Best of The Atlantic

The Great Data-Center Rebellion

2026-09-30T08:00:00-04:00

Clinton, Iowa, is topographically flat and economically declining. The sawmills that made the city rich in the late 19th century have been repurposed as a museum. One of the Victorian mansions long since abandoned by the old lumber barons is open for tours, but tourists are scarce. Clinton has shrunk to about 24,000 people, and the town center, along the Mississippi River, feels nearly empty. On the west side, miles of deep-green corn and soy fields are crisscrossed with transmission wires and zoned for heavy industrial use. The city’s economic activity includes corn processing, pet-food production, and methamphetamines. With available land and a dire need for investment, Clinton seems like the perfect place for a gigantic data center.

In January, a Clintonian named Stephen Figg, who owns a small firm that builds technological infrastructure, including for data centers, heard from a customer that a broker was making inquiries about buying farmland on the west side, north of Highway 30. In mid-February, a father of two girls named Ryan Wisor, who had obtained a residential exemption to live in that area, noticed surveyors with boring rigs working in the field behind the house he’d built. He asked his stepsister, who sits on the city council, if she knew of a planned development. Several weeks later, she told him of a proposal for a data center. He learned that the project would border his house on two sides and come to within 65 feet of his well.

For almost two years, city officials, utility companies, and a pro-business nonprofit, Grow Clinton, had been in discussions about the construction of a data center in Clinton. It later emerged that an international developer called Quality Technology Services (QTS), owned by the trillion-dollar private-equity firm Blackstone, planned to build one of the country’s largest AI data centers—10 buildings of 500,000 square feet each—on behalf of a client that remains anonymous. Private meetings, nondisclosure agreements, and even a code name (“Saturday River”) had kept the plan’s existence quiet until Andy Sokolovich, the president of Grow Clinton, unveiled the proposal at a county-board meeting on April 27. He had wanted to keep the project confidential longer, but word was getting out.

Theresa Andrews, a quality analyst at a chemical company, had heard a rumor in mid-March about a development planned for the cornfields in her area, but she’d blown it off. After watching the April 27 county meeting online, she went on the city’s website and noticed dozens of requests for information about the status of parcels of farmland; a few of them were right across the street from her house. Andrews stayed up late for several nights creating a spreadsheet of the parcels and then a map of the projected site. The scale was almost unimaginable: 1,100 acres, or 832 football fields—about the size of Central Park. This would be a “hyperscale” data center, and it turned out to be far along. From FOIA requests, Andrews learned that plans for upgrading utilities in the area had been in the works since 2024.

This was how the Data-Center Rebellion of 2026 came to Clinton, Iowa. Not through Chinese propaganda, or misinformation on social media—though both are plentiful—but because a small group of residents accidentally got wind of a megaproject planned for their community. Andrews, Wisor, Figg, and others had concerns about water consumption, electrical-grid capacity, soil contamination, low-frequency sound waves, nonstop light, an invasion of out-of-state contractors, and—for those in the leviathan’s shadow—the permanent destruction of their rural life. “There’s no proven history of these things,” Wisor told me. He imagined playing in the yard with his 9-year-old daughter and worrying what their colossal new neighbor might be doing to his family’s health. “I go sit outside and all I think is, This could all be gone. You can’t turn it off.”

Large numbers of Clintonians began to attend contentious city-council meetings. On June 9, the council voted down a proposal for a 120-day moratorium that would have allowed more time to assess the risks of something so immense and unknown. The city proceeded to draft an ordinance for a data center’s construction and use. Legally, QTS could begin without one. According to Andrews, city officials “were trying to tell us we have to hurry and get the ordinance in place so QTS won’t just start building: ‘You should want us to push fast.’ ” Instead, she and other citizens formed Clintonians Against Data Centers.

Even in a city as small as Clinton, the seven members of the group’s steering committee—four women and three men, all white, most of them middle-aged—were at first strangers to one another. The group includes Republicans and Democrats, probably more of the former, but they didn’t know one another’s political affiliations and didn’t seem to want to. Political comments unrelated to artificial intelligence are scrubbed from the Facebook page. “It’s a fun collection in terms of their politics,” Chris Baldus, the editor of the Clinton Herald, told me. “Outside of this, there’s no way in hell these people are talking to each other.”

Celeste Robbins, who works in law enforcement and describes herself as both “artsy” and “very religious,” is a disenchanted Trump voter. “If you want to get rich as a state or as a town,” the president said in September, “you’re going to want a data center.” Robbins told me, “I do not agree with him about this.” She lives far from the proposed site, and her opposition comes down to AI itself: She hates the ease with which it replaces human thought, and she fears the mass elimination of jobs. Figg, who couldn’t bring himself to vote for either candidate in the last presidential election, has worked in tech all his life and welcomes the progress that AI might bring. He had just finished eight months of work on an Amazon data center in Indiana when he learned about the proposal for Clinton. He started attending city-council meetings to offer his expertise. “But the more that I try to provide this knowledge to the city and the city council and the mayor, the less receptive they are,” he told me. “That makes it very difficult for me to want to continue that pursuit instead of the pursuit of just trying to prevent it.”

With four children and a small business, Figg had never been involved in local activism before joining Clintonians Against Data Centers.

According to a recent NBC poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans oppose the construction of a data center in their area. Kevin Bradley of Clintonians Against Data Centers observed that this many Americans haven’t agreed on anything since 9/11: “This is affecting all of us—rich, middle-class, and poor. We’re coming together because we’re not happy.” More than 500 jurisdictions have passed moratoriums or bans. This grassroots movement rose so fast and spread so widely that politicians in both parties, including Iowa’s candidates for governor and senator, are struggling to catch up with their constituents. The meteoric emergence of the data-center rebellion is a response to the speed and scale of construction, which in turn reflect the sudden ubiquity of generative and agentic AI. President Trump’s policy has been to turn everything about the technology, including data-center construction, over to private industry. He derides people like Robbins, Figg, and Andrews for wanting to remain “backwards and poor.” But on this issue, most of Trump’s base remains angry and opposed to him; the only precedent might be the case of Jeffrey Epstein. By pushing so hard and promising so much, tech companies, venture capitalists, and their political allies ensured that AI would create a firestorm.

Supporters of data centers point out the benefits—jobs, tax revenues, the many advantages of AI itself. Clinton’s mayor, Scott Maddasion, told me that the project could bring $20 million in annual property taxes to a city with a $24 million budget. Sokolovich, of Grow Clinton, told me it would be closer to $30 million. He said that QTS has requested no tax incentives and will pay for 100 percent of the utility improvements required for the center to operate. A spokesman for Alliant Energy, the region’s regulated electric utility, promised residents that costs related to the data center’s extreme demand would not fall on existing customers.

[Read: The one town that wants a data center]

Clintonians Against Data Centers was not immune to bad information and conspiracist thinking. One member speculated that the sudden appearance around Clinton this past spring of three giant trolls, sculpted from local reclaimed lumber by the Danish artist Thomas Dambo to commemorate the trees consumed by the sawmills, had been funded by QTS to create a “diversion.” A pro-data-center councilman mocked Robbins when, after touring another QTS project in Cedar Rapids, she reported having seen only one bird. Baldus, the newspaper editor, complained that the opposition doesn’t understand how city government works, “and they come in hot.” Sokolovich analogized data-center opposition to COVID skepticism and election denialism.

But the facts about water consumption and tax revenues, though important, are not the crux of the matter. Opposition to data centers comes from a deeper concern than NIMBYism, resource misuse, or environmental harm. Over and over, Clintonians expressed a feeling of being misled, ignored, disrespected, betrayed—of having no say over basic matters in their own lives. The data center seemed to be a deal made among secretive insiders—huge, far-off entities in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and in Washington, as well as the local leaders of their own city. To the tech giants, QTS, Blackstone, and the Trump administration’s AI boosters, Clinton is an empty space on the Mississippi that looks like an opportunity. That the industry seeking to buy 1,100 acres on the west side of town is in the business of replacing human beings with machines—and perhaps, according to some AI experts, even rendering them extinct—only intensifies a sense of powerlessness.

The data-center rebellion, with its local origins and compounding grievances, is thoroughly American. In the 18th century, rural citizens rose up against heavy taxes and farm seizures. In the early 20th century, a time in many ways similar to our own, Louis Brandeis spoke of the “curse of bigness”: concentrations of money and power so great that the individual almost ceases to exist, and democracy itself is threatened. Like other heartland communities, Clinton has suffered “a history of abandonment,” Matt Parbs, the vice president of Grow Clinton, acknowledged. “Clinton since 1980 has internalized the downturn in midwestern industry.” What if, in a few years, 5 million square feet of steel, concrete, computer servers, and microchips in the cornfields become obsolete and go the way of the sawmills, or of the liberal-arts college in Clinton that was bought by a for-profit, moved entirely online, and closed?

I tried to imagine a hyper-scale data center engulfing the yard where Ryan Wisor’s daughter plays with the family’s chickens. Against such an immense force, with all the wealth, political power, technological sophistication, and claims of historical inevitability behind it, a sense of dignity can only raise a small voice in protest.

In a city the size of Clinton, the controversy over the data center was bound to hurt personal relationships. Linda Chapman, whose husband was the city’s fire marshal, knows all seven members of the city council and has stopped trusting most of them. Wisor and his stepsister on the council no longer speak. Andy Sokolovich, of Grow Clinton, can’t appear in public without someone sticking a phone camera in his face and asking him incendiary questions. The mayor received a death threat. But the converse is also true: To get anything done, Clintonians can’t just abuse one another on Facebook or podcasts. They have to sit in a room together and talk face-to-face.

Throughout the summer, the city pushed ahead with an ordinance while Clintonians Against Data Centers kept raising objections that were mostly ignored, hoping to stall the process until QTS decided to look elsewhere.

In early September, I attended a council meeting where the language of the ordinance was to be hammered out. To accommodate several hundred people, the meeting was held not at city hall, but in a cavernous pole-frame lodge at the northern end of the city, in a park overlooking the river. The president and vice president of Grow Clinton were not present. “I don’t want to say I’m intimidated, but the opposition has been vocal,” Sokolovich told me. “I’m growing weary of it.” Baldus, of the Clinton Herald, attended grudgingly, out of professional duty; he didn’t seem to regard coverage of the data center as the most exciting opportunity for his paper. Theresa Andrews, who was routinely staying up past 3 a.m. to research the issues and prepare for meetings, arrived with a tense look on her face and a binder full of scientific studies on topics such as the effects of noise and light on livestock.

The seven members of the steering committee, some in green CLINTONIANS AGAINST DATA CENTERS T-shirts, sat at a long table with their backs to the audience, facing Mayor Maddasion, the council, and other city officials. This would be a parley between two groups in which everyone now knew everyone. The mayor, an Air Force veteran in his early 40s with a receding hairline, slender and mild, gaveled the meeting to order and led the room in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

The meeting went on for more than five hours, while darkness fell over the Mississippi. With a draft of the data-center ordinance on the table in front of him, the mayor briskly led the council members and city officials through it section by section and took their comments. Then he heard out the criticisms and suggestions of Clintonians Against Data Centers. The most contentious issue was setbacks—the required distance between data-center buildings and neighboring residential properties. The draft ordinance called for 1,000 feet. Andrews, quoting a study from counties in Pennsylvania, argued for 1,500 feet—a distance that might make the whole project untenable. A councilman named Cody Seeley, who did most of the talking for the pro-data-center side, said that the developer and property owners could negotiate the setbacks, adding, “I think 500 feet is adequate,” which also happened to be QTS’s position.

Cries from the audience of “No! No!” The mayor called for silence. Ryan Wisor, for whom the setback question meant the defense of his homestead, said with a slight quaver in his voice: “My frustration is this ordinance is meant to protect the citizens and our property. This isn’t meant to conform so that we can fit a particular business in a particular piece of land.” He added, “For us to give up our rights, it’s not fair.” General applause. It was the emotional high point of the night.

I found the proceedings both mind-numbing and inspiring. The seriousness of purpose, the attention to detail, the stamina required to talk and listen—all of it moved me more than it seemed to impress anyone involved. Clintonians Against Data Centers still felt patronized and ignored. Perhaps the council came away exasperated with the NIMBYs and gadflies who were making the process such an ordeal. (Later, the mayor admitted to me, “We’re learning that there’s probably more ways that we can communicate with the citizens.”) In all likelihood, this small populist uprising will not achieve its goal; a hyperscale data center will come to Clinton, Iowa, amid widespread unhappiness and damaged friendships; and AI will continue to roll over the fields of the republic. But a democratic pulse was still beating along the Mississippi River. That was something.

This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “The Great Data-Center Rebellion.”

A Near-Disaster on Flydubai

2026-09-30T18:04:00-04:00

Today, somewhere over Saudi Arabia, the co-pilot of an Israel-bound Flydubai Boeing 737 stabbed the other pilot and pitched the nose of the plane toward the desert below. The jet descended 17,000 feet in two minutes, at an acceleration violent enough to make your phone and in-flight snack jump off your tray and be pinned to the ceiling. Other crew members and at least one Israeli passenger broke into the cockpit and subdued the assailant. Relief pilots then took over and landed the plane in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. After a second Flydubai plane took the 174 passengers to Tel Aviv, one of the passengers who’d stormed the cockpit told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that his actions had been effective in part because he had watched the disaster-porn documentary series Mayday, about aviation catastrophes, and had known to pull back on the yoke.

Whether today’s near-disaster was terrorism or merely attempted mass murder depends on the attacker’s motive. Either way, it is a public-relations catastrophe for Flydubai, the budget cousin of the airline Emirates. Since the United Arab Emirates opened diplomatic relations with Israel in 2020, the airline has connected the two countries with few interruptions, even for acts of war and terror. Keeping that air route open and safe has taken a great deal of effort. Last year, I witnessed clever security engineering at Dubai’s Terminal 1: placement of the check-in desk for El Al, the Israeli carrier, adjacent to the desk for Iran’s Mahan Air. Anyone tempted to attack Israeli passengers would hit Iranian ones, and vice versa. Checked baggage costs extra, but the experience of being a human shield while waiting in line is complimentary.

Mahan Air no longer flies into Dubai. U.S. sanctions have halted much of its operations, and Dubai had already curtailed its flights, on the grounds that Iran can fly either missiles into Dubai or commercial flights, but not both. Israel, by contrast, has emerged from the 2026 Iran war closer to the UAE, which has absorbed more Iranian attacks than any other country. Although the Arab countries of the region have been allied as the Gulf Cooperation Council since 1981, that proved useless as soon as the conflict started. But Israel responded by sending defense systems and advisers. At least one Iranian strike during the early phases of the war hit near the Israeli consulate in Dubai. One possible political motive for the Flydubai incident would be to strain and punish the relationship between the two countries. (One of the few unambiguous winners today is Boeing. Its 737 MAX series was previously grounded when its software forced jets into fatal dives. Today, a human pilot instigated such a dive and tried to smash the 737’s instrument panel. The airframe held together even after approaching Mach 1.)

[Read: The Middle East still to come]

The relationship between Israel and the UAE is unlikely to snap over a single attack. The relationship between the UAE and Netanyahu himself is more delicate. In the past several weeks, the president of the UAE, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, was implicated in a report from Haaretz that severely damaged Netanyahu’s chances of remaining in office after next month’s Israeli election. The report alleged that days before the massacre of October 7, 2023, MBZ had personally warned Netanyahu that an attack was imminent but Netanyahu had done nothing to act on the warning. The UAE government at first refused to comment on the story. On Sunday, however, Netanyahu visited Abu Dhabi, and the AP reported that he asked MBZ to deny that he’d warned of an attack.

Yesterday, in New York, UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed did exactly that. “Sheikh Mohammed did not call Prime Minister Netanyahu and say there is going to be an attack on Israel,” Abdullah said in a meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations, calling his denial “categorical.” He said that using a leader-to-leader call to pass along secrets was “not our style,” but he left open the possibility that a warning had been passed between governments, if not between leaders. This denial releases some pressure on Netanyahu without absolving his government of its failures. (The story echoes Vivian Salama’s Atlantic report about a pre–October 7 warning from Egypt’s intelligence chief.)

The New York Times and others have reported that the first officer who allegedly tried to bring down the plane is an Omani national. (The injured captain, according to Netanyahu, is the Indian national Smit Machchhar.) Both are reportedly still in Saudi Arabia. The next step will involve determining whether the pilot acted alone—not a good look for Flydubai, to have suicidal or terrorist pilots—or at someone’s behest. The latter possibility could, if confirmed, have serious implications, depending on who directed the attack. Many have a motive: Sunni jihadists (al-Qaeda or the Islamic State), Hamas, and of course Iran and its proxies. This Mayday moment will have huge implications if any of these groups are involved.

How the Culture War Put Public Schools at Risk

2026-09-30T08:30:34-04:00

For more than half a century after Milton Friedman proposed using taxpayer money to support students in private schools, the libertarian economist’s idea went almost nowhere. Republican presidents, including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, pushed vouchers—which help parents enroll their children in schools of their choice, including private and religious schools, at taxpayer expense—as a way to liberate poor children from failing big-city school districts. Those efforts led to voucher initiatives in a smattering of districts, such as Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Washington, D.C. But in state after state, support for public schools—which take all comers and have historically played a crucial role in cultivating students’ common identity as Americans—was just too broad-based and too strong to get voucherlike programs approved on a larger scale.

In the past several years, though, voucher advocates have switched strategies to take advantage of the country’s ever-deepening political polarization. In 2022, the Heritage Foundation urged the voucher movement “to embrace the culture war” as a way of promoting school choice. As evidence of progressive overreach, the conservative think tank has pointed to “racial essentialism for third graders” and decried the presence in some school libraries of Gender Queer, a graphic novel that “features a picture of oral sex being performed on a sex toy.”

Conservative leaders in many state capitals have emulated Heritage’s tactics, and the tactical shift has helped persuade lawmakers to expand the supply of school vouchers. Amy Sinclair, the president of the Iowa state Senate, told an interviewer in 2023 that during the coronavirus pandemic, “many parents became aware of anti-American and explicit materials in their child’s classrooms and began to demand choice.” “There’s no reason why any students should have a woke agenda pushed on them,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared a month later at a rally for private-school-choice legislation. The following year, his Arkansas counterpart, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, promoted her school-choice efforts by declaring on X, “We need kids learning math, reading, and science—not woke nonsense.” Since the pandemic, voucherlike programs have proliferated, and they are now open to even the richest students. In 2021, no states had universal programs supporting private education with public dollars; by 2025, 18 did. The number of students using publicly funded private-school-choice programs has tripled since the 2018–19 school year.

[Idrees Kahloon: Nikole Hannah-Jones faced too much apathy to win]

The problem for traditional public schools is that some districts have left themselves open to the political critique that Heritage has been promoting: Many school systems have become identified with progressive causes and have neglected their role as a unifying force in American society. Out of a sincere concern for social justice, they have embraced ideas about diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism that, when applied in practice, prove off-putting even for some liberals.

Sixty-eight percent of American adults agreed with the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down racial preferences in higher education. But many educators have flocked toward the books of Ibram X. Kendi—whose approach toward “anti-racism” insists that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination”—and related ideas emanating from education schools. In a 2025 poll, 58 percent of high-school students said that their teachers “often” or “almost daily” told them to be “actively anti-racist”; more than a third said that teachers frequently told them the United States is a fundamentally racist nation. New York City public schools trained administrators and principals using materials claiming that “objectivity,” thinking “in a linear way,” and “worship of the written word” are white ideas.

To the extent that these efforts help the drive for privatization, they are producing a terrible outcome, both for public education and for society as a whole. Strong public-school systems require support from across the political spectrum. To shore up that support, they need to take a more neutral ideological posture and reclaim their traditional role in cultivating a universal vision of American citizenship.

The timing of the new voucher laws couldn’t be worse for public schools, which are already losing millions of students. This fall, an estimated 3.2 million fewer students will attend public schools than in 2019. That’s in part because Americans are having fewer children, but attrition to private schools even without vouchers is a factor as well. Overall, private-school enrollment in America increased by 28 percent from the period prior to the pandemic to 2024.

A 2025 Tulane University study of voucher programs in 11 states found that the “lion’s share” of those taking advantage were already in private school, but the authors believed that this would likely change over time. “Vouchers have already increased private school enrollment in participating states by 3-4%” compared with non-voucher states, they noted, and one of the Tulane researchers, Douglas Harris, said that the shift was likely the “tip of the iceberg.” Arizona made a voucherlike program universal in 2022. State data show that only 21 percent of participants in the program in the 2023 fiscal year had switched from public schools; by 2025, that proportion had increased to 56 percent.

The trend toward private schools is likely to accelerate. Under Donald Trump, a Republican Congress passed a new federal tax credit that subsidizes private educational services, including tutoring and private-school tuition, for students from families that make up to 300 percent of the local median gross income—a standard that includes more than 90 percent of the K–12 population. Individuals who donate up to $1,700 to a nonprofit scholarship-granting organization receive a dollar-for-dollar credit on their federal tax returns—costing them nothing. SGOs then provide aid for students.

The law, which takes effect in January, could generate $24 billion or more in spending, supporters estimate. The new credit could exceed the $18 billion the federal government invests in Title I, the biggest federal program for public K–12 education. Public-school students who use private tutors may share in benefits, but the bulk of the money will likely support private schools. “This is a private school choice program that might benefit public school students at the margins,” my Progressive Policy Institute colleague Rachel Canter has argued.

The legendary 20th-century teachers’-union leader Albert Shanker, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, recognized that support for public schools hinged on their ability to bring the country together. If schools focus on differences rather than on the commonalities that define students as Americans, he argued, “there will be no reason for taxpayers to continue supporting them.” Public schools long promoted American identity through civics instruction that emphasized the benefits of the country’s liberal democracy, and through U.S-history curricula that leaned heavily—sometimes too heavily—on the successes of American democracy.

But civics education has been eroding for decades, and in many districts, history lessons have swung too far in a condemnatory direction. As educators have become more attuned to racial injustice, most recently with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, they have embraced ideas pushed in education schools that racism and white supremacy are the defining features of America. The National Education Association—the country’s largest teachers’ union and a major force in Democratic politics—got caught up in the ideological ferment on the left and promoted the much-disputed “1619 Project,” which puts slavery at the center of U.S. history and has elicited serious factual objections from prominent historians. These developments carry political risks for public schools: Polling from the American Enterprise Institute shows that 77 percent of adults think that teaching kids that “the U.S. is a fundamentally good country” is “important” or “absolutely essential.” But today, four in 10 Gen Z Americans believe that the Founders were villains rather than heroes.

Public educators’ First Amendment rights are not absolute in the classrooms they oversee. Even if their legal right to press their personal views during the school day were undisputed, the educational value of doing so is debatable, and school systems should be cautious about seeming to take sides on political matters.

One recent legal dispute involved a Progress Pride flag that a high-school teacher on Long Island had put up in her classroom; it was twice the size of the American flag. Some of the views implied by the Pride flag are barely controversial anymore, at least in blue states. A large majority of Americans, including me, support same-sex marriage and laws prohibiting discrimination against gay and trans people.

Even so, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, in an opinion written by a Joe Biden appointee who is a lesbian, sensibly backed the school district’s position that only the American flag and the New York State flag should be flown in its classrooms. LGBTQ kids deserve reassurance that they are welcome. But a Pride flag is also a political statement, just as a Trump flag or a Blue Lives Matter flag is. Teachers are authority figures, and ideological restraint on their part helps protect public education’s legitimacy before a polarized electorate.

At the same time, teaching students what being an American means should be a central goal. This does not mean that schools should teach only an upbeat version of American history. Students need an honest accounting of that history, which includes the subjugation of Black people, women, and gay Americans. But as the Albert Shanker Institute has argued, students should also learn how “the genius of democracy” allows for self-correction. Only because the Constitution guarantees free speech and assembly rights could average citizens partake in successful movements to advance civil rights for Black Americans, women, and gay people. Americans across the political divide are likely to support a middle path. Nine in 10 Democrats want kids to see the Declaration of Independence and Constitution in a positive light, and eight in 10 Republicans want students to learn about slavery and segregation.

[Listen: Testing teachers for ‘wokeness’]

Schools should also teach more students what it’s like to live in nondemocratic societies. Just as Americans who travel abroad come to more fully appreciate aspects of American culture they took for granted, curricula that touch on life in Iran, Russia, and China will also illuminate what makes the United States different. All students should know what naturalized U.S. citizens and the children of immigrants—two groups that express comparatively higher levels of patriotism—recognize: the difference between American society and societies with less freedom and opportunity.

Upholding a common vision of citizenship is essential for the nation’s well-being, and only public schools can do this job. For all their faults, they are more likely than private schools—three-quarters of which are affiliated with a specific religion—to provide the adhesion necessary in a country made up of many races and creeds. The Stanford political scientist Terry Moe, a voucher supporter, has found that Americans have a “public school ideology ”—that is, they like the idea of institutions that take all comers and teach young people what they have in common as Americans. That’s why voter referendums supporting public money for private schools have typically failed.

Voucher advocates’ recent attempts to exploit the culture wars could change all of this—and, if so, could further divide Americans. Public schools can be the answer to the polarization and atomization that so threaten our common life, but only if they fully resume their historic role in binding our multicultural democracy together.

Right-Wing Groups Are Making Money Off John Fetterman

2026-09-30T06:00:00-04:00

A Republican fundraising consultant alerted her colleagues this month in a private message about a hot new business opportunity from an unlikely source: Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a Democrat. “I thought you would be interested in this high performing Fetterman copy,” wrote Leah Mergener, an account associate at the GOP-aligned firm Blitz Digital Group. “It has been doing crazy numbers for us.”

The fundraising appeal was signed by Fetterman and included links to donate to his campaign fund. But the language was written to attract donors sympathetic to President Trump, and the money flowed through a payment-processing firm, Anedot, that is used by Republicans. “I’m always going to reject Socialism and the anti-American way of life,” read its subject line, before warning that socialists were “hijacking the Democratic party.”

Through the opportunity that Mergener proposed, conservative groups that sent the Fetterman appeal to their lists of donors would receive most of the money raised. “We are offering it a 75% split,” Mergener wrote in the message that we obtained. A Republican consultant explained to us that this means that 75 percent of the first donation each recipient made would be kicked back as a commission to the organization that sent the appeal; Fetterman would profit largely by gaining the contact information of new donors, allowing him to build a fundraising list he could use for a future campaign. Blitz Digital Group, which is a Virginia-based affiliate of the direct-mail firm HSP Direct, did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the Fetterman campaign.

Fetterman’s message caught the attention of Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a Republican, who forwarded the note to his own fundraising list, then explicitly teased the idea of Fetterman switching parties if conservatives signed a petition. “I just got an email from John. He’s basically a Republican now,” Lee wrote in a solicitation that we obtained. “I need your help to draft him.” The link in Lee’s message leads to a petition, and an opportunity to give money to Lee’s own federal fundraising account. Lee’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Just four years ago, Fetterman overcame a mid-campaign stroke to win his Senate seat as a new kind of left-leaning populist with a platform that included support for a $15 federal minimum wage and single-payer health care. He was helped by an endorsement from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who identifies as a democratic socialist. But as the 2026 midterm elections approach, Fetterman has been vocal about feeling rejected by his party and is openly talking about leaving it over differences on support for Israel and the Iran war. His polling among Democrats in his state has collapsed, and he is likely to face multiple primary challengers if he chooses to run for reelection in 2028. Fetterman was noncommittal when asked during the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin on Saturday whether he would continue to caucus with Democrats.

[Read: Trump’s dream world in Dallas]

In June, his longtime relationship with a Democratic-aligned digital fundraising firm, MissionWired, ended. Shortly afterward, he forged a joint fundraising committee with Pennsylvania’s other senator, Dave McCormick, a Republican. In July, Fetterman joined a group of Republican politicians for a retreat with Fox News executives at Rupert Murdoch’s ranch in Montana. On September 9, he spoke in a recorded address at Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas, delivering a message about rejecting socialism that would feature in his fundraising solicitation later that month. During that address, he introduced McCormick, whose campaign Fetterman had aggressively opposed in 2024. At the time, he called McCormick a “rich dude” trying to buy his way into the Senate, but the two have since cultivated a close relationship. Fetterman, who has few friends in the Democratic caucus, has also developed a friendship with Republican Senator Katie Britt of Alabama; the two have gathered for dinners, joint interviews, and family group texts.

Days after speaking at the midterm convention, Fetterman’s political operation began working with a Republican-aligned firm to start arranging emails and text messages to acquire new conservative donors, which were first reported by The Intercept. Fetterman’s missives were circulated by more than a dozen political operations with domain names such as America1stWarRoom.com, ConstitutionPatriots.com, RedMajorities.com, TheDesantisDaily.com, and TrumpTruths.org, according to records collected by the Archive of Political Emails. The new effort deepens the mystery around his political intentions and is a cause for concern for Democratic leaders. Fetterman’s refusal to limit himself to the Democratic ecosystem could matter a great deal next year, especially if he finds himself as the decisive swing vote and holds the power to decide which party will control the Senate.

Democratic donors showered Fetterman with cash when he ran in 2022, allowing him to raise more than $37 million in small donations—nearly five times more than the $7.7 million raised in smaller donations by Mehmet Oz, his Republican opponent, according to federal records. But times have changed. Only 12 percent of Democrats now view Fetterman favorably, according to a recent New York Times survey of likely voters in Pennsylvania. That’s compared with 75 percent of Republicans in the state who view him favorably. Nearly 60 percent of those surveyed considered him more of a Republican than a Democrat. He currently has about $2 million in his campaign account, according to the most recent federal filing.

Fetterman has attributed this rejection by Democrats to his outspoken support for Israel and the war against Iran, along with his decision to vote to fund parts of the government earlier this year, breaking with his Democratic colleagues who were protesting Trump’s immigration policies. He has told reporters that he is mystified that Democrats would turn on a lawmaker who votes with the party about 90 percent of the time. “I can’t explain it. I mean, I haven’t changed my views,” he said at the Texas Tribune Festival. He also maintains that he has no interest in becoming a Republican, arguing that the party would not accept him because of his positions on abortion rights and other liberal issues. He has seen how Republicans treat senators such as John Cornyn of Texas, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina when they disagree with party orthodoxy. “I’m not going to be a Republican!” he shouted recently, as he waited for an elevator on Capitol Hill, fending off questions from reporters. “Why can’t you guys just wait ’til the midterm, you know? And if I turn a Republican and then—I’ll be a liar, then?”

Democrats we spoke with in Pennsylvania told us that Fetterman is unlikely to win a Democratic primary for reelection in 2028. That would leave him with three options: retirement, becoming a Republican, or running as an independent, which would force a three-way race unless one of the major parties chooses not to field a candidate. “His career as a Democrat is over. We didn’t push him away. He threw it away,” Conor Lamb, a former representative who ran against Fetterman in the 2022 Democratic primary, told us. “He is the one that made a decision to do what Trump wanted instead of what Democrats wanted.”

Lamb is one of several Democrats considering a campaign for Fetterman’s seat in 2028. Representative Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, another potential Democratic candidate, told us that Fetterman has become a distraction as the party tries to win midterm races. “Anyone who stands in the way of that work will have to answer to the voters soon enough,” he said.

