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My Role as a ‘Complicit’ Journalist

2026-05-05T07:00:00-04:00

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Cole Tomas Allen, the man accused of trying to assassinate President Trump late last month, appeared to consume political news like so many of his fellow citizens, absorbing daily doses of outrage on social media, metabolizing the anger, and projecting it out into the world in his own voice. His posts are remarkable for how typical they are for such platforms, where expressions of disgust are currency and polarization is the product.

In response to a clip of Vice President Vance expressing pride in ending aid to Ukraine, a Bluesky account reportedly used by Allen read, “What a piece of shit.” When another account argued that members of the administration were “damned” for serving a president who posted an AI image of himself as Jesus, the assumed Allen account quoted from the Book of Revelation about God’s fury at worshippers of “the beast.” When Trump proposed charging tolls in the Strait of Hormuz, Allen apparently responded, “It’s public knowledge that he likely IS basically a sociopathic mob boss.”

These were not calls for violence. But they were building blocks for the crime he would soon allegedly commit. In the manifesto he is said to have emailed to his family, Allen deployed the buzzwords of social media, casting his political disagreements as questions of character that diminished the humanity of his targets. He said that he aimed to kill Trump-administration officials, but that everyone in the ballroom was fair game because “most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit.” He argued that the constitutional order had been upended and the social contract broken: “The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.”

I was among the hundreds of “complicit” journalists who attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. My job is to interview figures from across the political spectrum, including the president and his advisers. I attend their events; I try to earn their trust; I inform the public about what is happening. Sometimes my work requires me to attend functions with administration officials; occasionally I am required to wear a tuxedo in the performance of this duty. It is no great revelation to say that Allen’s purported manifesto is wrong on the facts: The United States of America is still ruled by law, not by one man, or several people. Independent judges continue to interpret that law, and the president has not successfully defied a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court or the voting public. Trump has expanded executive power, dismantled federal ethics practices, and adopted authoritarian tactics, but he does not rule as a tyrant. The free press, despite new legal threats and cowering ownership, continues to check his power. The midterm elections will take place on November 3, and, if current sentiment holds, Trump will see his power diminished. Allen, not Trump, is the villain in this particular story, if he is guilty as charged. There is no justification for the violence he attempted.

But I cannot stop thinking about the role that journalists like me play in the drama that ended with Allen face down in a Washington Hilton hallway. I worry that we are at the beginning of a cycle of political violence that is going to get much worse, that will threaten more journalists, more corporate leaders, more candidates, and more elected and appointed officials. Public access to leaders will diminish as a result, and the gulf between the powerful and the aggrieved will grow. The list of recent attacks by suspects who seem to have been influenced not only by unfolding news events but also by the sludge of online political discourse is long and terrifying: Luigi Mangione, the accused murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson; Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk; Daniel Moreno-Gama, the accused Molotov-cocktail-wielding attacker at the home of the OpenAI leader Sam Altman, who has faced other threats; Vance Boelter, the alleged killer of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband; Elias Rodriguez, the alleged killer of two Israeli-embassy employees outside the Capital Jewish Museum; Robert Bowers, the convicted anti-Semitic mass shooter at a Pittsburgh synagogue; Payton Gendron, the convicted neo-Nazi shooter at a Buffalo supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood; Patrick Crusius, the convicted racist shooter at an El Paso Walmart. (The first five await trials.)

[Read: Rise of the blood populist]

No act has a single cause, and all of those suspects appear to have been mentally unstable to varying degrees. But their ideologies also appear to have been nurtured by the technologies we use to distribute and process political information, which isolate us from one another and push us to more extreme conclusions. Modern democracies function on the relatively recent idea that the violence that historically accompanied power transfer should be replaced with individual rights and open elections. These alleged assailants concluded that this idea no longer held, a conclusion that I observe as a growing feature of the online discourse, which routinely casts real policy difference and character judgment in apocalyptic terms stripped of critical nuance. After September 11, the national-security apparatus focused on finding homegrown terrorists who had been radicalized virtually by distant Muslim radicals. Now radicalization—including for many of the pro-Trump rioters who tried to paralyze the democratic process on January 6, 2021—comes from the algorithmic information systems themselves, which reward outrage, conspiracism, and emotional responses. They also diminish understanding, empathy, and verifiable facts.

My work unintentionally provides raw material for this ecosystem. Four days after the security breach at the Correspondents’ Dinner, I co-wrote an article about Trump’s tendency to compare himself to great figures from history—Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar, in particular. The article contained no hint of a justification for political violence. But as it churned through social media, that’s where it ended up, sparking one outraged post after another by enraged readers who called Trump “batshit crazy,” “f*cking insane,” and much more. “Was the guy who bum rushed the correspondents dinner with a shotgun the bad guy (?)” asked one user on X, responding to a link to the story. “We supposed to just let him conquer the planet and crown himself Emperor Of Earth ??”

This happens all the time. And so I do feel implicated, just not in the way Allen’s manifesto would have it.

Perhaps the most famous scene in The Boys on the Bus, the Timothy Crouse account of reporters covering the 1972 presidential campaign, takes place after the second debate between Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern. Newspaper reporters swarm the typewriter of the lead Associated Press writer, Walter Mears, to find out how he will start his story. They each worked for regional monopolies, with captive audiences, and wanted to please their editors. If they filed something different from Mears, they would have to explain themselves.

By the time I started covering presidential campaigns, in 2008, the incentives had reversed. On the internet, we all wrote for the same captive audience, sitting in front of computers at home, so there was no upside in writing the same lede as The New York Times or The Washington Post. To win internet traffic, you had to distinguish yourself. Small things became more important, and appealing to specific groups suddenly had advantages. A blogosphere of liberal and conservative writers—the precursors of social media—emerged to filter what happened through ideological lenses.

Around the same time, the founders of Politico began to adapt traditional media to the new technology. For decades, major newspapers had assigned reporters to watch the Sunday political talk shows and write about the news that was made. Politico’s editors realized that the digital world rewarded bite-size slices and multiple headlines that could ride on Google Search. In one instance in 2009, Politico produced nine separate headlines from a single CNN interview with Vice President Dick Cheney. Some could appeal to liberal emotional cues, perhaps earning a link from The Huffington Post. Some could resonate with the right, earning a link from the Drudge Report. Every reader would get only part of the story.

This echoed the shift in broadcast news that began with cable television. Fox News’s Roger Ailes had discovered in the ’90s that people watched not for information but for emotional gratification—to get mad, to feel the thrill of the underdog, the excitement of a car chase. (Ailes also obsessively demanded that female anchors display their bare legs.) Online, liberals clicked on stories about conservative rot. Conservatives clicked on stories about liberal excess. Independents clicked on stories about the corruption of the whole system. The news became an us-versus-them training ground.

Social media, the current architecture for mass distribution, gave algorithms the ability to supercharge the emotional resonance of information by prioritizing delivery based on engagement, a measure that largely tracks the tingling appeal. But algorithms, unlike regional newspapers, Politico, and blogs, do not screen for falsehoods and have no reputations to protect. So the fidelity to facts soon fell away. (What AI will do to us next is unclear: Some people have argued that the voice of AI is, for the moment, less polarizing than the algorithmic maw. Others predict that AI slop will accelerate the same algorithmic incentives and sever us from the physical world.)

It’s hard to imagine a story more fully covered than one about shots fired at a dinner attended by hundreds of journalists. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer watched a man sprint through the magnetometers and get tackled, and was on his network within minutes detailing what he saw. But if you consumed news of the attack on social media, you were at least as likely to be offered a conspiracist version of the event—the version that gave you the greatest emotional charge—suggesting that Trump could have staged the attempt on his life. The former MSNBC host Joy Reid raised the possibility on her podcast, just as the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson did. “If it was political theater, that would be one of the biggest manipulations in modern history,” Carlson said in a widely viewed video clip, adopting the just-asking-questions mode that has made him one of the most cynical rage-farmers of his generation.

[Read: A shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner ]

Once you understand these incentives, the other major distortions of political news fall into place. I’ve been in this business for a while, and I can more or less predict the likely readership of a story before it is published. The more a story taps an emotional vein—usually outrage or grievance—the more traffic it will tend to attract from social media. I am in the business of writing long and complicated stories full of nuance. Yet I am at the mercy of platforms that want to turn my words into cortisol and endorphins, often for people who will never click the link to read what I wrote. Regardless of my intentions, my work can fuel the false division I despise. Each derivative of my work, processed through the algorithm, becomes more cartoonish and less descriptive of what is real.

Every part of the political ecosystem now plays the game. Grievance, like a virus that can pass a cell wall, is often the best delivery vehicle. This explains much of the rise of Trump, the original insult-tweeting candidate, who designed his norm-breaking routine to provoke anger and deepen resentment on social media. It also explains the behavior of some Democrats. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries assessed a ruling this week on the Voting Rights Act by calling the Supreme Court’s majority “illegitimate,” a moment that immediately became viral. Trump rode the wave, announcing in his own social-media post that Jeffries “should not be allowed to talk that way.”

The Supreme Court is not, in fact, illegitimate under any reasonable legal argument. Each of its members was appointed and confirmed according to constitutional procedures, and they act in accordance with their view of the law, as they should. But Jeffries and Trump are not really engaged in a debate about legitimacy. (A couple of months earlier, Trump called a different majority on the high court “a Disgrace to our Nation,” “fools,” and “very unpatriotic, and disloyal to the Constitution.”) They are sophisticated politicians seeking partisan advantage. Trump has no path to restrict Jeffries’s right to speak, and when the court next rules against Trump, Jeffries will not question its legitimacy. This is a staged performance whose terms are set by the technological medium by which they are distributed. The problem is that many people who consume the debate will take it literally and embrace the outrage. As a typical commenter put it on Bluesky, in response to Jeffries’s comments, “The corrupt six should go to prison and never see daylight again for their treason.”

[Read: The era of normie extremism is here]

I am not suggesting that censorship offers any solutions, and I am not contending that everyone is equally to blame. I want to pause to acknowledge the strange new physics that is distorting how many people understand the world. The information delivered in feeds and podcasts has been torqued away from reality to seize our attention. Just as many children’s brains have been hijacked by TikTok feeds of cute cats or pimple popping, political debate is now captive to a kind of alarmism that dehumanizes by default and announces any deviation from the norm as proof of systemic collapse. Allen and his cohort would likely echo what my social-media commenters tell me each day: That there is a war happening in the United States, and that the system is irreparably broken. For a nation founded in a revolution that met tyranny with force, violence can seem far too logical in the face of such flawed conclusions.

The truth is more complicated, and more challenging: The nation’s political machinery, upset by technological change, is strained but functioning. We must commit again to the basic national project—to disagree, even viciously, while maintaining respect for one another’s humanity and a desire for truth. We must discount much of the venom we see online, and from pandering leaders, as a distortion of reality, not a mirror. If we do not, more people will die.

Democrats Could Use a Cold Shower Before the Midterms

2026-05-05T07:00:00-04:00

The Democratic wilderness is starting to look awfully sunny. Gone, for the most part, are the blame-casting, hand-wringing, and paralysis-by-analysis that gripped the party after Donald Trump’s reelection. Same with the constant grousing about how the party is fractured, leaderless, locked out of power in Washington, and unloved across the country.

Actually, that might all still be true. But you don’t hear about it as much. Democrats are too busy being giddy with anticipation for the midterms. Examples of this hyper-confidence began popping up at the beginning of the year (“Democrats will cruise to victory, including Senate control,” the writer Brian Beutler predicted) and have proliferated since then. Nearly every day seems to bring another Democratic overperformance in a special or off-year election, or another great poll for the party, improved House or Senate forecast, or headline about how Republicans are bracing for a brutal November. Is a blue wave coming? A blue tsunami? Or another blue mirage?

The causes for Democratic optimism are legitimate. The president’s approval ratings—historically a solid predictor of a party’s midterm outlook—have now dropped consistently into the 30s. Trump was already underwater on his two most important issues, the economy and the cost of living. Then he launched a protracted, unpopular war of choice with Iran that sent gas prices soaring, the Middle East into turmoil, and his numbers ever further south—all while he dismissed Democrats’ talk of affordability as a “good line of bullshit” and spoke nonstop about the need for an extravagant ballroom at the White House.

According to The New York Times’ polling average, 58 percent of Americans disapprove of the president’s overall performance, the highest share since right after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. A recent Fox News poll also showed that, by four percentage points, Americans prefer Democrats to Republicans on the economy, the first time since 2010 that Democrats have prevailed on that question.

[Read: The fight-club rule on gerrymandering]

Yet to hear some bullish Democrats talk, the idea that the party might merely win the few seats it needs to flip the House—which was widely expected to begin with—feels needlessly cautious. In many cases, Democrats have become unnervingly unrestrained in expressing their higher-end hopes. “Your viewers need to know that the Democrats are going to pick up at a minimum 25 seats,” the unnervingly unrestrained James Carville told Fox News in January. “Maybe as high as 45.”

Until recently, arguing that the Democrats could net the four seats required to take back the Senate would have been a major reach. That scenario now seems more realistic, as Democratic candidates are polling competitively (or better) in a number of states—Ohio, Alaska, Texas—that once looked far beyond reach. But some Democrats are allowing themselves to think beyond the merely conceivable. “I feel like we’re going to take back the Senate,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told NOTUS, which reported that Schumer envisioned “as many as eight seats in play.”

“This cycle very well might be more like a 1974 post-Watergate cycle, where voters are saying ‘burn the ships,’” David Jolly, a former Republican House member from Florida who is running for governor as a Democrat, told The Bulwark.

Before anyone starts burning ships, a reality check: Democrats have been left devastated by elections in the recent past that they’d also felt great about. The midterms are also still six months away. And presidents—none more than the 45th and 47th—have an unrivaled ability to make news and redirect prevailing narratives. So, for that matter, do Republican-friendly judges, such as the ones on the Supreme Court who last week tossed a grenade of uncertainty onto congressional maps by potentially jeopardizing Democratic seats in majority-Black districts.

Democrats picking up 49 House seats—as they did in 1974—would be exceedingly unlikely in this or any modern cycle. The country is too solidly 50–50, and the congressional maps have been redrawn over the years in a way that will ensure a high degree of stasis. After Democrats won a net total of 41 seats in 2018—their biggest gain since 1974—they significantly exhausted their body of “winnable” seats and thus the potential for future pickups. Only three Republicans carried districts won by Kamala Harris in 2024.

“The pool of possible defections for either party in a bad year is a very small number,” Charlie Cook, a veteran political analyst and the founder of the Cook Political Report, told me.

Dan Pfeiffer, a former top Barack Obama aide and a Pod Save America co-host, told me that even if Democrats manage this year to repeat their popular-vote margin from 2018—eight points—they would win considerably fewer than 41 seats and probably closer to 20. Cook said that Democrats are likely to have a “good” year in the House elections—“good defined between a dozen and 30 seats,” he explained. “But I have a hard time seeing that go north of 30.”

As for the Senate, Democrats face an extremely high degree of difficulty. Cook pointed out that they would not only have to take at least some states that Trump won three times (North Carolina, Ohio, Alaska, Texas). They would also have to hold Democratic seats in places that Trump won in 2024 (Georgia, Michigan) and would likely have to defeat the Republican Susan Collins in Maine, who has proved over three decades to be a unicorn of electoral resilience. Her likely opponent, the Bernie Sanders–backed oyster farmer Graham Platner, has generally been polling ahead of her. But he is a political novice who is packing heavy baggage, which pro-Collins committees will undoubtedly unpack for maximum effect.

Cook believes that Republicans are still more likely to hold the Senate, in spite of the optimistic Democratic projections. “For a lot of these folks, they’re going with the vibe and not looking at the arithmetic,” he said. Still, neither he nor Pfeiffer, both committed data gluttons, thinks that the Democrats’ buoyancy is misplaced. “I mean, the situation is quite good,” Pfeiffer said. “It does keep getting better.” He added that 2026 might be “the best political environment Democrats have had since 2006, and may be better than that.” (Democrats flipped both the House and the Senate in 2006.)

It’s worth recalling that Republicans had similarly high hopes before the 2022 midterms. A consensus of forecasters in the media and from both parties predicted big Republican wins, while a much smaller contingent of Democratic analysts argued that the election would in fact not be so bad. Simon Rosenberg, a longtime Democratic operative, was the most visible proponent of this contrarian view—and a purveyor of what became known as Democratic “hopium.”

As it turned out, Democrats performed far better than expected that November. Republicans won nine House seats, enough to take only a small majority in Congress. Democrats also gained a Senate seat by winning a large majority of close battleground states. There was no red wave to speak of. Rosenberg was seemingly vindicated, and was celebrated as a corrective to the Democratic Party’s pessimistic impulses. He launched a popular Substack called Hopium Chronicles, which remains widely read. Yet his hopium-laced prognosis for Democratic victory in 2024 turned out to be quite off.

[Ben Ritz: Democrats learned the wrong lesson from 2024]

When I spoke with Rosenberg recently, he sounded cautiously sanguine about November but still generous with his hopium offerings. He thinks that Democrats have a genuine shot at winning the Senate. He pointed out that national GOP committees and super PACs have in recent weeks engaged in “defensive spending”—they are putting huge sums of money into states that appeared solidly red a few months ago.

“This was an admission that those states are really in play, right?” Rosenberg told me. Republicans, he said, are “really panicking.” (Republicans can spend near-unlimited sums—defensively and otherwise—because they enjoy a huge fundraising advantage over Democrats.)

As the hopium pipe keeps getting passed around the Democratic campfire, could it also carry a risk of complacency? Improved morale is great for the party, but not if it saps voters of their most vital asset: urgency. Pfeiffer did not sound concerned when I asked him about this. “No one’s going to stay home because they’re overconfident,” he said. “We are so far from that.”

The elections of 2024 and 2016 remain fresh in the party consciousness, which is its own activation energy. And Democrats turned out in large numbers in 2018, during Trump’s first term, whereas Republicans have voted less reliably in midterms. The president’s willingness to campaign could boost GOP turnout, but that’s assuming that he will be motivated to do so—and he has not seemed to be up to this point. It’s also assuming that his supporters will vote as he says.

Trump is still here, though, despite many past predictions of his demise. That alone should serve as the Democrats’ main antidote to hopium.

Iran’s Unexpected Resilience

2026-05-05T17:18:00-04:00

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By the United States military’s estimation, about 1,550 marine vessels—oil tankers, bulk carriers, container ships, and more—are idling in the Persian Gulf right now. With the Strait of Hormuz effectively blockaded, their crews, many of them uninvolved in the ongoing war with Iran, are slowly using up supplies as they await safe passage through the mine-filled waterway. Donald Trump announced on Sunday that the U.S. would rescue these “victims of circumstance” by guiding them out of the war zone in an as-yet-unspecified way. On Monday, though, Iran’s military rejected the plan, warning that American military forces would be attacked if they approached the strait.

Both sides fired shots yesterday, although the U.S. claims that the cease-fire remains in place. The fact that Iran’s leaders are apparently willing to risk violating the delicate monthlong truce emphasizes just how fiercely they want to protect their hold over the strait. The past 65 days of war have badly punished Iran: Its leaders are dead, its navy and air force have been depleted, and its economy and infrastructure have been decimated. “If we leave right now,” Trump said last week, “it would take them 20 years to rebuild.” But amid the destruction, the country has also found new forms of leverage. Iran had not previously exercised this degree of control over the Strait of Hormuz, and before the war, the country could not have been confident that it would be able to do so. Even in its diminished state, the Iranian military has managed to deter enemy ships and outmaneuver anti-air systems, maintaining that grip on the strait while costing the U.S. billions.

After the U.S. and Israel began their military action, the Iranian government said it would attack any ship that tried to sail through the strait, and began deploying mines as deterrents. Before the war, more than 130 ships passed through each day; yesterday, that number was down to three. The ships that do cross now mostly do so under the strict supervision of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which reportedly has been demanding tolls in cryptocurrency and Chinese yuan, and rerouting traffic away from Oman, toward Iran-controlled waters.

Iranian dominance over the strait may well be the new norm. On Sunday, Iran’s Deputy Speaker of Parliament Ali Nikzad was emphatic that the country “will not back down” from its position on the strait, “and it will not return to its prewar conditions.” That’s because the country’s restrictions on the strait have succeeded on a strategic level, creating a global energy shock and unleashing economic devastation around the world—putting massive pressure on the U.S. and Israel to come to the bargaining table. Trump has demanded that Iran “Open the Fuckin’ Strait,” but as Iran’s threats yesterday made clear, we’re a long way off from the pre-February status quo. Even when Iranian leadership has offered to reopen the strait as part of potential peace deals, as it has over the past month, it has done so with the knowledge that Iran could always reassert control. That’s exactly what happened on April 17, when the country declared the strait open to all; the next day, Iran reimposed its restrictions on passing ships, effectively closing the waterway once again.

The strait is not the only tool available to Iran. As recently as this weekend, Trump said that the country has “no navy” and “no air force.” But U.S. officials told CBS in late April that they believe 60 percent of its navy is still “in existence”and two-thirds of its air force is “operational.” Although the Iranian military is indeed far weaker than the U.S. military, it has also reportedly proved scrappier and more capable than expected. Last week, the Pentagon offered its first estimate of the total cost of the war in Iran thus far: $25 billion. A single high-tech American weapon might cost millions; Iran’s signature drone—known as the Shahed-136—costs only tens of thousands, and has been threatening U.S. partners, such as Kuwait, Bahrain, and Azerbaijan, throughout the region. The anti-air munitions required to shoot them down can cost more than the Shaheds themselves. And when Shaheds do penetrate air defenses, they can be deadly.

Meanwhile, the country’s “mosquito fleet” of nimble, surveillance-dodging boats has been intimidating military and commercial vessels alike, projecting Iranian power in the strait. Admiral Brad Cooper, who leads U.S. Central Command, told reporters yesterday that the U.S. “blew up” six small Iranian boats in the area—a possible example of the IRGC’s reduced capacity. More typically, Cooper explained, the Iranian military deploys “between 20 and 40 small boats” when it intends to harass vessels. But a reduction in capacity is not the same as defeat. As my colleagues Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan Lemire reported last week, officials inside the Trump administration have admitted to being surprised at Iran’s resilience.

Although Trump insists that Iran has been completely destroyed and that the war is over, reality suggests otherwise. After two months of war with a superpower, Iran is in some respects outmatched: The U.S. said it bombed more than 13,000 targets during Operation Epic Fury. Yet Iran has refused to concede, even as hundreds of its own civilians have died and the rest have suffered from an economic crisis. U.S. efforts to fully degrade Iran’s defensive capacities may ultimately end up succeeding. But the longer Iran is able to inflict economic pain across the world, and the longer its depleted defensive capabilities hold, the more evidence its leaders have that it can continue to stand firm.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the U.S.-led mission to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is “separate and distinct” from the broader war with Iran and described it as defensive and temporary.
The World Health Organization said close-contact transmission among humans is suspected in a cruise ship’s hantavirus outbreak that has killed three people and infected at least seven; the virus is typically spread to humans through contact with infected rodents. About 150 passengers remain stranded off Cabo Verde while two patients are being evacuated, but officials say the public risk is low.
In an interview yesterday, President Trump accused Pope Leo XIV of endangering Catholics by opposing the U.S. war with Iran. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is set to visit Rome and meet with the pope on Thursday.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

What Adding Race to BMI Can Do

By Katherine J. Wu

In recent years, the perils of body mass index, or BMI, have become a hobbyhorse for professionals in several fields of medicine and research. For decades, doctors have used BMI to help diagnose and treat obesity, diabetes, and other chronic conditions, even as evidence has accumulated that the metric is a poor proxy for excess fat. BMI factors in height and weight but not actual body composition; many people with high BMIs are the picture of health, and many with “healthy” BMIs are at serious risk of metabolic disease. The case against BMI is strong enough that many in medicine would like to be free of it.

Gripes have been raised, too, about medical guidance that relies on race. Although race can track with some factors that influence health, such as lifestyle and socioeconomic status, its relationship to genetic differences is tenuous: Designations such as “Black” and “Asian” cover so many people, with such varied backgrounds, that they’re essentially meaningless as biological categories. When doctors have used race to assess well-being, they’ve missed diagnoses and discriminated against patients. Experts now widely consider many race-based tools in medicine to be harmful and outdated, and are eager to leave them behind.

But researchers and clinicians still rely deeply on both BMI and race, in some cases at the same time.

Read the full article.

A Brutal First for the Cruise Industry

2026-05-05T17:26:34-04:00

Norovirus loves a cruise ship. So did the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19. The crowded rooms, stuffy air, and communal dining of a giant boat filled with humans create the ideal conditions for pathogens to spread. Now hantavirus—a highly deadly rodent-borne pathogen that typically spreads when people breathe in the aerosolized feces or other bodily secretions of infected animals—may have discovered this too: The world now appears to be experiencing its first documented cruise-ship hantavirus outbreak.

Over the weekend, health officials contacted the World Health Organization to report a cluster of serious illnesses aboard a cruise ship bound for South Africa. Among the roughly 150 passengers and crew on board, three have died and four have fallen ill—one critically. The vessel, the MV Hondius, is now anchored off the coast of Cabo Verde, as those on the ship await further instructions.

The situation is serious and frankly a bit unnerving. For now, officials are scrambling to assess the situation. Only two of the seven supposed cases of hantavirus have been confirmed by laboratory testing; the rest are still “suspected,” according to the WHO. And as health officials investigate, more cases may appear. Hantavirus can simmer in the body for weeks before sparking symptoms, and the seven people who have fallen sick so far might have all caught the virus through a common animal exposure before they got on the ship.

But that’s not guaranteed. The possibility remains that hantavirus-ridden rodents stowed away on the ship, which could mean more exposures, more illnesses, and perhaps even more deaths. A less likely, but still very real alternative: People could be catching the virus from one another, which could pose an additional threat to those at the ship’s destination and beyond—and to the health-care workers treating them. At least one type of hantavirus may be capable of limited person-to-person transmission, in situations involving close and prolonged contact—the sort that a cruise ship certainly encourages. And that version, known as Andes virus, just so happens to be found in Argentina, from where the ship departed just weeks ago. Researchers are sequencing the virus detected on board to confirm its identity, but currently, “our working assumption is that it’s Andes virus,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the acting director of epidemic and pandemic management at the WHO, told me via email.

No matter which version of reality this is, scores of people are now trapped on a cruise ship, potentially with a lethal virus that is perhaps being ferried about by infected rodents and/or humans. The virus can kill up to half of the people it infects, so any further spread could have horrifying results. At least one person who fell ill was taken off the ship to be treated in a hospital; more evacuations are planned. But most of those on board have no clear indication of when they’ll be freed. Oceanwide Expeditions, the company operating the cruise, has said that the ship is facing a “serious medical situation” and that the company is cooperating with authorities and working to “uphold stringent health and safety procedures.”

Eventually, of course, all of the ship’s passengers will have to disembark; Spain has agreed to receive the ship in the Canary Islands. Still, health officials can’t yet say how much risk the passengers and crew will pose to the broader global community. All told, this incident is a deeply sobering reminder that cruise ships can be the setting for infectious-disease nightmares—because they offer pathogens so many simple opportunities to spread.

The perils of cruise ships became painfully apparent during the early days of COVID, when the coronavirus zoomed through hundreds of people aboard the Diamond Princess. In many ways, the ships represented—and, really, embraced—the exact conditions that the pandemic-wary were cautioned to avoid: close quarters, communal indoor dining, crummy ventilation in public spaces.

That setup also favors the norovirus, one of the most common pathogens aboard cruise ships, Vikram Niranjan, a public-health researcher at the University of Limerick, in Ireland, who has written about the vessels’ risks, told me. Norovirus is wildly contagious, and transmitted when people come into contact with infected feces or vomit. Contaminated food, water, and surfaces are common culprits—easy to come across when dealing with shared utensils and cafeteria-style dining.

What’s more, cruise-ship interiors, where passengers from all around the world mingle and breathe in stale air, are especially friendly to any respiratory pathogens that make it onboard—COVID, flu, and now perhaps hantavirus. And for a virus that seems capable of human-to-human spread, prolonged journeys that last for several weeks, like this one, are ripe for facilitating repeated exposure. The people suspected to have been sickened with hantavirus started showing symptoms several weeks apart, which raises the possibility that the illnesses represent a chain, rather than a cluster of cases with the same source. Plus, one of the individuals who is ill and will soon be evacuated is reportedly the ship’s doctor, a likely common contact of the confirmed cases.

Van Kerkhove said the WHO team suspects that “there may be multiple ways in which people have been infected—through exposure to rodents but also possibly through human to human transmission via close contact.” The researchers were told rodents weren’t on the ship, but “I, obviously, can’t confirm that,” she added. “As it’s a ship, there is always the possibility.”

All things considered, “it’s increasingly looking as if there is at least some human-to-human transmission,” Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s School of Public Health, told me. At the same time, Hanage noted, the cruise-ship conditions that might have allowed for that sort of spread could be making it harder for scientists to confirm the possibility. Even on land, human-to-human transmission is very difficult to confirm: People who tend to spend a lot of time together are among the likeliest to spread disease to one another, but they’re also prone to having the same exposure to an external source. Aboard a ship, even strangers are constantly schmoozing, widening the net that researchers have to cast.

Neither Niranjan nor Hanage thinks the takeaway is to swear off cruise ships. (Quite the opposite, Niranjan said: He’d still love to go on a cruise someday.) But realistically, the risks are at least as high as they would be for any other packed, prolonged party. If nothing else, pathogens thrive on our fondness for one another.

Judicial Supremacy Has Arrived

2026-05-05T10:49:21-04:00

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did not die all at once, or by one means. It died through attrition: a Congress that was too sclerotic and polarized to defend one of its finest accomplishments, lawyers and academics who tolerated retreats on civil rights, a society that lapsed into the comfortable illusion that it had accomplished the work of the civil-rights movement. And it died through action: a series of blows from conservative justices ideologically hostile to the law’s aims.

Last week’s decision in Callais v. Louisiana is the most devastating of those blows. The consequences are grave enough on their own terms. Callais will foreclose nearly all federal voting-rights claims aimed at ensuring minority political participation through fair districting. Over successive redistricting cycles, it is poised to collapse Black representation across the South in ways not seen since the end of Reconstruction.

