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This Founding Father Died in Disgrace. But He Can’t Be Forgotten.

2026-06-20T08:00:00-04:00

Early one evening in August 1798, a sitting justice of the Supreme Court named James Wilson died in a sparsely furnished boarding room on the second floor of a North Carolina tavern. He had been holed up there for nearly a year to avoid creditors, to whom he owed unspeakable debts from land speculation. Delirious and destitute, he died from malarial fever, which burned through the Carolinas every summer.

There was no public announcement of Wilson’s death. It was an ignominious end to a man who was not only a Supreme Court justice but also arguably the most influential, prescient, and democratic drafter of the Constitution, one of only six men to sign both that document and the Declaration of Independence.

The other Founders had acolytes who promoted their legacy and preserved their records, but Wilson died a pariah, which kept him out of history books as the conventional narrative of the founding took shape. Even today, his headstone in Philadelphia lists the wrong date for his death. Recovering his role in creating America is essential if the nation is to recommit itself to the ideals of democracy and popular sovereignty, which he championed with greater force than any of his contemporaries did.

[Danielle Allen: What the 18th century can teach the 21st]

Wilson’s peers had no doubt about his importance. “No man is more clear, copious, and comprehensive than Mr. Wilson,” said William Pierce, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention from Georgia. According to Benjamin Rush, who signed the Declaration of Independence alongside Wilson, “his mind, while he spoke, was one blaze of light.” He was “as able, candid, and honest a member as any in convention,” George Washington wrote.

This article has been adapted from Wegman’s new book.

Wilson first arrived in Philadelphia as a poor 23-year-old immigrant from Scotland. Two decades later, after becoming one of the most celebrated lawyers in America, he attended the 1787 Constitutional Convention in the same city. Wilson spoke more than all but one of his fellow delegates. From the start, his guiding principle was the power of regular people, whom he saw as “the legitimate source of all authority.”

“The general government is not an assemblage of states, but of individuals,” Wilson declared in his Scottish brogue. “It is not meant for the states, but for the individuals composing them: The individuals, therefore, not the States, ought to be represented in it.”

To many delegates, this was unconscionable. “The people should have as little to do as may be about the government,” Roger Sherman of Connecticut said in the convention’s opening days, as the delegates debated how to select members of Congress. Sherman wanted them to be chosen by state legislators rather than the public, who “are constantly liable to be misled.” Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts seconded the point. “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy,” Gerry said. “The people do not want virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots.”

Wilson rejected these characterizations outright. No other delegate was more persistent in defending the wisdom of the people or their right to exercise political authority in accordance with their numbers; he was the convention’s strongest advocate of proportional representation. Wilson also called repeatedly for direct popular elections to Congress, as well as for the allocation of representatives in both houses to be based on population. Delegates from the smaller states in particular were aghast at this latter proposal. William Paterson of New Jersey said that he would “rather submit to a monarch, to a despot, than to such a fate,” arguing instead that each state needed equal representation in Congress. Wilson countered that giving states equal power would endanger the entire American project. It would be “a fundamental and a perpetual error,” he said, one that “must be followed by disease, convulsions, and finally death itself.”

The central problem with state equality, Wilson argued, is that it undermined majority rule and thus republican government as a whole. A Senate in which each state had an equal vote would “enable the minority to control in all cases whatsoever, the sentiments and interests of the majority,” he said. Of the 13 states at the time, the seven smallest accounted for less than one-third of the population, Wilson pointed out, which meant “it would be in the power then of less than one-third to overrule two-thirds.”

Wilson lost the fight over state equality in the Senate, but more than a century later, he would be vindicated on the issue of direct congressional elections with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment.

Congress wasn’t the only branch that Wilson tried to democratize. Early in the convention, he argued for a popularly elected president. When the proposal failed to generate enthusiasm, Wilson was urged to come up with an alternative. The following day, he offered one: Divide the states into districts and allow the eligible voters in each district to nominate “electors” who would pick the president.

Wilson made clear that this was not his first choice; a direct vote “would produce more confidence among the people,” he said. But his elector proposal was far more democratic than the other option under consideration: letting Congress choose the president. More than three months later, the convention adopted a system very similar to Wilson’s original idea—illustrating again his knack for getting there before everyone else.

Wilson was devastated by losing debates about the design of Congress and the presidency, and in particular by the convention’s refusal to acknowledge the centrality of regular people to the government. But he would get another chance to enshrine his view of popular sovereignty.

In late July, when most delegates were out of town for a 10-day break, Wilson stayed in Philadelphia to serve on a five-man committee tasked with drafting the Constitution. William Ewald, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, has identified the moment when Wilson hit upon the document’s famous opening words.

Sitting in his home office, Wilson started to make notes on a large folio sheet bearing an early version of the preamble, which began: “The People of the States of New Hampshire etc.” After leaving some annotations, he stopped, went back to the beginning, and added: “We.” In that instant, Wilson had composed the three most resonant words in the history of democracy: “We the People.” He had ensured that the people would come first, before the states, and he watched over his phrase jealously. When it was altered in a later draft to “We the People and the States …” he changed it back to “We the People of the States …” (The individual states would ultimately be removed from the preamble altogether and replaced with “We the People of the United States”—the most Wilsonian gloss of all.)

During Pennsylvania’s ratifying convention later that year, Wilson aptly explained the preamble’s significance. It “contains the essence of all the bills of rights that have been or can be devised,” he said, “for, it establishes, at once, that in the great article of government, the people have a right to do what they please.” This was also the central message of the Declaration of Independence, which Wilson, more than any other Founder, insisted was the basis of the American experiment, supreme over even the Constitution.

During that ratifying convention, Wilson also argued that the franchise should extend broadly, beyond just property owners. Giving people the right to vote, he said, would turn their attention “to the contemplation of public men and public measures,” and foster civic virtue. Voting, he said in a later speech, “has a powerful tendency to open, to enlighten, to enlarge, and to exalt the mind.”

But Wilson’s prescience failed him in one significant instance: the Constitution’s handling of slavery. Although he was personally opposed to slavery, he was less outspoken about its injustice than were many of his peers, including slaveholders such as Thomas Jefferson and George Mason. (For many years, Wilson kept a domestic slave, a man named Thomas Pursel, whom he freed in 1794.) At the 1787 convention, Wilson was the one who proposed counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of representation and taxation. The general idea predated Wilson, but his willingness to use it in service of that abhorrent compromise—subordinating the dignity and equality of individual people to the importance of the American union—showed that his commitment to popular sovereignty had its limits.

Wilson was also hindered by personal failings. To finance his compulsive land speculation, he took on enormous debt, and toward the end of his life, he was forced to spend more time scrounging for investors than tending to the young nation he had helped create. His reputation was ruined. As a result, more than two centuries later, Wilson remains almost entirely absent from the prevailing narrative about the founding. This usually centers on the likes of Jefferson and his local, agrarian ideal; James Madison and his counterbalancing factions; Alexander Hamilton and his distrust of the common people. Those Founders were of course essential to the nation’s birth, and yet, in time, many of them came to agree with Wilson.

[Yuval Levin: The missing branch]

In a letter to a friend in 1816, Jefferson referred to what he called “the mother-principle, that ‘governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.’” He proposed a set of amendments to the Virginia Constitution, including “general suffrage,” “equal representation in the legislature,” and “an executive chosen by the people,” echoing what Wilson had sought to establish in the United States Constitution nearly three decades earlier.

In 1821, Madison wrote that his comments on voting rights during the convention—where he, contra Wilson, defended property qualifications to vote—did not convey his “more full and matured view of the subject.” Madison continued, “The right of suffrage is a fundamental article in republican constitutions.” More than a decade later, he wrote that “the will of the majority” is “the vital principle of republican Government,” sounding no less convinced than Wilson had been.

None of these other Founders foresaw more accurately than Wilson what America would become. Consider all of the ways in which his vision has come to fruition: in the dramatic expansion of suffrage and political equality, in the right of the people to elect their senators directly, and in the Supreme Court’s ultimate adoption of the principle of “one person, one vote.”

This was the world Wilson saw 250 years ago. He was, in a sense, a 21st-century man trapped in the 18th century. Today, Wilson’s ideals are under threat. Restoring him to his rightful place in the American story can help us save them.

This article has been adapted from Jesse Wegman’s new book, The Lost Founder.

The Myth of SpaceX

2026-06-20T07:00:00-04:00

SpaceX had its initial public offering last week. Now Elon Musk is a trillionaire on paper. But what is SpaceX? On one level, of course, SpaceX is a company that builds rockets and spacecraft and launches them into space. (Occasionally the rockets explode.) It is also the company that birthed Starlink, a satellite-internet business that generated more than $11 billion in revenue last year.

But the company can be defined in many ways. SpaceX is a financial instrument for Musk. Before the IPO, SpaceX acquired xAI, Musk’s artificial-intelligence company, which itself acquired X, the social-media site, back in 2025. The maneuver allowed SpaceX to claim that it believed it had “the largest actionable total addressable market in human history”: $28.5 trillion, to be precise. $26.5 trillion of that, according to the filing, would come from AI infrastructure and applications, meaning not from SpaceX’s core business of aerospace engineering and satellites.

Maybe most important, SpaceX is a story, even a meme. Musk is arguably a better salesman than an inventor, and what he began selling early on was a techno-utopian dream—of himself as a Tony Stark–style genius, of an environment-saving EV revolution, of securing a future for humanity by getting us all to Mars. He intuitively understands the warped dynamics of the attention economy. Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian, the authors of the book Muskism, describe his strategy on social media as “trolling is infrastructure”: “Every joke, every poll is a stress test of responsiveness,” they argue. “Can he still move markets with a post?” Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency based on a 13-year-old meme of a shiba inu, is the shining example of Musk’s ability to lavish attention on something—in this case, a fake asset whose entire joke was that it was worthless—and make it worth more to others as a result.

SpaceX is obviously not Dogecoin. Its rocket business is a genuine success story, as is Starlink. But the company’s appeal, particularly in the face of setbacks, is also reliant on a combination of story and Musk’s own image in ways that are not necessarily connected to reality. Musk has frequently set unrealistic timelines for projects, including putting a spacecraft on Mars by 2018. Last year, SpaceX’s flagship rocket underwent a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” on three test flights (it blew up). But SpaceX’s IPO filing was more oriented around its future ambitions and assumed triumphs, such as its desire to mine asteroids, promote space tourism, and “extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” An adviser to the deal told the Financial Times last month: “From a strict corporate finance perspective, the valuation makes no sense. But Elon is great at getting people to dream.”

What do you get when you combine SpaceX the business with the financial instrument and the meme? An unfathomable amount of money, it seems. Last week SpaceX opened trading at a market capitalization of $1.7 trillion. The scale of Musk’s own net worth is now almost impossible to comprehend, such that, on Monday, SpaceX’s stock rallied, and Musk’s one-day gain was more than the net worth of Bill Gates, once the richest person in the world. In short order, SpaceX has become the sixth-most valuable public company despite the fact that it posted a net loss of $4.94 billion last year on $18.7 billion in revenue.

On Tuesday, SpaceX announced it is using some of that value to purchase Cursor, the AI-coding start-up, for $60 billion, all in stock. In reaction to the news, Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund manager (and inveterate poster), wrote on X: “One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is.” Ackman’s reasoning rings true in a financial sense: According to the deal, the price that SpaceX will pay for Cursor will be set by its own share price in the seven trading days before closing, which in effect will mean that the more valuable SpaceX is, the less Cursor will cost it. But Ackman’s koan is also correct in a more absurdist way. It highlights the irrationality of the modern stock market and reflects a lesson of the past decade: If a person or group of people is able to marshal enough genuine attention toward an idea—no matter how ridiculous it might seem—they can usually bend reality toward their preferred outcome.

Other than perhaps Donald Trump, it’s difficult to argue anyone has been more successful at this than Musk. Musk excels not because he can’t stop winning, but because he understands that, in the financialized logic of our age, winning is less important than the perception that you will win. Speculation beats fundamentals. One way to look at Musk’s personal brand is as somebody who has borrowed obsessively against his own reputation, each loan used to invest in and service the debt of the last, until it becomes impossible to follow the money. One of the things that makes Elon Musk so valuable is how valuable he is.

With SpaceX’s IPO, you could argue that Musk has either won or broken capitalism. His wealth, in our current system, makes him a chaos agent with no real comparison. He is virtually impervious to fines. His money, should he wish to spend it, has the potential to drastically influence the outcome of elections. That leverage could be used to benefit Musk’s businesses, securing further contracts with the government and entrenching him deeper into the infrastructure of everyone’s lives. This power isn’t theoretical; Musk’s dominance in satellite connectivity has already made him geopolitically relevant in places including Ukraine and Iran.

SpaceX and Musk are, of course, not inevitable. Analysts are predicting volatility for the stock as lockup periods end and people sell shares. The AI bubble could pop. Musk could mismanage the company as he did with X, or he could become so radioactive that institutions stop associating with him. But you can also imagine the SpaceX flywheel spinning out of control, perpetuating itself as Musk and SpaceX become fully untethered from reality. On X, Will Manidis, a start-up founder and investor, argued recently that, given the dynamics of SpaceX’s stock, it could continue to purchase some of the internet’s foundational software companies at a cost of basically nothing. Neither Musk nor SpaceX responded to a request for comment on SpaceX’s direction, and such tweets, at this moment, are little more than fan fiction. But they represent the absurdity of Musk’s current position in the modern economy. Musk has long fantasized about creating a massive, vertically integrated constellation of services—from banking to social networking—he once dubbed “the everything app.” So far, he’s failed in that quest (the phrase trust Elon Musk with your routing number would still strike fear in the hearts of most people). But it’s not difficult to see Musk using his cheap and abundant money to build toward the Everything Holding Company.

Is any of this possible? Would it even be legal? That’s unclear. But as Bloomberg’s Matt Levine once noted, it seems like “Elon Musk’s recent career is a long experiment to prove that, if you are successful enough, the regular laws do not apply to you.”

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi memorably described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Goldman Sachs, he wrote, “positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble,” enabled by “a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules.” Revisiting that article in the age of Musk the trillionaire feels almost quaint. Musk and SpaceX have a true nose for money, including sniffing out government infusions and contracts. The aerospace company has figured out how to position itself firmly in the middle of the speculative hype of the AI cycle, and numerous financial organizations have amended rules designed to protect retail investors.

The vampiric Goldman Sachs that Taibbi describes is an institution, a system that became too big to fail, and thus ungovernable. Musk is a person, not a system or institution, but he owns more than 40 percent of SpaceX and controls more than 80 percent of its voting shares. According to Reuters, in the lead-up to SpaceX’s IPO Musk was dictating terms to Goldman Sachs and other banks.

If Goldman Sachs is the vampire squid, what does that make SpaceX and Musk? The natural world offers few good comparisons. What we’re seeing in terms of hype, valuation, and fortune is without precedent, even when stacked up against the wealth concentration of the Gilded Age. SpaceX and Musk are better served by a mythological comparison, in part because the entire enterprise is built on a story told over and over until it transcends reality. SpaceX is a rocket company, a complex financial instrument, a meme, a monument to a broken financial system. It is the seven-headed Hydra at the end of finance, the teleological endpoint of money. It is a myth kept alive by blind faith, devotion, and even aggression, which makes it dangerous whether you believe in it or not.

Trump’s Second Gamble on Iran

2026-06-20T07:00:00-04:00

Donald Trump’s war against Iran began with one gamble and ended with another. Initially, the president bet that he could stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions by bombing Iran’s revolutionary regime out of existence. So he spent tens of billions of dollars, and upended the global economy, only to sign a memorandum of understanding undoubtedly weaker than any deal he could have struck before the war. Embedded in this document is a new gamble: that if Iran’s revolutionaries can’t be dislodged by force, they might instead be bribed to abandon their identity.

The memorandum offers a bundle of American inducements so lopsided that it reads as if Tehran wrote the plan unilaterally. Of its 14 provisions, 13 either amount to diplomatic boilerplate or heavily favor Iran on their face. Tehran will receive military and economic concessions—and de facto acknowledgment of its control over the Strait of Hormuz—in exchange for a concession that it will not develop or buy nuclear weapons. Never mind that Iran has made and ignored such promises before, and the CIA doubts its sincerity now.

The humiliation of the memorandum is doubly egregious for Trump, who withdrew from Barack Obama’s multinational agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear programs. Trump called that agreement the “worst deal ever negotiated,” but it was less costly to America, was less generous to Iran, and offered more concrete nonproliferation guarantees. Trump is paying far more for far less.

[Graeme Wood: Iran has humiliated Trump]

He has acted like a poker player who believes his own bluffs. Trump vowed to raze Iran’s missile industry to the ground; defang its proxy militias, such as Hezbollah; unseat its regime; choose its next leader; and control the Strait of Hormuz. While none of his maximalist war goals were achieved, Trump celebrated the cease-fire, and lifting of the blockade, as if he had had no role in creating the whole mess in the first place.

The Islamic Republic, one of the world’s most brutal, isolated, and unpopular regimes, has emerged with its economy and military further decimated but its confidence restored. On the eve of the war, it was a bankrupt global pariah that had just massacred thousands of its own people—perhaps tens of thousands—to crush a national uprising. Today it celebrates having defied America and Israel, and basks in Western commentary that it is a rising power.

Virtually every American president since the 1979 Iranian Revolution has wanted to improve relations between Washington and Tehran. Doing so would be in the national interest of both America and Iran, but no administration has achieved this outcome. Iran’s revolutionary theocracy thrives in isolation and has made resistance against the United States and its ally Israel central to the regime’s identity, its internal legitimacy, and the cohesion of its security forces.

Having assassinated the regime’s top leadership, Trump is now trying not only to negotiate a new nuclear deal but to engineer a grand bargain that transforms U.S.-Iran relations. But he is hedging his own bet by putting J. D. Vance in charge of the effort. Vance recently told The New York Times that Tehran’s new elite are rethinking the revolution and coalescing around a new consensus that “47 years of Iran policy towards the United States has been a mistake.” Trump, however, has made no secret of his calculations. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” he said earlier this week. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J. D.”

[Jonathan Chait: All the sad hawks]

Vance’s political future may rest as much on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers as on Republican-primary voters. One of Vance’s hopes to lead Iran’s ideological transformation is Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former IRGC general and the current speaker of Iran’s Parliament. The two men spent more than 20 hours together in Islamabad earlier this year and reportedly built a private rapport. Yet Qalibaf’s recent public speeches and interviews—mocking America, praising Hezbollah, threatening Israel, and hailing partnership with China—will likely prove to be a truer barometer of Tehran’s intentions than any private assurances of goodwill.

There are other major obstacles to normalization. The memorandum suggests that Iran could get $300 billion in investment, ostensibly from the same Gulf countries that were just on the receiving end of thousands of Iranian missiles. “It’s presumptuous for the U.S. to commit other people’s money,” Ali Shihabi, an adviser to Saudi leadership, told me. “Gulf countries should not be paying reparations for a war they did not want.” A Gulf diplomat was much blunter. “They’re not going to get a penny from us,” he told me.

The logic of Trump’s current gamble with Iran resembles his entreaties to the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un during Trump’s first term: The president is offering reintegration as a reward for denuclearization. In Singapore, Trump famously tried to entice Kim with visions of turning North Korea’s missile-testing coastlines into prime real estate, marveling at the country’s “great beaches” and envisioning “the best hotels in the world.” But for revolutionary dictatorships such as North Korea and Iran, Western-backed luxury hotels, foreign tourists, and open capital flows aren’t a triumph—they are a Trojan horse that would erode their total information control and ideological legitimacy.

The memorandum calls for 60 days of negotiations, but virtually no one expects a nuclear agreement—let alone the end of a 47-year U.S.-Iran cold war—to come about so quickly. So the war may not be over; it might merely be paused. Tehran will try to rebuild its missiles and proxies, which won’t be part of any agreement. According to reports, it still retains as much as 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile and its mobile launchers. It still produces large quantities of missiles and drones.

Tehran’s new leadership is not moderating the regime’s internal conduct. Parastoo Ahmadi, a 29-year-old singer, was recently sentenced to 74 lashes for performing a concert publicly without a hijab. Security forces have stepped up persecution of the Baha’i religious minority. And dozens of political prisoners have been fast-tracked to the gallows. In other words, there are no visible signs on the ground to bolster Trump’s argument that the regime has become “very rational” and is “not radicalized.”

[Read: The U.S. had no choice but diplomacy—yet again]

Aside from the Iranian people, the Gulf countries that sought to befriend Trump have been the biggest losers. Their previously vibrant economies were sabotaged by Iran’s $20,000 drones. Given the existential threat they feel from Tehran, they will have no choice but to rely more than ever on America’s security umbrella—while also being forced, at the same time, to cut their own side deals with Iran.

Trump has recently metamorphosed from an Iran hawk into an Iran apologist, defending the Islamic Republic’s missile program and lauding Mojtaba Khamenei—an ideological carbon copy of the hard-line father whom Trump assassinated—as respected and pragmatic. The president’s incoherence has become a source of gallows humor among Iranians. “Trump went to delete Ayatollah Khamenei,” one Iranian told me, “but he accidentally pressed ‘Update.’”

Perhaps the peace deal is just a tactical retreat. “If he doesn’t like where this is going, he will go back to the blockade or bombing them,” a senior administration official told me. “And oil prices will be much lower.” Yet Trump, who has clearly wearied of the economic disruptions that his war has caused, may not want to gamble on renewed hostilities with Iran.

U.S. presidents typically begin to understand the nature of the Islamic Republic only at the end of their term. Ever since the 1979 revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis ruined Jimmy Carter’s reelection campaign, Tehran has prided itself on sabotaging American chief executives. This time it may get a two-for-one: the presidency of Donald Trump, and the presidential ambitions of J. D. Vance.

The Wall the Tohono O’odham Don’t Want

2026-06-20T07:31:00-04:00

Before Trump won his first election, in 2016, with promises to “build the wall,” Arizona’s border with Mexico already had the most barriers of any U.S. state. But an unfinished stretch lay along the southern boundary of the Tohono O’odham Nation, a reservation the size of Connecticut. Now Trump is trying to fill that line in, by ordering a wall built across a 62-mile-long stretch of reservation land. This would constitute what the chairman of the nation, Verlon Jose, called “the biggest land grab of the modern era.” The federal government, he told me, “hasn’t unilaterally tried to take Indian lands like this in a very long time.”

Cranes began putting massive steel panels in place in the San Rafael Valley last fall. From there, construction headed west toward the Tohono O’odham Nation. Jose had several meetings with local and federal officials, but the tribe’s objections to the wall were ignored. The Department of Homeland Security informed Jose that it planned to award contracts for construction by the end of this month, and contractors began touring the reservation. Concluding that legal action was its only option, the Tohono O’odham filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott, and U.S. Border Patrol Chief Rosario Vasquez.

[Read: The ‘big black scar’]

The tribe is asking for an injunction that would stop construction of the border wall on their land. Losing, Jose said, would be a devastating blow, not only to the Tohono O’odham, but to all future claims of Indian sovereignty.

The Tohono O’odham’s legal case argues that the reservation is private rather than public land, so the federal government is overstepping its authority by disregarding opposition from the Tohono O’odham, and trespassing on sovereign land; and the proposed border wall would destroy the traditional spiritual, kinship, and economic practices of the Tohono O’odham.

In 1907, Theodore Roosevelt issued a proclamation creating a 60-foot strip of public land stretching from California to New Mexico “as a protection against the smuggling of goods” to and from Mexico. This proclamation did not extend to registered native reservations, a fact that Trump acknowledged in a 2025 memorandum on “sealing the southern border.” He directed the secretaries of the interior, agriculture, and homeland security to “provide for the use and jurisdiction” by DOD over federal lands “including the Roosevelt Reservation and excluding Federal Indian Lands” (emphasis mine). Despite recognizing this distinction, the Trump administration has proceeded with the plan to use Tohono O’odham land for the wall as if it belonged to the federal government.

The Tohono O’odham’s lawsuit argues that its aboriginal land could become public only if Congress “extinguished” the tribe’s rights to it, which has never happened. Moreover, the federal government has consistently upheld Tohono O’odham land rights. Woodrow Wilson established the Tohono O’odham Reservation with two executive orders, one in 1916 and another in 1917. The following year, Congress ratified the reservation. In 1927, federal law was amended to make clear that “changes in the boundaries of reservations created by Executive order, proclamation, or otherwise for the use and occupation of Indians shall not be made except by Act of Congress.”

The Tohono O’odham had inhabited its land for hundreds of years before Mexico, through the 1854 Gadsden Purchase, ceded some of it to the United States. The Mexican-American War had left Mexico in dire financial straits; to pay down its debts, the Mexican government agreed to sell about 30,000 square miles of land in Arizona south of the Gila River, and in New Mexico west of the Rio Grande, for $10 million (about $400 million today). The new border divided the Tohono O’odham in two.

For several decades, there were no markers showing where the United States ended and where Mexico began. Only in the late 19th century did the United States and Mexico demarcate the international line with small stone obelisks that looked like miniature Washington monuments. They’re still there today. Over the decades the O’odham placed some barbed wire along the border to keep livestock from straying into the neighboring country, limiting the spread of maladies such as foot-and-mouth disease and hindering cattle thieves.

Geraldo L. Cadava

A border fence made of bollards and wire, in front of one of the concrete obelisks placed along the border in the 1890s

Then came 9/11. Jose began hearing about the government’s interest in building a wall. Where previously there had been only two or three Border Patrol officers on the reservation, soon there were hundreds. The number of migrants crossing the border also began to surge, here and elsewhere. Traffickers would sometimes abandon their vehicles on O’odham lands. The tribe had to pay for tow trucks to remove them—as well as for medical care for any smugglers and migrants who were injured in the area, and for autopsies for those who were found dead.

[Read: ‘Maybe DHS was a bad idea’]

Some O’odham wanted the federal government to help manage the border. Some feared that if they didn’t come to an agreement, the government could try to cut federal funds on which the O’odham rely on to pay for schools, roads, housing, and food assistance, even though those funds are legislatively mandated. And others largely oppose the presence of Border Patrol agents entirely, who routinely mistake them for migrants. Ultimately, the O’odham in 2006 reached a compromise: They would accept vehicle barriers to prevent cars and trucks from crossing the border, but not a solid wall.

The result was a combination of steel posts and surveillance towers that allow people to cross the border relatively unimpeded, so long as they travel on foot, carry their tribal identification card, and notify the Border Patrol in advance. This is what the Trump administration now wants to replace—with a double border made up of 30-foot-tall steel panels.

On the day in March that I met with Jose, he picked me up in a grocery-store parking lot in Sells, the capital of the Tohono O’odham Nation. I climbed into his blue Chevy Tahoe, and we drove to the San Miguel border crossing, about half an hour south. As we approached the border, he pointed to a fenced-in joint-law-enforcement center, shared by DHS and the Tohono O’odham Police Department. He explained that the buildings were trailers for migrant detainees and dorms so that Border Patrol agents wouldn’t have to return to regional headquarters in Tucson or Casa Grande, almost two hours away, after a day’s work. There was also a surveillance tower with cameras. We parked not far from the vertical steel barriers. Agents approached us, curious, then left us alone once they recognized Jose.

All along the border, people move back and forth to shop, visit family members, or attend school, but for Tohono O’odham in the United States and Mexico, the ability to cross the border is integral to holding their community together. Today, about 34,000 enrolled O’odham live in the United States; 3,000 live in Mexico. A wall, Jose explained, would disrupt O’odham cultural, spiritual, economic, and kinship practices including funerals, family visits, and trade. Mexican O’odham attend schools, send and receive mail at post offices, and seek medical services in Sells.

One O’odham man who lives in Mexico, just on the other side of the border, crosses every day to fill water tanks and haul them back to his ranch, Jose said. He told me about the funeral of an elder that had taken place only two days before I visited him. The man died in Arizona, but wanted to be buried “at home” in Sonora. A procession of vehicles accompanied the body to the border, where a group of O’odham carried the coffin from the car in Arizona to another car in Sonora, and then the procession continued to the cemetery.

Baboquivari Mountain, on the reservation in Arizona, is the tribe’s spiritual center—home to their Creator, I’itoi. In late February, Tohono O’odham hold the Baboquivari Run, during which they gather in Pozo Verde, Sonora, and run to the mountain. (Border Patrol officers prop the gate open as the runners cross from Mexico to the United States.) October 4 is the culmination of the Magdalena Pilgrimage, which involves hiking to the church of the town’s patron saint, San Francisco Javier, in Sonora. The lawsuit describes the tradition of praying to the Sea of Cortez to “take away our sickness and grief,” and how each year boys run “along traditional sacred paths marked by important religious landmarks.” The Trump administration’s proposed border would make these practices exceedingly difficult if not impossible.

