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The White House Freak-Out Over Natalie Harp

2026-08-20T20:05:00-04:00

You are reading this story only because the White House didn’t want you to.

I’ll explain. This past Sunday, Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia—who has become quite good at delivering viral campaign sound bites, slickly filmed by multiple cameras—unleashed a blistering indictment of President Trump’s leadership. Ossoff, a former documentary filmmaker who is generating 2028 buzz, denounced Trump’s handling of the Iran war this way: “While he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

It was a pithy and well-structured attack, but not so different from the broadsides delivered daily by Democrats on the campaign trail or on MS NOW. But one new word stood out: Natalie.

The line got a knowing laugh from a handful of observers in the room, and it electrified a subset of political obsessives on social media, who took to their favorite platforms and group chats with some version of “Oh, he went there!” or “I can’t believe he did that!” But although Ossoff’s aside resonated with the junkies, the majority of Americans likely had no idea who this Natalie woman was, and might never have given it another thought.

But then the West Wing lost its mind. And Trump did too. Their pushback was so overwhelming, so obviously coordinated, so ugly and personal that it became a story. The White House inadvertently created news, as well as a permission structure for even the most cautious, fact-based media organizations to take on the topic. Which is why the name Natalie Harp is now everywhere.

In Trump’s second term, his White House is populated by true believers. And no one believes more truly than Harp, whose devotion to Trump is unparalleled. A cancer survivor who credits the president with saving her life, the 35-year-old aide seems firmly glued to his side, an adoring smile stretched across her face. Harp has become an Oval Office gatekeeper, a ubiquitous travel companion, and one of only a few people with the keys to the president’s social-media account. She’s become one of the most unlikely powerful people in the administration—often seen in public but rarely heard from—and her presence has turned into a curiosity. Although she got some mentions in the press as well as in a new, best-selling book about Trump, Harp largely stayed out of the headlines even as she became the subject of Washington gossip and some West Wing grumbling.

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

But things changed because of a Turkish catering truck. The Washington Post reported last week that Harp was one of a handful of aides chosen to join Trump when he was furtively whisked off Air Force One at the Ankara airport earlier this summer because of Secret Service concerns about a threat from Iran. The questions were immediate: Why did this young aide, whose official responsibilities remain murky at best, hide with Trump in the truck as the president secretly boarded a different aircraft, even as the secretary of state and the secretary of the Treasury were left on board what became, in essence, a decoy plane? Just who is she, and what does she actually do? That chatter is likely what prompted Ossoff to name-drop Natalie. But it was the White House that pushed the story into the national discourse.

This White House rarely does things subtly—just look at all of the gold in the Oval Office or the maps depicting Canada as the 51st state. And when it comes to pushing back against a story aides don’t like, the two options are usually a) scorched earth or b) total obliteration. But even by that over-the-top standard, the outsize reaction was eyebrow-raising. Beyond some winking posts and passing mentions on cable-news shows, the story really wasn’t going anywhere until White House Communications Director Steven Cheung unleashed a flamethrower of a post on Monday morning, writing, in part, “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics. Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he’s a miserable person who hates this country.” Just a few minutes later, the White House spokesperson Davis Ingle chimed in with “Jon Ossoff is a cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama. Nobody gives a shit what this lightweight loser says.”

Well then! Suddenly, the story had life. A few hours later, the press pool was invited into the Oval Office for a photo op as Trump honored a heroic California lifeguard. The president prides himself on his accessibility to the media and took a few questions. Kristen Holmes of CNN asked, “Jon Ossoff said that you’d rather travel with your aide Natalie Harp and build the ballroom than do your job as president. What is your response?” Trump responded with his standard, 1980s-vintage insult about Ossoff—he called him “Pee-wee Herman”—and then, well, he proved the senator’s point by launching into a several-hundred-word defense of the ballroom. Later, he shushed Holmes as she tried to ask another question by snapping, “You’re a loud, boisterous person. You’re fake news. Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet.”

A short time later, the official White House Rapid Response X account went a step further, posting that Holmes was an “embarrassment to her alleged profession” and then, in a deeply personal attack, declaring, “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive.” The ugliness of the comment drew immediate pushback from CNN and other journalists, who defended Holmes.

Meanwhile, White House aides and Trump allies began an all-out shielding of Harp. One of the president’s sons defended her, as did a Cabinet member and a congresswoman. With some prodding from the White House, a whole bunch of conservative media members and MAGA influencers joined them, I was told by one of the people who’d received a nudge. (Ossoff, for his part, told MS NOW yesterday that Harp was fair game because “these White House staffers are adults, public officials paid by the taxpayer with immense power in positions of public trust.”)

If the goal was to shut down talk about Harp, it backfired spectacularly. Suddenly, media outlets that had ignored her felt the need to write about her. Questions about her security clearance came up, along with this one: When was the last time First Lady Melania Trump was seen in public anyway? (July 19, at the World Cup final.) And as more stories were written, West Wing aides got angrier, taking their cues from a furious president, two outside allies and a senior staffer told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to have that ire turned their way. “It’s rare to see them this worked up about anything,” one of the outside allies told me.

That furor, in a way, underlines Harp’s importance in Trump’s world. She is the president’s constant companion on Marine One, at Mar-a-Lago, and at summits across the world, those familiar with her position told me. They added that the president has described her to them as “my Natalie.” She’s also been nicknamed the “human printer” because she totes around a portable printer so she can, at any point, dash out a paper copy (Trump’s preferred form in which to read things) of a poll or a news story. She has learned his cadence—and unorthodox capitalizations—well enough to draft social-media posts for him to approve. She trawls social media for material that the president can use in his feeds, including posts that have led to trouble, such as one depicting the Obamas as apes. Some aides have quietly grumbled to those I spoke with that Harp is too inexperienced to have such unfettered access to the president.

Each item she prints, whether a positive poll of dubious origin or an attack on a political foe, reinforces Trump’s worldview. In Regime Change, a new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump is depicted explaining to people that Harp is the only aide who loves him as much as his family does. Haberman now says that Harp is Trump’s “human binkie.” Tales of Harp’s commitment to Trump are legion: She rode in the trunk of an SUV to accompany him to court. She sprinted across a golf course in Scotland so he wouldn’t be out of her sight. She left notes for the president that documented her intense devotion. And so on.

Ingle, the White House spokesperson, perhaps unsurprisingly reacted strongly when I asked for a comment about the matter, sending me a statement that read: “The media should get back to reporting real news and stop regurgitating Trump-Deranged liberal talking points.” And there is no expectation that, despite the whirlwind week, Harp’s role will change; a senior official told me that Harp was “upset by the unfair attention” but would not allow it to deter her from her duties. But those in the West Wing are bracing for more scrutiny. And, it just so happens, Melania Trump chose today to make an appearance in public.

“Good afternoon, I heard you missed me,” she told a Rose Garden crowd gathered for a foster-care initiative. “Here I am.”

From ‘Indispensable’ Ally to Target of Annihilation

2026-08-21T07:00:00-04:00

When the United States was looking for a way to talk to Iran about a nuclear deal more than a decade ago, it turned to Oman, asking the country to do something it had quietly done for years: make an impossible conversation possible. Because Washington and Tehran had no diplomatic relations, the U.S. felt that the most promising back channel to get a conversation started led through Muscat.

Iran was skeptical but willing to sit down with U.S. officials, provided there was some very particular diplomatic choreography. At Tehran’s request, Oman’s government found a room with multiple doors, so that American and Iranian officials would not be seen entering together. Omani officials took the head of the table, to create the impression that it was more than a bilateral conversation.

That session laid the groundwork for what ultimately became the 2015 nuclear pact. “Without Oman, I’m not sure there would be an Iran nuclear deal,” Jake Sullivan, one of the top U.S. officials involved in those talks, told me.

But today, that pact lies in ruins. President Trump tore it up, then went to war with Iran. Oman has watched its standing with Washington collapse too. Earlier this week, Trump threatened to “bomb the shit” out of the sultanate unless it did what America demanded—adding another longtime ally to the list of countries he has threatened to attack.

Oman, located on the southeastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, is often overshadowed by its wealthier, more conspicuous neighbors, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and by its more tumultuous neighbor, Yemen. Yet for decades, Oman punched above its weight diplomatically by serving as one of Washington’s most useful interlocutors in the Middle East, in part because it has maintained relationships with governments that Washington often cannot or will not talk to.

Trump has accused the sultanate of undermining his efforts to strike a deal with Iran and end the war, which began at the end of February and are now in a stalemate. The Strait of Hormuz, which is central to the conflict with Tehran, is also at the center of Washington’s dispute with Oman. The maritime corridor used to carry one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied-natural-gas supplies before the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran began and Tehran closed the strait to traffic through drone, small-boat, and mine attacks. Trump responded with a U.S. blockade, which remains in place even though the deadline for Washington and Tehran to reach an interim deal and set the stage for broader talks over Iran’s nuclear program expired earlier this week, showing no sign of a breakthrough.

Oman and Iran border opposite sides of the strait; their respective territorial waters meet in the 21-mile-wide choke point. The two countries have been in talks in recent weeks to restore commercial ‌shipping, which has dwindled to a trickle. Both countries have floated the idea of a service fee for passage through the strait, but other Gulf nations have objected. Trump has wavered on the issue, though Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said that the strait must return to being an open and free waterway. Trump has vowed to declare the strait a U.S. territory. He recently claimed that the strait was reopened and that mines and other hazards have been cleared. Shipping trackers continue to show a rate of passage dramatically below prewar levels.

Omani officials insist that charging for passage is within the country’s legal rights. When asked on Monday in the Oval Office whether he was out of patience with Oman, Trump told reporters: “No, I don’t think ⁠they behaved very well, but we’d handle them very easily, just like we do other things.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has separately threatened Oman with sanctions if Muscat facilitates fees for ships passing through the strait.

A U.S. official familiar with the deliberations told me that the administration views Oman’s handling of the negotiations as “dishonorable,” accusing Omani intermediaries of publicly portraying the two sides as nearing an agreement while privately conveying proposals to U.S. officials that the latter viewed as unacceptable. The official also accused Oman of delivering false statements to the press, which Omani officials deny. But this much is clear: The role that Oman used to play for Washington as a useful regional intermediary is over—at least as long as Trump remains in office.

The president’s anger presents an unusually awkward problem for Washington and for Muscat. Oman is not some distant neutral country that wandered into an American dispute. It has spent decades deliberately cultivating its relationship with Washington.

“Oman has decided its strategic importance is to be nonaligned the way Switzerland is nonaligned,” Jon Alterman, the chair in global security and geostrategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “It’s a relatively small, relatively poor place, surrounded by giants, and Oman has decided it will make itself indispensable to everyone—not because it helps everybody, but because it’s a place that can keep a secret and allows people to meet quietly and resolve conflicts.”

[Read: Trump’s new strategy of nothing]

Modern diplomatic relations between the United States and Oman date to 1972, but their history goes back much further. In 1833, President Andrew Jackson’s administration signed a Treaty of Amity and Commerce with Oman, then an important maritime power, as Washington sought to expand commercial ties in the region and protect American merchants operating in the Indian Ocean. An American consulate operated in Muscat from 1880 to 1915. In 1980, after the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Oman became the first Persian Gulf state to officially grant the U.S. access to its military facilities.

Oman doesn’t host a large, permanent American base like the Al Udeid Air Base, near Doha, the capital of Qatar. But Washington does have access to Omani military facilities and ports. In 2019, the two countries expanded that arrangement to include Duqm and Salalah, two key ports on the Arabian Sea, allowing American ships to operate and resupply outside the Gulf before entering the Strait of Hormuz.

Oman has also spent decades pursuing a foreign policy designed to maintain relationships across the region’s fault lines. It has good relations with Iran, maintains a security partnership with the United States, and has kept channels open to the Houthis, an Iranian-backed militia in Yemen. It has also maintained contact with Israel.

This is often described as Omani “neutrality,” though some of the sultanate’s regional neighbors believe that it favors Tehran. That has sometimes put Oman at odds with its fellow Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which view Iran as a major regional security threat. Oman declined to join the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen in 2015 and stayed out of the 2017 regional blockade of Qatar. Muscat also maintained channels to the Houthis, whom Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have long battled. One Saudi official I spoke with offered a skeptical assessment: “Oman’s definition of neutrality has been questionable.”

Oman rejects the idea that its connections to Iran, including its economic relationship with and ties to the Houthis, amount to complicity. Instead, it casts its ties as a relationship of economic and regional importance. Oman serves as an economic lifeline and reexport hub for Iran, absorbing trade activity that previously passed through the UAE. (The UAE announced this week that it is stopping all trade and financial transactions with Tehran.) Iran, meanwhile, supplies Oman with agricultural products and heavy materials.

A senior Omani diplomat I spoke with described neutrality as a practical necessity for a small state surrounded by larger powers. Oman, the official argued, gets criticized from all sides. “The Iranians will tell us, You’re being too soft on the West,” the official told me, while Western governments accuse Oman of being too soft on Iran. “And the Houthis will tell us we’re being too nice to the Saudis, and the Saudis will tell us we’re being too nice to the Houthis. It just goes with the territory.”

But Oman’s independence—its ability to talk to all sides, even if it irritates the others—is precisely what has made Muscat useful to successive American administrations.

Oman’s record as an intermediary is unusually long. The country has helped secure the release of American detainees held by Iran. It has also facilitated contacts involving Yemen. In early 2013, a small group of senior American officials quietly boarded a military plane bound for Oman. For years, John Kerry had been nurturing a diplomatic channel with Muscat, meeting secretly with Omani officials while he was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in hope of opening back-channel talks with Iran. As President Obama’s secretary of state, he gave the green light to dispatch top foreign-policy officials to Muscat, including then–Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Sullivan, who was serving as national security adviser to then–Vice President Biden.

Those talks helped form the basis for the 2013 interim nuclear agreement and, eventually, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. During the Biden administration, Muscat hosted the U.S. special envoy for Yemen, Tim Lenderking, and brokered his first direct contacts and message exchanges with Houthi representatives. Oman “wanted peace in Yemen, and they were willing to travel to Sanaa to meet with the Houthis and pass messages to Houthi leadership and exert their influence where they could to help us achieve a durable peace,” Lenderking, who is now a principal at the Washington-based law firm Squire Patton Boggs, told me. In 2025, the Trump administration again turned to Oman to host negotiations with Iran. Trump subsequently thanked Sultan Haitham bin Tariq, the country’s leader, for Oman’s role.

[Read: The art of the giveaway]

In addition to serving as an intermediary, Oman offers Washington military access and a stable partner near one of the world’s most important maritime choke points; Oman gets a powerful security partner while preserving the freedom to maintain its own relationships. But that bargain hinges on Oman’s independence.

Analysts told me that this is why the current rupture matters. If the U.S. wants Oman to function as an intermediary, it cannot simultaneously demand that Muscat adopt Washington’s preferred position toward Iran. The very quality that makes Oman useful—the ability to talk to everyone—can look like disloyalty.

That old paradox has now become a crisis. Oman says that it is trying to fulfill its obligations under international law and keep commercial shipping moving, including through Omani territorial waters. The Omani diplomat told me that the country’s lawyers believe that maritime fees can be lawful under international practice and that Oman has no intention of doing anything illegal.

Trump and his negotiators see the issue differently, particularly where any arrangement could give Iran greater control over shipping or legitimize Iranian fees in what Tehran could portray as a victory over its much more powerful nemesis. Other nations have stepped in to play crucial mediating roles in this conflict, thus far to no avail. But Muscat remains one of the few doors available to American negotiators. The difficult question now is whether Trump’s threats will finally slam it shut.

What’s Happening to the WNBA Isn’t Normal

2026-08-21T07:00:00-04:00

Let’s start with the good: The WNBA is more popular than ever. During the offseason, the league and the WNBA Players Association reached a landmark collective-bargaining agreement resulting in a 400 percent increase, on average, in player salaries. The average franchise valuation has soared 59 percent in the past year; the Golden State Valkyries were appraised at a league-high $850 million. Between now and 2030, the WNBA will add three new teams, in Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia. And the WNBA saw a 44 percent jump in ratings for this year’s All-Star Game—which, for the first time ever, hosted more in-person fans than the NBA’s.

Yet this success has come amid unprecedented controversy. In early July, a group of 11 Republican lawmakers sent a letter to Cathy Engelbert, the WNBA’s commissioner, demanding that she be held accountable for not adequately addressing “repeated acts of unnecessary physical hostility and violence” on the court against the Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark, who has emerged as one of the league’s most popular players. The letter also suggested that these acts may be “racially motivated” against Clark, who is white, and called for the Department of Justice to investigate. And right before the All-Star Game, Clark’s teammate Sophie Cunningham told ESPN, “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” which immediately became a massive talking point around and outside the league. Shortly thereafter, multiple rallies sprung up in support of Cunningham; Celeste Keaton, a co-owner of the Seattle Storm, was suspended after verbally confronting a pair of teenage fans during a game who were holding signs supporting Cunningham.

The discussions surrounding Cunningham and Clark have different origins; nonetheless, because they play together, their respective dramas have snowballed into one messy dispute that now envelops the league. Engelbert has certainly guided the league into its most financially stable era, but this is a complicated crossroads requiring delicate steering. Even if the WNBA isn’t in immediate danger of losing popularity, culture wars can be exhausting over time. And because its explosive success is the very thing attracting many of its critics, a narrative course correction may not be so simple. But the league needs to protect its players, and be careful not to kowtow too much to its critics.

Managing the WNBA responsibly is especially challenging in this political and media environment. As Media Matters for America recently noted, Fox News has dedicated at least 206 segments to the WNBA since late June, most of which revolved around racial issues or the inclusion of trans athletes in the league. It’s difficult to refocus attention when a major news network isn’t letting up.

Much of what’s happening now began when Clark entered the league, in 2024. In a short time, her tenure has helped the WNBA transform financially and receive more mainstream attention. But Clark’s stratospheric popularity has been complicated to manage. By keeping her views private, she’s become a blank slate for anyone’s cause. Though she has never publicly acknowledged her own political leanings, prominent conservatives have wielded Clark against her own league to advance MAGA’s racial grievances.

And whenever a perception emerges that Clark is being treated unfairly by her peers, the backlash is outsize. In June, the Phoenix Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas was suspended after hitting Clark in the throat during a game, one of the incidents prompting the letter from the Republican lawmakers. It was a bad play, but aggressive physical contact is an inevitable part of sports. Yet it was treated as an outlier: Thomas, who is Black, told reporters that after her play with Clark went viral, she received death threats and was called racial slurs.

The heated environment can be seen as part of a larger outcry. The league is about 70 percent Black, and anywhere from 25 to 35 percent queer; historically, its players have embraced progressive issues. In 2016, the Minnesota Lynx wore T-shirts calling for justice and accountability following the police-related deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. A few years later, Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, a Republican, wrote a letter to Engelbert criticizing the league’s support of the Black Lives Matter movement. In response, players backed Raphael Warnock, who eventually won the seat from Loeffler in the 2020 election.

This history has made the WNBA low-hanging fruit for MAGA figures, whether politicians or commentators, who use it to score cheap points with their base. Critics lacking a serious investment in women’s basketball can conveniently swoop in to recite their spiel, and pay no attention to the sport itself. When the league was less popular, its players may have been freer to express their opinions without blowback. Perhaps that’s no longer possible. During All-Star weekend, I spoke with the Lynx’s rookie sensation, Olivia Miles, who talked about the difficulty of using the league as a platform for other issues, given the current attention. “Learning how to navigate that through sports is not an easy thing to do, because everyone is watching us at all times,” she said. “There’s so many things that are said and done and criticized.”

The freedom to voice one’s politics goes both ways, and in Cunningham, conservative critics have a figure whose beliefs explicitly align with theirs on one particular topic. In the ESPN profile, she characterized her politics as “very much in the middle.” But her actions have drawn polarized attention. In Minneapolis, Cunningham took pictures with the former college swimmer Riley Gaines, who for years has advocated to keep transgender women out of women’s sports, and whose activism has been far more explicitly partisan. (Gaines has said the Biden administration “pushed radical gender ideology every chance it got,” and campaigned for President Trump.) “I think it’s people just practicing their rights of freedom of speech and doing what other fans have been doing since the WNBA has started,” Cunningham told reporters of the rallies held in her support. “And so props to them, props to everyone who is able to be competent and be bold and courageous enough to speak their truths.”

Now coaches and players are being peppered with questions about where they stand—even though the league has never had a trans-woman player. (Layshia Clarendon, who was the first WNBA player to undergo top surgery, identified as nonbinary and trans. They retired in 2024.) Clark, too, has been criticized for not backing Cunningham’s stance. Some, like the Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve, are choosing to do their own form of counterprotesting. Reeve wore a T-shirt during a recent game against the Fever that read Trans Kids Belong; ahead of the game, she defended trans rights to the media. “I’ve chosen to listen to transgender families, and what I know is exclusion is not the answer,” she said.

This is a snapshot of the current WNBA experience—unprecedented growth and great basketball at risk of being swallowed up by the same culture wars plaguing the broader political landscape. Nearly every day brings some new development conflating the conflicts. Last week, the former NBA players Royce White and Enes Kanter Freedom announced their intentions to identify as transgender in order to play in the WNBA. (It’s highly unlikely they’ll be allowed in the league.) During a game, Cunningham received a hard foul; the other player, the Chicago Sky’s DiJonai Carrington, was ejected and subsequently posted “WHITE PRIVILEGE” to social media. The implication, presumably, was that Carrington, who is Black, was more heavily penalized because of the perception that Cunningham, and by extension her image and outspokenness, needs to be protected.

With the overall success of the league at stake, being dragged into the political fray may be a steep price to pay for visibility. Still, the players don’t seem ready to shut up and dribble. “I think it’s really important that we don’t lose something that’s a foundational truth in our league, to the growth,” Jonquel Jones, who plays center for the New York Liberty, told me during All-Star weekend. “There’s enough space where we can grow as a league but still continue to have our integrity and continue to operate in a certain type of way. I feel like we’re losing that a little bit.”

[Read: A brief exchange that shows the enormous difference between Trump and Obama]

Competitive friction is one thing—but all of the WNBA’s players, regardless of who they are and what they believe, are now being publicly harassed. Before the All-Star Game, members of the players’ union executive and justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion committees met with league officials to express their concerns about the escalation in abuse. Yet the players are, in many ways, subject to political dynamics outside their control. “We’ve experienced a lot of great changes, but the perspective I have, it really weighs heavily on—and I want to say this in a way that isn’t taken the wrong way—this isn’t a problem that was created by the players,” WNBA Players Association President Nneka Ogwumike told me. “So looking to us to always fix it is not the only way.”

The question now is how the league can cool the rhetoric used around it. Clark, for example, has criticized the racism and misogyny that her fame has brought upon the WNBA, but that has done little to slow it down. When she was asked about the pregame demonstrations supporting Cunningham after a recent game against Minnesota, she opted for a generic, noncommittal answer. “I think it’s for leagues and the governing bodies to work with their athletes to find solutions, but our focus is on basketball,” she said. Perhaps she shouldn’t have to be more forceful—but soon enough, she may not have a choice.

Meanwhile, Cunningham has taken a different approach. Detractors call her “MAGA Barbie,” a nickname she’s disavowed, although, at the very least, she’s played just enough footsie with MAGA to enrich her own personal brand. Nevertheless, she seems to recognize that things have gotten out of control: “I’m going to let people just do the speaking for themselves, but for me, I want to get back to basketball,” she said in early August.

But how exactly can the league pivot back to basketball, especially during a time when outrage is so easily stoked? Last Wednesday, a task force of WNBA-team presidents and general managers met to discuss trans-athlete inclusion, as well as the abuse that many of their players have received. In a statement released after the meeting, the league denounced the outside criticism as “bad-faith efforts” that were meant to “demean or marginalize others.” The meeting didn’t result in any new eligibility guidelines regarding trans players, and it showed that the league is on the defensive—which won’t cut it.

The WNBA doesn’t get the luxury of being conveniently neutral the way other leagues do, not when its Black and queer players remain easy targets. Yet while all of this has been going on, excellent basketball is still happening. The league hasn’t imploded. Clark and Cunningham are able to play without causing riots. Nobody’s taken the bait regarding White and Freedom’s trollish provocations.

Perhaps the best thing the WNBA can do is stay firm in its own identity, even if a few brushfires get started in the process. A more visible commissioner with consistent messaging certainly could help. But all of this stems from the players feeling the freedom to express themselves—and, in turn, feeling confident in their capacity to navigate any criticism. In a way, the fuss around Clark and Cunningham shows that giving in to the social-media comments section isn’t the answer. The league needs to be who it is, and take whatever comes with it.

Ossoff’s ‘Natalie’ Moment

2026-08-21T06:00:00-04:00

How many words does it take to trigger MAGA world? Three, it turns out.

When Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia said at a rally on Sunday that President Trump wants to “travel with Natalie”—implying an untoward relationship between the 80-year-old grandfather and his 35-year-old special assistant, Natalie Harp—the outrage from Trump allies was as loud as it was predictable: Megyn Kelly, Newt Gingrich, and Laura Ingraham, among others, accused Ossoff of misogyny, despite having previously defended Trump’s own sexist comments. (The word hypocrisy feels inadequate here.)

