Best of The Atlantic

Trump Jr. Privately Breaks With His Dad

2026-10-20T15:25:00-04:00

Sign up for Inside the Trump Presidency, a newsletter featuring coverage of the second Trump term.

Donald Trump Jr. had a simple vision for his father’s foreign policy during the 2024 presidential campaign: If elected, Donald Trump was going to keep America out of another war in the Middle East.

“Remember when they said Trump would get us into a full-blown war with Iran?” he wrote on X that April, as Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones toward Israel. “Times like these should make us all realize how lucky we were to have Trump, his strength and his resolve.”

Two and a half years later, the president has enmeshed the United States in a full-blown war with Iran—and Trump Jr. isn’t happy about it.

Trump Jr. has repeatedly voiced his opposition to the ongoing Iran war in private conversations, two people who have spoken directly with him about the conflict told us. The president’s son, these people said, opposed the war from its outset and made his opposition known to his father. He has long been skeptical of foreign intervention, these people told us, and believed the U.S. should not enter another Middle East war. Trump Jr. was also especially close to Charlie Kirk, the late conservative activist, who had broken with the Trump administration to oppose the war in Iran.

“Don has kept his views on the subject private, as he would never publicly break with his dad on an issue like this, but I can’t imagine anyone who knows Don would be surprised by his personal views on the subject,” a person close to the president’s son told us. A spokesman for Trump Jr. declined to comment. The White House didn’t respond to questions about Trump Jr.’s position on the war, and an official said in a statement, “Iran has been decimated, and one way or the other, the conflict in Iran will be over very soon.”

The White House’s decision to ally with Israel against Tehran has exposed a deepening rift within MAGA—not just over Iran, but also over what “America First” actually means. The divide pits nationalists who see foreign wars as a betrayal of domestic priorities against hawks who argue that American power must be wielded more aggressively against its adversaries. For years, the two camps coexisted under Trump’s promise of strength without the cost of another major war. Iran has made that balancing act harder to sustain. “Don Jr. is the most MAGA of them all,” one of the people who spoke with him about his opposition to the Iran war told us.

Even within the administration, some of the president’s closest advisers, including Vice President Vance, have voiced private opposition to the war as they deliberated whether to join Israel in its military campaign. Others, including CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, were skeptical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s initial pitch in February that a regime-change operation—particularly one conducted from the air—was remotely realistic.

The political costs are mounting. A Pew Research Center survey conducted over the past month found that 65 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of the Iran operation, compared with 33 percent who approved. Republican approval fell from 69 percent in March to 63 percent. Nearly half of Americans expected the conflict to drag on for more than a year—far beyond the administration’s initial estimate of about four to six weeks.

[Read: Don Jr.’s wedding trap]

The economic consequences have sharpened the political fallout. Rising gas prices, driven by disruptions to the energy markets, are squeezing already strained household budgets. The midterm elections will test whether Republicans can defend a war that many voters oppose, while convincing those same voters that the administration is focused on their economic concerns. Republican candidates have been forced to defend a war with immense costs and an uncertain conclusion—one that the president initiated without congressional approval.

Trump Jr.’s private opposition offers yet another reminder that doubts about the war are not confined to the president’s critics or the fringes of the Republican Party. It also points to a deeper sentiment within the president’s base that he has betrayed key campaign promises: to avoid foreign wars and to make life more affordable for the average American.

The Three Dates for Deciding Ukraine’s Future

2026-10-20T20:12:00-04:00

Over the next eight weeks, as winter envelopes Ukraine, Russia plans to use the frigid weather as a weapon. Its arms factories have already made enough missiles and drones to take down Ukraine’s electrical grid, as well as the heating systems that millions of people rely on to stay warm. Homes far from the front will become deadly for their inhabitants as temperatures fall.

In that same time frame, three events taking place thousands of miles away could determine Ukraine’s future. The first is America’s Election Day, now two weeks away; leaders in Kyiv fear that if Democrats win one or both chambers of Congress, President Trump may turn even further against them in those final weeks of full Republican control of Washington. The second is a proposed summit in mid-November in southern China, where Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to meet with Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to plan how to end the war—without having a seat at the table for Ukraine.

The third is the G20 summit at Trump’s Miami-area golf course, scheduled to take place in mid-December. The president has visions of standing between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as they sign a peace deal, even if he has to strong-arm Ukraine to do it, according to advisers. One Ukrainian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss internal conversations, told us that it’s hard not to feel left out of decision making that will dictate the country’s future: “It looks like this is all happening without us.”

The U.S. president, who used to brag that he could resolve the war in 24 hours, has tossed aside some sanctions on Russia and struck a deal with Putin to import diesel from Moscow, giving a boost to the Russian war machine. He and his allies have threatened Kyiv, demanding that Zelensky stop attacking Russian oil refineries or risk losing access to American intelligence, weaponry, and satellite communications that it uses to defend itself. The calendar is now Ukraine’s foe—and so, Ukrainians fear, is Donald Trump.

Trump’s war in Iran has appeared to throttle Republicans’ chances in the midterms; the unending conflict, and the resulting surge in oil and gas prices, has eroded the GOP’s poll numbers and fueled Democrats’ hopes of taking both chambers of Congress. Stymied in his efforts to bring that war to a close, Trump recently shifted his focus to resolving the Ukraine conflict, in part to bring fuel prices down. But the way he’s chosen to try to do that has provided his fellow Republicans with a nasty October surprise. In a first for a U.S. president, Trump has sided with a traditional adversary, Russia, over a democracy that is not only fighting for its existence but also acting as a bulwark against a wider war. Trump’s diesel deal with Putin will have a negligible impact on American energy prices, but it’s a financial lifeline for Moscow.

[Read: Ukraine finds a new set of targets]

Trump has demanded an energy cease-fire—he even announced one earlier this month that had no basis in reality—yet has focused his ire entirely on Ukraine’s attacks on Russian oil refineries. He blames those strikes for the rise in energy prices while ignoring the real culprit, Iran’s ability to defy the United States and close the Strait of Hormuz. He’s convinced himself, three people close to him have told us, that Ukraine’s attacks on the refineries are, in part, meant to undermine Republicans’ chances next month—and, by extension, Trump. The president has ignored Moscow’s attacks on Ukraine’s electrical grid, and yesterday, hours after a drone strike on a public park killed six people, including two children, he downplayed its strikes on Ukraine’s cities, declaring that Russia had not “been doing much.” An image of one of the dead children, a 1-year-old killed as she sat in her stroller, was broadcast around the globe.

More pressure could be coming. Trump aides have threatened to withhold arms sales unless Kyiv stops targeting Russian diesel plants; this week, the administration delayed approving the transfer of missiles that Ukraine needs for its defense. Ukraine in the past week has said that it has not consistently received early warnings of attacks and no longer has full Starshield satellite access, which is impeding its ability to defend itself against Russia’s new fleet of jet-powered drones. (The Wall Street Journal reported today that Starshield’s creator, Elon Musk, ordered the slowdown. The White House and Musk had previously denied involvement.)

Some in Trump’s orbit have suggested that the United States go further and stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine. Trump’s deference to Putin has been a theme for a decade, yet this new round of kowtowing has handed Republicans another obstacle ahead of the elections. In a rare act of defiance, a handful in the party have denounced the president’s decisions, including his move to undercut a Russia-sanctions bill that he signed only a month ago in honor of its champion, the late Senator Lindsey Graham. The quick betrayal of Graham’s legacy was a blow for some of his Senate colleagues; GOP aides told us that Graham’s sudden July death cost Ukraine its most vocal champion in Trump’s inner circle, and that no one has stepped up to fill that void.

Michael Froman, who worked in the Clinton and Obama administrations and is now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told us that cutting off Kyiv from American weapons or intelligence might, in fact, prolong the war because it “would undermine Ukraine’s position at the negotiating table and make it less likely Russia would be willing to negotiate on any of the key outstanding issues.”

Officials with both parties predict that the Democrats will capture the House next month; the Senate appears to be a true toss-up. Kyiv will be carefully watching the results. A Democratic win next month will, in the long run, likely help Kyiv, and some of the more hopeful members of Zelensky’s camp believe that Republican defeats could force Trump to focus more on domestic issues, resulting in him leaving Ukraine alone. But other observers on both sides of the Atlantic fear that the opposite could be true. A president without a friendly Congress tends to fall back more on foreign policy, where he needs little help from Capitol Hill. Either way, the new Congress won’t be seated until January 3, leaving Trump unchecked for two more months and perhaps motivated to wield power before his party moves into the minority. Another major national election would not be for two years—plenty of time for Trump to push Ukraine without fear of voters punishing Republicans. “He could get distracted at any time,” one outside Trump ally told us. “But right now, he’s furious at Ukraine, and he wants Zelensky gone.”

Two weeks after Election Day, Trump plans to board Air Force One bound for a series of summits in Asia. Earlier this month, Trump overruled White House aides who had counseled against him calling to wish Putin a happy birthday, warning that little good would come of it. In that conversation, Trump authorized the diesel deal, and Putin suggested something grander: a meeting of the world’s great powers to divide up the world. Or at least Ukraine.

Putin proposed that he, Trump, and Xi hold a trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in Shenzhen, China, in mid-November to discuss a variety of issues, including Ukraine. Trump told reporters yesterday that he is open to attending the meeting, which would be his first face-to-face encounter with Putin since their unproductive summit in Alaska last year. It is no surprise that Trump is drawn to the idea; his deference toward Putin is rivaled only by his regard for Xi, whom he hosted in lavish fashion at the White House last month. He has previously been intrigued by the idea of the three powers—China, Russia, the United States—dividing the globe into spheres of influence, although Moscow these days hardly wields the international clout of Washington or Beijing.

[Read: The deferential president]

The idea of two authoritarians and their admirer plotting to slice up sovereign nations alarmed much of the West. And how, Kyiv demanded, could Ukraine’s future be decided with no input from Ukraine? But some in Trump’s orbit have backed the idea, belittling Ukraine as a corrupt backwater with no autonomy. Putin has never viewed Ukraine as a legitimate country, and Trump has held a grudge against it since 2019, when he was impeached (for the first time) after pressuring Zelensky to dig up damaging information about Trump’s political rival Joe Biden. He and his Ukrainian counterpart had a shouting match at the White House early in Trump’s second term, causing the U.S. to briefly withhold intelligence. Since then, Zelensky has tried to flatter Trump to stay on his good side, but those niceties have vanished as the American president has demanded that Ukraine pick a new leader.

Many of those in Trump’s orbit are unsympathetic to Ukraine’s plight and see the war not as a battle for the modern, rules-based world order—with its cardinal tenet prohibiting the seizure of land by force—but as an impediment to future business deals with Russia, some of which could enrich members of the president’s inner circle. Pushing Ukraine into taking a deal, even if that means it has to give up its claim on the Donbas, would open up avenues to dealmaking on Russia’s diesel, rare-earth minerals, and other resources. Zelensky has balked at any territorial concessions. “Our worry is that they are looking at this as a new Yalta Conference, to divide the world into spheres of influence,” another Ukrainian official told us.

Trump’s ideal timeline for some sort of Russia-Ukraine peace agreement, as we reported last week, would be in December at the G20 summit. That bit of history, were it to occur, would take place at one of Trump’s own properties. In Trump’s first term, he pushed to host the 2020 G7 at his golf course in Doral, just outside of Miami. But Trump abandoned the idea amid bipartisan blowback over his plan to personally profit off the event.

This time, there has been nary a Republican whimper of protest about Trump’s venue choice, but some have lodged complaints about the president’s other idea for the summit: to invite Putin. The Russian leader has yet to agree to show up, but if he does, it would be the first time he has attended a multilateral summit in a Western country since his invasion of Ukraine. It would allow him to take another step in shedding his status as an international pariah, though it is hard to imagine that European leaders are eager to talk with Putin.

Zelensky, who has already committed to attending the G20, has made clear that he would be willing to sit down with Putin, no matter the venue, to work out an agreement to end the war. If Trump has his way over the next eight weeks, it might be not a negotiation, but a capitulation.

You Can Believe Everything

2026-10-20T17:12:43-04:00

It was fitting that, just hours after the first public screenings of the Elizabeth Holmes documentary began last Thursday, Elon Musk put on a show of his own.

That night, in Texas, Musk unveiled the company’s new Roadster prototype, a car that would defy gravity. Tesla built what was roughly one-half of a roller-coaster loop, which the Roadster climbed before momentarily hanging upside down and then executing a controlled flip and gliding down to Earth. The demo worked. In another stunt, it did a barrel roll over a semi-truck. Each maneuver was powered by air thrusters that guided the car to a soft landing.

The demo was impressive. But watching the clips, I could feel my brain struggling to process what I was being shown. Was this real? The car did climb vertically, flip, and land. But Musk, who has built wildly successful companies, is also famously prone to outlandish claims that don’t always pan out. I couldn’t help but wonder what, if anything, Tesla’s demonstration or Musk had elided. “This will be an actual car that’s on the roads,” Musk said. He got the flying-car headlines he wanted, but will this car actually be released? There are already reasons to doubt it: The car displayed on Thursday won’t be in production until at least 2028, and it features 10 thrusters powered by 600 liters of compressed air. The flying version of the Roadster will be sold “invite-only.” Its price tag is likely to be astronomical. And so Musk isn’t exactly lying here. Rather, he’s making bold proclamations and asking people to take his pledge to deliver as an article of faith.

[Read: ]Imagine every AI agent on Earth buying the same cheap paper towels

Less than 48 hours later, I found myself sitting in a crowded theater, watching the new documentary You Can See Everything, about the disgraced and convicted founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, and her husband, Billy Evans. In one scene, Holmes and Evans are hurriedly trying to court investors and research talent to build out what they refer to as Theranos 2.0. This scene is arguably the only time in the film where the duo don’t appear to be filled with existential dread. During phone calls and Zoom meetings, they spit out jargon and look earnestly excited about what they can build if they “get the band back together.” At the end of the sequence, Holmes is asked about why she’s spending her last days with her family building a company, and she responds that this is what she’s meant to be doing here on Earth. It is one of the few moments where I confidently believe her. Whatever she earnestly believes about her own guilt, it seems clear that her identity is inextricably tied to her notion that she is, in Silicon Valley parlance, a builder: a high-agency, visionary type with a remarkable risk tolerance who makes things and isn’t afraid to fail, because she has a monomaniacal obsession with pushing the bounds of what’s possible.

The film, which had the biggest opening for a documentary in more than 20 years, is extremely well suited to a post-truth era. The co-directors, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, bury the audience with unreliable narration such that, when you get to the end, you feel like a participant in the film. It also left me exhilarated, slightly repulsed, and feeling as if I was going insane. In that way, the documentary replicates what it’s like to navigate the informational hall of mirrors we all inhabit. But what I found most bracing about the film—more so than the supposed unknowability of anyone or anything—is how Holmes’s act and affect do not feel like an aberration in 2026. In fact, her behavior embodies the current ethos of Silicon Valley.

When she built Theranos, Holmes was a college dropout with boundless ambitions who styled herself after Steve Jobs. Jobs famously said things such as “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” and Holmes, like Jobs, projected the aura of a person ready to pull the future into the present by any means necessary. Jobs routinely delivered on these promises, and kept many projects secret until they were ready for the masses. Holmes did the opposite, offering a fantastical version of a product that did not exist, obscuring the actual capabilities and lying about the financials. She wasn’t alone; over time, the idea of the builder became more synonymous with a founder’s ideas, charisma, and salesmanship than with the products themselves. “I watched countless founders of hard tech companies present fraudulent products at conferences,” Nikita Bier, a tech entrepreneur who was recently Elon Musk’s head of product at X, wrote on the platform this weekend in response to the documentary. “They had fake studies with fudged numbers. Most of the adults in the room excused it as ‘faking it ‘til you make it.’”

Holmes’s high-profile failure and the collapse of Theranos in 2018 didn’t kill the builder archetype. If anything, the very structure of Silicon Valley became more deeply intertwined with the builder mindset. Fake it ’til you make it (provided it isn’t outright fraud) is a necessary outcome of an industry that’s funded by venture capitalists, who often make strategic bets on projects so early in development that the products are still hypothetical. And so VCs threw unfathomable money at promising but half-baked ideas in the hopes of fabulous payouts. Failures were overlooked, even celebrated as necessary or teachable moments—honorable proof of being a “man in the arena.” In 2022, after Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire was revealed to be an elaborate Ponzi scheme, the writer John Ganz argued that, in an industry built on big bets, the line between frauds and visionaries becomes difficult to suss out until everything implodes. “This is the Fyre Festival era of capitalism: outlandish promises and then a ludicrous debacle.”

Much of that rush to invest has been driven by a culture progressively gripped by the fear of missing out on the next industry-shaking payout. Untold billions were poured into crypto, then NFTs, Web3, and the ill-fated metaverse. In crypto, rug-pulling scams and Ponzi schemes abounded; its boosters said things such as “Have fun staying poor.” Today we’re living through what many suggest could be an AI bubble, and the same mentality persists. Have fun staying poor has been replaced with the idea of a “permanent underclass” of people who failed to get in early and now stand to lose their economic viability, and potentially their human agency altogether. Like Theranos, crypto, and NFTs, the AI industry is defined by claims of its inevitability and its future power (to be certain, chatbots and coding agents are real and powerful in ways the other technologies were not). In this way, AI is a faith-based technology; one’s desire to work on it, bet the success of the global economy on it, love it, or fear its End Times powers is typically predicated on what one can imagine it might become.

The past eight years have warped the tech industry to the point that it can feel untethered from the constraints of reality. You can see it in headlines everywhere if you’re looking. On Saturday, an Anthropic co-founder, Jack Clark, suggested that the U.S. GDP could jump in the next four years from about $30 trillion to $44 trillion thanks to rapid AI-driven progress in many industries. This would be one of the largest periods of growth in U.S. history, a prediction based on nothing more than the most “extreme parameter setting” of an Anthropic economic model the company released this fall. You can see it in the IPO prospectuses for a company like SpaceX, which includes in its ambitions the goal to “extend the light of consciousness to the stars” and initiatives such as asteroid mining and space tourism. And earlier this month, Musk noted that “this will sound super crazy, but I see a path to SpaceX being worth orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy.” You could call all these claims tech optimism or, as the famed venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote in his 2023 manifesto, necessary for the “glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.” You could also call it speculative fiction.

About halfway through the film, Holmes heads to prison and the documentary shifts to focus on Billy Evans, the man with whom Holmes has two children. With Holmes in prison, Evans has become her unreliable narrator. He is, as others have noted, also a helpful lens to understand the transformation of Silicon Valley. Evans has seemingly embraced Musk and Andreessen’s brand of vice signaling. We see him shooting guns, extolling Charlie Kirk, and lashing out at people on X under the cloak of anonymity (posting as Holmes, using her X account). He makes grandiose claims about his new company but seems embittered and incapable of submitting to hard questions about it. The veneer of excitement that the couple project in the Theranos 2.0 montage is replaced by a paranoia and resentment that people, including possibly Fielder, might be trying to take him down.

It all made me wonder how Silicon Valley might respond to Theranos’s collapse if it were happening today. Reactionary types in the industry might rally around Holmes, insisting that she was too early or needed more time. They might attack the press more forcefully for trying to bring her down (Holmes and Theranos did try to retaliate against whistleblowers and the reporter who broke the story). Trust in traditional media is even lower now than it was back then, and Silicon Valley has a robust ecosystem of very popular, industry-friendly podcasts and creators who could champion Holmes’s narrative. Evans, for instance, appeared last week on the popular All-In podcast. X is now owned by Musk. The truth takes longer to come out; in some cases, it might feel almost irrelevant. The universal outrage that Theranos sparked in 2015, when news first emerged that something was deeply wrong, sounds quaint now.

“When people ask how she got so far, it’s largely explained by the period she did it in,” Bier wrote in his X post about Holmes. “And she got caught when the world suddenly woke up.” I agree with the first part of Bier’s statement and take issue with the second. The brand of delusion that defined Holmes and the twisted epistemological game that You Can See Everything showcases is still deeply embedded in the industry. None of this is to suggest that everyone in Silicon Valley is engaged in rampant, Theranos-like provable fraud. But today’s entrepreneurs are emboldened to make even more outlandish claims about the future, and it’s more difficult than ever to parse what is real, what is knowingly fake, and what is being offered in good or bad faith.

In response to Bier’s post, Jason Calacanis, an investor and a co-host of All-In, noted that there was “much truth” to Bier’s explanation before he offered a rebuttal befitting a true builder—AI will soon solve the Theranos problem: “In the next ten years, a blood testing product will emerge that will make folks go, ‘See, @ElizabethHolmes was just 20 years too early!’”

The builder is never wrong. If anything, they are just early. The future is coming. Just have faith.

*Illustration sources: Justin Sullivan / Getty; Liesa Johannssen-Koppitz / Bloomberg / Getty; Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu / Getty; USA Today / Reuters.

Sally Rooney Is Wrong, and So Is What’s Happening to Her

2026-10-20T15:34:09-04:00

On October 14, the publisher Faber & Faber announced that it would stop selling books by the Irish novelist Sally Rooney in the United Kingdom. Rooney has declared her intention to donate her earnings to a group called Palestine Action, which was banned last year by the British government. Her publisher concluded that it could not continue to pay royalties that would end up in the hands of a registered terrorist organization. “To sell a writer’s work and not be able to pass on earnings is an unconscionable situation for a publisher,” Faber said in a statement. “As such, and in full agreement with Sally, we have taken the decision that we can no longer supply her works in the UK in any format.” Almost immediately, international best sellers such as Normal People and Conversations With Friends began to disappear from the shelves of British bookstores.

Because of Rooney’s fame as both a “voice of her generation” and a pro-Palestinian activist, Faber’s decision provoked an outcry among advocates of the Palestinian cause, defenders of free expression, and writers and readers. But Rooney’s books haven’t been banned. Rather, their author, an Irish citizen, has decided to challenge the law of a foreign country, the United Kingdom. Britain’s 2000 Terrorism Act makes it a crime if a person “provides money or other property” and “knows or has reasonable cause to suspect that it will or may be used for the purposes of terrorism.” In this expansive language, the publisher would be on the hook along with its star author.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Europe’s free-speech problem]

By promising her royalties to Palestine Action, Rooney has forced her publisher’s hand—the key phrase in Faber’s brief statement is “in full agreement with Sally.” Faber could have tested the law in court, as courageous publishers have done in other cases, but it took a more direct course in cooperation with Rooney. No doubt she knows what she’s doing. She must have anticipated the storm of indignant editorials, social-media posts, and open letters that has followed the withdrawal of her books. At considerable cost to herself and her publisher, she’s using her cultural power to draw attention to the ban on Palestine Action and embarrass the British government into reversing it. This is not a story of literary censorship, but one of civil disobedience for political ends.

