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The Phrase I Texted My Kids 133 Times

2026-05-26T08:00:00-04:00

Too loud.

If you were to scroll through my archive of texts with my children—from the start of the coronavirus pandemic, in 2020, to the end of last year—you would find that I sent 133 of these messages.

I discovered this a few weeks ago, sitting alone on the couch in my living room, when, on a whim, I searched for the phrase on my phone. My youngest daughter, age 19, has been the most frequent recipient of the text, though each of my three children appears in the archive. Typically, I sent these messages between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. The backstory to each, I’m sure, was relatively consistent: I was in bed, thinking about my schedule for the next day—a board meeting, a difficult conversation I needed to have—when from downstairs came the noise. Shrieks of laughter. Trash talk escalating over a video game. A heated debate about a book or a TV show or a person, infused with teenagers’ fierce intensity. Or perhaps it was someone deciding at 11 p.m. that they would absolutely die without a McFlurry, kicking off a negotiation over who should place the DoorDash order.

In every instance, it was the same routine: I picked up my phone. I typed two words. I put the phone back down.

About 80 percent of the time, the message really did say just that: Too loud. Sometimes, depending on my mood, I would write a little more: Too loud. Love you, good night. Or, when I was feeling more like a school administrator than a father: Too loud. Shouldn’t you be working right now? Occasionally, someone would text back: Sorry. More often, the signals that the message had been received were subtler—a brief dip in the noise, maybe half an hour of relative quiet. Then the laughter would find its way back up the stairs. And I’d text again.

[Read: In praise of ‘difficult’ kids]

Read one way, the archive is exactly what it looks like: evidence of a dad who wanted to sleep and couldn’t, a catalog of minor annoyances sent into the dark and mostly ignored. Only in hindsight have I realized that I had been keeping a record of the years my house was full.

The messages captured so many scenes: my youngest daughter and her friends in the dining room, doing homework, waiting for their food to arrive, making one another laugh over nothing in particular; my son, the eldest, and a couple of his friends, watching basketball and losing their minds over a last-second shot that sent a game into overtime; my middle daughter, often with a coed crew, playing a board game or debating The Secret History or doing that thing that teenagers do where they reconstruct a shared experience they all participated in and still can’t quite believe happened.

My wife and I wanted them there. We loved the idea, and the reality, of a house full of kids. So we kept the pantry stocked with food they liked. Many of our children’s friends had keys to our front door. Some days, I would come home from work to find teenagers in the living room—without any of my own children present. “Where’s my daughter?” I might ask. “She’s still at school; she’ll be here soon,” the kids might say. It didn’t feel strange. It felt right.

My children knew, I think, that the Too loud texts were not quite what they appeared to be—that, yes, I was saying Keep it down, but what I meant was closer to I know you’re there; I’m glad you’re here. This was never spoken between us. I never thought to say it out loud. Instead, I kept stocking the pantry. Parental presence doesn’t always look the same, and isn’t typically announced. Sometimes it’s just a house that says Please come in, no questions asked.

[Read: Lighthouse parents have more confident kids]

It turns out that research can help explain what my wife and I were doing. Homes in which parents are emotionally present without being controlling tend to draw teenagers in rather than push them out. The kids wind up confiding in their parents more. They bring more of their real lives home. The noise they make isn’t incidental—it’s evidence of the fact that they have chosen to be there.

To be clear, none of this was in my head when I was texting Too loud at 11:30 p.m., annoyed and half-asleep. I am not that thoughtful a parent. I’m not sure any of us are, in the moment. But never once did I think to myself, I wish they were at someone else’s house. I also know that not every parent has space for this, literally or otherwise. Some kids live in small apartments, or they have parents with night-shift jobs, or parents whose constitutions don’t do well with chaos. (Parents can, of course, show up for their kids in many ways other than keeping an open house.)

The last text I sent was dated January, during winter break. My two younger kids, who are still in college, were home, catching up with their high-school friends, doing the things that college students do: comparing notes on roommates, dorm food, and work loads; being teenagers again for a few weeks before going back to the place where they are trying to become adults. I was working by then—winter break for college students runs longer than it does for school heads—and was lying awake, thinking about the next day. I heard the noise from downstairs. I picked up my phone.

Too loud.

I didn’t know it would be the last one. You never do.

What I know now is that so much was ending at once that I couldn’t see any of it clearly. Next month I will step down as head of the school I have led for 16 years, ending a role that has become, over time, part of the architecture of my daily life. My wife has already moved to Colorado to begin her new job. The house that has spent years accumulating noise—a cacophony of laughter and debates and late-night snacking—will still be here. But the sounds that filled it have already moved out.

[Read: When helicopter parents touch down—at college]

Nearly all of those kids causing a ruckus on our first floor this past winter were students at my school. Over the years, out of all of the children it had been my duty to look after, a decent number had found their way to my living room, my pantry, my Friday-night Shabbat table. Leaving the job and leaving the house are different losses, but they are related ones. Both ask me to let go of roles that have become a part of my identity.

I’ve spent much of my career telling parents that their job, ultimately, is to make themselves less necessary to their kids—that growing up is supposed to look like this: children pulling away, needing you differently, building lives that don’t require your constant presence. It’s sound advice. I’ve given it for 30 years. I’m still learning how to take it.

Now I get into bed before 10 p.m. most nights. The house is quiet. Our dog leaps up beside me, which I’m grateful for. I pick up a book and read and feel something I can’t quite name. Grief, maybe. But mostly a spaciousness where the noise used to be.

I don’t think I’d change a thing about the way things were—not the sleep I lost, not the half-hour reprieves that never lasted. Actually, I would change this: I would have known, while it was happening, what I was in the middle of. I would have known that every time I typed Too loud I was also saying Don’t go anywhere yet. But for most parents, that’s probably not how any of this works. You don’t know you’re in the good years until you’re standing in the quiet they left behind.

Does Donald Trump Know Men Are Also Allowed to Leave His Cabinet?

2026-05-26T18:01:00-04:00

Mr. President! Let me start this Cabinet meeting by thanking you for hanging the moon and organizing the nation, and the universe, in such a perfect way. The moon looks great where you put it. Everything you touch turns to gold, unless you would prefer it to turn to brass.

Now that we have dispensed with the pleasantries, I do have a tiny question: Do you know that you are also allowed to fire men? Really, you are! Men are allowed to leave the Cabinet too.

As one of the last remaining women in this Cabinet, I felt compelled to ask. Not for me, of course. For my sisters!

I literally cannot think of a worse place to have a feminist awakening than as a member of Donald Trump’s Cabinet, watching the departures of Pam Bondi but not Kash Patel, and Kristi Noem but not Pete Hegseth, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer but not Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Of course, that is not what this is. I would sooner die than have a feminist awakening. Obviously, I am aware of the patriarchy, but I have always believed that I could make it work for me, personally, if I just used the right hair products and smiled more.

I’m just wondering: Do I have a future here? I’m doing everything that everyone else is doing. I have a face. I have a jet. I have incompetence. I shower the president with praise at every Cabinet meeting. (See above.) But where is the ironclad job security, the sense that, no matter what I do, I am still an essential part of the team? Should I be drinking more? Snorkeling more? Both?

I will say I thought that it would be different when I agreed to serve. I thought, Well, this man has no respect for women. But he also has no respect for any type of person! I can build on that. “Put me in, Coach,” I said then.

Now there are just four of us left. I really thought that Tulsi’s willingness to conduct purges, peddle conspiracies, and cast doubt on the integrity of the last election would have endeared her to you more. But I also thought that about Pam.

Listen, if you were assembling a Cabinet purely on ability, none of us would be here. That’s the great thing bringing all of us here today: Whether we are male or female, old or young, white or nonwhite, the one thing that binds us is our shared absence of merit.

But if I were eliminating people for doing a bad job, I would certainly pick either the guy who is bringing back measles or the guy who is bringing back the flu—two distinct guys, each of whom is putting millions of lives at stake. If you spun me around (please do not spin me around; my hair is not equipped) in this room and I pointed at random, I would hit someone deserving of being fired. Or a chair. Or one of several models of a ballroom or an arch.

I know you have said, “No scalps.” Are you operating under the misapprehension that women don’t have scalps? This seems like the kind of thing you might believe. I don’t know anymore.

I’m no feminist. Obviously. I’m in the Trump Cabinet. But this is the kind of thing that makes me wonder about his outlook on the world! Not that we’re trying to list birth control as an environmentally noxious substance. Not the increased level of joking-but-not-joking about removing our right to vote, or having households all vote together under the man’s guidance. I know Pete Hegseth’s pastor knows what I’m talking about!

I’m indifferent to all of that. I’m talking about my own personal career here, and I do have to wonder if you’re holding the incompetent women in your Cabinet to the same standard as the incompetent men. Is this some sort of Women and Children First situation? Are you really going to wait for all of us to leave before anyone else is allowed to go?

I guess I just thought I would be safer here—that if I joined up, they wouldn’t come for me. I am not supposed to be the one under the bus. I’m supposed to be the one throwing other women there.

Trump’s Missing Ambassadors Are a Sign of a Deeper Problem

2026-05-26T07:18:42-04:00

The United States is fighting, in some form or another, with almost everyone. America’s in a hot war with Iran and a cold war with China and Russia (even if President Trump hasn’t figured that out). Trump has ignited various trade wars, and keeps talking up a possible conflict with Cuba. And just for good measure, the president seems still obsessed with grabbing Greenland, which would spark a confrontation with NATO, the most powerful and successful alliance in history—and one supposedly led by Washington.

This might seem like a good time for some traditional diplomacy: deploying ambassadors to smooth ruffled feathers, assure friends and warn enemies of American resolve, and work out details on trade and other issues that require professional attention. The problem is that those ambassadors don’t exist. As The Wall Street Journal reported last week, the Trump administration has left more than 100 ambassadorships unfilled, including some to important U.S. allies.

This is an unprecedented number of vacancies, even for a White House that has shown little interest in traditional diplomacy. (At the same point in Trump’s first term, only 45 slots were unfilled, which was nonetheless a slower rate of nominations than those of his predecessors.) The American Foreign Service Association, the union that represents Foreign Service officers, told the Journal that Trump “has been slow to nominate ambassadors, and those he nominates can often be held up in an increasingly slow and logjammed Senate confirmation process.”

Well, yes—but that’s a polite way of saying that Trump doesn’t understand the importance of ambassadors, and that he prefers to hand out such posts to friends and cronies, who will face tougher-than-normal Senate fights. In his usual personalized and chaotic way, he appears to bestow these appointments not to serve U.S. diplomatic goals, but to reward loyalty and, perhaps, troll the American public and the international community.

In fairness to Trump, every president reserves some ambassadorships for donors and pals; some of them end up doing fine work, and others should never have been allowed to represent the United States overseas. Typically, however, these political ambassadors are given a cushy job in a smaller or less strategically important nation. (Kari Lake, for example, is an extreme MAGA loyalist and a failed political candidate; she has been named the U.S. ambassador to Jamaica, a thoughtless slight to an American friend.) It’s bad enough to do this to such nations, but as I wrote this past winter, Trump has placed utterly embarrassing and incompetent people in major embassies, including in Jerusalem and Paris.

[Anne Applebaum: What did Jamaica do to deserve this?]

These appointments not only express Trump’s seeming disdain for diplomacy but reflect his long-apparent distrust of experts in general and professional diplomats in particular. Administration officials see no problem here, and told the Journal that “Trump leans on trusted envoys to manage relations with multiple countries at a time, which they say offers the president a more efficient model for his chosen envoys to deliver on his foreign policy needs region-by-region,” such as using Tom Barrack, Trump’s ambassador to Turkey, to also serve as his envoy for Syria, and relying on friends and family members such as Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner as personal emissaries.

The claim that this is a “more efficient model” is laughable. Trying to mediate a war between Russia and Ukraine without having confirmed ambassadors in either Moscow or Kyiv is not “efficient”; it is foolish. Likewise, dual-hatting ambassadors does not give their activities a broader regional coherence: It simply clogs their bandwidth, cross-wires staffs, and snarls communications channels. For example, not only is the ambassador to India, Sergio Gor, now America’s top diplomat to the world’s largest democracy; he also has some sort of responsibility for Central Asia, a region of approximately 85 million people and five very different nations—four of which still have no confirmed ambassador.

The Trump administration has never, to steal a phrase often used by former British Parliament Speaker John Bercow, given a flying flamingo about efficiency. So what’s behind all of these vacancies?

Trump likely has no real idea what ambassadors do, and apparently doesn’t care to. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, however, is not a political neophyte, and he knows what diplomats do, even if the president does not. He recognizes that ambassadors are important in day-to-day diplomacy and that they can be crucial during a crisis, when a foreign government wants to know that it is interacting with someone who has the full authority to speak on behalf of the president of the United States.

And yet, one of Rubio’s first actions as secretary was to recall 30 ambassadors. The State Department described this as a routine move, but that’s misleading: All ambassadors submit their resignation at the beginning of a new administration, and then they remain at their post until they are asked to extend their tour or a new ambassador is sent to replace them. But they are not usually recalled—that is, brought home immediately and leaving the office vacant—at the beginning of a new president’s term, and Rubio’s move suggested that some sort of political vetting was being applied to career diplomats.

Trump may also be extrapolating from his first term, and especially his first impeachment, when people in the government blew the whistle on his attempts to blackmail Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden and his family. He may have subsequently concluded that professional civil servants and diplomats are his political enemies. Of course, the president has never shown an understanding of apolitical service to the United States; any number of matters, including his White House ballroom and his proposed fund for supposed victims of the Justice Department, suggest that Trump’s conception of the U.S. government is that it is little different from a company that he owns, in which everyone works for him. And if they’re not supporters, they’re opponents.

[Vivian Salama: The end of diplomacy]

But maybe, in the end, Trump simply doesn’t want anyone representing him whom he can’t trust to keep his secrets and do his bidding, especially if what he wants is unethical or even possibly illegal (such as his chicanery with Ukraine in 2017). In the classic 1990 film Goodfellas, a New York hoodlum describes his boss, Paulie, as a guy who hated group conferences of any kind, because he “didn’t want anybody hearing what he said, and he didn’t want anybody listening to what he was being told.” Instead, Paulie’s trusted lieutenants move from person to person, talking with various would-be partners and supplicants, and then go back and whisper in Paulie’s ear.

Trump’s approach to diplomacy may be that simple: If you want to communicate with the United States, you wait until someone the boss trusts comes to you. Otherwise, you don’t waste your time talking with professional diplomats. As Reuters reported this week, foreign governments are bypassing embassies and instead “rewiring their diplomacy around a small circle of people with direct access to the president.” Unfortunately, if you’re a country such as Greece and you’re stuck with Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s ex-girlfriend, as the ambassador, you might not have many productive interactions with the American government for a while. But if you matter enough to Trump to get a visit from his son-in-law, then you know you’re talking with Washington.

The world will not come to a halt if the United States does not have an ambassador in every embassy. Some vacancies are normal, and the influence of U.S. ambassadors rises and recedes depending on the needs and views of each president. But Trump’s various diplomatic failures, including his serial humiliations at the hands of the leaders of China and Russia, his backtracking on his trade wars, and his inability to gather allied support for operations in the Middle East, all suggest that this is no way to run the diplomacy of a superpower.

The Advice I Hope You’ll Never Need

2026-05-26T10:00:00-04:00

If you’re reading this, there’s a chance that you have survived, witnessed, or somehow experienced a school shooting, which is a common enough occurrence in the United States that I felt compelled to write this essay. I myself have been through two school shootings: first in Parkland, Florida, when I was 12, and then at Brown University at the age of 20. As my university came together to cope with the tragedy we experienced on December 13, 2025, I noticed that sharing my prior experiences helped my peers feel understood and also made me feel better in the process.

Since I was 13 years old, I’ve dedicated myself to fighting for the prevention of gun violence. Now I hope that by sharing what I have learned over the past eight years and two school shootings, perhaps even one person will feel less alone. If you are in the unfortunate position of being able to relate to what I went through, I hope these five pieces of advice bring you comfort.

1. Surviving Looks Different for Everyone

When I speak publicly about my experiences, people tend to ask whether I really “qualify” as a survivor. This is a telling question. When I was 12, I was sitting outside at the middle school next to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School—a few hundred feet away from where a former student took the lives of 17 people. While outside, I heard gunshots coming from the building and saw first responders rushing to the scene. Almost immediately—while we were still at school under lockdown—I began to see graphic videos of the shooting shared on social media. I subsequently developed post-traumatic stress disorder, which I still suffer from to this day. Some people use the word survivor to describe people who were physically injured or in the same room as a shooter, but everyone—including survivors themselves—has wildly different understandings of what it means to “survive” a traumatic event. The reality is that gun violence, especially school shootings, have a ripple effect that can extend to entire communities. For me, being a survivor of a school shooting means having witnessed the event firsthand in my school community. Whatever this definition looks like for you, no one needs a detailed explanation.

2. Trauma Returns in Odd Ways

I believe that it’s really important to remember that regardless of whether you develop PTSD, you have still been through a deeply traumatic event. In the media, this trauma is often depicted as involving dramatic flashbacks or violent reactions to triggers, but real life is much more nuanced. Oftentimes, the ways that trauma shows up aren’t easy to recognize. Sure, I experience the expected hypervigilance, paranoia, and flashbacks when I hear fireworks, but my trauma has changed my life in subtler ways as well, and in ways that may feel embarrassing or “stupid.” I’ve realized that I tend to hyperfixate on shootings in the news, and will go so far as to watch old news coverage of the Parkland shooting. In restaurants, I always try to sit with my back against the wall. I prefer to fall asleep facing my door, just in case someone breaks in and I need to respond. I sometimes experience random waves of intense emotions, but I try to chalk it up to something else going on in my life (“I’m just sleep deprived”; “I’m on my period”). The most pervasive symptom I experience is a need to be prepared at all times. In any setting, my brain is going through hypothetical shootings that could occur at any moment and planning how I should react. This happens all day, every day, which means that I have unfortunately become quite accustomed to it. On the bright side, I have learned how to push these thoughts to my subconscious. But I still mention them because it’s important to be transparent about just how pervasive trauma can be in its moment-to-moment impacts. I don’t say all of this to imply that surviving a school shooting relegates you to a life of suffering, but rather to make you realize that all of these experiences and more are to be expected—and if you’re experiencing this too, you may benefit from therapy or other professional treatment. PTSD, and trauma as a whole, can feel like such a stigmatizing experience, but it is not only a normal response to such an event but also an experience shared by others. You are not alone.

3. Move Beyond “Why Me?”

These questions have haunted me for more than eight years: Why did this all happen to me? Why was my childhood innocence destroyed in such a violent and swift manner? How did this happen to me twice, the second time being at the place I love the most? Why did the universe decide to inflict this upon me? I know these questions do not have logical answers, yet the idea that I don’t deserve what I’ve been through is something that I—and maybe you— have found myself pondering for quite some time. Even though most people in my generation are acutely aware of the increasing prevalence of school shootings, you still never think it will happen to you until it does. Asking yourself these types of questions is justified and understandable, but it’s important to not get lost in them. There have been moments when my anger at the universe has led me down a path of nihilism and defeat, when I’ve convinced myself that karma, fate, or maybe even God is hell-bent on making me suffer. What’s helped me escape this endless cycle of frustration and hopelessness was shifting my focus toward the systemic violence plaguing our country, and questions about how I could help improve the situation for my fellow Americans. I continue to ground myself in the reality that school shootings do not have to be our normal, and they didn’t happen to me because of who I am as an individual, but rather because I grew up in America. This reality is still painful, but it allows more room for hope and optimism than “Why me?” ever will. Those who wish for the status quo rely on us giving up on reducing gun violence. It is therefore an act of resistance to maintain hope in the face of trauma.

4. You Are Not Alone

Although surviving a school shooting is still an incredibly rare experience, it has become an all too common occurrence in the lives of young Americans. Survival can feel extremely isolating. Even though Parkland and Brown both came together as communities in beautiful ways, I somehow still felt so alone. Whenever I was in public, I resented the people who seemed to be able to navigate life without the hypervigilance that has become my new normal. I would get frustrated with my parents and therapist, who clearly cared about what I was going through but never actually experienced what I did. What helped me finally kick this awful feeling was meeting survivors from different communities outside my own. These were people from Michigan, Texas, and elsewhere who all shared my grief, trauma, and anger. To this day, I am still close with many of those in our small but tight-knit community of school-shooting survivors involved in advocacy work. If activism isn’t your preferred coping mechanism, social media and support groups have connected me with many other school-shooting survivors. These are the friends I turn to in difficult moments—in the aftermath of an assassination, as when Charlie Kirk was killed, or in anticipation of the Fourth of July, when we’re all bracing for the sound of fireworks.

5. Give Yourself Grace

It can be hard for people who haven’t gone through a school shooting to understand just how exhausting everyday life can become when you are constantly on alert or anxious about your own safety. The most difficult mental obstacle for me has had to do with managing my own expectations for myself. Sustained levels of hypervigilance take a physical toll that often goes unrecognized, contributing to everything from fatigue to poor academic performance and even chronic pain. This ties into the oft-cited trope of creating your “new normal,” and as much as the term used to make me cringe, it’s really true. Humans are not meant to endure the type of suffering that school shootings inflict, and it would be unfair to expect yourself to bounce right back to your previous level of functioning. Instead of viewing my recovery as something linear that will improve over time, I’ve learned that life can be far more enjoyable and fulfilling if I don’t hold myself to unrealistic standards. I have good days and bad days, days when I rarely think about the shootings and days when they are all-consuming for seemingly no reason. To learn to live with your trauma, it’s imperative that you be gentle with your mind and your body.

If I’d read an article like this when I was 12, I’d like to think I could have saved myself some time trying to figure out how to move forward. However, I also want to acknowledge the absurdity that a guide to coping with a school shooting is necessary in the first place. After the Parkland shooting, I developed a growing resentment toward anyone who continued to act “normal” despite the world-shattering trauma I had just endured. How could the world keep spinning when our government barely batted an eye at a teenager murdering 17 people in less than seven minutes in a school building? How did the media and politicians move on so quickly once the manhunt for the Brown University shooter came to its violent end? I used to think of these frustrations as a trauma response, but I now see that there’s a more nuanced reason behind my anger: This country has abandoned those of us who bear the brunt of gun violence.

Our politicians have never had to experience monthly lockdown drills in school, or feel the unique fear of sitting in a classroom not knowing if your next moment will be your last. I hate that it takes life-changing trauma for people to feel compelled to speak out against gun violence. No more children should have to be shot in school at the expense of irresponsibly lax firearm regulations. Solving gun violence in America warrants not only a sweeping political response, but also a cultural reset. As Americans, why must we value the Second Amendment over our children, our future? Why must gun culture be so engrained in our national identity? And why must we remain complacent to an objectively solvable epidemic of gun violence? I hope that someday soon, the advice I’ve given you can become obsolete.

Why Trump Keeps Getting Rolled in Negotiations

2026-05-26T17:11:00-04:00

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.

Donald Trump’s reputation and political career were built on his dealmaking prowess, yet the president keeps demonstrating that he is a terrible negotiator.

Repeatedly over the past nine years, Trump has gotten rolled by counterparts during high-stakes exchanges. North Korea, Russia, Russia again, China, and China again have gotten the better of the United States. Trump has had to slink back to Washington without much to show except empty talk about friendship with whatever dictator has just run circles around him. He’s had some success in brokering agreements when acting as a third party (though not nearly as much as he pretends) but much less luck when his own government is a participant. The one glaring exception came when he was effectively negotiating with himself, getting his own administration to set up a $1.8 billion slush fund for his political allies.

The newest example of Trump’s artlessness is Iran. Let’s review the past few days: Trump posted on Saturday that he was close to striking a deal with Tehran that would end the war he started earlier this year and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. As the outlines of the agreement began to emerge, it looked both incomplete and bad: Trump had postponed discussing the hardest issues—matters, such as nuclear weapons, that led him to go to war—in exchange for opening the strait, which was open before Trump started the war. Hawkish Trump allies promptly criticized the deal, and despite histrionic pushback from Trump aides, the president had begun backing off claims of an imminent agreement by Sunday. “If I make a deal with Iran, it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama,” he posted. “Our deal is the exact opposite, but nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet.” Yesterday, in a sign that a deal might not be near at all, the U.S. military conducted what it called “self-defense strikes” against Iranian targets—directly contradicting the administration’s previous claims about having wiped out any threats to the United States in Iran.

The situation demonstrates a few reasons that Trump is such a bad negotiator. My colleagues Tom Nichols and Robert Kagan have all written illuminating articles on the specific failures inherent or likely in any deal with Iran. But the incident also shows the structural problems with the president’s approach.

First, Trump is unprepared. Some effective presidents (Dwight Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush) came to the White House with a history of deep engagement in public affairs and foreign relations, which made them ready to handle sensitive foreign negotiations. Others brought a formidable work ethic and a ruthless intellect (Barack Obama, Bill Clinton). Both types surround themselves with smart advisers whose input they take seriously. Trump is 0 for 3 on these conditions, which is one reason he wrote off the risk of Iran closing the strait in the first place: He both surrounds himself with less qualified aides than past presidents did and refuses to heed their counsel. The same failure of preparation extends to the frontline negotiators. Even after many of its top officials were killed in the war, Iran has maintained a hard-nosed corps of diplomats who have long been involved in foreign policy. Trump, by contrast, has dispatched a real-estate pal and his nepo-baby son-in-law. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, perhaps the best informed of Trump’s aides, has been largely invisible.

Second, as the roller-coaster weekend demonstrates, Trump is mercurial. Keeping one’s bottom line ambiguous in a negotiation is canny, but Trump doesn’t appear to have any bottom line in his own mind. He has cycled through different rationales for the war, including regime change and stopping Iran’s nuclear program, but hasn’t landed on one. Lacking a goal in the war means he also lacks a goal in the peace talks. Iran may be able to use that to its advantage, but even if its leaders are eager to make a deal, they will be understandably reluctant to agree to anything that requires a leap of faith, because Trump may change his mind at any moment, as appeared to happen amid Republican backlash in recent days.

Third, Trump is desperate for a deal, and everyone knows it. His misjudgments have led him to corporate bankruptcies and cheap sales in business, and he’s in a similar situation now. Every conflict between an autocracy and a democracy (however fragile this one may be) is asymmetric: Trump has to be concerned about public opinion, whereas Iran’s leaders have shown not only that they are indifferent to the suffering of their people; they are willing to massacre them by the thousands. But as the war drags on with no positive resolution in sight, and the U.S. economy looks shakier, Trump has become visibly more frantic to reach a peace agreement. (The president also seemed eager to have something to show for his weekend, because he skipped his eldest son’s wedding, ostensibly to work.) Iran, sensing Trump’s need for a deal, has maintained a hard line.