But as this debate over propriety unfolds, a dedicated swath of the Democratic base is delighted. Since Trump’s reelection, these voters have been hankering to see their leaders show, well, a little more fight. So far, most of that fight seems to have come from midterm candidates on the far left, who often target the Democratic Party itself or the so-called establishment. To hear Ossoff, a more moderate Democrat in a reddish-purple state, direct a sharp—albeit petty—jab directly at the president thrilled such voters.

Some, in fact, found it almost cathartic. “Someone finally said something,” a 52-year-old woman named Rebecca, who attended Ossoff’s Atlanta rally, told me, sounding delighted. Bring on the “smoke,” Aaron Whitely, the chair of the Democratic Party of Chatham County, in Georgia, told me. “The younger folks are looking for it. The older folks are loving it.”

Ossoff appears to know this. It’s why viral clips of the senator, who is running for reelection, seem to pop up every few weeks like zinnias in summer. It’s also why you can’t have a conversation about the 2028 presidential race without mentioning his name. But just because the base loves the smoke doesn’t mean every other Georgia voter will.

Throughout Ossoff’s reelection campaign, Democratic talking heads have credited the senator for succinctly calling out the Trump administration’s alleged self-dealing. His speech at the Center Stage Theater in Atlanta on Sunday afternoon contained his usual anti-corruption message: “They made you pay more for everything and took us to war on lies and spent most of last year trying to cover up for the world’s most famous pedophile,” he told the crowd, “while the crook president and his crook family raked in billions.”

But this time, about 10 minutes into the speech, Ossoff threw in the comment that lit up social media and group chats. “The president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks,” he said. “See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

[Read: Five theories of the Jon Ossoff moment]

The rowdy crowd laughed and groaned. Ossoff’s speeches are typically so dense with current-affairs references that only the most plugged-in rally-goers fully understand them. In those few lines alone, the senator nodded to the ongoing Iran war, to viral footage of Trump appearing to nap in public, to the controversial gift of a plane that Trump was forced to abandon because of security concerns, and, ultimately, to Trump’s intense closeness with Harp, the aide whose obsession with the president reportedly alarmed the Secret Service. Attendees understood him immediately. “He didn’t have to make any reference to their relationship; it’s very well known,” Rebecca, who declined to share her last name for fear of being targeted by the administration, said. “It’s in the public consciousness.”

People who have scrolled Facebook or tuned in to MS NOW during the past two years—and plenty of engaged Democrats of a certain age have done both, obsessively—are quite familiar with Harp. In 2024, reporting from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan identified her as Trump’s closest aide, one who keeps the president updated on positive press coverage and social-media buzz and who once gushed to Trump in a letter, “You are all that matters to me.” This week, CNN reported that Harp had once hunkered down in the trunk of an SUV to avoid being separated from the president. Another report revealed that Harp had worked in the White House for more than a year without an active security clearance.

It’s obvious that Ossoff’s comment about Harp found its target in the West Wing, because, as that awful saying goes, a hit dog really does tend to holler. “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, posted. When the CNN reporter Kristen Holmes asked Trump about Ossoff’s remark, the White House Rapid Response X account called her a “disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession” and said that one day, her children would be “sickened and embarrassed” by her. Soon, it was as though a private memo had gone out—and perhaps one did—to MAGA talking heads instructing them to frame Ossoff’s words as a misogynistic smear on a woman simply doing her job. “I feel bad for your staff if this is what you think of women,” Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida wrote on X. “Donald Trump has done more to elevate women in politics than any other President,” CNN’s Scott Jennings, who might be auditioning to replace Karoline Leavitt as White House press secretary, offered on X.

Some Democrats were irked with Ossoff too. The comments about Natalie “distracted and detracted from the power” of his otherwise effective message, the former Barack Obama adviser David Axelrod wrote on X. On the whole, “Ossoff has gone after Trump in a tough, fair, and pointed way,” Axelrod told me on a phone call yesterday. “This just seemed a little unnecessary and a bit gratuitous.”

Axelrod’s response was dismissed by the voters and local party leaders I spoke with as too sensitive. They pointed out that Ossoff had made only a light reference to Harp—one that a listener could interpret as they pleased. He didn’t actually accuse them of having an affair! Even if he had, those Democrats said, isn’t it time for party leaders to take a break from the high road? When I read Axelrod’s quote over the phone to Wanda Townes, the chair of the Democrats of Camden County, in Georgia, she was instantly annoyed. “That softness is the reason that Trump is in office. Stop being soft,” she told me. (“There’s no doubt it was chum in the water” for people “who feel like Trump has pushed Democrats around,” Axelrod said when I asked for his response.)

Earlier this summer, I wrote about the Democrats’ frustration that their party leaders still haven’t seemed to match their voters’ rage. “We’re still pissed that we lost the election in 2024—and we’re pissed at them for not doing a better job of standing up to the Republicans and to Trump,” Susan Polakoff Shaw, a leader of an Ohio grassroots Democratic group, told me then. It makes sense that she loved Ossoff’s comment this week about Harp. “If nothing else, Ossoff shed light on who this young woman is, what her job is, and the twisted relationship the two of them have,” she texted me. “I mean, who writes love letters to an 80 year old!??”

[Read: The Democratic base is angry ]

Pissed is certainly the operative word. And Ossoff has been successful lately because he sounds about as ticked off as voters are and channels that anger into clippable sound bites for social media. California Governor Gavin Newsom similarly attempts to provoke Trump in an aggressive, Trumpian style. But from Ossoff, who cuts a more wholesome figure and doesn’t imitate the president, the attacks are more surprising—and therefore perhaps more effective. Videos of the senator that have gone viral this year include Ossoff referring to Trump as a “failed president and a national disgrace” and using the phrases “Mar-a-Lago mafia” and “the Epstein class” to describe the president’s allies. Last month, Ossoff repeatedly asked Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, who had won the 2020 presidential election and called it “humiliating” when Clayton would not answer.

This kind of assertiveness is refreshing to Democrats, the party members I spoke with said. “Older white ladies, older Black ladies—they’re loving it,” Whitely said. Townes described her ideal future for the Democrats: “We need more Ossoffs; we need more Jasmine Crocketts,” she said, referring to the Texas representative whose own MAGA jabs have gone viral.

There is, of course, a downside to jabbing in politics: Not every voter relishes the melee. Crockett, to use Townes’s example, lost a primary for Senate in Texas this year, at least in part because even the Democrats who loved her pugnacity did not believe that she would be able to persuade independent and moderate Texans to vote for a Democrat. Similarly, success for Ossoff will be measured not by how much he delights his party’s most loyal supporters but by how many Georgians he can win over in November.

Madison Hahamy contributed research to this report.

An Unsettling Glimpse Into the GOP’s Future

2026-08-20T18:30:00-04:00

Normally, when a primary candidate finishes with 10.5 percent of the vote, it is a clear signal of their irrelevance.

James Fishback finished third in Tuesday’s Florida Republican gubernatorial primary, and at no point in the race did it seem like he ever had a chance. In fact, at no point in his broader career has the 31-year-old, who is known for his racist slurs and unabashed bigotry, achieved anything of note. The high-school-debate nonprofit he founded was hit with allegations that he had sexually groomed a 17-year-old employee. A hedge fund where he’d once worked said that it had planned on firing him before he resigned, and accused him of claiming a job title that had never existed at the firm. He founded his own investment firm but left after the board decided to shut down the funds he managed. Fishback told me that he had left the firm to run for governor. He claims to have been an adviser to DOGE—but former senior DOGE officials have denied it.

However, Fishback is defiantly proud of his showing, despite losing the primary to Representative Byron Donalds and also finishing well behind Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins. “I would much rather have gotten 10 percent and done all of this and really moved the needle in political discourse,” he told me today, “than have gotten 24 percent like Jay Collins did and have nothing to show for it.”

Despite his penchant for spectacular, serial failure, Fishback matters because he managed to figure out at least one thing: how to capture attention from the youthful right. Heading into Election Night, this was the one area where Fishback appeared to excel. A February poll from the University of North Florida found Fishback to be the leading candidate among GOP primary voters under 35, with 31 percent supporting him. By July, that number was up to 51 percent, according to a Change Research poll paid for by the conservative nonprofit Freedom Project USA. His candidacy was, in some respects, a test run for what might work with the next generation of Republican voters. What seems to be working is unrepentant bigotry.

[Read: Young Republican activists are turning against Trump]

Fishback’s appeal to younger voters can be explained by a few other things: He is relatively young. He ran a rage-bait campaign that met young people where they are, maintaining a heavy digital presence with posts and appearances on the livestreams of prominent influencers. He spoke with sympathy of the economic concerns of downwardly mobile youth. He did all of this while regularly tossing off casual racism and anti-Semitism.

During the campaign, he referred to Byron Donalds, who is Black, as By’rone and called him a “slave” to donor and corporate interests. When a Black man questioned Fishback about the grooming allegations against him, the Florida politician said that the man should be “lynched.” When I reached out to him earlier today, he doubled down: “I think anyone should be executed” for making those kinds of “false allegations,” he said. When I pressed him on why he’d specifically said “lynched” instead of “executed,” he trailed off before claiming that he might have actually gained votes for saying this. He has made not-so-subtle overtures to Groypers—slang for fans of the white-supremacist internet personality Nick Fuentes—by reportedly claiming that he rebuffed a PAC that offered him $500,000 under the condition that he rebuke Fuentes. “I hung up the phone, because I will never disavow patriotic Americans,” he told a crowd. He has used the term goyslop, anti-Semitic internet slang suggesting that there’s a Jewish conspiracy to harm the Gentile masses by feeding them junk food.

Fishback contests the “anti-Semitic” label. “I’ve condemned anti-Semitism repeatedly. It has no place in our society. Neither does the hatred of Christians,” he said when I questioned him about his use of goyslop and his praise of Groypers as “insightful” and “patriotic.” Fishback also pushed back against most of the ways he’s been described in the media. He said that he has “never claimed to be a DOGE adviser” even though he posted on X last year that he has “advised DOGE.” Fishback has maintained that the sexual-misconduct allegations are “completely false,” and he reiterated this to me, saying that no court ever found him guilty.

If you’re not prone to anti-Semitism and don’t enjoy far-right politics, it’s tempting to see Fishback as an aberration. When poll-tracking websites observed that Fishback seemed to be dominating campus precincts in Florida on Tuesday, several pundits were quick to point out that, in many cases, winning meant accruing only dozens of votes, because few students had returned to campuses from summer break. “FSU has 46,184 students. Twenty-eight people voted in this precinct. Fishback got 25,” wrote the conservative communications strategist Erica Knight. “He didn’t capture the youth vote. He captured a group chat.”

But the signs of a shift to the hard right among young Republican voters have been well documented. The New York Young Republicans Club’s Nazi tendencies are well known. A Yale poll from this past spring found that younger voters are more anti-Semitic than older generations. And a Manhattan Institute poll from December found that 25 percent of Republicans under the age of 50 openly express anti-Semitic views. “I do see the youth right turning the dial up on misogyny, anti-Semitism, and racism—even as the youth right is racially and ethnically diverse,” Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, a historian who has written about American campus conservatism, told me when I asked her about Fishback. She suspects that the “online populism and anti-establishment politics” that Fishback espouses are here to stay.

[Read: ‘Looksmaxxing’ reveals the depth of the crisis facing young men]

In my own coverage of the right, I’ve observed a steady uptick in the far-right drift of young conservatives. At large right-wing events, young conservatives have consistently espoused a deeply nativist strain of politics, and expressed their fandom of Fuentes and his politics. Even young right-wingers who don’t like Fuentes have told me that they’ve witnessed the growing influence of his politics or that they agree with his views and simply see him as an imperfect vessel. Young Republican staffers on Capitol Hill are increasingly open to his far-right, Groyper style of politics.

Fishback was able to show that the energy Fuentes and other young far-right figures online have tapped into isn’t just an internet or a conservative-staffer phenomenon. It’s an ideology that someone savvier and more skilled than Fishback might well leverage to achieve greater real-world success at some point in the near future.

Liberal Families Are Looking Pretty Traditional

2026-08-21T10:37:11-04:00

Picture an old-fashioned, idealized American scene. Young kids walk to and from a redbrick public schoolhouse; almost every kid’s commute is less than 10 minutes. On warm weekend days, the children run lemonade stands, doing brisk business. Their parents host a Christmas-tree-and-baked-goods sale on the school field every December, which draws a boisterous crowd. And about those parents: They’re almost all married. Divorce and single parenthood are rare. The whole tableau is, at first glance, a social conservative’s dream come true.

This scene exists in the real world. The neighborhood is my own; the elementary school is my kids’ school. But this is no conservative small town. It’s an urban neighborhood in Washington, D.C., a city where Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump 90 percent to 6 percent in the most recent election. Virtually all of the parents in this neighborhood are highly educated Democrats. Judging from what I see in my community here, these deep-blue Washington families are the kinds of families that so many conservatives value.

The strong marriages of elite blue America—families whose lives are, in a way, pretty darn conservative—offer a useful counterpoint to the simplistic culture-war narrative. Elite blue Americans are an attractive boogeyman for pundits on the right, who regularly write articles about how such people are pushing outré sexual and family values. But when you actually look at these people, you see a lot of folks who get married, have kids, stay married, and live lives that almost seem ripped from a Norman Rockwell painting. As the cultural commentator Aaron Renn put it, “If you want to see conservative values in practice, you’ll often find them among people who vote Democrat and align on the cultural left.” Conservatives might benefit from closely observing what’s going on here—liberal Americans achieving what seems to be the conservative goal of stable families.

Some social scientists have, in fact, argued that blue values such as egalitarianism and secularism tend to produce stronger marriages than red values such as religiosity and traditional gender roles. A few data points support their thesis. For example, highly educated Americans are trending blue in their politics, and highly educated Americans are also more likely to be married. As couples move up the educational ladder from high-school degree to associate’s degree to bachelor’s degree to master’s degree, the marriage rate keeps climbing.

[From the July 2026 issue: How to save marriage]

But other data paint a different picture. Liberals and Democrats lag behind conservatives and Republicans in marrying and having children, and the gap is growing. As of 2024, among adults aged 30 to 50, Republicans are 18 points more likely than Democrats to be married, and Republican women aged 25 to 35 are 31 points more likely to be mothers. Although delayed marriage and childbearing by Democrats is part of the story, some of the gap is undoubtedly Democrats opting out of marriage and parenthood altogether. Blue values alone don’t seem to directly produce stable families.

I’d offer this hypothesis instead: At least among many highly educated Democrats, stable families display a mixture of blue and red traits. That’s what you see in my neighborhood, as I recently wrote about for the Institute for Family Studies.

On the blue, egalitarian side, almost every family has two working parents. Stay-at-home moms are scarce. Educational attainment tends to be pretty equal between spouses. And some of the more symbolic lifestyle markers also trend egalitarian. For example, based on the parent lists for my kids’ classrooms, only nine kids out of 50 (18 percent) have two parents who share a last name.

But these families also display some more stereotypically red traits—including income hypergamy, meaning that fathers outearn mothers. In terms of income, there are three main career tiers among these well-educated D.C. parents. At the top of the income scale are the private-sector for-profit workers. In the middle are the government bureaucrats. And at the bottom are the nonprofit NGO workers. Most fathers are in the top or middle tier, while most mothers are in the middle or bottom one. (The small number of families with same-sex parents obviously don’t show this gendered division of income, but they also have two married parents who both work.)

[Read: The return of the Democratic manly man]

Why do these couples gravitate toward this gendered income division? Every couple is different, but for many families, this arrangement allows women to pursue career goals beyond remuneration. For example, one of my female colleagues (married, two young kids, separate last names) is working her self-described “dream job” prosecuting international money launderers in federal court. Her husband is a law-firm partner who makes most of the family’s income. My own household is similar: My wife has her dream job as an immunologist at the National Institutes of Health. It’s a career path that required several years as a poorly paid postdoc, during which I far outearned her. In Jane Austen novels, financially advantageous marriages helped women secure their social station. But in educated blue America, such marriages help women pursue their career goals—while maintaining a household income that can cover the cost of raising kids.

Many of these families also have other traditionalist or red-coded markers. For example, many are surprisingly religious. I’d estimate that almost a third of my kids’ friends go to church on a weekly basis, mostly in mainline Protestant or Catholic denominations. This might not reach the churchgoing levels of devout Bible Belt communities, and the mix of churches is definitely different, with evangelical options notably few. But these elite liberals go to church at a higher rate than Americans as a whole.

Elite liberals should be proud of their families—and they should preach what they practice. The conservative family scholar Brad Wilcox wasn’t wrong when he called it “hypocrisy” for liberals to publicly promote freewheeling family diversity even while they themselves follow traditional family patterns. Fortunately, some liberals are starting to speak up for the traditional family values generally out of fashion among liberals. In the past few years, for example, liberal writers such as Nicholas Kristof and center-left scholars such as Melissa Kearney have written about how a stable marriage is the best foundation for raising kids. The preaching, in other words, may be catching up to the practice. Let’s hope more people hear it.

The Terror of Aimlessness

2026-08-21T12:26:16-04:00

If there’s one thing young moviegoers seem to fear these days, it’s the idea of the in-between. The term liminal horror has gone from niche internet speak to Hollywood trend, thanks to the acclaimed TV show Severance and the recent smash-hit movie Backrooms. Stories like these mine the unsettling feeling of nondescript office corridors and basement halls that seem to self-replicate into infinity; this spring also saw the U.S. release of the excellent Japanese film Exit 8, a video-game adaptation about someone getting trapped in a subway station with seemingly no way out. Now there’s It Ends, a low-budget bit of creepy cleverness with a punchy pitch: What if you got lost driving down a road that never ends?

That this type of premise has grown more commonplace makes sense. Such a film typically needs only one set (for example, a long, lonely road, flanked by trees), a small cast of characters, and a spare, intentionally circular script. It Ends uses that scrappy charm to its advantage, the lack of frills dialing up a sense of realism. The film, written and directed by the newcomer Alexander Ullom, follows James (played by Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Tyler (Mitchell Cole), four friends who are headed on a celebratory graduation road trip. Their drive is occupied by the sort of nonsensical, wandering conversations young people love to have; there’s no real sign of anything being wrong until Tyler notices that he’s missed his turn.

The horror builds gradually, spikes, then slows to an existentially brutal crawl. The group realizes that there’s no way off the road, but when they get out of the car to look around, swarms of people emerge from the woods and fight to enter their vehicle. As the friends continue on in search of safety, they notice that the gas tank never goes empty, they never feel hungry, and nobody needs to sleep. They’re in a sort of limbo, condemned to keep moving despite having no destination. It’s essentially a Gen Z take on Sartre’s No Exit, a gentle riff on hell being other people, with a few jump scares tossed in for fun.

[Read: The eerie comfort of liminal spaces]

But while prior small-scale horror movies such as The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity had an unseen villain guiding the scares, It Ends thrives on an utter lack of information about what is happening and why. The terror of liminality is how effortlessly it evokes the creepiness of a bad dream, the kind that begins in the middle of the story and seems just off. There’s no monster around the corner, no demonic puzzle to be solved. The characters of It Ends initially debate what’s going on, keeping track of patterns occurring around them in search of some explanation. While James keeps doing so as a way of staying sane, the others start to accept their frozen existence; the strangers in the woods, it seems, are also confined to the road’s environs.

That Ullom manages to squeeze a feature-length movie out of such a mundane premise is impressive; it helps that his cast is charming enough to carry it off. As the film plods on, it starts to skip further and further ahead in time, warping the viewer’s sense of chronology. It Ends is more aggressively aimless than other recent entries in the genre: Exit 8 saw its heroes try to figure a way out of their infinite subway station (it was based on a video game, so some resolution was built into the plot); the protagonists of Backrooms discovered a world of non-Euclidean corridors and lobbies in a basement, then found out that opportunistic corporate villains were plundering it; such a revelation hints at sequels that could expand its lore.

The simplicity of It Ends, by comparison, is wonderful and jarring, as is the total inability for future properties to spill out of it. Part of the dread that liminal horror mines is the drudgery of the never-ending scroll, a familiar feeling for anyone who’s been on social media; no matter how much you look, you’ll never hit bottom, only summon more of whatever the algorithm wants to serve you. It Ends is set entirely outdoors but captures that same fear of being stuck without any touchstones to distinguish simulation from reality.

Why Is Everyone in Silicon Valley Talking Like That?

2026-08-20T17:38:06-04:00

Silicon Valley has long had its own dialect. Venture capitalists are always talking about the value of being “high agency” and making “orthogonal bets.” But lately, tech vernacular has taken a peculiar turn—people have started describing themselves as if they were chatbots. If you misspeak, maybe you’re “hallucinating.” Don’t know the answer to a question? That’s because it’s not in your “training data.” Feeling forgetful? Perhaps you have a case of “context rot,” a phrase that refers to the degradation of a bot’s responses over a long conversation. “I’ve been telling my wife I have context rot for months,” Conor Bronsdon, the host of an AI-focused podcast, told me.

Where I live, in San Francisco, such comparisons are inescapable. “I’ve described myself as high temperature,” a friend recently told me; in AI-speak, this means he is prone to randomness. AI experts now talk about updating their “weights” when they learn something new and training on “synthetic data” when going over internal thoughts. “Humans have a huge base model trained over billions of years of evolution,” one software engineer wrote on a popular tech forum. “It’s impressive how quickly we learn, but it’s arguably comparable to fine tuning.”

[Read: Machine unlearning]

Such speech easily comes off as unsettling, if not aggressively bleak: Why describe beautiful, tender life in detached, algorithmic terms? At the same time, language is a fossil record of previous technological revolutions, and if this current transformation is anything like previous ones, some of this new slang may well stick around. AI experts have repeatedly cautioned that anthropomorphism, or the tendency to attribute human qualities to nonhuman objects such as chatbots, can be misleading. But now the reverse is occurring in everyday speech—a sort of modelmorphism, wherein people describe themselves as if they were large language models.

The comparisons really took off a few years ago, after a group of AI researchers argued that language models are “stochastic parrots” that link together language based on statistical patterns without possessing any understanding of meaning. Dissenters retorted that humans are also “stochastic parrots.” As one software engineer riffed, “Humans are basically a sophisticated Markov chain. They are very good at pattern matching, but have no understanding of anything.”

Language has historically evolved alongside technology. Expressions such as running out of steam and cog in the machine, for instance, were adopted into common speech after the Industrial Revolution as shorthand for the human condition. AI metaphors are simply figures of speech, Anna Ivanova, a cognitive scientist at Georgia Tech, told me: When someone says, “My gears are turning,” they don’t literally mean that there are gears or gearlike things in their brain that are actually moving; in much the same way, when people say that they have “context rot,” they don’t mean that they literally have a transformer-based AI model running in their brain.

The difference between earlier technologies and AI systems is that artificial neural networks are loosely inspired by the brain itself. Philosophers such as Raphaël Millière and Cameron Buckner have argued that LLMs could serve as potential models of certain aspects of human cognition. In the 2010s, scientists found parallels between how image-recognition neural networks and the human brain process visual information. There may also be “parallels” between how LLMs and humans represent language, Ivanova said. The MIT neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko and others have identified a type of “language network” inside the human brain, which Fedorenko believes is “very similar in many ways to early LLMs.” These comparisons are contested, but they are receiving research attention: “The recent success of LLMs is rooted in the same computational principles that govern biological brains,” scientists wrote in a position paper last week.

“Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it,” the philosopher John Searle wrote in the 1980s. “I am told that some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult.” In the 19th and 20th centuries, people turned to telegraphs and telephone switchboards as models for the mind: “The brain is no more than a kind of central telephonic exchange,” the philosopher Henri Bergson once wrote. By the ’60s, some scholars were arguing that the mind functions like a computer. “Cognitive scientists often say that the mind is the software of the brain,” the philosopher Ned Block explained in 1990. Today, LLMs make for an alluring comparison.

For now, these analogies are being made mostly by those working in the AI industry. But over time, some of the metaphors might start to seep into everyday language. If you look at the growth of railroads, “a whole range of language change began to happen” as people started to use the new transportation system, Naomi Baron, a linguist and professor emerita at American University, told me. Some of the AI slang isn’t introducing new phrases into English so much as transforming the meaning of existing speech. Take the word hallucinating, which is used to describe AI models confabulating. People are “taking a term created for what the human mind is capable of doing, projecting it onto AI, and then projecting it back onto humans with an AI flavoring,” Baron explained.

None of this is to say every AI-inflected term should get a free pass. I’ve started chastising my friends when I catch them unironically referring to themselves as chatbots. Using LLM metaphors to describe our minds could lead to a reductive and dehumanizing understanding of human cognition. Earlier this year, when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was pressed on AI’s natural-resource demands, he said that “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human.”

Still, the people in tech I spoke with told me that using LLM-speak to describe their own mind helps them reflect on their cognitive habits. Language subsumes new idioms over time and masks their origins. People today say “My plans have been derailed” without much thought to the phrase’s railroad origins. Perhaps my great-grandchildren will grow up saying things such as “I have context rot” and “That’s not in my training data” without pausing to remember that those phrases first applied to machines.