Geraldo L. Cadava

Chairman Verlon Jose, at the San Miguel border crossing on the Tohono O’odham reservation

[Read: Every state is a border patrol state]

The federal government had assured the Tohono O’odham that the impact of any construction would be minimal, and that human remains, man-made rock formations, flowing streams, and archaeological findings would be left untouched. But in May, Customs and Border Protection acknowledged that a contractor hired by the federal government had “inadvertently disturbed” a thousand-year-old sacred site still used for spiritual ceremonies called Las Playas Intaglio. The 200-foot-long geoglyph looks like a fish carved into the desert floor, its nose pointed toward the Sea of Cortez. Photos posted online now show a wide path bulldozed right through the middle of it.

When California-bound white settlers crossed Tohono O’odham territory in the 19th century, Jose told me, his ancestors welcomed them. The Tohono O’odham have continued to welcome outsiders, including the federal government, even when those outsiders have sought to exert further control over the O’odham’s ancestral homelands.

According to Jose, the Tohono O’odham are as concerned about the security of their nation, and of the United States, as Trump is. Jose noted that many Tohono O’odham have served in the U.S. military. Federal agents patrol Tohono O’odham lands every day. The tribe established the Shadow Wolves, the first all-Indian DHS auxiliary group that helps secure the border. They spend millions of dollars a year on border enforcement. Whenever Customs and Border Protection comes and says, “We want to do this and this,” Jose told me, the Tohono O’odham have cooperated, even if the new systems create what he described as “layers of redundancy.” He added that, in part because of their cooperation, migrant crossings on O’odham land have plummeted by more than 95 percent over the past couple of years, and most of the fentanyl that enters Arizona comes through urban ports of entry, especially Nogales.

The lawsuit filed by the Tohono O’odham is a test of whether the sovereignty of native nations is real or imagined. Asked for comment, a DHS spokesperson responded, “Secretary Mullin is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and made clear during his confirmation hearing that he respects tribal sovereignty.” The statement added: “DHS values its relationship with the Tohono O’odham Nation and remains focused on open communication and minimizing impacts.” But the federal government, Jose said, has already “shown that it believes we’re only as sovereign as they allow us to be.”

Why Adventure Matters

2026-06-20T10:46:00-04:00

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

The word adventure tends to conjure images of people climbing mountains, kayaking through rapids, or traveling to remote corners of the world. It sounds expensive, athletic, and slightly exhausting.

But adventure is really just the experience of stepping into something uncertain—doing something for which you don’t already know the outcome. And that can happen almost anywhere. Maybe you can sign up for a new class, introduce yourself to a stranger, or simply say yes to an opportunity that scares you. What these experiences have in common is not danger. It’s unpredictability.

Adventure runs against the logic of modern life. We spend much of our time trying to reduce uncertainty—to make things more predictable, efficient, and manageable. Adventure asks us to do the opposite. It tests our willingness to leave the familiar behind.

On Adventure

Why You Might Need an Adventure

By Arthur C. Brooks

In a rut? Try shaking things up. (From 2024)

Read the article.

Seven Death-Defying Books for the Adventurous Reader

By Eva Holland

These titles will spirit you to some of the planet’s wildest landscapes, without making you leave your armchair.

Read the article.

How to Turn Anxiety Into Adventure

By Arthur C. Brooks

The secret is to turn your feeling of dread into the excitement of opportunity. (From 2025)

Read the article.

Still Curious?

The benefits of getting comfortable with uncertainty: “Wanting and not wanting the same thing at the same time is a baseline condition of human consciousness,” Julie Beck wrote in 2015.
The worst advice parents can give first-year students: Today’s college students will have ample time to figure out their careers, Ezekiel J. Emanuel wrote in 2024. Before that, encourage them to take risks.

Other Diversions

Courtesy of Michele R.

My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “The stunning beauty of Red Rock Canyon, just a 15-minute drive or so from my home. It takes my breath away each and every time I see it—whether from my car or when I wake my laptop!” Michele R., from Las Vegas, Nevada, writes.

— Rafaela

The Curse of Too Much Evidence

2026-06-20T08:00:00-04:00

Sylvia Meagher was 44 years old in the fall of 1965 and lived alone, except for her cat, Allegra, named after the ballet dancer Allegra Kent. She commuted from her one-bedroom apartment in the West Village to the United Nations, where she’d been working for nearly two decades at the World Health Organization. Although Meagher was a bureaucrat, her sensibilities were bohemian. She was acquainted with many of the painters, musicians, and writers who lived near her. In her foyer, Meagher displayed a painting of a nude figure given to her by a neighbor, the expressionist Alexander Dobkin. But the focal point of her living space was a bookcase laden with 26 reference volumes bound in dark-blue cloth. These were the supplemental materials of the Warren Commission Report. Only a few hundred private citizens in the United States purchased a copy of the 18,000-page, 54-pound series as soon as the Government Printing Office made it available. Far fewer had read it end to end. Perhaps only Meagher had nearly memorized it.

Released in September 1964, the Warren Report was the government’s official story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The report’s key finding was that an odd, angry, 24-year-old assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had acted alone, for reasons nobody could quite figure out. The public evidence—exhibits, hearings, et cetera—was piled into the supplementary volumes. The government did not furnish an index, making casual inquiry incredibly difficult.

During the year since she’d received delivery of her crate of the volumes, Meagher had been reading and rereading. She’d remade her living room into an office, with filing cabinets for notes and correspondence, and a large desk positioned near the fireplace. She took a volume on the subway each day and made notes on a clipboard; she worked during her commute, during her lunch hour, at night when she got home, and every weekend. One of her friends, the French journalist Leo Sauvage, called her “the only person in the world who really knows every item hidden in the 26 volumes of Hearings and Exhibits.”

Meagher was neither a conspiracy theorist nor a wannabe detective. She considered herself a “critic” of the Warren Report. A New Deal liberal with a far-left social circle, she had been subjected to questioning by a loyalty board during the Red Scare, putting her at odds with her government. When the president’s assassin was identified as a pro-Castro Marxist—not a segregationist or a radical right-winger, as many initially assumed—she felt compelled to walk through the existing evidence, piece by piece, and demonstrate where things fit and where they didn’t. She spent more than a year creating an index for the 26 volumes. At the same time, based on her clipboard work, she wrote her own analysis of the case, which was published in 1967 as Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, the Authorities, and the Report. And much later, hundreds of her letters and most of her personal notes ended up archived at Hood College, a small liberal-arts college in Maryland.

Through twists and turns of curiosity (and mid-pandemic boredom), I ended up reading Meagher’s papers and becoming obsessed with her obsession. Digging into the Warren Commission’s evidence, in Meagher’s time, was regarded as something more than eccentric. A journalist called people like her—the bookkeepers and graduate students and stay-at-home moms who journeyed to the National Archives in search of answers about the assassination—a “keening pack of speculators.” It was generally considered antipatriotic and morbid to interrogate the official account.

Today, there is nothing fringe about checking the facts or “just asking questions” of an official story. Everybody does it. You could credit the critics of the Warren Report for a great act of citizenship, but you could also credit them with inventing an American pastime: They discovered that there is something thrilling about a document dump, and picking through boxes and boxes of government files. We have often associated these habits with conspiracy theorists, truthers, and the nation’s most paranoid, but in the modern era of digitized records, anyone can jump down a rabbit hole anywhere, anytime, even on their phone. Online influencers can invent careers by plumbing the court docket in a celebrity lawsuit (see the Blake Lively–Justin Baldoni case). Members of Congress can make national headlines by demanding minutiae from the Hunter Biden–laptop saga. The public can scroll through thousands of pages of records related to the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, looking for mentions of President Trump.

Even when there is no promise of revelation, the search can be its own justification. Mine took me into a semisecret world that I could barely explain to my friends and family. The conspiratorial view of American history was both enticing and maddening, and I sometimes felt like the more I learned, the more I didn’t know.

[Read: America will be reading the Epstein files for decades]

The federal government’s records on the Kennedy assassination are housed in one of the largest archival facilities in the world: the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. In contrast to the dark and uncomfortable spaces that Warren Report critics would have visited in the original Archives building, on Pennsylvania Avenue, the reading room in Maryland is a dream. It has fantastic natural light enabled by so much glass—two-story windows wrap the entire space—that it was closed one morning while I was there because of a tornado warning.

On my first day there, to work on a book about Meagher and her friends, I learned that the JFK files are much more annoying to access than many of the others in that building. Only select Archives employees are permitted to go into those stacks; one staffer suggested to me that this is because anyone can disappear in there, sucked down rabbit holes, if there are no guardrails.

By the end of the first afternoon, I knew why. I was stumbling across amazing material, just in the boxes they’d brought to me in the reading room. They didn’t shed any light on the Kennedy assassination, exactly, but they shed light on everything around it. For instance, I spent at least an hour captivated by the paper trail left by the FBI as they tried to figure out how Dorothy Kilgallen, a New York tabloid reporter and game-show panelist, had gotten ahold of Jack Ruby’s testimony to the Warren Commission before it was published. The following year, she died in a bedroom of her Upper East Side townhouse at the age of 52, apparently from “acute ethanol and barbiturate intoxication.” Naturally, some people didn’t buy that it was a simple overdose.

I told my fiancé that there was more that I really needed to see, which I thought was true, but really I just wanted to keep looking. I ended up extending my research trip by nearly a week. One detour led me to Paul Krassner, a founding member of the Yippies, a radical (and radically goofy) New Left group. In 1976, Krassner was promising to sue the FBI over a fake reader letter it had sent to Life magazine in 1968, as part of its COINTELPRO anti-subversive program, calling him a “raving, unconfined nut.” This document was in the JFK files because it also mentioned Krassner’s infamous parodic account of the assassination, which depicts Lyndon B. Johnson engaging in necrophilia with JFK’s corpse aboard Air Force One. (Was this relevant to my book? No.)

One day, I was captivated by a story turned up by a Warren Report critic named Shirley Martin, a housewife in rural Oklahoma who was “commonly regarded as a busybody,” according to FBI agents who were monitoring her. While she was hoping to disprove the government’s theory that Oswald had attempted to assassinate the ultra-conservative General Edwin Walker in April 1963, she’d heard a rumor that Walker had entertained his own theories as to who was responsible. He had allegedly hired a private detective to find suspects, and the detective—in a twist worthy of a Coen-brothers movie—offered one suspect $5,000 to try to kill Walker, just to see if he would do it. The suspect asked for a fake passport and a getaway driver, appearing to take the plot seriously, but the detective was convinced that he was merely trying to con him out of the $5,000. (Relevant to my book? Actually, yes. I used the episode to illustrate how close Martin’s digging brought her to real, dramatic events.)

Sylvia Meagher, the woman who memorized the Warren Commission’s evidence, once described the experience of being carried away on a research tangent: “In the search for one document or one fact, the eye discovers and is trapped by a totally unrelated and fascinating document.” Meagher complained that she wouldn’t have enough time to spend on the case even if she didn’t have an actual career. Merely investigating Lee Harvey Oswald’s whereabouts throughout 1963 could’ve been its own full-time job. The alleged gunman had been spotted all over the continent in the last few months of his life, according to a flood of reports fielded by the Warren Commission. People thought they saw him in the guest book at the American Museum of Atomic Energy in Tennessee; checking in to the Skyline Motel in Pulaski, Virginia; passing out Fair Play for Cuba pamphlets in Montreal, “accompanied by a short, homely, heavy woman who took unusually long steps when walking,” according to one citizen. The commission considered a report from a magician-ventriloquist who’d been in residency at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club for two weeks before the assassination, and was certain that Oswald had been a volunteer for a memory trick that involved 20 audience members shouting out one word each in rapid succession. Meagher kept such reports in a folder she labeled “False Oswalds.” In 1966, she helped the UC San Diego philosophy professor Richard Popkin with his famous New York Review of Books essay “The Second Oswald,” which popularized the idea of Oswald decoys, and she later refined it in her own book.

The concept of multiple Oswalds is central to the plot of Don DeLillo’s 1988 novel, Libra, which is also about archival rabbit holes; one of the book’s characters is an in-house historian at the CIA who sits alone with ever-growing towers of documents, which he refers to as “the data-spew of hundreds of lives.” DeLillo was not the only literary giant to be drawn into that spew. Joan Didion, in her 1987 book, Miami, reprinted footnote 67 of volume X of a 1978 report from the House Select Committee on Assassinations; she identified a connection between a pair of anti-Castro Cuban brothers who fired a bazooka at the UN building in 1964, while Che Guevara was inside giving a speech, and a woman who claimed they had traveled with Oswald to Dallas the previous year.

Norman Mailer hosted an assassination discussion group in the late 1980s called the Dynamite Club, which met in both Washington, D.C., and New York. Among the participants were the Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy; novelists such as DeLillo and James Grady, the author of Six Days of the Condor; and assorted journalists, including Edward Jay Epstein, a New Yorker contributor who published a bombshell book about the Warren Commission in 1966.

The Dynamite Club was more parlor game than detective work. “Interesting conversations,” DeLillo said to me over email in 2024. “But I don’t recall that we reached any particular conclusion.” I’d written to ask if he was interested in Meagher’s work. He replied that he was looking at his bookshelf from his chair, and that her book was up there, along with about 60 other books on the case, plus the 26 volumes of Warren Commission evidence. “Acquiring the 26 volumes was a complicated matter,” DeLillo said, “but helpful to my work on Libra; and the volumes are also a kind of museum of voices—America speaking.” To illustrate his point he included various quotations from Marguerite Oswald, Lee’s mother, in parentheses. (“But, after all, I am going through a whole life, and it is very hard.”)

Meagher examined only a fraction of the government’s documentation of the Kennedy assassination. In the years after her book was published, millions more pages were declassified, always under pressure from the public. And because government agencies all communicated about the assassination for decades, and brought it up constantly in relation to later events, thousands of extraneous documents were marked as assassination-related. Now the files are a cross-section of U.S. history. If you cut into them and pull out a wedge, you get a little bit of everything. Looking for X, you stumble on Y. Meagher was likely at work at the UN the day that the brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo fired their portable rocket launcher at her office building from across the East River; its eight-pound shell, which had been manufactured by the U.S. Army, fell 200 yards short of the target, into the water. It’s easy to develop a conspiratorial view of history, because everything in the past is connected. And the more you read, the more you sense something just beyond your reach.

[Read: What the JFK file dump actually revealed]

Eventually, a rabbit hole will clog with documents. Sylvia Meagher’s one-bedroom apartment became stuffed with files on assassinations beyond JFK’s: Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and the 1972 attempt on Alabama Governor George Wallace. Her friend and fellow Warren Report critic Harold Weisberg filed countless Freedom of Information Act requests and sued the government repeatedly when its responses didn’t satisfy him. He accrued hundreds of thousands of JFK-related documents, which he stored at his chicken farm in Maryland. Meagher’s friend Mary Ferrell remodeled her house in Dallas to hold her assassination-related papers; that collection formed the basis of a monumental online depository that has become an indispensable research tool for generations of Warren Report critics.

In the internet age, such a massive public resource may not seem remarkable. But a culture of collecting, organizing, and searching a trove of government files didn’t create itself. People often point to the JFK assassination as the moment when conspiracy theorizing became an American pastime, but it was also the beginning of the age of documents, Mark Fenster, a law professor at the University of Florida and an expert in government transparency, told me. The Warren Report critics “were part of a direct challenge to the government based on the idea that if we can just get these documents, we can find the real truth,” he said. “Sadly, that is a dream that has never been realized and may never be realized.”

Some people still pursue that dream in the dry, dogged manner that Meagher did. Others, like me, jump in and out, enjoying the indulgence of cutting into something that is somehow both discrete (one batch of files on one narrow topic) and never-ending (more pages than you could possibly read). Across the years that I spent digging into the Kennedy assassination, I accrued dozens of books on the case, each with a somewhat different theory of events, and many of them convincing for an hour, or an afternoon, or a week, or more. Six decades after the fact, even a straitlaced researcher such as myself can still wonder about a thing or two—an ex-CIA guy here, a Cuban paramilitary group there.

Still others prefer to make the pursuit of truth by document into a spectacle. Early in his second term, Trump released more files about the Kennedy assassination, promising that, after 60 years of secrecy, people would now learn “THE TRUTH.” (Due to the hasty declassification, they mostly learned the Social Security numbers of former congressional staff.) And before his reelection, he blithely promised to release government records relating to Jeffrey Epstein, seeming to enjoy the positive response that he received whenever he mentioned the idea. But last summer, the promise blew up in his face: When the Justice Department finally released many of the files, a slew of mysterious redactions and omissions—some having to do with the president himself—prompted more conspiracy theorizing. Trump moved on to UFOs.

When I jumped (quite casually) down the Epstein rabbit hole, I used a free website that re-creates his email inbox—a tacky but useful restaging of years of correspondence with power brokers and cultural luminaries. There, I came across a bunch of emails between Epstein and a name I recognized from my days in the JFK files: Paul Krassner, who had once written unspeakable things about the 35th president’s corpse, and who later published some of the first conspiracy theories to connect the JFK assassination with Watergate. To my surprise, Krassner and Epstein corresponded until May 2019, two months before the latter’s arrest. In numerous friendly exchanges, Epstein expressed interest in Krassner’s writing, including a work-in-progress novel about the late comedian Lenny Bruce.

Starting when he needed dental surgery, Krassner often emailed to ask Epstein for money, which he apparently received. “I hope our contract will continue until I’m dead,” Krassner wrote in December 2017. The two men, in fact, died within weeks of each other less than two years later—Epstein in a jail cell in Manhattan and Krassner at home in Southern California. It was unclear from the emails whether they ever met in person. Their relationship had been totally unknown to the general public during their lives, as far as I could tell, and barely anyone noticed their correspondence once it was discoverable.

No, this discovery didn’t matter much. It was just a sliver of trivia buried in a data dump, a tunnel connecting two rabbit holes. But it reminded me that anything can have a special glow if you’re the one to find it—if you’re the one who thought to look for it. How did I come across Krassner in the Epstein files? It’s incredibly dumb, but you already know the answer. I’d searched Kennedy assassination, just to see.

Want to hear more from Kaitlyn Tiffany? Tune in as she joins The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, on June 25 for a virtual discussion about her new book. Register here.

Are GLP-1s Performance-Enhancing Drugs?

2026-06-20T09:00:00-04:00

Before Serena Williams picked up her racket at London’s Andy Murray Arena last week, two questions hung over her return to tennis.

First: How would she do? She answered that, in her first competition in nearly four years, by winning. The 44-year-old and her doubles partner, the 19-year-old Victoria Mboko, ended up besting the third seed in their opening match of the Queen’s Club tournament. Their victory was sealed by a 116-mile-an-hour serve from Williams that her opponents couldn’t return.

The second will take longer to answer: Did a GLP-1 weight-loss drug enhance her performance?

Williams is a paid spokesperson for Ro, a telehealth company that specializes in such medications. In ads, she says that she lost 34 pounds with the help of GLP-1s. It’s unclear whether Williams is still on her drug of choice, tirzepatide (her publicist declined to comment), which has helped her lose stubborn baby weight and manage her cholesterol. Although there’s no indication that she took it to gain a competitive advantage, Williams has also said that the medication improved her training and her game. The drug “helped me enhance everything that I was already doing—eating healthy and working out, whether it was as a professional athlete at the top level of tennis or just going to the gym every day,” she told People magazine in August.

With her comeback, Williams is the first active elite athlete to publicize her use of GLP-1s. But the world of sports is full of whispers that she is not the only one. The more athletes who follow Williams’s lead, the more urgent the question of whether GLP-1s should be treated as performance-enhancing drugs will become.

The World Anti-Doping Agency, which sets rules adopted by most international sporting leagues, has said that it is keeping a close eye on whether GLP-1s are being abused; for now, athletes are free to take them. (A Ro spokesperson told me that “any patient who receives a GLP-1 prescription through Ro has been determined to be clinically eligible for that treatment by a licensed medical provider.”) But experts are divided over whether GLP-1s have the potential to improve athleticism. “I can’t see that there would be much of an advantage at all to using these substances in an athlete,” Thomas Hudzik, a pharmaceutical consultant who has served on the advisory group that recommends what drugs WADA should ban, told me. Meanwhile, Lars Engebretsen, the head of WADA’s health, medical, and research committee, told the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation that he believes the drugs should be banned, but mostly because they could exacerbate eating disorders.

Opinions diverge because no studies have yet tested these drugs in elite athletes. Williams’s return to tennis—which will continue with a doubles appearance alongside her sister Venus at Wimbledon—is one of the first opportunities, as far as we know, to see how an elite athlete performs after taking a GLP-1. So far, the results have been uneven: She won with Mboko at the Queen’s Club, but lost her first doubles match at the Berlin Open this week. Doubles also demands less of athletes than a singles match does, so Williams’s full abilities have not yet been tested in competition. (Tennis fans are eager to know if Williams will get a wild-card singles spot at Wimbledon too.) “The jury is out in terms of endurance, stamina,” Rick Macci, who trained Williams during her childhood, told me.

[Read: America has a new GLP-1 playbook]

Being trim can be an advantage in some sports. A lighter frame can reduce the amount of effort needed for, say, climbing, running, or gymnastics. And weight is built into the structure of other sports. Wrestlers, for example, must weigh in to qualify for their matches. The popular strategy is to get just under the maximum weight for a given class—a process that GLP-1s might make easier. “It makes perfect sense in weight-category sports,” John Hawley, the director of Australian Catholic University’s Centre for Human Metabolism and Performance, told me via email.

But whether GLP-1s will deliver meaningful weight loss for athletes already in tip-top shape is an open question. No major trials have tested GLP-1s in healthy people with a normal or low BMI, so it’s unclear how much weight such people might lose on the drug. That could mean that among elite athletes, the drugs might have significant effects for only a small group, including Williams, who are seeking to get back into shape. Several clinical trials have also shown that GLP-1s can reduce an inflammation marker in the blood—but it’s still unclear how much of that improvement is the result of weight loss or an independent effect of the drugs.

Besides, being light isn’t necessarily an upside if it means a reduction in strength. Roughly 25 to 35 percent of the weight that GLP-1 patients lose is lean mass, according to a meta-analysis published in March. Athletes using GLP-1s will need to closely watch their diet and training to make sure they maintain muscle (perhaps while dealing with the vomiting, nausea, and diarrhea often associated with GLP-1s). Plus, GLP-1s are believed to dampen dopamine signaling, which “might actually put the lid on initiative and drive and competitiveness,” Ziyad Al-Aly, a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis who has studied GLP-1s, told me. Lack of research is a problem here too, Al-Aly emphasized: The best evidence of this hypothetical effect is a preprint study that found that mice sought out their exercise wheel less after being injected with semaglutide.

[Read: Ozempic is a brain drug]

Some studies on the effects of GLP-1s in certain sports are now under way. WADA, for example, is funding a trial to test how semaglutide changes runners’ body composition and performance. But pharmaceutical companies are actively testing new types of weight-loss medications that may have different effects on muscle, as well as combinations of GLP-1s with other drugs meant to preserve strength. Some of those drugs, such as a class that overrides the body’s natural limit on muscle growth, are already banned by WADA. Every new weight-loss medication will complicate any tenuous understanding of how these drugs affect athletic performance.

Determining whether a drug should be banned is not solely a scientific endeavor: WADA bases its decisions in part on whether the use of a drug violates “the spirit of sport,” which it defines as “the ethical pursuit of human excellence through the dedicated perfection of each Athlete’s natural talents.” Athletes earn our admiration because they work hard to perfect skills that most of us could never imagine having. We marvel at baseball sluggers because hitting a small ball traveling 90 miles an hour requires hard work; regularly hitting it 400 feet is that much harder. When a hitter takes an anabolic steroid, the wonder is largely lost.

Williams became a tennis icon in part because of her relentless desire to compete. Even as a child, “she would run so hard to try to get to the ball, she’d fall,” Macci said. When she competed in the Australian Open while pregnant in 2017, she defeated every opponent who faced her, without dropping a set. Being 44, having two kids, and struggling with extra weight didn’t stop her from returning to professional tennis. Yes, she was probably lighter and quicker because she took a GLP-1. But a good comeback embodies the spirit of sport, too.

Iran Got a Great Deal That It Could Still Squander

2026-06-20T07:00:00-04:00

The memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran appears to have ended the war on terms favorable to the Islamic Republic. It releases frozen Iranian assets, relaxes restrictions on Iranian oil sales, and lifts the American blockade of the Strait of Hormuz—in exchange for Iran ending its closure of the waterway. In other words, Iran receives things it didn’t have before the war in exchange for giving up something it wasn’t doing before the war.

But as good as these terms might look for Iran, they’ve still proved controversial within the Islamic Republic. In the days before the agreement, a loud coterie of hard-liners threw everything it had against the deal. A member of Parliament from Tehran said that signing the deal would make Iran “a colony of the United States.” Hard-line demonstrators wished “death” on the two men who led the talks with the U.S.: Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the speaker of Parliament, and Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister (respectively tagged as “the compromiser” and “the dishonorable”).

Hard-liners oppose the memorandum of understanding because they see any deal with the United States as normalizing contact with the Great Satan. They also fear an end to international sanctions: If Iran is no longer alone and under siege, what will become of its anti-Western ideology?

[Read: The war Trump can’t end]

Yet the deal went ahead because it had the support of most of Iran’s military and political leaders. About a dozen men sit on the National Security Council, the body that effectively runs Iran these days. Of them, reportedly only one opposed the deal, and this was likely Saeed Jalili, the former nuclear negotiator and unofficial leader of the ultra-hard-line faction. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps appears to have put its institutional weight behind agreement. Esmail Qaani, the head of IRGC’s external-operations wing, known as the Quds Force, went on state television to back it: “The negotiating team are no different than our boys working at the missile launchers,” he said.

The memorandum is seen as a victory for Qalibaf, Araghchi, and the man who actually signed it for Iran, the reformist President Masud Pezeshkian. The pro-diplomacy coalition includes reformist forces, such as the Unity of the Nation Party, which asked for the deal to be followed by “restorative justice” for the regime’s killing of protesters in January and an expansion of rights and freedoms. Two pro-reform former presidents, Mohammad Khatami and Hassan Rouhani, have also backed the deal.

But the Iranian regime has a long history of tug-of-war between two broad camps: the developmentalists, who are ready to move on from the Islamic Republic’s founding ideology in the name of economic progress, and the ideologues, who remain committed to anti-Americanism and the quest to destroy Israel. The struggle goes back to the 1990s, and the developmentalists have lost most rounds, not least because Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader for 37 years, sided with the ideologues. Khamenei sometimes green-lighted diplomacy with the West to gain economic relief, but he firmly opposed normalizing ties with the U.S. or holding high-level talks with Americans.

[Read: How Iran killed its economy]

His son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, is rhetorically committed to the same unforgiving worldview as his father was. In a message endorsing the deal, he said that he was “fundamentally of another opinion” but had been swayed by Pezeshkian’s guarantees. By signaling that the deal was not his preference, the leader empowered hard-liners to oppose it. But in this message, Mojtaba also approved face-to-face meetings with Americans, in a sharp departure from his father.

These dynamics among regime insiders matter because the tougher diplomatic task still lies ahead. The memorandum of understanding gives the U.S. and Iran 60 days to hash out a nuclear deal. This is the broader diplomatic arrangement that could lead to sanctions relief and be an economic game changer for Iran. (The memorandum of understanding has already proved beneficial in this regard: A U.S. dollar now sells for 1.56 million Iranian rials, down from 1.75 million last week.)

But we’ve been here several times before. In the 1990s, President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the grandfather of the developmentalists, sought to rebuild ties with the West and found himself stymied by Khamenei on one side and inconsistent partners in the U.S. on the other. Two decades later, when Rouhani was president, Iran painstakingly negotiated a nuclear deal with the Obama administration—only for the first Trump administration to sink it in 2018.

Iran’s current leaders are navigating the same duality within the regime and will surely face similar headwinds from without. And to some extent, they are still cautiously straddling the regime’s internal divide. Qalibaf presents himself as a statesman on the world stage, but last week also emptily pledged to “liberate Jerusalem.” But if he and the rest of Iran’s new leaders are really to change their country’s lot, they will have to change this mindset, prevail over the hard-liners, and make a clear choice: Do they want to perennially fight America and Israel, or to develop Iran’s economy and move on?

Soon Iranians will bury Ali Khamenei in a public funeral. They must also bury his revolutionary intransigence. Otherwise, they could well wind up squandering even this enviable deal with the United States.

The Price of Defeat in Iran

2026-06-19T07:00:00-04:00

Seventy-nine years ago this month, at Harvard University, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced a plan for the reconstruction of Europe. The Marshall Plan, as it quickly became known, committed more than $13 billion for Europe’s postwar recovery—approximately $150 billion in today’s dollars. Donald Trump’s deal with Iran, which he signed yesterday in Versailles, commits the United States and its regional partners to ensuring that Iran receives “at least $300 billion” for its “rehabilitation and economic development.”