But to view Callais as merely the final hit in the Voting Rights Act’s destruction is to miss its deeper ambition. The bigger shift is that Callais also closes off the possibility that a future Congress could respond with new legislation combating racial discrimination in the electoral system. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion, joined by the other Republican appointees, rests on an interpretation of the Fifteenth Amendment that effectively bars Congress from remedying the very inequities Callais unleashes—inequities the amendment itself was designed to eradicate and prevent.

Seen in this light, Callais is not merely an assault on a landmark statute, or just another step in the Court’s and America’s retreat from the multiracial democracy envisioned by the Constitution’s Reconstruction amendments. It is something more ambitious and insidious—a consolidation of judicial supremacy, achieved by turning those amendments against the congressional authority they were meant to confer. The decision does not only dismantle a statute; it hollows out Congress’s capacity to respond to the country’s needs.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act came apart in two stages before Callais. First, in 2013, five Republican-appointed justices invalidated the law’s requirement that jurisdictions with histories of voter discrimination obtain Department of Justice approval before changing voting laws. Second, in 2021, six Republican-appointed justices invented a new legal standard to make challenging burdensome voting rules in federal court nearly impossible.

Both decisions were legally dubious and practically consequential, but at least they left open an escape valve. Lawmakers could pass new legislation to revise the preclearance formula gutted in Shelby County v. Holder or clarify the Section 2 standard distorted in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2021 attempted exactly that. Directly responding to Shelby County and Brnovich, it passed in the House and stalled in the Senate during the Biden presidency.

[Marc Novicoff: The House of Representatives is turning into the Electoral College]

Its failure came from absence of political will among Republican lawmakers, save for Senator Lisa Murkowski, and from the contorted institutional design of Congress via the filibuster, not lack of constitutional authority. At that earlier time, there was no question that Congress had the authority to counter the Court’s deconstruction with a statutory corrective. Post-Callais, it no longer does.

On its surface, Callais resembles its two predecessors. It is primarily a statutory holding, not an overt constitutional one, undoubtedly a setback for voting rights but ultimately something that could appear fixable by a sufficiently robust John Lewis Act 2.0. But Alito’s reasoning embeds constitutional limits that preempt legislative remedy. Were Congress to pass a reform aimed at reversing Callais, Alito and his Republican-appointed colleagues would almost certainly deem it unconstitutional. The reason lies in the opinion’s embrace of what Alito calls “the limited authority that the Fifteenth Amendment confers” on Congress.

This framing is startling. The Fifteenth Amendment confers exceptionally broad authority on Congress. It declares, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged” based on “race.” It continues, with equal clarity, “The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” Adopted in the aftermath of the Civil War, its expansive, affirmative, and flexible provisions were designed to secure equal political citizenship for formerly enslaved people.

Alito’s analytical move in Callais is to invert the Fifteenth Amendment, recasting it as a restraint on “appropriate legislation.” He contends that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act must be tightly tethered to what he sees as the Fifteenth Amendment’s bar on intentional discrimination. Liability under the Voting Rights Act, he suggests, should arise only where evidence strongly implies that states had a discriminatory purpose in diluting racial minorities’ political power.

Formally, Callais stops short of requiring proof of discriminatory intent in redistricting. Practically, that distinction is meaningless; Alito reads the Fifteenth Amendment so narrowly that only the most explicit evidence of racial discrimination could ever satisfy it. As every civil-rights lawyer knows, proving discriminatory purpose is extraordinarily difficult, in many cases impossible, especially under the evidentiary frameworks championed by the Court’s conservatives.

More crucial, Congress has never embraced Alito’s narrow view of what counts as discrimination. It codified the opposite. Congress—in the Voting Rights Act, its reauthorizations, and a crucial 1982 amendment—repeatedly and unequivocally rejected the notion that vote-dilution claims must rest on provable intentional discrimination. Instead, Congress legislated explicitly on the premise that electoral systems can be invidious in their effects even absent provable malice.

Imagine that a 2028 sweep returns Democrats to unified control of Congress and the White House. They might attempt to restore the pre-Callais framework by reviving what are known as the Gingles factors, a test derived from a 1986 case that governed districting claims to safeguard the right of “cohesive groups of black voters to participate equally in the political process and to elect candidates of their choice.” Such a statute would likely have survived ordinary court review. But Alito’s reasoning would all but invite its invalidation. By allowing consideration of the effects of redistricting on Black voters, the resurrected Gingles factors—designed to give the Fifteenth Amendment teeth—would now run headfirst into a Fifteenth Amendment problem.

There’s another way that Callais will work to prevent future legislative remedies—this one political, not legal.

Shelby County and Brnovich were damaging, but their effects on representation are more marginal—affecting voters’ ability to participate, but at levels that could still have been overcome electorally, at least in most races. Callais is different in kind. In the near term, majority-minority districts across the South will evaporate. Over successive redistricting cycles, the result will likely be the most significant contraction of Black congressional representation since the end of Reconstruction, potentially the most precipitous fall in American history, a contraction that would have seemed, not long ago, unthinkable.

A redistricting regime that replaces Black Democrats with white Republicans alters the composition of the Congress that would need to act. The decision thus creates a self-reinforcing loop, weakening the representational coalition most committed to racial minorities’ voting rights while eroding the moral authority, political capacity, and agenda-setting power necessary for restoration.

[Vann R. Newkirk II: For a time, the U.S. protected democracy]

Among the casualties will likely be Terri Sewell of Alabama, Congress’s lead sponsor of the John Lewis Act, whose district Republicans have vowed to eliminate in the wake of Callais. Louisiana’s Troy Carter and Cleo Fields, whose seats emerged from the litigation at issue and who have become eloquent advocates for voting rights, face the same prospect. These lawmakers, among other Black Democrats from the South, are closest to the indignities of racism in American electoral politics, and they bring the full moral weight of the civil-rights tradition to bear in demanding something better.

The decision’s ambition extends further still. Callais does not merely allow the removal of the federal legislators most likely to fight for reform; it gives state lawmakers a road map to entrench vote dilution. In passages that read more like a practitioner’s guide to race dilution than a judge’s constitutional reasoning, Alito instructs lawmakers on precisely how to immunize discriminatory maps from review: Call them partisan gerrymanders. Partisan motivation, Alito affirms, is safe from scrutiny. “Courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim,” he writes. The message to Republican legislatures, in an opinion joined by every Republican appointee on the Court, is unambiguous: Eliminate Black districts while saying you’re doing it for Republican partisan advantage.

For any legislator inclined toward reform, the opinion is equally clarifying. Even a superficially race-neutral remedy, such as proportional representation, would confront a Court primed to strike it down if it threatened conservative political power. In her Callais dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, quoting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent in Shelby County, argued that the Voting Rights Act was “one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history.” If this statute—so textually grounded, so morally urgent, so explicitly authorized by the amendment it enforces, so significant in results—is not safe from wholescale judicial desecration, nothing is.

Alito’s treatment of the Fifteenth Amendment ultimately will strip Congress of its authority to articulate its own constitutional vision—and will force upon it a tamed, Court-approved understanding of its own powers.

To deny Congress meaningful enforcement authority is to deny it any substantive role in shaping constitutional meaning. This project emerged from City of Boerne v. Flores, a 1997 decision in which the Court’s conservatives held that Congress possesses “the power to enforce, not the power to determine what constitutes a constitutional violation.” Callais smuggles that principle into the tatters of the Voting Rights Act. Traces of it pervade Shelby County and Brnovich, but Callais invokes Boerne for authority and is accordingly more transparent in its embrace of supremacy as such. In so doing, it dismantles a long-standing constitutional settlement in which Congress and the Court jointly elaborated the meaning of foundational guarantees.

On one level, Callais is about the mechanics of representational democracy: about whether people have a voice in government, whether legislators respond to them, whether citizens recognize themselves in those who govern.

But Callais reaches something deeper, about constitutional democracy itself: about whether the Constitution, the law of laws, means what elected branches say it means, and whether those elected branches can act on that meaning. The Court has declared that the branch of government most accountable to the people cannot legislate its way toward a more inclusive democracy.

At the same time, the Court—the branch of government least accountable to the people—has claimed for itself the sole authority to say what the words of the Constitution mean. And it wields that power to entrench discrimination and wall off the paths by which a democratic society might redeem its most aspirational promises.

The Venture-Capital Populist

2026-05-04T05:55:00-04:00

Illustrations by Mike McQuade

The courtship between Silicon Valley and MAGA was consummated on June 6, 2024, in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood, on a street known as “Billionaires’ Row,” at the 22,000-square-foot, $45 million French-limestone mansion of a venture capitalist named David Sacks. Along with Chamath Palihapitiya, a fellow venture capitalist and a colleague on the All-In podcast, Sacks hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump. He knew that other technology titans were coming around to the ex-president but remained in the closet. “And I think that this event is going to break the ice on that,” Sacks said on the podcast the week before the fundraiser. “And maybe it’ll create a preference cascade, where all of a sudden it becomes acceptable to acknowledge the truth.”

A few years earlier, Sacks had described the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol as an “insurrection” and pronounced Trump “disqualified” from ever again holding national office. “What Trump did was absolutely outrageous, and I think it brought him to an ignominious end in American politics,” he said on the podcast a few days after the event. “He will pay for it in the history books, if not in a court of law.” Palihapitiya was more colloquial, calling Trump “a complete piece-of-shit fucking scumbag.” These might seem like tricky positions to climb down from—but the path that leads from scathing denunciation through gradual accommodation to sycophantic embrace of Trump is a well-worn pilgrimage trail. The journey is less wearisome for self-mortifiers who never considered democracy (a word seldom spoken on the podcast) all that important in the first place. One prominent traveler who had already shown the way was a guest at the fundraiser—Senator J. D. Vance, whose attendance helped close the deal on his selection as Trump’s running mate. Any lingering awkwardness between the hosts and their guest of honor was dispelled by the fundraiser’s $12 million haul, much of it from cryptocurrency moguls.

Opportunist doesn’t really describe Sacks. He doesn’t come across as slippery or two-faced. There’s no evasive glance or roguish smile. He can argue at great length, in a steady sinal drone, with an aggressive debater’s ability to make an evidence-based case for any position he holds—but the position always happens to coincide with his benefit. The only consistent principle of his career is a ruthless devotion to self-interest. Sacks has identified as a “libertarian conservative” all of his adult life, but he has sought government intervention on behalf of his investments when it’s suited him. In 2023, when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, Sacks demanded that the federal government bail out the uninsured deposits of start-up companies, much of the money from crypto firms. “Some libertarians care about the freedom of only one person,” Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur, investor, and right-wing provocateur, once said of his friend Sacks.

[From the May 2026 issue: What Noah Hawley learned about billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s private retreat]

In this sense, though Trump is impulsive and narcissistic while Sacks is cold-eyed and logical, they are well matched. “Sacks is a spirit animal for part of the president’s brain,” a former Biden-administration official told me. “The plutocratic part.” After the election, the new president appointed Sacks as his special adviser, or “czar,” for AI and crypto. After decades of keeping as far from Washington as possible, Silicon Valley would finally have its own man in the White House.

But Sacks has always taken a dim view of politics. At 25, appearing on a C‑SPAN talk show while still in law school, he expressed a preference for “the ethos of Wall Street” over “the ethos of Washington” and quoted Calvin Coolidge on the business of America being business, avowing: “I’d probably rather live in a greedy country where people don’t share than in an envious country where people are stealing from each other.”

Sacks went to Washington on behalf of business, including his own. But business and politics demand different, sometimes opposing talents. “Sacks’s policies are misaligned with his own party,” a congressional aide with a close view of how Sacks operates in Washington told me. “He doesn’t really understand how D.C. works.” His efforts in government on behalf of the tech industry have exposed the president to the charge that Trump is selling out his populist base on behalf of the country’s richest men, driving a wedge through the MAGA coalition.

Sacks once called a rare victory over Thiel in a game of chess one of the greatest moments of his life. In a photo, his arms are raised skyward, ecstatic disbelief on his face. He spent the early years of his career as a kind of junior partner in Thiel’s shadow. Sacks was born in 1972 in South Africa, and moved to the United States at age 5. He grew up in Memphis and attended an elite boys’ prep school before going on to Stanford University. As a sophomore with right-wing views he inevitably gravitated toward Thiel, who was by then in law school, and joined The Stanford Review, the conservative campus publication that Thiel had started as an undergrad. It took aim at the politically correct orthodoxy and anti-Western ideology that swept over American higher education in the late ’80s and early ’90s and never really left. But the outnumbered young conservatives’ mockery almost always overshot the target. An entire issue was devoted to making light of rape, including a contribution from Sacks that challenged whether statutory rape should be a crime. (He has since expressed regret for some of his youthful writings.)

Thiel was determined to be a public intellectual like his hero William F. Buckley, so he began writing a book on left-wing campus extremism. When he found the work too onerous, he turned the research over to Sacks, and they co-authored The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, published in 1995 by a libertarian think tank. Sacks attended the University of Chicago Law School, but law was too much like the detested public sector, and in 1999, when Thiel co-founded an online-payments company in Palo Alto that was soon to be called PayPal, Sacks left a consulting job to lead the company’s product team. He made important contributions to PayPal’s success; by various accounts, including Sacks’s own, he was also known for telling co-workers in blunt terms that they were wrong. A former colleague told me that with Sacks, “there’s masters and there’s slaves. He doesn’t have partners: ‘You do what I tell you to do, or you’re one of the few people that tell me what you want me to do.’ ” The former colleague added, “Part of his drive is that he believes he is one of the small number of elite people who really get it and are capable.” (The former colleague and some other Silicon Valley sources requested anonymity to discuss a figure who has power over their businesses; some government officials requested anonymity to speak about White House conversations, because they were not authorized to talk about them. Sacks declined to be interviewed.)

PayPal became famous for surviving the dot-com crash in 2000, and for producing a spawn of Silicon Valley stars known as the PayPal Mafia, including Sacks. Roger McNamee, a longtime tech investor, watched its success with admiration and apprehension. The PayPal Mafia saw before anyone else that the cost of starting an internet company was going to drop significantly. “They realized that the limits on processing power were going to go away,” McNamee told me. But these 20- and 30-somethings were not inspired in the same way that the founders of earlier Silicon Valley companies were: “They didn’t follow the vision of Steve Jobs, that tech can democratize power. They came to get rich.” McNamee added, “If their value system had been different, we would have a completely different country today.”

I met Sacks in 2011, at a dinner at Thiel’s house in San Francisco with a small group of entrepreneurs and investors, most of them PayPal alumni. They despised higher education, worshipped the creators of tech companies, wanted to found libertarian colonies on the high seas and be cryogenically frozen for future resurrection—eccentric outliers then, but forerunners of a broader political trend in the Valley. One guest was an AI expert named Eliezer Yudkowsky. Last year, he co-authored If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, which concludes that artificial superintelligence will kill literally every human being on Earth—thereby causing Thiel to label him “a legionnaire of the Antichrist.”

[Read: AI is grown, not built]

Sacks seemed the most normal of the group. He was a businessman with conventional libertarian views, more optimistic than Thiel about the economic power of the internet, less apocalyptic about the decline and fall of “Western civilization,” a key term in The Diversity Myth that Sacks seldom used after publication, showing no consistent ideological attachment other than to capitalism. His distaste for politics remained strong. “This is the battle,” Sacks told me. “Can the web disrupt the rest of the economy, or does the old economy fight back using politics to keep the new economy from taking over?” At the time we spoke, he was trying to disrupt the car-wash business. He had invested in an app that allowed you to send your car’s location to a person who would come wash it while you were off getting sushi or founding a company or taking a meeting in Hong Kong. The app, called Cherry, lasted only a year, but Sacks did better with another early-stage investment in a company that sent a town car to pick you up. “It’s totally disrupted the taxi business,” Sacks said of Uber, with undisguised pleasure.

He did extremely well, with a movie he co-produced in 2005 (Thank You for Smoking ), with a company he co-founded in 2008 (a Slack-like social network for businesses called Yammer), and with his investments: in Facebook, Palantir, and SpaceX after PayPal was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002; in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies after he sold Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012. That year, he threw himself a Marie Antoinette–themed 40th birthday party in a rented ancien régime–style Los Angeles mansion, with special guest Snoop Dogg. “Part of believing in capitalism is you don’t have to feel guilty,” Sacks told me.

Christian Grattan / Patrick McMullan / Getty

David Sacks and Elon Musk attend a party after a screening of the 2005 film Thank You for Smoking, which they co-produced, at Elaine’s in New York City.

He conducted himself in the usual way of an aristocrat of the second Gilded Age: buying lavish properties, contributing to mainstream politicians (Mitt Romney in 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016), and guarding his family’s privacy. He deplored the deterioration of urban life and funded the recall of San Francisco’s ultraprogressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin. Unlike Thiel, he didn’t publish writings on reactionary philosophers and the virtues of monopolistic capitalism.

The politics of the Valley was always a liberal sort of libertarianism: pro-choice, pro-immigration, idealistic, even utopian, arrogant about its mission of empowering individuals and connecting humanity, but indifferent to and ignorant of government, with an engineer’s contempt for the creaky workings of bureaucracy and the cluelessness of elected officials. Leave us alone to do our magic, which you can’t possibly understand, and everyone will benefit.

But about a decade ago, tech’s free ride ran into trouble. In 2013 Marc Andreessen, an inventor of the first popular web browser in the ’90s and now one of the Valley’s most successful venture capitalists, predicted to me a public backlash against technology companies over privacy rights, intellectual property, and monopoly power. With more foresight he would have included the addictive and corrosive effects of social media. Three years later, in 2016, Facebook enabled Russian meddling in an election that inflamed American divisions and sent Trump to the White House.

Trump and his populist followers made Big Tech a favorite target; so did progressives such as Senator Elizabeth Warren. Under bipartisan pressure, Silicon Valley had to search for ways to keep the government out of its business. Executives and investors spent fortunes on lobbying and campaign contributions. Mark Zuckerberg showed up in Washington to stand before Congress with his hand raised—eyes wide, as if stunned by the reality of representative government—and explain in tortured sentences why Facebook’s platforms weren’t driving America’s children to anxiety and depression while shredding the country’s civic ligature.

“Concern with tech monopoly was big in the first Trump administration,” Tim Wu, an antitrust expert and a professor at Columbia Law School who served in the White House under President Biden, told me. “This has been largely forgotten, but the first Trump administration brought the first cases against Facebook, which are under appeal, and against Google, which we won under Biden.” Biden’s Federal Trade Commission and the antitrust division of his Justice Department pushed anti-monopoly policies even harder. The tech giants “wanted to be able to get in and tell us what to do about everything,” Wu said.

Still, the confrontation between Washington and Silicon Valley under Biden was more rhetorical than substantive. His administration failed to push through any meaningful regulation of the industry, and its legislative achievements in infrastructure, semiconductor manufacturing, and clean energy directly benefited the technology sector. Yet during Biden’s presidency a highly visible element of Silicon Valley turned against the Democrats. It became known as the tech right.

Its most famous figure was Thiel, who had kept a lonely vigil for Trump in Silicon Valley since 2016. But by the early 2020s its most vocal spokesperson was Andreessen. For the tech right, technology is Promethean fire. The founders of the most successful companies in the Valley play a godlike role, for they alone can save America and “Western civilization” from Europe’s hyper-regulated stagnation and from communist and Islamist totalitarianism. Fred Turner, a Stanford professor who studies the culture of technology, told me that deep within Silicon Valley’s libertarianism lies “the idea of a community of saints, of special people, entrepreneurs, philosopher kings.”

In 2023 Andreessen published a litany of pseudo-Nietzschean credos called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” On AI: “We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone—we are literally making sand think.” The AI revolution is coming, just as electricity did; it will exalt mankind, and any attempt at regulation would be tantamount to mass slaughter: “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.” Among the “Patron Saints” of this cult of the entrepreneur, Andreessen included John Galt, the hero of every libertarian teen who reads Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, and the 20th-century philosopher James Burnham, best known for predicting that the modern world would be run by an amoral class of “managers,” with the talented few ruling over a mass of semi-slaves. Elsewhere, Andreessen has said that oligarchy is inevitable.

The nearly hysterical voice of “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” is that of a man who has freed himself from a deeply uncomfortable position. Andreessen was a longtime contributor to Democratic candidates. The political change of Silicon Valley figures like him was less a conversion to Trumpism than a deconversion from liberalism, caused by pressure from below and above. In 2025 Andreessen told The New York Times’ Ross Douthat that the new progressivism of the 2010s had “radicalized” young tech workers, turning them into spiteful and, once COVID hit, indolent rebels who intimidated their white, male, for-profit bosses into bowing to the Great Awokening. Andreessen was willing to pay high taxes and support liberal causes and candidates as long as he was regarded as a hero. But during the past decade, what he called “the Deal”—admiration and a free hand for Silicon Valley in exchange for building great companies, making the world better, and supporting Democrats—was broken, when first young people and then the Biden administration turned against the tech industry.

According to Andreessen, the administration wanted to kill the entire cryptocurrency sector by keeping the regulatory rules vague while threatening companies with devastating enforcement actions. He also described a meeting that he and his partner were given with senior officials at the Biden White House in May 2024 that, from the point of view of early-stage venture capitalists, was apocalyptic. Regarding AI, Andreessen claimed, the Biden people declared that the whole industry would be limited to a few heavily regulated large companies, with no place for start-ups: Because social media had turned out to be a disaster for democracy, Silicon Valley had to be nationalized or destroyed. Out in the West Wing parking lot, Andreessen and his partner decided to support Trump in that year’s election.

(I spoke with former Biden officials who disputed what Andreessen claimed he and his partner were told about AI; if anything, the officials said, those present had simply predicted how the capital-intensive technology would play out in the next few years. They pointed to several administration efforts on AI and start-ups that directly contradicted Andreessen’s nightmare account of Biden’s policies. “He needed a conversion story,” one former official told me.)

Illustration by Mike McQuade. Sources: Kiyoshi Ota / Bloomberg / Getty; Consolidated News Pictures / Getty; Sthanlee B. Mirador / Sipa USA / Reuters; Patrick Pleul / Picture Alliance / Getty.

In 2020, during the pandemic lockdowns, Sacks and three other venture capitalists started All-In; the weekly podcast would offer market analysis, political argument, and tech-bro banter about poker and cars. It made them famous online, with Sacks (nickname: “The Rainman”) the smartest, most conservative, and least funny of the four. Shortly after January 6, when Facebook and Twitter banned the soon-to-be-former president and other MAGA figures, Sacks stopped talking about Trump as a threat to democracy. Instead, he denounced the “Big Tech oligarchs” who were threatening free speech in “the biggest power grab in history.”

Free speech—at least as it concerned right-wing political figures—was Sacks’s entry point into MAGA, and he never let it go. Anytime one of the “besties” on All-In mentioned January 6, Sacks countered with claims of censorship. His rhetoric became more polemical, a return to his anti-PC youth, but now in the spirit of Trump, not William F. Buckley, as if he was talking himself into a new political identity. At times his enemies were woke oligarchs, at times mid-level technocrats, at times entry-level radicals, but always “elites.” He criticized the elite’s forever wars and trade giveaways to China, and “the collusion between Big Tech and our security state.” He called himself a “populist” and identified with the two-thirds of Americans who are working-class. In 2022, on the Honestly With Bari Weiss podcast, he said, “I think that the next Republican who’s going to be successful has to take a page out of TR’s”—Teddy Roosevelt’s—“playbook here, which is: ‘We do not represent the interests of these oligarchs and these big, powerful companies. We represent the interests of the working man and woman to have the right to free speech, to make a living, to conduct payments. And it should not be up to tech oligarchs to decide who has those rights.’ ”

[From the March 2024 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on the rise of techno-authoritarianism]

If venture-capital populism seems like a stretch, Sacks resolved it this way: End mass immigration of the mentally average, and you’d lay to rest the heartland’s suspicion of Silicon Valley. The solution to inequality is a smaller, less intrusive government, combined with unbridled technological innovation, which would inevitably increase productivity and wages. (Sacks was unaware or unconcerned that decades of unregulated tech and deregulated finance had coincided with growing economic inequality.) “If the Biden administration had only been letting in people with 150 IQs, we wouldn’t have this debate” about immigration, Sacks said on All-In. “If they were just letting in the Elons and the Jensens”—referring to Musk and Jensen Huang, the CEO of the chipmaker Nvidia—“we wouldn’t be having the same conversation today.”

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Sacks voiced alarm about the dangers of American involvement in the conflict. Soon he adopted whole hog the “realist” line (which was also the Russian line) that NATO’s eastward expansion had provoked Vladimir Putin into a defensive war. No matter how often Putin claimed Ukraine as a historic part of imperial Russia, how many times he refused to negotiate seriously, how many provinces he annexed, how many Ukrainian civilians the Russian military killed and cities it destroyed, Sacks stuck by his theory. Eventually, it sank him into conspiratorial waters.

[Anne Applebaum: Putin’s newest annexation is dire for Russia too]

“This is basically a manufactured conflict that I think really started with Russiagate,” Sacks said in a 2024 speech, “where somehow this fantasy was created that somehow Putin was controlling our elections.” The American left, the “neocons,” and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky managed to fool the U.S. and Europe into risking what Sacks called “Woke War III.” “Somehow, this Russiagate hoax has metastasized into a new cold war with Russia.”

It’s worth asking how someone so committed to facts and logic could end up spouting such nonsense. If Sacks made investment decisions on this basis, he would go bankrupt. An obvious explanation is that a successful businessman might not know much about history and politics. But an intellectual deficiency can be compounded by a moral one. It’s striking that the ordeal of a fragile democracy fighting for its life while under assault by an aggressive empire leaves Sacks so cold that he ends up sympathizing with the perpetrator. If you neutralize any sentiment of right and wrong, Ukraine just looks like a risky bet.

In the 2024 Republican presidential primary, Sacks supported Ron DeSantis—not because Trump had disqualified himself, but because he “just gives his political enemies so much to work with.” A moral objection had become a practical one—so when Trump blew away the Republican field, the final step to complete support was easy. Two weeks after the fundraiser, Trump was invited onto All-In and raved about the splendor of Sacks’s house. Sacks returned the compliment. That July, he delivered a six-and-a-half-minute speech for Trump at the Republican National Convention. By August, he had downgraded January 6 to a long-past event that admittedly “wasn’t great” but had been hyped by Democrats into a “fake coup.”

Jeff Giesea, a fellow Stanford Review alum and entrepreneur who had been a Trump supporter in 2016 before turning against MAGA, gave me a sympathetic account of the calculus made by Sacks and the tech right. “The story Sacks told himself, I imagine, is that, regardless of Trump’s flaws, the benefits to society from pro-tech policies would be a great improvement over an administration that was mired in safetyism and identity politics,” he said.

Sacks had taken the measure of Trump and found a kindred spirit. After getting to know the ex-president at the fundraiser and on the podcast, he reported his findings: “All of his instincts are Let’s empower the private sector; let’s cut regulations; let’s make taxes reasonable; let’s get the smartest people in the country; let’s have peace deals; let’s have growth. ”

Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call / Getty

Sacks, with J. D. Vance in the foreground, at the Republican National Convention in 2024. A month earlier, Sacks had hosted the fundraiser that helped close the deal on Vance’s selection as Donald Trump’s running mate.

In December 2024 Sacks was named the White House special adviser for AI and crypto, with a venture capitalist from Andreessen’s firm installed as his deputy. Sacks’s status as a “special government employee” allowed him to stay on as a partner at his company Craft Ventures, while working no more than 130 days over the course of a year at his government job. He also continued as a co-host of his All-In podcast, analyzing technology, influencing market perceptions, making predictions—all while playing a central role in shaping public policy on AI and crypto.

Because special government employees are subject to most of the conflict-of-interest rules for regular government employees, the Office of Government Ethics (whose head had been fired at the start of Trump’s second term) required two waivers to allow Sacks to keep a foot in both the public and private sectors. They were written by the White House counsel, David Warrington, a Republican operative who had acted as Trump’s personal lawyer after his first term. A spokesperson for Sacks told The Atlantic, “Mr. Sacks and Craft Ventures had to refrain from investing in companies directly affected by his duties as a government adviser and furthermore had to seek approval from the White House Counsel Office for all potential investments.” In essence, the waivers argued that Sacks’s holdings were so large that keeping dozens of small investments in companies related to crypto and AI would pose no conflict of interest for him, because they made up such a tiny fraction of his overall portfolio. But the waivers give only percentages, and their language is so opaque that it’s impossible to know the actual value of these investments. “They try to finesse the issue by saying, ‘Oh, it’s a relatively small percentage of his portfolio, and he’s so rich, it couldn’t possibly affect him,’ ” Kathleen Clark, an ethics lawyer who teaches at Washington University’s law school, told me, adding that this stance beggars belief.

In November, the Times published a lengthy investigation of Sacks, finding that, despite large divestments, he continued to hold stakes in hundreds of companies that advertised themselves as AI-related, and that key policy decisions benefited both Sacks and his Silicon Valley associates. A chorus of them, including Andreessen, rushed to his defense. Sacks called the Times article a “hoax,” hired a defamation-law firm to write a threatening letter, and argued that he had cost himself and his company a lot of money—$200 million in crypto holdings alone—to work in government voluntarily without pay. Clark waved aside the question of whether there’s personal corruption on Sacks’s part. “I urge you to limit your use of the term conflict of interest,” she told me, “because it doesn’t begin to capture what’s going on.”

What’s going on is that Sacks joined the most corrupt administration in American history. Throughout his year in the White House, his work on tech policy brushed up against the spectacular grift of his boss at almost every turn. Giesea, the former Stanford Review colleague, who remains an admirer of Sacks, said, “He is an asset to the Trump administration on AI policy. But now he’s trapped in a corrupt clown show.” The pervasive rot makes it almost impossible to distinguish public policy from private venality. The Trump administration’s corruption requires a taxonomy of its own.

[George Packer: America’s zombie democracy]

At the most blatant level are the gifts the president accepts from abroad: the $130,000 gold bar and the gold Rolex desk clock from Swiss billionaires, followed by a lowering of U.S. tariffs on Switzerland; the $400 million jet from the Qatari royal family that might cost another half a billion or so to be outfitted as Air Force One, followed by a presidential visit (Trump’s first major foreign trip in his second term) to a country accused of sponsoring terrorism; the Trump-family memecoins sold to wealthy favor seekers. Clark called such brazen bribes “power corruption”: displays intended to show that Trump can get away with anything—“the equivalent of shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue.”