The ‘Resistance’ Won

2026-08-20T13:01:12-04:00

Donald Trump celebrated the defeat of one of his first impeachment nemeses—retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Alex Vindman, who lost the Democratic Senate primary in Florida on Tuesday—in typical form. “SleazeBag Vindman loses tonight to a Radical Left Lunatic. How cool is that???” Trump exulted on Truth Social.

Vindman served as a witness in Trump’s first impeachment. Whatever currency this once gave him with Democratic voters has long since expired. In this, he is not unique. Democrats such as Dan Goldman, George Conway, and Tom Steyer, all of whom pushed for or played prominent roles in Trump’s first impeachment, have discovered in primaries this year that this credential means little to their party’s voters. Diana DeGette, a House manager during Trump’s second impeachment trial, and Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer who battled insurrectionists, have also lost primaries.

The rout of the Democratic Party’s impeachment stars has been interpreted, generally, as a sign of the end of resistance politics. “The string of losses for resistance candidates from the first Trump term illustrates a new era for the restive Democratic base, where vocal opposition to the president through official channels and public remonstrations no longer guarantees success,” Politico reports.

[David Frum: The ‘resistance’ is over]

The “resistance,” once a dominant mode of Democratic politics during the first Trump administration, was never cool. But in the second term, the “resistance liberal” has fallen out of favor so completely that the phrase has become a derisive punch line across the political spectrum. Which is a shame, because the resistance was, broadly speaking, correct. It was right about Trump’s nature, and also right about how to defeat him.

Resistance politics depicted Trump as a crook and an aspiring authoritarian with a troubling fondness for dictators, especially Vladimir Putin. He was a con man, unfit for office, and had broken faith with the best traditions of American politics. The Robert Mueller investigation found, among other things, that Putin had dangled a lucrative no-risk deal to Trump during the 2016 campaign. The Senate Intelligence Committee, found, in a bipartisan report, that the campaign’s links to Russia posed a “grave counterintelligence threat.” The first impeachment charged Trump with having “placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security.”

These much-derided processes turned out to supply an accurate, almost banal, description of how Trump has operated during his second term. His corruption and abuses of power have been let loose at a scale that was previously only imagined. Trump has all but severed America’s system of alliances, mocked and bullied Ukraine’s president, and showered praise upon Kim Jong Un.

What discredited resistance politics in liberal eyes is that it was closely associated with institutional procedures that were deemed to have ultimately failed to restrain Trump. Mueller’s investigation ended anticlimactically. Neither impeachment drew enough Republican support to remove Trump from office. Somewhat similarly, conservatives have sometimes claimed that the Russia investigation and first impeachment helped Trump politically by drawing to his side Republicans who resented the overreach.

One Republican who doesn’t seem to believe either of these arguments is Trump. The president has worked hard to ensure that no such humiliations recur during his second term, by stacking the Justice Department with loyalists, firing inspectors general en masse, purging the armed forces of “woke” officers, and generally eliminating any potential source of independence within the federal government.

Trump himself does not seem to think that the investigations that were avidly followed by resistance liberals did nothing to restrain his actions during his first term, or that they helped him shore up partisan support. And the absence of any such processes in his second term has not made Republicans in Congress feel freer to criticize the president. To the contrary, their fealty is more absolute than ever.

Even in the first term, resistance Democrats were dogged by their populist left-wing critics. This split first appeared in the spring of 2017, when Jon Ossoff ran to fill a special election for a House seat in Georgia, in a previously Republican district. Ossoff’s campaign, which attacked Trump’s corruption but declined to articulate a sharp progressive alternative, fell short.

Supporters of Bernie Sanders blamed Ossoff, and the party, for not taking up the Sanders message. “Ossoff’s campaign has failed to support or address any progressive issues. He embraces a centrist—not progressive—message, that both political parties waste taxpayer money, rather than politicians being corrupt by outside money,” the progressive writer Michael Sainato complained in the Observer. Winnie Wong, a co-founder of People for Bernie, told The Guardian of Ossoff, “He didn’t have a core progressive message and that ultimately is why he lost.” (Ossoff won a Senate race in 2020 and is leading the polls again this year, making slashing attacks on Trump’s personal corruption while steering clear of controversial left-wing policy stances.)

[Jonathan Chait: Liberals are now fighting a two-front war]

Like the Republican critics of resistance politics, progressive ones depicted it as substituting legal tactics for electoral victories. Yet the resistance was never limited to cheering on Mueller or hoping to persuade Republicans to convict the president of high crimes and misdemeanors. Resistance themes inspired the Democrats’ political message during Trump’s first term. And that message landed. Democrats retook the House in the 2018 midterms, despite a hot economy, and then defeated Trump’s reelection effort. Joe Biden, a link to a bygone era of civility and bipartisanship, ran in 2020 on a message of restoring the soul of America. He won.

Once in office, however, Biden ceded his domestic agenda to progressives who believed in Sanders’s vision of transformational change. They believed that only overturning the neoliberal order, handing control of domestic policy to neo-Brandeisians and climate hawks, and giving unions almost every policy they demanded would allow Democrats to regain the trust of working-class voters. This theory, not the resistance, failed. Biden’s support collapsed within his first year, and Kamala Harris’s half-hearted efforts to distance herself from her unpopular boss were too little, too late.

Trump’s return to office has left Democrats casting about for a stronger and more effective response. Perhaps the most obvious solution is the one they hit upon when Trump was first elected nearly a decade ago: Rather than promise to change everything about American politics, focus relentlessly on Trump’s unfitness. The crisis in the United States is not the general corruption of both parties; it is the specific corruption of Trump and his enablers. And the solution is simply to replace the corrupt, racist authoritarian with a governing party that respects the rule of law, equality, and basic decency.

President Trump Has a Pet-Project Docket at the National Parks

2026-08-20T15:42:00-04:00

President Trump gets what he wants, when he wants it, from the National Park Service. One and a half million dollars to replace brick pavers in Lafayette Park, across from the White House? Contracting officials at the NPS Washington headquarters found the money within five days last month. A $170,000 request to remove a fence around the Hains Point golf course, preparing the ground for a new “championship-quality” layout? Six days this summer. And the more–than–$5 million project to gild equine statues along the nearby Memorial Bridge? That took 12 days.

The rapid-approval system is specific to projects Trump wants, thanks to a reorganization at the Interior Department led by Secretary Doug Burgum. Trump issued an executive order to make the District of Columbia “safe and beautiful,” justifying the creation of an NPS docket of “White House priorities” that is handled separately from other park projects and is prioritized both for funding and contracting resources, according to documents I obtained and interviews with five current or former NPS officials. Meanwhile, many other projects throughout the nationwide system of parks are languishing.

The list I received includes Trump’s well-known projects on the National Mall and the refurbishment of the White House, along with several lesser-known efforts: The hiring and equipping of 450 new U.S. Park Police officers in the Washington region, and more than $12.8 million—some of which came from the Department of Justice—for police equipment, including new Flock license-plate-reading cameras, radios, tasers, laptops, body cameras, and body armor. Internal documentation for park projects typically includes “Consequences of Failure to Act,” which scores the urgency based on health and safety measures. When work began in January on fountains near the White House, officials described the need for the work in this way: “Such failure will disappoint visitors, as well as residents and employees of the White House.”

The new project-funding system was described by a contracting officer during an April meeting with NPS officials. “There’s three different lists: White House priorities, high priorities, and low priorities,” the official told colleagues on the virtual call, according to a written account that was provided to me. Those on the call, who do not work on White House priorities, were advised that projects on the low-priority list likely would not be completed, so they should attempt to get their needs moved to the high-priority list. White House priorities, meanwhile, were nonnegotiable. As Washington is beautified at great expense, officials told me, vital needs at dozens of national parks are not being filled.

I obtained copies of the high- and low-priority lists that circulated this summer inside the NPS. As of mid-July, that low-priority list included 1,573 projects, including many that officials told me would have been funded under prior administrations. Projects that have not yet been funded from that list, according to a separate national-park database, include requests for new wildlife-resistant dumpsters in Bryce Canyon National Park, snow machines to provide fire remediation in Alaska’s remote Yukon–Charley Rivers National Preserve, and an archaeological survey of recently acquired land at Camp Nelson National Monument, a major Union supply base during the Civil War that trained Black soldiers.

The Interior Department dismissed the concerns over this approach when I reached out for comment and told me that the low-priority list I had obtained included items that had been “mis-prioritized and were corrected.” Interior leaders have also boasted about new funding streams, including revenue from more expensive national-park passes for foreign visitors. “In any year, the National Park Service must prioritize projects most in need,” the press office said in an unsigned statement. “The National Park Service has not only been focused on beautifying the district for the 250th celebrations in our nation’s capital but has also been working on many deferred maintenance projects throughout the country.”

[Read: ‘Rush project at request of POTUS’]

But those working in the parks say that it is not just money holding these projects back. It’s also a lack of staff, after rounds of workforce reductions, who are able to handle contracts, a problem that the contracting official on the April call referred to as “capacity.” When Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency targeted the department last year, many contracting managers at the NPS took buyouts, and many of those who remained found themselves reassigned within the larger department. The NPS had 179 full-time administrative officers in June, a 21 percent decrease from the month Trump took office, according to Office of Management and Budget records. The result is a growing backlog of unfinished projects in far-flung parks, as government employees try to jury-rig temporary fixes, the officials said. “There is very little acquisition support,” one of the NPS employees told me. “This is going to get exponentially worse.”

Spencer Morgan, the site superintendent of the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site, in Buffalo, New York, told me that his facility is still waiting on this fiscal year’s promised operating-support funding, which needs to arrive before the end of September, or he will have to institute major cuts. He has been told that an additional stream of routine-maintenance funding he was expecting will never arrive. Because the site is run in conjunction with a local nonprofit that pays Morgan’s salary, he said that he was comfortable speaking openly about the struggles his staff faces as funding and resources are instead directed to the White House list. “I am not beholden to hold my tongue at this point,” he said.

Inside the NPS, Morgan said, the staff has been decimated. “I started in this role in April of 2024, and the number of people who are not there since I started is gut-wrenching,” he told me. “There is a whole loss of institutional knowledge.”

Other NPS employees requested anonymity to speak with me because they fear retaliation from their supervisors. One employee told me that their park can’t hire employees to fill vacant slots but also can’t contract out work, because it’s difficult to get on the high-priority list. “We keep being told to be creative,” this employee said. “And we are running into dead ends every time we try to pivot.”

[Read: Let them eat gold]

This reduction in spending showed up in budgetary documents I reported on in June. The documents showed a decrease of $854 million, or 68 percent, in spending on projects in park regions outside the Washington area in the first eight and a half months of fiscal year 2026, compared with the full prior fiscal year. During that same period, spending around Washington increased by about $100 million, not counting about $310 million in donations that the NPS received from allies of the president, most of which is going to fund a new White House ballroom.

The frustration over these shifting priorities has been a frequent topic of conversation among park superintendents, who are struggling to maintain services this summer. At another NPS meeting in early July, an employee presented a list of 133 projects, totaling $35.8 million, that they said were ready to go but lacked contracting staff to make them happen, according to a person on the call.

It’s not clear whether all of the projects on the White House priority list will receive funding this fiscal year. The list also includes a $25 million plan to replace the Eagle One helicopter used by the U.S. Park Police (and at least once by Burgum when he was running late for an Air Force One flight), $475,000 to clean and repaint the White House exterior, drones “to support law enforcement” in the Washington region, a new park-police substation for Rock Creek Park, and streetlight replacement along the National Mall. The priority list also includes improvements for parts of the country where Trump is known to travel. The document shows a $77,300 expense to clear brush and plant new trees around Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, as part of a much larger effort to plant 3,000 trees and provide a “security benefit” to the facility.

And Trump continues to add more projects to the list—or expand projects already on it. Take, for example, the brick pavers in Lafayette Park outside the White House gates. In May, Trump said that the park renovation would be funded by “a contribution that I made,” even though internal documentation shows public funds being used. After the Fourth of July celebrations, the NPS agreed to pay an additional $1.5 million to replace more of the brick pavers in that park. Then, in August, the president told reporters in the Oval Office that he was still deliberating on whether the brick pavers were good enough.

“Now we have a big decision to make,” he said. “Do we take the pavers that are red—you know, the red-brick pavers—and do we change them into a granite, to gray granite? They’re beautiful, but they’re not the original. So we’re gonna have to make that decision.” The National Park Service, no doubt, will be ready to follow the president’s lead if he pivots.

Ukraine Planned to Swarm Moscow Airports With AI-Guided Drones

2026-08-20T12:03:24-04:00

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Early this year, Ukrainian officials came to President Volodymyr Zelensky with a risky new plan to end the war with Russia. It would require expanding their bombing campaign to include a set of targets and a class of weapons they had long avoided. In addition to Ukraine’s ongoing strikes against Russian military bases, oil refineries, supply lines, and logistics hubs, the officials wanted to launch waves of AI-enabled drones at Moscow’s airports, hoping to stop international carriers from flying in and out of the Russian capital, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the plan, which has not been previously reported.

Both people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive military operations. If executed, the plan would mark a terrifying milestone in the history of warfare: an attack in which swarms of autonomous drones equipped with AI guidance systems would seek out and hit their targets without a human pilot controlling their movements. Such systems have been tested by various countries in recent years, including the United States. But the legality of their use has been vigorously debated as a possible violation of the laws of war, and they have never been deployed at scale.

When officials presented the plan to Zelensky this winter, he expressed strong reservations, one of the sources said. He worried that it could be seen as “piracy” if the drones hit a civilian airliner in Moscow, especially if the strikes killed or injured passengers, airport staff, or members of the flight crew. But in his desperation to find a Russian pressure point that could restart the peace process, Zelensky allowed preparations for the strikes to continue for several months this spring and early summer, both sources said.

A spokesperson for Zelensky declined to comment. Another official in the president’s office denied the existence of a plan to launch swarms of AI-enabled drones at Moscow’s airports. “That’s total nonsense,” the official told me, asking not to be named in an article about this topic. Ukraine has long sought to force the closure of Russian airports, the official added, and its drone strikes against various targets in Russia have often achieved that goal for short periods of time. But Ukraine does not have long-range weapons that are precise and reliable enough to hit Russian airports without posing an undue risk to civilians, the official said.

[Read: Inside the feud over Ukraine’s drone success]

According to Russian aviation authorities, airports across the country were forced to close 114 times during a one-month period last summer, from June 28 to July 28, usually due to the threat of Ukrainian drones. Moscow was affected by the highest number of shutdowns—at least 17 in total at its four main airports. The Russian association of travel agents reported more than 290 of these incidents nationwide in the first quarter of this year. The airport closures, which Russians refer to as a kovyor, meaning “carpet,” usually last a few hours before authorities give the all-clear and allow flights to resume. “We’ve only ever had one operation against the airports,” the official said. “Force the Russians to declare ‘carpets’ all the time.”

By the middle of spring, the plan to force a more permanent shutdown of Moscow’s airports had advanced far enough to receive a code name: M&Ms, a reference to the many small, cheap, and nearly identical drones that the mission would require. To overwhelm Russian air defenses, the operation would need to send as many as 1,000 drones a night to airports in and around Moscow, said one of the sources familiar with it.

Attacks of that size would not be far outside the norm in this conflict. Earlier this week, Russian authorities reported shooting down 791 Ukrainian drones in a single night, one of the largest attacks of the war; more than 600 of them were flying toward the Moscow region, according to the city’s mayor.

“The idea is to shut down the Moscow airspace to civilian flights for an extended period of time,” one of the sources familiar with the plan told me. Since the start of the Russian invasion, in February 2022, civilian air travel over Ukraine has been suspended. But Russian airports have mostly remained open, and millions of passengers used them this year to travel abroad. Due to Western sanctions, only a few international carriers still fly in and out of Moscow, including Turkish Airlines and Emirates, which many well-to-do Russians use to reach hubs in Istanbul and Dubai.

Forcing those carriers to stop flying to Russia would make life less comfortable for officials, oligarchs, and other wealthy loyalists of President Vladimir Putin. “People in the elites might come to Putin and say: We have a problem here,” said one of the sources familiar with the Ukrainian plan. That kind of pressure from the elites, in combination with other wartime strains on Russia’s economy and society, could force Putin to negotiate a peace deal, the source said.

Both sources told me planning for the operation was halted in July, when Zelensky abruptly fired its mastermind, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. As the architect of Ukraine’s military drone program, Fedorov had worked on the plan for most of this year, keeping it a secret even from some of his closest aides. He helped assemble a team of Ukrainian computer programmers to develop the AI guidance system, and he secured financing from Ukraine’s allies in Europe to produce the autonomous drones at scale, the two sources said.

Having served throughout the war as a crucial member of Zelensky’s team, Fedorov changed this month into a potential rival for the presidency. In a video address posted on YouTube yesterday, the former defense minister called for Ukraine to hold elections and choose a new government. Ukraine has not held presidential or parliamentary elections since 2019, because Ukrainian martial law, which has been in effect since the start of the invasion, prohibits elections in a time of war. Opinion polls taken in recent weeks show that Fedorov has grown popular enough in Ukraine since his dismissal to pose a serious challenge to Zelensky in a presidential race. “Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia,” Fedorov said in his speech.

The same day, the Ukrainian Parliament confirmed the nomination of a new defense minister, Yevhenii Khmara, a decorated military veteran. The vote in Parliament foreclosed Fedorov’s hopes of returning to his previous post anytime soon. It also threw into doubt the future of the operation known as M&Ms. One of the sources familiar with the plan expressed hope that the new defense minister would carry it forward. “We will try. Technically it’s possible,” the source said. “You can revive this project with a new team, but it would take, in my view, around three months.” By that time, another brutal winter of war will have arrived.

In the months before his dismissal, Fedorov pursued numerous high-tech plans to force the Russians to negotiate before the onset of winter. The Atlantic reported earlier this month that he had appealed for help from Elon Musk, and that Zelensky had asked President Trump to secure Musk’s assistance. The Ukrainians needed Musk to allow the use of Starlink, his satellite-communications network, as a navigation tool for drones to hit targets inside Russia, including Russian ballistic-missile launchers, with precision. Musk has refused to allow the use of Starlink over Russian territory. He has not replied to my messages seeking comment on the matter.

As an alternative to Starlink, the Ukrainians have rushed to develop reliable drones equipped with AI, which offer a way to get around Russia’s counter-drone defenses. Most attack drones require a pilot to guide them to their targets, through radio signals, mobile internet connections, or some other means of remote control. Russia, like most advanced military powers, uses electronic jamming to disrupt the signal between enemy drones and their pilots, forcing the weapons to crash or veer off course.

[Read: Ukraine’s plan to unnerve Putin]

Last summer, the Ukrainians found an ingenious way around this problem. They hid 117 drones inside five long-haul trucks and hired unwitting drivers to bring them close to Russian air bases. Once in position, the drones connected to the internet, reportedly using Russian SIM cards, and flew out of the trucks’ secret compartments. Drone pilots back in Ukraine used the internet connection to guide most of the weapons to their targets. The mission, known as Operation Spider’s Web, damaged or destroyed roughly two dozen Russian warplanes, including nuclear-capable bombers, that stood parked on the tarmac of their bases in Russia.

Ukraine’s latest plan would allow the drones to pilot themselves, using an AI-powered technique known as map matching, the two sources familiar with the plan told me. The technique involves uploading detailed maps of a drone’s intended flight path to its onboard computer, along with pictures of its targets. As the drone flies, its camera collects images of the terrain below. The onboard computer uses an AI model to compare those images with the ones stored in its memory, a bit like a person consulting a map on an unfamiliar highway. When the camera spots something that matches, or resembles, the image of the target, the drone flies into it and explodes. A human pilot does not need to confirm that the drone has found the right target before it strikes.

When this technology first appeared in Ukraine a couple of years ago, some drone manufacturers told me, they had declined to make it available to their clients in the military, because they found it too risky. One drone maker showed me an AI-targeting system with a kind of accuracy selector, which he could slide up and down on a screen. If he chose the lower setting, it would give the drone permission to attack even if its AI model is only 30 percent certain that it sees the right target. The highest setting tells the AI to reach 90 percent certainty before it decides to strike. Even that did not seem precise enough for the manufacturer, who wondered what would happen if a child on a bicycle were to enter the frame of the drone’s camera as it locked onto its target: “Who is responsible if that kid dies?”

Ukrainian officials, arms makers, and military officers have wrestled with such questions for years. Some have called for the Ukrainian Parliament or an international body such as the United Nations to develop guidelines for the use of AI targeting in warfare. No such rules exist in Ukrainian law. The U.S. and most of its allies have vague guidelines about a human needing to be “in the loop” before an AI model decides to attack. But most experts on the laws of war see such restrictions as outdated and insufficient.

Zelensky raised concerns about unintended targets being struck when it came to the plan to attack Moscow’s airports, one of the sources familiar with these conversations told me. The officials behind the plan offered work-arounds, the source said. They suggested, for example, that Ukraine would warn civilian airlines to avoid Russian airports and evacuate their planes before the swarm of Ukrainian drones arrived. “If they say to themselves, You know what, it’s getting too risky. Why even continue flying there?” the source said. “That would already have quite an impact on the Russian elites. Those are their main connections to the outside world.”

Jason Arday’s Final Self-Delusion

2026-08-18T07:00:00-04:00

In the Henrik Ibsen play The Wild Duck, Dr. Relling dispenses a drug that soothes the most profound self-loathing: livsløgn, a “life-lie,” a form of grandiose self-delusion that lets the pathetic figures who take it believe that they are geniuses and noble romantics. The life-lie, it turns out, is a hell of a drug—perhaps the most potent Scandinavian pharmaceutical invention before Ozempic—and keeps the play’s fragile characters from succumbing to “self-contempt and despair.” Against Relling’s advice, another character, Gregers, decides to free these losers from their life-lies and expose them. The play ends with a suicide.

On Friday, the former Cambridge professor Jason Arday died at the age of 41. British police said his death was “unexpected” but not “suspicious.” This classification, unexpected but not suspicious, includes the possibility that he died accidentally. But reports of Arday’s delicate emotional state at the time have led most to assume that he killed himself after weeks of accumulating revelations that he had lied compulsively for personal and professional gain. One of his last public statements was an interview with The Times of London in which he affirmed that he was “not a liar,” a line itself so blatantly false that any Ibsen fan would have recognized symptoms of a livsløgn overdose. He gave no George Santos–like, impish shrug at having been finally caught. (What took you so long?) He did not prepare to switch careers to pursue reality-TV stardom or write a Catch Me if You Can–style memoir about the dupes he met along the way. Instead, his response suggested—it is painful to notice this now, when nothing can be done—that he felt he had to stick with his story. That way led to a catastrophic end: narcissistic collapse, in which the lies stop working on others and finally on the liar himself. Arday appears to have convinced himself, wrongly, that the last remaining option was suicide, which was, of course, his final self-delusion. His lies won him undeserved praise and status, and they gave (unforgivably) false hope to people whose loved ones have severe developmental delays. But the only lie that ever killed anyone was the last one.

Some are now suggesting that Arday was the victim, and the people who drew attention to his lies, the villains. Ibram X. Kendi suggests that Arday might even be vindicated after a full accounting of the allegations against him. (Keep in mind that in addition to his straightforward acts of fabrication and plagiarism, always of less powerful academics, he claimed to have taken part in a British documentary series that preceded his birth.) And the hapless Good Law Project, which persuaded dozens of Cambridge bigwigs to rally behind Arday and dismiss his critics as racists, has issued an open letter calling for an investigation of “the press.” The media’s alleged crime: writing about this extraordinary case of a habitual liar’s appointment to a distinguished academic post, rather than letting the liar keep embarrassing himself and his institution. “Reasonable public interest” in the case had dissipated, the letter says, yet the press kept digging. Arday’s death was, it says, the “direct, foreseeable and foreseen result of press harassment.”

A Buddhist proverb says that when a wise man points at the moon, the fool stares at his finger. The media were unrelenting, but con-man stories are always popular, and the bigger the victim, the better. The press’s obsession was in proportion with the outlandishness of the lies told by Arday and on his behalf, and with public interest in the failures they revealed. Those failures were intellectual, institutional, and even legal. Arday called the cops on an academic who had asked him hostile questions, and he instructed a law firm to send a threatening letter to a reporter who did the same. The focus on those who pointed out Arday’s shortcomings, rather than on Arday himself and those who abetted his rise, is a clear sign that lessons from this miserable episode remain unlearned. The people responsible for it may repeat their errors and, in some cases, commit appalling new ones. (Kendi compares Arday’s treatment to a “lynching.” This analogy is tenable only if you think lynching means harshly criticizing people for actual transgressions, rather than summarily murdering them for no reason at all.)