If Rooney had earmarked her royalties for Hamas, there would be nothing more to say—she would deserve the wrath of a reasonable law. But Palestine Action isn’t Hamas; nor is it the Hilltop Youth, the movement of violent West Bank settlers. It’s a loosely organized “direct action” group of pro-Palestinian British activists whose immediate goal is to interrupt the transfer of weapons to Israel, and whose tactics amount to vandalism of property. In the summer of 2025, members broke into a Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire and sprayed red paint on a pair of military planes, which provoked Britain’s Labour government into designating Palestine Action a terrorist organization.

Other acts have been less spectacular but, in some ways, more vile. Vandals defaced and smashed the windows of a Jewish-owned investment business in an Orthodox neighborhood of North London because of its supposed ties to a weapons manufacturer. Thieves announced that they had stolen two busts of Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, from the University of Manchester, where he had once been a senior lecturer in chemistry. They beheaded one, and when a pro-Israel group offered $10,000 for the busts’ return, they proposed sending an amputated ear in exchange for the money. “First bust of Weizmann is dead,” Palestine Action posted on X. “Soon, his Zionist project will be too.” (The second bust turned out to be that of a different chemist.) So far, the group has seriously harmed one flesh-and-blood human being, when a member swung a sledgehammer at a kneeling police sergeant and fractured her back during a break-in at a weapons factory.

Sally Rooney’s favored activists play at being terrorists, but in fact they’re merely criminal and, by almost any definition, anti-Semitic. Britain already has laws that can deal with them. To lump Palestine Action with the Islamic State and al-Qaeda makes the word terrorism almost meaningless. Even worse, the Terrorism Act has been amended so broadly that anyone who “expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organization” in a “reckless” way could get arrested. As a result, hundreds of protesters—white-haired pensioners and vicars as well as keffiyeh-muffled fellow travelers—have been detained in the past year just for holding up placards that say I Oppose Genocide. I Support Palestine Action. This absurdity shows up in a recent report from Britain’s Home Office: There were “3,867 arrests for terrorism-related activity in the year ending June 2026”—an increase of 1,553 percent over the previous year, before Palestine Action was banned.

[Gal Beckerman: A free-speech meltdown]

If the withdrawal from sale of Rooney’s immensely popular novels can persuade the British Parliament to amend the law and expand the permissible speech of political activists, she will have done a service for freedom of expression. But there’s no reason to believe that this is her aim, or that she even cares very much about free speech. Rooney has become a prominent advocate—the literary name and face—for the cultural boycott of Israel, including those writers and publishers who fail to meet her exacting criteria for total separation from the state where they were born and live. She refused to allow her most recent books to be translated into Hebrew until she found an Israeli publisher that supports the boycott movement.

The purpose of a boycott is to ostracize its targets—to make it difficult or impossible for them to carry on a normal public existence. For writers, this means to be silenced. The only test of a commitment to free speech is the speech of people you disagree with, dislike, even despise. It’s a test that Rooney doesn’t pass and seems to have no interest in passing. Palestine Action should be undesignated as a terrorist organization; its vandals should be prosecuted under ordinary laws; its supporters should be allowed to hold up placards; Rooney’s books should be stocked, sold, and read. But she shouldn’t be turned into a martyr for a principle in which she herself has no real belief.

Elon Musk and Dario Amodei Are Offering Gifts—With Strings Attached

2026-10-20T19:30:00-04:00

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

Many people are understandably focused on the question of how AI will transform our civilization. Will it cure cancer? Will it end world hunger? Will it hack everyone’s bank accounts and incubate the next pandemic? But those who are already profiting from this technological revolution also have a more immediate concern. Their problem is—to paraphrase one of my favorite lines from Scarface—what to do with all the cash.

Over the past few days, two of America’s most prominent AI leaders have offered proposals for returning some of the spoils of the AI boom to the public. On Sunday, Anthropic announced that it would set aside 5 percent of the company’s stock in a new LLC—the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund—to be spent on causes it deems to be in the public’s interest. More stock may be added as the company becomes more valuable. If the company goes public at its current projected valuation of $1.5 trillion, the fund could hold $75 billion, making it one of the largest charities on the planet. (For context, the Gates Foundation Trust had about $89 billion in it at the end of last year.) Elon Musk, a centibillionaire and a longtime skeptic of traditional philanthropy, criticized the move and tried to one-up it, writing on X that he’d be giving one share of SpaceX to “every kid in America.” According to The New York Times’ back-of-the-napkin math, this could end up being a donation of more than $10 billion.

What AI’s biggest winners decide to do with their money could have profound consequences for how Americans live their lives. The birth of modern AI may turn out to be the biggest wealth-creation event in human history, yet most Americans are feeling those effects indirectly. AI is making some people’s jobs easier and driving innovation, but it isn’t hitting everyone’s personal finances equally, and almost half of U.S. adults think the technology will widen the gap between the rich and the poor. Musk and Anthropic are now laying out two different visions for AI-driven philanthropy—raising thorny questions about the level of control that the investor class will exert over our shared future.

The first and most obvious question for Anthropic: What if the company’s understanding of the “public good” doesn’t line up with the public’s wants or needs? Anthropic’s leaders, Dario and Daniela Amodei, have already committed to giving away most of their own personal wealth, and Dario has written on his blog about the kinds of philanthropy he admires. The Gates Foundation and PEPFAR, President George W. Bush’s public initiative for global AIDS relief, are both on his list. But how the firm’s leaders will actually decide to apportion these gifts remains somewhat nebulous. A press release for Anthropic’s fund lists “large donations to traditional nonprofits” and “direct distributions to specific populations” as examples of possible projects. Another stated goal is to remediate the effects of a massive, AI-driven labor-market transformation—an ironic instance of a company trying to solve a problem it helped create.

As many politicians and even AI corporations themselves have argued, this tech is powerful enough, and potentially such an important part of the global economy, that the wealth it creates may merit some degree of public control. Last October, as one possible plan for reckoning with the economic consequences of AI, Anthropic floated the idea of using “sovereign wealth funds to give citizens stakes in AI revenues.” (OpenAI’s leaders have also reportedly considered giving 5 percent of the company to the government.) At least for now, though, the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund isn’t giving anyone outside of the company a stake. And the fact that it won’t be a 501(c)(3), like the Gates Foundation, means that it won’t have to deal with the kinds of mandatory financial disclosures that are meant to keep charitable organizations maximally transparent. A democratic way to approach this project would be for the government to aggressively tax the company and decide for itself how to spend the money. Not every American agrees with their government representatives’ approach to resource allocation, but at least in the public sector, the people have a voice.

Although Musk’s path is also billionaire-led, it gives Americans a much more direct stake. Donald Trump clarified yesterday that Musk’s donation, if it happens, would use the country’s new child-savings accounts (known as “Trump Accounts”) as a vehicle. Rather than earmarking shares for a self-sustaining charitable foundation, Musk would be effectively cutting out the middleman, giving American children a piece of the company that houses his biggest AI bets. It would likely be a smaller total donation than Anthropic’s; one share per child may not turn out to be all that much money in the long run. And Trump Accounts aren’t a perfect dispersal mechanism; parents can’t reject donated shares, and they can’t immediately sell them. Once account holders turn 18, though, they can spend Musk’s gift on whatever they want.

Musk, like other tech billionaires, has questioned traditional modes of philanthropy. He knows that the public knows that giving can be an expression of power and control—a way to rehabilitate a donor’s image or provide political insulation for the donor and his enterprises. Musk may be getting something out of this too. If more people own a little chunk of the AI economy, will they start to become more receptive to data centers and other Big Tech interventions? The donation could also give recipients a reason to be less critical of Musk and his businesses; people with a stake in the company might be more inclined to tolerate unscrupulous behavior. Still, if he can follow through on his approach (and especially if he continues to donate AI stock, as he hinted in his post yesterday), his gift could have a real impact.

When SpaceX was about to go public earlier this year, my colleague Matteo Wong observed that “by weaving itself into the finances of most businesses and households in America, the AI industry is quickly making itself too big to fail.” AI is already deeply embedded in our life: in the businesses we interact with, in the pension funds and 401(k)s around which we plan our future. These massive donations, which represent a deviation from tech-industry norms, could reshape society for the better. But if the public comes to rely on Anthropic’s investments or on direct payouts from SpaceX, it’ll need to start caring even more about how well these companies perform. Public welfare needn’t be contingent on the whims of a few powerful firms; so much else already is.

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is donating roughly $80 million to support Democrats in the midterm elections, and is focused on helping the party win control of the House. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee is transferring $50 million to groups supporting Republican House and Senate candidates.
The United Kingdom announced that it will deploy Royal Air Force fighter jets to Saudi Arabia to defend against missile and drone attacks by the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. The jets will protect Saudi cities and infrastructure but will not conduct offensive strikes inside Yemen, British officials said.
Elon Musk ordered restrictions on Ukraine’s military-grade Starlink service last week, disrupting drone operations and air defenses, according to The Wall Street Journal. Musk reportedly discussed the decision, and President Trump said he did not know who was responsible for the move.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: The Trump administration has mandated that federal firefighters pursue a policy of “full suppression” on every wildfire, Joshua Partlow reports. He explores the sometimes fatal dangers of this aggressive approach.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

All the President’s Hotties

2026-10-20T14:15:48-04:00

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

“There are some reasons to be president,” Donald Trump mused at a rally in Georgia earlier this month. Take a wild guess what these might be. The cool armored car? Custody of the nuclear button? The opportunities for immense corruption? Wrong. The leader of the free world was referring to the joy of living in a house guarded by “big, strong, handsome soldiers.” Under Joe Biden, soldiers were not allowed to be hot, because of woke. Even worse, some of them were girls.

Yes, after two grinding years of governance, Trump is back in his happy place, out on the campaign trail, voicing whichever disconnected thoughts crackle and fizz through his frontal cortex. His favorite rhetorical theme lately is an unexpected one: the official presidential dreamboat rankings. In multiple rallies, Trump has gone on and on about the relative hotness of male politicians, soldiers, and even protesters. As a result, people on the internet have diagnosed him with a novel medical condition: gay dementia. After putting in a solid shift in the heterosexuality mines, has the former beauty-pageant proprietor now become so disinhibited that he can no longer repress his thirst for man-flesh?

A less salacious explanation might be that the president has always refined his speeches based on audience feedback, and he’s discovered that his hot-guy material absolutely kills. In 2024, he kept going on about “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” and whether being electrocuted is preferable to being eaten by a shark, simply because the crowds enjoyed those riffs. Today the MAGA faithful get a transgressive thrill from hearing a man put into office by Christian conservatives deliver homoerotic stylings on male beauty. Calling women hot would read as creepy, and might remind audiences of the sexual-assault allegations against Trump, or the locker-room gaucheness of “grab ’em by the pussy.” But lusting after men is good, clean fun, and after a decade pushing the limits of outrageous behavior, here is a taboo that Trump can harmlessly break. Which Democrat is going to mock a guy for being a little bit swishy? Stephen Miller will not dare whisper to his boss: Sir, you know that we keep snidely implying that James Talarico is secretly gay? Your obvious love of buff soldiers is giving—mixed messages.

Enough of the serious chin-stroking electoral analysis, though. You want to hear which men America’s greatest president considers to be stone-cold babes. Step forward, Jon Husted of Ohio, with your glorious, rippling glutes and your valiant crusade against energy-efficient dishwashers. At a campaign stop for the Republican Senate nominee in Dayton, Trump discovered that Husted used to be a star football player. Naturally, the president looked for evidence of this in Husted’s buttocks—the windows to the soul. As he later told a crowd in Youngstown: “I don’t do this with men very often.” (A lie.) “I started examining his body because I didn’t know he was a great athlete. And I looked and I watched up and down. I looked at his ass.” The crowd laughed, which encouraged Trump to add that he also admired Husted’s hands, which he said were “like claws.”

[Read: The king of queens]

Days later in Kentucky, Trump returned to the theme of Husted’s badonkadonk. “I examined his ass, and then I looked at his shoulders. I looked at his feet. I looked at his hand. I looked at his jawline,” he told the crowd. “I then patted him on the shoulder, and it was like a piece of steel. I’m still recovering.” The Ohio candidate had gained “nine or 10 points since I talked about that,” he said. (Also a lie.)

Trump has always had a weakness for a photogenic guy. He reportedly chose members of his Cabinet, such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, after seeing how good they looked on television. He’s long made a habit of singling out attractive men in his audiences, entreating the rest of the crowd to join in his appreciation. (“Get up here, please. I want to see,” he told a muscled young man at a Coast Guard ceremony this spring.) Back in February, the president described a “very powerful” steel-factory owner who was so grateful for his policies that “he said, ‘Sir, I want to kiss you so badly.’” In May, my colleague Ashley Parker chronicled some of the men whose looks had Trump favorably assessed. These included the president of Paraguay (“young and handsome”), military pilots (“perfect specimens”), and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (“under that beautiful exterior is a killer”).

The president’s homoerotic stylings have become more obvious, however, because he has so little else to talk about on the campaign trail. Crooked Hillary and Sleepy Joe have long since departed the scene, Shifty Schiff’s impeachment plans went nowhere, and the fake-news media have been replaced by MAGA toadies. With few enemies left (except his own terrible judgment) Trump is struggling to develop new material. Like many older people, he has retreated to his comfort zone, and his comfort zone is guarded by big, strapping men in uniform. “They’re always great-looking, these four-star guys. I don’t know if they get the job by their look,” he told a rally in Kansas this week. He also praised the rock singer Ted Nugent for having a son who was “a beautiful-looking guy.”

The president has ruminated so often on male beauty lately that it’s become very obvious that he has a type. His taste in men turns out to be somewhat basic—white, beefy, butch; think corn-fed midwestern fireman—and thoroughly partisan. At the same rally in Georgia where he enthused about the White House guards, Trump incorrectly declared that Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, was not a “good-looking man,” unlike his Republican challenger. “I actually think Mike Collins is a good-looking man—and he’s all man. He’s all man,” added Trump. “I’m not sure about Ossoff.” (Let me save you a click: Collins is a mulleted 59-year-old with a touch of latter-day Newt Gingrich about his facial features, whereas Ossoff is so cute that he clearly had to shave off his beard in order to be taken seriously.) Trump went on to declare that the GOP candidate for Georgia governor, Rick Jackson, was also a “very handsome, distinguished, beautiful-looking guy.” In Kansas, Trump expanded his hotness rankings to encompass the crowd. Describing one loyalist’s confrontation with a protester, he noted approvingly that “the MAGA guy beat the crap out of him. Not that that matters. Good-looking guy.”

Trump’s MAGA goggles do have some limits. Last month, he went through a phase of roasting Ken Paxton, devoting sections of multiple speeches to what a schlub he found the Republican Senate candidate in Texas to be. “He may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen,” the president observed on September 9, adding the next day: “I’m not sure if I like your look. I’m not sure if I like the way you dress. I don’t like the way you talk.” Sad! Paxton, apparently, has a face not even a homoerotically inclined Republican president can love.

An enthusiasm for buff young men in uniforms (or out of them) has always been one of the hallmarks of authoritarianism—a form of governance enamored of strong male bodies, and the promise of violence that they contain, even when the rulers consider overt homosexuality degenerate. Mussolini’s Italy simultaneously exiled dozens of gay men to the island of San Domino and produced the jaw-droppingly campy naked statues at the Stadio dei Marmi in Rome. Many dictators end up mired in camp: Muammar Qaddafi had an all-female bodyguard troop. Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov renamed April after his mother and built a gold statue of himself that rotated to face the sun. Emperor Bokassa I of the short-lived Central African empire tried to make his coronation ceremony an exact replica of the one held by Napoleon Bonaparte, but was hampered by having to hold it in a basketball stadium.

[Read: The surprising reason for the new homophobia]

Donald Trump’s simultaneous love for unchecked executive power and a well-turned male ankle is therefore part of a rich historical tradition. At the same time, it is also one of the many ways in which his political style represents a departure from typical American conservatism. From the 1970s onward, the Republicans were the party of the “moral majority” and “traditional values.” The idea that the party’s base is casually homophobic is still such conventional wisdom that J. D. Vance, a Millennial who very obviously had LGBTQ friends in his student years, now has to play-act as an old-school social conservative to show the depth of his political conversion. When a man at a rally in Texas shouted out that he loved Vance, the vice president replied: “I love you too, sir. In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I’m the vice president, not James Talarico.”

Vance does not seem to have grasped that his boss’s campiness is key to his political appeal—it’s the secret sauce that transforms nastiness into showbiz sass. Trump is politics’ answer to Joan Rivers, and his persona is influenced by all the flavors of American fakery: the carnival barker, the reality-TV host, the kayfabe world of professional wrestling. He looks like a man doing a drag performance as himself.

Trump’s embrace of camp also reflects his immunity to shame. I get the sense that Vance is crippled with embarrassment by the thought of that famous picture of him in eyeliner and a blond wig. His unease with gayness, campiness, and femininity reads as insecurity. By contrast, Trump loves Sunset Boulevard and doesn’t care who knows it. Hell, he even went to Liza Minnelli’s wedding. That authenticity and disinhibition means he can get a crowd of white Christians in Kentucky to listen to his homoerotic ramblings—and applaud.

What Lego Lost When It Grew Up

2026-10-20T07:30:00-04:00

Next month, just in time for the holidays, Lego will launch its largest set yet: a miniature version of the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia. (“Perfect for anyone who loves visionary design, architecture or travel,” the website proclaims.) The price tag, at $799.99, is a bargain if you assess it on a per-brick basis: The set contains 12,060 pieces, most of which are beige. The instructions are laid out such that the person building the model will re-create the historical timeline of the church’s construction, starting with the crypt. When complete, the model stands about two feet tall and is densely ornamented, frosted with wings and spires and 42 hook-handed figures serving as statues of biblical characters. Antoni Gaudí meant for his masterpiece to inspire awe and, at times, fear; so, too, may this heap of bricks.

Lego fans sometimes refer to their “dark ages”—the period of their life, usually starting in their teens, when they lost interest in their brick sets. Such angst has gone the way of dial-up internet now that Lego, like many other toy brands, actively courts older customers. In the early 2000s, Lego was near bankruptcy; today, powered by an emergent adult demographic, the company is earning record revenues and growing faster than many of its competitors. The situation sounds like a CEO’s daydream: a toy maker that’s ensured its customers will never age out of its merchandise. Yet by embracing the tastes and preferences of the Lego adult, the company has started to make wares that are distinctively un-toylike, losing something essential to their appeal in the process.

Of course, adults have always been able to buy and tinker with Lego sets as they pleased. Only in recent years, however, has the brand been so overt, and so enterprising, in reaching out to this audience. In 2020, the company officially launched its “Adults Welcome” marketing campaign, casting brick-building as a form of stress relief. The next year, when that campaign launched its first global TV ads, the company’s chief product and marketing officer told Ad Age that “children are at the center of everything we do, but we are delighted that the love of Lego building transcends age.”

Since then, the brand has rolled out hundreds of brick sets to suit grown-up interests—packaged in sleek black boxes rather than its traditional cheery egg-yolk yellow. The LEGO Masters reality show, in which two teams face off in preposterously elaborate building challenges, premiered in 2020, has aired for five seasons (with a sixth on the way), and spun off a celebrity holiday special. (A version starring kids was only announced in 2025.) The company’s indoor theme parks, which were originally designed for families, now host special adults-only nights. Today, if anyone tried telling Lego to dial back its engagement with adult fans, it would “run you out of town,” a former executive told National Geographic.

The toy business at large has also started courting older consumers, in response to all sorts of social shifts. Birth rates are falling; kids, favoring screen time, are said to age out of traditional toys earlier and earlier. But adults—a growing share of whom say they don’t expect to have children—have changed too. They’re less invested in traditional markers of maturity, and they hold tight to their youthful passions (and have more discretionary income than kids to pursue them). All sorts of companies now pander to those desires: As my colleague Valerie Trapp reported, Pop Mart’s Labubu campaign last year seemed squarely focused on entry-level office workers; this month, American Girl published its first novel for adults.

What’s been called the “kidult” market—which covers any consumer older than 12—has reached a more advanced stage. Just under half of adults in 2024 had bought a toy for themselves in the prior year, according to a report from the research firm Circana. Households without children now account for 55 percent of toy sales. In another sign of the times, the once-struggling chain Toys ‘R’ Us, which filed for bankruptcy nearly a decade ago, now plans to open 120 new stores, quadrupling its stand-alone locations. Some analysts argue that, in the toy business, grown-ups are no longer a mere sideline but its central source of growth.

For Lego, catering to adult fans represents a dramatic reversal from past practice. In the ’90s, “when they first became aware of us, they were, quite frankly, appalled,” Daniel Konstanski, the author of The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks, told me. Company leaders once worried that the overt enthusiasm of mature hobbyists “would tarnish the brand,” Konstanski said, “or be considered weird, kind of creepy.” That shifted in the early 2000s as the cash-strapped company made tentative overtures to these customers, creating Lego models of an Eiffel Tower, several airplanes, the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars.

The company generally avoided any theme that would be perceived as too adult; even very expensive or intricate sets, such as a model of NASA’s Apollo Saturn V rocket, had roots in topics that might at least theoretically appeal to a child’s interests. “It used to be that there was subject matter that the Lego Group wouldn’t touch,” Graham E. Hancock, the editor of the fan magazine Blocks, told me. Then, in 2015, Lego released a model of the living room that functions as the main set of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory. From then on, in Hancock’s view, the brand shed any hang-ups about making toys aimed exclusively at adults. Many sets now seem like they would baffle a child: Recent releases include models based on The X-Files ($199.99) and The Goonies ($329.99), cultural touchstones from decades before kids today were even born.

Grown-ups may handle toys very differently than kids do—treating them as pristine collectibles, fodder for social-media posts, or even financial investments. But once they’re out of the box, the toys function the same. A plushie shaped like an espresso cup might appeal more to adult sensibilities than to a child’s, but it’s still meant to be cuddled. Similarly, a NeeDoh sensory cube is there to be squished; a Hot Wheels car goes vroom; a Polly Pocket compact unfolds to reveal its Lilliputian world. Regardless of its owner’s age, the telos of the toy remains constant.

[Read: The latest toys for Millennial-parent guilt]

In this respect, Lego stands apart from other toy makers. Its grown-up sets don’t just come with different packaging and higher price tags; they also function differently. “It’s important to make that distinction,” Sarah Herman, the author of A Million Little Bricks, a book on Lego history, told me. “The more adult-targeted products are not just a more complicated version of what they’re making for children.” Classic Lego sets provided kids with relatively basic elements, either for open-ended creative building or as props for games of pretend. A kit would provide pieces to build a setting such as a town or space station, along with mini figures to move around.