This is, in effect, a Marshall Plan for the Iranian regime, albeit not one funded with American taxpayer dollars. But whereas the original was designed to consolidate an American victory, this one is designed to manage the consequences of a defeat that pushes the United States closer to disengaging from the Middle East.

The text of the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran is remarkably vague. Point one commits the United States and Iran to regional peace and stability. Vice President Vance told CNN that this means Iran will stop funding proxy forces and destabilizing the region; Tehran might well interpret that differently. The text does reiterate Iran’s commitment not to build a nuclear weapon, and it says that Iran agrees to “downblend” its highly enriched uranium on-site (which basically means diluting it). But the memorandum includes no other details regarding limits on enrichment. It says that Iran will not charge a toll for passage through the Strait of Hormuz for the next 60 days, but after that, nothing is specified.

When asked about the $300 billion, Vance claimed that the Gulf countries would supply it all. But the deal makes no such provision. It tasks the United States and its regional partners to develop the plan. Perhaps this is why a senior administration official told CNN that “people should not read too much into the language.” The official went on to describe the memorandum as a political document, saying, of the Iranians, “We came up with language that allows them to say what they need for their domestic politics.” But Iran will almost certainly demand that the United States stick to the letter of the agreement.

[Graeme Wood: Iran has humiliated Trump]

What we do know is that the relief for Iran is to come in stages. An immediate waiver of sanctions will allow it to export oil. This is a return to the arrangement under the Obama-era nuclear deal and is estimated to be worth up to $60 billion a year. Once the memorandum is implemented but before a final deal, Iran’s frozen assets will be released for it to spend as it seems fit. This reportedly consists of $24 billion held in banks in Qatar, Oman, and Iraq, although Tehran believes that its total inaccessible assets worldwide may exceed $100 billion. Only if a final agreement follows on this provisional one will Iran be provided with $300 billion and the lifting of all sanctions, including those linked to terrorism, its ballistic-missile program, and human-rights abuses. But Iran will already have received quite a lot up front.

The prospect of a final deal is remote, given the gap between the two sides. History is replete with wars that end in interim agreements, deferring difficult issues to future negotiations, only for the interim arrangement to become permanent. That is very likely to happen here.

When it does, Trump will face a choice. He can applaud the downblending of uranium and accept the new status quo. Or he can end the waivers and reimpose sanctions on oil. If he chooses the second course, Iran will, at a minimum, begin to charge a toll for transit through the strait, using the leverage it gained in the war. Things could spiral from there, but Trump has been clear that he wants out of the war and fears the economic consequences of a closed strait. That won’t change as the midterms approach. The Iranians surely know this, which makes it even less likely that they will compromise further.

The deal is a bad one. But Washington has no good choices at this point. Judged by the administration’s own objectives, the outcome is difficult to describe as anything other than a defeat. The United States entered the conflict seeking to eliminate Iran’s leverage, constrain its regional influence, and force it to accept strict limits on its nuclear program. Instead, Iran emerged with sanctions relief, a pathway to generous reconstruction financing, continuing ambiguity over key nuclear issues, and new leverage over the Strait of Hormuz.

The reason for this defeat was not a reluctance to use force. Many hawks advocated introducing ground troops, but doing so would have made matters much worse. The United States almost certainly would have wound up fighting the sort of casualty-heavy counterinsurgency campaign that has led it to costly defeats elsewhere. If the U.S. had attacked Iran’s civilian infrastructure, Iran would have retaliated against infrastructure in the Gulf, widening the war and exponentially worsening the global economic shock waves.

This was a war that should never have been fought. It was also fought foolishly. Beginning the campaign with a decapitation strike on the Iranian leadership made the conflict existential for the Iranian regime, which then had no reason to hold anything back. By contrast, the 12-day war last summer had the limited objective of destroying Iran’s nuclear program; knowing this, Tehran tempered its response to avoid a protracted all-out war with the United States. It did not do then what it did this winter: attack the Gulf states and close the Strait of Hormuz. Trump made no preparation to deal with these responses, even though they were widely predicted.

[Read: The betrayal of the Iranian people]

The memorandum of understanding may not even encapsulate the most important of Iran’s gains from this American blunder: The war could well mark the end of America’s will to play a security role in the Middle East. Domestic support for the U.S. alliance with Israel is in free fall. U.S. bases in the Middle East have been badly damaged, their vulnerability as targets exposed. Trump and his successors will be reluctant to use force against Iran in the future, knowing, as is now clear, that doing so will likely trigger the closure of the strait and an economic crisis. And Americans could be forgiven for feeling that they have tried every kind of policy in the Middle East over the past quarter century—war, diplomacy, working with civil society, building up regional partnerships, pushing various players to sign accords with one another—and watched them all fail.

No one should be under any illusion that an American withdrawal from the Middle East will make the region more peaceful or stable. The Israel-Iran rivalry would likely intensify, resulting in regular closures of the strait and possibly more wars. New rivalries, including one between Israel and Turkey, would no doubt fester and grow. The situation of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank would almost certainly worsen and become more hopeless. Russia and China would increase their influence and strategic presence.

But right now, those who favor American engagement in the Middle East have very little to work with. Israel is perceived as trigger-happy and indifferent to U.S. interests, and many Americans have come to see the region as a strategic black hole.

That might change if a new Israeli government comes to power, especially one led by a mainstream critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war policy, such as retired General Gadi Eisenkot, who has been rising in recent polls. Then the United States could possibly be persuaded to reengage: to help build energy infrastructure that circumvents the Strait of Hormuz and to return to the project of normalizing Israeli-Saudi ties, for which progress for Palestinians is a precondition.

But the window for such a shift is very narrow. For two decades, Washington has debated how to engage with this volatile region. Now many Americans question whether they should engage at all. If that sentiment hardens, Trump’s agreement with Iran may be remembered as the moment the United States began its withdrawal from the Middle East.

Britain’s Next Leader Has Emerged

2026-06-19T12:10:31-04:00

Britain has a new prime minister in waiting. Andy Burnham has wanted to lead the Labour Party for more than a decade, and now the deep unpopularity of the incumbent, Keir Starmer, has created a path to Downing Street for the Manchester mayor. Yesterday in Makerfield, a constituency outside Manchester in northern England, Burnham won a special parliamentary election that basically everyone understood to be both a referendum on Starmer’s leadership and a test of his own ability to defeat the radical right.

He won the by-election in a blowout, and is expected to challenge Starmer almost immediately—by pressuring him behind the scenes to resign or, failing that, by triggering a leadership contest. Either way, Burnham is highly likely to come out on top. The question for Britain is whether his easygoing charm and gift for communication will be enough to successfully lead a grumpy, stagnant country that has already had six prime ministers since the Brexit referendum in 2016.

[Read: How Britain became as poor as Mississippi]

Burnham’s path to power is, funnily enough, more typical of American politicians than British ones. In 2017, after falling out of favor with the prevailing mood within Labour—he was seen as too centrist and pro-business—he left the proverbial swamp by quitting Parliament for a local position, much like a congressman leaving D.C. to run for governor. In Manchester, generally agreed to be a prosperous and revitalized city, Burnham has been able to build a strong personal following without the pressures of national government. Championing what he calls “Manchesterism,” an agenda that seized back power for the city from the bureaucrats and moneymen of London, he has become known as Labour’s King of the North.

To compete for party leader and prime minister, though, Burnham needed a parliamentary seat. Unfortunately for him, Starmer knew this too, and successfully blocked him from running in a special election in a different Manchester-area constituency in February. The seat went to the left-wing Greens, prompting bitter recriminations that Burnham alone could have held it for Labour.

And so Burnham engineered a special election of his own, by persuading the scandal-plagued member of Parliament in nearby Makerfield, Josh Simons, to step down. Recent polls predicted a Burnham victory, but far underestimated its extent. His 55 percent exceeded the combined total for the runner-up, from Nigel Farage’s populist right Reform, and the candidate from its new, even more hard-line challenger, Restore. By comparison, Labour is currently polling at just 19 percent nationally.

[Read: Britain’s unbridgeable divide]

The speed with which Starmer has become unpopular is notable, even by the attention-deficit standards of recent British politics. After winning a 174-seat parliamentary majority in 2024, albeit with an underwhelming 34 percent of the vote, he has struggled to connect with the public. His terrible job-approval rating is superficially hard to understand, since his government has achieved significant victories: The railways are in the process of being renationalized—long a preoccupation of the left—while the volume of legal immigration and the number of migrants arriving in small boats have both fallen, fulfilling a demand of the right.

But the British economy remains sluggish. He tried to pass significant welfare cuts but failed because of a backbench rebellion. And he alienated elderly voters early on by attempting to remove one of their taxpayer-funded perks, the £300 (about $395) winter fuel allowance. Above all, Starmer has failed to communicate any kind of vision for Britain. He prided himself on refusing to be confined by the in-fighting of Labour’s past: Tony Blair’s business-friendly disciples against Gordon Brown’s pro-distribution faction, then both groups against Jeremy Corbyn’s unabashed socialists. But he was completely unable to define what it meant to be a Starmerite.

Hence the reemergence of Andy Burnham. This will be his third attempt at winning the Labour leadership. In 2010, he was little-known, and came in fourth. In 2015, he was too associated with “New Labour,” Blair’s centrist project, just as the party turned left and embraced Jeremy Corbyn. Burnham came second and subsequently decamped to Manchester.

Cynics think that Manchesterism is a mirage and that Burnham is unduly hogging the credit for the regeneration of the city’s downtown. Some suggest his superficial charm is giving a false picture of his political talents. In a notably skeptical profile, Joshi Herrmann of the independent Substack The Mill identified “a fatal weakness on Burnham’s part: he wants to be liked and he’s not particularly ruthless.”

But Burnham was calculating enough. His posters in the Makerfield campaign mentioned his name, not his party affiliation; canvassers were instructed to say that they were “out campaigning for Andy Burnham” rather than Labour. His personal popularity helped win the seat, along with an Obama-style hopey-changey message. Both of those things will be hard to maintain if he becomes prime minister.

Still, Burnham has significant advantages over Starmer, who for now is insisting that he will not step down voluntarily. Burnham’s short-form videos are notably better than Labour’s current efforts. The popular image of Starmer is him standing stiffly at a lectern, while Burnham is comfortable walking and talking to camera, often to a soundtrack of ’90s soccer-dad classics. (The venerable Manchester band Oasis let him use their song “Some Might Say” for one ad in his parliamentary campaign.) He has been a capable frontman in moments of crisis: He was highly visible during Manchester’s response to the 2017 bombing at an Ariana Grande concert, as well as the city’s response to COVID.

Over the past decade, a repeated knock on Burnham has been that he is a political chameleon. As a Remainer campaigning in a Brexit-voting seat, he stayed vague on the subject of Britain’s future relationship with the European Union. Last year he argued that politicians paid too much attention to the bond markets; last month, he reassured them by committing to Labour’s current efforts to hold down government borrowing. He held a launch event for his 2015 Labour leadership campaign at the headquarters of the accounting firm Ernst & Young, to signal his business-friendly credentials. By 2022, however, he was describing that move as “tone-deaf,” and this time around, he has presented himself as an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez–style economic populist, arguing that ordinary people’s living standards have been eroded by money flowing “into the hands of people for whom life was already very good” and arguing for a top tax rate of 50 percent. That shift reflects Labour’s leftward movement, as well as the recent success of the left-populist Greens.

[David Frum: The costs of Brexit are undeniable now]

The British electorate has fragmented. Labour now competes for left-wing votes not only with the Greens but with nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales. In the middle sit the Liberal Democrats, who appeal to both anti-Brexit Conservatives and former Labour voters uninterested in the party’s leftward turn. Right-wing voters can now choose among the ailing Conservatives, Reform, or Restore. The last of these is backed by Elon Musk and traffics in language about race and immigration that has been absent from British electoral politics since the demise of the British National Party. That 7 percent of Makerfield voters chose Restore—even in the knowledge that doing so might deprive another anti-immigration party of victory—points to a deep well of racial grievance and anti-establishment anger that even Farage cannot command.

All of these dynamics make special elections particularly unpredictable: Reform lost two recent ones to the Greens and Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party. And on the same day Burnham triumphed in Makerfield, the Conservatives won a parliamentary seat in Scotland from the Scottish Nationalist Party. The next national election will occur no later than 2029, and which party ends up with the most seats is anyone’s guess.

The circumstances of the Makerfield by-election make it an imperfect bellwether for national politics. Both Burnham and the Reform candidate, Rob Kenyon, presented their campaign as a chance to give the Labour prime minister a kicking. Farage, Reform’s attention-grabbing but divisive leader, was a curiously low-key presence. Kenyon, a plumber whose past social-media posts prompted allegations of sexism, was an underwhelming candidate. None of that stopped lots of British journalists turning up in Makerfield to write about the irresistible lure of Reform to working-class voters. Somehow, these articles never get written the other way around: No one opines that British voters long for a guy who served in Gordon Brown’s government and voted for the Iraq War, as Burnham did.

But people are more open-minded and pragmatic than many political commentators assume, and Burnham has long since shrugged off his association with previous eras of Labour. In the end, his pitch was simple—he is the only man who can save Labour and, by extension, Britain. This, he told his supporters on election night, was Labour’s “final chance to change.” Now Britons will find out if that’s true.

Science Has a Name for What’s Plaguing the Reflecting Pool

2026-06-19T15:50:00-04:00

Donald Trump has a new nemesis, with a name worthy of a supervillain: Scenedesmus.

The Reflecting Pool on the National Mall has become the country’s most high-profile science experiment, with workers battling against nature. After a week of combat, they have essentially killed off one type of algae infesting the pool, only to create the conditions for a new type to take over. And Scenedesmus, a genus of green algae nicknamed “Skinny Dead Mouse” by scientists, is now flourishing, according to testing that was run at the request of The Atlantic.

The pool, at the moment, looks like a strange bit of modern art. As workers treat different sections, the areas where they succeed in reducing the algae turn lighter shades of green. In some places, the water is relatively clear. In others, it’s an oily sludge. A quick glance, though, is enough to confirm that this is not the American-flag blue it was supposed to be.

Over the past few days, I’ve seen baby ducks swim through the pool; National Park Service workers wading around as they try to clean it; small children bending over to touch it. But none of the NPS workers at the site have been able to definitively tell me whether despite all of the algae—some species of which can be toxic—the water remains safe.

A spokesperson at the Department of Interior told me “there is ongoing water testing happening,” but would not disclose the results of those tests. Requests to spokespeople at the NPS have gone unanswered. I have been in touch with scientists who have applied for permits to get into the pool and conduct their own tests, but those permits have yet to be granted.

With the lack of transparency from the federal government and no clarity on what’s inside that murky water, I decided to dig—or dip—a little deeper myself. So late on Thursday morning, I filled several water bottles from different areas of the pool. Some were fairly clear, while other samples were dark green. My samples were delivered to two different scientists by that evening.

Algae from the Reflecting Pool seen under a microscope (Courtesy of Greg Boyer)

When algae first began to flourish in the Reflecting Pool, it appeared to be a blue-green cyanobacterial bloom that had taken over. Photos showed the kind of greenish surface film that can be indicative of that algae, which in some instances may produce neurotoxins harmful to people and pets. When Hans W. Paerl, a professor of marine and environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, opened the bottle of one of the samples I collected, he detected the distinctive earthy scents reminiscent of other cyanobacterial blooms he’d previously smelled. Under the microscope, he could see remnants of the previous bloom, but they were too degraded to identify. He attributed this, in part, to the endless jugs of hydrogen peroxide that workers had dumped into the pool to kill off the algae. “The guys dealing with peroxide treatment can pat themselves on the back,” he told me. “But it doesn’t really solve the overall problem.”

In fact, it’s created a new problem: The green algae, perhaps in the absence of the blue-green algae, are absolutely flourishing. “It is a pretty aggressive grower,” Paerl said. “What’s happened is they’ve just switched the players. And the green algae are just taking over.”

“I’ve never seen it bloom quite this thick,” Greg Boyer, a professor emeritus of biochemistry at the State University of New York, who analyzed our other samples, told me.

Read: What color is the Reflecting Pool? An investigation.

Boyer ran additional tests that determined there was little to no blue-green algae in the samples, making it highly unlikely to be toxic. That is to be expected, he said, at least for the moment. “This is peak season for green algae,” he said. “We’re pretty early in the season for blue-green algae.” In the next few weeks, by late July, that could change.

The treatments that NPS is now using to combat the bloom—hydrogen peroxide and nanobubble technology—are more effective at fighting blue-green algae. The green algae that are growing now, both Boyer and Paerl told me, are not likely to be discouraged by those methods, and so far they are proving to be resilient. Boyer was able to run tests to determine the current health of the algae. “They are stressed, but they are definitely not dead,” he said. “If I was going to design a facility to grow algae, I would probably design a facility that had a lot of surface area and was very shallow, so you have sunlight down to the bottom. And put a lot of nutrients in it. And that’s pretty much what the Reflecting Pool is. It’s just a perfect facility for growing algae.” The decision to paint the bottom a deep shade of blue, scientists have told me, raised the water temperature and accelerated the growth.

Bottom line? “The water will probably remain green for the foreseeable future,” Paerl said.

For the past week, workers at the Reflecting Pool have attempted to vacuum algae from the bottom, with hoses connected to the vacuums pumping water down nearby drains. The work, apparently, has become something of an emergency, with an email going out to NPS employees asking for volunteers to work 12-hour shifts and help pump out the algae as part of “critical pre-July 4th operational needs.” The email, which was reported by MeidasTouch Network, referred to the operation as a “regional and national priority.”

[Read: Inside America’s ugly birthday battle]

Yesterday evening, I saw several people in the center of the pool. They were dressed in the D.C. office uniform of khakis and a dress shirt, wearing waders as they vacuumed. As one of them ended a shift, handing his equipment back to NPS workers, he said he was “just doing my part.”

But another problem has also emerged: The sealant at the bottom of the pool, which was the bulk of the $16.4 million renovation project, is beginning to peel off. By yesterday evening, a whole chunk was gone. Tourists and locals were converging on the site where Martin Luther King Jr. spoke and where protesters denounced the Vietnam War, just to catch a glimpse of the wayward sealant—or perhaps even a souvenir.

“Taking a piece of paint is like taking a piece of the Berlin Wall,” one cyclist passing by told me. “It’s a piece of history.”

The Massive Implications of the Brendan Sorsby Ordeal

2026-06-19T08:00:00-04:00

In recent years, college sports have become an unregulated, high-stakes environment in which players are paid directly by schools and can transfer an unlimited number of times. But there are still some firm boundaries that nearly everyone agrees shouldn’t be crossed: gambling, for example. If you’re an athlete who gambles on your own team’s games, you shouldn’t be allowed to play. That’s how it works in the pros, where athletes such as Pete Rose and Jontay Porter received lifetime bans for betting. (Rose was controversially reinstated after his death.)

That’s what should’ve happened to the quarterback Brendan Sorsby, whose conduct isn’t debatable. During his single year playing for Indiana University, from 2022 to 2023, Sorsby made 2,900 bets—40 of which were on his own team, according to court documents. After transferring to the University of Cincinnati ahead of the 2024–25 season, he bet on Cincinnati men’s basketball; upon ending up at Texas Tech University earlier this year, he placed wagers on professional golf, the NBA, and MLB. In total, Sorsby bet at least $90,000 over four years, and sometimes used betting accounts registered to friends or family.

Shortly after Sorsby entered rehab for gambling addiction in April, regulators in multiple states opened investigations into his betting activity. Last month, the NCAA, the governing body for college sports in the United States, deemed that Sorsby was ineligible to play in the upcoming season. But last week, a Texas judge decided to wave away a pretty clear red flag. On June 8, Sorsby was granted a temporary injunction that would have allowed him to play this fall, potentially setting what would be a worrying precedent across college sports.

Ultimately, the NCAA and Texas Tech were spared significant embarrassment because Sorsby opted to apply for the NFL supplemental draft after meeting with school officials earlier this week. The supplemental draft is for players who typically have college eligibility or have faced disciplinary issues, and who become draft-eligible after the year’s NFL draft has taken place. The NFL still has to approve Sorsby’s application, but it’s possible he could be in the pros before long.

Nevertheless, Sorsby’s ordeal served as another example of the NCAA’s declining power. Sorsby’s attorneys framed his gambling addiction as a mental-health issue; Judge Ken Curry, who granted the injunction, agreed, writing that Sorsby would “suffer a probable, imminent, and irreparable injury” if he were unable to play for Texas Tech. The ruling was a come-to-Jesus reckoning that the NCAA surely never anticipated, demonstrating just how much the organization’s power is built on a house of cards. For most leagues, this would be an open-and-shut case; a ban from the sport would never be challenged. But the NCAA is in a different category. Other leagues have a collective-bargaining agreement in which rules and infractions are agreed upon in collaboration with the players. The NCAA doesn’t have that, so any practices the organization sets can be challenged in court. In recent years, the courts have been ripping apart the NCAA rule book, prohibiting the organization from imposing limitations on transferring, and allowing players to return to college play after having gone pro.

[Read: Hit them where it hurts]

As long as the NCAA refuses to accept reality—that its student athletes are something closer to employees than to amateurs—the ecosystem it’s supposed to protect will continue to be degraded. The organization’s overall failure to construct a comprehensive, equitable system that treats the players as true partners subject to clear-cut rules has led to the current scenario, where if Sorsby had played, it would have leveled the entire sport’s credibility.

Instead of dealing with the mess it created, the NCAA has chosen to beg Congress to help by passing the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act. If passed, the bill would give the NCAA a limited antitrust exemption, allowing the organization to unilaterally set its own rules. Whether the bill will pass is uncertain. Although some aspects of it would provide helpful systemic changes, such as creating more uniform policies related to discipline and eligibility, it would also wrench power away from the students and back toward the colleges.

A big reason for the chaos is that colleges have repeatedly shown that they will do whatever it takes, whether moral or immoral, to win. Nobody was forcing Texas Tech to play Sorsby in the fall. If not for the enormous backlash—which included a conference lawsuit and threats of a boycott by other schools—the Red Raiders would have happily held their noses and competed for the national championship that eluded them last year. Adding a talent like Sorsby presumably would have gotten them closer to winning it all. (They were also paying him a reported $6 million.)

But the lenient touch toward one of the game’s worst violations reflects a problem that’s only continuing to grow in the broader sports world. A recent survey revealed that one in three adults from the ages of 21 to 44 had wagered on sports before turning 21. Surely, Sorsby isn’t the only player who will be tempted to cash in. The lure of gambling is everywhere now that almost every major sports league has financial relationships with betting companies.

A crisis was averted, but the boundaries in college sports are still in danger of fading. The judicial system has shown the NCAA in recent years that without it having a real structure, maintaining any collective standard of conduct will be impossible

Iran Has Humiliated Trump

2026-06-18T12:00:00-04:00

The Iran deal has been described as a “humiliation” for the United States, since the upshot is that America gets little that it didn’t already have before the war, and Iran gets security guarantees and a big pile of money. Donald Trump’s agreement leaves Iran a theocratic state free to arm itself with ballistic missiles and drones and to murder its own citizens. Its terms suggest that this much-despised state will, after a 60-day period of free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, have the ability to regulate maritime traffic.

Normally one would have to pay a lot of money to a discreet professional to be humiliated this badly. Watching Trump and his aides sell the deal is in some ways as humiliating as the deal itself. “If other countries have” ballistic missiles, Trump said at the G7 conference yesterday, “it’s a little bit unfair” for Iran “not to have some.” Elimination of those missiles was one of the primary aims of the war, and thousands of Iranians, as well as more than a dozen Americans, died contesting it. Trump began his remarks today by stressing that the United States could have kept up the bombing if it wished “for another three weeks, two weeks, four weeks, two years. You would never have the Hormuz Strait open.” Keeping the strait open is one of the main purposes of the United States Navy, so these words sound a lot like an admission that the military of the United States cannot do its job, and might be equally vulnerable elsewhere, too.

[Jonathan Chait: All the sad hawks]

Humiliation, however, is distinct from defeat. Only the United States was humiliated; both countries have experienced a catastrophic loss. The defeat for the United States is the more obvious of the two: a loss of standing and the confirmation that even a rich country cannot force its will on a poor but determined one. For Iran, the defeat is subtler. Bordering countries once considered it a problem neighbor and now know it to be an outright threat. They are arming themselves accordingly and seeking ways to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s economy has been a disaster for about 15 years and is now a total wreck. Sanctions relief will help, but who exactly will want to invest in a country whose government is sustained by brutality and ruled according to the whims of a junta led by a mangled religious fanatic?

The best defense of this deal, from a U.S. perspective, is probably one that takes into account these economic and political headwinds facing Iran, and notices that they are more likely to change the regime than any further military action. You don’t need to huff and puff to blow down the house when the weatherman is predicting a typhoon tomorrow.

Another possible defense is that, like all deals made by Trump, and most deals made by the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is not much of a deal anyway, because both parties intended to break it before it was even signed. An anonymous U.S. official told CNN yesterday that “people shouldn’t read too much into the language” of the agreement, because the core of the agreement is “understandings we have with each other.” This statement goes against all legal advice ever given. (Read the contract; ignore what the other guy tells you while he watches you sign it.) Much of what’s in the agreement is so vague as to be meaningless. We know what a nuclear deal looks like, because Barack Obama got one, and it established detailed and invasive inspections that are most certainly not delineated in any document leaked or mentioned by Trump officials. The deal might have been reached only because both sides wanted to stop fighting, and both were willing to add vague terms because they didn’t want to be bound by precise ones.

The same U.S. official’s other comment to CNN was assurance that the “language” of the document—the same language the official encouraged his domestic audience to ignore—is calibrated to let Iranian officials “say what they need to say for their domestic politics.” This intriguing comment reflects a view of Iranian leadership I have heard from officials in previous administrations, including Democratic ones: that they are susceptible to flattery, and that they regard the exasperation and humiliation of the Americans as an end in itself.

[Daniel B. Shapiro: What did you expect?]

The humiliation is the point. Iran got the United States to sign a document that even Americans described as degrading, mortifying, a total capitulation. Who cares if the deal never really happens, or if each part turns out to be a little less sweet than it first appears? Iran has never before won a war, and even the blows it has struck against the United States, Israel, and its own citizens have up to now been pathetic and furtive, taking the form of terror attacks and indirect action through proxies. The existence of an understanding, with humiliating terms for America, is a heap of symbolic and emotional capital that no Iranian regime has enjoyed since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Now it is time to see how Iran will use the dividends from this humiliation. The $300 billion in investments is hardly the biggest opportunity for Iran to cash in. Far more valuable would be a pivot by the regime’s leadership away from some of the dogmas of its past, and toward reform. No previous leaders have had the ability to make such a pivot, and they probably did not want to make one anyway. The current leaders, however, have positioned themselves as saviors of the Islamic Republic, and with that credibility could institute certain changes that are widely known to be necessary and desirable, but that would have looked counterrevolutionary if proposed by anyone else.

Iran has won the war, or at least not lost it. The peace is up for grabs.

Toy Story Confronts a Nightmare of Modern Parenting

2026-06-19T08:00:00-04:00

Pixar’s cruelest and cleverest trick has been successfully convincing audiences, over several decades, that all kinds of creatures—even inanimate objects—can have rich inner lives. In Cars, vehicles talk and run a whole society; in Finding Nemo, fish feel imprisoned when they’re placed in a tank; Inside Out posits, through the use of anthropomorphized memories, that to be forgotten is a fate as bad as death. But no series ostensibly for children has worked harder to guilt-trip adults into taking better care of their pets or belongings than the Toy Story movies, in which the mere act of putting away playthings is tantamount to mass murder.

Toy Story 5, the latest in a likely never-ending run of sequels to Pixar’s first-ever feature film, finds a new and rich angle to the franchise: the notion of growing up too fast. In the world of Toy Story, practically every item beloved by children has a secret consciousness; toys privately chat and organize in kids’ bedrooms, always with the goal of helping their owners have fun. Toy Story 5, directed by the Pixar mainstay and animation legend Andrew Stanton (who also made Finding Nemo and WALL-E), introduces a character that should send a chill down the spine of every parent watching—a sentient tablet computer, whose idea of encouraging elementary schoolers to interact is to get them addicted to mindless games and push them onto social networks.

This is an innovative bit of horror for Toy Story, one that actually gets at the way children play today. That sense of modernity has sometimes felt absent from the movies’ sweetly old-fashioned world, which features pull-string cowboy dolls and a shiny spaceman action figure. Lilypad (voiced by Greta Lee) is a cutesy piece of tech gifted to the series’ human protagonist Bonnie, who is 8 years old and painfully shy. Ostensibly intended to bring her closer to more friends via the web, “Lily” instead zombifies Bonnie, a familiar syndrome that the other toys note is happening worldwide. Figurines and stuffies are gathering dust while youngsters tap away at screens.