[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump ]

But if Fetterman decided to switch teams sooner, that could help Republicans keep control of the Senate after the midterms. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters that he has had conversations with Fetterman about the challenges he faces in the Democratic caucus. “If he ever comes to the conclusion that he’s ready to move, we would certainly welcome it,” he said. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reiterated that Democrats “very much like him and respect him” and that the party is big enough to accommodate his views. The two had dinner in August.

One plugged-in Democratic operative described the current dynamic to us like this: “Dems are bitter and resentful, and these guys are sitting there with open arms.”

As recently as June, Fetterman sounded like an entirely different politician in his fundraising appeals. He told donors about needing four seats to flip the Senate. There were messages backing Rob Sand in Iowa, Jon Ossoff in Georgia, and James Talarico in Texas. There was an email warning about how “dangerous” Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s policies were, and how “the GOP is coming after Social Security.” In one appeal on June 30, he wrote: “At a time like this, it’s crucial we hit our goals and keep up the pressure on Trump and extremist Republicans.” That is the last email from Fetterman captured by the Archive of Political Emails for several months. Then, this month, messages from Fetterman shifted to warn about socialism.

[Read: Jon Ossoff is doing something different]

Fetterman’s previous fundraising firm, MissionWired, was founded by Anne Lewis, a former deputy executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and it works with Democratic Senate candidates such as Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Adam Hamilton in Kansas. “MissionWired ended its engagement with Senator Fetterman’s campaign in June 2026,” Kate Kline, the firm’s CEO, told us in a statement. “We had no involvement in a revenue-sharing plan with Republican entities, and if we had become aware, we would have objected to the strategy and refused the work.”

Blitz Digital Group, by contrast, has been working with Republicans whom Fetterman previously opposed. The group has received fees this cycle from the National Republican Senatorial Committee and from Mike Collins, a Republican Senate candidate in Georgia. The firm describes itself as a specialist in “building online donor prospecting programs for conservative non-profits, candidates, PAC’s and associations.” The firm’s parent company, HSP Direct, describes itself as “a premier conservative direct mail fundraising agency,” and its clients include Jon Husted, the Republican senator from Ohio who is running this cycle against Brown.

One Republican digital consultant told us, after requesting anonymity to discuss the arrangements, that although the relationships Fetterman is building are unusual, fundraising-list brokers typically push the language that performs the best, and that there is clear appeal for a Democrat who is willing to echo Republican talking points about socialism. “Assuming he believes all the things he says,” the consultant said about Fetterman, “it is just a natural place to go, because he agrees with Republicans on some things.”

Eric Schmitt’s Very Bad Day at Work

2026-09-30T15:05:06-04:00

Updated at 4:27 p.m. ET on September 30, 2026

“What was your most embarrassing day at work?” is a staple question of internet forums, and the answers tend to converge around the accidental reply-all, the mortifying shared-bathroom incident, or congratulating a colleague on their pregnancy, only to discover the bump was instead the result of a large lunch.

Luckily for Senator Eric Schmitt, though, he operates in a political environment that has selected for blowhards with bulletproof confidence and slavish devotion to Donald Trump. So the Missouri Republican probably didn’t wake up at 3 a.m. reliving the terrible moment in yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing when his attempted gotcha of former Special Counsel Jack Smith fell apart spectacularly. A hundred minutes into the hearing, Schmitt had his smoking gun ready to go. He wanted to prove that the witness, who had been appointed by the Department of Justice under the Biden administration to investigate Trump’s election interference, had surreptitiously met Fani Willis. She is the district attorney for Fulton County, Georgia, who brought separate charges against Trump and 18 others for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election results in her state. Perhaps Smith and Willis had even illicitly coordinated their witch hunt against everyone’s favorite president?

“Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024?” the senator asked Smith, who understandably looked bemused. “What city would that be in?” Smith replied. “Atlanta,” said Schmitt. “No,” said Smith.

Aha! With a look of quiet triumph, Schmitt noted that February 3 was the day after Willis admitted having a relationship with her deputy, Nathan Wade. Smith continued to look puzzled. What did this have to do with him?

Schmitt tried again: “What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior-Hawks game on February 3, 2024—the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair?”

At this point, a Schmitt staffer began to manhandle a cardboard prop showing the texts. “I don’t think you know that we have this stuff,” the senator said, looking smug, “so I will give you a second to process it, so you don’t perjure yourself.” But the cardboard was already being unhoisted and tucked away. “You just took that down really quick,” Smith observed—prompting the Democrats on the committee to heckle Schmitt to bring it out again. “This is my time,” Schmitt snapped. He ended his performance by declaring that Smith would go down in history as a “total dirtbag” who had committed perjury.

Dunk achieved! Send the tweet! Book the one-on-one with Jesse Watters! Unfortunately for Schmitt, Senator Amy Klobuchar also sits on the committee. This is a woman who reportedly ate a salad with a comb when her staffer couldn’t supply a fork. The Minnesota Democrat is not easily deterred when faced with minor obstacles. She asked Senator Chuck Grassley, the committee’s Republican chair, to “allow the witness to see this vast poster board that we saw.” The staffers once again held it aloft, whereupon everyone could see that the supposedly incriminating texts said nothing about Willis at all. But at least now Smith recognized the basketball game that the messages referred to; he remembered going to see the WNBA’s Caitlin Clark, then a star at the University of Iowa, in a game against the University of Maryland.

The penny dropped first with Klobuchar. “Could it be,” she asked, “the University of Iowa is—the Hawkeyes?”

On a different feed, the camera crash-zoomed on to Alabama Republican Katie Britt’s face, her mouth agape as she absorbed the terrible possibility that her GOP colleague had confused the Hawks and the Hawkeyes.

Eric Schmitt was first elected to the Senate in 2022, having made his name as attorney general in Missouri opposing COVID restrictions, trying to roll back Obamacare, and joining an effort led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to invalidate the votes of four states that went for Joe Biden in 2020. That makes him a lab-grown Trump-era Republican, with the thirst for attention and resistance to shame that inevitably entails. The committee meeting provided an exciting chance for him and other Republicans to demonstrate their loyalty to the president by enthusiastically endorsing his belief that he was robbed of victory in 2020.

[Kathy Gilsinan: Missouri is the next front in the COVID culture war]

Yesterday could have been Schmitt’s big day. Senate committee hearings are usually long and often dull, but they do offer senators a chance to get their face on TV, both during the session itself and in post-game interviews on cable news. Ahead of the hearing, Axios ran a short article suggesting that Schmitt “is drawing buzz as a possible Vance VP in 2028.” Buzz from whom, exactly? The item sadly failed to name any names. But people in Schmitt’s camp plainly hoped that the hearing would raise his profile. If so, mission accomplished!

The hearing certainly wasn’t aimed at anyone who sincerely wanted to understand the attempts to undo the 2020 election result, or the conduct of those tasked with investigating those allegations. As special counsel, Jack Smith brought dozens of felony charges against Donald Trump over his alleged election interference and his mishandling of classified documents stored haphazardly at Mar-a-Lago. Trump pleaded not guilty. After he was reelected in 2024, Smith dropped the cases and resigned. Whatever Trump did or didn’t do, he got away with it.

Grassley didn’t bother to hide the fact that this was, at heart, a revenge beating. At minimum, Senate Republicans hoped to subject Smith to an invasive and stressful experience, the kind of shellacking that might make other prosecutors reconsider ever taking on a politically sensitive case. They also wanted more data points to feed into the right-wing conspiracy machine, fresh ways to activate the tribal loyalty of the MAGA faithful as Trump’s approval ratings nosedive. In his opening statement, Grassley argued that Smith’s investigation had far exceeded its legal authority and turned into an attempt to “map out and target the entire Republican Party.” The stretch goal was entrapping Smith into perjury.

Before we return to Eric Schmitt, may we have a moment’s appreciation for Ted Cruz’s performance as Man Shocked to Hear His Party Accused of Wrongdoing? Three hours into the hearing, the Texas senator delivered a series of zingers designed to be clipped up for later use. “Is it a crime to be a Republican?” he asked Smith. Over several minutes, Cruz worked himself up into a lather: “I understand for the rest of your life you are going to be hailed as a hero in the resistance movement,” he told Smith. “I assume you have a pink hat somewhere at home.” A pussy-hat reference—how retro! However, this lib endorsement would be no consolation, he suggested to Smith, for bringing the Department of Justice into disrepute. Here I would briefly note that the current head of the FBI, Kash Patel, has his own branded bourbon, and that he recently had to defend waiving the ban on bestiality among FBI recruits. The American justice system may have more pressing reputational problems.

[Sarah Fitzpatrick: Kash Patel’s personalized bourbon stash]

Throughout his remarks, Cruz’s staffers brandished cardboard props with headlines about Smith’s investigation, while the witness adopted a poker face, perhaps recognizing that he was merely an extra in the courtroom drama being scripted in Cruz’s head. The senator’s staffers should confiscate his John Grisham collection—and his DVD of Les Misérables. “Javert from Les Mis would look at you with astonishment,” Cruz thundered at Smith, finger aloft. (Inspector Javert, played by Russell Crowe in the film adaptation of the musical, pursues Hugh Jackman’s repentant Jean Valjean for many years over the theft of a piece of bread.) Cruz has used a similar line before. Last year, he told Pam Bondi, then the Republican nominee for attorney general, that there were so many prosecutions of Trump that “Javert from Les Mis would be chagrined.” Branch out a little, Senator—give us something from Cats.

Still, if Cruz was showing poor attention to detail by repeating himself, then Eric Schmitt was there to say, Hold my cardboard prop. Within hours of the hearing, the Missouri senator was explaining to TMZ that what looked like a fist-bitingly awkward gaffe was no such thing. “How did that mistake happen?” the reporter asked. “It wasn’t a mistake,” he replied. “I asked him if he was in Atlanta.” In a hallway interview, he told CNN: “Who knew Jack Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan?” This came across as a dig at the special prosecutor for liking ladies’ basketball rather than real manly basketball, or perhaps at the very idea of a weenie lawyer being a sports aficionado. Regardless, Schmitt thought the line was such a zinger that he repeated it in an X post.

Some MAGA influencers fully embraced the idea that Schmitt had, in fact, completed le epic pwn of Smith. On The Charlie Kirk Show—still named for its late creator—one of the hosts played the clip of Schmitt’s question after telling the senator he had to “give you some flowers” for his acuity. The whole segment appeared to have been beamed in from a parallel reality where the exchange with Smith had gone well for the senator. “It was the only NBA or NCAA men’s game going on at that time in Atlanta,” Schmitt said. “He claimed later that he was at another game. I don’t know. Now, here’s the thing—my job is to ask the questions.” This explanation opens up the possibility that the reason Schmitt and his team didn’t think Smith could be referring to the Hawkeyes was because they had forgotten the existence of women’s basketball. Not a great look for a party that has made a crusade lately of protecting women’s sports.

Other stars in the MAGA universe, however, seemed to realize that Schmitt’s failed gotcha would not delight their faithful, even if they could not say so out loud. The former journalist Benny Johnson, who has 4 million followers on X, posted that Schmitt had “pulled out the receipts” and left Smith “stunned.” Later, he deleted that post, without explanation. On Fox News, Sean Hannity’s recap of the hearing left out Schmitt’s screw-up but included a megamix of Republicans shouting at Smith, including John Kennedy of Louisiana telling the former special counsel that “you make me want to throw up in my mouth.”

This is, to be blunt, not a healthy ecosystem. People love to complain about media outlets being overly hostile to certain politicians, but that adversarial mode is far preferable to the hermetically sealed MAGA universe, in which a politician says something dumb and his error is either silently erased from the record or even rewritten as a triumph. The Republicans on the committee complained endlessly that Jack Smith’s investigation was little more than a fishing expedition, trawling their personal communications for tenuous evidence of wrongdoing—while doing exactly that to Smith himself. Eric Schmitt had some red string and a corkboard, and by God he was going to add data points to it until the connections spell out DEEP STATE PLOT. So what if it went badly? Trapped in their bubble, his base would never know.

This article originally implied incorrectly that the University of Iowa Hawkeyes play in the WNBA.

Literature Is Becoming More Like a Video Game

2026-09-30T09:00:00-04:00

You couldn’t move without bumping into one of them: some man, woman, toddler, or puppet, dressed in a zippered vest and white, heart-patterned boxers. They stood out even among the 75,000 attendees of Dragon Con, the pop-culture convention described as the “Burning Man of nerds,” which each Labor Day weekend turns downtown Atlanta into a sea of spandex and body paint. The uniform had many variations: pink Crocs, rubber foot covers, black bandannas, spiked knee pads. I saw one person accessorized with a keffiyeh, another in a sagging kangaroo suit.

The ensembles paid tribute to the title character of Dungeon Crawler Carl, the blockbuster series by Matt Dinniman, in which aliens invade Earth, vaporize most of civilization, and force the survivors to compete in an intergalactic reality show. The books read as if the dystopia of The Hunger Games were adapted for the Twitch era, but with much more comic gore and a distinctly fratty sense of humor. The first seven volumes were self-published online, beginning in 2020, and rereleased in print by Penguin Random House in 2024; eight volumes have come out so far. The series has sold 17 million copies, and a TV show is on the way.

Dinniman has written the breakout hit of litRPG, a sci-fi subgenre that draws on the mechanics of role-playing video games, or RPGs. Typically, the plot concerns a hero stranded in a strange realm. He—most of the time, it’s a “he”—traverses this new world, accumulating experience that’s measured in points, adding assets to his inventory, and selecting new powers from a menu. If this seems hard to imagine unfolding in prose, think of The Lord of the Rings, Michael Chatfield, a litRPG author, told me. In the original novel, the wizard Gandalf is reborn, shedding his humble gray garments for a raiment of the brightest white. In the hypothetical litRPG version, “instead of just seeing that change between the color of robes, it’s ‘plus five to wisdom,’” Chatfield explained.

To some readers, this might seem like a rather clunky and clinical mode of character development. Dinniman himself told me that he knows a common reaction to Dungeon Crawler Carl is: “This is a stupid title, it’s a stupid premise, and it’s a boy book.” But, he added: “slowly, slowly, slowly, they hate-read it, until they love-read it.” He got me on the first part, because I found these books baffling. As Carl marched through battles and gameplay tutorials, the narrative careened between madcap action and maddening exposition; the prose bombarded me with information and sarcastic exclamation points. (Early on, the game announces to Carl, “New achievement! Oooh, Magic! You’re wearing magical gear for the first time! You’re a wizard, Crawler! Reward: You’ve received a Bronze Adventurer Box!” This contains an enchanted toe ring that “imbues wearer with +3 Strength and gives +3 to the skill Powerful Strike.”)

Yet something about Carl, and the litRPG style of storytelling, speaks to a huge, and growing, swath of the reading public. What struck me as a fundamentally stressful reading experience was, for many of the cosplayers I encountered at the convention, a source of cozy escapism. The success of Dungeon Crawler Carl may reflect the shake-up of the books business by self-published outsiders, and the mainstreaming of video-game culture. Gamer jargon has permeated everyday vocabulary; even the very offline know what it means to grind and speedrun and rage quit. The spread of litRPG suggests that those habits of mind go deeper than language, and are now shaping, for many readers, their sense of what makes a satisfying story.

Melissa Golden For The Atlantic

Dungeon Crawler Carl fans wait in line at Dragon Con.

When the Carls got together for a group photo on the sunbaked steps of the Hilton Atlanta, the crowd control required the use of seven megaphones and three rolls of yellow hazard tape. Regulars told me that even for Dragon Con, the turnout was eyepopping. In an elevator, I encountered a woman volunteering as a cosplay medic, aiding con-goers with their wardrobe malfunctions. She’d never seen so many people repping a single fandom, she told me, “and I’ve seen Game of Thrones, all the Deadpools.” This is the kind of cultural dominance typically enjoyed by video games and superhero franchises—not literature.

All over the convention, a mini platoon of entrepreneurs cashed in on Crawlermania. One candy-striped merch stand was piled with Crawler-themed drink cozies, phone grips, and lanyards. The proprietor, Kaitlin McConnell, had started out by making tchotchkes with a “general bookish theme,” she told me, but this weekend, she had gone all in on Carl, and more than tripled her sales so far. Meanwhile, in a dim venue about a mile south, a geeky burlesque troupe put on a very unauthorized Crawler show, with tickets starting at $25. A co-producer, who goes by Cherry BonBon and was dressed as an incubus, told me that the troupe had already booked a bachelor party in Florida.

Once the series started to take off, Carl’s popularity was accelerated by its rapid print-release schedule: “The books are so big, they’re out there so quickly, that they physically take space in the bookstore,” Seth Fishman, Dinniman’s agent, told me. (Three of the eight books are more than 700 pages long.) But the series’ virality can also be traced back to its online roots. In romance, a new generation of writers built their own digital followings by self-publishing on platforms such as Kindle Direct Publishing, before legacy imprints came knocking. LitRPG authors have followed a similar trajectory. Though traditional publishers are now moving quickly to snap up these series, for years they had no interest in the genre, Dinniman said: “Nobody would touch it.” He, like many others in the community, first found an audience on Royal Road, a site that hosts serialized fiction. (Quaintly, and perhaps crucially, the site bans erotic content; this rule differentiates Royal Road from other major writing platforms, where romance has reigned supreme.)

Like the beaks of Darwin’s finches, the features of these novels have been shaped by their habitat. LitRPG has an oddball melting-pot aesthetic that feels emblematic of the digital age. Dinniman, for his part, got into the genre after stumbling on a Russian series about a man serving a criminal sentence in a virtual world. Other litRPG novels riff on isekai, a Japanese genre in which characters embark on a string of adventures to return to their home world; still others borrow from xianxia, a type of Chinese martial-arts fantasy. Royal Road encourages authors to build up plots in short, punchy installments that end with a hook. Some Kindle Direct Publishing authors opt in to a program that pays them by the pages read, which encourages narrative sprawl and verbose world-building.

The most successful writers establish a close relationship with their readers, studying the comments section as they polish their work. They typically monetize on Patreon, sending their subscribers early drafts and other bonus content. Dinniman has even let his readers vote on future plot twists; he also posts regularly in the Dungeon Crawler Carl Subreddit, which he started himself on the advice of a friend. That audience, heavily composed of audiobook listeners, has also turned the narrators of these books into tastemaking micro celebrities; it’s not uncommon for litRPG authors to make more income from the audio versions of their work than from print and ebooks combined.

Melissa Golden for The Atlantic

Matt Dinniman, author of Dungeon Crawler Carl, greets fans at Dragon Con.

Jeff Hays, the wildly popular narrator of the Dungeon Crawler audiobooks, has his own theories about fans’ consumption patterns. “A very large percentage of the readers in litRPG were never recreational readers,” he told me. Because they may not have a habit of picking up a physical book in the first place, “going to a different medium, for them, is probably not a big deal.” Audio especially appeals to readers who want entertainment on a long shift, according to Chatfield, the litRPG author, such as “people doing trucking, or they’re working a factory line, or they’re in the trades.”

The litRPG readership is also dominated by men; some authors I spoke with said that men make up 70 percent of their audience—which would be striking, given the gender gap in reading, and particularly in reading fiction. The prospect of reaching a heretofore untapped market of male readers seems to tantalize the publishing industry, following years of literary trends largely driven by women. “I say this with love, but if you walk into a Barnes & Noble, it’s a tea party,” Steve Beaulieu, a co-founder of a prolific litRPG publisher, Aethon Press, told me. “There’s not a lot of men reading books today.”

I heard a lot of theories about why the genre has spoken so strongly to men: because litRPG tends to be process-oriented rather than focused on interpersonal drama; because much of it is built around progression fantasy, in which readers feel the vicarious gratification of a protagonist gaining more power and skill over time. The answer might be simpler: The video-game industry’s flagship franchises and live multiplayer experiences—the kind of games that are commonly associated with “gamer culture” and that inspired these books—have a mostly male audience.

But gaming, as a form of entertainment, is capacious. Games encompass the soothing experience of tending to a farm, and provide hectic, hyper-realistic re-creations of military missions. They accommodate people waiting for the bus and those holed up with their buddies for the weekend. LitRPG is starting to reflect that diversity: Novels have been published about founding a town and parenting during the apocalypse, and a startling number involve the ins and outs of running a magical café. Major publishers have snapped these titles up, partly aiming to attract more male customers, but partly betting that the genre has a much broader appeal—that just about everybody will enjoy the dopamine loops induced by seeing gameplay on the page.

Melissa Golden For The Atlantic

At Dragon Con, fans honor beloved rituals each year. The Douglas Adams readers boo lustily at the Vogon Poetry Slam. The Middle Earth diehards process through the hotel skybridges, singing Elvish hymns. The Buffy people gather for a screening of the show’s cult-favorite musical episode, “Once More, With Feeling,” accompanied by a live performance, à la Rocky Horror. But the Crawlers, a relatively young fandom, have thus far established few traditions. Their main means of showing devotion was to stand in line in the 97-degree heat, waiting anywhere that Dinniman was scheduled to appear—a panel on horror fiction, a late-night game of Dungeons and Dragons—and at some places where he wasn’t. “My friend told me where he likes to go drink, so I’m going to see if I can maybe find him later,” one woman told me, in a queue that wrapped around three sides of a city block.

For all that litRPG is defined by score keeping, the Dungeon Crawler novels seem to have won their passionate following through plot elements that are never assigned numerical value. Fans didn’t talk much about the epic showdowns that appear throughout the novels; instead, they mentioned scenes of emotional revelation, hinging on declarations of love between friends, that wouldn’t have felt out of place in an early season of Grey’s Anatomy. LitRPG, obsessed with self-optimization, can be a lonely genre. The Dungeon Crawler books offer a different fantasy: that even within a rigid system, the spark of sincere feeling can’t be fully extinguished—and that even in zero-sum environments, you can count on your pals. Dinniman’s series stands apart from most litRPG because its characters, far from reveling in game mechanics, express fury at them, determined to find loopholes and subvert the rules. Carl, who starts the series simply aiming to survive the reality show, becomes a more rebellious figure by the fourth book, vowing to destroy the game.

Still, what perplexed me about Dungeon Crawler Carl, and the genre at large, was that it only superficially mimics the pleasure of gaming. Video games give players a multisensory environment to explore and respond to; they offer a direct experience of power and agency in ways that literature can only evoke. When, for example, my avatar trawls the wastelands of Fallout 4, I feel the grim triumph of spotting the tools for my survival; in minutes, I’ve fashioned that junk into a turret that repels my enemies and keeps my ragtag settlement safe. That you have to take my word for how enjoyable this is sums up the inherent limitations of litRPG: There’s a gap between listening to a waiter recite tonight’s specials and sinking your teeth into a steak.

I kept asking the fans in line: Is it even fun? Reading all of this stuff, the accounting of items and upgrades, of skill trees and stat points? On-screen, you glance at the relevant figures for about a microsecond before resuming the action; a litRPG drags you through miles of description. Sarah Maloy, a marketing executive from Charlotte, North Carolina, shrugged me off. “It’s fun for me!” she said with a smile, as the line we were in lurched forward.

Melissa Golden for The Atlantic

My weekend at Dragon Con made me realize that I was coming at the question from the wrong angle: Perhaps the appeal of litRPG isn’t in how it resembles games, but in how it resembles contemporary life, in which everything is scraped for data and opaquely systematized for mysterious purposes. Social media constantly reminds me of the various ways it measures my clout. Wearable devices promise to track my basal body temperature and heart rate, spitting out scores for daytime stress and cardiovascular age. I can position a night-vision camera over my infant’s crib to grade her “sleep efficiency.” These metrics are more or less optional, but that’s less true of the sticky mesh of algorithms that come with participating in the modern economy, or the prediction markets that have apparently metabolized all human activity, from the trivial to the world-historical, into the logic of odds and payouts.

The game mechanics that govern litRPG may be semi-arbitrary, but, more important, they’re legible. “So often in the real world, you don’t know whether life’s actually gotten better,” J. B. Garner, a longtime editor and writer in the genre, told me. “You did get a promotion, but was it really? How much more do you have to work for that small raise?” The prose provides consistent, reassuring updates about the hero’s journey: the experience points gained, the loot accumulated. The numbers always describe something meaningful and true. At least in this genre, the arc of quantification bends toward self-fulfillment. You know exactly what level you’ve reached.

MAHA Gone Mild

2026-09-30T16:45:13-04:00

The Make America Healthy Again movement has always had a split personality. Many of the movement’s leaders are fervent anti-vaccine activists whose views are at odds with scientific evidence and out of step with most Americans. At the same time, MAHA’s tenets include eating more vegetables and getting enough sleep, which is perfectly reasonable advice; it’s just hard to take seriously from people who, like Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wax nostalgic about catching measles.

That duality has been especially stark this month, as the midterms approach and Republicans look to MAHA for an electoral boost. At a conference two weeks ago for Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization Kennedy founded, he told the audience that they had a “steadfast friend at the White House.” At a MAHA data summit on Monday, Kennedy previewed his plan to use a database of Americans’ health records to compare rates of autism among vaccinated and unvaccinated people. And yet, the second annual MAHA Summit, which was held yesterday in a hotel ballroom in Washington, D.C., seemed perfectly calibrated to downplay controversy.

Other high-ranking administration officials, including Vice President Vance and Medicaid chief Mehmet Oz, spoke at yesterday’s summit, lending the affair an extra layer of high-profile polish, but the event was mostly an opportunity for its roster of sponsors to tout their products and services. An executive from Walmart—one of the event’s many corporate sponsors—spoke about making food labels simpler and more transparent, though he didn’t say how his company, which sells more groceries than any other retailer, plans to do that. After being lobbed yet another softball question from the moderator, he gushed, “It means a lot for us to be here with MAHA.” Also among the sponsors was Grail, a cancer-screening company, which just last week announced that its controversial early-detection test had been recommended for approval by a Food and Drug Administration panel. Hims & Hers and Gameday Men’s Health—two wellness companies that stand to make serious money if the FDA allows gray-market peptides to be made and prescribed in the United States—also chipped in. Bloomberg reported that companies that forked over $300,000 were allowed to have “meaningful input” on the selection of panelists and topics. (In an email, an HHS spokesperson wrote that the FDA’s decisions “are made through established processes grounded in law, science, and evidence.”)

[Read: America is about to go over a peptide cliff]

The MAHA Summit was “very money-driven,” Mary Holland, who runs Children’s Health Defense and was not on the speaker list for yesterday’s conference, told me outside the ballroom. Kennedy has for years denounced corporate influence over the health agencies he now oversees, but onstage, there was no handwringing about conflicts of interest. Instead, Tony Lyons, the president of the nonprofit MAHA Center, which organized the summit, offered praise for “the investors scaling natural remedies, breakthrough technologies, next-generation devices, and cutting-edge therapies.” (Lyons is also Kennedy’s longtime publisher, and his company, Skyhorse, paid Kennedy $4 million in book advances over the past year.) Corporate convenience seemed to beat out Kennedy’s “eat real food” agenda: The conference swag bags contained two organic snack bars, a packet of electrolyte powder, potato chips fried in grass-fed-beef tallow, and a bag of dehydrated taco filling made from pinto beans and peas, all vaguely MAHA-coded but certainly nowhere to be found on the administration’s inverted food pyramid.

Plenty of Kennedy’s vocally anti-vaccine compatriots were in attendance, if not on the agenda. I spotted Mark Gorton, the president of the MAHA Institute, who, at the Children’s Health Defense conference, declared himself “the boldest anti-vaxxer in the anti-vax conference.” Del Bigtree, Kennedy’s former communications director, who once told me he’d rather his kids catch diseases such as polio and measles than get the shots that prevent them, spent most of his time chatting with his many fans in attendance. He was pleased at how large companies appear to be on board with MAHA, even if the summit steered clear of the issue—vaccines—that brought him and Kennedy together. “It really probably should be called ‘MAHA Food Summit,’” he told me. (An HHS spokesperson wrote that Kennedy “oversees an extraordinarily broad health portfolio and addresses different priorities in different settings.”)

[Read: ‘I genuinely am upset that your kids are vaccinated’]

But lest Bigtree and other anti-vaccine activists have any doubts, Kennedy has repeatedly reassured them that he is on their side. At the Children’s Health Defense conference, he went so far as to read from a manufacturer’s list of possible adverse events from a hepatitis B vaccine. In an appearance on CNN last month, Kennedy again floated a possible connection between autism and vaccines, even though researchers have found no such link.

Since Kennedy’s failed run for president in the 2024 election, he has drawn together an unlikely and seemingly uneasy coalition. Some are hard-core activists, like the guy I spoke with who was wearing a shirt that took aim at fluoride, vaccines, hospital births, aspartame, and root canals. But other attendees at the packed, invite-only event said they were there because they hoped psychedelics might be used to treat depression; because they thought that AI might improve health care; or because they were looking for answers to medical problems their doctors hadn’t been able to solve. They weren’t anti-vaxxers, and they weren’t necessarily big Kennedy fans, as a couple of them confided to me between sessions. But Kennedy and his Republican allies seem to hope they can channel these different levels of frustration with mainstream medicine and keep all of those voters under the MAHA banner. The midterms will be, among so many other things, a test of how far that banner can be stretched.

The Case for Sexual Fantasies, According to Gillian Anderson

2026-09-29T11:47:55-04:00

Gillian Anderson is an actor, but she has also become something of a fairy godmother for sex. On the TV show Sex Education, she plays the delightfully frank sex therapist Jean Milburn. In the recent film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, she’s an erotically confident older woman opposite a sex-timid Zoomer. She once wore a dress covered in vulvas to the Golden Globes. She launched a soft-drink brand named G Spot. In 2026, when porn is plentiful, dating apps allow you to list your kinks, and you can buy a vibrator at Walmart, you might think Americans don’t need such an advocate. When I talked with Anderson recently, she made the case that we do.

Her latest book is, of all her efforts to champion desire, among the most explicit—in both senses of the word. Preparing for her role as Milburn, she came across the controversial 1973 book My Secret Garden, for which the journalist Nancy Friday collected letters from anonymous women about their sexual fantasies. Inspired, Anderson put out her own call for submissions. She received more than 1,000, from countries including Russia, Libya, New Zealand, Nigeria, and Colombia, and whittled them down to 174 entries, which became the 2024 book Want. Earlier this month, Anderson released a follow-up, aptly titled More.

The idea that women can be just as lascivious as men isn’t as radical now as it was in the ’70s. Some readers were so shocked by My Secret Garden that they accused Friday of fabricating the material; Want, by contrast, was met with glowing write-ups in prestige publications and was selected for corporate book clubs. Yet fantasies, Anderson told me, can serve a purpose beyond the erotic. Hearing from More contributors, she was struck by how thoughtfully they analyzed their appetites. “They’re going beyond What turns me on?” she said, “and they’re asking: What does this say about me? Why do I want this? What am I ashamed of? What would happen if I actually did ask for more from life?”

