, she seems entirely propelled by an impulse she can’t quite control; she describes it herself as “an unrelenting drive toward self-expression.” I would argue, though, that Dunham has actually learned from her garrulous and unfiltered excesses—she’s got stories to tell in Famesick that blow the roof off, but she’s wielding them with precision this time around.

God bless a memoir that drops names—the more bold-faced and braggadocious the better. (Cher by Cher is beneficent on this front, with its nods to David Geffen and his self-actualization workshops and Salvador Dalí’s pet ocelot, Babou.) Famesick begins with Dunham on summer break from Oberlin College in the latter half of the 2000s, casting her family in a short film that she debuts at the Slamdance Film Festival to a room of about 10 people. (The screening that follows is a much more impressive title featuring puppets that just happens to have been directed by Josh and Benny Safdie.) Dunham graduates, and noodles around with a web series while sharing office space with Greta Gerwig.

She eventually writes a feature—2010’s Tiny Furniture—that’s bullied into existence by Dunham’s mother, the artist Laurie Simmons, who rolls up her sleeves and calls friends for investment. (“It was this dogged belief, this clearing of the path, that has made every aspect of my life possible,” Dunham writes, and while she’s long been skewered for her “privilege”—the term nepo baby did not exist prior to the 2020s—you get the sense that she’s benefited even more from her mother’s sheer force of character than from inherited connections.)

Tiny Furniture, much like the HBO show that succeeded it, was a loosely autobiographical account of a liberal-arts graduate floundering in sexual abjection and undefined creative ambition. It starred Dunham, her mother, and her sibling, and was filmed in her parents’ Tribeca apartment. Entire scenes, Dunham notes, were taken directly from a sadistic relationship she’d been having with a man whom she says gagged her with her own pantyhose, verbally abused her, and then watched cheerfully while verbatim chunks of his own obscene dialogue were brought to the big screen. (“People just like to feel seen,” Dunham shrugs.) Tiny Furniture won the Grand Jury Award at South by Southwest, and Dunham—thanks in part to a prescient early profile by the New York Times’s David Carr, became a hot commodity at 23. In a meeting with HBO, she pitched a series that would be a deglamorized version of Sex and the City, set in the interim phase where, as she told executives, “we’re having sex fueled by the availability of porn, and we’re feminists who don’t know how to live our politics. I want to see my friends on TV.” HBO offered her a blind pilot deal, and the rest is history.

[Read: Romance on-screen has never been colder. Maybe that’s just truthful.]

For everything that was written about Girls across its six seasons—and there was a lot—nothing has offered the access and insight that Dunham provides in Famesick. For example: She cast the show in six weeks, and auditioned actors including Elisabeth Olsen, Cristin Milioti, Dakota Johnson, and Amy Schumer. The suggestion to employ the straight-edged Allison Williams as Marnie came from the show’s godfather/producer Judd Apatow, who thought her normalness would gel well with Dunham and Jemima Kirke’s bohemian quirk. As for Apatow, he struck Dunham less as the Hollywood fixture he was than as “Howie, the Long Island exterminator my mother’s cousin Eileen was briefly married to, and to whom my father referred as ‘the insect assassin.’”

Knowing that Dunham would need a supervisor to help school her in the structure of television writing, HBO set up a meeting with Jenni Konner, who would become Dunham’s best friend and longtime collaborator. Famesick also ultimately paints her as its biggest villain, suggesting that she milked Dunham’s talent for profit and tossed her aside once her illnesses rendered her unserviceable. (In 2018 Dunham and Konner announced that they were pursuing individual projects, saying in a joint statement, “We have had one of the most significant relationships together in our adult lives and we respect each other’s choices.”)

There’s also Adam. Introduced as Hannah’s boundary-less hookup, inspired by Dunham’s unpleasant ex, but defined by the actor who eventually played him, Adam is one of the true gifts of Girls, extravagantly strange and inexplicably charismatic. Dunham’s revelations about Adam Driver, “all ears and nose, gangly and pigeon-toed,” whom she cast after an audition in which he bit her shoulder and then left without farewell or explanation, will likely dominate much of the discussion of Famesick. As brilliant an actor as Driver was (and is, and a ferociously private person to boot, in a way that charges these reminiscences with something like betrayal), Dunham writes that he ploughed through boundaries in search of his character, turning his and Dunham’s first choreographed sex scene into “something intimate, confusing, and primal.” He had a tendency, she writes, to spit and throw chairs when he was angry. The pair’s closeness almost crossed lines one night, as he arrived at her apartment after calling her to say, by her recollection, “I’m warning you, if I come up, I’m not leaving this time.” (Showing uncharacteristic instincts for self-preservation, Dunham refused to let him in, knowing that “however it went, my heart—bruised but improbably not yet broken—would crack.”)

What Dunham shares during Parts 1 and 2 of the book is the best possible combination of weighty and esoteric. Williams bought Dunham a tank top that said ALWAYS AND FOREVS, DOWN FOR WHATEVS. Zosia Mamet, who played Shoshanna, and Kirke, who played Jessa, moved in together, but their relationship fell apart when “Zosia began to casually date someone Jemima had claimed dibs on, despite the fact that she was married with a child.” Dunham started dating the musician and producer Jack Antonoff, who was as weird and “cozy” and neurotic as she was. The show became a very palpable hit, and almost immediately drew accusations that it was too white, too privileged, too popular.

As Dunham’s career took off, her health started declining: She suffered a bout of acute colitis a few weeks before Girls started filming, then excruciating pain she eventually realized was from endometriosis; her body gave her other “noisy signals” that the stress she was internalizing might not be sustainable. (Years later, after getting an email from a stranger who’d read about her issues, Dunham would be diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic disorder that can cause joint issues and chronic pain.) Antonoff began working with someone Dunham identifies only as a teenage pop star, who refers to Dunham as “Aunt Lena” (she’s using a walker, following a surgery for her endometriosis), and whose closeness with Antonoff becomes fodder for a very viral PowerPoin t analyzing signs of their supposed affair. (Yes, Dunham writes, she has seen it.)

It’s interesting to think about who Dunham names in this book and who she doesn’t; who is mentioned lovingly in the acknowledgements (“TayTay,” for “the music that makes the whole world feel seen”) but kept otherwise private; who’s quite ruthlessly excavated for copy and who’s only lightly alluded to. In her first book, Dunham’s intimate, highly confessional style spoke directly to the reader—she was sharing all of this with us, she explained, because “if I could take what I learned and make one menial job easier for you, or prevent you from having the kind of sex where you feel you must keep your sneakers on in case you want to run away during the act, then every misstep of mine was worthwhile.” For all the book’s erratic and random inclusions—Dunham’s diet journals and fantasy revenge emails among them—that sense of connection justified the oversharing.

The revelations in Famesick feel much more loaded, as though Dunham is settling scores, but also justifying herself. She seems to really want to communicate that she has suffered, both from extreme chronic pain and at the hands of people she trusted. She is a confessedly calculated narrator. A version of the book shared with me by the publisher a couple of weeks ago features, perhaps by accident, the same scene twice—Dunham posing for the photographer Annie Leibovitz on the Brooklyn Bridge while a man jumps to his death behind her—but offers two different versions of how the crew reacted, that they “stopped in their tracks and gasped” and that they “just carried on, moving lights, holding umbrellas over Annie,” as though she’s experimenting with which version will land better for the reader. (In the published version, the bridge scene only appears once.) She cites something she says Bruce Springsteen once told her: “You don’t owe it to people to be honest about every little thing. That doesn’t mean you lie—it just means you can have secrets. You only owe it to them to show ’em how your mind works.”

This is, I’d argue—with apologies to the Boss—bad advice for a memoirist. We know how Dunham’s mind works. We know her sharp eye, her self-deprecation, her skill with bathos. We know that the line between her life and her art, insomuch as a line exists, is porous to the point of chicken wire. What I longed for more of, in Famesick, was what the writer Leslie Jamison has called “the infinitude of any given life as a site of reckoning and truth.” The paradox of Famesick seems to be that the more famous you become, the less you have to defend turning yourself into a subject. And so largely missing from the book is a quality I’ve always loved about Dunham’s work, across Tiny Furniture and Girls and the books and the essays: her impulse to make broader meaning out of her experiences. “I am already in mourning, but I am not in doubt,” she wrote in an essay for Vogue, about the pain so life-altering that it led her to have an elective hysterectomy in her early 30s, evoking an ocean of nuance about choice and dreams and physical limits.

[Read: The wistful, sharp return of ]Girls

I’m not quite sure what the meaning of Famesick is, beyond getting certain things on the historical record. It is, in parts, riveting. Dunham is still among our funniest living writers. (Her mother’s diminutive psychic, Dunham notes in Famesick, once wrote a book called Small Mediums at Large; Dunham’s uterus, after its removal, is characterized as “the Chinatown Chanel purse of nightmares, full of both subtle and glaring flaws.”) She is generous to many of her collaborators, and to her father, who emerges in the book as a beautiful soul and a wag for all time. (“Since you were five,” he tells Dunham, “you’ve been walking around like you killed a man in Reno just to watch him die.”)

Yet as the second half of the book spins out stories of very dubious new boyfriends and Dunham’s growing reliance on painkillers, something crucial seems to be absent. It feels unfair to call a memoir self-indulgent, but this one can be, at least for an artist with such talent—Famesick has a tendency in later chapters to read more like glib stenography than rigorous self-interrogation. And for someone who was once considered an era-defining feminist voice, Dunham writes nothing substantive about Trump’s election and nothing at all about the overturning of Roe or the significance of #MeToo. She spends several pages explaining the context behind one of her most widely criticized acts, a statement she and Konner issued in 2017 defending the Girls writer Murray Miller from an allegation that he had sexually assaulted the actor Aurora Perrineau. (Miller denied the accusation.) Dunham had only just been released from the hospital at the time, she writes, was heavily medicated, and has no memory of drafting anything, let alone “a careless, blithe, and damaging” note that remains the one thing about which she still feels “genuine shame.”

All of which perhaps explains why she chooses her targets and her subjects so carefully in Famesick. When you’ve been a lightning rod for almost all of your public life, maybe you learn that having strong opinions about subjects outside of oneself offers minimal gain, that very little you could say might make a difference, anyway. And that the best you can do is just keep trying, as Dunham has, to find ways “to do this job I love.” Her persistence, in that sense, is the best possible rejoinder to her haters—regardless of circumstance and to her credit, Dunham will always have her word.

The Eighth Deadly Sin

2026-04-14T08:00:00-04:00

Sometimes, staring brainlessly into my laptop in the trough of a weekday afternoon, experiencing myself as a kind of online shadow, a thing of fidgets, a half-being hollowed out by roaming spectral appetites—for destruction, for gratification, for the email that never comes—it occurs to me to ask: Now, which of the seven deadly sins is this ?

Anger’s in there somewhere, sure, a kind of generalized psychic road rage, but not enough of it to qualify. Same with envy, pride, gluttony, lust—just floating shards. Avarice? Nah. Of the seven, sloth probably comes closest, that enigmatic void state known to the early Christians as “acedia.” But not even acedia, bottomless as it is, can quite comprehend this plugged-in groundlessness, this ether-sweeping emptiness, this interstellar elongation of the spirit. Sin, the theologians tell us, is whatever separates us from God. Whatever blocks the beams of divine love. And at 3:23 p.m. in Caffè Nero, I am all but unreachable by heavenly radiation; I can feel it wavering, honey-colored, at the fringes of my soul. So have we done it at last—you, me, the kids? Have we invented an eighth deadly sin?

I thought initially that the title of Peter Jones’s Self-Help From the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living was an oxymoron. Self-help is our thing, after all, our exemplary piece of circular modernity, our little closed circuit—the distressed subject coming to its own aid. The medievals, more vertical in their thinking, would have counted on the down-rushing swoop of God’s grace.

But Jones, a medieval historian, shows us that the High and Later Middle Ages (1100 to 1500, roughly) were every bit as goofy as we are about human nature and behavior, and equally hooked on buzzwords, listicles (Catherine of Siena’s five different types of tears, Thomas Aquinas’s five varieties of gluttony), and junk science. To explain the inexplicable (that is, themselves), the medievals used the 12 signs of the zodiac, the four humors—yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm—and the seven deadly sins. Jones takes the seven one by one, a chapter for each, arguing that this gnarly old taxonomy represents not only a timeless decoction of human wisdom but something of a moral map for our present wanderings. I think I agree with him, but let’s see.

It turns out that there were eight, at least in the beginning. Evagrius Ponticus was one of the world-abandoning superstar Desert Fathers of fourth-century Egypt. Influencer-like, he stood in freezing wells and subsisted on bread and oil, and after much torment and cogitation, he drew up a list of what he called “generic thoughts,” or routine invaders of the spirit: gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, sloth, vainglory, and pride. Subsequent spiritual engineers made their tweaks to Evagrius’s system, but the decisive overhaul was performed 200 years later, by Pope Gregory the Great. He rolled sadness into sloth, vainglory into pride, added envy, and voilà: the seven deadly sins.

[From the November 2024 issue: Hillary Kelly on Oliver Burkeman’s unlikely approach to self-help]

Now the sins were characters. They could be personified, and artists went to town. An illustration for Guillaume de Deguileville’s 14th-century poem “The Pilgrimage of Human Life” depicts avarice as a woman whose arms have been cut off (she retains the stumps) and replaced with allegorical limbs—feathered claws for rapaciousness, hands holding begging bowls and scales for moneylending, and so on. And is her tongue hanging out? Is she drooling with money-lust? It looks like it. Giotto painted envy as a woman—yes, the medievals, like us, were misogynists—a slanderous monster with a snake squirming out of her mouth, turning back, and reentering her head at the eyes. Also, she has huge, swiveling, batlike ears. And her feet are on fire.

Ghastly as they are, these allegorical images don’t really touch us moderns, or not deeply. Much more disturbing and relatable, in Giotto’s case, are the sour-faced onlookers and eavesdroppers who lurk at the edges of his frescoes in the Arena Chapel, in Padua: the servant watching in disaffection as an angel tells Anne that she is going to give birth to the Virgin Mary; the scowling, black-veiled woman overhearing Anne tell her husband, Joachim, that she has conceived. To be one of these characters, Jones writes, is to be a “bitter witness.” We know these people. We are these people. Social media: a cloud of bitter witnesses! This is envy—invidia—as it lives inside us, shriveling our spirits and kindling our meannesses.

Because this is 2026 and everything’s got to be personal, Self-Help From the Middle Ages prefaces each chapter, each sin, with a reminiscence from the author’s time teaching medieval history at a university in Siberia. Hemmed in by the cold, under laboratory conditions as it were, Jones self-examines in the lurid light of the seven deadlies. His transgressions are meek—a bit of ogling at the hot springs (lust), a snippy comment in a faculty meeting (anger). He doesn’t trash the common room in an alcoholic blaze or crucify a colleague’s cat. But this is precisely the point: The sins are quotidian, undramatic, regular human business. You can do all seven without leaving your house. The trick is to recognize the sins, to “name” them (in a modern but very appropriate locution). They offer a kind of diagnostic prism, refracting the black, primordial beam of sin into lesser rays of the identifiably and manageably human. And once you know what you’re dealing with, you can summon its opposite. If pride is getting the better of you, engage humility; if gluttony, moderation; if envy, compassion; and so on.

Otherwise they’ll hold us, they’ll dominate us, these sins. While I was reading the chapter on anger, I experienced a surge in understanding as to the nature of sin itself. Sin is subtle, seductive, addictive, of course: The medical encyclopedia The Property of Things (circa 1240) describes anger very perceptively as a “wave of bliss.” (Oh, the white-hot elation of righteousness, carrying me away!) But it’s also rigid and carceral, a system of control. Jones gives us the 13th-century Catalonian doctor Arnaud de Vilanova, who, after limited success treating anger with the miracle drug theriac (made from viper’s flesh sweetened with honey, a distillation of lilies, and about 40 other ingredients), fell to pondering the character of the malady itself. As Jones writes, “Fury pulls the mind away from reason (ratio), Arnaud reflected, and losing yourself in anger is like letting a puppeteer take control of your brain as well as your limbs.”

A puppeteer controlling your brain? Heavy-metal fans know where this is going—straight to the primary text of compulsion and merciless soul-negation, Metallica’s “Master of Puppets”: “Master of puppets, I’m pulling your strings / Twisting your mind and smashing your dreams / Blinded by me, you can’t see a thing / Just call my name ’cause I’ll hear you scream.” This is where the personification of the seven deadlies comes in handy: You, you naughty person, you libertine, rage beast, sybarite, whatever, might think that you’re committing a sin. But it’s the sin, the master of puppets, that is committing you. Unless you can turn, look it in the face, and summon the right ally.

As for the eighth sin, the new one—having Wi-Fi—is there anything to be done about that? Naturally, excessive online-ness has its counter-impulses: the digital detoxes and the dopamine fasts, all in the fine old spirit of medieval asceticism. You can go online right now and learn about how to be offline. But to free ourselves from this one, to even have the beginnings of a program to free ourselves, I think we’re going to have to do the truly and terrifyingly medieval thing. We’re going to have to get on our knees and pray.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “The Eighth Deadly Sin.”

Trump Ditched Hearts and Minds in the Iran War

2026-04-14T07:15:00-04:00

When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the war in Afghanistan in 2009, he concluded that U.S. forces’ tactics were causing unnecessary civilian deaths and would lead to America’s defeat. McChrystal issued a directive calling for more restraint in the use of force so as not to alienate locals. What was required, he told troops, was a “clear-eyed recognition that loss of popular support will be decisive to either side.”

McChrystal was no softy. As the head of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, he had overseen some of the most aggressive operations of the Iraq War. His troops had killed or captured thousands of militants in high-risk raids. But in Afghanistan, McChrystal made a different calculation: By showing what became known as “courageous restraint,” U.S. forces would claim the moral high ground, starve the Taliban of popular support, and win the war. In a counterinsurgent fight, hearts and minds were more important than bombs and bullets.

McChrystal’s mandate was widely resented by frontline troops who believed that the new rules put them in greater danger. Commanders safely ensconced on bases, they complained, were reluctant to order air support for troops in the field out of fear of derailing their careers by ordering attacks that came with a high potential for collateral damage. Service members had to approach militant positions on foot instead of by launching artillery strikes, exposing themselves to increased enemy fire. Some veterans came to see rules like McChrystal’s as a defining failure of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: The United States lost, they believed, because the military pulled its punches.

Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, a former National Guardsman, is among those critics. He has promised to unleash the American military in ways that haven’t been done in decades. He has fired military lawyers and empowered low-level commanders. “No stupid rules of engagement,” he declared after President Trump launched his war with Iran in late February.

This war—now subject to a two-week cease-fire and U.S.-Iranian standoff in the Strait of Hormuz—is America’s first major conflict of the post-counterinsurgent era, one that poses a test of how the U.S. military will perform in conflicts among states that are expected to dominate the future. What consideration will be given to hearts and minds in those wars? Initially, the president appeared stirred to action by Iranians’ protests against the regime; he promised protestors support as they demanded greater freedom. But Trump’s aspirations for ending the Islamic Republic’s repressive rule didn’t last. His focus became defeating Iran’s military, preventing its nuclear-weapons development, degrading its missile capabilities, and potentially taking its oil. As for Iran’s people, Trump proposed leaving them without electricity, drinking water, and the ability to travel. Then he threatened to wipe them out entirely, saying that “a whole civilization will die tonight” unless Tehran opened the Strait of Hormuz. It was a wild overcorrection from the “hearts and minds” ethos of days past.

Experts in military and international law told me that Trump’s threats to destroy power plants and bridges could be permissible under the laws of war if officials determined that the military value of their destruction outweighed the cost to civilians. But that doesn’t mean that the United States should go ahead. “If you want to establish a lasting peace,” Todd Huntley, a retired Navy lawyer who advised Special Operations units and now teaches at Georgetown University Law Center, told me, “you still need to be concerned about hearts and minds.”

So how should the U.S. military fight its wars?

In 2021, the Army’s top lawyer, Lieutenant General Charles Pede, warned of a looming crisis for America’s military. After two decades of counterinsurgent, or COIN, wars, troops had internalized restrictions like those McChrystal decreed for Afghanistan. Although sensible for that conflict, the rules would prove dangerous in a large, conventional-combat operation in which troops were attacking a foreign military from afar rather than fighting insurgents dispersed among a population. To succeed in a war against Iran, China, or Russia, he warned, Pentagon leaders needed to close the gap between the requirements of the laws of war and the stricter rules that U.S. leaders had layered on top. They needed to cure what Pede and his co-author, Colonel Peter Hayden, writing in a military journal, described as the “COIN hangover.”