[Read: The Toy Story franchise forgot its own message]

Accusing the film of tech hysteria would be easy, but I found myself impressed by how forcefully the script (by Stanton and Kenna Harris) charges at an issue that adults might actually want to talk to their children about as they leave the theater together. Toy Story 5 mostly avoids coming off as an angry plea that parents rip every screen out of their child’s field of vision—it makes Lily an anti-hero rather than a full-on villain. She goes up against the cowgirl doll Jessie (Joan Cusack) and the trusty and brash Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) in a debate that turns almost philosophical: Lily’s argument is that her internet connectivity and glamorous built-in apps make her a better bridge between kids.

Of course, Toy Story 5 largely disagrees with that point. The simple joy of unlocking young imaginations has always been the characters’ purpose in these movies; though they have inner lives that children cannot perceive, the toys are happiest when they’re being used and adored. Stanton represents Bonnie’s fantasy world as a bright dimension of pastel drawings and glitzy colors, whereas the Lilypad games are flat and uninspired. The real contrast, however, comes in the ways kids communicate with one another—offline, they’re supportive and creative, whereas when they’re texting from afar, they can be detached and cruel.

Perhaps wisely, given that the film’s emotional center is a little girl, the primary storyline follows Jessie. She takes over for her cowboy counterpart, Woody (Tom Hanks), who was the franchise’s longtime lead; he left the gang at the end of Toy Story 4, accepting that his time as the favorite had ended. Woody (now sporting a bald spot and a paunchy belly full of stuffing) is pretty quickly roped back into the action, yet he’s kept firmly in supporting-role territory so that Jessie can have a proper story arc—something she hasn’t really enjoyed since her introduction, in Toy Story 2. The lessons she learns here, some of them revolving around the owner who grew up and abandoned her long ago, are familiar fare for the Toy Story–verse: All childhood is fleeting, but there’s plenty to enjoy without having to fear the future. Still, the formula has enough novelty to keep this sequel from feeling entirely stale.

[Read: A radical message for a kids’ movie]

I still prefer Toy Story 4, a bizarre swerve that focused intently on the mechanics of toy consciousness by pondering the existence of Bonnie’s DIY creation, Forky, who was brought to life almost against his will to become a plaything. Nothing is quite as provocative in this installment, though I did appreciate a trio of supposed “old tech” toys Jessie meets, now reckoning with obsolescence in the back of their child’s closet. The best of them is Smarty Pants (Conan O’Brien), a potty-training tool who lives without purpose (or fresh batteries), his duties long ago fulfilled; as ever, the Toy Story movies cannot help but jab at adults thinking with remorse about any trinket or device they might have discarded over the years. That’s the weird magic of this franchise, more than 30 years on: Viewers might find themselves authentically rooting for a felt cowgirl and a fake toilet-paper roll to teach a knockoff iPad some manners.

The Least Logical Fashion Rule

2026-06-19T07:00:00-04:00

American dress codes seem to grow more lenient by the day. Jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts are ubiquitous among so-called white-collar workers. The taboo against shorts in professional settings, however, has endured. Here in Washington, D.C., the hot, humid summer air feels like a dog’s breath in your face. But legions of male office workers are expected to keep their legs bundled up, even as their female co-workers shiver in the air-conditioned chill. When I exposed my knees at the office recently—I’d biked to work and hadn’t had a chance to change, I swear—I triggered a lively discussion on Slack. I was made to understand that shorts were for children.

Why does the no-shorts rule cling so stubbornly to life, like trousers stuck to sweaty thighs in June? No one has a satisfying answer. It might be the most illogical fashion convention still standing. That means its days are probably numbered, and the glorious era of leg liberation is nigh.

There was a time when shorts really were for little boys. In the late-Victorian period, British schools adopted short pants for the youngest male students. This practice eventually spilled over into non-Commonwealth countries. Steve Knorsch, the U.S. managing director for the men’s clothier Cad & the Dandy, told me that at his all-boys school in 1970s Belgium, he wore shorts as part of his uniform—along with knee-length socks, a blazer, and a tie—until he was old enough for pants.

The association between shorts and children was still strong in 1932, when the diminutive English tennis star Bunny Austin decided he was done running around in “sweat-soaked trousers,” as he later put it, and debuted shorts at the U.S. National Championships. “With his white linen hat and his flannel shorts, the little English player looked like an A. A. Milne production,” The New York Times observed. Perhaps he did have an air of Christopher Robin about him, but Austin would go on to make two Wimbledon finals and introduce shorts to Centre Court. He lost the matches, but shorts won the war. In genteel athletic contexts, at least, grown men could shed their pants without worrying what the Times might say.

[Read: The boys who wear shorts all winter]

The fashion historian James Laver observes that menswear tends to originate on the sports field or the battlefield. During World War II, a huge number of British and Commonwealth soldiers wore shorts in Africa, popularizing the look. “After the war, you’re going to get a hell of a lot of khaki shorts in Army and Navy stores and things like that,” the eminent menswear journalist G. Bruce Boyer told me. “So guys started to wear them to wash the car, and then maybe even to play golf, and so forth.” In the ’50s, Bermuda shorts—a knee-length trouser accepted as formal wear on that island and absolutely nowhere else—caught on among the country-club set.

But a firewall held strong between the settings where shorts were appropriate—the club, the beach, a barbecue—and the office, where they weren’t. Boyer remembers American fashion brands trying to sell men’s suits with short trousers as far back as the ’50s. “The reason you’re not aware of it,” he said, “is because it didn’t work at all.”

Shorts remained forbidden even as other pillars of the office dress code crumbled. Jeans were originally blue-collar work wear. T-shirts used to be undergarments. Polo shirts went from the golf course to the conference room. A decade ago, athletic shoes were still mostly frowned on; now office floors squeak under the tread of chunky Hokas. The recently enacted U.S. Senate dress code, known informally as the SHORTS Act, requires a jacket, a tie, and—you guessed it—long pants. But it doesn’t mention footwear. These days, even members of Congress stalk the Capitol in sneakers.

The clear trend is toward comfort. According to a 2023 Gallup poll, just 3 percent of Americans wear a suit to work most days. Forty-one percent said they wear “business casual clothes,” and 31 percent said they wear street clothes. “These codes do change over time,” Derek Guy, a fashion writer better known as the Menswear Guy, told me. “I can’t give you a reason why, somehow, shorts have been a little more stubborn.”

[Read: Why American workers now dress so casually]

When pressed for an explanation, several experts brought up the former fashion designer Tom Ford. In a 2011 interview with Another Man magazine, Ford outlined his “five easy lessons in how to be a modern gentleman.” Things were going fine (Lesson 4: Don’t be racist or sexist) until the final lesson: “Shorts should only be worn on the tennis court or on the beach.”

“I think a lot of people really took that to heart and were like, Oh, fuck, this is up there with being a gentleman,” Avery Trufelman, the host of the fashion podcast Articles of Interest, told me. “I don’t think it’s too far afield to say part of the stigma, especially in America, comes from Tom Ford.”

Through his publicist, Ford declined to be interviewed for this article. This leaves us to speculate about why shorts might be deemed ungentlemanly. One possibility is that they simply look bad. Certainly, if they’re too long, shorts can visually shorten the legs, which is not particularly flattering. Maybe that’s why the 5-foot-7 Tom Cruise wears full-length jeans, not shorts, while playing beach volleyball in Top Gun. The easy solution is to wear shorts that stop a few inches above the knee. To some shorts skeptics, though, that particular cure would be worse than the disease. “Nobody wants to see your hairy legs,” Knorsch said. “Even if a male body can be very attractive, those long hairy sticks that sit below the waist are not very probably appetizing to look at.” This calls to mind the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode in which Larry David finds himself sitting on an airplane next to a pale middle-aged man wearing shorts. “Let me give you a little tip for travel,” Larry says. “Try not to wear shorts. It’s not all that attractive to look at for five hours.”

The problem with this theory is the inconsistency with which it’s invoked. If men’s legs were really so unsightly, then they would be considered ugly everywhere—but they aren’t. There’s no reason a body part that looks fine at a beer garden or a summer party should suddenly turn grotesque the moment a desk and a laptop appear. “I don’t think there’s anything objectively wrong with them,” Trufelman said. “I just looked out the window at two guys wearing shorts, and I thought they looked quite stylish.”

[Read: Hill staffers are wearing sneakers now]

Finally, even if shorts were inherently bad-looking, that still wouldn’t quite explain the rule, because ugly clothes are a staple of casual office attire. A guy wearing a polo shirt and khakis might be complying with the office dress code, but he’s also wearing a dork uniform. He might be better off with a nice pair of shorts, loafers, and, say, a linen or lightweight cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up. For more information, consult Jude Law’s character in The Talented Mr. Ripley.

As is so often the case, a rule binding one of the sexes ends up making both worse off. Because men are expected to wear long pants, office thermostats are set to unreasonably cold temperatures in the summer. Women, dressed sensibly for the weather in skirts and sleeveless blouses, end up shivering all day. It’s a waste of energy and money that makes as much sense as banning sweaters in winter.

Times change. Summers keep getting hotter. In April, as the U.S.-Iran war sent energy prices spiking, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike announced that government workers could wear shorts to the office. “There are fewer and fewer layers to take off, and people are now down to shorts,” she explained to reporters. This year’s World Cup is the first to mandate a water break for players midway through each half. (They also get to wear shorts to work.)

Shorts seem destined to one day join sneakers and jeans as acceptable office attire. In a 2023 Wall Street Journal poll, the position that shorts are never acceptable in an office setting received majority support from only one group: those who were 58 and older. These Baby Boomers are the bosses of American workplaces, but they won’t be forever. Seventy-five percent of Millennials said that “it can sometimes be appropriate” for a man to wear shorts to the office. Eventually, the male knee will be set free. Once that happens, it will be hard to remember why anyone was so afraid of it.

America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek

2026-06-18T12:21:00-04:00

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Last year, Steve Yegge started “suddenly getting pounded by nap attacks in the middle of the day.” Without fail, Yegge—a programmer and tech blogger—would “hit a wall, fall over, and sleep for 90 minutes,” he told me. Like many developers, Yegge no longer writes code by hand; instead, he manages a legion of bots to do that for him. His productivity has skyrocketed, but so too has his exhaustion. “I’ve fallen asleep slower at the anesthesiologist,” he recently wrote on his blog.

In theory, handing tasks off to coding agents should free up time, allowing larger blocks for deep work and rest. But some developers are having the opposite experience. Instead of allowing for greater focus, the latest AI tools are overwhelming workers, frazzling minds and shredding attention spans. Although agents can do plenty more work now than they could a year ago, they still need human oversight. Like toddlers, AI agents ask endless follow-up questions, require detailed instructions—and, if you leave them unsupervised, are liable to make a huge mess. Once you get several running simultaneously, there’s no time for breaks. As Yegge puts it on LinkedIn, his job is to be an “AI babysitter.”

[Read: AI agents are taking America by storm]

Plenty of people are seemingly starting to feel like depleted AI babysitters. When Boston Consulting Group recently surveyed roughly 1,500 workers across several roles at major American companies, the firm found that many workers were experiencing “mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity.” Respondents described a “buzzing” and “fog”-like feeling, sometimes accompanied by headaches, slower decision making, and trouble focusing. One engineering manager told the researchers that managing multiple bots at once was like having “a dozen browser tabs open in my head, all fighting for attention.” In the survey, 18 percent of developers reported AI-induced exhaustion. But in other roles, too, such as HR and marketing, where AI is also taking over, rates of reported fatigue were even higher.

In my own experiments with AI agents, I’ve experienced some of this brain fog myself. To get in the mindset of an overstimulated developer while working on this story, I asked Claude Code to deploy a team of agents to supplement my research. I already had done my reporting, but I figured the bot might be able to surface more information. Claude Code spun up a team of 17 researchers. It assigned eight agents to research different subtopics, another eight to serve as fact-checkers, and a final agent to synthesize the group’s findings into a memo.

The bot promised that the research would be easy. “Nothing for you to do,” it wrote. “Sit tight.” But the agents were needy from the start. Almost immediately, Claude Code began asking for all kinds of permissions to take actions on my behalf. Because I didn’t understand some of its questions, I started going down different rabbit holes trying to make sense of its requests. I could feel my shoulders tensing. Even once my research swarm finally got going, I kept checking in on the bots to make sure that they were on the right track. The fog was setting in. In the end, the memo that my 17 agents produced wasn’t very good, but neither was the paragraph I’d spent that time writing, because I’d been distracted by my omnipresent agent blob the entire time. (In line with The Atlantic’s policies on AI use, I didn’t use the tools to do any actual writing.)

This all felt like multitasking on steroids. In my quest to maximize my own productivity, I was wasting time and producing lower-quality work. As the BCG team found, “juggling and multitasking can become the definitive features of working with AI.” Fortunately, I am able to use AI tools only when they are genuinely helpful, but other workers may not have that luxury. Across corporate America, companies are pushing people to adopt AI—and some workers are even competing with one another on leaderboards that track individual usage. This has led some people to automate unnecessary tasks to prove to management that they are making use of the technology.

Others are finding they can’t stop talking to their agents. “Spinning up all these agents is sort of like pulling a bunch of slot machines at the same time,” Matthew Kropp, a managing director and senior partner at BCG, told me. If you assign work to a team of agents, you never know precisely what they will get back. Sometimes the bots fail miserably, but other times, they do produce great work. That variable reward, Kropp told me, hacks people’s dopamine circuits. “It’s very akin to gambling,” he said. Rather than taking time for breaks, some people are finding themselves feverishly rotating among different agents.

For all of the justified concern over the potential for AI to automate work, the rise of AI babysitting points to how the technology is already changing jobs. “People are constantly talking about a white-collar apocalypse,” the MIT economist David Autor told me. “I don’t think it’s going to look like that.” Perhaps soon, agents will be good enough to do more work unattended. Some people may lose jobs, but Autor expects that for many people, work will simply look different. A preindustrial cobbler who made shoes by hand had a very different relation to his work than his daughter threading laces on the factory floor did, but both were in the business of making shoes. Indeed, the internet is full of workers complaining about how their jobs have become akin to manning an assembly line. There may soon come a day when consultants reminisce about creating PowerPoint presentations by hand.

[Read: Imagine losing your job to the mere possibility of AI]

Whatever the future of white-collar work, it is likely to be messier and stranger than we can imagine. At the extreme, Andi Peng, an AI researcher, speculated that within the decade, we might not even need laptops at work, because agents will record human conversations and do computer work on humans’ behalf. The idea struck me as hard to fathom. Then again, a few decades ago most office work was done without the internet.

The more realistic future is, perhaps, less exciting. Now that agents can work for hours on end, workers are likely to face growing pressure to make the most of them. In Silicon Valley, engineers assign their agents tasks to complete overnight, and then check the results even before their morning coffee. Some are staying up late: “The opportunity cost of going to sleep is too high,” the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said on The Joe Rogan Experience last month. “If you go to sleep, you won’t be with your 20 AI coding agents.” Slack and email have already made workers feel as if they are expected to be available after hours. AI was supposed to alleviate people’s workload. Instead, with bots that can work while you sleep, we may be headed toward something like an infinite workweek.

‘You Slap Me in the Face, I’ll Slap You Right Back’

2026-06-18T09:00:00-04:00

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Democrats fall in love. Republicans fall in line. Or at least that’s the old joke.

The quote, often attributed to Bill Clinton, spoke to a political reality. After all, in a contest of tradition versus change, it’s no surprise that the party of tradition more easily comes to consensus than the one seeking change.

But where the “falling in love” of politics once implied progressive dreams of one change figure or another, it now seems to apply most to the cult of personality around President Trump. And the passion on the right has led to a kind of pragmatism on the left. In a world where Democrats fall in line, few people have been more successful at making that happen than Nancy Pelosi.

The longtime California member of Congress is the only woman to ever serve as speaker of the House. And her tenure was marked by uncommon party unity, even before Trump became the party foil he is. She says she did this with consensus, listening rather than telling.

“Democrats know what they have to be, and that is: We are not a monolith,” she told the Radio Atlantic host Hanna Rosin earlier this month at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, in Seattle. “I can’t go in there and say, Everybody should be like me because I’m from San Francisco, and this is the right thing to do. We have to listen to other people’s views and, hopefully, across the aisle.”

On this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic, that live conversation with Pelosi. She shares her thoughts on gerrymandering, the midterms, the progressive wing of the party, and her 39 years in Congress.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Hey. Before we get started today, we have an announcement. This show is adding three new dimensions. Number one, episodes now every Monday in addition to the Thursday episode. Number two, we have a new host, Adam Harris. You have probably heard him on the show. He’s co-hosted. He’s also been a guest on the show. And number three, the Monday show is gonna be on video. You can watch it on YouTube.

Adam, how you feeling about that? You looking good?

Adam Harris: I am feeling great. It’s been really exciting to get this show off the ground, and I’m excited to get started.

Rosin: So if you had to make a show right now—this week—what would it be about?

Harris: There’s just so much in the news. You have the Iran deal. You have the sort of ongoing, unfolding dimensions of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. You have the start of the World Cup. I think one of the reasons why I was really interested in coming back and joining you as a co-host on Radio Atlantic is because there is so much to explore. And there’s just so much news to cover. And so it’s honestly a bit of a blessing that we’re able to look at the world through this lens of this magazine that’s been around for 170 years.

Rosin: But let’s say you could do a show about literally anything you wanted. lt wouldn’t even have to be news-related. Would you create an alternate reality where the Spurs won?

Harris: 100 percent.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Harris: 100 percent. Both in 2017 and now.

Rosin: Got it.

Harris: (Laughs.)

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

Nancy Pelosi is a lot of things. But one thing a lot of people can agree on is that she knows how to get things done. And if she doesn’t like you—especially if you’re a president she disagrees with—she won’t try to hide it.

Pelosi was a key figure in pushing through the Affordable Care Act under President Obama as speaker of the House. An icon of Democratic politics for the last few decades: whipping up votes, negotiating bills, and, in one memorable moment from 2020, ripping up a speech at the State of the Union.

News anchor (from NBC News): A stunning moment here at the end of the president’s speech, Nancy Pelosi tearing up what appeared to be a copy of the president’s speech.

Rosin: Earlier this month, I sat down with Pelosi at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, in Seattle. We talked about the midterms, if the Democrats could win back the House, possibly the Senate. We talked about gerrymandering and the future of the Democratic Party—just as she is about to retire from it officially.

(Audience claps.)

Rosin (in interview): So we’re coming on—it’s 39 years—

Representative Nancy Pelosi: Yeah.

Rosin: —about, which is amazing.

Pelosi: June 9. Next week.

Rosin: June 9 is the anniversary of your swearing-in, right?

Pelosi: Right.

Rosin: Yeah. Amazing.

(Audience claps.)

Rosin: Which means you have five months to go.

Pelosi: Right.

Rosin: How are you liking the term emerita? Do you feel relieved, like, Oh, I don’t have to do this anymore? Or do you feel panicked, like, What do I do now?

Pelosi: Well, I’m only there for one reason right now, in addition to meeting the needs of my constituents, but my purpose is to win the House for the Democrats.

(Audience claps.)

Pelosi: And that’s it. That’s it. So right now, it’s like every day counts and you have to make every day count. And so I’m not looking in terms of five months or what. That’s what it is. Five months minus about three days, and we will have the election. And we wanna make sure that everybody knows that the election will be safe and will be protected, that we will win the election, and what we will do when we do. So I’m busy.

Rosin: Yeah. I knew you weren’t gonna sound like a person who’s five months from—the way a lot of us would sound if we were five months from retirement. It’s just impossible to imagine: When I think Nancy Pelosi, I think action verbs, like wrangling. There are things we associate with you, and none of them are fishing.

So looking at the House map, help us understand from your perspective: Is looking at the map of the nation and winning the House—do you think of it the same way you think of winning a vote, like gathering your people? Is it the same kind of thing?

Pelosi: Well, let’s define our terms. When we say winning the House, let’s think back to our Founders. As we celebrate—mostly—celebrate the 250th anniversary of July 4, 1776, and then what they did after that to write the Constitution. They wrote in the Constitution very clearly about the House and its purpose. So in order to talk about what we want to do, it’s important to note this: Our Founders thought that the House of Representatives should be a reflection of the American people, and that’s why there’s proportional representation.

The Senate at the time—you know, we have 40 million people in California. We have two senators. Some other states have 1 million persons, and they have two. But that’s what we take an oath to protect and defend. And they were, at the time, just appointed by the state legislature, just to go back in history a bit.

But the Founders, the one thing that they had total agreement on is they did not want a monarch. So the way they set up the Constitution for the election was: The president would have a four-year term, and the House would have a two-year term. So people ask me all the time, including members, How come we have to run every two years? It’s because that’s the genius of our Founders. They wanted the race for the House in two years to be a referendum on the executive. And that’s exactly how it turns out.

So when we say we have to win the House, that means we have to be a referendum, as our Founders intended, that we not have a monarch. So we fully intend to do just that.

Rosin: What would you put the chances of Democrats winning the House right now?

Pelosi: Not only are we going to win the House—

(Audience laughs.)

Pelosi: —we’re going to win big, and that’s what our plan is.

(Audience claps.)

Rosin: So that number of 100. That’s 100.

Pelosi: I guarantee you Hakeem Jeffries will be the speaker of the House, and he will be great. And right now he’s planning how we win, how we protect the election, and what we will do when we win.

Rosin: What about the Senate? I know the House is your baby and you love the House more, but just asking: What about the Senate?

Pelosi: That’s true. But I only speak about what I really know, and I know on the ground what is happening with the House. People say, Are you being a little arrogant? I said, No, I’m being confident. We’re gonna win the House.

The Senate has real possibilities. The bigger we win the House, the better chance for them to win the Senate. But if we win both, that would be a dream come true for our Founders. That’s what they had in mind.

(Audience claps.)

Rosin: So the person you’ve been alluding to but not mentioned by name, I remember hearing you on a podcast right before the presidential election—and this is painful to read now—what you said was, “I can’t even envision a situation where he could win. If he were to win, and we didn’t win the House, imagine how horrible it would be. I can hardly sleep at night as it is, but that would be unthinkable, impossible for our country.”

Now, your wish did not come true, so the question is: Has it been just as you expected? Worse than you expected? How has it rolled out?

Pelosi: Let us again define our terms.

(Audience laughs.)

Pelosi: You’re talking about what’s-his-name?

Rosin: He Who Shall Not Be Named.

Pelosi: He shall not be named.

Rosin: Since you’re not naming him, I’ll take your lead, yeah.

Pelosi: No, it’s worse. This is worse. The fact is that I didn’t come here to talk about him; I came here to talk about me. But okay, we’ll talk about him.

(Audience laughs.)

Pelosi: No, I’m teasing. Look what is at stake: a constitution where people are represented; where freedom of the press, freedom of speech, all democratic freedoms in the Bill of Rights. And then you have rule of law, due process, separation of powers—my personal favorite: independent judiciary, Supreme Court. So there’s so much at stake in this election coming. Not that we can change the Court right now, but this is an election we must win.

But I say to people—because there are people who are concerned about our democracy, and we need to be—but I said, When we campaign, we just can’t be talking about—we save our democracy at the kitchen table. This is about lowering the cost and increasing the availability and accessibility of health care, and it’s about ending the corruption that is going on in Washington, D.C. That’s what people vote on. We always have to make a distinction, Hanna, between what is important—and we can all agree on so many important things—and what people vote on, which is what is important to them at that time: the cost of living, affordability. And that’s the fight that we are in.

Rosin: In your book The Art of Power, you talk about managing George Bush. You talk about John McCain—just how you handle each one, your intuition. How did you handle Donald Trump? Like, if you had to strategize or you had to get something done or you needed the White House for some reason, how did you do it?

Pelosi: Well, I didn’t manage any of those people, but I respected them. You always want the president of the United States to succeed. And for the most part, Democratic or Republican, that was never an issue. We always were patriots, and as I say, you want the president to succeed.

In order for there to be cooperation and all the rest, there has to be some truth—I guess that’s the best word I could say—some validity as to what that person’s agenda might be for our country. So we’re having a difference of opinion on policy. I’d rather not talk personally about …

(Audience laughs.)

Rosin: I am genuinely curious because you’re so strategic in the book. You’re so good at reading people—

Pelosi: Yeah.

Rosin: —understanding what you need from each person and how to get it, to get everything on everybody, all the House members. It’s so many people. It’s like you have 10,000 children and you have to get them all in line. It’s kind of amazing.

So I did wonder about when you’re faced with a situation like this, but you do have some duty to the country—did you have any personal interactions or any insights about, well, how do you get something done here?

Pelosi: Well, the first term was better than the second term.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Pelosi: You know? But then we had to impeach him twice, so.

(Audience laughs.)

Rosin: So he wasn’t a fan.

Pelosi: A fan? No, no. (Laughs.) But the thing is, somebody said to me the other day, I fought really hard for you to impeach the president. I said, You didn’t do any such thing. There’s only one person responsible for the two impeachments of Donald Trump, and that person’s name is Donald Trump.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: Nancy Pelosi on that moment when she ripped up a copy of Donald Trump’s speech.

[Break]

Rosin: Do you all remember the moment that Representative Pelosi ripped up the speech? Okay—

(Audience claps.)

Rosin: —it was so meme-able. I feel like it’s just gonna be around forever. Did you think of that on the spot?

Pelosi: Yeah, I did.

Rosin: Really?

Pelosi: I’ll tell you, on a couple spots. One, here’s the way it was.

(Audience laughs.)

Pelosi: We go to the State of the Union, and again, wanna be respectful. They’re guests in our House, the House of Representatives. So anyway, when the president comes in, you probably notice that they hand a copy of the speech [to] the vice president, a copy to the speaker. So I had my copy there, and he starts to speak, and what I was hearing was not consistent with fact. So I tore a little piece and I said, I have to remember that on this page it wasn’t true.

(Audience laughs.)

And then the next page, it wasn’t true. And then the next page, it wasn’t true. The whole speech was really a manifesto of misrepresentations. So at the end I thought, I have to tear this speech up, because the whole thing—every single page—had misrepresentation. But worse than misrepresentation—lies.

But it’s on parchment, so you just can’t do this. You have to do this and this, and … (Laughs.) But I’ll tell you something; I go all over the world, and I’m like, We’re so proud of the Affordable Care Act and all these things that we did legislatively. All people wanna do is …

(Audience laughs.)

Pelosi: But also they don’t like when I point. This past week, for some reason, today I was in the airport and a young woman came up to me and she said—she had her phone with a picture on it—and she said, I’m the person who took this picture of you in the Cabinet office pointing at the president.

Wow. I didn’t know who took that picture. But in that picture, everybody tells me, That’s the one I want autographed. That’s the one I want autographed. Because in that picture I’m saying to the president, I’m leaving this meeting now because with you, Mr. President, which I called him, all roads lead to Putin.

So that to me was a more serious assault on what he had to say than just tearing up his manifesto of misrepresentations. Lies.

(Audience laughs.)

Rosin: I wanna talk about Congress more broadly. What do you think about the gerrymandering war that has opened up? Your successor, Hakeem Jeffries, has said, “Maximum warfare everywhere all the time.” The Democrats have definitely jumped into the gerrymandering war. How do you feel about that?

Pelosi: Oh. Let me back up on that. When we won the majority in ’18—so ’19 we went in and then when President Biden was elected in ’20—our first bill was H.R. 1, For the People Act. And one of the major provisions of the bill was no more partisan gerrymandering.

We have to get to that place. Now—

Rosin: But the Democrats don’t seem to take that position anymore, not really.

Pelosi: No, no. They do. You slap me in the face, I’ll slap you right back. So they did what they did in Texas. Winning this election is too important, so we did what—we didn’t wanna do what we did in California. But if they’re gonna try to take five seats in Texas, we’ll take five seats in California. Let me say this—

Rosin: But that is partisan.

Pelosi: —I would rather not have done that, but I’m not gonna let them get away with taking five seats and then going here and going there.

(Audience claps.)

Pelosi: I know some people like to say, Turn the other cheek. No. I’ll turn once I punch you in yours.

(Audience laughs.)

Rosin: Okay. I feel like I wanna rip up my speech just for—

(Audience laughs.)

Pelosi: (Laughs.) No, I don’t mean to sound that way, but that is our bill. We have in California commission redistricting. And we said we will take this departure right now because of what they did in Texas, and return to commission redistricting. We have to have it in every state of the union so that everybody knows that’s not what it’s about anymore. It’s about not politicians choosing their constituents. It’s about constituents choosing their elected officials, and that’s where it has to be.

(Audience claps.)

Rosin: After the last election, there was a lot of hand-wringing among Democrats: Who do we need to be? What do we need to evolve into? What should our policies be? What should our message be so that this doesn’t happen again? Do you have a clear answer to that? What the Democrats need to evolve into or change?

Pelosi: No. I think the Democrats know what they have to be, and that is: We are not a monolith.