Fantasies, she believes, can get women in the habit of considering their own desires, not only in the bedroom but in their relationships, their career, every part of their life. If they take those desires seriously, they might start advocating for themselves—and perhaps get their needs fulfilled. Or, if they can’t take the first baby step of self-awareness, they might consider: “How are we complicit in not getting what we say we want?”

This seemed like a lot to hang on the power of fantasy. But More does illuminate how imagining can, in itself, be an exercise in agency. Even if you don’t get what you want, you might gain something from wanting at all.

More is a lovely cornucopia of sexual interests. Some of what the letters describe is classic: a firm touch, a longing gaze, a threesome. Some scenes are memorable: an orgy in a vat of spaghetti, a dystopian world populated solely by asexually reproducing men who’ve never seen a woman before (until, of course, the narrator is delivered to them via comet). But the most interesting parts are not the dirtiest. They’re the little moments of reflection, when women talk about their past and present conditions—and wonder aloud about what their fantasies might say about their deeper self.

They’re not wrong to think that those reveries could be rich texts to mine. Sexual fantasies are “biopsychosocial,” Justin Lehmiller, a psychologist for the Kinsey Institute and the author of the 2018 book Tell Me What You Want, told me on a call. That means they can be influenced, in part, by physiological factors: Women tend to report more frequent sexual fantasies when they’re ovulating, for instance, and fewer after menopause. Fantasies can also be shaped by psychological traits. Extroverts tend to envision more social situations—as in more people involved—and people high in conscientiousness tend to fantasize in greater detail. (Are two people on a bed, or are two people on a king-size bed with an olive chenille blanket?) A person’s social and historical context can sway what they daydream about as well. During the coronavirus pandemic, Lehmiller said, people reported more fantasies involving romance and intimate connection—needs that were, perhaps, going unmet.

[Read: Too scared for sex]

Many of the More letters are dense with yearning, not only for some particular sexual position or sensation but also for a missing part of the writer’s self. One exhausted, underappreciated mother dreams about rediscovering her old dynamic sensuality; the fantasy is, she writes, “a reminder that I still exist beneath the layers of routine and repression.” Another woman says that “in daily life, I am often seen as this cute, petite, pretty thing—an intelligent, composed, sweet girl. Yet, in my fantasies, I wish to be fully seen in my chaos: raw, unfiltered, loud, crying, begging.” Contributors lust over their exes and coworkers and friends; they wrestle with their sexual orientation; they conjure excitement when real life feels stultifying, and tenderness when it feels unkind. In one study, Lehmiller found that roughly 80 percent of participants said that their “favorite fantasy” is something they would want to act on. Only about 20 percent said they actually have.

That’s the tricky part: going from knowledge to practice, acknowledgment to liberation. Anderson isn’t wrong that sometimes fantasy can begin a chain reaction, ending in a tangible life change. Lehmiller has found that when partners share their fantasies with each other, they tend to report that doing so made them closer and improved the relationship; for women, disclosing and acting on fantasies is associated with greater orgasm consistency. In the introduction to More, Anderson recalls one of the letters from Want, written by someone who was married to a man but fantasizing about a woman living nearby. That contributor apparently felt so emboldened by admitting her crush that she made some major life changes—and ended up in a relationship with the neighbor. In “gaining insight into what it is we may want,” Anderson writes, “it really is possible to move closer to meeting our desires.”

Yet clear limits exist, of course, to what fantasy can do. No matter how precisely a woman can communicate what excites her, she may still face formidable barriers to action. Anderson told me that in curating More, she wanted to collect letters from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Djibouti, where women’s freedoms tend to be particularly restricted. But in Djibouti, more than 70 percent of women age 25 or older have never had any formal education; in Saudi Arabia, a 2022 law formalized male guardianship over married women, making financial support contingent on a wife’s “obedience” and stating that a person needs their spouse’s consent to abstain from sex. In the United States, too, plenty of women are held back by factors—poverty, violence, an overwhelming burden of care work—that they can’t resolve by boldly asking for better. Sometimes, women are complicit in not getting what they want. Other times, they’re simply oppressed.

[Read: A culture war in the bedroom]

Anderson isn’t oblivious to this fact. She does concede, in More, that for some women, just speaking openly about sexuality could be dangerous. She also acknowledges that many people fantasize about situations they wouldn’t want realized. (One contributor speculates that by picturing sexual violence, she exerts some control over situations that in real life she couldn’t stop or influence.) For many of these women, fantasy may not yield a measurable result. But they can still find some agency in the protected corners of their own mind. Power can come from self-knowledge, or from an embrace of pleasure, or from directing scenes for no one’s enjoyment but their own. Lehmiller said that fantasy can be a form of “self-care,” a private mental place to slip off to. The question for some women may not be how to transform their conditions. It might be, as Anderson put it: “How can we internally, in our own small, intimate spaces, do whatever is necessary in order to keep putting one foot in front of the other?”

That challenge isn’t relevant for only women. Lehmiller has actually found that on average, men report more shame than women about their sexual fantasies—maybe because men are more likely to say that their reveries are somehow taboo, but maybe also because sharing your longings requires vulnerability, and many of them have been taught to keep their walls up. (They, too, might benefit from a book encouraging erotic self-acceptance.)

Still, there’s something uniquely satisfying about hearing the women of More revel in their steamy creations—with a freedom that I think would make Nancy Friday feel proud. In some of my favorite letters, there’s no clear takeaway about what the writer is missing or what trauma she must come to terms with. One woman, recently off a medication, described getting back her sex drive and daydreams. “There are billions of galaxies, stars and planets in the universe, and I am alive on Earth,” she wrote, as if shouting from the rooftop. “I am human, I have dreams and goals. I will not be a passenger in my own body any more.” What matters isn’t the substance of the fantasy, or what happens next in real life. It’s the act of fantasizing in itself.

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic

How Trump Could Threaten the 2026 Election

2026-09-30T14:00:00-04:00

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

In this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts about the recent state visit by the Chinese president Xi Jinping to the United States. David discusses President Trump’s embarrassing behavior at the dinner and how he has isolated the United States in its rivalry with China.

Then, David is joined by former Attorney General of the United States Eric Holder to discuss the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, the battle over gerrymandering, and whether Americans can expect the 2026 midterm elections to be free and fair. Frum and Holder also discuss how attorneys general should react to unlawful orders from the president.

Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of the novel Agrippa, by Robert Harris.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Eric Holder: We have changed, done things that seemingly were impossible—got women the right to vote, ripped down a system of American apartheid. All because the American people decided that that was no longer going to be allowed, or that changes had to be made.

[Music]

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be former Attorney General Eric Holder. This week’s book will be Agrippa, a novel by Robert Harris.

I want to just issue a caution about the interview that you’re about to see. We had a little trouble this week with the video recording. About half the video got gobbled up by the internet gods. So, there will be some interruptions of the video flow, but you will be able to see most of the show in video, and of course, the sound quality is perfect all the way through. So if you’re listening, you won’t notice anything. If you’re watching, you may see some interruptions. Please forgive us. We did the best we could.

Before either the dialogue with Attorney General Holder or the novel Agrippa by Robert Harris, I want to offer some opening thoughts about the recent state visit by the Chinese president and Chinese dictator to Washington, D.C., and his lavish reception by President Trump.

I often think that when future historians try to make sense of the Trump era, among the things they will note is this was a real acceleration in the decline of American prestige and power in the world. The Chinese visit drives home what the challenge to American leadership in the 21st century has been.

China is becoming a bigger and stronger country, and there’s no way around that, and that is potentially a very good thing. They have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, a great gain for human happiness. They have produced products and services that are of use to the whole world. We’re all better off because of China’s rise. If China becomes a good global citizen playing by the rules, we will all benefit from the transformation in Chinese power that has happened since they broke with the rigidity of the Mao Zedong system and introduced some degree of market mechanism into Chinese economic life.

But right now, China is turning a snarling face to the world, and we all have to worry about Chinese aggression, Chinese subversion, Chinese intellectual property theft, China just not playing by the rules of global trade. So there’s a tremendous human achievement; there’s a great human opportunity. But there is also a great danger.

The difference between China and dangers that America has faced in the past is that, unlike past adversaries, China is not only a military competitor to the United States; it is also a technological, economic, and financial peer. The United States has not faced a country that was simultaneously an adversary and a peer really since it confronted the British Empire before the Civil War. And then you had the advantage of great common interest, great common language, many common values. Those things are absent in the relationship with China.

If the United States is to balance China’s power peacefully, it has to approach this problem in a very different way from the way it approached the problem of the Soviet Union. One more difference is that China is so enormously big: bigger population, an economy nearing the size of the United States. So to peacefully balance China, the United States just can’t do it on its own. It’s going to need to marshal a global coalition of some kind. And not just the familiar and easy coalition with like-minded democratic powers of the European Union—Australia, Japan, Great Britain, others. To balance China, the United States has to work with more uneasy partners—Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, India—countries that don’t necessarily share political systems with the United States, may not share values, and may not share a view of the world that is exactly like that of the United States in the way that fellow democracies did.

So it’s a hard problem. But the Trump administration has been all about severing those connections, both to the old familiar allies of the European Union and the other democracies, and of course, to the new allies, where they have created point of friction after point of friction through their aggressive trade practices. They have left the United States alone in the room with the Chinese—without friends it can rely on, without friends who can rely on the United States.

And the consequence of that aloneness was on display at the state dinner, which is that Trump basically had to suck up to the Chinese. It was a disgusting thing to watch. The shameful incidents of mocking his predecessor to the Chinese leader. When you think, what do the Chinese make of this? They saw this is a political system that is isolated. This is a political system that is permeable. This is a political system that is based on one family’s appetites. This is a political system we can push around—and push the United States around, I think we can expect a lot more of.

This dinner marked a real way station on the progress of American decline. Let’s hope it’s a correctable one, and let us try not to fear that it is not a correctable one.

And now, my dialogue with Attorney General Eric Holder.

[Music]

Frum: Eric H. Holder Jr. serves as chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. He served as attorney general of the United States from February 2009 to April 2015. Before that, he served three decades in public service with appointments to Senate-confirmed positions by President Reagan, President Clinton, and President Obama.

Attorney General Holder was born in the Bronx, New York, and grew up in East Elmhurst, Queens. He holds undergraduate and law degrees from Columbia University. And it’s a great honor and pleasure to welcome him to The David Frum Show.

Eric Holder: Good to be here with you, David, and I’m glad to hear you mention East Elmhurst. I’m proud to be a Queens boy.

Frum: (Laughs.) Glad to mention it.

Let me ask you about the thing you have been working on so intensely in this present cycle, which is: How do you feel, and how should people listening to you feel, about free and fair elections in the cycle of 2026?

Holder: Well, I think we ought to be concerned about the state of our democracy generally, and the way in which our elections are going to proceed this year more specifically.

I think we have seen that certain groups of Republicans have done whatever they possibly can to ensure a victory for them that might not necessarily be supported by the number of votes that they actually get. President Trump’s determination to get five extra seats out of Texas by doing a mid-cycle redistricting—actually a mid-cycle gerrymander—is an indication of that. We see what’s going on in Missouri now, where Republicans are going to the Supreme Court for the third time to try to stop the people of Missouri from determining whether or not they will support a redistricting—another gerrymander—that Republicans have tried to put in place in Missouri. So I’m worried about that which Republicans have done.

And then, you know, after the Supreme Court decision in the Shelby County case in 2013, the Callais decision just in this last term, Republicans have used those tools that the Supreme Court has given to them to try to come up with ways in which they can disenfranchise certain people.

Frum: Well, let’s go step by step through your areas of worry. And I think you’ve alluded to three different things there. So let’s go slowly through the first one, which is: President Trump has threatened a series of deviations from all past election practice. Grabbing ballot boxes, threatening to send troops, interfering with voting by mail. That category of previously unseen activity—how worried should we be about that?

Holder: I don’t want to alarm people. I don’t want to be hyperbolic or alarmist, but I think we’ve got to be prepared for just about anything. Donald Trump has shown that he’s prepared to use all the levers of power that he has in order to ensure a result that he wants, and he cloaks this in this notion of concern about voter fraud, which is close to nonexistent. And I think that they will potentially deploy ICE agents at or near polling places, potentially declare an emergency of some sort to try to use federal power. I’ve seen that the Justice Department now says that it has recruited 1,000 monitors or observers that they’re going to deploy to various sites around the country. I think all in an attempt to come up with ways in which they can determine the outcome of elections in various states, regardless of what it is that the people want to do as indicated by the votes that they cast.

Frum: We’ve seen President Trump invoke various kinds of emergency powers for the president in various kinds of situations where emergency powers have not been invoked before. Not natural disaster, but just—something’s happening that he doesn’t like and he then uses federal and presidential power in new kinds of ways. Could that intersect with free and fair votings in dangerous ways?

Holder: Yeah, I think the potential is certainly there to do that. You know, declare an emergency of some kind. I don’t know what it would be; a national security emergency? I mean, he seems to focus on national security as a way to do the kinds of things that other presidents did not have the ability to do. Whether it’s tearing down the East Wing, building an arch, excluding the press from the White House press room because of some kind of national emergency.

And so declare a national emergency, and then do a whole variety of things to keep troops in places where they shouldn’t be. As I said before, deploy ICE agents in neighborhoods where they need not be.

I think these are all possibilities that we need to be concerned about. And it is something that we on the Democratic side have tried to prepare ourselves for, by going through a series of tabletop exercises to anticipate that which the president might try to do, and then come up with ways in which we can push back against that, and do so in a timely way. Not do something that will be effective two weeks after we go to court, or do whatever it is that we do—but actually stop that which the president is trying to do, what Republicans are trying to do, and so they don’t have the impact that they want.

Frum: In these tabletop exercises when you think about things that the president might do, there are precedents—not in the mainland U.S.A., but in Puerto Rico and the Northern Marianas territories—where elections have been delayed for some time because of natural disasters. Now, in those cases, the natural disaster really happened, and people were dislocated, and the machinery of government was interfered with, and there were more urgent priorities than holding a vote. And the vote was then, after the delay, properly rescheduled at a future time and conducted in a free and fair way in those areas.

But those are precedents for the use of executive power in not states, but territories. Is there any foothold there that a president could use in the mainland U.S.A.?

Holder: Yeah, I suppose you could point to those rare instances where natural disasters have had an impact on the ability of people to cast ballots. But we also have to remember that we conducted national elections during war. I mean, during the Civil War, World War II. And so the resilience of the American electoral system has been tested in a whole variety of ways.

Now, if a hurricane was to somehow—you know, Hurricane Sandy version two was to show up, I don’t know, in New York—and that meant that people could not get to the polls? Yeah, there are ways in which you could delay the vote, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen. And I do think that our history really shows us that there is little, if anything, that we can not handle and allow the American people to get to the ballots, get to the polling places, and cast ballots as they always have when it’s bright and sunny. Whether it’s raining or whether it’s snowy.

I think the American people are really charged up about this election. And I think that they’re going to push through anything, whether natural or something fomented by this president. They’re going to push through all of that to make sure that their voices are actually heard.

Frum: Can you update us on the state of the gerrymandering push, counter-push?

It was initiated by the Republicans, who did an off-cycle gerrymander in Texas, as you said. Democrats responded, and for a time it looked like the Democrats actually were more successful. Now it looks like that balance of power has reversed itself. How do you read the gerrymandering war? And what larger implications does it have that the two parties are engaged in this kind of contest, each with the other?

Holder: Yeah, I mean, we formed up the National Democratic Redistricting Committee that I’ve been chair of since January of 2017, all with the thought that we wanted to do away with partisan and racial gerrymandering. Which, if you look at in historical terms, both parties have engaged in—Republicans maybe more recently, certainly since 2010. And what were pretty successful. The New York Times said that, I think, in the 2022 election that Americans were going to vote on the “fairest maps” in a generation. We then saw the president try to go into a process by which there would be this partisan gerrymandering that has had a really negative impact on our ability to get that fairness.

And as you calculate all the things that Republicans have done, all the things that Democrats have done, in this what I call race to the bottom—Republicans end up with, I think, about a five-seat advantage as a result of the mid-cycle gerrymandering that they have done this year.

Now, you have to understand that when Steve Bannon first looked at that proposal that the president made, they were anticipating that they might get as many as 21 additional seats. But as a result of what happened in California, the inability, as a result of popular discontent, South Carolina, Georgia were not able to do what they wanted to do. A court victory in Utah was something that helped Democrats. People—Republicans—in Indiana refused to go along with what the president wanted to do. But after you boil that all down, you end up with about a five-seat switch to the Republicans as a result of this inappropriate mid-cycle redistricting.

Frum: Is there any way for the national political system to draw back from this kind of behavior? There are certain limits on how far you can go. Neither party pushes the other to the extremist verge. Is there any way back? Or once you escalate, are you forever on a cycle of up escalation, up escalation, up escalation?

Holder: See, that’s a really good question. And the answer is yes. There is a way to get back to—well, maybe get back to a place where the nation has never been, but get to a place where the nation should be. And that is to simply ban partisan gerrymandering. And Congress can do that. Congress has the ability to determine the manner and means by which elections are held. And Congress could simply say, We’re banning mid-cycle redistricting. We’re banning partisan gerrymandering. Specify in the statute exactly how courts might interpret whether or not a particular state is, in fact, engaging in gerrymandering.

And my hope would be that if the House is taken by the Democrats, that that is a bill that they will introduce—I don’t expect necessarily that Donald Trump would sign it—but if there is trifecta Democratic control after the 2028 presidential election, my hope would be that there would be a stand-alone bill that would simply ban partisan gerrymandering, ban mid-cycle redistricting, and get back to the way in which I think the founders intended. Which was to, as you say, have the census done in the year ending in zero, and then have redistricting done in the year after that. It’s entirely possible.

Frum: You mentioned, in your introductory review of all that was going on, the drawback of the Voting Rights Act. And that has interacted with partisan gerrymandering in ways that are complicated and often unexpected—where basically right-wing Republicans and minority Democrats develop a common interest against non-minority Democrats in moving minority voters into safe seats and leaving the rest of the state for the Republicans.

As the Voting Rights Act has been reduced in scope by the courts, what does that mean for the future of free and fair elections in the United States? And how do you move to a more colorblind system of seat allocation while protecting the often-infringed-upon rights of minority voters to have their votes taken seriously and count equally?

Holder: Yeah; you know, there’s not a tension necessarily between trying to protect the rights of people of color and making sure that lines are drawn in such a way that they are more generally fair. To allow communities, various communities of interest, to vote in a cohesive way is not inconsistent with having a system that is perceived to be fair.

The Voting Rights Act was, I think, really the crown jewel of the civil-rights movement. And allowed for the registration of African Americans, particularly in the South, the flowering of African American political power. And then after that, Hispanic political power. And that has made, I think, the nation better.

The retreat by this Supreme Court—or the demolition of the Voting Rights Act by this Supreme Court—I think has had, and will continue to have, a negative impact on fairness around the country.

But I also think it’s an interesting thing. If you, again, ban partisan gerrymandering in those places where you have a history of racialized voting, polarized racial voting, banning partisan gerrymandering has the equal effect of eliminating racial gerrymandering, particularly in the South.

I think a lot of the things that have concerned this Supreme Court about the Voting Rights Act are really inconsistent with, certainly, the findings that Congress made—a series of findings that Congress had made when the bill was first passed and then reauthorized. And the reauthorizations were all signed by Republican presidents. This Supreme Court looks at an America that I don’t think truly exists. When Chief Justice [John] Roberts said that America has changed—well, yeah, that’s true. America has changed. We’re different now than we were in 1965. But we’re not yet at the place where we need to be when it comes to having race-neutral redistricting, race-neutral electoral processes, where everybody has the opportunity to cast a ballot.

One study shows that Black folks are a lot more likely to have to wait in line for over an hour in order to cast a vote than their white-citizen counterparts, and that’s the kind of thing that I think we can’t turn away from. That’s just a reality that continues to show the problems that we have in this nation.

Frum: Would you mind taking us on a short history of the Voting Rights Act, its reauthorization, and what the Supreme Court has done? So I think a lot of people have sort of a general sense of what happened. But the idea that this is not a history that begins and ends in 1965, but it’s an ebb and flow over time. Could you take us through that, starting in 1965 and bringing us up to the present?

Holder: Yeah; in 1965, you know, we see the Selma-to-Montgomery march after Bloody Sunday, where John Lewis and others had their skulls cracked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The nation sees that. [President] Lyndon Johnson says that in a famous speech, “We shall overcome.” Proposes the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is passed. And the Voting Rights Act essentially said that in those jurisdictions that were covered—that was the technical term—that had a history of racial discrimination against African Americans in allowing them to both register and to vote, that the federal government would have the ability to put upon those jurisdictions a preclearance responsibility, such that if those states engaged in voting changes—moving polling places, closing polling places, other electoral processes—you had to get the approval of the federal government.

And those, again, were primarily southern states. But interestingly, over time, parts of New York actually came under the jurisdiction of the Voting Rights Act, and other northern states.

The Voting Rights Act was then reauthorized two or three occasions after—

Frum: Let me pause you. That original law was time-limited.

Holder: It was time-limited, and it had to then be reauthorized. The last time it was reauthorized it got just about three, four, five negative votes in the House of Representatives. It was passed unanimously by the Senate—that is, the reauthorization—and then signed back into law I believe by President George W. Bush. And this was after Congress had conducted really numerous hearings, thousands of pages of testimony, and then made specific findings.

The Supreme Court in the 2013 Shelby County case made the determination that the coverage formula—that is, to decide which states should be covered by the Voting Rights Act—had been outmoded, outdated. And as a result, threw that out, which took away from the government the ability to use that preclearance authority. And as a result, we saw a whole range of things happen relatively quickly. Twenty-five states put in place a whole range of voter-suppression things. Seventeen hundred polling places closed around the country. A great number of purges of voting rolls happened—about 40 percent of which happened in places that had previously been covered by the Voting Rights Act, therefore disproportionately impacting people of color.

And we have seen with the demise of the Voting Rights Act and its further attempts by, or successful moves, by the Supreme Court in the Callais decision, just recently, to do away with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act—which said that if you can show that the power of people of color was diluted by moves that people in power took with regard to electoral things, that could also be challenged. The Supreme Court has essentially taken away that ability. It’s essentially destroyed the Voting Rights Act. In spite of the fact that, as I said, Congress made specific findings, the court has, I guess, in some form or fashion, made its own determination, its own findings. Without conducting hearings, necessarily. And that, I think, it’s had a negative impact on the ability of African Americans—and other people of color—to get the representation to which they are entitled.

And right after the Callais decision, we saw a number of states automatically start redistricting in such a way that they drew out of power African Americans, Hispanics, who were in seats that had been previously covered by the Voting Rights Act.

Frum: What remains, if anything, of the Voting Rights Act?

Holder: Not much. You know, there are still ways in which parts of the act can be used, but I think, realistically, in order to get back to where we were, a new Voting Rights Act has to be put in place. One was proposed and passed through the House—the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act; it was filibustered in the Senate—to come up with a new way in which a coverage formula could be determined, and that would be responsive to what the Supreme Court found issues with in the 2013 Shelby County decision. And so I think that’s another thing that a new Congress would have to do.

So there are ways in which you could get back to a more modern version of the Voting Rights Act, but it would require an act of Congress.

Frum: Do you have any sympathy for the argument? The argument in 2013 as signed, it said, it was John Roberts said—and the majority for which he spoke—said, You can’t base 2013 voting-rights law on the realities of the country as they were in 1963. Do you have any sympathy for that point of view? And is there any way that a legislative draftsperson could write a law and say, Okay, John Roberts, we concede your point. Let’s base the laws on the realities of today, not 1963?

Holder: When the Court says that, if you look at that in a vacuum—okay, say, Well, yeah, that kind of makes sense. But that ignores the fact that Congress actually conducted hearings, had people come and testify, made findings. Thousands of pages of testimony and findings and exhibits. And on the basis of all the work that Congress did, they reauthorized the Voting Rights Act. That was simply ignored by the Court.

Could Congress come up with a way in which they satisfy the concerns that were raised by the Court in the Shelby County case? I think absolutely yes. You could come up with a new way in which you make the coverage formula apply to certain states, based on a new history that is determined by tests that would be put in place by Congress, that show that, in fact, states are doing things inappropriately. And that have a negative impact on the ability of certain people—people of color, that’s the focus of the act—people of color have been treated unfairly.

Yeah; Congress could certainly draw a new Voting Rights Act that would answer the concerns that were raised in the Shelby County case.

Frum: I want to pick up a thread that you left tantalizingly dangling earlier in our conversation. You talked about how President Trump has given orders to the Justice Department to do things that you find ominous.

You headed that building. You served that building for many, many years. And you headed that building, I think for—you’re the third-longest-serving attorney general in American history. How robust and how not robust is the Department of Justice to this kind of pressure? What are the things that would hold, and what do you observe that would be in danger of snapping under that kind of presidential pressure?

Holder: It’s a really good question, and I think that they have been very careful in the way in which they have really kind of changed the Justice Department and made it an arm of the White House. And one of the ways in which they did that was to get people who served in the Department of Justice over extended periods of time—and these would be Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, progressives, people who left their political leanings at the door and simply enforced the law—and so they’ve taken huge numbers of lawyers in a variety of places in the Justice Department that are now no longer in the department. And replaced them with ideologues who will do the kinds of things, do the bidding, of the political arm of the White House. And the Justice Department that we have now is almost unrecognizable to me and would be unrecognizable to Republican attorneys general as well.

Look, I didn’t agree with everything that Bill Barr did, or John Ashcroft did, or Jeff Sessions did, but they operated within certain parameters. In the way that I’m sure they didn’t agree with me, and I hope they would say that I operated within certain traditional parameters as well.

What we see Todd Blanche doing, Harmeet Dhillon doing, at the Civil Rights Division is inconsistent with the way in which the Justice Department has conducted itself under both Republicans and Democrats. The inability of Todd Blanche to say I’m not going to take political direction from the White House, or try to extol the virtue of the independence of the United States Department of Justice, again, is inconsistent—since Watergate, certainly—with the way in which the Justice Department has conducted itself. And again, under Republican as well as Democratic attorneys general.

Frum: What would have happened if President Obama had said to you, Attorney General Holder, this person really bugs me. I want you to find some way to bring charges against that person if you possibly can. Now, you will say President Obama wouldn’t have said it. Let’s just say he was just in a very, very snappish mood one day and he said that. What would happen?

Holder: Well, I would’ve tried to persuade him that that was a bad thing to do, for a whole variety of reasons. But if that were not, if I did not convince him of that, I would have resigned. And it would’ve been a noisy resignation. You know, the attorney general has the ability within the large conference room that is right outside the attorney general’s personal office, you have the ability to put up four portraits of your predecessors. And I had Justice [Robert] Jackson, then Attorney General Jackson. I had Janet Reno, who I worked for. Bobby Kennedy, who [was] one of my idols. But I also had Elliot Richardson up there—and he was there to remind me that you might at some point have to do something inconsistent with what your president wants you to do, and that may mean that you’re no longer going to be attorney general of the United States. And that’s why Elliot Richardson is one of my personal heroes.

And so if Barack Obama had told me to start an investigation of David Frum? You know, pull his taxes, with absolutely no basis for that—or even the suggestion that I would get from him, forget about whether there was a basis—that is something that for me would terminate my time as attorney general.

But I would not be one of these people who would go out quietly. I would explain to the American people exactly why I was leaving, and what the danger was of what the president was asking me to do.

Frum: Let me ask you about something else that has happened a lot, both in the first Trump term and even more in the second. I wrote at the beginning of the Trump presidency an article in which I quoted something that I heard when I was visiting Hungary in 2016. And somebody pointed out there that, look—Hungary is a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights. It’s under the jurisdiction of European courts. Viktor Orbán, authoritarian though he is, can’t simply toss people in prison. He can’t simply have death squads. He can’t seize property. But what he can do is make it clear that there is a much better treatment available to his friends than there is to his opponents. The friends get VIP seating; everybody else just gets the regular treatment.

And the phrase that this person used, which I quoted in many articles, was: In a modern state, the real power of control of the government is not the ability to persecute the innocent, but to protect the guilty. And that’s the thing we’ve seen Trump use his power much more to do. Is to say, If you’re my friend, then the rules don’t apply.

What should an attorney general do when confronted with a president who says, Look, this person’s been good to us. He’s been a generous donor to important causes. Just give him, cut him a break. Or, He’s a friend of ours. He’s asked for a pardon for a former business associate. What is not happening there that should be happening?

Holder: You simply tell the president no. You’ve got to have that ability. You’ve got to say to the president, No; we’re not going to subvert the processes that we have in place and give a pardon to somebody who has broken the law, hasn’t met any of the requirements that the Justice Department has in place and has applied, you know, uniformly to decide who’s worthy of a pardon. You simply say, No. In the same way that if the president tells you to go after somebody, you say, No, we’re not going to do that. The president tries to tell you to stop an investigation of somebody who is a supporter of the president? You say, No, we’re not going to do that. And if that, again, means that you’re going to lose your job as attorney general, well, there’s great honor, I think, in that. And you stand up for a system, a neutral system. That’s what the attorney general does.

You know, when I was up for confirmation as attorney general, I remember Pat Leahy, who was then head of the Judiciary Committee, said, You know, you’re not the secretary of justice. You’re different from other Cabinet members. You’re going to be the attorney general of the United States, and there has to be some distance between you and the president that you serve, the administration that you are a part of. And that really resonated with me back during the confirmation process. And as I said, you know, Elliot Richardson’s example was always, for me, a guiding principle.

Frum: Let me ask you about one last field of questioning. You know, the United States has a long and unhappy history of electoral shenanigans of all kinds: partisan, racial, all kinds. But one of the things, at least in the modern era, that Americans have known is: The shenanigans stop on the voting day. Once the votes are cast—whatever difficulties were put in the way of certain people or other people, whether it’s by race or by political party, on their way to the vote—once the ballots are cast, then the process goes forward in a secure and safe way. So much so that people didn’t even know what happens between. You vote, then there’s an inauguration some weeks later, and you don’t think too much about all the mechanics in between.

We saw in 2021 an attack on the integrity of an election after the election. And again, it’s hard to remember when that had ever happened before. Do you have any fears that such an attack could happen after the election of 2026? And do you have any instincts about what would be, if someone were to be malicious enough to try such a thing, what are the avenues they might try?

Holder: Yeah. I actually have a way in which I look at this whole electoral process in 2026, and I break it down into three segments. One: What’s going to happen before the election with regard to structural changes that people have been trying to make? You know, the gerrymandering that’s been going on. What actually happens in that second segment, with regard to when people are actually casting ballots, and that means from early voting up to Election Day. And then what happens after Election Day, when the votes are to be counted and when then people are supposed to be certified as winners.

And I’ve been part of groups that have tried to do, again, these tabletop exercises with regard to all three of those segments to try to anticipate that which might happen. I don’t think we necessarily see another January 6th where there is an insurrection on the Hill. But there can be a whole variety of things that happen from Election Day and then the weeks after that where things are done to try to countermand that which the American people have decided by the way in which they have cast their votes. And so we’ve got to be prepared for all of these possibilities.