Over the years, the authors noted, the COIN-era rules of engagement were embraced by civil-society groups and legal commentators who wanted the new principles codified. These advocates urged military leaders to use precision bombs exclusively and to forswear the use of explosive weapons in crowded urban areas. More worrying, in Pede and Hayden’s view, an entire generation of troops now confused those elevated COIN guidelines with the laws of war. (A lieutenant who had led a platoon in the early days of the Iraq War might now be a colonel.) In a war against a major modern military, units couldn’t always afford to verify whether civilians were nearby before returning enemy artillery fire. Neither could troops expend the time to ask the chain of command for permission to use more potent munitions, they wrote. And commanders might no longer have the luxury of observing an adversary for hours to ensure his identity and rule out the potential for causing collateral damage before striking.

Troops “must always be mindful of their legal and moral obligation to minimize suffering of civilians and to avoid unnecessary damage of civilian objects,” the co-authors wrote. “But they are not required to discard considerations of military necessity or to forget their mandate to accomplish their mission.”

Their observations resonated. In simulations of large-scale conventional operations in 2023, one officer wrote about his experience with the “hangover.” Brigade combat teams exercising in Germany regularly lost most of their combat power because of concern about causing civilian casualties. Troops hesitated to fire on an enemy force in a civilian area because of their mistaken belief that any civilian casualty was unlawful, Major Jason Young, a coach and observer at the Hohenfels training center, wrote. Staff officers, confusing a maneuver’s potential impact on civilians with its legality, sometimes wouldn’t even present a potential target to a commander if striking it might result in noncombatant deaths. “Mistaking old policies for law has had disastrous consequences” in preparations for those future battles, he wrote.

Majid Saeedi / Getty

The Karaj B1 bridge in Karaj, Iran, was destroyed by U.S. airstrikes on April 2. Iranian authorities said eight people were killed and almost 100 injured when the bridge was bombed.

The Pede and Hayden concept of a COIN hangover is circulating at the Pentagon as Hegseth pushes for greater lethality and a reversal of what some troops describe as the “feminization” of the military. Leadership is emphasizing that “the military is for killing people and crushing things,” one person familiar with the issue told me.

In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth wrote about telling his platoon in Iraq to disregard the rules of engagement briefed to them by a military lawyer, known as a judge advocate general, who had told them that they couldn’t shoot at a militant holding a grenade launcher until he aimed at them. (Several former JAGs told me that such guidance, if Hegseth’s account is correct, constituted bad legal advice.) Hegseth routinely uses aggressive language to make his point. “Our war fighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise, and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it,” Hegseth told reporters recently. “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

[Read: The Pentagon’s lawyers are now under review]

For Hegseth and other veterans, the effort to win hearts and minds is entangled with the military quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq, the failures of nation building, and what they saw as an exaggerated sensitivity toward civilian populations at the cost of U.S. lives. “Restrictive ROE increase the likelihood of American deaths,” one senior Pentagon official told me, using a shorthand to refer to rules of engagement. “We do see both sides of the argument, but we come at it from backing the war fighter on the ground and making sure they come home alive.”

The official cited America’s history of “total war” in World War II, including the scorched-earth tactics used in Dresden and Hiroshima. Hegseth and some other veterans like to invoke that era’s battlefield victories, when they believe that men were men, the rules of engagement were loose, and the U.S. was indisputably the good guy.

In this century’s counterinsurgent conflicts, the United States has targeted some civilian sites—including banks and oil trucks commandeered by the Islamic State—but sparingly and after extensive internal debate. Despite those precautions, the military killed thousands of civilians in its air war against ISIS. The record of that conflict, which I covered in detail as a reporter covering the military, produced new safeguards for civilians. (The Trump administration rolled back some of those restrictions, but others remain.) The widespread destruction of bridges, power plants, and drinking-water facilities in Iran, if carried out, would represent a departure from recent military practice but may be legally permissible. This defines the gap that Pede, Hayden, and other military theorists argue must be closed.

But the argument that military leaders need to either be so cautious as to endanger American troops or else jettison all concerns about civilian lives presents a false choice and is probably strategically unsound. If hospitals can’t function and drinking water is unavailable, civilians may rally around the regime you are trying to weaken. And some national-security experts question just how severe the COIN hangover is.

Scott Anderson, a lawyer who formerly worked at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and who is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, pointed to strikes that killed scores of civilians during the close of the war against ISIS, before the COIN era ended. A secretive Special Operations unit with its own rules of engagement conducted those attacks. “My concern still is that it’s all too human and natural to pivot to something much more barbaric when a person is under threat,” Anderson told me. “That’s why we need laws of war in the first place, to constrain that impulse.”

When the U.S. enters into conflicts alongside allies, these questions become even more complicated. Israel and the United States have conducted parallel (but not joint) operations against Iran. I have spent weeks trying to disentangle which nation bombed what targets, and what legal and operational limits each country has set, because they have released only limited information. The Pentagon under Hegseth has denied journalists the access they had in previous wars. Human-rights groups estimate that at least 1,700 Iranian civilians have been killed since the conflict began.

[Read: The real intelligence failure in Iran]

For most of the conflict, the U.S. and Israel have maintained a clear division of labor, suggesting that their militaries are operating under different rules of engagement. The U.S. struck military targets, including missile launchers and weapons depots, along with drone factories. Israel struck military sites but also targeted nonmilitary infrastructure, including steel plants, power facilities, and banks. And Israel assassinated senior Iranian leaders, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, National Security Council Chief Ali Larijani, and multiple Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders.

I asked an Israeli military official about images of damaged and smoking apartment blocs that were apparent targets. The official told me that the IRGC embedded workshops or other facilities in or under residences. She added that the Israel Defense Forces attempt to use precision weapons to minimize damage. “If an armed organization uses a building, it doesn’t matter what that building is; it automatically turns into a military subject,” she said.

U.S. and Israeli officials told me that the two countries worked closely together, deconflicting flights, sharing intelligence, holding daily video conferences, and coordinating on a target list. Israeli liaison officers are stationed at Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, and vice versa. But a U.S. official emphasized that each military has its own operation—Epic Fury for the U.S. and Roaring Lion for Israel. At times, Israel has struck targets beyond those on which it briefed the U.S., one U.S. military official told me. (The IDF declined comment.) Several weeks into the war, Trump rebuked Israel for a strike on an Iranian natural-gas site on territory that extends into Qatar that prompted Iran to hit back at a Qatari energy facility.

But that was before the Pentagon, in the week leading up to the cease-fire, also hit a bridge and a gathering of Iranian officials. (The U.S. has provided few details about those strikes.) Then Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s core infrastructure and erase its civilization. The president had clearly left the struggle for hearts and minds behind.

While critics believe that the restrained COIN approach diminished America’s chances of victory in the wars of the past, Trump’s and Hegseth’s more bare-knuckled rules haven’t resulted in success in this war either. And the moral posture that McChrystal advocated for in Afghanistan is among the conflict’s many casualties.

The Strange Origin of AI’s ‘Reasoning’ Abilities

2026-04-14T11:38:00-04:00

In July 2020, 4chan’s video-game discussion board looked much like the rest of the notorious online forum. There were elaborate, libidinal fantasies involving “whores” and “dragon cum,” and comments on how long a gamer had to wait “before my dick can get up for another beating,” as one put it.

And yet, as the gamers discussed such things, they were also making a discovery of significance to the AI industry. Some of them were playing AI Dungeon, a new text-based role-playing game that was essentially an AI version of Dungeons & Dragons. In endlessly generated fantasy-world scenarios, players described actions like “pick up the sword” or “tell the troll to go away,” and the computer responded with the action that followed.

In addition to asking the game’s characters to engage in various sex acts (naturally), the 4chan gamers also asked them to do math problems. That sounds strange, of course, but AI Dungeon was powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3, and the gamers knew that they were among the first people to probe the capabilities of this new large language model. This was more than two years before the release of ChatGPT, and the model was famously bad at math. It frequently failed at simple arithmetic. But when they asked a character in the game to do a math problem and provide a step-by-step explanation, one of them wrote, the LLM was “not only solving math problems but actually solves them in a way that fits the personality of the fucking character.”

The players had come upon a new feature—what’s known in AI today as “chain of thought.” Essentially, it means that the model explains the steps required to solve a problem, in addition to giving an answer. Asking the model for a chain of thought also seems to improve the accuracy of its answers to certain kinds of problems. The gamers on 4chan recognized the significance immediately, and posted examples on Twitter.

Recently, the tech industry has promoted chain of thought as a revolution in technology, and a reason to get excited about AI all over again. Researchers at Google claimed in a paper to be “the first” to elicit a “chain of thought” from a general-purpose LLM, more than a year after the 4chan gamers shared their findings. (This claim was removed from subsequent versions of the paper, which still did not acknowledge the gamers, though at least one other research paper has.) And in the past couple of years, companies have begun to claim that their chatbots are not just getting math problems right; they are actually thinking about them. OpenAI wrote in 2024 that its “o1” model “thinks before it answers,” and Google claimed that Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental was “capable of showing its thoughts.” Companies started referring to their models as “reasoning models,” ostensibly a new kind of product from an LLM.

Amid all this hype, the 4chan history is instructive. 4chan gamers, for all their brash language, have tended to speak in more levelheaded—and accurate—terms than the AI industry about how the models work. Last year, for example, Anthropic published a long and serious-looking article, “On the Biology of a Large Language Model.” Its visual presentation mimicked scientific publications, with sophisticated-looking diagrams and equations. But on every topic, the article described the operation of the LLM in terms of a human mind. It said the LLM “plans” its writing in advance, “generalizes” its knowledge, and can be “unfaithful” to its chain of thought (meaning, the article explains, the LLM is occasionally “bullshitting”).

Contrast this with a guide written in 2024 by people on 4chan, which begins with the heading, “Your bot is an illusion,” and proceeds with a clear, detailed description of how companies use an LLM to construct a chatbot that responds to questions and has a personality. It describes an LLM’s most important technical features and shows how the model’s outputs correspond to its various inputs. The guide is a useful reminder of the most basic truth about large language models: The only thing they can do is imitate their training data.

LLMs can output explanations of math because they were trained on explanations of math. Some of those explanations come from textbooks, but companies also train their so-called reasoning models on text that conveys the act of thinking. I dug into some open-source AI-training data sets and found hundreds of thousands of meandering solutions to math problems that included language such as “Wait, no. The question is,” “First, I should parse the input correctly,” and “Wait, but in cases where …” As far as I’ve seen, companies acquire this text either by paying workers to write it or generating it with other AI models. (Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment.)

Models trained on such utterances are not actually reasoning; they are predicting what reasoning might look like. There isn’t even necessarily any connection between a model’s reasoning steps and its final answer. Researchers have shown that models can provide incorrect chain-of-thought text but still arrive at the correct result.

Some people have argued that if a computer can imitate human reason well enough to fool us every time, then how can we say it isn’t doing the real thing? Researchers at Apple have explored this question, and their findings are insightful. For example, they discovered that a model might answer a math word problem correctly, but then answer the same problem incorrectly after the wording was changed slightly. Specifically, they found that state-of-the-art reasoning models performed up to 65 percent worse when irrelevant information was added to a question, even when the wording of key facts was left unchanged. Apple researchers have also shown, in a paper titled “The Illusion of Thinking,” that although the reasoning models do better than standard LLMs on certain problems, they are also worse at others.

The reason the chain-of-thought trick does often work is fairly simple. The additional words in the chain of thought give the model more context, which guides its word-predicting process in a better direction, as Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas explained in a 2024 interview. This is analogous to the common advice about being specific when asking an LLM a question on any topic. The more details you give, the more you push the LLM toward the relevant words in its memory.

Some of the 4chan gamers appeared to understand this immediately. As one explained back in July 2020: “It makes sense since it is based on human language that you have to talk to it like one”—that is, like a human—“to get a proper response.”

In addition to the gamers, another AI enthusiast discovered the chain-of-thought trick at almost the exact same time. A computer-science student named Zach Robertson, who also came to GPT-3 through AI Dungeon, wrote a blog post in July 2020 about “how to amplify GPT3’s capabilities” by breaking math problems into multiple steps. That September he gave a presentation that showed how the steps could be “chained” together. Robertson, who is now a Ph.D. student in computer science at Stanford, told me on a video call that he was not aware of the 4chan gamers. In fact, he wasn’t even aware he could be considered a co-inventor of chain of thought. I’d seen his blog post cited in a research paper, but when I first mentioned it in an email, he was unsure what I was talking about. He’d removed the post from the internet a couple of years ago when migrating his blog to a new site. (He restored it after we spoke.)

I thought Robertson might be proud to learn he was a pioneer in an area of such enthusiasm within the AI industry. But he seemed only mildly tickled. Those early experiments with AI Dungeon were what got him interested in AI, he told me, but he’s since moved on to other topics. Chain of thought was a remarkable trick, but that’s also all it was.

Hegseth’s Unholy War

2026-04-14T06:00:00-04:00

“The devil,” William Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, “can cite Scripture for his purpose.” As we’ve seen in recent weeks, so can Pete Hegseth.

Late last month, during the first Christian worship service at the Pentagon since the Iran war began, the secretary of defense cast the conflict as essentially religious and spiritual in nature. The focus of his remarks was less the righteousness of our side of the war than the necessity of mercilessly inflicting vengeance and pain on the other.

Hegseth invoked Psalm 18, in which King David says he did not turn back until his enemies were “consumed.” His enemies “cried for help, but there was none to save them.” Hegseth read passages in which David exults that he “beat them fine as dust before the wind” and “cast them out like the mire of the streets.”

Hegseth also read a prayer composed by a chaplain—relying on imprecatory psalms, including 35, 58, and 144—requesting God’s “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” Hegseth prayed that “every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness.” He requested that God “break the teeth of the ungodly.” By “the blast of your anger,” he said, God would “let the evil perish.” The Almighty should “pour out your wrath against those who plot vain things and blow them away like chaff before the wind.” Hegseth beseeched God to act so “evil may be driven back and wicked souls be delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.”

The man who refers to himself as the secretary of war concluded his prayer with “we ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ, king over all kings, and amen. Amen.”

To be clear, then: Secretary of Defense Hegseth is praying for “overwhelming violence” and “no mercy” in the “powerful name of Jesus Christ,” the Prince of Peace.

As Ronit Stahl, a historian of the military chaplaincy, told Greg Sargent of The New Republic, “It’s highly unusual for high-ranking officers or civilian military leaders to relish killing and violence in God’s name as a religious duty.”

But Hegseth is different. Last month, Hegseth said that the United States would give “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies,” which would constitute a war crime under both international law and U.S. military codes. Pentagon offices designed to prevent civilian harm during combat operations are being dismantled. And in Donald Trump’s first term, Hegseth lobbied the president for pardons for three members of the military who were facing charges related to, or had been convicted of, war crimes. He defended Blackwater contractors convicted of murdering Iraqi civilians. He appears to relish the ability to inflict destruction and death.

Trump, for his part, has threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants, desalination stations, oil wells, roads, bridges, and other infrastructure. Last week, he threatened to send the Iranians “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.” On Easter weekend, he wrote that unless the Iranians open the Strait of Hormuz, “all Hell will reign down on them. All glory to God.” And in the most crazed statement of his crazed presidency, Trump wrote on Easter morning, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.”

[Missy Ryan: Pete Hegseth delights in violence]

The day after Easter, Trump intensified his threats to devastate Iranian bridges and power plants if Iran’s leaders didn’t agree to a cease-fire. “Every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again,” the president warned. He dismissed any concerns that such actions might constitute war crimes. “Not at all,” Trump said. The following day, the president of the United States wrote on social media, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

In the end, Trump pulled back; a whole civilization did not die on Tuesday night. But no one can doubt Trump’s genuine indifference to the norms and laws of armed conflict that, however imperfectly, aim to restrain the worst abuses. When asked earlier this year if there are any limits on his global powers, he answered, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Hegseth has given us a lot to untangle theologically. Take his use of imprecatory psalms, which call on God to rain down calamity and destruction upon his enemies. Imprecatory psalms are emotional laments, in the voice of the desperate and the powerless—and they sound very different when recited by those in charge of the most awesome military force in history. In imprecatory psalms, it is God, not humans, being asked to execute judgment. These psalms generally express a deep yearning for justice, with vengeance placed in the hands of the Lord, freeing us of the consuming need to seek revenge ourselves.

Psalm 18 is not an imprecatory psalm. In it, David narrates his own story, telling of the destruction of his enemies and crediting God for making it possible. Hegseth’s invocation of Psalm 18 sends the message that military action is an expression of divine will, and that the attack on Iran constitutes a holy war.

The Trump administration’s invocation of scripture and allusions to the total annihilation of the enemy add yet another layer. Hegseth and Trump and their supporters, particularly the fundamentalist and evangelical Christians among them, want theological cover for targeting Iran’s power supply, which might result in mass civilian death. Hospital equipment would stop working, water purification would cease, sewage systems and food refrigeration would fail. The food supply chain would be disrupted. Urban areas might become unlivable, forcing millions to flee.

Trump hasn’t yet done those things, and perhaps he never will. But the president and his secretary of defense are already justifying such acts, just in case they decide to go down this path. They want to signal to the world, and perhaps reassure themselves, that God is on their side. That killing civilians is not just acceptable but an act of righteous obedience.

Some bells can’t be unrung.

Tucked away in this debate is a complicated interpretive dispute. Some adherents of the Christian faith believe, as many of the early church fathers did, that biblical accounts of divine violence—especially accounts of God commanding the Israelites to kill entire populations—are not literal but allegorical, representing the soul’s battle against sin. Figures like Origen argued that embracing a literal understanding of texts such as 1 Samuel 15:3, in which God commands that his people utterly destroy “man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey,” would attribute monstrous qualities to God, a moral impossibility. A good rule of thumb, they would say, is that if you find yourself ascribing to God actions that are repellant and horrifying when done by humans, something is amiss.

[Peter Wehner: Pete Hegseth’s moral unseriousness]

Others, like Paul Copan, the author of Is God a Moral Monster?, believe that the language of herem—a Hebrew term for a ban, in this case meaning total destruction, or wholesale slaughter—was typical of the hyperbole found in the ancient Near East. What’s being described is a military conflict, he would say, but one sanctioned by God. The specific words in the Bible, however, reflect the military bravado employed by writers of the Hebrew scriptures. They are not to be taken literally.

The philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff offers a contemporary example that helps illustrate this point: If a high-school-basketball player says that his team “slaughtered” its opponents, he doesn’t literally mean what he says, and he doesn’t assume that anyone would take him to be literal. He’s simply saying that his team dominated the game. Advocates of this interpretive approach point out that in the Book of Joshua, peoples who were said to have been “utterly destroyed” reappear. So, they argue, the language was either intentionally hyperbolic or the accounts false.

A third group of scholars that includes Peter Enns, a professor of biblical studies at Eastern University, believes that the portrayal of God as an advocate for total annihilation is what you’d expect from a tribal people describing God in their tribal ways. As Enns has written, “God never told the Israelites to kill the Canaanites. The Israelites believed that God told them to kill the Canaanites."

In a blog post published last year, Enns makes what he considers to be the more important point: “The word of God as a two-edged sword is supposed to be turned inward, piercing us, not everyone around us.” He adds, “The Bible is not a weapon, a sword to be wielded against modern-day Canaanites or Babylonians. It is a book where we meet God. It brings hope, encouragement, knowledge, and deep truth for those willing to risk, and to ‘die’ to themselves, as Jesus puts it, to accept the challenge of scripture, knowing they will be undone in the process.”

Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, says that the Bible is “the accumulation of what you might call the interaction of God with a succession of human societies.” The biblical scholar John Barton refers to the Bible as a “dialogue among authors.” The authors say different things at different times, including about God. The Bible is a book—a library of books, really—that contains, and is meant to contain, different and at times competing theologies. The Bible preserves disagreements, and it’s no less sacred for doing so. (Among the competing accounts of this subject within scripture are 2 Kings and Hosea, which present contrasting perspectives on Jehu’s massacre of the House of Ahab, and the differences in attitude toward the Ninevites in Jonah, where we see expansive mercy, and Nahum, where we see wrath.)

Still others, like Tremper Longman III, a scholar of the Jewish Bible, accept the full historicity and divine authorization of the herem commands. Longman believes that God ordered the wholesale slaughter not just of opposing armies but of entire populations, including women, children, and infants. But, he argues, the circumstances were unique, the product of a particular historical moment, and not to be replicated. To do so would be to undo the work of Jesus.

Longman relies on what he calls “spiritual continuity.” What he means by that is “the war against the Canaanites was simply an earlier phase of the battle that comes to its climax on the cross and its completion at the final judgment. The object of warfare moves from the Canaanites, who are the object of God’s wrath for their sin, to the spiritual powers and principalities, and then finally to the utter destruction of all evil, human and spiritual.”

None of these scholars, despite their other disagreements, sees holy war as normative. That should be especially obvious to those who claim to follow Jesus, who told them to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” The Sermon on the Mount is a repudiation of the conquest ethic.