[Read: The truths that failed Jason Arday]

Some lies are so preposterous that intelligent people who believe them bear some responsibility for being taken in. And they are outright guilty for repeating the lies and urging others to believe them. This is obviously so in Arday’s case. The lies depended on willful credulity, as well as amplification by other professors, including Cambridge’s Hilary Cremin, who went on the BBC and told Arday that “you are the best in the world, in terms of the research that you do.” Reviewers gushed over his books and pronounced them moving, “brave,” and “insightful.” Defenders did begin to distance themselves when the lies became even more lurid and inexplicable, as with the claims that a masked man invisible to security cameras had menaced Arday with a knife and that someone had sent him the head of a pig, which he disposed of rather than preserved as evidence. The trajectory of his deception seems to have been from tragedy (a man carried away with lies and too compulsive to stop telling them) to farce (once the lies became ridiculous enough that only a complicit person could believe them) and finally back to tragedy on Friday. Arday’s colleagues, his editors, and the people who knew he was a fraud but said nothing have absorbed some ridicule for their role in hiring and publishing him. But to date, I have seen no evidence that they have considered their complicity, let alone repaired the damage to their institutions by explaining their error or, better yet, just resigning.

They elevated Arday, a fragile and disturbed person, into a position where his fragility would be tested and he would be shattered. Even if the Cambridge Faculty of Education’s standards were so low that his inadequacies would remain unremarked there, he was a fellow of a Cambridge college with real scholars who would eventually be indignant upon realizing that their new colleague’s scholarship consisted of copy-paste jobs, semiliterate nonsense, and fan notes on his favorite 1990s Brit-pop. Did Arday’s allies think no one would notice? That those who noticed would be forever intimidated into polite silence? That drinking sherry in the common room of Jesus College would be a pleasant experience for Arday himself as he waited to be found out? Those who placed Arday in that situation were cruel and heartless. They may as well have taken a skin-and-bones Make-A-Wish kid, told him that he could fly, and shot him out of a cannon. The journalists were not the ones who stuffed Arday into the cannon and lit the fuse. They were gravity.

In The Wild Duck, Ibsen’s main villain is Gregers, the crusading moralist who makes it his mission to “rescue” the characters from their sustaining life-lies and help them and those who respect them see their deficiencies. The Gregers in this case is Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher with an abiding interest in race and a particular curiosity about the supposed mental deficiencies of Black people. Cofnas’s views on race science (he believes that very few Black people are cognitively equipped to be employed at a “meritocratic” university) led him to be run out of Cambridge in 2024, just as Arday was being appointed to one of the university’s most prestigious chairs. Cambridge’s failure to vet this appointment left an opening for Cofnas, smarting from his own dismissal, to take on the unsavory task of assembling a dossier on Arday’s work. The results were so galling that morbid curiosity drove others to scrutinize everything else about Arday, including his implausible claims that he secretly raised large sums for charity and was among the world’s greatest long-distance runners.

[Read: Icarus in the faculty lounge]

Dr. Relling calls Gregers’s urge to disabuse and expose “an acute attack of integrity,” and he warns that going cold turkey off livsløgn will not end well for patients or others. (Other Ibsen plays are relevant here too: In some, the collapse of illusions afflicts whole towns, not just a few of their members.) The difference between Gregers and Cofnas seems to be that the latter, perhaps as a result of his being scorned by Cambridge, has no affection for the people whose life-lies he methodically destroyed. Cofnas recently told the podcaster Winston Marshall that “talking about” race “makes people feel bad, and there are a lot of things that are true that make people feel bad that we don’t need to talk about.” But the subversion of academic standards, at what Cofnas perceives as his own expense, demanded action. The result will be good for academia, Cofnas insists, a far better outcome than preserving the good feelings that went along with silence.

In Ibsen, when Gregers forces integrity on a self-deluded character, that character’s daughter decides to kill herself. Gregers sounds most like Cofnas in the final scene. He is confident that her death, however horrible, will “set free all that is noble” in those who partook in the life-lie as they see life for what it is. Life sustained by delusion “is not worth living,” Gregers says. But he knows the cost of being an odious truth teller. “I am glad that my destiny is what it is,” he tells Relling: “to be the thirteenth at table,” the guest who everyone wishes would stop showing up, because he brings misfortune to any dinner he attends.

Arday was hired to teach social science. A terminal irony is that his main contribution to that body of knowledge will be as a case study, about a community that elevated a flawed man to a position exalted beyond his ability, without knowing or caring that they were actually offering him as a human sacrifice.

Donald Trump Effectively Just Told Iran to Get a Nuclear Weapon

2026-08-20T12:54:43-04:00

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Anyone can get distracted now and then, and say things out loud he or she probably shouldn’t say. Perhaps an excited friend lets on about a surprise party, or a co-worker dishes up some unseemly office gossip. Or, if you’re the president of the United States, you might reveal some numbers about an adversary’s nuclear arsenal and then admit that those weapons, even a relatively small number of them, are pretty darn useful.

Donald Trump made this impromptu foray into nuclear-deterrence issues yesterday when he was inspecting the destruction he’s inflicted on the White House East Wing. A reporter asked whether he was again exchanging letters with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a reference to the president’s earlier epistolary bromance with Pyongyang’s dictator. “I can’t tell you that,” Trump responded. “But I get along with him. And you know what? The fact that I get along with him, that’s a good thing. Not a bad thing.”

It’s not always a “good thing” to “get along with” a murderous autocrat who runs a country that is functionally a prison camp, especially one with a nuclear arsenal. The size of that arsenal is a tightly held secret in Pyongyang, but it is not inconsequential: Experts working from open sources have made various guesses, usually in the range of roughly 60 thermonuclear weapons.

[Tom Nichols: Trump will make South Korea pay for his Iran humiliation]

Trump, however, blurted out an exact tally. “He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons,” the president said. That’s a pretty specific number; the intelligence community almost never issues such precise figures, instead offering ranges of plausible guesses. Trump may be making it up out of nowhere, or perhaps talking about some subset of Pyongyang’s arsenal, as the arms-control expert Jeffrey Lewis suggested, or he’s garbling something he saw in a classified setting and didn’t understand. In the end, Lewis mused in a series of posts on social media, “Trump is trying to tell us a secret he heard, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what it means.”

Clearly, Trump has been getting briefed on developments about the North Korean nuclear inventory. And yet, he seems strangely unconcerned. The stockpile might be small, but it is in the hands of a dangerous regime. Even at its current estimated size, the Hermit Kingdom’s arsenal can kill tens of millions of people in Asia; soon enough, the North Koreans may be able to reach the United States with nuclear-armed long-range missiles.

The president, however, seemed more concerned with blaming other chief executives for the situation, and he assured everyone that all was well.

Should have never allowed it to happen. They should have never allowed it. If I were president, I wouldn’t have allowed it. But he’s got ’em. I get along with him very well. I can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon. And I know Kim Jong Un very well, and he’s gonna be fine. As long as we have a smart president, he’s going to be fine. If we have a dumb president, then he’s probably not gonna be so fine.

“Smart” and “dumb” need a bit of unpacking here, of course. When Trump says “smart,” he means me, and when he says “dumb” he means not me. What he seems to be implying is that although North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is very dangerous, he has no intention of messing with either the bombs or the regime and that future presidents would be fools to do otherwise.

Trump never says how he would have stopped North Korea’s nuclear program, and despite his current equanimity about North Korea’s nukes, he has emphasized that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon, because … well, his reasoning on this double standard isn’t clear. Is it because the North Koreans—fighting alongside Russia in the middle of Europe, sharing missile technology with U.S. enemies, and running giant crypto scams—are somehow less dangerous a regime than Iran? Or perhaps he thinks the Iranian ayatollahs aren’t as reasonable as the North Korean leader—a man whose regime routinely threatens to turn Western cities into a “sea of fire”? Or—more likely—Trump feels he can live with Kim’s nuclear ambitions because the two of them took nice walks during a meeting that sated Trump’s ego with lots of saluting and pageantry.

Whatever Trump’s feelings, his bumbled comments (and needless fumbling of likely classified information) nonetheless revealed how much Trump regards nuclear weapons as a sign of status, and sent a message of crystalline clarity to Iran: Nuclear deterrence, even with only a few bombs, works. Get a nuclear weapon as soon as you can if you want to be safe and treated with the kind of deference America shows to North Korea.

[Tom Nichols: Russia and America are rediscovering the limits of nuclear weapons]

Iran and North Korea are practically allies, and in all likelihood, the North Koreans have probably already said something like this to their friends in Tehran. Recall that when NATO began its 2011 intervention in Libya, officials in Pyongyang said that Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi should have held on to his nuclear program, instead of bargaining it away in exchange for Western promises. Months later, Qaddafi was dragged into the street and torn to pieces by his own people. The North Koreans, according to one scholar, probably felt “alarmed, but also deeply satisfied with themselves” as they watched countries such as Iraq and Libya suffer a fate that the DPRK averted by having a nuclear shield.

And now the sitting president of the United States has affirmed North Korea’s strategic wisdom: Trump has shown the world that even a tiny nuclear arsenal deters America from taking military action, and in Trump’s case, enemies who acquire nuclear weapons will also receive fawning letters and precious visits from the most powerful man on the planet. Forgo those weapons, as the Iranians have done until now, and the result is destruction, attempts at regime change, and demands for unconditional surrender.

Build a nuclear bomb, and you’ll face sanctions and other hardships—but you won’t get stealth bombers pulverizing your country. Your regime will survive, and after everyone gets used to the idea of another nuclear-armed power in the world, you’ll get entreaties and offers for talks.

And if America has a “smart” president, you might even get a love letter or two.

The New History Wars

2026-08-20T11:11:00-04:00

On a recent afternoon in Washington, I put on a pair of augmented-reality glasses for a tour of some very recent ruins: the White House East Wing. In recent months, black fencing has overtaken the area, where Donald Trump’s ballroom construction is speeding along as the Supreme Court decides its fate. Visitors can’t see much of anything from the street. As I wore the clunky eyewear, though, historic images of the structure flashed in front of me. The glasses showed me features wiped away by the president during his ongoing renovation spree, such as the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden and the White House Family Theater. Looking around, I could see a panorama of images visualizing Trump’s plans to transform Washington, D.C.: the Reflecting Pool, the Triumphal Arch, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and more.

The tour guide, a public historian named Lexi Cleveland, created this very 2026 experience as the executive vice president of ARtGlass, an AR company. (One of the co-founders is Greg Werkheiser, a cultural-heritage lawyer currently suing the Trump administration over plans to paint the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.) Cleveland prompted me with questions throughout. “What do we actually lose when we lose a building?” she asked. When the glasses showed me a Black Lives Matter mural that the city removed after Trump’s return to office, Cleveland juxtaposed it with the equestrian statue of President Andrew Jackson in front of the White House. The populist Jackson is one of Trump’s favorite presidents; expanding slavery and signing the Indian Removal Act are inextricable parts of his legacy. The construction of the statue, completed in 1852, involved an enslaved apprentice. “If you got to decide,” Cleveland asked, “does the statue stay, go, get contextualized with signage, or get moved to a museum?”

She plans to ask these questions to larger groups when the tours start in full this month, and she’s prepared to mediate debates. The approach feels fitting in a country engaged in an active struggle over how to remember its past.

History is on Trump’s mind. He wants to become part of it by reshaping the commemorative landscape of Washington. And he wants to reframe how history is told within Washington’s museums. For over a year, the White House has scolded and threatened the Smithsonian. But last month, the president took an unprecedented step toward pushing that feud into the real world. In an executive order, he called on the National Park Service to place signs outside the National Museum of American History, which the White House has said is subject to “ideological capture” at the hands of “a radical activist cohort.” The Park Service will direct visitors to “accurate information” about the nation’s past and mount its own temporary exhibit about the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, who the White House says aren’t showcased enough by the museum. The fight for public memory will soon spill into the streets.

[Read: The capital is a mess]

It will happen on the National Mall, where the National Guard continues to roam and not far from the transformed White House, with its abundant fencing—at this point, a core aesthetic of the second Trump administration. Across town, scaffolding outside the Kennedy Center blocks the part of the facade where Trump’s name once hung above the late president’s. Historic statues at Arlington Memorial Bridge have been swallowed up by blindin g gold. Meanwhile, at two plazas in downtown Washington, statues that came down during the Black Lives Matter protests have been reinstalled: One of Confederate General Albert Pike returned to Judiciary Square last fall, and one of Caesar Rodney (which was toppled in Wilmington, Delaware), who signed the Declaration of Independence and enslaved hundreds of people, now overlooks Freedom Plaza.

Historians, preservationists, and activists are finding ways to work their own ideas and stories back into public space, in spite of the obstacles. The most visible example might be a series of viral art pieces by the guerilla art group the Secret Handshake that keep appearing on the Mall. (In March, the group plopped a gold toilet by the Lincoln Memorial to poke fun at Trump’s redevelopment projects.) But there are more sober ventures too. When Trump’s exhibit goes up outside the American History Museum, a group called Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian plans to send docents to “interpret” the signage for visitors—a nerdy form of counter-protest. Even the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, which has not yet been assigned a site because of partisan fighting in Congress, is oddly of a piece with this renegade spirit: It has resorted to an augmented-reality exhibit that dreams up some new monuments for D.C.

The projects get at the central disagreement fueling these feuds over history: whether, as Trump sees it, American history is best told through a simple, sweeping narrative of grandeur or, as these groups see it, through a compendium of diverse stories. If the city suddenly feels like it’s in rough-draft form, Trump isn’t the only one with a red pen in hand.

A few days after Trump issued his executive order about the National Museum of American History, I arrived at a very wholesome protest: about a dozen concerned museumgoers holding signs outside the staff entrance to the building and singing patriotic songs such as “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” The makeshift choir is part of a larger group, Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, that came together last year to archive material across the Smithsonian because it feared that the Trump administration might start altering exhibits. I found one of Citizen Historians’ leaders, Jessica Dickinson Goodman, explaining the recent drama to a group of tourists, a kind of test run for conversations to come.

Earlier this month, the group’s role expanded from DIY archivists to rogue docents when it put out a call for help interpreting the signage that Trump is adding to the Mall. In its newsletter, the group described the effort as nonconfrontational and fact-based. Dozens of volunteers came forward. Dickinson Goodman told me that they’re creating instructions for the types of topics that might arise: “We’ll start showing up as soon as we hear of construction starting.”

[Read: Trump’s trigger warnings]

One place where the grand, old-school version of history that the Trump administration seems to prefer prevails in the monuments and memorials on the National Mall. Here, the subject matter is clear, and the tone, though solemn, is usually celebratory.

The sole memorial dedicated to a named historical woman is for Eleanor Roosevelt, though the statue is incorporated into her husband’s larger commemorative site. For its 250th celebration, the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum put out its augmented-reality exhibit, “Unhidden Heroines,” to highlight five women associated with five major monuments—and to underscore their absence from public art. It’s hard not to perceive an exhibition squished onto your phone screen as an indicator of where women’s history stands these days.

Still, it’s worth a “visit.” At the Jefferson Memorial, the geotagged exhibition focuses on Mary Katharine Goddard, who printed the first copy of the Declaration of Independence to list most of the signers. At the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, Dorothy Height talks about how she helped organize the March on Washington but did not speak at it. At the end of each anecdote, a “monument” of sorts pops up next to whatever your camera is pointing at. The figures appear so large on the screen, they sometimes dwarf the actual monuments. “That was intentional, of course, because they were towering women in their own right,” Karri Nussle, the museum’s associate director for advancement and external affairs, told me.

It was fun. Well done too. But sitting there with my phone and my headphones and the make-believe monuments, I also felt kind of sad. Eventually, the augmented-reality glasses come off. The phone screen goes black. The volunteer docents go home. What’s left? At the Jefferson Memorial, after I put my phone down, sending a cartoonish Mary Katharine Goddard back into the digital ether, it was just me and the man cast in bronze.

What Does a Trump Endorsement Actually Mean in 2026?

2026-08-20T19:06:00-04:00

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

Cory Mills’s reelection campaign was in trouble before it even began. Washington, D.C., police investigated the Florida representative early last year after a woman alleged that he’d assaulted her; later in 2025, a different woman was granted a restraining order against him. Neither woman was his wife. Mills, who has denied any wrongdoing, was never charged with anything, and the woman who alleged that he’d assaulted her walked back her claim after it became public. Still, questions lingered. Then, in February, Donald Trump endorsed him anyway, calling him an “America First Patriot and Tremendous Champion” of his district.

Not everyone in Florida’s Republican establishment felt the same. Governor Ron DeSantis declined to back him, and Representatives Anna Paulina Luna and Mike Haridopolos threw their support behind his opponent. A House ethics probe is ongoing. On Tuesday, Mills lost his primary election—and despite never having rescinded his endorsement, Trump is now trying to back away from the congressman retroactively. “I told Congressman Cory Mills of Florida, a friend of mine, to get out of the Race, but he wouldn’t listen,” he posted on Truth Social yesterday morning. Mills’s opponent, Ryan Elijah—who already won the primary—now has Trump’s “Complete and Total Endorsement!”

What does a presidential endorsement mean for a Republican facing a primary election in 2026? If not enduring loyalty from the White House, then at least a reliable boost in the polls. The candidates that Trump supports still tend to win big; about 96 percent of the politicians he tapped this year (more than 300 of them) won their primary, according to Ballotpedia—an impressive ratio. Trump clearly enjoys the perception that his endorsement makes or breaks a candidate. “If they don’t get the endorsement, they don’t win,” he said in 2021.

For many voters, particularly in the MAGA camp, perceived loyalty to Trump remains a deciding factor. (Just ask Bill Cassidy.) But not every bet Trump makes pays off. An endorsement has never been an outright guarantee of victory, and the rare exceptions illuminate some truths about Trump and the GOP. Two of the president’s other picks lost their primary race on Tuesday: Megan Degenfelder, the head of Wyoming’s Department of Education, who was running for the state’s governorship, and the former Commerce Department adviser Catalina Lauf, who was up for an open House seat in southwest Florida. By CNN’s count, that makes 10 Trump-endorsed candidates who have so far lost their primary this year.

No single, unifying theory can explain these races. Sometimes, the timing makes a difference. When Trump endorsed Degenfelder as Wyoming’s best choice for the governorship, back in January, the state’s education chief hadn’t even entered the race. Once she did, the nod gave her campaign an early lead—an advantage she held on prediction markets for about seven months, despite being outraised and outspent by her main opponent in the GOP primary. In the end, she couldn’t sustain it. Lauf got her endorsement from Trump last week, almost a full year into her campaign, and well after mail-in voting had already begun. Her primary was always more of a toss-up than Degenfelder’s, but Trump’s endorsement may have arrived too late to make a difference.

The president also cares more about some races than he does about others. In Indiana, he was able to use his endorsement power to punish those who had opposed his agenda. Trump vowed that Republican state senators who were up for reelection would lose their race if they rejected a gerrymandering plan he backed—and in May, after a concerted effort and successful fundraising from the MAGA base, most of those politicians did indeed lose their primary. Compare that with what he gave Lauf: not much more than a one-off Truth Social post.

Not every race is a blanket referendum on Trump’s endorsement power; the particulars always matter. The Republican strategist Doug Heye told me that “when the voters go in the voting booth, the word Trump doesn’t appear. It’s those candidates.” Mike Lindell, the Trump-endorsed MyPillow founder and MAGA stalwart, lost his bid for the Minnesota governorship earlier this month. He’d been leading in the polls, despite the fact that he was obviously unqualified—and that the state’s GOP leadership had declined to endorse him, suggesting that he’d be an “easy target” for Democrats. On Election Day, though, he lost to the experienced state House speaker Lisa Demuth. His adjacency to Trump couldn’t get him over the line.

As much as Trump likes the idea that he alone can propel a candidate to victory, he also seems to try to skew the odds in his favor. As NPR points out, the president has lately been backing more incumbents than he did during the 2018 midterms (75 percent of his choices this year have been sitting politicians), which suggests a greater aversion to risk. He also tends to make endorsements much earlier than he used to, getting involved from the outset and attempting to deter competition. Recent history is full of examples of races where Trump’s endorsement did make a big difference: The Ohio Senate seat that ultimately went to J. D. Vance in 2022 was fiercely contested until the president made his pick. Often, though, the president is simply playing the odds, betting on the candidate he thinks has the best chance.

That’s exactly what happened in Texas earlier this year. Ahead of the GOP primary for John Cornyn’s Senate seat, Trump was widely expected to endorse the incumbent. As my colleague Elaine Godfrey noted at the time, the senator tried to rename a highway after Trump in an effort to secure his support. But the president went with a competitor, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’d been ahead in the polls despite being impeached a few years prior. Back in 2022, in the lead-up to Missouri’s Senate primary, Trump went with a more unusual strategy. He wrote on social media that he’d decided to endorse “ERIC”—but didn’t specify which of the three candidates named Eric he actually supported. Was it a gaffe, or a sly acknowledgment that he didn’t want to pick among them?

Trump has been more involved in primaries than his predecessors were, setting a new expectation for how active presidents should be in those races. Many of his endorsements have been a boon for his favored candidates. But not every election is about Donald Trump.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

The FBI searched the Washington, D.C., home of former Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell and seized his electronic devices over the weekend, according to a person familiar with the matter. The actions were part of an investigation into sexual-misconduct allegations against Swalwell, who has previously denied them.
Canadian officials resumed trade talks with the United States ahead of a Saturday deadline that could trigger 50 percent tariffs on about $20 billion in Canadian exports. President Trump suspended the planned tariffs on Tuesday, saying that the two countries had reached a deal that still needed to be finalized.
The USS Abraham Lincoln and its crew of about 5,000 people began its journey home to San Diego from the Middle East after a nine-month deployment that largely focused on supporting U.S. operations against Iran. The USS George Washington has arrived in the region to take its place.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

The Color Recession May Be Permanent

By Amogh Dimri

When Bob Buckter, a 79-year-old housepainter who also goes by “Dr. Color,” began his career, in the 1970s, the job was a lot more fun. Acid-tripping hippies in his hometown of San Francisco wanted “wild-ass color combinations” for their facades, he told me. Armed with mustard-yellow, lime-green, and vermilion paint, Buckter happily transformed drab Victorian and Edwardian homes into vivid eye candy.

Today, almost no one seems to be looking to the hues of jelly beans for inspiration for their home—or car or couch or fridge or practically anything else.

Read the full article.

The Wrong Kind of American

2026-08-17T06:00:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: Watch the interview with Julia Curlee on Radio Atlantic.

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At the CIA, they’d started an office pool on when I’d be fired.

President Trump would be sworn in for his second term at noon; the smart money had me gone by 12:15. But the smart money hadn’t counted on Trump’s first pick to run intelligence for the National Security Council being shredded by an online mob on suspicion of disloyalty. There wasn’t yet anyone in place to fire me.

After taking the oath, Trump spoke at the Capitol. “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”

“Did he … ?” an NSA colleague asked. She glanced at me and looked away.

“Yeah,” I muttered. The good news: I was one of those two genders. The bad news: The administration would have views as to which one.

I gripped my badge. I could take it off, leave the White House complex, walk out the north gate, and never look back. I imagined the story they would tell: See? Even she knew she didn’t belong.

I didn’t move. I’d wanted this badge since I was a kid. I’d chosen to be here.

“I know you all heard what the president said,” I told my team after Trump’s speech. “There’s a rumor of an executive order on bathrooms. If anyone asks, I’m using the coffee shops across the street.”

My whole team spoke up: Julia, we’ve got your back.

“Me being trans is not a secret,” I reminded them. “Promise me: Nobody covers for me.”

Back in my office, I closed the door. I cried quickly, efficiently, no sound—the way you do when the walls have ears, and everyone thinks you’re fearless.

Joe Biden’s political appointees had left the week before, and I was now the senior intelligence official in the White House. For the incoming Trump administration, the trans woman would man the gates.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve carried two dreams. The first came true in 2007, when I raised my hand, standing on the agency’s marble seal, and became a CIA officer. The second dream, I didn’t dare speak aloud; it came from an unexplainable conviction that I should have been born a woman. The longing, like homesickness, grew into an unbearable darkness.

On a sweltering June morning in 2013, I sat in the CIA parking lot, hands clamped on the wheel, preparing myself to live out my second dream. Terrified of my first day at work as Julia, I’d chosen a blue button-down and pants, hoping no one would notice I’d changed genders. At the turnstile, the guard smiled. “Morning, ma’am,” he said, and the badge reader flashed green. To use the lexicon of my trade, the after-action review would have read: “Nothing significant to report.”

In the years ahead—traveling to 35 countries, briefing former President George W. Bush, becoming a mom—being trans would sometimes seem like the most ordinary part of my life. But as much as I wanted to disappear into normal womanhood and the work, I knew there were others who needed to see that a life like mine was possible. So, in 2017, I wrote in these pages under the pseudonym Jenny Hall about how being openly trans at the CIA made me a better officer. CIA recruiters used the essay on college campuses, and new officers—not realizing they were talking with the author—told me that it had inspired them to apply.

[Read: Coming out as transgender made me a more effective CIA officer]

Soon after the essay ran, a call went out for volunteers to join the President’s Daily Brief staff and serve the new Trump administration. Working the PDB meant staying up all night to distill the most sensitive intelligence we possessed into a book that the president and our senior leaders read at dawn. It was one of the CIA’s most coveted assignments—a proving ground for our best analysts.

But the new administration was led by a president who had praised Vladimir Putin and compared the intelligence community to the Nazis. Almost nobody volunteered. I did.

Growing up in Hawaii, I dreamed of seeing the world. My grandfather gave me a simple promise: “Work hard, don’t complain; the country will take care of you. We came to America for small things. No pogroms. No leaky roof. Paradise was a bonus.”