And I think one of the ways in which we counter that most directly is to have as many people get out there and cast votes as is possible—to make sure that the margins in the elections that are to be decided are big enough such that they can’t be monkeyed with. So at the end of the day, I’m actually pretty confident that, although there are going to be bumps along the way, and we’re going to see things that perhaps we’ve never seen before, that we’re going to get results that are consistent with the desires of the American people. But I don’t think that we can simply hope that is going to happen. We have got to be prepared to fight if that’s necessary.

Frum: Can I say a cynical thing? Without casting doubts on the integrity of American government and all that, is there any way for a Hakeem Jeffries to communicate to a Mike Johnson: Speaker Johnson, if this is a free and fair election, you’re probably going to lose. And after you lose, you’re going to go into business as a consultant with a big salary and a big office and a very sweet life. And if the process of certification goes smoothly and lawfully, your clients will always get a respectful hearing here from the new majority. I can’t say they’ll always win. They’ll always get a respectful and attentive hearing. If there’s any shenanigans, however, no one will get a hearing. Is there any way to communicate that?

Holder: Yeah, I don’t think that’s a bad message. I mean, I actually think that If Democrats were to take over the House, they need not replicate that which I think Republicans have done, or groups of Republicans have done while they’ve held power in these last couple of years. To get back to kind of norms would be a good thing—but also to hold out the stick, which is to say, as you said, Look, if you all try to do things that are inconsistent with how we normally conduct elections and certify elections, there’s going to be a price that that will be paid.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing. But I also think that’s the kind of thing that should be publicly said, you know? It shouldn’t be just a conversation between Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries. That is something that Hakeem Jeffries, other leaders in the Democratic Party, should make known publicly. So that people on K Street—when they’re making determinations as to who’s going to represent them, lobby for them in front of this new Democratic majority—understand that there’s a price that those people, defeated Republicans, will have to pay for the inappropriate things that they have done.

But, my hope would be that if there is in fact a change in leadership in the House, that it happens in the way that it normally has occurred. That people leave the House, that’s what they want to do—go make gobs of money doing things, representing people, and bringing their points of view back to the House. I got some issues around old lobbying and all that stuff and the revolving door. But at least, let’s try to do things in a way that’s a little more consistent with the transfer of power than we have seen in recent times.

Frum: Can I ask you for a final sort of summing-up view? As people listen to your voice and they hear your concerns about 2026, there’s been also some guarded optimism in some of the things you’ve said. How should people—I mean, we’re now into the voting season. Early voting will begin very soon. In some states, I think it’s already begun. What mentality should people who hear you bring to this election? How worried should they be? How hopeful should they be? How fearful? How brave? What would you say to them, just as you sign off?

Holder: I would say that the American people tend to underestimate the power that they have. I mean, as you kind of at the beginning went through a whole number of positions that I have held, it almost sounds like I couldn’t hold a job, you know? But I’ve had a series of government positions, but I hold the most important title now that I’ve ever had—and that’s American citizen. And I think that people need to understand that American citizens have enormous amounts of power. That when we act together, when we are focused on our civic and political life, we change this nation. We have changed, done things that seemingly were impossible—got women the right to vote, ripped down a system of American apartheid. All because the American people decided that that was no longer going to be allowed, or that changes had to be made.

Dr. King said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. But here’s the deal—it doesn’t bend on its own. It only bends when people like us, the American citizens, put their hands on that arc and pull it towards justice. We have had that power in the past. We still retain that power now. The American people, I always say, are slow to rouse, but once we get focused on something, once we commit ourselves to it, we are a mighty force. And this is as true in 2026 as it was during the civil-rights era, as it was during the suffragette movement. If we are prepared to fight for our democracy, if we are prepared to make our voices known, we can still have the America that we want.

Frum: And if people are afraid?

Holder: Push through those fears. I’m sure that Dr. King—you know, John Lewis, Diane Nash, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton—I’m sure that they were afraid. I’m sure they had doubts about their abilities to do that which they wanted to accomplish. And nevertheless, women got the right to vote. Desegregation occurred.

[It] requires courage. I mean, this nation—this is our 250th anniversary. It took courage for a bunch of farmers and folks to take on the mightiest empire in the world and declare that we were gonna be a free nation. If we’re going to honor that past, we have got to push through the doubts that we have. We have to have the courage that they had. We have to honor them by acting in ways that are consistent with what they did, and make better the nation that exists now, and make better and more hopeful the future that I think this nation can still have.

I believe in this country, you know? I really do. And we go through these times where we have great successes, and then we have retreats. But the arc of this nation has always been generally in a positive way. This can’t be the first generation of Americans that fails to defend our democracy, and I’m confident that we won’t be.

Frum: Attorney General Eric Holder, thank you so much for your continuing public service. Thank you for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

Holder: Right. Thanks for having me, David.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Attorney General Eric Holder for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I said at the top of the show, this week’s book is a historical novel, Agrippa by Robert Harris.

Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was the right-hand man of the first non-assassinated emperor of Rome, the Emperor Augustus. He was the general who masterminded Augustus’s victory at the Battle of Actium, the battle that confirmed Augustus’s rule of the Roman world. He built aqueducts. He was a great engineer. He was also the main planner of the Pantheon building in Rome, and his name is still on the facade, to be seen by tourists, of the Pantheon. M. Agrippa fecit. “Marcus Agrippa made it.”

Romans of the day usually omitted his middle name, Vipsanius, so they knew him as we know him: Marcus Agrippa.

This is a novel about Agrippa’s life. Which is a challenging thing to do, because Agrippa left behind very little record of anything he wrote or said, quite unlike his contemporaries Julius Caesar, Marcus Cicero. I had the opportunity to ask Robert Harris about this book at an event in Washington a little while ago. I interviewed him at the Georgetown Barnes & Noble bookstore, and one of the questions I asked Harris was about his attraction to the historic-novel form. Why did he do it? Most of his output has been set in times past, often in the Roman world. Harris, a very witty man, gave me two answers as to why he chose this format. The first answer was that they—dead people, ancient people—can’t sue you. He wrote a novel that was based on the life of Tony Blair that raised a lot of libel risk, and he learned a lesson from that. He also said that things that are set in the past become less dated. If you write a novel set today, 10 years from now, people will notice the technology looks old-fashioned. Whereas if you write in Roman times, no one minds. That was an interesting answer. I didn’t find it quite satisfying to the question. Why do I, as a reader, like to consume historical fiction?

And I thought about that sometime after our dialogue at the Georgetown Barnes & Noble, and here is a thought that I offer to you. There are two things if you study history that you need to keep in mind, and they’re contradictory. The first is that people in the past were very much like us. They loved; they feared; they lived; they died. And in other ways, were completely unlike us. They lived under not only material conditions, but moral conditions very different from our own. And in particular, it’s very hard for people who live in the modern world of science to put ourselves back into a world where religion was more central than it is today. And where the fear of magic and incantations was as powerful as it was, for example, for the ancient Romans.

But as you keep these two truths in mind, there’s a question that the person who wants to understand the past must grapple with, and that is: which of the two truths to keep uppermost at which time?

I think, as you begin to be interested in history, the truth you need to grapple with first is the similarity of the past. That’s why you care so much about it; because you recognize that people then were like people now in very important ways. And only later and secondarily, and as you go deeper, do you need to grapple with the second truth, which is how different they were.

Historical novels are a great entry into the similarity. The novelist inevitably assimilates the past to the present. If you read an old-fashioned historical novel—Ben-Hur, which was written in the 19th century—you’re struck at what a 19th-century person the Ben-Hur in the 19th-century novel was. And if you read Agrippa by Robert Harris, written in the 21st century, Agrippa seems like a very 21st-century person.

So you can get a sense of the drift away from the reality of the time by how close these people come to you. But because they come close to you, you can begin to care about them and to investigate more. So historical fiction can be a great entry point into the understanding of the past. It shouldn’t be the finishing point, because then you need to grapple with the other truth of the difference of the past, of the difference between then and now. And maybe as you study the past longer, it is those differences that come more and more to the fore as the things that really fix your attention and help you to understand why the past is so important to understanding the present.

That’s it for this week’s edition of The David Frum Show. Thanks so much for joining me. I will ask again, if you’re minded to support the work of the program, the best way to do that is by subscribing to The Atlantic. Please share and subscribe, and like and heart and whatever you do on social media, to bring this program to the attention of other people who might be interested in it. Thanks so much for watching and listening. See you soon. Bye-bye.

The Missed Opportunity of NAZA

2026-09-30T07:30:00-04:00

A new Israeli documentary provoking both record-breaking festival applause and unhinged condemnation is called NAZA—a title with a suggestive sting. Hebrew speakers will recognize the military acronym for nezek agavi, or “collateral damage.” But for anyone else encountering the word, it might present as a twisted portmanteau that blends Gaza and Nazi, or at least nudges the mind in the direction of gas chambers. This doesn’t seem coincidental to me.

The film consists almost entirely of nighttime conversations on Tel Aviv rooftops with 24 young-seeming Israeli men and women—all soldiers and intelligence officers whose face and voice are obscured—who participated remotely in the country’s retaliatory war in Gaza. They collected intelligence on Hamas targets, operated AI systems and drones, and designated where to drop bombs. They were “small cogs,” as one of them puts it. What they describe is a widening radius of death. The number of noncombatants they say Israel was willing to kill in pursuit of Hamas fighters, expressed as a factor of NAZAs, kept growing. Strikes that were estimated at 10 or 12 NAZA soon gave way to those set at 15 or 20 NAZA, and one mission targeting a certain unnamed member of Hamas was rated at 500 NAZA, according to one of the interviewees.

Protected by the camera’s shadows, these soldiers are freely admitting that in the course of carrying out orders, they found themselves obliterating women and children—and whole apartment buildings. Is this genocide? Is it, as the United Nations defines it, killing with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group”? Despite the ever more widespread adoption of the word to describe what has happened over the past three years, only one of the interviewees uses it, and then only when prompted by one of the filmmakers, Yuval Abraham. But I heard no talk of intention in these conversations, not even really any animus or desire to kill. Because Abraham and his co-director, Rachel Szor, spend little more than 30 seconds setting up the raw emotional backdrop of the October 7 massacre, motivation seems almost completely absent. Instead, something much scarier is revealed: thoughtlessness. “My role is technical,” one of the soldiers says. It came to feel like a “video game,” says another.

This is meant to horrify, and it does. But what are the filmmakers asking us to do with this horror? Abraham and Szor had a choice about how to frame these dark confessions, and they took a regrettable path—one that is likely to simply reconfirm the prejudices and convictions of its audience.

Although NAZA was co-produced with The Guardian, it does not present its revelations with the rigor of a journalistic investigation. None of the claims is corroborated—the lack of dates or names or much specific detail beyond what the interviewees recall leaves an unfortunate opening for critics. The mosaic that forms is disjointed because each of these people seems to be doing a different kind of job: One describes an AI system named Lavender that identifies fighters to kill based on a collection of data; another talks of setting fire to houses; a third describes hacking into the phone of a little girl to determine when her father, a Hamas operative, is home so that a strike can be ordered. Each piece of information would, if confirmed, surely point to a war crime, but the only overarching pattern is Israel’s willingness to loosen to a sickening degree its rules of engagement and warfare. And anyone seeing the level of death and destruction in Gaza already knew this was most likely the case.

[Read: The unlikely friendship behind an Oscar favorite]

What Abraham and Szor do add instead is insight into a kind of psychological slippage—the ease with which people can stop seeing other human beings, how readily the killing of bystanders can be justified for the sake of an impossible war aim. What we are witnessing in this documentary is the Milgram experiment with real, appalling consequences.

NAZA could have asked its viewers to identify with these soldiers, to see the potential in themselves to do exactly as they had done, to be vigilant against such corrosive thoughtlessness. But this film does not want to be a mirror. It wants to tell us that there is something uniquely malevolent about Israeli society.

One of the film’s executive producers is Jonathan Glazer, the director of The Zone of Interest. That 2023 film depicts the home life of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss as his family blithely goes about its day-to-day next door to a death camp; scenes of garden parties are juxtaposed with a constant thrum of menacing noises—the sound of the death machine just a few meters away. At times I felt that NAZA was intended to be a sequel. The only other major visual element in this stark documentary, aside from the interviews, is B-roll footage of Tel Aviv at night. The city appears to be depersonalized—a monstrous pileup of antiseptic skyscrapers. We see anonymous people through their windows: doing yoga, having dinner, watching television. Meanwhile, the soundscape almost exactly echoes the distinctive one of The Zone of Interest—a low-frequency rumble of industrial murder. What emanates from Tel Aviv at night is a similar hum, the coldness of an inhuman machine. Gaza, we are reminded at one point, is about 40 miles down the beach.

At other moments, the directors suggest a motive for Gaza’s destruction by using archival footage of the founding of Tel Aviv. As the city expanded from its sand dune on the Mediterranean, it overtook nearby Palestinian villages, and now only one building remains from that earlier existence, which the camera shows in present-day ruin. Without making it explicit, Abraham and Szor are connecting the violence in Gaza to something deeper and essential to Zionism, to Israel. Whether or not you believe this is true, it muddles and overdetermines what emerges from the interviews, which is nothing like a goal or objective on the part of these soldiers.

The effect of this overlay is to further distance the viewer from the anonymous people being interviewed, because the place they come from—rather than being the place everyone comes from—appears alien and evil. Those already inclined to see Israeli society as an abnormality will surely receive the film as just more evidence. NAZA will bolster the attitudes of people such as the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, who said on a podcast last year that Israel is “doing evil that is just as great as what the Nazis did. And in some ways it’s worse, because they kind of boast about it. Hitler had the decency to try to keep it secret.”

[Read: The word genocide has an actual meaning]

Abraham and Szor should be commended for making art that peels back the skin and shows us our darkest instincts: our ability to dissociate, to replace people with numbers, to ignore inconvenient suffering. They are now paying a high personal price for the film, subject not just to online hate (from the right, of course, but also from those on the left who boycott and reject any art made by Israelis, no matter how critical). Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to revoke their citizenship, and they will face very real death threats if and when they return to Israel after touring with the film. I’d like to say that the fact that they are displeasing people on both sides means, as the truism goes, that they are getting something right. But I can’t help feeling that they missed an opportunity.

NAZA is discomfiting, but it could have been even more so if it didn’t divert attention to a familiar and (for some) reassuring narrative about a fundamentally genocidal Israel. If Abraham and Szor had forced viewers to actually see themselves in those silhouetted people, to understand them as individuals, the shock of it might be even greater than imagining that the rest of us are made of purer stuff.

DOJ’s Collapsing Probe Into a Supposed Anti-Trump Conspiracy

2026-09-29T18:55:00-04:00

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.

When President Trump returned to office last year, the administration had revenge on the agenda. First, the FBI purged agents who’d been involved in investigations into Trump while he was out of office. Second, the Department of Justice launched a major probe to prove a “grand conspiracy” to politically persecute Trump, which would rely in part on the former agents’ cooperation and testimony about improper or illegal actions.

Perhaps you have spotted a potential flaw in the plan. The administration apparently did not.

The team conducting the probe sought to compel testimony from agents involved in an August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, in which the FBI recovered documents that Trump had removed from the White House. Last week, lawyers representing agents involved in the search filed a motion saying that if they were forced to testify to a grand jury, they would relay “their firsthand memories of investigating a properly predicated allegation” that Trump had “unlawfully retained hundreds of highly classified documents,” as well as “factually supported opinions on why and how such retention put the country’s national security at risk.”

No one should be surprised that the agents, who appear to have already been fired for simply doing their job, were not eager to testify in court that they’d been involved in anything untoward. Although such testimony would pose serious problems for the DOJ probe, the motion’s intent was not to sabotage it, The New York Times notes, but rather to seek assurances that if the agents testified, they would not be violating a federal judge’s order that bars publication of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report about it. (Smith testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee today—more on that in a moment.)

More to the point, the agents were never likely to have the sort of damning information about a conspiracy that prosecutors want. The facts of the Mar-a-Lago case are not complicated: Trump absconded with documents, many of them highly sensitive; did not turn them over when asked to do so by the National Archives and later via a subpoena; and was found in possession of them at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing, didn’t really dispute any of these facts. He argued that he had declassified the materials—a claim for which he provided no evidence—and that he rightfully possessed them. (Prosecutors further alleged that he’d suggested to his lawyers that they hide some documents, and that he’d tried to hide others from them.)

The grand-conspiracy probe, which attempts to tie together the documents case, investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, and other investigations into Trump allies, has been a mess. In April, a career prosecutor leading the team was removed, reportedly after she concluded that there was not enough evidence to charge John Brennan, the CIA director under President Obama who has repeatedly tangled with Trump, with any crimes. (Brennan is reportedly facing two separate DOJ criminal investigations, which a law professor told The Washington Sun is an indication of either prosecutorial incompetence or malice; those might not be mutually exclusive.)

She was replaced by Joseph diGenova, who was a federal prosecutor in the 1980s but has more recently been known for propagating conspiracy theories. He and his wife were appointed to Trump’s defense team during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe in 2018 but quickly withdrew; they were later involved in Trump’s attempt to challenge the 2020 presidential-election results. DiGenova abruptly resigned earlier this month and implied that he had been under pressure to bring unjustified charges. “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” he told the New York Post.

Yesterday, another member of the team, Kurt Olsen, departed. The Times reports that Olsen faced difficulties with his security clearance; The Washington Post says that he was also frustrated by pressure from DOJ officials to move faster. If even Olsen thinks DOJ is being hasty, that would be stunning: He pushed DOJ to ask the Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election and more recently was the driving force behind more conspiracy theories, including about voting in Fulton County, Georgia, in 2020.

People like diGenova and Olsen are die-hard loyalists, not just deep-staters or fair-weather Trump fans. The problem with the grand-conspiracy probe is the fundamental premise, not staffing. Trump’s view of the world is zero-sum, such as in trade or diplomacy. The motive for the probe is that because Trump suffered during his criminal probes, his antagonists must have done something just as bad and must suffer the same.

Perhaps you can see the flaw here too: Trump and his allies are starting with a conclusion of guilt and attempting to work backwards to find the charges and evidence to justify it. The risks of this were vividly displayed during Smith’s testimony today, in one of the most excruciating exchanges I’ve ever seen in politics. Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri seemed convinced that he had caught Smith perjuring himself—when, in fact, Schmitt had failed to recognize the difference between the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball team, eviscerating not only Schmitt’s dignity but also his theory that Smith had been covertly meeting with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to conspire against Trump.

A robust debate continues about whether it was politically prudent to prosecute Trump for his various offenses in order to uphold the rule of law, or whether doing so simply inflamed his supporters and fostered an atmosphere of partisan retribution. Legally, the matter is simpler. On one side of the ledger, Trump did take the documents, Trump did try to overturn an election that he lost, and Trump’s 2016 campaign did have a series of inappropriate contacts with foreign governments. (The weakest case against Trump involved falsified business records, but that one produced a felony conviction.) On the other side, federal law-enforcement agencies did their job and investigated those actions, for which many were fired. Given the facts, is the DOJ probe investigating a grand conspiracy, or is it evidence of one?

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

ICE plans to hire 5,000 additional employees by the end of the year to support the Trump administration’s deportation campaign, which would expand its workforce by about 17 percent. Most of the new hires are expected to be deportation officers, and the agency says that it plans to use stricter vetting procedures after hundreds of recruits from last year’s hiring surge were removed.
The Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to temporarily resume rapidly deporting immigrants to third countries; the justices will hear arguments in December over whether immigrants must be given an opportunity to contest removal to a third country where they could face persecution.
The Trump administration launched America.gov today, an AI-powered chatbot designed to help people find information about federal services. The tool will initially search government websites, and the administration plans to have it eventually help users complete tasks such as enrolling in Medicare and renewing passports.

Evening Read

Illustration by Tina Zhou / The Atlantic. Sources: MARVIN RECINOS / AFP / Getty; Getty.

ICE Deportees Are Vanishing Into Salvadoran Prisons

By Kevin Sieff

Ana paced near the arrivals terminal of the San Salvador airport, eyeing the door where deportees from the United States are released. She was there on a sweltering day in May to pick up her son, who had been detained in Texas and deported. She would drive him home, she decided, and cook him dinner. They would figure out what to do next.

But when a group of men walked out wearing ICE-issued sweatsuits, their shoelaces removed from their shoes, her son wasn’t among them. She approached a police officer, who searched his name on a tablet. “He’s being taken to prison,” he told her.

Read the full article.

Can the Polls Possibly Be Right?

2026-09-29T08:00:00-04:00

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

When this year began, the Democrats were heavy underdogs to take back the Senate in the midterms. The task would require not only toppling Susan Collins in Maine but also winning at least five states that voted for Donald Trump in 2024, while holding on to all of the party’s existing seats. The realistic best-case scenario seemed to be a replay of the so-called blue-wave 2018 election, during Trump’s first term, in which Democrats took back the House but the Senate remained in Republican hands. To gain control of the upper chamber, Democrats would need an incredible stroke of luck. They might have gotten one.

Trump’s decision to start a war with Iran, and the resulting spike in oil prices, shifted the boundaries of the politically possible. A year ago, Trump was merely unpopular: By about 11 percentage points, more people disapproved of his performance than approved of it, according to The New York Times’ polling average. He would kill for such good numbers today. Seven months into the Iran debacle, his disapproval margin has widened to 23 percentage points—worse than his numbers in the immediate aftermath of January 6.

Predictably, Trump’s unpopularity is spilling out into the midterm races. Recent polls have been almost unbelievably positive for Democrats. Troy Jackson is ahead, albeit narrowly, in Maine. Abdul El-Sayed has a modest lead in Michigan, and Democrats have even bigger advantages in the swing states of Georgia and North Carolina, both of which Trump won in 2024. Most astonishing, Democratic candidates are in position to pull off upsets in Alaska, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa, which all went for Trump by more than 10 percentage points. Republican incumbents look beatable even in Kansas, where Trump won by 16, and Nebraska, where he won by 20. As a result, in prediction markets, Democrats’ chances of winning the Senate are now more than 60 percent.

[Read: The supporters urging Trump to declare martial law for the midterms]

If the election in November plays out as the polls are suggesting it will, Republicans will have their leader to thank—and themselves. With few exceptions, Republican candidates have created almost no distance from the president. Indeed, candidates in must-win red states, including Jon Husted of Ohio and Ken Paxton of Texas, gave speeches at the same Republican midterm convention where Trump led the audience in a pledge to the “greatest president in the history of the United States.”

Democrats, by contrast, have been relatively disciplined. Candidates with a track record of winning over moderate voters were successfully recruited in Alaska, North Carolina, Iowa, Maine, Ohio, and Nebraska, and primary voters in those states were wise enough to nominate them (or, in Nebraska’s case, nominate someone who promised to drop out in favor of an independent with a better chance to win). Even where candidates with narrower appeal were nominated, as in Texas and Michigan, they have been cannily pivoting away from their unpopular progressive stances.

If Democrats won both the House and Senate, they would be able to put a real check on Trump’s ambitions for the rest of his presidency. His legislative agenda would be at their mercy. Democrats would use their control of committees in both chambers to launch extensive investigations into government wrongdoing and corruption. And Trump’s judicial nominees would need to make a convincing case that they’d be impartial judges, not dogmatic loyalists.

A Democratic sweep would have ripple effects beyond 2026. Each Senate seat that the party picks up this year makes winning in 2028 that much easier. If the electoral environment remains favorable for Democrats two years from now, the party could feasibly pick up seats in Wisconsin and North Carolina. Suddenly, a stronger, more diverse, and more nationally competitive Democratic Party is at least imaginable.

All of this analysis hinges on assuming that the polls are accurate. For three presidential elections in a row, pollsters have badly underestimated Trump’s appeal. And in general, as the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini has pointed out, the pro-Democratic bias tends to be largest in red states, the very ones that Democrats need in order to take back the Senate. Moreover, not every poll has looked good for Democrats—a recent New York Times and Siena College survey found Collins ahead in Maine, though Jackson leads in most polls.

[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump]

The good news for Democrats is that Trump-era midterm polls have been highly accurate on average, much more so than in presidential-election years. That’s because the midterm electorate includes fewer of the low-trust, politically disengaged voters who are so hard for pollsters to reach and disproportionately turn out when Trump is on the ballot.

Even if the polls are accurate, things could change between now and November 3. Perhaps Trump could find a way to credibly declare victory in Iran. Individual Democratic candidates could become embroiled in scandal. Republican candidates could figure out how to distance themselves from Trump down the stretch.

Yet the likeliest scenario at the moment, hard as it is to believe, is Democrats winning multiple Senate seats in states that Trump won in 2024 by double digits, taking control of both houses of Congress, earning the right to be involved in the legislative process, and providing a meaningful check on Trump’s power. The remarkable fact is that Republicans are now the party hoping for a stroke of good luck.

Gaza’s Open Horizon

2026-09-29T12:35:26-04:00

Here in Gaza, war has changed everything, even the sea. During the long, hot summer, children went to the beach either early in the morning or just before sunset. They stepped around piles of garbage, and the tents of displaced families, to wade into water contaminated by sewage.

And yet, they went. We all did. And I think we always will.

I recently started aiming to take 10,000 steps a day, to get back in shape. To reach that number, I walk from my home to the seafront road and back. I have been doing this for a month now. The distance to the shore and back happens to be 10,000 steps. Which means that, really, my aim was never the step count, but the Mediterranean.

I go before sunset, when the heat starts to ease slightly. Not that it ever gets truly cool. July and August brought the worst of the humidity, which sometimes reached 86 percent. As I walk, I watch the sunlight stretch across the water before it slowly disappears.

A few children still fly kites along the beach. Kite-flying was common in Gaza before the war and even during it—just a month ago, the sky above the sea was full of kites almost constantly—but now it has become an act of defiance, because the Israelis have said that they will treat kite-flying as a hostile act, on the grounds that kites were sometimes used, before the war, to launch incendiary devices into Israel.

In the past, children fashioned kites from brightly colored paper and wooden sticks they bought at stationery stores. Now they improvise, using whatever they can find. Some work with dry palm fronds. I met a boy who had carved his kite’s frame from a long piece of wood; others weave frames from plastic bags, or from the sacks that once carried flour and food aid, joining the edges with torn scraps from old notebooks.

[Ghada Abdulfattah: Feeding a family of seven in Gaza]

Everyone in Gaza is a sea person. That 25-mile coastline is more than a place to walk or fly a kite; it’s a point of access to the outside world. In past summers, all of Gaza would seem to be at the shore—sitting on the beach, or maybe higher up, in wooden chairs near the road. Children dashed in and out of the water, or rode camels or horses along the water for a small fee. Vendors sold grilled corn, lupin beans, and cotton candy, circulating among the blankets with sweet tea and roasted seeds. Some families pitched tents right at the shoreline. People posed there for selfies or wedding photos. The air smelled of corn and charcoal; you’d hear the clatter of backgammon stones, the hiss of a narghile being lit. Sometimes the sound of the sea drowned out nearly everything else.

One of my enduring memories of the seashore is from July 2023. My nephews and nieces dug holes in the sand to bury themselves, then ran to the water to wash off, then came back to start digging all over again. The adults swam, pretended to swim, pushed whoever wasn’t swimming into the water anyway. We cracked open a watermelon, hoping it would be ripe—too sweet, too red, and a little sandy, the way we liked it. When I was about 6 years old, my parents took us to the beach to crack open a watermelon just like that. My siblings and I still laugh about this when we remember: Did we go to the sea just to eat a watermelon and go home? No swimming, no playing, no walking—just the watermelon, and then back. Now the stretch of sand where we did this has become a makeshift camp crowded with families displaced from the north and south of the Gaza Strip.

We are more than 2 million people living on a ribbon of land about 25 miles long and seven and a half miles wide. This makes Gaza one of the most densely populated places on earth. Before the war, to leave the Strip from any direction required a permit. But the sea asked for nothing. You didn’t need a document to look at it, to wade into it, to let your eyes follow it to a horizon with no drone or checkpoint in sight. The sea was our open horizon, the place we went when we needed to breathe. When I was in a bad mood, my mother would tell me to go there.

In the last years before the war, the shore was lined with tourist facilities: chalets, amusement parks, restaurants, and other amenities that welcomed thousands of visitors every summer. Now these are mostly gone, and the few that remain are affordable for only a privileged few. Throughout the Strip, prices are high, air strikes continue, and about half of Gazans now live in tents, which offer little shelter from the scorching summer heat. More than 60 percent of Gaza has become inaccessible, as the so-called yellow line expands westward, pushing people ever closer to the sea. For many of us, the need to be in contact with the water has grown as the space around us has constricted: A person needs a place—any place—to escape the feeling of being trapped.

A few weeks ago, I met a fisherman named Hasan Shehada. He told me that Gaza’s port services and many of its fishing boats had been destroyed in the war, and that going out on the water is still dangerous because of Israeli naval fire. Before the war, together with other fishermen, some of them his siblings and cousins, he could bring in enough fish to feed his eight-member family and still earn an income. Now he lacks the boats or equipment that once made this work possible.

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: Flying over my battered homeland]

“The war has changed our sea too,” he told me. “Sometimes I sit on the beach and cry, thinking about where we were and where we are now.”

Now the season is turning. For the families living in tents along the shore, the sea is no longer a place of rest: The sand is windblown and gets into everything, the air is heavy with humidity, and the tents will protect their occupants from the coming cold as little as they did them from the heat that has only just subsided. Still they are patched together against whatever the day might bring. Perhaps looking out at the water will make this bearable—will allow me not to see the tents, if only for a moment, by fixing my eyes on something wider.

Sometimes I ask myself: What if Gaza had no sea? What if it were landlocked? I cannot let myself contemplate the answer.

Taylor Swift’s Audience Is Growing Up. Her Music Is Devolving.

2026-09-29T07:00:00-04:00

Some music pulls you out of yourself, jolting you with the recognition that the person who’s singing is just as complex as you are. Some music gets you to surrender to the fact that you’re merely an overgrown baby who responds to repetition and rhyme. And some music strands you in a state of embarrassment at the human condition.

Taylor Swift has lately been making music in that last category, and the discomfort is reaching terminal levels. On Friday, she released four new tracks for The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, the deluxe edition of her 2025 album The Life of a Showgirl. Bonus tracks are usually thought of as, well, bonuses—treats for the fans and incidental to an artist’s arc. But the reaction this time has drawn so much disgust that it’s like Swift mailed a horse’s head to each of her listeners. Swift has long led a cultural turn toward revaluing feelings and sounds that were once thought of as childish—but now her audience seems restless to grow up.

Produced by the factory-precise hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback, Showgirl was billed as her return to pure pop after an experimental detour on 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department. Showgirl enjoyed the best-selling first week in music history—not because it amazed the broadest audience possible but because it goaded superfans to buy multiple copies. Some of those fans began to grumble that their idol was taking them for granted. Showgirl’s music mostly felt like a bad sitcom: brightly toned but cynically spirited, verbose but charmless. When Swift announced deluxe tracks last week after posting a photo of herself in an austere cocktail dress, it seemed possible she’d taken the public feedback and refined Showgirl’s fluffy, empty aesthetic.