When Peter drew his sword at the Garden of Gethsemane, during the night of Jesus’s arrest, Jesus told him, “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” Jesus affirmed a shocking thing: The kingdom he was inaugurating is not advanced by the sword. Yet Hegseth prayed that “every round would find its mark.”

Virtually all of the individuals within the various interpretive camps in Christianity I’ve discussed above would contend that it is a serious misreading of scripture to argue that imprecatory psalms and conquest accounts in books like Deuteronomy, Joshua, and 1 Samuel are endorsements of the wholesale slaughter of innocents today.

And that’s not all. Almost all rabbinical scholars—whether they affirm the historicity of the conquest accounts or not—emphatically agree that the rules of the warfare the scripture describes no longer apply. Among other things, Jewish scholars point out, the specific peoples against whom herem was commanded no longer exist as identifiable groups. That door has been bolted shut. “There is a category of milchemet mitzvah, which is a commanded war of self-defense,” Michael Holzman, the rabbi of the Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation, told me. “But wars of annihilation no longer exist.”

Serious and thoughtful people have argued over these issues, which have bedeviled Christians and Jews for millennia. But Hegseth, Trump, and many of their fundamentalist and evangelical followers seem less interested in textual interpretation than in seeking scriptural validation for their bloodlust. They seem determined to find texts within the Bible to justify their dark passions, their emotional and psychological predilections. They believe what they believe quite apart from the Bible; its utility is to affirm what they already intend to do. Hegseth and his merry band of holy warriors aren’t interested in being on the side of God so much as they are insistent that God is on their side.

This is a constant temptation, and giving in to it almost always ends badly.

On an individual level, there’s something quite sad about people whose lives are fueled by hate and vengeance, who seem perennially unsettled, and for whom inner peace and calm contentment seem always out of reach. They are at war with the world and at war with themselves.

When these individuals assume positions of power, however—when they are able to inflict suffering on others, particularly on a mass scale; when their pathologies become society-wide and find a haven within the highest reaches of government—sympathy should give way not just to concern but to outrage.

One thing I’ve come to see, more clearly than I once did, is that understanding sacred texts does not depend solely on knowledge of the text. At least as important, and perhaps a good deal more important, are the sensibilities and temperament—the wisdom—that readers bring to the text.

In fundamentalist and evangelical circles in particular, enormous emphasis is put on reading scripture and memorizing Bible verses. That can be a blessing, of course. Christians and Jews believe that the books comprising their canon are holy. They bear witness to God—the Word behind the words—and reveal what it means to live rightly before God. In times of trial and grief, the words of the Bible can be healing. They can provide hope and grace in the journey.

But it’s also true that in the wrong hands, Bible verses can become decontextualized, or be used to sanctify preexisting biases. Scripture has on far too many occasions been used to deny scientific truths (evolution and the age of the Earth) and to advance immoral ends (slavery, segregation). People frequently use the Bible to wound others under the guise of speaking “truth in love.” Many of the greatest crimes in Christian history were committed by people who knew their Bible exceedingly well.

The Bible said it, I believe it, and that settles it is an approach to hermeneutics that can lead people astray. It rests on two mistaken presumptions: that the Bible is easy to interpret, and that our own interpretations of the Bible are inerrant. Neither is true.

[Missy Ryan: Holy warrior]

The latest debate about holy war is a reminder that moral dispositions and discernment are among the most important interpretive tools Christians have. The apostle Paul seemed to hint at this when he said, in 1 Corinthians 13, that you can have all knowledge, you can fathom all mysteries, you can have faith that moves mountains, but without love, you are nothing.

Those who relish mercilessness and see themselves as agents of God’s wrath are nothing.

The Parable of the President

2026-04-13T14:15:00-04:00

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Many people get the Sunday scaries, but most of them are not a sitting president facing self-inflicted global chaos and the growing possibility of a bruising midterm election in a few months. What feels like a weekly social-media crashout from the president of the United States usually starts some time on Sunday and continues into the early hours of the next morning. Given the failure of negotiations with Iran on Saturday, the likelihood of elevated gas prices for months, and the resounding defeat of Trump’s ally and role model Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Donald Trump had plenty of fuel for a freakout last night.

But the most notable subject in this week’s edition was Pope Leo XIV, who has been critical of Trump’s attack on Venezuela and war in Iran. The posts illustrate that Trump views religion much the way he views everything else: as something that can serve him but does not create any obligations on him.

“Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, kicking off a lengthy jeremiad. “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.” Trump claimed that Leo XIV was elected only because the cardinals believed he’d be good at dealing with the current administration. Trump is also upset that Leo met with David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist and commentator. “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician,” Trump said.

Forty-six minutes later, Trump posted an illustration of himself as a Jesus-like figure, reaching out to heal a man in bed while a nurse, a soldier, and others look on, and with a background of patriotic bric-a-brac (flag, eagles, fighter jets). The image has been circulating for at least a couple of months, during which time an angel near the top of the image has somehow transformed into a creepy monstrosity, presumably through the wonders of generative AI. The illustration drew claims of blasphemy and even demonic possession from some usual Trump allies on the right; the president has since deleted it, telling reporters he believed that the picture depicted him as a doctor.

Too many contradictions appear here to list them all. For example, Trump insists that Leo renounce politics yet also complains about the pope’s policy stance on crime. What he’s referring to here is a mystery. (The Catholic Church could be said to have a decarceral agenda: Jesus, quoting the Prophet Isaiah, said that he had been sent to preach freedom to prisoners, and the first pope, Peter, was imprisoned at least once and likely executed for professing Jesus. Then again, the Vatican City has, by some accounts, the highest per-capita crime rate in the world, due mainly to pickpocketing.)

Another contradiction is that Trump doesn’t actually seem to have any problem with the intermingling of religion and politics—as the Christlike image shows, and as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s aggressive rhetoric about the war demonstrates. The president’s reflexive response to criticism (or perceived criticism) from any public figure is to unleash a social-media barrage against them, without much thought about who the person is or what their role in society might be. This black-and-white view of the world owes more to Mani, another religious leader whose death was depicted as a crucifixion, than to Jesus of Nazareth.

The tirade at Leo is the latest escalation of anti-Catholic sentiment among some figures on the MAGA right. Trump has a number of devout Catholics in his administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J. D. Vance, although some, like Vance, have sometimes disagreed with the Holy See under Leo and his predecessor, Francis. The Free Press reported last week that the Pentagon had summoned a Vatican official, the first known time such a meeting had been held. It didn’t go well, with administration officials reportedly invoking the Avignon papacy, the 14th century domination of the role by the French crown. Both sides downplayed the report, but Trump’s post makes it hard to dismiss the friction between them.

Speaking with reporters as he flew to Algeria today, Leo said, “I have no fear, neither of the Trump administration nor of speaking out loudly about the message in the Gospel.” And though more restrained than Trump, he showed that he can dish it out as well as take it, quipping about Truth Social, “It’s ironic—the name of the site itself. Say no more.”

But although Leo separated himself from involvement in electoral politics in the way that Trump meant it, he defended his claim to speak on social issues, citing Jesus’s statement that “blessed are the peacemakers.” Matters of peace, poverty, and privilege are central to Christianity, and navigating how and how much to take on these issues is a challenge to any secular leader—indeed, any individual—who professes the religion.

Trump’s theological vision shares much with, and may have come from, Norman Vincent Peale, a popular Protestant minister of the mid-20th century. Peale, who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, attracted congregants including the Trump family with a version of Christianity that emphasized happiness and material wealth but perhaps asked less of its followers, even though Jesus repeatedly says in the Gospels that following him is not a casual endeavor.

As an adult, Trump showed few signs of religiosity or familiarity with scripture even as he courted Christians in the 2016 election. Since surviving an assassination attempt in 2024, Trump has sounded more overtly religious, and has publicly mused about his chances to get into heaven. But his rhetoric has not been matched by any clear change in behavior, quest for absolution for past sins, or increased attendance at church. Matters of peace, poverty, and privilege do not seem front of mind: After briefly portraying himself as a peacemaker in pursuit of the Nobel Prize, Trump has now embraced military adventure; he has shrugged at economic tumult; and he has brushed aside faith leaders’ concerns about his immigration enforcement. Trump well understands the iconographic and organizational power of Christianity, but he seems to reject the idea that it should create any constraints on him.

Related:

An Oligarchy of Old People

2026-04-13T08:00:00-04:00

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Gerontocracy has always thrived in undemocratic places—Communist people’s republics, Gulf monarchies—where only death could pry power from the ruling elders. American gerontocracy is exceptional for being freely elected. Donald Trump will soon be an octogenarian, and is president in part because the preceding octogenarian, Joe Biden, did not want to admit his senescence. The median senator is 65, and the oldest, 92-year-old Chuck Grassley, has not ruled out running for reelection in 2028. The typical general-election voter is a spry 52, but in primary elections, which decide the majority of political contests, that number rises to 59. Half of all the money donated to political campaigns comes from Americans age 66 and older.

Although political gerontocracy has operated overtly, the rising economic power of the elderly has escaped much notice. Over the past 40 or so years, American wealth has grown ever more concentrated among the oldest generations. In 1989, Americans over age 55 held 56 percent of it; today they hold 74 percent. During that same period, the share of wealth held by Americans under 40 has shrunk by nearly half, from 12 to 6.6 percent. The color of money is now gray.

Much of this shift is the result of demographic change: 18 percent of Americans are senior citizens today, up from 13 percent in 1990. But even at the household level, Americans over 55 have accrued wealth more rapidly than those who are younger. Among those 75 and older, the numbers are particularly striking. In 1983, their household net worth was only slightly above the national average; by 2022, it was 55 percent higher.

For nearly a century, some of the central debates in American politics have been over inequalities—between rich and poor, male and female, Black and white. When the Baby Boomers were children, older Americans were widely viewed as vulnerable. “Fifty percent of the elderly exist below minimum standards of decency, and this is a figure much higher than that for any other age group,” Michael Harrington wrote in his 1962 book The Other America, often credited with inspiring the War on Poverty. “This is no country for old men.”

Three years later, in 1965, Medicare was created. A major expansion of Social Security followed in 1972. These changes were remarkably effective: The share of elderly people living in poverty dropped by more than one-third within a decade. But because these programs are broad-based entitlements, they have transferred huge sums to the prosperous, too. The portfolios of that latter group, meanwhile, have been swelled by a rising stock market and rising home values, outcomes that may not be entirely replicable for younger generations. As a result of all of these factors, intergenerational inequality between old and young has not merely reversed. It has accelerated.

Most current Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries will receive more from the program over their lifetime than they paid in taxes, and the extra money will necessarily come from the pockets of younger generations. The two programs now pay out more than $2 trillion a year, more than one-third of all federal expenditures. Their sustainability was a subject of major debate during the Obama years, when the national debt was much lower than it is today and interest rates on that debt were close to zero. Financially, the matter is more urgent now. The trust funds for Social Security benefits and Medicare’s hospital insurance are projected to become insolvent in roughly seven years.

[Lyman Stone: The Boomers ruined everything]

Yet even noticing the looming threats has become taboo for the two major political parties. One of Trump’s shrewdest political realizations was that entitlement reform—once a priority for fiscal conservatives—was a losing issue. Instead, he has pledged not to touch entitlement spending and lavished seniors with even more government money. His One Big Beautiful Bill Act created a special $6,000 tax deduction for seniors, which will cost taxpayers $91 billion over the next four years. The same bill cuts $1 trillion in spending on Medicaid, which is expected to leave some 5 million working-age Americans uninsured.

This bodes poorly for intergenerational peace. Respect for elders is being replaced by resentment of elders. A majority of young Americans no longer believe in the American dream. Many Millennials and Gen Zers expressly blame the Boomers for that, accusing them of hoarding wealth, jobs, and power. Many of these accusations are inchoate, but they are not entirely baseless.

The best rebuttal to the gerontocratic critique is that young Americans do not appreciate how good they have it. Although people of working age possess a smaller share of the national wealth, they are richer in absolute terms than Boomers were at their age. The median 35-year-old Millennial earns 38 percent more in post-tax, inflation-adjusted income than the typical Boomer did at the same age, according to research by the economist Kevin Corinth. Gen Zers have only begun their careers, but so far they are earning more than their Millennial predecessors. This trend shows up in wealth statistics, too. When Boomers were between the ages of 25 and 43, they had a median net worth of $58,000 (in 2022 dollars); Millennials at the same stage of life had a net worth of $85,000. So why are young Americans so depressed about their economic future?

[From the May 2023 issue: Jean M. Twenge on the myth of the broke Millennial]

The pathologies of the housing market are one reason. The typical home today costs five times the median annual income, up from 3.5 times the median annual income in 1984. Boomers got lucky: When they were young, they could afford to buy houses that then appreciated fantastically in value. But that luck was arguably manufactured by Washington, which engineered the rise of 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages and created tax deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes.

These government subsidies still exist today. But even with them, younger Americans cannot buy houses at the same rate that Boomers did. In a paper titled “Giving Up,” the economists Seung Hyeong Lee and Younggeun Yoo predicted that Millennials will enter retirement with much lower homeownership rates than the generations before them—74 percent compared with 84 percent for Boomers. Some 15 percent of Millennials, they noted, had already given up on homeownership by age 30. These Millennials, they found, work less, spend more on credit, and are more likely to buy cryptocurrency or make other risky investments. Feeling locked out of owning a house casts a malaise—one made worse by the anxiety that the welfare state they currently support will become stingier when they eventually need it.

Older generations used the levers of government to create this situation. In high-cost cities, the building of new homes and apartment complexes is often derailed in local planning and zoning-board meetings. In 2019, the political scientists Katherine Levine Einstein, Maxwell Palmer, and David Glick published a study examining who attended such meetings in the Boston area. The attendees, they found, were likely to be longtime homeowners who oppose new development. Preventing construction kept the value of their assets high—at the expense of younger, prospective homeowners.

Homeowner preferences hard-coded into state constitutions decades ago now further sustain the gerontocracy. In 1978, Californians voted by referendum for Proposition 13, which severely limited the property taxes that existing homeowners would have to pay—so long as they remained in place. In one study, the law was estimated to have caused a 15 percent increase in California housing prices all by itself. As longtime homeowners profited, the lost tax revenue forced reductions in school spending.

California is not unique, and housing is not the only means by which the older generations have effectively pulled up the ladder behind them. Preferences for the elderly over the young are a fixture of public budgets nationwide. Across all government programs—federal, state, and local—$2 are now spent on seniors for every $1 spent on children.

According to Tim Vlandas, an Oxford political economist, advanced democracies around the world are reaching the point of “gerontonomia”—his term for a stagnating political economy set up to prioritize elderly citizens. These citizens punish their elected governments for inflation, which lessens the value of savings and pension payments. They are much more tolerant of unemployment, because they no longer work; slow growth, because their wealth has already accumulated; and high public debt, because their descendants will pay it. The result, Vlandas argues, is lower wage growth for those still working, and also worse outcomes for their children, as a result of lower social investment over the course of their lives.

Graying democracies everywhere have made generous pension commitments that they are struggling to maintain. In the United Kingdom, the “triple lock,” a rule that in most years mandates that state pension payments increase more than inflation, seems politically impossible to change. In France, people protested for months against Emmanuel Macron in 2023 over the raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64.

Yet these challenges are especially acute in America. Because Social Security still has a trust fund to draw on, voters may not realize that benefits already exceed contributions. But this fund, which stood at $2.9 trillion in 2021, is on pace to dwindle to zero by about 2033. The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown will hasten the arrival of exhaustion day by cutting the number of tax-paying workers who support retirees’ benefits. Once that trust fund is gone—absent a tax increase on current workers or some other change—beneficiaries would suffer an immediate 23 percent cut in payments. A similar process would leave the Medicare Part A program, which covers hospital stays for the elderly, insolvent at about the same time.

The national debt will by then be gargantuan. Previously unthinkable ideas—such as means-tested Social Security benefits, confiscatory wealth taxes, even health-care rationing—might be contemplated. The bill coming due for the senior welfare state might not trouble this president, but it could well be the defining problem for the next one.

Some people would like to start the fight over how to resolve it now. Among them are radical thinkers who contend that in order to defeat economic gerontocracy, Americans must first defang the elderly ruling class. In his forthcoming book, Gerontocracy in America, the 54-year-old Yale law and history professor Samuel Moyn calls for destroying this “tyranny of the minority,” set up by “old people with enormous private power who hold society in chains.” Power, he argues, needs to be seized back, leaving “the elderly divested of political power, wealth, and property.”

Moyn wants to create mandatory retirement ages, perhaps starting as low as 65, for elected officials and people with some desirable private-sector jobs. Then he would come for the money, increasing taxes on both income and accumulated assets to dilute the share of elderly wealth. Most astonishingly, he proposes diluting older Americans’ political power too, by literally valuing the votes of young people more, on the theory that the latter will suffer the consequences of political decisions for much longer. (This proposed social engineering is both harsh and vanishingly improbable. The modern legal principle of “one person, one vote” exists for good reason.)

Still, Moyn’s ideas underscore the need for an equitable post-Boomer settlement, one that will be easier to find if we start the search sooner rather than later. In the 20th century, the United States realized it was too rich and too decent a country to allow its elderly citizens to live in penury. And it made an enduring commitment to address that problem, one that has unequivocally succeeded: There has never been a better time to be a senior citizen in America. And yet the U.S. has made no comparable commitment to working families, who are stymied not only by expensive housing but also by child-care and higher-education bills. Child poverty in America persists at levels alarmingly higher than in other advanced democracies.

Initiatives such as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society established what current workers in a decent country owed to retirees. A new social contract can be struck that would deliver at least some optimism for today’s workers. Curing gerontonomia would require redirecting some public funds from programs aimed at the elderly, such as Social Security, to family benefits, education, and infrastructure. But an intergenerational recalibration can come about in gentler ways than Moyn’s: The wealthiest Social Security recipients, for instance, could forgo some of their scheduled benefits, which could instead be contributed annually to “baby bond” accounts for America’s children, a source of capital to be used in adulthood.

And not every solution rests with the welfare state. Cutting through housing restrictions would generate enormous social benefit, if America’s elderly ruling class were to allow such a feat. Today’s gerontocrats will eventually die. But their legacy will be a mess to sort out.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “A Fine Country for Old Men.”

The 10 Things the Bezoses Are Almost Certainly Grateful for Each Morning

2026-04-14T10:09:00-04:00

“On a typical day, the newlyweds wake up around 6 in their new, roughly $230 million compound on Indian Creek, an exclusive private island in Miami often called ‘Billionaire Bunker.’ They don’t touch their phones. Instead, they begin each day by listing 10 things they’re grateful for—and they can’t repeat what they named the day before.” — The New York Times

Monday, 6 a.m.

1. Money.

2. Our new, roughly $230 million compound on Indian Creek, an exclusive private island in Miami often called “Billionaire Bunker.”

3. Our stunning physical appearance, both natural and man-made.

4. Our close, continuing friendship with Leonardo DiCaprio, someone with whom we are able to discuss the travails of yacht ownership. A subject not everyone understands!

5. Jared Kushner. A friend close enough that he’s invited to our wedding!

6. How much less bad news there is to read anymore! Especially in that one paper—what’s it called?

7. The great view we had of Donald Trump’s inauguration, right on the stage and everything! Everyone should see J. D. Vance up close before they die.

8. Not having to worry that anyone we meet will tell us their honest opinion. There is a certain net worth above which you will never hear an honest opinion from anyone ever again, and we crossed that threshold $120 billion ago.

9. Family. Family, of course.

10. Access to the best air—the really good, fancy air.

Tuesday, 6 a.m.

1. Narwhals.

2. A thing I didn’t know about myself until I had this much money was how charming I was, how good all my ideas were, and how everything I had to say was interesting. And … I’m grateful for that.

3. ~~Money~~ We said “money” yesterday. Love.

4. The yacht, of course.

5. How much cake there is to eat in the world. More people should try cake.

6. That I haven’t had that awful dream in a long time. The one from which I wake up screaming.

7. Early access to the Melania documentary! Some things money can’t buy, but … that is not one of them.

8. The ability to leave the planet sometimes, if we want! For a girls’ trip, even!

9. Sydney Sweeney!

10. The things that money can’t buy, which it turns out money can buy, if you have enough money. Or is that “money” again?

Wednesday, 6 a.m.

1. Money

2. Our wonderful seats at the inauguration, and the little golden eggs they served there.

3. That I could pee in a bottle if I wanted, but I never have to.

4. My coffee mug that says Woke Up Sexy as Hell Again and my coffee mug that says Hunk.

5. Hors d’oeuvres!

6. Anna Wintour’s respect.

7. What’s the word for never having to go anywhere you don’t want to go or do anything you don’t want to do?

8. Never having to smell a subway again!

9. The knowledge that although now we are saving the narwhals, if one day we were suddenly to decide that we wanted to destroy the narwhals, we could do so just as easily, and no one would stop us.