All of these factors combine to mean that Trump is ill-equipped to win any negotiation, much less one that is the result of his own blundering into war. Trump is likely to muddle through, as he has so many times in his career, and reach some sort of agreement with Iran. He will surely say that it’s a great triumph, but reality will be harder to ignore than it was when Trump’s failures merely hurt his own bank accounts.

One of the ironies of The Art of the Deal, the book that made Trump’s reputation as a clever businessman, is that Trump himself didn’t write it. His ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, has said that he cobbled the volume together after sitting at Trump’s elbow while he conducted his daily business. Unfortunately, it’s probably too late for Trump to hire a real professional to handle negotiations with Iran.

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps warned it would use a “decisive reciprocal response” against any violations of the cease-fire after U.S. Central Command said it had carried out strikes yesterday in southern Iran.
The Republican-majority South Carolina Senate blocked a White House–led effort to redraw the state’s congressional map ahead of the midterms, dealing a setback to President Trump’s redistricting agenda.
A federal court temporarily blocked Alabama from using a new congressional map that Republicans hoped would help them regain a Democratic-held House seat in the midterms, ordering the state to keep its current districts for now.

Evening Read

Illustration by Alisa Gao / The Atlantic. Source: Joe Raedle / Getty.

The Advice I Hope You’ll Never Need

By Zoe Weissman

If you’re reading this, there’s a chance that you have survived, witnessed, or somehow experienced a school shooting, which is a common enough occurrence in the United States that I felt compelled to write this essay. I myself have been through two school shootings: first in Parkland, Florida, when I was 12, and then at Brown University at the age of 20. As my university came together to cope with the tragedy we experienced on December 13, 2025, I noticed that sharing my prior experiences helped my peers feel understood and also made me feel better in the process.

Since I was 13 years old, I’ve dedicated myself to fighting for the prevention of gun violence. Now I hope that by sharing what I have learned over the past eight years and two school shootings, perhaps even one person will feel less alone. If you are in the unfortunate position of being able to relate to what I went through, I hope these five pieces of advice bring you comfort.

Read the full article.

The Great Depopulation

2026-05-26T07:00:00-04:00

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

Why has the number of births declined everywhere, all at once?

Some blame technology, particularly smartphones and social media. Others blame a kind of 21st-century weltschmerz—a sadness about the state of the world and our uncertain future in it. A long essay in The New York Times by Anna Louie Sussman, titled “Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All,” argues that today’s generation is too anxious about the future to make the irreversible commitment of having a child.

So who is right? Is this about phones and technology, or is it a reflection of modern anxiety about the world? Or, perhaps, both?

Birth rates have been declining in developed countries for a long time, as child mortality has declined, as women’s education has increased, as female labor-force participation has soared, as contraception use has proliferated, and as modern notions of feminism have empowered women to take more control over their bodies and their economic futures. And birth rates have continued to decline as smartphone usage has surged, as housing prices have increased, as time spent at home on the internet has grown, and as socialization and coupling have declined.

The decline is accelerating faster than almost anybody predicted. As John Burn-Murdoch recently observed in the Financial Times, United Nations demographers predicted that there would be 350,000 births in South Korea in 2023; the real figure came in at 230,000. The total fertility rate has fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman in almost every country in North America, South America, Europe, and southern and eastern Asia.

“Only two things are important right now in life: fertility and deep learning,” the University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde said at the conclusion of a recent lecture. “Everything else is noise. Once you start thinking about these, it’s hard to start thinking about anything else.” I recently spoke with Fernández-Villaverde about why the birth rate is dropping, why it matters, and just how steep the decline is likely to get.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Derek Thompson: Why is fertility important?

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde: The number of children born today will determine how our society will look in 30 to 40 years. The year 2023 was a unique year in the history of humanity, because it’s the first time our total fertility rate as a planet fell below replacement rate. That has never happened before in 200,000 years. That means the world population will peak in another 30 years or so if the trend continues.

Thompson: Tell me what replacement level means and what total fertility rate means.

Fernández-Villaverde: Imagine you have a population of 1 million people. How many children need to be born for that population to be constant at 1 million in the long run? It turns out that for every woman in that population, you need 2.1 kids.

Why 2.1 and not 2.0? Two reasons. First, there are a little more boys born than girls, around 105 boys for every 100 girls, if you don’t do anything like selective abortions. Second, not all girls who are born will move on to become mothers themselves. They will die of accidents or other reasons before they enter their fertile ages. So you need every woman to have 2.1 kids on average to keep population constant. That’s the replacement rate.

The total fertility rate is an estimate of how many children women will have in a given population. When we look at the U.S. right now, the fertility rate is around 1.57. That means the average American woman is having 1.57 kids. Because the replacement rate is 2.1, a way to think about it is that we have a shortfall of slightly over 0.5 kids. There is a subtlety I want the audience to understand. The total fertility rate is an estimate. It’s slightly different from what we call “completed fertility.” Completed fertility is when I go back to women who are already 50 years old and see how many kids they actually had. The problem with completed fertility, which is what we really care about in the very long run, is that by definition it takes decades before we can compute it. So if we are going to make any forecast about the future, we cannot rely on completed fertility.

[Marc Novicoff: The fertility crisis isn’t as bad as you’ve heard—it’s worse]

Thompson: Given your educated estimate, what is the decade when the global population will start its structural decline?

Fernández-Villaverde: At this moment, I would say 2055. In 2055, the world population will start going down.

Thompson: If you go back to the 1960s and 1970s, it was common for public intellectuals to predict that the global population would rise and rise until the environment buckled and we suffered ecological disaster and widespread famine that wiped out billions of human souls. That has not happened. Global fertility has declined significantly. It’s falling faster than practically anybody predicted, certainly folks like Paul Ehrlich, author of the infamous book The Population Bomb. Why do you think these so-called experts were both so confident and so wrong?

Fernández-Villaverde: The wording of your question already tells you a lot about the answer, because you used the word public intellectuals. You didn’t use the word demographers.

I’m a professor at Penn, and we have—sorry to brag—what I think is one of the best demographics groups in the world. Had you gone to our population study center in 1968 or 1969 and asked professional demographers what they thought about Ehrlich’s book, they would have probably said, “Eh!” I would argue the book was not very good at the time, and what a lot of the public intellectuals were saying was not really what the best demographers were saying.

Thompson: But your research also seems to disagree strongly with expert demographers today. You’ve said that you think the United Nations is overestimating the total fertility rate of many countries. Why are today’s experts wrong?

Fernández-Villaverde: The Population Division of the United Nations was created because there was a serious concern that we were having a population bomb. It’s very difficult for an institution that has spent 60 years saying we had a population bomb to wake up and say, “There is no population bomb.”

In fact, the UN has three scenarios: low fertility, middle fertility, high fertility. My scenario and their low-fertility scenario are on top of each other. It’s not that I’m very far away from the UN. We are already fighting about the second decimal. The problem is that these things, even at the second decimal, accumulate over half a century.

Thompson: I think a lot of people believe that falling fertility is mostly a rich-country phenomenon. But you point out that’s a misconception. Total fertility rate is lower than that of the U.S. in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Thailand. Why is this happening at a global level?

Fernández-Villaverde: There are several hypotheses on the table, and I’m going to list them in what I think is their relative importance.

First, there’s been a huge change in social norms worldwide. This probably has a lot to do with social media and cellphones. If you’re in a country like South Korea, or in many Latin American countries, where household work allocation is very unequal, suddenly a lot of younger women are looking at the world and saying, “Why am I going to be working for my husband 24 hours a day?” Social media has really changed that perception.

Second, we have moved to an economy that is much more service-based. Service-based economies, even in India and Africa, mean people don’t work in factories that much anymore, or even in agriculture. They work in shops; they work in offices. Those are jobs much easier for women to have, because they don’t depend on physical strength. In Mexico, Brazil, or Colombia, if you are a woman 22 or 23 years old with a decent job in the service sector, and a guy comes to you and tells you, “If we get married, I’m going to be the macho in the home, ruling everything; you are going to work for me all the time, and we are going to have three kids,” you tell the guy no.

Third is what I have called the educational arms race. People are staying much longer in school. They are marrying or forming partnerships much later in life. When they are thinking about their kids, they understand they will need to maintain their kids and educate their kids for many, many years. This is particularly true in Asia—in China, Korea, and Japan, where [there is pressure for] your kid to excel in high school and college. Those are the countries with the lowest fertility rates.

The last is housing. In many countries, not in all, housing is at historical heights in relative price. That also limits the ability of families to have more children.

Thompson: Two other issues I want to put on the table. First, contraception. Second, socialization rates in the West and throughout East Asia have gone down. People socialize less, they couple up less. When you put all of this together, having kids has gone from being a necessity or a predestination to a choice.

[From the February 2025 issue: The anti-social century]

Fernández-Villaverde: At the very basic level, I fully agree. That’s why I already forecast back in 2001 that fertility was going to drop a lot. But if you stopped the Jesús of 2001 and told him Colombia’s fertility was 2.8 or 3 then, and asked me where I thought Colombia’s fertility would be in 2026, given all these mechanisms, I would have probably said 1.8, 1.7. What the Jesús of 2001 would have been enormously surprised by is that it’s not 1.8 or 1.7. It’s 1.1.

That’s what has surprised me, that we have not gone from seven to two. We have gone down much, much further.

You were mentioning contraception. The U.S. was around 1.9 in 2000. There was lots of contraception in the U.S. in 2000. And in 2000, the U.S. was already a service-based economy. It was already a world where women were empowered, maybe not as much as today, but not very different from today. So why have we gone from the 1.9 of 2000 to the 1.57 of today? That is the mystery.

Thompson: More education for women is good. More freedom for women is good. I’m very pro–access to contraception. So the reasons for the decline of fertility are a mix of, I think, quite clearly good things and arguably bad things. Similarly, the implications of the decline of fertility combine both upsides and downsides. Let’s talk about the upsides first.

Fernández-Villaverde: In a world where population doesn’t grow or where population starts going down, we will consume less energy, or the growth of energy consumption will be smaller. That’s good for the environment.

Second, it will help us redesign a lot of cities across the world. I’m originally from Madrid, in Spain. A lot of the residential neighborhoods in Madrid are ugly. People don’t see those when they come to visit Madrid, but they are really ugly, because in the 1960s and 1970s when population was growing very fast, you had to build these horrible high-rises just to put people under a roof. We are not going to need those ugly high-rises. We can demolish them.

Thompson: What are the downsides?

Fernández-Villaverde: The obvious thing that comes to mind is Social Security. Everything related to retirement benefits, Social Security payments, the equivalent of Medicare and similar health programs for the elderly across the world, that’s going to impose a tremendous amount of cost on the planet. But also you are going to start being forced to close primary schools. The school district here in Philadelphia, where I live, was just forced to announce a couple of weeks ago that they are closing a lot of primary schools because there are no kids. That’s a serious disruption for a lot of local communities. You will be forced to close hospitals. You will be forced to close a lot of other public services.

Finally, if fertility really stays at 1 or 1.1 for a long time, I don’t think we appreciate how big a change this is. Now I’m going to make a crazy forecast, and I want everyone to understand this is a crazy forecast. Let’s suppose Thailand keeps its current fertility rate of 0.8 for 200 years. Thailand right now has 63 million people. At the end of 200 years, it will be around 2 million people.

Thompson: Sorry, 2 million?

Fernández-Villaverde: Two million. How do you wind down a society of 63 million people into 2 million? When population starts falling a lot, countries may do crazy subsidies for having kids—things can change. Maybe the people who are still having kids tend to have more kids, and they grow as a share of the population. All of those things can happen. I’m just highlighting that these things compound over time. You are going from a society that has 63 million people to a society that has 2 million. It means you need to close 98 percent of the hospitals of the country. It means you need to close 98 percent of the schools of the country.

Thompson: It also seems to me that the politics of immigration become a significant and unavoidable part of sustaining the welfare state, because what do you need to sustain a welfare state? You need taxable income. Where does the income come from? It comes from people. And if you’re running out of people, you need to import people, and that’s called immigration. But in my experience as someone who lives thousands of miles away from Europe, it seems to me like practically every country that allows immigrants to become a certain share of their population almost always has a populist backlash.

Slashing Social Security creates another backlash. So you find yourself in an environment where there is no long-term popular solution to your political problems. That’s what I see as an outsider.

Fernández-Villaverde: Exactly. Japan right now is around 98 percent ethnically Japanese. If we wanted to keep the population of Japan constant in 200 years through immigration, in 200 years Japan will be 5 percent Japanese and 95 percent non-Japanese. This is not about bringing in a few immigrants. This is about changing your country. That country will not be Japan. You may say, “I’m perfectly fine. I’m not attached to the idea of Japan in the abstract.” But I can see a lot of Japanese say, “This is not about being a xenophobe. This is not about being anti-immigrant. This is about not having a country anymore.”

In Spain, in addition to Spanish, we have regional languages like Catalan. The problem is Catalonia is getting a lot of immigrants. The immigrants are not Catalan speakers. Their kids may learn Catalan in school, but they don’t speak Catalan. Given the current level of immigration, Catalan, I have forecast, is doomed as a language. It will not exist. Some people will always speak it in a small village in the mountains, but as a working language of day-to-day life, Catalan is doomed. If you’re a native Catalan speaker, this is existential. So this is not about being anti-immigrant because I’m a nasty guy. This is not about being racist. This is just about saying, “Don’t I have a right to my language to still exist?” I’m an immigrant myself, so it’s not that I’m against immigration. But like everything, it needs to be within a reasonable degree.

Thompson: You said only two things matter in the world. One is fertility. The other one is deep learning—AI. How do these trends intersect?

Fernández-Villaverde: They intersect to some degree, but not as much as sometimes people think. If, thanks to artificial intelligence and robotics, a lot of jobs can be done by computers and robots, and that generates a lot of economic growth and that helps us to pay for Social Security, that will make the transition much easier. I’m a bit of a techno-optimist in that sense, and I’m glad this is happening. I think it’s going to give us more degrees of freedom to adapt our society.

But coming back to my point before, this is just not about GDP. My wife and I love to go to a small village in England to spend some time on vacation. It’s a lovely English village. They recently closed the local pub because of population decline. The problem is the local pub in an English village is not just the place you go for a beer. It’s the place where you meet your neighbors. It’s the social gathering place of the village. How are you going to substitute that with artificial intelligence?

This article was adapted from a post on Derek Thompson’s Substack.

Americans Have Entered the Age of the Needle

2026-05-26T08:43:55-04:00

My generation—which is to say, the pillbox generation—came of age during the 1990s. The number of adults who were taking five or more prescription drugs doubled in that decade; the use of medications for depression and cholesterol more than tripled. If pills had once been used from time to time to curb a headache or stifle an infection, now they were a daily ritual for tens of millions of Americans. Popping meds, whether by catapult or tweezers, became the norm.

In the 2020s, we’re living through a second such transition: the dawning of the needle age.

For the past five years, the nation’s shots have multiplied to levels never seen before. Injected medications were once unusual, and mostly limited to diabetics who needed insulin. Now millions of diabetics use syringes of Ozempic, and millions of other people are on Mounjaro for weight loss. In 2025, some 12 percent of all U.S. adults partook of these injections or others in their class. GLP-1 shots were so commonplace last year that they accounted for about 7 percent of all prescriptions in America.

Even this is just the tip of the needle. Americans’ use of IVF has doubled in a decade, and now requires something on the order of 10 million to 20 million self-administered hormone shots a year. By 2024, 10 million rounds of Botox (or other wrinkle relaxants) were given out, along with 8 million filler treatments. Although some cosmetic shots are administered in doctors’ offices, many of the rest are received at the 10,000 “medical spas” that have lately come to dot the country. These are puncture parlors, more or less, and they offer a growing list of services: not just treatments for the skin but also vitamin injections, IV-dripped electrolytes, and minerals delivered through a tube. One needle-forward wellness chain, called JECT, has locations in Miami Beach, West Hollywood, the Hamptons, and, as it happens, right around the corner from my house in Brooklyn. If I were ever in the mood, I could head over for a “24K gold micro-dosing” process that will supposedly inject my face 2,400 times a minute.

[Read: No one in movies knows how to swallow a pill]

These needle trend lines have been building for a while. Botox was approved for cosmetic use in 2002, and the first GLP-1-based drug for diabetes reached the market three years after that. But today’s rampant culture of injection did not have its breakthrough moment until early summer 2021, when the FDA signed off on semaglutide, the ingredient in Ozempic, as a treatment for obesity. That kicked off the weight-loss-medication craze. A month later, Joe Rogan told his millions of podcast listeners that injecting peptides—not insulin or Ozempic, but other, less established ones—can have miraculous results. Rogan said he’d tried one in particular called BPC-157, which cured his elbow tendinitis in two weeks. Peptide fever built from there, on glowing testimonials from tech bros, celebrities, and eventually officials at the highest levels of the U.S. government. “I’m a big fan of peptides; I’ve used them myself,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Rogan earlier this year. (RFK Jr. has also promised that regulators will soon be easing restrictions on the sale of peptides.)

The funny thing about our growing love for getting shots is how utterly at odds it is with human nature. Who, exactly, has any sort of love for getting shots? Needlephobia is natural and indeed appears to be widespread, even among grown-ups. Although formal research on the topic has been somewhat limited, a 2018 review of several dozen studies found that for adults under 40, the rate of needle fear may be as high as 30 percent. According to the same analysis, 16 percent may skip their flu shots simply to avoid the stress of an injection.

[Read: Should your flu and COVID shots go in different arms?]

This last point in particular was worried over in summer 2021, just as our needle age was starting. New vaccines had been developed to reduce the risk of death from COVID-19, and experts worried that anxiety over needle sticks would hamper uptake. One paper out that June concluded that one-tenth of all COVID-vaccine hesitancy could be explained in just this way. Some people even called for a needle-fear exemption to be added to the mandates for vaccines.

And yet none of this posed a challenge to the rollout that ensued, which became without a doubt the largest mass injection effort in the nation’s history. By the end of 2021, more than half a billion doses of the COVID shots had been plunged into our deltoids. Let’s put that in “24K gold micro-dosing” terms: Americans received an average of 1,000 COVID shots a minute, every single minute of that year.

[Read: The good news about vaccine hesitancy]

Yet a wariness about vaccines persists; perhaps it’s even grown, in certain quarters, since we started getting immunized against COVID. Jennifer Reich, a medical sociologist at the University of Colorado at Denver, has found that some people who refuse vaccines may indeed be hung up on the thought of a needle entering their body. But they aren’t simply squeamish; they’re worried by the fact that injections are unnatural, that a shot administers medicine in a way that isn’t right. “I would love it if they would put more research into edible vaccinations,” one mother told her, “so that it goes through the digestive system rather than directly—bang!—into the bloodstream.”

This framing of injection as a shortcut into people’s bodies conveys another meaning, too: It suggests that shots have greater potency and purity than other forms of medication. As a medical technology, the needle “plays in these contradictory ways,” Reich told me; what makes it scary also makes it strong. If you really want a given treatment, then you might prefer the needle version to a pill, so that it is delivered—bang!—into your bloodstream, where presumably it acts with greatest force. Inject that Botox straight into my wrinkles, please. Let me shoot this muscle-building peptide right into my butt.

In this way, America’s needlephilia and needlephobia are tightly coupled, both across the culture and among individuals. “There’s a huge overlap between people who sell the promise of wellness through alternative means and people who oppose vaccines,” Reich said. Indeed, this overlap has been a hallmark of the age of injections: The same person who might “stack” half a dozen experimental peptide injections into his weekly regimen may also end up saying no to a COVID booster; the same person who will pay $900 for microneedling with salmon sperm may refuse a hepatitis B shot for her newborn baby.

This isn’t quite a contradiction, though. People seem to draw a line between injections for the greater good and injections for their own well-being. When you’re given a vaccine, you’re participating in the work of public health, and hoping to stave off an illness that you may have never experienced and that may never pose a risk to you directly. When you take a dose of semaglutide, you’re engaged in private care, and expecting to optimize your own health, visibly and quickly. That difference is reflected in the hand that holds the needle: A vaccine gets put into your arm by someone else; most GLP-1 drugs are self-injected. (Oral formulations of GLP-1s for weight loss have become available in recent months.) “I think that sense of control over the mode of administration might be really important,” Reich said. The line between public health and private wellness also changes how the drugs are regulated: In the past two years the government has taken steps to raise the bar for demonstrating the safety of vaccines, while lowering it for peptides.

Reich told me that she thinks the needle is an emblem of a broader shift toward asking individuals to solve their own health problems. For some parents, even vaccines have been “recast as kind of an optimization technology,” she said; they tell her how they pick and choose among the recommended shots, asking whether and how each one might personally benefit their children. In this worldview, the vaccine schedule may not look that different from the menu of services at JECT.

Maybe this is where we’re headed next: injections as a vector for autonomy in medicine, vaccinations à la carte, home recipes for peptide shots, glucose sensors poking through your skin. This is health care in 2026. Welcome to the needle age.

The ‘Vibecession’ Is Over. The ‘Permacession’ Is Here.

2026-05-24T07:15:12-04:00

According to Americans, it is bad out there. Real bad. This month, the University of Michigan’s index of consumer sentiment dropped to its lowest point since 1952, when the survey started. A poll of potential Republican voters found that just 43 percent rated the economy as “excellent” or “good” and 55 percent as “fair” or “poor”; for potential Democratic voters, the shares were 5 percent and 94 percent, respectively. Low-income families are nervous, and so are high-income ones. Students and retirees are dour. Rural and urban voters are dissatisfied. People are worried about the present and future. They’re concerned for themselves and their neighbors.

Indeed, households are feeling worse about their personal finances and the broader state of the economy than they did during the Great Inflation of the 1970s, when the cost of groceries doubled and the government was forced to ration gasoline; the Volcker shock, from 1979 to 1982, when the average interest rate on 30-year mortgages hit 18.6 percent and the country went into devastating back-to-back recessions; the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, when 200,000 firms collapsed, the unemployment rate flirted with 15 percent, and essentials such as infant formula became impossible to find; and the Great Recession, when the stock market lost half its value, the banking system teetered on the brink of implosion, and lenders foreclosed on 6 million homes.

I have been covering the “vibecession” for a few years now, and I thought I mostly understood it. Headline economic statistics are failing to capture the fragility and strain that consumers are experiencing. Families are struggling to afford child care and health care. The housing shortage is eating into incomes. Inflation is pissing consumers off every time they hit the grocery store. Inequality is cleaving the haves and the have-nots. A hiring freeze is preventing young people from embarking on their chosen career. But seeing the latest consumer-sentiment figures and comparing them with hard economic data, I found that my usual explanations fell short.

[Annie Lowrey: The everything recession ]

Americans are expressing some of the deepest, broadest, and stubbornest economic pessimism ever recorded. They’re doing so even though nearly every American who wants a job has one and the stock market is booming. Things aren’t perfect, and people have plenty of reasons to be disappointed. But I couldn’t come up with a coherent explanation for why people are this down about an economy this good, or why they are so mad right now.

Instead of trying to understand why the American people were right, I began trying to understand why they were wrong. We shouldn’t call it a vibecession anymore, I came to think. Vibes are temporary, and whatever this is isn’t going away. It’s a “permacession.” People have stopped believing that the economy can be good, and have lost the willingness to admit that they are doing well. That pessimism might be harder to fix than an actual downturn.

At this point, I feel obligated to harp on an unpopular and perhaps even offensive truth—a truth that Americans don’t want to hear and don’t want to believe, a truth that might get me ripped apart in the comments and actually-ed across the internet: This economy is delivering significant improvements in living standards for the majority of American families across the income spectrum. This economy is pretty darn great.

Ninety-six out of every 100 Americans who want a job have one. The rate of underemployment is low, and the rate of labor-force participation is high, meaning that there’s no pool of discouraged workers lurking behind the marquee jobs statistics. Young workers are struggling to establish themselves, given businesses’ caution around hiring. Still, the tight labor market has fueled wage gains that have swelled family budgets, even after accounting for inflation. Real disposable personal income, which measures how much spending power Americans actually have, is at a record high. Inequality has eased, following an extended period in which the earnings of low-income Americans grew faster than those of their rich peers. People are spending more than they ever have on rent and health care, sure, but also on DoorDash and meals in restaurants, vacations, cars, pets, clothing, and “wellness”—concierge doctors, supplements, red-light masks. Part of the reason app-based gambling has taken off is because dudes are flush enough to afford stupid prop bets.

A few years ago, or even one year ago, we had much more reason to worry. In 2022, nominal prices jumped 8 percent, forcing the Federal Reserve to jack up interest rates. Economists debated whether the country would need to undergo a brief recession to restore price stability, or whether we would end up in a 1970s-style stagflationary cycle. Pretty much everyone thought we would enter a double-dip downturn. Yet businesses and households shrugged it all off. Companies kept hiring. Investors kept investing. Families kept spending. Despite the doom and gloom, resilience has been the hallmark of the post-COVID economy. The United States has powered through a change of power in Washington, a trade war, a hot war with Iran, a sharp round of monetary tightening, and an extended government shutdown without the engine giving out.

Look outside this country, and American prosperity comes into sharper relief. Europe’s GDP per capita was 77 percent of the United States’ as of 2008. Now, the continent is half as productive. The American middle class is richer than the middle class of every major European economy. If France and Britain were states, they would be the poorest in the Union.

Look outside this millennium, and the current prosperity becomes dazzling. Americans feel worse now than they did at every financial nadir we have hit since the world wars. Many insist that the middle class had it better in the 1950s and 1960s, when a single income could cover a big suburban ranch house with a picket fence and a yard for the kids. Except that, for most Americans, it could not. The average American today purchases nearly twice as much stuff as the average American did in the early 1990s. Homes are twice as large as they were in the 1960s, when a significant subset of Americans did not have indoor plumbing.

What gives, then? Why do people feel so terrible? A few persistent trends are weighing on consumer assessments of the economy, and a few structural factors are keeping Americans from feeling as comfortable as their bank statements and the national accounts suggest they should.

Inequality is perhaps the most fundamental. The top 10 percent of American earners make as much as the bottom 90 percent. The richest 1 percent of households account for more wealth than the entirety of the middle class. Inequality has frozen intergenerational mobility (a kid born to poor parents has less than a one-in-10 chance of making it to the top fifth of the income ladder) and driven a wedge in life expectancy (rich men live 15 years longer than poor men). This slows growth, destroys social trust, increases judgment and moralism, and saps societal happiness.

Add to this a cost-of-living crisis that has squeezed working families. For more than two decades, the cost of essential services—child care, health care, higher education, and elder care—has crept up faster than the overall pace of inflation. Since the Great Recession, a huge and growing housing shortage has led rents and mortgages to skyrocket. Millions of Americans are living in apartments they consider too small or too shabby, in neighborhoods they do not really want to live in. Millions are putting off getting married, purchasing a home, having a child, starting a business, or switching careers thanks to housing costs.