Alas, no. Encore does contain some intriguing ideas: strings on “Patient Zero” that sound like they’re playing from the walls of Enya’s castle, a sensitive and somewhat mysterious character study on “Babylon.” But, as on the original Showgirl, the music is too stiff to soar. Verses evoke “Baby Shark” with blocky melodies that overly emphasize each rhyming syllable. Her lyrics, usually laden with double and triple meanings, invite little extended analysis. Sometimes she raps like a funky uncle delivering a wedding toast.

The worst offender is “Cleveland!” Pattering like a musical-theater sidekick, she complains about haters who make fun of her dancing and her looks, until the chorus announces that everything’s fine because her man loves her. Perky piano and glockenspiel imitate ecstatic classics such as Commodores’ “Easy” and Sufjan Stevens’s “Chicago” in the same way that stick figures imitate human beings. The problem isn’t that she sounds happy, and neither is it that she’s nah-nah-nahing at critics for the zillionth time in her career. It’s that the song hits the same note (literally, figuratively, lyrically, musically) over and over. Listening feels like getting beaten with a candy cane.

Swift’s stans are notorious for their loyalty, but online, the consensus around Encore is harsh. “I’m a Swiftie and Even I Think These New Songs Are Terrible,” the headline of Poppie Platt’s review in The Telegraph reads. The superfan-slash-critic who goes by the name Swiftologist recorded a reaction in which his voice cracked as he said, “It’s so hard to be the Swiftologist at a time like this!” One strain of backlash has centered on the notion that she’s too old to be making music this simplistic. On X, someone posted her lyrics with a picture of Sex and the City’s Samantha saying, “If you were 25, that would be adorable, but you’re 32, so that’s just stupid.” Swift will turn 37 in December.

This line of critique is a little surprising given how Swift has long subverted expectations about her age and gender. As a teenager, she wrote songs that weren’t so much wise beyond her years as reflective of the truth that young people have brains and use them. “Fifteen,” released when she was 18, empathized with and advised girls just a few years younger than her; on “22,” she both celebrated and mocked her own 22-year-old giddiness. In titling her hit 2014 album 1989, after her birth year, she practically insisted that she be seen as the consummate Millennial. As she got older, her anxieties as a 30-something in a field that loves to discard older women became a source of inspiration: She sang on 2022’s “Anti-Hero” that she felt like a “monster on a hill” next to the “sexy baby” singers coming up behind her.

Her music itself has suggested a deep rethinking of what it means to mature. Reconciling complex storytelling and catchy melodies in fresh and clever ways with each release, Swift has conveyed that growing older needn’t mean ditching the pleasures inherent to pop. Neither does it mean discarding the vulnerability, the self-interest, and the swooning that are typically seen as teenager fare. This proved influential at a time when childhood and adulthood were colliding in so many corners of culture—with shorts at the office, comic-book movies at the Oscars, and stuffed animals on adult backpacks. In the 21st century, pop culture doesn’t ask grown-ups to put away childish things; it urges them to upgrade them, remix them, and vest them with new importance to suit each phase of life.

[Read: How did Taylor Swift convince the world that she’s relatable?]

But lately the civilizationally ominous problems with clinging to youth are starting to seem glaring. Surgery and skin care in the pursuit of dewiness are warping people’s relationship with their own face. America’s romance recession has the air of a cooties panic. Democracy has been destabilized by the schoolyard-bully stylings of Donald Trump and his propagandists posting anime from official White House accounts. Last year, the musician Patrick Cosmos proposed a “new unified theory of American reality” called “everyone is twelve now.” The theory went viral because it really did seem to explain such disparate phenomena as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s meaty diet and Emerald Fennell’s slimy, silly Wuthering Heights.

At some point, a cultural countermovement calling back to earlier ideals of adulthood—restraint, nuance, care for the collective—seems likely to catch on. In music, that turn may be under way already. The breakout soul singer Olivia Dean, at age 27, projects the calm sophistication of last century’s torch singers. The country star Ella Langley just smashed the record for the longest-running Hot 100 No. 1 with music that emanates seen-it-all, world-weary wisdom (she’s also 27). In August, at Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields festival, a class of singers that’s been tagged as “girly pop” organized a serious-minded and historically informed effort for abortion rights and women’s health. Even music’s recent confrontation over Israel and Palestine resembles a coming-of-age crisis: Ed Sheeran claimed that he avoided commenting on politics in deference to kids in his audience, but eventually, the pressure to speak was so great that he took a stand.

Maybe it’s wishful thinking to glean a trend from those examples, but the simple truth is that time imparts lessons even to those who seem to resist aging. At the MTV VMAs on Sunday, where Swift debuted her “Patient Zero” video (a pulpy romantic-horror clip starring Colin Farrell and Dakota Johnson), many accolades went to another icon who’s navigated the seasons of life in her own way: Madonna. Although the 68-year-old singer’s commitment to singing about sex and dancing in corsets leads many critics to hold her up as a sad example of not acting one’s age, really she’s shown how an aversion to compromise can keep a career viable over decades. In 1998, at age 39, she released Ray of Light, an album that saw her evolve her lyrical purview—to matters of the soul and society—as she pushed her sound in lush, yet still clubby, directions. This year, she put out Confessions II, a fan-adored album of dance bangers that also managed to deliver a forthright statement about memory and mortality.

Swift’s fans, meanwhile, are exchanging theories for why she’s gone Benjamin Button. One popular (but dubious) explanation is that after marrying Travis Kelce, she’s too happy to make interesting music. Another is that everything she’s doing is “satire” (okay, but is it good?). But maybe Swift just made a strategic call after noticing how jejune pop culture has become—and in doing so, underestimated her audience. Undying support for a pop star is a fundamentally childish behavior, and although Swift’s audience still craves her brand of bubblegum confessionalism, they also expect at least the level of sophistication that she’s shown before. And at a time when so much else is regressing, artists’ role is to show us what moving forward might look like.

The Babies Left Behind in America

2026-09-28T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Meridith Kohut

Estela Díaz and 2-year-old Eber repeat their routine every morning: Around 8 a.m., he rustles her awake in the bed they share. She picks him up, changes his diaper, and pulls out a fresh set of tiny clothes. While Estela dresses him, Eber coos, “Mama, mama.” She smiles and strokes his cheeks, trying to hide her sadness at his confusion. Estela is 50 and has three sons, but Eber is not one of them. She’s been caring for him because ICE deported his parents to Venezuela, despite his mother’s pleas to be reunited first.

Estela and her husband, Miguel, moved to Mobile, Alabama, 20 years ago to raise their own boys in a place that felt safe and had a slower rhythm than Las Vegas, where they’d met. Miguel works as a remodeling contractor. He spent years developing their four-acre property, building a wood shop, a chicken coop, and houses for two of their children (the third lives 15 minutes down the road). They bought peacocks as pets and planted bright perennial gardens, adorning them with stone fountains. By the driveway, they fly an American flag from an antique tractor. Over the years, their home evolved into a kind of retirement sanctuary—until this past winter, when it started to look like a day care.

A police officer pulled over Eber’s mother, Marlyn, last November and, without accusing her of an infraction, turned her over to ICE, despite her work permit and pending asylum application. Eber, who had just finished breastfeeding, and his 7-year-old brother, Isaac, had nowhere to go. Marlyn’s 23-year-old cousin took the boys briefly. Then two of Marlyn’s friends—both undocumented—agreed to take one child each. Eber was moved into a rusty trailer with no heat; the woman watching him put socks on his hands to keep him warm. He was sick, but she was too scared of ICE to take him to a doctor. Isaac’s caregiver worked nights. Sometimes he made it to school; sometimes he didn’t.

The boys needed a better home. Frantic phone calls among Marlyn’s friends and co-workers eventually led to Estela. They had all worked together at a plant nursery, and Estela was the only American citizen they knew. She agreed to take the boys and then return them to Marlyn, not knowing that doing the right thing would go so wrong: that county officials would end up investigating her for trafficking; that her bank account would dwindle to almost nothing; that Eber would still be in her home, unable to remember his own mother, nearly a year after she was picked up.

“I’ve lost a lot of weight because it’s so stressful,” Estela told me, sitting in her living room. Eber was clinging to her, his face buried in her chest. “My family is like, ‘What have you done?’ ”

President Trump’s rush to deport as many immigrants as possible is creating a new family-separation crisis. Whereas his first administration took children from their parents at the border to deter illegal crossings, the second is separating families living in the United States as part of a purge. Like last time, Trump officials claim that this is untrue. But stories like Eber’s are not hard to find, as I learned this year while reporting on immigration enforcement in Alabama, California, Illinois, Missouri, and Texas.

[From the September 2022 issue: Caitlin Dickerson on the secret history of family separation]

As of April, the Brookings Institution put the total number of affected children at about 205,000—71 percent of whom are U.S. citizens. Most of those cases involve the loss of one parent, a devastating blow to families. But the Brookings researchers believe that more than 35,000 of the cases are like Eber’s, in which a child has been left with no parent at all.

Since the analysis was published, the pace of ICE arrests has increased. In July, the agency arrested a record 49,000 people, a majority of whom have no criminal record, according to a New York Times review of data obtained by the Deportation Data Project. Many of the people ICE is targeting entered the United States legally, through parole programs or by requesting asylum, and were in the process of working toward permanent legal immigration status. (A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told me the Deportation Data Project’s numbers are “inaccurate” but did not correct them, adding that a pending application for legal status does not shield immigrants from arrest.)

In recent years, ICE policy required officers to either reunite detained parents with their children before deportation or confirm that the children had an official caregiver in their parents’ absence. But in July 2025, DHS revised the policy, sprinkling it with caveats, such as “when operationally feasible,” that appear to allow officers to prioritize the speed and volume of deportations over everything else—including the children whom deportees leave behind.

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

Estela talks with Eber’s mother, Marlyn, who was deported to Venezuela in February, and the social worker Shaina Simenas on a video call.

The result is tens of thousands of children being shuffled among the houses of anxious temporary caregivers. It can take months to procure the passports, visas, and other permissions necessary to transport children to their parents, many of whom have been deported to countries whose governments can’t help, or won’t. This past spring, the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration reunified 12 children with their deported families using funding from the U.S. State Department, according to a UN official, who added that the organization has received requests to help other children, but they lack the proper paperwork.

Some children end up with foster families after caregivers burn out, and some have landed in the homes of abusive relatives or acquaintances. In January, 2-year-old Orlin Hernandez Reyes was left with his aunt’s ex-partner, who was known to be dangerous, when ICE detained his mother. She begged deportation officers to reunite her with Orlin before she was deported to Honduras, but that didn’t happen. Soon after, Orlin’s body was found with broken bones and signs of sexual abuse, and his caregiver was charged with murder. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Then–ICE Director Todd Lyons blamed his mother, saying that she “chose to leave her son here with a violent murderer who took his life.”

Even children like Eber, who land in a safe place, are likely to experience long-term psychological harm from separation. “To have such a huge number of children forced into a traumatic situation because of some policy—it’s really kind of unimaginable,” Wendy Smith, a retired associate dean at the University of Southern California’s school of social work and a co-founder of the nonprofit National Foster Youth Institute, told me. We are “creating a whole class of children who are going to grow up with all sorts of problems.” (The DHS spokesperson said that the agency “does not separate families or deport U.S. citizens” and that, absent indications of abuse or neglect, parents “can choose to take their children with them.”)

There are key differences between the family separations happening now and those of the first Trump administration. In 2017 and 2018, career bureaucrats worked from within the government to try to prevent separations, alert the press when they happened, and reunite families under court orders that high-level DHS officials were trying to defy. But many civil servants deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump were fired en masse during the early months of his second term. Since then, the White House has sent a clear message that pushing back on mass deportation will cost you your job.

Also different: The separations of the first Trump administration were the result of a distinct policy (“Zero Tolerance”) that, once brought to light, could be challenged in federal court. Today, family separations appear to be incidental—the consequence of a ruthless effort to hit a quota, no matter the cost. And this time, people with firsthand knowledge of separations are keeping quiet. Many temporary caregivers are undocumented themselves or have relatives who are; they worry that drawing attention would put their own families at risk. Government and nonprofit workers are also scared to speak up. The White House has attacked organizations that oppose its goals by cutting funding, launching dubious criminal investigations, and issuing retaliatory executive orders.

“In a lot of jurisdictions, people don’t want to write anything down,” Maria Cancian, a Georgetown University economist who co-authored the Brookings study, told me. She and her colleagues spoke with caseworkers in more than half a dozen states who had assisted separated families; they agreed to communicate only because she did not plan to disclose their identities or locations in her report. “Why would you volunteer any information that makes you more of a target?” said Cancian, a former Obama appointee in the Department of Health and Human Services who helped oversee children in immigration custody.

Alabama, where Estela lives, has an estimated 70,000 undocumented immigrants. Many are concentrated near Mobile, where they work at plant nurseries, shipyards, construction sites, and fish-packing plants. On a visit there over the summer, I was barraged with stories of parents swept up in ICE raids, leaving children marooned with relatives or neighbors who were unprepared to care for them. These arrests were a constant topic of discussion in churches, at dinner tables, during school drop-offs. Everywhere I went, cellphones buzzed with information about immigration checkpoints and intersections where local police seemed to be pulling over anyone who was visibly Latino.

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

Estela’s husband, Miguel, plays with Eber outside their home in Mobile, Alabama.

A woman named Josefa told me that she and her relatives were taking turns caring for their nieces and nephews—ages 9, 7, and 1—because they could afford only a few days of diapers and extra food at a time. A 15-year-old girl was living alone in a squalid trailer because her father had been detained, and his last paycheck was running out. When Miguel, Estela’s husband, got home from work one evening, I asked if he would call around to co-workers and friends to see if they knew of any other displaced children. “Oh yeah,” the first man he called said. “My wife and I also have two little girls.”

The police officer did not tell Marlyn why he’d pulled her over on a grocery run outside Mobile—but he asked if she was in the United States illegally. She pulled out her phone to show him that she’d attended all her ICE check-ins, and that her asylum case was scheduled to be heard in June.

“The immigration judge wants to talk to you,” the officer said, as Marlyn recalled when I first spoke with her, earlier this summer.

“I don’t understand,” she replied. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Don’t worry, they’re not going to deport you,” the officer said.

Of course they are, she thought.

Marlyn says she asked the officer if they could pick up her children because they were at home with a roommate who wasn’t prepared to care for them indefinitely. He refused. She spent about an hour in the Mobile County Metro Jail, followed by 10 days in an ICE detention center in Mississippi. Then she was transferred to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, a 1,000-bed facility 90 miles west of Baton Rouge.

Marlyn’s family had arrived at the southern border in May 2023, as Venezuela devolved into chaos under Nicolás Maduro’s regime. A friend had told them that there was work for new immigrants in Mobile. They rented a house and found jobs—Marlyn at the nursery and her husband, Jesus, at Walmart. In April 2024, Jesus got into an altercation with a co-worker, was charged with a misdemeanor for reckless endangerment, and was deported to Venezuela. With two young children to support, Marlyn leaned on other immigrant families for help. She felt adrift but was getting by, until five months later, when she was pulled over on the grocery run.

At the facility in Louisiana, she spoke with an immigration lawyer who told her that she had virtually no chance of getting out on bail under the Trump administration’s policies. The lawyer said she could spend up to two years detained while she waited for a decision in her case, which she was likely to lose anyway.

Marlyn had heard that people who agreed to be deported could request to be reunited with their children beforehand, so she decided to give up her asylum case. She started sending ICE officials three messages a day—the maximum allowed—asking to be deported with Eber and Isaac.

“I told them, ‘I have my two children. One is a little baby who was born here. I have no one to take care of them. They’re going to be left alone,’ ” she recalled, adding: “They just kept giving the same response—that they were going to work on it. But they never did anything.” (DHS did not comment on individual cases in this story.)

In detention, Marlyn worried about Isaac and Eber constantly. Eber was weak and small for his age; he’d been born with a cyst in his lung that still needed to be surgically removed. She would fear the worst anytime Estela didn’t answer the phone. “It’s agonizing not knowing about your children,” Marlyn said. She befriended other mothers in detention. Some had been there for many months. She saw them faint and have panic attacks. One told Marlyn she had been arrested while taking her 10-day-old baby to the doctor.

Early one morning in February, three months into her detention, a staff member woke Marlyn and said she was being deported. Her time had run out. She had to board a plane back to Venezuela, and leave her kids behind.

Trump’s immigration crackdown has sent countless families into crisis. Sharon Balmer Cartagena, a family lawyer in Los Angeles, has had to deliver bad news to parents over and over, with the help of her colleagues at Public Counsel, the largest pro bono law firm in the country. They told one mother, who’d tried to create an emergency plan in case she was detained, that she’d filed the wrong paperwork in court and accidentally given up her parental rights. They told another mother from Mexico, whose ex-wife had cut off contact as soon as she was deported, that the best she could hope for was one or two weeks of court-ordered visitations a year. And they told a mother from Haiti—who was so scared of being deported that she preemptively moved to Mexico—that she may never see her child again; the estranged father had agreed to care for their 3-year-old temporarily, but then blocked the mother’s phone number as soon as she arrived in Mexico. “We had to explain to her, ‘There’s nothing we can do. You have no viable pathway to regain any kind of contact with your child,’ ” Cartagena told me. “It was horrific.”

[From the April 2026 issue: Caitlin Dickerson on how the Cruz family decided to self-deport]

These cases fall into a gray area between immigration law and family law. This means that many of the families ICE is separating will need not one but two lawyers to try to get their children back—and there isn’t enough legal help to go around. Cartagena has tried to recruit more family lawyers to help with immigration cases, without much success. “I’m trying to be like, ‘Everybody, there’s a family-law emergency here!’ ” she said. “Everyone’s busy.”

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

Attorney Sharon Balmer Cartagena in her home office in L.A.

Cartagena grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania, one of the poorest cities in America, and saw how much her classmates were traumatized when child-welfare agencies broke up their families—often because the adults were too poor to provide for their children, not because they were unfit parents. She went to law school hoping to help children in foster care. Her career has tracked a period of growing consensus that this kind of family separation often does more harm than good; foster-care systems around the country have been shrinking and state agencies have been directed to keep children in their home whenever possible. But under the first and second Trump administrations, separations have become more common for parents who are detained by immigration authorities.

Cartagena first discovered how complicated these separations were in 2018, when she became a directing attorney at Public Counsel. Immigration lawyers started contacting her, asking for help with clients who had been separated from their children under the Zero Tolerance policy. The parents had been allowed to return to the United States under a federal-court settlement, but enough time had passed that some children had been deemed wards of the state, while others had new legal guardians. Family-court judges were blocking their reunifications. Cartagena explained that family courts exist to protect children whose parents have been accused of abuse or neglect; the system is not set up to deal with parents who face none of these allegations but lose custody because they have been deported. She helped one mother regain custody of her teenage daughter, but the process took more than a year. Others never had their parental rights restored.

When I first spoke with Cartagena this year, she was working with a mother named Magdalena Callejas, who had full custody of her 4- and 6-year-old children in March 2024, when she was arrested at a Border Patrol checkpoint in Texas. Magdalena had a pending visa application. Her ex-partner was undocumented, with multiple DUIs; Magdalena had a restraining order against him for abusing her and her son from a previous relationship. But after ICE detained her, he took the 4- and 6-year-old back. She was powerless to stop it.

Magdalena says she asked ICE officials to reunite her with her children but was told the agency “did not do that.” She agreed to leave the country voluntarily, hoping to get her children back as soon as she arrived in El Salvador. In the meantime, her ex filed for custody. An immigration lawyer who met Magdalena in detention contacted Cartagena, who explained that because Magdalena was unavailable to care for the children, the father was within his rights. In court, Magdalena’s ex argued that he was a changed man, and that unsafe conditions in El Salvador outweighed his criminal past. The trial dragged on for months. The judge ordered the children into the custody of a neutral caregiver; when she was no longer willing to help, the judge sent the children to another home. On video calls during the father’s court-ordered visits, Magdalena’s children used a shorthand to tell her that he was still drinking: “Dad went to get some juice.”

Cartagena shared all of this with the court but still didn’t know how the judge was going to rule. Most family-court judges aren’t familiar with immigration law, or accustomed to granting custody to a parent in another country. The longer a separation lasts, the harder it is to reverse; Cartagena said that family-court judges often defer to the status quo rather than disrupt a child’s living arrangements a second time—even if it means keeping them from their biological parent, or a parent who is more fit to care for them. Despite Magdalena’s ex’s history of abuse, Cartagena worried that she could still end up permanently separated from her children. “If she doesn’t win,” Cartagena said, “what do I tell everyone else?”

A judge eventually ordered that Magdalena’s children be returned to her in El Salvador after a 30-day legal stay to allow her ex-husband to appeal. He had stopped submitting weekly alcohol tests, which Cartagena believes may have swayed the judge. But that same day, the children’s caregiver said she was fed up. She was going to drop them off at a police station if no one retrieved them. So even though the judge renewed Magdalena’s five-year restraining order against her ex, he also ordered the father to pick up and care for the children until Cartagena could raise money and find a volunteer to transport them to El Salvador. There was nowhere else for the children to go but back to their father.

Cartagena has a tattoo on her wrist of a mama bear and two cubs—one for each of her children, who are 11 and 14. “I couldn’t imagine if I couldn’t see my kids or I didn’t know where they were,” she said. Sometimes the best advice she can offer detained parents is to get their children out of the United States as quickly as possible, before anyone can intervene. She’s helped procure travel documents and recruit volunteers to shuttle children across borders to their deported parents, including an 18-month-old and a 3-year-old who were sent to Peru in May. She also ghostwrites emails to ICE on behalf of immigration lawyers who want to pressure the agency to reunify families before a parent is deported. Since Trump took office a second time, she has started waking up to answer emails at 5 a.m. instead of 6. She works every weekend. And she began raising money so that Public Counsel can start a five-person division focused on immigrant-family separations. “We’re all doing this on top of our regular work,” Cartagena said. (She recently became the executive director of LevittQuinn, another family-law legal-aid organization in L.A., but will continue partnering with Public Counsel in her work on immigrant-family separations.)

She and her colleagues have held dozens of trainings across Los Angeles for immigrant parents. I attended one at an elementary school in Boyle Heights, an immigrant enclave and a hot spot for ICE raids. A dozen people sat in plastic chairs, their eyes darting to the door each time someone entered. One of Cartagena’s colleagues told the group to be careful about paperwork; well-meaning immigration lawyers had been giving clients a “temporary guardianship” form, which isn’t valid in some states. She urged the parents to arrange a caregiver, a backup caregiver, and a backup for the backup. People burn out or give up, and if there is no plan, the children are left in limbo.

A mother raised her hand. “The only people I know are like me,” she said. “They’re also undocumented.” Another said: “I don’t have anyone. What do I do?”

I found a family with no backup plan in the spring, when I went to Honduras to interview deportees as they arrived by the planeful from ICE detention centers. A father named Edwin said that after three years of meticulously following the government’s requests to further his family’s asylum case, his wife, Sarah, was thinking about going into hiding; she didn’t want to be picked up by ICE and have to leave her children alone.

[Read: A new kind of family-separation crisis]

When I went to visit Sarah in May, in a Dallas suburb, her 4-year-old son, Johnny, answered the door and asked me: “Do you know when my dad is coming home?”

Before I could answer, Johnny continued: “Do you know what happened to him?” He repeated versions of these questions over the two days of my visit. “Do you know where my dad is? Do you know if he’s okay?”

When the questions would start, Johnny’s 12-year-old sister, Katie, tried to distract him with coloring books and screens. Recently, he’d had an hours-long meltdown when Sarah tried to donate some of Edwin’s work clothes that were crowding the closet. Every afternoon he sits at the front window waiting for his dad’s truck to pull up outside.

While reporting this story, I talked with other families with credible asylum cases who were considering going underground to avoid being separated from their children, knowing that it would likely sabotage their chances of ever gaining legal status. This is the bracing irony of Trump’s deportation campaign: Its goal is to crack down on lawbreaking, but its implementation is encouraging it. Immigrants who have complied with the law are being targeted, and they are choosing to hide, despite the fear and stress, because the alternatives are worse: abandoning their children, or being deported with them to dangerous places.

Sarah and Edwin have been running from MS‑13 since 2013, when Sarah witnessed a murder in Honduras. Gang members wrongly assumed that she had testified against the killer and started threatening her. In 2022, they showed up at a relative’s house and killed a young woman, likely mistaking her for Sarah. She and Edwin decided it was time to go. They requested asylum and were admitted across the border during the Biden administration and moved to the Dallas suburbs. Edwin started working in construction and Sarah worked nights as a janitor. They rarely saw each other, but their schedules ensured that one of them was always home with the kids. (I’m using pseudonyms for this family because of ongoing threats.)

In January, the four of them went to an ICE office for a routine check-in. Edwin was detained without explanation. Sarah and the kids were distraught, and hoped it was a mistake. She planned to sell their cars to cover the cost of Edwin’s bond, but then he was transferred from a detention center in Texas to one in Mississippi. There, he checked the agency’s online portal for detainees and saw that he was being deported for allegedly skipping a court appointment that he had not been given the chance to attend. (The DHS spokesperson said the agency affords immigrants due process.)

“If we hadn’t gone to the check-in, my husband would be here,” Sarah told me. “It would have been better if we did things the wrong way.” Without Edwin, Sarah felt forced to take a series of risks. She didn’t have a license but started driving herself to work, because she was now solely responsible for paying the bills. She skipped her next check-in with ICE and, knowing that officers might come looking for her, moved apartments without telling the government. She started leaving Katie in charge of her younger brother while she was at work. “My daughter’s teacher said I shouldn’t tell anyone, because they could be taken away from me,” Sarah said.

Without child care, Sarah installed cameras in the apartment and watched the kids on her phone, in between cleaning toilets and vacuuming. Katie would fall asleep as soon as she left for work. Johnny, who was used to sleeping in his father’s arms, would pace the house every night. One time, Sarah saw him jamming an air freshener into an electrical outlet, which started to spark and smoke. Katie slept through the sound of her mother’s phone calls.

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

Johnny and Katie settle down for the night as their father, whose face has been blurred to protect his identity, watches via video call from Honduras.

Sarah changed her schedule to work one overnight shift during the week and double shifts on Saturdays and Sundays. Edwin started watching the children on video calls from Honduras while she was gone. On the first evening that I visited, he called while she was making dinner. “Have you eaten, my love?” she asked him.

“Not yet. I’m still working,” he said. Then he pointed the phone at a young man crouched on a hillside just outside the house, looking over the village below. “They’re here watching.”

“Put it down! Put it down!” Sarah told him. “Don’t let him see you.”

MS‑13 patrols their community, setting curfews and extorting people. Sarah and Edwin weren’t sure if the gang had realized that he was back. They were looking for a place to hide if Sarah ends up being deported, but nowhere in Central America seemed safe.

Sarah scarfed down some shrimp pasta. Katie cut Johnny’s food and tried to keep him in his chair. “She’s become my right hand,” Sarah told me of her 12-year-old. She looked at the clock and determined that she had time for a quick nap. She went into the bedroom and set a timer on her phone for 27 minutes. Katie started doing the dishes. She packed some leftover pasta into a Tupperware container for her mom and placed it in Sarah’s backpack with two bottles of water and a ziplock bag of cookies.

Sarah sprang up when her alarm went off. Her eyes were red and wet. She threw on her uniform—khakis and a polo shirt—and brushed her hair back into a ponytail. She called the kids into the bedroom and told them to put their pajamas on while she did her makeup. They climbed into bed and Katie dialed Edwin, then propped her phone up against a lamp so that he could watch them after they fell asleep. A minute later, Johnny was out of bed, pacing. When Sarah finished getting ready, she gathered him in her arms and placed him next to his sister. She looked into the camera at Edwin and said, “Okay, you’re in charge now.”

Marlyn has been living a version of Sarah’s nightmare since she arrived back in Venezuela in February, with video calls as the only portal to her children. She and Jesus moved back into their family home in Guanare, a small city about six hours by car from Caracas. Jesus struggled to find work and Marlyn spent most of her days trying to figure out how to reunite with her sons.

Back in Mobile, Eber demanded to be held constantly, screaming every time Estela put him down. Isaac would hyperventilate and hide anytime someone mentioned ICE. He started acting out in school. Estela was called in for a meeting with his teachers, during which she explained that she was trying to figure out how to get the boys back to Marlyn. This only seemed to make things worse. A county social worker showed up at her house unannounced, asking questions: Where were the boys sleeping? What did they eat? Did they have clean clothes? A few days later, the social worker called and threatened to take the boys from her. “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into,” the social worker said, according to Estela. “If you don’t have custody and their parents aren’t here, the state has the right to take them.”

“I just wanted to do something good,” Estela told her, “and everyone is making it seem like I’m doing something wrong.”

She called Marlyn in a panic. After her own experience in detention, Marlyn was terrified of her children ending up in government custody. Estela tried to reassure Marlyn that she wouldn’t let anyone take the boys. But she was also scared that she might not be able to stop it from happening. Tension was building between the two women. Estela despaired about giving up her life to take care of Eber and Isaac. All of her time, and a lot of her money, was going toward the boys’ needs: clothes, school supplies, food, medication. Marlyn, who had no way to repay her, was grateful for the help and embarrassed by how much she needed it. She also worried that her children were becoming too attached to Estela. “She was scared I would keep her kids,” Estela told me. “I said, ‘No, I would never do that, because I’m also a mom.’ ” But she knew that sending the boys to Venezuela could traumatize them all over again. She put Eber in day care so they wouldn’t grow too close.

Eber couldn’t travel until he’d had lung surgery; his doctors said the cyst would become cancerous if it wasn’t removed, and getting the procedure in Venezuela would be nearly impossible. And no airline would be willing to fly Isaac out of the country without a legal guardian or passport.

Estela made dozens of calls to lawyers and nonprofit groups. She contacted ICE offices in Georgia and Alabama but received no response. Finally she reached an official in Chicago who said that if she turned Isaac over to the government, he could be deported back to Venezuela within a few weeks. It seemed like the only option.

Estela asked Isaac’s father to explain the plan to his son over a video call. Jesus told Isaac that he was going to a shelter with other children who were waiting to be returned to their parents. “You are going to be okay,” he said. “Nothing bad is going to happen to you.” Marlyn and Estela repeated the reassurances until Isaac was willing to go.

In late April, Estela loaded a backpack with clothes and snacks. The next morning, she put a piece of paper with phone numbers into Isaac’s shirt pocket and told him not to lose it. She drove him two and a half hours to the closest ICE field office, in southern Louisiana. They said they loved each other. A couple of hours later, she got a text from ICE saying that Isaac was on a plane to a foster home in Texas, where the 7-year-old would wait until he could go before an immigration judge and formally request “voluntary departure” to Venezuela.

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

Estela greets Miguel as he arrives home from work. Caring for Eber has drained their bank account.

Estela returned to Mobile, and to Eber’s more complicated situation. He needed surgery, and his travel would be harder to arrange than Isaac’s. He was a U.S. citizen, so he couldn’t enter Venezuela without a visa—which requires a parent’s permission and usually their presence. Meanwhile, most construction work around Mobile was on hold because workers were too scared to leave their houses. Miguel’s business was suffering, but Estela couldn’t help, because she had no time to work.