Adult sets, by contrast, serve almost entirely as decor. Once you’ve constructed your model of a Gustav Klimt painting, potted hibiscus plant, or Darth Vader’s star destroyer—all currently available on Lego’s website—you can’t do anything else with it. It sits on a shelf as a trophy: gleaming, inert, and quasi-sculptural. These bricks do not invite further interaction. Some, forbiddingly, come with informational plaques to stand next to the finished object. At this point, Konstanski estimates, only about half of Lego’s sets are intended for play; the remainder are meant for display.

But the display mindset isn’t strictly confined to adults: Some new sets geared toward a younger audience—a Christmas tree, an Olivia Rodrigo–licensed faux vinyl record—appear purely ornamental. Kids today, more accustomed to digital entertainment, seem to have lost interest in handling physical toys—so much so that Lego, apparently hoping to reengage them, recently rolled out new high-tech bricks, fitted with bespoke computer chips, that light up and make sounds in response to movement. Nearly a decade of research and development went into inventing these brick sets, perhaps in the hope that, after they’re assembled, they won’t be abandoned on a shelf somewhere. The company describes them as “play-focused toys.”

Lego aficionados talk about the toy as a timeless classic. The genius of the product, in their telling, is that its essential components have remained unaltered for decades: A brick from as early as 1958 will click, satisfyingly, with one that comes fresh off the factory line today. This property—the grip between two Lego pieces after they’ve been snapped together—is called “clutch power,” and its constancy is oddly reassuring. It’s a physical sign that our old pleasures still have a secure, precise connection to the present moment, especially when everything else about toys—who buys them, their place in our lives—seems to have changed.

Donald Trump Really Wants This Golf Course

2026-10-20T15:41:00-04:00

Sign up for Inside the Trump Presidency, a newsletter featuring coverage of the second Trump term.

Donald Trump is treating the championship golf course he wants to build in Washington, D.C., with the gravity of an actual emergency. He has posted on Truth Social about the course at least 15 times in the past few days, including a dozen posts around 1 a.m. this morning. He wrote yesterday that work “is scheduled to begin IMMEDIATELY!” And the Trump administration has brought in a team of senior Justice Department lawyers, including the agency’s third in command, to defend its actions in court. Last week, when Katie Zacharia praised Trump after he fired her as press secretary, a photo she posted contained a blurred-out map on Trump’s desk of what appeared to be the golf site. It is literally at the top of Trump’s pile.

A golf-course renovation is probably not the big priority you’d expect from the president just two weeks before the midterm elections, where his party will face voters who are frustrated by high prices and dislike his many vanity projects. But Trump doesn’t seem concerned that he may be risking another Reflecting Pool scandal at a high-stakes moment. On Sunday, he posted design plans for his PGA-worthy golf course. Right before a hearing yesterday, he called the federal judge presiding over a case about the golf course a “crazed lunatic” and claimed that the Interior Department could go ahead with his plan with no approval.

Trump has pushed to glam up the municipal golf course in East Potomac Park near the National Mall for months, insisting in June that work would begin on “one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World” on September 1. But starting such a project is more complicated than such a timeline would imply. The entire park is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and would be subject to extensive bureaucratic reviews.

On October 10, the National Park Service, with little notice, cut down more than 400 trees, leaving the timber piled up in the middle of the course and setting off fears among locals that the president planned to blow through the usual red tape and start building. But preservationists and two golfers had sued over the pending changes earlier this year. So it was back to court. There, the government said that the tree removals are part of a 2019 plan to restore the course to its historic state, even though the plan is seven years old and there was no rush before. Ana C. Reyes, the judge in the case, has been skeptical that overgrown vegetation in the park suddenly became urgent enough to necessitate removal over a holiday weekend, especially because it coincided with Trump’s pressure over the course. Reyes insisted yesterday that this could not be a coincidence.

“Both can be true,” a lawyer for the government told Reyes.

“No,” Reyes replied. “Both cannot be true. We’re not dealing with quantum physics here.”

Meanwhile, the design plans that Trump posted have sparked anger among the many locals who use East Potomac Park for recreation. The map appears to remove Ohio Drive, a popular running and cycling route, and to extend the golf course to the man-made island’s perimeter, removing space for picnickers and fishers; it also replaces the park’s three affordable golf courses (one 18-hole and two nine-holes) with a single, pro-level 18-hole course. Even the famous cherry-blossom trees there seem to be at risk of removal. The renovation would significantly shrink who is able to use a place Congress designated in 1897 “to be forever held and used as a park for the recreation and pleasure of the people.”

To get to the bottom of who ordered the tree removals and for what purpose, Reyes called in several Interior and Park Service officials to testify yesterday during a hearing that stretched some seven hours. She wanted to make sense of the contradiction between the government’s position—that this was routine work, not part of any championship-golf-course plan—and Trump’s public statements.

[Read: The cutest target of Trump’s D.C. makeover]

The entire affair has been dizzying. According to Trump’s recent posts, work on the new golf course is ready to begin, the golf architect Tom Fazio has a design, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is “very excited,” and the park will soon be closed for its big makeover. If you ask the Department of Justice, as Reyes did, Trump’s golf-course plan has not been finalized. There has been no “final agency action,” DOJ lawyers argue, meaning that according to the Administrative Procedure Act, the plan cannot yet be scrutinized in court. Fazio has no contract with the government, they said, and there are not yet official plans to close the park. Still, a DOJ lawyer asserted, when pressed by the judge, that Trump’s statements are not incorrect but can be compared to executive orders that are then interpreted by agencies in ways that are consistent with the law. (On Truth Social, Trump also added that “any variance or changes will be made, depending on site conditions, by the Experts in Parks and Recreation, whose experience and knowledge in Seawalls, Landscaping, and Design are second to none.”)

If this seems confusing, that’s because it is. In a summer hearing for the case, Reyes likened the government’s stance to Schrodinger’s cat. Trump’s golf course is somehow simultaneously being built and not being built. Yesterday’s hearings captured the absurdity of the situation and the acrobatics the government seemingly must perform to defend a president who wants what he wants.

Trump has focused on renovation projects with an unprecedented intensity during his second term, working to put his stamp on the nation’s capital in arch, ballroom, and sculpture-garden form. The golf course is unique, though, in that it deals not with the widely known part of Washington’s monumental landscape but with a space people use in their everyday life.

The government has downplayed its golf-course efforts in court; in a filing on Sunday, DOJ lawyers likened the changes to East Potomac to redesigning “all the art exhibits in a Smithsonian Museum” and claimed that they’re relatively minor. Reyes didn’t buy that in court yesterday. Changing the layout of an entire historic golf course is not like changing exhibits, she said; it’s like tearing down an entire museum and building a new one.

The lawsuit has gotten heated at times. Government lawyers have tried and failed to have Reyes taken off the case, asserting in a court filing that “no reasonable observer could consider Judge Reyes sufficiently impartial to adjudicate this case.” Yesterday, she appeared especially careful, sustaining a number of objections from the government to her questions. After a more pointed exchange, she insisted that a government lawyer tell her whether she was yelling. The lawyer said that the question would be very difficult to answer.

Foreshadowing the government’s arguments, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wrote on X last week that “I missed the part of the Constitutional Convention that put federal judges in charge of golf-course maintenance.” (Reyes had not actually barred routine work on the course; rather, she’d requested notice of “major developments.”)

As the hearing wound down, Reyes noted that during the final break, she had received worried texts from her mother and brother about reported death threats against her. Then she, like Miller, invoked the early days of the republic. A federal judge receiving threats over a golf course, she said, is probably not what the Founding Fathers envisioned.

France Will Never Be Enough for the People Desecrating It

2026-10-20T15:54:00-04:00

At 8 p.m. on Sunday night, President Emmanuel Macron delivered a national address to condemn the rioting and looting that convulsed France this weekend, from Brittany to Perpignan. His suit and tie were black, instead of his customary navy blue, and he denounced the “seditionists from far-left fringe groups, joined by many criminals, engaged in unbridled violence in our cities.” He decried the grotesque destruction—crystallized in the viral image of a fire consuming the 19th-century wooden roof of the town hall in Limoges—and the methodical sacking of businesses. “Rien ne le justifie, rien ne l’explique, rien ne l’excuse,” he said: Nothing justifies it, nothing explains it, nothing excuses it. Macron acknowledged legitimate concerns about education and the cost of living, distinguished between peaceful protesters and rioters, and called for prosecutions while instructing prefects to consider banning mass gatherings.

It sounded good. But as I was watching Macron live from New York, I called my children in Paris and heard the giddy chaos—the shouts and cheering—still vibrating through the streets below their open window. They told me that some of the stores beneath their apartment were being ransacked as the president was speaking. I had to push from my mind the appalling thought that these rioters might climb into the building’s residential upper levels. Words aren’t enough anymore.

Slowly, the French authorities are starting to grasp that. “The day of disorder and violence that we have just experienced in France is one day too many,” Bruno Le Maire, a former government minister under Macron, wrote on X on Saturday, when there were roughly 2,400 arrests and 1,000 police officers and gendarmes injured, seven of them grievously. At least 3,000 businesses were damaged or looted over the weekend. Yesterday, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced “localized” curfews in Paris and other cities across the country, which is a start. Today, Lecornu added that the military would be deployed this weekend, when further protests are planned. These interventions are welcome. But if the government cannot restore peace quickly, then a state of emergency is the only sane option.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The violence sweeping France was never really about schools]

The “internal decay” besetting France, as my friend the writer Pascal Bruckner phrased it, piggybacks on other, more intelligible causes. Some of the protests began in response to genuine grievances about France’s underfunded schools and exorbitant cost of living. But they have since turned into paroxysms of disdain for healthy civic life—nothing more cerebral, nothing to do with policy. “The high-school students’ cause died on Saturday, October 17,” Bruckner wrote in Le Figaro. “It will not recover, however legitimate its original demands may have been.”

An investigation published in Le Parisien yesterday concurs with Bruckner, suggesting that the recent violence is detached from the educational grievances that originally sparked the student protests. The paper reports that according to French intelligence sources, there is an alliance de circonstance between organized ultra-left militants and a larger group of young people from the banlieues encircling major urban areas, many of whom were not politically engaged and likely never expressed an interest in the movement’s original demands. Some of these insurgents sought confrontation with the state before the scheduled demonstrations even began. Others merely took the opportunity to stuff their pockets and watch their country burn.

These past weeks of pandemonium have driven home for me that no society, not even a society as generous and in many ways enlightened as France’s, can make life sweet enough for angry young men. Nihilists of the kind we’ve seen flood the streets of France from coast to coast will never uphold their end of the social contract, no matter how beautifully it is drafted. This is the essence of Tocqueville’s famous paradox: As societies become more equal—and few societies strive to be more egalitarian than France, thanks to heavy taxation of the rich and a generous social safety net—any perceived or remaining inequalities become intolerable.

The rioters in France are not political actors expressing the “language of the unheard,” but nihilists rebelling against the very idea of a collective national life. Whether their stated justification is racism, Islamophobia, neoliberalism, or something else, they are agents of chaos and spite, lashing out against their productive, decent neighbors, perhaps precisely because those neighbors are productive and decent. And so they burn, shatter, and humiliate the symbols of the established order.

Official government estimates place the number of protesters at more than 500,000. Images from last weekend showed patrols of police forces overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the pillaging. The Macron administration was drastically underprepared for the size of the rebellion and now faces an impossible situation. Any confrontation or escalation risks providing the protesters with a martyr; if that victim comes from a marginalized demographic, the conflagration could spark a full-fledged riot.

[David A. Graham: What Trump’s comments about France say about him]

But the alternative—appeasement—is equally unacceptable. The state cannot expect its law-abiding citizens—the majority of the population, which includes the peaceful protesters—to accept its repeated failures to safeguard them and their livelihoods. A people’s ability to move freely, conduct business, and come and go from their homes through streets that are neither dangerous nor desecrated is a fundamental right. The cost of indulging the anarchists, looters, and rioters who infiltrate mass movements has fallen on the rest of France, who never consented to cover it.

“We are six months away from our presidential election,” Macron reminded the country toward the end of his speech. “And so all those who are telling you today that the urgent thing is to take to the streets—to demonstrate, to create disorder—have only one goal: to damage the republic and hijack the debate.”

He’s correct. But if Macron is unable to contain these forces, which seek to push the political debate into flame-scorched streets and schools and places of business, then he will be handing votes to the far-right leaders who have promised to do so.

What Trump’s Comments About France Say About Him

2026-10-19T17:16:00-04:00

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

You might imagine that, given the imminent midterm elections, a spluttering war in Iran, and his sinking personal approval, Donald Trump has enough to worry about. Not so. The president has been posting prolifically on Truth Social over the past two days about protests in France. “The migrants have taken over France. They must CLOSE THE BORDERS, FAST!” he wrote this morning. Trump’s reactions don’t tell us a great deal about the protests or about French society, but they do reveal three things about Trump.

First, Trump’s favorite mode is punditry. Even as the world’s most powerful man, he frequently seems to prefer watching TV and shooting opinions from the hip to engaging in governance. This explains why he continued to give freewheeling briefings, full of his own speculation and medical advice, while the coronavirus swept the United States in 2020, and it might be one reason he’s fixated on France at a time of political peril for his own party.

Second, and related, Trump can’t resist meddling in other countries’ affairs, engaging in behavior that previous presidents would have concluded was inappropriate. The U.S. government has long worked to covertly influence foreign elections, and in some cases encouraged or fomented coups. But presidents have mostly avoided issuing public endorsements or other interventions in partisan politics overseas, two things Trump loves to do. He endorsed the prime minister of Japan for reelection, backed a right-wing candidate for president of Poland, placed tariffs on Brazil for prosecuting his ally Jair Bolsonaro, and lent his administration’s credibility to the reelection campaign of Hungary’s then-President Viktor Orbán. (Orbán lost.) This weekend, he endorsed embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump’s blaming of immigrants in France amplifies the platform of National Rally, a far-right party with fascist roots that is ideologically aligned with MAGA and has its best shot yet at capturing the French presidency for the first time next spring.

But U.S. interference abroad tends to produce some pushback. Leaders and voters in sovereign countries may not like a superpower telling them how to live—especially in a nation such as France, which still sees itself as a global player. Apologists might contend that Trump’s meddling in foreign politics is a sign of strength, projecting American power worldwide, but the brush-off Trump received when begging for international assistance in the Persian Gulf showed the cost of treating allies dismissively. Trump’s approach to the protests is notable because for years, he seemed to get along with French President Emmanuel Macron better than with almost any other foreign leader, a bromance sealed with history’s most awkward handshake. Their friendship seems to have cooled more recently, in part because of tariffs and Trump’s antagonism toward Ukraine. (Notably, the Kremlin is also using France’s protests to score political points.)

Third, Trump views all forms of protest—at least those with which he disagrees—as inherently illegitimate. The violence in France warrants concern: This past weekend, the country saw some of its worst riots in decades; shops were looted and landmarks were destroyed as rioters seemed to take advantage of the mass marches. But in his posts on Truth Social, the president does not simply condemn the violence—he suggests that the riots must be the work of foreign seditionists. The protest movement was in fact sparked by domestic concerns, particularly demands for better funding for the nation’s school system. Macron, in contrast to Trump, has said that many protestors have legitimate demands, even as he has fiercely condemned violence, which he blames on “troublemakers from far-left fringe groups.”

Authoritarians see any popular resistance as a danger to their power, which is why the autocratic Russian regime and the aspiring strongman Trump are united in condemning French demonstrations. And as nationalists, they must also blame the danger on outsiders, even though French authorities have not made any link between immigrants and unrest. “Western liberals imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion,” Vice President Vance posted on X this weekend, along with a clip of the city hall in Limoges, in the old province of Limousin, burning. “They ignored fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility. They were told it would lead to this and they didn’t listen.” This was not only a missed opportunity for Vance to blame literal limousine liberals for the riots; it was patently absurd. The French don’t need outsiders to teach them how to rage in the streets. They’ve been doing it for centuries. (Trump, an aficionado of Les Misérables, might not have made this mistake.) To the extent that migrants are involved in these protests, it is proof that they have assimilated fully to the French way of life.

Suggesting that Trump and Vance might be wiser to focus on getting their own house in order than to look overseas would be easy, but it misses the point. This weekend, while Trump was posting about French protests, Americans were participating in thousands of “No Kings” demonstrations around the country and Trump’s “border czar” was insinuating that Ilhan Omar, a Democratic lawmaker who is a naturalized citizen, committed immigration fraud. Trump’s attempts to delegitimize protest and whip up xenophobia aren’t ultimately about France. They’re about the United States.

Related:

Why Trump turned to the sewer (From 2025)
The violence sweeping France was never really about schools.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

The Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other accused September 11 plotters who are seeking to reinstate a 2024 plea deal that would have given them life sentences. The three men are scheduled to stand trial before a military commission in 2028 and could face the death penalty.
Yesterday, President Trump defended his decision to ease sanctions and tariffs on Russia, saying the move was intended to keep Moscow at the negotiating table for a peace agreement with Ukraine. He also suggested that the talks included negotiations over the release of a hostage, but he did not identify anyone involved.
Houthi forces launched three ballistic missiles at a military camp in Yemen’s Shabwa province, killing at least 47 people and injuring at least 53 others, according to Yemeni military officials. The attack comes amid renewed fighting between the Iran-backed group and Yemeni government forces supported by Saudi Arabia.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Rafaela Jinich explores how to indulge in fall.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Adam Maida / The Atlantic

The Minimal Requirements for a Society Free From Fear

By Adam Kirsch

In 1989, the year the West won the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama published an essay announcing “the end of history.” He wasn’t claiming that historic events would stop taking place; what was over, rather, was the debate about the meaning of those events. Since the Enlightenment, Western thinkers had believed that history was progressing toward a final destination. According to communism, the engine of progress was class conflict, and history would end in the creation of a classless society. With the failure of the Soviet empire, Fukuyama argued, this idea had been discredited. Only one alternative remained: It was now clear that the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” was “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” There would still be disagreements within liberalism—Fukuyama named religion and nationalism as likely fault lines—but there could no longer be any disagreement about liberalism.

Read the full article.

How the Rabbit Revolution Went Too Far

2026-10-18T09:25:00-04:00

This is the moment I knew that the whole vibrator thing had gone too far: It was about a year ago, and I’d ordered a replacement rabbit, the model I’d fallen for around 2007, amid the vibrator renaissance brought about by Sex and the City. An early episode of that zeitgeist show features the prudish Charlotte, having reluctantly bought a “Rabbit Pearl” on the advice of her friend Miranda, becoming so addicted to her new toy that she stops leaving her apartment, thus turning the rabbit into a cultural icon for female pleasure.

More than a quarter century had passed since that innocent moment, and the rabbit—once a battery-operated device with a clunky rotating shaft and dainty bunny ears that shivered with astonishing proficiency—had turned sleek and space-age. The rabbits I ordered had USB chargers and a variety of speeds. They had safety locks and silencers, like guns.

I didn’t want all these added features—22 speeds was about 20 too many—but I could never remember the name of the most recent one I’d ordered, so I had to Google best rabbit vibrators, a quest that once upon a time had taken me to niche women’s websites but now took me to The New York Times’ Wirecutter.

It’s not that the newer rabbit models don’t work; it’s that they do too much. I mean, I wouldn’t buy a spatula that also dusted the floor. My latest model was so fancy and complicated that it took me a while to figure out how to switch it on, but the real problem was that, once it was on, I could not figure out how to turn the thing off.

The day I received it, I was about to record a podcast, a detail that sounds irrelevant until you realize what I was up against: I could not have a vibrator droning on in the background of an hour-long audio conversation. I spent minutes that felt like hours desperately pushing three buttons in alternating sequences only to be thwarted—the rabbit would not turn off. It thumped, it jittered, it whirred round and round. I determined that the only way to shut the damn thing up would be to run down its battery. Racing to beat the clock before the podcast began, I bolted to my front door to place the infernal device outside, where its insistent whirring wouldn’t be picked up by the mic. Just before I got there, I somehow hit the right sequence, and the vibrator finally shut down.

What a sad modern portrait: a single woman, living alone, with a rabbit vibrator jackhammering haplessly against her door.

Around that time, I happened to be listening to Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast when I heard a sex therapist say, “Turn down the speed on your vibrators.” Shepard—a modern man in the sex-positive mold—sounded confused; he seemed to be under the impression that vibrators were good for women.

Weren’t we all?

I’d been thinking about turning down the speed on my vibrator for a long time, but I’d considered my affliction personal, not society-wide. Now it was dawning on me that the problem wasn’t simply mine. Women are being sold egg-shaped suction devices in the pages of New York magazine, and BookTok influencers pair with sex-toy companies for promotional collabs. Yes, there is a bookmark that doubles as a vibrator. (“Building a world where women choose their pleasure + their power,” reads the Instagram bio for Her Little Bookmark.)

Does this consumer game of one-upmanship amid the mainstreaming of vibrators even matter? There are too many varieties of women’s razors, too, and I don’t care. But what worries me is how this points in the direction in which so much of modern life has been barreling: self-pleasure, self-love, self-care, self, self, self.

This is where my mind goes when I read or hear a certain type of brittle “Don’t need a man, I have a vibrator” argument, a flex that’s been prevalent on social media for at least a decade. I’d love to see a chart of the well-documented sex recession laid across a chart of vibrator sales. A vibrator may get you off better than a man (or a woman, for that matter), but will it clean the gutters? Hold you in the dark? Kill the rat skittering around the attic? I write these words, and then I think: But wait, what if one day it can?

I arrived late to vibrators, or perhaps I should say masturbation, in the relatively vibrator-shy ’90s. I was a few years out of college, sharing pitchers of beer with my buddy Aaron, and we were about halfway through the second pitcher when I shared a very personal detail: I’d never had an orgasm.

Not ever? Aaron was fascinated but not judgmental; in fact, another female friend had recently confessed something similar, and he’d researched the problem late one night (he was in law school, and miserable) and discovered that her predicament was both common and easy to solve.

“You need the Cadillac of vibrators,” he said, referring to the Hitachi Magic Wand, a personal massager that resembled a large white microphone. The Hitachi, he’d learned, launched women into such paroxysms of pleasure that it had acquired cult status. And he’d heard that you could buy it at Walmart.

Walmart? I was incredulous. Walmart had famously eighty-sixed popular albums by Marilyn Manson and (of all people) Sheryl Crow, but Aaron explained that this was part of the ruse. All of those “personal massagers” I’d seen in Sharper Image catalogs? Those were vibrators. Why else were they waterproof? I had to admit that he had a point.