When the pandemic hit, the price of everything jumped, increasing the salience of the affordability crisis. Once the supply chains unsnarled, the tight labor market came with a strange, uncomfortable downside: Rising wages for low-income workers translated into raising prices for middle- and high-income consumers. Janitors, home-health aides, line cooks, day-care teachers, manicurists, and taxi drivers started making more. Teachers, accountants, social-media consultants, inventory managers, and payroll administrators did not exactly like it.

Then there’s polarization. Republicans and Democrats view the economy far more differently than they used to. What was a 20-point gap in partisan economic expectations during the Reagan and Obama administrations has become a 50-point gap during the Trump administrations. “The size of the partisan divide in expectations has completely dominated rational assessments” of the economy, argues Joanne Hsu, the director of the University of Michigan’s surveys of consumers.

These factors help explain why the vibes got so awful after the Great Recession. But they don’t explain why people are so much more fed up today than they were a year ago or three years ago. Maybe voters are ticked off that prices haven’t come down in the way Trump said they would, Paul Krugman has argued. Maybe the 2022 price spike was “uniquely challenging relative to historical antecedents,” Jared Bernstein and Daniel Posthumus have theorized. Perhaps voters need a few more years of wage gains beating price hikes before they feel good again. Maybe families are furious that gas prices are spiking right before summer-travel season. Or maybe this has less to do with the real economy than you might think.

Americans seem to be mad about everything, or in spite of everything. Rates of teen pregnancy, domestic abuse, vehicle crashes, and violent crime have plummeted. Nobody cares. Scientists have saved babies, extended lifetimes, and cured cancers. Nobody cares. Researchers came up with a drug that takes the struggle out of dieting. Nobody cares. The unemployment rate goes up. Nobody cares. The unemployment rate goes down. Nobody cares. Inequality goes up. Nobody cares. Inequality goes down. Nobody cares. Or rather, everybody cares. And they’re cynical and furious.

As Sam Peltzman of the University of Chicago has found, the country has experienced “a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness,” across “nearly all typical demographics and geographies.” Roughly 20 to 25 percentage points more Americans described themselves as “very happy” than “not so happy” from 1970 to 2020. Then, the “not so happy” group swelled and the “very happy” group shrank, narrowing the gap to zero to five percentage points, where it has remained. He calls it the “happiness crash.”

[From the February 2025 issue: The anti-social century ]

The crash coincides with a collapse in institutional confidence: Americans are giving up on the Supreme Court, the military, corporations, the education system, religious groups, medical professionals, and scientists. It also coincides with a collapse in civic trust. Fewer people think that their neighbors are trustworthy; fewer believe that the political system can or will deliver for them. Fair enough, I guess. Institutions haven’t exactly acquitted themselves well since the Great Recession. Still, the internet nurtures these Hobbesian, splenetic views. We never got back to socializing in person after COVID, as my colleague Derek Thompson has noted. And the social media we replaced our friends with lost the social part. In a few decades, we have gone from comparing ourselves with our neighbors to comparing ourselves with our friends on Facebook to sucking on a gavage tube of unabashedly consumerist, questionably accurate, highly emotional, and extremely polarizing short-form video content, milled for us by attention-farming software.

TikTok videos and Instagram reels make people fiscally delulu—I hate myself—encouraging manic spending and inculcating “money dysmorphia.” At the same time, they give people a delulu—yet I can’t stop—sense of how the economy is doing. I searched for phrases such as how jobs are doing and keywords such as hiring and economy 2026 while writing this story. I was not presented with a bunch of videos about how the jobless rate is 4.3 percent, or the surprising fortitude of the American economy, or the fact that Gen Zers are off to a better financial start in life than Millennials were at the same age. Instead, I saw a bunch of fake ads for fake jobs, nonsensical class analyses, and slop about how AI is crashing the whole labor market, along with crypto spam. This kind of negativity drives engagement. To be fair to TikTok, even the real news has gotten far more dire. Because we live in a complicated, unequal, and expensive economy, there’s always a true but incomplete scary story to tell.

People are distressed about gas prices and inflation and the housing market. Or they’re distressed about everything, and gas prices and inflation and the housing market are fuel for their dissatisfaction. Or they’re distressed about everything because they’re shotgunning horror stories about how fragile the economy is while watching people redecorate their casitas in earth tones, and so they’re redecorating their bedroom in earth tones, and they’re terrified because Donald Trump is in the office or because one day he won’t be. (I think.) And if you point out the prosperity we are all experiencing, if definitely not enjoying, people berate you for being snooty and/or naive.

In a roundabout way, the country’s affluence might be contributing to its pessimism. Seventy years ago, voters were overwhelmingly concerned with life-and-death issues: war, hunger, disease, violence. Today voters are more worried about social concerns: the environment, minority rights, immigration, health policy, casitas, I guess. They have shifted from materialism to postmaterialism, in the framing of the political scientist Ronald Inglehart. And postmaterialism has driven the rise of identity politics, which revolve more around who a person is and what they want rather than what they truly need.

I don’t see an easy salve for what’s ailing us, even if prices at the pump go back down. People aren’t going to change how they spend their time. Social-media platforms aren’t going to change what kind of content they deliver. Voters aren’t going to become less jaded, polarized, riven by contempt, puffed up on self-righteousness, or susceptible to fearmongering, just as they won’t become more trusting of major institutions. If measurable improvements in the economy have little effect on measured sentiment, a crucial feedback loop between good politics and good policies is broken. We may end up with the economy we fear we already have—and if that happens, I suppose you could say that we asked for it.

The Olympics These Were Not

2026-05-25T16:35:00-04:00

Photographs by Maggie Shannon

In person, they did not seem quite real. Gathered on a blue carpet under bright lights, inside a $50 million Las Vegas venue that had been built just for them, the athletes of the Enhanced Games—colloquially known as the “doping Olympics”—looked like action figures. When they stood next to other people, the effect was different but no less uncanny; it was as if they’d been Photoshopped, blown up 25 percent compared with the rest of their species.

They were here competing in three sports—running, weightlifting, and swimming—under the banner of Enhanced, a sporting event and supplement company that has, over the past few years, raised more than $300 million in venture capital, including from Peter Thiel and 1789 Capital, which aims to fund “the next chapter of American exceptionalism” and counts Donald Trump Jr. as a partner. The games, once announced, quickly became one of the most controversial sporting events in recent history. The premise was that anyone could take any FDA-approved substance; whoever broke a world record would win up to $1 million. (Non-doping athletes were welcome to compete for the same prize pool, if they could handle the odds.) The event would be broadcast live on YouTube and Roku, but really, it was designed to be clipped into vertical video—“built for social media, not for television,” Enhanced’s CEO, Max Martin, told reporters proudly during a press conference on Saturday. Every competition would be less than a minute.

The athletes were doping under the close supervision of a team of doctors, as part of a clinical trial conducted this past spring in Abu Dhabi. Each athlete’s regimen—Enhanced prefers the more science-y term protocol—is kept confidential as a matter of safety and trade-secret protection: no copycats. But collectively, the competitors were on some combination of 37 substances, including Adderall, beta-blockers, human growth hormone, and five forms of testosterone.

They have reported various effects: mood swings, increased power, faster recovery times, new facial hair. Padding around the pool, the Australian swimmer James Magnussen, age 35 and a holder of three Olympic medals, was impossible to look away from, his head balanced atop a bulging neck, traps spilling out like over-risen sourdough from his bronze swimsuit, a state-of-the-art, super-buoyant model that is banned from mainstream competition. (As big as he was, Magnussen had actually been forced to dial back his enhancement protocols after encountering some practical issues: He had put on so much muscle that he was sinking in the pool, and he couldn’t find a swimsuit big enough to fit him.)

Among the other athletes was the 32-year-old Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev, who broke the world record in the 50-meter freestyle at a previous Enhanced event, earning the organization’s first million-dollar check. Megan Romano, a 35-year-old former world-champion backstroker, had been retired for almost a decade when she became the first woman and first American to sign up for the games; she said she did so to “see what’s humanly possible.” Hafþór Björnsson, a 37-year-old Icelandic weightlifter, wanted to break the world record for deadlift: 1,135 pounds, which is heavier than a yearling Angus steer, several refrigerators, or most grand pianos. Andrii Govorov, 34, a Ukrainian who holds the world record in the 50-meter butterfly (swum clean), is doing it for the paycheck, he has told reporters: High-end training costs at least five figures a month, and after Russia invaded his country, he needed a more stable way to support himself and his family.

Boady Santavy, weightlifter (Maggie Shannon for The Atlantic)

Each of these athletes had signed on to enhancement at least in part as a reaction to the cruelties of their chosen profession: the criminally low wages, the limitations of the human body, the math that makes a 35-year-old in elite condition basically a senior citizen, the fact that no matter how much any governing agency polices performance-enhancing drugs, some people will always find new ways to use them undetected, edging out athletes who have not taken the advantage. And they each did so knowing that they have made a choice from which there is essentially no going back.

Because doping is prohibited and under-studied, we do not have a clear understanding of what it does to the body, long term, although evidence suggests that it can be associated with mood disorders, high blood pressure, infertility, and organ damage. Perhaps of more immediate concern for athletes who’ve dedicated their life to a sport and its community is the reputational risk. The idea that doping is cheating and cheating is wrong is sports’ ground truth; until Enhanced, every professional sports league on Earth (and many amateur ones) had banned it.

The mainstream sports establishment denounced the Enhanced Games, in many cases permanently barring from future competition anyone who admits to juicing—“excommunicated” them, as the two-time Olympic gold medalist Cody Miller, one of the stars of the games, put it. “There’s obviously a legacy impact for every athlete that joins,” Rick Adams, who spent 14 years working for the United States Olympic Committee before starting as Enhanced’s chief sporting officer, told me. The ones who decided to participate, he said, did so after careful consideration. They are doing it for glory, or for fun, or to make $1 million in 30 seconds, or to remember what it feels like to be the best in the world, even if that best comes with an asterisk.

In the lead-up to the weekend, the event’s organizers—their ambitions high, their stadium expensive, the Killers scheduled to play after the events—had invoked the Super Bowl as their template. But at a press conference the day before, they downgraded it to WrestleMania. The comparison seemed an apt one to me. Both are interested, in different ways, in notions of artifice and authenticity. Both are stunts as much as sporting events. Both are fun to watch at least in part because they carry with them the distinct possibility that someone could get hurt.

You can guess what kind of person goes to an event like this. Start-up guys. Longevity guys. Bodybuilder guys. Diplo.

But mostly, it seemed, the kind of person who goes to an event like this was the kind of person who Enhanced thought could help it go viral. Some attendees had paid for their own travel to Vegas, but everyone had a free ticket and had been handpicked to be there. “I do social media,” a 21-year-old named Wyatt Aube told me, “like, I guess, a lot of people here.”

Aube doesn’t care much about sports or biohacking, but he has 162,000 followers on Instagram. His manager had a bunch of tickets and offered to fly him out from Los Angeles in a private jet. He was enjoying the spectacle. “It’s fun, it’s cool,” he said. “It’s kind of like a circus for athletes. They’re, well—not freaks but—” he paused. “Out of the ordinary.”

Max Martin, CEO of Enhanced, third from left (Maggie Shannon for The Atlantic)

A fitness influencer with very white teeth gamely said hi to a stranger’s friend on FaceTime—the friend, it turned out, was a fan; the influencer, it turned out, was very famous. Scrums of boys—YouTubers, if I had to guess—roved the grounds, taking video mostly of one another. The food and drink were lavish, free, and evidently appealing: Though organizers had promised 2,500 spectators—fewer than attend your average minor-league baseball game—the stands had big empty patches all night, even as the areas behind them were clotted with people in fascinating, impractical outfits, taking selfies and eating sun-warmed shrimp cocktail. The vibe was neither Super Bowl nor WrestleMania—it was a brand activation. Back in the arena, the announcer begged us to “make some noise” so many times, I started to feel bad for him.

If the sports themselves felt like a bit of a sideshow, it’s possible that this was by design, that the games were mostly a vessel (or a Trojan horse) for Enhanced’s broader business—the one that went public via a SPAC earlier this month, and the one that, theoretically, will have Enhanced taking the checks instead of writing them. The first thing you see when you go to Enhanced’s website is not information about the games; it’s a link to the company’s online store, where you can get all manner of peptides, supplements, and prescription medications. Many of the product names are recognizable from the clinical trial of the athletes, and many are sold by other companies, with direct-to-consumer storefronts all over the internet.

But while those other companies need to pay for advertising against major sporting events in order to reach their would-be consumers where they are, for Enhanced, the sporting event is the advertisement. “At the first Enhanced Games, athletes will break world records,” Aron D’Souza, an Enhanced co-founder, told Joe Rogan about two years ago. “When that happens, everyone’s going to say, What is he on? And how do I get it?” It is a holistically integrated cultural-commercial enterprise, and the product it is selling is the supposed future of the human body.

In this, the games were remarkably well timed. In the years since Enhanced announced its existence, humanity has entered a new era of body modification and augmentation. Cosmetic surgery has gone from something to keep secret to something to post about on Instagram. One in eight Americans is, reportedly, on a GLP-1. Gray-market peptides are a massive business. Dentists are taking testosterone, and 20-somethings are getting Botox, and in the future, no one will be bald. “People are going to be hotter, smarter, younger,” a spectator, Lisa Gonzalez-Turner, told me. “That’s just the reality.” (Naturally, she runs a supplements company.)

Kyle Kirvay is a New Jersey cop turned bodybuilding influencer; his biceps were the size of small watermelons and he wore a black tank top with the word ANIMAL printed on it in yellow (the name of a supplement company he works with). He was there watching because he hopes to compete in next year’s Enhanced Games. He told me something similar: “The way we’re going, and the way the new generation is, it’s like, who cares?”

Kyle Kirvay, bodybuilding influencer (Maggie Shannon for The Atlantic)

This culture shift is what makes the games possible as an event and as a business, as an entertainment product and a product product. Often, in the arena, those things were the same. On the giant screens suspended over the stadium, guests could scan a QR code, which would lead to a website that would transform the subject of a selfie, using AI, into an Enhanced athlete, as yoked-out as the ones in front of them. In the broadcast booth, the entrepreneur and influencer Bryan Johnson—who is most famous for his intensive, multimillion-dollar effort at lifespan extension—served as a commentator. (He sat under an umbrella, presumably to avoid all the UV radiation.) Good get: His presence reminded viewers that you don’t need to be an elite athlete to be optimizing. You just need to have some money to burn.

All sporting events are, fundamentally, freak shows. They are about watching superhuman bodies doing superhuman things, genetic marvels being pushed in unnatural and dangerous ways for strangers’ enjoyment.

The Enhanced Games are the Super Bowl, and WrestleMania, but Martin, the CEO, is fond of name-checking a different sporting event, too—another that achieved startling cultural force very quickly: Formula 1. In Enhanced’s schema, the scientists are the engineers, and the athletes are both the driver and the car—the professional custodians of expensive, beautiful, fastidiously maintained, performance-optimized vehicles, purpose-built by experts to defy the laws of science.

It’s an interesting way to talk about sports, and maybe a more honest one. Although the establishment loves to talk about determination and force of will—what the World Anti-Doping Agency calls “the spirit of sport,” what every Olympics ad milks to make you cry—the obvious fact is that every elite athlete is already enhanced in some way. The Patriots offensive tackle Morgan Moses slept in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber when he was recovering from a knee injury two seasons ago. The Olympic rower Liam Corrigan shared last year that his supplement stack included 11 different vitamins, minerals, medications, and corticosteroids. Shohei Ohtani is the most naturally gifted baseball player in a generation, but he has also had his elbow rebuilt and reinforced by some of the best doctors in the world, using state-of-the-art industrial materials—twice.

Some years ago, a team of Swedish scientists, using sophisticated methods, developed a system for increasing glucose-molecule storage in marathoners’ bodies. That was in the 1960s; they called it carbo-loading, and it is now so commonplace that people you know do it before a fun run. “To explore and then exploit the benefits afforded by new knowledge and new technologies,” the UC Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë has written, is not only natural; it’s in the true spirit of sports.

Maybe even more natural than regulation. Deep into the 20th century, “there was simply no concept of doping, let alone the opinion that it constituted cheating,” April Henning and Paul Dimeo write in Doping: A Sporting History. But in 1967, the International Olympic Committee first started banning certain substances, and since then the rules have been draconian, even as they have been ever-shifting. (I am writing this article, and you may be reading it, with the help of caffeine, which was banned by WADA for two decades.) The act of administering sports competition involves enforcing a collection of arbitrary lines; the act of watching sports involves seeing what athletes can do within those lines. Enhanced is attempting to obliterate both of those constructs at once. When I asked Johnson what he was hoping to see at the games, he told me he was looking forward to nothing less than “the piercing of the taboo that there’s a right and wrong. That there’s some authority in the world that says this is allowed and that is not allowed.”

(Maggie Shannon for The Atlantic)

In the end, only Gkolomeev broke a world record, by seven-hundredths of a second, in the final event of the night, the 50-meter freestyle. When the time was confirmed, the big screens flashed WORLD RECORD, and the stadium lights went blood-red. The mood was electric, in the way a mood can be anything when big, expensive screens are lit up. Martin, watching from the sidelines, jumped so high in the air, I thought he might fall in the pool.

But if the goal was to unambiguously locate the future of human performance, that was more elusive. This was not exactly the “multiple” broken records that Martin had spent the weekend promising. In several cases, non-enhanced athletes handily won their events, complicating the sales pitch. Björnsson dropped the barbell. Magnussen, whose giant neck had been appearing all over Enhanced’s ads, finished dead last in both of his races. The event peaked at 250,000 concurrent YouTube viewers, per Enhanced; the last Super Bowl, by contrast, had about 125 million viewers across platforms.

When Gkolomeev emerged from the pool, he gazed out on people who did not entirely seem to know why they were there. He was rich—much richer than he had been that morning, having earned more in a single day than any other swimmer in the history of the sport. He picked up his young son, kissed his wife. The Sphere glowed yellow behind the stands. And the crowd—such as it was—cheered for a record that will, rightly or wrongly, be questioned and caveated as long as it exists.

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A Sweeping Theory of Everything Is Revolutionizing the Democratic Party

2026-05-26T07:00:00-04:00

“I helped set in motion a revolution that aims to rebuild something like a true liberal democracy in America,” Barry C. Lynn wrote two years ago in Harper’s.

The claim is notable less for being impossibly grandiose than for being more or less correct.

Lynn is the intellectual godfather of what is now known as the neo-Brandeisian movement, which identifies corporate consolidation as the singular, villainous force behind everything that has gone wrong in the United States. “It is vital to understand,” Lynn wrote in his 2020 book, Liberty from All Masters, “that monopoly is not one of many economics problems but rather the political economic problem of our time,” causing “just about every ill in our society today.”

When he says that he holds corporate consolidation responsible for just about every problem, he means it. A list of social ills Lynn has attributed to monopolists includes not just the cost of goods and services but also: “The vast and growing inequality of wealth, political power, and control. The rise of the radical right. The surge in racism and homophobia. The attacks on reproductive choice and marriage. The collapse of our news media.”

The movement that he leads has reshaped progressive thought on economics, antitrust enforcement, and political strategy. Lynn and his acolytes run a handful of nonprofit organizations, including the Open Markets Institute, where he serves as executive director. But they also influence liberal magazines, Democratic elected officials, and other key nodes of discourse on the left. Members of his movement held important positions in Joe Biden’s administration, and his followers are waging a vigorous—even vicious—campaign to ensure that they regain their power in the next Democratic administration.

I met Lynn in March at his office near the Treasury Department, just around the corner from the White House, where he once made frequent visits to his many allies in the Biden administration. The shelves were lined with books by Lynn and other neo-Brandeisians. A balcony overlooked the Treasury building, and the proximity to the executive branch was an advantage, he said, when “our friends” were in office. Lynn regards his factional triumph as a fait accompli. “We’ve largely won the intellectual debate,” he told me matter-of-factly, allowing that the only remaining liberals who disagree with him are “those who are paid to do so.”

Over the past two decades or so, Lynn has revived, modernized, and enlarged on a long-dormant antitrust ideology, spreading its tenets with astonishing energy. He operates in the intellectual and political realms simultaneously, waging both an evangelical crusade and a bare-knuckled factional struggle for power. Lynn’s inside game has worked so well that, even though the average Democrat can barely detect the transformation, many party leaders have adopted his sweeping theory of everything.

Lynn has won so much that the Democratic Party may soon be tired of his winning. The effects of his revolution on the party and its ability to govern are far greater than many intellectuals, politicians, and staffers seem to grasp. To attribute all problems to a single cause is to reject every solution but one. It is also to dismiss anyone who thinks differently—that is, anyone who thinks about the world like nearly any Democrat did until very recently—as a corrupt enemy who must be expunged.

Lynn began developing his monocausal view of the world when he was a business journalist in the 1990s and early aughts. Walmart’s leverage over its suppliers was a particular fascination. “Wal-Mart and other monopsonists,” Lynn wrote in Harper’s 20 years ago, “are slowly freezing our economy into an ever more rigid crystal that holds each of us ever more tightly in place, and that every day is more liable to collapse from some sudden shock.” Instead of inexorably taking over the economy, however, Walmart eventually lost market share to Amazon and other competitors without government intervention. If Lynn was perturbed by the failure of his prophecy, he gave no sign, turning his attention to the monopolistic power of Facebook (which has also subsequently lost market share) and Amazon.

Like conventional antitrust enforcers, Lynn faulted these corporate behemoths for overcharging consumers, undercutting their competition, and preventing innovation. He went beyond the liberal consensus, however, and argued that large firms were inherently dangerous. The goal he set out for antitrust policy was not merely to prevent firms from blocking competition, but also to reshape the economy to place more economic and political power in the hands of small-business owners.

“We may have democracy, or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both,” the Progressive Era jurist Louis Brandeis is supposed to have said, though there is no evidence that he ever actually said it. The neo-Brandesian movement has a name of similarly mysterious provenance. Lynn told me he cannot recall who came up with the name. The first prominent usage on record is a 2017 Nation article by David Dayen about one of the conferences promoting Lynn’s ideas. “You can call them the ‘New Brandeis movement,’” Dayen wrote.

In 2001, Lynn joined the New America Foundation, a think tank that at the time relied heavily on journalists rather than research fellows recruited from academia or government. In 2011, he launched its Open Markets program, dedicated to antitrust policy. At New America, Lynn developed his thinking into a comprehensive worldview.

Lynn sees American history as a struggle against monopolization, an evil he believes the U.S. Constitution was concerned with preventing. The heroes of his narrative run from Thomas Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson to Joe Biden. Its villains include Alexander Hamilton, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and, above all, Robert Bork, who reinterpreted antitrust doctrine as focused on protecting consumers—a legal transformation that Lynn deems the turning point that set America onto a path toward oligarchy.

Anti-monopolization, Lynn argues, is “an all-encompassing framework for seeing and shaping power in every corner of our democratic republic.” He believes that “most prices are entirely arbitrary and political in nature.” This has led the neo-Brandeisians to embrace price controls and other populist measures that economists, even very liberal ones, generally oppose. More expansively, Lynn believes that “market forces”—which he places in scare quotes—do not exist. His indictment of economics is neither mild nor limited. He has compared the discipline to Lysenkoism, a pseudo-scientific fad under Stalin. “The ‘science’ of economics today … ,” he wrote in his 2011 book, Cornered, “has become a form of madness, a dream of human imagination we mistake for a pattern of the world.”

Lynn’s insistence that the entire field of economics is a lie has, perhaps unsurprisingly, failed to persuade many economists. “The economists were the worst,” he has written of the Washington insiders to whom he has spent two decades promoting his gospel. These benighted souls “often as not were completely unable to comprehend—or in some cases to admit—the logical outcomes of gearing every economic system to promote the concentration of wealth and power. In response to irrefutable proof, they would mumble a few incoherent words before vanishing.”

When you have resisted the propaganda that has enslaved the minds of millions of your fellow citizens, and grasped the hidden truth that the authorities have sought to conceal, your burden is heavy, and the desire to share your revelations irrepressible. I read Lynn’s most recent two books and many of his articles in advance of our meeting, which ran well over two hours. After we met, he emailed to suggest that this effort, while commendable, hardly sufficed, and that “the only way to appreciate the full breadth of what we do is also to watch some of the events I have curated, read some of the speeches I helped edit, and review some of the articles and books I have shaped.”

Lynn’s own account of the effect his obsessive qualities have on others is difficult to improve on. In a Harper’s essay shortly before the 2024 election—it would be fair to call it a manifesto—he describes his impact:

I cornered Fed chairs at the conference coffee table, interrogated Nobel-winning economists in their pieds-à-terre, nabbed the empty seat next to the president’s consigliere. I overstayed my welcome in dozens of congressional offices and blocked Cabinet secretaries from stumbling from Capitol Hill cocktails to the black cars idling at the curb. I cajoled bankers and insurers to share their deepest fears. I spent a small fortune on drinks for those whose job, it seemed, was to know something, anything. I pushed friendships and acquaintanceships to the edge and beyond.

Lynn’s evangelism has won numerous converts, and he has cultivated protégés eager to soak up his wisdom. Lynn’s first hire at New America was Lina Khan, a political-theory graduate from Williams College who had served as editor of her campus newspaper. She was brought onboard to look into Amazon. “It’s so much easier to teach public policy to people who already know how to write than teach writing to public policy experts,” Lynn later told The New York Times. Khan, who later credited Lynn with “introducing me to these issues in the first place,” adopted his view of antitrust policy and its paramount role. “Antimonopoly,” she has written, “is a key tool and philosophical underpinning for structuring society on a democratic foundation.”

In 2016, Khan and Lynn met with Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts. In a speech at New America shortly thereafter, which Lynn helped shape, Warren described anti-consolidation as “one of the basic founding principles of our nation” and broadly endorsed his program.

Khan began to eclipse Lynn as the movement’s most prominent avatar, even as he remained its most influential. At Yale Law School, she wrote a law-review essay about Amazon that drew national attention. “The dominant framework in antitrust today fails to recognize the risk that Amazon’s dominance poses for discrimination and barriers to new entry,” she wrote. An article of neo-Brandeisian faith is that previous administrations, in both parties, adopted a narrow definition of consumer harm, focused entirely on prices, in antitrust policy. In her essay on Amazon, Khan criticized “the current framework in antitrust— specifically its pegging competition to ‘consumer welfare,’ defined as short-term price effects.” Echoing one of Lynn’s distinctive precepts, she has written that “there are no such things as market ‘forces.’” (Khan declined to speak to me for this article.)

Rather than publish their work in little-read reports on their own website, as most think-tank scholars did, Lynn and his followers published a stream of columns in the news media. He explained to Politico in 2017, adopting the language of monopoly economics, “We can vertically integrate and do the writing ourselves.”