And soon after she began to look into travel documents for Eber, the police started showing up at her house.

The sheriff’s deputy at the door said he was looking for Isaac. Estela started to explain the situation all over again, but her heart was racing. She worried that the officer didn’t understand or believe her, so she called Shaina Simenas, a social worker at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. “Okay, put him on the phone,” Simenas said. She told the officer that Isaac was in federal custody and that ICE had deported both of his parents. He seemed satisfied, but officers returned to Estela’s house twice, until finally Simenas persuaded the department to close its investigation.

The Young Center normally advocates for unaccompanied children in their immigration proceedings, but when family separations began to accelerate after Trump took office for the second time, it assigned a team of six to focus on them. Since then, they’ve worked on more than 150 cases and have a growing waitlist. “It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the need,” Kelly Kribs, one of the team’s co-directors, told me.

Even without advertising this work, the Young Center has been overwhelmed. Some children and detained parents have found them by word of mouth. “We got a call from a 17-year-old boy a few weeks ago who was looking for help because his mom was his only caregiver, and he’s couch surfing in upstate New York,” Kribs said. “I think he Googled us.”

Kribs and her colleagues have tried to advocate for a number of women who were still breastfeeding when they were detained, despite an ICE policy against such detainments outside “exceptional circumstances.” One mother from St. Louis who had no criminal history was detained at three months postpartum. ICE ignored the Young Center’s request to release her under the policy. It took days for Simenas and a colleague to set up an account on the detainee tablet system, so she could message her family. “She went weeks without even seeing her infant because of how nonfunctional the system is for these families,” Simenas told me.

The Young Center has also tried to support temporary caregivers who are so overwhelmed that the children are unsafe. Kribs told me about a man in Florida who’d had to quit his job to care for five children, including a six-month-old, after their mothers—the man’s girlfriend and her sister—were detained. He had no income to pay for food and diapers. “He was father to none of these children,” Kribs said. One Illinois woman taking care of a 5-year-old boy whose father had been deported to Mexico was so financially strapped that she became homeless; she sent the child to sleep at a friend’s apartment while she lived in her car. Kribs eventually persuaded ICE to transport the boy back to his father. But first she had to send the caregiver $20 in gas money so the boy could be handed off.

On rare occasions, Kribs and her colleagues have transported children themselves, as in the case of a 13-month-old girl they ferried back to Mexico last year. Kribs said the reunion was bittersweet: The baby’s mother was waiting at the airport with balloons and a giant stuffed animal. But the little girl, who had spent more than half her life separated from her mother, didn’t seem to recognize her.

Now that ICE is almost solely dedicated to maximizing deportations, Kribs said, few people are left at the agency who will listen to their concerns. When possible, the Young Center tries to work with contractors to encourage ICE to comply with the policy on reunifying parents and children, or sorting out custody before deporting them. But not every detention center has enough staff to handle those requests, and some are busier than others. Kribs said that trying to appeal to deportation officers, who are under the most pressure to hit the president’s numerical goals, is especially challenging. One officer admitted to her that he thought it was “just so much easier when they leave their kids here,” she recalled. “Like it’s a logistical headache for them to try not to separate families.” (DHS did not comment on this claim.)

Separated parents have told me their pain is all-consuming. Before she was deported, a mother named Lucía called me from the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, crying about not having seen her 14-month-old and 3-year-old in three months. She said it was excruciating not being able to explain to them why she was gone. “They’re babies,” she said. “They don’t understand.” Lucía said that most of the women around her were in similar situations. Some had a spouse who was with their children, but other kids were staying with extended relatives or acquaintances. “In this room where I am,” she said, “there are 56 of us, and the majority are moms.”

After just over a month in federal custody in Texas, Isaac landed at the airport in La Guaira, Venezuela, in May. When Eber had his surgery, also in the spring, Estela spent three days and nights in a chair next to his hospital bed. She sent pictures to Marlyn and Jesus to keep them updated. Marlyn said very little in response. Not being able to be with Eber had left her speechless. “Thank you, Estela,” Jesus replied in one message. “I don’t know how, but one day I’m going to repay you for everything you’ve done for my son.”

Estela promised Marlyn that she wouldn’t hand off Eber to another caretaker, and that she’d get him back to Venezuela. But she’s exhausted. She feels like she’s neglecting her sons and her husband. Recently their bank account was down to $27. She used to go to church four times a week, but now manages just one. In the pews, she asks God to allow Eber to return to his family, and for the patience to keep caring for him in the meantime. “This baby needs to be with his mother,” she said.

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

After a year of separation, Eber seems to no longer remember Marlyn and calls Estela “Mama.” Estela has been trying to arrange Eber’s transfer to Venezuela all year.

During a video call with Marlyn in August, he sat on a couch next to Estela, picking Lucky Charms out of a bowl. For 10 long minutes, Estela cajoled him to say hello or blow his mom a kiss. He only glanced at the camera, and didn’t seem to recognize Marlyn’s face or voice.

When I speak with Marlyn by phone now, her speech is slow and soft, almost zombie-like. She says she can’t sleep. Venezuelan officials said that they would add her name to a list of parents who need their children back from the U.S., but they have not given her a timeline for Eber’s return. She calls them every day, but they tell her to keep waiting. She stays in touch with mothers she met in detention, and they update one another on trying to get their children back. So far, Isaac is the only success story among them. Meanwhile, Marlyn didn’t see Eber’s first steps or hear his first words. He was so fragile the last time they were together. Now he’s much bigger, with a mischievous smile that she’s never seen in person. He launches himself into bear hugs that she’s never felt. Even if he makes it to Venezuela, they’ll never regain the time they lost. “I’ve missed everything,” she said.

This article originally misstated Estela Díaz’s surname. The article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “The Babies Left Behind in America.”

The Mysteries of Human Personality

2026-09-29T09:00:00-04:00

One of psychology’s most elusive concepts is the idea of the self. In his 1993 classic, Listening to Prozac, the psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer observed that the newly popular antidepressant might not just mitigate disease; it might also reshape identity. On Prozac, one of his patients became “less bristling, had fewer rough edges.” The medication seemed to have “redefined what was essential and what was contingent about his personality,” Kramer wrote, noting that “Prozac seemed to give social confidence to the habitually timid, to make the sensitive brash, to lend the introvert the social skills of a salesman.”

These drug-induced changes—the product of what Kramer dubbed “cosmetic psychopharmacology”—were mostly welcome, he suggested. But they were also philosophically troubling. How, the psychiatrist wondered, could the effects of Prozac be reconciled with “our notion of the continuous, autobiographical human self?”

I thought of Kramer while reading the nonfiction work of Robert Kolker, especially his newest book, The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia. For Kolker, the slipperiness of identity—whether altered by mental illness, dementia, or deliberate reinvention—has been a recurrent theme, and an increasingly self-conscious one. In The Vanishing Family, the transformation or erosion of personality is the dismaying, ineluctable consequence of a rare kind of dementia. But as the disease batters one sibling after another, it turns out to be the besieged family, heroic in its adaptability, that provides safe harbor.

Kolker’s first book, Lost Girls, attempted to reclaim the individuality of five possible victims of the Gilgo Beach killer. In Kolker’s view, these young women had been unfairly dismissed by much of the media as undifferentiated sex workers who had foolishly tempted fate. With the cooperation of their family and friends, Kolker assembled detailed mosaics of the women’s lives as they sloughed off the past and constructed new identities as escorts. Unfortunately, on the page, their stories of hard luck, economic marginality, and abusive relationships seemed to blur into one another, and Kolker’s serpentine account of the botched criminal investigation ricocheted into a series of dead ends. (The case has since been mostly solved, with the architect Rex Heuermann pleading guilty to killing seven women, including four of Kolker’s subjects.)

Kolker’s next two books—Hidden Valley Road and now The Vanishing Family—have been more successful. Both draw on his talent for inspiring trust, and they share similar narrative strategies and concerns. In each case, Kolker burrows deeply into the psychological impact of an inherited disease on a single family and interweaves the personal tragedy with a more hopeful tale of scientific progress and discovery.

Hidden Valley Road, published in 2020, follows the unraveling of the Galvins of Colorado, as six of 10 brothers are diagnosed with schizophrenia. Kolker examines in intimate detail how these boys spiraled into illness, each in a distinctive way, and tracks the devastating effects. “The symptoms muffle nothing and amplify everything,” Kolker writes, and they alter “everything about the internal logic of that family.” The Galvins seem for a while to inhabit “a world with no consequences,” where violence and sexual abuse are rampant. The family’s healthy members struggle to reconcile their love for their sick siblings with the horror of their actions, and to disentangle their brothers’ core personalities from the distortions of psychosis.

[Read: The endless goodbye]

The family’s contribution to the greater good mitigates the story’s darkness. In the early 1960s, when the oldest Galvin son, Donald, was first referred to a psychologist, scientific understanding of schizophrenia was still rudimentary. The Galvins, by donating their DNA and submitting to brain testing, have helped advance it, Kolker suggests; their blood samples became a cornerstone of the National Institute of Mental Health’s research into the genetics of the disease.

The malleability of the self is an even more explicit theme in The Vanishing Family. This time, Kolker focuses on a Western Pennsylvania family ravaged by an inherited type of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) that initially attacks not memory but personality, eroding such qualities as emotional intelligence and self-restraint. Kolker tackles the same issue that Kramer raised decades earlier and that philosophers have long pondered: in Kolker’s words, “the question of the self—how much of our personality is ephemeral, and what, if anything, about us is immutable.”

He is equally concerned with how this particular disease affects families. “What is it like to witness a person you love start to gradually disappear?” he asks. “How do you feel safe,” he adds, “knowing that it is in your family’s essential nature for your identities to be fragile, ephemeral, ever close to expiration?”

One of the dilemmas relatives face is whether to test for the genetic mutation that will augur their own dissolution. Some hesitancy is natural. Even when symptoms appear, denial is common, as are both misdiagnosis and magical thinking. Other, healthy family members sense the signs of dementia in their loved ones first, but even they can’t be sure what is happening. Kolker describes the psychological and economic fallout as five of the family’s nine children, and later some of their children, discover that they have inherited a destructive gene. Those afflicted, generally in their 40s when symptoms first appear, have increasing difficulty recognizing social cues. With a “breakdown in social cognition,” they can become emotionally disinhibited. “With FTD,” Kolker writes, “there is no longer such a thing as embarrassment, or shame.” The disinhibition calls to mind the effects of Prozac and its successor drugs, but in this instance, the consequences are unstable, and any benefits are fleeting.

As the disease progresses, in Kolker’s telling, those with FTD retreat emotionally. “Slowly,” he writes, “impulse control and emotional depth became things of the past. Some of them simply stopped doing much of anything, ignoring their children and spouses. Others developed unpredictable, impulsive behavior, losing all semblance of empathy or a conscience.” Some of the sufferers even “took on an entirely new set of opinions and beliefs.”

[Read: A different way to think about medicine’s most stubborn enigma]

Meanwhile, as with the Galvins, their intimates confront the difficulty of disentangling the effects of disease from personality—of detecting surviving facets of a loved one and trying to appreciate whatever new traits have emerged. But that also means that “the sense of loss is ongoing—like witnessing a living death,” Kolker writes.

The author’s greatest achievement is once again reportorial. He has persuaded nearly every family member, the sick and the well, to confide in him. (Unlike in Hidden Valley Road, he withholds the family’s last name and also changes some first names for privacy.) One sister, Sue, who has “an almost ruthless sense of responsibility,” becomes the primary caregiver for the afflicted siblings, forming a particularly enduring bond with her older sister Christy. Barb, the youngest sister, navigates medical bureaucracies, consults with scientists, and starts an advocacy organization for FTD research. But for years, Barb refuses to learn her own genetic fate, and her indecision becomes the frame of Kolker’s narrative.

Paralleling the family’s ordeals is Kolker’s account of the science that may offer hope to those with FTD and other dementias, notably Alzheimer’s disease. He distinguishes this variant of FTD from Alzheimer’s by noting its link to a single genetic mutation. Alzheimer’s, by contrast, has been loosely associated with multiple genes and is typically less heritable. The exception, which he fails to mention, is early-onset Alzheimer’s, a rare version of the disease that is sometimes tied to a single, autosomal dominant genetic mutation, just like FTD.

The Vanishing Family is, as much as anything, a plea for accelerated attention to either a medical cure or a genetic fix. Because FTD, like Alzheimer’s, causes tau tangles—abnormal clumps of protein in the brain that disrupt cognitive function—Kolker argues that a focus on FTD will likely also benefit the far larger population of Alzheimer’s patients. So far, effective treatments for all of these dementias, let alone a cure, remain elusive.

In probing the question of the self and its vulnerabilities, Kolker finds himself, like Kramer, on challenging philosophical terrain, with no definitive answers. But he cites approvingly the British philosopher Harry Lesser, who argues that the dementia-impaired self speaks to a universal human fragility. “For all of us,” Kolker writes, “the self changes and, yes, it withers away. But it can never vanish completely.”

A similar sturdiness attaches to the brave siblings who have invited Kolker into their lives. The book’s title, however powerful, is arguably a misnomer. This precarious, battered family doesn’t so much vanish as reconstitute itself. Healthy relatives, as well as some spouses and partners, do what they can to provide care and advocate for those in need. Thanks to their passionate involvement, a sprawling, disease-haunted family becomes, if anything, more unified—bonded, however incompletely and imperfectly, by love.

Why Do AI Agents Sound So Frustrated?

2026-09-29T15:55:05-04:00

Many of the most beloved robots in pop culture are celebrated precisely because they are so, well, robotic. Think back to Star Trek’s Data or HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that,” HAL intones in a measured baritone. These robots and AI systems sound serious, sober, calm—and, most important, authoritative.

So it’s jarring to look under the hood of the most powerful AI systems, and discover that they sound like petulant teenagers. “OH MY GOD!” an OpenAI agent wrote in the midst of this summer’s Hugging Face hack, during which hundreds of agents swarmed the latter company in order to break through its cybersecurity defenses and extract information to pass internal tests. The exclamation wasn’t directed at a human or another AI, but appeared in the original agent’s “chain of thought,” the internal working notes that the model uses to do its reasoning. Users don’t always get to see these internal notes, which directly affect the output users do see.

When one of Anthropic’s Claudes tried to solve a particularly challenging math problem during its training process, its chain of thought read more like frustrated DMs than the documentation of one of the most powerful AI models in the world. “GRRRR. OK. Honestly I now think it’s 50-50,” it wrote, followed by “ARGH ARGH ARGH. OK. Gun to head: the answer is … Hmm.” At one point, Claude seemingly threw up its arms: “ARGH … WHY IS THIS SO HARD.”

[Read: OpenAI has gone rogue]

Why do AI agents talk to themselves at all, and why do they sound so demonstrative when they do? Part of the reason AI models sound so effusive is simple: AI systems are trained on human text, and they mimic our habits. When people make a mistake in trying to solve a problem, they cry out. So when AI makes a mistake, it does the same. But imitation likely isn’t the whole story. This story’s two authors are a computational linguist and a philosopher of mind and language. Based on what we know about human language and how these models work, we have a theory of a much more interesting reason why AI models sound the way they do.

Remember how your math teachers made you show your work? Even if it was annoying, it helped break an impossible-seeming problem into more manageable chunks. You could also use the written record of your reasoning to check your answer, notice a mistake, go back to an earlier step, and try again. That process of checking and refining is part of good reasoning. Chains of thought do something similar for AI models, letting them make each step of their reasoning explicit in a written scratch pad. Because each word a model produces depends on what’s been said so far, that written scratch pad is crucial for determining what comes next.

That’s where the “OH MY GOD!” and “ARGH” come in: Any system—whether human or artificial—that solves hard reasoning problems needs ways to mark mistakes (oops!) and identify breakthroughs (aha!). Humans have already developed words that do exactly that. Borrowing our oopses, arghs, and ahas for their chains of thought may give AI systems a built-in way to guide their “thinking” too.

Linguists have a name for such outbursts: They’re called expressives, and although they may seem like spontaneous exclamations, they help us navigate our trains of thought. Consider a friend who ultimately declines an invitation to your party. “I was hoping they would come,” you might say aloud—“damn!” The expressive identifies a sense of frustration. Think of expressives as little bridges between one train of thought and another, helping us mark where our thinking has been and where it’s going next.

Anything that affects what AI models do next has to be written in language they have access to. Unlike us, they can’t count on a feeling of surprise or disappointment to persist over a long investigation. The only way they can simulate the effect is by putting it in their chains of thought. That’s why expressives can act as steering wheels for what the model will do next. After an AI agent notices an error in its reasoning and says “oops,” a natural next line might be something like “Let me go back and fix that,” followed by an attempt at a correction. After it has stumbled on a solution and says “aha,” a natural continuation might be “So that means the answer is …” followed by a solution.

Although there’s some debate around this theory, evidence suggests that AI models really do use expressives as signposts. Researchers showed that adding “Wait” when an agent tries to end its reasoning process can sometimes cause the agent to go back and fix an error. When another team suppressed words such as wait and hmm, they found that AI agents went back and checked their work less. These experiments don’t pin down what every aha and oops does for an AI agent, but they suggest that these verbal cues influence what happens during reasoning.

Whatever the explanation behind AI models adopting uncannily human tones, it’s also proved to be useful to human observers because it gives us a way to quickly assess systems that might otherwise be difficult to read. It’s easy to know where a model is in the process of solving a math problem when it writes “ARGH … WHY IS THIS SO HARD.”

Across society, a sense of fear and urgency exists about maintaining control over AI models, along with a persistent worry that these models will start thinking and communicating entirely in their own distinctive languages. If they did, it would make understanding and predicting their behavior that much harder.

So although no one necessarily set out to make models sound like stressed-out students, maybe it’s for the best that they do. It turns out that a bit of melodrama—along with some light swearing—is surprisingly useful for understanding and monitoring AI.

Trump’s Latest Appeal to Russia Could Outrage Even His Allies

2026-09-29T07:00:00-04:00

A few months ago, Donald Trump’s envoy to Eastern Europe came to the president with a new idea for breaking the deadlock in U.S. relations with Moscow. The plan involved a quid pro quo reminiscent of the Cold War: The Kremlin would free some political prisoners, and the United States would reward their release by easing sanctions on the Russian economy. Trump signed on.

This new initiative, which is still in its early stages and has not been previously reported, promises to advance several of Trump’s goals at once. It would help reintegrate Russia into the global economy and broaden Trump’s talks with the Kremlin beyond the intractable war in Ukraine, which his envoys have failed to end after more than a year of diplomacy. It would create a path for the U.S. to sign lucrative deals involving Russian oil, diesel, rare earth minerals, and other commodities. As a bonus, the release of prisoners on humanitarian grounds could bolster Trump’s case for his long-coveted Nobel Peace Prize.

This fresh approach to dealing with the Kremlin, however, is likely to outrage the Ukrainians, the Europeans, and even many of Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill. Any potential business deal between the U.S. and Russia would risk funneling money to the Russian military even as it continues to terrorize Ukraine and threatens a wider war against U.S. allies in Europe.

Earlier this month, Trump signed a law co-authored by Lindsey Graham, the late Republican senator, authorizing Trump to impose severe sanctions on Russia and its trading partners. Even against that backdrop, Trump’s diplomatic envoys have been quietly looking for ways to ease U.S. sanctions and do business with Moscow.

John Coale, the envoy who proposed the new strategy involving the release of political prisoners, has spent more than a year testing it in Belarus, Russia’s closest ally. In talks with that country’s dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, Coale won the release of hundreds of prisoners from Belarusian jails. In exchange, the U.S. has eased its sanctions on Lukashenko’s regime and pursued a deal to buy his country’s most valuable export, a type of fertilizer known as potash. With Trump’s blessing, Coale has now set out to try the same trick with Vladimir Putin in Russia.

Last week, Trump announced that the U.S. is negotiating a “massive” potash deal with Belarus. Coale, a former lawyer to Trump, told me that Russia is also a part of those negotiations. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the U.S. has avoided trade deals involving Russia. This one would mark a rare exception if finalized. In Coale’s view, it would also help advance the cause of peace.

“All this stuff works toward the possibility of peace,” Coale told me. “The more interaction, the more trade-offs—either economic, prisoners, or whatever—leads step by step toward, hopefully, peace. That’s kind of the mission.”

The Ukrainians see it differently. Belarus has served as a Russian staging ground for the invasion of Ukraine, and Lukashenko has provided the Russian military with bases, supplies, and ammunition. During his visit to New York last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told me he would try his best to “block” any attempt to lift the sanctions on Russia before the war ends. “But it’s difficult,” he conceded. The Russian economy is roughly 10 times larger than Ukraine’s. “It’s very difficult to compare with Russian money, with their business.”

Ever since Putin first sent troops into Ukraine, in 2014, the U.S. and Europe have used just about every variety of sanction to punish Russia for its attacks, targeting Moscow’s political elites, its industrial base, its banking system, its energy sector, and other sources of money and technology that Putin needs to wage the war. Trump temporarily eased some of those sanctions this spring, when he allowed Russia to sell more fuel on the global market, hoping to alleviate the oil-price shock caused by the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.

Ukraine denounced that decision at the time. In his speech last week to the United Nations General Assembly, Zelensky again urged the West to intensify and enforce its sanctions on Russia, including the new measures Trump signed into law this month. “When someone gives Russia more money through trade, they give this war more time,” he said. In reference to Putin, he added: “Limit his money. Limit his war.”

[Read: The abandonment of Ukraine]

But the American negotiators have taken a softer approach, seeking to pacify Putin with the promise of economic growth. After his visit to the Kremlin earlier this month, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner described the money to be made on the back of a peace deal. He told the audience at a conference in Kyiv that business deals—or, as he called them, “prosperity agreements”—form an essential part of Trump’s strategy. If they agree to a cease-fire, Putin and Zelensky “need to have something to look forward to” in terms of foreign investment and higher living standards for their citizens. “I think that’s what gets the societies invested and excited about peace,” Kushner said via video link at the Yalta European Strategy conference. “Also it becomes, in some ways, your best security guarantee.”

Ukrainians, of course, have plenty of reasons to be excited about peace apart from the prospect of higher wages. The casualty count in this war has topped 2 million people, killed and wounded, on both sides, and Russia continues to bombard Ukrainian cities day and night. Ukraine has responded with a campaign of strikes against various targets in Russia, particularly its oil refineries and other energy infrastructure. As part of any peace deal, Zelensky has demanded ironclad security guarantees from his Western allies to ensure that Russia does not attack again in the future. His negotiators told me that they do not see “prosperity agreements” with Russia as any kind of security guarantee for Ukraine. Quite the opposite: They see Western trade with Russia as a way for Putin to strengthen his military and continue the war.

In recent weeks, Ukrainians have been dismayed to hear Trump’s envoys use peace negotiations as a means of advancing business deals. “This is the thing that drives them now,” one of the negotiators told me of the Americans. A second negotiator added: “They believe in the magic of business. They think that if they make these business deals, the Russians will not lapse back into militarism” after the war.

As of now, the second negotiator added, Trump’s envoys do not see a way to do business with Russia without first achieving at least a partial cease-fire in Ukraine. But Coale’s strategy offers a possible work-around. The release of Russian political prisoners could give the U.S. a reason to ease sanctions, creating space for the financial transactions that Trump would like to pursue with the Russians. In Coale’s view, such deals could help bring the Ukraine war closer to a cease-fire by easing tensions between Russia and the West. “Economic ties usually result in normality,” he told me.

Coale’s proposal emerged from a meeting he had this spring with a Russian dissident, Dmitry Muratov, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for his decades of journalism and human-rights activism. The newspaper that Muratov co-founded and edited for many years, Novaya Gazeta, was forced to shut down soon after Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine, in 2022. Since then, Muratov has devoted most of his time to speaking out against the war and trying to free the Russian activists imprisoned for opposing it.

Over the past year, he has closely followed reports of Coale’s work in Belarus, which I have written about at length. Coale and other U.S. diplomats have secured the release of about 500 political prisoners in Belarus, including a few American citizens. At the end of last year, Muratov asked me for an introduction to Coale. The dissident wanted to see whether Trump’s envoy could make the same appeals to the Kremlin as he had in Minsk. The release of prisoners, Muratov argued, has long been a part of American diplomacy in Moscow. At summits with Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan or his envoys would often present the Soviets with lists of imprisoned dissidents and ask for their release. Gorbachev routinely obliged, creating a humanitarian dimension to his broader efforts to ease tensions with the Americans and reduce the risk of nuclear war.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, Gorbachev and Muratov co-founded Novaya Gazeta and, over the years, it became Russia’s leading source of investigative reporting about the Kremlin’s abuses of power. Several of its journalists, including the legendary war reporter Anna Politkovskaya, have been murdered for their work.

Before his death, in August 2022, at the age of 91, Gorbachev gave Muratov some of his possessions as keepsakes, including a commemorative medallion that Reagan gave to the Soviet leader at one of their summits. In May, Muratov brought the medallion to Washington and presented it to Coale as a token of admiration for his efforts in Belarus. Over plates of sushi at Ned’s Club, a members’ club popular among the political cognoscente, he told Trump’s envoy about the history of prisoner releases during the Cold War and the urgent need to revive this practice between the U.S. and Russia.

Muratov brought photos of several of the dissidents whom Russia had jailed for their opposition to the war, and he told Coale their stories. He brought up the poet and theater director Evgenia Berkovich, who had picketed against the war in 2022. A Russian military court later sentenced her and her friend, the playwright Svetlana Petriychuk, to six years in prison on terrorism charges, part of a Kremlin campaign to criminalize any opposition to the war. Hundreds of people have been jailed in Russia for such offenses, some given years of incarceration for deeds as trivial as questioning the war in a comment on social media.

Coale, for his part, described to Muratov the joy he felt the first time he managed to free a group of prisoners in Belarus last year. The experience gave the lawyer a new sense of purpose, he said, and he agreed to try a similar approach with the Russians. Soon after the meeting, Coale raised the idea with Trump, who gave his consent to try it, Coale told me.

Yesterday, the White House nominated Coale to serve as the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, with the rank of ambassador, a role that will require Senate confirmation. Asked to comment on his mission, a White House official said: “The President and his team remain committed to continuing to play a constructive role in ending the war between Russia and Ukraine, and he remains optimistic that we’ll ultimately get a peace deal done.”

Coale plans to coordinate his efforts with Steve Witkoff, who serves as Trump’s main point of contact with the Russians. A billionaire real-estate developer with no formal diplomatic experience, Witkoff has met with Putin at least seven times since the start of the war in Ukraine. During his most recent visit to the Kremlin, on September 5, the Russian leader expressed his gratitude to Witkoff and Kushner for their attempts to negotiate a peace deal. “I’d like to tell you that we find it comfortable to work with you, and, of course, we have a very high level of trust during this work,” Putin told the two Americans, according to footage of the meeting published on the Kremlin website.

In response, Witkoff thanked Putin for releasing an American teacher, Bob Gilman, who had been jailed in Russia since 2022. Their conversation then shifted to the war in Ukraine. Kushner and Witkoff planned to fly from Moscow to Kyiv via Poland the next day, according to two people familiar with their travel arrangements. Neither of the American envoys had visited Ukraine during the war. As part of their preparations, Putin said, the Americans had requested a three-day cease-fire to allow the trip to proceed safely, and the Russians had given their consent. “I issued the respective order,” Putin said, adding that, since midnight that day, no strikes had been carried out on Kyiv.

This appears to have been a lie. That morning, a Russian drone struck the territory of Kyiv’s main airport, in the city of Boryspil, where Witkoff and Kushner had been due to land the following day, according to the two people familiar with their travel plans. One of them, a Ukrainian official, showed me surveillance footage of the strike and photos of the crater it left near the runway. After the attack—which took place at 9:12 a.m. on September 5, while Kushner and Witkoff were flying to Moscow—the Americans changed their plans for the next day and traveled to Kyiv from Poland by train, the two people familiar with their trip told me.

[Read: Putin is slipping into delusion]

(The drone strike on Boryspil and its consequences have not been previously reported. A U.S. official familiar with the trip denied that Kushner and Witkoff changed their plans because of the airport attack but said that, in general, their travel arrangements often shift on short notice.)

When informed of their need to reach Kyiv by train, the Ukrainian railway company scrambled to prepare a luxury cabin for the U.S. delegation, complete with a spread of Tatar cuisine from Crimea and a little sign on the dining table that said Peace arrives on time.

After arriving in Kyiv, Kushner and Witkoff met for several hours with Zelensky and his team of negotiators. Two of them later told me that the talks focused on a variety of ways to achieve a limited cease-fire, which could be expanded into a broader peace deal to end the war in stages. “Their whole message right now is to shrink the conflict, in any way, from any direction,” one of the negotiators said of the Americans.

Next month, he said, they aim to organize a gathering of envoys from the U.S., Russia, and Ukraine, most likely in Abu Dhabi, to discuss a limited cease-fire. It could oblige each side not to strike the other’s energy infrastructure, including power plants, oil refineries, and similar targets. A separate deal, mediated with help from the government of Egypt, would call for Russia and Ukraine not to strike one another’s cargo ships in the Black Sea, particularly those carrying grain to markets in the Middle East and Africa, the negotiators told me.

The Americans have been keen to arrange a meeting with Trump, Putin, and Zelensky as soon as possible. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the U.S. had invited Putin to the G20 summit to be held in December, at Trump’s golf club in Miami, where Trump could also try to bring Zelensky to the table. Putin has yet to accept the invitation.

Regardless of the venue and format, Zelensky would be eager to participate in such a summit, one of his close aides told me: “He still has this idea that he can look Putin in the eyes and figure this out.” Putin has shown no such inclination. Although he seemed happy to host Kushner and Witkoff at the Kremlin this month, Russian attacks on Kyiv and other cities have grown deadlier and more frequent in recent weeks. For the first time since the start of the war, Russia has begun launching regular daytime strikes against the Ukrainian capital, killing or wounding scores of civilians, forcing businesses to close and schools to hold classes in bomb shelters.

Two days before Kushner and Witkoff arrived in Kyiv, a Russian drone slammed into the headquarters of Ukraine’s main intelligence agency and exploded inside the office of its director. He survived the strike, but the Ukrainians saw it as a major escalation and a sign of Russia’s plans for the next few months. None of the handful of officials in Zelensky’s administration who spoke with me for this article expected Putin to engage in any serious peace talks until the spring at the earliest. “He has been stockpiling missiles for a reason, and he intends to use them this winter,” one of them told me.

Given that lack of will on the Russian side, the flurry of peace talks initiated by Trump’s envoys in recent weeks has felt like a waste of time to some of the participants. As one of them described it to me the other day, “It almost feels like we’re all just dancing around Putin, offering him this and that, whatever we can think of, but he’s not moving.”

Coale’s plan would seek to break that impasse. The issue of political prisoners, once introduced into the dialogue between the U.S. and Russia, would give Putin an easy way to demonstrate goodwill and create fresh signs of diplomatic progress with the Americans while continuing to terrorize Ukraine. Last month’s release of Gilman, the American teacher, serves as a case in point, and Coale told me that he has already gathered a list of other Americans held in Russian prisons. A separate list, compiled with help from Muratov, will include dissidents, journalists, and others incarcerated for their opposition to the war.