10. That there’s so much beauty in the world. Especially the higher and farther away from it you get.

Thursday, 6 a.m.

1. In the dream everything smelled like burning hair, and I was flailing in dark water while missiles exploded overhead, and all I wanted was to protect my family, and I couldn’t, because the people who were in charge of everything couldn’t see me, couldn’t hear me, were so high up in their helicopters and so secure in their bunkers that they didn’t think my life had anything to do with them. I’m grateful for getting to wake up from that dream and lie next to you!

2. Our new $230 million compound on Billionaire Bunker!

3. Cake.

4. Helicopters!

5. The Met Gala!

6. All the bad news we don’t know about, and all the good news we do!

7. How thick the gate is at our compound!

8. How well trained our security officers are!

9. How nice everything is. Just nice, all the time.

10. Money! No. We said that yesterday.

There’s a Message for MAGA in Viktor Orbán’s Defeat

2026-04-13T13:50:11-04:00

Viktor Orbán’s loss in yesterday’s election is just as much a defeat for Donald Trump and his vice president, J. D. Vance, as it is for the now-toppled Hungarian strongman. Seldom have American leaders intervened so overtly in a foreign election, and seldom has their preferred candidate fared so badly. Trump has a way of distancing himself from people who disappoint him. Last night, when reporters asked him about the outcome in Hungary, he turned and walked away. But having tied himself so tightly to Orbán, he may find it unusually difficult to dissociate himself from the prime minister’s downfall.

Red Make America Great Again caps and other pro-Trump symbols saturated Orbán’s campaign rallies. But the opposition party—led by Péter Magyar, a conservative who had deserted Orbán’s inner circle—opted for different imagery: The euphoric crowds that occupied the streets of Budapest to welcome the end of the prime minister’s 16-year reign featured fireworks, flags, face paint, and plum brandy. And along the banks of the Danube, the Hungarian tricolor mingled with the emblem of the European Union.

Trump has generally forfeited the United States’ global leadership, except for the variety that operates at the barrel of a gun. But he still fancies himself the boss of an international far-right bloc, and he enjoyed the magnified view of his own power in the mirror that Orbán held up to him. Strategically and stylistically, the two leaders are similar. The prime minister was the first EU head of government to endorse Trump in 2016, and the Republican nominee’s upset victory went on to galvanize populist parties across the world.

Over the next decade, no foreign leader worked harder than Orbán to translate reactionary politics into a cross-border governing program. He turned Hungary into a testing ground for practices that Trump is now implementing in America, including the expansion of executive power and the assault on universities and other elements of civil society. Orbán has nurtured a network of think tanks and other government-backed institutions that both court existing MAGA luminaries and cultivate new ones. He put an ally of Vance, and a votary of so-called post-liberalism, on his payroll in Budapest. In Washington, meanwhile, the second Trump administration brought in young aides with experience at pro-government institutes in Budapest.

In the weeks before the election, I asked representatives of the opposition party, Tisza, how they would approach this ecosystem of government-backed institutions. Party representatives told me that new funding would cease immediately and that the government would explore ways of recovering money that’s been promised through long-term grants. Magyar, who is likely to be Hungary’s next prime minister, confirmed as much in a news conference today, arguing that the funding structure amounted to a criminal offense and vowing to launch an investigation. Many think-tank leaders, one aide told me, “will be out of a job very soon.” That could be a prelude to a broader unraveling of the Washington-Budapest nexus that has so animated far-right circles in the past decade.

Competing accusations of foreign influence defined Hungary’s election. Orbán tried to portray Magyar as a covert agent of Brussels; Magyar accused Orbán of secretly colluding with Russian security services to stay in power. There was nothing surreptitious, meanwhile, about the American government’s efforts to shore up support for the prime minister.

Consider the time and effort that Trump and Vance invested in the election. Trump broadcast multiple endorsements on social media and recorded a video that was played at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest. Before traveling to Islamabad for Saturday’s failed peace talks with Iranian leaders, Vance spent two days in the Hungarian capital campaigning alongside the prime minister, at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. One wondered, as Trump warned of the end of Iranian civilization, whether his vice president might not have better things to do.

[Read: J. D. Vance is definitely against foreign election interference]

Trump treated Orbán’s reelection bid like a domestic political contest, with all the attendant implications for his political capital. “We love Viktor,” the president said last fall, standing before his European counterparts at a Middle East peace summit. “You are fantastic, all right? I know a lot of people don’t agree with me, but I’m the only one that matters.” As the election neared, his endorsements of Orbán were indistinguishable from his interventions in competitive U.S. congressional races, complete with his emphatic capitalization. Orbán, he wrote, would protect “LAW AND ORDER!” Trump’s eldest son removed any remaining doubt about the stakes when he weighed in over the weekend, addressing Hungarian voters on X. “We hope you will vote for my father’s friend and ally,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote. “One leader in Europe has a direct line to the White House, I hope you will support Viktor Orban!”

Vance made the contest even more personal by flying to Budapest to stump for the prime minister. Standing at his side, Vance called the Hungarian leader by his first name and voiced confidence in his victory. At a joint press conference, the vice president predicted, “Viktor Orbán’s gonna win,” and then turned to him and asked, “Viktor, is that right?” Western diplomats in Budapest suggested to me that Vance’s visit may have backfired. They observed that Trump’s war in Iran is unpopular in Europe and that the welcoming of any foreign leader was at odds with Orbán’s argument that he stood for Hungarian sovereignty. (A spokesperson for the vice president didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Trump didn’t just send individual emissaries to Budapest; he also involved the apparatus of the U.S. State Department in the election. Before Vance’s appearance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to the Hungarian capital in February. The visit had an ostensible diplomatic purpose—signing a civil nuclear-cooperation agreement between the two countries—but the political overtones were obvious. “Your success is our success,” Rubio told Orbán.

Trump dangled further U.S. assistance at the eleventh hour. Two days before the election, he took to Truth Social to suggest that Orbán’s reelection would enable the furthering of economic ties between the two countries. “My Administration stands ready to use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian People ever need it,” he wrote. There is a backstory here: People familiar with the situation told me that the Hungarian government had been seeking broad economic support of the kind that the Trump administration had provided to Argentina just before elections in that country last fall. He never extended similar generosity to Hungary, and the vague, last-minute promise didn’t go over as planned. According to an analysis shared with me by Redpoint Advisors, an intelligence- and geopolitical-risk-advisory firm, Hungarian-language reaction on social media to Trump’s promise revealed deep distrust of the president’s motives. Negative mentions of Trump, which had been declining, spiked following the announcement, growing 47 percent in the hour after his pledge.

I figured that Orbán was going to lose—or at least that he figured he would lose—when I attended his final rally, on the eve of the election, in the heart of the capital’s Castle District. Not enough of his supporters showed up to fill the public square, and some of those who did attend were disappointed because the campaign hadn’t put up screens so that people at the back of the crowd could see the speech. There was, however, a nice view of the Matthias Church, with its exquisite tracery and stone gargoyles.

[Read: Viktor Orbán could actually lose]

The prime minister seemed dejected, even defensive. He didn’t have much good news to share with his supporters; the economy was in shambles, and people knew it. One bright spot, which he highlighted, was that “the U.S. made clear they are supporting us.” How special to have the backing of “the strongest country on Earth.”

I don’t know if it was the stage lights or the wisps of smoke from cigarettes, but the scene took on an artificial quality, like when additional frames are added to a movie to smooth out the picture, in what’s sometimes called the “soap-opera effect.” Bad filmmaking was also on the mind of Ferenc Németh, a specialist in international relations, when I reached him by phone over the weekend. Németh once worked at a foreign-policy institute in Budapest but left after it came under the control of the prime minister’s office. Now he’s a visiting researcher at Georgetown University, watching life in America come to resemble Hungary’s.

“What is happening here is the same that was happening in Hungary 15 years ago,” Németh told me. “I saw this movie once, and I gave it zero stars on Letterboxd,” he added, referring to the social-networking service that allows users to rank films. “But now I’m being forced to watch it again.”

Hungary is a small country that ejected its prime minister in large part because of domestic economic conditions. The country’s broader significance lies in the illiberal model it has exported abroad. That model has champions at the height of the U.S. government who appear inclined to intervene, audaciously, in foreign campaigns. Next year, elections will take place in numerous European countries whose populations are each larger than Hungary’s, including France, Italy, Poland, and Spain. One measure of their meaning will be whether MAGA caps appear at the victory parties.

The Conciliator

2026-04-12T07:00:00-04:00

Read more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here.

When I first met Gretchen Whitmer last fall, she seemed to want to talk about anything except Donald Trump. She avoided using his name, referring to him, only sparingly, as “the president.” She came closest to criticizing him when she lamented that “this constant tariff chaos is really hurting our economy.”

Our interview took place, at her team’s request, in a Marriott conference room in Ypsilanti. It lasted precisely 22 minutes. And the Michigan governor, who is formidable in person, with sharply arched eyebrows and dark hair streaked with gray, did not seem thrilled to be doing it. She smiled tightly and spoke with caution while, across from us, an anxious-looking staffer counted down our remaining time together. Whitmer was careful, in fact, to highlight her own carefulness. At a National Governors Association dinner that she had attended with Trump last year, “there was a lot of conversation that I did not agree with,” Whitmer told me. “But I just sat there and bit my tongue because I’m not going to win that debate in that moment, and it’s not going to serve Michigan well.”

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

Had Whitmer gone soft on Trump? For more than half a decade, she’s been “Big Gretch,” the Bell’s-drinking, fuchsia-lipstick-wearing, sometimes-performative badass from up north. She became governor during the peak of the anti-Trump resistance. Then her clash with the president during the pandemic sent her rocket into orbit. When Trump dismissed her as “the woman in Michigan,” she put the insult on a T-shirt and wore it on television; Etsy artisans hawked prayer candles with her face on them. In 2020, Joe Biden almost chose her as his running mate. After his disastrous 2024 bid, many Democrats hoped that Whitmer, not Kamala Harris, would swoop in to replace him. Now Whitmer is on the list of potential presidential contenders for 2028.

But if Democratic voters are looking for someone to confront Trump directly, Whitmer might not be their candidate. In his second term, she has instead looked for ways to collaborate with him; one of her visits to the White House last year resulted in a much-mocked photo of the governor hiding her face behind folders in the Oval Office. Contrast this approach with the likes of J. B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California, who have spent the past year waging insult warfare against the president. Even Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, whose state looks a lot more like Whitmer’s in political makeup, has repeatedly criticized the Trump administration, including calling J. D. Vance “profoundly and pathetically weak.”

Whitmer, in other words, seems to have given up the fight. Which made me wonder: Was this a tactical move—Let Gavin lose his mind on social media, while I win back the Midwest—or was it something else? The governor, after all, was the target of a pretty terrifying kidnapping plot in 2020. Had a fear of violence caused her to change course?

Whitmer didn’t cop to either of these explanations in any of our three relatively brief conversations over the past few months. She maintains that her underlying governing philosophy hasn’t changed: “I’ll take all the heat in the world if I can deliver for Michigan,” she said when we discussed the Oval Office photo.

Some Democrats approve of Whitmer’s new strategy. Others, though, think the governor has lost some of the pugnacity that once defined her. They view Whitmer as “almost groveling” and “pulling her punches” with Trump, a former senior staffer for Whitmer told me. (This person and a few others I spoke with were granted anonymity to talk candidly about the governor, who, for some of them, remains a close colleague.) During a meeting that Whitmer attended with the state Democratic caucus last spring, one lawmaker praised her for being Big Gretch and a strong fighter against Trump. But Whitmer batted down the compliment, calling the nickname a “persona” that others have put on her, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting.

Many of Whitmer’s supporters in Michigan have been feeling confused, one of these people told me. “They’re just like, ‘What happened to Big Gretch?’”

Madeleine Hordinski for The Atlantic

Gretchen Whitmer enters the Clique, a diner in Detroit, in January.

Every Whitmer supporter—and even most of her critics—will tell you that the governor’s single greatest strength as a politician is that she sounds like a regular person. Whitmer, who is 54, is authentic Michigan, down to the nasal vowels; she’s never lived anywhere else. She seems to enjoy making fun of herself. In her book, True Gretch, the governor freely admits that she partied too hard as a teenager and once vomited on her high-school principal. She writes about pulling out her dental flipper to make her colleagues laugh. These days, Instagram provides the best glimpse of Whitmer’s personality. One recent video shows the governor’s endearing struggle with a family recipe for popovers. “Why is it so thick?” she asks, frowning into the blender. “Oh, the milk’s not in there!”

It took a while for me to see this side of Whitmer. While reporting this story, I watched her speak at political events and a book talk. Eventually, I was able to see her interact with regular Michiganders at a diner in downtown Detroit in January, though the crowd there wasn’t particularly organic; ahead of the visit, Whitmer’s team had asked several local party leaders and activists to attend. Still, I got a small taste of a bigger truth: Big Gretch is a good time.

Weaving among tables, Whitmer took selfies and clutched hands. “If I could carry a tune, I’d sing to ya!” she told a man at the counter celebrating his birthday. She posed for a photo with a group of waitresses and somehow ended up with a toddler in her arms. “You’re so cute!” she squealed. At one point, Whitmer joined three women in a booth, ordered a stack of silver-dollar pancakes, and then insisted that a staffer take one. “Eat it, Henry!” she chanted. “Eat it! Eat it!” Later, Whitmer told me with a sly smile that she’d read The Atlantic’s recent profile of Newsom. “I enjoyed that one of your colleagues described Gavin as handsome ‘in a faintly sinister way,’” she said.

A Detroit rapper popularized the nickname Big Gretch, which the governor’s team insists that she “loves,” during the early months of the pandemic. But Whitmer’s reputation as a political force in Michigan goes back decades. Her parents, Richard and Sherry Whitmer, served, respectively, as the Republican head of the state’s Commerce Department and the Democratic assistant attorney general. Whitmer studied communications at Michigan State University in the hope of becoming a sports broadcaster. But after interning for a Democratic lawmaker in Lansing, she followed the same path as her parents: law school, then politics.

She spent six years in the Michigan state House, and another nine in the state Senate, four of them as minority leader. Back then, Democrats were used to being outnumbered, which meant that they were used to having to shout to be heard. And Whitmer was louder than anyone else. When a fellow Democrat was barred from speaking after using the word vagina on the house floor, Whitmer helped stage a performance of The Vagina Monologues on the steps of the state capitol. Once, during a debate, she chided her Republican colleagues until they told her that she was out of order. “Go ahead and gavel me!” she replied. “Her stuff got quoted more than anybody else,” Randy Richardville, a former Republican majority leader, told me. She was funny and direct. “I used to tell my people to stop watching her, stop listening, stop paying so much attention,” he said.

Many Americans first encountered Whitmer in 2013, when she revealed in a speech on the floor of the Michigan Senate that she had been raped in college. Republicans had been pushing for legislation to require women to buy a separate insurance policy to pay for abortions, including in the case of rape or incest. “I think you need to see the face of the women who you are impacting with this vote today,” Whitmer told her colleagues. The legislation passed anyway. But women from all over the state called to thank Whitmer for her honesty.

Even though Whitmer was viewed as liberal, she seemed to genuinely like her Republican colleagues. Richardville recalled a time when Whitmer was particularly angry about some piece of GOP legislation and was harsh with him on the Senate floor. Afterward, the two still met in his office for a drink. “We were kind of like those cartoons—the dog and chicken or whoever they are. They punch in and punch out at five,” Richardville said. Years later, when state Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, a Republican, said that Whitmer was “on the batshit-crazy spectrum,” she sent him a birthday cake decorated with the words Happy 65th BAT Day!

Whitmer announced that she was running for governor a few months after Trump’s election in 2016. Her slogan, “Fix the damn roads,” was folksy and charming, and in November 2018, a generally excellent year for Democrats, she was elected by almost 10 points. After her first year in office, she delivered the Democrats’ response to the president’s State of the Union address, in which she called out Trump’s bad behavior. “Bullying people on Twitter doesn’t fix bridges; it burns them,” Whitmer said. One month later, the coronavirus came to Michigan.

Eric Lee / The New York Times / Redux

Whitmer blocks her face as President Trump answers questions from reporters in the Oval Office last April.

Like other governors, Whitmer ordered residents to stay at home and schools to close as the virus spread. She felt comfortable criticizing Trump’s leadership from the start. “The federal government did not take this seriously early enough,” she said in a mid–March 2020 interview on MSNBC. In response, Trump urged Whitmer to “work harder.” A few days later, Whitmer doubled down on CNN. “I don’t want to be in a sparring match with the federal government,” she said. “But we are behind the eight ball because they didn’t do proper planning.” Soon, the president was on Fox News blasting Whitmer for complaining. He told reporters that he’d instructed Mike Pence, who was coordinating the federal and state pandemic response, not to call “the woman in Michigan.” On Twitter, Trump dubbed the governor “Gretchen ‘Half’ Whitmer.”

The situation in Michigan felt especially volatile. Whitmer extended the state’s stay-at-home order through April and initially issued restrictions that many Michiganders found ridiculous, including closing golf courses and outdoor garden centers. That month, 3,000 protesters descended on Lansing. “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” the president tweeted in support. Subsequent protests featured armed men loitering outside Whitmer’s office in the state capitol building. The governor faced personal scrutiny, too. After boating restrictions were lifted, her husband, Marc Mallory, tried to use their relationship to get his boat in the water before other people could. A year later, Whitmer was caught violating social-distancing rules with friends at a Lansing bar.

She apologized for some of those missteps. More important to liberals, she didn’t cower in the face of Trump’s attacks. “You said you stand with Michigan—prove it,” she tweeted at the president in March 2020, challenging him to send more masks and ventilators. She appeared on The Daily Show in the T-shirt printed with Trump’s quote, tweaked for a sharper effect: That Woman From Michigan. At the time, Democrats were desperate for heroes, and Whitmer quickly became one. “Big Gretch” merchandise began to appear in tchotchke shops alongside Nevertheless, she persisted mugs and Ruth Bader Ginsburg yoga mats. At one point during the pandemic, Robert De Niro called in to a Whitmer-administration finance meeting to show his support for the governor.

All of this attention seemed like it might add up to something, and by summer 2020, Whitmer was being vetted for vice president. She wasn’t sure about it at first, people familiar with her thinking at the time told me; she struggled to imagine herself as a creature of Washington, D.C. She got along well with Biden, though, and by the time he asked her to fly to Delaware for an in-person chat, she was ready to say yes. Biden didn’t ask. The moment called for a Black running mate, the former senior staffer for Whitmer told me, so he had to choose Kamala Harris. “But I think he wanted it to be Whitmer,” this person said. Asked to confirm, a former adviser to both Biden and Harris said that the assessment carried “some weight.”

Whitmer campaigned happily for the ticket, but behind the scenes she was dealing with a nightmare. Earlier in the summer, the head of her security detail had sat her down in the sunroom of the governor’s residence and offered an urgent update: A group of men tied to a militia group called the Wolverine Watchmen, outraged over her COVID restrictions, was plotting to kidnap and possibly kill her. For the next several weeks, federal and state officials monitored the group as it staked out Whitmer’s multiple residences. Publicly, the governor said nothing. Finally, in early October 2020, the agents had collected enough evidence to arrest the men and foil the plot.

On October 8, Whitmer delivered a steely televised address, calling the men “sick and depraved.” In an article for this magazine, she unloaded on Trump, writing that “his violent rhetoric puts leaders across the country in danger.” During an interview on Meet the Press, she had a small sign reading 86 45, an apparent reference to removing Trump from office, visible in the background of her shot. (When Michigan Republicans accused the governor of calling for Trump’s assassination, a press aide for Whitmer said in a statement, “It’s pretty clear nobody in the Trump campaign has ever worked a food service job.”)

The situation shook Whitmer and her family. Her husband had received so many threats at his dental practice that he was forced to retire early. Her then-teenage daughters, Sydney and Sherry, refused to return to the family’s summer cottage in Elk Rapids, one of the locations staked out by the plotters. In Lansing, $1 million in security upgrades, including a perimeter fence, were installed around the governor’s mansion.

Madeleine Hordinski for The Atlantic

Whitmer’s teleprompter at the Detroit Auto Show

As Michigan emerged from the pandemic, Whitmer was winning again. She was reelected by a huge margin in the 2022 midterms, during which voters also approved a measure to make abortion a constitutional right and state Democrats got their first governing trifecta in nearly 40 years. With their new power, they repealed right-to-work legislation and made breakfast and lunch free for all public-school students, among other accomplishments. The national buzz around Whitmer was growing louder, and Whitmer didn’t shut it down. She filmed a viral social-media campaign that featured a Barbie doll named Lil Gretch zooming around Lansing in a pink convertible, wrote True Gretch, and launched a political-action committee to recruit and train candidates. “People frickin’ loved her,” one Democratic state lawmaker recalled.