[From the September 2026 issue: The great romance slump]

We drove to Walmart but it didn’t have the Cadillac of vibrators. Unwilling to end our adventure, Aaron picked up an alternate model he declared the “Ford Taurus of vibrators.” The picture on the front resembled a plug-in hand mixer. Whatever, I’d come this far.

That night, alone in my garage apartment, I unwrapped the box, drank some red wine to set the mood, and plugged the Ford Taurus of vibrators into an outlet, only to discover that the cord didn’t reach the bed. Was there an extension cord around? Never mind. I lay down nervously on a small braided rug, staring at the slowly rotating blades of the ceiling fan, and turned on the power, only to discover that hell no. It felt like industrial turbines were juddering against my most sensitive spot. Hard pass.

But a few nights later, I got an idea. Back in high school, my mother had given me a Brookstone mini-massager she’d bought at the mall, a stocking stuffer for a teen daughter with D cups and upper-back pain. I’d been lugging it from apartment to apartment like a kitchen utensil I never used. It was demure and beige, the size of a small flashlight, and it was waterproof. Huh, never noticed that. Drumming up my courage, I closed the curtains, lit votive candles, uncorked a bottle of wine, and settled under the covers with a device I would eventually know as the “pocket rocket.”

And that name fit. I felt like I was being shot into space.

The history of vibrators is a bit murky. In the Next Room (Or The Vibrator Play) is a 2009 Broadway production dramatizing the idea that Victorian doctors used early vibrators on women deemed “hysterical,” a term derived from the Greek word hystera, for “womb,” the supposed origin of women’s madness.

Did this happen? I like to think so. Evidence suggests that even the ancient Romans applied this approach to treating female mental illness. The second-century physician Galen wrote of treating a woman whose brain he believed to be dangerously bathed in her unreleased sexual fluids. He applied “manual stimulation,” and ta-da, “she was cured.” (The patient “took great pleasure from this,” Galen noted.)

Of course, the technology that transformed society, according to most accounts of women’s liberation and the sexual revolution, was birth control. The pill came out in the ’60s, but in many states only married women could get a prescription. It wasn’t until the ’70s that the pill went mainstream, allowing women to set a course for their own reproduction, a power they’d never had, at least in such potent and efficient form. But the sexual revolution and women’s liberation could also be at odds with each other. On one hand were Our Bodies, Ourselves, consciousness-raising sessions, hand mirrors held between the thighs. On the other hand were the normalization of casual sex without consequence, the “zipless fuck,” the rise of Penthouse and skirt hems—all seeming to serve men’s pleasure more than women’s. Or did they? Helen Gurley Brown and Erica Jong argued otherwise.

But then, in 1976, a sex educator named Shere Hite published The Hite Report, possibly the most revealing document ever produced about women’s sexual proclivities (more revealing, I’d say, than the more famous studies from Alfred Kinsey). To read The Hite Report now is to be gobsmacked by the sheer industriousness of women in the pre-vibrator era. Everyday items such as carrots and candles became ersatz phalluses; women sought climax under running bathwater or against the flat, vibrating side of an electric shaver. One woman even made creative use of an ashtray. The raw-liver scene in Philip Roth’s 1969 novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, may be the most famous over-the-top depiction of masturbation in American literature, but The Hite Report may be Portnoy’s feminine counterpart, with its robust chronicle of women’s sometimes Byzantine pursuit of pleasure.

For all The Hite Report’s descriptions of private erotic delight, though, the book’s strongest running theme is the deep and shameful fear expressed by women who were not getting themselves off, and didn’t know how. “I finally had an orgasm,” a woman tells people at a swanky party in 1979’s Manhattan, “and my doctor told me it was the wrong kind.”

By the ’70s and ’80s, bored grocery shoppers could flip through Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan to find new blow-job techniques while in the checkout line. But in the 1989 film Parenthood, a family dinner is interrupted by a power outage, and the everyman played by Steve Martin searches for a flashlight only to find his divorced sister’s big dildo buzzing in his hand as the lights flicker back on. She’s mortified.

I got the message: As a woman, giving pleasure to your partner was good; seeking pleasure for yourself was embarrassing. As a teen, I had Parenthood and Fast Times on VHS, and I studied them to become a more sophisticated version of myself. Believe it or not, the idea of masturbation never occurred to me. Put my hands down there? That was my boyfriend’s business. Not long after he and I broke up, he started hanging out with a cool college girl who drew a map of the clitoris. When he told me this over the phone, I was furious and humiliated. And also: Could I borrow that drawing?

For women of my generation, messages about sexual pleasure were mixed at best. Dr. Ruth was on the airwaves, adorably chirping about the joys of sexual freedom and toys that could assist women in their quest. But when I was in college, Joycelyn Elders was forced to resign as Bill Clinton’s surgeon general. Her alleged crime? She talked about the benefits of masturbation.

Self-pleasure is the foundation of all human sexuality, the late Betty Dodson used to say. Dodson was a pioneer of sex-positive feminism who taught workshops for women with the same body hang-ups she’d once had. Dodson died in 2020, but her legacy is etched across the early 21st century, in shows such as Girls and stores including Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, which infamously sold a jade egg for insertion into the vagina.

By the 2010s, sex toys were everywhere. Posters for Grace and Frankie, a Netflix comedy starring 70-something Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, featured the silver-haired heroines holding purple vibrating-wand massagers like light sabers. A charming 2016 Netflix series called Love, about dating in Los Angeles, features a scene wherein the beautiful but troubled protagonist tumbles into bed with her suitor only to reach into her bedside drawer, pull out her vibrator, and go to town on herself as he waits, awkwardly, for her to finish.

I took the point—self-pleasure could go too far; moderation was the prudent path—but I was about 40 when I saw that Netflix show. I was chronically single and trying to date sober (another story entirely), and I was not ready to slow down the odyssey of delights kicked off by my Brookstone pocket rocket. My bedside drawer was filled with items bought on a whim (a tongue-shaped pink vibe, a pocket rocket shaped like lipstick to sneak past airport security). I collected vibrators from online depots that sent the products in discreet packaging.

The idea that vibrators, touted as a way to encourage women’s sexual exploration, might be keeping them from experiences they craved—intimacy, physical touch, actual relationships—was something of a taboo subject in those years. I doubt many sex therapists wanted to be on record telling women to masturbate less when many women didn’t masturbate at all. The arrival of the MeToo movement in 2017 pushed the battle of the sexes closer to a full-scale war; shocking reports about “good guys” such as Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer (Matt Lauer?!) left women I knew wondering whether it was simply safest and best to opt out of dating entirely.

But I was dismayed to find women on social media braying that they didn’t need a man if they had a vibrator. Because … was it possible that part of the reason I hadn’t found the long-term partner I wanted so badly was that I had too many vibrators? I’m not saying vibrators kept me from dating. I dated a ton. I’m saying that when the dating market proved challenging and the men not quite right, it was all too easy to return to my empty house at the end of a less than stellar evening, pluck out a buzzing rocket ship from my nightstand drawer, and find release.

[Read: Are we in an intimacy crisis?]

I think it was 2022, late in the pandemic era, when I started wondering whether that drawer, so clogged with toys that it was becoming hard to shut, had turned into a paltry substitute for the beauty I had assumed life would deliver, to love and be loved by another. I noticed that sex with a man I cared about left me feeling saturated and soul-satisfied, whereas getting off with a mechanical device left me sleepy and only lightly relieved, like I’d managed to scratch a stubborn itch.

I dated a man who stroked the pale skin of my inner elbow in the most electric way, and when he was gone, I tried replicating this in my bed, but it never worked. I needed the surprise of his touch. I have spent most of my adulthood alone, at least from a relationship standpoint, and it’s not a bad way to be, but therapists and dating experts will tell you it’s only in relationship to others that we truly know ourselves.

“You’re too picky.” I’ve heard it a million times, and I’m guilty as charged. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve fought too hard for this odd, beautiful life to share it with a man who doesn’t fit. And yet I know from my closest friendships and creative partnerships that living side by side requires work. Conflict, civil disagreements, crossed wires that leave me feeling rattled and badly misunderstood—that’s how I learn. That’s how I grow.

I worry that technology-induced orgasms on demand made it too easy for me—and made it too easy for society at large—to stay cocooned in a little pod of self-gratification: Netflix, DoorDash, Amazon Prime, conversations that weren’t real conversations, mediated through the flat screens of text and social media. It feels good in the instant, and it can feel awfully empty as the years pass. If you keep scratching that stubborn itch, do you ever address the reason you’re itching in the first place?

When Gloria Steinem died last month, I thought about the line she made famous in the ’70s heyday of second-wave feminism: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Was it a joke? A slogan more than a commandment? In 2000, Steinem married the entrepreneur David Bale, and after he died, she was grief-stricken. I doubt that line, clever and quotable, was ever meant to be taken literally, but the glib notion that women don’t need romantic love remains one of the most pernicious strains of the female-empowerment age.

I am now 52. I’ve never been married, and I’ve never had kids, and although I’ve come to terms with that, I wonder how the combination of certain early-21st-century ideas about women’s independence and certain vibrator technologies shaped the trajectory of my romantic life.

I don’t plan to give up masturbation, or vibrators, though I’ve tossed several, including the jackhammering rabbit of doorstep-thumping fame. A technological assist can be helpful—and fun—but when it becomes a crutch, or even a solitary delivery system, maybe it’s time to rethink how we’ve valorized the vibrator, or at least the notion of vibrators everywhere all the time, every day of the week. I’ve started to see vibrators as proto–sex robots that have been Trojan horsed into the culture under the guise of female pleasure only to acquire Bluetooth capabilities and talismanic status among the women who swear by them. How long before these things start talking with us? Answering our emails? Doing our taxes?

We live in a convenience culture whose engine runs on the tantalizing promise that we can skip the hard parts—the cooking, the cleaning, the infinite search for a better half—but I have learned that the hard part is also, in many instances, the best part. Pushing past those frustrating challenges into discovery can be a source of such pleasure.

The great lie of modern culture is that we don’t need one another. Maybe not all women need men, but I’ve come to realize that this one does. Of course, men need women too. Men need men, and women need women, and so on. The salesmen of the 21st century will keep slinging their wares: DIY! AI companion! Chatbot boyfriend! Like so much of our day-to-day lives, getting off is becoming more efficient, easier, faster.

But has it gotten better?

Americans Are Spending More Money to Drive Worse Cars

2026-10-19T18:06:00-04:00

For the first time since the dawn of the automobile, the majority of new cars are not powered exclusively by gasoline: So far in 2026, electric vehicles and hybrids are outselling traditional gas-powered cars. As oil prices have gone up and up since the start of the war in Iran, drivers from Hanoi to Hamburg are picking up EVs like never before. According to the energy think tank Ember, 49 countries have broken EV-sales records this year. The prime minister of Thailand recently ditched his Rolls-Royce and commuted to work in an all-electric BYD Sealion.

And then there’s the United States. For all the angst over high gas prices, EVs accounted for just 6.4 percent of new-car sales in the U.S. from July to September. That’s a slight rise from January, before the beginning of the war with Iran—but just barely. The U.S. has long been something of an EV laggard, full of drivers (and a president) who are skeptical of battery-powered cars. But even as gas prices have jumped from $3 to $4.50 over the past year, drivers won’t budge.

America’s car fleet was never going to flip overnight. No one forks over $50,000 for a Tesla the moment gas hits $5 a gallon. “If gas prices are higher for a little while,” Elaine Buckberg, a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability and a former executive at General Motors, told me. “People say, ‘Oh, this is going to pass. I’m not going to go and change what vehicle I own.’” But when high gas prices linger for half a year or longer, Buckberg added, the direction of the car industry can shift. The shortages and lines of the 1970s helped kill the mid-century land yacht. In the 2000s, record-high gas prices tempered the craze for gas-guzzling SUVs and pushed millions of Americans to buy hybrids like the Toyota Prius. Now drivers have a real alternative to the whims of the world oil market. They’re just not taking it.

Americans are not all gasoline loyalists who’ve forsworn battery power. In fact, most drivers now say that they are strongly considering an EV as their next vehicle, and the trend is even stronger among people under 35. Pre-owned EVs are surging, but they represent a sliver of the used-car market, because so few of them are out there. The biggest winner from the gasoline spike has been the plain old hybrid, the green-car solution of the George W. Bush years. Sales in the U.S. have jumped 27 percent over the past year.

To some degree, Americans aren’t making the leap for several long-standing reasons: EVs are too expensive, and the options are lacking. Because the U.S. effectively bans electric cars made in China, we are cut off from buying something such as the BYD Dolphin Surf, an electric sedan that sells for about $22,000 in Europe. Many of the models that drivers are familiar with still cannot be had as an EV. Toyotas such as the RAV4 and Camry now come only as hybrids; last year, Ford killed the electric version of the F-150 pickup truck, this country’s most popular vehicle, citing low sales. Ford is now hyping up a roughly $30,000 electric pickup truck, but that won’t arrive until 2027. Meanwhile, America’s only electric minivan is the struggling Volkswagen ID. Buzz, a modern take on the flower-power bus. And although Tesla’s cars have a lot going for them, plenty of Americans say they won’t touch the brand because of Elon Musk. In short, the EV market is full of holes.

[Read: The great Tesla sell-off]

That said, it’s hard not to look at tepid EV sales and wonder whether Americans have lost the plot on electric cars. The price gap between gas and electric cars is closing; more EVs are now available for under $40,000. Charging networks are expanding, and battery ranges are climbing. Compared with even just a year or two ago, buying an electric car comes with fewer trade-offs. And in plenty of ways, EVs are just better. They’re zippy and fun to drive. They don’t require much of the routine maintenance, such as oil changes, that make car ownership annoying. They can do all sorts of things that fossil-fuel burners cannot: refuel at home, keep a house’s lights on during a blackout, store luggage in a “frunk.”

But if gas that’s creeping up on $5 a gallon isn’t enough to persuade people to go electric, what will? When I posed the question to Buckberg, she told me about research she’d worked on while at GM: Drivers were “happy to buy an EV—as long as they don’t have to give up anything they like about their current vehicle,” she said. In other words, it’s not enough for EVs to be good at what they’re good at—especially when relatively few Americans know someone who has one. They need to match the things that gas cars are good at too. Fast chargers are spreading, but not fast enough to free us from the mental load of worrying about where to refuel—something that’s been a given in a nation with a gas station at every corner. And what EVs can’t do yet (unless you’re in China) is recharge in as little time as it takes to pump gas. That’s something American drivers see as a prerequisite, even though most of us don’t regularly take very long road trips and drive an average of 30-some miles a day—a total easily handled by charging at home.

There’s every reason to think that EVs will continue a gradual climb, Corey Cantor, the research director at the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told me. A new wave of hyper-capable electric cars is arriving in America, with ranges above 400 miles per charge. But if EVs really have to do everything gas-powered cars do—and more—before drivers give them a chance, it’ll be a long time before America embraces them en masse. We’re nowhere near the charging speeds that China has achieved nor the density of plugs that would rival the ubiquity of gas stations. Until then, Americans will keep pumping gas into worse cars while the rest of the world has long moved on.

A New Season of Autocracy in America

2026-10-20T06:00:00-04:00

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

In this new season of Autocracy in America, host Anne Applebaum sits down with leaders in politics, technology, and culture to discuss what can be done now to reverse the slide toward autocracy.

The following is a transcript:

Anne Applebaum: The midterms mark the beginning of the end of President Donald Trump’s second term in office. Although we don’t know who and what the results will bring, we do know that, regardless of what happens, there will now be opportunities to prevent the further degradation of our democracy. This November, the Autocracy in America podcast is coming back, this time to focus on that recovery.

I’m Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic. Join me for interviews with the people who will be leading the charge. I’ll talk with leaders about their plans to work with the administration, to restore international relationships, and to repair the damage done to our economy. I’ll ask what it could look like to retrain and restrain ICE, rescue our cultural institutions, and keep our elections safe.

The new season of Autocracy in America arrives Tuesday, November the 10th, and will be available in video and audio. Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

How to Indulge in Fall

2026-10-17T08:00:00-04:00

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

There’s a lot to love about fall: the changing leaves, the crisp air, the return of cozy sweaters, and, of course, pumpkin-spice everything. As the days grow shorter and the weather cools, the season offers plenty of reasons to slow down and indulge in life’s little comforts.

Although fall has its familiar rituals, there are always new ways to enjoy it. Maybe you’re looking for your next great read, a recipe to try on a chilly afternoon, or an excuse to spend more time outdoors before winter arrives. To help you get into the autumn spirit, explore some of our favorite Atlantic stories and recommendations for the season.

Fall Favorites

Six Books to Read by the Fire

Each of these titles is a perfect companion while the days grow imperceptibly longer.

By Amanda Parrish Morgan

Read the article.

Six Movies to Get You in the Fall Mood

From cozy classics to unlikely favorites, The Atlantic’s writers and editors share their seasonal picks.

By Rafaela Jinich

Read the article.

How Starbucks Perfected Autumn

The pumpkin spice latte has defined fall for 20 years. (From 2023)

By Ian Bogost

Read the article.

Still Curious?

What the falling leaves taught Thoreau: His autumnal observations held a lesson for him in his final years, Jake Lundberg writes.
No one knows how big pumpkins can get. A decade ago, the world’s heaviest pumpkin weighed 2,000 pounds. Now the 3,000-pound mark is within sight, Yasmin Tayag wrote in 2024.

Other Diversions

Courtesy of Lynn D.

My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “We were lucky to head East before the storm because the foliage is incredibly colorful,” Lynn D. from Moretown, Vermont, shared. “This photo was taken from the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire.”

We’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.

— Rafaela

America Is Now an Ally of Russia

2026-10-18T17:51:28-04:00

Sign up for Inside the Trump Presidency, a newsletter featuring coverage of the second Trump term.

In the past week, the president of the United States has conclusively turned America into an ally of the Russian Federation.

Donald Trump has now abandoned pretense and is openly aiding the Kremlin in its war against a friend and partner of the U.S. The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history. To judge from the available evidence, he has not done so out of a cold calculation of the national interest. Instead, he has based his decisions on his own interests; his open admiration for Russia’s dictator; his resentment of Ukraine’s democratically elected president; and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.

In September, Trump signed a sanctions bill that Congress had passed, named after the late Senator Lindsey Graham, a pro-Ukraine hawk. The legislation sanctioned Russia as well as other countries that are supporting Russia’s invasion and brutalization of Ukraine. The bill was approved with bipartisan support, but some Republicans and most House Democrats voted against the law, arguing that it contained a trap door, a provision that would allow Trump to suspend the prescribed sanctions at will.

Those critics were correct to be worried. Trump pulled the lever on that trap door just two days before the law was supposed to go into effect. In an executive order signed on Friday, Trump said that “such a waiver at this time is in the national interests of the United States”—he declined to explain exactly how the waiver was in America’s interests—and that the law would remain unexecuted until such time as his administration decides otherwise. This waiver came a short while after Trump lifted restrictions on Russia’s sales of diesel fuel to the U.S. and other markets.

Trump’s recent actions in support of Russia are so obvious that they have generated a rare moment of bipartisan disgust: Both Democrats and Republicans now seem to share a horror at the betrayal of Ukraine, and at the president’s reckless abdication of America’s role as leader of the free world.

The president’s aides are scrambling to explain why this capitulation to Russia isn’t exactly what it looks like. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when pressed by a reporter, said that the administration would “assess” the impact of the Graham Act after a 60-day period. This was nonsense: The executive order includes no such timeline, and no one seriously believes that the administration is running numbers to decide whether sanctions are a good idea.

Rubio was joined in his excuse making by a handful of desperate Republicans who tried to cast Trump’s decision as some sort of tough-love patriotism. When asked on Sunday whether he agreed with Trump on lifting sanctions, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma said, “He is choosing the American people first, is what he’s doing.” But few even on the American right seem willing to buy it. Trump loyalist Senator Ted Cruz called Trump’s move “a mistake,” and Senator Darline Graham, who now holds her brother’s seat, broke with Trump as well.

Some conservative commentators, including Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who writes for National Review, expressed considerably more rage. McCarthy wrote on Saturday that Putin is on a “quest to reconstitute America’s Soviet enemy,” and that “President Donald Trump is giving him aid and comfort.” As a lawyer, McCarthy surely did not choose those words at random. Aid and comfort are part of the criteria in Article III of the Constitution of the United States that define treason. McCarthy called for “immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump-Putin alliance.”

Trump’s decision has nothing to do with American national security. His de facto alliance with Russia is a sordid arrangement rooted in his own fears and hatreds.

First, Trump knows that Republicans are almost certainly facing a beating in the midterm elections, in part over the price of gas—a spike caused by the kind of war in Iran that he promised during his 2024 campaign to never start. He is desperate to do anything he can to lower the price of gas, and because he does not seem to understand how the international economy works, he may well believe that some janky diesel deal with Russia will alleviate high fuel prices in the United States. (It will not, although it will certainly help some Russian companies.)

As Malcolm Rifkind, a former defense minister of the United Kingdom, put it this weekend: “Donald Trump has shown himself as a person to be repulsive; as a President of the United States to be a disgrace to his own people as well as to his international responsibilities. We all know his actual reasons for this are a grubby attempt to win a few more votes in the midterms by trying to get oil prices down.” The result, Rifkind rightly added, is that Trump will now be “directly responsible” for the deaths of Ukrainians who will die while Putin uses the Russian alliance with America to continue the fighting.

But even if the American economy were in better shape, Trump’s history with Putin suggests that he was never going to allow the sanctions in the Graham Act to be enforced. Trump’s suspension of the law is a signal to Ukraine, to Russia, to Europe, and to America’s NATO allies that the Trump White House and Putin’s Kremlin are now on the same side.

Trump’s man-crush on the Russian dictator has been well documented and need not be recounted in all its unctuous detail. His attachment is so obvious that for years it has sparked various complicated theories about its origins, but Occam’s razor suggests a more direct explanation: Trump is a weak man who is intimidated by stronger and smarter men. His humiliating relationship with Putin is different only in degree from the way he interacts with other authoritarian leaders, including China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (a dangerous totalitarian with whom Trump claimed to have fallen in love).

As if to prove the point, this afternoon Trump posted a whiny screed on his Truth Social site in which he pleaded with the public to understand how overmatched he is against Putin. Trump tried to explain that he is accommodating the Russian leader because he doesn’t “want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.” In a deeply pathetic admission, he warned that angering Putin could have consequences in Iran: “Perhaps more importantly, Russia is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way, and will, unless stupid people get in the way.” He then said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has gotten so much money from the Biden administration and from Europe that “he doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”

Consider what the American president just told the entire world: Please don’t interfere in my relationship with a murderous dictator, or he might help the country that America’s men and women in uniform are fighting at this very moment. The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet—yes, that’s still the United States right now—is trying to get everyone else, including the American Congress, to avoid antagonizing Putin, instead of warning Putin not to even think about aiding Iran. Nothing better illustrates just how weak a supplicant Trump has become in his relationship with the Kremlin boss.