A slightly less glaring kind of corruption abuses government power for private gain: presidential pardons handed out to past and future benefactors; investment deals floated by Trump’s two favorite diplomats, his real-estate buddy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, during the most sensitive peace talks in Russia and the Middle East; major investments in Trump-family crypto and real-estate businesses by foreign governments with extensive U.S. interests; stock trades and prediction bets likely based on insider access to official information, including about war.

Criminal anti-corruption statutes are still on the books. But these embarrassing shows of personal turpitude go uninvestigated and unpunished because the mechanisms for holding public officials accountable have been destroyed. When whistleblowers go unprotected, inspectors general are fired, incompetent loyalists replace nonpartisan civil servants, the Department of Justice is turned into the president’s own law firm and police force, and Congress abandons any oversight function, nothing is left to prevent the rot from spreading into every cell of government. (When Senator Warren wrote to Sacks asking for information on potential conflicts of interest in his role as a special government employee, the answer was silence.) The effect is to demoralize the public, to instill a sense of powerlessness. “We’re living in an era when the corruption is occurring on an unprecedented scale, orders of magnitude larger than anything we’ve seen in the history of this country,” Clark said. “And yet the more important story is what Trump has done to enable that corruption, which is dismantling the rule of law.”

Finally, there’s what Lawrence Lessig, of Harvard Law School, calls “institutional corruption,” which may be perfectly legal: the warping of public trust toward private ends, the replacement of the country’s priorities with those of a special-interest group. This brings us back to Sacks.

In his 2025 inaugural address, Trump declared America to be at the start of a “golden age.” His administration put crypto and AI at its center.

Cryptocurrency is a long-standing libertarian project—the dream of a privatized financial system. The founders of PayPal originally aspired to create a tool that gave people around the world access to finance, including in poor and corrupt countries without reliable banking institutions. But in practice, crypto’s anonymity and volatility have made it extremely prone to criminal activity and risky speculation. As a candidate in 2024, Trump, a former crypto skeptic and a latecomer to investing in it, won the industry’s lucrative backing on a promise to put the federal government to work on its behalf and turn the U.S. into “the crypto capital of the planet.” Back in office, he pardoned convicted crypto executives, neutered consumer protections, ended investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission into crypto firms with ties to Trump’s businesses, and disbanded the Justice Department’s crypto-enforcement team. In May 2025, investors paid up to $400 million to buy $TRUMP memecoins in exchange for access to the president at a private crypto gala. Since 2024, Trump’s crypto wealth has grown by at least $7.5 billion.

[James Surowiecki: Crypto is a victim of its own success]

Sacks’s main item of business was to push through Congress a bill that would create a regulatory structure for cryptocurrency—something that the Biden administration hadn’t done, to the frustration of the industry and venture capitalists. The GENIUS Act required issuers of a type of crypto called stablecoin to back their digital currency on a one-to-one basis with assets such as dollars and short-term U.S. Treasury bills. According to Sacks and other supporters, the GENIUS Act would position the dollar as the default currency of the digital economy, while providing guardrails against fraud and other abuses. Critics argued that the guardrails were inadequate, and that crypto issued by private firms with government backing could undermine the entire financial system because of weak regulations and nonexistent enforcement actions. The law also does nothing to prevent government officials from profiting off crypto. When the GENIUS Act passed on a bipartisan vote in July, Silicon Valley and Sacks won the first big return on their investment in Trump.

If Sacks’s purpose with crypto was to bring it under a federal regulatory regime in order to make the industry more viable to buyers and valuable to investors, his goal with AI was to keep it unregulated, and to align administration policy with the industry’s wishes. His motto became “Let the private sector cook.”

At the start of his term, Trump revoked a Biden executive order that, among other measures, required AI labs to share the results of safety testing with the government. Though one company found that complying with the order required just one day of work for a single employee per year, Trump pronounced it onerous. Safetyism became a dirty word on the tech right, almost as contemptible as the phrase woke AI—an all-purpose indictment of Biden-era attempts to limit harm from AI to the public, especially children. Yet in the early weeks of the new administration, its policies reflected more continuity than rupture. Not only did Trump keep Biden’s restrictions on licensing the export of advanced AI technology to adversaries such as China; he even strengthened them.

Sacks’s influence increased when Elon Musk, his old friend and fellow PayPal mafioso, who was running the Department of Government Efficiency near the czar’s office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, walked away from his work of stripping the executive branch. “You see a more conciliatory approach to China emerging only after Musk has his falling-out with the White House,” Oren Cass, the founder of the conservative think tank American Compass, told me. “With Musk out of the picture, I think Sacks certainly became more prominent.” In April 2025, David Feith, a China hawk who was a senior director for technology and national security on the National Security Council, was fired in a larger purge after the right-wing influencer Laura Loomer warned Trump that Feith was disloyal. Soon after, the NSC’s whole technology directorate was eliminated, clearing the way for Sacks to become the loudest voice on tech policy. His goal was to keep AI free of regulation and let the private sector sell the most advanced American technology to the world—even to China.

On May 13, Trump scrapped a Biden rule, about to take effect, that would have restricted the global spread of advanced AI technology by dividing countries into three categories of trust, with China fully denied access. (A former White House official called it “the most ‘America First’ rule the Biden administration ever had.”) That same day the president traveled to the Middle East to consummate a deal, which Sacks had helped negotiate, to sell 500,000 AI chips to the United Arab Emirates. This astonishing figure alarmed national-security officials: Some of the chips were likely to end up in China, where strict export controls still applied, and the sale would make it easier for the Emiratis to acquire enough computing power to build their own AI capabilities.

The smell of corruption hung in the air before Air Force One took off for Abu Dhabi. At the beginning of May, one of Witkoff’s sons had announced that the Emirates’ AI-investment firm would put $2 billion into the crypto exchange Binance, using a stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, the crypto company founded by the Trump and Witkoff families. A co-founder of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, was pardoned by Trump after serving four months in a U.S. prison in 2024 for failing to comply with anti-money-laundering measures. In January of this year, The Wall Street Journal reported an even more blatant scandal: A few days before Trump’s inauguration, a powerful Emirati politician known as the “spy sheikh” (almost always photographed wearing sunglasses, even in the Oval Office) had bought a 49 percent share of World Liberty Financial. These deals made the UAE chip sale look like a giant payoff from the administration.

No one is allowed to be more corrupt than the president, but Sacks may well benefit from Emirati goodwill. The nearly $3 trillion UAE sovereign-wealth fund, of which more than half is controlled by the spy sheikh, offers an immense pot of money for venture capital. Although Sacks had no financial interest in the chip deal that he helped broker, it could put Craft Ventures in a sweet spot for a future round of funding. Is it unfair to point this out? Sacks’s position makes it naive not to. Remaining an investor while serving in an administration rife with graft and shaping policies that could significantly affect present and future deals blurs the line between public and private into indistinction. “It’s hard to disentangle his ideology from his personal interests,” the congressional aide who has followed Sacks closely said. “Maybe they’re one and the same: ‘Let the private sector cook,’ and it just so happens he benefits handsomely from that.” (Sacks’s spokesperson told The Atlantic that future investments “would not be a violation of government-ethics rules. Qualified people would not want to serve in government if it meant permanently giving up their careers.”)

On July 23, the White House released its “AI action plan” at an event in Washington co-hosted by the All-In podcast. Trump called out each of Sacks’s “besties” from the show, and they shared the stage with Vice President Vance and other administration leaders. (Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, had nixed the original idea for All-In to be the sole sponsor, perhaps out of a sense of propriety.) The 28-page plan, “Winning the Race,” called for rapid development of AI technology and construction of data centers so the U.S. can achieve global dominance. It was co-signed by Sacks, but its main author was Dean Ball, a technology researcher who served as a White House adviser for four months last year. Ball pointed out to me that the plan didn’t pose a choice between innovation and safety, nor did it take a position on changes in export controls: “What it does say is we should enforce the chip-export controls that we have more robustly than we currently do.”

But Sacks had already undermined this key aspect of the plan. A week before it was released, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, the world’s leader in AI-chip production, had announced the resumption of the sale of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China, which the Trump administration had banned in April, before Sacks became the dominant official in tech policy. AI is an industry in which the U.S. has a significant advantage over its main rival. China is able to produce less than 3 percent of U.S. computing power—200,000 chips a year to America’s 12 million or so. Hardly anyone except Sacks was able to explain how the decision to lift the ban on selling chips to China fit with “winning the race” for global dominance, or with an “America First” administration.

[Read: Trump wasted no time derailing his own AI plan]

“I would define winning as the whole world consolidates around the American tech stack,” he said on All-In. “If we have 80 to 90 percent market share, that’s winning.” In other words, sell advanced American AI everywhere, including China, to make U.S. technologies and companies dominant. The counterargument, made to me by former Biden-administration officials as well as conservative critics of the Trump-Sacks policy, is that China will never allow itself to become dependent on U.S. technology. Instead, the People’s Republic will do what it’s done in other sectors: steal U.S. technology and innovate its own—the long-term “indigenization” strategy of Xi Jinping, and the reason the regime has prevented Chinese AI companies, which are hungry for American chips, from importing anywhere close to the numbers the Trump administration has made available for sale.

“Folks on the pro-export side have a story about how actually selling more of these advanced chips to China will addict them to our technology stack and slow their progress,” Oren Cass said of the Trump-Sacks policy. “I find it a ridiculously inadequate story that never holds up to 10 seconds of scrutiny.” Cass distinguished between an ideological view of U.S.-China competition (“two incompatible systems that can coexist but can’t be integrated in any meaningful way”) and the commercial view that has always been Trump’s, and seems to be Sacks’s. The key figure in moving American tech policy on China to the commercial view was Huang, who was eager to gain greater access to the Chinese market. Sacks now had the clout to accompany the CEO of the world’s richest firm into the Oval Office. “When Jensen comes to town, it elevates Sacks’s stature,” the congressional aide said.

I asked a former White House official with knowledge of the discussions if Sacks had achieved his goal of lifting the ban on selling chips to China simply by sitting down with Huang and a president with a well-known weakness for plutocrats. “Yes. That is exactly what happened,” the former official said. As for Sacks’s motive, “there is not a rational explanation. I think doing favors for Nvidia is the only real explanation, or else he believes Nvidia’s talking points that no one else buys.” (In a letter to The New York Times in November, Sacks’s lawyers wrote that the policies Sacks had advocated for benefited “all American chip companies” and that “Mr. Sacks has independently arrived at his views on chip policy by consulting and reading hundreds of experts in the space.”)

Even if Sacks is solely motivated by a sincere belief in free-market capitalism, his portfolio companies could now have privileged access to the world’s most coveted computer chips in a market where demand is stronger than supply. “This is why the person who’s regulating AI for the U.S. government shouldn’t also be running a venture-capital firm that has money all throughout the tech industry,” the former White House official said. “Of course he’s picking the winners that in some way benefit him.”

In December, Huang secured an even more valuable victory when the White House allowed Nvidia to begin selling to China one of its most advanced AI chips, the H200. This was too much for some conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. Jim Banks, a MAGA-aligned senator from Indiana, had already introduced bipartisan legislation, called GAIN AI, that required Nvidia to put American customers, such as start-up companies and universities, ahead of Chinese companies for its limited supply of AI chips. Sacks, determined to prevent government from limiting tech’s commercial potential, began lobbying hard to keep GAIN AI out of the annual defense-appropriation bill. His efforts to get Republican senators to strip it from their version failed, but when the White House declared its opposition, House Republican leadership killed GAIN AI just before the final vote in December. “What ultimately happened is Jensen talked to the president about this, the dam broke, and Sacks got his way,” the congressional aide told me.

Sacks had less success when the administration tried to get Congress to pass a 10-year moratorium on state AI regulations. The measure lost in the Senate in July, 99–1, but its unpopularity didn’t deter Sacks from trying again. In December, Trump signed an executive order, written by Sacks, that banned states from passing laws to regulate AI. By then, state legislatures had introduced hundreds of bills—chiefly in blue states such as California and New York, but also in Florida, Utah, and Texas—and enacted dozens.

Sacks’s heavy-handed interventions in Congress on behalf of tech companies did not sit well with some of Trump’s MAGA allies. Stopping the spread of sexual material, protecting children from harmful chatbots, preserving individual privacy, heading off catastrophic threats such as bioterrorism, preventing large-scale unemployment—these things turn out to matter to Americans across the partisan divide. Polls consistently show that a majority fear AI will do more harm than good. Citizens of the world’s AI leader have a more negative view of the technology than those of almost any other country. Appearing on All-In in December, Tucker Carlson gently pointed out to Sacks and his co-hosts that Americans already feel powerless—“and all of a sudden you have a technology that promises to concentrate power still further in the hands of people other than them, and so they’re touchy about it.”

Oren Cass told me, “One of the challenges of the tech right is they are—what’s the opposite of adept ?” I offered clumsy. “They are very politically clumsy and don’t have a very good feel for the realities of the American electorate, how politics is conducted, what it takes to be successful.” Steve Bannon, a leader of the populist wing of the MAGA movement, recently told me that Sacks’s efforts on behalf of Silicon Valley are blowing up in his face. “Sacks is the best thing to ever happen to the populist revolt against the oligarchs. His unique blend of arrogance and incompetence has single-handedly delivered humiliating defeat to the AI supremacists.”

Brian Snyder / Reuters

Sacks and the Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a private White House dinner for technology and business leaders in September

Meanwhile, AI’s capability is doubling about every four months. It is already changing work and life for millions of people, with the potential to transform fields such as medicine and war. Its inventors spend hundreds of billions of dollars to develop the technology even as they issue dire warnings of its dangers: It might kill us, but we have to make it as powerful as possible as fast as possible. Sacks dismisses or minimizes the potential for harm. In public comments he has claimed that AI isn’t addictive like social media, that productivity gains will more than make up for lost jobs, and that the number of teenage suicides caused by chatbots is small. Because China doesn’t care about things like copyright protection, compensated journalism, and restrictions on export licenses, we can’t afford to either. He accuses skeptics of belonging to the cult of effective altruists—“doomers,” funded by a few anti-AI Big Tech billionaires, who peddle lies to invite global control of the technology for their own financial gain.

One of the doomers, Nate Soares, a co-author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, told me: “The lab leaders say this is horribly dangerous, the employees say this is horribly dangerous, the eminent scientists and researchers who developed AI decades ago say this is horribly dangerous. The only people who say ‘Don’t worry’ are the venture capitalists. They’re the ones who stand to profit from it but aren’t close enough to understand it.”

Unlike Andreessen, Sacks doesn’t equate regulating AI with mass murder. But for every concern, he has the same answer: AI is coming, just like the tide. If America doesn’t win the race, China will.

Once in government, Sacks learned to adopt his boss’s language and defend the indefensible. He derided “fake news” and called climate change a “hoax,” January 6 prosecutions “lawfare,” the notion of White House corruption “nonsense,” and the killing of two protesters by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis a consequence of “antifa-style operations” intent on thwarting the president’s deportation of “criminal aliens.” He liked Trump’s idea of seizing Greenland and predicted that the war in Iran, which he blamed on “that whole neocon establishment,” would probably be short and decisive because the markets wanted it over and Trump’s political instincts were “impeccable.” But on the threats of censorship, politicized justice, state surveillance, and monopoly power, which had once animated his outrage, and which now came from the Trump administration, he had nothing to say. Sacks had become what he always despised—political.

[From the July 2025 issue: The talented Mr. Vance]

In March, he left his position as AI-and-crypto czar, saying that he had completed his 130 days of service, and returned full-time to Craft Ventures. In December he had moved from San Francisco to Austin, just in time to escape a proposed tax on billionaires that may appear before California voters this November.

Silicon Valley will still have a valuable line to the White House. When Sacks stepped down, he was named co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Its members include Andreessen, Zuckerberg, Huang, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, a co-founder of a cryptocurrency exchange, the CEO of a semiconductor manufacturer, and a billionaire investor who co-hosts All-In with Sacks. (Among the 15 there is one academic scientist.) This lineup, almost a parody of crony capitalism, signals the final union of America’s interests with those of its wealthiest citizens—tech power fused with state power. The private sector is cooking in Washington.

In his year there, Sacks achieved his two central goals: putting the government’s seal of approval on crypto and keeping its hands off artificial intelligence. He was also a founding member of an exclusive MAGA-aligned club in Georgetown, with a fee of $500,000, called the Executive Branch, and he midwifed the creation of an AI-industry lobby, Innovation Council, that plans to spend at least $100 million in support of the Trump administration’s technology policy in this year’s midterm elections.

In winning his policy battles, though, Sacks might have lost the war. What Tim Wu calls “the turn away from populism to corruption in tech policy” has alienated important parts of the MAGA coalition from Trump and his rich backers. Steve Bannon says that he and his anti–Big Tech allies are going to make the Innovation Council “the moral equivalent of AIPAC: You take that money and you’re dead.” At some point, an unlikely left-right alliance could unite against the tech oligarchs. “Donald Trump and his administration are using the presidency to make themselves and their billionaire friends richer,” Senator Warren told me, listing Sacks’s policy achievements in crypto and AI. “We are at an inflection point where very powerful AI systems threaten to displace jobs and transform our economy—and we will be living with the consequences for years if Sacks gets his way.”

AI could well be the most important issue in the 2028 presidential election. Sacks has moved Trump into the camp of the Silicon Valley saints, selling a world few people actually want to live in, where the state is the handmaiden of industry, wealth accumulates to insider elites tainted by grift, and ordinary people find that they’re losing the last power they have left, over their own minds.

Every so often, the hosts of All-In remember that staggering quantities of money are pooling upward in America, while discontent roils down below. Suddenly sounding earnest, almost chastened, one of them will call on the group to “fix this inequality gap,” end “ostentatious displays of wealth,” do more in the mode of Carnegie and Rockefeller to benefit the public, maybe even support a wealth tax to stave off the coming class war. But Sacks will have none of it. He alone remains committed to the principle of self-interest. He still believes that capitalism means never having to say you’re sorry.

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

Yet Another Wasted Met Gala

2026-05-05T14:09:05-04:00

Every year, the Met Gala—the opulent celebration of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute—unveils a theme with a dress code that its famous attendees then attempt to interpret. And every year, many of the guests fail the assignment: They arrive in a superficial take on “punk” or an awkward rendition of “dandyism,” if they don’t veer off course completely. (See: various questionable efforts to capture the 2019 theme, “camp.”) It’s a treat, then, when someone gets it just right.

Someone like the actor Tessa Thompson at this year’s event, for instance. The theme of the 2026 exhibit, “Costume Art,” considered how fashion and fine art intersect; the gala’s corresponding dress code was “fashion is art.” Thompson’s Valentino garment, inspired by the French painter Yves Klein, couldn’t have been more appropriate. Klein was known for exploring a particular shade of ultramarine blue, now known as International Klein Blue, throughout his career; in one project, he drenched models in blue paint and used them as human paintbrushes. Thompson’s dress, in said hue, involved sculptural pattern cuttings (fashion) and evoked the shape of paint splatter (fine art). She even coated her fingers in blue makeup, referencing Klein’s MO down to the last detail.

If you tuned in to the official livestream of the Met Gala red carpet last night, however, you would have learned none of this. Indeed, you wouldn’t have learned much at all. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the spotlight stayed largely on the spectacle. One ostentatiously dressed invitee after another paraded across the screen; occasionally they were stopped for a trivia-laden interview. Did you know Amanda Seyfried has a donkey whose milk she does not drink, because the donkey is male? Or that Hailey Bieber loves listening to Rihanna when she’s getting ready?

[Read: The real game changer at the Met Gala]

Shallow chitchat is the lingua franca of red-carpet Q&As—but the Met Gala is the rare venue where the question “Who are you wearing?” can yield actual substance beyond just a name, and more so this year than in the recent past. The Costume Institute exhibit heralded last night features nine new mannequins modeling body types that aren’t typically included in the fashion industry, including those that are in wheelchairs, pregnant, or missing limbs. “Fashion is art” was meant to encourage attendees to think about how every human body is a canvas, and about how making an item of clothing—the precision that goes into selecting textiles, creating shapes, and combining colors—requires the same kind of artistry deployed by the painters and sculptors featured throughout the museum. In a speech before the evening began, Anna Wintour, the Vogue editorial director and Met Gala co-chair credited with transforming the event into the A-list pageant it is today, emphasized that the evening was an opportunity to showcase the work that goes into fashion—work, she said, that included the efforts of hairdressers, drivers, and caterers, who make the Met Gala itself possible. Once she hit the carpet, Wintour noted that the livestream also encourages tourists to visit the Met in person.

Yet what the Met puts on display for such visitors to view seemed beside the point last night. Some celebrities, such as Lena Dunham and Gwendoline Christie, mentioned some of the artworks and artists they were referencing, such as Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes and John Singer Sargent, respectively. A handful of times, an image of a concept sketch or the cited inspiration appeared on-screen. But mostly, for every minute an interview devoted to exploring the thinking behind an outfit, another was spent on empty blather. The designer Michael Kors, for example, who made Anne Hathaway’s gown, had just finished describing the dress as an ode to the Grecian urns in the Met when the conversation turned to Hathaway’s sleep schedule.

The superficiality, perhaps unintentionally, highlighted the noise surrounding this year’s Met Gala—particularly the fact that the billionaires Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos were the lead sponsors and honorary co-chairs of the evening. But anyone watching the livestream would not have heard the hosts discuss the protests that had cropped up against the Amazon founder’s involvement, or that one protester was detained after attempting to enter the event. (This is not the first time that the Met Gala has met in-person pushback; pro-Palestine demonstrators similarly stood out front, and off camera, last year.) They wouldn’t have noticed that the gala was attended by several tech CEOs, some of whom skipped the photo op and slipped inside; Sánchez Bezos posed for the cameras but didn’t participate in interviews. Other reporters whose exchanges weren’t caught on the livestream did ask celebrities about Bezos’s participation: Venus Williams, one of this year’s celebrity co-chairs alongside Beyonce, sidestepped a question, while Cher mentioned she was “not a fan.”

The emphasis on glamour did nonetheless offer some excitement—and financial payoff. This year’s Met Gala brought Beyoncé back to the event for the first time in 10 years, saw the debut of Stevie Nicks as an attendee, and raised a record-breaking $42 million, putting the Costume Institute on track to become self-sustaining. But the gala’s masterminds—including Wintour and Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator—should go beyond showing off bespoke gowns and suits. The event is a pop-culture institution with the cachet to really elevate the artistry of fashion. Beyond letting the public ogle nice suits and gowns, it could emphasize the handiwork that goes into such clothing—and help us understand what makes the spectacle possible.

Progressive Activists Are Sometimes on the Wrong Side of History

2026-05-05T10:51:56-04:00

The debate over Israel’s war with Hamas has been unusually vicious in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where pro-Palestine activists have vandalized, spat on, and menaced targets they deemed too Zionist. At the University of Michigan’s graduation ceremony on an unseasonably chilly Saturday morning in front of some 70,000 spectators—including me, my wife, and our parents—the historian and faculty senate chair Derek Peterson instructed the crowd that the moral and just position in this dispute belonged entirely to one side. That side, ironically, is the one responsible for nearly all the intimidation in Ann Arbor.

“The greatness of this university rests also on the courage and the conviction of student activists who have pushed this university down the path towards justice,” Peterson said, citing “the pro-Palestinian student activists, who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.”

Whether the activists have opened hearts to their position or had the opposite effect (a possibility for which there is at least some evidence), is a matter of debate. But debate is the very thing Peterson wishes to preclude. In his brief speech, he recounted how women, Jews, and African Americans pushed for needed social change at the university, and he described today’s Palestinian activists as a continuation of this virtuous history. The theme was that progressive activists inherently occupy the right side of history.

[George Packer: Why activism leads to so much bad writing]

This is a common view on the left, one that sometimes leads progressives who recoil from activists’ specific positions or actions to withhold disapproval. The left’s reverence for activism is a pathology that can enable the movement’s worst ideas and instincts to escape scrutiny.

Despite that, Peterson walked the Michigan Stadium crowd through a narrative that is familiar to any liberal and to nearly any recent graduate of a prestigious university. Equality was not handed down by benevolent leaders, he suggested, but demanded by brave activists who defied social condemnation. Their critics may have disparaged their causes and perhaps their methods at the time, but history has proved them correct. It follows, therefore, that their modern heirs will eventually be seen as equally just. I’ve had versions of this argument thrown back at me nearly every time I’ve criticized any progressive activist group.

One flaw with this account is that it is selective. Over the past two years, many Michigan students have marched or chanted in support of Israel, but Peterson excluded them from his litany of activists blessed by the legacy of righteous protest. The actual argument made by Peterson and others is for deference not to student activists in general but specifically to progressive student activists. And even this one-sided deference suffers from a survivorship bias of sorts. Progressives believe that activists are on the right side of history, because they choose to remember the causes that fared well. But activists on the left have not always acted with wisdom and foresight: Left-wing demonstrators also marched against aid to the Allies in the 1940s, to block nuclear power in the 1970s, and in defense of totalitarian regimes during the Cold War.

The assumption that progressive activists are inherently on the side of justice elevates them above the category of mere political actors into a kind of priestly class whom others can only learn from, and can never criticize. It redirects any scrutiny of their positions to general admiration for their idealism and passion.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Choose the activism that won’t make you miserable]

Concern and empathy for Palestinian suffering and anger at Israel’s excessive counterattack are admirable, but the movement’s ambition is not limited to that. Michigan’s pro-Palestine activism is primarily organized by Students Allied for Freedom and Equality, which is the local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a national network. Both the national group and its Michigan chapter have endorsed the October 7, 2023, attacks. Adult progressives’ insistence on viewing their activities as mere youthful idealism makes it impossible to question those positions.

The activists themselves have absorbed the historical-justice narrative, concluding that they are entitled to take whatever steps they see fit to advance their cause. Many campus chapters have seized common space for themselves, an action that no group is allowed. If the crew team, a fraternity, or some local MAGA fans occupied a chunk of grass that belongs to the whole community, they would be evicted quickly. Michigan’s activists did this, and also repeatedly intimidated targets at their homes, including throwing a jar filled with urine through the window of the Democratic regent Jordan Acker’s house in the middle of the night.

Most causes have adherents who get carried away. But not every cause does so with the encouragement of professors who cast them as angels of justice by mere dint of the category of action they are taking. Peterson was lecturing an audience of graduates and their families. Much like the activists he praised, he was commandeering a common space intended to belong to the entire university community on behalf of a narrower, contested segment of it. In so doing, he demonstrated how a belief in the immutable righteousness of one’s own side can be a license to abuse power.

What Adding Race to BMI Can Do

2026-05-05T08:00:00-04:00

In recent years, the perils of body mass index, or BMI, have become a hobbyhorse for professionals in several fields of medicine and research. For decades, doctors have used BMI to help diagnose and treat obesity, diabetes, and other chronic conditions, even as evidence has accumulated that the metric is a poor proxy for excess fat. BMI factors in height and weight but not actual body composition; many people with high BMIs are the picture of health, and many with “healthy” BMIs are at serious risk of metabolic disease. The case against BMI is strong enough that many in medicine would like to be free of it.

Gripes have been raised, too, about medical guidance that relies on race. Although race can track with some factors that influence health, such as lifestyle and socioeconomic status, its relationship to genetic differences is tenuous: Designations such as “Black” and “Asian” cover so many people, with such varied backgrounds, that they’re essentially meaningless as biological categories. When doctors have used race to assess well-being, they’ve missed diagnoses and discriminated against patients. Experts now widely consider many race-based tools in medicine to be harmful and outdated, and are eager to leave them behind.

But researchers and clinicians still rely deeply on both BMI and race, in some cases at the same time. When screening for type 2 diabetes, for instance, race-sensitive BMI cutoffs identify more at-risk people than either factor alone. And however conflicted experts are over how to use that tool and others like it, finding alternatives comes with its own baggage.

When weighing the risk factors for type 2 diabetes, doctors generally flag a BMI of 25 or higher—what’s usually considered “overweight”—as a factor for further testing. But experts have known for a long time that this universal cutoff makes little sense. The original calculation of BMI arose nearly 200 years ago, was never intended for medical use, and was based on data from primarily white, European populations. And so researchers, clinicians, and policy makers around the world have pushed for people of Asian descent to get that same screening at a lower BMI threshold, of 23. The American Diabetes Association and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force have supported that guidance for years; the CDC’s online prediabetes test has lower BMI cutoffs for Asian Americans than for people from other backgrounds. In Asian countries such as South Korea and Singapore, the lower threshold has been adopted as the national standard. At this point, the reality for people of Asian descent seems quite clear: “We do know that certain groups would benefit from more aggressive therapy at lower BMI cutoffs,” Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity-medicine specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, told me.

In this case, applying a race-and-ethnicity filter may help address some of BMI’s shortcomings. Studies suggest that many people of Asian descent—especially of South Asian descent—might have more trouble regulating their blood sugar than other racial and ethnic groups do, and seem more likely to store fat “in places that it shouldn’t be,” such as around visceral organs, in the abdomen, in the liver, and in muscles, Alka Kanaya, a diabetes researcher at UC San Francisco, told me. That so-called visceral fat seems to drive inflammation and insulin resistance, and has been linked to serious medical issues. But BMI can’t account for the location of fat in the body and so can mask diabetes risk for populations in which bodies might appear thin but have more centralized fat. Using a BMI of 25 to screen for diabetes could mean missing one-third to one-half of Asian Americans with type 2 diabetes; a threshold of 23, meanwhile, could cut that missed proportion in half.

At the same time, racialized cutoffs reveal the drawbacks of relying on race at all. “Asians” is a big group—billions of people—that itself contains immense diversity. And when researchers parse out people of, say, Vietnamese descent from those of Indian, Filipino, Chinese, Korean, or Pacific Islander heritage, they find different risks (without much insight into whether those differences are driven by lifestyle, socioeconomic factors, genetics, or a combination). Not everyone knows their full racial or ethnic makeup; people of mixed backgrounds are one of the fastest-growing demographic groups in the United States. “How do you classify them?” Maria Rosario Araneta, an epidemiologist and a diabetes researcher at UC San Diego, asked me. Ideal screening tools excel both at identifying risky cases and at excluding healthy ones. But lowering the BMI cutoff for people of Asian descent starkly increases the number of patients who are unnecessarily flagged for further testing.