But around the same time, some people in Michigan began to detect a change in the governor. Local journalists and state lawmakers who’d been accustomed to watching Whitmer banter with reporters and field unscreened questions from constituents noticed that she’d become less spontaneous and less accessible. Her already tight inner circle became tighter. Her team began giving news outlets notice of the governor’s schedule hours in advance, instead of days. “They never emerged from the lockdown, and they act like it,” partly because of the kidnapping threat, Chad Livengood, the politics editor of The Detroit News, told me. (A Whitmer spokesperson said that the governor maintains “very deep engagement” with state legislators, and that her office “implemented new security protocols” for the safety of Whitmer, her staff, and reporters.)

Livengood, who has covered Whitmer since she was in the state Senate, said that these days, the governor seems “so focused on trying to follow talking points and advisers that some of that old, jocular Gretchen Whitmer talk and haggling has kind of stopped.” One well-known cable-news host also told me that Whitmer’s aides have “a lot more desire to manage” her television appearances compared with other politicians’, which feels “out of whack” with Whitmer’s interpersonal skills.

It would be understandable if the threats had made the governor more circumspect; many Michiganders were—and remain—angry about the way that she handled COVID. “There’s a heightened awareness now that I didn’t have before,” Whitmer writes in her memoir. In one of our interviews, she elaborated. “I think I’m still processing it,” she told me. “I’ve had to have my guard up for so long in such a personal and serious way, that, you know, I’m trying to just let my guard down and be me.” Some of Whitmer’s would-be kidnappers are in prison; other accused conspirators were acquitted. One of them has filed paperwork to run for governor. “It’s a strange place to be in,” she said.

Whitmer’s new reticence also coincided with a quickly deteriorating political environment for Democrats. By 2024, they were struggling to make progress on many of Whitmer’s stated priorities, including paid family leave and government-transparency reforms. Some state lawmakers blamed themselves. Others were frustrated with Whitmer. “There was no vision,” Mark Brewer, a former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, told me. “Someone had to lead, and she didn’t.”

To some observers, Whitmer seemed to have made the calculation that, because little was happening in the Michigan legislature, she might as well pivot to national politics. Lots of Democrats hoped it meant that the governor was angling to replace Biden on the 2024 ticket. But Whitmer never wavered in her support for the 81-year-old incumbent—even after his calamitous June debate against Trump. (Although Whitmer did not endorse Harris for 24 hours after Biden dropped out of the race, the governor insists that she was not thinking of challenging her. “I wanted to take a beat and get the lay of the land,” she told me. “It had to be” Harris, she added, because “Joe Biden took so long to make a different decision.”)

The election was devastating for Whitmer, bringing both a Republican resurgence in Michigan that ended her party’s trifecta and a sweeping Trump victory. During speaking engagements, the governor likes to tell crowds that she dealt with the disappointment by watching all eight seasons of the TV show Dexter—“A serial killer to lift your spirits!”—before getting back to work.

This also appears to be the moment when Whitmer decided to try something new with Trump. The kidnapping plot might have given her a heightened sense of awareness and changed her relationship with the press. But now came the strategic recalibration. “When I was ready to reengage, after a brief break, I had done the analysis,” she told me. “This president just got reelected. My own state helped put him in the White House again. I’ve got two years. What am I going to do with these two years?”

Sarah Rice / Redux

Whitmer takes the stage at a Detroit campaign event for Kamala Harris in September 2024.

Whitmer made her intentions clear right away. On the day of Trump’s inauguration, she wrote the president a letter congratulating him and praising his recent words of support for the auto industry. She also included her personal cellphone number and invited Trump to call her if he needed anything. In her State of the State address the next month, Whitmer offered a new declaration of purpose: “I am not looking for fights,” she told Michiganders. “My north star has always been collaboration.”

Whitmer began to set up White House meetings with Trump—she’s had three so far, compared with only one during his entire first term in office. They have discussed an array of Michigan-centric issues—emergency aid after an ice storm, a proposed semiconductor plant, a request for new fighter jets at Michigan’s Selfridge Air National Guard base. Which brings us to the moment that has probably played like a Chaplin-esque silent projection inside the governor’s brain for the past 12 months: One afternoon in April, Whitmer went to the White House with Matt Hall, the new Republican speaker of the Michigan House. She and Hall were expecting a private meeting with the president, but instead, a White House staffer ushered them into an Oval Office full of reporters. They spent the next hour positioned beside Trump as he signed executive orders related to his 2020-election lies. When a camera turned to Whitmer, she covered her face with a pair of blue folders.

Basically everyone knew it had been a setup. “She got sucked into some bullshit,” Tommy Stallworth, a Democratic former state lawmaker and a senior adviser to Whitmer, told me. (Hall defended Trump, telling me that the president had decided to merge events to save time.) But for some Democrats, the photo became an instant symbol of the party’s feckless response to Trump—and another crack in the Big Gretch persona. Unlike in Zohran Mamdani’s later visit to the White House, when the New York City mayor-elect seemed to charm Trump with his confidence, Whitmer looked helpless. The folder moment showed that Whitmer “is not the badass with these great political instincts that you’ve been led to believe,” one prominent national Democratic Party strategist told me. “I love Gretchen Whitmer,” Brewer said. “But oh my God.” (Months later, in an article dubbing Whitmer “Trump’s favorite Democrat,” Politico reported that the governor autographed a copy of the photo for Trump the next time she visited. She also brought him a mocked-up newspaper celebrating how potential federal investments could deliver a “historic jobs boom” for Michigan, as well as a flag and a bullet from Selfridge.)

To the extent that Whitmer has criticized the president in his second term, she’s kept her comments soft and a little vague. “There is room for her to be a louder voice, particularly because so many folks have gotten accustomed to hearing from her,” former Michigan Democratic Party Chair Lavora Barnes told me. At the Detroit Auto Show earlier this year, for example, Whitmer defended the Trump-maligned United States–Mexico–Canada trade agreement without mentioning the president directly: “We cannot and we should not—as some have said—we cannot and should not abandon it.” Whitmer did not issue a statement in the days after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis. When I asked the governor why, she said, “I do not need to put out an official Gretchen Whitmer statement on every single thing that happens, because all I’d be doing is putting out press statements every day.” Two weeks later, after Customs and Border Protection agents fatally shot Alex Pretti, Whitmer quickly released an official statement saying that “the violence must stop” without referring to Pretti directly.

Even though the governor has taken some action when state residents have been threatened by ICE, she has at times been slow to do so, including in a case in which state Republicans were eager to help, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

Whitmer seems to have concluded that she can do more with her remaining time in office through conciliation than through confrontation. The past year shows “that you can’t be too cautious with Trump, and you have to choose your battles very carefully,” Julie Brixie, a Democratic state lawmaker in Michigan, told me. “Governor Whitmer has done a great job of that.” Kansas Governor Laura Kelly, a friend of Whitmer’s, told me that states are more at risk in Trump’s second administration, which is why she figures that the approach Whitmer and her team “took in the first term cannot be the approach that they take in the second.”

In some ways, Whitmer’s new posture is working. After her Oval Office visits, the president agreed to provide some emergency aid to Michigan, and to supply new planes for Selfridge. Notably, the National Guard has not yet been unleashed on Detroit. And even though ICE agents have conducted immigration-enforcement operations in the state, they haven’t made it a special target. Whitmer believes that she has set an example for other leaders, including Mamdani, a democratic socialist, to visit the White House and work with the president.

At least some of Whitmer’s constituents seem to appreciate this. Whitmer’s visit to the diner in Detroit took place a few days after Good was killed. As Whitmer greeted a group of elderly patrons, she alluded vaguely to the violence in Minnesota. “Crazy things happening out there,” she said, before adding, “We’ve gotta keep that from happening in Michigan.” One woman nodded and replied, “That’s why you gotta keep the channel of communication open.”

It’s not clear how long this strategy will succeed. Trump could change his mind at any moment about the new fighter jets for Selfridge, which aren’t set to arrive until 2028. Whitmer’s much-desired semiconductor plant fell through, thanks to tariffs and a shift in federal policy. “I don’t think it’s worked,” Brewer said of Whitmer’s closeness with Trump. “He’s given us a few trinkets.”

Last May, the president even dangled the possibility of pardoning some of the men involved in the kidnapping plot. When the governor learned this, she told me, she called Trump, who seemed to believe that the men had been treated unfairly. “I said, ‘No, Mr. President, they had trials, and this is very serious,’” Whitmer told him, before following up with a letter urging Trump not to go through with the pardons. So far, Trump has stood down. But “nothing is written in stone,” Whitmer acknowledged. (When I reached out to the White House for a response to this and a number of other questions, an official said in an email that Whitmer and Trump “have a friendly relationship and are willing to work together to get things done for the people of Michigan, whom the President loves!”)

Madeleine Hordinski for The Atlantic

Whitmer at the Clique, in Detroit, in January

If Whitmer runs, her work-with-Trump strategy could double as a 2028 campaign platform. She wouldn’t say so directly, but some of her allies did. “Every social-media liberal believes that silence means complicity,” John Anzalone, Whitmer’s pollster and a Democratic strategist, told me. “Silence is sometimes just really fucking smart.”

Whitmer, who has less than a year left as governor, told me that a presidential campaign isn’t something that she’s “gearing up for.” And many Michigan Democrats think she isn’t interested, perhaps partly because of the 2020 threats against her. It’s also conceivable that, by trying to be as inoffensive as possible, Whitmer is positioning herself as the ideal vice-presidential candidate.

But the governor doesn’t seem to have ruled out a run of her own. A nonprofit group supporting her has raised millions of dollars and hired some of her former aides. While I was reporting this story, the governor attended a fundraiser and a book talk in Florida and a PAC event in Wisconsin. She launched a Substack where she plans to expound on the path forward for Democrats. And like several other would-be presidential candidates, she spoke at this year’s Munich Security Conference, though she kept her comments Michigan-focused and, somewhat perplexingly, seemed unprepared to answer foreign-policy questions.

The affirmative case for a Whitmer campaign goes like this: Right now, Democrats might want leaders who thirst for combat, but their appetites will change. Other Democratic governors have won the “mess-with-Trump primary,” the consultant James Carville told me, but in two years, the president will be “the last person that the country’s gonna want to hear about.” By 2028, voters will want candidates who, like Whitmer, have prioritized action over ideology. In this second age of Trump, Democrats “need to prove that you can make democracy work, that you have delivered for people,” the Democratic political adviser Jennifer Palmieri told me. After Whitmer met with Trump in spring 2025, her approval rating soared—and popularity in Michigan isn’t a bad barometer for someone potentially seeking national office.

The problem with this theory is that, right now at least, Democrats are not looking for careful politicians. A large majority of Democratic voters believe that their leaders aren’t fighting hard enough against Trump and his policies, according to one 2025 survey from the Pew Research Center. In a crowded 2028 primary, Whitmer “will be starting from behind, and leaning very heavily on her record, and I don’t know if that’s enough when people are just so rabidly anti-Trump,” the Democratic pollster Adam Carlson told me. Even though many Democratic donors were excited about Whitmer’s potential as a candidate in 2024, there is no longer much enthusiasm, one prominent donor-adviser told me: “There is no badass energy to Gretchen Whitmer anymore.”

Whitmer seems at least a little concerned about this perception. Toward the end of our final conversation, at the diner, I asked the governor whether she was still comfortable embracing the nickname she’d earned during the pandemic. She seemed exasperated. She spoke for a while, repeating what she’d told me earlier about advocating for her state, and noted that none of her predecessors had managed to get a Selfridge deal. Then she turned back to my question. “I am Big Gretch. Big Gretch is me,” she said. “I’m always going to show up for the people of Michigan—even when it comes at the cost of myself.”

The Challenge the Artemis II Crew Gave the Rest of Us

2026-04-14T07:26:44-04:00

As a reporter covering NASA during the early 1980s, I quickly grew accustomed to close encounters with real-life space legends. All part of the job. But a chance sighting at the Kennedy Space Center one evening reminded me of the magic of leaving Earth.

I had just finished anchoring a broadcast of the space shuttle’s first nighttime launch along with Gene Cernan, the commander of Apollo 17 and the last man to leave his footprints on the moon. Gene regularly joined me to add his expertise and eloquence to our coverage. As we left the booth, he stopped, pointed skyward, and said, “Lynn, you see that spot there, the left eye of the man in the moon?” I looked up and nodded. Gene continued: “That’s where I landed.”

Whoa. That face was a real place. The man next to me had stood there. I couldn’t stop staring.

Last week, the goosebumps returned. At a moment that perfectly dovetailed with many Americans’ yearning for a personal mental-health day (just one?), Artemis II, the first moon-bound mission with humans since 1972, delivered an unusually emotional escape. The magic, this time, wasn’t just the smooth launch and the “perfect, bullseye splashdown,” as NASA’s Rob Navias commented, but the palpable awe radiating from four extraordinary Earthlings as they showed the rest of us what we were missing.

“You’d fall in straight to the center of the moon if you stepped in some of those,” the pilot Victor Glover reported about the vast field of craters, never seen before, that pockmark the other side of the moon. He described islands of light, valleys that looked like black holes. Our moon not only has a face; it has a spine.

Commander Reid Wiseman delivered a play-by-play of active meteoroid strikes on the lunar surface: “I saw two, and Jeremy [Hansen, the Canadian mission specialist,] has seen one,” Wiseman began; the science adviser Kelsey Young literally jumped out of her chair back at mission control. “Oh, Jeremy saw two.” These are valuable scientific observations—crucial information for future settlements on a celestial body with no atmosphere. But I couldn’t stop grinning either as Young smacked her forehead in delight.

The solar eclipse also provided invaluable data, thanks to the astronauts’ giant, magnified view as the moon blocked the sun. They reported subtle color nuances, photometry, and other details that might explain the evolution of the lunar surface. Understanding its origins could help us learn where we came from too, and, more important, where we are going. Or at least provide some answers to all those times we lay on the grass as kids and stared up into the night sky, wondering.

Wonder. It’s a hard experience to translate. And Commander Wiseman wasn’t shy about admitting that everything they’d seen had worn out his supply of adjectives. “Houston,” he radioed down, “if you could give me about 20 new superlatives in the mission summary for tomorrow, that will help my vocabulary out a bit.”

I’d never heard astronauts so candid, so uninhibited. Their excitement was profound, their enthusiasm contagious. When I emailed Marsha Ivins, a retired astronaut pal, to ask about her reaction to the mission, she admitted that when Integrity left the relative safety of Earth orbit—essentially flying without a net for anything requiring urgent attention—she had “one of those wonder/horror/amazement/buzzy/pride/respect-for-the-physics moments.” In other words: Ain’t science grand.

And what Artemis saw from Integrity (talk about a perfectly timed choice of name) is quickly rewriting the science books. It’s been a minute since we as a nation had a moment like this, in which our scientific prowess shone bright—a minute since we showed proper reverence for all those equations and computations and codes, the “little ones and zeroes,” as Cernan, an engineer, used to tell me. The facts that matter, that make you feel: Wow!

Ivins also reminded me, though, that Wow! works only when it’s put in motion by human beings. Don’t forget, she said, “the years of dedicated work the entire team has spent getting to these magical 10 days.”

Early on, the mission specialist Christina Koch was asked about living and working in a capsule about the size of a very large hot tub covered over with a seven-foot ceiling. It was so tight, Koch confessed, smiling, that even in the more spacious setting of microgravity, every movement was “a four-person activity.” This was not a complaint. They actually liked their group hugs. When Koch returned to Houston, she was asked to define the word crew. She didn’t hesitate: “a group that is in it all the time, no matter what, that is stroking together every minute, for the same purpose.” Then, in what I’d call a hopeful, if not generous, plea for global cooperation, she extended the metaphor to the rest of us. When she looked out the spacecraft’s windows and saw the home planet, she said, “Earth was just this lifeboat hanging, undisturbingly, in the universe … Planet Earth, you are a crew.”

If only.

People used to ask me why I liked covering the space program, and I never had to think twice: My other beat was politics, and it was more than satisfying to deal with individuals for whom spin described how a satellite moved when launched, not how to cover up a story. NASA is, of course, a public agency, and no journalist should ever give it a pass—should ever exonerate the deadly decisions and misguided management, for example, that led to the loss of 14 human beings in the hideous accidents that destroyed first Challenger, then Columbia. But today’s journalists seem, at least, to have a relationship with NASA management that’s strikingly different from that of their peers in other government agencies. With no media access of my own, I watched much of the activity on NASA’s TV feed, where the back-and-forth at press conferences was consistently cordial and sane. The questions ranged from tough to just informative, but no one on the podium belittled any reporter with a scornful slur. And almost every journalist bookended the question with a gracious “Thank you.”

I don’t know if this civility means that NASA is operating on its own planet, but I do find it appealing. And perhaps this concern—among the astronauts, between the crew and mission control, between the agency and the press—is how this very human mission accomplished so much. How four people traveled farther from their home planet than anyone, ever, and came back safely.

Maybe everyone was simply caught up in the seductive power of what the capcom Jacki Mahaffey teasingly called “moon joy.” The crew was smitten. They cooed openly about what they saw, about their families, about one another. Ground control was captivated. Management agreed.

“If you can’t take love to the stars, what are we doing?” Amit Kshatriya, the NASA associate administrator, asked at a press conference. “Like, why are we even going? That’s why we send humans instead of robots sometimes.”

That was, I repeat, a NASA official, speaking publicly. Love. Bring it on. Can the glow from this 10-day burst of joy possibly be sustained?

Maybe that’s not the right question. This mission humanized the moon. Now we should ask, can that glow ever reflect back on Earth?

The Looming College-Enrollment Death Spiral

2026-04-12T07:00:00-04:00

The “demographic cliff” is upon us. The number of teenagers graduating from American high schools peaked last year. It will begin declining this spring and keep falling steadily through at least 2041. The trend is more of a downward slope than an abrupt falloff, but the gradient is steep and represents a crisis to colleges dependent on filling classroom seats and dorm beds. The United States currently has about 4,000 colleges. According to a recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, about 60 are closing on average each year; that number could double in any given year if the bottom falls out of enrollment.

If the harm were only to the institutions forced to close because they’re running out of customers, that would be unfortunate but not tragic. But the causality runs in the other direction too, as students who otherwise would have gone to college find themselves with no viable option in the place where they live. American higher education has long consisted of two markets: one where high-achieving, typically affluent students compete for seats at national universities, and one where mostly middle- and lower-income students stay closer to home. Members of the first group will be fine even as college closures accelerate. The second group will suffer. After many decades of democratization, higher education could once again become a luxury good.

Over the past half century, as more teenagers have enrolled in higher education, what was once mostly a local business has become national, especially for top students, whose sense of distance has gradually shifted. Campuses that once felt far away now seem closer, thanks first to interstate highways, then to discount airlines, and then to technology. Parents in the 1980s might have talked to their college kid on a dorm-floor pay phone once every few weeks, if they were lucky. Today’s parents can text and FaceTime their kids multiple times a day.

Even so, roughly half of students at four-year colleges still attend one within 50 miles of home. The result is a market divided into two: one built on national brands that attract high-performing students from everywhere, and another that serves a local and regional population of place-bound students. Those two markets have hardened in recent years. Applications to the roughly five dozen campuses that accept fewer than 20 percent of applicants have skyrocketed, from nearly 800,000 two decades ago to more than 2.35 million today. This is largely why the admissions process feels so much more competitive to parents who went to college in the ’80s and ’90s. The pool of top students hasn’t grown that much. What’s changed is that the top students from Los Angeles and Chicago and Atlanta and Buffalo are now applying to the same schools, where the size of the freshman classes have barely budged since the ’70s. And each student is applying to more of these schools.

[Rose Horowitch: The Harvard of the South … of the West?]

As they lost more and more local students to national universities, regional colleges found ways to stay afloat. They expanded access for underrepresented groups, added programs and amenities to attract students who might have skipped college otherwise, and partnered with the private sector to reach new markets online and internationally. For a long time, they could count on finding enough teenagers to fill their freshman class.

That era is over. Undergraduate enrollment nationwide has mostly been falling since 2011, even before the demographic cliff. Now, with fewer 18-year-olds in the pipeline, the enrollment machine at local and regional campuses is running out of fuel.

If you overlay a map of where colleges are located with projections of high-school graduates, you’ll notice an immediate disconnect with supply and demand. The Northeast and the Midwest have the highest density of college campuses but will also see some of the biggest declines in the number of high-school graduates by the 2040s. In all, 38 states are projected to see a drop in the number of graduates. Only 10, most of them in the South, will experience growth.