Trump engages in this kind of personalized diplomacy in part because he believes himself to be—against all evidence—a master dealmaker. But the greater irony, considering how much he rails against globalism, is that he also behaves this way because he is in fact a globalist himself. He does not view the world as a collection of sovereign nations; he sees it instead as territories run by mob bosses. The weaker ones, especially America’s allies, can be abused and threatened at will. The stronger godfathers, including America’s dedicated enemies, are peers and thus treated with respect. The interests of the innocent millions in those countries are of no consequence. What matters is what’s good for Trump, his underbosses, and his family.

Trump also seems to be motivated by his open loathing of Zelensky, a hostility that can be traced back to Trump’s first term, when the unwillingness of Ukrainian authorities to be part of a scheme to investigate Joe Biden led to Trump’s first impeachment. But Trump’s antipathy toward Zelensky is more than score-settling: To him, it seems, Zelensky is a loser, a nobody who is causing needless trouble for his friend Vladimir. The American president cannot understand why Zelensky and his people do not simply accept their situation and lie down under Russia’s tank treads.

Earlier this month, Trump called for Zelensky’s removal. Now he seems determined to let Putin, rather than the people of Ukraine, fulfill that demand.

In the words of another famous Russian named Vladimir, What is to be done? The answers are not comforting.

Congress, when it reconvenes, can try to pass new legislation, but a bill amending the Graham Act would require a veto-proof majority to become law. Republicans have shown no interest in taking the power to tariff out of Trump’s hands, and they are equally unlikely to strip him of the power to lift the sanctions they just tried to impose. The courts are also unlikely to challenge the president when he invokes national security, which he does for almost everything he wants.

An additional problem is that both Trump’s secretary of defense and his vice president are likely to support a policy aimed at securing a Russian victory. Vance joined Trump in an attempt to bully Zelensky during their infamous meeting in the White House in early 2025, and he is unlikely to ask Trump to reconsider helping Putin. Pete Hegseth, for his part, appears willing to say and do whatever keeps him in the Pentagon. America’s senior military officers may be sympathetic to Ukraine—as are most American citizens—but the idea that the adolescent, self-styled “secretary of war” is going to suddenly deliver a mature and stoic defense of democracy against Russian imperialism is laughable.

For the foreseeable future, Ukraine’s fate depends on aid from Europe. Perhaps Europe will continue to step up, and a new Congress might try to demand more support from the White House. But everyone will have to hurry: Winter is coming.

Zelensky, sadly, knows that a Russian victory looks to be exactly what Trump wants. If “the United States will support Putin,” he said on Sunday, “it’s unbelievable. It’s a tragedy.” He added: “Of course, if these two countries will be together, of course we will not prevail. And we will not be able to stand.”

A world in which the White House is allied to the Kremlin was, until now, the stuff of paranoid fiction. Manchurian candidates and red presidents were fantasies, dark tales that Americans told themselves, like ghost stories around a campfire. But this alliance now exists. If Stalin and his Cold War successors could see what Trump and Putin have created, and how the mighty United States has been humbled and humiliated, they might think that their evil hopes were not wrong, but only that they dreamed them too early.

Mamdani Is the Centrist We’ve Been Waiting For

2026-10-19T07:00:00-04:00

Ever since Zohran Mamdani exhilarated the left with his out-of-nowhere mayoral campaign, mainstream Democrats have been dejectedly searching for an inspirational figure of their own. Where is the Democratic executive who has the media savvy to inspire his own cultlike following while making pragmatic governing decisions and ignoring the incessant demands of progressive activists?

At last, the moderates have found such a Democrat. His name is Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani’s election, which created the theoretical prospect of 8.5 million Americans living under “the warmth of collectivism,” as he once put it, was met with understandable shock. The reality, however, has been far more mundane.

Mamdani’s campaign platform already contained several gestures to moderates. He said he would retain Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is, to put it plainly, a billionaire Zionist cop, three things never in favor with the hard left. He also pledged to liberalize permitting to encourage more housing construction by private developers. When The New York Times asked him during the campaign, “What’s one issue in politics that you’ve changed your mind about?” Mamdani cited “the role of the private market in housing construction.”

Most important, Mamdani emphasized the importance of efficiency in city services. This might sound like an ideologically neutral goal, and it has been embraced at times by the leaders of left-wing governments—including Milwaukee’s “sewer socialists” during the early to mid-20th century. But efficiency creates tension with progressive interest groups, which generally care less about maximizing taxpayers’ bang for the buck than maintaining secure jobs and high wages for public employees.

[Joseph Heath: The populist revolt against cognitive elites]

Once elected, Mamdani retreated from some of his progressive ambitions. Among his splashiest campaign promises was “fast, free” bus service. Skeptics had questioned the wisdom of forgoing the revenue from bus fares, especially given the possibility that free buses would become mobile homeless shelters inhospitable to other New Yorkers. Mamdani still says he wants free buses, but in his initial proposal, released in concert with Governor Kathy Hochul, he quietly adopted the position of his critics, dropping the plan to eliminate fares and focusing instead on speed and reliability. He shrank another of his most ambitious proposals, universal child care for 2-year-olds, into a more gradual expansion, beginning with a modest increase of 2,000 new seats this fall and a goal of adding more in subsequent years.

During the campaign, Mamdani promised to establish an “Office of Community Safety,” which would cost $1 billion a year and task civilian workers instead of police officers with responding to mental-health emergencies. This notion was itself a compromise. As a state-assembly candidate, he’d endorsed defunding the police. As a mayoral candidate, he suggested shifting responsibilities. But as mayor, Mamdani wound up providing just over $40 million a year for this service, or 4 percent of the promised amount.

As a candidate, Mamdani said he would relinquish mayoral control of schools—a key demand of teachers’ unions, which understand that putting schools under the direction of school-board officials elected in low-turnout races gives the unions enormous leverage over education policy. He reversed that position even before he took office. Perhaps he realized that voters would hold him accountable for school performance, and that his goals would not be served by ceding authority to an interest group whose incentive is to maximize teacher pay and job security rather than to produce good outcomes for students. He has also put off a promise to reduce class sizes, which teachers’ unions care about but which is not an especially cost-effective way to promote learning gains.

Mamdani did follow through on his promise to freeze rent for about 40 percent of the city’s apartments, even though nearly any economist would say that the freeze makes housing less affordable in the long run. But this move merely followed decades of ineffective precedent. Mamdani’s most novel position on housing has been to push for a streamlined approval process to unlock more private home construction.

He has pushed Albany to raise taxes dramatically on wealthy New Yorkers, although so far he has settled for a pied-à-terre tax on second homes worth more than $5 million. And he has continued to pursue his goofy notion of opening city-run grocery stores that he believes would hold down food prices. It is difficult to see how this project could succeed, because public employees have little expertise in the complex supermarket business, and subsidizing public stores to undercut their competitors on price would both threaten small businesses and encourage black-market reselling. But Mamdani met these and other objections to his plan by scaling the public stores back to the size of a small demonstration project.

At the same time, he has made many overtures to moderates. He unveiled an initiative to combat anti-Semitism, which some pro-Palestinian activists have denounced for funding Jewish organizations that are Zionist. He also maintained the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, which has policed terrorist threats and aggressive protest tactics by activist organizations. The DSA has called this group “specialized units used to suppress dissent” and demanded that Mamdani abolish it. Leftists have denounced all of these moves, which prioritize security for the targets of protesters at the expense of the freedom of protesters to harass their targets.

[From the August 2026 issue: The ‘consumer socialism’ trap]

More recently, he has infuriated the left by refusing to fire Tisch after ICE agents shot a New Yorker earlier this month. Instead, Mamdani praised Tisch—one of the best police commissioners in recent memory—for fighting corruption and bringing the murder rate to its lowest level in years.

Mamdani has not abandoned his antagonism toward Israel, which is the issue that animated his early career in politics and has helped endear him to the left. In his statement commemorating the October 7 massacre of Israelis, he devoted most of his attention to Palestinian victims of Israel’s counterattack. But if not everybody loves the balance he has struck, he is at least attempting to strike one. Mamdani has grasped the value, or at least the necessity, of reassuring Jewish New Yorkers of their safety, even if they disagree with him on the Middle East. This commitment has placed him at odds with the most radical elements of the Free Palestine movement, which have sought to make Zionists uncomfortable, if not outright frightened. When anti-Israel activists booed Mamdani and accused him of perpetrating genocide last week, they were responding to the fact that he is acting as a mayor for the city’s entire population, not the most fanatical elements of his base.

It’s possible that, in his heart, Mamdani would rather be leading a genuine socialist revolution than making hype videos of city workers filling potholes. But enacting socialism is notoriously harder than calling for it at a rally. It’s especially tricky to pull off in a city that faces severe fiscal constraints, whose rich denizens can easily move to nearby jurisdictions to protect their wealth, and that relies heavily on cooperation from the state legislature and the governor. A similar mismatch between ambition and authority applies to Mamdani’s vision of a post-Zionist Middle East, which lies well beyond the purview of his municipal powers.

To his credit, Mamdani has confronted quickly the hard realities that other socialist leaders have learned more painfully, trading his Marxist dream of revolutionary transformation for patient gradualism. Mamdani has adapted quickly to the limits of his office. His political talent (and core of allied social-media influencers) has enabled him to maintain his base of adoring fans even as he confines his work to humdrum municipal governance. Mamdani has discovered that socialism can succeed in New York through one simple trick: abandoning socialism.

How Corruption Got This Bad

2026-10-19T08:00:00-04:00

“Isn’t that illegal?”

That’s a question I get asked a lot as a former federal prosecutor. Donald Trump, his family, and members of his administration are most often the inspiration. Last year, the Qataris gave the U.S. Defense Department a $400 million luxury jumbo jet for the president’s use, which he plans to take with him to his presidential library when he leaves office. Then Trump gave Qatar NATO-like security guarantees. Does that sound like a bribe? Exactly four days before Trump was inaugurated for the second time, the Emiratis invested $500 million in the Trump-family crypto business. Four months later, Trump green-lighted selling them advanced AI chips, which the Biden administration had blocked out of fear that they would fall into the hands of the Chinese. Same question. But even though I hear “Isn’t that illegal?” a lot more than I used to, it isn’t a new question. Former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy and former Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell, a Democrat and a Republican, both took lavish gifts from individuals and entities seeking their help and made national news when they were prosecuted for it. Surely that was illegal?

Common sense notwithstanding, however, the answer is no. Neither Espy nor McDonnell was held accountable, and even Trump’s seemingly egregious misbehavior likely can’t be prosecuted. That’s because starting in the 1980s, the Supreme Court has interpreted anti-corruption laws in ways so narrow as to effectively legalize flat-out corruption. These decisions put whole categories of politicians’ conduct beyond a prosecutor’s reach. It’s an absurd result. But we live in the Court’s world.

For 20 years, I prosecuted white-collar crime at the U.S. Department of Justice. My first criminal trial was Enron. My last was Hunter Biden. In between, I prosecuted on corruption charges the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the mayor of Baltimore; the Baltimore police commissioner; the Baltimore City state’s attorney; and dozens of other politicians, government employees, police officers, and prison guards. I served in leadership positions at the Justice Department and on Capitol Hill focused on corruption. I finished my DOJ career in the department’s Public Integrity Section in Washington, the specialized unit that prosecuted public corruption around the country—until February 2025, when it was effectively shut down. I was one of the prosecutors asked to dismiss the case against New York Mayor Eric Adams. Like nearly all my colleagues in Public Integrity, I declined to do so and left the department that year.

In all that time, I experienced how the Supreme Court restrained prosecutors in cases involving public officials. Even before the start of my career, the justices had begun to chip away at federal anti-corruption statutes, and this project accelerated during my tenure. When FBI agents brought me evidence of misconduct, I often had to turn the cases away, knowing I’d never be able to make charges stick. The longer I served, the harder my job became.

[Adam Serwer: Trump’s politicized prosecutions may hit a roadblock]

The first of these Supreme Court rulings was McNally v. United States, decided in 1987. In that case, a member of the Kentucky governor’s Cabinet, a local businessman, and a former chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party received hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks from an insurance company that did business with the state. Prosecutors charged them with depriving the public of its right to their “honest services,” a crime under the federal mail- and wire-fraud statutes. The Court reversed their convictions and declared that the public enjoyed no such right. Although federal courts had upheld similar convictions for more than 40 years, the Supreme Court ruled that all those courts had gotten it wrong: It declared that the mail-fraud—and, by implication, the wire-fraud—statute was limited to protecting money and property, not intangible rights such as citizens’ right to good government. Congress reacted swiftly. One year later, a broad bipartisan majority in Congress passed legislation effectively reversing the Court’s decision. But McNally is an outlier in that regard.

In 1999, in United States v. Sun-Diamond Growers of California, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of an agricultural trade association that gave gifts—tickets to the U.S. Open, expensive luggage, even a crystal bowl—to the U.S. secretary of agriculture in the Clinton administration. The Supreme Court held that giving a politician lavish gifts because of his official position was not illegal. Rather than focusing on the conduct at hand, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for a unanimous Court, spun out a ridiculous hypothetical—that the government’s interpretation of the statute would allow the president to be prosecuted for accepting “replica jerseys given by championship sports teams.” What that claim ignored was the reality that no Justice Department would ever authorize such a prosecution.

In Skilling v. United States, decided in 2010, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of Jeffrey Skilling, a former CEO of Enron Corporation, for conspiring to commit honest-services fraud. I had been one of the prosecutors in Skilling’s trial. Although Skilling was the president of a publicly traded company, not a politician, he was charged with conspiracy to commit honest-services wire fraud for undisclosed self-dealing. Self-dealing is a problem whether the perpetrator is a corporate executive hiding a conflict of interest from shareholders or an elected official hiding one from voters. Except the Supreme Court held that it wasn’t illegal. Confronted with the fact that lower courts had for years upheld honest-services-fraud convictions for undisclosed self-dealing, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority opinion noted the “infrequency” of those decisions and how they were not “models of clarity.” That, of course, didn’t mean those decisions were wrong. Remarkably, Ginsburg didn’t even say they were. Instead, she claimed that because bribery and kickbacks were the “basis of most honest-services prosecutions,” that’s what the statute’s application would be limited to. In place of legal analysis, the Court resorted to a game of numbers, and the practical effect was to restrict the number of corruption cases prosecutors could bring under this statute.

In perhaps its grossest pro-corruption decision, the Supreme Court in 2016 reversed Robert McDonnell’s conviction. A jury had convicted the former governor on bribery charges for accepting $175,000 in loans and gifts from the CEO of a nutritional-supplement company that wanted Virginia’s public universities to run clinical trials on his product. The Court held that what McDonnell did for the CEO—setting up meetings, hosting events, talking to other elected officials, all to benefit his company—did not qualify as “official acts,” for which McDonnell could be bribed. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a unanimous Court, adopted the most restrictive of definitions of official acts, things such as voting in the Senate or in an official committee. The decision leads directly to the question Why would a CEO give a governor that much money if these weren’t official acts? The Supreme Court didn’t offer an answer.

Then, in 2024, in Snyder v. United States, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of the mayor of Portage, Indiana, for accepting $13,000 from a company that got more than $1 million in city contracts. Prosecutors charged him with violating a statute Congress had enacted to protect federal money administered by the states, called “666,” after its numbering in the United States Code. The indictment had charged these payments to the mayor as illegal gratuities, which is what the law calls “illegal gifts.” In reversing his conviction, the Court held that 666 covered only bribery, not gratuities. In that year alone, approximately $1 trillion in federal funds flowed to the states. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted in his majority opinion, as many as 19 million state and local officials administer this money. But according to the Supreme Court, there’s nothing wrong with giving them a little something extra for the effort.

That same year, the Court decided Trump v. United States, announcing a sweeping and previously unrecognized doctrine of official-acts immunity for former presidents. Whereas the decisions discussed above left prosecutors room to pursue certain kinds of corruption, the Trump ruling means that presidents, alone among elected officials, can likely never be prosecuted for corruption. That’s because the Court, with Chief Justice Roberts writing for the majority, held that former presidents enjoy absolute immunity for actions within their “core” constitutional authority and presumptive immunity for all other official acts. And worse, unlike the earlier decisions that interpreted statutes and that therefore Congress can reverse by passing new legislation, the Court claimed that presidential immunity was required by the Constitution itself. So only a future Supreme Court that decided to reverse the Trump decision, or an amendment to the Constitution, could cancel the get-out-of-jail-free card the Court gave presidents.

[David Frum: The Trump presidency’s world-historical heist]

All but the last two decisions, Snyder and Trump, spanned the Court’s conservative-liberal divide. Sun-Diamond and McDonnell were even unanimous. This isn’t partisan politics; it’s political elites protecting political elites. The facts in these cases were egregious, but the Court purported to be saving hapless bureaucrats from overzealous prosecutors in the future. In any event, they haven’t. Instead they’ve told juries of ordinary Americans that what they concluded to be corruption was not. Perhaps to try to obscure what it was doing, the Court used technical rather than normative language, something the Fordham law professor Zephyr Teachout explored more broadly in her paper “Demoralizing Elite Fraud,” in The Yale Law Journal. But that technical language can’t obscure the underlying badness of the conduct that the Court blessed.

Congress can undo much of what the Supreme Court has done: address Sun-Diamond by making it illegal to give a politician gifts because of his position; address Skilling by designating undisclosed conflicts of interest as honest-services fraud; address McDonnell by expanding the definition of official acts in the bribery statute to cover what politicians actually do all day; and address Snyder by amending 666 to cover gratuities. As noted above, Congress already reversed the Court’s decision in McNally, and prosecutors have brought hundreds of honest-services prosecutions ever since, albeit with the limitations the Skilling decision imposed. Addressing Trump v. United States is tougher, but options still exist: Congress could close off the avenues a president can use to enrich himself and try to build his legacy by, for example, prohibiting the U.S. government from accepting gifts such as the Qatari plane, or disqualifying companies that invest in a president’s businesses or donate to his library from bidding on government contracts. That would be a good first step, but more ambitious approaches are needed, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act. Unfortunately, Congress, like the Supreme Court, has so far chosen to protect political elites—in Congress’s case, by doing nothing.

This behavior should be illegal because corruption is poison to democracy. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent in Snyder, “Greed makes governments—at every level—less responsive, less efficient, and less trustworthy from the perspective of the communities they serve.” And Americans know it. Results of a Gallup survey announced last month show that Americans’ perceptions of government corruption are at their highest in 20 years: 89 percent of adults say it is widespread. That is a 10-percentage-point increase since 2025 and includes strong majorities of both Democrats and Republicans. Although the Court has placed politicians beyond the law’s reach, at least for now, the public gets it. Hopefully, a new Congress will too.

The Easiest Way to Keep Your Friends

2025-01-12T08:00:00-05:00

It started as a friendship of convenience. Kira and Nino, a husband and wife, had lived in the same building as my husband and me for years. We interacted occasionally, as congenial acquaintances do. Then the pandemic hit, and well, you know: We had time; we had proximity. We exchanged food and drinks and books and laughs, and one day I looked up and we were all honest-to-God genuine friends, the kind who water each other’s plants and know each other’s Sichuan-takeout requests.

But then the world opened up. We had offices to go to, errands to run, and other friends and family to meet with. We saw our neighbors mostly in passing—hi, how are you, it’s been too long, we must hang—and I realized that we’d fallen into a trap: the exhausting tangle of calendar gymnastics that plagues many adult friendships. Busy with everything else, we hadn’t spent quality time together in months.

The hardest part about adult friendship is, by far, scheduling time to see one another, especially when trying to plan for a group. Thursday’s bad for one person, and Saturday’s not good for another. Monday would work—but hold up, the restaurant we want to try isn’t open that day. Let’s wait a couple of weeks. Somehow, though, the day never comes. Your friends forgot to follow up, or maybe you did. Either way, can you even call one another friends anymore?

I tend to catastrophize, because I am dramatic. I’m a terrible friend who deserves no one, I think, or I will die alone, pining for old buddies who fell out of touch because we were “tired” and “busy.” But after some bouts of agonizing, I hit on a simple solution: Set a recurring date on your calendar to get together. And then stick to it.

[Read: The six forces that fuel friendship]

Some people might find this tactic a little soulless and formal, the same way that some couples deride the idea of scheduling sex. Yet when your life is ruled by your phone and nothing gets done unless it ends up on a to-do list, booking repeat friend dates is practical—a way to carve out real time not just for errands and work, but also for engaging with the people you love.

Setting a friend routine is not a new concept. Whether they do poker or bingo nights, tailgates or Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, Americans have long found ways to regularly socialize. What I’m proposing, however, is more casual, more intimate. Parties have their place, as do bar trivia and other big group activities. The problem is, those events will almost inevitably involve people whom you find annoying, which means that—if you’re like me—you’ll still be left craving time with the people you do like. A recurring calendar date lets you set the terms. You can be with the people you want at the time you want, and enjoy the comfort of hopping straight into easy conversation, bad small talk avoided.

Relationships need repetition and structure to grow. They need rituals and habits. This is why many adults say it was easier to cultivate close friendships in school, when they saw the same people every day, and why so many people idealize the warm vibes of Cheers or Friends: same bar, same café, same time, same people.

Recent research has found that although plenty of Americans have friends, many of them aren’t seeing one another. Partly, this is because institutions that used to encourage consistent, more seamless socialization, such as religious and civic groups, have largely declined in popularity. Without those conduits, planning hangouts becomes a form of social labor—the kind that, for many people, can easily feel like a chore. And because proactive communication is a requisite for scheduling, the work frequently falls on the same individuals over and over again, usually the naturally organized, the extroverted, and (let’s be honest) the women. But these people are also busy. Ask too much of them, and the whole exercise risks becoming a recipe for resentment.

Put together a recurring date, though, and bam: The drudgery of “when are you free?” disappears. I can understand why some people might find the idea a little cringe. When you know that your friends’ schedules are already booked with back-to-back activities, asking for permanent space on their calendar might feel like an imposition. This is a big, vulnerable, “define the relationship” sort of ask, a Do you like me as much as I like you? conversation. Imagine the embarrassment if a friend were to say no—or worse, to gently push off the question until you eventually realize that they don’t feel quite the way you do.