At first they mostly published in the Washington Monthly, a liberal magazine once devoted to the journalist Charles Peters’s idiosyncratic vision of government reform but more recently converted to Lynn’s. In recent years, they have expanded into horizontal integration. The American Prospect (which Dayen now edits), The Nation, The Intercept, The New Republic, and Democracy (the latter two of which share the same editor, Michael Tomasky), as well as Harper’s, where Lynn still publishes his big-think essays, tout the neo-Brandeisian line often, and criticize it with vanishing infrequency.

Small political magazines play an outsize role in shaping the intellectual debate among Democratic Party elites. That committed enemies of monopolization have built a sort of cartel might seem ironic, but perhaps the neo-Brandeisians have a keener appreciation than most of the power of cornering a market.

Their ideas began spreading rapidly during Donald Trump’s first term, when shocked liberals were groping for explanations as to what could have driven Americans into the arms of such an outrageous figure. Small reasons—Hillary Clinton’s unpopularity, the quirks of the Electoral College, the difficulty of a party winning three straight presidential elections, the cultural challenge of electing the first woman president, the unpopularity of the party’s stance on immigration or on a variety of cultural issues—did not satisfy Democrats’ demand for answers. A profound crisis must have profound causes, and Lynn was offering a totalistic account of social decay.

The 2016 election not only convinced Democrats that they had betrayed the working class but also marked a breaking point between Democrats and the tech industry. During Barack Obama’s administration, many Democrats viewed Silicon Valley as a benign, socially progressive force. After Trump won, their anger turned toward social media for allowing bots and Russian users to flood the internet with messages attacking Hillary Clinton. And while subsequent analysis cast doubt on the scale of the effect that social media had on the outcome, the relationship never mended. As stark critics of the tech industry, neo-Brandeisians found themselves selling a remedy many Democrats were suddenly eager to buy.

Lynn’s theory promised to resolve all their dilemmas. It explained how their party had lost working-class voters and supplied a simple message that would win them back. Cultural liberals could avoid the painful necessity of jettisoning some of the party’s unpopular stances to win back alienated voters. By redirecting all the political questions that had bedeviled the party into a simple argument about the perfidy of big corporations, neo-Brandeisian theory offered a road map to restoring the lost prosperity of the New Deal era and rebuilding a connection to the voters who had abandoned them in despair. Their slashing anti-corporate rhetoric has met with overwhelming agreement from Democratic voters; in a recent New York Times/Siena poll, two-thirds of them said they would like their party to “go after corporate monopolies and price gouging.”

The neo-Brandeisian climb to power appeared to stall when Warren’s presidential campaign crashed and burned in 2020. But she successfully maneuvered during the transition from President Trump to President Biden to gain influence over the incoming administration’s policy priorities and staff. As a result, the neo-Brandeisian network played an important role in promoting Lynn’s allies and denigrating competing candidates. When Biden considered appointing Susan Davies, a former deputy White House counsel under President Obama, to the Justice Department’s top antitrust post, a slew of articles savaged her as a corporate shill. Her candidacy died.

The staffing wars ended with a virtual neo-Brandeisian clean sweep. Khan was appointed to run the Federal Trade Commission, which Matt Stoller—a researcher at the American Economic Liberties project—called an “earth-shattering” event. The neo-Brandeisian enthusiast Jonathan Kanter got the DOJ antitrust job. Tim Wu, another fellow traveler, became special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy. Other Lynn disciples poured into the ranks. The neo-Brandeisian thinkers Warren recruited into the administration represented the movement’s brightest minds and most energetic administrators.

Lynn told me his proudest moment came in 2021, when Biden signed an executive order declaring a whole-of-government commitment to anti-monopolization. The speech and the order were tangible evidence that Lynn’s movement had progressed “from being outliers to sort of actually having captured large portions of this administration,” as he boasted to an interviewer that year.

With Biden’s presidency, the neo-Brandeisian movement crossed over from insurgency to establishment. Its adherents wielded the power of the federal government. And unlike many other issue areas, which require legislation, their vision could be implemented through executive action.

The neo-Brandeisians rewrote guidelines to impose stricter standards for merger approvals. Khan unsuccessfully sued Microsoft and Meta to block acquisitions. Her commission imposed a ban on noncompete clauses, a measure used by firms to prevent employees from leaving their jobs that has drawn bitter condemnation from libertarians and moderates as well as neo-Brandeisians. (The ban was later blocked in court.) Khan’s greatest success was likely in deterring a larger number of mergers with the threat of regulatory pressure.

In the neo-Brandeisian account of history, Biden’s presidency was a new apogee, the moment the Democratic Party turned from what they see as the failed corporate centrism that held the party in thrall from Jimmy Carter through Obama. In their estimation, the achievements of Biden’s presidency rank alongside those of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. This interpretation became the conventional wisdom, repeated as fact in, among other places, The New York Times, which stated in a 2024 news story, “Of the triumvirate of recent Democrats in the White House, Mr. Biden is the one who historians, political strategists and policy experts argue has racked up the most expansive list of legislative accomplishments.”

Yet, by any objective measure, the neo-Brandeisians failed. Khan’s attempts to bring Lynn’s grand theories to bear on the legal minutiae of antitrust law frustrated the agency’s professional staff. “What am I going to do? Go to court and say, ‘This cement merger threatens democracy’? … The whole approach is so incoherent,” a former FTC staffer told New York magazine.

No discernible economic revolution followed Biden’s neo-Brandeisian program. The University of Michigan law professor Daniel Crane examined the record and found that “on a statistical level, the neo-Brandeisians did not increase antitrust enforcement, and in many ways were less rigorous in bringing antitrust cases than previous administrations.” A paper by Diana Moss of the Progressive Policy Institute likewise found that the Biden administration “made progress in invigorating merger enforcement in some areas but may be lagging behind in others.”

Moss, a former head of the American Antitrust Institute, told me the neo-Brandeisians’ error is to view antitrust policy “not as law enforcement but as a broad policy tool for fixing a lot of problems—economic, political, and social.” Antitrust enforcement isn’t that powerful, for the simple reason that corporate concentration is not the root cause of every problem.

Even the movement’s focus on Big Tech, a source of genuine social harm, seems to misdiagnose the central issue. The iPhone and social media have created powerful addictive products that degrade their customers’ attention spans and in-person social attachments. A concentrated market would mean people pay too much for the product, or get too little innovation, or have too few choices. Instead, the tech sector is overflowing with novel, popular, and inexpensive, often free, products. Facebook, which Lynn attacked for its domination of social media, has lost market share to TikTok and other competitors. Just as the problem with the drug cartels is not that they’re cartels but that they sell drugs, the primary harm produced by Big Tech is not its consolidated structure but the fact that many of its products harm its consumers and society as a whole.

Biden’s antitrust enforcers were also wrong to believe that their Democratic predecessors had ignored all factors other than costs to consumers. Although Lynn criticized “the more modern consumer welfare standard,” Moss writes in a forthcoming paper, he misunderstood “what the standard was and what it could restrain—information that was indelibly imprinted on Lynn’s mentees.”

Antitrust enforcers before Biden assumed that the government could step in to break up concentrated markets if they resulted in lower product quality, less innovation, or the exclusion of competitors, as well as high prices. Consequently, there was no hidden trove of economic liberty that Lynn’s acolytes could unlock with more determined regulation.

The neo-Brandeisians also had a stroke of bad luck. They gained power at a moment when conditions happened to be especially unsuited for their ideas.

The dominant issue in public opinion since Biden’s election has been the post-pandemic inflation spike. Democrats have sought to turn this issue to their advantage by promising to foster “affordability.” But neo-Brandeisian dogma is not designed to bring down prices. It actually maintains that economic policy is too concerned with keeping costs down. Lynn has decried the Democratic Party’s “fixation on lowering prices,” and lauds small businesses and farms that are less able to generate economies of scale than giant corporations are, and therefore have to charge more for their products. After the Biden administration recognized that inflation was eating away at public approval, the antitrust regulators tried to uncover price-fixing schemes in industries like gas stations, shipping, and groceries, with little success.

When a radical program fails to yield its expected results, its most zealous adherents usually insist that they have been foiled by circumstance, or the machinations of their opponents. (True socialism has never been tried.)

The neo-Brandeisians do not make this excuse. To the contrary, they insist that their revolution succeeded. “The last four years have seen how powerful the movement can be in solving real problems,” Zephyr Teachout, who once chaired the board at Open Markets, wrote in 2024.

“Biden destroyed the intellectual foundations of the system of private monopoly control,” Lynn wrote in 2024, “restored the original American vision of government as a tool to break all concentrations of power,” and oversaw “the greatest period of anti-monopoly enforcement in U.S. history,” among other achievements.

I asked Lynn what positive effects he could point to as evidence of the impact of these transformative changes. The query seemed to put him slightly off. He listed some of Biden’s antitrust measures, before I interjected to point out that those were actions, not effects. He criticized Kamala Harris for refusing to commit to reappointing Khan, arguing that this waffling symbolized her inability to cast herself as an enemy of the oligarchy—but this, too, failed to explain what Biden’s populism had actually achieved.

Finally, Lynn suggested that Biden’s reforms simply hadn’t had enough time. He is not alone in offering this defense. Michael Tomasky made the same point in a February essay arguing that neo-Brandeisians have the answer to Democrats’ political needs.

That the neo-Brandeisian revolution would require more than four years to fully reshape the economy is a fair point. But if they had truly implemented an earth-shattering transformation, then surely at least some faint tremors would have registered with the public. Instead, Biden’s popularity plunged early in his presidency and never recovered. There was no uptick in Biden’s approval rate produced by trustbusting, no green shoots that promised to blossom with more time.

The neo-Brandeisians maintain that they have the solution to nearly every ill in modern life, yet somehow, despite administering strong medicine, no improvements were discernable to the public within four years, much less rewarded by voters.

The reason their unimpressive record in power under Biden left the neo-Brandeisians’ confidence utterly unshaken is that their belief system is more like a religion than an economic theory.

Last year, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein asked Teachout on his podcast if she could think of any issues that cannot be solved by smashing corporate concentration. At first she ventured, “I don’t think that anti-monopoly can solve significant problems of racism in this country,” but quickly retracted even this concession. “Having said that,” she continued, “there’s a reason that Frederick Douglass and [W. E. B.] Du Bois were so concerned about monopoly power.”

It would make little sense, from this standpoint, for Democrats to change anything heading into the next presidential election. And so the neo-Brandeisians have accordingly begun a vigorous effort to persuade Democratic elites to commit to rerunning the Biden agenda and strategy, but more loudly and with a younger candidate.

They have been joined by other interest groups that have held sway within the party—especially advocates of social liberalism, who are resisting demands from centrists that they retreat from some of the party’s unpopular positions. At a progressive conference last fall, speaker after speaker asserted that Republican attacks on immigration, transgender participation in female sports, or any other political vulnerability could be defused by turning the issue back to billionaires. Teachout endorsed Zohran Mamdani; Khan worked for his transition team and has joined his mayoral administration, forging another tie between the neo-Brandeisians and other components of the Democratic Party’s left wing. The “Fighting Oligarchy” tour by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez celebrated neo-Brandeisian themes, and AOC seemed to be echoing a version of Lynn’s idiosyncratic view of American history when she claimed earlier this month, “The American Revolution was against the billionaires of their time, and we are declaring independence from such an extreme marriage of wealth and the state.”

The neo-Brandeisians are also reaching right. They seem to believe that they can reshape the contours of American politics along a new axis, pitting populists against elitists. This configuration would cut crosswise through both parties. They see in Trump’s populist gestures confirmation of the appeal of their own ideas and potential for cooperation.

Neo-Brandeisian ideas have drawn at least some support from Trump world. J. D. Vance and Steve Bannon, among others, have been labeled “Khanservatives” to signify their admiration for Biden’s crusading FTC commissioner. Bannon and Khan exchanged praise when they ran into each other at a 2025 conference (Bannon: “My girl! We want you back. You’re the best.” Khan: “We’re all relying on you to keep the fight alive for the populist wing.”)

Open Markets praised three of Trump’s appointees as “moderately to strongly sympathetic to the antitrust enforcement philosophy of Jonathan Kanter and Lina Khan.” Stoller, the American Economic Liberties researcher, gushed that Trump’s appointment of Gail Slater to the antitrust division at DOJ was “a very powerful statement that Trump wants to take on big tech” and attacked “Wall Street Dems” who complained when Trump demanded that Netflix fire Democrat Susan Rice from its board.

But if Lynn’s movement has viewed Trump as a figure possessing at least some laudable populist impulses with which they can occasionally agree, this premise has proved naive. Trump’s interest in antitrust enforcement predictably has little to do with restraining corporate power and is largely consumed with leveraging regulatory threats to compel firms to support his political agenda. Trump’s FTC chair, Andrew Ferguson, whose appointment received praise from Open Markets, has thuggishly harassed Trump’s critics. Slater tried to enforce antitrust law in a reasonable way, but this got her pushed out. One can only imagine the powers Trump would be employing now if neo-Brandeisian friendly proposals like regulating Facebook as a public utility or requiring any billion-dollar company to receive a federal charter were in effect.

And when the grand left-right alliance between Trump and the neo-Brandeisians scored a recent political victory, as a matter of policy the win was perverse. In March, the Senate debated a bipartisan bill designed to stimulate more housing production. Both Trump (in one of his occasional populist forays) and Warren pushed for the inclusion of an amendment to the ROAD to Housing Act that would prevent any large entity from renting out large numbers of single-family homes. The amendment undercut the bill’s intent to make housing more affordable—making it illegal for a company to build homes and rent them out would restrict the supply and drive up the cost for renters.

Brian Schatz, the Democratic senator from Hawaii who championed the bill, suggested that the amendment was a drafting error. But then Warren stepped forward to clarify that the ban was very much intended. “There are some folks in private equity who don’t like that,” she replied, implying that her colleague’s objection was mere special pleading on behalf of Wall Street. “But it’s a very deliberate choice.”

Warren’s position aligned with Lynn’s neo-Brandeisian dogma, which maintains that bringing down the price of housing cannot be achieved by enabling the construction of more private homes, as most housing analysts believe. The solution, somehow, is instead to prevent private firms from entering the single-family market. Nearly any economist would say that if your goal is to make housing more affordable, banning firms from building rental houses makes no sense. But since neo-Brandeisian thought rejects economics as a pseudo-science that rationalizes the desires of capital owners, that objection carries little weight.

The neo-Brandeisian strategy of forming alliances with Trump and attempting to co-opt his appeal has, not incidentally, made the Democratic Party more Trumpian—that is, more prone to demagogic solutions that fly in the face of technocratic wisdom, like price controls or other popular-sounding but half-baked policies. The shortcomings of that approach were apparent under the Biden administration, which took pride in more or less banishing economists from economic policy-making positions. This banishment likely contributed to Biden’s slowness in responding to the inflation surge until it was too late. Populism does not exactly seem to be going well for Trump these days, either.

A noxious side effect of populism is its habit of dismissing all critics as corrupt shills, a style of politics that has flowed into the party along with the neo-Brandeisians.

Lynn has summarized the so-called abundance agenda—a wonky plan to build more housing and infrastructure—as a scheme “to cozy up to good oligarchs, so they can shelter us until the MAGA storm blows over.” Khan has said roughly the same thing, brushing aside the abundance agenda—“I haven’t seen any credible analysis that suggested why Democrats lost was we didn’t have enough donors on our side”—which, whatever you think of abundance’s merits, is not the proposition.

The abundance agenda does not cover all issues, and it is perfectly compatible with stringent antitrust enforcement. (Part of the abundance housing agenda is to break open neighborhood cartels that prevent new entrants into the housing market, a very anti-monopolistic concept.) But since Lynn’s theory purports to explain everything, it regards all other diagnoses of America’s problems as challenges, and therefore, by definition, as corporate plots. This has seriously compromised the Democratic Party’s ability to formulate creative and practical solutions to real-world problems, not all of which can be solved by attacking corporate power.

Lynn expressed to me some concern that attacking liberal targets would push them away, rather than converting them. He cited Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and former Clinton and Obama adviser, as one of many liberals the neo-Brandeisians have alienated by assailing as a corporate tool.

The staffers who fill Lynn’s network appear to have no such qualms. They have described their liberal critics as being “of, by, and for ‘disruptors’ like Uber, Airbnb, crypto, Tesla, and other companies/industries built on knowingly violating the law.” They say their critics are operating a “business front, billionaire ploy, or bookselling grift,” or “taking bribes.” Recently, they have begun describing non-Brandeisian Democrats as the “Epstein class.” The rationale for this smear is that Reid Hoffman, a donor to moderate liberal causes, knew Jeffrey Epstein. Hoffman denies having done anything unethical, but the social relationship is close enough, the neo-Brandeisians suggest, to contaminate any idea or figure Hoffman has ever supported.

Shortly after Warren went after Schatz, the neo-Brandeisian network savaged him as a mouthpiece for private equity. The same fate likely awaits any presidential candidate who deviates from their line.

This rhetoric is not unusually harsh by their standards, nor are the people who employ it inconsequential. The movement’s professional class repeats it more or less daily on social media and in its network of sympathetic publications. They have described the party’s pre-Biden leadership, including Barack Obama, as not merely failures (a claim many leftists make) but sinister plutocrats as well. And so the neo-Brandesians have set out to drive Obama Democrats from the party.

A cynic would see this campaign—to trash the reputations of liberals who merely disagree with their policies—as a ploy to discredit the neo-Brandesians’ factional enemies and retain the movement’s hold on power. And judging by its growing prominence, and the ease with which Lynn and his allies have shrugged off a politically disastrous four years in power, it has succeeded.

Yet after talking to Lynn and absorbing his manifestos, I could not escape the conclusion that he genuinely believes his monomaniacal account. He really does think that he and his allies have discovered not a, but the, profound truth about America and the world. That monopolies function as a kind of Hegelian force that explains the movement and meaning of history. That he has precisely diagnosed the singular cause of the peril into which America has plunged for decades, and contains in turn the blueprint for its redemption.

Their fervent belief in this plan requires, almost incidentally, tearing apart the Democratic Party in order to save it. The trouble is that their theories don’t embody perfect truth, so the tearing might happen, but the saving part will never arrive.

Teens Are Forgoing a Classic Rite of Passage

2025-03-10T09:00:00-04:00

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Lisa A. Phillips has found herself in a strange position as of late: trying to convince her students that romantic love is worthwhile. They don’t believe in overly idealizing partnerships or in the clichés fed to them in rom-coms; some have declared that love is a concept created by the media. Phillips, a journalist who teaches a SUNY New Paltz course called “Love and Heartbreak,” responds that of course relationships aren’t all perfect passion, and we should question the tropes we’re surrounded by. But also: Those tropes began somewhere. Across cultures, people describe the experience of falling for someone in quite similar ways, “whether they grew up with a Disney-movie IV in their vein,” she told me, or “in a remote area with no media whatsoever.” The sensation is big, she tells her students; it’s overwhelming; it can feel utterly transcendent. They’re skeptical.

Maybe if Phillips had been teaching this class a decade ago, her students would already have learned some of this firsthand. Today, though, that’s less likely: Research indicates that the number of teens experiencing romantic relationships has dropped. In a 2023 poll from the Survey Center on American Life, 56 percent of Gen Z adults said they’d been in a romantic relationship at any point in their teen years, compared with 76 percent of Gen Xers and 78 percent of Baby Boomers. And the General Social Survey, a long-running poll of about 3,000 Americans, found in 2021 that 54 percent of participants ages 18 to 34 reported not having a “steady” partner; in 2004, only 33 percent said the same.

As I’ve written, a whole lot of American adults are withdrawing from romance—not just young people. But the trend seems to be especially pronounced for Gen Z, or people born roughly between 1997 and 2012. Of course, you can grow into a perfectly mature and healthy adult without ever having had a romantic relationship; some research even suggests you might be better off that way. In the aggregate, though, this shift could be concerning: a sign, researchers told me, of a generation struggling with vulnerability. A first love, for so many, has been a milestone on the path to adulthood—a challenging, thrilling, world-expanding experience that can help people understand who they are and whom they’re looking for. What’s lost if that rite of passage disappears?

You can experience so much without being in a defined relationship. You can flirt; you can kiss; you can dance. You can have a crush so big it takes up all the space in your brain; you can care about someone deeply; you can get hurt—badly. Plenty of young people, then, could be having transformative romantic encounters and still reporting that they’ve never been in a relationship. It could be the label, not the emotional reality, that’s changing, Thao Ha, a developmental psychologist at Arizona State University, told me. She’s found that lots of high schoolers report having “dated” before—a looser term that might better suit the realities of adolescent courtship today. (In a YouGov poll from last year, about 50 percent of respondents aged 18 to 34 said they’d been in a “situationship,” or undefined relationship.) Some of that activity might not entail exclusivity or regularity, or any promise of long-term commitment. But it could still help young people with what researchers told me are some core rewards of early romantic exploration: gaining autonomy from parents, developing a sense of identity, what Phillips called an “existential” benefit—the “sometimes painful, sometimes amazing trial-and-error process of seeking closeness.”

Becoming a well-rounded grown-up, in fact, doesn’t really require romantic experience of any sort. Adolescence and emerging adulthood are times of uncertainty; what young people need most, Amy Rauer, a human-development professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told me, is often just a cheerleader: a peer, a grandparent, a coach, or someone else making them feel valued, which can set them up to feel secure in future relationships. Teens can also learn social skills—how to make small talk, resolve arguments, empathize across differences—in all kinds of platonic relationships.

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

Some research, Phillips pointed out, actually suggests that young people might benefit from a lack of romantic activity. One study found that, compared with their dating peers, students who dated very infrequently or not at all over a seven-year period were seen by their teachers as having better leadership and social skills, and reported fewer symptoms of depression. After all, young love isn’t always positive. It can be an emotional whirlwind; it can distract from schoolwork, or from friends, or from other interests. In the worst cases, it can be abusive. (Adolescent girls experience intimate-partner violence at particularly high rates.) And when it ends, teens—with little perspective and few learned coping mechanisms—can be absolutely wrecked.

Despite how common a lack of relationship experience is now—especially but not only for teens—a lot of people still feel embarrassed by it. TikTok is filled with influencers declaring that they’re 26 or 30 or 40 and have never been in a relationship, sharing how insecure that’s made them feel; commenters stream in, by the hundreds of thousands, to divulge their own feelings of shame. Many of my friends, who are entering their 30s, constantly stress about this: They fear they won’t know how to be a good partner if the opportunity arises. But all of a person’s interactions, not just romantic ones, can shape how they’ll show up in a relationship. One 2019 study, which followed 165 subjects ages 13 to 30, found that strong friendships in adolescence predicted romantic-life satisfaction in adulthood; early romantic experience, meanwhile, wasn’t related to future satisfaction at all. (Teens commonly learn how to fight and make up with friends, Phillips told me, but they might be less likely to stick it out with a lover long enough for conflict resolution.)

[Read: The dating-app diversity paradox]

Overall, when it comes to who you are in a relationship, what matters most is simply who you are, period. And the traits that make you you are likely to remain fairly stable throughout your life. A 2022 study found, for instance, that subjects who were single during adolescence—but had their first relationship by age 26—reported no lower self-esteem than those who’d started dating earlier. Tita Gonzalez Avilés, a personality psychologist at Germany’s Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz who has led some of this research, told me that although people often think their relationships will change them, the influence typically happens the other way around: Who you are shapes what kind of relationship you’ll have. Research has even shown that people’s satisfaction in a relationship tends to remain pretty consistent across their various partners.

Given all that, you might think it a good thing that Gen Z has less going on in the romance department. Perhaps young people are busy with other pursuits, focusing on friendship and school and hobbies; maybe they no longer want to settle for a mediocre partner. The transition to adulthood tends to take longer today, pushing back lots of different milestones—steps such as financial independence, buying a home, and, notably, getting married—sometimes indefinitely. In that sense, young people have an eminently rational reason to hold off on seeking partnership: The deadline is extended. But researchers have pointed to other, more worrisome reasons for the romance dip.

Phillips has heard a lot about situationships—and scenarios that aren’t even well-defined enough to use that label. For her new book, First Love: Guiding Teens Through Relationships and Heartbreak, she interviewed more than 100 young people and parents, and found, as Ha did, that early romance today tends to reside in a gray area. “You have a long period of we’re talking,” Phillips told me. “You’re kind of dancing around the idea of a sexual-romantic connection, maybe even having some of those experiences, but not really talking about what it is.” For some, the lack of strict relationship expectations can be freeing. But many, Phillips told me, find the ambiguity distressing, because they don’t know what they have the right to feel—or the right to ask for. Some recounted how they ended up feeling invested in a fling—and described it not only as bad news, but as a personal failure: They said that they “got caught” (as if red-handed), “caught feelings” (like an illness), or succumbed to “dumb-bitch hour” (when late at night, defenses down, they texted a crush and—God forbid—let themselves feel close to someone). “Young people would be hard on themselves,” Phillips told me, “because they would think, Okay, this person let me know this wasn’t going to be a thing. And then my heart let it be a thing.”

The young-love recession, in other words, might reflect a real shift in how comfortable Americans are, on the whole, with emotional intimacy. Generational researchers have described Gen Z as a cohort particularly concerned with security, averse to risk, and slow to trust—so it makes sense that a lot of teens today might be hesitant to throw themselves into a relationship, or even just to admit they care whether their dalliance will continue next week. In a 2023 Hinge survey of Gen Z daters, 90 percent of participants said they wanted to find love—but 56 percent said that fear of rejection had kept them from pursuing a potential relationship, and 57 percent said they’d refrained from confessing their feelings about someone because they worried it would “be a turn-off.” Those reservations can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, Phillips said, in which young people keep a romantic prospect at arm’s length—and then, when they feel confused or get hurt anyway, they become even more wary of relationships. “Why would I want to go any further in this world,” she said many wonder, “when I had this flirtation that seemed to be very close and very promising and went nowhere?”

[Read: The people who quit dating]

I heard something similar from Daniel A. Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life: People still badly want connection, but among Gen Z, “there’s a real sense of anxiety about how to go about it.” That social nervousness affects platonic and romantic relationships alike; he’s found, in fact, that people who spend more time with friends are also more likely to have dated regularly during their teen years. “Trying to forge romantic connections and be vulnerable—it’s really difficult,” he said, “when you’re constantly worried about being hurt or being taken advantage of.”

Some of that self-protective instinct has probably trickled down from older generations, especially when it comes to dynamics in heterosexual relationships. As Cox has found while reporting a forthcoming book on the gender divide, men and women seem to be growing ever further apart. Young men are shifting rightward, and many are feeling misunderstood. Women, meanwhile, have become more suspicious of men. Fear of sexual assault has increased significantly in recent years, and so has concern about dating-app safety. If so many grown women are feeling vigilant, imagine how girls and younger women feel: at a vulnerable age, still learning about the world and already surrounded by the message—and, in plenty of cases, the reality—that boys and men are dangerous. Imagine, too, how some boys and young men feel: just figuring out who they are and already getting the message that they’re not trusted. Perhaps it’s not surprising that people are trying to control their romantic feelings, whether by focusing on friendships or by keeping situationships allegedly emotion-free.