Service before politics. Country before self.

I clung to this promise as I became a man, a husband, a father, a CIA officer, a wife, a mother.

For two years I served the Trump White House, arriving at work around midnight, six days a week, roaming the West Wing before dawn. My wife learned to live with the silence at the dinner table.

Sometimes I filled in on the road—summers in Bedminster, winters in Palm Beach. On my first trip, I boarded at Joint Base Andrews and a card waited at my seat: Ms. Curlee, Welcome Aboard Air Force One.

Grateful for the welcome, I was less grateful to whoever had sat me in the middle of the White House press pool. So I stuffed my face with the best waffles of my life and kept small talk to a minimum. As we flew to Mar-a-Lago, the president’s aide beckoned me to the front of the plane. No one cared that a trans woman was briefing President Trump.

Then one morning, my boss walked in, a wide smile on her face. She had a new job for me.

“Julia, what would you think about briefing the vice president?”

“This vice president?”

Days later, I stood in his driveway at the Naval Observatory. I must be insane, I thought. Mike Pence had built his career on public opposition to marriages like mine—to people like me. But for all our differences, he was the vice president. He needed the best intel support possible, and this was my country too.

“Mr. Vice President,” I said, “it’s an honor to meet you. My name is Julia”—like I’d practiced a thousand times.

“You’re abandoning me with her?” Pence teased his outgoing briefer, with a line I’d heard he used with other people. He turned to me. “Okay, Julia, tell me something I don’t know.”

“Sir, did you know that a third of Purdue’s computer-science grad students are Chinese nationals?”

He nodded once. “Get in the car.”

I grabbed my case and climbed into the Beast, the nickname for the executive limo. I hunted in vain for a seat belt as Secret Service radios squawked, “On the move.” I dug in my heels as the floor pitched. Pennsylvania Avenue, the PDB, and me—alone with Mike Pence.

When I got home, my wife and I decided to keep my new boss’s identity a secret. In my community, his name was shorthand for everything we feared. I could imagine the optics, and God help us if someone called a reporter.

For the next year, I briefed him nearly every morning. As soon as the coffee was hot, Pence was ready to work. He ripped through the briefing book, firing questions at me, scribbling in the margins.

Down the hall, the president was using his phone to light up Twitter. The vice president preferred to use our multibillion-dollar intel apparatus to save lives. Some mornings he would push back on an assessment, but I would hold the line, explaining how the conclusions had been reached. That was the job. When my tour was almost up, he asked me to extend it.

One morning, as we approached the White House gates, the vice president turned to me. “Julia, do you know why they call it ‘the People’s House’?”

“No, sir.”

“Right up until the Civil War, anyone could come to the door and wait to see the president.”

As the steel gates opened, he leaned in. “You know, it’s a privilege to work here.”

“Yes, sir.” I held his gaze. “It is.”

When my tour finally ended, Pence invited my family to the White House. In his office, he took my mother’s hand and smiled: “You must be very proud of your daughter.”

Years before, my mother had told me that in her grief, she’d felt that—somehow—I’d killed her son. Now I’d done the impossible: lived both dreams, becoming an intelligence officer and a woman. Now the vice president was holding my mother’s hand.

No one has affirmed my gender identity quite like Mike Pence. On my last day, I gave him a letter. I wrote: “I’m a transgender CIA officer, a wife and mother—and I served the Vice President. Anything is possible in America.” I told him many people at the CIA hadn’t believed that a trans officer like me could serve someone like him.

“Well,” he said, “I’m glad I passed the test.”

In that moment, it felt like the battle had been won.

Courtesy of Julia Curlee

Vice President Pence with the author at the White House in 2019

For years, friends told me people need to know that a gay trans woman had worked for Mike Pence and that the world hadn’t exploded. No—I was adamant—we serve in silence. But I kept the photos of that time.

After January 6, 2021, the vice president invited his former PDB briefers for a farewell picture in the West Wing. The place was quieter than I’d ever heard it. As we said our goodbyes, my voice shook.

“Sir,” I said, “what you did last week—I’ve never been prouder to have worked for you.”

He nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “That means a lot to me.”

We shook hands. The mob at the Capitol had chanted for his hanging. He’d done his duty to the country, certifying the vote. I’d done mine to him. That was the bargain. Service before politics. Country before self.

[Read: Transgender soldiers want the dignity of serving their country]

Two and a half years later, after a stint back at the CIA, I returned to the White House as a director for intelligence programs on President Biden’s National Security Council.

Days after Trump’s 2024 election victory, the intelligence staff gathered in our boss’s office. He was not a man who frightened easily. But he knew what was coming. “I need to strongly advise you to leave before Inauguration Day,” he said. “There’s a world in which you’ll be targeted individually.” He didn’t say my name. He didn’t need to. “They know how to use the tools this time. Install loyalists at CIA, FBI, and Justice—turn clearances and investigations into weapons.”

I told him I wasn’t resigning. Then the CIA’s deputy director sat me down. “Julia, look at me. You don’t have to do this. You have a target on your back that others don’t.”

“With respect, sir—this is what we do.”

He searched my face, looking for a crack. When he didn’t find one, he nodded. “Good luck.”

Days before the inauguration, Biden gathered the staff in the East Wing. “Now, folks, here’s the deal. Trump doesn’t know it yet, but he needs you. It’s important for the country.”

Of all the senior government officials who spoke with us before the new administration took office, Biden was the only one who asked us to stay.

On Inauguration Day, I stood in the West Wing to brief the new national security adviser, minutes after he’d taken office. Down the hall, the president signed an executive order banning me from restrooms in all federal buildings. I would start to plan policy meetings around bathroom stops across Pennsylvania Avenue.

The next day, my team fanned out to brief the new leadership on our nation’s highest secrets. Then these leaders stripped my insurance coverage for the estrogen that keeps me healthy, voided my discrimination protections, and declared me “male” to foreign governments on my passport. I would keep briefing them anyway.

On the third day came the purge—160 career NSC staff members sent home. Then new White House officials asked me to read them into classified programs; they called me around the clock, desperate for access to intelligence. Programs crucial to U.S. interests sat unmanaged; the officers who had been in charge of them had been escorted out. When NSC leaders realized what they’d done, it fell to me to call the people they’d humiliated and beg them to come back. They did.

One week in, the administration I served reinstated its ban on trans people in the military. Decorated officers such as my friend Colonel Bree Fram were thrown out for the crime of being honest. In the White House, people called me “indispensable.” I still was not welcome in their bathrooms.

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

A month later, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired 100 intelligence officers, many of them trans, for taking part in an LGBTQ group chat that conservative media had cast as sexually explicit. The next day, I ran an intel briefing—for her—because that is what we do. The following week, the president stood before Congress and called trans children a lie.

Then, one Saturday, I was sitting in a rib joint in Roanoke, Virginia, when my phone buzzed. “Julia, sorry to bother,” my boss said. “I have bad news. Your White House tour’s over. Chief of staff called. I can’t give you a reason.”

I was elbows-deep in brisket, the sauce congealing. I’d beaten the “Fire Julia” office pool by about 68 days. I was being sent back to my home agency. My boss cleared his throat.

“Um, Julia—we still need you Monday. But please. Be discreet.”

Fired on Saturday. Needed on Monday. But stay invisible?

Then my phone exploded—a dozen friends forwarding the same tweet. “SCOOP: A transgender, Biden holdover who hates President Trump is still working in the NSC intel office,” the right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer had written. “If you are aware of this person and have their name, please send it to me and I will post their identity.”

Monday arrived, and cherry blossoms framed a perfect spring day in Washington. I reported to the White House. I had no badge, and my accounts had been revoked. I spent three marathon days helping the administration that had fired me finish the budget, and handing off the portfolio I’d overseen for two years. As I packed up, a string of senior Trump appointees stopped in to say goodbye. One took my hand. “Thank you for staying as long as you did,” he whispered. “Not many would have.”

That night, a list of hidden “enemies” in the administration provided by Loomer landed on the president’s desk. But an internet activist like Loomer doesn’t come up with names on her own, or just walk into the Oval to give them to the president. Someone in the building had helped her. Most of those fired, including my boss, were rock-ribbed Republicans, experts in their fields, who had been courteous and professional.

As I walked out the north gate with my small box of belongings, I finally understood the warning: “Be discreet.” The White House had needed me. Trump officials had known I was trans from day one. This hadn’t been an issue until it was public—and then nothing else I’d done mattered. Not my service, not my war-zone tours, not even which restroom I used.

I was the wrong kind of American.

One morning after returning to the CIA, I passed a tour group in our museum, clustered below a photo of me high on the wall, near one of the 33rd president. “Here next to President Truman,” the guide said, “is a PDB briefer on Air Force One. Our highest secrets, collected at vast expense and great risk.”

“How do you become a briefer?” someone asked.

The guide smiled. “Very competitive. Years of experience. Our best.”

The tour moved on to the Osama bin Laden raid. I stayed. My eyes drifted over the photo, from my face in black and white to the vice president’s PDB in my lap. I’d spent decades fighting for my place—from a beach boy who dreamed of seeing the world to an officer who served her country. Now my photo hung as an artifact of a time when the CIA proudly said the quality of the work was more important than the gender of the person doing it.

My eyes fell to the door below—the door to the restroom I was barred from entering.

Courtesy of Julia Curlee

The author in Baghdad in April 2005

Every year since my first day as Julia, I’d sent a Pride Month email to my colleagues. But by June 2025, they’d banned the CIA’s LGBTQ group. Pride flags that had flown for decades were suddenly gone. My finger hovered over the “Send” button. Two sentences:

“Happy Pride. You are not alone.”

I froze. Someone would report this email to drive me out of the agency, just like at the White House. Don’t end up the last openly trans CIA officer, I told myself. I deleted the email, breathing through the urge to do something heroic and stupid. In the screen’s dark reflection, I saw my face—exhausted, angry.

That was the moment I knew I had to resign. I’d weighed my family’s health insurance against two sentences of solidarity and chosen to surrender my integrity. The agency that had taught me to tell hard truths was now teaching me to be invisible. It was time to go.

I loved the agency. I loved its mission. I love it still. I served under four presidents and through three wars. I lived by my grandfather’s words: Work hard, don’t complain; the country will take care of you.

I kept my end.

In 2017, I closed my Atlantic essay with the words “And trans kids should know, CIA is always recruiting.” That promise has been broken. I cannot in good conscience advise LGBTQ Americans to join the CIA—and that sentence is the hardest thing I have ever written.

The agency has been gutted as part of a deliberate plan, the director of the Office of Management and Budget once boasted, to put the people who defend our country “in trauma.” Analysts have been fired in public or questioned by the FBI; decade-old assessments have been denounced by the CIA director in the press. The president calls analysis “virtual treason” when it contradicts his preferred reality, and uses the CIA to undermine public confidence in American elections.

Fear has done its work. Irreplaceable officers with crucial language and technical skills, and decades of experience, have walked out the door. Those who remain within an agency built to deliver hard truths are being muzzled.

Twenty years ago, I sat in a bunker in Iraq, praying I would survive the night, in a war begun after our intelligence community had failed to do enough to challenge what the White House wanted to hear. Our agency spent the next two decades repairing the trust that failure broke. I know institutions can be rebuilt. Officers can come back, but only if someone is willing to tell the truth. In the entrance of our Original Headquarters Building, across from the stars for every officer slain in the line of duty, you can still read the words carved in marble:

And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.

I know that the CIA friends I left behind are holding the line under impossible circumstances. The country needs them more than ever. And I understand my colleagues who left but can’t speak up. Their livelihoods depend on clearances and contracts that can be revoked with a phone call. But we all swore an oath to the Constitution.

Naima Green for The Atlantic

The author in Washington, D.C., in August

I’m afraid too. This administration has already taken most of what I had to lose. I know that the White House and its online mob will come for me. My ancestors fled pogroms; they knew a fear I never expected to feel in the United States. I was offered an untenable bargain: Don’t make trouble. Take the insults—deviant, diversity hire, man in a dress—from those who have never faced enemy fire, who asked for my assistance in private and then signed the orders to erase people like me because “transgender ideology” was a threat to Western civilization.

Flailing regimes dehumanize minorities to distract from their failures. When the economy collapses or a war goes badly, they find a tiny group of people, make them the enemy within, and rally the country against them. This is how it’s gone in Iran. Hungary. Russia. I wrote PDBs about it. This will not stop with trans people. It never has.

But that caricature works only if people like me don’t exist—and I exist. I speak now because somewhere, a trans kid is watching. I want that kid to know that they are not alone. I was a trans kid too, and I’ll be damned if I let another generation grow up the way I did—told that they don’t belong, that they don’t deserve a job, a bathroom, a future. If I could brief presidents and serve in the White House—twice—so can they.

I had planned to spend the rest of my career serving my country at the CIA. This White House took my calling, but it will not take my pride, or tell me that I don’t belong, or that I must disappear. I once wrote under a pseudonym so I could keep serving. I write now in my own name for the same reason.

Julia.

This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “The Wrong Kind of American.”

A Stubbornly Naive Group of GOP Senators

2026-08-19T17:11:00-04:00

For many observers of American politics, the past few years have been disillusioning, knocking down hopeful beliefs about what the people of the United States will support or tolerate. Even some of Donald Trump’s backers have become disaffected.

Yet somehow, a small caucus of non-MAGA Republican senators has managed to remain preciously naive about the president and the administration he runs. No matter how many times Trump or his aides show who they are and how they operate, these senators seem flabbergasted and saddened.

No case illustrates the ease with which they are fooled like the confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general. Blanche was confirmed last week on a 50–49 vote, but only after GOP Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn extracted a written assurance from Blanche that a $1.8 billion fund for payouts to Trump allies would not proceed. Senator Bill Cassidy also wavered, but said he was persuaded by the vow. (All three men will leave the Senate at the end of this term: Tillis is retiring, and Cornyn and Cassidy lost primaries to Trump-backed challengers.)

This weekend, Blanche was interviewed on Meet the Press. Kristen Welker asked whether he could “pledge that the Justice Department will always act independently of the White House.” Blanche refused—likely an honest answer, given his demonstrated willingness to follow Trump’s lead, but one that should worry anyone who believes in the rule of law; witness Trump’s repeated demands for political prosecutions, irrespective of evidence. Yet Blanche insisted to Welker that Trump “will never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never will.”

That might reassure someone whose political memory stretches back only as far as early August. But anyone old enough to remember the slush fund, or Blanche’s starring role in negotiating it (as laid out by Federal Judge Kathleen Williams in May), would know that Trump not only has asked Blanche to do something unethical, but that Blanche complied. In order to vote to confirm, Cornyn, Tillis, and Cassidy had to convince themselves first that Blanche’s conduct in that case is not indicative of his basic moral compass; and second that he would be more accountable once permanently confirmed by the Senate than he was when he still had to win over their votes. If Trump finds or attempts to find some way to resuscitate the slush fund—as some experts believe he might—many people will be dismayed, but only this trio of guileless senators will be shocked.

Cassidy’s willingness to vote for a Trump yes-man is all the more puzzling because he voted to convict Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial, and because the president led the charge to defeat him in a primary. (The impeachment vote was Trump’s main reason for targeting him.) But Cassidy has a long record of credulity. As my colleague Nicholas Florko has reported, Cassidy—a physician—cast a deciding vote to confirm Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but only after the nominee made promises about preserving the existing vaccination regime, a pledge he promptly broke. On ABC’s The Week this past Sunday, Cassidy said “it’s pretty evident” that Kennedy’s vow was a lie. And on CNN’s State of the Union, he called the White House’s latest vaccine move, attempting to unbundle the measles, mumps, and rubella injection, “a crazy, stupid thing.” Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, another doctor, voted for Kennedy and has since been upset about the administration’s anti-vaccine steps. Who could have foreseen that the prominent vaccine skeptic would undermine federal vaccination policy?

Two other moderate Republicans, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, voted against Blanche’s confirmation, issuing statements that noted the politicization of the Justice Department under his watch as acting attorney general. But they are not always so clear-eyed. Murkowski delivered one of 2025’s most unintentionally hilarious statements when she cast a crucial vote to pass Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act through the Senate. “My sincere hope is that this is not the final product,” Murkowski said in a statement. “This bill needs more work across chambers and is not ready for the President’s desk. We need to work together to get this right.” Naturally, that didn’t happen; the mystery is why she thought the White House, or Mike Johnson’s House, would improve the bill once she’d surrendered her leverage.

Collins, however, is the dean of the credulous caucus. The Mainer, who faces a tough reelection campaign this fall, is perpetually concerned about Trump-administration actions, but seldom ready to actually use her power. Collins is a rare pro-abortion-rights Republican who previously said she wouldn’t support any Supreme Court nominee who opposed Roe v. Wade. In 2018, she voted to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who said Roe was “settled as precedent.” When Kavanaugh was part of the majority that voted to overturn Roe in 2022, Collins lamented the ruling but now says she didn’t regret her vote for Kavanaugh and would do it again. More recently, Collins helped pass a huge appropriation for ICE with few strings attached, then expressed dismay at the use of the funds to buy “shock gloves” for agents. Even her vote against Blanche was symbolic, because he had enough votes to be confirmed without her.

One could easily write these senators off as cynical, but if they’re acting for political gain, it’s not working well: Cassidy’s and Cornyn’s mild deviations from Trump led to the end of their careers; Tillis’s retirement helped him avoid what might have been a stiff primary challenge. Many of their concerns appear earnest. Perhaps they really just are that gullible, unable to adapt to a Trump age that is leaving them behind. In defending his Blanche vote, Cassidy shrugged off attacks: “I’ll be criticized for this vote. What’s new?” But voters might reasonably expect that their elected officials are savvier about the world than a babe in the woods.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

The United Arab Emirates said it will halt all trade and financial transactions with Iran, after accusing Iran of launching missiles toward Emirati territory. The announcement came hours after President Trump spoke with the UAE’s leader. Iran has denied carrying out the missile attacks.
The democratic socialist Angie Nixon defeated Alex Vindman, a former National Security Council aide, a surprise win in Florida’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary last night. Nixon will face Republican Senator Ashley Moody in November.
Trump said today that he had urged Republican Representative Cory Mills to drop out of his Florida primary “but he wouldn’t listen.” Mills lost to the former television anchor Ryan Elijah last night, and Trump has since backed Elijah.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Democrats are failing the Waymo test, Rogé Karma argues.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Getty; The Atlantic

You Don’t Know How Bad the Pizza Box Is

By Saahil Desai

Happiness, people will have you think, does not come from possessing things. It comes from love. Self-acceptance. Career satisfaction. Whatever. But here’s what everyone has failed to consider: the Ooni Koda 12-inch gas-powered outdoor pizza oven.

Since I purchased mine a year ago, my at-home pizza game has hit levels that are inching toward pizzaiolo perfection. Like Da Vinci in front of a blank canvas, I now churn out perfectly burnished pies entirely from scratch—dough, sauce, caramelized onions, and all. By merely looking at a pie, I can tell you whether the cornicione is too puffy or just right, if the crust could use a bit more leoparding, and whether the dough should have spent another day in the fridge. I am now, in a word, pizza-pilled.

But enlightenment is not without its consequences.

Read the full article. (From 2023)

Democrats Are Failing the Waymo Test

2026-08-19T07:00:00-04:00

Sign up for Work in Progress, a newsletter where Rogé Karma investigates the mysteries of a complicated economy.

The driverless future is here—but, to borrow from William Gibson, it’s not evenly distributed. Waymo’s self-driving robotaxis are available in cities in California, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas. Aside from California, where the technology originated, those are all red or purple states. In every other blue state, meanwhile, driverless taxis are still not allowed to operate. If you live in Miami or Dallas, you can summon a Waymo to get where you’re going. If you live in Boston or New York, you can’t.

This is not an accident. In Democratic jurisdictions, a coalition of labor unions, anti-tech activists, and politicians have kept driverless vehicles off the streets. (Colorado, which passed a bill authorizing driverless vehicles in 2017, before the current backlash, is on track to become the exception later this year.) They argue that the new technology would make the roads more dangerous and throw millions of human drivers out of work, all to enrich a handful of tech oligarchs.

A version of this fight is now playing out in Washington, D.C., where Kamala Harris won more than 90 percent of the vote in 2024 and where local officials recently introduced a bill that would provide a pathway for robotaxis to begin operating. Some residents have welcomed that prospect. But others are digging in their heels. Bill Davis, the president of the local Teamsters union, declared in a statement that the legislation “doesn’t benefit anyone outside of Silicon Valley billionaires” and “comes at the expense of middle-class professional drivers and anyone else who wants safer streets in our city.”

Driverless cars will indeed cost some workers their jobs. But unlike so many other recent Silicon Valley innovations, they have already demonstrated the potential to bring immense societal benefits. About 40,000 Americans die in car accidents every year. The number of crash-related injuries is much larger. As many as 10,000 crash victims enter emergency rooms around the country every day. Waymos are so much safer than human drivers that deploying them widely could avert countless injuries and deaths every year.

[Saahil Desai: Move fast and break nothing]

They will also make transportation more affordable: A taxi without a driver is much cheaper. Waymo is currently more expensive than Uber and Lyft, but that’s largely because supply is artificially constrained and demand is high. The price differential is dropping fast and will go away soon. Waymos also show promise in reducing carbon emissions and air pollution (the cars are electric), and providing reliable access to people who live in poor neighborhoods (who are routinely turned down by rideshare drivers). Saying no to Waymo is saying no to a technology that will change the world for the better.

There is a name for a political movement that taps into people’s resistance to change and defense of the status quo. William F. Buckley famously described a conservative as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” Progressivism was founded on the opposite ethic: that scientific and technological progress can bring about a better, more equitable future, provided that it’s steered in the right direction. In this sense, self-driving cars are a test for American progressives—a test of whether they have become so captured by interest groups, so hostile to corporations, and so fearful of technological change that they’ve transformed into enemies of progress itself.

In much of the country, the popular conception of self-driving cars is something between a bumbling idiot and a mechanical death trap. Videos of Waymo vehicles making ridiculous errors go viral online. Earlier this year, a Waymo hit a child who ran into the road near an elementary school in Santa Monica, California, causing minor injuries. When a jurisdiction considers whether to allow Waymos, stories like these come up again and again. “I’m also deeply concerned about the safety issues autonomous vehicles have already had in other cities,” Helen Raynor-Hughes, a longtime D.C.-area resident, testified during a public hearing in July, citing “reports of crashes, traffic disruptions, and situations where these vehicles failed to respond properly to pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers.”

But anecdotes can mislead. The question is how robotaxis’ error rate stacks up against that of human drivers. In a recent study, researchers at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety compared the crash and accident data on a per-mile basis for Waymo vehicles with those of human drivers in the cities where Waymos operated from 2021 to 2024. They found that Waymos were involved in 68 percent fewer crashes serious enough to be reported to police and 81 percent fewer crashes that caused an injury. These findings are “likely conservative” because human drivers regularly fail to report accidents, Eric Teoh, the report’s lead author, told me.

Several other studies have produced even more favorable results. These studies are co-authored by Waymo researchers but have been peer-reviewed by independent academics. Every expert I spoke with for this story, including Waymo skeptics, told me that they consider the research to be high-quality. “Reductions this big are basically unheard of when it comes to traffic safety,” Noah Goodall, a senior research scientist at the Virginia Transportation Research Council, told me. “Not even seat belts or airbags achieved the kinds of numbers we’re seeing here.” (Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet, is the only company that has demonstrated such a strong safety record. The others, including Tesla, have not disclosed the data needed to make safety claims.)

Even these figures probably underestimate how safe Waymos are. The journalists Timothy B. Lee and Kai Williams recently reviewed the details of the 78 accidents that Waymo vehicles had been involved in over a seven-month period and that were serious enough to cause an injury or trigger an airbag deployment. They found just one example where Waymo “could plausibly bear some responsibility” for a taxi crashing into another vehicle or a pedestrian—the Santa Monica–school incident—and another three where culpability was “mixed or unclear.” “We went into this looking for any evidence that Waymo could even remotely be at fault for a given crash,” Lee told me. “But those cases were just really hard to find.”

The big caveat to Waymo’s safety record is its difficulty with so-called edge cases—unpredictable situations for which its algorithm is unprepared and in which human judgment really comes in handy. When a power outage knocked out a third of San Francisco’s traffic lights last December, at least 60 Waymos abruptly idled mid-road, causing severe gridlock and delays. Something similar happened to a few dozen Waymos this year when the driverless vehicles encountered unexpected road closures during San Francisco’s Fourth of July celebrations. Waymos have obstructed emergency vehicles in several cities, typically because of their tendency to freeze when they encounter alarms, sirens, or temporary road closures. The company has not done nearly enough to fix the problem. “Competent driving is about a lot more than crash statistics,” Philip Koopman, an emeritus professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon, told me. “If Waymo isn’t able to address some of these problematic patterns, it is going to be very hard to convince the public they are safe.”