[Read: The type of love that makes people happiest]

When I first considered using the same scheduling tool that I use for work meetings (mandatory, not cool) for my friendships (not mandatory, very cool), I thought of a line from my horoscope chart that haunts me: People see me (Taurus sun, Virgo rising) as “organized” and diligent” and also, sometimes, “a bit boring.” Mortifying! I’m supposed to be free-spirited and effortless and fun! I want to live in a world where I run into pals unexpectedly, where a quick text after a grueling Tuesday afternoon can lead to a Tuesday-evening happy hour. But for many Americans, contemporary adult life is not built for spur-of-the moment indulgences. When you have to work, prep meals, take care of kids, and perform all the other tasks required to function as a human, the luxury of spontaneity vanishes.

So last summer, I asked my neighbors if they wanted to set up a regular dinner date. And a surprising thing happened when we did: Our relationship became cozier, more meaningful, more spontaneous. When I was solo parenting and sprained my ankle, Nino took my 1-year-old to day care, and Kira fed me breakfast. When Nino’s dad got sick, we lent him our car for hospital visits. We’ve had to skip a month, and sometimes we reschedule. But adding some friendship structure to my calendar has made life feel much more alive. Recently, when my family and I flew home after a trip and had nothing in our fridge, my neighbors remembered, and at the last minute they asked if we’d like to join them for a steak. We were tired—maybe too tired to socialize. We went anyway. And guess what: They energized us, the way that good friends do.

Life Really Is Better Without the Internet

2023-11-27T07:00:00-05:00

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

Before our first child was born last year, my wife and I often deliberated about the kind of parents we wanted to be—and the kind we didn’t. We watched families at restaurants sitting in silence, glued to their phones, barely taking their eyes off the screens between bites. We saw children paw at their parents, desperate to interact, only to be handed an iPad to keep quiet. We didn’t want to live like that. We vowed to be present with one another, at home and in public. We wanted our child to watch us paying attention to each other and to him.

The reality, after our son was born, was quite different. In those sleep-deprived early days, I found myself resorting to my phone as a refuge from the chaos. I fell into some embarrassing middle-aged-dad stereotypes. I developed a bizarre interest in forums about personal finance and vintage hats. I spent up to four hours a day looking at my phone while right in front of me was this new, beautiful life, a baby we had dreamed about for years.

My wife, Cristina, felt abandoned in the isolation of new motherhood and complained of my near-constant phone use.

“When you look at your phone,” she told me, “it’s as though you disappear.”

When it comes to having an unhealthy relationship with technology, I’m in good company. Most of us find that smartphones have made our lives better, but we struggle to use them in healthy ways. Nearly 60 percent of American adults told Gallup last year that they use their phones too often. American adults spend an average of four and a half hours on their phones each day, the research firm Insider Intelligence reported this summer. Almost all of us keep our smartphones within arm’s reach during waking hours, Gallup found, and most of us do so when we sleep.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to break a phone addiction]

Such easy and constant access to distraction is having an impact: Overuse harms our sleep and mental health. Constant distraction makes us less productive and can impair our ability to concentrate. Studies have shown that the mere presence of a smartphone can reduce our cognitive ability by taking attention away from other tasks—even if the phone is turned off. A majority of married couples report that their partner’s divided attention has caused strife in their relationship.

On a warm Saturday afternoon this past spring, I reached a breaking point. I had been on my phone for hours a day for the past several weeks. I found myself reaching for the phone whenever there was an opportunity or brief pause in parenting responsibilities. Was this what life was going to be like for the next 30 years? Days filled with a series of small interruptions while I scrolled for scraps of trivia and news?

While our child napped that afternoon, I sat brooding on the porch. I told Cristina that I wasn’t happy with the way we were living and that I didn’t know what to do to get back on track.

“It sounds like we should get rid of the internet,” she told me.

I knew she was right. For years, we had discussed raising our child in a tech-lite home, but we had become so overwhelmed with parenting that this priority had been pushed aside. We had tried half measures before: setting a timer on the Wi-Fi router that shut it off during evening hours, making “no phone” zones in the house. But these were too easy to get around. To achieve what we truly wanted—a home that served as a sanctuary for meaningful family time without distractions—this was the step we needed to take. We talked about how spaces that were once off-limits for technology seemed to dwindle by the day. Our National Parks, public restrooms, even places of worship are now game for digital connection. We felt it was important to have at least one space in our lives that would be set apart. We agreed that our home, the one place where we still had control, would be a fine option.

“When?” I asked.

“Now,” she said.

As Millennials born in the mid-1980s, my wife and I are part of the last generation to have known life before the introduction of widespread home-internet access. We straddle both sides of the digital revolution. We remember answering the telephone without knowing who was calling, showing up at a friend’s house unannounced, what it was like to be lost and bored. In my 20s, I traveled across Europe, Latin America, and Asia for months without a phone, relying only on guidebooks and advice from strangers. I hitchhiked across the American South with a flip phone. I did a stint on a commercial fishing crew in Alaska, which put me completely off the grid for five months without access to a phone or the internet.

Cristina and I had also gone off the grid together earlier in our marriage. In 2018, we moved into a 72-square-foot tiny house we built into a cargo van, where we lived for two years, mostly on public lands and without Wi-Fi. In the wilderness, cellular data were limited, so we logged on only for essentials when we popped back into civilization. It was on the fringes where we first tasted the joy of a life in which the internet was merely a tool.

Without distractions, the days seemed to expand. We learned to harvest time, an idea that came to us in national forests across the U.S. We realized that days undisturbed by digital interruptions made time slow down and improved the quality of our time together. Life was broken down to its most basic elements: Find a place to sleep; cook simple meals to eat; bathe in a river; explore. We promised ourselves that when our time in the van came to an end, we would continue living this way as best we could. (We didn’t, of course; the pandemic started not long after our return to civilization, making the internet feel essential for work and social interaction.)

So yes, we’d had some practice with this before. Surely we could make it work.

But we did need to plan. We live in a log cabin beyond the reach of cell towers in North Carolina’s rural High Country, and up until that point we had relied on Wi-Fi to make phone calls. We might be crazy enough to cut our home off from the internet, but we didn’t want to be completely disconnected. We were trying to relive the ’90s, sure, but not the 1890s. Opting out of the internet would require us to opt in to a landline, which raised even more questions: If we needed to call a doctor, how would we find the phone number? What if we needed an emergency plumber? Turns out, the Yellow Pages still exist. (They’re actually called The Real Yellow Pages, as though dozens of imposter phone books are out there.)

[Read: America gave up on the best home technology there is]

When the technician from the phone company arrived to put in our landline, I asked him, “Do you install many landlines these days?”

“Mostly just for old people,” he said.

I told him we were doing it in hopes of making our lives simpler. He just nodded as if to say, Sure, man, whatever.

With a couple of twists of his tools, the room filled with a sound I hadn’t heard in ages: a dial tone. That long-forgotten but familiar pitch instantly brought me back to childhood: the anticipation of calling my best friend to ask if he wanted to come outside and play hockey in the street, or the nervous dread in middle school of calling a girl for the first time.

“You know,” the technician said before walking out the door, “most people just use Wi-Fi calling.”

I spent our final morning with internet service on a content binge. I scrolled Twitter. Using a family member’s borrowed password, I pulled up one final movie on Netflix: This Is the End. Halfway through the first act, Seth Rogen and James Franco suddenly froze on the screen. The house went quiet. We were officially disconnected.

Like any form of withdrawal, the first days offline required adjustment. With nowhere to scroll, I developed a voracious appetite for words. I had downloaded digital versions of magazines to an iPad and loaded my nightstand with books from the library. I devoured them all, and started reading anything I could get my hands on.

Over time, the racing pace of a mind that had been hooked on content slowed down. I began to read deeply, sometimes for hours, consuming complex works that I would have struggled to focus on before.

While reading news articles, I still felt an old tug to share links through social media. But now there was no one to share them with. I was reading purely for reading’s sake, sharing an intimate moment with no one but the author. It made reading and thinking a private act, without any temptation to be performative in sharing my opinions. Reading through entire publications, instead of finding stories through a social-media algorithm that fed me a narrow range of content it thought I would enjoy, exposed me to a broader range of opinions, viewpoints, and types of stories. It made me a better consumer of news.

At the end of the first week, my phone reported that my screen time had plummeted by 80 percent. I had reclaimed several hours a day, time that I used to play games with my son, cook elaborate meals, engage in uninterrupted work, and take long walks with my family. Sometimes I just sat and thought, a radical act in our hustle culture. I daydreamed, letting my mind travel where it pleased with no agenda or direction. I realized that it had been years since I’d last allowed myself to do, well, nothing.

Friends and family have responded with bewilderment and concerned amusement. “I could never do that,” people often tell us, “but I wish I could.” One friend—a former chief of staff for a Republican member of Congress—tried to sign me up for a print subscription to Hustler magazine. (This unsolicited gesture of concern for my sexual well-being failed because of a new anti-porn law in his state. And thank heavens for that: We rent our home from a Bible scholar and minister.) Other friends, knowing that our landline doesn’t have caller ID, occasionally prank call us like we did when we were teenagers. (We welcome it; the calls lead to long, meaningful opportunities to catch up after years of texting.) When we aren’t home, callers seem amused to leave a real voice message on our answering machine. It’s fun to listen to younger people leave messages; they are adorably befuddled by what to say. When a friend in her 20s tried to call and got a busy signal, she figured the phone was broken: She’d never heard that sound before.

Of course, this has also come with trade-offs.

One night, while watching a DVD in our basement, Cristina and I saw a dark object flash across the screen. Did a bird get into the house? I stood up to turn on a light and saw another flying object with wide black wings silently swoop past my head.

“It’s a bat!” Cristina yelled. She leaped off the couch onto the ground and threw me a blanket. “Cover your head!”

As our eyes adjusted to the light, we watched several bats stream out of our fireplace, flying in circles around our heads. On our bellies, we crawled up the stairs and fled into our bedroom, shutting the door behind us. In normal times, we would have pulled out our phones and started frantically searching for what to do when your house is infested with bats. But we didn’t have that option. It was nearly midnight, too late to phone a friend, so we just had to pray that the bats hadn’t made it into our bedroom. We covered the baby’s crib with a mosquito net and tried to go to sleep.

The next morning, Cristina called her mother and asked her to search for information while I plunged into the phone book for the number of an exterminator. Over the phone, Cristina’s mother read us information about how to handle bats and whether we’d need a rabies shot. She described in detail how to identify bat poop. My mother-in-law was literally reading us the internet. It felt ridiculous.

Beyond battling bats in our basement, not having access to the internet also makes working from home a unique challenge. As a journalist, being virtually unreachable has done wonders for my ability to write for long stretches without distraction. But I have to leave the house in search of Wi-Fi to finish some tasks, such as responding to emails from editors, participating in group calls on Zoom, or performing other collaborative work that can only be done online. I spend hours during the workday holed up in my office or the local library, time that otherwise could be spent with a laptop on my couch. When coordinating work calls, I have to give out two phone numbers, depending on whether I’m home or not. I sometimes have to hop in the car before bed and drive down the mountain to check a last-minute email. My job as a university lecturer requires me to be present in the classroom, so I aim to accomplish as much work as possible on campus.

Separating spaces for online work and home life has helped me draw a sharp dividing line between my responsibilities to family and employer. The rise of telecommuting, supercharged by the pandemic, seems to have been a mixed bag, even for employees who enjoy it. Workers have more flexibility, but they are now expected to be reachable beyond work hours. Burnout persists. Working from home with children in the house has its own challenges.

Shopping requires careful planning. Without Amazon, we buy most of our goods in person at stores in town. We still order things online, but we can’t do it impulsively, and we buy fewer things as a result. While I was out shopping recently, I called Cristina at home to see if she needed anything at the store. “Just text me a list,” I said, completely forgetting that she quite literally could not. So we made our list the old-fashioned way. We talked about what we needed and I wrote it on a piece of paper.

[Read: The best thing about Amazon was never going to last]

I acknowledge the immense privilege of being able to choose to opt out of a service that people rely on to get by in daily life. I also benefit from work that can be done partially on my own schedule and a job that provides parental leave, which was when we made this decision. But now that we have made this change in our lives, I will grieve if we ever have to return to the life we had before. Our tech-lite experiment will only become more difficult in the future, as more parts of our society require online connection to function. As our child grows, he will no doubt start to wonder why we don’t have the same access his friends have. What if he attends a school that requires online homework? Will we be those parents who resist? My own work in the future might not be possible offline.

Still, we’re not the only ones exploring ways to limit technology’s role in our lives. England recently advised schools to impose complete bans on cellphone use, a move that is slowly being adopted by some American school districts. A subset of Americans who want more control over their digital life are trading their smartphones for old-fashioned flip phones; Gen Z teenagers are leading the charge. It’s no mystery why vacationers are flocking to vacation rentals that offer “off-the-grid” properties without internet service as though it’s a special luxury.

Most people won’t—or can’t—go as far as we did. But they can set aside space in their lives uncluttered by devices, or their insatiable demand for our attention. Establishing a space beyond tech’s reach is a way of declaring independence from our unsettling reliance on technology. It reminds us that we can live and thrive without it—and happily so. Our family certainly has.

“I like you better without the internet,” Cristina told me recently.

So do I.

Winners of the 2026 Epson International Pano Awards

2026-10-20T11:02:00-04:00

Silent Citadel. 34th place (tie), Open—Nature / Landscapes. Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.

Center of the Cosmos. Winner, Open-Built Environment. Times Square, New York City. Liu: “Times Square is one of the most photographed places in the world, so my challenge was to find a perspective that could make such a familiar place feel unfamiliar again. From above, the dense architecture, streets, and illuminated billboards seem to radiate around the square.”

Winter on the Ranch. 38th place (tie), Open—Nature / Landscapes. Westcliffe, Colorado.

The Hanging Garden. 89th place (tie), Open—Nature / Landscapes. Atchafalaya Basin, U.S.A.

Lines of Light. Fourth place (tie), Open—Nature / Landscapes. Churchill, Canada.

Running on Salt. 74th place (tie), Open—Aerial. Dead Sea, Israel.

Currents of the Tundra—Sami Reindeer Migration. Fourth place (tie), Open—Aerial. Alta, Norway.

Golden Colossus. 34th place (tie), Open—Nature / Landscapes. Amboseli, Kenya.

Walking in the Rainbow. Fifth place (tie), Open—Built Environment. Eastbourne, U.K.

Reservoir. 55th place (tie), Amateur—Built Environment. Gellért-hegy, Hungary.

Ocean King. 38th place (tie), Open—Nature / Landscapes. Disco Bay, Greenland.

Circle Game. 67th place (tie), Open—Nature / Landscapes. Taipo, Hong Kong.

The Sleeping Giant. Winner, The Raw Planet Award. Garcia: “Parinacota Volcano was one of the main photographic goals of my trip to Chile. Rising to more than 6,300 meters, the mountain has a distinctive snow-covered cone with an almost perfect symmetry that immediately reminded me of volcanoes such as Mount Fuji. Beside it stands Pomerape, another giant reaching more than 6,200 meters, together forming one of the most impressive landscapes I encountered during the journey.”

Final Flight. Fourth place (tie), Amateur—Built Environment. A Japanese reconnaissance aircraft “Saiun.”

Guelta. 95th place (tie), Open—Nature / Landscapes. Ennedi Massif, Chad.

Between a Rock and a Soft Place. 59th place (tie), Open—Nature / Landscapes. Nunavut, Canada.

Rivers of Fire. 74th place (tie), Open—Aerial. Grindavik, Iceland.

Urban Migration. 65th place (tie), Open—Built Environment. Nairobi, Kenya.

Rider at Dusk. 46th place (tie), Amateur—Nature / Landscapes. Mount Bromo.

Golden Path to the Sanctuary. Ninth place (tie), Open—Built Environment. Japan.

Royal Penguin. 46th place (tie), Open—Nature / Landscapes. Australia, Macquarie Island.

To see a full gallery of winners and honorees from this year and previous years, be sure to visit the competition’s website.

Trump’s ‘Staggering One-Two Punch’ to Ukraine

2026-10-20T10:09:11-04:00

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

In the past few weeks, President Trump has seemingly done an about-face in his support for Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky. The two leaders have long had a fraught relationship, to say the least, which reached a zenith in February 2025, when they got into a heated shouting match in the Oval Office. “I’m not aligned with anyone,” Trump said at the time. “I’m aligned with the world. I’m aligned with Europe.”

Now, four years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Trump has struck a deal with Vladimir Putin to import Russian diesel fuel into the United States. He’s also calling for Zelensky to be replaced, and exempting Russia from a sanctions bill passed by Congress—which Trump himself signed. Several congressional Republicans now count themselves among the inquiring minds desperate to know: Is Ukraine the United States’ ally, or is it Russia?

On today’s episode of Radio Atlantic, my colleagues Jonathan Lemire and Simon Shuster join me to discuss the conflict between the two nations and the reasons behind Trump’s realignment.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jonathan Lemire: We are now just 15 days until Election Day. Voters in many states are already casting their ballots and early-voting. And it is not only seemingly un-American to side with Moscow over a European democracy, but also it’s yet another case of where Democrats can make the argument that [Donald] Trump is kowtowing to a dictator, but also is simply distracted and doesn’t have the right priorities.

Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris, and today we need to talk about what’s happening in Ukraine, and why President Trump is choosing now to step in.

Over the last few weeks, the president has turned on Ukraine. He struck a deal with Vladimir Putin to import Russian diesel fuel. He exempted Russia from a sanctions bill he himself signed. He’s repeatedly attacked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And last week, sudden restrictions on Starshield, a version of Starlink that is crucial to Ukraine’s military operations, caught the world by surprise.

What is going on here? Is this a last-ditch midterm effort by a deeply unpopular president looking to maintain his party’s control of Congress? What impact does Trump’s meddling have on the war? Is there anything Ukraine can do?

I’m joined today by my colleagues Jonathan Lemire and Simon Shuster, who have reported extensively on the prolonged conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and Trump’s diminishing return on his promise to end the war.

Let’s get to questions. Jonathan, Simon, welcome to the show.

Simon Shuster: Thank you; great to be with you.

Jonathan Lemire: Thank you for having us.

Harris: Over the weekend, the president signed an executive order exempting Russia from new sanctions measures that Congress put into place last month. This came shortly after Trump announced that he had reached an agreement with Vladimir Putin to import Russian diesel fuel. So, Jonathan, I want to start with you. Why does it seem that the president is siding with Russia now?

Lemire: This is the first time, I’d argue, in American political history that our campaign October surprise is a U.S. president throwing in his lot with the Kremlin. President Trump is deeply concerned about the impact of fuel prices, gas prices, that’s impacting Republicans’ chances in November. Now, the biggest reason why, of course, prices are so high is Trump’s war with Iran and Iran’s ability to limit the amount of oil coming out of the Middle East through the Strait of Hormuz.

But Trump has found another scapegoat here in President Zelensky and Ukraine. And it’s a pretty staggering one-two punch: this move on the diesel, which really won’t even impact prices all that much, and then to unwind these sanctions—sanctions he had just signed a short time ago in honor of his friend the late Senator Lindsey Graham. It has clearly left Kyiv reeling and even some of Trump’s own party deeply upset.

Harris: And Simon, when you think about this support for Russia, is there any evidence that it could potentially help lessen Russia’s support for Iran? Or is that in any part of this equation for the president?

Shuster: That’s what Trump has argued in his most recent statements about this. And it was a really bizarre statement, honestly. He said, Look, of course I have to be nice to Russia; we have to prevent them from helping Iran. And we have to give Russia these goodies so that it doesn’t go and help Iran essentially kill American servicemen and women in the Middle East.

And that’s such a weak argument, honestly. That’s also the word that President Zelensky incidentally used to describe a lot of these decisions from President Trump. It’s a sign of weakness.

If you’re really out to prevent the Russians from assisting Iran, is there no better leverage that the United States, the world’s most powerful country, has than to offer sanctions relief to Russia as a preemptive request and a preemptive offer to Vladimir Putin not to help America’s adversaries? It’s just a bizarre situation. But then, that is the argument that Trump himself made in a social-media post.

Lemire: And it’s so deeply flawed because Russia’s already been helping Iran. U.S. intelligence has assessed that they have provided Tehran with information targeting coordinates and the like of American assets in the region and Americans’ allies.

Shuster: Yeah, and there have been ships spotted going from Russia across the Caspian Sea to Iran. But when this issue comes up of Russia providing military and intelligence support to the Iranians, Trump just consistently brushes it off as, It’s not that big a deal, or, Russia could be doing much worse.

Yeah, probably—Russia could be doing a lot worse. There are a lot of weapon systems it’s using in Ukraine that it has not yet given, apparently, to Iran, but it could. But I think the flaws in that argument are just insane.

Harris: The president has tried to both pressure Russia and Ukraine in recent weeks into stopping attacks on energy infrastructure, but that hasn’t necessarily worked out. Simon, what exactly happened there with those negotiations, and why did it fail?

Shuster: The “energy cease-fire,” as it’s known, has been on the table certainly since President Trump returned to the White House, about a year and a half ago. They’ve been trying to get this energy cease-fire, which would mean basically Ukraine stops hitting Russian energy-sector assets, like oil refineries and things like that, and the Russians would then reciprocate by agreeing to stop hitting Ukrainian power plants and other energy infrastructure.

So that has been discussed. Russia—Putin—has just refused to go for it in any way, shape, or form. And it seems like this summer, the Americans gave up trying to pressure Putin into accepting this partial cease-fire, and began preemptively pursuing business deals with Russia, and now more recently, easing sanctions including on Russia’s energy sector.

All of these goodies for the Russians were supposed to come—according to the negotiations with Ukraine, the Europeans, and with the Russians—after Russia agreed to a partial cease-fire. Russia refused to agree to a partial cease-fire, and it is still getting the benefits that the Trump administration were dangling in front of the Russians to get them to stop hitting Ukrainian energy-sector sites and agree to at least this partial cease-fire that the Ukrainians certainly hoped they could build a larger truce, a larger end to the war, on top of that partial end to the fighting, on one dimension of the fighting.

Lemire: As Simon so well put, this is such an extraordinarily one-sided deal—that basically Trump is not pressuring Putin to stop hitting Ukrainian infrastructure, energy infrastructure, including its electric grid, as Ukraine braces for what’s gonna be a very tough, dark, cold winter. And yet [he] is angry, furious at Ukraine because they won’t stop hitting Russian refineries. And Zelensky made it clear he would stop if Putin would agree to his end of the cease-fire. Putin won’t. So Zelensky’s like, Well, why should we? And yet Trump won’t make this an equivalence, and in fact, he’s only angry at Ukraine. And as Simon and I reported in our story last week, there’s a chance that it will escalate, Trump’s anger, that he stops sharing intel perhaps, stops allowing Europeans to purchase American weapons and ship them to Ukraine for their use.