Your job title and your job description, one and the same: representative. So I can’t go in there and say, Everybody should be like me because I’m from San Francisco, and this is the right thing to do. We have to listen to other people’s views and, hopefully, across the aisle. So there are elements, exuberances in the party now that should be heard and the rest.

But when we have that vote the first couple of days of January, we will all—not me, ’cause I won’t be there—they will all be voting for Hakeem Jeffries for speaker. And then they will—you build the consensus. You recognize the importance of every voice, and everybody doesn’t think alike. We are the Democratic Party.

The Republican Party has a different attitude. They just do what they’re told. That’s not what we are. That’s not what we are.

Rosin: One theory that I hear a lot, and which I am dying to hear your response to, is there’s a powerful young generation of politicians whose style is different. It’s sort of movement, grassroots politics plus social-media influence. AOC is the most prominent example.

There was a perception, maybe a media perception initially, that you were maybe resistant to that because it would fracture the Democratic Party or it would somehow not keep the party together. Is that perception true? And has your view evolved on how to bring in this new style of politics?

Pelosi: Well, let us again define our terms. I was not for candidates coming in and running against our incumbents, because we needed to win the House. In other words, weighing the equities, we had to win because we were the referendum on that executive in the White House. We had to win. So no, I wasn’t happy about people saying, Let’s spend a whole lot of money challenging Democrats. You wanna do that, do that. But don’t think that that’s something that is good for this year. Do it a year when we have the luxury of having the majority. You can’t gain by losing.

So AOC is wonderful. She’s much more operational than I think people may think. So that wasn’t the case. The big difference is just social media—

Rosin: How? How? How do you notice that?

Pelosi: One of the tragedies or the victims of social media is truth. There’s nothing that is sort of, We all agree that this is the choice that we have. It’s a lot of misrepresentation. But with all due respect to whatever you’re quoting there, we’re gonna win this election.

There will be those, like in San Francisco—we just had a race where there’s a guy who was going after Hakeem, going after me, going after da-da-da. It’s over for him. Okay?

(Audience laughs.)

Mm-hmm. Because that’s not—I mean, what is the point? You have to be respectful of all that new energy and young people coming and seeing things in a different way. But the idea is that there will be those who will be out there to just take down the incumbents when this is our year to honor the Constitution of the United States. I’m not for that.

You run anytime you want and do whatever you wanna do. But don’t expect that to be welcome when we’ve gotta stay completely focused on saving the Constitution, but more importantly, helping people at the kitchen table. But that’s, again, that’s the Democratic Party. Look, I was chair of the party in California before I was ever in Congress. And I loved it because I would prepare candidates to go out there and win, and I knew how to win elections.

But I’m a progressive leftie—San Francisco. I had the left-left on my case all the time, and that’s their right. But it doesn’t mean that I’m against them when you say, Have you changed your mind? No, I haven’t changed my mind. I’m for winning.

(Audience laughs.)

Rosin: We’re out of time. There’s gonna be a lot of debate about your legacy, everything that you’ve accomplished for a long time after you leave the House. I will say, for me, personally, one of the great legacies that you’ve left for me in my life is the Nancy Pelosi clap, which I employ all of the time. So let’s give Nancy Pelosi a Nancy Pelosi clap.

(Audience claps.)

Rosin: Thank you so much.

Pelosi: Let’s thank Hanna for putting up with me all this time.

(Audience claps.)

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Genevieve Finn fact-checked. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music.

Audio and video recordings by Fremont Studios and the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival.

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. Thank you for listening. And don’t forget: We now have a show on Monday morning with new co-host Adam Harris.

The Left-Wing Case Against Anti-Zionism

2026-06-18T15:49:14-04:00

In September 1948, a prosperous Jewish businessman in Iraq was publicly hanged in front of a cheering crowd of 12,000. The following day, close-up images of Shafiq Ades’s broken body ran on the front page of Iraqi newspapers in a triumphant and gruesome spectacle that celebrated the punishment of a “Zionist traitor.” Iraq was losing the war that would create the state of Israel, a humiliation that challenged fantasies of Arab unity and conquest. A military tribunal accused Ades of selling arms to Israel, and he was convicted within days. The state determined that the execution would take place outside his own mansion in a public act of humiliation. Regardless of whether it was true that Ades was a Zionist, his murder was an act of anti-Zionist violence—driven by a violent hatred of Israel and anyone associated with it.

The flight or expulsion of 850,000 Jews from countries across the Middle East is a story that still too often rests in silence, but even when it is told, the ideology that caused it is seldom named. The displacement of so many Jews from their ancient home becomes a kind of tit for tat—a balancing act of victimhood against the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled during Israel’s war of independence. The fact that accusations of “Zionism” were what legitimized anti-Jewish violence—whether during the Tripoli pogroms of 1945, 1948, and 1967; the 1947 pogrom in Aleppo, Syria, and synagogue bombings in Damascus and Aleppo in 1949; or the expulsion of Egyptian Jews in 1956 by Gamal Abdel Nasser—drops out of the calculus.

[David Frum: Anti-Semitism is becoming mainstream]

How can it be that an ideology that has produced repeated acts of discrimination, dispossession, and violence now bears the mantle of progressivism in the West and has been normalized within the Democratic Party? Like Stalinism or the Khmer Rouge, anti-Zionism represents a wrong turn for the left. Anti-Zionism claims to be concerned with rights of minorities, opposition to racism, and universal justice. In truth, though, it has appropriated the language of anti-colonial liberation to justify oppression, transformed anti-racism into a racist accusation, and turned hatred of Israel into a global ritual.

Anti-Zionism has hijacked the left, and it did so through exploiting the left’s tendency toward internationalism and its skepticism of nation-states. It transformed Jewish peoplehood into a crime and charged that Jewish difference amounted to a claim of supremacy, even as it demanded that a persecuted minority submit to the dominance of the majority. Yet the public reckoning with anti-Zionism still awaits its moment.

I am a Jew who supports women’s rights, gay rights, and trans rights, and who believes that climate change will pose a major challenge to human society. Opposing anti-Zionism is, similarly, a natural extension of my concern for truth and equality. If the Democratic Party wants to maintain an authentic commitment to human rights, it must oppose the movement that seeks the elimination of Israel and the purging from civil society of those marked as Zionists.

Decades before the creation of the state of Israel, Vladimir Lenin laid the groundwork for anti-Zionism. In his early-20th-century polemics, Lenin cast Zionism, the movement to found a Jewish state, as a form of “bourgeois nationalism,” a scheme by privileged Jews to divide the working class. Either Jews should dissolve into the universal proletarian movement, he argued, or expect to be marked as class enemies. “Jewish national culture is the slogan of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie, the slogan of our enemies,” he wrote. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Jewish section of the Communist Party, or Yevsektsiya, would systematically dismantle Jewish life, as synagogues and the Hebrew language itself were branded as Zionist.

Once Israel was created, the Marxist-Leninist ideology that cast Zionism as bourgeois nationalism flowed into a more developed propaganda apparatus, which coded Israel as the center of Western imperialism while elevating other nationalisms as virtuous expressions of opposition to capitalist power. A new definition of Jews emerged, inverting the classical anti-Semitic claim that Jews were non-European race polluters to charge instead that Zionists were “European colonizers.” As the 1956 Suez Crisis helped crystallize an alliance between Arab nationalists and the Soviet Union, this anti-Zionist ideology took root in the Middle East.

In 1965, Fayez Sayegh published Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, an ahistorical argument that Jews are not truly from the Land of Israel, but an alien people. Jewish indigeneity is but a settler fabrication, he charged, a 19th-century construct in which biblical fundamentalists invented the notion that Jews see the Land of Israel as their origin and destiny. In Sayegh’s work, and in that of his followers, Jewish history and belonging were erased, the truth of Jewish life made to dissolve in the face of a political project that cast elimination as justice.

Sayegh and other Arab nationalists believed that Zionism dismembered Arab unity and violated the universal norms of the post–World War II international order. These writers transformed theological polemics against the “chosen people” and accusations of “Jewish superiority” into the claim that “Zionism is racism.” Jewish nationhood was inherently “exclusivist,” whereas Arab nationalism could be framed as emancipatory, part of a global struggle against oppression.

Anti-Zionism recoded the left’s concern with abuses of state power and the rights of minorities into a hatred of the Jewish state, just as the classical anti-Semitism of the 19th century recoded right-wing concern with the integrity of the nation and foreign influence into a hatred of Jews as a dispersed, stateless minority. But the internationalism that transformed Israel into a beacon of “ultranationalism” and “fascism”—the Soviets reveled in Holocaust inversion and in the depiction of Israelis as Nazis—would itself become a global system of oppression, subjecting one small state to an endless trial of elimination.

Discussions of whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism obscure the fact that anti-Zionism, as it actually exists, remains genocidal in intent, demanding the erasure of a national group that is protected under international law. The Genocide Convention protects all national groups, including those based on shared citizenship. Discrimination against Israelis qua Israelis—and the “Zionists” who appear as their proxies—is a moral wrong.

The left’s internationalism—once the calling card of progress—has hardened into hostility to Israel, across academia, NGOs, mainstream-media outlets, and the United Nations. The constant accusations that circulate across these networks of authority are not normal critiques of a state, but claims that cast Israel as the exemplar of the three great sins of the postwar international order—colonialism, apartheid, and genocide—a “rogue state” said to violate the very fabric of the world.

The progressive case against anti-Zionism recognizes the freedom of Israelis to choose the nature of the society they want to live under. It recognizes that Israel may be becoming more like other Middle Eastern countries—that its increased religiosity in recent years is partially driven by the Mizrahi segment of its population, those who were expelled from other countries in the region. And it seeks to extend to Israel the same allowance that progressives extend to other nations in the region, an acknowledgment that societies can differ from secular Western ideals.

[Yair Rosenberg: America’s anti-Jewish assassins are making the case for Zionism]

Since the Six-Day War in 1967, which resulted in the emergence of the messianic Gush Emunim movement and the planting of settlements in the West Bank, changes within Israeli society have alienated many American Jews, as well as secular, left-wing Israelis. Religiosity and nationalism have fused, displacing cosmopolitanism. The language of leftist universalism now seems ever more remote from Israel’s reality.

But the left must adhere to its own standards, irrespective of changes within Israel. It needs to acknowledge the harms caused by anti-Zionism—the forced exodus of Mizrahi Jews across the Middle East, the cultural erasure of Jews under the Soviet Union, and the anti-Jewish violence and purging happening in the West today. And it needs to address them.

The brokenness that anti-Zionism sees in the world, as a vast oppressive conspiracy that sustains the existence of Israel—the system that Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, claimed is “the enemy of humanity”—is a brokenness that anti-Zionism brings into the world. The oppressive system is anti-Zionism itself. It’s a brokenness that, it just so happens, Jewish tradition tasks the Jewish people—and all of humanity—to repair.

The Father-Daughter Routine That Transformed Our Family Life

2025-06-12T08:00:00-04:00

In the early years, weekend adventures with my daughter followed a script: a park, a pet store, a local bakery or maybe somewhere for lunch. We’d do it every Saturday, on and on. Now my daughter is nearly 9, and the tone and tenor of our routine have changed. The music we listen to matters more—she’s gone from wanting “Baby Shark” to having strong opinions about how Kurt Cobain kind of sounds like a loud, angry version of the Beatles. We still go to bakeries (this is a topic on which we fundamentally agree as father and child), but now we can also talk about what we enjoy at them (both the pastries and the fact that we’re supporting small businesses in the city we love).

Conceptually, what my family has come to call “Dad-urday” grew out of a common parenting-duo problem: Sometimes, even though my wife and I believe in sharing household duties equally, one person will end up doing more kid-related labor than the other. This, I will admit (with some discomfort and guilt), fairly accurately depicts my family situation. Although I do parent throughout the week, I travel a lot for work, which means my wife has had to take on many an early morning alone.

So we designated Saturday mornings as my time to wake up with our daughter: make breakfast, watch some cartoons, then get ready to go out for a bit. I bring my wife a cup of coffee in bed and let her snuggle with our needy, oddball house cats—and allow her a full morning to herself. Dad-urday was a logistical decision that turned into a ritual, one that’s become an anchor to my life: I design my work calendar around it and always try to fly home by Friday night.

[Read: The default-parent problem]

When my daughter was tiny and refused to sleep on a regular schedule at home, our Saturdays involved a lot of naps (hers, not mine), and I acted as a sort of baby-sleep chauffeur. The back of my Volkswagen was the only place she would snooze soundly—after a habitual 30-minute period of screaming-infant Sturm und Drang—so I would drive her around for hours on end, looping through neighborhoods and cruising up and down the hills of our Oregon town.

But soon enough, as my daughter got a little older, Dad-urday became more dynamic: We’d talk over the day’s agenda and debate which park to visit. Some weeks, she’d choose one with elaborate climbing equipment; others, she’d want one with trails and streams to traverse. Afterward we’d visit a store called Pets on Broadway because I love animals and so does she. It’s like a zoo in there, with fish and lizards and guinea pigs and a cat-adoption station, and we’d always get a treat or toy to bring home for our kitties.

Every Dad-urday, we aim to be out of the house until at least the early afternoon. This creates an uninterrupted period in which my daughter is the only person I’m talking to, and vice versa—me the planner, seeking order through scheduling, plotting out the best spot to have lunch ahead of an afternoon movie; she the great adventurer, up for anything, ready to let 10 a.m. become 3 p.m. if the getting is good at the park with the epic zip line.

Now that my daughter is way bigger, our days reflect her changing interests and greater maturity. She’s learning to play the guitar, so I’ve been subjecting her to my Millennial-with-Boomer-tastes CD wallet: Jerry Garcia, the Kinks, J Dilla, XTC. We roam around and visit music shops, plugging guitars into cool amps and fiddling with distortion and delay pedals, behavior that the guitar-shop bros seem willing to tolerate in small doses.

[Read: I still get called daddy-mommy]

Our conversations have also expanded to encompass the wider world and its fundamental truths. The other day, on our way to pick up some kimchi, my daughter demanded to know, in detail, the difference between a pickle (like the ones we had in a jar in the fridge) and kimchi, which I had previously—and not entirely accurately—described as “a style of Korean pickle.” By the end of the chat, I was talking about the different preserving and fermenting traditions of various cuisines, and she was ready to conduct a taste test when we got back home. Another development: Whenever we order lunch, my daughter now has an ideal deli sandwich (turkey, cheddar, sourdough, light mayo). I find it charming, but it also feels like some kind of passage into adulthood, the fact that my child knows herself well enough to dictate her preferences to the deli guy. If her grandfather or great-grandfather, who both knew their way around a deli, were here, they would be positively verklempt.

When we go to a park, I get to see other ways in which my daughter’s personality has expanded. I listen to her rattling off the name and subspecies of every bird we glimpse. I watch her being kind to younger kids on the climbing wall. She is almost too big for a lot of the equipment—on certain sets of monkey bars, her toes nearly touch the ground—yet she calls over every couple of minutes, asking me to observe some feat of gymnastic glory. She still needs me to watch her on the playground, at least for now.

I can imagine that to some people, “Dad-urday” might just sound like a cutesy rebrand for “parenting.” But something about putting a name to the ritual has helped underscore for me exactly how precious my time with my daughter is—and how swiftly it moves. A consistent routine we share each week allows me to easily track her growth, as with height marks on a doorframe. And in my mind, under “Dad-urday,” I now have a memory archive of hundreds of Saturdays with my kid, which allows me to reflect on the changes over the course of her childhood, and the changes within myself, more clearly.

Of course, nobody bats a thousand. Some weekends, if my daughter has a Saturday-morning birthday party or some other peg in her byzantine social schedule, we opt instead for a cheeky “Sun-dad.” And every so often we’ll miss a weekend. That makes the rest of the week feel out of balance, as if I’m missing some core part of myself. You see, I’ve come to love who I am on Dad-urday: gentler, more patient, more present and aware of the beauty of the world, because my daughter and I are seeing it together.

Before I wrote this essay, by the way, I sat down with my kid and talked with her about it. I’m careful about what I share online, and like many parents, I feel conflicted about creating content out of intimate moments. But my daughter told me, in her kind, self-assured way, that she thought writing about Dad-urday was a great idea—because she wanted other kids to get to have Dad-urdays, too.

The Growing Cohort of Single Dads by Choice

2025-08-19T08:00:00-04:00

Updated at 12:25 p.m. ET on August 20, 2025

Charlie Calkins grew up in a big extended family. We’re talking about nearly 30 cousins—some of whom had their own kids. When he was in high school, he spent a lot of time with those young children: a position that some surly teens might resent but that Calkins adored. The idea that someday he would be a father himself seemed, to him, only natural.

He just needed to wait for the right partner to show up. So he did: He waited and waited. He went to business school. He built a career in tech. He traveled. And he went on dates. When a relationship didn’t work out, he’d return to “professional mode”—bouncing between “intermittent surges” of dating and work. “I spent a lot of my early adulthood going, When everything’s right, it will happen,” he told me. “I’m definitely a The stars will align kind of person. And then one day it hit me: They were not aligning.”

That’s how Calkins ended up, in his 40s, making an appointment with a fertility clinic—and eventually, over the course of years, getting matched with an egg donor and a “gestational carrier,” or surrogate. At 49, he became a parent. Now he’s living in Durham, North Carolina, with a 7-year-old son and a daughter who’s almost 2.

Single mother by choice has become a common term for unpartnered women who have intentionally become parents. You rarely hear of single fathers by choice, which makes sense given that they’re much more rare. But this population, it appears, has been expanding—slowly, over the course of a couple of decades, and then more notably in the past few years. The exact count is unclear; most surveys don’t differentiate them from widowers or men separated from an uninvolved co-parent. Still: Susan Golombok, a University of Cambridge psychologist and the author of We Are Family: The Modern Transformation of Parents and Children, told me that before this millennium, single dads by choice were virtually unheard of. Based on my conversations with kin researchers, fertility-industry professionals, and adoption centers, that’s certainly not the case anymore.

[Read: Another side of modern fatherhood]

Over the past few years, Yan Dekel, a community manager for an organization called Men Having Babies (MHB), has noticed what he described as “a radical change” in single-fatherhood interest. The nonprofit hosts conferences in a number of large U.S. cities (and abroad) to offer parenting or surrogacy information, legal advice, financial aid—but the main audience was always intended to be coupled gay men. As recently as 2021, Dekel told me, only a few single men would show up to a typical conference. Now the “singles’ session” tends to bring in about 50 men. In some cities, that represents a whole quarter of all the conference-goers.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising given that singlehood rates have been rising for years, more steeply among men than women—leaving lots of would-be dads without a co-parent. But the fact that single men are deciding to start families on their own, some of them paying extravagantly for egg donation and surrogacy, might also say something about just how important fatherhood is for many men today. Multiple family-planning professionals told me that the coronavirus pandemic was a turning point for a lot of single fathers by choice: It led to a “reorganization, reprioritization of what’s really important in life,” Jennifer McGill, the chief operating officer of the Maryland surrogacy agency Creative Family Connections, told me. Some men are deciding that being a father is what matters to them—even if romance isn’t in the cards.

American households are dramatically more diverse than they were a century ago. Gay couples are adopting or using fertility services; divorced parents are finding new partners and creating big blended families; friends are platonically co-parenting. Our norms for kinship are simply loosening up, and that can create a “reinforcing phenomenon,” as Ron Poole-Dayan, MHB’s founder, put it: The more single dads you see around you, the more likely you might be to become a single dad yourself—and the more likely you might then be to inspire someone else’s choice. Of the seven men I spoke with who were either a single dad or in the process of becoming one, most mentioned having a single-parent friend or having gone to an MHB conference: something that made the possibility feel a little less abstract.

The experts I spoke with had the sense that single fatherhood by choice is more common among gay men than straight ones. Gay men, for one thing, would likely need to adopt or use a surrogate to have a kid whether they were partnered or not. Perhaps more important, they may be more accustomed to imagining what a family could look like beyond the bounds of societal expectations. And in recent years, Poole-Dayan told me, the gay community has seen a real “demographic recovery” after the AIDS epidemic took so many lives beginning in the 1980s. A new generation of gay men has made it through young adulthood with more health, stability, financial security, and societal acceptance than many before them ever had. All of those factors can make starting a family feel more possible.

For straight single dads by choice, the leap away from convention might feel more “daunting,” Batya Novick, a therapist who works with clients seeking to grow a family, told me. Novick started her practice, Calla Collective, in 2016—but only in the past year and a half have single men started coming to her to talk through whether they should have a kid. Whereas the gay men she’s worked with generally haven’t planned to give up on dating at all, the straight ones, she told me, seemed to be pursuing single fatherhood “in the face of defeat versus the face of choice.” She’s seen them struggle with a feeling of failure for not finding a wife, with “latent grief” as they adjust expectations, with isolation as they search for anyone around them having families in nontraditional ways. Some clients wrestle not only with how they’d make single parenthood work logistically and financially, but also with what becoming a sole caregiver means for their sense of self, she told me: “There is this almost unspoken de-masculation.”

[Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance]

They’re considering this in a moment when many of the traditional trappings of manhood—a spouse, a breadwinner’s paycheck, an ambient sense of power—are no longer a given. Women are now graduating from college at higher rates than men. A growing share of jobs require a degree, while many industries that traditionally favored men—physical labor, factory work—are in decline. As fewer women (thankfully) rely on men for financial security, fewer straight men can rely on marriage. Conversations about “toxic masculinity” have put some men on the defensive; others see the traditional model of manhood as something to move away from. But toward what?

Fatherhood, whatever questions about identity it might raise for some men, can also be an answer. Richard Reeves, as the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, talks to—well, a lot of boys and men. And he told me that he sees many of them placing great importance on becoming a dad, in a way he didn’t always notice. For so long, he said, “fatherhood was mediated through motherhood”: Many straight men became dads almost by default, and their relationship with their children often remained fairly indirect. Picture a family tree, he told me, in which the lines between a mom and her children, and between herself and her husband, are solid—but a dotted line runs between that dad and his kids. Because fathers weren’t expected to give as much, in terms of the time and labor of child care, many of them also gained less in close, emotional relationships with their children.

[Read: The people who quit dating]

Today, though, fathers on the whole are far more engaged than they used to be. Even just from 2015 to 2023, the time that 25-to-44-year-old fathers spent on child care in an average week increased by about two and a half hours. That time climbed significantly from 2019 to 2023, perhaps a sign of what McGill, the surrogacy-agency COO, had described as men coming out of the pandemic wanting to “spend those moments with their loved ones before it was too late.” And when the Pew Research Center polled young adults without children in late 2023, it found that 57 percent of the men surveyed said they hoped to have kids someday, while only 45 percent of the women said the same. Perhaps as pressure on women to become mothers has loosened, allowing more women to choose to remain child-free, some men are undergoing the opposite revelation: realizing that some of the qualities associated with parenting, such as care and tenderness, need not be so relentlessly feminized; that parenthood could be a much-needed source of purpose. Single fathers by choice, who have the ultimate solid line between themselves and their kids, give Reeves hope. “People are realizing,” he said, “that fatherhood has to survive gender equality.”

For many of the single men I talked with, fatherhood dangled a promise of deeper meaning in life. They told me they wanted to multiply love, to teach a child all that they’d learned, to re-create the warm family dynamic they’d experienced as a child. One New York dad, Raghav Nayar, said that he craved a sense both of purpose and of “human connection.” Like many men, he’d never quite learned to open up to people emotionally. He was academically and professionally successful, yet unfulfilled. But he was inspired by a Buddhist tale he’d heard, about a child whose mother gives him the top of a glass of milk: the tastiest part, with the highest concentration of butter. A parent, the story goes, doesn’t expect anything in return for their love. He wanted to feel that kind of transcendent selflessness. “If I raise a child who is a good human being,” he told me, “I can’t ask for anything else.”

Becoming a single dad by choice tends to be difficult—in some ways that are unavoidable, and some ways that reflect persistent skepticism about men’s fitness as parents. Single men can’t legally adopt or access assisted reproductive technology in every country, so many of them travel to the United States just to get that chance. But even in America, some adoption agencies view single men with suspicion, and many don’t actively recruit men. In some states, surrogacy is illegal or requires overcoming legal obstacles; in every state, it’s complicated and extraordinarily expensive. A hopeful father must choose an egg donor, who will undergo a slate of medical screenings, and find a surrogate, who may well live in another state. Legal contracts have to be drawn up to ensure that the father will be considered the sole parent (and not the surrogate, who would otherwise hold parental rights). Because so many people need to be paid, the price of this undertaking hasn’t gone down much over the years, even as it’s become more widely used, Sheeva Talebian, a doctor at CCRM Fertility in New York, told me. All in all, it can cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars. And, of course, that’s just the start of raising a child, which itself is prohibitively expensive for many Americans.

Men Having Babies provides financial assistance to some aspiring dads, but the organization has also been pushing for insurance plans to cover these costs. So far success has been limited. In 2019, for instance, New York passed legislation making IVF a mandated health-plan benefit for large-group insurance policies—and in 2021 issued an anti-discrimination directive for same-sex couples. But surrogacy coverage still isn’t required, so single men and gay male partners are out of luck. And many insurance providers still define infertility as the inability to conceive after a year of trying, rather than the inability to conceive without medical intervention. MHB has tried to galvanize people around these issues—but has struggled, even within the LGBTQ community. Poole-Dayan thinks many people see parenthood as integral to a woman’s purpose but as an extra treat for men, especially gay men. This is the flip side of the misguided assumption that all women want children and will be deprived without them: that men can’t truly be deprived of parenthood. “The average person doesn’t think of us as childless,” he told me. “A lot of discrimination is tolerated and a lot of support is withheld because of that. And this is without even talking about those people who are actually looking at what we’re doing suspiciously.”

[Read: What older dads know]

The donor-and-surrogacy process can also take years, which is difficult given that many single men start it, McGill told me, in their 40s—when they realize they’re running out of time. Male fertility does decline with age, though not at a rate as steep as for women. But men still face emotional, logistical, and existential limits on their child-rearing window: They might not want to carry around a toddler when they’re 60, or leave a still-young child parentless when they die—and men face a shorter average lifespan than women. Greg Larson, an aspiring dad in New Jersey, started looking for egg donors in 2022, had embryos created by the end of 2023, and now he’s matched with a surrogate—but she hasn’t gotten pregnant yet. If everything goes perfectly, he might have a baby around his 46th birthday, next May. If things don’t work out with this surrogate, he might not start all of this over again.

And yet, despite the obstacles, becoming a single dad by choice can be empowering. It means not waiting for a partner to complete your life, knowing what you want to prioritize, actively creating the life you want, even if it’s not what anyone expected of you. For the men I spoke with, making this decision also pushed them to be vulnerable enough to ask for help, or to build community. Calkins has four sisters, two of whom are local and all of whom adore his kids. He finds himself texting “the aunties” little updates—the kind of thing he might, in a different world, be sending to a spouse. Larson has met other aspiring single dads through Men Having Babies; they talk about navigating the surrogacy process, how to date while they’re in the midst of it, what to tell romantic prospects about the possibility but not certainty of near-future fatherhood. “It’s really cool,” he said, “the people that you pick up along the way that you get unexpected support from.”

The men I spoke with never set out to buck tradition; they just wanted to be dads. But that decision spurred some of them to consider what it means to be a good father—and a good man. Nayar told me he notices now how rarely he sees another father in the park with his kid. Sometimes when he does, he thinks the father seems a little begrudging, walking slightly behind the child, and he wonders how many of these dads were told by their wife to take the kid out to play. He understands: He, too, is stretching to be not just a provider, that classic masculine trope, but also a nurturer—someone softer, more open. The other day, when he was visiting his cousin’s two daughters, the 5-year-old got in trouble and ran into the living room and hid behind the couch. He picked her up and took her to the mirror, and they looked at their reflections together. “You are wonderful,” he told her. “And you don’t have to worry about anything.”

In an ideal world, these single dads by choice might prefer not to be single. But many of the experts I spoke with told me the ones they knew were notably steady and optimistic. And that made sense to me: The ones who have made it this far are the ones who really want fatherhood. “I don’t know quite how to explain it,” Calkins told me, “but I was just so confident and comfortable with the fact that I wanted to be a parent. And I was going to love being a parent, which I do.” Getting to this point, despite the effort and technology involved, felt like the most organic thing in the world to him. And in a way he never quite expected, the stars ended up aligning after all.

This article originally stated that Creative Family Connections is a fertility clinic. In fact, it’s a surrogacy agency.

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The Aurelian

1941-11-01T12:00:00-05:00

Luring aside one of the trolley-car numbers, the street started at the corner of a crowded avenue. For a long time it crept on in obscurity, with no shop windows or any such joys. Then came a small square (four benches, a bed of pansies) round which the trolley steered with rasping disapproval. Here the street changed its name, and a new life began. Along the right side, shops appeared: a fruiterer's, with vivid pyramids of oranges; a tobacconist's, with the picture of a voluptuous Turk; a delicatessen, with fat brown and gray coils of sausages; and then, all of a sudden, a butterfly store. At night, and especially when it was damp, with the asphalt shining like the back of a seal, passers-by would stop for a second before that symbol of fair weather. The insects on exhibit were huge and gorgeous. People would say to themselves, 'What colors—amazing!' and plod on through the drizzle. Eyed wings wide open in wonder, shimmering blue satin, black magic—these lingered for a while, floating in one's vision, until one boarded the trolley or bought a newspaper. And, just because they were together with the butterflies, a few other objects would remain in one's memory: a globe, pencils, and a monkey's skull on a pile of copybooks.