Even under conditions of a gender cold war, many girls might get on fine—but boys could suffer more. When psychologists told me that young people can flourish in the absence of romance, that was assuming they have close friends to rely on and to teach them social graces (including one as simple as making conversation). Boys and young men, who aren’t as likely to have such tight bonds, tend to learn those skills from women. Maybe they have a sister or a mother or female friends who can help with that—but if not, Cox told me, being single might put them at a real emotional and developmental disadvantage. That might make them less prepared to date.

[Read: The golden age of dating doesn’t exist]

A rise in skepticism toward romance is a loss, not just for boys but for society as a whole. Romantic love isn’t better or more important than platonic love, but it’s different—and telling yourself you have no need for it doesn’t necessarily make it true.

Phillips talked to her students about an excerpt of Plato’s Symposium, in which—at the beginning of time—Zeus splits each human in two in order to foil their plan to overthrow the gods. From then on, everyone wanders around yearning for their other half. Falling in love, according to the story, is when you finally find it. Alas: Her students hated the story. They didn’t like the idea of only one other person being meant for each of us, or the suggestion that they’d be incomplete without such a reunion. They told her they wanted to be whole all by themselves—not dependent on a soulmate. They had a point.

And yet, Phillips still felt there was something sad about their reaction. They didn’t seem to understand that “relationships are an interpersonal exchange,” she said: that “they involve both feeling expanded by someone else and then some genuine sacrifices.” You are at least a little dependent on someone in a relationship; that’s what the symbiosis of love requires. It’s scary—but it can be interesting, and beautiful when it’s good, and sometimes formative even when it doesn’t stay good. You might want to find out for yourself.

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Trump’s War Is Staggering to an Incoherent Defeat

2026-05-24T20:12:40-04:00

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No one yet knows the details of the Iran deal that President Trump has been teasing on social media for the past day or so. The president himself has admonished his followers not to “listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about.” But as this war stumbles to a close, it is clear that the president, too, is lost: He didn’t know what he was doing when he began it, and now he doesn’t know how to get out of it.

Only a day ago, Trump was trying to project confidence. Yesterday, he hailed an agreement with Iran as mostly done; it was, he said on his Truth Social site, “largely negotiated” and close to “finalization.” The Iranians, of course, immediately disputed this characterization, and by the next day, Trump was backpedaling. “If I make a deal with Iran,” he posted this afternoon, “it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama, which gave Iran massive amounts of CASH, and a clear and open path to a Nuclear Weapon.” The agreement that was only a day earlier “largely negotiated” was now only a notional memorandum, and Trump griped that it was unfair to criticize it because “nobody has seen it, or knows what it is,” and it “isn’t even fully negotiated yet.”

By this afternoon, Trump was reduced to posting a meme of a jet carrying a bomb under its wing with Thank you for your attention to this matter written on it.

Many of those most alarmed about what Trump might end up accepting to get out of this dead-end conflict in Iran are not his critics, but his supporters. Trump’s enablers may not have access to the details of an agreement, but they’re clearly worried: Senators Lindsey Graham, Roger Wicker, and Ted Cruz were all posting expressions of shock and dismay on social media. Graham said that any deal that caves to Iran “makes one wonder why the war started to begin with”; Wicker said that a possible 60-day cease-fire would be a “disaster.” Cruz gently suggested that the tsar does not know what his devious boyars are up to, describing the deal as “being pushed by some voices in the administration.”

Even Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser, posted a long screed warning Trump not to make a deal. “I know you want to get out of this mess,” he said. He then counseled the president to “give it some thought.” Trump’s former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo weighed in as well, comparing the possible outline of a deal to the kind of thing Barack Obama’s team might have come up when designing the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and warning that it could mean that America would end up paying “the IRGC to build a WMD program and terrorize the world.” Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, during his first term, and he regularly speaks of the JCPOA (and Obama) with contempt; Pompeo’s comparison was sure to infuriate the Trump team.

And sure enough, Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, responded almost immediately to Pompeo—and gave the world a glimpse of what appears to be some sweaty panic building inside the White House. “Mike Pompeo has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about,” Cheung posted on X. “He should shut his stupid mouth and leave the real work to the professionals. He’s not read into anything that’s happening, so how would he know.” (Cheung also kept posting updates about Trump working in the Oval Office on a Saturday, as if this were an amazing illustration of the president’s work ethic.)

Trump’s worried sycophants probably know that the details of an eventual agreement likely do not matter very much at this point. As my colleague David Frum noted earlier today, the war has already ended with America’s strategic defeat by the Islamic Republic of Iran, an outcome for which Trump is directly responsible. How much Iran will get away with, and how much humiliation the United States will endure, has yet to be ironed out by the negotiators, but the war is now almost certain to end with Tehran’s theocrats firmly in power, and with a stronger chokehold both on their own people and on the international economy than they had three months ago.

Not only is Trump incoherently staggering to defeat, he now risks signing on to an agreement that could be far worse than anything Obama negotiated with Iran a decade ago. I was a critic of the JCPOA back then because I believed that it contravened some basic diplomatic logic by front-loading concessions to the Iranians while hoping they would later abide by its terms. Obama, too, knew the risk he was taking, as he admitted at the time to The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. “Look, 20 years from now, I’m still going to be around, God willing. If Iran has a nuclear weapon, it’s my name on this,” he told Goldberg in 2015. “I think it’s fair to say that in addition to our profound national-security interests, I have a personal interest in locking this down.”

The JCPOA was not perfect, but it was the product of the efforts of professional diplomats, scientists, and other experts, and once it was in place, it was really the only game in town. Obama gambled that Iran would feel pressure to observe the JCPOA once it went into effect, and he was right. Three years later, few argued that Iran was in violation of the agreement; Trump trashed it anyway, without any thought or preparation, much as he has done with other arms agreements.

Trump could have adhered to the JCPOA, and had Iran tried to sprint to a bomb—and no evidence exists that Tehran was doing so in 2026—he could have blamed Obama, made the case to Congress for war, and launched military action. Faced with the ticking clock of an imminent Iranian nuclear test, even Trump’s most dedicated opponents at home and abroad would likely have lent their support. Instead (presumably while still savoring the sugar high of a quick win in Venezuela) he decided that he would seek glory as the liberator of Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly told Trump that the mullahs would fall; CIA Director John Ratcliffe, however, told him that such a prediction was “farcical.”

Now the president will end up having to sign off on a set of terms that will likely make the JCPOA look demanding by comparison. Trump began this war assuming that all other issues—nuclear weapons, terrorism, Iran’s regional adventurism—would vanish when the regime was toppled. When that didn’t happen, he had no plan for what to do next, and he seems to have settled on preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons as the central explanation, not only for why he went to war, but for why Americans must now suffer the economic effects of the conflict. The Iranians may well promise to forswear a nuclear program—as they did to Obama a decade ago—but for now, they are not only presenting themselves as the aggrieved party, they’re behaving like the victors: setting demands, making the Americans negotiate the status of the Strait of Hormuz, and kicking the nuclear question down the road.

Yesterday, the president told Axios that the chance of reaching an agreement with the Iranians was a “solid 50/50,” and that he either would accept a “good” deal or “blow them to kingdom come.” Neither of these things is going to happen. Instead, a piece of paper will, at some point, come out of a meeting room in Pakistan. It will certify that the United States must accept a major strategic defeat in the Middle East. And Donald Trump, who brought America to this point because of his ego and his incompetence, will sign it.

Why Trump Lost

2026-05-24T10:45:37-04:00

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The first surprising thing about President Trump’s impending defeat in the 2026 Iran war is that he already fought and won a successful war against Iran last year. In June 2025, U.S. and Israeli air strikes badly damaged the Iranian nuclear program in 12 days of bombardment. Exactly how badly remains controversial. But they didn’t do nothing. If Trump had quit while ahead, he could have banked his gains from last June as a solid if imperfect win.

The second surprising thing about Trump’s impending defeat is that he does not seem to have cared at all about the only evident reason to resume fighting in 2026: the Iranian people’s rebellion against their brutal oppressors. Trump has never given any evidence of caring about Iranian democracy or human rights. He promised the Iranian people “Help is on the way” on January 13, but military operations did not commence until thousands were dead and the rebellion was already effectively crushed. During military operations, Trump made clear that he sought a deal with the existing regime. He made no effort to support or cooperate with Iranian dissidents before, during, or after the uprising.

The third surprising thing about Trump’s impending defeat is that even he himself seems never to have understood why he went back to war against Iran. What exactly did he think he would achieve? He kept saying that he wanted to ensure that Iran never developed a nuclear weapon. He also insisted that he had effectively prevented it from doing so in August. He seemed genuinely to believe that claim. If so, why resume the fighting? If, however, those words were wrong, then why not simply hit the nuclear sites again? Why the need for this bigger war?

Trump started the February 28 war for reasons of personality, not strategy. He is on his way to losing the war for the same reasons of personality.

Trump is arrogant. Think how often Trump mocks his predecessors as “dumb” and praises himself as “smart.” Those predecessors, from Jimmy Carter through Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, all had to ponder military responses to Iranian terrorism and aggression. They all ultimately decided not to wage a major war against Iranian national territory. Among the prime deterrents to action: the Strait of Hormuz problem. Trump apparently decided that a problem that was too hard for everybody else would magically disappear for him, because he is tough and growls in his official photographs.

Trump is reckless. Trump is not a plan-ahead guy. He plunges into desperate adventures without any clear endgame in mind. What really was Trump’s plan on January 6, 2021? After Mike Pence was seized by rioters and forced at gunpoint to recite the magic words Trump wanted him to say, what was supposed to happen then? The 81 million American majority who’d voted against Trump in 2020 would submit? The military, CIA, and FBI would follow blatantly illegal orders? In 2021, Trump provoked violence and hoped it would all somehow work out. He followed the same approach again in 2026.

Trump hates procedure. A lot of the apparatus of the modern presidency exists to force confrontations with unwelcome realities. Cabinet officers are confirmed by the Senate to assure the country that major offices are filled by people of character and competence. The National Security Council is supposed to process challenging data to ensure that the president receives necessary information. But to run the Department of Defense, Trump nominated and the Senate approved Pete Hegseth. Instead of choosing a national security adviser to replace Mike Waltz after Waltz’s resignation on May 1, 2025, Trump tapped Secretary of State Marco Rubio to take on the role. But to double up that particular job dooms the job not to be done at all, especially because Trump has shriveled the NSC’s staff and subjected it to loyalty tests demanded by his most screwball supporters.

Trump is panicky. For all his bluster and boasting, Trump cannot take the heat. Presidents who believe in their decisions ride out bad polls. Trump panics and reverses course. Trump has been signaling since mid-March that he wants an end to the Iran war at almost any price. The Iranians have read those signals. For all the damage the U.S. military inflicted on Iran, the Iranians seem to have gambled that they could outlast Trump. They’ve been proven right.

Trump is gullible. As Trump’s present secretary of state observed back in 2016, Trump is most fundamentally a con artist. But Trump is often a self-defeating con artist who falls victim to his own con. Trump demanded “unconditional surrender” from Iran. Instead, he’s negotiating an exit that concedes most of Iran’s demands and leaves Iran in a more dominant position over Persian Gulf oil traffic than it occupied before the war. But Trump seems genuinely to have convinced himself that he’s won a mighty victory, and he seems truly baffled that others decline to endorse his flim-flam.

Trump can’t lead. Trump’s method of governance is command. He cannot work across party lines, and he cannot speak to any part of the American nation beyond his MAGA base. A war leader, however, must be a national leader. War imposes costly sacrifices. Leaders who take the nation to war must explain those costs and inspire those sacrifices. Trump simply cannot do any of that work, and he has no idea how it could be done.

For three years in his first term, Trump benefited from the strong economy that he inherited. Then the pandemic struck, and his first instinct was to hunt for someone to blame. In this second presidency, his main work has been spectacular self-enrichment, even as the economy has sagged under the weight of his catastrophic trade wars. He made no case for an Iran war to the public and never sought approval by Congress. There are some Iran hawks on the Democratic side, especially in the Senate. Trump never tried to ally with them.

Trump’s vision of the presidency is authoritarian and kleptocratic: Issue orders, grab money, luxuriate in flattery, erect monuments to oneself. That’s no way to lead a nation through the hazards and difficulties of war. Now the war is ending on disadvantageous terms for the United States. Trump’s old methods will be turned to a new task: trying to deceive the American people and the world into believing that the war he lost was really a big win, the biggest ever, so big you cannot believe it. He’s likely to discover that, indeed, nobody does believe it.

College Should Be Way More Fun

2026-05-23T07:00:00-04:00

One afternoon last fall, a class full of Amherst seniors forgot I was there. In the 19th-century octagonal room where I taught my course on fiction, they were deep in an argument about the tempestuous ending of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw—about whether the ghosts haunting two children in a gothic country house are real, about whether they exist only in the deteriorating mind of their governess, about why one of the children dies at the novel’s conclusion, about whether he even dies at all. The famously ambiguous novel is strewn with evidence to support incompatible interpretations, and my students found it all. The discussion became loud, animated. People smiled, then laughed. Nobody was waiting for me to tell them the answer; the room was theirs, all eight sides of it.

A large language model on one of their phones would have exhausted the debate with just a few keystrokes. Try it: Ask ChatGPT or Gemini if the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw are real, and they will with alarming speed give you a few bullet points for rival interpretations—and then stand ready for the next question. Ask one to pick a side, and it will do so with triumphant certainty. (“Definitively? No—the ghosts do not exist,” ChatGPT told me.) Or it might offer you a cheeky riff to tie things off, as Claude recently did for me: “The ‘real’ answer may simply be that James wanted the question to haunt you.” The ghosts are haunting, get it?

My point is not that the LLMs are more right or wrong than their human counterparts, but that the speed at which they churn through the argument is the exact opposite of the slow, messy conversation that unfolded in front of me last fall. What makes The Turn of the Screw so generative isn’t that it has a hidden answer waiting to be unlocked. James built the ambiguity in on purpose, and lingering over that uncertainty, turning it over, is the entire point. (“The story,” as one of the characters famously says, “won’t tell.”)

That kind of intellectual experience—irreducibly human, stubbornly inconclusive—is precisely what artificial intelligence cannot offer. AI is a certainty machine: Ask a question, get an answer. But the most important questions don’t work that way, and learning to live inside them, and to enjoy living inside them, may be the most valuable thing that a liberal education can teach. In all the hand-wringing about higher education and its future, we risk turning our colleges into joyless job preparation, political death matches, or both. We’ve forgotten the most important thing of all—that thinking can be deeply pleasurable.

Anxiety about the outsourcing of human thought to computational models is perhaps the dominant strain in our educational discourse at the moment, and plenty has been written about how to protect our campuses from intellectual erosion at a moment when nearly nine in 10 students are using AI in their studies.

Cal Newport, the computer-science professor and productivity writer, has offered one kind of solution: Treat “cognitive fitness” like physical fitness. Universities, he’s said, should become “citadels of concentration,” functioning like a “Navy SEAL boot camp” to prepare students for intellectual hardship. As any athlete will tell you, if you are going to succeed, you have to put in the hard work of the weight room. Lift, rest, repeat.

I’m a fan of Newport’s. But when we treat education solely as a grim, rigorous workout meant to stave off cognitive decline, we forget that the reason athletes engage in intense physical preparation is so they can participate in games and contests that are deeply pleasurable. (As Crash Davis famously demands of his teammates in Bull Durham, “Fun, goddamnit!”) Athletics is not the same as preparation for war, nor is the work of deep thinking. Both are social activities that require hard work, yes, but both are accompanied by the possibility of something else: joy.

We cannot lose sight of that pleasure, and not only because of AI. Over the past few years, educators have watched students succumb to the rush to righteousness—an urgent reflex to seize the “correct” moral or political position and then vociferously defend it by disputing the legitimacy of all others. It is a rejection of the slow work of wrestling with ambiguity. What Newport’s “boot camp” metaphor misses—and what the ideological piety that plays out on social media completely neglects—is that the play of ideas is the essential counterweight to both intellectual laziness and rigid dogma.

Intellectual play is less like a modern sporting event and more like those endless playground games of tag and Wiffle ball you played as a kid. It is a social mode of inquiry propelled by boundless curiosity and a healthy skepticism. Play prevents thinkers and the institutions they inhabit from becoming rooted, fixed, and dull. As Richard Hofstadter put it long ago in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, “Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties.”

An undergraduate education must facilitate this kind of slow thinking and its playfulness. It is through play, not painful reps at the intellectual gym, that we do the crucial pedagogical work of teaching our students how to think with both creativity and rigor. It is through play that we are invited to embrace the messy, circuitous, and experimental nature of human curiosity. When professors play as intellectuals, we introduce our students to one of the most valuable gifts we have to offer: the pleasure of the life of the mind.

One persistent criticism of the work that we do on college campuses is that it seems hopelessly frivolous and out of touch. How can a roomful of students debating The Turn of the Screw have any relevance to the profound civic and technological challenges of our own time? It’s impossible to ignore that humanities enrollment has been in decline for well over a decade because of the fear that this kind of activity offers nothing in the way of a marketable skill or quantifiable return on investment.

Yet what we need now, and will need even more as machine thinking works its way deeper and deeper into the workplace, is the capacity for human judgment—judgment that is human not only because a person made it but also because they have learned to think together with other humans about challenges that have no clear answer or solution.

When students debate whether the ghosts in James’s novel are real or imagined, they are not merely settling a literary dispute. They are practicing the capacity to hold two competing interpretations in mind simultaneously, to test each against the available evidence, and to remain genuinely uncertain without becoming paralyzed. They are learning that a question worth asking is, in many cases, one that resists a clean answer.

These are precisely the cognitive habits that have atrophied in our public life. Our most urgent challenges, whether the governance of artificial intelligence, the erosion of democratic norms, or the challenge of building shared meaning across fractured communities, are not engineering problems with determinable solutions. They are interpretive ones that involve weighing trade-offs and competing values. They require citizens who can listen carefully, argue charitably, tolerate complexity, and resist the pull of the obvious. The seminar room, at its best, is where that tolerance is built.

About 90 years ago, one of my predecessors as president of Amherst College, Alexander Meiklejohn, wrote that the art of democracy is “the art of thinking independently together.” That’s what we learn when we engage in intellectual play, and that is what a democratic society requires—the capacity to engage not only in a contest of ideas but also in the joyfulness of our collective striving. To be sure, it’s a long road to travel from the ghosts of Henry James to a revival of our democratic life, so we should have some fun along the way.

Pope Leo’s Unsettling Vision of the AI Future

2026-05-25T08:16:00-04:00

The Vatican, as one aphorism puts it, tends to “think in centuries.” But Pope Leo XIV seems intent on changing that, moving with remarkable speed to publish his first encyclical today, Magnifica Humanitas, “on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” Leo has managed to produce a major teaching document on AI while college students are still booing commencement speeches about how the technology will change the world. Compare that with his 19th-century namesake, Pope Leo XIII, who didn’t publish an encyclical about the Industrial Revolution until more than a century after it started.

In Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), Leo seeks to counterbalance alarm with hope. He composes a long and vivid list of dangers posed by AI, but insists that the technology is a “gift that can alleviate suffering and open up new possibilities”—as long as it’s ordered by humane values rather than monopolistic interests. As for the specific advantages that AI might yield, however, Leo is largely silent. His expressions of alarm are detailed and expansive; his expressions of hope, perfunctory and brief.

Leo decries AI-driven unemployment, especially among young people, as well as the environmental degradation caused by energy-intensive, carbon-emitting AI infrastructure. He condemns the exploitation of workers such as those who label data, moderate disturbing content, or extract “the resources required for the production of the devices and microprocessors on which AI depends.”

[Read: Why Silicon Valley is turning to the Catholic Church]

The encyclical also takes a hard line against autonomous-weapons systems. “Moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation, for it involves conscience, personal responsibility and the recognition of the other as a person,” Leo writes. “Therefore, it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems.”

On many of these issues, Leo offers prescriptions for reform that rely heavily on governments and institutions to mitigate AI’s risks. As is typical for papal documents, the encyclical does not offer detailed recommendations or specify which bodies should carry them out. “Robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility are required,” he writes. With regard to work, the pope argues that “every introduction of automation and AI should be accompanied by verifiable measures to protect the employment, retraining and participation of workers.”

Beyond concerns of public policy, Leo expresses a range of humanistic reservations about AI. He warns against “equating this type of ‘intelligence’ with that of human beings,” who, unlike machines, can grow in wisdom through relationships and experiences of joy and suffering, including bodily pain. The technology can “weaken personal creativity and judgment,” he says, and promote the “illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject” that can lead users to “lose the very desire to form genuine human connections.”

The encyclical rejects two philosophies espoused by some in Silicon Valley—transhumanism and posthumanism—that see technology as a means to augment or perfect people. Such conceptions of perfectibility pose a threat to the vulnerable, the pope writes, by making it “easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy.”

Reflecting on this danger, Leo laments that modern culture tends to view every limitation “primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.”

Although his main focus is technology, Leo touches on other subjects. The document includes a section condemning the rise of what he calls a “culture of power” and the resulting “normalization of war.” In one notable aside, Leo apologizes for how long the Church took to offer a “formal, absolute and universal condemnation of slavery,” which didn’t happen until 1888. That delay “constitutes a wound in Christian memory,” the pope writes. “For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon.”

The encyclical follows in the line of Leo XIII, who initiated the modern tradition of Catholic social teaching, most famously with his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which defended the rights of workers during the Industrial Revolution. The current pontiff suggested, at the very start of his reign last May, that his namesake’s work would inspire his own teaching “in response to another industrial revolution and the developments of artificial intelligence.”

The new encyclical is also informed by more than 10 years of dialogue between the Vatican and representatives of the tech industry that began under Pope Francis. In an unusual move, Christopher Olah, a co-founder of the AI company Anthropic, took part in a panel that presented the document alongside Leo.

“Every frontier AI lab—including Anthropic—operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing,” Olah said at the presentation. “That is why, if we want this technology to go well, it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives—people who care about things going well, who are paying close attention, who are willing to say hard things and insist on safety, who are willing to be our earnest, thoughtful critics.”

[Read: Anthropic is at war with itself]

Magnifica Humanitas repeatedly advises against giving tech leaders unbridled power to develop AI and determine its use. When control over platforms, data, and computing power is “concentrated in the hands of a few,” Leo writes, “it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development.” Elsewhere, he warns that “small but highly influential groups can shape information and consumption patterns, influence democratic processes and steer economic dynamics to their own advantage, undermining social justice and solidarity among peoples.”

To fend against the concentration of corporate power, the pope calls for more transparency and accountability regarding the use of AI in business. “When data and algorithms influence credit distribution, personnel selection or access to services and opportunities,” Leo writes, “it is necessary that decisions be understandable, contestable and subject to oversight, so that individuals are not reduced to mere profiles.”

Leo also denounces what he calls novel forms of colonialism, including the “extraction” of health data and demographic information. “These have become the new ‘rare earths’ of power: vital data which, once aggregated and analyzed, can be used to train predictive models, guide investment strategies, anticipate crises and, above all, determine who and what is deemed to matter.” Individuals must be able to decide how their own health data are used, Leo says, if this information is to be “a true common good rather than an instrument of dominance.”

Ultimately, the pope lays out the choice that humanity faces in stark terms: “If technology becomes the ultimate criterion, the human person risks being reduced to data, a cog in a machine or a commodity. If, however, technology is integrated with a wise perspective, it can become an instrument of growth, justice and fraternity.” More than anything, Magnifica Humanitas is an exhaustive account of what could happen if the world makes the wrong choice. As for the benefits of making the right one, Leo mostly leaves them to the reader’s imagination.

Ken Paxton Is Actually Doing This

2026-05-22T10:59:51-04:00

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President Trump took 11 weeks to choose between Senator John Cornyn and State Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate primary runoff—so long that most people figured he’d never actually decide. Which is why, when Trump finally endorsed Paxton on Tuesday, the news hit a crowd of Republican retirees at a Tex-Mex restaurant like manna from the MAGA heavens.

Paxton was due that day for a meet-and-greet at Matt’s Rancho Martinez in Allen, but he was running late. Suddenly, the sound system, which had been vibrating gently with a selection of the Country Top 40, began blasting “Y.M.C.A.” People read Trump’s Truth Social post aloud from their phones and waved their arms in time with the president’s unofficial anthem. A man near me with slicked-back hair shouted into his phone, “We did it!” And by the time the next song came on—Thunderstruck! Ahh-ahh!—waiters were circulating with trays of free margaritas. “I have chills!” one elderly woman told me happily. Another lifted her plastic cup to the sky and shouted over the din, “What a time to be alive!”

It really is. Donald Trump is a historically unpopular politician. Gas prices, high inflation, and the war with Iran have all systems flashing fire-engine red for Republicans in November. Yet here was the president, throwing his political weight behind Paxton—a man who has been indicted, impeached, and allegedly unfaithful to his wife. In Washington, D.C., Senate Republicans were apoplectic at the president’s casual betrayal of one of their own. But here at the Rancho, an endorsement from Trump was welcomed like a hug from Oprah or the title of “Sole Survivor,” an American prize of inestimable value. These Texas Republicans love their attorney general the way that they love Trump: wholeheartedly, with no questions asked.

By choosing Paxton, the president is rewarding his—and his base’s—unwavering devotion. He is likely also guaranteeing Paxton a primary victory over Cornyn. And in so doing, Trump may have cemented a set of very difficult circumstances for his party. If Paxton wins on Tuesday, Democrats will probably be better positioned to win statewide in Texas than they’ve been in the past 40 years.

In the beginning, there was a pen. A $1,000 Montblanc, to be specific, the writing instrument of choice for celebrities, heads of state, and other kinds of people who recognize the cultural cachet of a customizable gold nib. Paxton apparently knows a good pen when he sees one, and in 2013, then–State Senator Paxton did see one—next to a metal detector at the Collin County Courthouse, where a fellow attorney had accidentally left it behind. Paxton picked it up and pocketed it. Later, after a call from an officer, Paxton returned the pen to its rightful owner; it had been a misunderstanding, a simple mistake, a Paxton spokesperson said. But that didn’t stop the ads. “This is Attorney General Ken Paxton, rummaging through the metal-detector trays and stealing that $1,000 pen,” the narrator says in one from 2018.

Texas hadn’t seen anything yet.