Unlike a Home Depot or a McDonald’s, colleges can’t simply relocate when the nearby population shrinks. “When local options start to disappear, it can start a downward spiral,” Nicholas Hillman, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies the geography of higher education, told me. Colleges come to resemble zombie malls with fewer majors and students, eventually ending up in a doom loop they can’t escape.

In 2022, Pennsylvania merged six schools in the 14-campus Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education into two new institutions. “We were built and operating as if we still had 120,000 students, when in reality we only had 85,000,” Daniel Greenstein, the former chancellor of the system who oversaw the merger, told me. The merger preserved some physical presence, but at a cost, Greenstein said. Students who wanted to be on a campus could be, but many advanced courses with small enrollments and specialized faculty would be offered solely online.

Such hybrid options might work for some place-bound teenagers, but online courses aren’t a replacement for most teenagers right out of high school. “If you’re an 18-year-old and can’t go the traditional route, you’re probably not going to choose a degree program of any kind,” Michael Koppenheffer, a vice president at EAB, an enrollment consulting firm, told me. Only about 16 percent of undergraduates ages 15 to 23 took classes for their entire degree fully online in 2019–20, the most recent numbers available from the Department of Education.

When local options for a campus-based experience disappear, so do students in higher education overall. The share of American teenagers enrolling in college after high school has dropped from a high of 70 percent in 2016 to 62 percent in 2022, the most recent year available. A lack of nearby options is one reason fewer high-school graduates are going straight to college, Hillman told me.

At the high school that I graduated from, in northeastern Pennsylvania, about 55 percent of graduates now go on to college. But the options around them have narrowed considerably since my childhood. The nearby Penn State campus is set to shut down in 2027, one of seven the university is closing around the state because of falling enrollment. Several neighboring private colleges also face financial challenges as they attract fewer students.

When enrollment falls, campuses shut down. And when campuses disappear, enrollment falls further, because the local students most likely to attend those institutions lose a nearby option. A vicious cycle emerges, and the worry is that the demographic cliff combined with campus closures will drive the number of college-going students only further downward. “When you close the campus, you lose the students who would have gone there,” Hillman said.

U.S. higher education is rooted in the nation’s founding and in the migration patterns that followed over the next two centuries. The spread of colleges into towns and cities across the country, which put a degree within reach of a growing share of the public, is one of the triumphs of postwar America. In the 1960s, Ohio’s governor, James Rhodes, outlined his vision of establishing a college within 30 miles of every resident and set about building regional campuses of large public universities across the state. He was mapping a future for a nation on the move, one with an ever-expanding higher-education system. We’re now at risk of the process playing out in reverse.

Don’t Just Replace Chavez—Rethink Monuments

2026-04-14T07:30:00-04:00

Almost every day, I drive along a street named after Cesar Chavez, past a mural of Cesar Chavez that shows the labor leader, who died in 1993, clutching the billowing flag of the United Farm Workers with one arm and a group of anonymous laborers with the other. For years, I’ve been struck by the work’s ardent theatricality: Chavez appears sturdy and powerful, whereas the figures look like they’ve fainted. In Los Angeles, where I live, Chavez is everywhere. Within a mile of that mural are two others. A multitude of municipal sites, both grandiose and mundane, bear his name. The transfer station downtown where I wait for the bus is named for Chavez. So is a city park in San Fernando, on the northern fringes of L.A., where a naturalistic bronze statue always looked as if it was about to break into a rally speech.

I now look on those tributes with horror and dismay. Late last month, The New York Times published an investigation that detailed harrowing allegations of sexual abuse by Chavez, including the grooming and assault of minors. Chavez’s longtime colleague Dolores Huerta alleged that he had raped her. The response has been swift: Statues, monuments, and murals of Chavez have been obscured or removed—including the bronze in San Fernando, which was wrapped up and carted away the day after the Times story ran. California lawmakers also scrapped a state holiday in his honor, replacing it with the more inclusive “Farmworkers Day.” For now, Chavez’s name still clings to libraries, schools, and streets. But this difficult process highlights all of the ways in which memorializations of the farmworker movement have missed the mark. The focus has frequently been on Chavez—at the exclusion of the many organizers and workers who helped make the UFW’s campaigns to raise working standards a success. No movement is built by one man alone.

The reassessment of Chavez coincides with a volatile debate over public memorials and the forms they take. We live in a reactionary moment: The Trump administration has resuscitated a monument to a Confederate general in Washington, D.C., and installed a statue of Christopher Columbus on the White House grounds, while generally promoting a vision that prizes the heroic and the classical. (Think: man on a plinth.)

But this is also a time when communities and designers are radically reimagining what a monument can be. In 2022, a project honoring the Navajo Nation dispensed with the usual statuary in favor of hiking trails woven around Dinétah, the territory that marks the traditional Navajo (Diné) homeland. “Some monuments are not entities that we as humans have to build,” the artist and curator Sháńdíín Brown wrote of the project, “but something that the creator has already gifted to us.” The removal—and possible replacement—of tributes to Chavez will be fraught; it will also open up possibilities.

No matter what happens next, Chavez’s vanishing profile leaves a gap that won’t be easily filled. A 2021 study published by Monument Lab, a nonprofit research-and-design studio, showed that among the top-50 historical figures most frequently honored with memorials in the United States, there is not a single U.S.-born Latino. The highly visible Chavez has therefore been an important symbol around which to rally. “He’s part of the iconography of the 1960s,” Eric Avila, a cultural historian who teaches at UCLA, told me. “Bobby Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X—there is this canon of people we study as symbols of different social movements and symbols of that time in American history. And for Mexican Americans, Chavez became that figure.” Chavez’s fall from grace feels especially shocking today, when policy makers are targeting immigrants, and violent ICE raids are a staple of social media. “It hurts to think about the victims,” Avila said. “It also hurts to think about this gaping absence in the iconography of a movement.”

[Read: The dethroning of Cesar Chavez]

As the memorials come down, some people have called for replacing images of Chavez with those of Huerta. Muralists in L.A. and Philadelphia have already done so on existing artwork, painting over the disgraced leader with depictions of his former colleague. Huerta has publicly stated that she doesn’t want streets and buildings named after her, and that memorials should instead focus on “UFW martyrs, organizers, farmworkers, and families who sacrificed everything to build something bigger than any one person.” Huerta deserves her flowers—she was an important coordinator of the nationwide boycotts that made the UFW effective. But she’s right. Now is the moment to reconceive such tributes entirely.

And that begins with asking the right questions. “It’s not just who is deserving of a monument, but how do we commemorate, and how do we reflect history to its fullest capacity?” Paul Farber, the director of Monument Lab, told me. “If you have a vision of power that is expansive, collective, from the ground up, you will see the need to make monuments not just to the singular figure, but to put that figure in the context of how they were elevated.”

AAron Ontiveroz / The Denver Post / Getty

The bust of Cesar Chavez after its removal from Cesar Chavez Park in Denver, Colorado last month.

Substituting one bronze for another does not necessarily achieve that. In fact, it might even perpetuate the elisions of the past. The 1965 Delano grape strike, for example—an event that helped spark the modern farmworker movement in California’s Central Valley—wasn’t led by Chavez and the UFW; it was organized by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, a union made up primarily of Filipino workers and led by the Filipino organizer Larry Itliong. Also crucial to the history of the movement was the work of Bert Corona, the founder of the activist group Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, which fought for the rights of undocumented workers—something the UFW initially resisted. (At one point, Chavez even launched an “Illegals Campaign” that encouraged union members to report “wetbacks” to immigration authorities.)

Organizers such as Corona and Itliong should certainly be remembered. (In 2024, a park in Delano was named for the latter activist, a belated recognition.) And communities will likely continue to erect tributes to such individuals, because personal histories are powerful tools for storytelling. But even those types of monuments can be designed in ways that incorporate other stories. The bronze statue of Chavez in San Fernando, for example, was accompanied by a mural that featured workers and other activists.

“Especially when we’re talking about labor and social movements,” Farber said, “how do you make room for more protagonists?” This question should be asked more broadly. Martin Luther King Jr. is the fourth-most-popular subject of monuments in the U.S., according to the Monument Lab audit; he is a potent symbol of the collective fight for Black civil rights. Yet in many places, he is depicted alone. King deserves to be honored for his work. But in focusing exclusively on him, the designers of those tributes have left out the other activists who made his gains a reality—including Bayard Rustin, who helped plan the 1963 March on Washington. A memorial based on the great-man theory of history is a tale only half told.

[Read: The real fight for the Smithsonian]

There are elegant ways to pay tribute to groups of people. Maya Lin’s groundbreaking Vietnam Veterans Memorial, unveiled in 1982—a minimalist, V-shaped black-granite wall cut into the land—sought to honor not an individual soldier or general but all of the war dead. (It’s powerful not just for what it does—listing names—but for what it is: a scar on the earth.) More recently, a pair of remarkable monuments to labor have taken like-minded approaches. Completed in 2020, the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, at the University of Virginia, consists of an austere granite circle, open on one end. Carved within are the names of those who were forced to work at the institution; for people whose name remains unknown, a small line cut into the granite creates a record of their existence. And at Bryn Mawr College, outside Philadelphia, a 2025 design by Nekisha Durrett transformed a campus courtyard into a site of remembrance. The work consists of looped footpaths with paving stones that bear the names of the Black people who once labored at the college. The paths echo underground servant tunnels to which those workers’ travels were often confined. At night, some of the stones are illuminated from within, creating a sparkling, lantern effect. There are also monuments that push at the boundaries of what a monument is: the Ireichō, which first went on view in 2022, is a book that contains the name of every person of Japanese ancestry incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II.

In 2012, President Obama traveled to Keene, California, to announce the creation of Cesar E. Chavez National Monument, which protects the bucolic 116-acre site in the Tehachapi Mountains where the UFW once maintained its headquarters. Known as La Paz, it is where Chavez is buried and his office preserved, complete with its original furnishings. It’s also—chillingly—where some of the sexual abuse is reported to have taken place. Less than a week after the Times published its exposé, two Republican senators, John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy, introduced a bill to close the park.

A better tactic would be to reimagine the monument to tell a more complete story about the farmworker movement—and about Chavez. “It’s a super complicated story, and the complexities have been glossed over,” Avila said. “It’s a good thing that we are reckoning now with the real history, which is not as pretty as we would like it to be. But that’s what history is.” In this case, the history is ongoing; farmworkers still face low pay and punishing working conditions aggravated by climate change, often laboring through toxic wildfires and extreme heat. The movement was—and is—much bigger than Chavez. It’s time the monuments caught up to that vision.

The Slow, Quiet Demise of American Romance

2024-12-03T08:00:00-05:00

After Donald Trump’s reelection, a lot of women were angry: at the result, at what Trump’s return to office could mean for their lives, and at the many people who voted for him—especially the men. In the ensuing days, some of these women began suggesting, half-jokingly or in total earnest, a radical kind of recourse: a sex strike.

Many of them cited South Korea’s 4B movement, in which women responding to what they describe as a damaging patriarchal culture have renounced not only sex with men but also dating, marriage, and childbirth. The idea of an American version drew a good deal of media attention—though not positive attention, for the most part. (“4B Is Not the Winning Strategy to Resist the Patriarchy People Think It Is,” a Time headline read.) It’s true that a 4B-style movement might never take off in the United States. For starters, it’s unclear what such a movement’s aim would be, or how it would effect political change here. (South Korea’s movement hasn’t exactly taken off either.) But a big shift is happening among straight American men and women—a parting of ways that began long before the election. Many people, perhaps women most of all, have been quietly turning away from heterosexual partnership.

As a reporter covering modern dating, I’ve spoken with a lot of men and women who have reluctantly given up the search for love. I believe that people can have rich, fulfilling lives with or without partners; I also know that courtship has never been easy. But research supports the idea that, in recent years, the United States has seen a particularly pronounced crisis of faith in romance. The Pew Research Center, in an analysis of census data, found that as of 2019, 38 percent of adults were unpartnered—that is, not married or living with a partner—compared with 29 percent in 1990. In a survey Pew conducted that same year, half of single adults said they were not seeking dates. When Pew divided that result by gender, it found that 61 percent of single men said they were looking to date or find a relationship while only 38 percent of single women said the same.

In other words, straight partnerships seem to be going out not with a 4B-style bang but with a whimper. And however subtle the shift might seem, it has huge implications for men and women: how they treat each other, whether they’re willing to trust each other, and how they’ll build their futures—together or apart.

Years ago, the business journalist Jon Birger was working at Fortune when he noticed a trend. The men he knew seemed to have no trouble dating; they were all either coupled up or content being bachelors. His female friends and colleagues, meanwhile, “seemed to have everything going for them” but couldn’t find partners, he told me. They shared horror stories about their dates that he could hardly believe. He wanted to know what was going on—so he went looking for answers.

That search resulted in his 2015 book, Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game. His main takeaway was that college-educated women were competing for a shrinking number of similarly educated men, and that given this “man deficit,” they were facing a demoralizing dating scene. Starting in the 1970s, the share of bachelor’s degrees awarded to men began to drop; more recently, the number of women enrolling in and completing college has surpassed the number of men to a significant extent. Many college-educated women look for partners who feel equal to them in terms of education or career ambitions—and simply can’t find them.

[Read: Why does romance now feel like work?]

But even if these women don’t prioritize dating a man with a degree or a prestigious job, many of the men without those credentials don’t want to date them. In the U.S. and elsewhere, Marcia C. Inhorn, a Yale anthropologist, told me, mainstream cultural tradition has encouraged women to engage in hypergamy: “marrying up to a slightly older man, somebody who’s more career advanced, makes more money.” Men, meanwhile, have tended toward hypogamy, marrying someone younger, less well off, and less academically accomplished. Those norms are still so ingrained that as more women have made advances at school and work, many men have held it against them. That women’s hard-earned achievements disadvantage them romantically is a dark irony.

Men are feeling penalized too. Daniel A. Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life, talked with young men while reporting his forthcoming book, Uncoupled, on the U.S. gender divide. Many discussed watching the women around them flourish, while the men themselves floundered. “If you look around the classroom,” Cox said, describing these men’s perspectives, “it’s their female peers who are killing it … They’re the leaders of all these clubs. They’re going to college at much higher rates. And then when they get to college, they’re doing much better.” Disparity in educational attainment is not men’s only point of grievance. They experience, for instance, higher rates of addiction and suicide, and report having fewer friends. Many men Cox has spoken with are aware of the ways some of their peers are faltering. At the same time, they’re hearing cultural conversations about “patriarchy and male advantage,” Cox told me, and they feel that those critiques are unfair coming from women they see as succeeding spectacularly.

[Read: Misogyny comes roaring back]

But those formidable young women aren’t having a good time either. Cox has heard from girls in high school whose boyfriends pressured them into sending nude photographs, which he said then got “passed around like trading cards.” He has heard from women who are constantly afraid of being sexually assaulted, or who find that the men they date always seem to expect sex but don’t seem interested in having a conversation. Inhorn similarly noted that in her discussions with women, “there was a lot of grimness, just about the way men treated women … a sort of gender despair.” Cox has found that both women and men believe that their gender disadvantages them. When so many men feel underappreciated and so many women feel mistreated, it creates a vicious cycle of resentment.

Dating complete strangers probably doesn’t help—yet that’s how most people do courtship these days. The anonymity provided by apps precludes accountability: No mutual friends will find out if you acted like a jerk on a date. Birger told me that this can result in even worse behavior from some college-educated men, who might feel emboldened by having numbers on their side. (“Lopsided gender ratios turn some nice guys into monsters,” he wrote in Date-onomics, describing men who promised to text back and never did, who insulted women’s bodies, who cavalierly dumped people they were fond of because they were confident they could find other great options.) And without input from shared acquaintances—useful context for personality quirks, or reasons to empathize with someone else’s views—both men and women might be more likely to make snap judgments after only a date or two, and walk away.

[Read: The people who quit dating]

They might be quicker to judge based on political differences, for example—to see the other person as a proxy for a party or a principle, rather than as a complicated human being worth engaging in debate. A political gap between American women and men already existed before the election: Men have aligned more with the right and women with the left. In November, young voters seemed to diverge even more starkly based on gender. Cox told me he doesn’t believe that this will split a huge number of long-term couples. But he does think it will prevent a lot of new prospects from giving each other a chance.

For those seeking romance, political differences might only worsen what was already a dispiriting state of affairs: In Pew’s 2019 survey, 75 percent of respondents said that finding a date in the past year had been difficult, and 67 percent said that their dating life wasn’t going well. Among the people who said dating had gotten harder in the past 10 years, women were twice as likely as men to say that it now involved more risk—both physical and emotional. In 2022, Pew found that women were 9 percent less likely than men to report positive experiences with online dating.

As American women and men grow more discouraged, it’s not hard to imagine more straight people giving up on sex and dating—motivated not by allegiance to a cause or a group but by exhaustion and self-protection. If that happens, relationships, families, and communities will transform. In some ways, they’ve already started to.

Women, for instance, are freezing their eggs at growing rates. Many commentators have assumed that the trend is the result of women prioritizing their careers, but Inhorn has found that the large majority would have children sooner rather than later if they could; they’re simply struggling to find a co-parent. For her book Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs, she spent a decade interviewing more than 150 women undergoing the egg-freezing process, 82 percent of whom were single; of the 18 percent who were partnered, half felt that their relationship wasn’t stable enough for parenthood, and others did not believe that their partner was ready. Almost everyone’s reason for egg freezing, she told me, was “incredible frustration, sadness, anxiety surrounding partnership.” In fact, most women who freeze their eggs never use them, often because they don’t find a partner, Inhorn told me. Not everyone has the resources, the support, or, frankly, the desire for single parenthood.

[Read: Why are women freezing their eggs? Look to the men.]

Even if a withdrawal from relationships isn’t initially meant to be political, it can still become so, Rosanna Hertz, a Wellesley College sociologist and the author of Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice, told me. She refers to many “single by chance” mothers as “reluctant revolutionaries.” They end up on an unconventional life path only because the standard route—finding a heterosexual relationship and starting a family—didn’t work out, despite years of trying. (“They don’t get up one morning,” she told me, “and say, Gee, I’m sitting around in my pajamas. I think I’ll order sperm on the internet.”) But some connect with other women who have run up against similar challenges; then they begin to talk about their experiences publicly. And in this national moment, when pundits are panicking about low fertility and marriage rates, people who quit dating, opt out of parenthood, or have children on their own are making a political choice, whether they intend to or not.

Women should have every right to build a meaningful future that doesn’t require men, and if society is slowly moving to acknowledge that idea, you might call that a silver lining to the gender divide. But however well those alternative paths might work for some individuals, they’re unlikely to heal the societal gender rift. And they won’t change the fact that many straight men and women still want to find love. Cox, the author of Uncoupled, told me that when you survey people, the majority say they would like a long-term, stable relationship. “The sad part for me,” he said, “is that I don’t think there’s a fundamental shift in desire”—only in outcome. The sentiment he hears is “Ideally, this would not be my life,” but finding a partner is “too difficult. It’s too hard. And I’m having a lot of negative experiences that I just don’t want to have.”

When I mentioned that I’d been picturing straight American romance as disappearing with a quiet little whimper, he thought that sounded right. He also offered his own metaphor: a slow, almost-imperceptible shrug.

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The Yosemite National Park

1899-08-01T12:00:00-05:00

Of all the mountain ranges I have climbed, I like the Sierra Nevada the best. Though extremely rugged, with its main features on the grandest scale in height and depth, it is nevertheless easy of access and hospitable; and its marvelous beauty, displayed in striking and alluring forms, wooes the admiring wanderer on and on, higher and higher, charmed and enchanted. Benevolent, solemn, fateful, pervaded with divine light, every landscape glows like a countenance hallowed in eternal repose; and every one of its living creatures, clad in flesh and leaves, and every crystal of its rocks, whether on the surface shining in the sun or buries miles deep in what we call darkness, is throbbing and pulsing with the heartbeats of God. All the world lies warm in one heart, yet the Sierra seems to get more light than other mountains. The weather is mostly sunshine embellished with magnificent storms, and nearly everything shines from base to summit, — the rocks, streams, lakes, glaciers, irised falls, and the forests of silver fir and silver pine. And how bright is the shining after summer showers and dewy nights, and after frosty nights in spring and autumn, when the morning sunbeams are pouring through the crystals on the bushes and grass, and in winter through the snow-laden trees!

The average cloudiness for the whole year is perhaps less than ten hundredths. Scarcely a day of all the summer is dark, though there is no lack of magnificent thundering cumuli. They rise in the warm midday hours, mostly over the middle region, in June and July, like new mountain ranges, higher Sierras, mightily augmenting the grandeur of the scenery while giving rain to the forests and gardens and bringing forth their fragrance. The wonderful weather and beauty inspire everybody to be up and doing. Every summer day is a workday to be confidently counted on, the short dashes of rain forming, not interruptions, but rests. The big blessed storm days of winter, when the whole range stands white, are not a whit less inspiring and kind. Well may the Sierra be called the Range of Light, not the Snowy Range; for only in winter is it white; while all the year it is bright.