Experts also disagree on what could be used instead of BMI to screen people. Body-composition scans can measure fat directly, but they’re expensive and impractical to use on everyone. Another option could be to screen everyone above a certain age for diabetes, using a fasting glucose test or another test that measures a blood sugar called A1C. But fasting glucose tests—which require, well, fasting—may not come with ideal compliance. And Araneta and her colleagues have found that A1C cutoffs for diagnosing diabetes may need to be reevaluated, especially for certain Asian populations that may develop diabetes at lower levels than people of European descent.

Alternative strategies for estimating excess fat have their challenges too. Goutham Rao, a family physician at the University Hospitals Health System, told me that he favors using waist circumference or waist-height ratio. But other researchers find any tool that relies on measuring waists to be impossibly messy. Even well-trained professionals will sometimes take measurements from different parts of a patient’s midsection; the person being measured, too, can skew the results: “You take a small breath in and you change your waist circumference by two centimeters,” Kanaya said. And research suggests that cutoffs that rely on waist circumference may, yes, also need to take into account a person’s ethnicity or race. “Of course, BMI is not perfect,” George King, the chief scientific officer at the Joslin Diabetes Center, in Boston, told me. “But we don’t really have much else to guide us.”

For now, several researchers told me, race-sensitive BMI risk cutoffs could stand to be used more widely, not less. In the United Kingdom, says Rishi Caleyachetty, a general practitioner and an epidemiologist who has studied BMI, although the National Health Service uses the 23 cutoff for some ethnic populations, including those of Asian descent, those thresholds haven’t been consistently adopted across the country. In the U.S., Stanford said, the Mass General Weight Center still uses a universal set of BMI cutoffs to admit patients, and she has had to overrule those standards in several cases to ensure that certain patients are seen. And many insurance companies have relied on BMI to determine whether they’ll pay for GLP-1 medications, without carving out exceptions for particular racial or ethnic groups that might have distinct risk profiles.

Scientists haven’t been able to rigorously study how much of an impact calls to “screen at 23” have had—in part because Asian Americans weren’t well represented in the U.S.’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which includes estimates of diabetes prevalence, until 2011. King said he thinks that the available evidence hints at a drop in the prevalence of undiagnosed diabetes in Asian American communities. But one small study from 2022, based on self-reported data on diabetes screening, found no change in diabetes-screening rates among Asian Americans after the change in guidance.

BMI cutoffs that take into account race and ethnicity may be short-lived, as researchers develop better tools and protocols to help people identify and manage chronic metabolic conditions. But BMI is still everywhere for a reason: “No single measure will compete with BMI in simplicity,” Samar El Khoudary, a women’s-health researcher and an epidemiologist at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Public Health, told me. Across the board, the researchers I spoke with told me that they understand the serious limitations—and major risks—of overusing or misusing BMI and race, separately or together. But many of them also worry that too hastily casting these categorizations aside could do more harm than good. “To be able to remove it, you need to be able to replace it,” El Khoudary said. And she doesn’t yet see a clear plan for what metric can accomplish that—certainly not one that can also avoid all of BMI’s pitfalls.

For Ibram X. Kendi, It’s Nazis All the Way Down

2026-05-05T07:00:00-04:00

A conspiracy theory is soothing to the believer not just because it promises a complete explanation for all that appears wrong with the world, but also because it confirms the sense that something is wrong with the world. Society is in flux: New technology is altering how we work and think, centuries-old definitions of gender are collapsing, long-trusted institutions are crumbling, the weather itself seems to be in revolt. Any or all of these changes might make you feel unmoored, as if you are no longer in control. The conspiracy theorist comes along and says you are right. And more than that: Someone, or some group, is completely to blame; they are actively working to take away what you so recently took for granted. If this answer flies in the face of all observable truth, if it reduces life to a zero-sum game, it can still feel plausible because the conspiracy theorist is speaking to a human anxiety about the good and prosperous life being a limited commodity. As Naomi Klein put it in her recent book, Doppelganger: “Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right.”

Ibram X. Kendi correctly calls the “Great Replacement” theory, which jibes perfectly with the description above, “the most dominant political theory of our time.” The idea that nefarious forces, usually Jews (or “globalists,” in the more polite versions), are opening the gates to Black and brown immigrants in order to eradicate white culture has propelled extreme-right nativist movements over the past 15 years. We’ve heard this from the mouth of Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk, but also from Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán. In Kendi’s new book, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, he sets out to capture this theory’s spread.

The goal is an admirable one—the danger of this idea has been proved again and again as it’s shown up in the scrawled manifestos of mass shooters from South Carolina to Norway. But the book Kendi has written reads less like an effort to understand why these conspiracy theorists are so effective and more like a murder board in a detective’s office, laying out an expanding web of evidence meant to prove that this theory has been deliberately engineered and that its proponents are in cahoots. Faces of leaders such as the far-right British politician Nigel Farage and Argentine President Javier Milei are pinned up and threads are strung between them—or tied to their parental histories, or to books they may have read, or to places where they may have all gathered together.

A great deal of research clearly went into amassing the copious data points that fill this nearly 600-page book, but the result is a slog to get through, because—beyond a vague nod toward the manipulation of “anger” and economic anxiety—Kendi almost completely ignores the people who are attracted to this worldview or the reasons they might be. Instead, he gives us something less helpful: another conspiracy theory.

In Kendi’s telling, the Great Replacement theory is itself a mask, one covering an ism we already know and loathe: Nazism. He aims to show, through a “genealogy of theory and tactics,” how little has changed beyond a slight “renovation.” Although “great replacement parties” across Europe may have banished open racism, pivoted from denouncing the pollution of blood to lamenting the erosion of culture, and occasionally chosen leaders who were not straight, white men, they “did not abandon the house of Hitler,” Kendi writes. “They gutted it. They renovated it. New walls and fixtures and furniture.”

[Read: The crisis of the intellectuals]

These extreme-right parties have manufactured a feeling of scarcity, he explains—the same emotion Hitler produced when he sought to persuade Germans to destroy “International Jewry” before it destroyed them. The story of replacement has no basis in reality, Kendi writes. Even in European countries supposedly being flooded by immigrants, they still represent a small minority. But white politicians everywhere are using fear to gain political power and then argue for authoritarian forms of control, which “everyday White people” are willing to accept in order to preserve their tiny bit of privilege over society’s most marginalized.

So far this might seem like run-of-the-mill white supremacy rearing its head in the 21st century, albeit in less shrill tones. Yet Kendi argues that the Great Replacement theory is not just the most recent manifestation of racial anxiety, but something far broader, more all-encompassing, and more manufactured. This is why it is a “theory” and not a “philosophy,” he writes: because “it blends elements from philosophies across the spectrum, including populism, centrism, socialism, nationalism, liberalism, conservatism, and especially fascism.” What other theory has a similar “philosophical hybridity,” according to Kendi? Nazism.

All this feels quite muddled, but what I came to understand as Kendi expanded his Great Replacement net was that he wants it to capture any kind of mindset in which those most privileged in a society imagine themselves to be its victims. This is more than just a racial inversion—though that is often the form this über-theory takes. It could also include anti-vaxxers pinning yellow stars to their shirts because they are convinced that they’re going to be targeted by their government, or French protesters angry over a proposal to raise their retirement age. What Kendi is interested in is finding links between such manifestations, but all I could see as I read (and read, and read) is that there is potentially no end to this anxiety; it is as old as the conflict between Cain and Abel or Jacob and Esau. It is also not unique to white Europeans and Americans. Wasn’t this same fear of reversal behind the massacres of the Tutsis in Rwanda and the Rohingya in Myanmar?

For Kendi, however, this is not a pattern of human nature but a modern plot. And so he expends a lot of energy connecting the dots on that murder board in order to prove that like minds are working together. A 2011 book by the French writer Renaud Camus, The Great Replacement, which expresses fears that Muslim immigrants are going to destroy French civilization, shows up at the bedside of various leaders. A meeting by the far-right German party AfD (Alternative for Germany) on how to expel migrants from the country is held a suspicious eight kilometers away from the site of the Wannsee Conference, where the Nazis gathered to plot the “Final Solution.” “It may not be a coincidence,” Kendi decides.

Often he simply lets two facts sit side by side, rubbing provocatively against each other: “On June 15, 2025, Trump announced his administration’s ‘very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.’ German Nazis and their collaborators executed one of the single largest mass deportation programs in history when they forcibly remigrated millions of European Jews to concentration camps outside of their home countries.”

[Read: The quiet way authoritarianism begins to crumble]

Great Replacement, in Kendi’s widening definition, starts to encompass so many disparate examples that it loses its explanatory power. Is Canada’s conservative politician Pierre Poilievre a “great replacement leader”? Kendi’s logic for including him is largely based on the fact that Poilievre spoke to the concerns of those 2022 trucker protesters who were responding to COVID lockdowns by demanding a return of their “freedoms.” He was addressing constituent complaints about business closures and school lockdowns, which is what all sorts of politicians did. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, makes it onto the board because of his harsh crackdown on gangs, though crime was genuinely an acute problem in the country and most Salvadorans were very happy to see him attack it. He has weakened democratic institutions and countenanced claims of torture and other abuses, but I’m not sure this puts him ideologically in league with Orbán and Le Pen.

For all the material Kendi brings together, his conclusion reduces it to the size of a small cabal meeting in a back room: “The actual protagonists in this story are the great replacement financiers, politicians, theorists, and soldiers. They are striving to bring into being the actual great replacement humans should fear in the twenty-first century: the replacement of democracy with dictatorship.” This implication—that far-right puppeteers are working together to manipulate the masses as part of their plan for world domination—doesn’t seem much different to me than imagining George Soros pulling the strings of immigration policy in order to generate a new and permanent Democratic majority.

The worst thing about Kendi’s theorizing is that it allows him to avoid seriously contending with why conspiracy theories appeal to so many people. He could begin by examining his own need for a totalizing rationale. “I did not find the subject of this book,” he writes. “The subject of this book found me.” After the 2020 George Floyd protests, Kendi’s expansive ideas about racism, encapsulated in his 2019 book, How to Be an Antiracist, were widely circulated—and attacked. That book argued that racism is as pervasive as air, that it flows through all of our institutions and our social arrangements. If you tolerated these unequal systems, you were racist; if you fought to undo them, you were anti-racist.

Many people objected to this strict binary, and Kendi experienced the resulting backlash as the kind of inversion he has written about in this new book. The “great replacement politicians and theorists have misrepresented, maligned, and villainized me—and many intellectuals like me—as anti-White, as ‘racist,’” he writes. (He was also credibly accused of mismanaging Boston University’s Center for Antiracism Research, which was set up under his leadership, a charge he disputed at the time but doesn’t mention in this book.) It seems to me that he decided to fight fire with fire; instead of addressing criticisms of overreach head-on, he chose to suggest that those who accuse him of being racist are, by his expansive definition, neo-Nazis.

Why do people feel that they are going to be replaced? Understanding this is not the same as justifying it, especially when it comes to the violence these beliefs often inspire. But Kendi has identified a real and dangerous human problem—a deep, pathological sense of grievance—even while not really endeavoring to comprehend it. To see how that might have gone, read the work of sociologists such as Arlie Russell Hochschild. Her book Strangers in Their Own Land, which Kendi mentions in passing, identified the “deep story” that working-class white people in Louisiana were telling themselves about their place in society. This was “the story feelings tell,” as Hochschild put it, of “hopes, fears, pride, shame, resentment, and anxiety.” These people felt like the world was rushing ahead of them; like they were overwhelmed; like they were waiting patiently in line while others were cutting ahead of them.

[Read: The truth about extremism that America likes to forget]

Kendi might answer that it is not his job, or any Black person’s job, to unpack the anxieties of white people, and I’d be sympathetic to his exasperation. But if he really believes, as he writes near the end of his book, that Great Replacement politicians will do whatever they need to keep manipulating these feelings to their advantage, even “triggering World War III to extend their rule,” then he should consider not just connecting the dots, but looking more closely at the individuals who keep gravitating toward these ideas. His plan for getting past this zero-sum thinking is for us all to recognize our common humanity—and that goal is hard to argue with. But the only way to get there is to first contend with those humans who don’t partake in such a magnanimous vision, who reach for the easiest of answers to make sense of why they feel something is being ripped away from them. Maybe we should start by recognizing not only that the disorientation and uprootedness behind this sentiment is real, but that right now it might be one of the few things most of us genuinely do share.

The Secret of Elizabeth Strout’s Appeal

2026-05-05T08:00:00-04:00

How does she do it? Not just the neat trick of beguiling highbrow critics while at the same time pleasing millions of readers who don’t care about literary bona fides. The real feat is harpooning the reader artlessly (or so it seems), with language as plain as a Congregational church, a paucity of dramatic incident, and a cast of characters no more exotic than your neighbors. They aren’t exotic, her characters, but they’re quirky—some cantankerous, some bafflingly passive, all convincingly real. Thinking about them, I keep coming back to the bedrock of her work, what she has called “the singularity and mystery of each person.” She shows us how strange we are, and how similar (an insight verging on homily but thankfully sugar-free). She’s not a minimalist, but Elizabeth Strout does more with less than any writer I can think of.

Her 11th novel, The Things We Never Say, is classic Strout (New England setting, unhappy marriages, family secrets, lots of what mental-health professionals call “suicidal ideation”); her legion of fans is bound to propel it to the top of the best-seller lists. And this time, there’s an urgent topical element: The story begins in the summer of 2024—not in Maine, where Strout grew up, her go-to fictional territory, but rather in an unnamed seaside town in Massachusetts—and Donald Trump (whose name is one of the things never said) is about to be elected president for the second time. Strout’s hero, Artie Dam, is a high-school history teacher, so it comes as no surprise when he eventually writes the word FASCISM on the blackboard.

Artie grew up poor, married rich, worked hard, and now is grateful for his settled, comfortable life (“He was, in many ways, the embodiment of the American dream”). Instinctively humble, he insists on egalitarian ethics, telling his class, “Do not ever feel that you are superior to someone else.” You want to like Artie—and when you find out that his placid, often-jovial exterior conceals a troubled inner life, you want to know him better (even though his closest friend admits to herself that he’s “almost dopey”).

He suffers from the most common ailment in Strout’s world—loneliness. The eponymous main character in Olive Kitteridge, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009, knows “that loneliness can kill people.” She tells a man who doesn’t want to die alone: “We’re always alone. Born alone. Die alone. What difference does it make?” (The sentences enact isolation.) In My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), Lucy confesses, “Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted.”

Artie’s brand of loneliness is specified in the novel’s epigraph, from Carl Jung; it comes from “being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself.” His grown-up son has been a little distant lately, but his students call him “Damn-dam, the greatest man,” and his colleagues like and respect him. Still, Artie is lonely; the flow of thought and feeling finds no outlet. He goes to a cocktail party with his wife; on the way home, he wonders why “people never say anything real,” and as he hangs their coats in the closet, he feels “a dismalness return to him.”

On page 16 we learn his “secret” answer to his condition: “For more than two months, he had been thinking how to kill himself without his wife or son (or students) knowing that he had done so.” Considerate even as he plots self-slaughter, Artie decides that drowning is the way to go. His sailboat is moored in the bay. A boating accident might be staged. But then a boating accident very nearly does kill him (he slips when stepping from dinghy to boat). The water in the cove is frigid—“so cold he felt as though he had been dropped into a test tube of acid.” As the current sweeps him away from shore, Artie understands that he won’t last long.

[From the March 2025 issue: Adam Begley on Ali Smith’s ghost stories]

Strout has set the scene with a comically banal metaphor: “The sky was once again a terrific blue; white clouds rolled past, puffy-looking like enormous cotton balls.” Now, unable to swim against the current, his boots full of icy water, his sodden sweater and coat weighing him down, Artie stares up at the sky. “Oh, it was beautiful! White clouds moved far above him, momentarily blocking the sun, and then the sun came out again.” Stripped of ornament, the goofy simile gone, the radically spare sequence of sun-clouds-sun matches the seesaw of emotion visited upon the reader—lovely day, mortal fear, sudden hope when rescue arrives. After the tension, release. “It was that quiet and that simple, but Artie—having almost died—no longer wanted to.”

Because we nearly lose him (less than a quarter of the way through the novel), Artie is now that friend we hug close and watch over nervously. Fear of spoilers prevents me from saying why, but Artie’s troubles (mostly centered on his wife, who thinks he’s “soft,” and his son, whose marital woes may or may not explain his hangdog look) have not blown away like cotton-ball clouds. Soon Artie feels as cut off as he did before the near-death drenching.

Which could be why, at age 57, he starts shoplifting, taking first a cheap plastic comb from a drugstore. Then comes a remarkable episode in a shop three towns away from where he lives.

[Read: An interview with Elizabeth Strout about her novel Abide With Me]

Strout’s scene-setting is brilliantly terse and precise: “A little bell tinkled as Artie stepped over the threshold of the men’s carpeted clothing store. There was almost a sense of stepping inside a small church, it was that quiet.” The peculiar placement of “carpeted” and the hesitant, almost-apologetic church metaphor do plenty of work, reflecting Artie’s confusion, echoing his voice, invoking traditional morality, and pretending with the colloquial phrasing that nothing literary is happening on the page.

Artie buys a shirt and then tries to steal two dress shirts (impossible, by the way, to imagine him actually wanting to wear them). “What am I doing?” he thinks, feeling “bizarrely far away.” Strout gives the tinkling bell she started with a sinister echo: “As he stepped through the shop’s front door, a loud buzzer went off, and Artie experienced both an immediate terror and bewilderment.” He’s been caught, a blaring indictment spoiling the holy hush.

A wrenching swerve here, I know, but I want to revisit the hilarious shoplifting scene near the beginning of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001). Chip Lambert steals a filet of line-caught Norwegian salmon from a Manhattan food emporium Franzen calls “the Nightmare” (though it’s obviously Dean & DeLuca). The scene is a flamboyant satire of turn-of-millennium yuppiedom:

A humidity had stolen over the sky, a sulfurous uneasy wind from Rahway and Bayonne. The supergentry of SoHo and Tribeca were streaming through the Nightmare’s brushed-steel portals. The men came in various shapes and sizes, but all the women were slim and thirty-six; many were both slim and pregnant.

Chip has no way of paying the $78.40 that the filet costs. When he tucks it under his sweater, it slips down into his pants: “The dangling filet felt like a cool, loaded diaper.” Later it spreads into his underpants “like a wide, warm slug.” The Nightmare is hellish (that sulfurous wind) and stealing from it hardly seems sinful; the thief’s only discomfort is physical, and Franzen plays it for laughs.

Shoplifting is a crime against capitalism, an insult to consumerism, the pursuit of happiness perverted. Ostentatious, almost boastful, Franzen amplifies the socioeconomic implications. Strout—subtle, almost furtive—mutes them. But both highlight the character’s desperation. Chip is beyond broke and generally in a bad way. A purloined salmon filet covering the groin “like a codpiece” is a low point for him (and reminds us of his priapic obsessions), but he gets away with it—zero remorse—and that’s somehow exactly right. Unashamed, unpunished, he’ll regale dinner guests with the story and get a laugh.

Strout, meanwhile, looks inward, deep into Artie, who’s mortified, profoundly shaken. Once the shock has worn off, he sees his behavior as an alarming symptom—has he had a stroke?

Diametrically opposed in temperament, Strout and Franzen do have something in common: They’ve both had books chosen for Oprah’s Book Club. Whereas Strout was a gracious and grateful beneficiary of the “Oprah effect,” Franzen famously made disobliging comments about some previous picks—“schmaltzy, one-dimensional,” he called them.

Is Strout one-dimensional? Though quiet (the clang of current events mostly muffled), her novels are complex and layered. She’s a keen dissector of American class structure. Whether she’s schmaltzy is trickier. More interested in virtue than vice, she likes to show what appears to be vice vanquished by the revelation of hidden virtue. Are you a schmaltzy writer if you shy away from depicting evil, if your baddies turn out to be merely misguided?

The Burgess Boys (2013) revolves around what seems to be an act of evil. In a small town in Maine coping with a substantial influx of Somali immigrants, Zach (the Burgess brothers’ teenage nephew) throws a frozen pig’s head through the door of a storefront mosque—during Ramadan.

As usual when a public issue is at stake, Strout makes it personal. She channels her character Abdikarim, a café owner homesick for Mogadishu, to show the pain and fear inflicted by this desecration, and she also gradually reveals what motivated Zach, who eventually sees the gravity of his “dumb joke.” His regret shades into genuine contrition. Moreover, Abdikarim manages to forgive Zach, whom he understands is no more than a frightened child.

Strout sympathizes with the Somali immigrants. Her protagonist, Bob Burgess, laments “the terrible, terrible stuff they’ve been through” (and also acknowledges the difficulties that communities face in integrating and assimilating people from a very foreign culture). She despises bigotry and racism—the whole gamut, from the townsfolk who know better but insist on calling the new arrivals “Somalians” to the neo-Nazi white supremacists who make a cameo and call them “parasites.” As anyone who’s read any of her work can testify, Strout champions tolerance. Her tender heart is clearly center-left.

But to call her tenderhearted would be wrong. Angry, blunt, brittle, occasionally cruel (and especially intolerant of “meek-and-mousy-looking people”), Olive Kitteridge, in many ways the quintessential Strout character, is nobody’s idea of a liberal snowflake. She’s no conservative, either. Her disdain for George W. Bush (whose name, like Trump’s, is never mentioned) affects her physically: “She couldn’t stand to look at the president’s face: His close-set eyes, the jut of his chin, the sight offended her viscerally.” Nor is she woke, or rather (to avoid anachronism), politically correct: “Here was a man who looked retarded,” she thinks. “You could see it in his stupid little eyes.”

The tender side of Strout is her hopefulness—and that may be toughening up. In The Burgess Boys, Olive Kitteridge, and other early books, Strout seemed confident that good would eventually prevail, or at least persist. She never did happy endings, but in general her characters coped or grew or showed remorse; they endured, and the reader cheered them on.

Loneliness isn’t Artie’s sole affliction. He’s deeply disturbed by the temper of the times. The upcoming presidential election makes him feel “as if a noose was tightening each day around his neck.” His wife calls him a “doomsayer.” And indeed, he thinks his country will “never be the same, not in his lifetime.” When he teaches the Civil War to 11th graders, he assigns each student a soldier or nurse from Massachusetts to research. The principal calls him in and tells him some parents have demanded that he also assign “the Confederate side.” Dismayed, the principal apologizes: “This forcing you to take on Confederate soldiers, I’m sorry. This is what anticipatory obedience is.” Artie complies, yet sticks to a core principle. “In all my years of teaching,” he says when asked in class whom he’ll vote for, “I have never made my political views available to my students.” The reader is in no doubt.

Olive Kitteridge, a recurring character who gets a nod in the new novel, allows Strout to explore how to be a good person when you’re not, in fact, a particularly good person. With Artie, she shows how a good person fares in the age of Trump, when dismalness is an ever more common complaint and her characters’ sins of omission snowball into big, consequential lies; the moral slippage is both personal and political, domestic and national.

Always eager to exploit tension among her characters, Strout sets up a contrast between the meals Artie shares with two friends. One is Kenneth Moynihan, the man who saved Artie when he nearly drowned; the other is Anne Merrill, a colleague who teaches English at the high school and has been “a little bit in love with him” for years. Making canny but sparing use of fiction’s superpower—interiority—Strout lets seemingly trivial interactions give rise to unexpected emotions.

[Read: Elizabeth Strout on Louise Glück’s poem “Nostos”]

With Ken, Artie opens up easily: “Boy, I talk a lot with you. I just yak away.” When he tells him a momentous secret he’s shared with no one else, Ken feels privileged to be his confidant. They talk about their children, their parents, “how deeply upset people were these days,” the mess in the Middle East. Tucked between parentheses is the exception: “(They did not talk about the upcoming election in their own country.)” It later emerges that Ken may be a supporter of the unnamed Trump, but Artie doesn’t let that trouble him. The easy connection between the two men—Ken reaches out, touches Artie’s hand, and even says, though self-consciously, “Thank you for sharing”—is just a little mawkish.

A painfully awkward lunch with Anne swings the pendulum the other way. Here, Artie is incapable of telling his old friend anything, and when she tries to confide in him, his reaction disappoints. Both are baffled by the disconnect. Later, he realizes that what he fails to tell her shields her, and him, from having to acknowledge a chain of betrayals. Because he doesn’t open up to her, the best they can do is shake their heads in tandem over the topic du jour: “The election, Jesus,” she says. He answers, “I know, Anne. I know.”

Strout questions the conventional wisdom of our combative times by suggesting that partisan agreement doesn’t always bring us together, and that the partisan divide doesn’t always divide. A refreshing perspective—but how wearying, how unsettling, to be unsure even of our friends’ loyalties. Artie’s emotional range shrinks as the book draws to a close. In the epilogue, he says repeatedly that he’s tired. He’s tired of the lies he’s lived with; tired of the ambient anger; tired of the daily shocks administered by the new president. “On and on it went. Artie watched all these things, and he slowly understood that what he had felt the day of the election was true: His country was committing suicide.”

The Things We Never Say … and yet, in two unmistakably political paragraphs in the novel’s epilogue, Strout makes a point of saying. She compiles a record of Artie’s distress during the first year of the new administration (deportations, arrests of student protesters, “Alligator Alcatraz”—he’s serially appalled). I suppose it could be mistaken for an anti-Trump rant: She certainly lets us know where she stands. Yet she’s neither preaching to the converted nor attempting to convince the misguided. Artie’s distress could be common ground, or not.

Lucy Barton—another writer, a stand-in for Strout—learned when she was very young that books soothed her sense of isolation. Lucy found her calling thanks to a rush of fellow feeling: “I will write and people will not feel so alone!”

This article appears in the June 2026 print edition.

Why Stocks Keep Going Up

2026-05-04T12:38:00-04:00

The military stalemate between the United States and Iran is crippling the flow of oil around the world. Gas prices are soaring. Inflation is back above 3 percent. Consumer confidence is tanking, and most Americans are pessimistic about the economy. Yet the S&P 500 has risen 29 percent over the past 12 months, and hit an all-time high last week. After a sell-off at the start of the war, stocks are up 13 percent in 30 days. Despite oil blockades and a threat to a whole civilization, investors have shrugged and kept buying. The stock market looks completely out of touch with reality.

But there is a logic at work: Stocks keep going up because corporate profits have continued to soar. If investors have learned to ignore President Trump’s chaos, it’s not because they’re oblivious to reality, but because this chaos has hardly dented corporate profits. Yes, there’s a disconnect between the stock market’s buoyancy and how ordinary Americans feel about the economy. But the stock market isn’t about the price of milk; it’s about how corporations are doing, and right now they are doing quite well.

Consider the so-called Magnificent Seven, the major tech companies with some of the most valuable stocks in the world, many of which reported record quarterly earnings last week. Alphabet is now on track to make more than $120 billion in profits this year alone. Nvidia is on pace to earn more than that, and has nearly doubled its profits from last year. Meta’s latest earnings rose 61 percent year over year. These companies will collectively make more than half a trillion dollars in profit this year.

[Rogé Karma: So, about that AI bubble]

This phenomenon goes beyond tech. Close to 80 percent of S&P 500 companies that have reported earnings so far have beaten expectations. The average profit margin for S&P 500 companies is now at its highest point in 15 years, continuing a trend that began post-pandemic. There are several possible reasons for this: Inflation and market consolidation have granted companies more pricing power, productivity has been rising (perhaps because of AI tools), and the AI build-out has fueled huge tech profits. But regardless of why it’s happening, future profits are an essential ingredient for stock valuations, so stocks are naturally rising, too.

This is not to say that today’s stock market makes complete sense. Two weeks ago, the former shoe company Allbirds announced that it was pivoting to artificial intelligence, and its stock septupled overnight. Since COVID began, retail investors have also gotten used to “buying the dip,” treating every sell-off as a clearance-sale opportunity, regardless of geopolitical turmoil.

But there’s plenty of evidence that investors are paying attention to the metrics that matter. Companies that report disappointing sales numbers or miss earnings expectations are being punished by the market. When Nike reported in late March that it expected revenues to drop, the stock fell by more than 15 percent in a day. Investors are also noting future threats to profitability, selling off stocks in software-as-service businesses that may soon be gouged by AI.

[Listen: On the brink of global recession]

There is some concern that the stock market’s price-to-earnings ratio—the amount investors pay for every dollar of corporate earnings—is high (albeit not near the levels we saw during the internet-stock bubble). But in general, investors seem to be sensibly accounting for the fact that corporate earnings are not just high, but growing at a sustainably fast clip. The question now is just how sensible that assumption will prove to be. The war’s high energy prices are hitting corporate bottom lines and taking about $4 billion a month out of the pockets of American consumers. If this continues into the summer, businesses should prepare for less consumer spending and weaker profits.

Investors are also wagering heavily on the AI boom, and the next year or so should reveal whether the valuations of various tech companies have been overinflated. Tech companies have been pouring money into building new data centers and AI chips, which could prove savvy if public demand for their products continues to grow, but will be a serious problem if AI fails to be as lucrative as everyone is promising.

For most investors, buoyed by years of growth, that is a concern for another day. Although many people, including Trump, understand the stock market as a measure of the economy’s health, the divide between what investors see and what most people feel is wide and growing.

How Everest Has Changed Since Into Thin Air

2026-05-04T07:00:00-04:00

When the first edition of Into Thin Air was published not long after the 1996 Mount Everest calamity, during which eight climbers died in a violent storm, I assumed that the disturbing events I described in my book would convince amateur climbers that paying a lot of money to be guided up the highest mountain on Earth was a bad idea. I was wrong. The deadly hazards I wrote about attracted novice climbers to Everest like gamblers to a slot machine. The owner of one of the prominent guiding companies told me that Into Thin Air was better advertising for his business than anything he could have imagined.

When I climbed to the summit of Everest in May 1996, I was, according to the Himalayan Database, only the 621st person to arrive there since the mountain was first summited, in May 1953. During the 30 years following my ascent, Everest was climbed approximately 13,000 times. At least 90 percent of those ascents were made by clients and employees of commercial guiding companies. As this astounding number suggests, scaling the world’s highest mountain is a very different experience than it was in 1996. Most notably, Everest climbers are now much less likely to die. From 1921, when the first serious attempt to climb the mountain was made, through 1996, one person was killed, on average, for every five who reached the summit. Over the next 28 years, that ratio diminished to one death for every 68 summits. In 2025, only five climbers died and 866 reached the summit, a ratio of one fatality for every 173 climbers who got to the top.