As the street blinked and ran on, there followed again a succession of ordinary shops—soap, coal, bread—with another pause at the corner where there was a small bar. The bartender, a dashing fellow in a starched collar and a green sweater, was deft at shaving off with one stroke the foam topping the glass under the beer tap; he also had a well-earned reputation as a wit. Every night, at a round table by the window, the fruiterer, the baker, an unemployed man, and the bartender's first cousin played cards with great gusto. As the winner of the current stake immediately ordered four drinks, none of the players could ever get rich.

On Saturdays, at an adjacent table, there would sit a flabby elderly man with a florid face, lank hair, and a grayish moustache, carelessly clipped. When he appeared, the players greeted him noisily without looking up from their cards. He invariably ordered rum, filled his pipe, and gazed at the game with pink-rimmed watery eyes. The left eyelid drooped slightly.

Occasionally someone turned to him, and asked how his shop was doing; he would be slow to answer, and often did not answer at all. If the bartender's daughter, a pretty freckled girl in a polka-dotted frock, happened to pass close enough, he had a go at her elusive hip, and, whether the slap succeeded or not, his gloomy expression never changed, although the veins on his temple grew purple. Mine host very humorously called him 'Herr Professor.' 'Well, how is the Herr Professor tonight?' he would ask, coming over to him, and the man would ponder for some time in silence and then, with a wet underlip pushing out from under the pipe like that of a feeding elephant, he would answer something neither funny nor polite. The bartender would counter briskly, which made the players at the next table, though seemingly absorbed in their cards, rock with ugly glee.

The man wore a roomy gray suit with great exaggeration of the vest motif, and when the cuckoo popped out of the clock he ponderously extracted a thick silver watch and gazed at it askance, holding it in the palm of his hand and squinting because of the smoke. Punctually at eleven he knocked out his pipe, paid for his rum, and, after extending a flaccid hand to anyone who might choose to shake it, silently left.

He walked awkwardly, with a slight limp. His legs seemed too thin for his body. Just before the window of his shop he turned into a passage, where there was a door on the right with a brass plate: PAUL PILGRAM. This door led into his tiny dingy apartment, which could also be reached by an inner corridor at the back of the shop. Eleanor was usually asleep when he came home on those festive nights. Half a dozen faded photographs of the same clumsy ship, taken from different angles, and of a palm tree that looked as bleak as if it were growing on Helgoland, hung in black frames above the double bed. Muttering to himself, Pilgram limped away into bulbless darkness with a lighted candle, came back with his suspenders dangling, and kept muttering while sitting on the edge of the bed and slowly, painfully, taking off his shoes. His wife, half-waking, moaned into her pillow and offered to help him; and then, with a threatening rumble in his voice, he would tell her to keep quiet, and repeated that guttural 'Ruhe!' several times, more and more fiercely.

After the stroke which had almost killed him some time ago (like a mountain falling upon him from behind just as he had bent towards his shoestrings), he now undressed reluctantly, growling until he got safely into bed, and then growling again if the faucet happened to drip in the adjoining kitchen. Eleanor would roll out of bed and totter into the kitchen and totter back with a dazed sigh, her small face wax-pale and shiny, and the plastered corns on her feet showing from under her dismally long nightgown. They had married in 1905, almost a quarter of a century before, and were childless because Pilgram had always thought that children would be merely a hindrance to the realization of what had been in his youth a delightfully exciting plan but had now gradually become a dark, passionate obsession.

He slept on his back with an old-fashioned nightcap coming down on his forehead; it was to all appearances the solid and sonorous sleep that might be expected in an elderly German shopkeeper, and one could readily suppose that his quilted torpor was entirely devoid of visions; but actually this churlish, heavy man, who fed mainly on Erbswurst and boiled potatoes, placidly believing in his newspaper and quite ignorant of the world (in so far as his secret passion was not involved), dreamed of things that would have seemed utterly unintelligible to his wife or his neighbors; for Pilgram belonged, or rather was meant to belong (something—the place, the time, the man—had been ill-chosen), to a special breed of dreamers, such dreamers as used to be called in the old days 'Aurelians'—perhaps on account of those chrysalids, those 'jewels of Nature,' which they loved to find hanging on fences above the dusty nettles of country lanes.

On Sundays he drank his morning coffee in several sloppy sessions, and then went out for a walk with his wife, a slow silent stroll which Eleanor looked forward to all week. On workdays he opened his shop as early as possible because of the children who passed by on their way to school; for lately he had been keeping school supplies in addition to his basic stock. Some small boy, swinging his satchel and chewing a sandwich, would slouch past the tobacconist's (where a certain brand of cigarettes offered airplane pictures), past the delicatessen (which rebuked one for having eaten that sandwich long before lunchtime), and then, remembering he wanted an eraser, would enter the next shop. Pilgram would mumble something, sticking out his lower lip from under the stem of his pipe, and, after a listless search, would plump down an open carton on the counter. The boy would feel and squeeze the virgin-pale India rubber, would not find the sort he favored, and would leave without even noticing the principal wares in the store.

'These modern children!' Pilgram would think with disgust, and he recalled his own boyhood. His father—a sailor, a rover, a bit of a rogue—married late in life a sallow-skinned, light-eyed Dutch girl whom he brought from Java to Berlin, and opened a shop of exotic curios. Pilgram could not remember now when, exactly, butterflies had begun to oust the stuffed birds of paradise, the stale talismans, the fans with dragons, and the like; but as a boy he already feverishly swapped specimens with collectors, and after his parents died butterflies reigned supreme in the dim little shop. Up to 1914 there were enough amateurs and professionals about to keep things going in a mild, very mild, way; later on, however, it became necessary to make concessions, a display case with the biography of the silkworm furnishing a transition to school supplies, just as in the old days pictures ignominiously composed of sparkling wings had probably been a first step towards lepidopterology.

Now the window contained, apart from penholders, mainly showy insects, popular stars among butterflies, some of them set on plaster and framed—intended merely for ornamenting the home. In the shop itself, permeated with the pungent odor of a strong disinfectant, the real, the precious collections were kept. The whole place was littered with various cases, cartons, cigar boxes. Tall cabinets contained numerous glass-lidded drawers filled with ordered series of perfect specimens impeccably spread and labeled. A dusty old shield or something (last remnant of the original wares) stood in a dark corner. Now and then livestock would appear: loaded brown pupae with a symmetrical confluence of delicate lines and grooves on the thorax, showing how the rudimentary wings, feet, antennue, and proboscis were packed. If one touched such a pupa as it lay on its bed of moss, the tapering end of the segmented abdomen would start jerking this way and that like the swathed limbs of a baby. The pupae cost a Reichsmark apiece and in due time yielded a limp, bedraggled, miraculously expanding moth. And sometimes other creatures would be temporarily on sale: just then there happened to be a dozen lizards, natives of Majorca, cold, black, blue-bellied things, which Pilgram fed on meal worms for the main course and grapes for dessert.

He had spent all his life in Berlin and its suburbs; had never traveled farther than Peacock Island on a neighboring lake. He was a first-class entomologist. Dr. Rebel of Vienna had named a certain rare moth Agrotis pilgrami; and Pilgram himself had published several descriptions. His boxes contained most of the countries of the world, but all he had ever seen of it was the dull sand-and-pine scenery of an occasional Sunday trip; and he would be reminded of captures that had seemed to him so miraculous in his boyhood as he melancholically gazed at the familiar fauna about him, limited by a familiar landscape, to which it corresponded as hopelessly as he to his street. From a roadside shrub he would pick up a large turquoise-green caterpillar with a china-blue horn on the last ring; there it lay quite stiff on the palm of his hand, and presently, with a sigh, he would put it back on its twig as if it were some dead trinket.

Although once or twice he had had the chance to switch to a more profitable business—selling cloth, for instance, instead of moths—he stubbornly held on to his shop as the symbolic link between his dreary existence and the phantom of perfect happiness. What he craved for, with a fierce, almost morbid intensity, was to net himself the rarest butterflies of distant countries, to see them in flight with his own eyes, to stand waist-deep in lush grass and feel the follow-through of the swishing net and then the furious throbbing of wings through a clutched fold of the gauze.

Every year it seemed to him stranger that last year he had not managed somehow to lay aside enough money for at least a fortnight's collecting trip abroad, but he had never been thrifty, business had always been slack, there was always a gap somewhere, and, even if luck did come his way now and then, something was sure to go wrong at the last moment. He had married counting heavily on a share in his father-in-law's business, but a month later the man had died, leaving nothing but debts. Just before the war, an unexpected deal brought a journey to Algeria so near that he even acquired a sun helmet. When all travel stopped, he still consoled himself with the hope that he might be sent to some exciting place as a soldier; but he was clumsy, sickly, not very young, and thus saw neither active service nor exotic Lepidoptera. Then, after the war, when he had managed again to save a little money (for a week in Zermatt, this time), the inflation suddenly turned his meagre hoard into something less than the price of a trolley-car ticket.

After that he gave up trying. He grew more and more depressed as his passion grew stronger. When some entomological acquaintance happened to drop in, Pilgram was only annoyed. 'That fellow,' he would think, 'may be as learned as the late Dr. Staudinger, but he has no more imagination than a stamp collector.' The glass-lidded boxes over which both were bending gradually took up the whole counter, and the pipe in Pilgram's sucking lips kept emitting a wistful squeak. Pensively he gazed at the serried rows of delicate insects, all alike to you or me, and now and then he tapped on the glass with a stubby forefinger, stressing some special rarity. 'That's a curiously dark aberration,' the learned visitor might say. 'Eisner got one like that at an auction in London, but it was not so dark, and it cost him fourteen pounds.' Painfully sniffling with his extinguished pipe, Pilgram would raise the box to the light, which made the shadows of the butterflies slip from beneath them across the papered bottom; then he would put it down again, and, working in his nails under the tight edges of the lid, would shake it loose with a jerk and smoothly remove it. 'And Eisner's female was not so fresh,' the visitor would add, and some eavesdroppers coming in for a copybook or a postage stamp might well wonder what on earth these two were talking about.

Grunting, Pilgram plucked at the gilded head of the black pin upon which the silky little creature was crucified, and took the specimen out of the box. Turning it this way and that, he peered at the label pinned under the body. 'Yes—Tatsienlu, East Tibet,' he read. 'Taken by the native collectors of Father Dejean' (which sounded almost like 'Prester John')—and he would stick the butterfly back again, right into the same pinhole. His motions seemed casual, even careless, but this was the unerring nonchalance of the specialist: the pin, with the precious insect, and Pilgram's fat fingers were the correlated parts of one and the same flawless machine. It might happen, however, that some open box, having been brushed by the elbow of the visitor, would stealthily begin to slide off the counter—to be stopped just in the nick of time by Pilgram, who would then calmly go on lighting his pipe; only much later, when busy elsewhere, he would suddenly produce a moan of retrospective anguish.

But not only averted crashes made him moan. Father Dejean, stout-hearted missionary climbing among the rhododendrons and snows, how enviable was thy lot! And Pilgram would stare at his boxes and puff and brood and reflect that he need not go so far: that there were thousands of hunting grounds all over Europe. Out of localities cited in entomological works he had built up a special world of his own, to which his science was a most detailed guidebook. In that world there were no casinos, no old churches, nothing that might attract a normal tourist. Digne in Southern France, Ragusa in Dalmatia, Sarepta on the Volga, Abisko in Lapland—those were the famous sites dear to butterfly collectors, and this is where they had poked about, on and off, since the fifties of the last century (always greatly perplexing the local inhabitants). And as clearly as if it were a reminiscence Pilgram saw himself troubling the sleep of a little hotel by stamping and jumping about a room through the wide-open window of which, out of the black generous night, a whitish moth had dashed in and was kissing its shadow all over the ceiling.

In these impossible dreams of his he visited the Islands of the Blessed, where in the hot ravines that cut the lower slopes of the chestnut- and laurel-clad mountains there occurs a weird local race of the Cabbage White; and also that other island, those railway banks near Vizzavona and the pine woods farther up, which are the haunts of the squat and dusky Corsican Swallowtail. He visited the far North, the arctic bogs that produced such delicate downy butterflies. He knew the high Alpine pastures, with those flat stones lying here and there among the slippery matted grass; for there is no greater delight than to lift such a stone and find beneath it a plump sleepy moth of a still undescribed species. He saw glazed Apollo butterflies, ocellated with red, float in the mountain draft across the mule track that ran between a steep cliff and an abyss of wild white waters. In Italian gardens in the summer dusk, the gravel crunched invitingly underfoot, and Pilgram gazed through the growing darkness at clusters of blossoms in front of which suddenly there appeared an Oleander Hawk, which passed from flower to flower, humming intently and stopping at the corolla, its wings vibrating so rapidly that nothing but a ghostly nimbus was visible about its streamlined body. And best of all, perhaps, were the white heathered hills near Madrid, the valleys of Andalusia, fertile and wooded Albarracin, whither a little bus driven by the forest guard's brother groaned up a twisted road.

He had more difficulty in imagining the tropics, but experienced still keener pangs when he did, for never would he catch the loftily flapping Brazilian Morphos, so ample and radiant that they cast an azure reflection upon one's hand, Dever come upon those crowds of African butterflies closely stuck like innumerable fancy flags into the rich black mud and rising in a colored cloud when his shadow approached—a long, very long, shadow.

III

'Ja, ja, ja,' he would mutter, nodding his heavy head, and holding the case before him as if it were a beloved portrait. The bell over the door would tinkle, his wife would come in with a wet umbrella and a shopping bag, and slowly he would turn his back to her as he inserted the case into the cabinet. So it went on, that obsession and that despair and that nightmarish impossibility to swindle destiny, until a certain first of April, of all dates. For more than a year he had had in his keeping a cabinet devoted solely to the genus of those small clear-winged moths that mimic wasps or mosquitoes. The widow of a great authority on that particular group had given Pilgram her husband's collection to sell on commission. He hastened to tell the silly woman that he would not be able to get more than seventy-five marks for it, although he knew very well that, according to catalogue prices, it was worth fifty times more, so that the amateur to whom he would sell the lot for, say, a thousand marks would consider it a good bargain. The amateur, however, did not appear, though Pilgram had written to all the wealthiest collectors. So he had locked up the cabinet, and stopped thinking about it.

That April morning a sunburned, bespectacled man in an old mackintosh and without any hat on his brown bald head sauntered in, and asked for some carbon paper. Pilgram slipped the small coins paid for the sticky violet stuff he so hated to handle into the slit of a small clay money pot, and, sucking on his pipe, fixed his stare into space. The man cast a rapid glance round the shop, and remarked upon the extravagant brilliancy of an iridescent green insect with many tails. Pilgram mumbled something about Madagascar. 'And that—that's not a butterfly, is it?' said the man, indicating another specimen. Pilgram slowly replied that he had a whole collection of that special kind. 'Ach, was!' said the man. Pilgram scratched his bristly chin, and limped into a recess of the shop. He pulled out a case, and laid it on the counter. The man pored over those tiny vitreous creatures with bright orange feet and belted bodies. Pilgram pointed with the stem of his pipe to one of the rows, and simultaneously the man exclaimed: 'Good God—uralensis!' and that ejaculation gave him away. Pilgram heaped box after box on the counter as it dawned upon him that the visitor knew perfectly well of the existence of this collection, had come for its sake, was, as a matter of fact, the rich amateur Sommer, to whom he had written and who had just returned from a trip to Venezuela; and finally, when the question was carelessly put,—'Well, and what would the price be?'—Pilgram smiled.

He knew it was madness; he knew he was leaving a helpless Eleanor, debts, unpaid taxes, a store at which only trash was bought; he knew that the nine hundred and fifty marks he might get would permit him to travel for no longer than a few months; and still he accepted it all as a man who felt that tomorrow would bring dreary old age and that the good fortune which now beckoned would never again repeat its invitation.

When finally Sommer said that on the fourth he would give a definite answer, Pilgram decided that the dream of his life was about to break at last from its old crinkly cocoon. He spent several hours examining a map, choosing a route, estimating the time of appearance of this or that species, and suddenly something black and blinding welled before his eyes, and he stumbled about his shop for quite a while before he felt better. The fourth came and Sommer failed to turn up, and, after waiting all day, Pilgrain retired to his bedroom and silently lay down. He refused his supper, and for several minutes, with his eyes closed, nagged his wife, thinking she was still standing near; then he heard her sobbing softly in the kitchen, and toyed with the idea of taking an axe and splitting her pale-haired head. Next day he stayed in bed, and Eleanor took his place in the shop and sold a box of water colors. And after still another day, when the whole thing seemed merely delirium, Sommer, a carnation in his buttonhole and his mackintosh on his arm, entered the store. And when he took out a wad, and the banknotes rustled, Pilgram's nose began to bleed violently.

The delivery of the cabinet and a visit to the credulous old woman, to whom he reluctantly gave fifty marks, were his last business in town. The much more expensive visit to the traveling agency already referred to his new existence, where only butterflies mattered. Eleanor, though not familiar with her husband's transactions, looked happy, feeling that he had made a good profit, but fearing to ask how much. That afternoon a neighbor dropped in to remind them that tomorrow was the wedding of his daughter. So next morning Eleanor busied herself with brightening up her silk dress and pressing her husband's best suit. She would go there about five, she thought, and he would follow later, after closing time. When he looked up at her with a puzzled frown and then flatly refused to go, it did not surprise her, for she had long become used to all sorts of disappointments. 'There might be champagne,' she said, when already standing in the doorway. No answer—only the shuffling of boxes. She looked thoughtfully at the nice clean gloves on her hands, and went out.

Pilgram, having put the more valuable collections in order, looked at his watch and saw it was time to pack: his train left at 8:29. He locked the shop, dragged out of the corridor his father's old checkered suitcase, and packed the hunting implements first: a folding net, killing jars, pillboxes, a lantern for mothing at night on the sierras, and a few packages of pins. As an afterthought he put in a couple of spreading boards and a cork-bottomed box, though in general he intended to keep his captures in papers, as is usually done when going from place to place. Then he took the suitcase into the bedroom and threw in some thick socks and underwear. He added two or three things that might be sold in an extremity, such as, for instance, a silver tumbler and a bronze medal in a velvet case, which had belonged to his father-in-law.

Again he looked at his watch, and then decided it was time to start for the station. 'Eleanor!' he called loudly, getting into his overcoat. As she did not reply, he looked into the kitchen. No, she was not there; and then vaguely he remembered something about a wedding. Hurriedly he got a scrap of paper and scribbled a few words in pencil. He left the note and the keys in a conspicuous place, and with a chill of excitement, a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach, verified for the last time whether the money and tickets were in his wallet. 'Also los' said Pilgram, and gripped the suitcase.

But, as it was his first journey, he still kept worrying nervously whether there was anything he might have forgotten; then it occurred to him that he had no small change, and he remembered the clay money pot where there might be a few coins. Groaning and knocking the heavy suitcase against corners, he returned to his counter. In the twilight of the strangely still shop, eyed wings stared at him from all sides, and Pilgram perceived something almost appalling in the richness of the huge happiness that was leaning towards him like a mountain. Trying to avoid the knowing looks of those numberless eyes, he drew a deep breath and, catching sight of the hazy money pot, which seemed to hang in mid-air, reached quickly for it. The pot slipped from his moist grasp and broke on the floor with a dizzy spinning of twinkling coins; and Pilgram bent low to pick them up.

Night came; a slippery polished moon sped, without the least friction, in between chinchilla clouds, and Eleanor returning from the wedding supper, and still all atingle from the wine and the juicy jokes, recalled her own wedding day as she leisurely walked home. Somehow all the thoughts now passing through her brain kept turning so as to show their moon-bright, attractive side; she felt almost light-hearted as she entered the gateway and proceeded to open the door, and she caught herself thinking that it was surely a great thing to have an apartment of one's own, stuffy and dark though it might be. Smiling, she turned on the light in her bedroom, and saw at once that all the drawers had been pulled open; she hardly had time to imagine burglars, for there were those keys on the night table and a bit of paper propped against the alarm clock. The note was brief: 'Off to Spain. Don't touch anything till I write. Borrow from Sch. or W. Feed the lizards.'

The faucet was dripping in the kitchen. Unconsciously she picked up her silver bag where she had dropped it, and then kept on sitting on the edge of the bed, quite straight and still, with her hands in her lap as if she were having her photograph taken. After a time someone got up, walked across the room, inspected the bolted window, came back again, while she watched with indifference, not realizing that it was she who was moving. The drops of water plopped in slow succession, and suddenly she felt terrified at being alone in the house. The man whom she had loved for his mute omniscience, stolid coarseness, grim perseverance in work, had stolen away.... She felt like howling, running to the police, showing her marriage certificate, insisting, pleading; but still she kept on sitting, her hair slightly ruffled, her hands in white gloves.

Yes, Pilgram had gone far, very far. Most probably he visited Granada and Murcia and Albarracin, and then traveled farther still, to Surinam or Taprobane; and one can hardly doubt that he saw all the glorious bugs he had longed to see—velvety black butterflies soaring over the jungle, and a tiny moth in Tasmania, and that Chinese 'Skipper' said to smell of crushed roses when alive, and the short-clubbed beauty that a Mr. Baron had just discovered in Mexico. So, in a certain sense, it is quite irrelevant that some time later, upon wandering into the shop, Eleanor saw the checkered suitcase, and then her husband, sprawling on the floor with his back to the counter, among scattered coins, his livid face knocked out of shape by death.

J. D. Vance’s AI Doctrine

2026-06-21T07:00:00-04:00

In early 2025, J. D. Vance paid a visit to Les Invalides, in Paris, where he was invited to clutch the sword of the Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of the American Revolution. In a speech the next day, Vance drew a parallel between that sword and artificial intelligence, calling them both “weapons that are dangerous in the wrong hands but are incredible tools for liberty and prosperity in the right hands.”

Whether the rollout of AI in the U.S. ends up in the right hands will depend to some degree on the vice president himself. Since President Trump returned to office, Vance has taken a prominent role in articulating how the administration should approach the AI revolution. Many Republicans, including Trump, broadly favor a hands-off approach. Vance, in a series of speeches and interviews, has offered a more substantive framework for the interplay among government, AI companies, and workers—with the occasional political barb thrown in.

He, too, has called for avoiding regulations that slow innovation. But he also believes that some forms of power are too important to leave to Big Tech to self-regulate. And he has sought to tackle one question on the minds of many Americans: What will happen to workers?

Vance’s approach reflects the tension between the two main forces that fueled his political rise. Before he ran for Senate, Vance worked in venture capital, and his ascent was backed by Silicon Valley figures such as Peter Thiel and David Sacks—many of the same people who are now in the aggressively anti-regulation, pro-market camp of the GOP. Yet Vance also built his political reputation on his self-described hillbilly upbringing and on giving voice to the frustrations of working-class voters—who feel forgotten by Washington, view both government and big companies with suspicion, and fear that AI is coming for their jobs.

Now Vance is attempting to build a distinctly MAGA vision of AI that rewards innovation and is global in ambition, protective of American workers, skeptical of regulation, and wary of concentrated corporate power. Depending on what you think about AI (and about Vance), that could be viewed as a reasonable middle ground designed to keep some guardrails on AI’s development and to help protect American livelihoods—or viewed as the tap dance of a politician aiming to appease everyone and potentially satisfying no one.

Either way, Vance is in no doubt about the stakes. The day after touching Lafayette’s sword, he told the audience of executives and policy makers gathered for the Artificial Intelligence Summit: “If we choose the wrong approach on other things that could be conceived of as dangerous—things like AI—and choose to hold ourselves back, it will alter not only our GDP or the stock market but the very future of the project that Lafayette and the American founders set off to create.”

Vance often compares workers’ fears about the impact of AI to concerns that followed the introduction of ATMs in the 1970s, when many people predicted that bank tellers would become obsolete. “What actually happens is we have more bank tellers today than we did when the ATM was created, but they’re doing slightly different work,” Vance told the Interesting Times podcast in May 2025. “More productive. They have pretty good wages relative to other folks in the economy. I tend to think that is how this innovation happens.”

[Read: What happens if Trump seizes AI companies]

I asked the economist James Bessen, who has written extensively about the impact of ATMs, whether that was an apt analogy. “It’s not even the right account of what happened with bank tellers,” he told me. When ATMs were first introduced, the number of tellers in any given bank branch likely fell. That dynamic also made it cheaper to open new branches, which banks raced to do after deregulatory measures in the 1990s allowed them to expand their footprint. More branches meant more tellers, though they were performing different roles. That picture changed again after 2010, as online banking spread. This time, the new technology led to a dramatic reduction in the number of teller jobs.

A more fitting comparison, Bessen told me, is the 19th-century automation of the textiles industry. Automation made cloth cheaper, demand surged, and employment and productivity both grew. But by the mid-20th century, those gains had already been reaped, and as productivity continued to grow and demand plateaued, jobs disappeared. The lesson is that technological progress doesn’t guarantee permanent job creation, as Vance suggests. What is clear, Bessen added, is that people across the workforce will need to acquire new skills if they want to keep working.

Vance disagrees. “I don’t buy the premise,” he told me in an interview last week. “I have not yet seen the evidence that you’re going to see widespread job destruction because of AI.”

Yet Vance said he worries that the benefits of AI will fall disproportionately on the wealthy, as has happened in previous industrial revolutions. “You certainly saw a massive concentration of wealth and income upwards,” he said. “I do worry about that. I think it’s a serious concern, and I think it’s something, certainly, policy makers should not sit idly by and let happen.”

Vance acknowledges that he is an optimist. And he has a venture capitalist’s focus on productivity. Americans, he says, should be less concerned about AI replacing workers and more worried about falling behind in developing technologies that make workers more productive. “If the robots were coming to take all of our jobs, you would see labor productivity skyrocketing in this country—but you actually see labor productivity flatlining,” he said at the Winning the AI Race Summit last July.

The bigger problem, he believes, is the tendency by some companies to prioritize foreign talent. Vance has criticized Microsoft and other tech firms for laying off workers while simultaneously applying for H-1B worker visas to hire foreign labor. Corporate claims of a domestic talent shortage are a “bullshit story,” he has said. “When we try to grow our economy, frankly, through importing cheap labor, that, I think, is a dead end,” he said at the summit. Microsoft declined to comment.

Will Rinehart, a tech-policy expert at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, told me that he has discussed with the vice president’s staff ways to promote labor development for an AI world. “What’s interesting about Vance is that he does cut his own line, where, in part, he is with the administration on no excessive regulation of AI, but at the same time, he sees this as an opportunity for pro-worker development and pro-worker growth,” Rinehart said.

How that might translate into policy, however, isn’t clear—and on this, the United States isn’t alone. “It’s not surprising to me that they don’t have a plan for that,” Nathaniel Persily, a co-director of the Stanford Law School AI Initiative, told me. “Frankly, no country in the world right now seems to have a thought-out plan for how to deal with AI-related labor-force impacts.”

The Republican Party itself is split over what to do about AI, a fight reflected in a meeting at Vance’s office last year. Seated across from each other were two influential figures in Trump’s orbit: David Sacks, who stepped down in March as the administration’s AI czar (but continues to advise the White House), and the conservative attorney Mike Davis, who was trying to stop Sacks from inserting language into legislation that would have limited congressional oversight over the technology and eliminated state jurisdiction.

Vance, who is close to both men, tried to talk through their differences. The exchange grew heated at times, and Vance urged Sacks and Davis to find common ground, according to officials familiar with the exchange.

Weeks later, in December, Trump signed an executive order that sought to curb states’ ability to pass their own AI regulation, and directed the administration to work with Congress on a national framework for governance. Republican governors from 17 states responded by calling on Congress to strip any language that banned state-level AI regulations from a congressional budget reconciliation. California and other Democratic-run states have pushed their own AI rules.

Months later, those tensions still simmer. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has argued that the White House can’t legally strip states of their right to protect citizens using an executive order alone, and has pushed ahead with proposals for Florida to put its own safeguards around AI. Earlier this month, Florida became the first state to sue OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, claiming that ChatGPT puts corporate profits ahead of safety and is unsafe for minors. Kate Waters, a spokesperson for OpenAI, told me in a statement that the company is working to enhance AI safety. “We know there is more work to do,” she said. “We are committed to getting this right.”

In February, Fox News’s Martha MacCallum asked Vance in an interview whether AI policies should be left to the states or be federalized. He said the country needed “one standard” because the tech companies are, in his words, “so complicated.”