Even so, the fact that Waymos are considerably safer than human drivers is undeniable. A robot driver can’t drink and drive, fall asleep at the wheel, or check its phone. It won’t flout the rules of the road when it’s running late or trying to impress its friends. And it is equipped with more than a dozen different cameras, plus radar and laser sensors, meaning it doesn’t have blind spots. Bryant Walker Smith, an associate law professor at the University of South Carolina, has advised governments on how to regulate self-driving cars. “What I always tell policy makers is that we absolutely should be concerned about automated driving,” he told me. “But we should be terrified of human driving.”

Safety might be the average American’s top concern about driverless cars, but the average American isn’t spearheading the political resistance to Waymo. Labor unions are. The campaign against driverless vehicles has been led by a coalition of unions representing taxi, rideshare, and truck drivers who argue that self-driving cars will destroy millions of working-class jobs. (Although experts believe that self-driving trucks and delivery vehicles are at least several years away from being a regular presence on roads, labor unions see robotaxi legalization as a stepping stone to a fully automated driving future.) Indeed, Helen Raynor-Hughes, the area resident who testified about Waymo’s safety record, began by identifying herself as a Service Employees International Union member who drives for Uber and Lyft.

In 2026 alone, this Labor United Against Waymo coalition has helped defeat or delay legislation to authorize driverless vehicles in Illinois, Minnesota, Maryland, Virginia, Oregon, and Washington State. In January, New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared that she would pursue a bill to allow robotaxis to operate in the state, only to backtrack a few weeks later following an outcry from labor leaders.

When I arrived at D.C.’s city hall in July for a public hearing on the proposed bill to authorize Waymo, I passed dozens of protesters from various labor groups chanting and holding signs with slogans such as WAYMO? HELL NO and AI DOESN’T VOTE. We Do. Inside, about a dozen labor leaders and rideshare drivers demanded that city officials vote against the bill. Crystal Middleton, a D.C. resident who drives Uber and Lyft part-time to support her family, testified that if Waymo were adopted in the city, “many D.C. families, including mine, will struggle to make ends meet.”

I’m sympathetic to that argument. When I was growing up, my dad spent years driving Uber and Lyft on the weekends to help pay the bills. Like many drivers, he resented the meager pay and lack of benefits. (There’s an irony that unions and Democratic lawmakers are rallying to defend the type of precarious gig work that they have spent more than a decade criticizing.) But it’s hard to imagine what our family would have done without the extra income. The impulse to protect workers like him—not to mention the delivery and truck drivers who fear that they’ll be next—from being displaced by a new technology is understandable.

That approach, however, ignores the larger number of people who would benefit from a change to the status quo. At the public hearing, local nonprofit leaders and politicians, including Shane Simenstad, the director of public policy for Safe Kids Worldwide, pointed out that rideshare drivers often refuse to enter less desirable parts of the city, leaving residents of poor neighborhoods without a reliable way to get to work or school. Claire Stanley, the director of advocacy and governmental affairs for the American Council of the Blind, spoke about being denied Uber and Lyft rides because of her service dog. Multiple women testified about their fear of being harassed or assaulted by rideshare drivers. (According to a 2025 New York Times investigation, Uber received a report of sexual assault or misconduct nearly every eight minutes on average in the U.S. from 2017 to 2022.)

Some of the most moving testimonies came from the victims of car crashes and their loved ones. Rameez Tase, a local resident and avid cyclist, told the story of a friend who had been nearly killed after being hit by a car. “Anyone who knows me well knows that my biggest fear of death is being struck and killed by a distracted driver—and leaving my three young children without a father for the rest of their lives,” he said. Cesar Toledo, a member of the D.C. Commission on Poverty, recounted a childhood “marked by the terrifying reality of riding in vehicles driven by family members under the influence.”

Car accidents kill roughly as many Americans each year as breast cancer does, and twice the number of people who die from homicides. It is a leading cause of death among children and young adults. “The number of traffic deaths in America is the equivalent of a Boeing 737 crashing every single day,” Jonathan Slotkin, a neurosurgeon who regularly treats crash victims, told me. “That’s what we’ve chosen to tolerate as the price of mobility.”

Waymos, to be clear, wouldn’t solve this problem right away. Although rideshare and taxi drivers get into accidents at higher rates than the average driver, they make up a small fraction of cars on the road. But operating robotaxis is a key step for Waymo and other companies to perfect their self-driving technology, which could then be sold to vehicle manufacturers like Toyota to include as an optional feature in every car. “If we had a drug that showed these kinds of results, we’d be doing everything we could to get it out to as many people as fast as possible,” Slotkin said.

[Read: The huge problem Waymo didn’t see coming]

Widespread adoption of driverless vehicles would further a litany of goals that anyone should celebrate, especially those who claim to be progressive: slashing traffic injuries and deaths; helping the poor and disabled secure stable employment; making cities safer places to bike and walk; reducing the prevelance of sexual assault and misconduct; putting more electric vehicles on the roads. And yet progressives are the ones standing in the way. “Honestly, it’s just embarrassing,” Colin Mortimer, the director of the Center for New Liberalism, a center-left advocacy group, told me. “Liberals are always talking about how we’re the party that believes in science, that believes in data, that believes in helping the vulnerable. But on this issue we’re doing the exact opposite.”

Some Washington, D.C., legislators believe that the nation’s capital can pioneer a different approach to Waymo. In May, the D.C. Council member Charles Allen introduced a bill that would authorize driverless vehicles to begin operating in the district, but only if their makers meet certain key conditions designed in part to address the edge-case problem and reduce the impact on the city’s labor force. These include completing stringent testing and safety requirements and submitting a plan for interacting with first responders. Even then, the total number of driverless vehicles would be capped at a few hundred during the initial rollout. Each vehicle would also be subject to a per-mile tax used to fund public transit, as well as workforce training and compensation for displaced rideshare and taxi drivers. “We have to be honest with ourselves: This technology is already here and is only going to become a bigger part of our lives going forward,” Allen told me a few weeks after the hearing. “And so we can either bury our heads in the sand and have this change happen to us. Or we can put guardrails in place to make sure the technology works for us and our communities.”

In Allen’s view, too many restrictions would risk throttling a technology that could otherwise bring huge benefits; too few would invite a high-profile incident that draws a public backlash. Getting the balance right will be difficult. My own view is that the bill should have more restrictive testing requirements around edge cases—for instance, simulating power outages or major emergencies—before driverless vehicles can be deployed. But it should also create a less bureaucratic process for increasing the number of vehicles once those requirements have been met. The bill also faces several political obstacles, including an incoming mayor who expressed skepticism about Waymo expansion on the campaign trail. But Allen is trying to do something that no city has done before: chart a middle course between letting the new technology rip and blocking it altogether.

One-hundred and fifty years ago, the United States was experiencing the advent of a brand-new transportation technology. Railroads reduced cross-country travel from months to days, turned the U.S. into an industrial powerhouse, and enabled the modern consumer economy. But they also displaced workers, such as canal operators and stagecoach drivers; led to skyrocketing inequality; and produced corrupt monopolies presided over by ruthless oligarchs. A new political movement formed in response. Its adherents passed legislation that protected workers, created novel regulatory agencies, broke up powerful monopolies, and developed safety standards. Neither techno-utopians nor luddites, they believed that technology could be a force for progress—but only if it was actively shaped and regulated by the public. They thus called themselves progressives. Their political descendants would do well to remember their example.

Secrets of a Jeopardy Champion

2026-08-20T07:00:00-04:00

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I remember each of my triumphs in a trivia game because they are so rare. (Highlight, 2023: Who is Barry Manilow?) I do not shine in bar-trivia night, or charades, or Sporcle. At home, my track record when shouting out Jeopardy answers was always worse than anyone else’s on the couch, including my own children, who are obviously much younger than I am. What is Walden? What is Mount Everest? What is a pansy? Whatever comes at the end of “What is,” I usually do not know. The children long ago moved on to the British quiz show University Challenge, which I watched only once and never again, to preserve my sense of authority as a parent and also my self-worth (“If the number of the year of the Battle of Hastings is divided by the number of wives of Henry VIII, which pope’s numerical designation do you get?”)

I’ve always comforted myself by saying that trivia was a pointless accumulation of junk in the brain, the mental equivalent of a cluttered closet. But this is obviously just envy. Knowing trivia is a skill like any other. It can be learned, practiced, and serve you well in many ways beyond shouting answers to the TV.

On this episode of Radio Atlantic: Drew Goins—an Atlantic staff writer, a Jeopardy champion, and the creator of The Atlantic’s new trivia game, Rabbithole—shares his secrets on winning at Jeopardy and cultivating a very particular brand of curiosity.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I have never had the desire to go on Jeopardy. Like, at all. And to be clear, I haven’t been invited either.

Alex Trebek: If you’re ready, then let us play Jeopardy.

Rosin: My track record when I’m sitting on the couch, shouting out answers, is not good.

[Music]

Rosin: I don’t have the patience or the talent to memorize trivia, and I don’t crave the spotlight or pressure that comes with it. But recently, I started to feel like even though I don’t want to be a Jeopardy champion, it might be worth it to start thinking like one.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

Drew Goins is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He created The Atlantic’s new trivia game, Rabbithole. But more importantly for this conversation and his Instagram following, he’s also a Jeopardy champion.

Ken Jennings: Drew Goins, congratulations! $35,000 for you, and you’re—

Rosin: And his approach to the game and to championdom is not what I expected, which is: Just be a born genius.

Turns out, it helps to be curious. Be the kind of person who finds joy in knowledge for knowledge’s sake, which seems like a quality that could be good for life, not just Jeopardy.

Also, there are some tricks, secrets that only a champion would know.

Drew Goins: The key to winning at Jeopardy is not knowing everything; the key to winning at Jeopardy is knowing one thing about everything.

Rosin: Today on the show: how to win at Jeopardy.

Drew, welcome to the show.

Goins: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Rosin: I’m very honored to have a Jeopardy champion.

Goins: A Jeopardy champion and a Jeopardy loser—let’s not forget that.

Rosin: So what was the first moment when you saw Jeopardy and thought, That’s me. I wanna do that. That speaks to me?

Goins: I think this is gonna be a common answer for people of my age, which is: the original run of Ken Jennings.

He is obviously the host now. He won 74 games before that in the mid-aughts. And I remember watching and thinking, Oh my God, you know, this dweeby software engineer is the coolest person I have ever seen.

Ken will say he’s still kind of amazed that people find him cool or whatever. But I have this very vivid childhood memory of being on a family beach vacation and scurrying back in from the ocean because it was almost 7 o’clock, and Ken was still playing, and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00.

And that day at the, you know, boardwalk, I had won some inflatable raft to take into the ocean, and I spent the episode blowing it up with my mouth. We did not have a pump or anything. And so by the end of the episode, I was so lightheaded from blowing up this raft. And then Ken loses.

Trebek: —FedEx. His wager was $5,601. He winds up in second place with $8,799.

Goins: It’s his 75th game.

[Applause]

Trebek: All good things have to come to an end, don’t they? Well, too bad for Ken, but he’s going home with a lot of money.

Goins: And I’m, like, a middle schooler at the time. And I’m like, Oh, surely, I’m hallucinating. It must be the lack of oxygen in my brain. This can’t be happening. (Laughs.)

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Goins: And then I asked my dad, “Did that really happen?” And he said, “Son, I’m afraid so.” I went on to avenge the legacy of Ken Jennings.

Rosin: So how did you go about studying? Like, how does one actually study? I feel like I’ve seen documentaries about spelling-bee kids, so I do have a sense of what their life looks like. What does a Jeopardy kid’s life look like?

Goins: The spelling-bee comparison I think is gonna be elucidating because when these kids are prepping for the Scripps, they have a really discrete amount of information to learn. Obviously, the English language is very generative. There are tons and tons and tons of words, so it’s strange to say discrete, but they learn their roots, and they learn various suffixes and the way that morphemes combine to form words.

Jeopardy is different, at least at first blush, ’cause it feels like Jeopardy can ask about anything. And so it’s a really overwhelming thing to set out and actually prepare for Jeopardy. I think the first step of it, at least in my experience, happened just in my upbringing, before I was actively preparing for the show, which is just a lifetime of curiosity.

Because it does ask about so much—it just pays to be a really curious person who’s interested in a lot of things. But then once you get what’s called The Call (capital T, capital C)—that’s what Jeopardy people say when you actually get the invitation to come onto the show—that’s kind of when you kick into high gear for studying, studying.

And you realize pretty quickly once you set out to actually learn Jeopardy stuff, that the canon of what Jeopardy asks about and the depth at which Jeopardy asks things is pretty much the same as the spelling bee. Like, there are tricks to pick up, there are bounds to what you need to learn, and you just need to figure out what those bounds are.

Once you go on the show, if you happen to be invited back and do well, people say you kind of get stuck in “forever Jeopardy.” So I might go back again at some point. I’ve gone a couple of times to play Jeopardy. But now that I’m in that space, every day I have an app on my phone that has thousands of flash cards on it. And I am hitting new flash cards to remember what the currency of the United Arab Emirates is, or remember what Pascalization is—these things that you just accrete over time that will disappear if you don’t tend to them.

Rosin: Okay, so now I’m in the other world with you. We’ve moved through the portal, and as you’re in this portal and you’re accumulating this knowledge, what are some taxonomies that you have developed? Like, what is the world of Jeopardy? What’s the landscape? What does it look like? What are you learning?

Goins: I think what Jeopardy really celebrates and what the Jeopardy canon really celebrates is an old-fashioned idea of a well-rounded person. The example that I think of and that a lot of people point to is how much Jeopardy asks about opera.

[Music]

Jennings: It’s time for Final Jeopardy, where we’re getting a little high-brow today. “Opera Source Material” is the category.

Goins: The average Joe Schmo, myself included, before going on Jeopardy does not know a whole lot about opera. But once you hit the Double Jeopardy round, which is where things become a little more rarefied, a little more academic, none of this pop-culture smut that appears in the first round of Jeopardy, you will often get questions about opera.

If you want to know whether something is likely to appear in the Jeopardy canon, ask yourself at a dinner party of a dozen or so well-read guests, Would two or more people know the thing?

Jeopardy has pushed me to want to be a better, more knowledgeable person, including learning things that I didn’t know before. Sports, for instance: I am not much of a sports person, and Jeopardy asks a lot about it. And I think what I tell myself when learning about sports or doing flash cards, It’s like taking my vitamins, right? I tell myself, This is not just for Jeopardy. I think this makes me a more well-rounded person who can maybe have a conversation with somebody that I wouldn’t have had before.

Rosin: Did it ever lead to a genuine interest? Like, did you ever start listening to any of the operas that you learned about?

Goins: I was listening to Carmen yesterday, actually.

Rosin: Ah, okay.

Goins: And I had not been an opera person before.

Rosin: So you’ve talked about what you have to learn. How do you learn it? Memory, the memory palace, and memory tricks are a whole art form of their own. So now that you’ve gotten a sense of the landscape of things you have to know, how does one remember them?

Goins: Kids’ reference books.

Rosin: Kids’ reference books?

Goins: Kids’ reference books. So in addition to bounds of breadth that we’ve been discussing for the Jeopardy canon, it is also a very shallow canon. Jeopardy only asks one thing about most things. If Jeopardy asks about a European duchy, the European duchy is going to be Luxembourg. If it asks about an Iowa painter—I am sure there are great painters in Iowa who are not Grant Wood—

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Goins: —but if Jeopardy asks about it, the Iowa painter is gonna be Grant Wood.

You kind of just have to learn one thing about everything. And what’s great for that are kids’ reference books. I’m talking about kids’ encyclopedias, kids’ atlases, all of those, like, What Is guides. So I checked out from my public library at the time What Is the Super Bowl?

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Goins: And I promise I know what the Super Bowl is, but I wanted that one thing beyond just football.

Rosin: Yeah, yeah.

Goins: These kids’ reference books—this is a trick that super-champion James Holzhauer also points to as having helped him—are great because they are really well shaped for the ethos of Jeopardy, of a survey of information that goes only so deep. And they’re colorfully illustrated. They are a joy to read.

I grew up reading them, and when I went off to high school, college, whatever, I kind of reluctantly set them aside because I was like, Oh, well, I’m a serious adult now who needs to read books that don’t have pictures. And then when I got the call to go on Jeopardy, I was like, Ooh! For listeners, I’m rubbing my hands together gleefully right now. I was like, I get to read children’s reference books again.

Rosin: Yeah.

Goins: Because getting to learn a little bit about so much is just really, really delightful.

[Music]

Rosin: I was a little hung up on this kids’-reference-book thing, so I decided to put it to the test. I made Drew play a quick round of Jeopardy and had him explain how he knew or didn’t know the answers. And just like a real game of Jeopardy, Drew didn’t have access to the questions ahead of time. I swear.

Okay, here we go.

Rosin: Dennis Hopper won a Best Villain MTV Movie Award for menacing a bus in this film.

Goins: What is Speed?

Rosin: Yes. So that was kind of a guess.

Goins: That was a guess, but Jeopardy clues are written very economically. Very rarely is there a word in there that is not in some way pointing you to the answer.

So I’ve, like—I had no idea Dennis Hopper was in that movie, which I have never seen, but I know Speed to be possibly the only movie that takes place almost entirely on a bus.

Rosin: Interesting.

After 3,388 performances and an eight-year run, this musical was no longer “the word” when it closed April 13, 1980.

Goins: Another little clue in there. What is Grease?

Rosin: Yes! What was your clue?

Goins: “The word.”

Rosin: The word.

Goins and Rosin simultaneously: (Sings.) Grease is the word.

Rosin: Yeah, exactly.

Goins: See, I would not have known that just from the statistics of it, ’cause there are, you know, a lot of long-running musicals. But you have to know Jeopardy’s language too.

Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

This colorful cake got a boost in popularity from Steel Magnolias, where it was an armadillo-shaped groom’s cake.

Goins: “This colorful cake.” So from there I’m thinking, Okay, what’s a cake with a color in the name? What is red-velvet cake?

Rosin: Yes. I see how this is working. This is essentially: The Jeopardy mind would know to discount the irrelevant and very obscure—not necessarily obscure, but the more detailed information in here.

Goins: Right. See, it’s great if you happen to have seen Steel Magnolias, which a lot of people have, but really well-written Jeopardy clues offer a backdoor into the answer as well.

Rosin: Yeah. Yeah, ’cause “armadillo-shaped groom’s cake” is not gonna get you there. But “colorful cake,” there aren’t that many well-known cakes with a color.

Goins: Yeah. So red velvet is a reasonable guess.

[Music]

Rosin: There’s no shortage of hacks and tricks you can learn to prepare for a Jeopardy game. But what can Jeopardy do for you? That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: Okay, so I feel like we’ve covered the theory of Jeopardy. Now I wanna ask you about the reality.

Goins: Sure.

Rosin: What was your very first time on the show?

Goins: My first time on the show was in June 2024.

Jennings: Drew Goins is a journalist from Honolulu, Hawaii, and being from the Aloha State—

Goins: And when you go on Jeopardy for the first time, they don’t put you up in a hotel. They don’t pay for travel or anything. You are paying for your own way.

Even if you come in third, you get $2,000 as your prize. I think the thinking is: That covers your expenses, and you get to have this experience. But it is kind of isolating because you’re out in California, terra incognita, by yourself. And I showed up to the studio, and you go past the studio gates at Sony Picture Studios, and you’re ushered into this parking garage, and there are a circle of chairs and a metal detector, and that’s it.

But then you go through that security screening, and then you go on to Stage 10, which is where the show is actually recorded, and all of a sudden, you open up the doors, and you’re greeted by a model podium and this wall of Emmys, and a hockey jersey that had been given to Trebek with his last name on it, and all of a sudden it feels so real.

[Music]

Goins: And you get just a chill. Oh, I’m giving myself chills right now describing it, which is how much of a dork I am.

And I remember going into the greenroom for the first time. And in the months, years since I’ve played Jeopardy, I think of this greenroom as—this is gonna sound so hokey—but as one of my happy places.

Because the people who are in there are your fellow contestants, who are just as nervous as you are and just as big of fans as learning inconsequentia. As the nervous energy wears off a little bit, people start warming up and they start sharing fun facts about things, and showing off their little trivia, maybe out of nervousness, maybe out of friendliness. A mixture of the two, possibly.

And by an hour in, everybody’s just saying, “Oh, well, did you know this? Did you know this? Did you know that?” And everyone’s like, “Oh, yeah, of course, of course. Then what about this?” And it’s just this bacchanalian celebration of knowledge, and the knowledge is flowing left and right. It is so exciting to be in a room of people who aspire to what Jeopardy wants you to aspire to.

Rosin: Okay, so you’re there in your first game. This is 2024, and how does it go?

Goins: I lose. (Laughs.)

Rosin: And do you remember any of the—

Goins: I lose stylishly.

Rosin: What do you mean? You looked good losing, or?

Goins: I certainly didn’t look good. I looked [like a] deer in the headlights. No, I played a really, really good game, and I lost narrowly.

I was leading until the very end, when my competitor David Erb, he finds the final Daily Double and wagers really big. It’s a Civil War question. The answer is Lee’s Miserables, a play on Les Miserables, and he springs in front of me. And then he gets Final Jeopardy right.

Jennings: So David Erb’s lead of $22,000, looking pretty good right now. Did he come up with Macbeth? He did. Well done. What did you wager, David?

Goins: I get it wrong, adding insult to injury.

Jennings: Drew Goins had an impressive second-place total of $16,800 today. Did he think of Macbeth? “Who is Titus Andronicus?” That’s even a bloodier play but unfortunately not correct.

Goins: But I played well enough that they, a couple of months later, ring me up and say, “Would you like to come back for the Second Chance tournament?” So I feel surpassingly lucky to have had not just one opportunity to play this dream of mine, but two, when most people get zero bites at the apple.

Jennings: Drew, welcome back. I hope you enjoyed your first appearance on Jeopardy.

Goins: I ultimately win the Second Chance competition. So I go to the next one, and I finish second in that, but by some other odd twist of fate, one of the contestants who was supposed to go into the Tournament of Champions is not able to play. And so I take her spot, and then I make it to the semifinals of the Tournament of Champions, where I, sadly, once again, fall short, but was brought back again for this year’s Jeopardy Invitational Tournament, which, as I said earlier, “forever Jeopardy,” right? Who knows what’s next.

Rosin: By the way, how much did you win?

Goins: I won just shy of $100,000.

Rosin: Oh! What?

Goins: Yeah.

Rosin: That’s incredible.

Goins: Pretty good.

Rosin: And what do Jeopardy champions do with their money?

Goins: (Laughs.) Nothing! If you’re struggling to fall asleep any night, just call up a former Jeopardy champion and ask them what they did with their money, because I can guarantee you it is in a high-yield savings account, or it is in very safe index funds.

I have a friend, Adriana, who won a whole bunch of money on the show, multiple times more than I won, and when she went back for a return appearance, she was asked how her life has changed since winning the money, and she said, “Oh, well, I’ve become a little more liberal with my boba budget.”

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Goins: I was like, “I should hope so. I really should hope so.”

Rosin: So this is not like calling up lottery winners.

Goins: No. It is not. Yeah.

Rosin: So I’ve heard people defend Jeopardy by saying, for example: “In an era of disinformation, we should respect this accumulation of facts.” Do you buy that theory?

Goins: I think that some people who are real defenders of trivia and fans of it like to frame it as an act of resistance or defiance. But I think that asks trivia to do things that trivia is not well equipped to do. There’s this common response variable of being a good, educated person and enjoying Jeopardy, and that common response variable is loving knowledge.

But I think we need to set trivia apart from that. What is so beautiful about trivia is that it really doesn’t matter. It is just knowledge purely for the sake of knowledge. I pick up these facts, and I get this little tickle of excitement when I see something that’s just sparkly or delightful, not because I know that I’m gonna use it, let alone use it to stop the creeping tide of authoritarianism in the United States, but because it’s this beautiful little jewel.

It is good and delightful to know that the Tuskegee Airmen flew mostly P-51 Mustangs, but knowing that one little bit of trivia is not gonna stop anybody from removing the Tuskegee Airmen from a curriculum. That’s just not what trivia is for or capable of.

Rosin: So then how did you start to think about knowledge or you in relation to knowledge? It’s not necessarily knowledge as liberation or as a path to liberation. It’s not necessarily knowledge as protest. It’s not necessarily knowledge as a thing you have to conquer and amass, and conquer and amass.

So what is the value to you, or what has the value been to you over time?

Goins: Preparing for and playing Jeopardy has really led me to see knowledge like I’d never seen it before, as this ocean out there.

[Music]

Goins: I think of my beach trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where Ken lost, and the next day when I was out on my raft that I had blown up with my own two lips, and just floating on top of this enormous body, knowing that I would never come close to experiencing all or even a small part of it, but delighting and just splashing right below the surface.

And to me, that’s what trivia is like, where I can stand on the shore of this body and scoop out something that will bring me a little bit of joy.

Rosin: Whew, Drew, I’m with you out there. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Goins: Thank you. This was a blast.

Rosin: Listeners, if you want to try your hand at trivia, Drew has a new game on The Atlantic website. It’s called Rabbithole.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes and Jacob Smollen. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Sam Fentress fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

15 Books You Won’t Regret Rereading

2022-01-19T11:01:00-05:00

Hundreds of thousands of books are published in the United States each year, and this dramatic influx of titles largely runs the calendars of the publishing and media industries—usually to the detriment of any work that isn’t brand new. Even best sellers or novels by famous authors get lost in the deluge, and books that were beloved on release can fall off readers’ radar quickly. But many were popular or critically acclaimed for good reasons, and they’re worth revisiting.