The greater likelihood of surviving an Everest expedition might come as a surprise, given the numerous photos of alarming traffic jams on the mountain that have gone viral in recent years. But the very real risks posed by these crowds have been mitigated by other developments. Weather forecasts are more accurate, oxygen masks are more efficient and reliable, guided climbers are now provided with as many oxygen canisters as they are willing to pay for, and each commercial climbing client is typically ushered up the mountain by at least one personal Sherpa guide.

Perhaps the most significant change in the past 30 years, however, is the transfer of authority and agency on the mountain: from European and American climbers and guiding companies to Nepalis. Thanks to the greater demand for high-altitude workers on Everest, many more Nepalis are now employed by commercial guiding operations; today they represent a majority of the highly qualified guides. Even more noteworthy is the dramatic increase in the number of expedition services owned and run by Nepalis, which currently make up most of the guiding companies on Everest.

No longer do Nepalis primarily function as kitchen workers and load carriers. They are now frequently the most skilled and accomplished guides on the mountain. For all intents and purposes, climbing activity on the Nepali side of Everest—where most ascents take place—is controlled by Sherpas. They install and maintain the dozens of ladders and miles of fixed rope on the mountain. They call the shots. They’re the gatekeepers. This is entirely appropriate, given that the mountain rises from the homeland of the Sherpas, a native ethnic group, and they have been a crucial presence on Everest expeditions since the earliest attempts to climb it.

[Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go]

This remarkable transformation can be traced to a variety of factors, but among the most consequential was the creation of the Khumbu Climbing Center, a project launched by the American climbers Jenni Lowe and Conrad Anker to teach technical-climbing skills to Nepali high-altitude workers. The idea to create a training program for Sherpas came from Jenni’s first husband, Alex Lowe, a friend and occasional climbing partner of mine, who had been appalled, on numerous Himalayan expeditions, by how little technical training most Sherpas had received, putting them at great risk.

Tragically, Alex was killed in an avalanche on Shishapangma, a 26,335-foot Tibetan peak, in October 1999, before he had an opportunity to accomplish his goal. In 2004, Jenni, along with her second husband, Conrad, launched the first Khumbu Climbing School in Phortse village. (I volunteered as an instructor that inaugural year, and again in 2005.) The Khumbu Climbing Center, as it is now known, has certified more than 1,000 Nepali guides, who are presently employed by commercial guiding companies on Everest and throughout the world.

Nepali workers deserve much of the credit for making Everest a less dangerous mountain than it used to be. But climbing it is still exceedingly hazardous, especially for the Sherpas themselves. Because clients now receive a lot more supplemental oxygen than they used to, workers must make even more trips through the deadly Khumbu Icefall (a constantly shifting, 2,000-foot-high jumble of house-size blocks of ice) to carry additional canisters to the upper mountain. Furthermore, the rapidly warming Himalayan climate is making the carapace of snow and ice that covers much of the Everest massif more unstable, which makes the icefall more likely to be the site of another mass-casualty event like the avalanche that killed 16 Nepali workers on April 14, 2014.

Despite the dire risks they face, the Nepalis have often failed to receive the respect they deserve from foreign climbers. Resentment over this has festered for decades among Sherpas. In 2013, the frustration erupted on a steep ice face at 23,000 feet. (The incident was most thoughtfully recounted in Melissa Arnot Reid’s climbing memoir, Enough.) Earlier that year, Nepali expedition leaders announced that on April 27, a large Sherpa team would begin installing fixed ropes on Everest’s Lhotse Face, and asked all climbers to stay far away for the duration of the operation. Everyone heeded this request except for two acclaimed professional alpinists, Ueli Steck and Simone Moro, and the cinematographer documenting their ascent, Jonathan Griffith. The European climbers stayed more than 100 feet away from the Sherpa team for most of their climb, but to reach Camp 3, they had to pass directly above the Sherpas as they worked. When doing so, the Europeans inadvertently knocked off small chunks of ice that struck a few Sherpas.

According to Arnot Reid, who was on the mountain that day, the Sherpas were furious—in part because the falling ice was a genuine hazard, but mostly because they considered the Europeans’ defiance of the closure incredibly disrespectful. An altercation broke out on the steep ice face, during which Moro directed an obscene insult at Mingma Tenzing, the leader of the Sherpa rope team. This was so objectionable to the Sherpas that the entire team immediately abandoned their unfinished work and descended to Camp 2. When the European climbers came down to that camp shortly thereafter, a mob of 100 angry Sherpas confronted them, hurling rocks at the climbers and kicking them after they fell to the ground. As the melee escalated, Arnot Reid persuaded Moro to get down on his knees and apologize. When he reluctantly acceded, the mob dispersed, allowing Steck and Moro to flee down the Khumbu Icefall with minor injuries and their tails between their legs.

[Read: The year climate change closed Everest]

The confrontation was ugly, but it led to a more honest, long overdue accounting of the historic relationship between Sherpas and foreign climbers—an assessment reinforced by a labor strike prompted by the 2014 avalanche. These shocking incidents compelled foreigners to acknowledge that Sherpas have played an essential role—and have been exposed to disproportionate risk—on almost every significant Everest expedition since the very first one in 1921, yet have seldom been regarded as equal partners or elite mountaineers.

A pivotal event in the Sherpas’ struggle for respect occurred on January 16, 2021, when 10 of Nepal’s most accomplished mountain guides endured gale-force winds and a temperature of 58 degrees below zero to complete the first winter ascent of K2, the planet’s second-highest summit—a much more difficult and dangerous peak than Everest. Considered the last great unsolved challenge in high-altitude mountaineering, a K2 winter ascent had been attempted many times without success by some of the strongest climbers in the world before the all-Nepali team arrived on top, 28,251 feet above sea level, and belted out Nepal’s national anthem en masse. A video of this moment went viral, generating accolades from around the world. According to one of the team leaders, Mingma Gyalje Sherpa (also known as “Mingma G”), their astonishing feat was “about giving justice to our future generations.” Roughly 100 years after the first Sherpa deaths on Everest, the hard-won respect achieved by Nepali climbers was wonderful to behold.

Other developments since 1996 have been less wonderful. The swarms of climbers who now arrive every April to be guided up the Nepali side of Everest give a big boost to the regional economy, but their presence is highly damaging to the environment, and new regulations concerning trash and human-waste removal have failed to adequately address the degradation.

Developments over the past 30 years have wrought a different kind of degradation as well. Climbing to the highest point on Earth is still an adventure that entails considerable risk and typically requires weeks of immense effort. But the commodification of the mountain has stripped away much of what once made climbing Everest such a uniquely profound experience. As the journalist Carl Hoffman mused in a review of a recent book about the Everest guiding industry, these companies perform an admirable service by providing expertise and assistance that now enables almost anyone to climb Everest. Nevertheless, he writes, “it’s hard not to look at those pictures of clients stacked on the side of the mountain in long lines, clutching their handrails and not think: Gross. That something fundamental to exploration and adventure and the human experience of it has been lost, is lost; that the thing they’ve purchased is a thing so vastly different from its very idea as to render it meaningless.”

This is true, I’m sad to say. But if you have what it takes, it is still possible to ascend Everest in the same manner as mountaineers of yore—including the minimalist style of Reinhold Messner’s renowned solo ascent. On August 20, 1980, Messner reached the summit of Everest alone, in stormy monsoon conditions, via a partially new route on the Tibetan side of the peak, without relying on bottled oxygen, established camps, a rope, or other humans of any nationality. It is still considered the greatest mountaineering feat of all time.

If you’re unwilling to go full Messner, you can honor the mountain’s historic stature and avoid the hordes by forgoing the relatively favorable weather of the spring climbing season and attempting your ascent in the colder, much snowier autumn months, or simply stay away from the two primary guided routes. By taking a direct route up Everest’s immense North Face instead, or trying the remote Kangshung Face, you are unlikely to encounter other people, and are guaranteed to experience all the adversity you might desire. You also stand a better chance of getting killed. Which explains, of course, why such routes remain uncrowded: Most of the multitudes who attempt Everest these days simply want to reach the summit with as little effort and risk as possible, by whatever means offer the greatest probability of success.

After what I experienced in 1996, I’m not inclined to fault them.

This essay was adapted from the 30th-anniversary edition of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, which is out May 10.

The Candidate From ICE

2026-05-04T16:01:00-04:00

In mid-January, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and agents were battling protesters on the icy streets of Minneapolis, ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan abruptly quit. This was a week after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good; another protester, Alex Pretti, was slain nine days later. Sheahan, then 28, had been on the job for less than a year, but she did not resign in protest. She left to run for Congress in Ohio.

Sheahan’s campaign quickly raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, and released ads that leaned hard into her lead role in President Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. Sheahan came to ICE with no background in immigration, but she was close to Kristi Noem, Trump’s first Homeland Security secretary this term. Some veteran officials did not take kindly to being ordered around by an inexperienced 20-something who had previously worked at the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (some jokingly referred to her as “fish cop”). Noem’s public-affairs team often appeared intent to counter those concerns by circulating photos of Sheahan wearing body armor and an ICE badge, and flying in helicopters. Those images now feature prominently in Sheahan’s political ads and promotional videos.

I was curious to see how Sheahan’s mass-deportation message was playing with Republican primary voters, especially as ICE’s reputation has deteriorated, so I traveled late last month to Ohio’s Ninth Congressional District, which includes Toledo and rural areas across the state’s northwest corner. Ohio was key to the MAGA movement’s conquest of working-class white voters in the Rust Belt who were disaffected by globalization and booming immigration. It is the state where Trump falsely claimed in 2024 that Haitian immigrants in the city of Springfield were eating cats and dogs. Trump has carried Ohio in the past three presidential elections and won this district in 2024. But without his name on the ballot this year, Sheahan’s candidacy will test how much the mass-deportation message can still drive GOP voters to the polls.

I stopped by the city library for a candidate forum that was hosted by a local MAGA group, Toledoans for Trump, and was attended by about 50 Republicans who were mostly older and white. Several picked up yard signs that said YES to ICE and NO to Sanctuary Cities. Other voters and activists I spoke with said they have been thrilled by Trump’s border crackdown. And they wanted punishment for the immigrants Trump officials have accused of bilking welfare programs. But many told me they are more focused this year on economic issues such as gas prices and inflation. They’re against the expansion of data centers in the district, which they said would swallow up farmland and jack up their electric bills. They’re skeptical of the war in Iran and wary of what they view as undue Israeli influence over Trump.

Allison Molnar, who told me that she was a military spouse, carried home one of the pro-ICE signs and said she would plant it on her lawn. When I asked if she liked Sheahan—who didn’t show up to the forum—Molnar called her “an outsider.” She said she’ll vote for the former lawmaker Derek Merrin, who has run in this race once before.

Merrin kicked off his stump speech that day with illegal immigration—he wasn’t going to be outflanked—and he told the audience that negative media coverage of Trump was intended to demobilize GOP voters. “They want us to forget about the victories and successes that we are having,” he said. “Donald Trump has essentially stopped illegal immigration on the southern border. That’s a huge victory.”

For the past 43 years, the district has been represented by Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat, who first won her seat in 1982, the year that CD players and Diet Coke were introduced. Now 79, she is the longest-serving woman in congressional history. Kaptur has positioned herself as a moderate on immigration while urging more oversight of ICE tactics and spending.

Like Ohio itself, the district has trended more conservative in recent years, and Republicans have redrawn the district’s boundaries twice since 2022 to make it more difficult for Kaptur to win. The district now encompasses an area that voted for Trump in 2024 by nearly 11 percentage points—an extraordinary advantage to whoever can win the GOP primary tomorrow. Matt Gorman, a GOP political consultant, told me that Republicans have coveted the seat for a long time—“It’s a white whale,” he said—and that beating Kaptur is especially important for Republicans this year because doing so would help offset heavy losses the party is anticipating elsewhere.

[Read: The fight-club rule on gerrymandering]

“It is a seat we should win. It is a seat we need to win,” said Gorman, a former spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “This seat is too important to screw up.”

Before Sheahan unexpectedly got into the race, two state representatives were already front-runners in the primary contest: Merrin, 40, whom Kaptur narrowly defeated in 2024, before the district was redrawn to make it even more conservative, and Josh Williams, 41, a state lawmaker and criminal-defense attorney who notes that he was the first Black Republican elected to the Ohio House of Representatives in 50 years. Both men align themselves with Trump and his agenda.

Sheahan has been racing to introduce herself to voters and generate name recognition. Her ads tout her as a “tough team player” who attended Ohio State University, where she was a member of the women’s rowing team, and are loaded with references to Trump. One ad claims, falsely, that ICE deported 2.5 million immigrants during her tenure (government statistics show about 400,000 ICE deportations last year). “In less than one year at ICE, I’ve stopped more illegal immigration than Marcy Kaptur has in her 43 years in Washington,” Sheahan says.

[Read: Kristi Noem is gone. Now mass deportations can really begin.]

Sheahan has secured the endorsement of Urban Meyer, the former Ohio State football coach and broadcaster; the MAGA rocker Ted Nugent; and Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry. Notably, she has not received a Trump endorsement.

She appears to have struggled to gain traction. A poll of 600 likely GOP primary voters conducted in mid-April put Sheahan in third place, with 10 percent of support. Merrin, the former lawmaker who previously challenged Kaptur, led with 33 percent support, and the state lawmaker Williams was at 14 percent. But 40 percent of respondents said they hadn’t made up their mind. The pollster, J.L. Partners, noted that voter preference is driven by name identification more than any issue, which benefits Merrin. The survey found that Sheahan was effectively tied with Merrin among respondents who knew who she was, and the pollster noted that a Trump endorsement of any candidate would be powerful enough to “change the entire race.”

But GOP consultants I spoke with told me that whatever hopes Sheahan had of getting a late Trump endorsement were probably dashed on April 23, when The Daily Mail published an article headlined “Lesbian Sex Secrets of Kristi Noem’s ICE leader” that describes Sheahan’s alleged relationship with a younger colleague on the 2020 Trump campaign whom she briefly supervised. (Sheahan’s political adviser denied that she’d ever been in a relationship with a subordinate, and said the behavior depicted in the story was not illegal or outside the bounds of many relationships among young people.)

During my conversations with Republican voters and activists, I was struck by the extent to which they characterized Sheahan as a dilettante and a carpetbagger, even though she grew up on a local farm. A few weeks after Sheahan got in the race, a Williams supporter named Chris Enoch published a stinging editorial in the local Sandusky Register saying that he was “suspicious of Ohio ex-pats charging back in to run for office.”

“A community leader must be of, by, and for the community,” Enoch wrote. “They must know the community because they have lived it, worked in it, and put in the time to understand it fully.” That view of Sheahan was shared by many of the roughly two dozen Republican voters and party activists I spoke with in this district. Not one said they planned to support her in the primary. During my visit two weeks ago, Sheahan didn’t have any public events or speeches scheduled.

Sheahan and her staff did not respond to my calls and text messages. GOP activists in the district I met said they’ve been kept at a distance too. “Not to be rude, but I have zero perception of her,” Ron Johns, one of the founders of Toledoans for Trump, which has endorsed Merrin, told me. “I’ve never even considered her in the race. If she wants to run for something like county commissioner, we could use more candidates,” he said, “but I just don’t think this one is going to be her race.”

Wade Kapszukiewicz, the Democratic mayor of Toledo, told me that regardless of the GOP-primary outcome, Kaptur will face the toughest race of her career this fall. Kapszukiewicz said she is a “tenacious fighter” who has deep roots in a district where authenticity matters and voters “despise phonies.”

“The math looks overwhelming, but she is in touch with the values that matter in this part of the country,” Kapszukiewicz said. “Her real opponents are the mapmakers who redrew the district.” Kaptur has raised more than $3 million to defend against whoever emerges from the GOP primary. As in other recent cycles, to win, she’ll need Republicans to split their tickets and vote for her.

In one middle-class neighborhood of Toledo, I met Steve Hamilton, a retired engineer who told me that he plans to back Kaptur again, even though he’s voted for Trump the past three times. Hamilton has met Kaptur and likes her personally. “She doesn’t always vote the way I’d like, but she’s a good lady,” he told me. Hamilton said he’s worried about the direction of the economy and the country’s ever-increasing national debt. As for immigration, he favors “getting the bad guys out” but said he wouldn’t want to see Minneapolis-style chaos in his hometown.

I met him while shadowing Williams as he knocked on doors of one-story ranch houses and urged Republican voters to turn out for the primary. Williams told me that “affordability” is the No. 1 issue on voters’ minds. “We have the war going on with Iran, and the increase that we see at the gas pumps. We also have an explosion of property taxes.” Immigration, Williams said, “is not that huge of an issue here in northwest Ohio,” but like other GOP candidates, he opposes sanctuary policies and supports ICE.

[Read: Conservative women find a new way to talk about ICE]

Democratic strategists I spoke with said that if Sheahan wins the primary, they would not try to cast her work at ICE as a moral outrage. Rather, they think she’s most vulnerable to allegations of waste, incompetence, and corruption under Noem’s leadership. It was Sheahan who led the effort at ICE last year to purchase a fleet of new “wrapped” vehicles emblazoned with the agency’s logo. Rank-and-file ICE officers, who generally prefer to keep a low profile and use unmarked cars, have eschewed the vehicles, and the Washington Examiner reported that many are gathering dust in ICE garages.

In the campaign events I attended, Merrin and Williams did not mention Sheahan. Their lack of attention to her candidacy may be the clearest sign that they do not view her as much of a threat. Gorman, the GOP consultant, told me that at some point, Kaptur will lose or retire. “And,” he said, “the Republican to finally be there when the music stops for Marcy is going to have a very long congressional career.”

Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed to this report.

The House of Representatives Is Turning Into the Electoral College

2026-05-05T07:00:00-04:00

The very short list of constraints on partisan gerrymandering has gotten even shorter. Until last week, the Supreme Court had interpreted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to require states to draw some majority-minority districts. But in Louisiana v. Callais, it overturned that requirement and held that the VRA prohibits gerrymandering only if it’s done with the explicit goal of racial discrimination. If the intent behind disenfranchising minority voters appears to be merely partisan, the gerrymander is now legal. The ruling will allow Republican state legislatures in the South to erase most if not all of the region’s few blue House districts without fear of being blocked in court.

And so the gerrymandering wars, already awful, are poised to get even worse. Democrats will respond to the Republican response to Callais; Republicans will respond to the response to the response; voters will lose in the process. In a few years, almost every seat in the House of Representatives could be safely occupied by a hyper-partisan incumbent, beholden only to primary voters. The chamber could become something like the Electoral College: Whoever wins a state gets all of its representatives, and the winners are there just to vote for or against the president.

Because of the timing of the ruling, the effects are likely to be modest for the upcoming midterms. On Thursday, Louisiana suspended its primary election to give the state time to redraw the map. The legislature might eliminate just the one seat at issue in Callais, or it could try to eliminate both of the state’s majority-Black, Democratic-leaning districts. A few more seats could be in play elsewhere in the South. On Friday, after saying two days earlier that she would not do so, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey announced that she would call a special legislative session to redraw the state’s maps. Donald Trump has claimed that he has the Tennessee governor’s promise to do likewise. In other deep-red states, key deadlines have already passed, making last-minute map-drawing difficult or impossible.

The implications for 2028 and onward are more dramatic. Trump’s successful push to get Republican states to do off-cycle redistricting this year already blew past one long-standing impediment to gerrymandering maximalism. The removal of the VRA will make the arms race even more cutthroat. “It’s gonna be awful,” Sean Trende, a prominent districting expert, told me. Kyle Kondik, an elections analyst at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, compared the situation to “an all-you-can-eat buffet.” Republicans could draw Democrats completely out of the delegations of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and take another district or two in Georgia.

Presumably, Democrats would feel the need to respond. In some blue states, including New York, New Jersey, Colorado, and Washington, voters and legislators would have to decide to scrap nonpartisan redistricting commissions in order to join the gerrymandering free-for-all. In others, such as Oregon and Maryland, that wouldn’t be necessary. “I’d take 52 seats from California and 17 seats from Illinois,” Representative Terri Sewell, a Black Democrat who represents a sure-to-be-torn-up district in Alabama, said at a press conference after the Callais decision came down. By that, she meant all 52 and all 17. Could California, a state with more registered Republicans than any other, really send zero Republican representatives to Congress? It’s mathematically conceivable. Likewise, Illinois could theoretically engineer a blue-wash. The key is to draw districts that start in big cities and stretch all the way across the state, so that urban Democratic voters outweigh rural Republicans in every district. These maps are sometimes called “baconmanders,” because the districts resemble thin, curvy strips.

[David A. Graham: How the Supreme Court came to accept a practice it called unjust]

Democratic hardball would probably inspire Republicans outside the South to get even more ambitious. Their job would be easier, because red states tend not to have redistricting commissions. Opportunities abound in Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kentucky. Even Ohio and Texas could probably find a few more blue seats to eliminate.

Figuring out which party benefits more from this mass disenfranchisement is extremely difficult, because so many variables—including referenda, legislator preferences, and state-court legal challenges—go into determining what happens in each state. “I just feel like you’d really just be guessing,” Kondik told me. Zachary Donnini, the head of data science at VoteHub, was willing to game it out. He tentatively predicted that states would stop just short of the absolute maximum level of gerrymandering, winding up with 206 safe Republican seats and 203 safe Democratic seats. Because there are 435 total seats in the House of Representatives, this would leave the whole country with only 26 competitive districts.

One factor that could stop legislators from enacting the most ruthless possible gerrymander—which even the Supreme Court cannot overturn—is a bias in favor of preserving incumbents’ districts. Creating a new Democratic (or Republican) district generally requires taking some territory away from another district that votes so overwhelmingly Democratic (or Republican) that it has votes to spare. But a congressman who usually wins by 20 does not want to see his advantage suddenly cut to five points—that means more pressure to campaign, fundraise, and worry about what voters think. A similar fear is that of the infelicitously named “dummymander,” in which one party tries to create so many seats for itself that it winds up spreading its support too thin. In North Carolina, for example, Republicans entirely control the map-drawing process, but both parties are competitive statewide. The state legislature could draw 14 districts that all slightly broke for Trump in 2024, but that could mean losing all 14 if the state shifts a few points to the left. (A final factor limiting gerrymandering is shame on the part of state legislators. But this is in steadily dwindling supply.)

Whichever party ultimately gains more seats from the gerrymandering wars, the loser is clear: American democracy. In a maximum-gerrymandering scenario, more than 400 seats in the House could be safe and essentially uncontestable, delivering to voters year after year an unresponsive and unimpeachable class of lazy representatives with little incentive to represent them. At a high-enough level of abstraction, the way out is simple: Congress could enact a federal law prohibiting partisan gerrymandering. The details are not quite as straightforward. One major impediment is, simply, that Republicans have never expressed much interest in ending gerrymandering. As each state gerrymanders, moreover, it sends ever more partisan representatives to the House—the exact representatives least likely to mutually disarm and end the practice that brought them there.

And no single reform is without its flaws. The Democrats’ 2021 voting-reform package, which all but one House Democrat voted for before it died in the Senate, mandated independent commissions in every state. But those commissions can deadlock or produce maps that are still unfair in some way, sometimes requiring the courts to intervene. Academics tend to prefer more creative solutions—such as having one party draw a map with twice as many districts as necessary and then letting the other party choose how to combine them, or switching entirely to a system of proportional representation with multimember districts—but academics are not in charge. If Republicans were to finally join the fight against gerrymandering, they’d likely have their own ideas for how to fix it.

None of these approaches would be perfect. All would be preferable to the status quo, in which politicians elected to represent the will of the voters find more and more elaborate ways to avoid having to do so.

Your Next Dog May Live Longer

2026-05-02T08:00:00-04:00

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One day last November, my dog, Forrest, sat on the cold marble steps of the Smithsonian’s natural-history museum in Washington, D.C., ready to meet Celine Halioua, a woman who may one day add a tail-wagging year or so to his life, and also the lives of millions of other dogs. In 2019, Halioua founded a company called Loyal, and in February 2025, a pill that she developed for dogs was deemed likely to be effective by the FDA. If the company ticks a few remaining boxes, the drug could soon be on sale, kick-starting a new era of longevity medicine that could eventually also lengthen humans’ lives.

More than 10,000 years ago, dogs made a farseeing bet on humans. They padded carefully up to our campfires, ate scraps, and kept watch, hitching their fates to a species that would soon bestride the planet. They have since become the fourth-most-populous large land mammal, trailing only sheep, cows, and goats, which all lead less pampered lives. Now we’re trying to keep our best animal friends around longer too.

If only I could have explained all of this to Forrest before our walk with Halioua. As a Portuguese water dog, he hails from a clever breed, but he doesn’t understand advanced pharmacology, so I worried that he might be indifferent to her, or even rude. But Halioua, who is 31, had arrived with a plan. She stooped down, squealed his name, and opened her hand, revealing a treat that he promptly devoured.

Halioua was 18 years old when the cold fact of death blew through her. She was working at a neuro-oncology lab and couldn’t unsee the cosmic unfairness of a brain-cancer diagnosis, the way it constricted the possibilities of a person’s life and cut short their closest relationships. Death had an important role to play back when life was single-celled and simple, Halioua told me. It helped evolution iterate rapidly and build up more complicated organisms. But now that natural selection has created complex, intelligent animals—namely, us—we should stretch out the good, healthy part of our lifespan as well as that of our dogs, too. With extra decades, she said, we might even become more forward-looking, and less likely to wreck a world that we will have to keep living in.

After college, Halioua enrolled in a doctoral program in genetics at Oxford and worked in life-extension research during her time off school. The field has never been uniformly rigorous in its approach to research. Over the years, Halioua has developed an aversion to what she described as longevity “bro science.” She’s not into the translucent-skinned gurus who primarily experiment on themselves and post their physiological data, including the duration of their sleeping erections, on X. She’s not trying to gain eternal life through obsessively healthy living, she once told me over a tray of french fries.

Halioua got her big break from Laura Deming, a former child prodigy who was accepted to MIT at age 14 and later co-founded the world’s largest venture fund for longevity research. Halioua was only 23 when she started interning at Deming’s offices in San Francisco, but after two weeks, Deming hired her, and eventually promoted her to chief of staff. Early on, she gave Halioua a blunt pep talk. “I didn’t really speak the Silicon Valley language,” Halioua told me. Deming told Halioua that she didn’t sound smart. That made Halioua self-conscious, but she was grateful and resolved to assimilate by listening to every last episode of the Y Combinator Startup Podcast. It wouldn’t make for the most cinematic training montage if there were ever a movie about her life, but it helped her pick up the local lingo and speak at a more rapid clip.

At Deming’s fund, Halioua sat in on start-up pitches and broadened her view of the longevity industry. She saw that serious money was flowing into it. Investors have dropped more than $10 billion on life-extension companies in just the past five years. Most of that has gone to long-term bets on radical life-extension projects for humans, some intended to defeat aging altogether. Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman have both bankrolled new efforts to wind back the internal clocks of our bodies’ cells using epigenetic techniques that have already extended the lives of mice. But the companies that they have invested in—Altos and Retro Biosciences—are focused on preclinical or early-phase work. The same goes for Calico, Alphabet’s secretive life-extension company. It may be decades before we know if those bets have paid off.

Halioua wanted to move faster, and she had personal reasons for focusing first on dogs. She grew up on Austin’s semirural outskirts, the lone daughter of immigrant parents from Germany and Morocco, and like many children—especially only children—she formed intense relationships with animals. Her family had 15 cats and several dogs, most of them strays. In middle school, she started visiting an old cowboy who lived in a run-down house nearby. She began taking his retired racehorse, Ziggy, on walks, and her family later bought the horse. Years later, when the horse died, she got a tattoo of its racing name next to her heart.

Halioua has made a habit of adopting senior dogs, and that means she more frequently has to experience the heartbreak that she’s trying to forestall for dog owners. Four years ago, she brought home a 10-year-old rottweiler named Della that had been found wandering Oakland’s streets. In 2024, I visited Halioua in San Francisco, and Della came with us almost everywhere we went—to the local coffee shop, to the stables where Halioua keeps a dressage horse. Shortly before I saw Halioua in D.C., I learned that she’d had to put Della down. On the plane, she’d made the mistake of scrolling through old pictures. She spotted Della in one and felt her vision blur with hot tears. “Della would literally spoon me at night,” she said. “They’re such pure souls.”

Halioua had another reason for starting with dogs, beyond her connection to them: Federal approval for animal drugs is easier to come by than it is for human drugs. And because dogs tend to live only a decade or so, she can quickly tell whether a life-extension drug is working in them. Her end goal is to lengthen human lives. For thousands of years, dogs have gone out ahead of humans as wilderness scouts. They have ventured into buildings to sniff out explosives. Some even got killed rocketing into space before us. Now they’re entering another new frontier that may be fraught with its own unforeseeable dangers.

Illustration by Gaia Alari

Scientists have already dramatically lengthened the lives of many animals, but they’ve mostly been tiny ones that people don’t care much about. By the early 1990s, a molecular biologist named Cynthia Kenyon had for years been arguing that aging is not simply a matter of accumulated wear and tear. To Kenyon, who now serves as the vice president of aging research at Calico, the fact that animals have such a wide range of lifespans was evidence that the aging process is directed by genes.

In 1993, Kenyon doubled the lifespan of a roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans, with the tweak of a single gene that targeted its insulin receptors. Scientists have since used similar genetic tricks to substantially extend the lives of flies. Most tantalizing, they have done it in adult mice.

Dogs are nearer to us, genetically, than mice are, and they age in many of the ways that we do. We suffer from some of the same cancers and use some of the same chemotherapies to treat them. The human brain’s neurons experience similar modes of decay, and so, too, do our downstream behaviors. Dogs can lose control of their bladder in old age. They can forget faces, become more grumpy, and bump into walls. Kenyon told me that although the mice research is encouraging, a drug pathway that successfully extends a dog’s life will generate more enthusiasm among scientists who hope to try similar treatments on humans.