Of this glorious range the Yosemite National Park is a central section, thirty-six miles in length and forty-eight miles in breadth. The famous Yosemite Valley lies in the heart of it, and it includes the head waters of the Tuolumne and Merced rivers, two of the most songful streams in the world; innumerable lakes and waterfalls and smooth silky lawns; the noblest forests, the loftiest granite domes, the deepest ice-sculptured canons, the brightest crystalline pavements, and snowy mountains soaring into the sky twelve and thirteen thousand feet, arrayed in open ranks and spiry pinnacled groups partially separated by tremendous cañons and amphitheatres; gardens on their sunny brows avalanches thundering down their long white slopes, cataracts roaring gray and foaming in the crooked rugged gorges. and glaciers in their shadowy recesses working in silence, slowly completing their sculpture; new-born lakes at their feet, blue and green, free or encumbered with drifting icebergs like miniature Arctic Oceans, shining, sparkling, calm as stars.

Nowhere will you see the majestic operations of nature more clearly revealed beside the frailest, most gentle and peaceful things. Nearly all the park is a profound solitude. Yet it is full of charming company, full of God’s thoughts, a place of peace and safety amid the most exalted grandeur and eager enthusiastic action, a new song, a place of beginnings abounding in first lessons on life, mountain-building, eternal, invincible, unbreakable order; with sermons in stones, storms, trees, flowers, and animals brimful of humanity. During the last glacial period, just past, the former features of the range were rubbed off as a chalk sketch from a blackboard, and a new beginning was made. Hence the wonderful clearness and freshness of the rocky pages.

But to get all this into words is a hopeless task. The leanest sketch of each feature would need a whole chapter. Nor would any amount of space, however industriously scribbled, be of much avail. To defrauded town toilers, parks in magazine articles are like pictures of bread to the hungry. I can write only hints to incite good wanderers to come to the feast.

While this glorious park embraces big, generous samples of the very best of the Sierra treasure, it is, fortunately, at the same time, the most accessible portion. It lies opposite San Francisco, at a distance of about one hundred and forty miles. Railroads connected with all the continent reach into the foothills, and three good carriage roads, from Big Oak Flat, Coulterville, and Raymond, run into Yosemite Valley. Another, called the Tioga road, runs from Crocker’s Station on the Yosemite Big Oak Flat road near the Tuolumne Big Tree Grove, right across the park to the summit of the range by way of Lake Tenaya, the Big Tuolumne Meadows, and Mount Dana. These roads, with many trials that radiate from Yosemite Valley, bring most of the park within reach of everybody, well or half well.

The three main natural divisions of the park, the lower, middle, and alpine regions, are fairly well defined in altitude, topographical features, and vegetation. The lower, with an average elevation of about five thousand feet, is the region of the great forests, made up of sugar pine, the largest and most beautiful of all the pines in the world; the silvery yellow pine, the next in rank; Douglas spruce, libocedrus, the white and red silver firs, and the Sequoia gigantea, or “big tree,” the king of conifers, the noblest of a noble race. On warm slopes next the foothills there are a few Sabine nut pines; oaks make beautiful groves in the cañon valleys; and poplar, alder, maple, laurel, and Nuttall’s flowering dogwood shade the banks of the streams. Many of the pines are more than two hundred feet high, but they are not crowded together. The sunbeams streaming through their feathery arches brighten the ground, and you walk beneath the radiant ceiling in devout subdued mood, as if you were in a grand cathedral with mellow light sifting through colored windows, while the flowery pillared aisles open enchanting vistas in every direction. Scarcely a peak or ridge in the whole region rises bare above the forests, though they are thinly planted in some places where the soil is shallow. From the cool breezy heights you look abroad over a boundless waving sea of evergreens, covering hill and ridge and smooth-flowing slope as far as the eye can reach, and filling every hollow and down-plunging ravine in glorious triumphant exuberance.

Perhaps the best general view of the pine forests of the park, and one of the best in the range, is obtained from the top of the Merced and Tuolumne divide near Hazel Green. On the long, smooth, finely folded slopes of the main ridge, at a height of five to six thousand feet above the sea, they reach most perfect development and are marshaled to view in magnificent towering ranks, their colossal spires and domes and broad palmlike crowns, deep in the kind sky, rising above one another, — a multitude of giants in perfect health and beauty, — sun-fed mountaineers rejoicing in their strength, chanting with the winds, in accord with the falling waters. The ground is mostly open and inviting to walkers. The fragrant chambatia is outspread in rich carpets miles in extent; the manzanita, in orchard-like groves, covered with pink bell-shaped flowers in the spring, grows in openings facing the sun, hazel and buckthorn in the dells; warm brows are purple with mint, yellow with sunflowers and violets; and tall lilies ring their bells around the borders of meadows and along the ferny, mossy banks of the streams. Never was mountain forest more lavishly furnished.

Hazel Green is a good place quietly to camp and study, to get acquainted with the trees and birds, to drink the reviving water and weather, and to watch the changing lights of the big charmed days. The rose light of the dawn, creeping higher among the stars, changes to daffodil yellow; then come the level enthusiastic sunbeams pouring across the feathery ridges, touching pine after pine, spruce and fir, libocedrus and lordly sequoia, searching every recess, until all are awakened and warmed. In the white noon they shine in silvery splendor, every needle and cell in bole and branch thrilling and tingling with ardent life; and the whole landscape glows with consciousness, like the face of a god. The hours go by uncounted. The evening flames with purple and gold. The breeze that has been blowing from the lowlands dies away, and far and near the mighty host of trees baptized in the purple flood stand hushed and thoughtful, awaiting the sun’s blessing and farewell, — as impressive a ceremony as if it were never to rise again. When the daylight fades, the night breeze from the snowy summits begins to blow, and the trees, waving and rustling beneath the stars, breathe free again.

It is hard to leave such camps and woods; nevertheless, to the large majority of travelers the middle region of the park is still more interesting, for it has the most striking features of all the Sierra scenery, — the deepest sections of the famous cañons, of which the Yosemite Valley, Hetch-Hetchy Valley, and many smaller ones are wider portions, with level parklike floors and walls of immense height and grandeur of sculpture. This middle region holds also the greater number of the beautiful glacier lakes and glacier meadows, the great granite domes, and the most brilliant and most extensive of the glacier pavements. And though in large part it is severely rocky and bare, it is still rich in trees. The magnificent silver fir (Abies magnifica), which ranks with the giants, forms a continuous belt across the park above the pines at an elevation of from seven to nine thousand feet, and north and south of the park boundaries to the extremities of the range, only slightly interrupted by the main cañons. The two-leaved or tamarack pine makes another less regular belt along the upper margin of the region, while between these two belts, and mingling with them, in groves or scattered, are the mountain hemlock, the most graceful of evergreens; the noble mountain pine; the Jeffrey form of the yellow pine, with big cones and long needles; and the brown, burly, sturdy Western juniper. All these, except the juniper, which grows on bald rocks, have plenty of flowery brush about them, and gardens in open spaces.

Here, too, lies the broad, shining heavily sculptured region of primeval granite, which best tells the story of the glacial period on the Pacific side of the continent. No other mountain chain on the globe, as far as I know, is so rich as the Sierra in bold, striking, well-preserved glacial monuments, easily understood by anybody capable of patient observation. Every feature is more or less glacial, and this park portion of the range is the brightest and clearest of all. Not a peak, ridge, dome, canon, lake basin, garden, forest, or stream but in some way explains the past existence and modes of action of flowing, grinding, sculpturing, soil-making, scenery-making ice. For, notwithstanding the post-glacial agents—air, rain, frost, rivers, earthquakes, avalanches—have been at work upon the greater part of the range for tens of thousands of stormy years, engraving their own characters over those of the ice, the latter are so heavily emphasized and enduring they still rise in sublime relief, clear and legible through every after inscription. The streams have traced only shallow wrinkles as yet, and avalanche, wind, rain, and melting snow have made blurs and scars, but the change effected on the face of the landscape is not greater than is made on the face of a mountaineer by a single year of weathering.

Of all the glacial phenomena presented here, the most striking and attractive to travelers are the polished pavements, because they are so beautiful, and their beauty is of so rare a kind, — unlike any part of the loose earthy lowlands where people dwell and earn their bread. They are simply flat or gently undulating areas of solid resisting granite, the unchanged surface over which the ancient glaciers flowed. They are found in the most perfect condition at an elevation of from eight to nine thousand feet above sea level. Some are miles in extent, only slightly blurred or scarred by spots that have at last yielded to the weather; while the best preserved portions are brilliantly polished, and reflect the sunbeams as calm water or glass, shining as if rubbed and burnished every day, notwithstanding they have been exposed to plashing, corroding rains, dew, frost, and melting sloppy snows for thousands of years.

The attention of hunters and prospectors, who see so much in their wild journeys, is seldom attracted by moraines, however regular and artificial-looking; or rocks, however boldly sculptured; or cañons, however deep and sheer-walled. But when they come to these pavements, they go down on their knees and rub their hands admiringly on the glistening surface, and try hard to account for its mysterious smoothness and brightness. They may have seen the winter avalanches come down the mountains, through the woods, sweeping away the trees and scouring the ground; but they conclude that this cannot be the work of avalanches, because the stri show that the agent, whatever it was, flowed along the around and over the top of high ridges and domes, and also filled the deep cañons. Neither can they see how water could be the agent, for the strange polish is found thousands of feet above the reach of any conceivable flood. Only the winds seem capable of moving over the face of the country in the directions indicated by the lines and grooves.

The pavements are particularly fine around Lake Tenaya, and have suggested the Indian name Py-we-ack, the Lake of the Shining Rocks. Indians seldom trouble themselves with geological questions, but a Mono Indian once came to me and asked if I could tell him what made the rocks so smooth at Tenaya. Even dogs and horses, on their first journeys into this region, study geology to the extent of gazing wonderingly at the strange brightness of the ground, and pawing it and smelling it, as if afraid of falling or sinking.

In the production of this admirable hard finish, the glaciers in many places exerted a pressure of more than a hundred tons to the square foot, planing down granite, slate, and quartz alike, showing their structure, and making beautiful mosaics where large feldspar crystals form the greater part of the rock. On such pavements the sunshine is at times dazzling, as if the surface were of burnished silver.

Here, also, are the brightest of the Sierra landscapes in general. The regions lying at the same elevation to the north and south were perhaps subjected to as long and intense a glaciation; but because the rocks are less resisting, their polished surfaces have mostly given way to the weather, leaving here and there only small imperfect patches on the most enduring portions of cañon walls protected from the action of rain and snow, and on hard bosses kept comparatively dry by boulders. The short, steeply inclined canons of the east flank of the range are in some places brightly polished, but they are far less magnificent than those of the broad west flank.

One of the best general views of the middle region of the park is to be had from the top of a majestic dome which long ago I named the Glacier Monument. It is situated a few miles to the north of Cathedral Peak, and rises to a height of about fifteen hundred feet above its base and ten thousand above the sea. At first sight it seems sternly inaccessible, but a good climber will find that it may be scaled on the south side. Approaching it from this side you pass through a dense bryanthus-fringed grove of mountain hemlock, catching glimpses now and then of the colossal dome towering to an immense height above the dark evergreens; and when at last you have made your way across woods, wading through azalea and ledum thickets, you step abruptly out of the tree shadows and mossy leafy softness upon a bare porphyry pavement, and behold the dome unveiled in all its grandeur. Fancy a nicely proportioned monument, eight or ten feet high, hewn from one stone, standing in a pleasure ground; magnify it to a height of fifteen hundred feet, retaining its simplicity of form and fineness, and cover its surface with crystals; then you may gain an idea of the sublimity and beauty of this ice-burnished dome, one of many adorning this wonderful park.

In making the ascent, one finds that the curve of the base rapidly steepens, until one is in danger of slipping; but feldspar crystals, two or three inches long, that have been weathered into relief, afford slight footholds. The summit is in part burnished, like the sides and base, the stri and scratches indicating that the mighty Tuolumne Glacier, two or three thousand feet deep, overwhelmed it while it stood firm like a boulder at the bottom of a river. The pressure it withstood must have been enormous. Had it been less solidly built, it would have been ground and crushed into moraine fragments, like the general mass of the mountain flank in which at first it lay imbedded; for it is only a hard residual knob or knot with a concentric structure of superior strength, brought into relief by the removal of the less resisting rock about it, — an illustration in stone of the survival of the strongest and most favorably situated.

Hardly less wonderful, when we contemplate the storms it has encountered since first it saw the light, is its present unwasted condition. The whole quantity of postglacial wear and tear it has suffered has not diminished its stature a single inch, as may be readily shown by measuring from the level of the unchanged polished portions of the surface. Indeed, the average postglacial denudation of the entire region, measured in the same way, is found to be less than two inches, — a mighty contrast to that of the ice; for the glacial denudation here has been not less than a mile; that is, in developing the present landscapes, an amount of rock a mile in average thickness has been silently carried away by flowing ice during the last glacial period.

A few erratic boulders nicely poised on the founded summit of the monument tell an interesting story. They came from a mountain on the crest of the range, about twelve miles to the eastward, floating like chips on the frozen sea, and were stranded here when the top of the monument emerged to the light of day, while the companions of these boulders, whose positions chanced to be over the slopes where they could not find rest, were carried farther on by the shallowing current.

The general view from the summit consists of a sublime assemblage of iceborn mountains and rocks and long wavering ridges, lakes and streams and meadows, moraines in wide-sweeping belts, and beds covered and dotted with forests and groves, — hundreds of square miles of them composed in wild harmony. The snowy mountains on the axis of the range, mostly sharp-peaked and crested, rise in a noble array along the sky to the eastward and northward; the gray-pillared Hoffman spur and the Yosemite domes and a countless number of others to the westward; Cathedral Peak with its many spires and companion peaks and domes to the southward; and a smooth billowy multitude of rocks, from fifty feet or less to a thousand feet high, which from their peculiar form seem to be rolling on westward, fill most of the middle ground. Immediately beneath you are the Big Tuolumne Meadows, with an ample swath of dark pine woods on either side, enlivened by the young river, that is seen sparkling and shimmering as it sways from side to side, tracing as best it can its broad glacial channel.

The ancient Tuolumne Glacier, lavishly flooded by many a noble affluent from the snow-laden flanks of Mounts Dana, Gibbs, Lyell, Maclure, and others nameless as yet, poured its majestic overflowing current, four or five miles wide, directly against the high outstanding mass of Mount Hoffman, which divided and deflected it right and left, just as a river is divided against an island that stands in the middle of its channel. Two distinct glaciers were thus formed, one of which flowed through the Big Tuolumne cañon and Hetch Hetchy Valley, while the other swept upward five hundred feet in a broad current across the divide between the basins of the Tuolumne and Merced into the Tenaya basin, and thence down through the Tenaya cañon and Yosemite Valley.

The maplike distinctness and freshness of this glacial landscape cannot fail to excite the attention of every observer, no matter how little of its scientific significance he may at first recognize. These bald, glossy, westward-leaning rocks in the open middle ground, with their rounded backs and shoulders toward the glacier fountains of the summit mountains and their split angular fronts looking in the opposite direction, every one of them displaying the form of greatest strength with reference to physical structure and glacial action, show the tremendous force with which through unnumbered centuries the ice flood swept over them, and also the direction of the flow; while the mountains, with their sharp summits and abraded sides, indicate the height to which the glacier rose; and the moraines, curving and swaying in beautiful lines, mark the boundaries of the main trunk and its tributaries as they existed toward the close of the glacial winter. None of the commercial highways of the sea or land, marked with buoys and lamps, fences and guideboards, is so unmistakably indicated as are these channels of the vanished Tuolumne glaciers.

The action of flowing ice, whether in the form of river-like glaciers or broad mantling folds, is but little understood as compared with that of other sculpturing agents. Rivers work openly where people dwell, and so do the rain, and the sea thundering on all the shores of the world; and the universal ocean of air, through unseen, speaks aloud in a thousand voices and explains its modes of working and its power. But glaciers, back in their cold solitudes, work apart from men, exerting their tremendous energies in silence and darkness. Coming in vapor from the sea, flying invisible on the wind, descending in snow, changing to ice, white, spiritlike, they brood outspread over the predestined landscapes, working on unwearied through unmeasured ages, until in the fullness of time the mountains and valleys are brought forth, channels furrowed for the rivers, basins made for meadows and lakes, and soil beds spread for the forests and fields that man and beast may be fed. Then vanishing like clouds, they melt into streams and go singing back home to the sea.

To an observer upon this adamantine old monument in the midst of such scenery, getting glimpses of the thoughts of God, the day seems endless, the sun stands still. Much faithless fuss is made over the passage in the Bible telling of the standing still of the sun for Joshua. Here you may learn that the miracle occurs for every devout mountaineer, for everybody doing anything worth doing, seeing anything worth seeing. One day is as a thousand years, a thousand years as one day, and while yet in the flesh you enjoy immortality.

From the monument you will find an easy way down through the woods and along the Big Tuolumne Meadows to Mount Dana, the summit of which commands a grand telling view of the alpine region. The scenery all the way is inspiring, and you saunter on without knowing that you are climbing. The spacious sunny meadows, through the midst of which the bright river glides, extend with but little interruption ten miles to the eastward, dark woods rising on either side to the limit of tree growth, and above the woods a picturesque line of gray peaks and spires dotted with snow banks; while, on the axis of the Sierra, Mount Dana and his noble compeers repose in massive sublimity, their vast size and simple flowing contours contrasting in the most striking manner with the clustering spires and thin-pinnacled crests crisply outlined on the horizon to the north and south of them.

Tracing the silky lawns, gradually ascending, gazing at the sublime scenery more and more openly unfolded, noting the avalanche gaps in the upper forests, lingering over beds of blue gentians and purple-flowered bryanthus and cassiope, and dwarf willows an inch high in close-felted gray carpets, brightened here and there with kalmia and soft creeping mats of vaccinium sprinkled with pink bells that seem to have been showered down from the sky like hail, — thus beguiled and enchanted, you reach the base of the mountain wholly unconscious of the miles you have walked. And so on to the summit. For all the way up the long red slate slopes, that in the distance seemed barren, you find little garden beds and tufts of dwarf phlox, ivesia, and blue arctic daisies that go straight to your heart, blessed fellow mountaineers kept safe and warm by a thousand miracles. You are now more than thirteen thousand feet above the sea, and to the north and south you behold a sublime wilderness of mountains in glorious array, their snowy summits towering together in crowded, bewildering abundance, shoulder to shoulder, peak beyond peak. To the east lies the Great Basin, barren-looking and silent, apparently a land of pure desolation, rich only in beautiful light. Mono Lake, fourteen miles long, is outspread below you at a depth of nearly seven thousand feet, its shores of volcanic ashes and sand, treeless and sunburned; a group of volcanic cones, with well-formed, unwasted craters rises to the south of the lake; while up from its eastern shore innumerable mountains with soft flowing outlines extend range beyond range, gray, and pale purple, and blue, — the farthest gradually fading on the flowing horizon. Westward you look down and over the countless moraines, glacier meadows, and grand sea of domes and rock waves of the upper Tuolumne basin, the Cathedral and Hoffman mountains with their wavering lines and zones of forest, the wonderful region to the north of the Tuolumne cañon, and across the dark belt of silver firs to the pale mountains of the coast.

In the icy fountains of the Mount Lyell and Ritter groups of peaks, to the south of Dana, three of the most important of the Sierra rivers—the Tuolumne, Merced, and San Joaquin—take their rise, their highest tributaries being within a few miles of one another as they rush forth on their adventurous courses from beneath snow banks and glaciers.

Of the small shrinking glaciers of the Sierra, remnants of the majestic system that sculptured the range, I have seen sixty-five. About twenty-five of them are in the park, and eight are in sight from Mount Dana.

The glacier lakes are sprinkled over all the alpine and subalpine regions, gleaming like eyes beneath heavy rock brows, tree-fringed or bare, embosomed in the woods, or lying in open basins with green and purple meadows around them; but the greater number are in the cool shadowy hollows of the summit mountains not far from the glaciers, the highest lying at an elevation of from eleven to nearly twelve thousand feet above the sea. The whole number in the Sierra, not counting the smallest, can hardly be less than fifteen hundred, of which about two hundred and fifty are in the park. From one standpoint, on Red Mountain, I counted forty-two, most of them within a radius of ten miles. The glacier meadows, which are spread over the filled-up basins of vanished lakes and form one of the most charming features of the scenery, are still more numerous than the lakes.