Here is a list of 15 fiction titles from the past two decades that you may have forgotten about in the years since. Some are from familiar names such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, and Louise Erdrich; others are by authors you may not have heard of at all. These selections include plenty of drama, and there’s an undercurrent of gentle comedy, even in novels with dark themes or plots. Their characters define love in many different ways, and they seek fulfillment across geographies and time periods—contemporary London, Vichy France, Nigeria, North Korea. Ultimately, these stories are bound together by a compassion for their characters’ struggles and shortcomings—a quality that only our finest writers are able to cultivate.

Anchor Books

The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood

Atwood’s tenth novel, a science-fiction story wrapped in a whodunit, throws noir tropes into a thoroughly modern setting and dares readers to keep up. It sometimes loses readers to her more accessible titles, such as the justly famous The Handmaid’s Tale or the imaginative MaddAddam trilogy, but The Blind Assassin stands out for its complicated structure and themes. The dual narrative follows Iris Griffen, angry and elderly, and her sister, Laura, whose book, also called The Blind Assassin, has made Laura into a kind of martyr after her death by suicide. Iris describes the siblings’ strange post–World War I upbringing: Their mother died in childbirth, their father slowly pickled himself in whiskey, and tutors came and went. Thanks to the large number of people obsessed with the book, Iris decides to tell her side of the story—and the sisters’ very different lives converge. The literary pyrotechnics Atwood employs are great fun to read, as she asks: What do we owe our families, past and present?

Scribner

Brick Lane, by Monica Ali

Ali’s debut novel feels Dickensian, thanks to a cast of various lively characters. It’s set in a Bangladeshi corner of London, but it begins in Bangladesh, when Nazneen, whose younger sister, Hasina, has fallen in love and eloped, bends to her parents’ will and marries an older man named Chanu. After he moves her to England and she has three children, Nazneen surprises everyone (herself included) by developing a new independence and starting to navigate the city on her own. She begins an affair with a younger Muslim man named Karim, which provides her with romance and sexual fulfillment, but offers no easy escape from her daily obligations. Hasina’s fate is no easier—her promising match deteriorates, and so do her job prospects; both sisters must forge strong bonds with the women in their lives to find hope for their futures.

[Read: Housegirl complicates the diaspora narrative]

Amistad

The Known World, by Edward P. Jones

The enslaver in this dense, astonishing consideration of the rot at America’s core is a Black man, Henry Townsend, who was once enslaved himself. That’s meant to be shocking, but it’s also historically accurate; a number of Black slaveowners did exist in the pre–Civil War United States. Townsend lies on his deathbed at the novel’s beginning, his wife, Caldonia, by his side. The book’s agile, omniscient narration, structured as a series of interconnected stories, leaps back and forth in time as frequently as it jumps between characters. We learn about Henry’s father, Augustus, who disapproved of his son’s decision to keep people in bondage, and about Caldonia’s twin brother, Calvin, and his unrequited love for another man. Occasionally Jones inserts invented references to fictional documents, which unmoors readers and makes them question the history they’ve been taught. Jones’s story painfully illustrates how insidious the evil of slavery was for all in its path.

Vintage

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

The English residential school Hailsham first appears simultaneously quaint and menacing. Its students, including the book’s narrator, Kathy, engage in wholesome activities but are slowly introduced to their destiny: They are clones who will eventually have their organs harvested. Ishiguro isn’t writing pure science fiction, though; instead, he’s pursuing more elegant, metaphysical ideas. Do any of us have control over our own life? What do we do with the time we’re allotted? As Kathy grows up with, then takes a job caring for, her friends Tommy and Ruth, she knows that their bodies will be used until they die. Ishiguro writes a delicate dance between life’s moments of sheer joy—making art, learning to cook, falling in love—and their inescapable end. Tommy’s and Ruth’s coming of age is complicated by the state-sanctioned nature of the organ donation and the disturbed ethics of their existence, which destabilize our notions of what it means to be human. Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is better known, but Never Let Me Go might be his most tender work.

Vintage

Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky

The noted Ukrainian-French Jewish author Irène Némirovsky was arrested and deported to Auschwitz in 1942, where she died later that year. Her ambitious work Suite Française was planned as five novels, but only two exist; they were both published for the first time in 2004. (A third part was outlined but never completed.) They’re a master class in comic writing about small-town prejudice in wartime, filled with characters who bumble their way through important decisions. Storm in June, the first book, follows the invasion of France and its surrender to German forces through the eyes of two families, one upper-class, one middle-class. The second novel, Dolce, examines life in a village in Vichy France, where a woman whose house is commandeered by German officers must make a difficult choice between love and honor. Composed in the middle of the events it describes, Suite Française offers a surprising and incisive insider’s take on how the Nazis convinced so many French citizens to accept German rule.

Penguin

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl

The especially precocious 16-year-old Blue van Meer enters her senior year at a new high school in North Carolina after moving there with her academic father, Gareth. The murder mystery she gets tangled in when she meets a group called the Bluebloods might remind readers of Donna Tartt’s work, but Pessl’s debut novel is compelling less because of its plot and more because of its unusual execution. Blue tells her story in a combination of arch references, allusions, and imperfect, sometimes clunky word collages, and she’s always telling readers that being a teen can get very old, very fast. Yet when the group starts investigating, the action gets very fast too, and we see that Pessl’s setup was a slow burn in service of a terrific denouement.

Vintage

Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese

The twins Marion and Shiva Stone were once conjoined, so the effects of a major surgery are present in their very bones. As the brothers grow into adulthood and their own careers as surgeons, Verghese closely examines the bodies they cut open. That level of detail is perhaps not for the squeamish. However, it’s used to clue us in to the relationship between a surgeon’s precision and a body’s mess, and also references political upheaval and regime change in Ethiopia, where the brothers grow up, over decades. Verghese tries to do it all in his initial work of fiction (he wrote two fine memoirs first): He dips into history, tragedy, comedy, drama, reference, and documentary. If he sometimes misses the mark, it’s hard to fault him, especially because the story is tied together by a romance made as neatly as the finest sutures.

Little, Brown

Say You’re One of Them, by Uwem Akpan

Each of the five stories in this wrenching collection is told from the perspective of a different child in a different African country. Akpan, a Jesuit priest, employs his faith’s purest anger to remove the curtain between privileged readers and impoverished characters. A girl watches her Hutu father join a murderous mob seeking Tutsi people like her mother. Another set of children obey their mom, who urges them to sniff glue to help them forget their extreme hunger. Akpan invokes an unmistakable fairy-tale violence, most visible in the “Hansel and Gretel”–like “Fattening for Gabon,” in which siblings sent to an uncle for safety have no idea of his cruel plans. Though Say You’re One of Them won prizes and was an Oprah’s Book Club pick, it’s been overlooked since, likely because of the difficult and painful material—both of which are its author’s deliberate choices—and not because of the writing or storytelling, which are superb.

Random House

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson

Simonson’s book is worthy of a lead spot in any list of comedies of manners. When the staid, retired English Major Pettigrew starts a friendship with the local shopkeeper Mrs. Ali, who is Pakistani, he begins to realize for the first time how racist some of the local characters and conventions in his village are. As the Major and the Mrs. slowly fall in love, both contend with people who would prefer that the couple go their separate ways. Simonson uses well-worn archetypes (golf-club toadies, event-planning matrons) to great effect, showing how unnecessary those backward roles are in the modern world. A subplot about an heirloom shotgun feeds nicely into the book’s climax, and the prose has a controlled, even Austenian, sense of humor that illuminates everyone’s misplaced expectations.

[Read: Making peace with Jane Austen’s marriage plots]

Random House

The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson

In a fictional but detailed version of North Korea, being a citizen of the state takes precedence over any personal identity. Johnson’s protagonist, Jun Do (think “John Doe,” as you’re meant to), starts life in great deprivation in an orphanage. He undergoes a series of strange adventures that includes a stint in the United States and capture, imprisonment, and torture by his government. Jun Do winds up impersonating an important military commander, whose actor wife Jun Do loves beyond reason. He grows into a complex character whom you root for, even when he suffers at the hands of one of the novel’s three narrators, an interrogator fast losing faith in his superiors. Although The Orphan Master’s Son won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it deserves renewed attention 10 years on, at a time when agency, kindness, and love are more important to protect than ever.

Harper

Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter

Every Jess Walter novel is an immersive experience, but Beautiful Ruins literally opens with a watery submersion off the coast of Genoa, Italy, in 1962. A starlet named Dee Moray arrives there straight from the set of Cleopatra (yes, the one with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor). Sparks fly between Dee and a local pensione proprietor named Pasquale, who works at the “Hotel Adequate View.” But just as you settle in for an Italian beachside romance, Walter lobs the story 50 years into the future, when a Hollywood production office is having its “Wild Pitch Friday.” For reasons that will eventually be made clear, Pasquale sits and waits to offer up his story, and Walter launches into a series of vignettes that demonstrate the many ways people rummage through their lives to make art, whether through movies, memoir, or novels. Beautiful Ruins is brash, sly, and delightful.

Harper

The Round House, by Louise Erdrich

Some critics prefer other Erdrich novels, including Love Medicine or The Night Watchman. But The Round House is among her best, and should be read for the voice of its narrator, Joe Coutts, an Ojibwe lawyer whose tale begins in 1988, when he’s 13. That summer, he and his father separately, and dangerously, pursue justice for his mother’s harrowing rape. Erdrich’s authorial genius is evident in the way she gives voice to a personal experience of deep pain and connects it to the ongoing violence of settler colonialism that crosses generations, while allowing the younger Joe an adolescent ease with his friends.

Penguin

A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki

Ozeki, an award-winning author and a Zen Buddhist priest, considers how writing and mortality intertwine in A Tale for the Time Being. The story is full of wonderful specificity, such as how one of its narrators, the teenage Nao, keeps her diary and other papers in a Hello Kitty lunchbox. The other narrator, also called Ruth, has moved to Canada’s Vancouver Island in search of a simpler life, but when Nao’s lunchbox washes up on the beach, Ruth finds her existence changed by its contents. The novel explores depression and introduces, among other things, a subplot about a kamikaze pilot, but it never feels despairing, and Ozeki doesn’t burden readers with high-flying concepts. The “time being” of the title refers both to the fleeting nature of the present moment and to humans themselves, whose lives, Nao writes, are governed by the flow of time. The wordplay serves as a reminder that all stories and all people have their places, but also their endings.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Under the Udala Trees, by Chinelo Okparanta

Ijeoma, the narrator and protagonist of Okparanta’s debut novel, grows up during the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s. She is sent away from Biafra to family friends for safety, where she first falls in love with another girl, Amina. Even after their relationship is discovered and the two are separated, Ijeoma has a romance with another woman, Ndidi, until she bows to maternal pressure and marries a man. Although the backdrop to much of Ijeoma’s story is war and famine, the action can be rich and sweet, as she and her lovers discover their true selves. Okparanta’s no-nonsense prose and focused narration help make Ijeoma’s voice stand out in a book as gentle as it is real.

[Read: A novel that weighs the costs of love and motherhood]

Catapult

Sea Monsters, by Chloe Aridjis

Luisa appears to us as a teenager in the late ’80s, roaming a beach town called Zipolite in Oaxaca, where she’s arrived with her brooding goth boyfriend, Tomás, in search of a group of runaway circus performers. Aridjis won the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction with this atmospheric and whimsical coming-of-age story, but it was published by a small press and should find more readers. Nothing much happens in Luisa’s tale—except experience, which may be one of the most challenging things to capture on the page. Luisa adores The Smiths and Joy Division and wants to carve a space for herself in a life that has so far been dictated by her scholarly parents and their values. If Luisa finds the feelings and places she’s longing for, what will happen to her? Will she be better off? Satisfied? Or will she not yet have the maturity she needs to appreciate what she wants? Aridjis’s novel asks these questions and more, but smartly, it doesn’t worry about the answers.

The Secret Power of Menopause

2019-09-06T13:00:00-04:00

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

Don’t try to tell this to a mother sitting in the bleachers during a four-hour swim meet; or enduring a birthday party involving toddlers and craft projects; or resting in an armchair on a peaceful evening, savoring the heft of a tiny body and the scent of an infant’s freshly washed hair. Interminable or sweetly languid though they may feel in the moment, the childbearing years are startlingly brief. Fertility, which typically ends in a woman’s mid-40s, occupies less than half of her adult life. And then, if she’s lucky, she has 30 or 40 years in which to do something else.

Most people don’t realize how unusual humans are, in the way that nonreproductive females (how shall I put this?) persist. Females of most other species can bear young until they die, and many do, or at best enjoy a brief respite from breeding before death. This is true not only of creatures you might expect, such as rabbits, but also of long-lived mammals such as Asian elephants, and of primates such as gorillas and chimps. The odd exceptions—the Japanese aphid, for example, enters a “glue bomb” stage after her reproductive phase, ready to immobilize a colony intruder—only prove the rule.

The mystery of why women go on and on and on after their procreative function has ceased has occupied some of the great minds of the ages. I am sorry to report that many of those minds have not been forward-thinking. “It is a well-known fact … that after women have lost their genital function their character often undergoes a peculiar alteration” and they become “quarrelsome, vexatious and overbearing,” Sigmund Freud pronounced. The male-dominated medical community of the mid-20th century was similarly dismissive. “The unpalatable truth must be faced that all postmenopausal women are castrates,” opined the gynecologist Robert Wilson, who elaborated on this theme in his 1966 best seller, Feminine Forever. The influential book, it later emerged, was backed by a pharmaceutical company eager to market hormone-replacement therapy.

Even the architects of the sexual revolution were fixated on fertility as a marker of femininity, an attitude that seems doubly unfair coming from the people who gave us the pill. “Once the ovaries stop, the very essence of being a woman stops,” wrote the psychiatrist David Reuben in 1969 in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, adding that the postmenopausal woman comes “as close as she can to being a man.” Or rather, “not really a man but no longer a functional woman.”

Little wonder that women writers have felt the need to weigh in over the centuries. A few took an upbeat approach. At the age of 41, having just given birth to her sixth child, the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote her friend Susan B. Anthony in 1857 to say that their best activist years lay ahead. “We shall not be in our prime before fifty & after that we shall be good for twenty years at least.” Others were less sanguine. At 54, writing her memoir, Simone de Beauvoir gloomily prepared to say “goodbye to all those things I once enjoyed”; women, Freud had taught her, become miserable and sexless as they age. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Helen Gurley Brown, Germaine Greer—all warily chronicled their maturity, as of course did the writer who invented the concept of “passage,” Gail Sheehy. Nora Ephron felt bad about her neck, and her anxiety spawned a best seller.

Even now it’s hard for a woman not to dread the consequences of moving out of youth. One of the wryest recent meditations is an episode of Inside Amy Schumer, in which the eponymous comedian happens upon three of her comedic icons—Tina Fey, Patricia Arquette, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus—picnicking in a meadow. They are celebrating Louis-Dreyfus’s “last fuckable day,” as adjudicated by the media, Fey explains. Schumer, feigning astonishment, asks whether the media do this to men. The trio laughs and laughs.

Three new books about postmenopausal womanhood show that the conversation is changing. For the first time, The New York Times noted early this year, a sizable cohort of women is moving into the sixth and seventh decades of life with a surfeit of energy and workplace experience. Women are better educated than men. Many spend early middle age constrained by work-life challenges, like athletes training with ankle weights. Once the weights come off, they have the muscle to run. Literally: The 2020 slate of female presidential candidates is Exhibit A.

The landscape looks different due to the #MeToo movement as well. In some ways, it has divided women by generation, yet even older women who may regret a return to the idea of feminine fragility are overjoyed to see workplace predators toppled. The unseating of men like Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer has opened the way for women like Christiane Amanpour and Gayle King to occupy top spots, where they exemplify what 60‑something really looks like: pretty freaking great.

FSG

The current conversation is also informed by evolutionary biology, which evaluates traits based on their reproductive purpose. Given that menopause is nonreproductive by definition, biologists consider it a “big evolutionary puzzle,” the novelist Darcey Steinke writes in her memoir, Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life. According to the prevailing view, a human female possesses all the eggs she will have while still in the womb; the number promptly begins diminishing, and by her mid-40s, the remaining ova have deteriorated. To an evolutionary biologist, this is interesting and weird. To Steinke, it was miserable and hard. Her book is lyrical but a bit depressing, because she herself was depressed.

Some women experience few symptoms during menopause, but Steinke suffered nearly two awful years of hot flashes, acute episodes that were like “four-minute surprise anxiety attacks.” She sensed mortality stalking her: “For the first time, I feel I have a time stamp, an expiration date.” She writes vividly and a little wistfully about sex, mourning her lost desirability, as she sees it, and the waning of her own desire. She feels angry; she yells at her husband. “Early times of sexual frenzy seem almost impossible now.”

Every woman is of course entitled to—can’t escape—her own response to menopause. But Steinke’s melancholy reflections sound a bit retrograde, as if she can’t escape those insufferable doctors, the Wilsons and the Reubens, with their pompous pronouncements about the wreckage that remains when estrogen, like a tide, drains away. “Without hormones my femininity is fraying,” she writes. In a transitional state herself, she identifies with people who are transitioning out of their birth gender—not that the empathy brings much relief.

Steinke also identifies with one of the few other species that enjoy a long postmenopausal life: killer whales. In the ocean, nonreproductive females play an important role. With the wisdom of years, they guide their pod to the best salmon. Steinke kayaks in waters off the coast of Seattle, hoping to commune, and is rewarded with a magnificent breaching. “The wild matriarchs have given me hope,” she writes. “They are neither frail nor apprehensive, but in every way leaders of their communities.”

That menopause may enable a new role and stature for women is the central argument of The Slow Moon Climbs: The Science, History, and Meaning of Menopause, by Susan Mattern. A historian at the University of Georgia, she steps away from the personal to consider “humanity’s massive primeval past.” Once upon a time, scientists assumed that women (and men) were designed to live to about 50, and that menopause was an accident, a by-product of medical progress. Yet even in primitive societies, it turns out, a portion of women lived well past middle age, which suggests that menopause is a feature, not a bug, of human evolution.

Princeton University Press

Mattern has her own audacious theory as to why: Menopause is a key to our success as a species. In humanity’s hunter-gatherer days, tribes needed a balance of producers and consumers—people who brought in food, and people who ate it. Most adults did both. Not so children, who remain dependent during the long period of brain development. Members who could bring in food for more than one person without adding to the population were crucial.

Enter the postmenopausal female. The anthropologist Kristen Hawkes studied a modern foraging tribe, the Hadza, and found that an energetic group of older women brought “more food into camp than any other age and sex category.” This paved the way for the Grandmother Hypothesis: Not only do older women serve as food producers, but they are providers of “allocare,” communal child care. In the Hadza and other tribes, Mattern writes, women “reach peak foraging productivity in their 50s and continue to produce a caloric surplus through old age.” She points out that tribes have been known to kill members who can’t contribute. If grandmothers aren’t murdered, she reasons, that is because they are useful.

Mattern makes the case that menopause probably emerged in humans when we diverged from chimpanzees millions of years ago. It gave Homo sapiens an advantage over other species of hominids such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, she proposes. Limiting childbearing to younger women, whose offspring could be cared for by older women, enabled the species to bounce back from an epidemic or a crisis: Those fertile women could reproduce quickly, but no woman could do so forever, sparing the tribe the risk of overpopulation. With the advent of farming, menopause still served an important purpose. The most prosperous time for a peasant family was postmenopausal, Mattern argues, when older children could help and the family no longer had new members to support. Nowadays, with fewer children and more resources, she brightly adds, “women past menopause, who historically used their energy surplus to help their families survive, can now use it in other ways.” While Steinke experienced menopause as a shutting-down, Mattern sees it as an opening-up.

Both views are true, as the New York Times columnist Gail Collins shows in No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History, which spans the colonial era to the present. Her takeaway is that older women fare well when circumstances permit them to be productive: “If you’re important economically, you’re important.” Providing allocare is well and good, but “eras in which older women were able to earn money or increase their family assets were eras in which they were … popular,” Collins writes drily.

Tracing their shifting status, she observes that during the colonial period, women continued spinning, weaving, and the like into old age. Physically, of course, the stage could be hell—pelvic disorders, childbirth damage, rotting teeth. Older enslaved women were exiled and horribly neglected. Yet often, the only thing worse than being a woman was being a man: Male mortality was higher, and widowhood could be a blessing—widows, at least white ones, could own property (unlike married women). Then, as the country became more populated, men monopolized the jobs. Women had less of an economic purpose, and they lost status.

Little, Brown

Collins highlights the great age of social reform in the mid-19th century as another period when older women enjoyed prestige, though less because they had economic power than because they wielded moral authority. Notably, they used that authority to make the case for, among other things, female clout well into later life. A standout among women’s-rights advocates, Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that women could occupy different spheres at different life stages, moving from narrow domestic concerns to community-minded platforms. Stanton, Collins writes, “believed that menopause had redirected all her ‘vital forces’ from her reproductive organs to her brain.” Vital she and Susan B. Anthony certainly were as they barnstormed the country, made speeches on tabletops, played cards with soldiers. Their age allowed them to “have adventures.” At the same time, one observer wrote, “stately Mrs. Stanton has secured much immunity by a comfortable look of motherliness.”

As the white-collar workplace expanded in the industrial era, women were shouldered out of it, eroding female social power across the age range. Older black women were a mainstay of early civil-rights struggles, but the contributions of activists such as Mary Church Terrell and Mary McLeod Bethune were sidelined, the credit given to younger men. And women’s return to the workforce during World War II gave way to postwar pressure to depart it, which delivered mixed results for older women. In the 1960s and ’70s, important strides were made thanks to female workers such as flight attendants, who filed class-action lawsuits protesting rules that obliged them to retire if they married or reached age 35. Yet as women’s earning potential grew along with their work span and sexual freedom, the more senior among them faced newly corrosive pressures.

It may not be a coincidence that Wilson, Reuben, and their ilk pushed the perils of “the menopause” during this era. The centrality of sexual liberty to the women’s movement arguably left second-wave feminists more vulnerable to insecurity about their bodies and looks. Susan Mattern proposes that the very concept of a menopausal syndrome was the invention of a culture that aimed to psychologically weaken women in a strong period of life—at a historical moment when female power was rising. “Dominant groups,” she observes, “can be very creative in inventing new ways of oppressing people.”

Yet I’m struck, reading these accounts, that Stanton intuited what remains true today: Women have a different life trajectory than men, and the place of menopause in it is liberating in a way that’s worth considering. To describe a passage of life, even a painful one, can itself be a form of empowerment. Men, too, feel loss and insecurity as they age, and perhaps could use a map of sorts themselves. Crossing the midlife point, many struggle to recalibrate professional ambition (as Arthur Brooks’s article in The Atlantic’s July issue revealed) and to build stronger social and intimate ties. Online-dating sites betray men’s own anxiety about physical decline (“My friends say I look much younger than 60!”) and suggest that many men are perfectly willing to date women across the age range. The sex books are right: Men aren’t as picky about women’s bodies as women fear. Men crave sex, but they also crave conversation, a partner with confidence and achievements. Even Simone de Beauvoir changed her mind. In The Coming of Age, a book about the experience of getting older, she wrote that she had crossed a “frontier” and found peace. She had also taken a younger lover. “It has been far less sombre,” she reported, “than I had foreseen.”

Photos of the Week: Robot Training, Straw Chickens, Blessed Dogs

2026-08-21T09:00:00-04:00

Omar Ashtawy / Getty

Children swim at a pool in Khan Younis, Gaza, on August 19, 2026. Palestinian children, including amputees, some of whom have lost limbs during the war, and orphans participate in swimming training as part of the “Waves of Hope” project carried out by HEAL Palestine.

Luisa Gonzalez / Reuters

A drone image of a church damaged by a recent earthquake in Quimbaya, Colombia, seen on August 18, 2026

Jeff J Mitchell / Getty

A young boy herds a flock into the ring at the Lairg auction on August 18, 2026, in Scotland.

Petras Malukas / AFP / Getty

Corgis take part in a 50-meter race in Vingis Park in Vilnius on August 15, 2026. This is the fifth time Vilnius has hosted a corgi race and costume contest, inviting corgis from across Europe.

CFoto / Future Publishing / Getty

Tourists visit a giant Dachshund installation that is 13 meters long, inside the Haus Nowhare store on Huaihai Middle Road in Shanghai, China, on August 17, 2026.

Chanakarn Laosarakham / AFP / Getty

A man jogs past a dinosaur statue at Bueng Kaen Nakhon Public Park in Khon Kaen, Thailand, on August 20, 2026.

Tom Dubravec / AP

A wildfire approaches a beach on the Adriatic coast near Omis, southern Croatia, on August 14, 2026.

Lindsey Wasson / AP

A woman is silhouetted against the setting sun while holding up her phone at Pocket Beach in Myrtle Edwards Park, overlooking Elliott Bay in Seattle on August 18, 2026.