Forrest is four years old, and although not a dot of gray appears in his glossy black muzzle, he is already showing some signs of aging. He catches fewer cases of the zoomies, and before he leaps up onto the bed, he takes its measure. As we walked on the National Mall, Halioua explained that inside him—as in humans of every age—cancer cells are constantly popping up. His immune system still has lots of ways of zapping cancer cells out of existence before they multiply into tumors. But by the time Forrest reaches age 10, when dogs become eligible for Loyal’s pill, those defenses will more often misfire and fail to stop not just cancer but also other life-abbreviating ailments.

On her tricep, Halioua has another tattoo, this one of a Labrador retriever, but it doesn’t pay tribute to a previous pet. It’s a tribute to the 48 Labrador puppies who participated in a 14-year study by scientists at the dog-food company Purina. They split the puppies into two groups and fed one group 25 percent less than the other. After tracking the dogs for the rest of their lives, they found that those who were fed smaller bowls of kibble lived nearly two years longer, on average. By making one crude shift to the dogs’ metabolism, the scientists had extended their lives by more than 15 percent.

Several recent biomedical findings suggest that a profound link exists between an animal’s metabolism and its lifespan. The potential life-extending effects of Ozempic and other GLP-1s have been especially intriguing on this score. The drugs treat obesity by slowing the movement of food through the gastrointestinal system and suppressing appetite, but they also seem to trigger a cascade of other unexpected benefits all across the body. They appear to improve the condition of people’s kidneys, liver, heart, and even their brain. Some longevity researchers now argue that GLP-1s are the first de facto anti-aging drugs because they slow so many of the life-shortening processes that operate inside of us.

[From the December 2022 issue: Sarah Zhang on how much a cat’s life is worth]

But GLP-1s are blunt instruments. The longevity benefits they confer are a byproduct of appetite suppression. Loyal’s drug is designed to trigger some of the same effects, without a dog having to face any of the deprivations experienced by GLP-1 users or the Labradors in the Purina study.

Scientists who studied the Purina data noted that the calorie-restricted dogs were less awash in insulin, a metabolic hormone that is known to accelerate certain aging processes, in excess. The exact mechanism of Loyal’s drug is still proprietary, but scientists at the company told me that the pill tinkers with a dog’s insulin sensitivity.

Every time Forrest eats, his small intestine breaks down the resulting slurry of kibble into glucose and other compounds. His pancreas then produces a tiny pulse of insulin, a chemical whisper that echoes all through his bloodstream, telling different kinds of tissues to absorb the glucose. In a young, healthy dog, this system is precise; it requires only that whisper. But like us, dogs become less sensitive to insulin as they get older and require more of a clanging cymbal. The resulting glut of insulin can inflame tissues all across the body, and over time, this can weaken the immune system and contribute to all manner of chronic diseases, including cancer and heart disease. When a dog or a person becomes less sensitive to insulin, brain decay can set in quicker, and the operations of neurons can be scrambled.

Loyal’s daily pill is intended to restore a dog’s insulin sensitivity. It dissolves into particles that travel throughout the body, like little Paul Reveres, telling tissue systems to be on the lookout for insulin and to respond quickly when it reaches them. That way, the glucose doesn’t linger, and the pancreas doesn’t keep flooding the blood with the hormone.

Federal regulators have generally preferred drugs that target specific diseases, classified by organ systems, an approach that may simply miss certain whole-body aging processes. That the FDA has taken the unusual step of allowing Loyal to develop a drug specifically for life extension, as opposed to for some particular ailment, suggests a shifting approach. After reviewing Loyal’s early data, the agency found that by operating across different organ systems, the drug was reasonably likely to extend a dog’s life. Whether it works or not, this new openness on the part of the FDA is exciting all by itself.

Loyal hopes to be able to start selling its drug next year, for about $100 a month for dogs of most sizes. (The pill has met FDA requirements for an expectation of safety and efficacy, but it needs to meet a core manufacturing requirement before the company can receive conditional approval to market the drug.) The unpublished study that the FDA reviewed was relatively small, involving about 50 dogs whose aging-related biomarkers were tracked for three months. There were clear improvements, but improvements in biomarkers are not enough to know that a drug works. As part of its campaign to secure full approval from the FDA, the company has launched a roughly five-year clinical trial to know, with greater certainty, whether and how much it extends a dog’s life.

Illustration by Gaia Alari

As late as the 1980s, animal-health divisions at pharmaceutical companies were lightly staffed backwaters. At Merck, “you only worked in that part of the company if you weren’t very ambitious,” Linda Rhodes, an industry veteran, told me. Back then, the sector focused on drugs that helped cattle and swine survive long enough to make slaughter weight. Dog owners were regarded as a niche market inside a niche market.

In the ’90s, the blockbuster sales of two flea-and-tick medications, Frontline and Advantage, demonstrated untapped demand, and then intensified that demand by enabling new levels of indoor intimacy between dogs and people. Dogs have been bed warmers since the time of ancient Egypt, at least, but many more of them were invited to sleep with us after they were reliably rendered tick-and-flea-free.

Even just decades ago, fewer people described their dogs as family members. Now seniors spend as much on gifts for their dogs as they do for their grandchildren. People buy their dogs health insurance, take them in for regular dental visits, and sign them up for memberships at concierge-style veterinary clinics modeled after One Medical. Families are willing to go into debt to finance a surgery if doing so means saving a beloved dog’s life.

If dogs start living longer, these familial feelings of obligation may intensify. People may feel guilty if they can’t afford a daily pill that keeps their dog alive longer. Above a certain socioeconomic threshold, not spending an extra $1,000 a year or more in the hopes of doing so could seem neglectful. Elderly people may think twice about adopting dogs that have the potential to live much longer. Euthanasia decisions are already brutalizing for dog owners, and those decisions may become even more fraught.

The fundamental sadness of loving a dog is knowing that you are more likely to lose them than vice versa, because their lifespan is easily contained by yours. There’s every reason to try to keep them around longer, especially if the extra years are healthy ones. But our relationship with them may change if we succeed, perhaps in some ways that we don’t expect.

Loyal’s clinical trial, which the company says is the largest one ever run on an animal drug, began in December 2023. More than 1,300 dogs enrolled, all at least 10 years old and weighing at least 14 pounds, and representing many different breeds. Age verification at times proved difficult; some owners submitted screenshots of Facebook posts they’d made back when the dogs were puppies. Most clinical trials for dogs last a month or two, but the owners of these dogs have committed to keeping at it for at least half a decade. They don’t even know whether their pet might be taking a placebo, as half of the test population is. The FDA expects the pill to be safe, but no dog has yet had it in their system for five years.

By the time the trial finishes, Halioua may already have had the drug on the market for years. She recently assembled a focus group of 20 taste-tester dogs to get the flavor just right at launch. One day of taste-testing wasn’t enough, because many dogs will inhale just about anything with gusto the first time they eat it, and this is a pill they’ll have to take for the rest of their life. Compared with cats, dogs tend to chomp down on pills easily, but some of Halioua’s taste-testers were quite discerning; one spat out a disagreeable flavor variant and then, to underscore his verdict, peed on it.

Halioua is trying to anticipate other ways that her business might fail, even if the science proves out. In 2007, a much-hyped appetite suppressant for overweight dogs flopped spectacularly, not because it tasted bad or didn’t work but rather, in part, because it removed a dog’s great relish for tasting things in general. The human-dog bond has been food-based since its earliest campfire beginnings. Halioua explained that people didn’t like it when they couldn’t use treats to motivate their pets.

Halioua wants the pill to sell well so that she can build up a war chest. That way, the company could fund its own clinical trials for a human-longevity drug without having to sell out to “Big Pharma Daddy,” as she put it. Halioua doesn’t want to forfeit control of the process to a larger, more risk-averse, and possibly slower-moving company.

She has plenty of years left to see her plan through. I asked her if she wants to live for centuries, or even forever. “It’s not an obvious yes,” she told me. No one knows how much a human’s life can be extended, but whether it’s a few years or decades or more, Halioua said she wouldn’t want to keep living just for the sake of it.

She’d want to continually remake herself—“update,” in the founder parlance that she has adopted—try lots of new things. When I’d seen her in D.C., she was on the verge of one such change. I’d asked her if she would keep adopting older dogs. She told me that part of her felt like she had an ethical mandate to. “But also part of me is like, ‘Holy fuck, I don’t think I can sign up to do this again,’” she said. A few months later, Halioua did get another rottweiler, a rescue named Squish. She will most likely get to spend more time with her than she did with Della, whether the pill works or not. Squish is not even two years old.

The End of Cigarettes Is Coming

2026-05-04T11:00:00-04:00

For almost two decades, British retailers have told customers that if they were born after the current date 18 years ago, they can’t buy cigarettes. Starting next year, that date will freeze. Under a recently passed law, selling cigarettes to anyone born on or after January 1, 2009, will be illegal—in perpetuity. As long as the law is in effect, no one who is 17 or younger on New Year’s Day 2027 will ever be allowed to buy tobacco legally.

This generational tobacco ban represents a very different approach from the tobacco-control policy that most Americans are used to. The U.S. regime looks more like what the drug-policy scholar Mark Kleiman called “grudging toleration” toward cigarettes: tax, regulate, and scold, but stop short of outright bans. The new British approach will, eventually, lead to outright prohibition.

Prohibition. The word conjures the specter of violence, crime, and policy failure. But the United Kingdom isn’t the first jurisdiction to impose a generational ban, and it probably won’t be the last. The tiny island nation of the Maldives did so in November. New Zealand passed one in 2022, but a new governing coalition took power and repealed the law before it could go into effect. Here in the United States, 22 towns in Massachusetts, beginning with the Boston suburb of Brookline, have passed a generational ban, a possible precursor to statewide legislation.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The U.K. smoking ban is illiberal]

The spread of such prohibitions raises the counterintuitive possibility that tobacco bans are in fact a consequence of grudging toleration, rather than a departure from it. Decades of legal intolerance have steadily eroded the user base and cultural support that justified legality in the first place. Stigmatizing smoking, in other words, seems to have created the basis for an outright ban. That dynamic has implications not just for tobacco, but for the many addictive products now dominating a growing share of our economy, including social-media and gambling apps. As addictive designs grow more and more common, prohibition might come back into style.

A crackdown on cigarettes has certainly been a long time coming. As late as 1974, at least 40 percent of Americans were smokers. But that figure declined steadily over the next half century. Today, just one in 10 Americans is a smoker.

Policy changes helped create that cultural shift. In 1964, the surgeon general publicly warned that smoking causes cancer; advertising bans and mandatory labels soon followed. After that came “clean air” laws and municipal smoking bans and then, in the late 1990s, the $200 billion settlement between tobacco companies and the states.

Throughout this process, American policy makers did everything short of actually banning cigarettes themselves. Instead of prohibiting them, we took a “public health” middle ground, allowing people to indulge their vice if they chose to, while heavily discouraging smoking and proscribing who could buy cigarettes and where they could do so.

To an extent, this worked. But smoking still kills roughly half a million Americans a year, nearly seven times as many as those who die from a drug overdose. Death is a trailing indicator, and the decline in the smoking population should eventually mean fewer deaths. But even in 2035, one analysis found, more than 160,000 current smokers are projected to die from their habit.

At this point, the returns on public-health messaging and social stigma might be bottoming out. Does anyone still smoking Marlboros not know by now that cigarettes can kill them? But precisely because of the success of policies that stopped short of prohibition, the constituency of voters who would oppose a ban has dwindled. Indeed, a 2023 poll found that a majority of Americans would support banning all tobacco products. Legal stigmatization produced cultural judgment that, in turn, may eventually acquire the force of law.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons America might not follow the United Kingdom. The U.K.’s socialized health-care system means that the costs of smoking are more directly borne by the taxpayer. Americans are more individualistic and suspicious of government than the British. Still unclear is whether the U.K. policy experiment will work, in the sense of reducing smoking’s total harm. Some of the people prohibited from buying cigarettes legally will do so illegally, whether with the help of a friend born before 2009 or through black markets. Such markets can and do generate crime. We don’t have enough research yet to judge if the costs will be worth the benefits.

[Nicholas Florko: What’s so bad about nicotine?]

Still, the results of the U.K. tobacco ban and similar efforts might offer lessons beyond those related to smoking. America is beset by a variety of addictive products that seem difficult to contain using the delicate instruments of public health. For example, in a landmark ruling last month, a jury determined that Meta and YouTube must pay a woman $6 million for the damage that their products did to her as a child. The plaintiff’s case was built on the idea that social media’s addictiveness is a defective product design, the same argument made about tobacco decades ago. The Public Health Advocacy Institute—whose president, Richard Daynard, pioneered the litigation strategy—has recently brought similar suits against sportsbooks and prediction markets.

These and other addictive products were initially met with enthusiasm; many are now facing backlash. In each case, the moderate position is to endorse some degree of regulation while stopping short of being so crude as to ban something harmful outright. But if the experience of tobacco is instructive, then stigmatizing, taxing, and regulating something for long enough can eventually create the conditions for an outright ban.

Prohibition has been a dirty word in American public policy since the Twenty-First Amendment passed. But as the Carnegie Mellon professor Jonathan Caulkins has observed, American jurisdictions successfully prohibit the sale of products such as fireworks and raw milk on a regular basis. Should we be squeamish about doing so for other things? As with cigarettes, the age of half measures and cautious regulation may soon be over.

The Cost of ‘Natural’ Womanhood

2026-05-03T08:00:00-04:00

Supposedly, the menstrual cycle is a gift. It’s a product of good design. It’s a miraculous dance of hormones that can’t be contained. Such are the messages flooding the internet these days, courtesy of lifestyle influencers, crunchy moms, so-called hormone coaches, and all sorts of popular entertainers.

The menstrual cycle, according to these same voices, is also an emotional roller coaster, best ridden with the aid of bespoke products. Viral memes and TikTok trends play up women’s purportedly excessive spike in libido during ovulation and dramatic irrationality during menstruation and the luteal phase (the 14 days or so between ovulation and menstruation). The cycle-tracking app Belle Health has used Moana’s verdant mother goddess and her volcanic counterpart to illustrate the difference. The meal-kit company Hungry Root recommends ordering sweets during the luteal phase. Every stage of the cycle has its own skin serum. You can test your hormone levels at a boutique women’s clinic, or at home using a $100-plus device and a monthly app subscription. (Evidence for the efficacy of most of these tests, devices, and apps is mixed at best.)

Riding the hormonal highs and lows is supposed to be worth it in part because of ovulation, a purportedly glorious, clear-skinned moment that justifies all the cramps and that one influencer calls women’s “secret superpower.” Advocates for a “natural” menstrual cycle argue that modern medicine—especially birth control—has robbed women of this gift, and therefore their true selves. If reclaiming it comes with wild mood swings, well, that’s a small price to pay. But in the long term, buying into these stories about mood and biology could have a higher cost.

Hormone shifts, of course, can exert some influence on mood. Progesterone, estrogen, and other hormones fluctuate throughout the menstrual cycle, and many people feel the effects of the sudden peaks and dips. Nearly all women report some mood changes and discomfort in the week prior to menstruation. Roughly 3 percent of premenopausal women likely experience premenstrual dysphoric disorder, which is characterized by severe mood swings related to one’s cycle. PCOS, fibroids, and endometriosis come with additional hormonal fluctuations, which can cause intense pain and bleeding, irregular periods, hair growth, and weight gain. Menstruation itself can be painful (not to mention annoying), which is unlikely to put anyone in a good mood. Menopause—and the hormonal changes that can last for years leading up to it—can also wreak physical and psychological havoc.

[Read: Women in menopause are getting short shrift]

But despite their use of scientific-sounding language like follicular and luteal, content creators severely exaggerate the influence of hormonal changes and the euphoria they can supposedly inspire. Hormones are not just powerful, they insist, but empowering, the ticket to health, harmony, and femininity. If your follicular phase doesn’t make you feel extra beautiful and sexual, or if you feel generally out of whack, something must be interfering with your hormones. Maybe that’s because you’re eating wrong, exercising wrong, too stressed, too caffeinated, or—God forbid—taking hormonal birth control.

Contraceptive pills, hormonal IUDs, birth-control implants, and Plan B all work by suppressing ovulation. And for that reason, hormonal contraception has in recent years been presented as a harmful disruptor of the natural joys of womanhood. “When you change your hormones, you change who you are,” Sarah Hill, an evolutionary psychologist at Texas Christian University and author of The Period Brain said in a 2024 interview. “If you want women to be feminine again, and soft again and beautiful,” the right-wing wellness podcaster Alex Clark declared last year, “women need to be ovulating.”

The only way to really get in touch with your body, according to this line of thinking, is to give your hormones free rein. In a Rolling Stone interview last year, the singer Lorde described how she stopped taking birth control before writing her most recent album. Her next ovulation, she said, was “one of the best drugs I’ve ever done.” (She chalked her decision to go off birth control up to right-wing influence, acknowledging a split from her usual politics.)

[Read: Why are so many women being told their hormones are out of whack?]

The promise of a “natural” approach to women’s health is seductive, in large part because of the ways that modern medicine has failed women. Women’s health is perennially understudied: In 2024, for instance, 6 percent of the annual National Institutes of Health budget went toward studying women’s health, and that was before the wave of scientific-grant terminations under the Trump administration. This could help explain why hormonal birth control is so often prescribed for dozens of ailments—including painful periods, fibroids, and PCOS—that have few other effective treatments. Plus, the side-effect profile of hormonal birth control can be brutal: It can cause weight gain, exacerbate some underlying mood disorders, and raise the risk of blood clots (but much less than pregnancy does), which in turn can increase the risk of stroke. It also increases the risk of certain types of cancers (while reducing the risk of other types).

But jettisoning hormonal treatments also means losing their benefits. Decades of research indicate that the hormones used in contraceptives, menopause care, and IVF are safe for the large majority of people. Hormonal IUDs and birth-control pills are highly effective, especially compared with more MAHA-aligned fertility-awareness methods. Hormones are also a lifeline for women who have uncomfortable-to-debilitating conditions such as endometriosis and premenstrual dysphoric disorder, as well as a range of autoimmune disorders that have nothing to do with reproduction. Hormonal infertility treatments have helped people safely create and expand families since the late 1970s.

Claiming that the menstrual cycle is mystical and powerful might sound feminist. But teaching women that they should naturally feel erratic at virtually every point in their cycle could lead women to downplay—and miss out on treatment for—actual mood or hormonal disorders. The attitude also has social consequences. Denigrating hormonal birth control when access to abortion is restricted could leave more women with unwanted pregnancies; it dovetails with some pronatalists’ argument that women should dedicate themselves to motherhood and the conservative push for women to embrace traditional gender roles. “Whenever we see a precipitous rise in hormones as an area of interest, it usually also indicates shifting ideas of gender and culture,” Alexander Borsa, a public-health researcher at Columbia University, told me. If women are susceptible to biologically driven instability, how could Americans possibly trust them to be equal to men? To hold political power? To run companies? (In fact, an essay arguing that women are not fit to do such things went viral last fall.)

[Read: No, women aren’t the problem]

Urging women to “balance” their hormones “naturally” perpetuates an insidious, age-old idea that women are especially close to nature and God. “There’s a long tradition of linking women to nature, men to culture,” Helen King, a historian and the author of Immaculate Forms, told me in an email. “In Ancient Greek medicine, women’s flesh was seen as more absorbent, as resembling a fleece, whereas men’s flesh was like a fabric garment. Women were closer to the natural product, the raw materials, men were superior as the finished product.”

At their most chilling, such beliefs are paired with arguments that women not only are especially natural, but also should stay that way—that modern medicine shouldn’t try to understand or interfere with women’s bodies. Many in the MAHA movement, for example, urge women of childbearing age to be as “natural” as possible—to embrace traditional gender roles while rejecting chemicals, vaccines, additives in foods, and of course birth control. The federal government has, to its credit, recently championed the use of estrogen to relieve symptoms of menopause. But at the same time, for women of childbearing age, it is promoting restorative reproductive medicine, a form of fertility treatment that eschews hormonal intervention and is not empirically backed.

The more people believe that women are ruled by their untamable hormones, the more women stand to lose actual power. Leaning into the supposed euphoria of ovulation is fun, sure—who wouldn’t want to try the best drug Lorde has ever taken? But that drug trip is fleeting. When it ends, what are women left with?

Why One Coach’s Personal Life Is a Sports-Wide Scandal

2026-05-04T09:00:00-04:00

Updated at 11:56 a.m. ET on April 8, 2026.

Just a few months ago, the New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel was experiencing a special kind of celebrity. Across the sports world, Vrabel was widely praised for becoming one of eight coaches in NFL history to take his team to the Super Bowl in his very first season as head coach. Built like an oak tree, the former linebacker (he spent eight seasons with the Patriots) is known for his no-nonsense demeanor, and has even put on football pads to mix it up with his players—all part of the tough persona that endeared him to fans.

Though the Patriots lost the Super Bowl, many still believed that Vrabel was perfectly positioned to return the franchise to the upper tier of the NFL, where it has lived for the majority of the 21st century. For the past few weeks, however, Vrabel’s reputation has shifted as he’s become a fixture in the gossip pages. On April 7, the New York Post published photos of him and the NFL reporter Dianna Russini together at an Arizona resort. Both Russini and Vrabel, who are married to other people, initially denied having any personal involvement beyond their professional capacity.

But as Russini’s then-employer The Athletic (which is owned by the New York Times Company) began an internal investigation into their relationship, Russini resigned from her position. (In her statement, she didn’t explicitly deny the allegations, but said she had “no interest in submitting to a public inquiry that has already caused far more damage than I am willing to accept.”) A week later, Vrabel told reporters: “I’ve had some difficult conversations with people I care about—with my family, the organization, the coaches, the players.” He didn’t confirm or deny the rumors, but called the issue a “personal and private matter.”

Shortly thereafter, Vrabel issued a statement announcing he would be missing part of the upcoming NFL draft to seek counseling. For the head coach to be away from the team during the draft is highly unusual; even under these circumstances, the announcement seemed to come out of nowhere. But just before the draft began, the Post published photos of Vrabel and Russini kissing and holding hands at a New York bar in 2020, furthering speculation about their personal relationship. (At the time, Russini was working for ESPN and Vrabel was the head coach of the Tennessee Titans. I should mention that I used to work at ESPN, but didn’t work with Russini.) Now Vrabel is being regularly hounded by paparazzi at the airport, while facing accusations that he’s a philanderer.

The violation of journalistic ethics is obvious: Married or not, reporters should never develop intimate relationships with their sources. (The Times’ ethical-journalism handbook, which journalists for The Athletic are not subject to, says that any romantic relationships between journalist and source must be disclosed to the standards editor, and notes that “staff members may have to recuse themselves from certain coverage”; The Athletic’s editorial guidelines do not explicitly mention romantic relationships.) For some women in sports journalism, the situation resurfaces misogynistic assumptions that women reporters sleep with sources for information or that they use their access like a personal dating app.

But even absent a flagrant ethical transgression, the relationship between coaches and journalists can be tricky to navigate. Sports journalists are expected to get close to coaches, players, and members of a team’s front office. In the process, some journalists wind up developing buddy-buddy relationships with their sources that go beyond basic professional obligation. Proving it from the outside is hard, but some sports fans are used to noticing—and speculating—when a journalist appears to be getting a lot of information from the same source, or when their objectivity seems to bend toward supporting a particular agenda.

[Read: The thrill of defeat]

Putting aside the tabloid nature of the situation, it’s fair to wonder how Vrabel and Russini’s relationship—whatever it entailed—could have influenced Russini’s reporting, which in turn influences real people’s lives and livelihoods. For example, throughout this past NFL season Russini reported that the Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver A. J. Brown was unhappy with his role on the team. Vrabel had coached Brown for three seasons in Tennessee, and Russini noted in later, co-bylined reports that the Patriots were a possible destination for the disgruntled player. Could Russini have reported on Brown’s discontent in order to help facilitate a trade to New England? Maybe, maybe not—but we might never know, as the league dismissed the idea of conducting any investigation into Vrabel’s behavior.

Vrabel has often spoken passionately about accountability being a core principle of his football team, but in providing vague answers about his relationship with Russini, he seems to be dodging what he’s preaching. Russini’s career might be over. And perhaps that’s appropriate: Her job is different than his, including the professional ethics and standards required to perform it. Meanwhile, Vrabel may be allowed to move on to the new NFL season, and in the process offer all the right platitudes about getting back to business. There’s a gap between what he said when he was being praised and what he’s done under fire.

But even if Vrabel stays with the team, things won’t be business as usual anytime soon. He now faces a new level of scrutiny on top of the demands and pressure that automatically come with trying to be a winning NFL coach. It’s a new reality that he completely earned.

This article originally referred to the Times’ code of conduct, instead of its ethical-journalism handbook, and has been updated to reflect the distinction.

Why We Lose Our Friends as We Age

2023-02-11T08:00:00-05:00

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.

When I was in college, an acquaintance who had graduated a few years prior came back to visit for the weekend. As we walked around campus on Saturday night, he flung his hands into the cold Connecticut air and exclaimed, “You guys are so lucky; you live a minute away from all your friends. You’ll never have this again.”

At the time, I thought it was kind of sad—a grown man pining for my life of university housing and late library nights. But his words have stuck with me in the years since. “In adulthood, as people grow up and go away, friendships are the relationships most likely to take a hit,” my colleague Julie Beck wrote in 2015. The older you get, the more effort it takes to maintain connections, because you don’t have as many built-in opportunities to see your friends every day.

The writer Jennifer Senior noted last year that the fact of our choosing friendships makes them both fragile and special: “You have to continually opt in. That you choose it is what gives it its value,” she wrote. But that’s also what makes friendships harder to hold on to as our lives evolve.

It’s hard but not impossible. Senior notes that when it comes to friendship, “we are ritual-deficient, nearly devoid of rites that force us together.” So we have to create them: weekly phone calls, friendship anniversaries, road trips, “whatever it takes.”

“Friendship is the rare kind of relationship that remains forever available to us as we age,” Senior writes. “It’s a bulwark against stasis, a potential source of creativity and renewal in lives that otherwise narrow with time.” It’s something worth choosing, over and over again.

On Friendship

Oliver Munday

It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart

By Jennifer Senior

The older we get, the more we need our friends—and the harder it is to keep them.

Wenjia Tang

The Six Forces That Fuel Friendship

By Julie Beck

I’ve spent more than three years interviewing friends for “The Friendship Files.” Here’s what I’ve learned.

Millennium Images / Gallery Stock

Why Making Friends in Midlife Is So Hard

By Katharine Smyth

I thought I was done dating. But after moving across the country, I had to start again—this time, in search of platonic love.

Still Curious?

How friendship changes at the end of life: In an edition of her Friendship Files series, Julie Beck spoke with two women who have spent time ministering to aging and dying members of their congregation.
Want closer friendships? Move away from your friends. Distance isn’t the barrier that some may think.

Other Diversions

P.S.

In one of my favorite editions of Julie’s Friendship Files, she spoke with three women who tried an interesting experiment to deal with “the friendship desert of modern adulthood”: They entered into “arranged friendships,” bringing together a group of strangers who committed to be friends through it all.

— Isabel

You Might Be a Late Bloomer

2024-06-26T09:40:35-04:00

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

Paul Cézanne always knew he wanted to be an artist. His father compelled him to enter law school, but after two desultory years he withdrew. In 1861, at the age of 22, he went to Paris to pursue his artistic dreams but was rejected by the École des Beaux-Arts, struggled as a painter, and retreated back to his hometown in the south of France, where he worked as a clerk in his father’s bank.

He returned to Paris the next year and was turned down again by the École. His paintings were rejected by the Salon de Paris every year from 1864 to 1869. He continued to submit paintings until 1882, but none were accepted. He joined with the Impressionists, many of whose works were also being rejected, but soon stopped showing with them as well.

By middle age, he was discouraged. He wrote to a friend, “On this matter I must tell you that the numerous studies to which I devoted myself having produced only negative results, and dreading criticism that is only too justified, I have resolved to work in silence, until the day when I should feel capable of defending theoretically the results of my endeavors.” No Cézanne paintings were put on public display when he was between 46 and 56, the prime years for many artists, including some of Cézanne’s most prominent contemporaries.

In 1886, when Cézanne was 47, the celebrated writer Émile Zola, the artist’s closest friend since adolescence, published a novel called The Oeuvre. It was about two young men, one who grows up to be a famous author and the other who grows up to be a failed painter and commits suicide. The painter character was based, at least in part, on Cézanne. (“I had grown up almost in the same cradle as my friend, my brother, Paul Cézanne,” Zola would later write in a French newspaper, “in whom one begins to realize only today the touches of genius of a great painter come to nothing.”) Upon publication of the novel, Zola sent a copy to Cézanne, who responded with a short, polite reply. After that, they rarely communicated.

Things began to turn around in 1895, when, at the age of 56, Cézanne had his first one-man show. Two years later, one of his paintings was purchased by a museum in Berlin, the first time any museum had shown that kind of interest in his work. By the time he was 60, his paintings had started selling, though for much lower prices than those fetched by Manet or Renoir. Soon he was famous, revered. Fellow artists made pilgrimages to watch him work.

What drove the man through all those decades of setbacks and obscurity? One biographer attributed it to his “inquiétude”—his drive, restlessness, anxiety. He just kept pushing himself to get better.

His continual sense of dissatisfaction was evident in a letter he wrote to his son in 1906, at age 67, a month before he died: “I want to tell you that as a painter I am becoming more clairvoyant to nature, but that it is always very difficult for me to realize my feelings. I cannot reach the intensity that unfolds before my senses. I do not possess that wonderful richness of color that animates nature.” He was still at it on the day he died, still working on his paintings, still teaching himself to improve.

The year after his death, a retrospective of his work was mounted in Paris. Before long, he would be widely recognized as one of the founders of modern art: “Cézanne is the father of us all,” both Matisse and Picasso are said to have declared.

Today we live in a society structured to promote early bloomers. Our school system has sorted people by the time they are 18, using grades and SAT scores. Some of these people zoom to prestigious academic launching pads while others get left behind. Many of our most prominent models of success made it big while young—Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, Michael Jordan. Magazines publish lists with headlines like “30 Under 30” to glamorize youthful superstars on the rise. Age discrimination is a fact of life. In California in 2010, for example, more people filed claims with the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing for age discrimination than for racial discrimination or sexual harassment. “Young people are just smarter,” Zuckerberg once said, in possibly the dumbest statement in American history. “There are no second acts in American lives,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed, in what might be the next dumbest.