So there are levers here that Trump could pull, and right now there’s real concern across Europe that he has just completely abandoned any pretense of being neutral and is fully on Putin’s side.

Harris: Ukraine has refrained from targeting civilians in this conflict, whereas Russia has not. How has that impacted the landscape of the war?

Shuster: That’s been a really fascinating thread in my reporting in the last few months. Particularly I’ve been writing about how Ukraine has had this plan on the table to strike Russian airports, to use drone attacks on Russian airports that would, of course, severely disrupt everyday life in Russia and the Russian economy. And from my sources in Zelensky’s team and the military in Ukraine, it’s been clear that Zelensky has been holding back.

He has approved a version of these strikes, which are very painful for Russia, but ones that don’t endanger civilian aircraft and civilian travelers. So it essentially has drones hovering over airports and disrupting the traffic and forcing the aviation authorities to slow down and delay flights and cancel flights, but it doesn’t endanger civilians. So this is an interesting dynamic, and I think what’s on Zelensky’s mind is, Hey, we are not like Russia. We are fighting this war to remain a democracy, to remain a country that values human rights and human life. And we don’t want that to allow this war to turn us into them, into the evil that Ukraine is seeing unleashed upon them.

So that’s been very important to Zelensky, and I think more pragmatically, he’s very concerned about maintaining international support. To your question, he sees attacks against civilians, even inside Russia, as something that would really hurt Ukraine’s ability to keep the world on its side. Now, again, that doesn’t seem to matter for President Trump. He appears to be turning his back on Ukraine regardless of that caution. But I think the European partners—Germany and others, European partners of Ukraine—for them, it’s quite important to see that Ukraine is not resorting to the strikes against civilians that Russia carries out on a daily basis in Ukraine.

Harris: Last week, Ukraine faced some sudden disruptions to Starshield, which is a military version of Elon Musk’s Starlink. Jonathan, what do we know about who shut that down and why?

Lemire: Basically, a speed limit was capped, and Russia now has, first of all, drones that are jet-engine-powered, which go faster than ones before.

And if Starlink or Starshield is limited in the speed it can operate on, then that’s gonna limit Ukraine’s ability to shoot those drones down. It will also limit Ukraine’s ability to have any strikes in Russian-controlled territory within Ukraine. Already Elon Musk and Starshield do not let Ukraine have access to Starlink for attacks in Russia, but they do have it within the borders of Ukraine.

There’s been a lot of finger-pointing here. Our colleagues at The Atlantic have spent days on this, as to who exactly ordered it, whether it came from the White House—and there’s been some media reports that it has, and the White House has denied it. Some have floated the idea it was a glitch—no one in Ukraine believes that.

But certainly, a significant moment here reveals the power once more that Elon Musk has over human lives across this country. And Simon, go for it here. But it’s something that I know Zelensky—even in the last couple of days, even after it seemed like maybe the service was restored—has cast doubt about.

Shuster: Yeah, and Zelensky, to your point, has said—I’m paraphrasing here—basically, We’re not stupid; we know what happened. We know how Starlink works. And it just cut off. The disruptions happened in ways that leave very little possibility, if any possibility, that this was some kind of technical glitch. The scale and the timing of these disruptions made it clear that somebody made a decision to do this to Ukraine. And there has been a lot of finger-pointing.

Harris: And we should say Musk has denied that it was him, and on X said that this was the decision of the U.S. government and Trump.

When we come back, we discuss Trump’s fraught relationship with Zelensky and how Republicans and world leaders are reacting to his latest overtures to Putin.

[Music]

Harris: Trump and Zelensky have had this really fraught relationship since the president returned to office in 2025, and it now seems more contentious than ever, with the president saying that Zelensky should be replaced. What is Zelensky supposed to do here? What is he to do here? Does he need Trump on his side in order to win this war?

Shuster: I’m afraid so. And I had sources in Zelensky’s team saying basically—even some of the more hawkish ones who are calling for more aggressive strikes against Russia, including the airport strikes that I mentioned earlier. One of them even told me, If Trump now sides with Putin, if the Americans now become allies of Russia, we really need to change our strategy and basically take a deal.

And that got a lot of blowback from many people in Ukraine, including government officials who were like: No, no, no; that’s alarmism. But just in the last couple of days, President Zelensky has said something very similar in one of the interviews he gave on American TV or to the U.K.

Harris: It was on Meet the Press.

Shuster: Was it Meet the Press? And he said …

Volodymyr Zelensky: If the United States will take,—officially will take—the side of Russia, of course, if these two countries will be together, of course we will not prevail, and we will not be able to stand.

Shuster: As we’ve reported, Ukraine has many cards to play militarily still. There are many targets that are pressure points inside Russia, for the Russian economy, that it could hit. But it doesn’t seem like Putin is going to budge. Those kinds of strikes, those kinds of escalations on the Ukrainian side are going to force Russia to come to the table. So it really puts Ukraine in a very difficult position if it loses this ally. And it’s not at all clear that the Europeans can pick up the slack.

Lemire: And you’re right to zero in on the relationship between Trump and Zelensky. Obviously, we had the famed Oval Office blowup in February of 2025, but it even predates that. There’s been some in Trump’s orbit who have said to me that Trump holds a grudge against Zelensky for his first impeachment, from his first term—when Trump leaned on Zelensky to try to find politically damaging information about Joe Biden and his family ahead of the 2020 election, and Zelensky refused. It was captured on the call; it was captured by a whistleblower; and Trump was impeached for the first time. So he’s always had this animus there.

And it’s completely in contrast to his feelings for Vladimir Putin, who he sided with repeatedly in the first term, including in their infamous summit in Helsinki, and to even now, where Trump is trying to allow Putin to reenter the global stage, where he is trying to pressure Europeans to make more deals with Russia. He obviously wants to open up American business interests, have their access to Russia. And he’s even invited Putin to join the G20 Summit, which Trump is hosting at his golf course just outside Miami later this year.

Harris: And Jonathan, how are Republicans who support Ukraine reacting to all of the president’s overtures to Putin and Russia, and what does this mean to their broader efforts to pressure Moscow?

Lemire: Well, there’s a few things here. First of all, there’s still largely bipartisan support for Ukraine. There are some hold-out Republicans who don’t want to do it, and there’s skeptics even in the administration; obviously J. D. Vance was a loud one. But Ukraine’s biggest champion on the hill was Lindsey Graham. And Graham also played an important role as a conduit to Trump about their plight. In fact, Graham died shortly after returning from a trip to Kyiv.

There are Republicans who have voiced some public concern about this. Others are choosing to remain quiet, as they often do when Trump does something they don’t like, because they dare not cross them. But I’ve certainly spoken to a few of them the last couple of days who voiced real unhappiness about this decision for two reasons. One, simply because they do believe in Ukraine’s cause and do not think we should be backing Russia. And there’s even been some Republicans on the Hill who say, We should have hearings on this. Again, not too many voices, but they have spoken out. But others have remained quiet but are still privately seething because this is yet another distraction for them on the campaign trail. We are now just 15 days until Election Day. Voters in many states are already casting their ballots and early-voting. And it is not only seemingly un-American to side with Moscow over a European democracy, but also it’s yet another case of where Democrats can make the argument that Trump is kowtowing to a dictator, but also is simply distracted and doesn’t have the right priorities.

Shuster: If I could just add quickly on Lindsey Graham, just how ugly this looks to so many people on the Hill. I talked to Lindsey Graham about the sanctions bill that he championed and he said, Look, Simon, we’re not going to get this thing passed unless we couch it in a way that Trump will accept. And the way Lindsey Graham came up with doing that is: It’s all options. He wrote the bill as a tool kit, as he put it, for Trump to use against Russia if he chooses. It left a lot of the power in Trump’s hands to punish Russia or not to punish Russia. And that, Lindsey Graham told me, was the only way it was gonna get the necessary support from the White House to pass.

So now what we’ve seen just over this weekend: Yes, Trump after the death of Lindsey Graham agreed to sign this sanctions package, the sanctions law against Russia. But not only did he not implement it, but he basically granted an indefinite waiver for Russia to all of these sanctions. And that is such a blow to the legacy of Lindsey Graham, who really staked so much of his political capital and his efforts as a senator on getting this thing passed, certainly in the last year or so of his life, that it’s just so ugly to see, the way that that’s being trampled on.

Harris: It’s been more than four years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion into Ukraine. I’m gonna ask you all to both open your reporters’ notebooks a little bit here. What will you be looking for as this situation continues to develop throughout the next week and on into the midterms?

Lemire: Well, I think it’s a couple of things. First of all, this seems to be Trump’s focus right now in this closing stretch of the campaign, which I think is, as just noted, not particularly helpful to Republicans. But as the weather gets colder, I think the whole world is gonna be watching a pair of potential summits.

One is there’s a summit coming up in China, in November, shortly after the election, where, per reporting, Putin has floated to Trump that he should meet alongside Xi Jinping of China and the three of them should come up with a plan for a deal to end the conflict in Ukraine—i.e., leaving Zelensky and Ukraine off to the side.

And then the G20, in December, where this would be Putin’s first, if he goes—and the Kremlin has not committed yet that he will. But if he goes, it would be his first appearance at a one of these big, multilateral summits in a democracy since the war began and perhaps end his status as international pariah, at least in some way.

And these are things that, as Simon covers so well for us, deeply unnerves Ukraine, which is just simply taking a pummeling right now from Russia—one that’s only increased in recent days after Trump’s moves here to help Putin.

Harris: And Simon, same thing to you.

Shuster: I’m gonna be watching very closely how Ukraine is responding to these suspensions of U.S. support. Whether it’s Starlink, whether it’s intelligence sharing, they’ve proven themselves to be extremely innovative in meeting various threats. Whether they’re diplomatic or Russian ballistic missiles or whatever, they come up with ways to adapt, whether it’s through technology or sly and clever diplomacy. So I’m watching that. They have various technologies that they’re trying to bring online as fast as possible to replace what Elon Musk has let them use so far.

And I’m also, by the same token, watching what the Europeans are doing very closely, because they see all this as a massive betrayal by the Americans. The Europeans have so much at stake in this war, and they’re going to be adjusting their understanding of the alliance with the United States, their dependence on the United States for security and military assistance, and doing their best to again rush out military assets and technologies to try to give them some autonomy from America.

Now, in the years, decades, when we look back on the situation today, I think this is gonna be a turning point in that rift between the U.S. and its closest traditional allies. So I’m gonna be watching very closely how that rift widens, and how the Europeans try to step up and do what they can to gain some greater autonomy from the United States.

Harris: All of this is evolving really quickly, and thank you both for joining me to help us understand it a little bit better. We have a lot to look out for in the coming days. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Shuster: Thank you.

Lemire: Thank you. Anytime.

[Music]

Harris: That’s all for today’s show.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli and edited by Hadley Robinson. It was engineered by Miguel Carrascal and has original music by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. If you like what you saw here, new episodes of Radio Atlantic drop every Monday and Thursday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, on Apple or Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.

The Cynicism of Trump’s Climate Policy

2026-10-20T07:00:00-04:00

President Trump has previously called climate change a “hoax” and a “scam.” But last month, when the Environmental Protection Agency proposed rescinding the conclusion that greenhouse-gas emissions from the power sector “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare,” it did not question the reality of climate change. Instead, it claimed that large emissions reductions will not be enough to avert harm, and the country is better off doing nothing at all. This is utter nihilism. It is also completely wrong.

The power sector is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the United States (only transportation emits more), accounting for approximately 24 percent of the country’s emissions. The U.S., in turn, is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, after China, accounting for approximately 12 percent of the global total. If the U.S. power sector were a country, it would be the sixth largest emitter of greenhouse gases (fifth if European Union countries were counted individually rather than as a single jurisdiction).

The EPA’s argument is similar to one the agency made in February, when it said that eliminating such emissions from the transportation sector would likewise not make an appreciable difference. Putting these two claims together magnifies the brazenness: The EPA argues that eliminating or substantially reducing about half of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions would be futile and would not meaningfully slow the pace of climate change. It follows from the EPA’s logic that eliminating or substantially reducing the greenhouse-gas emissions of any other sector of the economy would be even more pointless. And the same goes for the emissions of any sector of any country, anywhere in the world.

In fact, according to the EPA’s reasoning, nothing anyone could do anywhere would make any difference. (It also, relatedly, makes a legal claim that it doesn’t have the authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions in the first place.) The agency’s approach is akin to saying that eating a whole loaf of bread is calorie-free as long as the bread is cut in sufficiently thin slices—they’re all so thin that they can’t possibly matter.

[Read: What does the climate movement do now?]

These are standards I know well. From January 2023 to January 2025, when I served as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, I was responsible for the review of all significant executive-branch regulations, including this one. The fact is that some of those slices are not thin at all. The U.S. power sector’s greenhouse-gas emissions create enormous damage. In 2022, the power sector emitted more than 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide, more than 68,000 tons of nitrous oxide, and more than 35,000 tons of methane, all three of which are powerful greenhouse gases. Reducing this pollution—and the climate and health damages it creates—would greatly benefit life on Earth. The global advantages of the EPA’s carbon-pollution standards, which the Biden administration announced in 2024 and the Trump administration now seeks to repeal, were estimated to be $20 billion a year—a total that includes savings both from avoiding climate change and from reducing localized pollution that harms human health. Of this total, several billion dollars’ worth of avoided economic damages would accrue to Americans specifically.

A report by the Institute for Policy Integrity estimated that one year’s worth of greenhouse-gas emissions from the U.S. power sector would produce roughly 5,300 additional yearly premature deaths from heat waves and wildfires in the U.S. alone. This figure does not include the significant number of additional deaths from co-pollutants, such as particulate matter, that power plants emit. Putting the magnitude of this effect in context, the report noted that 5,300 deaths are “more than the annual U.S. deaths caused by kidney infections, the flu, firearm accidents, meningitis, bronchitis, appendicitis, and salmonella combined.”

In its proposed repeal of emissions limits, the EPA ignores these effects. Instead, the agency presents an estimate showing that even if the greenhouse-gas emissions of the U.S. power sector were eliminated, the impacts on global mean surface temperature and sea-level rise would be small. The agency wholly ignores the scientific evidence that increased weather-pattern volatility, such as storm surges, not averages of measurements such as temperature, drives most negative impacts of climate change. The EPA’s approach is like saying that an office building is comfortable if its mean temperature is 70 degrees, without checking whether some rooms are at 90 degrees and others at 50 degrees.

The EPA has no good arguments to call the existing evidence into question. The Biden administration’s process to determine the economic damages from greenhouse gases unfolded over several years, and included robust public input and peer review. The EPA casts all of this aside in three steps: First, it acknowledges (against its own interest) that, under the relevant provision of the Clean Air Act, “the appropriate indicator of impact is not emissions or concentrations, but public health and welfare impacts.” Second, although this would suggest that negative consequences of rescinding endangerment findings would be measured by additional forecasted deaths, for example, the EPA in fact does not consider any such impacts. Third, the EPA waves aside all estimates of such consequences using just one word: uncertainties. In its view, uncertainty renders careful estimates of future damages completely invalid.

[Read: Climate change is moving mountains]

Hiding behind uncertainties is a cruel trick that the Trump administration has used with abandon. In multiple proceedings from February onward, it has cited “uncertainties” as a reason to stop estimating the local damage from dangerous air pollutants, such as particulate matter and ozone. For decades, those estimates had been provided on the basis of extensive peer-reviewed scientific literature, but the EPA now essentially assumes that this pollution causes no negative health effects, because whatever consequences existed were too “uncertain.”

One curiosity: In proposing the rescission of the endangerment finding, the agency does not dispute the seriousness of climate change. The proposal discusses at some length a July study by the National Academy of Sciences on the attribution of extreme weather events to global climate change—a study well within the mainstream of climate science. The EPA does not take issue with the academy’s study and is therefore implicitly saying that climate change is a serious problem, but that it can do nothing to ameliorate the severely negative consequences.

But this too is wrong. Of course, the benefits of U.S. emissions reductions would be augmented if they were accompanied by correspondingly ambitious actions by other countries. If the U.S. believed that other countries were not doing enough on that front, instead of rescinding its own restrictions, it could use its considerable power on the world stage to induce other countries to do more. The Trump administration is doing the opposite: It withdrew from the Paris Agreement, under which countries, including the United States, pledged to meet emissions-reduction targets, and it stopped participating in international climate negotiations altogether.

The Trump administration is not merely cynical; it is also irrational and wrong. If its nihilism becomes our national policy, as it is proposing, everyone will suffer the consequences.

Two Firefighters Died in Yosemite—For What?

2026-10-19T16:48:29-04:00

This year, the Trump administration gave federal firefighters a mandate: no more letting fires burn. Conventional wisdom among firefighters and public-land managers has held that allowing fires in remote areas to run their course can be beneficial. But now the administration’s new U.S. Wildland Fire Service was to pursue a policy of “full suppression” on every wildfire, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum instructed his workforce, to avoid the possibility of dangerous spread. “Accelerate initial attack,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins put it in her own directive to the Forest Service. “Suppress fires early and limit growth.” And when Yosemite National Park caught on fire last month, that is what firefighters did.

The hazy skies above the park filled with aircraft—planes dropping fire retardant on forested slopes; helicopters ferrying hotshot crews to the blaze. At one point, at least 17 helicopters were in rotation, along with more than 1,000 firefighters. “I’ve worked in Yosemite and with Yosemite for almost 40 years,” Tom Nichols, a former head of fire and aviation for the National Park Service (and no relation to the Atlantic writer Tom Nichols), told me. “I’ve never seen that kind of response.”

At the start, attacking the fire aggressively made sense: It had started near a popular hiking trail and was burning on a slope above Wawona, a small community in the park. It looked to be human caused. In such situations, federal policy, even before this year, called for firefighters to use “full suppression” to try to put it out as quickly as possible, former Yosemite fire officials told me.

But as it developed, the Dome Fire spread to the north and east, farther up the mountains, away from any homes or communities. The resources being poured into fighting it began to baffle some fire veterans. As a former Yosemite official put it to me, “There’s really no reason to be attacking a fire like that.” (I spoke with several sources for this story who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly and hoped to avoid professional repercussions.) Such an aggressive approach can be dangerous. Five days into the effort to put it out, one of the helicopters was doing water-bucket drops from a nearby lake when it crashed. Both pilots died.

“For what?” one federal fire official told me. “There’s nothing out there. Just let nature do its thing.” Another official had to ask: “Did they die in vain?”

Under the Trump administration’s policy of full fire suppression, so far this year entrapments—when firefighters’ positions are surrounded by flames—are above the average for the previous two decades. At least 17 wildland firefighters, pilots, and contractors have been killed, surpassing the full-year average over the past decade, according to the Wildland Firefighter Foundation. That number includes four firefighters in Colorado who died this summer responding to the Knowles and Gore fires as flames spread amid high winds and low visibility. After that incident, several Democratic senators called on the Interior Department to investigate whether the full-suppression policy put firefighters at undue risk.

Brian Fennessy, the Wildland Fire Service chief, doesn’t think that the new policy is putting firefighters in more danger, he told me. The two pilots’ deaths in the Dome Fire were a tragedy—one he hopes his agency can learn from—but “this was not the year to allow managed fire on the landscape,” he said. The winter was historically warm, and snowpacks were at record lows across much of the western United States. Federal authorities were not about to let fires burn unattended, even in the wild. And the administration’s policy of suppression does mean increasing the number of people and helicopters fighting a given fire, he said: “Instead of two engines and a helicopter, maybe you’ve got four engines, two helicopters, maybe an air tanker.” Given how hot and dry it’s been, had firefighters not focused on putting out fires, in Yosemite and elsewhere, many could have been worse, he said.

The question of whether to harness or extinguish fire is particularly relevant in Yosemite. This is where America’s formal debate over that policy began, after Abraham Lincoln signed a bill in 1864 to grant the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias to California as a public trust. The commission to oversee the area disagreed about the question of annual burning by Native Americans, Stephen Pyne, a historian of fire, told me. Fires set by the Ahwahneechees were “deliberate and purposeful, even artful,” Pyne writes in his book about Yosemite’s fire history, Pyrocene Park: “They burned to keep grasslands open and attract game animals like deer to fresh forage; to keep trees from crowding out annual-grass prairies; to help harvest acorns; to stimulate willows useful for basketry; to promote berries.” Some of the Yosemite’s first commissioners saw the value in that. Others, such as Frederick Law Olmsted, considered such fires vandalism that undermined, as he put it, “the duty of preservation.”

For more than a century afterwards, the suppressionists prevailed until, in 1974, Yosemite leaders allowed a major lightning-caused fire to burn in the Illilouette Creek basin, whose creek runs behind Half Dome, the park’s famous bald mountain. This was the first big test of its new policy to manage certain fires for ecological benefit. Since then, more than 100 fires have come through that basin, and scientists have documented its renaissance. The proportion of the basin covered by dense conifer forest fell by 20 percent, and a mosaic of meadows and grasslands emerged. Biodiversity bloomed, as bees and bats and understory plants thrived. Even streams flowed a bit more abundantly, as fewer trees competed for water and snow had more open space to accumulate, Scott Stephens, a professor of wildfire science at UC Berkeley, told me. The regular burning also makes the basin more capable of handling future fire, he said, by minimizing how much of it burns at a destructive intensity. It’s now “one of the most resilient, functioning forests in all of California.”

Set under the right conditions, prescribed fires, too, can help prevent hotter-burning conflagrations. The evidence was plain just four years ago in Yosemite, when the Washburn Fire bore down on the Mariposa Grove and its revered giant sequoias. The park had conducted more than 20 prescribed fires in that area since the 1970s. And when the Washburn Fire approached the grove, the flames moved around the treated areas as if they were boulders in a stream, sparing the sequoias that have been burning up in great numbers elsewhere in California.

But this year, at least, under the Trump administration’s leadership, the park seems to have stepped back from prescribed burns as well. Although in many recent years Yosemite has done several prescribed fires, this year the park has done none and even canceled a long-planned prescribed fire near the Mariposa Grove scheduled for May, around Memorial Day, according to two people familiar with the decision. They added that Ray McPadden, the superintendent of the park, was concerned it would affect park visitation because it required closing parts of the grove temporarily. (McPadden did not respond to a request for comment; the Wildland Fire Service said Yosemite was looking for an opportunity to complete the burn this fall.)

Over the long term, avoiding fire puts the sequoias at risk, Cicely Muldoon, who retired as Yosemite’s superintendent last year, told me. And on top of that, jettisoning controlled burns, which ultimately keep fires modest, also means that “you’re really putting people in harm’s way.” A little fire—however it starts—can help prevent future huge fires.