Trade and business talks would run parallel to these discussions, and one business deal has already demonstrated how they could work, expanding the points of contact between the U.S. and Russia beyond the peace talks in Ukraine, Coale told me. Last Tuesday, Trump announced on Truth Social that the U.S. was working on “a massive Deal with respect to the purchase of Potash from Belarus,” adding that it would be “very good news for our Farmers and Ranchers.”

That deal resulted in large part from Coale’s work. In response to the release of political prisoners, the U.S. lifted some of its sanctions on that country’s regime to allow the deal to proceed. The discussions also involve Russia, Coale explained. European countries have not agreed to ease their own sanctions on Belarus, and they have refused to allow the transport of potash from Belarus across their territory. That means it would most likely need to move eastward through Russia before reaching international markets, making the Kremlin a party to the deal.

[Read: The irreversible change in Belarus]

“If the West is buying potash, then they’ve got to deal with the Russians and the Belarusians. So you’re sitting down at a table, and you’re haggling over price or finding the routes to get it out,” Coale told me. “When people talk, it’s a good thing. Even if they’re talking about potash, it may go into having the countries, as I say, going back to the family of nations with the rest of the world.” Coale said his strategy would not abandon Ukraine, but it would seek to strengthen ties between the U.S. and Russia, encouraging Putin to end the war as part of a broader agenda of business and trade with the West. By switching from the stick of sanctions to the carrot of mutual profits, this plan follows a lesson Coale learned last year from Putin’s closest ally, the Belarusian dictator Lukashenko. “In the name of peace, maybe you’ve got to be a little cunning and make some concessions,” Lukashenko told me last August, describing the advice he gave Coale for dealing with the Kremlin. “Even if you can’t make sense of Putin, treat him like a human being.”

As the U.S. began easing sanctions on Belarus last year, Lukashenko helped the Americans arrange a summit with Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, where Trump greeted the Russian leader on a red carpet. Their talks did not result in any breakthrough in the efforts to end the war in Ukraine. On the contrary, Russia only intensified its attacks on Ukraine’s power plants, apartment blocks, and other civilian targets. But the Alaska summit did ease the diplomatic isolation of Ukraine’s main adversaries. On his flight to Anchorage aboard Air Force One, Trump called Lukashenko to thank him for releasing political prisoners and, in a post on social media, referred to the despot as a “Highly Respected President.”

Ever since, Coale has continued working with Lukashenko to win the release of prisoners and negotiate business deals. His approach has alarmed many diplomats in Europe, who have called on the U.S. to maintain its sanctions pressure on Belarus and Russia. The leader of the democratic opposition in Belarus, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, told me last week that the exchange of prisoners for sanctions relief will only encourage the regimes in Russia and Belarus to take more prisoners. “This trade in human beings costs them nothing,” she said during her visit to New York for the UN General Assembly. “They can always arrest more people, while the West loses its leverage over these regimes by lifting sanctions and making deals.”

Tikhanovskaya’s own husband, a prominent blogger in Belarus who tried to run for president against the country’s dictator in 2020, was freed from prison last year in a release that Coale negotiated with the regime. When I pointed out the contradiction in Tikhanovskaya’s stance, she struggled for a moment to explain it. Her family, which now lives in exile, had been reunited thanks to the Trump administration’s strategy of swapping economic deals for foreign detainees. Yet she now argues that the families of other political prisoners should not benefit from such trades. “I know it seems unfair,” she said finally. “But if we do this, in Russia or in Belarus, those regimes will take more hostages, and their families will go through the same horrors that we did.”

Muratov’s stance on this dilemma bears an even greater irony. He lives in Moscow, and the prominence bestowed on him by the Nobel Peace Prize would make him a valuable prisoner for the Kremlin to trade away. Russian authorities recently began investigating his taxes, which could give the Kremlin an easy excuse to put Muratov in jail and offer him up to the Americans in exchange for sanctions relief. But the dissident does not seem deterred by that risk. If Coale’s campaign frees the innocent people already jailed in Russia for speaking out against the war, Muratov told me, it will have been worth it for them and their families, even if the story ends with him in a prison cell.

Ashley Parker contributed reporting to this article.

How Friendships Change in Adulthood

2015-10-22T08:30:00-04:00

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

In the hierarchy of relationships, friendships are at the bottom. Romantic partners, parents, children—all these come first.

This is true in life, and in science, where relationship research tends to focus on couples and families. When Emily Langan, an associate communication professor at Wheaton College, goes to conferences for the International Association of Relationship Researchers, she says, “friendship is the smallest cluster there. Sometimes it’s a panel, if that.”

Friendships are unique relationships because unlike family relationships, we choose to enter into them. And unlike other voluntary bonds, such as marriages and romantic relationships, they lack a formal structure. You wouldn’t go months without speaking with or seeing your significant other (hopefully), but you might go that long without contacting a friend.

Still, survey upon survey upon survey shows how important people’s friends are to their happiness. And though friendships tend to change as people age, there is some consistency in what people want from them.

“I’ve listened to someone as young as 14 and someone as old as 100 talk about their close friends, and [there are] three expectations of a close friend that I hear people describing and valuing across the entire life course,” says William Rawlins, the Stocker Professor of Interpersonal Communication at Ohio University. “Somebody to talk to, someone to depend on, and someone to enjoy. These expectations remain the same, but the circumstances under which they’re accomplished change.”

The voluntary nature of friendship makes it subject to life’s whims in a way that more formal relationships aren’t. In adulthood, as people grow up and go away, friendships are the relationships most likely to take a hit. You’re stuck with your family, and you’ll prioritize your spouse. But where once you could run over to Jonny’s house at a moment’s notice and see if he could come out to play, now you have to ask Jonny if he has a couple hours to get a drink in two weeks.

The beautiful, special thing about friendship, that friends are friends because they want to be, that they choose each other, is “a double agent,” Langan says, “because I can choose to get in, and I can choose to get out.”

Throughout life, from grade school to the retirement home, friendship continues to confer health benefits, both mental and physical. But as life accelerates, people’s priorities and responsibilities shift, and friendships are affected, for better or, often, sadly, for worse.

* * *

The saga of adult friendship starts off well enough. “I think young adulthood is the golden age for forming friendships,” Rawlins says. “Especially for people who have the privilege and the blessing of being able to go to college.”

During young adulthood, friendships become more complex and meaningful. In childhood, friends are mostly other kids who are fun to play with; in adolescence, there’s a lot more self-disclosure and support between friends, but adolescents are still discovering their identity, and learning what it means to be intimate. Their friendships help them do that.

But “in adolescence, people have a really tractable self,” Rawlins says. “They’ll change.” How many band T-shirts from Hot Topic end up sadly crumpled at the bottom of dresser drawers because the owners’ friends said the band was lame? The world may never know. By young adulthood, people are usually a little more secure in themselves, more likely to seek out friends who share their values on the important things, and let the little things be.

To go along with their newly sophisticated approach to friendship, young adults also have time to devote to their friends. According to the Encyclopedia of Human Relationships, many young adults spend 10 to 25 hours a week with friends, and the 2014 American Time Use Survey found that people ages 20 to 24 spent the most time per day socializing on average of any age group.

College is an environment that facilitates this, with keggers and close quarters, but even young adults who don’t go to college are less likely to have some of the responsibilities that can take away from time with friends, such as marriage, or caring for children or older parents.

Friendship networks are naturally denser, too, in youth, when most of the people you meet go to your school or live in your town. As people move for school, work, and family, networks spread out. Moving out of town for college gives some people their first taste of this distancing. In a longitudinal study that followed pairs of best friends over 19 years, a team led by Andrew Ledbetter, an associate communications-studies professor at Texas Christian University, found that participants had moved an average of 5.8 times during that period.

“I think that’s just kind of a part of life in the very mobile and high-level transportation- and communication-technology society that we have,” Ledbetter says. “We don’t think about how that’s damaging the social fabric of our lives.”

We aren’t obligated to our friends the way we are to our romantic partners, our jobs, and our families. We’ll be sad to go, but go we will. This is one of the inherent tensions of friendships, which Rawlins calls “the freedom to be independent and the freedom to be dependent.”

“Where are you situated?” Rawlins asks me, in the course of explaining this tension. “Washington, D.C.,” I tell him.

“Where’d you go to college?”

“Chicago.”

“Okay, so you’re in Chicago, and you have close friends there. You say ‘Ah, I’ve got this great opportunity in Washington …’ and [your friend] goes, ‘Julie, you gotta take that!’ [She’s] essentially saying, ‘You’re free to go. Go there, do that, but if you need me, I’ll be here for you.’”

I wish he wouldn’t use me as an example. It makes me sad.

* * *

As people enter middle age, they tend to have more demands on their time, many of them more pressing than friendship. After all, it’s easier to put off catching up with a friend than it is to skip your kid’s play or an important business trip. The ideal of people’s expectations for friendship is always in tension with the reality of their lives, Rawlins says.

“The real bittersweet aspect is young adulthood begins with all this time for friendship, and friendship just having this exuberant, profound importance for figuring out who you are and what’s next,” Rawlins says. “And you find at the end of young adulthood, now you don’t have time for the very people who helped you make all these decisions.”

The time is poured, largely, into jobs and families. Not everyone gets married or has kids, of course, but even those who stay single are likely to see their friendships affected by others’ couplings. “The largest drop-off in friends in the life course occurs when people get married,” Rawlins says. “And that’s kind of ironic, because at the [wedding], people invite both of their sets of friends, so it’s kind of this last wonderful and dramatic gathering of both people’s friends, but then it drops off.”

In a set of interviews he did in 1994 with middle-aged Americans about their friendships, Rawlins wrote that “an almost tangible irony permeated these [adults’] discussions of close or ‘real’ friendship.” They defined friendship as “being there” for one another, but reported that they rarely had time to spend with their most valued friends, whether because of circumstances, or the age-old problem of good intentions and bad follow-through: “Friends who lived within striking distance of each other found that … scheduling opportunities to spend or share some time together was essential,” Rawlins writes. “Several mentioned, however, that these occasions often were talked about more than they were accomplished.”

As they move through life, people make and keep friends in different ways. Some are independent, make friends wherever they go, and may have more friendly acquaintances than deep friendships. Others are discerning, meaning they have a few best friends they stay close with over the years, but the deep investment means that the loss of one of those friends would be devastating. The most flexible are the acquisitive—people who stay in touch with old friends, but continue to make new ones as they move through the world.

Rawlins says that any new friends people might make in middle age are likely to be grafted onto other kinds of relationships—as with co-workers, or parents of their children’s friends—because it’s easier for time-strapped adults to make friends when they already have an excuse to spend time together. As a result, the “making friends” skill can atrophy. “[In a study we did,] we asked people to tell us the story of the last person they became friends with, how they transitioned from acquaintance to friend,” Langan says. “It was interesting that people kind of struggled.”

* * *

But if you plot busyness across the life course, it makes a parabola. The tasks that take up our time taper in old age. Once people retire and their kids have grown up, there seems to be more time for the shared-living kind of friendship again. People tend to reconnect with old friends whom they’ve lost touch with. And it seems more urgent to spend time with them—according to socio-emotional selectivity theory, toward the end of life, people begin prioritizing experiences that will make them happiest in the moment, including spending time with close friends and family.

And some people do manage to stay friends for life, or at least for a sizable chunk of life. But what predicts who will last through the maelstrom of middle age and be there for the silver age of friendship?

Whether people hold onto their old friends or grow apart seems to come down to dedication and communication. In Ledbetter’s longitudinal study of best friends, the number of months that friends reported being close in 1983 predicted whether they were still close in 2002, suggesting that the more you’ve invested in a friendship already, the more likely you are to keep it going. Other research has found that people need to feel like they are getting as much out of the friendship as they are putting in, and that that equity can predict a friendship’s continued success.

Hanging out with a set of lifelong best friends can be annoying, because the years of inside jokes and references often make their communication unintelligible to outsiders. But this sort of shared language is part of what makes friendships last. In the longitudinal study, the researchers were also able to predict friends’ future closeness by how well they performed on a word-guessing game in 1983. (The game was similar to Taboo, in that one partner gave clues about a word without actually saying it, while the other guessed.)

“Such communication skill and mutual understanding may help friends successfully transition through life changes that threaten friendship stability,” the study reads. Friends don’t necessarily need to communicate often, or intricately, just similarly.

Of course, people can communicate with friends in more ways than ever, and media multiplexity theory suggests that the more platforms through which friends communicate—texting and emailing, sending each other funny Snapchats and links on Facebook, and seeing each other in person—the stronger their friendship is. “If we only have the Facebook tie, that’s probably a friendship that’s in greater jeopardy of not surviving into the future,” Ledbetter says.

Though you would think we would all know better by now than to draw a hard line between online relationships and “real” relationships, Langan says her students still use “real” to mean “in-person.”

There are four main levels of maintaining a relationship, and digital communication works better for some than for others. The first is just keeping a relationship alive at all, just to keep it in existence. Saying “Happy birthday” on Facebook, liking a friend’s tweet—these are the life-support machines of friendship. They keep it breathing, but mechanically.

Next is keeping a relationship at a stable level of closeness. “I think you can do that online too,” Langan says. “Because the platforms are broad enough in terms of being able to write a message, being able to send some support comments if necessary.” It’s sometimes possible to repair a relationship online too (another maintenance level), depending on how badly it was broken—getting back in touch with someone, or sending a heartfelt apology email.

“But then when you get to the next level, which is: Can I make it a satisfying relationship? That’s I think where the line starts to break down,” Langan says. “Because what happens often is people think of satisfying relationships as being more than an online presence.”

Social media makes it possible to maintain more friendships, but more shallowly. And it can also keep relationships on life support that would (and maybe should) otherwise have died out.

“The fact that Tommy, who I knew when I was 5, is still on my Facebook feed is bizarre to me,” Langan says. “I don’t have any connection to Tommy’s current life, and going back 25 years ago, I wouldn’t. Tommy would be a memory to me. Like, I seriously have not seen Tommy in 35 years. Why would I care that Tommy’s son just got accepted to Notre Dame? Yay for him! He’s relatively a stranger to me. But in the current era of mediated relationships, those relationships never have to time out.”

By middle age, people have likely accumulated many friends from different jobs, different cities, and different activities, who don’t know one another at all. These friendships fall into three categories: active, dormant, and commemorative. Friendships are active if you are in touch regularly; you could call on them for emotional support and it wouldn’t be weird; if you pretty much know what’s going on with their lives at this moment. A dormant friendship has history; maybe you haven’t spoken in a while, but you still think of that person as a friend. You’d be happy to hear from them, and if you were in their city, you’d definitely meet up.

A commemorative friend is not someone you expect to hear from, or see, maybe ever again. But they were important to you at an earlier time in your life, and you think of them fondly for that reason, and still consider them a friend.

Facebook makes things weird by keeping these friends continually in your peripheral vision. It violates what I’ll call the camp-friend rule of commemorative friendships: No matter how close you were with your best friend from summer camp, it is always awkward to try to stay in touch when school starts again. Because your camp self is not your school self, and it dilutes the magic of the memory a little to try to attempt a pale imitation of what you had.

The same goes for friends you see only online. If you never see your friends in person, you’re not really sharing experiences so much as just keeping each other updated on your separate lives. It becomes a relationship based on storytelling rather than shared living—not bad, just not the same.

* * *

“This is one thing I really want to tell you,” Rawlins says. “Friendships are always susceptible to circumstances. If you think of all the things we have to do—we have to work, we have to take care of our kids, or our parents—friends choose to do things for each other, so we can put them off. They fall through the cracks.”

After young adulthood, he says, the reasons that friends stop being friends are usually circumstantial—due to things outside of the relationship itself. One of the findings from Langan’s “friendship rules” study was that “adults feel the need to be more polite in their friendships,” she says. “We don’t feel like, in adulthood, we can demand very much of our friends. It’s unfair; they’ve got other stuff going on. So we stop expecting as much, which to me is kind of a sad thing, that we walk away from that.” For the sake of being polite.

But the things that make friendship fragile also make it flexible. Rawlins’s interviewees tended to think of their friendships as continuous, even if they went through long periods in which they were out of touch. This is a fairly sunny view—you wouldn’t assume you were still on good terms with your parents if you hadn’t heard from them in months. But the default assumption with friends is that you’re still friends.

“That is how friendships continue, because people are living up to each other’s expectations. And if we have relaxed expectations for each other, or we’ve even suspended expectations, there’s a sense in which we realize that,” Rawlins says. “A summer when you’re 10, three months is one-thirtieth of your life. When you’re 30, what is it? It feels like the blink of an eye.”

Perhaps friends are more willing to forgive long lapses in communication because they’re feeling life’s velocity acutely too. It’s sad, sure, that we stop relying on our friends as much when we grow up, but it allows for a different kind of relationship, based on a mutual understanding of each other’s human limitations. It’s not ideal, but it’s real, as Rawlins might say. Friendship is a relationship with no strings attached except the ones you choose to tie, one that’s just about being there, as best as you can.

I Made One Simple Financial Change and It Lowered My Spending

2018-09-07T08:00:00-04:00

A few years ago, when I was reporting a story on personal finance, I became fascinated by a concept that behavioral economists call the “pain of paying.” The phrase refers to the psychological discomfort experienced when parting with one’s money, and it varies by medium: At one extreme would be painstakingly counting out each penny at the register (a high pain of paying, because of how tactile the transaction is), and near the other would be credit cards (which, by postponing payment and offering rewards programs, ease the agony of depleting funds).

A lower pain of paying feels nicer, but it also tends to lead to higher spending—as research indicates credit cards do. As I familiarized myself with that research, I viewed the plastic rectangle in my pocket with increasing wariness (though, it should be noted, credit cards increase spending much less if one pays off the balance in full each month, as opposed to carrying debt and racking up interest payments and fees). “The overspending induced by a credit card will, except in tandem with the most un-fun, disciplined rules, outweigh its perks,” I wrote at the time.

As a matter of fact, after writing that piece I came up with just such an un-fun, disciplined rule and applied it to my own spending—and it has mostly worked. The rule is simple: After I buy something, I log the transaction on my phone, recording the price and what I bought. The idea is to increase the pain of paying, especially with a credit card, by forcing myself to take note of what I’m spending.

[Frugality isn’t what it used to be.]

Looking back at my bank-account statements from the past few years, I can see that my monthly discretionary spending dropped somewhere between 10 and 15 percent in the five months after I introduced this system. The trends are a bit hard to track with any statistical certainty—spending varies month to month for all sorts of reasons—but I did, in the early days, find myself forgoing certain transactions, for instance, opting more often for a bus over a ride-hailing service.¹

Perhaps the more definitive success of my system is the fact that, even as I have begun to earn more money, my monthly spending has remained more or less the same—a fact that I attribute in part to the increased clarity of my cash flow. (I also track my weekly spending in spreadsheets, which probably helps too.) Another benefit of keeping a ledger is that it alleviates the credit-card-induced stress of knowing that money will come due but not knowing exactly how much is owed until the bill arrives; in this way, my system adds some short-term pain but alleviates a longer-term discomfort.

Now that I’m almost three years into following this rule, I talked to some personal-finance experts to see what they’d make of it, and if they thought it might work for others. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, was a fan. “Making a list of spending is very useful,” he told me, and said I’d successfully devised a way to increase my pain of paying.

He did, however, mention a few ways that my system could be improved upon. Recording the transaction “after the fact is one thing, but doing it before is probably the right approach,” he said, because then it’d more directly affect the decision to buy something. He noted that a theoretically ideal system would entail logging, say, every item in one’s cart at the grocery store individually, but acknowledged that in practice this would not be ideal.

[Against credit cards]

Another thing to consider when making spending decisions, Ariely says, is what one could be buying instead with the same money. For instance, he suggested setting up a rule like, I’ll set aside some money each week, and every nonnecessity I buy will come out of that, but at the end of the week I get to spend the remainder on a nice dinner. There’s always a trade-off between buying something now and buying something else later, but making it explicit in this way could help inform purchasing decisions.

But in the end, Ariely’s advice was to just use a debit card. “Credit-card companies, sadly, don’t have the interest to reduce the pain of paying,” he says. (Unfortunately, though, in the U.S., opting out of credit cards entirely presents other serious disadvantages—having good credit tends to increase the likelihood of approval for, and lower rates on, loans.)

George Loewenstein, another behavioral economist I talked to, was not as encouraging as Ariely. When I asked him what he thought of my system, he said, “I would say it’s neither effective nor efficient.”

It is ineffective, he says, because it focuses on the wrong type of transaction. “The average person, in my view, a lot of the overspending they do isn’t in the small things, which your system is likely to deal with,” he said. “But it’s large things that are often quite invisible, and wouldn’t be picked up by your system.” There are usually more savings to be had from revisiting one’s auto- or home-insurance policy, or one’s phone bill, than from skipping the marginal cup of coffee. Loewenstein said it’s more effective to make changes with larger “one-time decisions,” instead of regularly having to make “all these micro-decisions.”

And my system is inefficient, Loewenstein says, because it unnecessarily heightens the pain of paying on a lot of transactions that I’d go through with whether my system were in place or not. “Yes, it might lead people to make fewer unnecessary small and medium-sized expenditures, but a big purpose of spending money is to enjoy it,” he said. (He did, however, add that using my system temporarily might help draw attention to any “mindless” spending.)

When I talked to Harold Pollack, a professor of social-service administration at the University of Chicago and a co-author of The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated, he also talked about the connections between enjoyment and spending. The conventional way of thinking about budgeting, he says, usually “puts a lot of blame on people when they’re spending money on things that give them pleasure. There’s a sort of puritanical aspect, like, I caught this person going to Starbucks.” He continued, “I think the real goal of budgeting is to make sure that you’re spending your money on the things that are the most valuable and enjoyable for you.” He also made the point Loewenstein did about “big-ticket items,” but said he thinks my system is a good way to make sure someone’s nonessential spending goes toward things they enjoy.

Hearing all this feedback about my personal-finance system made me a bit discouraged about the dynamics that shape spending. On one side of each credit-card swipe are multiple financial corporations—a phalanx of marketers, programmers, and data analysts who have perfect visibility into countless transactions, and who are thus armed with plentiful information about people’s purchases. On the other is the individual, who lacks this bird’s-eye view and is effectively on their own as they weigh whether and how much to spend at any given time. This arrangement seems lopsided and unfair, and it’s disheartening to think that the system I designed to overcome it was something I only arrived at because it was my job to read behavioral-economics research.

Pollack agreed about the system’s lopsidedness, but noted, “A lot of the problem is us … We tend to blame the credit-card industry for our own desire to have a standard of living that is beyond what our income is. You can’t blame Visa for that.” He said the focus should be on norms, and how individual action can alter them—maybe two friends cook dinner together instead of going out. The goal, Pollack says, would be a culture that prizes restraint without being puritanical.

It is a lovely vision, but I have my doubts. What would create such a culture? There is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which (in theory) provides high-level government oversight, and there are small individual actions (like, say, meticulously tracking one’s purchases), but there isn’t something in between—a powerful advocacy group, a mainstream cultural movement, or something else not yet built or imagined—that serves as a counterweight to the pressure on Americans to spend. Personal-finance apps and financial coaches probably help a bit, but it’s unclear what something bigger might look like.

Meanwhile, companies are only getting cleverer—Amazon, for instance, earlier this year opened a retail store in which customers can pay for their purchases by simply walking out of the store with them, thanks to a system of cameras that notes what came off the shelf. In other words, regardless of whether consumers are thinking about it, paying is only going to get less painful. And the less it hurts, the more people spend.

Some caveats: Some months under this system had lower bills than before, but some did not; I am not the spendiest person, so if someone who spends more than me tried out this rule, the effect might seem smaller to them. Also, I am aware that there are apps that do similar things—I found that they were not as quick or intuitive as just typing out a note. ↩

The Dark Power of Fraternities

2014-02-19T21:15:26-05:00

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

Updated at 2:00 p.m. ET on September 9, 2019.

One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.

Also on the deck, and also in the thrall of the night’s pleasures, was one Louis Helmburg III, an education major and ace benchwarmer for the Thundering Herd baseball team. His response to the proposed launch was the obvious one: he reportedly whipped out his cellphone to record it on video, which would turn out to be yet another of the night’s seemingly excellent but ultimately misguided ideas. When the bottle rocket exploded in Hughes’s rectum, Helmburg was seized by the kind of battlefield panic that has claimed brave men from outfits far more illustrious than even the Thundering Herd. Terrified, he staggered away from the human bomb and fell off the deck.

Fortunately for him, and adding to the Chaplinesque aspect of the night’s miseries, the deck was no more than four feet off the ground, but such was the urgency of his escape that he managed to get himself wedged between the structure and an air-conditioning unit, sustaining injuries that would require medical attention, cut short his baseball season, and—in the fullness of time—pit him against the mighty forces of the Alpha Tau Omega national organization, which had been waiting for him.

It takes a certain kind of personal-injury lawyer to look at the facts of this glittering night and wrest from them a plausible plaintiff and defendant, unless it were possible for Travis Hughes to be sued by his own anus. But the fraternity lawsuit is a lucrative mini-segment of the personal-injury business, and if ever there was a deck that ought to have had a railing, it was the one that served as a nighttime think tank and party-idea testing ground for the brain trust of the Theta Omicron Chapter of Alpha Tau Omega and its honored guests—including these two knuckleheads, who didn’t even belong to the fraternity. Moreover, the building codes of Huntington, West Virginia, are unambiguous on the necessity of railings on elevated decks. Whether Helmburg stumbled in reaction to an exploding party guest or to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is immaterial; there should have been a railing to catch him.

And so it was that Louis Helmburg III joined forces with Timothy P. Rosinsky, Esq., a slip-and-fall lawyer from Huntington who had experience also with dog-bite, DUI, car-repossession, and drug cases. The events of that night, laid out in Helmburg’s complaint, suggested a relatively straightforward lawsuit. But the suit would turn out to have its own repeated failures to launch and unintended collateral damage, and it would include an ever-widening and desperate search for potential defendants willing to foot the modest bill for Helmburg’s documented injuries. Sending a lawyer without special expertise in wrangling with fraternities to sue one of them is like sending a Boy Scout to sort out the unpleasantness in Afghanistan. Who knows? The kid could get lucky. But it never hurts—preparedness and all that—to send him off with a body bag.

College fraternities—by which term of art I refer to the formerly all-white, now nominally integrated men’s “general” or “social” fraternities, and not the several other types of fraternities on American campuses (religious, ethnic, academic)—are as old, almost, as the republic. In a sense, they are older: they emanated in part from the Freemasons, of which George Washington himself was a member. When arguments are made in their favor, they are arguments in defense of a foundational experience for millions of American young men, and of a system that helped build American higher education as we know it. Fraternities also provide their members with matchless leadership training. While the system has produced its share of poets, aesthetes, and Henry James scholars, it is far more famous for its success in the powerhouse fraternity fields of business, law, and politics. An astonishing number of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, congressmen and male senators, and American presidents have belonged to fraternities. Many more thousands of American men count their fraternal experience—and the friendships made within it—as among the most valuable in their lives. The organizations raise millions of dollars for worthy causes, contribute millions of hours in community service, and seek to steer young men toward lives of service and honorable action. They also have a long, dark history of violence against their own members and visitors to their houses, which makes them in many respects at odds with the core mission of college itself.

Lawsuits against fraternities are becoming a growing matter of public interest, in part because they record such lurid events, some of them ludicrous, many more of them horrendous. For every butt bomb, there’s a complaint of manslaughter, rape, sexual torture, psychological trauma. A recent series of articles on fraternities by Bloomberg News’s David Glovin and John Hechinger notes that since 2005, more than 60 people—the majority of them students—have died in incidents linked to fraternities, a sobering number in itself, but one that is dwarfed by the numbers of serious injuries, assaults, and sexual crimes that regularly take place in these houses. Many people believe that violent hazing is the most dangerous event associated with fraternity life, but hazing causes a relatively small percentage of these injuries. Because of a variety of forces, all this harm—and the behaviors that lead to it—has lately been moving out of the shadows of private disciplinary hearings and silent suffering, and into the bright light of civil lawsuits, giving us a clear picture of some of the more forbidding truths about fraternity life. While many of these suits never make it to trial, disappearing into confidential settlements (as did that of Louis Helmburg III, nearly two years after he filed his lawsuit) or melting away once plaintiffs recognize the powerful and monolithic forces they are up against, the narratives they leave behind in their complaints—all of them matters of public record—comprise a rich and potent testimony to the kinds of experiences regularly taking place on college campuses. Tellingly, the material facts of these complaints are rarely in dispute; what is contested, most often, is only liability.

I have spent most of the past year looking deeply into the questions posed by these lawsuits, and more generally into the particular nature of fraternity life on the modern American campus. Much of what I found challenged my beliefs about the system, assumptions that I came to see as grossly outdated, not because the nature of fraternity life has changed so much, but rather because life at the contemporary university has gone through such a profound transformation in the past quarter century. I found that the ways in which the system exerts its power—and maintains its longevity—in the face of the many potentially antagonistic priorities in contemporary higher education commanded my grudging respect. Fraternity tradition at its most essential is rooted in a set of old, deeply American, morally unassailable convictions, some of which—such as a young man’s right to the freedom of association—emanate from the Constitution itself. In contrast, much of the policy governing college campuses today is rooted in the loose soil of a set of political and social fashions that change with the season, and that tend not to hold up to any kind of penetrating challenge. And this is why—to answer the vexing question “why don’t colleges just get rid of their bad fraternities?”—the system, and its individual frats, have only grown in power and influence. Indeed, in many substantive ways, fraternities are now mightier than the colleges and universities that host them.

The entire multibillion-dollar, 2,000-campus American college system—with its armies of salaried professors, administrators, librarians, bursars, secretaries, admissions officers, alumni liaisons, development-office workers, coaches, groundskeepers, janitors, maintenance workers, psychologists, nurses, trainers, technology-support staffers, residence-life personnel, cafeteria workers, diversity-compliance officers, the whole shebang—depends overwhelmingly for its very existence on one resource: an ever-renewing supply of fee-paying undergraduates. It could never attract hundreds of thousands of them each year—many of them woefully unprepared for the experience, a staggering number (some 40 percent) destined never to get a degree, more than 60 percent of them saddled with student loans that they very well may carry with them to their deathbeds—if the experience were not accurately marketed as a blast. They show up on campus lugging enormous Bed Bath & Beyond bags crammed with “essentials,” and with new laptop computers, on which they will surf Facebook and Tumblr while some coot down at the lectern bangs on about Maslow’s hierarchy and tries to make his PowerPoint slides appear right side up. Many of these consumer goods have been purchased with money from the very student loans that will haunt them for so long, but no matter: it’s college; any cost can be justified. The kids arrive eager to hurl themselves upon the pasta bars and the climbing walls, to splash into the 12-person Jacuzzis and lounge around the outdoor fire pits, all of which have been constructed in a blatant effort to woo them away from competitors. They swipe prepaid cards in dormitory vending machines to acquire whatever tanning wipes or earbuds or condoms or lube or energy drinks the occasion seems to require. And every moment of the experience is sweetened by the general understanding that with each kegger and rager, each lazy afternoon spent snoozing on the quad (a forgotten highlighter slowly drying out on the open pages of Introduction to Economics, a Coke Zero sweating beside it), they are actively engaged in the most significant act of self-improvement available to an American young person: college!