But for many people, the talents that bloom later in life are more consequential than the ones that bloom early. A 2019 study by researchers in Denmark found that, on average, Nobel Prize winners made their crucial discoveries at the age of 44. Even brilliant people apparently need at least a couple of decades to master their field.

The average age of a U.S. patent applicant is 47. A 45-year-old is twice as likely to produce a scientific breakthrough as a 25-year-old. A study published in The American Economic Review found 45 to be the average age of an entrepreneur–and found furthermore that the likelihood that an entrepreneur’s start-up will succeed increases significantly between ages 25 and 35, with the odds of success continuing to rise well into the 50s. A tech founder who is 50 is twice as likely to start a successful company as one who is 30. A study by researchers at Northwestern University, MIT, and the U.S. Census Bureau found that the fastest-growing start-ups were founded by people whose average age was 45 when their company was launched. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation produced a study that found that the peak innovation age is the late 40s.

Successful late bloomers are all around us. Morgan Freeman had his breakthrough roles in Street Smart and Driving Miss Daisy in his early 50s. Colonel Harland Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken in his 60s. Isak Dinesen published the book that established her literary reputation, Out of Africa, at 52. Morris Chang founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world’s leading chipmaker, at 55. If Samuel Johnson had died at 40, few would remember him, but now he is considered one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language. Copernicus came up with his theory of planetary motion in his 60s. Grandma Moses started painting at 77. Noah was around 600 when he built his ark (though Noah truthers dispute his birth certificate).

Why do some people hit their peak later than others? In his book Late Bloomers, the journalist Rich Karlgaard points out that this is really two questions: First, why didn’t these people bloom earlier? Second, what traits or skills did they possess that enabled them to bloom late? It turns out that late bloomers are not simply early bloomers on a delayed timetable—they didn’t just do the things early bloomers did but at a later age. Late bloomers tend to be qualitatively different, possessing a different set of abilities that are mostly invisible to or discouraged by our current education system. They usually have to invent their own paths. Late bloomers “fulfill their potential frequently in novel and unexpected ways,” Karlgaard writes, “surprising even those closest to them.”

[Jim VandeHei: What I wish someone had told me 30 years ago]

If you survey history, a taxonomy of achievement emerges. In the first category are the early bloomers, the precocious geniuses. These are people like Picasso or Fitzgerald who succeeded young. As the University of Chicago economist David Galenson has pointed out, these high achievers usually made a conceptual breakthrough. They came up with a new idea and then executed it. Picasso had a clear idea of Cubism, and how he was going to revolutionize art, in his mid-20s. Then he went out and painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Then there are the “second-mountain people,” exemplified by, say, Albert Schweitzer. First, they conquer their career mountain; Schweitzer, for instance, was an accomplished musician and scholar. But these people find their career success unsatisfying, so they leave their career mountain to serve humanity—their whole motivational structure shifts from acquisition to altruism. Schweitzer became a doctor in the poorest parts of Africa, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in 1952.

Finally, there are the people Galenson calls “the masters.” In his book Old Masters and Young Geniuses, he writes about people like Cézanne or Alfred Hitchcock or Charles Darwin, who were not all that successful—and in some cases just not even very good at what they did—when they were young. This could have been discouraging, but they just kept improving.

These people don’t do as much advance planning as the conceptual geniuses, but they regard their entire lives as experiments. They try something and learn, and then they try something else and learn more. Their focus is not on their finished work, which they often toss away haphazardly. Their focus is on the process of learning itself: Am I closer to understanding, to mastering? They live their lives as a long period of trial and error, trying this and trying that, a slow process of accumulation and elaboration, so the quality of their work peaks late in life. They are the ugly ducklings of human achievement, who, over the decades, turn themselves into swans.

Let’s look at some of the traits that tend to distinguish late bloomers from early bloomers—the qualities that cause them to lag early in life but surge ahead over the long haul.

Intrinsic motivation. Most of our schools and workplaces are built around extrinsic motivation: If you work hard, you will be rewarded with good grades, better salaries, and performance bonuses. Extrinsic-motivation systems are built on the assumption that although work is unpleasant, if you give people external incentives to perform, they will respond productively.

People who submit to these extrinsic-reward systems are encouraged to develop a merit-badge mentality. They get good at complying with other people’s standards, following other people’s methods, and pursuing other people’s goals. The people who thrive in these sorts of systems are good at earning high GPAs—having the self-discipline to get A’s in all subjects, even the ones that don’t interest them. They are valuable to companies precisely because they’re good at competently completing whatever tasks are put in front of them.

People driven by intrinsic motivation are not like that. They are bad at paying attention to what other people tell them to pay attention to. Winston Churchill was a poor student for just this reason. “Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn,” he wrote in his autobiography, My Early Life.

But such people can be great at paying attention to things that do interest them. The intrinsically motivated have a strong need for autonomy. They are driven by their own curiosity, their own obsessions—and the power of this motivation eclipses the lesser ones fired by extrinsic rewards.

Extrinsically motivated people tend to race ahead during young adulthood, when the job is to please teachers, bosses, and other older people, but then stop working as hard once that goal is met. They’re likely to take short cuts if it can get them more quickly to the goal.

Worse, as research by scholars like the psychologist Edward L. Deci has established, if you reward people extrinsically, you can end up crushing the person’s capacity for intrinsic motivation. If you pay kids to read, they might read more in the short term—but over time they’ll regard reading as unpleasant work, best avoided. A 2009 London School of Economics study that looked at 51 corporate pay-for-performance plans found that financial incentives “can have a negative impact on overall performance.”

I once asked a group of students on their final day at their prestigious university what book had changed their life over the previous four years. A long, awkward silence followed. Finally a student said, “You have to understand, we don’t read like that. We only sample enough of each book to get through class.” These students were hurrying to be good enough to get their merit badges, but not getting deep enough into any subject to be transformed. They didn’t love the process of learning itself, which is what you need if you’re going to keep educating yourself decade after decade—which, in turn, is what you need to keep advancing when the world isn’t rewarding you with impressive grades and prizes.

Intrinsically motivated people, by contrast, are self-directed and often obsessed, burying themselves deep into some subject or task. They find learning about a subject or doing an activity to be their own reward, so they are less likely to cut corners. As Vincent van Gogh—a kind of early late bloomer, who struggled to find his way and didn’t create most of his signature works until the last two years of his life before dying at 37—wrote to his brother, “I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.”

In Drive, the writer Daniel Pink argues that extrinsic-motivation models work fine when tasks are routine, boring, and technical. But he cites a vast body of research showing that intrinsically motivated people are more productive, more persistent, and less likely to burn out. They also exhibit higher levels of well-being. Over the long run, Pink concludes, “intrinsically motivated people usually achieve more than their reward-seeking counterparts.”

Early screw-ups. Late bloomers often don’t fit into existing systems. To use William Deresiewicz’s term, they are bad at being “excellent sheep”—bad at following the conventional rules of success. Or to put it another way, they can be assholes. Buckminster Fuller was expelled from college twice, lost his job in the building business when he was 32, and later contemplated suicide so his family could live off his life insurance. But then he moved to Greenwich Village, took a teaching job at Black Mountain College, and eventually emerged as an architect, designer, futurist, and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Colonel Sanders was fired for insubordination when he was a railway engineer, and then fired again for brawling with a colleague while working as a fireman. His career as a lawyer ended when he got into a fistfight with a client, and he lost his job as an insurance salesman because he was unsuited to working for other people. Then, at 62, he created the recipe for what became Kentucky Fried Chicken, began to succeed as a franchiser at 69, and sold the company for $2 million when he was 73.

Late bloomers often have an edge to them, a willingness to battle with authority.

“Diversive curiosity.” Our culture pushes people to specialize early: Be like Tiger Woods driving golf balls as a toddler. Concentrate on one thing and get really good, really fast—whether it is golf or physics or investing. In the academic world, specialization is rewarded: Don’t be a scholar of Europe, be a scholar of Dutch basket weaving in the 16th century.

Yet when the journalist David Epstein looked at the lives of professional athletes, he found that most of them were less like Tiger Woods and more like Roger Federer, who played a lot of different sports when he was young. These athletes went through what researchers call a “sampling period” and only narrowed their focus to one sport later on. In his book Range, Epstein writes that people who went through a sampling period ended up enjoying greater success over the long run: “One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earning lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fitted their skills and personalities.”

[Jessica Lahey and Tim Lahey: How middle-school failures lead to medical-school success]

Many late bloomers endure a brutal wandering period, as they cast about for a vocation. Julia Child made hats, worked for U.S. intelligence (where she was part of a team trying to develop an effective shark repellent), and thought about trying to become a novelist before enrolling in a French cooking school at 37. Van Gogh was an art dealer, a teacher, a bookseller, and a street preacher before taking up painting at 27. During those wandering years, he was a miserable failure. His family watched his repeated downward spirals with embarrassment.

During these early periods, late bloomers try and then quit so many jobs that the people around them might conclude that they lack resilience. But these are exactly the years when the late bloomers are developing what psychologists call “diversive curiosity”—the ability to wander into a broad range of interests in a manner that seems to have no rhyme or reason.

The benefits of this kind of curiosity might be hard to see in the short term, but they become obvious once the late bloomer begins to take advantage of their breadth of knowledge by putting discordant ideas together in new ways. When the psychologist Howard Gruber studied the diaries of Charles Darwin, he found that in the decades before he published On the Origin of Species, Darwin was “pen pals” (as David Epstein puts it) with at least 231 scientists, whose worked ranged across 13 broad streams, from economics to geology, the biology of barnacles to the sex life of birds. Darwin couldn’t have written his great masterworks if he hadn’t been able to combine these vastly different intellectual currents.

Epstein notes that many of the most successful scientists have had diverse interests, and especially in different kinds of performing: Nobel Prize winners are 22 times more likely to spend large chunks of time as an amateur actor, musician, magician, or other type of performer than non-Nobel-winning scientists are. Epstein quotes Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the founder of modern neuroscience: “To him who observes them from afar, it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies,” Cajal wrote, speaking of these late-blooming Nobelists, “while in reality they are channeling and strengthening them.”

Late bloomers tend to have a high tolerance for ambiguity, and can bring multiple ways of thinking to bear on a single complex problem. They also have a high tolerance for inefficiency. They walk through life like a curious person browsing through a bookstore. In old age, the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote, “The amateur spirit has guided my thinking and writing.” He had wandered from subject to subject throughout his life, playing around.

The ability to self-teach. Late bloomers don’t find their calling until they are too old for traditional education systems. So they have to teach themselves. Successful autodidacts start with what psychologists call a “high need for cognition”—in other words, they like to think a lot. In his book Curious, Ian Leslie presents a series of statements that, when answered in the affirmative, indicate a high need for cognition: “I would prefer complex to simple problems”; “I prefer my life be filled with puzzles that I can’t solve”; “I find satisfaction in deliberating hard and for long hours.”

Leonardo da Vinci is the poster child for high-cognition needs. Consider his famous lists of self-assigned research projects: “Ask the master of arithmetic how to square a triangle … examine a crossbow … ask about the measurement of the sun … draw Milan.” Benjamin Franklin was similar. After he was appointed U.S. ambassador to France, he could have relaxed on his transatlantic voyages between home and work. Instead, he turned them into scientific expeditions, measuring the temperature of the water as he went, which allowed him to discover and chart the Gulf Stream.

Successful late bloomers combine this high need for cognition with a seemingly contradictory trait: epistemic humility. They are aggressive about wanting to acquire knowledge and learn—but they are also modest, possessing an accurate sense of how much they don’t know.

This mentality combines high self-belief (I can figure this out on my own; I know my standards are right and the world’s standards are wrong) with high self-doubt (There’s a lot I don’t know, and I am falling short in many ways).

The combination of a high need for cognition and epistemic humility is a recipe for lifelong learning. Late bloomers learn more slowly but also more deeply precisely because they’re exploring on their own. The benefits of acquiring this self-taught knowledge compound over time. The more you know about a subject, the faster you can learn. A chess grandmaster with thousands of past matches stored in their head will see a new strategy much faster than a chess beginner. Knowledge begets knowledge. Researchers call this “the Matthew effect”: “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance.” Pretty soon, the late bloomer is taking off.

The ability to finally commit. Of course, late bloomers can’t just wander forever. At some point they must grab onto some challenge that engages their powerful intrinsic drive. They have to commit. Ray Kroc endured a classic wandering period. He got a job selling ribbons. He played piano in a bordello. He read the ticker tape at the Chicago stock exchange. He sold paper cups and then milkshake mixers. In that latter job he noticed that one restaurant was ordering a tremendous number of milkshake machines. Curious, he drove halfway across the country to see it, and found a fast-food restaurant that was more efficiently churning out meals than any he had ever encountered. “There was something almost religious about Kroc’s inspirational moment when he discovered McDonald’s,” Henry Oliver writes in his forthcoming book, Second Act. Kroc just cared about hamburgers and fries (and milkshakes) more than most people. He bought the restaurant, and brought to it his own form of genius, which was the ability to franchise it on a massive scale.

The mind of the explorer. By middle age, many late bloomers have achieved lift-off and are getting to enjoy the pleasures of concentrated effort. They are absorbed, fascinated. But since they are freer from ties and associations than the early achiever, late bloomers can also change their mind and update their models without worrying about betraying any professional norms.

We have a notion that the happiest people are those who have aimed their life toward some goal and then attained it, like winning a championship trophy or achieving renown. But the best moments of life can be found within the lifelong learning or quest itself. It’s doing something so fulfilling that the work is its own reward. “Effort is the one thing that gives meaning to life,” the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck once wrote. “Effort means you care about something.”

“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life,” the sculptor Henry Moore once told the poet Donald Hall. “And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

Crankiness in old age. So far, I’ve been describing late bloomers as if they were all openhearted curiosity and wonder. But remember that many of them have been butting against established institutions their whole lives—and they’ve naturally developed oppositional, chip-on-the-shoulder, even angry mindsets.

In his essay “The Artist Grows Old,” the great art critic Sir Kenneth Clark wrote about painters—like Titian, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Cézanne—who produced their best work at the end of their lives, sometimes in their 80s or even 90s. He noticed that while these older artists painted with passion, this passion was inflected with what he called “transcendental pessimism.” The artists who peak late, he found, “take a very poor view of human life.” They are energized by a holy rage. The British artist William Turner felt so hopeless late in life that he barely spoke. “Old artists are solitary,” Clark writes. “Like all old people they are bored and irritated by the company of their fellow bipeds and yet find their isolation depressing. They are also suspicious of interference.”

The angry old artists fight back with their brushes. They retreat from realism. Their handling of paint grows freer. “Cézanne, who in middle life painted with the delicacy of a watercolorist, and was almost afraid, as he said, to sully the whiteness of a canvas, ended by attacking it with heavy and passionate strokes,” Clark writes. “The increased vitality of an aged hand is hard to explain.”

Younger painters, like younger workers in any field, are trying to learn the language of the craft. Older painters, like older expert practitioners in other fields, have mastered the language and are willing to bend it. Older painters feel free to jettison the rules that stifle their prophetic voice. They can express what they need to more purely.

Clark’s analysis is insightful, but I think he may be overgeneralizing. His theory applies to an angry, pessimistic painting like Michelangelo’s late work The Crucifixion of St. Peter, a painting of an old man raging against the inhumanity of the world. But Clark’s theory doesn’t really apply to, say, Rembrandt’s late work The Return of the Prodigal Son. By the time he painted it, Rembrandt was old, broke, and out of fashion; his wife and many of his children had preceded him to the grave. But Prodigal Son is infused with a spirit of holy forgiveness. It shows a father offering infinite love to a wayward, emaciated, and grateful son. It couldn’t be gentler.

Wisdom. After a lifetime of experimentation, some late bloomers transcend their craft or career and achieve a kind of comprehensive wisdom.

Wisdom is a complicated trait. It starts with pattern recognition—using experience to understand what is really going on. The neuroscientist Elkhonon Goldberg provides a classic expression of this ability in his book The Wisdom Paradox. “Frequently when I am faced with what would appear from the outside to be a challenging problem, the grinding mental computation is somehow circumvented, rendered, as if by magic, unnecessary,” he writes. “The solution comes effortlessly, seamlessly, seemingly by itself. What I have lost with age in my capacity for hard mental work, I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight.”

But the trait we call wisdom is more than just pattern recognition; it’s the ability to see things from multiple points of view, the ability to aggregate perspectives and rest in the tensions between them. When he was in his 60s, Cézanne built a study in Provence and painted a series of paintings of a single mountain, Mont Sainte-Victoire, which are now often considered his greatest works. He painted the mountain at different times of day, in different sorts of light. He wasn’t so much painting the mountain as painting time. He was also painting perception itself, its continual flow, its uncertainties and evolutions. “I progress very slowly,” he wrote to the painter Émile Bernard, “for nature reveals herself to me in complex ways; and the progress needed is endless.”

“Old men ought to be explorers,” T. S. Eliot wrote in East Coker. “Here and there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion.” For some late bloomers, the exploration never ends. They have a certain distinct way of being in the world, but they express that way of being at greater and greater levels of complexity as they age.

Wisdom is an intellectual trait—the ability to see reality as it really is. But it is also a moral trait; we wouldn’t call a self-centered person wise. It is also a spiritual trait; the wise person possesses a certain tranquility, the ability to stay calm when others are overwhelmed with negative emotions.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to succeed at failure]

When I was young I was mentored by William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman, both at that time approaching the end of their careers. Both men had changed history. Buckley created the modern conservative movement that led to the election of Ronald Reagan. Friedman changed economics and won the Nobel Prize. I had a chance to ask each of them, separately, if they ever felt completion, if they ever had a sense that they’d done their work and now they had crossed the finish line and could relax. Neither man even understood my question. They were never at rest, pushing for what they saw as a better society all the days of their lives.

My friend Tim Keller, the late pastor, was in some ways not a classic late bloomer—his talents were already evident when he was a young man. But those talents weren’t afforded much public scope at the church in rural Virginia where his calling had taken him.

Tim didn’t feel qualified to publish his first major book until he was 58. Over the next 10 years he published nearly three dozen more, harvesting the wisdom he’d been gathering all along. His books have sold more than 25 million copies. During this same time, he founded Redeemer, the most influential church in New York and maybe America.

When Tim got pancreatic cancer at the age of 70, he was still in the prime of his late-blooming life. Under the shadow of death, as he wrote in The Atlantic, his spiritual awareness grew deeper. He experienced more sadness and also more joy. But what I will always remember about those final years is how much more eager Tim was to talk about the state of the world than about the state of his own health. He had more to give, and he worked feverishly until the end. He left behind an agenda for how to repair the American church—a specific action plan for how to mend the Christian presence in our torn land.

I’ve noticed this pattern again and again: Slow at the start, late bloomers are still sprinting during that final lap—they do not slow down as age brings its decay. They are seeking. They are striving. They are in it with all their heart.

Waiting for the Weekend

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The word “weekend” started life as “week-end” but lost its hyphen somewhere along the way, ceasing to be merely the end of the week and acquiring, instead, an autonomous and sovereign existence. “Have a good weekend,” we say to one another—never “Have a good week.” Where once the week consisted of weekdays and Sunday, it now consists of weekdays and weekend. Ask most people to name the first day of the week and they will answer, Monday, of course; fifty years ago the answer would have been Sunday. Wall calendars still show Sunday as the first day of the week, and children are taught the days of the week starting with Sunday, but how long will these conventions last? Sunday, once the day of rest, has become merely one of two days of what is often strenuous activity. Although we continue to celebrate the traditional religious and civic holidays—holy days—these now account for only a small portion of our total nonworking days, and are overshadowed by the 104 days of secular weekends.

For most of us life assumes a different rhythm on the weekend; we sleep in, cut the grass, wash the car. We also go to the movies, especially during hot weather. We travel. And of course we exercise and play games. Some of these pastimes, like tennis, have an old history and a newfound popularity; others, like whitewater canoeing, windsurfing, and hang-gliding, are more recent. Most are distinguished from nineteenth-century recreations such as croquet and golf by their relative arduousness and even riskiness.

Although the weekend is a time for sports, for shopping, and for household chores, it is foremost a manifestation of the structure of our leisure. The chief Oxford English Dictionary definition of leisure is “time which one can spend as one pleases.” That is, “free” time. But in one of his popular columns in The Illustrated London News—a Saturday paper—G. K. Chesterton pointed out that leisure should not be confused with liberty. Contrary to most people’s expectations, the presence of the first by no means assures the availability of the second. This confusion arose, according to Chesterton, because the term “leisure” is used to describe three different things: “The first is being allowed to do something. The second is being allowed to do anything. And the third (and perhaps most rare and precious) is being allowed to do nothing.” The first, he acknowledged, was the most common form of leisure, and the one that of late—he was writing in the early 1890s—had shown the greatest quantitative increase. The second—the liberty to fashion what one willed out of one’s leisure time—was more unusual and tended to be the province of artists and other creative individuals. It was the third, however, that was obviously his favorite, because it allowed idleness—in Chesterton’s view, the truest form of leisure.

Perhaps only someone as portly as Chesterton (Maisie Ward, his biographer, estimated that he weighed almost 300 pounds) could rhapsodize over idleness. More likely, inactivity attracted him because he was the least lazy of men; his bibliography lists more than a hundred published books—biographies, novels, essays, poetry, and short stories. He was also a magazine editor and a lecturer and broadcaster. Although he managed to cram all this into a relatively short life (he died at sixty-two), it was, as his physique would suggest, a life replete with material enjoyments, and surprisingly unhurried. Not a life of leisure, perhaps, but one carried out at a leisurely pace.

Chesterton’s observation that modern society provided many opportunities for leisure but made it “more and more easy to get some things and impossible to get others” continues to be true. Should you want to play tennis or golf, for example, courts and courses abound. Fancy a video? There are plenty of specialty stores, lending libraries, and mail-order clubs. Lepidopterists, however, will have a difficult time finding unfenced countryside in which to practice their avocation. If your pastime is laying bricks and you do not have a rural estate, as Winston Churchill had, you will not find a bricklaying franchise at your neighborhood mall. Better take up golf instead.

Chesterton argued that a man compelled by lack of choice—or by social pressure—to play golf when he would rather be attending to some solitary hobby was not so different from the slave who might have several hours of leisure while his overseer slept but had to be ready to work at a moment’s notice. Neither could be said to be the master of his leisure. Both had free time but not freedom. To press this parallel further, have we become enslaved by the weekend?

At first glance it is an odd question, for surely it is our work that enslaves us, not our free time. We call people who become obsessed by their jobs workaholics, but we don’t have a word for someone who is possessed by recreation. Maybe we should. I have many acquaintances for whom weekend activities seem more important than workaday existence, and who behave as if the week were merely an irritating interference in their real, extracurricular lives. I sometimes have the impression that to really know these weekend sailors, mountain climbers, and horsewomen, I would have to accompany them on their outings and excursions—see them in their natural habitat, so to speak. But would I see a different person, or merely the same one governed by different conventions of comportment, behavior, accoutrement, and dress?

I’m always charmed by old photographs of skiers which show groups of people in what appear to be street clothes, with uncomplicated pieces of bent wood strapped to sturdy walking boots. These men and women have a playful and unaffected air. Today every novice is caparisoned in skin-tight spandex, like an Olympic racer, and even cross-country skiing, a simple enough pastime, has been infected by a preoccupation with correct dress, authentic terminology, and up-to-date equipment. This reflects an attitude toward play which is different from what it was in the past. Most outdoor sports, once simply muddled through, are now undertaken with a high degree of seriousness. “Professional” used to be a word that distinguished someone who was paid for an activity from the sportsman; today the word has come to denote anyone with a high degree of proficiency; “professional-quality” equipment is available to—and desired by—all. Conversely, “amateur,” a wonderful word literally meaning “lover,” has been degraded to mean a rank beginner or anyone without a certain level of skill. “Just an amateur,” we say; it is not, as it once was, a compliment.

The lack of carelessness in our recreation, the sense of obligation to get things right, and the emphasis on protocol and decorum do represent an enslavement of a kind. People used to “play” tennis; now they “work” on their backhand. It is not hard to imagine what Chesterton would have thought of such dedication; this is just the sort of laborious pursuit of play that he so often derided. “If a thing is worth doing,” he once wrote, “it is worth doing badly.”

Chesterton held the traditional view that leisure was different from the type of recreation typically afforded by the modern weekend. His own leisure pastimes included an eclectic mix of the unfashionable and the bohemian—sketching, collecting weapons, and playing with the cardboard cutouts of his toy theater. Leisure was the opportunity for personal, even idiosyncratic, pursuits, not for ordered recreation; it was for private reverie rather than for public spectacles. If a sport was undertaken, it was for the love of playing—not of winning, nor even of playing well. Above all, free time was to remain that: free of the encumbrance of convention, free of the need for busyness, free for the “noble habit of doing nothing at all.” That hardly describes the modern weekend.

Work Versus Leisure

What is the meaning of the weekday-weekend cycle? Is it yet another symptom of the standardization and bureaucratization of everyday life that social critics such as Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul have warned about? Is the weekend merely the cunning marketing ploy of the materialist culture, a device to increase consumption? Is it a deceptive placebo to counteract the boredom and meaninglessness of the workplace?

Or is this the heralded Leisure Society? If so, it is hardly what was anticipated. The decades leading up to the 1930s saw a continuing reduction in the number of hours in the workweek, from just under sixty to just under fifty, and during the Great Depression even below thirty-five. There was every reason to think that this trend would continue and workdays would grow shorter and shorter. This, and widespread automation, would eventually lead to universal leisure. Not everyone agreed that this would be a good thing; there was much speculation about what people would do with their newfound freedom, and some psychologists worried that universal leisure would really mean universal boredom. Hardly, argued the optimists; it would provide the opportunity for self-improvement, adult education, and a blossoming of the creative arts. Others were less sanguine about the prospects for creative ease in a society that had effectively glorified labor.

Universal leisure did not come to pass, or at least it did not arrive in the expected form. For one thing, the workday appears to have stabilized at about eight hours. Automation has reduced jobs in certain industries, as was predicted, but overall employment has increased, not decreased, although not necessarily in high-paying jobs. Women have entered the work force, with the result that more, not fewer, people are working; since housework still needs to be done, it can be argued that in many families there is really less leisure than before. On the other hand, the development of the weekend has caused a redistribution of leisure time, which for many people has effectively shortened the length of the workweek. This redistribution, coupled with more disposable income, has made it possible to undertake recreation in a variety of unexpected ways—some creative, some not—and do so throughout the year instead of at annual intervals.

All these developments have called into question the traditional relationship between leisure and work, a relationship about which our culture has always been ambivalent. Generally speaking, there are two opposing schools of thought. On the one hand is the ideal—held by thinkers as disparate as Karl Marx and the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper—of a society increasingly emancipated from labor. This notion echoes the Aristotelian view that the goal of life is happiness, and that leisure, as distinguished from amusement and recreation, is the state necessary for its achievement. “It is commonly believed that happiness depends on leisure,” Aristotle wrote in his Ethics, “because we occupy ourselves so that we may have leisure, just as we make war in order that we may live at peace.” Or, to put it more succinctly, as did the title of Loverboy’s 1981 hit song, we are “Working for the Weekend.”

Opposed to this is the more modern (so-called Protestant) work ethic that values labor for its own sake, and sees its reduction—or, worse, its elimination—as an unthinkable degradation of human life. “There is no substitute for work except other serious work,” wrote Lewis Mumford, who considered that meaningful work was the highest form of human activity. According to this view, work should be its own reward, whether it is factory work, housework, or a workout. Leisure, equated with idleness, is suspect; leisure without toil, or disconnected from it, is altogether sinister. The weekend is not free time but break time—an intermission.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I want first to examine something that will shed light on the relation between work and leisure: how we came to adopt a rigorous division of our everyday lives into five days of work and two of play, and how the weekend became the chief temporal institution of the modern age. And how, in turn, this universally accepted structure has affected the course and nature of our leisure—whether it involves playing golf, laying bricks, or just daydreaming.

The Invention of the Week

Our chief occasion for leisure—the weekend—is the direct product of the mechanical practice of measuring time. Counting days in chunks of seven now comes so naturally that it’s easy to forget that this is an unusual way to mark the passage of time. Day spans the interval between the rising and the setting of the sun; the twenty-four-hour day is the duration between one dawn and the next. The month measures—or once did—the time required for the moon to wax, become full, and wane; and the year counts one full cycle of the seasons. What does the week measure? Nothing. At least, nothing visible. No natural phenomenon occurs every seven days—nothing happens to the sun, the moon, or the stars. The week is an artificial, man-made interval.

Generally speaking, our timekeeping is flexible, full of inconsistencies. The length of the day varies with the season; the duration of the month is irregular. Adjustments need to be made: every four years we add a day to February; every 400 years we add a day to the centurial year. The week, however, is exactly seven days long, now and forever. We say that there are fifty-two weeks in a year, but that is an approximation, since the week is not a subdivision of either the month or the year. The week mocks the calendar and marches relentlessly and unbroken across time, paying no attention to the seasons. The British scholar F. H. Colson, who in 1926 wrote a fascinating monograph on the subject, described the week as an “intruder.” It is an intruder that arrived relatively late. The week emerged as the final feature of what became the Western calendar sometime in the second or third century A.D., in ancient Rome. But it can be glimpsed in different guises—not always seven days long, and not always continuous—in many earlier civilizations.

Seven appeared as a magical number among the Babylonians, as early as the third millennium B.C., and played an important role in their calendar. There were seven heavenly bodies with apparent motion in the sky: the “erring” seven, the seven “wanderers”—that is, the seven planets of antiquity (including the sun and the moon). Whether they suggested the belief in the magic number or merely reinforced it is not clear. In any case, as astronomy—and astrology—spread from Babylonia to Greece, Egypt, and Rome, the seven heavenly bodies became identified with the great gods of the pantheon.

At the time that the planetary week became popular in Rome, there was already a seven-day week in place: the Judaic Sabbath observance. It is possible—although the idea is disputed by many scholars—that the Jews adopted this method of timekeeping during their exile in Babylonia in the sixth century B.C., and converted the septenary fascination into their Sabbath. The adoption of a continuous seven-day period independent of the lunar cycle was unusual, and exactly why the Jews evolved this mechanism is unclear. According to the Old Testament, the Sabbath was “their” day given to them—and them alone—by Jehovah. Unquestionably, its very singularity appealed to the exiled Jews as a way of differentiating themselves from the alien Babylonian Gentiles who surrounded them. In any case, that the Sabbath occurred on every seventh day, irrespective of the seasons, was a powerful idea, for it overrode all other existing calendars.