Over the next decade, Paxton would build a rap sheet of legal and ethical entanglements so long and complex that it is difficult to quickly sum up. I’ll try: In 2015, his first year as attorney general, Paxton was charged with defrauding investors in a tech company. (The charges were dismissed after Paxton agreed to do community service and take an ethics class.) In 2020, some of Paxton’s aides reported their boss to the FBI, accusing him of using his office to benefit a particular donor; Paxton later fired those staffers, who sued, alleging retaliation. (The FBI investigated Paxton, but the Justice Department ultimately declined to prosecute. A judge did find that the attorney general had violated the state Whistleblower Act, and Texas paid the aides $6.6 million.) In late 2020, Paxton became a star player in Trump’s “Stop the Steal” attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election, by suing to invalidate the results in four states that Joe Biden won.

By 2023, Paxton was the subject of a full-blown impeachment investigation based in part on the above allegations. Ultimately, the Texas House, including the majority of Republicans, voted to impeach him. Paxton was eventually acquitted by the Senate, with Trump’s help. But during the Senate trial, sordid details about his personal life spilled out, including witness testimony that Paxton had cheated on his wife, State Senator Angela Paxton. Later, in 2025, Angela announced that she was divorcing Paxton on “biblical grounds,” which is the Baptist way of saying that Ken was at it again. (Paxton has denied allegations of an affair.)

Despite all of this, Paxton continues to win. He’s been reelected twice since 2014, serving 11 years as attorney general. Cornyn has run attack ads, but the rushing river of Paxton controversies is tough to channel. Earlier this year, the Cornyn campaign released a six-minute ad unpacking all of Paxton’s corruption allegations that no voter could reasonably be expected to sit through. Later, the campaign tried a different approach, publishing an AI-generated spot centered on Paxton’s alleged infidelity that was both hard to follow and painfully campy.

Ask any Paxton supporter what they make of these accusations, and they will usually reply with some version of “Fake news!” or “He who is without sin can cast the first stone.” Many of them simply seem exasperated. “Who cares?” a man named Eric told me in Allen. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry!” The truth is that grassroots conservatives in Texas stand by Paxton because he has consistently stuck by them. By the time Trump entered the White House, Paxton had already positioned himself as an enemy of the establishment, a warrior against the deep state. As attorney general, he sued the Obama administration more than a dozen times, with mixed success; later, he filed more than 100 lawsuits against the Biden administration. (Both of these facts are applause lines in Paxton’s stump speech.)

As attorney general, Paxton sues like he breathes. This month, he won a $10 million settlement from the Texas Children’s Hospital that required it to stop gender-transition surgeries for minors. He also ordered Texas public schools to show proof that they were displaying copies of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, which, considering the quantity and credibility of all the allegations against him, is a bit like the fox giving the henhouse a lesson on etiquette.

Paxton’s superpower is that he is highly adaptable to the changing dynamics of his party and, like the president, appears to be completely lacking in shame. He has always simply “ignored electability as a concern,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a political-science professor at the University of Houston, told me. “He has no brakes.”

Voters I interviewed proudly made the same comparison. People thought Trump couldn’t win in 2016, a man named Doug Snyder told me after writing a $1,000 check for Paxton in Dallas. “Guess what? We’ve got the hats. And we’ve been to Mar-a-Lago,” he said.

Politics needs more leaders like Paxton and Trump, Diane Truitt told me at the same event—alpha males, she elaborated, like Bambi’s dad “coming out of the forest with those huge antlers.”

Which brings us, as always, back to Trump. Senate Republicans had urged the president to endorse Cornyn, who has been in the Senate for 23 years, and whose white-haired politesse evokes a bygone congressional era. Last week, in an apparently desperate effort to secure Trump’s affections, Cornyn tried to rename a highway after him. But Trump was not to be swayed. “John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

Paxton’s supporters can rattle off Cornyn’s sins without even pausing to think: He was slow to endorse Trump in 2016, and wasn’t enthusiastic enough about Trump’s efforts to build the border wall. Worse, he voted with Democrats to pass a gun-control package after the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde. He is, in short, a RINO, or Republican in Name Only. Paxton’s advertising campaign against Cornyn has been ugly. This month, the attorney general put out an ad arguing that the incumbent senator supports “Muslim mass immigration” and featuring Cornyn saying “Inshallah.” (“Ken Paxton has never said anything in Arabic,” a spokesperson for Paxton told me.)

Next week’s primary will be close, but Trump’s endorsement will probably give Paxton the edge. Whichever man wins will go up against James Talarico, a baby-faced state lawmaker and Presbyterian seminarian whose campaign has centered on faith and economic populism. Talarico is, in some ways, eminently attackable: He has said, for example, that “God is nonbinary” and argued that opposition to abortion isn’t rooted in scripture. Paxton is already workshopping nicknames for him, including “Six-Gender Jimmy” and “Low-T Talarico.”

But many Texas political observers and strategists believe that Cornyn would be better-positioned than Paxton to beat Talarico in November, given Cornyn’s ability to fundraise and his palatability among general-election voters. Especially in a year when the political environment seems so favorable to Democrats, running someone as controversial as Paxton, they argue, would be risky. The Cook Political Report has already said that if the attorney general wins next week, “Texas would move into a fully competitive race.”

This is, of course, the outcome that many Republicans dread most: that Paxton will be unable to win over the moderate Republican and independent voters he’ll need to succeed in November—and that Texas will make Talarico the first Democratic senator it’s elected since 1988. If Paxton is the nominee, “we’re in deep kimchi, which is Korean for ‘shit,’” Jerry Patterson, a Republican, former Texas land commissioner, and Cornyn supporter, told me. (Patterson is evidently not a fermented-vegetable fan.) “We’ve excited a new group of voters,” he added, referring to Trump and Paxton supporters, “and now we’re paying the price for it.”

At least for now, the voters Patterson is talking about seem to exist in an alternate reality—a place where Donald Trump’s endorsement can only be a good thing, where MAGA reigns and margaritas abound. “I don’t know where they’re getting those numbers from,” a woman named Mary told me in Allen, when I asked about the president’s dwindling national popularity. At the Rancho, voters don’t see Ken Paxton as an electoral liability any more than they believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square. For them, November is looking particularly bright.

The National Debt’s Unforgiving Math

2026-05-25T07:00:00-04:00

Is America heading toward a national debt crisis? As an economic adviser to President Biden and an economist active in mainly Democratic policy circles since the late 1980s, I’ve spent most of my career dismissing arguments that any debt-ratio level signifies a “crisis.” I still think that’s true, even as our publicly held debt has reached 100 percent of our GDP. But I also now believe that if you’re not worried about this country’s fiscal outlook, you’re not paying enough attention.

What changed? The national debt held by the public, about $31 trillion, is now the size of the U.S. economy, up from 39 percent of the economy in 2008 and 79 percent in 2019. For most of the country’s history, the fact that the economy’s growth rate surpassed the interest rate on the debt enabled us to keep paying our bills.

But as my colleagues and I show in a policy brief for the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research, the fiscal outlook today is much more challenging. We concluded that the combination of higher deficits and climbing interest rates raises the risk that borrowing will become more expensive and will push government debt levels to climb relentlessly. This is a debt spiral.

[Rogé Karma: The debt is about to matter again]

The math is simple and unforgiving. Say both your annual income and your debt equal $100. Suppose you face a 2 percent interest rate but you get a 4 percent raise. You’ll have no problem paying your creditor their $2 in interest from your $4 in added income. But if you swap those rates around, every year puts you further in the hole.

Events of the past few weeks reveal that the problem of rising interest rates is not theoretical. President Trump’s war in Iran, which is putting upward pressure on inflation, has led lenders to insist on extra compensation—that is, higher interest rates—to offset inflation’s erosion of the value of future payments. Based on the wide gulf between our spending obligations and our expected tax revenues, debt investors also know that the government will have to issue trillions of dollars in debt in the coming years. And with all of that debt flooding the market, the government will have to offer higher rates to keep its creditors in the game.

Those pressures don’t just show up as higher interest rates on government debt. Because banks use rates on government debt as a benchmark for the interest rates they charge, the price of borrowing on mortgage, auto, business, and home-improvement loans goes up for everyone. People tend to think of affordability exclusively in price terms, as in the cost of groceries. But research confirms that the price of borrowing is very much a cost-of-living variable.

Creditors are already insisting on higher “term premiums,” meaning higher compensation in the form of higher interest rates when they buy our debt. Higher rates mean higher debt service, and the net interest is already the fastest growing part of the budget, which means we’re on the edge of a troubling feedback loop.

That’s the math problem. Then there’s the political problem. As an occasional political insider, I’ve noticed up close that policy makers have come to see deficit spending as a way to deliver goods to their donors and constituents. This has ensured that fiscal irresponsibility generates solid political benefits at no political cost. President Ronald Reagan insisted that his tax cuts, which mostly benefited the rich, would generate enough extra growth to both offset their costs and trickle down to the middle class. The cuts simply grew the deficit instead.

Recent research has shown that from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, Congress reacted to higher forecasted deficits by working to reduce them with spending curbs and tax increases. But by the time President George W. Bush was pushing for big tax cuts in his first term, the political costs of fiscal irresponsibility had apparently fallen away. When Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill warned Vice President Dick Cheney about the deficits the tax cuts would generate, Cheney reportedly responded, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”

I have been dovish on the budget in part because I understand that public debt, like private debt, is not all bad. Just as it is sensible for a family to borrow to invest in their kids’ college education, so too might a government sensibly borrow to invest in productive infrastructure. Both investments should yield returns that help offset the debt they incur. Borrowing and investing is economically sustainable when doing so boosts growth relative to the cost of borrowing.

But this logic does not hold for deficit-financed tax cuts any more than it does for borrowing to go for a weekend in Vegas. Advocates of tax cuts—from Reagan’s cuts in the ’80s to Trump’s in the 2010s and ’20s—have long argued that they generate more than enough growth to pay for themselves. This has never been true. As Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, and I have shown in recent research, tax cuts are precisely to blame for driving up the country’s debt ratio. Bush cut taxes on income, dividends, capital gains, and inherited estates, and Trump delivered more of the same, including large cuts in corporate rates and for “pass-through” business income. As Kogan puts it, “Had the Bush and Trump tax cuts never been enacted, debt/GDP would be declining indefinitely instead of rising.”

Profligacy can produce devastating results. We’ve certainly seen consequences in other countries, most notably in the United Kingdom, where international creditors responded to a debt-inducing budget in 2022 by dumping U.K. bonds, which led to soaring interest rates and tanking currency values. But the dollar is different. As the globe’s main reserve currency, the dollar is something that other countries need for various transactions, which they manage by holding U.S. bonds. This ensures the market for our public debt is orders of magnitude larger than any other country’s. America’s debt auctions sell whatever is issued, regardless of administration or budget. This means that the United States has a lot more leeway to deficit-spend than other countries. But this leeway is not infinite.

Now consider this: Any politician who runs on reducing the deficit—who insists that Americans must now accept some combination of spending cuts and higher tax payments—will be at a sharp disadvantage against an opponent who claims that no tax hikes or spending cuts are needed, that the problems can be solved by simply cutting waste, fraud, and abuse, and by growing our way out of this mess. Who can resist a plan for eating ice cream all day without ever gaining a pound?

A political platform that’s both fiscally and politically responsible starts by pointing out that decades of tax cuts have put us on an unsustainable path. Moves to try to offset these cuts by taking away essential health and nutritional support for the poor are not only shameful; they also promise to exacerbate the affordability crisis and stark inequalities that are already plaguing economically vulnerable families without making much of a difference to the budget.

[Read: Congressional Republicans might set off the debt bomb]

Given that we are moving into an AI world that’s generating trillions in tech-sector wealth mostly out of the IRS’s reach (because the U.S. tax code primarily taxes realized income, not asset growth, such as stocks), we need to start thinking about how to tax wealth if we want a fair and sustainable budget. Polls show that most Americans view the fact that rich people don’t pay their fair share as evidence that the system is rigged. In the Biden administration, we proposed a tax on high-end, “unrealized” capital gains (appreciated assets that had not been sold). Lawmakers who wish to tax wealth may worry about alienating the donor class, but this is an essential way to increase revenues at a time when high-end wealth accumulation appears to be accelerating.

Unfortunately, the politics of getting the United States on a sustainable track are miserable. With the midterms around the corner, I am certainly not suggesting that Democrats now run as the party of fiscal responsibility and eating your spinach. Even economists have to weigh fiscal discipline against threats to democracy and the rule of law. I may have flipped from dove to hawk, but this political moment requires a nod to Saint Augustine’s prayer: “God, guide us toward fiscal sustainability … just not quite yet.”

Instead, those of us who are worried about this country’s debt path have a responsibility to help the American people understand the relationship between shortsighted fiscal policies and ballooning household costs. If we’re smart about it, we can at least begin to move closer to a more sustainable path under the principle that when you’re in a hole, step one is to stop digging.

Beach Vacationers Are Doing It Wrong

2022-08-08T07:00:00-04:00

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Ah, summertime! Right about now, you might be yearning or even packing for your dream vacation—one full of rest and relaxation. Long, languorous days of doing nothing, perhaps lying on the beach or holed up in a cabin somewhere far from the city. Imagine how happy you’ll be.

Then imagine how bored you’ll be. Lying in the blazing sun on the beach, you’ll be stuck in your head with plenty of time to think about your problems. To your surprise, you might start feeling lonely and bored—even restless—with all this free time. The truth is, when it comes to vacation, rest and relaxation aren’t just overrated. They might even work against the very things a trip is meant to cultivate: a mental reset, a sense of relaxation, happiness. A better vacation is one in which vigorous exercise features prominently. That way, you can take a break not just from work and routine life but also from the tyranny of self-absorption.

Recently, a close friend and his wife invited my husband and me to join them on a cycling vacation. I was a bit nervous; I’m a serious swimmer but not an experienced cyclist. Riding 30 to 40 miles a day through Vancouver’s impressive hills for five days sounded like hard work, not pleasure. But by the end of our first day of riding, I was overtaken by euphoric calm.

[Read: Plan ahead. Don’t post. And seven other rules for a happy vacation.]

The work of managing hills by bike has a special way of commanding your attention. I was so busy thinking about whether I could hold my pace for the next rise and how fast I could go downhill without wiping out that I had no time to think about myself. I started looking forward to getting up early and hitting the road. I took in the mountains and forests, dense with cedar and fir, but my focus was really on the bike and the road.

The wandering mind, which is often self-absorbed, is generally not a happy one. In one study, researchers randomly pinged people on their smart devices during the day to ask them what they were doing and how they felt. The team found that the participants were happiest when they were involved in an activity and not thinking much about anything else, and least happy when they were daydreaming and preoccupied with their own thoughts. Such mind-wandering was at least somewhat frequent in all activities reported except sex. In another study, subjects who remained physically busy were happier than those who were inactive, even when they were forced into being busy.

When we are really engaged in activities, we have less opportunity to worry and feel bad. That might be because focusing on a task temporarily quiets the default network, a set of interconnected brain regions that is most active when a person is self-focused, thinking about the past or imagining the future. The default network is deactivated when people focus on the outside world—and, intriguingly, when they use psychedelics. In other words, when our full attention is taken up by something outside of ourselves, we are freed from the uncomfortable burden of self-awareness.

[Read: The reason our minds wander]

Scientists can’t brain-image people in motion, but it’s a good bet that exercise quiets the default network. To some extent, other absorbing activities, such as doing math puzzles or knitting, might suffice too. Ditto cooking and painting. But I think none has the unique effect of physical exertion, which not only suspends self-absorption but triggers biological effects—such as the release of endorphins—that bring about a sense of well-being and, if we’re lucky, rapture. Exercise gives us a sense of accomplishment and mastery, tires us out, and improves our sleep in a way that reading, listening to a podcast, and enjoying music don’t.

In fairness to the rest-and-relaxation lobby, some introspection is indeed good for you, and being able to tolerate idleness and boredom is a sign of psychological strength. I’m a clinical psychiatrist, and I know well that self-understanding is a cherished goal of therapy. But too much self-examination doesn’t make you happier or more enlightened. Besides, vacation is not the time to work on that skill. You can incorporate moments of idleness into your daily life if you want to get better at sitting with yourself, but vacation is a time for feeling good and escaping responsibilities, including the ones to yourself. Accordingly, you should do what makes you feel good, and that’s activity, not idleness.

This advice might sound heretical coming from a shrink, but in fact, it’s informed by my experience with patients. I spend a lot of time trying to get depressed and anxious people to stop their unproductive navel-gazing and engage with the outside world and other people. One former patient who was determined to have a relaxing vacation in Italy rented a villa, sat around the pool with a pile of books all day, and promptly descended into a state of anxious misery. When he emailed me about his predicament, I told him to get up and go hiking with his wife every day. He returned from his trip two weeks later having barely read a book, but very relaxed and happy. He’d spent nearly all his time outside, hiking and eating.

[Read: Go for a walk]

The psychological benefits of exertion don’t apply just to vacations; they’re for everyone at any time. My father-in-law, an 86-year-old with a ferocious intellectual appetite, never seems so happy and vividly alive as he does after a brief spin around the neighborhood on his recumbent bike. But taking on a physical challenge during vacation is especially valuable. You are guaranteed to have a lot of downtime while you’re away, which is a lure for idleness, mind-wandering, and unhappiness—all of which can be remedied by exercise. You also have far more time for exertion during vacation than in regular life, so you can really get into the zone and enjoy yourself.

I don’t want you to think that the psychological benefits of an active vacation require you to travel far, buy fancy equipment, or put in Herculean effort. You don’t have to bike 40 miles a day or hike from sunrise to sundown. Perhaps you could try taking a long, vigorous walk each morning of your trip or commit to stretching for 30 minutes a day. All that matters is that your exertion exceeds your normal baseline physical activity enough to command your attention. Breathe hard enough that you can forget the mountain views around you or the cool ocean breeze, and you might just find that you’ll forget your worries too.

These Teens Got Therapy. Then They Got Worse.

2023-11-06T07:00:00-05:00

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

You have to admit, it seemed like a great way to help anxious and depressed teens.

Researchers in Australia assigned more than 1,000 young teenagers to one of two classes: either a typical middle-school health class or one that taught a version of a mental-health treatment called dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT. After eight weeks, the researchers planned to measure whether the DBT teens’ mental health had improved.

The therapy was based on strong science: DBT incorporates some classic techniques from therapy, such as cognitive reappraisal, or reframing negative events in a more positive way, and it also includes more avant-garde techniques such as mindfulness, the practice of being in the present moment. Both techniques have been proven to alleviate psychological struggles.

This special DBT-for-teens program also covered a range of both mental-health coping strategies and life skills—which are, again, correlated with health and happiness. One week, students were instructed to pay attention to things they wouldn’t typically notice, such as a sunset. Another, they were told to sleep more, eat right, and exercise. They were taught to accept unpleasant things they couldn’t change, and also how to distract themselves from negative emotions and ask for things they need. “We really tried to put the focus on, how can you apply some of this stuff to things that are happening in your everyday lives already?” Lauren Harvey, a psychologist at the University of Sydney and the lead author of the study, told me.

[Read: Why American teens are so sad]

But what happened was not what Harvey and her co-authors predicted. The therapy seemed to make the kids worse. Immediately after the intervention, the therapy group had worse relationships with their parents and increases in depression and anxiety. They were also less emotionally regulated and had less awareness of their emotions, and they reported a lower quality of life, compared with the control group.

Most of these negative effects dissipated after a few months, but six months later, the therapy group was still reporting poorer relationships with their parents.

These results are, well, depressing. Therapy is supposed to relieve depression, not exacerbate it. (And, in case it’s not clear, although it’s disappointing that the therapy program didn’t work, it’s commendable that Harvey and her colleagues analyzed it objectively and published the negative results.)

But for people who study teen-mental-health treatments, these findings are part of a familiar pattern. All sorts of so-called universal interventions, in which a big group of teens are subjected to “healthy” messaging from adults, have failed. Last year, a study of thousands of British kids who were put through a mindfulness program found that, in the end, they had the same depression and well-being outcomes as the control group. A cognitive-behavioral-therapy program for teens had similarly disappointing results—it proved no better than regular classwork.

D.A.R.E., which from the ’90s to early 2000s taught legions of elementary-school students 10 different street names for heroin, similarly had little to show for its efforts. (The curriculum has since been revamped.) The self-esteem-boosting craze of the ’80s also didn’t amount to much—and later research questioned whether having high self-esteem is even beneficial. Anti-bullying programs for high schoolers seem to increase bullying.

Reading these findings, haters of high-school assemblies might tingle with schadenfreude. But the consistent failure of these kinds of programs is troubling, because teen mental health is now considered a crisis—one that has so far resisted even well-considered solutions. From 2007 to 2016, pediatric emergency-room visits for mental-health disorders rose 60 percent. Most teen girls—57 percent—felt “persistently sad or hopeless” in 2021, up from 36 percent in 2011. That figure is a still-not-great 29 percent among teen boys. Nearly a third of teen girls have considered suicide, according to the CDC. (Although school closures probably didn’t help things, these numbers were rising even before the coronavirus pandemic began.) The kids are not all right, and frustratingly, we don’t really know how to help them. It feels like we should be able to just sit the teens down and tell them how to be happier. But that doesn’t seem to work, and sometimes it even backfires.

These types of programs tend to flop for a lot of different reasons. In the case of the Australian study, the teens didn’t opt in to the intervention; they were signed up for it, class by class. But teens don’t like being told by adults how to think or what to do, even if it’s something that could benefit them, experts told me. The Australian kids were instructed to practice the DBT exercises at home, and those who did so had better outcomes, but only about a third practiced at least weekly. This could be considered low, but does anyone really enjoy doing their “therapy homework”? Especially when they have, you know, regular homework? “It’s just another thing they are required and asked to do without any input from them,” as Jessica Schleider, a psychologist at Northwestern University, puts it.

What’s more, these complex, therapy-adjacent concepts might confound young teens—the average age of the kids in the DBT study was just 13.5. And in order to make the program palatable to so many kids, the instructors might have had to dilute DBT beyond the point where it was actually helpful. “It’s kind of like giving somebody a couple of doses of an antibiotic for a serious illness in an attempt to prevent that illness from emerging at a population level, which intuitively makes no sense,” Schleider told me.

That brings us to another problem with universal interventions. Many therapists use DBT to help people struggling with suicidal ideation and self-injury, through months of intensive individual treatment. But the teens in this study weren’t, on average, clinically depressed or anxious to begin with. Many of them were just normal, happy kids. It’s possible that by teaching kids to notice their negative thoughts, the program inadvertently reinforced those thoughts.

“Maybe everybody thinking about how anxious or hurt they are might not be the best idea,” says Jean M. Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the author of Generations. “We might be taking people who are doing just fine and trying to teach them these techniques, which may actually call attention to their distress.”

That leaves the question of why the relationships between the DBT kids and their parents soured, remaining that way even months later. Harvey, the study author, thinks the fact that the intervention didn’t include the parents might have created a gap of sorts between the parents and their kids. The kids might have learned to advocate for themselves more assertively, but if parents didn’t understand where that was coming from, family tensions might have arisen.

Of course, there’s not a huge risk that American public schools will apply mental-health treatments to ninth graders without their parents’ consent. School boards can barely agree on which books to allow, so I don’t anticipate mandatory therapy coming to our shores anytime soon. (Many U.S. schools incorporate “social-emotional learning” into their curriculum, but this differs from the programs mentioned in any of these studies.)

[Read: What’s the smallest amount of therapy that’s still effective?]

Still, we’ve had our share of impotent programs aimed at making teens “better.” And it would be nice if something like a Big Mindfulness Assembly worked. Schleider said that rather than subject entire classrooms of kids to therapeutic information, mental-health treatment should be available to kids when they feel that they need it, not just when it happens to be fifth period. (She has designed some interventions along these lines.) In many states, adolescents can’t access any mental-health care without parental consent. “For teens who don’t feel comfortable going to their parents, that basically just means too bad for them,” Schleider said. “Which, unfortunately, in our research, is about a third of teens.” Most teens don’t have their own money or insurance; many couldn’t drive to a therapist’s office if they wanted to. So they turn to social media, which might actually reinforce poor mental health.

The upshot of all of these failed experiments, from the cheesy D.A.R.E. to the trendy mindfulness, is the old chestnut that you can’t change people who aren’t ready to change. Teens can make poor choices, but they are smart and, on some level, know themselves. Alleviating the teen-mental-health crisis may require something that is not altogether comfortable for adults: trusting that teenagers will know when they need help. We may need to make treatment available but not obligatory. Teens have plenty of obligations as it is.

Cloud, Castle, Lake

1941-06-01T12:00:00-04:00

One of my representatives—a modest, mild bachelor, very efficient—happened to win a pleasure trip at a charity ball given by Russian refugees. The Berlin summer was in full flood (it was the second week of damp and cold, so that it was a pity to look at everything which had turned green in vain, and only the sparrows kept cheerful); he did not care to go anywhere, but when he tried to sell his ticket at the office of the Bureau of Pleasantrips he was told that to do so he would have to have special permission from the Ministry of Transportation; when he tried them, it turned out that first he would have to draw up a complicated petition at a notary's on stamped paper; and besides, a so-called ‘certificate of non-absence from the city for the summertime’ had to be obtained from the police.

So he sighed a little, and decided to go. He borrowed an aluminum flask from friends, repaired his soles, bought a belt and a fancy-style flannel shirt—one of those cowardly things which shrink in the first wash. Incidentally, it was too large for that likable little man, his hair always neatly trimmed, his eyes so intelligent and kind. I cannot remember his name at the moment. I think it was Vasili Ivanovich.

He slept badly the night before the departure. And why? Because he had to get up unusually early, and hence took along into his dreams the delicate face of the watch ticking on his night table; but mainly because that very night, for no reason at all, he began to imagine that this trip, thrust upon him by a feminine Fate in a low-cut gown, this trip which he had accepted so reluctantly, would bring him some wonderful, tremulous happiness. This happiness would have something in common with his childhood, and with the excitement aroused in him by Russian lyrical poetry, and with some evening sky line once seen in a dream, and with that lady, another man's wife, whom he had hopelessly loved for seven years—but it would be even fuller and more significant than all that. And besides, he felt that the really good life must be oriented toward something or someone.

The morning was dull, but steam-warm and close, with an inner sun, and it was quite pleasant to rattle in a streetcar to the distant railway station where the gathering place was: several people, alas, were taking part in the excursion. Who would they be, these drowsy beings, drowsy as seem all creatures still unknown to us? By Window No. 6, at 7 a.m., as was indicated in the directions appended to the ticket, he saw them (they were already waiting; he had managed to be late by about three minutes).

A lanky blond young man in Tyrolese garb stood out at once. He was burned the color of a cock's comb, had huge brick-red knees with golden hairs, and his nose looked lacquered. He was the leader furnished by the Bureau, and as soon as the newcomer had joined the group (which consisted of four women and as many men) he led it off toward a train lurking behind other trains, carrying his monstrous knapsack with terrifying ease, and firmly clanking with his hobnailed boots.