“What’s happening in California affects what happens in Ohio, and vice versa. I think that, eventually, you’re going to have some standard applied, whether it’s a federal standard or whether it’s one state standard dominating,” he added. “Frankly, the worst possible outcome would be to have far-left California dominate the entire AI regulatory map. That is, unfortunately, what the Californians would like to happen.”

Vance doesn’t want to see the Europeans take the lead, either. In his Paris speech, he argued that perhaps the greatest threat to AI was that governments would burden it with rules before the benefits could be realized.

Vance argued that overly restrictive rules—in other words, what he sees happening in Europe—strengthen the position of established firms, making it harder for new companies to compete. In Paris, Vance also described how he viewed the technology itself. He talked about AI in the way that previous generations talked about oil, steel, and nuclear reactors—as a source of national power that could determine which countries build stronger economies, field more capable militaries, and exert greater influence in the decades ahead. “AI, we believe, is going to make us more productive, more prosperous, and more free,” he said.

[Read: The conversions of J. D. Vance]

Given those stakes, Vance has repeatedly warned against allowing a small number of companies to control the industry. That view sets him apart from many traditional Republicans, who have long been skeptical of antitrust enforcement. Vance sees danger not only in government overregulation but in a handful of dominant firms gaining too much power. The new industrial revolution will be thwarted, he said, “if we allow AI to become dominated by massive players looking to use the tech to censor or control users’ thoughts.”

His interest in corporate restraint goes only so far. The construction of AI data centers is controversial in both parties. Supporters argue that the sprawling facilities are essential to winning the global AI race; detractors warn that they strain power grids, consume enormous amounts of energy and water, and hand even more influence to Big Tech. Vance has mostly sided with the builders.

For all of Vance’s skepticism of regulation, he makes exceptions where national security, human judgment, or democracy are on the line. Addressing the graduating class at the U.S. Air Force Academy in May, Vance warned that artificial intelligence was transforming warfare faster than military institutions have historically adapted to new technologies. He cautioned them to “use technology to make you better, but never submit to it.”

In making his case, Vance invoked Pope Leo XIV, whose recent writings on AI have called for stricter ethical constraints on autonomous weapons and warned that some military systems are already moving beyond meaningful human control. Vance has publicly disagreed with the pontiff on other matters, but he embraced those concerns.

AI is rapidly becoming embedded in national-security systems. OpenAI and other major tech firms have scaled up their partnerships with the Department of Defense. Anthropic, which has been put on a national-security blacklist, is an exception. (Trump last week said that talks with Anthropic to resolve the issue were “going fine.”) The company’s relationship with the federal government fractured earlier this year following a fierce dispute over military guardrails, including whether AI systems should be allowed to make autonomous decisions.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has argued that the Pentagon’s AI initiatives should operate “without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications” and that the military is “building war ready weapons and systems, not chatbots for an Ivy League faculty lounge.” He issued a directive requiring a handful of AI defense contractors to permit the military to use their technologies for all “lawful operational use,” without exceptions.

Vance, who, like Hegseth, is a military veteran, has focused on a different concern: ensuring that even as machines become more capable, human beings retain responsibility for choices that carry moral weight. “Decisions over life and death must be made by humans and not machines,” he said at the Air Force Academy.

The dilemma facing policy makers now is whether the lines that Vance favors will hold—or whether the AI revolution will overwhelm those seeking to guide its development. On that, Les Invalides and Lafayette may provide different history lessons than the ones Vance cited in Paris.

On July 14, 1789, Parisian insurgents seized weaponry from Les Invalides that they used to storm the Bastille later the same day. In the resulting chaos, Lafayette, as head of the French National Guard, sought to steer a middle path between the monarchy and the insurrectionists. He failed, and was eventually forced to flee France.

The Warrior-Witches of Ukraine’s Resistance

2026-06-21T07:00:00-04:00

For several months last year, a Ukrainian housewife, 35 and lonely in a marriage that had gone cold, traded WhatsApp messages with a Chechen commander, Achmad, stationed somewhere in Ukraine’s occupied south. They wrote about their days, their disappointments, what they hoped to do when the war ended. She asked about the front. He told her.

“Send me a picture,” she said. “I want to see your life.”

One afternoon, he obliged—a photograph taken inside the barracks, of himself and another soldier grinning for the camera. Behind them, pinned to the wall, was a map of the compound showing the unit’s position.

The housewife did not exist. “She” was a middle-aged officer named Serhiy working for Ukraine’s military-intelligence directorate, part of a concerted effort to draw secrets from the men sent to occupy his country.

“Serhiy was great at flirting,” his commander told me. “Guys in our team started asking him for dating advice.” Shortly after Achmad sent that photograph, the coordinates it revealed were struck by a Ukrainian drone.

[Anne Applebaum: Ukraine is not losing. Russia is not winning.]

Ukraine’s resistance is alive and more lethal than ever. But it has changed dramatically since its early days. A man I will call Dmytro (he requested anonymity for reasons of safety) has served with a resistance team inside occupied Kherson from the first days of the full-scale invasion. “We took insane risks then,” he told me. “Nobody thought the Russians would be here long.” Partisan cells sprang up organically—people who knew one another, sometimes ex-military, improvising as they went. Symbolic acts of resistance happened daily. Ukrainians flew their flag and blared patriotic songs in public. The image of a grandmother pressing sunflower seeds into a Russian paratrooper’s hand—“so that sunflowers grow here when you die”—traveled around the world.

As it became clear the Russians intended to stay, such open defiance faded. Today, expressing support for Ukraine in Russian-occupied areas is likely to earn a trip to “the basement,” a euphemism for Russian torture chambers. Dmytro described Russia’s repression as a kind of machine: “It takes time to get spinning, then it has its own momentum.” High-resolution surveillance cameras now blanket city centers, and interrogations are a feature of daily life. Resistance leaders from Mariupol estimate that nearly half of the adult population there has been polygraphed by the Russian security service.

Even peaceful acts can meet with extreme repression. In 2022 and 2023, occupation forces in Mariupol effectively banned the colors blue and yellow. Residents describe receiving aid packages, including school supplies, with yellow and blue markers ripped out of their boxes. Today, Russia’s camera net is sophisticated enough to track individuals block by block, masked or not. Petro Andriushchenko escaped from Mariupol and now coordinates a cell still operating there. “Pro-Ukrainian graffiti can get you killed,” he told me. “Even disguised, your movements can be traced backwards to find where you live.”

The kind of symbolic resistance once waged by the general public has now given way to intelligence work, carried out by serious operatives. Managed by handlers in unoccupied Ukraine, these agents help identify targets, verify coordinates, and pass them to the Ukrainian military. The location of Achmad’s barracks, although traced through online subterfuge, was almost certainly confirmed by an agent on the ground. The result is a movement that has grown both quieter and deadlier. It now feeds the “middle-strike” campaign—a sustained drone offensive against targets deep inside the occupied territories, including air defenses, logistics hubs, command posts, and personnel. A crucial link in that kill chain is information from loyal Ukrainians behind enemy lines.

The partisans I spoke with included coordinators directing operations from free Ukraine, operatives working inside occupied territory, and volunteers scattered across Ukraine and abroad. Many have family members still living under Russian occupation and must closely guard their resistance activities. Inside the occupied territories, most agents work alone, their only connection via encrypted communication with their handlers. One operative, code-named Sestra, has no idea how far the network around her extends, except that it kills Russians almost every day. “What you do not know,” she explained to me, “you cannot betray under interrogation.”

The Russian military is a meat grinder. Commanders send infantry forward in waves that Ukrainian officers refer to as “human radar”: The piles of bodies reveal Ukrainian strong points. As crude as Russia’s infantry operations may be, its electronic countermeasures are very sophisticated and continually reshape how the resistance communicates and survives.

Until June 2022, Ukraine’s mobile carriers Kyivstar and Vodafone kept operating in the occupied zones, because the Russians had not yet stood up their own infrastructure. Then the Ukrainian networks went dark, and the resistance had to improvise. Early fixes were crude: VPNs, Wi-Fi nodes. Methods have since been refined, and the details are closely guarded. What is clear is that any phone purchased inside the occupied territories is useless for resistance work. Devices sold there come preloaded with monitoring software developed by Russian intelligence. That app is called Druge—Друг—which means “friend” in Russian.

Druge monitors communications, photographs, and location data, relaying all of it back to Russian intelligence. One woman who had recently escaped from an occupied zone told me that her mother, who still lived there, tried to delete Druge. The icon disappeared, but the app kept running in the background. At checkpoints, Russian soldiers examine every phone. Not having Druge installed is a red flag to them; having an encrypted app, such as Signal, guarantees a phone’s owner a trip to the basement.

Phones smuggled in from free Ukraine are the linchpin of resistance communications. For a time, one reliable route ran through Deutsche Post: parcels mailed from Germany, routed through Russia, delivered to innocuous addresses in occupied territory—a government office, a shop—and wrapped so that any tampering would be evident. That route is now closed. Others remain, though the specifics are closely held. In emergencies, a phone can be delivered by drone, which demands real-time coordination and carries its own risks. These “clean” devices do not have Russian spyware installed, and they lack SIM cards that would connect to the local mobile network. Because cell towers can detect when a new phone enters their coverage area, resistance members compose encrypted messages on a clean phone then send them via internet, using the hotspot of a second device already recognized by the network.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Ukraine has finally given up on Trump]

Few resistance agents have professional training. Most learn on the job. Partisans pass around hard-copy tradecraft manuals to avoid using vulnerable digital channels. Within Kherson’s partisan brigade, one of the most sought-after is a Soviet-era handbook describing CIA catfishing tactics in Africa during the Cold War. No online version exists, but a well-worn original circulates among the resistance.

“Your CIA was good at this,” Dmytro said. “You bastards knew how to use sex.”

Several Ukrainian print shops have developed methods for hiding instruction manuals inside best-selling books. A guard at a Russian checkpoint, thumbing through an artificially tattered paperback, will likely have no idea that some of the pages explain how to kill him.

Inside the occupied territories, women form the backbone of the resistance. Many hold positions in Russia’s civil administration—at clinics, schools, and government offices—and report to Ukrainian intelligence. They exploit the occupiers’ assumptions: Russian soldiers often fail to imagine that women can be combatants. Few suspect that a grandmother passing their barracks every morning, shopping bags in hand, is the first link in a kill chain.

Some women volunteer with Russia-based charities supplying aid to military units. Every interaction is a collection opportunity. In late May, a government-linked Russian aid organization circulated a warning about this over Telegram: It had identified individuals, the agency noted, “who offer to deliver humanitarian aid to the Special Military Operation zone” as “a tactic employed by hostile forces to gather intelligence regarding the deployment of Russian troops.”

The most valuable sources are the occupiers themselves. In free Ukraine, agents build online relationships with occupation soldiers. Most of the operatives are women—though some men, such as Serhiy, have a gift for it. Native Russian soldiers tend to be difficult marks; they are transactional, Serhiy’s commander told me. “They always ask in the first five minutes: ‘Are we going to fuck or not?’” Chechens, by contrast, are “much more likely to seek a real relationship” and are easier to manipulate.

Since its creation in the early 1990s, the National Academy of the Security Service of Ukraine has trained operatives to cultivate intelligence assets. There are rumors of a new course that requires students to develop online connections with real occupation soldiers. An instructor at the academy, who requested anonymity for security reasons, would not confirm the course’s existence but insisted that “every intelligence agency does this—even yours.” When pressed about a specific aspect of the rumor, that the highest grades go to students who deliver target coordinates by the end of the course, he smiled. “That would indeed earn high marks.”

Most instruction for resistance agents, however, remains unofficial. Olena Biletska runs the Ukrainian Women’s Guard, a volunteer organization launched after Russia’s initial assault in 2014 to train women to survive under attack or occupation. By 2022, training had been delivered to more than 60,000 participants, some of whom remained in occupied territory. Most courses cover basic self-defense and survival, but others apply to resistance work. Pipelines smuggle training materials behind enemy lines. One course focuses on defeating polygraphs; others cover urban surveillance and intelligence-gathering.

Outside Ukraine, a diaspora helps vet target coordinates obtained through these resistance networks. Refugees from the occupied territories, who have detailed local knowledge, provide insight for the middle-strike drone campaign. A woman I will call Roksana, who asked for her name to be withheld to protect her network inside Ukraine, served in a clinic near Kherson on the occupied south bank of the Dnipro River. She barely escaped with her life after refusing to work for the Russian military. Now, living abroad, she helps verify targets for Ukrainian military intelligence. “I know my village—every street, every farm, every warehouse,” she told me.

For Roksana and some of the other women operatives I spoke with, the determination to destroy the Russian occupation was forged in dark experience. “Almost every day, for the first few weeks after the invasion, we would hear about another body in the street,” Roksana said. “If it was a woman, they were often abused.” The doctor Tetyana Kostyantynivna runs the women’s center at one of Kyiv’s largest hospitals. In 2022 and 2023, her facility treated a steady stream of sexual-assault survivors from the occupied territories, ranging in age from 4 to 75. “Over the past four years,” she told me, “we have become a world leader in new methods for gynecological reconstructive surgery.”

During her own escape, Roksana passed through 33 Russian checkpoints, several of which were surrounded by dead bodies. Some of those corpses were of women and showed what she understood to be clear signs of sexual violence. At one checkpoint, a Russian soldier fired into the back of Roksana’s car while it sat parked, hitting a passenger in the legs. The soldiers did it for sport. But Roksana’s group made it through, and today, she has no reservations about guiding drone strikes against her own village, if doing so helps drive the Russians out. “We can rebuild warehouses,” she said, “but the Russians can’t rebuild Russians.”

[Read: Something is wrong with Russia’s children]

Women are crucial to the Ukrainian resistance. “They can go places, do things, that men cannot,” Andriushchenko, who runs agents inside Mariupol, told me. “Also, they are ruthless.” Several resistance leaders call their female agents vidma, a term that appears often in Ukrainian folklore. Its closest translation is “witch,” but it has a very different connotation here. The word derives from vidate, which means “to know.” Lesia Orobets, a former member of the Ukrainian Parliament, explained: “Vidmas were wise. They understood the secrets of the surrounding environment. Here in Ukraine, our vidmas were respected for their knowledge, not burned for it.”

These warrior-witches have become Ukraine’s most feared intelligence assets, moving through occupied territory like shadows. Orobets travels abroad often, where she is sometimes asked, “What happens if Ukraine runs out of men?”

“Be careful what you wish for,” she says. “If Ukraine’s women are in charge, there won’t be a Russian left alive.”

In the early months of the occupation, children played a role in the resistance. They slipped through checkpoints easily, took instantly to encrypted apps, and were extraordinarily brave. But the risks they took were no less grave than those faced by adults. An errant social-media post—or simply “liking” content supportive of Ukraine—was enough to get a child hauled in for interrogation. Those sessions could involve unspeakable violence, especially for girls. I interviewed one who was only 11 when her village near Kherson had been occupied. Implicated in “resistance” activities, she was dragged from her home. As we began our conversation, she apologized for her stutter. “I did not used to have this problem,” she told me, “until the Russians took me to the basement.”

The resistance says that it now enforces an absolute ban on children taking part. Dmytro, from the Kherson brigade, explained that “it’s not just about the risk to the kids. It’s about the risk to the whole unit.” The death of a child at Russian hands can devastate morale. Andriushchenko described the case of two teenage boys from Melitopol who had been interrogated by Russia’s security service. Their bodies were never returned, almost certainly because of how badly the boys had been tortured. “Their deaths hit us hard,” he said. “What they did to them.”

In practice, the ban on children helping the resistance has its limits. In one occupied city, teenagers have learned to move around the Russian camera network. For a while, they spray-painted Ukrainian colors on the sides of abandoned buildings. Now, given the risks of carrying blue or yellow paint, they chalk or scratch the Ukrainian letter Ї, which does not exist in the Russian alphabet, wherever they can get away with it. Even this, resistance leaders discourage. Sestra, the agent operating inside Mariupol, describes how “a single piece of graffiti can mean torture, a cellar, or deportation to Russia for the child, and arrest or the stripping of parental rights for the family.”

“It’s not worth it,” Andriushchenko said. “We need intel, not art. When they turn 18, they’ll get their turn.”

If resistance fighters are the first link in the kill chain, drone operators are the last. Iegor Kravchenko, whose call sign is “Ram,” commands a company in Ukraine’s 426th Unmanned Systems Regiment. Every night, his unit launches attack drones into the occupied territories. “A significant percentage of those missions,” he told me, “rely on intel provided by the resistance.”

Today, the middle-strike drone campaign is the main engine of partisan activity. It has become extraordinarily efficient. For a high-priority target—an air-defense system, a command post, a munitions dump—anywhere from 15 minutes to a few hours can elapse between the transmission of coordinates and the strike. There have been moments when an operative was still chatting online with a soldier as a drone hit his position. “Our goal,” Orobets said, “is to make sure Russian soldiers never reach the front line.”

[Read: Building tanks while the Ukrainians master drones]

I asked the partisans why they would talk with me at all, sharing intimate details of the war’s most dangerous operations. In part, they are sending a message to the occupier: You are hated here. Sestra put a finer point on this: “I want every Russian soldier who has set foot on our land to carry that paranoia with him—suffocating, relentless, every second of every day. I want him to look at the grandmother at the market, at the bus driver, at the doctor in the clinic, at the ordinary passerby on the street—and to see in each of them his own potential destruction.”

The Ukrainian operatives also want Americans to know that Ukraine is fighting for every inch of its land. Asked whether Ukraine would tolerate a peace deal ceding occupied territory, Biletska answered, “Have you seen Bucha? Kherson? Mariupol? That’s not peace.”

As for Achmad, the Chechen commander who revealed the location of his own barracks, Andriushchenko was blunt: “He’s gone dark online, but we suspect he still doesn’t realize he was flirting with a middle-aged chuvak,” meaning a dude.

I asked whether he worried about exposing Achmad as a source. “No. I hope his unit learns what he did,” Andriushchenko said. “And then I hope they cut off his balls.”

How to Think About AI Before It’s Too Late

2026-06-19T13:00:00-04:00

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

Cory Doctorow has a refrain: “The most important thing about a gadget isn’t what it does; it’s who it does it for and what it does it to.” In this episode of Galaxy Brain, he sits down with Charlie Warzel to talk about the AI boom, making the case that the hype, vision, and dreams of endless growth are unsustainable. Doctorow expands on his viral “enshittification” thesis: a critique of AI based around power and whether we are using AI tools or being used by them.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Cory Doctorow: Bosses are infinitely horny for firing workers and replacing them with machines. And they have been since forever, right? That’s the story of the Industrial Revolution. They just—there’s something about this, and it’s not just cutting costs. I think that if you’re the boss, you are haunted by the knowledge that if you don’t show up for work, the business just ticks over as per normal. But if all the workers don’t show up, that’s “You’re out of business.” And so maybe you tell yourself you’re driving the car, but secretly you worry that you’re in the back seat with a Fisher Price steering wheel. And one of the things about AI is: It dangles the possibility of wiring the toy steering wheel into the car’s drivetrain.

[Music]

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to examine the case against AI.

Well, sort of.

What follows isn’t a case against the technology: machine learning, generative AI, coding agents. It is instead a case against this particular ideology behind AI: how it’s built, how it’s implemented. Cory Doctorow is a little bit of everything. He’s a science-fiction writer; he’s a technologist himself; he’s a prolific blogger and a journalist. He’s also an activist who has been working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation on digital-rights management, among other issues.

And it’s this combination of all of these jobs that make Doctorow this particularly shrewd critic of technology. He’s somebody who has both the skill set to see how technologies are being implemented in ways that work against human flourishing, while also being able to imagine all the ways that the future might be different.

And most recently, Doctorow gained notoriety for coining the term enshittification. This has become the shorthand for the way that companies and their platforms start out with this promise of empowerment. But then once they’ve captured the market share, they begin to degrade their services and extract more from their users. Now, enshittification put a name to this pervasive feeling about technology, and especially the tools of the Web 2 era. But a lot of the dynamics of Doctorow’s work are extremely relevant to the AI boom, which is dominated by many of the same personalities of the platform era.

Doctorow has a new book. It’s called The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, and it builds on a lot of this past work. We’ll get into what a reverse centaur is in just a moment, I promise. But it’s the book’s subtitle that got my attention: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late.

The AI conversation is, as we’ve explored before, intensely polarized, and you have some critics who just seem unable to engage with the usefulness of this technology. But what makes Doctorow’s perspective different is that his critique is not purely about the technology itself. It’s about the power dynamics that surround it. Again and again in his book, he comes back to the same refrain. “The most important thing about a gadget isn’t what it does; it’s who it does it for and what it does it to.” Doctorow’s animating questions needle at something bigger. This question that I think is shared by so many people right now. Why, in this era of intense technological progress, do so many things feel like they’re getting worse and more exhausting?

Who really benefits from these tools? Which groups of workers are actually using them, and which groups are being used by them? Is there an AI bubble? What does it look like if it pops? What does meaningful resistance to AI look like, in an era of growth at all costs? Cory Doctorow joins me now to talk about it all.

[Music]

Warzel: Cory, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

Doctorow: Thank you, Charlie. It’s a pleasure to be on.

Warzel: So in the intro to your book, you’re talking about different ways that people use artificial intelligence, and you mention that you use it in certain instances. What is your relationship to artificial intelligence in terms of tools you use?

Doctorow: The most common use I make of AI—and it’s daily, and I just did it again—is I publish a blog, at pluralistic.net. And because I am keenly aware of how the platforms trap us, I control that blog. I publish it on my own self-hosted WordPress site, on a server on a shelf that I own. So my prompt for OLAMA, one of the Olama models that I have running on my laptop, is: find typos. And that is remarkably good. So not only does it catch a bunch of stuff that my text editor or word processor wouldn’t normally catch—things like you type a word that is a correct word but not the word you meant. So you type shocker instead of shocked. Double punctuation, typing the word and twice in a row; kind of stuff we do all the time.

But also—this is where it’s like, faintly magic—is the other day I referred to something, as I was writing, and I pasted in a link to the Wikipedia article on it. And then I referred to it again later by slightly different name. So it was something like saturation theory. And I called it “the saturation hypothesis.” And the chatbot said: In the URL, it’s called saturation theory. Did you mean saturation theory here? Which was amazing.

Warzel: Yeah. Genuinely helpful.

Doctorow: Yeah, super helpful. Look, you know, I don’t know where your computer-origin stories are, but my first word processor was a program I bought in a magazine that I typed into an Apple II Plus. And my word processors have gotten new features since then, on the reg. And an enormous number of them are things I have no use for at all. Many of them are things that I think other people use very badly, and some of them are things that I find indispensable. And AI is a plug-in to my word processor as far as I’m concerned—and I have never used a plug-in and said, Right, well, that’s it. Now we need to gather up all the writers and put them in a wood chipper. We should probably spend, I don’t know, 1.4 trillion dollars on this. See how good we can get this word processor plug-in to run.

Warzel: Well this brings me to your book. It brings me to the central operating principle of centaurs, reverse centaurs. I want to do some defining for people in the audience who aren’t gonna understand it. What is a centaur? Not the mythological animal, but the automation theory that you’ve based the book around. And what is a reverse centaur?

Doctorow: So in automation theory, a centaur is someone assisted by a machine. So, you know, you’re wearing glasses, you’re riding a bicycle, you’re using a spell-checker, you’re playing a harmonica instead of making mouth noises: You’re a centaur. And a reverse centaur is someone who is conscripted to help the machine. So there’s a process a machine can almost do, but there’s a part of it that it can’t do. And someone has inveigled you to do that other part. And because the capital that went into that machine is depreciating, right? The machine only lasts so long. You want to sweat that asset as hard as you can.

And because machines don’t get tired, and they typically work faster than we do, you—the reverse centaur—are the bottleneck in the machine. You are Lucy and Ethel trying to get chocolates off the assembly line and get them into the chocolate box. And the boss is running the assembly line at the maximum speed that the humans can conceivably do it at, and they are expecting you to work at—to or slightly beyond the point at which you collapse from exhaustion. So someone who is a reverse centaur isn’t just used by a machine; they are used up by the machine.

Warzel: Let’s anchor that in the real world. Would an Amazon delivery driver [be] the ur-example right now of somebody trapped in reverse centaurism, or what have you?

Doctorow: Yeah; it’s hard to overstate how much automation in that van is about seeing if you can get the person to work so hard that there is just no slack left for them. So we all know about the drivers not peeing, right? Or rather, peeing in bottles. That’s not just because they have a hard schedule. The van is determining what route you’re going to take and how long it’s going to take. And then you have to make the prediction real, irrespective of traffic conditions and so on. You are covered by many cameras and many sensors when you drive an Amazon van. And they are doing things like penalizing you for looking in the wrong direction. So you might be looking at something that you anticipate is a danger, but the van disagrees. And so they are dinging you on that.

And then there are the more sort of mundane complaints, like the machine thinks that you can deliver these three parcels after parking your van because they’re all in the same housing complex. And what the machine doesn’t know is that one of those drop-offs is a mile away. And so either you drive to the other half of the housing complex and get fined by the system for driving when you were supposed to be walking—or you walk or run to the other place, and you get fined by the system for missing your time quota on that delivery.

Warzel: Well, and then there’s this story that 404 Media reported recently. The one about the Rivian vans that Amazon uses that have been wired to turn off the air conditioner after between like 10 minutes or 30 seconds, depending if the driver is out of the seat. And so you have these drivers who are trying to hack them in order to just have safe conditions when they’re driving in the middle of the summer. And I think it speaks to this technology using us, right? And so part of the thesis of this book is that these tools are created for the express purpose of creating these reverse centaurs, right? Something that none of us out here in the world want to be. So why are they engineered this way? Why are they engineered to make us reverse centaurs?

Doctorow: You know, you and I and the people listening to this, we’ve been through a lot of tech bubbles lately. You know, whether that’s Web 3 or crypto or what have you. We get bubble after bubble after bubble. And this bubble is a bubble like those—but it’s much bigger. And one of the things this book wants to interrogate is first of all, why do we have bubbles? And second of all, why is this bubble so much bigger? And it is so much bigger. I mean, when I wrote the book, it was 700-billion-dollar capex expenditure worldwide. Now it’s a 1.4-trillion-dollar capex worldwide, and it’s going up and up.

Warzel: Yeah, and that 1.4 trillion is Goldman Sachs’s prediction for spending on AI infrastructure in 2027.

Doctorow: So it’s—this is a shocking amount of money. We’ve never set this much money on fire before for anything. It makes tulip bulbs look like rational conduct. You know, the South Seas look like an achievable objective, right? So where’s this all coming from?

Well, first of all, I think we have bubbles because firms that have saturated their market go very quickly from being treated by investors as growing firms to being mature firms. And when that happens, their shares are grossly overvalued, because if a share in a company is a claim on its future earnings. If those future earnings are going to be larger than they are this year, then it makes sense that the share will be worth a lot, because those earnings are going to grow and grow and grow. But if we know how much the company brings in—and if it brings in about the same every year, plus or minus a few points—then it has a much lower what’s called a price-to-earnings ratio, right? It just trades at a lower multiple of its annual earnings.

And from the perspective of management at the firm, this is bad. Because once you start being a mature company, and your share price drops precipitously, a thing that just keeps happening whenever anything threatens these companies, the market’s really telling us that they think these companies’ growth is going to tap out soon. That’s very bad. It’s bad because, you know, if you’re an executive who’s been compensated in shares, well … that’s your net worth, right? When the share price goes off, falls off the cliff. But also it’s really bad because shares in growth firms are very liquid. They’re like money. And so, yeah—you can hire executives with shares. You can also buy companies with shares. Both of those are really good ways to grow. And once you’ve hit the limit on growth, once you are Google with a 90 percent search market share, and the market starts to treat you as mature again, then you have to use money to buy things that you used to use shares to buy. So, you know, you have to go find a creditor or like a customer or an investor to grow by money. Whereas you can just grow by shares by deciding you’re gonna issue more stock.

And so, this is very dangerous. And so we see this string of bubbles. At first, the bubbles were quite grounded. You know, you had Google saying, We’re about to become Facebook, because we have this thing called Google Plus. And the problem with that is that while we can all agree on how much Facebook is worth because it’s there on their balance sheet, Facebook vociferously disagrees with Google that they’re about to become Google Plus. And they make that point very forcefully in public, and it makes it hard to sell that narrative.

So we switch to, like, imaginary things that we’re going to conquer. Web 3, crypto, blah, blah, blah, right? Metaverse. And then we get to this one. And this one is much bigger. And so why is this one so much bigger? Why was the market willing to spend so much more money? Well, some of it is, again—it’s just material. This is more real than crypto or metaverse or whatever. You know, it’s like it’s a super-interesting computer-science breakthrough. And not only that—because we have crypto, we have computer-science breakthroughs all the time. Usually when you find a way to get a computer to do something cool, if you do it harder, it doesn’t get cooler. Right? The returns to scale are pretty limited, and AI had these incredible returns to scale which are now plateauing. But there was a period where we could just spend more and do the same thing and get more out the other end.