An observer stationed here, in the glacial period, would have overlooked a wrinkled mantle of ice as continuous as that which now covers the continent of Greenland; and of all the vast landscape now shining in the sun, he would have seen only the tops of the summit peaks, rising darkly like storm-beaten islands, lifeless and hopeless, above rock-encumbered ice waves. If among the agents that nature has employed in making these mountains there be one that above all other deserves the name of Destroyer, it is the glacier. But we quickly learn that destruction is creation. During the dreary centuries through which the Sierra lay in darkness, crushed beneath the ice folds of the glacial winter, there was a steady invincible advance toward the warm life and beauty of to-day; and it is just where the glaciers crushed most destructively that the greatest amount of beauty is made manifest. But as these landscapes have succeeded the preglacial landscapes, so they in turn are giving place to others already planned and foreseen. The granite domes and pavements, apparently imperishable, we take as symbols of permanence, while these crumbling peaks, down whose frosty gullies avalanches are ever falling, are symbols of change and decay. Yet all alike, fast or slow, are surely vanishing away.

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.

The Atlantic’s May Cover: Caity Weaver Finds the Best Free Restaurant Bread in America

2026-04-14T08:15:33-04:00

“Here is the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow: At some point within this text, I will reveal to you what—after 555 responses, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of monomaniacal research—I have determined to be the best free restaurant bread in America. I will not attempt to slither to the moral high ground, arguing that best is a meaningless measure, or insisting that all bread is dear in its own way. Even if you attempt to betray me—for instance, by merely scanning the text that follows for the phrase Here it is: the best free restaurant bread in America—I will uphold my end of the bargain.”

In The Atlantic’s May cover story, staff writer Caity Weaver takes readers on a delightful and poignant journalistic quest––and takes no prisoners along the way––to reveal to America the truly perfect free restaurant loaf within its midst. This was a question that dogged Weaver on dinners out with her husband, enjoying what she considered at the time to be the best free bread: “It seemed incredible, but also possible, that this really could be the best free restaurant bread in America. What if it was? Even more dizzyingly, what if it wasn’t? What if—unfathomable—someone else was giving away an even better bread for free? The thought drove me crazy. I begged for the opportunity to investigate.”

Over the course of many months, Weaver pursued this mission: “How would I determine the best free restaurant bread in America? Simple: I would ask every single person I encountered, ‘What is the best free restaurant bread in America?’; travel to the most likely candidates; and try the bread myself.” She writes about the highs (ordering all 16 loaves offered as part of a $525 tasting meal at Joël Robuchon in the MGM Grand Las Vegas) and the accessible (her family’s eternal favorite, Red Lobster’s Cheddar Bay Biscuits). Weaver grouped those she asked into three categories: the truly happy in life who can immediately rattle off their favorite bread; those who can’t or won’t be bothered to think of a single free bread they’ve enjoyed; and those who feel too much pressure to answer the question. She writes: “I am astonished that only a minority of people can summon an answer quickly. My mental filing cabinet devoted to cataloging free restaurant breads is one of the largest and most scrupulously maintained in my neocortex; I’ve discarded the contents of other filing cabinets (‘Visuospatial Reasoning,’ ‘First Aid’) to make room for it. What occupies the free-bread space in others’ minds?”

Caity Weaver’s “I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America” was published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests.

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Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | The Atlantic
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Photos: Hungarians Cheer Orbán’s Loss

2026-04-13T12:31:29-04:00

Reuters

A drone view shows people gathering to celebrate across the River Danube from the Parliament building, following the partial results of the parliamentary election, in Budapest, Hungary, on April 12, 2026.

Denes Erdos / AP

A man waves a Hungarian flag as he celebrates in the streets after the announcement of partial results of the Hungarian parliamentary election in Budapest on April 12, 2026.

Jakub Porzycki / Reuters

Péter Magyar, the Tisza-party candidate for Hungarian prime minister, greets supporters in Budapest after he won the parliamentary election on April 12, 2026.

Attila Husejnow / SOPA Images / Reuters

Supporters of the Tisza party hold up glowing torches and light tubes during an election-night rally in Budapest on April 12, 2026.

Denes Erdos / AP

Young supporters celebrate in Budapest early on April 13, 2026, after Péter Magyar’s Tisza party defeated Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in the country’s parliamentary elections.

Jaap Arriens / Sipa USA / Reuters

Revelers are seen in the streets of Budapest on April 13, 2026, as thousands gathered after closing polls pointed to a victory for the Tisza opposition party. Last year, drone footage of zebras running on a luxury estate owned by a wealthy friend of Viktor Orbán’s turned into a rallying image, with the zebras becoming symbols of corruption under Orbán’s government.

Attila Husejnow / SOPA Images / Reuters

Supporters of the Tisza party hold up glowing torches and light tubes during the election-night rally in Budapest on April 12, 2026.

Ferenc Isza / AFP / Getty

Supporters of the Tisza party celebrate during election night on the banks of the River Danube with the Parliament building in the background, on April 12, 2026.

Attila Husejnow / SOPA Images / Reuters

Tisza-party supporters celebrate, holding glowing torches and light tubes in Budapest on April 12, 2026.

Balint Szentgallay / Reuters

Prime Minister–Elect Péter Magyar delivers a speech in Budapest on April 12, 2026, after winning the general election.

Sean Gallup / Getty

Joyful revelers greet one another in an underground metro station as they celebrate the resounding Tisza-party win in Hungarian parliamentary elections on April 12, 2026, in Budapest.

Sean Gallup / Getty

One of a group of celebrants in an underground metro station gives a thumbs-down while showing live video of the concession statement of Hungarian Prime Minister and Fidesz-party leader Viktor Orbán on April 12, 2026, in Budapest.

Elisabeth Mandl / Reuters

People celebrate in a metro station following partial results on the day of the Hungarian parliamentary election in Budapest, April 12, 2026.

Lisi Niesner / Reuters

People gather to celebrate across the River Danube from the Parliament building, following the partial results of the parliamentary election, in Budapest, Hungary, on April 12, 2026.

Three Changes Wrought by the Iran War

2026-04-13T12:29:42-04:00

The fragile cease-fire between the United States and Iran marks the beginning of the end of this conflict—and it leaves behind three key changes to the Middle East.

First, the regional and global economic effects of this war will be profound, lasting, and largely negative. Although the United States, blessed with natural resources, is better positioned to weather the effects of this war than most countries in Europe or Asia, everyone will feel the pain for years to come.

Second, the political and security situation of the Persian Gulf is much worse than it was six weeks ago—and that is true, incredibly, of all parties involved in the conflict. Iran might be the closest thing to a winner in this war, but it will not feel that way to most Iranians, who have taken an almighty beating.

Third, this marks the end of a remarkable era of Israeli military adventurism that began in response to the traumatic Hamas attacks and massacres of October 7, 2023. The U.S.-Israeli defense relationship, as well, is likely headed for a dramatic rethink by Democrats and Republicans alike.

[Read: Iran out-trolled the troller in chief]

The war will affect the American and global economies in ways that most Americans still do not yet understand. Even if the shooting stops today, the Arab Gulf States will need to spend the next several years rebuilding infrastructure, while also rearming. The ripple effects of those rebuilding and rearmament efforts will be felt throughout the American economy. Money from the Gulf has fueled many of the investments in artificial intelligence over the past few years, both through direct investments in start-ups and through indirect placements in U.S.-based venture-capital funds. Now the sovereign-wealth vehicles of the Gulf will likely need to deploy more capital at home, curtailing investments abroad.

We’re only just starting to feel the inflationary effects of this war. Even if the Strait of Hormuz were to open up tomorrow—and President Trump is now vowing to impose his own blockade—the price of jet fuel, diesel fuel, and countless petroleum by-products and petrochemical feedstocks will remain elevated for the better part of the next year. Countries will also be refilling their strategic reserves, further reducing the supply available to consumers. Companies across the world are panicking about potential shortages of everything from helium to fertilizer.

Some of the oil-and-gas infrastructure that has been destroyed in this conflict will take years, not months, to rebuild. Unlike pipelines, which are relatively easy to fix, the downstream gathering, liquefaction, and processing infrastructure that Iran has targeted features purpose-built components using exotic metallurgy for which there are no off-the-shelf replacements. The Iranian strikes on the Qatari liquefied-natural-gas facilities at Ras Laffan, for example, will likely take approximately 4 percent of the world’s LNG offline for at least the next three years.

Integrated air and missile defenses have also been depleted. I have criticized the way in which the Arab Gulf States have built—or, more often than not, failed to build—independent military capabilities. Indeed, you would think, given how dependent the Gulf economies are on moving oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz, that they would have acquired some moderately capable naval forces of their own by now. Alas, they have not.

But their investment in integrated air and missile defense systems since the conclusion of the Gulf War in 1991 has certainly paid off. Those systems have performed well, but they are expensive—orders of magnitude more expensive than the Iranian rockets and missiles they are designed to counter—and will need to be replenished. The Arab Gulf States will also need to invest in new ways to counter Iranian drones, against which the U.S. military has also struggled. In many ways, the past few weeks have represented the last easy drone war. The next war will almost certainly feature swarms of semi-autonomous drones that could rapidly overwhelm current defenses.

The political and security situation in the Gulf following this war is somehow worse for each party in the conflict. Iran has been horribly bloodied. We cannot know what kinds of pressures the Iranian leadership will be under in the months ahead as it seeks to rebuild its shattered economy. For now, though, the Iranian regime is intact and emboldened, and it will be determined both to replenish its conventional armaments and to accelerate its nuclear-weapons program—a nightmare for the world.

If Iran is now able to determine what flows through the Strait of Hormuz, the war will have been a total strategic disaster for the United States and its regional partners. Remember, the strait was open prior to the conflict. The war itself—instigated by the United States and Israel—was what led Iran to hold shipping through the strait hostage. Iran might even have doubted its ability to do so prior to this conflict. But as it turns out, Iran didn’t need to physically block the strait; it could effectively halt maritime traffic by making any ships passing through uninsurable. Other countries will now need to reckon with Iran’s ability to shut down the strait at will.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will figure out a way to work around the new choke point. Indeed, the national oil companies in both countries—Aramco and ADNOC, respectively—deserve a lot of credit for the midstream infrastructure investments they each made prior to the conflict that have allowed them to weather the fighting. But for Iraq, Kuwait, and Qatar, which are all in tougher geographic positions, the functional closure of the strait is catastrophic.

Yet, incredibly, despite the U.S. failures in this campaign, it’s hard not to imagine that the Gulf will be more dependent on the United States going forward. It has no good alternatives. Russia has had no meaningful ability to project power beyond its borders since 2022, and China has shown no interest in taking on the security burdens that the United States has shouldered in the region. Security cooperation between the United States and the Gulf States will, against all odds, deepen in the decade to come.

The same cannot be said for the security relationship between the United States and Israel. The past six weeks will likely prove to be the high-water mark in the relationship between the two countries. And the era of Israeli military adventurism, which has weakened all of Israel’s immediate adversaries yet left Israel feeling more anxious than ever, is surely at an end.

Iran—Israel’s truly mortal enemy—has always threatened Israeli and U.S. interests in three different ways: through its nuclear program, conventional rocket and missile arsenal, and support for proxy forces and regimes.

Working alongside the United States, Israel has managed to severely degrade each of these three threats. Hamas and Hezbollah are shadows of their former selves. The Assad regime, in Syria, is no more. The Houthis and Iraq’s Shiite militias have been cowed into something approaching quiescence. The nuclear program—although far from “obliterated,” as Trump likes to say—has nonetheless been knocked back at least a year. And Iran’s air and missile defenses have been hit hard, while its arsenal of missiles and rockets has been reduced.

Yet despite these battlefield successes, even the most hawkish Israelis will understand that the very real and rising tide of anti-Semitism across the globe does not fully explain why Israel finds itself so alone. They will understand, even if grudgingly, the world’s horror at the tens of thousands of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Iranian civilian casualties in the wars they have waged over the past three years.

And they will grasp, as well, the role that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has played in his nation’s isolation. He is, for younger Americans, synonymous with the Israeli state. And his behavior over the years toward both Republican and Democratic leaders—which now includes encouraging a president to pursue a wildly unpopular war—is a big reason a majority of Americans under the age of 50, from both parties, now dislike Israel. Many Israelis and supporters of Israel in the United States hope that the elections in October will finally sweep him from power.

[Read: The forgotten war that Iran already won]

But Netanyahu’s removal alone will not repair relations between the United States and Israel. Last week, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for an end to U.S. military support for Israel. Within the decade, that will likely be the Democratic Party’s official position.

In 2016, when I was a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration, I helped negotiate the last 10-year memorandum of understanding between the United States and Israel, granting $3.8 billion annually in U.S. tax dollars. Even then, I heard complaints and questions from peers in the administration who wondered why we were providing so much assistance to such a wealthy country—and one whose leader had spent the previous eight years condescending to and undermining our president.

Despite the wars since 2023, Israel’s economy has grown only more vibrant over the past decade. One of the biggest drivers behind the Abraham Accords—a genuine diplomatic achievement by the first Trump administration—was the promise to unlock Gulf investment in Israel’s dynamic technology sector. So why, Americans will ask, are we subsidizing the Israeli economy? In addition, the sales of U.S. arms to Israel were meant to guarantee, as Israel and its defenders always assured us, that Israel would never ask America to fight its wars. Yet many Americans believe that is precisely what has happened over the past two and half years.

Netanyahu himself has said that Israel should end its dependence on U.S. military support—which, as he correctly foresees, is likely to be turned into a source of leverage by future administrations. The United States and Israel will continue to work together on the development and production of advanced weapons, such as integrated air and missile defenses. But this war marks the end of the Israeli-U.S. defense relationship as it has existed in recent decades.

The Most Important Thing Dave Chappelle Ever Did Was Walk Away

2026-04-13T09:43:04-04:00

Editor’s note: This article is a response to K. Austin Collins’s review “Who Is Black Comedy For?,” which focused on Black Out Loud: The Revolutionary History of Black Comedy From Vaudeville to ’90s Sitcoms, an excerpt of which you can read here.

My book Black Out Loud started, like most books do, with a feeling I couldn’t shake—one that took hold when In Living Color first aired in the early 1990s and that, as I’ve written previously, only deepened. K. Austin Collins reviewed my book, which traces that history from vaudeville forward, and I’ve been sitting with his take. He’s a serious critic, and the review deserves an honest conversation. Let me start with what he got right.

Collins argues that because I ended my book with Chappelle’s Show and framed the entire history of Black comedy as a march toward crossover fearlessness, I left out something essential: the comedy that never wanted to cross over at all. Def Comedy Jam. BET’s ComicView. Paul Mooney. Patrice O’Neal. Katt Williams. Tyler Perry’s House of Payne, which quietly became the longest-running Black sitcom in television history while most of the critical establishment wasn’t paying attention. These are real omissions, and I want to be straight with you about that: Every book has a frame, and frames always cost you something. What mine cost me was the full weight of Black comedy that thrived entirely on its own terms, answerable only to Black audiences and no one else.

But here’s where I’d push back—and I want to do it carefully, because Collins is making a subtler argument than it might first appear. He writes that I err in “holding up the era of crossover appeal as the apex of Black comic achievement.” And he frames the choice to dwell on 1990s network sitcoms as a choice to gauge Black comedy’s progress “in terms that are not always those of Black comedians themselves.” That’s a serious charge, and it deserves a serious answer.

First, the factual question: Does the book actually hold up the crossover era as an apex? I don’t think it does. And it certainly wasn’t what I intended. My chapter on Family Matters includes the story of when Jaleel White, the actor who played Steve Urkel on the show, sits in a UCLA lecture hall and hears a teaching assistant call him a modern-day Sambo. White didn’t argue back, he said in his own memoir, because he felt he couldn’t entirely dismiss the critique. My Living Single chapter ends with Erika Alexander describing what happened after that show was canceled: no development deals waiting, no industry safety net, just “back to pilot season”—as if five seasons of a top-rated show had never happened. The book doesn’t read those moments as proof that the American experiment worked. It reads them as evidence of how contingent the whole thing always was.

But Collins’s deeper point isn’t really about whether I celebrate the ’90s uncritically. It’s about the frame itself—about what it means to use network television as your primary lens at all. When Collins writes that “the promise has always been contingent—you can tell jokes about race, but …,” he is identifying something that runs through the entire history I tried to tell. The ellipsis is doing real work there. You can tell jokes about race, but not if they make white audiences too uncomfortable. You can have your own show, but not if it doesn’t appeal to white viewers. You can be Richard Pryor, but only if you eventually show up in buddy comedies with Gene Wilder. The condition attached to Black visibility in mainstream American entertainment has almost never been lifted entirely. It’s just been renegotiated, generation by generation, at significant personal, artistic, and cultural cost.

Collins is right that I tell that story mostly from inside those negotiations. What I’m less willing to concede is his implication that telling it from inside is the same as endorsing the terms of the deal. Consider what the book actually shows about the ’90s-sitcom era. Living Single was built by a 27-year-old Black woman who had to fight her network to keep a central character they found “too strong.” A Different World was transformed into something vital and resonant only after a Black woman, Debbie Allen, seized creative control of it and refused to let NBC flatten it back into safer territory. In Living Color existed as long as Keenen Wayans could hold Fox at arm’s length—and when he couldn’t, he walked. These are not stories about the American experiment succeeding. They are stories about Black artists extracting space from institutions that were always trying to take it back.

The real disagreement between Collins and me, I think, is about whether those extractions matter—whether they belong in the center of a history of Black comedic achievement or whether centering them concedes too much to the institutions agnostic to that achievement (though happy to profit off of it). Collins believes, or at least implies, that the more radical tradition is the one that never bothered negotiating with those institutions at all—that the real fearlessness is in the work that was never asking for a seat at the table. I have deep respect for that argument. I’ve watched enough Katt Williams to know it isn’t wrong.

But I keep coming back to something Keenen Wayans said about why he took In Living Color to Fox in the first place. He looked at Saturday Night Live—at what it had done for Eddie Murphy, at what it couldn’t do for Damon Wayans—and he thought: We could do this, on our own terms, for our people, on a platform large enough that it actually changes what’s possible. The goal wasn’t integration for the sake of integration, or to prove anything to white America. But it was, at least in part, to create permission for the comics who would come next, for the future writers and showrunners who were then watching from their dorm rooms and deciding what was possible for them. Yvette Lee Bowser toiled in the writers’ room of A Different World and decided she could create Living Single. Mara Brock Akil watched Living Single and decided she could create Girlfriends. That is not necessarily evidence that the American experiment is working—but it is evidence of Black artists using the proximity to power they’d fought for to build something that mattered to them, even if those creations were temporary.

Collins asks: What if fearlessness has nothing to do with white audiences or gatekeepers? I’d answer: Sometimes it doesn’t. And those comics and that tradition deserve their own full reckoning. But sometimes fearlessness is precisely the willingness to walk into the rooms that were designed to diminish you, take what you need, refuse to be diminished, and leave something behind for the next person who has to walk in after you.

That brings me to Chappelle, where Collins and I diverge most directly. He suggests that Chappelle’s most important contribution might not be the Netflix specials or the Prince sketch but the moment he turned to the camera and said, “This racism is killing me inside!” I’d go further: I think the most important thing Chappelle ever did was walk off the set entirely. Not because he rejected his audience, but because he refused to let the wrong audience define the work. That act of refusal is the direct descendant of every Black comedian I wrote about who chose integrity over the deal. Keenen Wayans leaving In Living Color when Fox moved to control it. Richard Pryor walking offstage in Las Vegas mid-set because he looked out at Dean Martin in the front row and didn’t recognize himself anymore. The willingness to stop is just as much the tradition as trailblazing in the first place.

Collins also invokes Dick Gregory’s late-in-life argument that Black entertainers were burdened by liberation expectations that white male entertainers never had to carry. It’s a powerful point, and Gregory was right. But Gregory himself spent decades making that burden visible—on stages, in marches, and in an autobiography that was anything but safe. The contradiction between what Gregory said and what Gregory did is itself part of the story I was telling: that the tension between public performance and private conviction is baked into this entire tradition, going back to the enslaved people who learned to mask their real feelings behind laughter.

Collins closes by asking what a truly revolutionary history of Black comedy would look like if it centered the comedy that never needed white approval. It’s the right question, and I hope someone writes that book. I mean that seriously. But I’d gently offer this: The fearlessness of the comics who built careers entirely within Black cultural spaces was made possible, in part, by the generations who fought for autonomy inside the mainstream institutions—and won enough of it to loosen the grip for everyone who came after. Those aren’t two separate histories. They’re the same one, told from different vantage points.

Black Out Loud is one vantage point. There are many others. What I’d ask readers—both those who’ve read the book and those who haven’t yet—is to consider whether the story I did tell holds up within the frame I chose. I believe it does. I also believe Collins has identified the limits of that frame, and I’m grateful for that. The comedy that lives beyond that frame deserves its own telling, with the same seriousness and depth. That’s the book I’d read next.