Everyone found a place in an empty car, unmistakably third-class, and Vasili Ivanovich, having sat down by himself and put a peppermint into his mouth, immediately opened a little volume of Tiutchev, whom he had long intended to reread, but he was requested to put the book aside and join the group. An elderly bespectacled post-office clerk, with skull, chin, and upper lip a bristly blue as if he had shaved off some extraordinarily luxuriant and tough growth especially for this trip, immediately announced that he had been to Russia and knew some Russian,—for instance, patzlui,—and, recalling philanderings in Tsaritsyn, winked in such a manner that his fat wife sketched out in the air the preface of a backhand box on the ear. The company was getting noisy. Four employees of the same building firm were tossing each other heavyweight jokes: a middle-aged man, Schultz; a younger man, Schultz also, and two fidgety young women with big mouths and big rumps. The red-headed, rather burlesque widow in a sport skirt knew something too about Russia (the Riga beaches). There was also a dark young man by the name of Schramm, with lustreless eyes and a vague velvety vileness about his person and manners, who constantly switched the conversation to this or that attractive aspect of the excursion, and who gave the first signal for rapturous appreciation; he was, as it turned out later, a special stimulator from the Bureau of Pleasantrips.

The locomotive, working rapidly with its elbows, hurried through a pine forest, then—with relief—among fields. Only dimly realizing as yet all the absurdity and horror of the situation, and perhaps attempting to persuade himself that everything was very nice, Vasili Ivanovich contrived to enjoy the fleeting gifts of the road. And indeed, how enticing it all is, what charm the world acquires when it is wound up and moving like a merry-go-round! The burning sun crept toward a corner of the window and suddenly spilled over the yellow bench. The badly pressed shadow of the car sped madly along the grassy bank, where flowers blended into colored streaks. A crossing: a cyclist was waiting, one foot resting on the ground. Trees appeared in groups and singly, revolving coolly and blandly, displaying the latest fashions. The blue dampness of a ravine. A memory of love, disguised as a meadow. Wispy clouds—greyhounds of heaven.

We both, Vasili Ivanovich and I, have always been impressed by the anonymity of all the parts of a landscape, so dangerous for the soul, the impossibility of ever finding out where that path you see leads—and look, what a tempting thicket! It happened that on a distant slope or in a gap in the trees there would appear and, as it were, stop for an instant, like air retained in the lungs, a spot so enchanting—a lawn, a terrace—such perfect expression of tender, well-meaning beauty—that it seemed that if one could stop the train and go thither, forever, to you, my love ... But a thousand beech trunks were already madly leaping by, whirling in a sizzling sun pool, and again the chance for happiness was gone.

At the stations, Vasili Ivanovich would look at the configuration of some entirely insignificant objects—a smear on the platform, a cherry stone, a cigarette butt—and would say to himself that never, never would he remember these three little things here in that particular interrelation, this pattern, which he now could see with such deathless precision; or again, looking at a group of children waiting for a train, he would try with all his might to single out at least one remarkable destiny—in the form of a violin or a crown, a propeller or a lyre—and would gaze until the whole party of village schoolboys appeared as on an old photograph, now reproduced with a little white cross above the face of the last boy on the right: the hero's childhood.

But one could look out of the window only by snatches. All had been given sheet music with verses from the Bureau:—

Stop that worrying and moping,
Take a knotted stick and rise,
Come a-tramping in the open
With the good, the hearty guys!

Tramp your country's grass and stubble,
With the good, the hearty guys,
Kill the hermit and his trouble

And to hell with doubts and sighs!
One mile, two miles, five and twenty,
Sunny skies and wind in plenty ...
Come a-tramping with the guys!

This was to be sung in chorus. Vasili Ivanovich, who not only could not sing, but could not even pronounce German words clearly, took advantage of the drowning roar of mingling voices and merely opened his mouth while swaying slightly, as if he were really singing—but the leader, at a sign from the subtle Schramm, suddenly stopped the general singing and, squinting askance at Vasili Ivanovich, demanded that he sing solo. Vasili Ivanovich cleared his throat, timidly began, and after a minute of solitary torment all joined in; but he did not dare thereafter to drop out.

He had with him his favorite cucumber from the Russian store, a loaf of bread, and three eggs. When evening came, and the low crimson sun entered wholly the soiled seasick car, stunned by its own din, all were invited to hand over their provisions, in order to divide them evenly—this was particularly easy, as all except Vasili Ivanovich had the same things. The cucumber amused everybody, was pronounced inedible, and was thrown out of the window. In view of the insufficiency of his contribution, Vasili Ivanovich got a smaller portion of sausage.

He was made to play cards. They pulled him about, questioned him, verified whether he could show the route of the trip on a map—in a word, all busied themselves with him, at first good-naturedly, then with malevolence, which grew with the approach of night. Both girls were called Greta; the red-headed widow somehow resembled the rooster-leader; Schramm, Schultz, and the other Schultz, the post-office clerk and his wife, all gradually melted together, merged together, forming one collective, wobbly, many-handed being, from which one could not escape. It pressed upon him from all sides. But suddenly at some station all climbed out, and it was already dark, although in the west there still hung a very long, very pink cloud, and farther along the track, with a soul-piercing light, the star of a lamp trembled through the slow smoke of the engine, and crickets chirped in the dark, and from somewhere there came the odor of jasmine and hay, my love.

They spent the night in a tumbledown inn. A mature bedbug is awful, but there is a certain grace in the motions of silky wood lice. The post-office clerk was separated from his wife, who was put with the widow; he was given to Vasili Ivanovich for the night. The two beds took up the whole room. Quilt on top, chamber pot below. The clerk said that somehow he did not feel sleepy, and began to talk of his Russian adventures, rather more circumstantially than in the train. He was a great bully of a man, thorough and obstinate, clad in long cotton drawers, with mother-of-pearl claws on his dirty toes, and bear's fur between fat breasts. A moth dashed about the ceiling, hobnobbing with its shadow. ‘In Tsaritsyn,’ the clerk was saying, ‘there are now three schools, a German, a Czech, and a Chinese one. At any rate, that is what my brother-in-law says; he went there to build tractors.’

Next day, from early morning to five o'clock in the afternoon, they raised dust along a highway, which undulated from hill to hill; then they took a green road through a dense fir wood. Vasili Ivanovich, as the least burdened, was given an enormous round loaf of bread to carry under his arm. How I hate you, our daily! But still his precious, experienced eyes noted what was necessary. Against the background of fir-tree gloom a dry needle was hanging vertically on an invisible thread.

Again they piled into a train, and again the small partitionless car was empty. The other Schultz began to teach Vasili Ivanovich how to play the mandolin. There was much laughter. When they got tired of that, they thought up a capital game, which was supervised by Schramm. It consisted of the following: the women would lie down on the benches they chose, under which the men were already hidden, and when from under one of the benches there would emerge a ruddy face with ears, or a big outspread hand, with a skirt-lifting curve of the fingers (which would provoke much squealing), then it would be revealed who was paired off with whom. Three times Vasili Ivanovich lay down in filthy darkness, and three times it turned out that there was no one on the bench when he crawled out from under. He was acknowledged the loser and was forced to eat a cigarette butt.

They spent the night on straw mattresses in a barn, and early in the morning set out again on foot. Firs, ravines, foamy streams. From the heat, from the songs which one had constantly to bawl, Vasili Ivanovich became so exhausted that during the midday halt he fell asleep at once, and awoke only when they began to slap at imaginary horseflies on him. But after another hour of marching, that very happiness of which he had once half-dreamt was suddenly discovered.

It was a pure, blue lake, with an unusual expression of its water. In the middle, a large cloud was reflected in its entirety. On the other side, on a hill thickly covered with verdure (and the darker the verdure, the more poetic it is), towered, arising from dactyl to dactyl, an ancient black castle. Of course, there are plenty of such views in Central Europe, but just this one, in the inexpressible and unique harmoniousness of its three principal parts, in its smile, in some mysterious innocence it had,—my love! my obedient one!—was something so unique, and so familiar, and so long-promised, and it so understood the beholder, that Vasili Ivanovich even pressed his hand to his heart, as if to see whether his heart was there in order to give it away.

At some distance, Schramm, poking into the air with the leader's alpenstock, was calling the attention of the excursionists to something or other; they had settled themselves around on the grass in poses seen in amateur snapshots, while the leader sat on a stump, his behind to the lake, and was having a snack. Quietly, concealing himself behind his own back, Vasili Ivanovich followed the shore, and came to a kind of inn. A dog still quite young greeted him; it crept on its belly, its jaws laughing, its tail fervently beating the ground. Vasili Ivanovich accompanied the dog into the house, a piebald two-storied dwelling with a winking window beneath a convex tiled eyelid, and he found the owner, a tall old man vaguely resembling a Russian war veteran, who spoke German so poorly and with such a soft drawl that Vasili Ivanovich changed to his own tongue, but the man understood as in a dream, and continued in the language of his environment, his family.

Upstairs was a room for travelers. ‘You know, I shall take it for the rest of my life,’ Vasili Ivanovich is reported to have said as soon as he had entered it. The room itself had nothing remarkable about it. On the contrary, it was a most ordinary room, with a red floor, daisies daubed on the white walls, and a small mirror half filled with the yellow infusion of the reflected flowers—but from the window one could clearly see the lake with its cloud and its castle, in a motionless and perfect correlation of happiness. Without reasoning, without considering, only entirely surrendering to an attraction the truth of which consisted in its own strength, a strength which he had never experienced before, Vasili Ivanovich in one radiant second realized that here in this little room with that view, beautiful to the verge of tears, life would at last be what he had always wished it to be. What exactly it would be like, what would take place here, that of course he did not know, but all around him were help, promise, and consolation—so that there could not be any doubt that he must live here. In a moment he figured out how he would manage it so as not to have to return to Berlin again, how to get the few possessions that he had—books, the blue suit, her photograph. How simple it was turning out! As my representative, he was earning enough for the modest life of a refugee Russian.

‘My friends,’ he cried, having run down again to the meadow by the shore, ‘my friends, good-bye. I shall remain for good in that house over there. We can't travel together any longer. I shall go no farther. I am not going anywhere. Good-bye!’

‘How is that?’ said the leader in a queer voice, after a short pause, during which the smile on the lips of Vasili Ivanovich slowly faded, while the people who had been sitting on the grass half-rose and stared at him with stony eyes.

‘But why?’ he faltered. ‘It is here that ...’

‘Silence!’ the post-office clerk suddenly bellowed with extraordinary force. ‘Come to your senses, you drunken swine!’

‘Wait a moment, gentlemen,’ said the leader, and, having passed his tongue over his lips, he turned to Vasili Ivanovich.

‘You probably have been drinking,’ he said quietly. ‘Or have gone out of your mind. You are taking a pleasure trip with us. Tomorrow, according to the appointed itinerary,—look at your ticket,—we are all returning to Berlin. There can be no question of anyone—in this case you—refusing to continue this communal journey. We were singing today a certain song—try and remember what it said. That's enough now! Come, children, we are going on.’

‘There will be beer at Ewald,’ said Schramm in a caressing voice. ‘Five hours by train. Walks. A hunting lodge. Coal mines. Lots of interesting things.’

‘I shall complain,’ wailed Vasili Ivanovich. ‘Give me back my bag. I have the right to remain where I want. Oh, but this is nothing less than an invitation to a beheading’ —he told me he cried when they seized him by the arms.

‘If necessary we shall carry you,’ said the leader grimly, ‘but that is not likely to be pleasant for you. I am responsible for each of you, and shall bring back each of you, alive or dead.'

Swept along a forest road as in a hideous fairy tale, squeezed, twisted, Vasili Ivanovich could not even turn around, and only felt how the radiance behind his back receded, fractured by trees, and then it was no longer there, and all around the dark firs fretted but could not interfere. As soon as everyone had got into the car and the train had pulled off, they began to beat him—they beat him a long time, and with a good deal of inventiveness. It occurred to them, among other things, to use a corkscrew on his palms; then on his feet. The post-office clerk, who had been to Russia, fashioned a knout out of a stick and a belt, and began to use it with devilish dexterity. Atta boy! The other men relied more on their iron heels, whereas the women were satisfied to pinch and to slap. All had a wonderful time.

After returning to Berlin, he called on me; was much changed; sat down quietly, putting his hands on his knees; told his story; kept on repeating that he must resign his position, begged me to let him go, insisted that he could not continue, that he had not the strength to belong to mankind any longer. Of course, I let him go.

The Burden They Carry

2026-05-25T08:15:00-04:00

Wheeling the old warriors
off the Honor Flight plane
with flags and banners,
people calling their names.

From Chosen to Kabul,
from Baghdad to Hue,
after all these years
today was their day.

Oh, the burden they carry,
I heard one woman say.
I wonder if our children
would serve today?

But not far off
another plane left,
with soldiers and sailors,
their solemn duty kept.

Nearby, a young wife,
two children at her side.
It’s the burden she carries
as the plane took flight.

And across the sea
in an ancient land,
a lowered steel ramp,
a song from a band.

A flag-draped coffin.
A fallen hero inside.
It’s the burden they carried,
and they carried it with pride.

Emptiness and sorrow,
pain and loss.
It’s the burden they carry.
The unbearable cost.

They swore an oath
to support and defend.
It’s the burden they carried
to the very end.

Wheeling the old warriors
off the Honor Flight plane
with flags and banners,
people calling their names.

From Fallujah to Khe Sanh,
from V-E to V-J,
after all these years
today was their day.

A young child waved
as the old men passed.
Home to a hero’s welcome.
Home at last.

It’s a burden they carry
for a day like today.
It’s a hallowed price
that they gladly pay.

But to those who carry
the greatest burden of all,
for their loved ones who never
came home—

May God be with you
and let you know,
you’ll never carry that burden
alone.

The Magician of the Kremlin

2026-05-25T07:00:00-04:00

For the past 18 months, Vladimir Putin’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine have been led by a man with no diplomatic background or expertise. Kirill Dmitriev, a banker who is under sanctions for his role in financing the war, has been shuttling from Moscow to Florida to meet with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in and around the exclusive island known as Billionaire Bunker. His pitch during these rendezvous is that the United States should sell out Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for glittering billion-dollar projects for Russian and American companies—digging for precious minerals in the Arctic, say, or joint missions to Mars.

These fantasies are rooted in the idea that the Americans can be talked into ignoring some of the most salient facts about contemporary Russia. What sane investor would put long-term money into a country where the law is a facade, where the intelligence services can expropriate your business as soon as it looks profitable, and where another neo-imperial war might flip the chessboard at any given moment?

Putin chose Dmitriev for this job not only because of his reassuring American credentials—degrees from Stanford and Harvard Business School, work experience at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs—but because his profile matches that of his two main American interlocutors. He is an oligarch whose glamorous blond wife is close friends with Putin’s younger daughter. That makes him a virtual son-in-law of the ruler, and it may be the reason his real-estate holdings alone have soared from some $5 million to $100 million over the past decade.

But Dmitriev is more than just a gifted Kremlin illusionist. He is living proof that if you squint hard enough, you can blur out the difference between a free society and one ruled by fear. You can convince yourself that everything Ukrainians have been fighting for since 2014—democracy, civic rights, a European future—is meaningless.

[Anne Applebaum: Putin’s war comes home to Moscow]

Not so long ago, Dmitriev was making a very different pitch to Western investors. He was among the most prominent spokespeople for economic reform, a man who talked up Russia as a place where the rule of law would prevail, where corruption and Mafia tactics would be tamed, where foreign capital would be safe from the oligarchs. He wanted what the Ukrainians want.

Dmitriev seems to have willed himself to forget all of this, just as he has willed himself to forget that he was born and raised in Ukraine, and that some of his former schoolmates are among those fighting and dying on the front lines. And he wants Witkoff and Kushner and President Trump, and the rest of us, to forget it all too. If Alexei Navalny is the defining figure of what it takes to resist tyranny in our time, Dmitriev may someday be remembered as his opposite: the man who will do anything to stay close to power.

Matthew Murray, an American lawyer, recalls that Dmitriev approached him at the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in 2011. Murray lived in Moscow at the time and was representing a nonprofit called the Center for Business Ethics and Corporate Governance, which he had co-founded a decade earlier.

Dmitriev wanted Murray’s advice. He had just been given the job of running a new sovereign wealth fund, and he wanted to hold it to the highest international standards, he told Murray. The fund would lead efforts to modernize and diversify the Russian economy away from its dependence on oil and gas, partly by investing in public health and manufacturing.

Luring big investors may have been Dmitriev’s primary motive. But he also seemed interested in improving Russia’s dilapidated roads, airports, and hospitals while making the system more transparent. He asked Murray if he would draw up a model ethics code for use at the new Russian Direct Investment Fund, saying that he also hoped to promote other Russian companies.

Dmitriev got some of America’s biggest private-equity figures to sign on as advisers: Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group, David Bonderman of TPG, and Leon Black of Apollo Global Management. One of the early joint investments with American firms was in a chain of well-run hospitals in Russia called Mother and Child.

Dmitriev wasn’t doing this because he was brave, or had principles. He preached economic reform because the wind was blowing that way. Everyone I spoke with about Dmitriev emphasized his sheer ordinariness, his bland charm, his ability to adapt to the moment. “He was so invisible,” one former business partner said (like many people who still have dealings with Russia, she asked for anonymity). Dmitriev appears to have had the full support of Russia’s then-president, Dmitry Medvedev, who was sitting in for Putin, and who often struck the same notes about honesty and transparency. Russia was on the verge of joining the World Trade Organization in 2011, an effort that had taken almost two decades.

In other words, Russia’s current degree of kleptocratic tyranny wasn’t necessarily preordained; the country might have moved in a somewhat more liberal direction. Dmitriev would no doubt have been very happy with that, and he would have been able to keep his American friends and investors.

But the protests that began in Kyiv in late 2013 seem to have touched a nerve with Putin. The dream of an open economy—what the Ukrainian protesters were demanding, and what Dmitriev was preaching in Moscow—was ever more clearly a threat to the Kremlin’s control of Ukraine and other former Soviet lands, because that control depended on maintaining a rigged system dominated by Moscow-friendly oligarchs.

So Putin made his choice. After he annexed Crimea and began sending his proxies into eastern Ukraine, the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions. That scared off the illustrious Western advisers at the Russian Direct Investment Fund, and Dmitriev’s moment as an apostle of ethics and transparency came to an end.

He then deftly retooled the RDIF into a political vehicle that would serve two purposes for Putin: placating oligarchs at home and charming autocrats abroad. Dmitriev became a frequent visitor to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, where he persuaded Mohammed bin Salman and Mohamed bin Zayed to pledge billions in investments to the RDIF. The fund provides almost no information about its investments, so whether any of its projects made money is impossible to know.

It may not have mattered. For the Emiratis, the largesse “was about political overlay and optics more than money,” a source familiar with the Emirati leadership’s thinking but not authorized to speak about it publicly told me. “The idea was partly to put some guardrails on the Iranian regime, via Russia and China.” In other words, the Emiratis hoped that investing substantial money into those two countries—which have important relationships with Iran—might lead them to restrain Iran from harming Emirati interests.

That did not pan out. Instead, Russia provided Iran with targeting information on U.S. military assets in the Middle East during the recent war. Most of these are located in the Gulf countries.

Back home in Russia, Dmitriev was dutifully transforming the RDIF from a vehicle for economic reform into a slush fund. In 2015, it moved $1.75 billion of pension money from Russia’s National Welfare Fund to Sibur, a petrochemical giant controlled by oligarchs, including one who was Putin’s son-in-law at the time. Later, Dmitriev shared information about the fund’s upcoming deals with that same son-in-law, according to leaked documents published by the Latvia-based Russian reporting platform iStories.

Dmitriev was becoming part of the Putin family circle. His wife, the TV presenter and onetime model Natalia Popova, is both a friend and a business associate of Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova, who is listed alongside her on the boards of a number of companies. That may help to explain Dmitriev’s sudden acquisition of a large personal fortune: According to an investigation by Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, his $100 million in real estate is far more than what he has made from his salary and board positions.

By 2016, Putin trusted Dmitriev so much that he sent him on a diplomatic mission that had nothing to do with finance. On the day after Trump’s election, Dmitriev flew to New York, where he planned to attend the World Chess Championship final. On the way, he sent a series of urgent texts to George Nader, a Lebanese American political fixer and convicted sex offender who had strong ties to the Trump campaign.

Dmitriev texted that if there was “a chance to see anyone key from Trump camp,” he “would love to start building for the future.” In another text, Dmitriev writes: “My boss sends you his warmest regards.” He meant Putin. The trip went well, and two months later—still before the inauguration—Dmitriev sat at a hotel bar in the Seychelles, talking to Erik Prince, the Blackwater founder and Trump ally, about how the United States and Russia could drop their differences and make money together.

We know about Dmitriev’s texts because they were published in 2019 in the Mueller report on Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. That high-profile investigation put a damper on Dmitriev’s efforts, but he never lost Putin’s confidence.

In 2020, Putin assigned Dmitriev to lead the production and export of Sputnik, Russia’s COVID vaccine. A financier with no experience in public health was an odd choice for that position. Dmitriev worked hard on a flashy publicity campaign, with very mixed results. Sputnik was ultimately provided to several dozen countries, but its rollout was plagued by accusations of profiteering and broken promises. In a number of countries in Africa, Asia, and South America, Dmitriev gave exclusive distribution rights to a brand-new company, registered in the United Arab Emirates to a member of the Dubai ruling family, which made a fortune by doubling the price for each dose. The government of Ghana canceled a contract to buy Sputnik amid accusations of corruption and nondelivery of doses; Kenya blocked use of the vaccine for similar reasons.

When Trump regained the presidency in 2024, Putin again sent Dmitriev—now part of his inner circle—to the United States. Dmitriev had prepped for his reentry by adopting an online persona that was pure MAGA: frequent snarky posts on X about the idiocy of the “globalists,” obsequious praise of Trump and Elon Musk. His pinned tweet as of this writing is a link to an interview on Fox News in which he declares that the Trump team “stopped World War Three from happening.”

This time Dmitriev was working on a larger canvas: He was in effect Russia’s lead diplomat on the “peace talks” with which Putin hopes to advance his takeover of Ukraine. Dmitriev appears to have had a hand in drafting the 28-point plan that Trump urged Volodymyr Zelensky to sign last November, and that would have required Ukraine to cede large territories to Russia and drastically shrink the size of its army. The icing on this cynical proposal was Dmitriev’s specialty: a host of “mutually beneficial corporate opportunities” for the United States and Russia.

Dmitriev has an unusual qualification for leading these diplomatic talks, though it is one he rarely ever mentions: He grew up in Kyiv, the son of prominent scientists. The family was not rich, but Dmitriev’s father, a cell biologist, held high positions in the Communist Party of Ukraine in the 1980s. Two former friends at the Kyiv Natural-Scientific Lyceum No. 145—one of the most competitive secondary schools in the former Soviet Union—told me that Dmitriev was likable, if a little arrogant. He was a good student and athlete who stood out mainly for his ambition.

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

“He talked all the time about how to get away from this gray Soviet reality and get a good education in the U.S.A.,” said Volodymyr Ariev, who was in the same class and is now a member of Parliament.

Dmitriev’s family connections got him a place on a school trip to the United States, where he later returned and spent almost a decade, earning his degrees from Stanford and Harvard before moving to Moscow in 2000.

Dmitriev’s father still lived in Kyiv in early 2022, when the Russian army was massing on the Ukrainian border. Many prominent people in Ukraine and Russia—including Zelensky—thought Putin was bluffing. It may be a measure of Dmitriev’s closeness to the Russian leader that he was not fooled. A few days before the invasion, his father abruptly left the country, most likely at his urging, according to neighbors of the family who spoke with the Ukrainian channel TSN last year.

When I spoke with Dmitriev’s former classmates, I thought they would express some surprise at what has happened to their old friend. Instead, they responded with a weary familiarity. “We have a name for people like this,” Ariev said. The word—yanichar—originated centuries ago, when the Ottoman officials who controlled parts of what is now Ukraine would kidnap boys to indoctrinate and train in the imperial capital before sending them back as men to crush local rebellions by their former compatriots. “Traitor” is probably too weak a translation.

Oleksandr Lisnichenko, another former classmate, said that one of Dmitriev’s closest childhood friends was seriously wounded at the front. That friend refused my request to speak.

“He said, ‘I don’t want to talk about Kirill,’” Lisnichenko told me. “‘I just want to shoot him in the knees.’”

How to Break Cuba

2026-05-24T08:01:34-04:00

In 1960, Washington watched aghast as Fidel Castro’s post-Revolution government seized companies and assets it viewed as the spoils of vanquished U.S. imperialism. Among the biggest prizes were two plants that sat above some of the largest nickel and cobalt deposits in the world. The United States had acquired one of them to secure a strategic supply of nickel for armor plating and aircraft engines during World War II. But the revolutionaries lacked know-how, and soon, the operations were struggling. “Cuban Mining Industry Virtually Destroyed in First Two Years of Castro Regime,” read a January 1961 New York Times headline, “PITS ARE CLOSED, FACTORIES SILENT.”

The Cuban regime turned to its Cold War patron, as it did for so much else in its early years. Soviet engineers and mining specialists retooled the Nicaro plant and the Moa Bay nickel complex into pillars of the island’s economy and icons of Cuban sovereignty, funding power plants and social programs. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Castro sought a replacement savior closer to home in a 1994 deal with Sherritt International, a Canadian nickel and cobalt miner and refiner. Cuba provided the ore and labor. Sherritt brought capital, refining technology, and access to global markets.

The U.S. tried repeatedly to sever that lifeline for Havana, including with a Bill Clinton–era law that barred any profits being recouped from property confiscated after the 1959 revolution. But the nickel and cobalt kept flowing. Nickel—raw or semifinished—was Cuba’s third-largest export in 2024, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, and China was the top recipient.

Now the Trump administration has targeted those industries anew as part of its all-points campaign to overpower the post-Castro regime. Other elements of that drive have been deliberately attention-grabbing. The Justice Department recently indicted 94-year-old Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother and successor, for the alleged downing of planes that killed three Americans and a U.S. resident 30 years ago. The USS Nimitz, an aircraft carrier, has moved into the Caribbean, much as the USS Gerald R. Ford approached Venezuela before the ouster of the dictator Nicolás Maduro. CIA Director John Ratcliffe recently made a highly unusual visit to his intelligence counterpart in Havana. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio marked Cuban Independence Day with a video message in Spanish telling Cubans that their government is to blame for their “unimaginable hardships.”

[Read: Cubans’ despair]

The blow that landed on May 1—packaged as a wonkish executive order—was much less flashy but did more immediate damage. The presidential decree imposed new sanctions on companies doing business with the regime, significantly expanding the comprehensive embargo and making it akin to those aimed at countries such as Iran, Russia, and North Korea. Within a week, Sherritt said that it would dissolve its partnership with the state-owned General Nickel Company, ending the Moa Nickel joint venture and other interests in electricity generation and natural gas.