The origin of the planetary week is obscure as regards place and time. Dion Cassius, a Roman historian who lived in the third century, A.D., thought that the planetary week was conceived in Egypt, but modern scholars dispute this claim; more likely it was a Hellenistic practice that migrated to Rome. He also maintained that the planetary week was a relatively recent invention. There is some evidence, however, of a planetary week during the Augustan period, 200 years before, and it may have originated even earlier. What is certain is that by Dion’s era the habit of measuring time in cycles of seven days was already established in private life throughout the Roman Empire.

The week was many things to many people, sometimes many things to the same people. It was magical and practical both. A superstition at first, it survived as a social convention, much as shaking hands with the right hand has endured because there is a need for a gesture to represent friendly feelings to a stranger. The week was a short unit of time around which people could organize their lives, their work, and their leisure. At the same time, the week was a simple and memorable device for relating everyday activities to supernatural concerns, whether these involved observing a commandment from Jehovah, commemorating Christ’s resurrection, receiving the influence of a planetary deity, or, just to be safe, all three.

The roots of the week lie deep, too deep to understand fully. An air of mystery surrounds the week; perhaps that, too, is a part of its appeal. It is an observance that has been distilled over centuries of use, molded through common belief and ordinary usage. Above all, it is a popular practice that took hold without magisterial sanction. This, more than anything else, explains its durability. Less an intruder than an unofficial guest, the week was invited in through the kitchen door, and has become a friend of the family—a useful friend, for whatever else it did, the seven-day cycle provided a convenient structure for the repetitive rhythm of daily activities. It included not only a day for worship but also a day for baking bread, for washing, for cleaning house, for going to market—and for resting. Surely this over-and-over quality has always been one of the attractions of the week—and of the weekend. “Once a week” is one of the commonest measures of time. The planetary week is not a grand chronometer of celestial movements or a gauge of seasonal changes. It is something both simpler and more profound: a measure of ordinary, everyday life.

From Day Off to Days Off

The Oxford English Dictionary finds the earliest recorded use of the word “weekend” in an 1879 issue of Notes and Queries, an English magazine. “In Staffordshire, if a person leaves home at the end of his week’s work on the Saturday afternoon to spend the evening of Saturday and the following Sunday with friends at a distance,” the magazine citation goes, “he is said to be spending his week-end at So-and-so.” This is obviously a definition, which suggests that the word had only recently come into use. It is also important to note that the “week’s work” is described as ending on the Saturday afternoon. It was precisely this early ending to the week that produced a holiday period of a day and a half—the first weekend. This innovation—and it was a uniquely British one—occurred in roughly the third quarter of the nineteenth century.

Throughout the eighteenth century the workweek ended on Saturday evening; Sunday was the weekly day off. The Reformation, and later Puritanism, had made Sunday the weekly holy day in an attempt to displace the saints’ days and religious festivals of Catholicism (the Catholic Sunday was merely one holy day among many). Although the taboo on work was more or less respected, the strictures of Sabbatarianism that prohibited merriment and levity on the Lord’s Day were rejected by most Englishmen, who saw the holiday as a chance to drink, gamble, and generally have a good time.

For most people Sunday was the only official weekly holiday, but this did not necessarily mean that the life of the average British worker was one of unremitting toil. Far from it. Work was always interrupted to commemorate the annual feasts of Christmas, New Year, and Whitsuntide (the week beginning with the seventh Sunday after Easter). These traditional holidays were universally observed, but the length of the breaks varied. Depending on local convention, work stopped for anywhere from a few days to two weeks. There were also communal holidays associated with special, occasional events such as prizefights, horse races, and other sporting competitions, and also fairs, circuses, and traveling menageries. When one of these attractions arrived in a village or town, regular work more or less stopped while people flocked to gape and marvel at the exotic animals, equestrian acrobats, and assorted human freaks and oddities.

The idea of spontaneously closing up shop or leaving the workbench for the pursuit of pleasure may strike the modern reader as irresponsible, but for the eighteenth-century worker the line between work and play was blurred. Many recreational activities were directly linked to the workplace, since trade guilds often organized their own outings and had their own singing and drinking clubs and their own preferred taverns.

Eighteenth-century workers had, as Hugh Cunningham puts it in Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, “a high preference for leisure, and for long periods of it.” This preference was hardly something new. What was new was the ability, in prosperous Georgian England, of so many people to indulge it. For the first time in centuries many workers earned more than survival wages. Now they had choices: they could buy goods or leisure. They could work more and earn more, or they could forgo the extra wages and enjoy more free time instead. Most chose the latter course. This was especially true for the highly paid skilled workers, who had the greatest degree of economic freedom, but even general laborers, who were employed at day rates, had a choice in the matter. Many of these worked intensively, sometimes for much more than the customary ten hours a day, and then quit to enjoy themselves until their money ran out.

It was not unusual for sporting events, fairs, and other celebrations to last several days. Since Sunday was always an official holiday, usually the days following were added on. This produced a regular custom of staying away from work on Monday, frequently doing so also on Tuesday, and then working long hours at the end of the week to catch up. Among some trades the Monday holiday achieved what amounted to an official status. Weavers and miners, for example, regularly took a holiday on the Monday after payday—which occurred weekly, on Friday or Saturday. This practice became so common that it was called “keeping Saint Monday.”

Saint Monday may have started as an individual preference for staying away from work—whether to relax, to recover from drunkenness, or both—but its popularity during the 1850s and 1860s was ensured by the enterprise of the leisure industry. During that period sporting events, such as horse races and cricket matches, often took place on Mondays, since their organizers knew that many working-class customers would be prepared to take the day off. And since many public events were prohibited on the Sabbath, Monday became the chief occasion for secular recreations. Attendance at botanical gardens and museums soared on Monday, which was also the day that ordinary people went to the theater and the dance hall, and the day that workingmen’s social clubs held their weekly meetings.

The energy of entrepreneurs, assisted by advertising, was an important influence not only on the diffusion and persistence of Saint Monday but also on leisure in general. Hence a curious and apparently contradictory situation: not so much the commercialization of leisure as the discovery of leisure thanks to commerce. This distinction is worth bearing in mind when one considers the complaint commonly made today that contemporary leisure is being “tainted” or “corrupted” by commercialism. Beginning in the eighteenth century, with magazines, coffeehouses, and music rooms, and continuing throughout the nineteenth, with professional sports and holiday travel, the modern idea of personal leisure emerged at the same time as the business of leisure. The first could not have happened without the second.

Saint Monday had many critics. Religious groups campaigned against the tradition, which they saw as linked to the drinking and dissipation that, in their eyes, dishonored the Sabbath. They were joined by middle-class social reformers and by proponents of rational recreation, who also had an interest in altering Sunday behavior. By the end of the century many shops and factories had begun closing on Saturday afternoons, leaving a half-holiday for household chores and social activities—an evening at the dance hall or the pub—and permitting Sunday to be used exclusively for prayer and sober recreations.

It’s unlikely that the Saturday half-holiday would have spread as rapidly as it did if it had not been for the support of the factory owners. Factory owners had little to gain from insisting on a six-day week of workdays of up to twelve hours if on some days so few workers showed up that the factory had to be shut down anyway. The proposal for a Saturday half-holiday offered a way out, and factory owners supported it in return for a commitment to regular attendance on the part of their employees. Half Saturdays and shorter workdays became the pattern followed by all later labor negotiations, and by legislation governing the length of the workday.

In the 1870s people began to speak of “week-ending” or “spending the week-end.” The country houses of the wealthy were generally located in the Home Counties, in the vicinity of London, and were now easily reached by train. It became fashionable to go to the country on Friday afternoon and return to the city on Monday, and these house parties became an important feature of upper-class social life. Weekend outings, often to the seashore, were also available to the lower classes, although their weekend was usually shorter, extending from Saturday afternoon until Sunday evening.

According to one contemporary observer, Thomas Wright, “That the Saturday half-holiday movement is one of the most practically beneficial that has ever been inaugurated with a view to the social improvement of ‘the masses,’ no one who is acquainted with its workings will for a moment doubt.” He approvingly described a variety of activities in which working people indulged on the Saturday half-holiday. The afternoon began with a leisurely midday meal at home, which was often followed by a weekly bath in the neighborhood bathhouse—an important institution at a time when few homes had running water, and one that was common in British and North American cities until well into the twentieth century. The rest of the daytime hours might be spent reading the paper, working around the house, attending a club, or strolling around town window-shopping. Saturday afternoon became a customary time for park concerts, soccer games, rowing, and bicycling—and, of course, drinking in the local pub, for despite the hopes of the reformers and Evangelicals, drinking was still the chief leisure pastime of the working classes, whether the holiday occurred on Saturday or on Monday.

Wright emphasized that the afternoon was usually brought to a close in time for tea at five o’clock, to leave plenty of time for the chief entertainment of the week. Saturday night was the time for an outing to the theater; most people brought their own food and drink into the cheap seats in the gallery. The music hall, an important influence on the spread of Saturday night’s popularity, began as an adjunct to taverns but emerged as an independent entity in the 1840s, and continued to be prominent in British entertainment for the next eighty years.

This was not the elite leisure of the aristocracy and landed gentry, for whom recreations such as shooting and fox hunting had become an all-consuming way of life. Nor was it the traditional mixture of leisure and work among ordinary people. No longer were work and play interchanged at will; no longer did they occur in the same milieu. There was now a special time for leisure, as well as a special place. Being neither play as work nor work as play, middle-class leisure, which eventually infiltrated and influenced all of society, involved something new: the strict demarcation of a temporal and a physical boundary between leisure and work. These boundaries—exemplified by the weekend—more than anything else characterize modern leisure.

Photos: The Rescue of Timmy the Whale

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Jens Büttner / DPA / Getty

A helper splashes a stranded humpback whale at sunset in shallow waters of the Baltic Sea near Fährdorf, off the island of Poel, Germany, on April 24, 2026. The humpback whale, nicknamed Timmy by German media, became stranded in the area three weeks earlier.

Daniel Bockwoldt / DPA / Getty

Greenpeace boats sail alongside a whale lying in the Baltic Sea on March 29, 2026, near the the island of Poel.

Ulrich Perrey / DPA / Getty

Several excavators are used near the stranded whale on March 26, 2026.

Daniel Bockwoldt / DPA / Getty

Journalists follow the rescue attempts near the stranded whale on March 26, 2026.

Marcus Golejewski / DPA / Getty

Water is sprayed on Timmy the whale, still stranded on a sandbank off the island of Poel on April 11, 2026.

Bernd Wüstneck / DPA / Getty

Pontoons, two cranes, and more equipment for rescuing the stranded humpback whale arrive by truck at the port of Kirchdorf on the Baltic Sea island of Poel on April 16, 2026. The equipment was set up to be used in a new rescue attempt for the humpback whale stranded off the island.

Bernd Wüstneck / DPA / Getty

In the port of Kirchdorf pontoons are lowered in sections, ready to be used to rescue the stranded whale, on April 16, 2026.

Morris MacMatzen / Getty

An excavator on a floating pontoon sits in a standby position near the stranded whale off the island of Poel on April 17, 2026. Authorities said its survival chances were growing dimmer by the day. Rescuers, in a last-ditch effort, hoped to remove sand from beneath the whale and then transport the whale to the North Sea.

Stefan Sauer / DPA / Getty

An aerial view of the stranded whale, seen off the island of Poel on April 18, 2026, with its back covered with cloth for protection

Morris MacMatzen / Getty

Veterinarian Janine Bahr-van Gemmert gestures as she speaks to the assembled media during a press conference at the harbor of Kirchdorf about the stranded humpback whale during efforts to save it on April 18, 2026, near Wismar, Germany.

Jens Büttner / DPA / Getty

Helpers splash the stranded whale with water on April 21, 2026. The animal had swum free the day before, traveling several kilometers before becoming stranded again.

Philip Dulian / DPA / Getty

An aerial view of the excavator rig set up close to the stranded whale on April 22, 2026

Marcus Golejewski / DPA / Getty

Helpers work to clear away sand beneath the stranded humpback whale on April 22, 2026.

Philip Dulian / DPA / Getty

An aerial view of a newly dug channel that leads from the stranded whale into deeper water, seen on April 25, 2026

Bodo Marks / DPA / Getty

A barge is pushed by a boat along the Kiel Canal near Hohenhörn, Germany, on April 26, 2026. The barge is set to transport the Timmy the whale through the Baltic Sea to the North Sea, if it can be successfully freed.

Jens Büttner / DPA / Getty

Helpers use straps to try to pull the stranded whale along the dredged channel toward a transport barge on April 28, 2026.

Philip Dulian / DPA / Getty

The whale swims and is pulled toward the transport barge on April 28, 2026.

NonstopNews / Schwarck / Reuters

People pull and guide the stranded humpback whale into a barge during rescue efforts organized by a private initiative in shallow waters of the Baltic Sea near Wismar, Germany, on April 28, 2026.

Jens Büttner / DPA / Getty

Helpers celebrate after the stranded whale was pulled into the transport barge on April 28, 2026.

Stefan Sauer / DPA / Getty

The formerly stranded whale sits inside the barge intended for its transportation on April 28, 2026, seen at the end of a short channel dug to help pull it away from a sandbar.

Christoph Reichwein / DPA / Reuters

Timmy the whale is towed in a barge by a tugboat along the Danish coast below Skagen, in the so-called Skagerrak, through the Baltic Sea.

Bodo Marks / DPA / Getty

A tug named Robin Hood pulls the barge with Timmy the whale toward the Baltic Sea in the evening, seen off Wismar on April 28, 2026.

Philip Dulian / DPA / Getty

An aerial view of Timmy in the flooded barge, being towed near the Danish border on April 29, 2026. Timmy was reportedly outfitted with a GPS transmitter to track its progress during a difficult recovery after being stranded for weeks.

Sebastian Peters / NEWS5 / AFP / Getty

An aerial photo taken on May 2, 2026, shows the rescued humpback whale offshore near Skagen, after it was released from a barge. It had been struggling to survive after beaching off the German coast but was released into the North Sea off Denmark, Germany’s News5 agency said. Dubbed Timmy by the German media, the whale was first spotted stuck on a sandbank on March 23 near the city of Luebeck before freeing itself and then becoming stuck again several times. Some experts expressed concern about the whale’s immediate prospects, noting that the whale had been quite ill, and that such a lengthy stranding weakened it significantly.

How the Supreme Court Came to Accept a Practice It Called Unjust

2026-05-04T17:25:00-04:00

Seven years ago, midway through a multiyear demolition of the Voting Rights Act, John Roberts’s Supreme Court heard a case on a slightly different topic: partisan gerrymandering. Republican legislators from North Carolina had drawn a map of U.S. House districts that courts, including the high court, had found was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the VRA. So the North Carolina lawmakers tried again, this time going out of their way to make clear that they were trying to reduce Democratic representation, not Black representation.

The gambit worked. Roberts, writing for the majority, lamented that partisan gerrymandering was pernicious and unfair. “Excessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust,” he wrote in Rucho v. Common Cause. But the majority nonetheless concluded that federal courts had no role to play in policing partisan gerrymandering, because it was a political question. Still, Roberts didn’t want that to seem like an endorsement: “Our conclusion does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering.”

That was then. The conservative majority’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais last week doesn’t just tolerate but encourages states to embrace partisan gerrymandering as a justification for squeezing out majority-Black districts. As politicians work through the impact of the decision, Republican-led governments in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Alabama have all announced plans to try to redraw maps this week, and South Carolina’s legislature may not be far behind. The mission will be drawing the most ruthless partisan gerrymanders they can, in the hopes of protecting the GOP majority in the U.S. House.

This is what Justice Samuel Alito, the author of the Callais opinion, recommends. Discarding the Court’s old requirement, which said that mapmakers must consider whether minority voters were numerous and concentrated enough to constitute their own district, Alito wrote that plaintiffs must provide strong evidence that minority voters were intentionally targeted for their race. But he also offered an escape hatch, the law professor Richard L. Hasen explains: Even if a state “likely could have drawn a map favoring minority voters” but didn’t, “the state can defend itself by (wait for it … ) admitting to engaging in partisan gerrymandering.” In other words, as the scholar Joshua A. Douglas puts it, partisan gerrymandering “has become an absolute defense to any claim of racial discrimination under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.”

The fundamental ideology of the Callais majority is “color-blindness.” In a 2007 case undermining affirmative action, Roberts articulated the idea plainly: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” That’s the sort of glib comment that sounds like an argument ender as long as you don’t think too much about it. But it’s no coincidence, as my colleague Adam Serwer wrote last week, that the earliest advocates for color-blindness were reinvented segregationists.

In the color-blindness framework, any discussion of race is itself seen as impolite, the political scientist Julia Azari notes. Alito’s opinion hurriedly states that “vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, which have made great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination.” This is true as far as it goes but also highly tendentious, writing off both existing disparities and the important role that the VRA has played in combating discrimination. (The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg likened abandoning parts of the VRA because of reduced discrimination to throwing away one’s umbrella during a storm because one isn’t yet wet.)

Alito acknowledges that Black voters tend to be Democrats in the South, but his allegiance to color-blindness prevents him from thinking too deeply about why. It is not some weird coincidence but the result of Democrats taking up the cause of civil rights, and Republicans becoming consistent opponents. This makes Alito’s argument that Black Democrats are losing representation because they are Democrats, not because they are Black, incoherent. “To ‘control for partisanship’ when assessing racial gerrymandering is to erase the very mechanism through which racism travels,” the political scientist Jake Grumbach writes.

The fallout from Callais stands a good chance of making the relationship between race and partisanship even stronger. Black voters have some good critiques of the Democratic Party, but watching Republican-led governments race to redraw maps to eliminate Black representation is unlikely to push them to the GOP. Then again, it may not matter: If mapmakers are empowered to draw ruthlessly partisan maps that are also racially discriminatory, the views of Black voters in some places, especially in the South, will simply not be electorally relevant.

In his 2019 opinion in Rucho, Roberts portrayed his decision to allow partisan gerrymandering as rooted in humility and restraint about the proper role of the judiciary, despite his dislike of extremely partisan maps: “No one can accuse this Court of having a crabbed view of the reach of its competence. But we have no commission to allocate political power and influence in the absence of a constitutional directive or legal standards to guide us in the exercise of such authority.” It is ironic, then, that Roberts and his allies have had no compunctions about trashing the VRA, a law duly passed and renewed by Congress. Their hubris will bring about an efflorescence of the same partisan gerrymandering that Roberts claimed to detest.

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Iran struck a key oil hub in the United Arab Emirates as well as several American warships and commercial vessels on the Strait of Hormuz, according to United States Central Command.
A report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general found that the agency failed to properly secure mobile devices used by its intelligence office, allowing high-risk apps and weak security practices that could expose sensitive information. DHS said it agrees with the recommendations and has begun making changes to tighten protections on its devices.
The Supreme Court paused a lower-court ruling and temporarily restored nationwide access to the abortion pill mifepristone, allowing it to be prescribed via telemedicine and mailed to patients while legal challenges continue.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores stories on how to find focus when it’s most elusive.

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The Atlantic staff writer Nick Miroff has been named as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting. Read a selection of his stories:

An ‘Administrative Error’ Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison (From March 2025)
How the Trump Administration Flipped on Kilmar Abrego Garcia (From April 2025)
The Hype Man of Trump’s Mass Deportations (From July 2025)
Trump Loves ICE. Its Workforce Has Never Been So Miserable. (From July 2025)
ICE’s ‘Athletically Allergic’ Recruits (From October 2025)

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Cost of ‘Natural’ Womanhood

By Andréa Becker

Supposedly, the menstrual cycle is a gift. It’s a product of good design. It’s a miraculous dance of hormones that can’t be contained. Such are the messages flooding the internet these days, courtesy of lifestyle influencers, crunchy moms, so-called hormone coaches, and all sorts of popular entertainers.

The menstrual cycle, according to these same voices, is also an emotional roller coaster, best ridden with the aid of bespoke products …

Riding the hormonal highs and lows is supposed to be worth it in part because of ovulation, a purportedly glorious, clear-skinned moment that justifies all the cramps and that one influencer calls women’s “secret superpower.” Advocates for a “natural” menstrual cycle argue that modern medicine—especially birth control—has robbed women of this gift, and therefore their true selves. If reclaiming it comes with wild mood swings, well, that’s a small price to pay. But in the long term, buying into these stories about mood and biology could have a higher cost.

Read the full article.

Europe Without America

2026-05-04T16:03:57-04:00

We got this. That was the Trump administration’s message to European allies in the early days of its war with Iran. Washington hadn’t warned its NATO partners about the military campaign, jointly undertaken with Israel, much less consulted with them about the war’s objectives.

Instead, American officials told Europeans to look after their own interests. Specifically, the Pentagon advised counterparts in Berlin to concentrate on NATO’s eastern flank—the part of the alliance closest to Russia—while the United States managed Iran and the rest of the Middle East, two German officials told me. “They were really confident,” one of the officials said, referring to U.S. war planners.

But that confidence was short-lived, and after President Trump’s hope for a swift victory faded, he began lashing out at NATO for not doing enough to help the United States. Inside the Pentagon, meanwhile, the team helping manage the military’s relationship with NATO allies was about to take a hit.

In March, the director of NATO policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense was abruptly reassigned, current and former U.S. officials told me. Mark Jones, who had spent more than two decades working on NATO and Europe policy as both a soldier and a civil servant, was viewed as being out of step with the administration’s jaundiced view of the alliance. His removal, which has not previously been reported, undermined U.S. cooperation with European partners just as the war in Iran was creating a new crisis in relations with the continent.

The crisis became apparent when stalemate conditions took hold in the Middle East. Iran effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz, sending gas prices soaring. As the war continued, the U.S. military depleted key weapons stockpiles. The fallout has been severe for Europe, which was already living with tremors from the war in Ukraine and is now facing Iran-induced delays in U.S. weapons shipments, along with economic turmoil: inflation, energy-price shocks, and strains on disparate industries including plastics, textiles, and toys. At the end of March, Slovenia became the first European country to introduce fuel rationing. Others have since taken similar steps.

Europe is all but powerless to influence the course of the conflict, despite the consequences it’s suffering. A European-led coalition is considering options to ensure freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, a choke point for 20 percent of global oil and liquefied-natural-gas supplies. But the coalition’s leaders have said that they will deploy military assets only once a durable cease-fire is in place. That still seems far off; as Trump declared the hostilities “terminated” and vowed U.S. assistance for ships exiting the waterway, Iran threatened to attack American warships and other vessels that seek to transit the passage without its permission.

European leaders who have courted Trump’s favor over the past year have sometimes let slip their honest opinion of his war effort. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told schoolchildren last week that Iranian leaders had “humiliated” the United States. Trump reacted furiously, writing on Truth Social that Merz “doesn’t know what he’s talking about!” The president had already been smarting over not getting European help, which he thinks the United States is owed, for the Iran war. He called NATO allies “cowards” for not sending their navies to open the Strait of Hormuz, labeling the alliance a “paper tiger.”

[From the January issue: The new German war machine]

But Merz’s comments clearly stung in a new way. Trump said that his administration was considering shrinking the U.S. military presence in Germany, promising a decision “over the next short period of time.” Two days later, the Pentagon indicated that it would withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany over the next year, out of nearly 40,000 stationed there. Officials told me that there was no in-depth staff review prior to the announcement, meaning no detailed consideration of which units would be affected or of the broader implications of the drawdown.

That only a fraction of U.S. forces will say auf Wiedersehen demonstrates the symbolic nature of the move. But abrupt changes in U.S. deployments could interfere with training exercises, further alienating allies. And U.S. retrenchment without compensatory European reinforcements weakens NATO’s deterrent force—which is welcome news in Moscow.

In many ways, this is the scenario for which Europe, led by Germany, has been preparing, spurred on by the need for autonomy from Trump’s erratic decision making. Virtually since NATO’s founding, in 1949, American leaders have urged Europeans to spend more on their own defense. Past presidents have also threatened, in fits of pique, to withdraw troops. In 1973, Richard Nixon was so upset over the lack of European support for American efforts in the Yom Kippur War—a proxy battle with the Soviet Union—that he told Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser and secretary of state, that he wanted to “get our boys back home.”

European leaders, faced with renewed Russian aggression in 2022 and then Trump’s reelection in 2024, have finally gotten the message. Germany spent $114 billion on defense in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 24 percent. Once a laggard, Germany is rebuilding its munitions stockpile, acquiring hundreds of tanks and thousands of armed vehicles, adding to its air defense, investing in cyber and satellite-reconnaissance capabilities, and buying the jets necessary to carry U.S. nuclear weapons.

[Read: Is the end of NATO near?]

Germany and its European neighbors would prefer to build up their capabilities in partnership with the United States, gradually taking over the conventional defense of the continent while continuing to rely on the U.S. nuclear umbrella. When I interviewed Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister, last summer, he emphasized the need for a plan delineating how European capabilities would compensate for any U.S. drawdown. “Let’s work out a road map. You do less, and we fulfill,” he said, “to avoid dangerous capability gaps in between.”

Trump clearly has other plans—or no plans beyond acting on grievances. The result is European powers recognizing that they must guard against being bullied and blackmailed by the president, or simply surprised by his whims. Pistorius, in a statement reacting to the planned troop withdrawal, argued, “We must strengthen the European pillar within NATO. In other words: as Europeans, we must take on more responsibility for our own security.”

Thomas Röwekamp, who chairs the defense committee in the Bundestag, Germany’s Parliament, was more pointed, saying, “The American president’s constant provocations are unacceptable.” He added, “We should not be unsettled by this, but rather resolutely strengthen our own capabilities. Europe must stand on its own two feet in terms of security policy—this is the course we have embarked upon.”

But what course is the United States following, and who is setting it? Not the now-former director of NATO policy at the Pentagon.

Traditionally, that role has been a vital one. Washington is by far the most powerful NATO member, and the policy director helps shape U.S. goals within the alliance, galvanize other member nations, and resolve disputes among them. Jones, the long-serving official in this position, had been working on NATO and Europe policy at the Pentagon since 2003. He joined the NATO office within the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2010 and became its director six years later. He mentored numerous U.S. officials who went on to serve in senior military and diplomatic positions. One former official called him an “institution.”

But Jones was blamed for being fundamentally too pro-NATO, current and former officials told me. Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, ordered a subordinate to notify Jones of his reassignment. In response to questions, Jones told me that he was still employed at the Pentagon and couldn’t comment on policy matters. In a statement, a Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment on individual personnel matters but said, “We all serve at the pleasure of the president.”

Just last month, Colby praised Germany’s new military strategy, which spells out the country’s plan to become Europe’s strongest conventional fighting force by 2039. On X, Colby posted photos of meetings with German military officials and diplomats, writing that the strategy “represents a clear, credible way forward to NATO 3.0: A NATO in which Europe and Canada step up to meet their responsibilities within the Alliance and transform it from a paper tiger to a strong deterrent and defense.”

I mentioned the plaudits at the time to a German official, who didn’t seem reassured. It’s hard to stay on the administration’s good side for long. Colby’s praise proved to be only the latest hairpin turn in the descent of U.S.-European relations. Within days, Trump had transformed the chancellor’s moment of candor into a full-blown standoff over the American military presence in Germany. But this, too, fits a broader pattern of a diminishing American presence in Europe.

[Read: The hardest job in Europe ]

Washington has reduced its military footprint in Europe since the height of the Cold War, in the 1950s, when about 350,000 soldiers were based there, mostly in West Germany. Significant drawdowns occurred in the 1990s, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the 2000s, when assets were redeployed for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The first Trump administration drew up options to remove about 12,000 troops from Germany, which was cast by the president as a penalty for Berlin being “delinquent” in military spending. President Biden reversed the plans and later surged U.S. forces to Europe after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

An official at U.S. European Command, which oversees American military operations on the continent, told me this week that there are about 80,000 U.S. service members in the European theater, with the largest number—38,000—stationed in Germany. The soldiers work from key nodes in Germany of the global U.S.-military apparatus, including Ramstein Air Base and the headquarters of U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command, as well as Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the largest overseas U.S. hospital, which has treated U.S. service members wounded in the war in Iran.

The irony of Merz bearing the brunt of Trump’s anger is that Germany has allowed the U.S. military to use Ramstein as a staging ground for strikes and other aspects of its Iran operation. That’s in contrast with other NATO allies: Spain shut its airspace wholesale, while Italy blocked U.S. bombers from landing at a key air base in Sicily. Trump thanked Merz for the latitude his country had allowed the U.S. military when the two leaders met in Washington in early March, saying, “We appreciate it, and they’re just making it comfortable. We’re not asking them to put boots on the ground or anything.” Britain initially denied U.S. basing requests, only to reverse course. The change didn’t improve Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s standing with Trump, who said of Starmer, “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.”

What precisely Washington is asking of its allies has puzzled some European nations. The basing needs are clear. And American officials in bilateral meetings have spoken of the capabilities required to clear mines laid by Iran in the Strait of Hormuz. But the broader bid for assistance remains ambiguous.

In past campaigns in the Middle East, the United States put together a coalition to specify its requests to European allies and coordinate action. When Washington responded to Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea beginning in December 2023, for instance, countries including Greece and Denmark sent frigates at the request of the United States.

[Read: Why Europe is talking about nukes]

The Trump administration didn’t bother making specific requests of its European allies for the war against Iran. Instead, each day brought new, conflicting signals. At first, the message was that the United States and Israel could handle it. Then Trump lashed out on social media, saying that allies “should have been there.” But the Trump administration never told key European partners what specifically it wanted from them in Iran, multiple European officials told me. The Pentagon spokesperson told me that the administration “has been consistently and repeatedly clear about the demand signal to allies to contribute to addressing a threat that affects Europe as much as America and our Middle East allies. The notion that the Department did not convey these requests widely and clearly is demonstrably false.”

NATO is a defensive alliance. The United States wasn’t attacked. Even so, if the Trump administration had simply asked for specific military assistance in Iran, European officials told me, some countries probably would have obliged. Good relations with Washington are that important to them—especially until they have strong-enough militaries to control their own fate. Until then, their leaders will continue to choose their words wisely, and suffer the consequences when they don’t.