Warzel: I think it’s a really great point about growth companies, that there is almost a danger when you’re in that phase where, “No, we’re going to grow very soon,” right? Just you wait. That’s a really good place for them to be. The period of actual growth, like “We are booming right now,” essentially can only mean, to the market, “Soon, we will stop.” And that is the scary point. I take that totally.

Tell how you connect that to the idea of “We are not only working on this computer-science experiment, but we are working on it in such a way that it is going to turn us into tools of the development.” Like, why do these things push these companies to make the products that turn us into these reverse centaurs?

Doctorow: So yeah, that’s the ideology question, right? What is it that makes capital allocators so excited about AI, versus all the other things they’ve been excited about? And I think a big part of this is that bosses are infinitely horny for firing workers and replacing them with machines. And they have been since forever, right? That’s the story of the Industrial Revolution. They just—there’s something about this, and it’s not just cutting costs. I think that if you’re the boss, you are haunted by the knowledge that if you don’t show up for work, the business just ticks over as per normal. But if all the workers don’t show up, that’s “You’re out of business.” And so maybe you tell yourself you’re driving the car, but secretly you worry that you’re in the back seat with a Fisher Price steering wheel. And one of the things about AI is: It dangles the possibility of wiring the toy steering wheel into the car’s drivetrain.

So the boss has an amazing, cool idea and then gets pooped out by the bot. And there are no ego-destroying confrontations with people who know how to do things, who tell you that your idea is dumb. You know, when I was on the picket line with the screenwriters, because I live in Burbank and I’m in an affiliated union; I’m in the Animation Guild writers’ unit. So when I was on the picket line with the writers near my house, one of them said to me, you know, “You give notes to a writers’ room the same way you prompt a bot,” right? Like, “Give me E.T., but it’s about a dog, with a love interest and a car chase.” And the difference is that you say that to writers, and they’re like, Go make a spreadsheet. The grown-ups are making a movie. Whereas you say it to a bot, and it just gives you a script.

Warzel: Well, it’s also interesting, too, how a lot of really, really rich, influential people—even higher than the level of normal CEO; we’re talking like in the billionaire class—have a lot of people, I’ve spent time around these people, a lot of people who say, like, Yeah, sir, that’s an awesome idea. Yes, let’s draw that up. We’ll get our people on it. We’ll do that.

Right? It’s interesting that the chatbots also behave that same way. The chatbot is: Sir, we’ll get right on it. Absolutely.

Doctorow: And if you are familiar with the psyche of bosses, you might say, “Yeah, offering them a way to like get stuff done without having to argue with workers is gonna be very popular.” But also those upper-tier capital allocators, those billionaires and oligarchs, they themselves already live in a world that’s pretty solipsistic. Right?

You know, if you become a billionaire, I think it’s axiomatic that you have to hurt a lot of people. And to hurt a lot of people, you have to, in some sense, believe that what they feel isn’t as real as what you feel; that they’re not real people the way you’re a real person. You know, Elon Musk calls everyone he disagrees with an NPC [non-player character]. And you know, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are the same people who got really excited about effective altruism, and particularly the strain of it that said you can hurt as many living people as you want, provided that you spend a lot of time thinking about bringing a small amount of joy to the lives of 10,000, or rather 10 to the 53 artificial people who will come into being in 10,000 years, right? It’s a very solipsistic way of viewing the world.

And you know, Mark Zuckerberg wants to build social media without people, right? Like, in social media without socializing is like: Your friends are the reason you can’t leave Facebook, because you love them. But they’re a pain in the ass, and you can’t agree on when it’s time to leave. And so that’s great for me, but I’ve been trying to get your friends to see reason and understand that the best way to have a friendship is to maximize your engagement with a platform. And for some reason they just keep having a friendship the way normal people do. So I think we’re gonna get rid of your friends and replace them with chatbots.

Right. You know, social media without socializing, it’s very similar to the idea of a workplace without workers and a screenplay without screenwriters and a movie without actors.

Warzel: But it can only go so far, it seems, in terms of this. One of the defenses right now of the idea potentially that these guys are going to fire everyone, right? That this tool is going to allow bosses to, you know, AI-wash their companies. But I think what we’ve seen already is the fact that it’s difficult. You have companies who have laid people off hiring people back in; that there’s problems. It seems like you have a very low opinion of a lot of bosses in this sense. Do you think they’re that dumb? That they’re just going to continue to do this even in the face of, if there aren’t these same productivity gains?

Doctorow: I mean, I think unless you spent 2008 in a cave, you have to at least entertain that possibility. Right. These are like, the analysts who are telling us that AI is, whatever, a 17-trillion-dollar industry are the ones who told us that 95 percent of us would be using the metaverse by 2025. There is a degree of credulity there, where if you think that you can find exit liquidity for an investment, it doesn’t really matter whether the investment pays off. It just matters whether it fails after you’ve given the bag to someone else.

Warzel: Understanding all of that—understanding that we are living in a bit of a wild west here—we are also living in a time of a lot of people operating with impunity, sort of saying the quiet part out loud. I want to talk about the AI bubble. You predicate a lot of this on there being, that AI is a bubble. I think that that case was the absolute majority case in the fall. And I think now, we have some of these new coding agents. You see Anthropic turning what looks like it’s gonna be a pretty record profit here. Give me your case for the AI bubble as you see it, here in the summer of 2026.

Doctorow: Well, if these companies are going to be profitable, it will have to generate revenues in excess of its depreciating assets, including capital expenditure on new product development. And in excess of its operating costs. It will have to make more money when it adds more customers. And when those customers use its product, it will have to increase its profit, not decrease its profit. So it will have to find a pricing and market strategy that has good unit economics and where depreciation and amortization are commensurate with the rate at which they are able to replenish their capital. And that’s just not the case.

Warzel: What do you say to people who are looking at the demand right now? It is a narrative that is coming from inside that industry. There is also adoption that is real. How do you parse that? How do you see that playing into that?

Doctorow: So giving away hundred-dollar bills, or selling hundred-dollar bills at a dollar apiece, will have a high demand. One of the things that we’ve seen with market leaders in the last couple of months is that when they try to charge $5 for those hundred-dollar bills, people are like, Oh my God, we can’t afford $5 for these hundred-dollar bills. So I’m not surprised to hear that there is demand for it. So the question isn’t: If you prompt an LLM often enough and harness enough compute, can you make software that is useful? That’s very clearly true. And I should say the best programmers, I know many of them, love working with LLMs. I don’t question it for a minute.

We do know that in the sort of reverse-centaur or centaur configuration that you hear lots of people who are in charge of how they write software. Who say, I write software the way I like, and I use these tools when it makes sense, and I am feeling really good about it. And then you hear from a lot of people who are like, They fired nine-tenths of my colleagues, and my job is to mark the bot’s homework. And we’re shipping the worst code I’ve ever seen. And, you know, God help you if you ever use one of our products.

And again—his resolves that conundrum, right? About how it is that two groups of people who are reliable narrators of their own experience can use the same tools and conclude completely opposite things about it. It’s because the important thing about a technology is only secondarily what it does—and it’s primarily who it does it for and who it does it to. And people who get to use the tools the way they want, they make better decisions than when you dictate to them how you do it. This is why tailorism was a failure.

Warzel: I want to get a little bit into the harms that you show of this type of dynamic, especially with this type of AI as it is foisted on people. You have a story about Air Canada call centers in there. But tell me what an “accountability sink” is, and how something like ChatGPT might play into that.

Doctorow: Yeah; this this comes from Dan Davies, who’s a British writer, investment analyst, and basically a cybernetics-and-systems-theory guy. And this term, accountability sink, is basically when you have a a system or a person or something that you can blame for otherwise foreseeable mistakes. So that when people get hurt, it’s not your fault, it’s the accountability sink’s fault.

And an example of this is, as you say, Air Canada. I have a dog in this fight. Like all the best Americans, I am Canadian. Air Canada’s customer service has always been pretty bad, so you could see why—if the only reason to have customer service is to have someone explain over and over again that the company isn’t going to solve your problem—why you wouldn’t just ask an AI to do that? And that’s what Air Canada did.

So there was a man who was going to his grandmother’s funeral, and he got on the Air Canada customer-service portal, and he said, How does a bereavement fair work? And the chatbot said, You buy a full-fare ticket today, go to your grandmother’s funeral, come back, get a copy of the death certificate, send it in, and we will refund you the difference. Which he did. And when he did, the human being who was in charge of issuing, you know, refunds was like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s not how we do it. You had to do this before you flew. You don’t get any money back. And he appealed it all the way through every level of customer service at Air Canada, and eventually got a judgment against Air Canada for on the order of seven or eight hundred dollars Canadian.

So this was like a multi-month process. And you could see that, from Air Canada’s perspective, it doesn’t matter if it’s wrong. It just matters if it doesn’t produce more of a loss than a gain. And there is a certain perverse incentive to give people bad advice that costs them money if there’s no way for them to get the money back. Air Canada is the nation’s flagship carrier; the majority of routes, they have one or fewer competitors. You’re gonna keep using Air Canada anyway, so why would they care?

You know, if you remember on Saturday Night Live, Lily Tomlin used to do this bit she started on Laugh-In. Ernestine, the AT&T phone operator, she’d do these ads for AT&T. And she would turn to the camera at the end of each one, and she would say: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.” So if you enjoy that kind of market power, and you know that people have few if any avenues of recourse, you can use AI and blame the AI for the mistake. When really, this was the foreseeable and foreseen outcome of putting an AI in place of the human being who is already not there to do a good job.

Warzel: Tell me about automation blindness. How humans become this dull node in the loop reviewing AI output. It’s sort of similar to auto; it’s a little like the corollary to, you know, the chatbot takes over the call center.

Doctorow: Yeah. Well, there’s a funny thing that happens at TSA checkpoints. TSA people train all day, every day, to find water bottles. And they are the world’s water-bottle-finding-est people that we have ever created. They are the Louis Pasteur of finding water bottles, because they get more practice than anyone else. But the number of people who deliberately bring a gun or a bomb onto an airplane, it is indistinguishable from zero. Now, obviously, at the very furthest margin, there are people who do it, which is why we have airport security. But there is every reason to think that without a regular supply of people walking through, deliberately carrying guns and bombs through that have been disguised, that airport-security people just cannot remain vigilant for it. Because they detrain to find one thing when they are training to find the other one, which is water bottles, which is the thing that we all bring through.

Warzel: And so you’re suggesting that in this paradigm, where all these jobs are—if they’re not being fully automated away, if you have a human in the loop, you’re suggesting that this type of automation blindness is going to increase.

Doctorow: Yeah. Especially when you think about this in combination with this reverse-centaur paradigm of work speed-up, of sweating the asset. So if your job is to have a new AI judgment or result put in front of you at the maximum speed that you could theoretically evaluate it—and if in the majority of times it’s good enough—your job, the majority of times, is to click “Okay.” And you have to do that relentlessly at this incredible pace. It’s going to require some very atypical kind of neurological makeup to spot that. I won’t say there’s no one ever born who couldn’t do that job, but most of us are not going to be that person. And there aren’t enough of those people to be the human in the loop.

So let me give you an example of how you might configure automation in two different contexts. So I have an extremely treatable form of cancer, so I spent a lot of time following the news about cancer treatment and AI. And it looks like AI can sometimes spot solid-mass tumors that humans miss on X-rays. And so, if there was a sales call between an AI salesperson and the hospital administrator at the Kaiser hospital where I get my care. And they were saying, Right, here’s the pitch. Right now you spend a million dollars a year on radiologists. They’re each assessing a hundred X-rays a day. I want you to give me half a million dollars a year for my robo-radiologist, over and above the salary of those million dollars that you’re spending now. And now, your radiologists are going to do fewer X-rays, because one or two times a day, the AI is going to say, “Have another look at that one.” And they’re going to stop, and they’re going to look at it again.

No risk of automation blindness, right? That is an arrangement, as someone with cancer, that I would be very happy to see.

That’s not the pitch, because there aren’t enough hospitals that want to spend an extra half-million dollars a year over and above their payroll. The pitch goes like this: Fire nine-tenths of your radiologists. Put the remaining 10 percent in charge of rubber-stamping the output from the X-ray, but they’re supposed to look at it closely enough to actually make an assessment about it. But you’re gonna work them as fast as you possibly can to to wet-sweat this asset as much as you can, realize as much of a savings as you can, fire as many workers as you can. In that circumstance, when the AI is usually right about the chest X-ray, but sometimes wrong—and the radiologist is just clicking “Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay,” five times a minute—that radiologist is gonna kill people. And we’re not gonna blame the AI; we’re gonna blame them.

Warzel: And that’s the accountability sink.

Doctorow: That is the accountability sink.

Warzel: So it seems to me, what I appreciate about your work is that it tries to consider these tools in the context of the types of people who are in control of deploying them. Control of purchasing them, control of all that, right? And you write that the workers—the non-oligarchs bosses of the world—need to puncture the AI bubble as soon as possible, right? Before it gets even further out of control. Wouldn’t that be quite bad for it to pop now? I know that’s a naive-sounding question. But just as part of it, it’s like wouldn’t it wouldn’t it be really bad?

Doctorow: Yeah, it would be really bad for a 1.4-trillion-dollar bubble to pop. It would be even worse for a 2-trillion-dollar bubble to pop. And so you know, I do believe that history is ours to make; that that the future has not been written. But when I say that, I don’t mean that there’s a way that AI becomes profitable. I mean that there’s a way that we deal with the fact that it is a bubble, and what we do when the bubble pops. If we know that it’s coming, if we understand who created it, if we regulate in response to it.

You know, one of the reasons we have the string of bubbles we’ve had in this century is because the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Glass-Steagall was a law put in place after the Great Crash and the Great Depression. And it was intended—and worked very well—to structurally separate investment banks from commercial banks, from consumer banks. And we got rid of that law. And you know, this is not all that different from other things that we deregulated in that era. You know, we stopped enforcing antitrust law around the same time, and then we got a lot of monopolies. Those two facts are actually really closely related.

And, you know, if I get grumpy or cranky, it’s really because it sometimes feels like we have so little object permanence that we couldn’t win a game of peekaboo. And we just forget that in living memory, we had a thing we did that stopped a bad outcome, and then we stopped doing that thing, and then the bad outcome happened. And we’re like, This is a mystery. What an unfortunate situation for us. But you know, as Margaret Thatcher told us, there is no alternative. So I guess we just have to live with it.

And I sometimes feel like, you know, the people who advocated for the removal of structural separation and finance and the end of antitrust law, those are the same people who are inflating this bubble, and who are also saying, How dare you blame me for all the bad outcomes of all the other bubbles and all the economic problems we have with monopolies.

So, you know, we can choose how we react to this bubble. When we had a bubble in the ’30s that destroyed society, we responded by changing the structure of markets to dampen the likelihood of bubbles, and we installed policing mechanisms that looked for exceptions that escaped from the market-structuring efforts, and that either address them legislatively or through enforcement. These are not the lost arts of a fallen civilization. This is not building a pyramid without power tools. It’s just prudent regulation.

We could choose that, when this bubble bursts. Or we could choose to do austerity again. And when we do austerity, we drive people into the arms of fascists. And so we could have a collapse followed by an authoritarian surge—or, we could have a collapse followed by a prudent regulation and a reckoning with the mistakes that we made that brought us to this juncture. And maybe with the people who claimed that these mistakes wouldn’t happen.

Warzel: What does opposition look like, then? There’s clearly a moment to seize on something. If you are an activist, or someone who doesn’t want this, or a politician, what is your version of real opposition to this in the moment? This type of artificial intelligence and these companies? What does it look like?

Doctorow: I think that a lot of the times when people criticize AI, they stipulate to a bunch of its claims without interrogating them. So when we say: This AI data center is going to be polluting. It’s going to be noisy. It was undertaken under undemocratic conditions. We have better uses for that land. It’s going to be hard on our water supply and our grid. We should also add: And, by the way, this company might be bankrupt before they turn it on. And not stipulate to the idea that this thing that can’t go on forever will never stop.

I think when we criticize AI more broadly, we should remember that, as offensive as it is, for the AI companies to say to creative workers, Our goal is to make you bankrupt, and our tactic for doing that is training our models on your work—that we shouldn’t stipulate to the idea that the work is as good as ours, right? That they’ve done anything good.

And we should remind investors who have seen these splashy demos—because I think that’s what, you know, AI art and AI text gen and AI video and so on—we should remind them that the workers that this stands to displace have a wage bill globally that sums up to less than the kombucha expenses for one training run of Midjourney.

And that even if they fire every illustrator in the world and replace them with slop, that it won’t turn a buck, right? That this is a money-losing proposition. That if you charge, if you stop giving away, selling hundred-dollar bills for a buck apiece, it’s always going to be cheaper to hire illustrators. Illustrators are among the most immiserated low-wage workers in the creative industries.

Warzel: Do you see a possible future in which it does just keep going like this? Like the irrational nature of this, you know, in the way that we have closed the Strait of Hormuz for a very long time, and a lot of people are like: You’re going to feel the pain very soon, and the market will soon reflect all of you know this shortage. And then Donald Trump posts something on Truth Social, and then the market goes, Yeah, you know, we’ll believe that. And like, you know, every Friday we’ll just do this dance.

That things—the bubbles, so to speak, and the cultural part of the bubble too, right? The political, the cultural, the economic part of the bubble, that we’ve become so used to that. That we just do the irrational, This is just how it’s going to be. We’re going to operate in this irrational dystopia of: Yes, the bottom is going to fall out. No it’s not.

Doctorow: So the question is: Can this thing that can’t go on forever never stop? And the answer lies in material things. So, to keep the AI bubble going, you need to keep sending money to guys in bunny suits in Taiwan, who sit in clean rooms for eight-hour shifts while, like, you know, tin is evacuated into or vaporized into an evacuated chamber and hit with a laser and then hit with a different laser to create a vapor that creates the visible wavelength of light that etches a four-nanometer scale feature on a chip.

So someone needs to send real things to Taiwan so that those people can eat. They won’t keep doing it if they can’t eat, right? So there needs to be real things—not just things on balance sheets, but actual things. There needs to be energy, right? That’s a like, it’s a non-negotiable. And there is only so much mismanagement that you can do and prop up through money creation and stimulus without actually doing industrial policy that produces real things people need: you know, health care and and so on. That you can do before things … then it starts to tell, right? You start to see a failure.

This is not investment advice. I’m not short or long on AI. I’m, you know, putting all of my investment in laser tag, because I think we’ve got lots of laser-tag arenas coming online soon. But I don’t believe in—I don’t know when the AI bubble is going to pop. But the other thing that goes around my head all day long is Stein’s Law, which is that anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops. And there are hard-material limits on the ability to cook the planet and devote an ever-larger share of our national project, our global project, to building GPUs and putting them online. And those hard-material limits are not remediable through belief. They require a material response.

Warzel: A lot of this book, and a lot of your work sense, is obviously in conversation with your last book. The topic of enshittification, which, you know, it’s taken off in in ways that are kind of unbelievable to see. The idea that these platforms and companies are slowly getting worse—exerting more power over people, getting locked into these ecosystems.

I don’t know if we’re fully in the enshittification era of AI yet, but you can see the contours of that with token use, and things like that starting to go. But enshittification’s also become, as you know so well, the shorthand for a general feeling of anger and frustration around the degradation of just services and experience of everyday life. And recently you wrote this article that cited the National Customer Rage survey, which has been surveying a panel of a thousand representative consumers every three years for a decade. It’s been going on since the ’70s. And essentially, part of the takeaway here is that people are furious now. Like historically pissed off, in this customer-rage sense. AI is a big part of this.

How does this cycle break? Because it just feels like it’s everywhere. Like, we can talk about it in the sense of AI. But you can also feel it at the grocery store, at the wherever. And I think it has this real curdling effect—especially when you’re having so much trouble, and you see the Elon Musk trillionaire news, and there’s people all over the place being like, Congratulate this innovator on having, you know, more money than anyone could ever have imagined. How does this cycle break?

Doctorow: Well, about 15 years ago, I guess, there was a book by Thomas Piketty, the French economist, called Capital in the Twenty-First Century. And Piketty did this monumental research project, going through every ledger of capital flows going back 300 years to trace capital flows and capital concentration over centuries. And their conclusion was that all of the things being equal, capital tends to accumulate. That if you have money, you tend to make money.

They summarize this as R is greater than G. The rate of return on capital is always greater than the rate of growth. And so Piketty’s point was: If you don’t do something about that, rich people get richer and richer and richer and richer and richer and richer. Doesn’t matter how big the pie is getting; the share of the pie owned by the rich gets bigger faster than the pie gets bigger. Always, as an iron law. And then eventually, this becomes untenable. Eventually, the rich—because they are unchecked—there is no democratic accountability. They are as subject to folly as the rest of us. They look to one another with great jealousy, and use us as pawns in bids to take one another’s fortunes once our fortunes have been stripped bare. That this creates massive instability, and that those instabilities tip.

And he sees these points over and over again. Where the share of income in the top decile, the top 10 percent, reaches—or wealth, rather, not income—reaches a certain point, and then you get the French Revolution. And then World War I and World War II, and so on and so on. And his message was: That unless we do something about oligarchy, the end state of oligarchy is not stability. The end state of oligarchy is chaos. It’s collapse.

And that is my worry. And you mentioned before that there are these billionaires who love the fantasy of AI, and love the fantasy of a world without people, and that they live in a world without people now where everyone around them is a non-player character who just glazes them with AI-like nonsense. But there’s another group of people who love AI—which is politicians who want to exert their will without having to go through a permanent civil service. Just like there’s a dream of a workplace without workers, there’s a dream of a government without bureaucrats, right?

This is what Trump wants to do with DOGE. This was the whole nature of the DOGE project, was you take away the deep state. Which is to say: everyone who knows how the government works. And you replace them with chatbots. And then Trump has an idea, and it happens. You don’t have these collisions with people who are like, That’s not just not how the government works. We can’t do it that way. There are people who won’t be able to fill in that form you want them to fill in. If you take away this support, this other thing will collapse.

It doesn’t work that way. You just tell the chatbot to do it, and the chatbot just does it. You can see how this would be really unstable. We’re living through it. We’re living through it with just screwflies. Right? No amount of belief is gonna help you when beef is 30 dollars a pound. Like, that’s politically destabilizing.

And so I think that—unless we can confront oligarchy by democratic means, that we will find ourselves in the midst of a circumstance where it is being confronted by nondemocratic means. Whether or not that’s what we want, or what we aim for.

And I really worry about it. I think oligarchy is the force that stops us from addressing the polycrisis of genocide and climate degradation and rising authoritarianism. And until we meet that oligarchy challenge, I think we are going to struggle to do more than fight a holding action on everything else. And when we get rid of the oligarchs, it’s still not gonna be easy.

Warzel: I think that’s a tough place to leave it. But that chaos, I think it is very much where we are today. Cory Doctorow: Thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain, for talking about all this.

Doctorow: Thank you, Charlie. It’s been a real pleasure.

[Music]

Warzel: That’s it for us here. Thank you again to my guest, Cory Doctorow. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe on YouTube or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my fellow colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. That’s TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you on the internet.

This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Renee Klahr and engineered by Miguel Carrascal. Our theme is by Rob Smierciak. Hadley Robinson is our senior supervising producer. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

The Thinkers Who Explain This Baffling Era

2026-06-19T09:30:00-04:00

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

My favorite essays feel like surprising chemical reactions: Their materials combine into something novel and combustible. The French philosopher Roland Barthes’s 1957 essay “The World of Wrestling,” which examines the “amplification of the tragic masks” in professional (fake) grappling, certainly fits this category. So does an article in The Atlantic this week, in which the staff writer Gal Beckerman invokes Barthes’ essay to explain the symbolic importance of UFC 250, the gaudy display of blood sport that Donald Trump staged in front of the White House on Sunday. As Beckerman’s editor, I love the way he explains the news through the writings of philosophers, making an implicit case that they are less arcane—and more relevant—than some readers might think. So I decided to ask him to recommend a few more thinkers who might shed some light on the baffling era we’re living through.

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

Boris Kachka: Has the UFC fight sent you back to other writers beyond Barthes?

Gal Beckerman: Yes. Philosophers, even those who produce some fairly dense theory, have asked the kinds of big questions that can help us make sense of two men covered in sweat and blood on the White House lawn. Another book that came to mind last weekend was Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, from 1960—particularly when I took in the scenes of tens of thousands of mostly men watching the fights from screens set up at the Ellipse. Canetti saw the impulse to join a crowd as part of a deeply human desire to dissolve individual boundaries, to both lose yourself and experience a kind of emotional release, a sense of power, that comes with feeling many times larger than just your isolated self.

Kachka: So Barthes analyzes the spectacle, and Canetti gets into the spectator’s head. Who helps you understand other forces behind Trump’s rise? What about, say, vaccine skepticism?

Beckerman: Bruno Latour, who died in 2022, was a sociologist of science who argued that what we think of as scientific truth is actually created through multiple subjective forces—such as funding and politics and personality. He meant to upend the idea of science as this pure process, and instead to understand it as a completely human one. I’m not sure that he anticipated Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but everyone can now understand Latour’s central point, which is that individuals influence the direction that science takes and the kinds of truths it produces. One of his more accessible and relevant books is The Pasteurization of France, which examines Louis Pasteur’s success in making germs a central focus of public health in the 19th century—not as a scientific triumph so much as the result of a subtle war, built on alliances with various interest groups.

Kachka: That must have been revelatory at a time when most people seemed to believe that science was infallible. But expertise has been downgraded—and more people are getting their information from podcasters and influencers. Who could help us understand this shift?

Beckerman: The shift that I’m most interested in is an enormous one: the coming end of the very long historical moment in which written culture has dominated the Western world. AI takes this a step further, because so many basic aspects of human thinking feel threatened by it. The best analogy we have to this kind of seismic change is the reverse—the long-ago move away from oral culture—and the best book I know on this topic is Walter J. Ong’s 1982 work Orality and Literacy. It’s a fascinating look at how the new technology of writing fundamentally restructured human consciousness, moving us into more abstract and analytical ways of thinking but also eroding the great capacity humans once had for memorizing and visualizing information. I don’t know what this new shift will do to our brains, but Ong’s work suggests that we may be headed toward a new experience of being human.

Kachka: Post-literacy and AI—now we’re moving into really big ideas. Who’s one writer who can give us a real galaxy-brain take on our brave new world?

Beckerman: I’ll take any opportunity to bring Hannah Arendt into the chat. Although she is mostly remembered as the philosopher who analyzed totalitarianism, she also wrote extensively about the strange limbo of modernity. She tried to express what it was like to have left behind traditional ways of life—religious, political, cultural—without yet having new models to replace them. On this theme, I’d recommend her 1961 essay collection, Between Past and Future. She was looking at what it meant to live during such a disorienting moment, from the perspective of education, authority, freedom, culture, truth, and politics. This should ring a bell. Such works don’t have the clear and obvious answers of self-help books, but they provide us something to think with, which is the most we can hope for as we muddle our way toward the future.

Matt McClain / Getty

The Theory That Explains Trump’s UFC Fight

By Gal Beckerman

By staging a “spectacle of excess” on the White House lawn, the president expressed the violent essence of his worldview.

Read the full article.

What to Read

Dawn, by Octavia E. Butler

Salvation and exploitation go hand in hand in this story by one of science fiction’s all-time greats. Dawn’s main character, Lilith, awakens in the care of an alien species long after Earth has been destroyed by nuclear war. These beings, the Oankali, seem magnanimous, but Lilith soon learns that they are not selfless; they are acting on a biological imperative to merge their genes with those of other taxons. Lilith is charged with preparing other awakened humans to help repopulate a revitalized Earth, but she knows that if she accepts and succeeds, future generations of her species will become something very different from her. Complex and unflinching, Dawn explores thorny issues involving consent and power; most forcefully, the novel contemplates what it truly means to love another being. — Alexandra Oliva

From our list: Six books that take you to space

Out Next Week

📚 Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand, by Fiona Sampson

📚 Fires in the Night: The Earth Liberation Front, the FBI, and a Secret History of Eco-Sabotage, by Matthew Wolfe

📚 Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

Your Weekend Read

Illustration by Jonelle Afurong. Source: Angel Studios.

Finally, an Action Movie About Washington’s French and Indian War Years

By James Parker

“Where shall we look for Washington, the greatest among men,” asked Parson Weems in 1800, “but in America—that greatest Continent, which, rising from beneath the frozen pole, stretches far and wide to the south?” Weems, Washington’s first biographer, was a propagandist of genius—but even he might not have known quite how American he was being when he wrote that line. A smaller country, it is implied—geographically smaller, and smaller in soul—simply could not have handled the monster-truck greatness of this man. It would have ruptured or burst. For greatness like this, only America would have been big enough.

Read the full article.

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