Sherritt’s move spelled serious trouble for an economy already on the brink. For many months, the U.S. has enforced a blockade that stops Venezuelan and Mexican oil shipments from reaching Cuba. Factories have gone idle. Public transportation sputters. Long lines for basic goods stretch through Havana. Blackouts are commonplace. President Miguel Díaz-Canel described the U.S. sanctions as “collective punishment” on the Cuban people.

Then, last week, Sherritt announced it would only suspend its joint venture in Cuba and was in talks to sell a controlling ownership stake in Sherritt to Gillon Capital, with the apparent blessing of the U.S. State and Treasury Departments. Gillon is a Dallas-based firm that belongs to the family of Ray Washburne, a real-estate executive who served in the first Trump administration; neither firm responded to a request for comment.

Such a deal, if it goes through, could potentially bring the saga of Cuba’s mineral riches full circle by returning nickel and cobalt mines to U.S. ownership at a time when they have acquired a new strategic importance. Both minerals are used in manufacturing, including of cellphones and car batteries, and both help explain why the Trump administration is eager to bring Cuba to heel, one way or another.

Trump has not been seeking to normalize relations with the post-Castro regime so much as force a conditional surrender. Ratcliffe made the point to the Cubans last week while the president, Rubio, and several members of the administration’s senior foreign-policy team were dining on crispy beef ribs and roast duck in Beijing. The CIA chief’s mission to Havana was to “personally deliver President Trump’s message that the United States is prepared to seriously engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes fundamental changes,” a CIA official told me. Ratcliffe also warned that Trump’s threats should be treated as credible, the implication being that if the U.S. military could pluck Maduro from his home in Caracas, it could do the same to leaders in Havana. The U.S. carrier now lurking in the Caribbean serves as a constant reminder.

As with Venezuela, the United States sees Cuba as an unwelcome outpost of Russian and Chinese influence, not so much a Cold War relic as a current national-security threat sitting 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Ratcliffe’s discussions were held “against the backdrop that Cuba can no longer be a safe haven for adversaries in the Western Hemisphere,” the CIA official said.

The squeeze on Cuba’s nickel and cobalt operations fits into another area of geopolitical rivalry: the race for critical-minerals dominance. China is far ahead and uses its market power to dictate global terms. The Trump administration is trying to reduce U.S. dependence on Chinese supplies through sanctions, export controls, and an aggressive tariffs structure, as well as by imposing stiff penalties on businesses that rely on Chinese technology. Those are part of a broader effort to persuade mineral-rich countries in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia to redirect critical-minerals supply chains toward the United States. Diversifying away from China is often a condition of access to U.S. markets and financing.

[Read: All eyes on Cuba]

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is at the center of this initiative. He told me in a written response that the U.S. would like to see a critical-minerals partnership with Cuba that could create economic opportunities for “both the American and Cuban people.” But, he added, “the economic trajectory of Cuba will not change as long as the people who are in charge of it now remain in power.”

For decades, the red earth around the eastern Cuban town of Moa fueled the Cuban Revolution. The site of the joint venture with Sherritt still holds nearly a quarter century of remaining reserves, according to estimates from Sherritt. What its riches will power next may depend on the fate of Sherritt and its joint venture but Cuba could in theory become an important piece of Washington’s strategy for countering Beijing. Such a deal might also pave the way for other American businesses; Trump is enamored of the opportunities a pliant Cuba could offer domestic businesses, several U.S. officials told me, much as it did in the Fulgencio Batista era, leading up to the 1959 revolution.

But Havana, too, may have some leverage. The Trump administration blew up a Canadian company’s business in order to tighten the screws on the regime. But Cuba may be tempted to respond by offering shares in one of its crown jewels to an ally, or at least threatening to do so. “This is a good chance for China and Russia to step back in,” Diego von Vacano, a political-science professor and Latin America specialist at Texas A&M University, told me. In that case, the Trump administration might find that its drive to humble a tiny nearby regime hands further advantage to its chief adversaries in a much bigger, more important battle.

The Man Behind the Trump Administration’s Favorite Psychedelic

2026-05-24T08:00:00-04:00

W. Bryan Hubbard speaks a lot about divinity. He thinks that psychedelic drugs have divine origin and can put you in touch with a higher power. He also believes that his role in catalyzing the most prominent political action supporting psychedelics to date was divinely orchestrated.

And so meeting him at Trinity United Methodist Church in downtown Denver felt natural. The late-April light streamed through stained-glass windows while Hubbard, a broad-shouldered man with straight posture, settled into a pew. His brown hair was pulled back into a low bun, and he wore a plaid shirt and blue jeans. In a southern lilt, he described how he’s been generating previously unheard-of Republican enthusiasm for psychedelics, in particular for a drug called ibogaine. Though robust data from U.S.-based clinical trials about this drug are lacking, some researchers—along with a number of enthusiasts—believe that ibogaine may help people with opioid addiction and withdrawal, and perhaps PTSD and traumatic brain injuries too.

On a Saturday morning a couple of weeks before Hubbard and I met, Donald Trump signed an executive order that directed several federal agencies to accelerate research on psychedelics—including ibogaine—as treatments for mental-health conditions. Rumors about such an order had circulated among psychedelics insiders since the beginning of April, when Joe Rogan had hosted Hubbard and former Texas Governor Rick Perry on his podcast. When the headphones came off, Hubbard told me, he decided to ask Rogan for a favor: Would he contact the president about ibogaine? As Rogan recounted at the Oval Office, “Trump’s reply was, ‘Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval?’” (At the signing, Trump didn’t know at first how to pronounce the word ibogaine, though he did jokingly ask if he could have some.)

From the beginning of Trump’s second presidency, many psychedelics enthusiasts hoped that his administration would be favorable to the medical use of psychedelic drugs. MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression seemed to be the likeliest candidates, given that both regimens are in the late phases of clinical trials. But the final push for Trump’s most consequential psychedelics policy was linked to a drug whose benefits are supported by only a handful of preclinical studies and a single Phase 1 trial.

That strange turn speaks to Hubbard’s advocacy over the past few years. His success can be partly attributed to the fact that a meat-eating southerner and lifelong Republican is not the typical psychedelics spokesperson. But it also reflects a bigger shift in the political culture of psychedelics since the days of LSD-taking environmentalists and anti–Vietnam War protesters. Perry, a conservative as well, has been a prominent ibogaine supporter since he tried the drug in a Mexican medical clinic in 2023. Many high-profile combat veterans want medical access to ibogaine. Hubbard, who had posters of Ronald Reagan in his childhood bedroom, said that these days, he has more success proselytizing for ibogaine on the right than on the left. “I have been able to talk to the most religiously fundamentalist, white, Republican conservatives that you would imagine,” he told me. And many of them are on board.

In the dimly lit sanctuary of the church, Hubbard explained how he used to have the “typical conservative” view of psychedelics: “that these were a bunch of subversive, hippie drugs that made people roll around in the mud naked, and they had no beneficial or helpful purpose.” Then, in 2018, he read a Scientific American article that mentioned research on psilocybin for the treatment of alcohol-use disorder that piqued his curiosity. He estimated he had about a dozen psilocybin trips over the next four years.

In 2022, Hubbard, a lawyer, was offered a position as chair of the Kentucky Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission, in charge of distributing nearly $1 billion in settlement money from opioid companies to programs for addiction prevention, treatment, and recovery. Hubbard hosted town halls, where, he told me, “the sum-total message from the people who came to attend, was, We don’t think that you have either the competence or the honesty to do anything that’s going to help us.” Hubbard, eager for a new solution, turned to a psychedelics Substack writer he admired to ask if she knew of any compound that might help with opioid addiction. As he tells it, she responded, “Have you ever heard of ibogaine?”

Ibogaine is derived from a shrub called Tabernanthe iboga, which grows in Central and West Africa. In Gabon, iboga root is used in ritualistic ceremonies in the Bwiti tradition. Those ceremonies mark the transition to adulthood and can be grueling. “The experience was intended as a kind of temporary death,” the French anthropologist Julien Bonhomme wrote in a chapter of the book Expanding Mindscapes: A Global History of Psychedelics.

After the compound was isolated in Europe at the turn of the 20th century, an ibogaine-based drug was sold in France as a mild stimulant (low doses can increase energy), but it stopped being manufactured after athletes took it to enhance their performance. In 1962, an American with a heroin addiction, Howard Lotsof, received a gift of ibogaine from a chemist friend and noticed that his cravings disappeared after he took the drug. He shared it with other people who had heroin addictions and found that some of them also reduced their use and sidestepped major withdrawal symptoms. Some quit using entirely. Thanks to stories like Lotsof’s, even today, “ibogaine comes with this tremendous amount of mythology around its benefits for opioid disorder,” Joji Suzuki, an addiction psychiatrist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told me.

Lotsof tried to get scientists around the world to set up a proper clinical trial. But by the 1990s, such attempts had mostly stalled. Instead, advocacy groups raised money to send people desperate for addiction treatment, and later veterans, to ibogaine clinics outside the U.S., including in Saint Kitts, Mexico, and the Netherlands. In those settings, ibogaine leads to a trip that lasts anywhere from 12 to 36 hours. At first, a person has vivid, dreamlike hallucinations, often scenes from their own life. That’s followed by periods of contemplation, energized wakefulness, and, purportedly, a vanishing of withdrawal symptoms. The drug can also induce nausea and vomiting and has serious cardiac risks. Using it safely requires continuous heart monitoring, and some clinics now offer intravenous magnesium to reduce the chances of heart complications.

Few studies have examined ibogaine’s effects on opioid-use disorder and other conditions, and they tend to be on very small groups of people, many of whom sought out ibogaine on their own. In one observational study, 88 people who had gone to a clinic in Mexico between 2012 and 2015 filled out a survey. A majority said that ibogaine reduced their opioid-withdrawal symptoms, and at the time of the survey, 41 percent were abstinent. In a more recent, often-cited paper from Stanford, researchers scanned the brains of veterans with traumatic brain injuries before and after they went to a clinic in Mexico. Most of the veterans’ symptoms significantly improved. But the study had no control group, and the participants were atypical: male former Special Operations Forces veterans who were motivated enough to pay to travel for the treatment. Without further study, it’s hard to say how the effects they experienced might generalize to other populations.

[Read: Tripping on nothing]

Despite the scant hard evidence, Hubbard saw ibogaine as the solution his state needed. Within a year of learning about the drug, he drafted a proposal to dedicate 5 percent of the state’s opioid-settlement funds to researching ibogaine for opioid-use disorder. In addition to its potential to treat addiction, Hubbard believed ibogaine to be the ideal political candidate for state-funded psychedelics research in general. LSD and mushrooms came with baggage—notably the belief that they would make you go crazy or start wearing tie-dye—but no one had heard of ibogaine. It wasn’t a recreational drug, and had little potential to become one thanks to its often-punishing physical side effects. “I thought there was an opportunity to introduce ibogaine as a blank slate,” Hubbard said. In November of 2023, Hubbard and his wife even traveled to a clinic in Mexico to try ibogaine for themselves.

But then, political turnover killed the project. In late 2023, Hubbard alleges, a new state attorney general, Russell Coleman, pushed him out. “He expressed great displeasure with my public advocacy for ibogaine in Kentucky,” Hubbard wrote in his resignation letter. (Coleman did not respond to requests for comment.)

Hubbard, though, remained convinced that the need for new opioid-addiction treatments, as well as the potential benefits for veterans, made ibogaine the ultimate bipartisan psychedelic. In 2025, he and Perry founded their nonprofit, Americans for Ibogaine, and successfully lobbied for Texas to pass a $50 million fund-matching bill for ibogaine research. AFI has also been lobbying for a multistate partnership that would create a nationwide ibogaine trial. Lawmakers in red states—including Tennessee, Missouri, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and West Virginia—have led the charge on introducing, and in some cases passing, laws that support research on ibogaine. Even Kentucky recently passed a framework to study the use of ibogaine to treat substance-use disorders. Hubbard called it “full-circle justice.”

Psychedelics come with no inherent ideologies, of course. “Psychedelics seem to appear throughout history at moments when people are deeply questioning something,” Erika Dyck, a historian of medicine and psychedelics at the University of Saskatchewan, in Canada, told me.

This is how Hubbard understands any Republican acceptance of psychedelics. The new support coming from the right, he believes, mirrors the left’s mindset in the 1960s: a response to the widespread distrust of powerful people and federal institutions, and the resulting sense of disillusionment. “The right’s embrace of psychedelics is its own countercultural response,” he said. (The fact psychedelics may help American service members is certainly a helpful selling point too.)

Hubbard told me that his own politics are informed by his ancestors, who were coal miners from the mountains of Virginia, western North Carolina, and East Kentucky. One of his greatest influences, he said, is the United Mine Workers of America, a union that organized around improving working conditions and increasing wages. He said his great-great-grandfather, along with four of his brothers, crossed the Ohio River to fight against the South during the Civil War. Psychedelics, by his reckoning, are crucial for “everybody who wants to have a shot at living with any measure of freedom or dignity.”

Listening to Hubbard muse about universal human rights and freedom, it’s easy to understand why he’s frequently compared to a preacher. His remarks about the medical benefits of ibogaine quickly morph into pronouncements of the sacredness of humankind. “I see the science as a gateway to the spirituality,” he said. The 4,202-pipe organ gleamed over us.

Psychedelics and religion are no strangers. These compounds are used as religious sacraments in both Indigenous traditions and contemporary psychedelic churches. The author Aldous Huxley, who wrote about his own mescaline experience in The Doors of Perception, went on to argue that psychedelics would lead to mass spiritual evolution. (More recently, psychedelics researchers and advocates have said the same.) One of the most infamous studies of the 1960s involved a Harvard Ph.D. student giving mushrooms to divinity students because of the drugs’ ability to reliably induce mystical experiences. Lucas Richert, a historian of medicine and pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me Hubbard is so effective because he taps into that legacy. Hubbard’s advocacy becomes “as much a moral argument or a nationalistic argument, as a biomedical or regulatory argument,” Richert said. Hubbard is also not the only 21st-century conservative making the connection: Perry recently wrote the foreword for a book called The Christian’s Guide to Psychedelics.

For all his success with the right, Hubbard worries he’s not reaching, and is maybe even alienating, essential groups, including public-health experts and medical professionals. The American Psychiatric Association, for example, released a response to Trump’s executive order welcoming federal investment in research, but cautioning that there was “currently inadequate scientific evidence for endorsing the use of psychedelics to treat any psychiatric disorder except within the context of approved investigational studies.” Other psychedelics researchers have expressed wariness at how simplistically advocates like Hubbard sometimes present the drugs: as quick, miraculous cures, rather than difficult psychological and physical experiences that don’t work for everyone and can come with challenging side effects.

Opinions may be shifting even among the public-health establishment. Nora Volkow, the longtime director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said in 2024 that ibogaine was unlikely to ever receive approval as a treatment for opioid addiction. But at the American Psychiatric Association conference earlier this month, her presentation included positive remarks on ibogaine and other psychedelics, the industry news site Psychedelic Alpha reported. Still, Hubbard remains concerned about his audience. The week after we met, he testified at the Ohio capitol in support of legislation to establish ibogaine research in the state. When I asked him how it went, he said, “I wish that some of the audiences that I had the opportunity to speak to had a lot more Democrats and were a lot less white. That’s probably my biggest preoccupation right now.”

[Read: The horseshoe theory of psychedelics]

Suzuki, too, told me he worries about the politicization of psychedelics. If Republican enthusiasm can remove bureaucratic barriers to research on ibogaine and other drugs, he said, “I’m fully in support of it.” But too much partisan support could risk undermining the credibility of his and other researchers’ work. “The impression that I would want to avoid is that this particular project or that particular drug is being approved only because of their alignment with the current administration.”

In an ideal world, politics wouldn’t be able to soil good research. But partisan strife has a long reach. In Denver, I had originally arranged to meet Hubbard at a different church nearby. But the day before the scheduled appointment, I got a rush of emails and calls from a woman who worked there. She told me that after searching Hubbard’s name online, she would not be willing to host us. The church is progressive, and Hubbard, thanks to his association with Trump and Rogan, could alienate the congregation.

When I relayed this story to Hubbard, he momentarily appeared taken aback, then recovered. The woman’s reluctance, he said, was a sign of how divided the country is—exactly why psychedelics were needed to “restore the nation’s soul.” Before we left the church, I looked back at stained-glass windows depicting Jesus rising from the dead, winged and crowned, representing a link between the divine and humankind. Psychedelics, I thought, are undergoing a resurrection of their own. But it’s unclear if their worshippers will be willing to gather under the same roof.

The Kardashians Explain It All

2026-05-24T08:00:00-04:00

One of the boldest questions Barbara Walters ever asked was less a question than an insult. The year was 2011, and Walters was interviewing three members of the Kardashian family—the sisters Kim, Khloé, and Kourtney—and their mother, Kris Jenner. The conversation was, in theory, a compliment to her guests; Walters had included the Kardashians in the most recent edition of her annual “10 Most Fascinating People” list. But now, sitting with the four women, she observed: “You don’t really act; you don’t sing; you don’t dance. You don’t have any—forgive me—any talent.”

Had Walters been hoping to manufacture some drama with the remark—one of her own talents was her ability to make famous people cry on national television—she had underestimated the celebrities before her. “But we’re still entertaining people,” Khloé replied, meeting Walters’s barb with practiced placidity. Kim, taking her sister’s cue, noted the challenge of making people “fall in love with you for being you.”

Their serenity should not have come as a surprise. The Kardashians were professionally versed in treating the real as not quite real. And they had heard versions of Walters’s critique before. From nearly the moment that their first show, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, premiered, in 2007, its success had been met with suspicion. In its affect, the series was notably listless: Everyone involved (even the strivers it depicted) seemed a bit bored. It followed people who were wealthy and pretty, and their efforts to get wealthier and prettier. That it entertained viewers seemed, to its detractors, an indictment—not just of the family but also of the people who kept watching it. KUWTK was a canary in the content mine: evidence of all that can go wrong when “reality” is remade for ratings.

The anxiety the show provoked only added to its allure. KUWTK endured for an improbable 20 seasons, fueled by fans and hate-watchers and the fact that, commercially, the two amount to the same thing. By the time its finale aired on E!, in 2021, the show’s run read like a vindication of the Kardashians and their critics. The family was famous for being famous, the naysayers said. The Kardashians agreed—and then rode the fame, along with their Lamborghinis, all the way to the bank.

Today, the Kardashians are, collectively, more than just billionaires. They are a conglomerate with a brand identity, a Fortune 500–size operating budget, and an openness to being publicly traded. Repackaged as Instagram posts, TikTok reels, and meme-friendly screenshots, they are also their own corporate assets, their own sponsored content. The Kardashians are endlessly selling things (diet aids, makeup, apparel). Mostly, though, they are selling themselves.

[Read: The pandemic clarified who the Kardashians really are]

This is what Walters was hinting at when she asked the Kardashian women—informed them, really—about their lack of talent. Fame, being a currency, is typically earned. Talent has traditionally been one route to fame’s wealth. It has also, however, been associated with a kind of godliness: a gift that is possessed and that might be given to the world at large. Walters, in questioning the Kardashians’ talent, was doing more than merely insulting her guests. She was also (forgive her) implicating them. Their fame, she suggested, was ill-gotten—lucre not quite stolen but gained as passive income.

The claim was not new. What was remarkable was that it failed to recognize the more salient feature of the family’s ascendance: The Kardashians did not amass their power despite their lack of talent; they rose because they understand, with the canny foresight of the early adopter, how talent is being redefined.

Even the physical goods the Kardashians have brought to market—Skims, Kim’s shapewear brand, was recently valued at $5 billion, and Kylie sold more than half of her eponymous cosmetics company, in 2019, for $600 million—have been extensions of their telegenic brand. They are things that defer to images: products that exist primarily because, in the attention economy, eyeballs are meant to be monetized. And the Kardashians keep making us look.

You may not be able to name all of the people in the family (whose most prominent members also include Kendall and Kylie Jenner; the five sisters’ brother, Rob; and Kris’s former spouse Caitlyn Jenner). But you are subject to them all the same—and to the images, carefully posed and flawlessly filtered, that Kardashian Inc. and its subsidiaries churn out with factory efficiency. The Kardashians reside in Hidden Hills (and in Calabasas, and Malibu, and the Coachella Valley); as pieces of content, though, they live everywhere. Awareness of them is no longer an opt-in proposition.

Their power, because of that, is hegemonic—and historic. When, in 2015, Cosmopolitan dubbed the Kardashians “America’s First Family,” the magazine was making its own bid for eyeballs; it was also making a point. Democracies have their dynasties, and the Kardashians are among Americans’ unelected leaders, shaping our language and tastes and beauty standards, one piece of sponcon at a time. The title of their reality show acknowledged that ethereal form of influence. We keep up with the Kardashians in the same way that we keep up with the Joneses: involuntarily and inevitably. Like the Medicis, had that family patronized only themselves—like the Carnegies, had they manufactured not steel but empty air—the Kardashians have ascended, in their case by proving that nothingness, in a culture that defers to images, can be the stuff of empires.

They are also, as the psychotherapist and author MJ Corey argues in her exhaustive new analysis Dekonstructing the Kardashians, perfect metonyms for American culture—humans who have, as media figures, adopted the epic and somewhat pitiable proportions of Las Vegas, Disneyland, or the WWE. The Kardashians are hyperreal and fantastical, aspirational and kitsch. In her preface, Corey offers a note of apology for the topic at hand, quoting the author David Sinclair—who, in writing about the Spice Girls, observed that his subject would require him to defend the group’s honor and his own.

The rest of Corey’s book, however, is unapologetic, and rightfully so: The Kardashians matter, Corey suggests, because of who they are, but also because of who we are. They are fun-house mirrors, their cosmetically enhanced curves reflecting us back to ourselves both as we exist and as we might hope to be.

[Read: The sadness of the Kardashians]

Corey’s book—spun out from Kardashian Kolloquium, the name of various social-media accounts that she has maintained over the years to track the doings of America’s shadow First Family—reads less as a biography of one clan than as a study of the culture that elevated it. This makes Dekonstructing the Kardashians particularly compelling: To deconstruct the family, to treat them as a text to be read, as canon to be accepted, is to understand the media moment. The book’s subtitle is, aptly, A New Media Manifesto. The Kardashians, Corey writes, are “a composite of historical touchpoints, media tropes, and shifting identities.” They are reliably overexposed and underappreciated. Offering themselves up as images to be analyzed—“even if I’m objectifying myself, I feel good about it,” Kim once said, like a Pandora unleashing a flurry of think pieces—they function, effectively, as myths.

This is their talent, their gift. Societies need shared stories, shared icons, shared lore. The Kardashians provide them. The family, Corey argues, embodies the postmodern theorist Roland Barthes’ notion that images are collectively authored: objects that find their meaning in the way that viewers interpret them.

Dekonstructing the Kardashians can be dizzying in its scope. Corey, at different points, compares Kim to Marilyn Monroe, a Coke bottle, a Disney princess, and Mickey Mouse. Theorizing about the family, she invokes Benjamin and Baudrillard and Hegel and so many other thinkers that the book can read as a brief history of modern, and postmodern, thought. Remarkably, though, the book’s argument justifies its breadth. Dekonstructing the Kardashians, somewhat like Naomi Klein’s 2023 masterpiece, Doppelganger, is both about its nominal subject (Klein’s being, most directly, the writer Naomi Wolf) and not really about it at all. Klein treats Wolf—with whom she is often confused—as a metaphor for the divisions (of information, of political conviction, of reality) that are unsteadying American culture. Doppelgängers, the “twin strangers” of German folklore, are omens. Klein’s own double, having recently turned to the “mirror world” of conspiracism and paranoia, is a person whose path hints at trouble ahead.

To some viewers, the Kardashians may seem like trouble. For Corey, they are most interesting when met on their own terms. Who are they, as people? Their audiences will likely never know. Nor should we much care. The operative question is what they are, and why—and how they keep people watching.

This is perhaps why the Kardashians have retained their capacity to infuriate. Their success calls viewers’ bluff. Their status punctures one of Americans’ most fragile pieces of lore: the idea that the country, through its economy, is also a meritocracy. In that myth, markets are agents of morality. Through the market’s transactions, the idea goes, talent is rewarded; hard work gets its due.

The Kardashians, captains of industry in a post-industrial age, defy the old myths. Kim and her siblings were born into an age of excess, when “greed was good,” aspiration was limitless, and admiration for “lifestyles of the rich and famous”—something converted from a sociological category to a piece of entertainment—was losing its association with shame. Today, they are their own economic engines. The family employs not only the traditional Hollywood retinues (agents, assistants, stylists, housekeepers) but also people who act as their personal marketing departments, legal teams, and brand consultants.

The apex predators of our ever-more-stratified media environment have found their place at the top less by preying on others than by proving their willingness to be consumed: their bodies, ourselves. The Kardashians expose everything—the precise make of her breast implants (Kylie), the diet she used to drop a reported 16 pounds in three weeks (Kim), the plastic surgeon who performed her recent facelift (Kris)—while revealing, in practical terms, very little.

Their ability to shape-shift, literally and otherwise, is crucial to their appeal. They are living memes, infinitely adaptable and communally shared. They say almost nothing and, in that, they could mean almost anything—which makes them sphinxlike too. The Kardashians deliver their riddles in the internet’s global vernaculars: images, hashtags, assorted outrages. Gazing down, graceful and inscrutable, they befuddle all who behold them partly because they mean to and are good at it, and partly because befuddlement tends to double as engagement on Instagram.

Perhaps the family’s biggest riddle is what exactly it is giving back along the way. The Kardashians have been rewarded handsomely for their entrepreneurial solipsism. This is why they have the gross domestic product of a small country. But it is also why their power can seem so gross. The Kardashians may not be the icons we want, but they are the ones the system has elevated. As long as we keep looking, they will be the ones that we deserve.

*Illustration sources: Andreas Rentz / Getty; Angela Weiss / AFP / Getty; Araya Doheny / Getty; Arturo Holmes / Getty; Axelle / Bauer-Griffin / FilmMagic; Bing Guan / Bloomberg; Dave Hogan / Getty; Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty; Getty; Jaime Nogales / Medios y Media / Getty; Jamie McCarthy / Getty; Jamie McCarthy / WireImage; Jared Siskin / amfAR / Getty; Jeff Spicer / Getty; John Shearer / WireImage; Kevin Mazur / Getty; MEGA / GC Images; Michael Loccisano / Getty; Phillip Faraone / Getty; Rachpoot The Hollywood Curtain / Bauer-Griffin / GC Images; Robin L Marshall / Getty; Rosalind O'Connor / NBC / Getty; Stefanie Keenan / Getty; Steve Granitz / FilmMagic; Taylor Hill / FilmMagic

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