Fabrizio Villa / Getty

Luigi Renna, the metropolitan archbishop of Catania, places the skull of Saint Agatha inside the head of the saint’s reliquary bust before it is sealed on August 17, 2026, in Catania, Italy.

Xiao Benxiang / VCG / Getty

A data collector conducts robot skill training in a real-life-simulation scenario to collect high-quality real-machine data in Wuhu, Anhui Province, China, on August 17, 2026.

Luis Acosta / AFP / Getty

A kitten sleeps at a provisional shelter at the Coliseo Menor, after a 7.4-magnitude earthquake in Pereira, Colombia, on August 16, 2026.

Firdia Lisnawati / AP

A man walks past a collapsed mosque after an earthquake in Lamba Leda, East Nusa Tenggara province, Indonesia, on August 18, 2026.

Stephen Lam / San Francisco Chronicle / Getty

A woman and child walk past a debris-strewn street after Hurricane Lala struck Naalehu, Hawaii, on August 17, 2026. The Category 1 hurricane brought heavy rain and strong winds to the island of Hawaii before moving away without making landfall, causing extensive damage to towns along the island’s southern end.

Waseem Andrabi / Hindustan Times / Getty

An aerial view of Muslim devotees gathered outside the historic Khanqah-e-Naqshband Sahib shrine in Khwaja Bazar to offer special congregational afternoon prayers on August 17, 2026, in Srinagar, India.

Zeljko Stevanic / Xinhua / Getty

A participant jumps into the River Soča from a 17-meter-high bridge during a traditional jumping event in Kanal ob Soči, Slovenia, on August 16, 2026.

Tobias Schwarz / AFP / Getty

A lion is pictured in its enclosure at the Berlin Zoo on August 18, 2026.

Alex Martin / AFP / Getty

A male red-panda cub, born on June 17, 2026, nestles in its den at the Safari de Peaugres Zoo near Peaugres, France, on August 19, 2026.

Juan Karita / AP

The Catholic priest Saul Mamani blesses dogs with holy water during Mass at the Gran Poder parish, marking the feast day of San Roque, the patron saint of dogs, in La Paz, Bolivia, on August 16, 2026.

Mahmoud Issa / Reuters

A Palestinian girl fills water containers outside the wall of a zoo that was damaged during the war, in Gaza City, on August 15, 2026.

Karl-Josef Hildenbrand / DPA / Getty

Anglers row a boat across Lake Hopfensee as it glistens at sunset, in Füssen, Germany, on August 16, 2026.

Ismail Aslandag / Anadolu / Getty

An aerial view shows Lake Tuz displaying vibrant pink and red hues caused by increased salinity, high temperatures, and microalgae that produce beta-carotene, in Ankara, Turkey, on August 18, 2026.

Bloomberg / Getty

Solar panels stretch to the horizon at the Tengger Desert New Energy Base in Zhongwei, Ningxia, China, on August 16, 2026. Solar power will soon surpass coal as China’s largest source of generation capacity, marking a major milestone in the country’s rapid renewable-energy build-out.

VCG / Getty

Tea farmers prune tea gardens on August 16, 2026, in Yanwu Village in China’s Zhejiang Province.

Miguel Medina / AFP / Getty

A grape harvester at work in the vineyards of the Correns winegrowers’ cooperative, in the Var department of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, France, on August 17, 2026

Thomas Kienzle / AFP / Getty

People observe a figure of a Lego man made of pumpkins at a pumpkin exhibition in the garden of Ludwigsburg Castle in Ludwigsburg, Germany, on August 20, 2026.

Andrew Harnik / Getty

The Arts of War statues, newly covered in gold leaf, are visible at Arlington Memorial Bridge near the Lincoln Memorial on August 14, 2026, in Washington, D.C.

Joel Saget / AFP / Getty

A dromedary camel stands next to the Crone Circus Big Top set up in the parking lot of a Carrefour Market in Pont-Audemer, France, on August 17, 2026.

Jens Büttner / DPA / Getty

Two oversize chickens made from straw bales advertise the harvest festival in the village of Bahlen, Germany, on August 18, 2026.

Another Pot of Paint Thrown in the Public’s Face

2026-08-20T13:17:43-04:00

For several months, something discomfiting has been creeping onto San Francisco’s lampposts, bulletin boards, and restaurant windows: more and more signs, for run clubs and a July 4 parade and tacos, all of which are obviously entirely produced by generative AI.

This bothers me terribly. (Friends have called it a fixation.) But why does it bother me? A ChatGPT-generated poster for a garage sale seems legitimately dispiriting compared with a handwritten flyer, or even a haphazardly formatted Word document. What about a bodega using an AI-generated image of a hamburger instead of a random piece of clip art pulled from the internet? It’s not like most of these flyers were ever going to be high art anyway. Still, the issue nags at me constantly, whenever I pass one of these synthetic images plastered over the real world.

Last month, in part looking for a reprieve from the AI onslaught, I went to what promised to be an imaginative new exhibition of Henri Matisse and other fauvists’ work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The show was centered on Femme au chapeau (“Woman With a Hat”), a foundational painting in modern art. Matisse depicted his wife with colors that were totally detached from reality: teal patches of skin, an orange-and-green neck, a phantasmagoric hat. In 1905, when the painting debuted, this was scandalous: “A pot of paint has just been thrown in the public’s face,” one critic declared.

Walking through the galleries, I was taken aback by what struck me as a scandal of its own. The museum, in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, had used generative AI to augment visitors’ experience—in ways I found, at least initially, rather off-putting.

Part of the exhibition’s conceit was to re-create Femme au chapeau’s historical context. The museum commissioned a local artist to develop wallpaper that could have been in the palace where the painting debuted and worked with an animator to create a visual projection of the walls of Gertrude and Leo Stein’s living room, where the canvas hung for many years. I loved all of that. But an AI-generated animation of the streets of Paris circa 1905, with shadowy figures walking to the gallery and a dirigible floating above, felt more like a gimmick than historical immersion. The museumgoers around me, however, seemed awed.

Then, near the gallery’s exit, came the second AI experiment: a row of screens, each showing an expanded Matisse painting made with Veo, Google’s video-generation model. A painting of a seashore became a 3-D rendering in fauvist style; a portrait of a girl with green eyes was reimagined to place the girl in Matisse’s studio.

The fauvists painted the world with flat slabs of highly saturated hues, delighting in color for the sake of color rather than realism. Using AI to move beyond the frame and give the images “realistic” depth seemed antithetical to their original vision. I recalled childhood memories of being entranced by various Matisse works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, marveling at his Dance and The Piano Lesson. The AI videos alienated me rather than inviting me in.

Yet maybe I’m just a grump? I am at least open to the possibility that my response is not so different from that of the pot-of-paint conservatives in the early 1900s. So I reached out to the museum’s chief curator, Janet Bishop, to learn more about these AI experiments—how they’d been conceived, what effect they had on the show, and what role AI broadly has to play in traditional art museums. We met at the galleries, where Bishop told me that curators wanted to “give a sense of what early-20th-century Parisians or visitors to the Grand Palais would have experienced in approaching this imposing exhibition hall and then going into the sprawling 1905 salon.” The AI installations resulted from extensive human research and oversight. I came away, to my surprise, not unconvinced of these experiments’ utility—though still a bit skeptical of their tastefulness.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Matteo Wong: How did your collaboration with Google Arts & Culture come about?

Janet Bishop: It was early in 2026. We were fairly far along in terms of planning for the exhibition. We had secured all the artwork by that point and were in the process of developing a couple of the ideas that we had for how to situate visitors, such as by re-creating the gallery where Matisse’s painting made its debut at the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris and the successive scandal.

Our original idea for the opening gallery, where we wanted to bring our visitors back in time to turn-of-the-century Paris, was to project a lantern slide that is an image of the Grand Palais. Then our museum director, Christopher Bedford, and head of education and community engagement, Gamynne Guillotte, got back from a really inspiring trip to the Google Arts & Culture offices in London and proposed the idea of setting still images in motion.

Through our curatorial research, we had postcards, still images, interior shots, exterior shots, and other material to work with. So in what became weekly meetings with Google Arts & Culture and project team members, we reviewed the images we had and developed this film.

Wong: What does having the animated film provide to a visitor that projecting the lantern slide and displaying postcards wouldn’t?

Bishop: We have some archival displays throughout the exhibition. But what we’re programming for in this entrance gallery is to give people a sense of what it felt like to approach the Salon d’Automne in a more immersive way.

Wong: Someone could look at this AI animation and its imperfections and perhaps find it kitsch. Were you worried about that at all?

Bishop: “AI-generated” makes it sound like AI did it by itself or that this was quick and easy. The project was very labor-intensive, and everything is historically accurate. One moment that was especially exciting to me was when we were looking at a draft, and there were all of these figures that were moving away from the building, and I said to the Google engineer, “Oh my gosh, it would be so amazing if we could have them walk toward the building,” and she said, “No problem.”

Wong: Is it harder now to get people to come here and engage with the art, especially younger folks? Or is this something that would have been just as helpful decades ago?

Bishop: You were talking about your experience as a child going to MoMA, and now we recognize that people have a lot of things that command their attention. One of the challenges in getting people to art museums is just pulling people away from their screens.

People are used to experiencing content in a really wide variety of ways. I know that it is important to our director that, given our proximity to Silicon Valley, we pay attention to developing technology and how it might enhance visitor experience. I loved the idea of the original lantern slide as a projection, but I can say that I think this film does something different in terms of giving our visitors a sense of the energy of Paris around the turn of the last century.

Wong: I’d also like to talk about the other AI collaboration with Google in the exhibition, near the exit. Can you tell me the origins of this one?

Bishop: The thought for what we called the “Experiment” was to enter into the world of a select number of Matisse paintings and imagine the context for those paintings beyond what is represented on the canvas. For instance, with The Girl With Green Eyes, we don’t know who the sitter was, but we do know that it was made in Matisse’s studio. So in the Experiment, you see the figure get up and walk across the studio. The details of the studio are consistent with his actual studio, which—we know what it looks like. And she looks out the window across the Seine.

Wong: Clearly a lot of visitors are enjoying this, but I wanted to ask why you thought it was important to help people imagine the world beyond the frame. My initial reaction, if I’m being honest, was that there’s a frame for a reason, and that the paintings aren’t naturalistic for a reason. What was so shocking 100 years ago was that these were, like, just flat planes of color, and that the colors were the focus. To turn that into a three-dimensional seascape seems almost wrong or off-putting.

Bishop: It’s part of our interest in engaging with different sorts of learners, people of different ages. They’ve been very popular with kids, and these images of paintings might encourage people to look more closely at the actual paintings. We’re experimenting, and I think experimentation is very definitely what we embraced with these features within the exhibition.

Wong: You mentioned earlier that you were excited by changing the historical AI video to have visitors walking toward the palace, rather than away from it. Was there a similar moment of excitement here?

Bishop: The big surprises came for me in the first piece, where in terms of the ability to conjure an experience, the use of AI as a tool made us more effective in achieving our goals than would have been possible without it. So that was really actually quite exciting. I think the Experiment is a little bit less integral to the story but an engaging feature that I’m happy that we pursued.

Photos: Releasing Animals Back Into Their Habitats

2026-08-20T12:50:51-04:00

Kazakh Ministry of Environment / Anadolu / Getty

At the Ile-Balkhash Nature Reserve, a female Amur tiger named Umit is released into its natural habitat in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on August 3, 2026. Umit (a Kazakh word for “hope”) was the first to be released out of four Amur (Siberian) tigers that were transferred from Russia to Kazakhstan.

Hauke-Christian Dittrich / DPA / Getty

Shortly before being released into the wild at the eastern end of the German island of Juist, a seal named Ernie peeks out of a transport crate on August 13, 2026.

Hauke-Christian Dittrich / DPA / Getty

Three seals, (from left) Ernie, Lucy, and Tiffy, scoot into the water during their release on the German island of Juist on August 13, 2026, after being successfully raised at the Norddeich Seal Sanctuary.

Maria Derhachova / Global Images Ukraine / Getty

An employee of the Ukrainian Bat Center holds a bat in her hand while preparing it for flight on April 5, 2026, in Lviv, Ukraine. All bat species found in Ukraine have the status of “vulnerable” or “rare” and are listed in the Red Book of Ukraine. During the winter, volunteers care for bats that could not find a place for hibernation or are injured. They are fed, treated, and sent into hibernation. In spring, they are released into the natural environment so that they can continue their life in usual conditions.

Henning Kaiser / DPA / Getty

After being released, wild horses discover their new habitat on the Sophienhöhe at the Hambach open-cast mine near Niederzier, Germany, as part of a larger recultivation project, on June 13, 2024.

Henning Kaiser / DPA / Getty

During a release program organized by the State Office for Nature, Environment, and Climate of North Rhine-Westphalia, a field hamster is released into the wild above a pre-drilled burrow near Pulheim, Germany, on June 25, 2026.

Sean Gallup / Getty

Lutz Krenkel, a fisherman with the Regional Fishery Office of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, prepares to release a three-year-old Baltic sturgeon into the Oder River as his colleague Stefanie Felsing assists, on May 24, 2023, in Lebus, Germany. The sturgeon, along with 700 others that had been bred in captivity, was released into the Oder in an ongoing repopulation effort. The Baltic sturgeon was once common to the entire Baltic Sea region, though overfishing and waterway development led to its practical extinction by the 1950s.

Ariel Schalit / AP

Netz, a sea turtle with a transmission device attached to her shell, makes her way to the Mediterranean Sea after being released by the Sea Turtle Rescue Center, in Michmoret, Israel, on August 19, 2022. Five turtles were released back into the wild after months of rehabilitation at the rescue center after suffering physical trauma from fishing nets, pollution, and underwater explosives.

Mindy Schauer / MediaNewsGroup / Orange County Register / Getty

Lulu Vallejo of Fullerton releases a Cooper’s hawk, one of four rehabilitated raptors that donors set free from OC Bird of Prey Center, in Mission Viejo, California, on October 19, 2024. The bird had suffered head trauma after striking a window, and spent months in rehab.

Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times / Getty

One of two sea-lion pups released from medical care rushes to the water near the Hermosa Beach Pier in Hermosa, California, on June 24, 2025. The two were medically treated by the Marine Mammal Care Center Los Angeles for various health issues and released about a month later.

Viacheslav Madiievskyi / Ukrinform / Future Publishing / Getty

People watch small songbirds fly out of a cage during a traditional release of rescued birds at Feldman Ecopark, in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine, on April 12, 2026. This year, more than 300 rescued birds (songbirds, pheasants, owls, swans, and partridges) were released into the wild. All of them underwent rehabilitation at the Dobryi Dim (Good Home) Feldman Ecopark Animal Rescue Center after injuries from Russian attacks, entanglement in anti-drone nets, or poachers.

Viacheslav Madiievskyi / Ukrinform / Future Publishing / Getty

Pheasants fly out of a wooden cage during a release of rescued birds at Feldman Ecopark in Ukraine on April 12, 2026.

Sina Schuldt / DPA / Getty

Maria Oetjen releases young lesser-spotted catsharks into the North Sea near Borkum, Germany, on July 13, 2022.

Dolores Ochoa / AP

Juvenile giant tortoises are released on Floreana Island as part of a project to reintroduce the species to its native habitat in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, on February 20, 2026.

Felix Hörhager / DPA / Getty

An ibex jumps out of a trailer during a release of Swiss ibex below the Benediktenwand, while members of the press document the scene in Bad Tölz, Germany, on April 14, 2023.

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Staff and volunteers from International Bird Rescue in Southern California assist in the release of 15 California brown pelicans from cages at a beach in San Pedro, California, on May 28, 2025, following weeks of care for starvation and injuries.

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Daniel Günther, minister president of Schleswig-Holstein, releases a protected and endangered species of crayfish into a gravel pond at the Seewerk Warder gravel pit on August 10, 2026. The goal is to help ensure the long-term survival of the species.

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An Iberian lynx runs after being released in the Sierra de Arana mountain range, 40 kilometers from Granada, in Iznalloz, Spain, on February 20, 2024. Five Iberian lynx were released in a mountainous area of the Andalusian province of Granada as part of the LIFE LynxConnect project to repopulate this native species.

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A griffon vulture flies into the sky after being released on October 27, 2023. The vulture had been found injured and exhausted, and was cared for at Van Yüzüncü Yıl University’s Wild Animal Protection Rehabilitation Center in Van, Turkey, before being released into its natural habitat.

Another Big Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives

2026-08-20T07:00:00-04:00

When some Taylor Swift fans listened to the lyrics of her 2025 song “Wi$h Li$t,” in which she sings about yearning to “settle down” with “a couple kids,” they heard a Republican dog whistle. On social media, they claimed that Swift’s desire for family life was “a conservative agenda on a silver platter.”

Swift, an avowed feminist who has endorsed Democratic political candidates, almost certainly did not set out to make “tradwife propaganda.” But her online critics are getting at something real: Having children—particularly lots of children—has become a bit right-coded, as the kids say. Americans and Europeans who identify as leftist or liberal tend to have fewer children than those who identify as conservative or right-leaning. In the United States, differences in desired fertility seem to start at a young age—one 2024 study found that Republican-identifying 12th graders said they want more children than Democrat-identifying 12th graders.

Of course, plenty of liberals have children, and plenty of conservatives have small families or remain childless. And many Americans identify as neither conservative nor liberal, but rather as something in between. Still, several academics told me that research conducted in the past few years has shown a fairly strong association between ideology and fertility. The latest evidence comes from a June report by the Institute for Family Studies, a think tank that promotes marriage and family life, which polled more than 7,000 Americans aged 18 to 54 and found that self-identified conservatives had 1.4 kids, on average, to liberals’ 1.09, a statistically significant difference. The study also found that liberals were more likely to not have children. The ideological fertility gap remained even after controlling for other variables that may influence family size, such as religion, race, income, age, marital status, and education.

[Read: A culture war in the bedroom]

Lyman Stone, the head of IFS’s pronatalism initiative and the researcher who ran the poll, told me that when he first saw the results, he thought, Duh. This trend of greater fertility on the right fits with a pattern that he and other demographers have noticed since the 1990s. There’s no clear explanation for why, precisely, liberals tend to have fewer children than conservatives do. Causation and correlation are difficult to untangle here. Liberals are more likely to pursue higher education and to marry later, both of which can lead to having fewer children, and some research suggests that having children may make a person become more socially conservative.

The researchers I spoke with put forth three general theories about why the partisan fertility gap may persist, beyond simple demographics. First, liberals seem to have more anxiety about both the state of the world and their own parenting abilities, which may make them more reluctant to start a family. Second, the values and aspirations of liberals and conservatives tend to differ in ways that shape how they choose to live their lives. Finally, for decades, liberals and conservatives have been sorting into disparate geographic locations and lifestyles, and their respective bubbles seem to reinforce the decision to have children, or not. The result is that a singer such as Swift expressing her desire to have children may, to some liberals, seem like she’s spinning propaganda for a traditional life they can’t imagine wanting.

Some of the most striking data points from the IFS survey suggest that liberals hold a bleaker view of parenthood than conservatives do. Among liberals, 18 percent of respondents were unsure whether they would be a good parent, compared with 9 percent of conservatives. More than a third of the liberals said they thought parenting is “very complicated, difficult, and stressful,” compared with less than a quarter of conservatives. And 19 percent of liberals thought their mental health was “not good enough to have children right now,” compared with 10 percent of conservatives. All three beliefs were associated with having fewer children. “These views of parenting shape your idea of how hard and how rewarding it’s going to be to be a parent,” Stone said.

Other researchers I interviewed suggested several factors that might lead liberals to have this grim perspective. One is that liberals are more likely to follow a broad array of mainstream news sources, which may make them more aware of societal problems such as climate change or rising authoritarianism, and thus more concerned about bringing children into a world with such seemingly intractable challenges. Keeping up with current events could also alert liberals to changes in state policies that make pregnancy riskier. “The media that you consume, is it telling you that you might not be able to get pregnancy care if you need it?” Karen Guzzo, a demographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies family formation, asked me.

According to Guzzo, liberals may also be more likely to believe that daunting news events will have a measurable impact on their life. Conservatives, by contrast, tend to believe that they will persevere despite whatever happens in the world. Many studies have shown that conservatives tend to favor individual responsibility and free will as an explanation for people’s successes and failures. When faced with a hypothetical scenario of a person losing their job, for example, conservatives are more likely to assume that the person was a poor performer, rather than that the company had financial problems. Guzzo said that many liberals, by contrast, are more likely to believe that structural factors such as the economy or the housing market will shape their future.

Some researchers also wondered whether therapeutic ideas about trauma and family dynamics could play a role in discouraging liberals from having kids. Liberals are more likely than conservatives to seek out counseling, and one view that can emerge in therapy is that the client’s own parents damaged them in some way. If someone believes “my parents have harmed me,” Heather Rackin, a Louisiana State University sociologist who studies family formation, told me, “they might become really afraid of reproducing those harms on their children.”

Another factor possibly driving the fertility gap is that Democrats and Republicans, as a whole, have different values. Researchers told me that many Democrats believe that the pinnacle of achievement is having a good education and a fruitful career. For many Republicans, the primary goal in life is to raise children. Conservatives, Stone said, “tend to just be predisposed to think that family is what you’re supposed to do.”

Conservatives and liberals, Rackin said, seem to have different answers to the questions “What does it mean to be an adult?” and “What does it mean to live a good life?” According to various studies and surveys, she said, “conservatives are more likely to see people as embedded within traditions and obligations and social roles, and parenthood is a role.” Liberals, Rackin added, seem more interested in self-definition, and in “constructing and expressing your own identity and aspirations. You don’t just accept roles because of tradition.” In one recent Pew Research Center poll, for instance, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to say that having children was “highly important” for living a fulfilling life, and in another, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say that creative activities were “one of the most important things” to them. Democrats, then, may be less willing to choose parenthood when it competes as a priority with career, friendships, travel, and other pursuits.

[Read: The best parenting hack is being rich]

Religion explains much of this values gap. Some 80 percent of conservatives are Christian, for example, compared with 37 percent of liberals, and many denominations of Christianity encourage having children. But even in studies that control for religiosity, some of the difference in desired fertility between the parties remains. Something about the conservative worldview seems oriented toward family life. “I think even if you took nonreligious conservatives and nonreligious liberals and compared them,” Rackin said, they’d still have different definitions of the meaning of life, which would in turn give them different perspectives on whether to have children.

The final explanation for the partisan fertility gap stems from the fact that, over the past few decades, the two major political parties have become more and more geographically sorted. Democrats tend to live among Democrats; Republicans, among Republicans. Jacob Brown, a Boston University political scientist who studies this phenomenon, told me this doesn’t necessarily mean Republicans and Democrats physically moved away from each other. Instead, the two parties shifted over time such that they have come to represent different types of people—the Democratic Party appeals to people in cities; the Republican Party targets rural voters. Now people who belong to each party disproportionately socialize with other people of the same party. Less than a third of Democrats, according to one recent survey, have “at least some” Republican friends.

This sorting means that initially small differences in fertility between liberals and conservatives can compound over time. As liberals see many other liberal, child-free people around them, and conservatives see fellow conservatives with larger families, they may make decisions about their own family size based on the choices of their friends and neighbors. “You’re getting cues about what appropriate behavior is from those around you,” Rackin said.

Research from the Penn State sociologist Daniel DellaPosta shows how this kind of social reinforcement can work. In a 2015 study, DellaPosta and his colleagues examined a survey of 216 different activities and beliefs—such as watching a dance performance or reading horoscopes—and found that 58 percent of them were significantly correlated with political ideology. People who dismissed modern art as something “a child could do,” for example, tended to be conservative, whereas jazz aficionados were likely to be liberal. This isn’t because liberal psychology necessarily fosters a love for John Coltrane. Rather, liberals and conservatives tend to interact with people similar to themselves, and through those exchanges, they influence one another’s lifestyle, DellaPosta told me. A liberal jazz fan, in other words, will spread his enthusiasm for A Love Supreme to other liberals because his social network is likely to be made up mostly of liberals.

[From the March 2020 issue: The nuclear family was a mistake]

Something similar could be happening with decisions about whether to have children, or how many to have. “Political identity and all kinds of lifestyle preferences can become very closely aligned even when there’s no necessary or intrinsic connection between them,” DellaPosta told me. (He’s not the only one who’s found these associations: In a 2018 study, two researchers found that liberals are, in fact, more likely to drink lattes than conservatives are.)

Of course, some behaviors and beliefs do have an obvious connection to politics. Conservatives in DellaPosta’s study were more likely to endorse spanking kids, for instance, which aligns with conservatism’s more traditionalist worldview. Liberals were more likely to say that people who intend to get married should live together first, which corresponds with liberalism’s more sexually permissive mores. But DellaPosta’s work also shows that political preferences may influence decisions about having children not because there’s something Republican about having kids, but because political affiliation invisibly guides how people live their life.

Maybe no single one of these theories is right—but, rather, all of them are. Ideology may nudge people into parenthood or childlessness by subtly shaping what they value, what they fear, whom they surround themselves with, and what they want out of life. The end result is that, as everyone settles on one side of the parenthood fence or the other, many pick the side with people a lot like themselves.