Under the Trump administration’s reorganization of federal firefighting resources, superintendents of national parks no longer decide how to manage fires that start within their borders. That authority now lies with the Wildland Fire Service, which is housed within the Department of the Interior. After last summer’s Dragon Bravo fire at the Grand Canyon, a lightning-caused fire that destroyed more than 100 buildings, Trump-administration officials have shunned the notion of letting fires burn for the health of the landscape.

From the beginning, people fighting the Dome Fire—including those from the National Park Service and two different California interagency incident-management teams—did all that they could to put the fire out, for weeks. Because it was burning on remote slopes, these firefighters relied heavily on helicopters to reach the flames, haul in supplies, and drop water. (The teams also sent in mule trains and firefighters hiking on foot.) Crews camped in the woods as they cut fire lines by hand. Such a response is expensive too. Fighting a 6,700-acre fire that has burned no buildings has cost at least $55 million so far, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. The Wildland Fire Service said in a statement that fire managers were concerned about different assets as the fire progressed, including Yosemite West—another nearby community—and the Badger Pass ski area.

In the field, the work was logistically complex, and its tempo was high. Six firefighters got injured or became ill, according to the Wildland Fire Service. People were reporting falls, bee stings, smoke inhalalation, one firefighter told me, and the frequency of incidents was “more than you’d expect” for what they were gaining from keeping the fire at bay, the firefighter said. “People were like, What are we doing? There’s nothing out here. We’re slamming this fire shut,” this person added. “People were questioning that.”

Congestion from so many helicopters caused safety concerns, too, including a close call on September 19 between a firefighting helicopter and skydivers near the Mariposa-Yosemite Airport, a small airfield outside the park. Although an employee from Skydive Yosemite had alerted firefighters about their plans in a morning briefing, when five people jumped from 14,000 feet later that day, they floated down as a helicopter carrying cargo hovered in the vicinity of their landing zone, Paul Wignall, the company’s owner, told me. The helicopter pilot did not appear to be monitoring radio messages from the skydiving plane, Wignall said, and one of the divers drifted close enough to make eye contact with the helicopter pilot. By the time others in the group came down, the helicopter had flown off. Wignall was particularly concerned about the powerful rush of air from the helicopter’s blade. “If he can see a parachute coming, he should get the hell out of there,” Wignall said.

During the incident, the helicopter pilot “took action in response” to the skydivers, the Wildland Fire Service said in a statement, and firefighters later met with the skydiving operator to discuss the incident. The FAA brought in a temporary control tower, and firefighters moved equipment to avoid potential problems, Adrienne Freeman, a spokesperson on one of the interagency incident-management teams for the Dome Fire, told me. Authorities would later close the airport for a week. The day after the skydiving incident, another helicopter went down fighting the fire.

The circumstances of the deadly crash on September 20 remain under investigation. The firefighting community has rallied support for the families of the two pilots who died—Greg King and Ryan Cutter—and held ceremonies to honor their service. The pilots worked for Precision, a Forest Service contractor based in Oregon. After the crash, the use of aircraft on the fire paused as Fire Service managers assessed the safety risk. The losses cast a shadow over the whole enterprise.

The danger of letting a fire burn might very well have been higher than normal because of the hot, dry conditions this year, as Brian Fennessy, the federal fire chief, said. But these types of years are more common now. The next one could be hot and dry too. In Yosemite, and across America, the choice to always put the fires out carries its own risks. The kindling keeps piling up, increasing the chance that the next one will be so big that no one can control it.

Why the Internet Needs a Memory

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

In 1996, during the early years of the web, I could see that those of us who were participating online were creating an extraordinary new record of human activity—and allowing it to disappear almost as quickly as we made it.

The web was becoming the place where government officials made promises, journalists published information in the public interest, and ordinary people shared ideas and documented their lives. Yet it was fragile—equal parts consequential and ephemeral.

Many people assume that once something is published online, it will remain forever retrievable. The saying that “the internet never forgets” has produced a dangerously false sense of permanence. In reality, the internet forgets continuously. Websites are constantly revised, deleted, and abandoned altogether.

This is why, 30 years ago, I founded the Internet Archive. I wanted to build a mechanism for permanence in the internet age. Soon after that, I helped build the Internet Archive’s most-used resource, the Wayback Machine, a system that would preserve webpages as they appeared at any one moment in time, allowing future readers to return to those moments. The idea was simple but urgent: If the internet was going to become humanity’s principal publishing platform, then it needed what every great publishing system that came before it had needed. It needed a library.

People all over the world use the Wayback Machine all the time. What began as an effort to preserve the web has become an essential tool for journalists, researchers, historians, and the broader public.

Yet the future of this tool has become extremely vulnerable. The New York Times is now blocking the Internet Archive’s ability to preserve its articles. The Guardian has restricted our access to its published articles and removed articles from some of the Wayback Machine’s interfaces. USA Today and a growing number of other news organizations have also placed barriers in the path of web archivists (even, yes, The Atlantic). As of May 2026, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab had identified more than 340 local-news sites that were limiting the Internet Archive’s ability to preserve their journalism.

The publishers taking these steps have all pointed to one reason: the unauthorized use of their work by AI companies to train large language models. They complain that our library serves as a back door around paywalls, licensing negotiations, and technical restrictions. The Times has said that it is blocking us because the Wayback Machine allegedly provides “unfettered access” to its work. But this fear-based approach does not take into account that the Internet Archive is taking steps to prevent AI companies from scraping the materials we preserve.

I understand why publishers are angry. Journalism is expensive. Reporting requires skilled people, time, courage, legal support, and institutions willing to withstand pressure. Journalists have watched advertising revenue disappear and subscription growth slow while technology companies build enormously profitable products using material created by others. Publishers have every right to challenge commercial businesses that they believe are inappropriately exploiting their work.

But blocking a nonprofit library is the wrong response to this problem. Impeding the Wayback Machine’s preservation work will not prevent powerful AI companies from gathering training data. It will certainly not restore the advertising-based business model that supported newspapers in the 20th century, a business model that has long since collapsed. What it will do is prevent historians, researchers, courts, ordinary readers—and, most ironic, journalists themselves—from consulting an accurate record of what once appeared on the web. It is difficult to quantify the scale of what we stand to lose. A continuous record of web activity is an enormously powerful accountability tool, especially at a time when seeking the truth and reporting it has become ever more complicated and the informational environment is growing only more complex.

Joe Mullin, who is a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has offered a fitting analogy: Imagine a newspaper announcing that physical libraries will no longer be permitted to preserve copies of its past issues. That is effectively what is happening now. For the past three decades, the Wayback Machine has served as a library for the public web. The destruction of that library is creating holes in the historical record.

A crucial fact in this debate is one that publishers themselves know better than anyone: Journalists rely on the Wayback Machine. They use it to recover deleted tweets, verify past public statements by powerful individuals who wish to avoid scrutiny, examine earlier versions of government documents, and establish what a person or institution said about a subject before some controversy or scandal prompted them to change course. Journalists use the Wayback Machine to see defunct websites and the archives of closed newsrooms. They use it when the primary evidence for a story has vanished from the web.

A news organization that blocks the Wayback Machine may believe it is acting in the best interest of its journalists. But instead it is dismantling one of journalism’s most important investigative instruments.

My argument is simple: The public record needs an independent steward. A society that cannot inspect its past is easier to deceive. In 2017, Katie Hafner and Griffin Palmer, writing for The New York Times, relied on the Wayback Machine to report that private-equity investment was reshaping dermatology practices—expanding the use of physician assistants, increasing the volume of biopsies and procedures, enacting ever more aggressive screening and treatment protocols, and exposing elderly patients to treatments whose benefits were doubtful.

The Wayback Machine gave Hafner and Palmer an empirical record that proved crucial for their story: evidence of change over time. The current website of Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery (one of the companies they were looking into) showed a sprawling operation with more than 180 locations and 124 physician assistants. But earlier versions of the site showed that the number of physician assistants listed by the company had increased by 400 percent since 2008, amid a debate over whether physician assistants are qualified to properly make diagnoses. When I spoke with Hafner about the story, she told me she could not have made her point as powerfully as she did without the Wayback Machine. The records she retrieved from our archive enabled her to demonstrate the scale, speed, and direction of a corporate transformation, including the rapid growth of a business model that placed many more lesser-trained practitioners in clinics serving vulnerable patients.

Hafner and Palmer are among thousands of reporters whose use of the Wayback Machine has contributed to extraordinary journalism. A politics reporter may find that an agency quietly removed a document, or even a single sentence, in the face of criticism. A city-hall reporter may need an earlier version of a municipal page containing budget figures, meeting records, and public-health guidance. A technology reporter may need to compare successive versions of a platform’s terms of service. An investigative journalist examining allegations against a public figure may need to scour a decade-old webpage that has since been deleted.

Government agencies routinely scrub important information from their sites, and the Wayback Machine is a faster and more practical method of discovery than a Freedom of Information Act request. These are not hypothetical benefits. Over and over and over again, the Wayback Machine has confirmed facts that would be irretrievable without an independent archive.

Our own monitoring finds that more than 100 news articles in a typical month cite or rely on material preserved by the Wayback Machine. We can reasonably assume that there are tens of thousands of additional visits to the Wayback Machine every month, when an archived page might help illuminate the truth.

Mark Graham, who directs the Wayback Machine, recently described having visited The New York Times to meet with data journalists and reporters—and being approached by a senior researcher who thanked him profusely. The researcher said Times staffers used the Wayback Machine constantly and had even found material there that they could not find anywhere else. Consider what that means. Even one of the best-resourced news organizations in the world does not possess a complete, easily usable record of the material it needs.

Plenty of journalists—including at The Atlantic—have championed and defended the importance of the Wayback Machine. MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow has called the Internet Archive a national treasure and said she uses it daily. She and hundreds of other journalists have signed a statement calling for web preservation.

These journalists understand that their work is cumulative. A story links to documents, earlier articles, public statements, data sets, and numerous other verifiable facts in the public record. Future stories return to (and build upon) that evidence. When underlying links die, one of the chains of verification breaks along with it.

In 2024, the Pew Research Center announced the findings of a study that tracked 1 million webpages over a 10-year period. At the end of the study, one-quarter of those pages were no longer accessible. Among pages that existed in 2013, the first year of the study, the loss rate was 38 percent. Even among pages collected as recently as 2021, roughly one in five had disappeared within two years.

This is not the timescale of ancient history. But it is often the timescale of someone’s political career, a long-running lawsuit, or a company’s rise and fall.

Elements of the web disappear for all kinds of reasons, nefarious and mundane. Perhaps a page is deleted during a redesign. Maybe a publication changes ownership, or a content-management system is replaced.

After the Pew study came out, the Internet Archive took a closer look at its data set to determine how much of the lost material had been preserved by the Wayback Machine. The analysis found that 16 percent of the vanished URLs are accessible via the Wayback Machine.

Consider the Rocky Mountain News. Colorado’s oldest newspaper published for nearly 150 years and earned a reputation for forceful accountability journalism that exposed corruption, misspent public money, and institutions that were failing the people they were meant to serve. In its final decade, the paper won four—I repeat, four —Pulitzer Prizes: for photographic coverage of the Columbine school shooting, for its images of Colorado’s devastating wildfires, and for the writing and photography of “Final Salute,” a deeply reported account of Marines killed in Iraq. In 2015, The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance reported the story of how one of the paper’s Pulitzer finalists successfully resuscitated an investigative series of his that had vanished from the web when the paper did. Her story concluded with a link to the series that he’d saved. Even that link is now dead. (Though you can still find the series here.)

No institution, however prestigious, is immortal. The Wayback Machine holds the work of publications that no longer exist, such as the Rocky Mountain News. It preserves the archive of MTV News and BET.com, including decades of cultural reporting removed from the web without warning. It preserves a robust record of early-2000s web culture from Gawker Media. It provides access to work produced by Apple Daily and Stand News, Hong Kong–based news outlets that were forced to shut down in 2021 as part of a government crackdown, as well as independent Russian-language journalism, some of it produced in exile. It holds the only copy of USA Today from September 11, 2001, because the paper’s website was overwhelmed and its online editors continuously updated stories by hand without preserving the changes made along the way.

The Internet Archive is not an AI company. A commercial AI laboratory, a search engine, a research project, and a nonprofit library may all use automated systems to retrieve publicly available webpages. From a server’s perspective, each may appear to be a bot. But not all bots are bad bots. They do not have the same mission, business model, or conduct.

Publishers’ concerns about abusive scraping are merited. I know this acutely because the Internet Archive has itself been subjected to extreme machine traffic. In one incident, an AI startup sent tens of thousands of requests per second and overloaded our systems. We blocked the offending hosts, contacted the company, and worked to stop the behavior.

When a company attempts to extract material at scale, it burdens our nonprofit infrastructure and interferes with access by ordinary users. We understand why publishers object to how AI companies have used their work. But recognizing a problem does not justify attacking the wrong institution and disregarding the public interest. In short, the Wayback Machine has become collateral damage in a fight between publishers and AI companies. Blocking the Internet Archive will not stop AI. Commercial AI companies have crawled the live web, licensed large data sets, purchased access from platforms, obtained third-party collections, and built their own retrieval systems. Publishers can sue those companies, negotiate with them, or build technical controls specifically directed at them. We have already built such controls to protect the material on our site—including the material we preserve from news organizations.

Web archiving belongs to a well-established legal tradition. Courts have repeatedly recognized that copying material for indexing and search can be a transformative fair use. A searchable system cannot function without making technical copies of the material it indexes. In the now-famous Google Books litigation, in which authors sued Google over the digitization of millions of books, courts held that scanning books to create a searchable research tool served a different purpose from selling or reading the original books, and was fair use under U.S. copyright law.

Defending preservation does not require ignoring publishers’ legitimate concerns. The Internet Archive has adapted repeatedly as the web has changed. We use rate limits, filtering, monitoring, and network-security systems to respond to abusive access. We have restricted bulk functionality in particular contexts and optimized important parts of the Wayback Machine for human use.

Those efforts can and should continue. Publishers and archives can distinguish ordinary human consultation from sustained bulk extraction. We can develop better methods for identifying abusive traffic, create responsible-access arrangements, improve communication during high-volume incidents, and discuss access to application programming interfaces separately from the preservation of publicly available pages. Most important, we can preserve records while applying reasonable protections against mass downloading.

The press cannot have it both ways. Journalists describe their work as the first draft of history—but a draft of history must survive if it is to be revised, improved upon, and understood.

The Minimal Requirements for a Society Free From Fear

2026-10-19T08:00:00-04:00

In 1989, the year the West won the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama published an essay announcing “the end of history.” He wasn’t claiming that historic events would stop taking place; what was over, rather, was the debate about the meaning of those events. Since the Enlightenment, Western thinkers had believed that history was progressing toward a final destination. According to communism, the engine of progress was class conflict, and history would end in the creation of a classless society. With the failure of the Soviet empire, Fukuyama argued, this idea had been discredited. Only one alternative remained: It was now clear that the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” was “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” There would still be disagreements within liberalism—Fukuyama named religion and nationalism as likely fault lines—but there could no longer be any disagreement about liberalism.

To see how that judgment is holding up, just look at the kinds of titles that political theorists are producing these days: How Liberalism Failed, A World After Liberalism, Liberalism Against Itself. Even Fukuyama wrote a book titled Liberalism and Its Discontents. Across the West, the far right and the far left are on the rise, and the one thing they agree on is their contempt for liberalism. To MAGA and its European cousins, such as France’s National Rally and the United Kingdom’s Reform Party, liberals are rootless elitists who look down on their fellow citizens while coddling immigrants and criminals. To progressives and democratic socialists, liberalism—often qualified with the prefix neo—means ruthless globalized capitalism, prettied up with rhetoric about meritocracy and human rights. Appeals to liberal principles and defenses of the liberal world order have shown little power to rally the public, or even much of the political establishment.

Now that the liberal triumphalism of the post–Cold War era is dying, what can replace it? The answer may lie in another important essay written in 1989—one that received much less attention than Fukuyama’s, but enjoys a cult reputation among keepers of the liberal flame. “The Liberalism of Fear,” by Judith Shklar, has just been published for the first time as a book—a small book, because the essay is only about 8,000 words long, but a timely one. In fact, as the political scientist Mark Lilla says in his introduction, it’s “far more timely today than it was upon its publication.” In 1989, Shklar’s minimalist definition of liberalism as a bulwark against government terror—what she calls, simply, a politics of “damage control”—might have sounded unambitious or uninspiring. In an America where ICE agents shoot protesters and grab people off the street, it sounds prescient.

Shklar’s argument involves history and philosophy, but like all political ideas, it begins with an intuition, a feeling. Communism, one might say, begins in indignation: a refusal to accept a world where some people exploit and others are exploited. Nationalism begins in loyalty: a sense of connection and obligation to one’s own people. There is nothing wrong with these emotions; they are even praiseworthy. But when one political feeling crowds out all others—when everyone and everything is subordinated to the pursuit of social justice or national pride—good can justify the worst evils.

[From the May 2022 issue: There is no liberal world order]

What makes liberalism different from these political ideologies is that, as Shklar writes, it “does not have any particular positive doctrines about how people are to conduct their lives.” Liberalism doesn’t offer a vision of a perfect world—one where injustice is abolished, or where a particular nation reigns supreme. Instead, it is rooted in a justified fear of the real world, where people with power often use it to oppress, torture, and kill. “Liberalism’s deepest grounding,” Shklar writes, is the belief “that cruelty is an absolute evil.” The classic liberal principles outlined by thinkers such as Locke and Mill, the ideas that guided the American and French Revolutions, follow from this basic fear of cruelty. Freedom of religion means that you won’t be burned at the stake for holding the wrong beliefs. Freedom of speech means that you won’t be locked up for saying what you think. The rule of law means that you can be punished only for committing a crime, not because a powerful person is out to get you.

Not coincidentally, these liberal freedoms are framed as limits on the power of the state. “Public cruelty,” Shklar writes, “is made possible by differences in public power,” and the government is always more powerful than any citizen. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; we want the government to have the power to punish crime or defend against invasion. But liberalism believes that there must be strict and effective limits on how that power is used. “The governments of this world, with their overwhelming power to kill, maim, indoctrinate, and make war are not to be trusted unconditionally,” Shklar writes. What the liberalism of fear wants to prevent above all are “habitual and pervasive acts of cruelty and torture performed by military, paramilitary, and police agents in any regime.”

This might have seemed like an odd concern for an American political philosopher in 1989. Police states were disappearing in Eastern Europe; democracy activists were bravely standing up to tanks in Tiananmen Square; Nelson Mandela left his jail cell on his way to becoming president of South Africa. America under George H. W. Bush had its problems, but no one would have put paramilitary violence and police torture high on the list. At a time when Fukuyama was celebrating the end of history, why was Shklar contemplating these specters at the feast?

The most obvious answer is that, unlike most Americans, she had seen them firsthand. Born to a Jewish family in Latvia in 1928, Judith Nisse grew up in the shadow of approaching war and the Holocaust. In an autobiographical lecture, she recalled that as a child, she was traumatized by reading Shakespeare’s play Titus Andronicus, which is full of murder, cannibalism, and severed heads: “To this day I can still feel the fear and horror it inspired.” Her sister tried to comfort her by saying that “these things did not really happen,” but it didn’t help, because “both she and I knew that far worse was going on all around us.” As Jews in Latvia, Shklar recalled, “everyone around us wanted us to be somewhere else at best, or to kill us at worst.” The Nisse family managed to escape at the last possible moment and took an epic journey in 1940 across Russia and the Pacific to Canada. The next year, the Nazis invaded Latvia and the 40,000 Jews of Riga were murdered, most of them shot by German troops and local auxiliaries in a nearby forest.

When Shklar arrived at Harvard’s department of government as a graduate student in 1951, she was struck by how completely her American colleagues ignored the central political experience of their own time: “I knew what had happened in Europe between 1940 and 1945, and I assumed that most people at Harvard also were aware of the physical, political, and moral calamity that had occurred, but it was never to be discussed.” This “isolating” experience “had a lot to do with my later writings,” Shklar noted. At first, she didn’t intend to stay in the academy: “I would have liked to be a literary editor of The Atlantic or some such publication.” But she remained at Harvard for her entire career as a professor, writing about subjects directly or indirectly connected with the European catastrophe: the failure of the Enlightenment tradition, the concept of law in the Nuremberg trials, the nature of cruelty and injustice.

“The Liberalism of Fear” was published three years before Shklar’s death in 1992, and though it wasn’t one of her major works, the title has become a kind of shorthand for her worldview. As Lilla writes in his introduction, for Shklar, “fear of being in another’s arbitrary power is the ur-human experience that modern liberalism was developed to stave off.” In the essay, she discusses the tools that modern liberal societies use for this purpose. Some of these tools are legal: “Without well-defined procedures, honest judges, opportunities for counsel and for appeals, no one has a chance.” Others are political and economic, such as security for private property: “Nothing gives a person greater social resources than legally guaranteed proprietorship.”

[Read: This is the way a world order ends]

But Shklar is most concerned with the ideas and habits of mind that sustain liberal societies. And it is here that her message for today becomes most urgent. The “perfect liberal,” she writes, “respects other people without condescension, arrogance, humility, or fear. He or she does not insult others with lies or cruelty, both of which mar one’s own character no less than they injure one’s victims.” These aren’t the heroic virtues needed to win wars or found empires; they are minimal requirements for a society free from fear. Until recently, they were expected of anyone who hoped to play a role in American public life, regardless of their political views.

Only since Donald Trump got to the White House have Americans realized how much they took for granted the sobriety and politeness of Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama. Trumpism’s assault on liberal democracy isn’t only a matter of laws and policies. From the beginning, it has been about legitimizing cruelty. When Trump mockingly imitated a disabled reporter, or said police officers shouldn’t be “too nice” when putting suspects into police cars, or pardoned an American soldier convicted by a court martial of murdering civilians, he was sending the message that he approves of cruelty, and will support those who commit it.

The federal government and the Republican Party resisted that message in his first term; in his second, they have mostly stopped resisting. We are still a long way from the Europe of Shklar’s childhood. America has been a liberal democracy for a long time, and the majority of Americans are not ready to embrace a politics of cruelty. But that prospect feels a lot less theoretical than it did when “The Liberalism of Fear” was written. In the essay, Shklar says that government terror and cruelty weren’t things of the past, but could be seen in “the foreign news in the New York Times.” Now it’s not just the foreign news that reminds us how much we have to be afraid of—and how much we need the values and institutions of liberalism, no matter how unfashionable they’ve become.