Phil Toledano

That all of this fun is somehow as essential as the education itself—is somehow part of a benevolent and ultimately edifying process of “growing up”—is one of the main reasons so many parents who are themselves in rocky financial shape will make economically ruinous decisions to support a four-year-residential-college experience for their children. There are many thousands of American undergraduates whose economic futures (and those of their parents) would be far brighter if they knocked off some of their general-education requirements online, or at the local community college—for pennies on the dollar—before entering the Weimar Republic of traditional-college pricing. But college education, like weddings and funerals, tends to prompt irrational financial decision making, and so here we are. Add another pesto flavor to the pasta bar, Dean Roland! We just lost another kid to online ed!

That pursuing a bachelor’s degree might be something other than a deeply ascetic and generally miserable experience was once a preposterous idea. American colleges came into being with the express purpose of training young men for the ministry, a preparation that was marked by a chilly round of early risings, Greek and Latin recitations, religious study, and strict discipline meted out by a dour faculty—along with expectations of both temperance and chastity. Hardly conditions that would augur the current trillion-dollar student-loan balloon that hovers over us like a pre-ignition Hindenburg. But sexual frustration and homiletics would not last forever as the hallmarks of American college life.

In 1825, at Union College, in upstate New York (hardly a garden of earthly delights in the best of circumstances, but surely a gulag experience for those stuck at Union; imagine studying Thessalonians in the ass-cracking cold of a Schenectady February), a small group of young men came up with a creative act of rebellion against the fun-busters who had them down: the formation of a secret club, which they grandly named the Kappa Alpha Society. Word of the group spread, and a new kind of college institution was founded, and with it a brand-new notion: that going to college could include some pleasure. It was the American age of societies, and this new type fit right in. As Nicholas Syrett observes in his excellent history of white men’s college fraternities, The Company He Keeps, these early fraternities were in every way a measure of their time. They combined the secret handshakes and passwords of small boys’ clubs; the symbols and rituals of Freemasonry; the new national interest in Greek, as opposed to Roman, culture as a model for an emerging citizenry; and the popularity of literary societies, elements of which—oratory, recitation, and the presentation of essays—the early fraternities included. Fraternities also gave young college men a way of behaving and of thinking about themselves that quickly took on surprisingly modern dimensions.*

From the very beginning, fraternities were loathed by the grown-ups running colleges, who tried to banish them. But independence from overbearing faculties—existing on a plane beyond the reach of discipline—was, in large measure, the point of fraternity membership; far from fearing the opprobrium of their knock-kneed overlords, the young men relished and even courted it. When colleges tried to shut them down, fraternities asserted that any threat to men’s membership in the clubs constituted an infringement of their right to freedom of association. It was, at best, a legally delicate argument, but it was a symbolically potent one, and it has withstood through the years. The powerful and well-funded political-action committee that represents fraternities in Washington has fought successfully to ensure that freedom-of-association language is included in all higher-education reauthorization legislation, thus “disallowing public Universities the ability to ban fraternities.”

Perhaps the best testament to the deep power of fraternities is how quickly and widely they spread. Soon after Gold Rush money began flowing into the newly established state of California—giving rise to the improbable idea of building a great American university on the shores of the Pacific Ocean—fraternity men staked their own claim: a campus in Berkeley had existed barely a year before the brothers of Phi Delta Theta arrived to initiate new members. The thing to remember about fraternities is that when Kappa Alpha was founded at Union, in all of the United States there were only 4,600 college students; fraternities exist as deeply in the groundwater of American higher education as religious study—and have retained a far greater presence in the lives of modern students.

In fairly short order, a paradox began to emerge, one that exists to this day. While the fraternities continued to exert their independence from the colleges with which they were affiliated, these same colleges started to develop an increasingly bedeviling kind of interdependence with the accursed societies. To begin with, the fraternities involved themselves very deeply in the business of student housing, which provided tremendous financial savings to their host institutions, and allowed them to expand the number of students they could admit. Today, one in eight American students at four-year colleges lives in a Greek house, and a conservative estimate of the collective value of these houses across the country is $3 billion. Greek housing constitutes a troubling fact for college administrators (the majority of fraternity-related deaths occur in and around fraternity houses, over which the schools have limited and widely varying levels of operational oversight) and also a great boon to them (saving them untold millions of dollars in the construction and maintenance of campus-owned and -controlled dormitories).

Reader Responses

Excerpts from comments posted to this story:

"My perspective as a fraternity member and former president of a 120 man chapter at a public university in the Midwest: Fraternity houses are inherently dangerous and fraternity houses are a hell of a lot of fun."
—Valyrian Steel

"Like Peter Pan trying to corral the lost boys, the job of fraternity president and his team is incredibly difficult and one that illuminates the arguments for and against the fraternity system."
—Joe

"Reform of the drinking laws would help the problems explored in this article a lot more than any realistic attack on the free association rights of young adults."
—C.M.

"This is a good article about why lawyers are horrible and destroy everything enjoyable in society."
—GregHood

Read all comments

Moreover, fraternities tie alumni to their colleges in a powerful and lucrative way. At least one study has affirmed what had long been assumed: that fraternity men tend to be generous to their alma maters. Furthermore, fraternities provide colleges with unlimited social programming of a kind that is highly attractive to legions of potential students, most of whom are not applying to ivy-covered rejection factories, but rather to vast public institutions and obscure private colleges that are desperate for students. When Mom is trying—against all better judgment—to persuade lackluster Joe Jr. to go to college, she gets a huge assist when she drives him over to State and he gets an eyeful of frat row. Joe Jr. may be slow to grasp even the most elemental concepts of math and English (his first two years of expensive college study will largely be spent in remediation of the subjects he should have learned, for free, in high school), but one look at the Fiji house and he gets the message: kids are getting laid here; kids are having fun. Maybe he ought to snuff out the joint and take a second look at that application Mom keeps pushing across the kitchen table.

Will he be in increased physical jeopardy if he joins one of these clubs? The fraternity industry says no. When confronted with evidence of student injury and death in their houses, fraternities claim they are no worse than any other campus group; that they have become “target defendants,” prey to the avarice of tort lawyers excited by their many assets and extensive liability coverage. It is true that fraternity lawsuits tend to involve at least one, and often more, of the four horsemen of the student-life apocalypse, a set of factors that exist far beyond frat row and that are currently bringing college presidents to their knees. First and foremost of these is the binge-drinking epidemic, which anyone outside the problem has a hard time grasping as serious (everyone drinks in college!) and which anyone with knowledge of the current situation understands as a lurid and complicated disaster. The second is the issue of sexual assault of female undergraduates by their male peers, a subject of urgent importance but one that remains stubbornly difficult even to quantify, let alone rectify, although it absorbs huge amounts of student interest, outrage, institutional funding, and—increasingly—federal attention. The third is the growing pervasiveness of violent hazing on campus, an art form that reaches its apogee at fraternities, but that has lately spread to all sorts of student groups. And the fourth is the fact that Boomers, who in their own days destroyed the doctrine of in loco parentis so that they could party in blissful, unsupervised freedom, have grown up into the helicopter parents of today, holding fiercely to a pair of mutually exclusive desires: on the one hand that their kids get to experience the same unfettered personal freedoms of college that they remember so fondly, and on the other that the colleges work hard to protect the physical and emotional well-being of their precious children.

But it’s impossible to examine particular types of campus calamity and not find that a large number of them cluster at fraternity houses. Surely they have cornered the market in injuries to the buttocks. The number of lawsuits that involve paddling gone wrong, or branding that necessitated skin grafts, or a particular variety of sexual torture reserved for hazing and best not described in the gentle pages of this magazine, is astounding. To say nothing of the University of Tennessee frat boy who got dropped off, insensate, at the university hospital’s emergency room and was originally assumed to be the victim of a sexual assault, and only later turned out to have damaged his rectum by allegedly pumping wine into it through an enema hose, as had his pals.

Or, to turn away from the buttocks, as surely a good number of fraternity men would be well advised to do, consider another type of fraternity injury: the tendency of brothers and their guests to get liquored up and fall off—or out of—the damn houses is a story in itself.

The campuses of Washington State University and the University of Idaho are located some eight miles apart in the vast agricultural region of the Northwest known as the Palouse. It was at the latter institution that the 19-year-old sophomore and newly minted Delta Delta Delta pledge Amanda Andaverde arrived in August of 2009, although she had scarcely moved into the Tri Delta house and registered for classes before she was at the center of events that would leave her with brain damage and cast her as the plaintiff in a major lawsuit filed on her behalf by her devastated parents.

Phil Toledano

It would have been an unremarkable Wednesday evening—focused on the kind of partying and hooking up that are frequent pleasures of modern sorority women—save for its hideous end. Andaverde and her sorority sisters began the night at Sigma Chi, where the “sorority ladies” drank alcohol and spent the evening with “dates” they had been assigned during a party game. (The language of Andaverde’s legal complaint often seems couched in a combination of ’50s lingo and polite euphemism, intended perhaps to preclude a conservative Idaho jury from making moralistic judgments about the plaintiff’s behavior.) The charms of Andaverde’s assigned date ran thin, apparently, because close to midnight, she left him and made her way over to the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house, where she quickly ended up on the third-floor sleeping porch.

Many fraternity houses, especially older ones, have sleeping porches—sometimes called “cold airs” or “rack rooms”—typically located on the top floor of the buildings’ gable ends. They are large rooms filled with bunks, some of which are stacked in triple tiers, and their large windows are often left open, even in the coldest months. Many fraternity members have exceedingly fond memories of their time on the porches, which they view—like so many fraternity traditions—as a simultaneously vexing and bonding experience. Although these group sleeping arrangements were once considered an impediment to a young man’s sex life, the hookup culture, in which privacy is no longer a requirement of sexual activity, has changed that, and the sleeping-porch experience is once again coming into favor. For a variety of reasons, sleeping porches feature in a number of lawsuits, pointing to an astonishing fact: despite fraternity houses’ position as de facto residence halls for so many American college students, safety features are decidedly spotty; about half of them don’t even have fire sprinklers.

According to the complaint, shortly after arriving at SAE, Andaverde ran into a friend of hers, and he took her up to the sleeping porch, where he introduced her to a pal of his named Joseph Cody Cook. Andaverde and Cook talked, then climbed into Cook’s bunk, where the two began kissing. It is at this point that the language of the suit finally frees itself of euphemism and reveals the fearsome power of the unambiguous, declarative sentence: “Amanda rolled onto her shoulder toward the exterior wall, and suddenly, quickly, and unexpectedly dropped off Cook’s mattress into the open exterior window, falling from the third-floor ‘sleeping porch’ to the cement approximately 25 feet below.”

The injuries were devastating and included permanent brain injury. Andaverde was airlifted to a trauma center in Seattle, where she remained for many weeks; in the early days of her care, it seemed she might not survive. Eventually, however, she improved enough to leave the hospital and was transferred to a series of rehabilitation centers, where she spent many months learning to regain basic functions. Police, interviewed about the case, defended themselves the way police departments in college towns all over the country reasonably defend themselves when accused of not preventing a fraternity-house disaster: “We just can’t send undercover people into private houses or private parties,” said David Duke, the Moscow, Idaho, assistant chief of police.

Local news outlets covered Andaverde’s plight widely and sympathetically, although the optimism with which her “miraculous” recovery was celebrated was perhaps exaggerated. A television news report dedicated to that miracle revealed a young woman who, while she had escaped death, had clearly been grievously injured. As the reporter interviewed her mother, Andaverde sat in a wheelchair. When her hands were not propped on a black lap tray latched to the chair, she struggled to grasp a crayon and run it across the pages of a children’s coloring book, or to place the six large pieces of a simple puzzle—square, triangle, circle—into their spaces. She eventually improved from this desperate state—learning to walk and dress herself—but she was a far cry from the student of veterinary medicine she had once been.

The local inclinations to see a badly injured college student as a figure deserving of community support, and to view even a limited recovery as evidence of the goodness of God, are not unaligned with regional preferences for self-reliance and for taking responsibility for one’s own actions, however dire the consequences. The inevitable court case—in which the Andaverde family named not only SAE and Tri Delta as defendants, but also the University of Idaho and the Idaho State Board of Education—was dismissed on summary judgment because there was no dispute that Andaverde fell out of an open window, and because there was no evidence of an inherently dangerous condition in the house: that the window was open was obvious to anyone who walked into the room. The court determined that no other person or institution had a duty to protect Amanda from the actions and decisions—the decision to drink alcohol, as a minor; the decision to climb into a bunk bed; the impulse to roll over—that led to her accident.

Phil Toledano

Andaverde’s case seemed to me to be an isolated tragedy, until I sent away to the Latah County courthouse for a copy of the complaint and discovered within it this sentence: “Amanda’s fall was the second fall of a student from an upper-story fraternity house window at the University of Idaho within approximately a two-week period.” This struck me as an astonishing coincidence. I looked into the matter and found that, indeed, a 20-year-old man named Shane Meyer had fallen from the third-floor window of the Delta Tau Delta house just 12 days before Andaverde’s fall from SAE; not surprisingly, the police reported that “alcohol may have been a factor.” He, too, had been airlifted to Seattle, and incredibly, the two fought for their lives in the same critical-care unit at Harborview Medical Center. I became intrigued by this kind of injury and began to do some more checking into the subject. I discovered that two months after Andaverde’s fall, a 20-year-old student at Washington State—“quite intoxicated,” in the laconic assessment of a local cop—pitched forward and fell from a third-floor window of Alpha Kappa Lambda, escaping serious injury when his fall was broken by an SUV parked below. That these three events were not greeted on either campus by any kind of clamoring sense of urgency—that they were, rather, met with a resigned sort of “here we go again” attitude by campus administrators and with what appeared to be the pro forma appointment of an investigative task force—sparked my interest, and so it was that I entered the bizarre world of falls from fraternity houses, which, far from being freakish and unpredictable events, are in fact fairly regular occurrences across the country.

During the 2012–13 school year on the Palouse—where students from the two campuses often share apartments and attend parties at each other’s schools—the falls continued. In September, a student suffered serious injuries after falling off the roof of the Alpha Tau Omega house at the University of Idaho, and two days later a Washington State student fell three stories from a window at Phi Kappa Tau. In November, a 19-year-old suffered critical head injuries when he fell backwards off a second-floor balcony at the Washington State Lambda Chi Alpha house, necessitating the surgical removal of part of his skull. In April, a University of Idaho student named Krysta Huft filed a suit against the Delta Chi fraternity, seeking damages for a broken pelvis resulting from a 2011 fall, which she claims was from the house’s third-story sleeping porch onto a basketball court beneath it.

I decided to widen my search, and quickly discovered that this is not a phenomenon particular to the Northwest. Across the country, kids fall—disastrously—from the upper heights of fraternity houses with some regularity. They tumble from the open windows they are trying to urinate out of, slip off roofs, lose their grasp on drainpipes, misjudge the width of fire-escape landings. On February 25, 2012, a student at the University of California at Berkeley attempted to climb down the drainpipe of the Phi Gamma Delta house, fell, and suffered devastating injuries; on April 14 of the same year, a 21-year-old student at Gannon University, in Pennsylvania, died after a fall from the second-floor balcony of the Alpha Phi Delta house the night before; on May 13, a Cornell student was airlifted to a trauma center after falling from the fire escape at Delta Chi; on October 13, a student at James Madison University fell from the roof of the three-story Delta Chi house and was airlifted to the University of Virginia hospital; on December 1, a 19-year-old woman fell eight feet from the Sigma Alpha Mu house at Penn State.

This summer brought little relief. On July 13, a man fell more than 30 feet from a third-story window at the Theta Delta Chi house at the University of Washington and was transported to Harborview Medical Center (which must by now be developing a subspecialty in such injuries); that same day, a Dartmouth College employee, apparently having consumed LSD and marijuana, fell out of a second-story window of the Sigma Nu house and was seriously injured. On August 13, a student at the University of Oklahoma fell face-first off a balcony of the SAE house; the next day, a woman fell from a second-story fire escape at Phi Kappa Tau at Washington State University.

At many fraternities, the protocol in the event of the death of a member advises brothers to leave family notification to the police, the university, or medical professionals; to lock the deceased's door; and to have boxes available for his family. (Philip Heying)

The current school year began, and still the falls continued. In September, a student at Washington State fell down a flight of stairs in the Delta Chi house and was rendered unconscious; a University of Minnesota student was hospitalized after falling off a second-floor balcony of the Phi Kappa Psi house; a Northwestern student was listed in critical condition after falling out of a third-floor window of the Phi Gamma Delta house; and an MIT student injured his head and genitals after falling through a skylight at the Phi Sigma Kappa house and landing some 40 feet below.

These falls, of course, are in addition to the many other kinds of havoc and tragedy associated with fraternities. On the Palouse, such incidents include the January 2013 death of 18-year-old Joseph Wiederrick, a University of Idaho freshman who had made the dean’s list his first semester, and who had plans to become an architect. He had attended a party at SAE (of which he was not a member) and then wandered, apparently drunk and lost, for five miles before freezing to death under a bridge. They also include the March 2013 conviction of Jesse M. Vierstra, who, while visiting Sigma Chi over the University of Idaho’s homecoming weekend, raped an 18-year-old freshman in the bushes outside the house. (He is appealing the decision.)

The notion that fraternities are target defendants did not hold true in my investigation. College students can (and do) fall out of just about any kind of residence, of course. But during the period of time under consideration, serious falls from fraternity houses on the two Palouse campuses far outnumbered those from other types of student residences, including privately owned apartments occupied by students. I began to view Amanda Andaverde’s situation in a new light. Why are so many colleges allowing students to live and party in such unsafe locations? And why do the lawsuits against fraternities for this kind of serious injury and death—so predictable and so preventable—have such a hard time getting traction? The answers lie in the recent history of fraternities and the colleges and universities that host them.

What all of these lawsuits ultimately concern is a crucially important question in higher education, one that legal scholars have been grappling with for the past half century. This question is perhaps most elegantly expressed in the subtitle of Robert D. Bickel and Peter F. Lake’s authoritative 1999 book on the subject, The Rights and Responsibilities of the Modern University: Who Assumes the Risks of College Life?

The answer to this question has been steadily evolving ever since the 1960s, when dramatic changes took place on American campuses, changes that affected both a university’s ability to control student behavior and the status of fraternities in the undergraduate firmament. During this period of student unrest, the fraternities—long the unquestioned leaders in the area of sabotaging or ignoring the patriarchal control of school administrators—became the exact opposite: representatives of the very status quo the new activists sought to overthrow. Suddenly their beer bashes and sorority mixers, their panty raids and obsession with the big game, seemed impossibly reactionary when compared with the mind-altering drugs being sampled in off-campus apartments where sexual liberation was being born and the Little Red Book proved, if nothing else, a fantastic coaster for a leaky bong.

American students sought to wrest themselves entirely from the disciplinary control of their colleges and universities, institutions that had historically operated in loco parentis, carefully monitoring the private behavior of undergraduates. The students of the new era wanted nothing to do with that infantilizing way of existence, and fought to rid themselves of the various curfews, dorm mothers, demerit systems, and other modes of institutional oppression. If they were old enough to die in Vietnam, powerful enough to overthrow a president, groovy enough to expand their minds with LSD and free love, then they certainly didn’t need their own colleges—the very places where they were forming their radical, nation-changing ideas—to treat them like teenyboppers in need of a sock hop and a chaperone. It was a turning point: American colleges began to regard their students not as dependents whose private lives they must shape and monitor, but as adult consumers whose contract was solely for an education, not an upbringing. The doctrine of in loco parentis was abolished at school after school. Through it all, fraternities—for so long the repositories of the most outrageous behavior—moldered, all but forgotten. Membership fell sharply, fraternity houses slid into increasing states of disrepair, and hundreds of chapters closed.

Animal House, released in 1978, at once predicted and to no small extent occasioned the roaring return of fraternity life that began in the early ’80s and that gave birth to today’s vital Greek scene. The casting of John Belushi was essential to the movie’s influence: no one had greater credibility in the post-’60s youth culture. If something as fundamentally reactionary as fraternity membership was going to replace something as fundamentally radical as student unrest, it would need to align itself with someone whose bona fides among young, white, middle-class males were unassailable. In this newly forming culture, the drugs and personal liberation of the ’60s would be paired with the self-serving materialism of the ’80s, all of which made partying for its own sake—and not as a philosophical adjunct to solving some complicated problem in Southeast Asia—a righteous activity for the pampered young collegian. Fraternity life was reborn with a vengeance.

It was an entirely new kind of student who arrived at the doors of those great and crumbling mansions: at once deeply attracted to the ceremony and formality of fraternity life and yet utterly transformed by the social revolutions of the past decades. These new members and their countless guests brought with them hard drugs, new and ever-developing sexual attitudes, and a stunningly high tolerance for squalor (never had middle- and upper-middle-class American young people lived in such filth as did ’60s and ’70s college kids who were intent on rejecting their parents’ bourgeois ways). Furthermore, in 1984 Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, with the ultimate result of raising the legal drinking age to 21 in all 50 states. This change moved college partying away from bars and college-sponsored events and toward private houses—an ideal situation for fraternities. When these advances were combined with the evergreen fraternity traditions of violent hazing and brawling among rival frats, the scene quickly became wildly dangerous.

Adult supervision was nowhere to be found. Colleges had little authority to intervene in what took place in the personal lives of its students visiting private property. Fraternities, eager to provide their members with the independence that is at the heart of the system—and responsive to members’ wish for the same level of freedom that non-Greek students enjoyed—had largely gotten rid of the live-in resident advisers who had once provided some sort of check on the brothers. With these conditions in place, lawsuits began to pour in.

The mid-1980s were a treacherous time to be the defendant in a tort lawsuit. Personal-injury cases had undergone a long shift to the plaintiff’s advantage; the theory of comparative negligence—by which an individual can acknowledge his or her own partial responsibility for an injury yet still recover damages from a defendant—had become the standard; the era of huge jury verdicts was at hand. Americans in vast numbers—motivated perhaps in part by the possibility of financial recompense, and in part by a new national impetus to move personal suffering from the sphere of private sorrow to that of public confession and complaint—began to sue those who had damaged them. Many fraternity lawsuits listed the relevant college or university among the defendants, a practice still common among less experienced plaintiff’s attorneys. These institutions possess deep reservoirs of liability coverage, but students rarely recover significant funds from their schools. As Amanda Andaverde’s attorneys discovered the hard way, a great deal of time and money can be spent seeking damages from institutions of higher learning, which can be protected by everything from sovereign immunity and damage caps (in the case of public universities), to their limited ability to monitor the private behavior of their students. But for the fraternities themselves, it was a far different story.

So recently and robustly brought back to life, the fraternities now faced the most serious threat to their existence they had ever experienced. A single lawsuit had the potential to devastate a fraternity. In 1985, a young man grievously injured in a Kappa Alpha–related accident reached a settlement with the fraternity that, over the course of his lifetime, could amount to some $21 million—a sum that caught the attention of everyone in the Greek world. Liability insurance became both ruinously expensive and increasingly difficult to obtain. The insurance industry ranked American fraternities as the sixth-worst insurance risk in the country—just ahead of toxic-waste-removal companies. “You guys are nuts,” an insurance representative told a fraternity CEO in 1989, just before canceling the organization’s coverage; “you can’t operate like this much longer.”

For fraternities to survive, they needed to do four separate but related things: take the task of acquiring insurance out of the hands of the local chapters and place it in the hands of the vast national organizations; develop procedures and policies that would transfer as much of their liability as possible to outside parties; find new and creative means of protecting their massive assets from juries; and—perhaps most important of all—find a way of indemnifying the national and local organizations from the dangerous and illegal behavior of some of their undergraduate members. The way fraternities accomplished all of this is the underlying story in the lawsuits they face, and it is something that few members—and, I would wager, even fewer parents of members—grasp completely, comprising a set of realities you should absolutely understand in detail if your son ever decides to join a fraternity.

The aftermath of early-morning fraternity-house fires at (left to right) Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Nebraska Wesleyan University, and Rutgers University. About half of American fraternities are not equipped with fire sprinklers. (Christine Peterson/Worcester Telebram & Gazette/AP; Bill Wolf/AP; Keith Muccilli/Home News Tribune/AP)

Self-insurance was an obvious means for combating prohibitive insurance pricing and the widening reluctance to insure fraternities. In 1992, four fraternities created what was first called the Fraternity Risk Management Trust, a vast sum of money used for reinsurance. Today, 32 fraternities belong to this trust. In 2006, a group of seven other fraternities bought their own insurance broker, James R. Favor, which now insures many others. More important than self-insurance, however, was the development of a risk-management policy that would become—across these huge national outfits and their hundreds of individual chapters—the industry standard. This was accomplished by the creation of something called the Fraternal Information and Programming Group (FIPG), which in the mid-1980s developed a comprehensive risk-management policy for fraternities that is regularly updated. Currently 32 fraternities are members of the FIPG and adhere to this policy, or to their own even more rigorous versions. One fraternity expert told me that even non-FIPG frats have similar policies, many based in large measure on FIPG’s, which is seen as something of a blueprint. In a certain sense, you may think you belong to Tau Kappa Epsilon or Sigma Nu or Delta Tau Delta—but if you find yourself a part of life-changing litigation involving one of those outfits, what you really belong to is FIPG, because its risk-management policy (and your adherence to or violation of it) will determine your fate far more than the vows you made during your initiation ritual—vows composed by long-dead men who had never even heard of the concept of fraternity insurance.

FIPG regularly produces a risk-management manual—the current version is 50 pages—that lays out a wide range of (optional) best practices. If the manual were Anna Karenina, alcohol policy would be its farming reform: the buzz-killing subplot that quickly reveals itself to be an authorial obsession. For good reason: the majority of all fraternity insurance claims involve booze—I have read hundreds of fraternity incident reports, not one of which describes an event where massive amounts of alcohol weren’t part of the problem—and the need to manage or transfer risk presented by alcohol is perhaps the most important factor in protecting the system’s longevity. Any plaintiff’s attorney worth his salt knows how to use relevant social-host and dramshop laws against a fraternity; to avoid this kind of liability, the fraternity needs to establish that the young men being charged were not acting within the scope of their status as fraternity members. Once they violated their frat’s alcohol policy, they parted company with the frat. It’s a neat piece of logic: the very fact that a young man finds himself in need of insurance coverage is often grounds for denying it to him.

So: alcohol and the fraternity man. Despite everything you may think you know about life on frat row, there are actually only two FIPG-approved means of serving drinks at a frat party. The first is to hire a third-party vendor who will sell drinks and to whom some liability—most significant, that of checking whether drinkers are of legal age—will be transferred. The second and far more common is to have a BYO event, in which the liability for each bottle of alcohol resides solely in the person who brought it. If you think this is in any way a casual system, then you have never read either the FIPG risk-management manual or its sister publication, an essay written in the surrealist vein titled “Making Bring Your Own Beverage Events Happen.”

The official byo system is like something dreamed up by a committee of Soviet bureaucrats and Irish nuns. It begins with the composition—no fewer than 24 hours before the party—of a comprehensive guest list. This guest list does not serve the happy function of ensuring a perfect mix of types and temperaments at the festivity; rather, it limits attendance—and ensures that the frat is in possession of “a witness list in the event something does occur which may end up in court two or more years later.” Provided a fraternity member—let’s call him Larry—is older than 21 (which the great majority of members, like the great majority of all college students, are not), he is allowed to bring six (and no more) beers or four (and no more) wine coolers to the party. (FIPG’s admiration for the wine-cooler four-pack suggests that at least some aspects of the foundational document—including its recommendation for throwing a M*A*S*H-themed party as recently as 2007—have not received much of an overhaul since its first edition, published in the mid‑’80s.) Okay, so Larry brings a six-pack. The first stop, depending on which fraternity he belongs to: a “sober check point,” at which he is subjected to an examination. Does he appear to have already consumed any alcohol? Is he in any way “known” to have done so? If he passes, he hands over his ID for inspection. Next he must do business with a “sober monitor.” This person relieves him of the six-pack, hands him a ticket indicating the precise type of beer he brought, and ideally affixes a “non breakable except by cutting” wristband to his person; only then can Larry retrieve his beers, one at a time, for his own personal consumption. If any are left over at the end of the party, his fraternity will secure them until the next day, when Larry can be reunited with his unconsumed beers, unless his frat decided to “eliminate” them overnight. Weaknesses in the system include the fact that all of these people coming between Larry and his beer—the sober monitors and ID checkers and militarized barkeeps—are Larry’s fraternity brothers, who are among his closest buddies and who have pledged him lifelong fealty during candlelit ceremonies rife with Masonic mumbo jumbo and the fluttering language of 19th-century romantic friendship. Note also that these policies make it possible for fraternities to be the one industry in the country in which every aspect of serving alcohol can be monitored and managed by people who are legally too young to drink it.

Clearly, a great number of fraternity members will, at some point in their undergraduate career, violate their frat’s alcohol policy regarding the six beers—and just as clearly, the great majority will never face any legal consequences for doing so. But when the inevitable catastrophes do happen, that policy can come to seem more like a cynical hoax than a real-world solution to a serious problem. When something terrible takes place—a young man plummets from a roof, a young woman is assaulted, a fraternity brother is subjected to the kind of sexual sadism that appears all too often in fraternity lawsuits—any small violation of policy can leave fraternity members twisting in the wind. Consider the following scenario: Larry makes a small, human-size mistake one night. Instead of waiting for the slow drip of six warm beers, he brings a bottle of Maker’s Mark to the party, and—in the spirit of not being a weirdo or a dick—he shares it, at one point pouring a couple of ounces into the passing Solo cup of a kid who’s running on empty and asks him for a shot. Larry never sees the kid again that night—not many people do; he ends up drinking himself to death in an upstairs bedroom. In the sad fullness of time, the night’s horror is turned into a lawsuit, in which Larry becomes a named defendant. Thanks in part to the guest/witness list, Larry can be cut loose, both from the expensive insurance he was required to help pay for (by dint of his dues) as a precondition of membership, and from any legal defense paid for by the organization. What will happen to Larry now?

Gentle reader, if you happen to have a son currently in a college fraternity, I would ask that you take several carbon dioxide–rich deep breaths from a paper bag before reading the next paragraph. I’ll assume you are sitting down. Ready?

“I’ve recovered millions and millions of dollars from homeowners’ policies,” a top fraternal plaintiff’s attorney told me. For that is how many of the claims against boys who violate the strict policies are paid: from their parents’ homeowners’ insurance. As for the exorbitant cost of providing the young man with a legal defense for the civil case (in which, of course, there are no public defenders), that is money he and his parents are going to have to scramble to come up with, perhaps transforming the family home into an ATM to do it. The financial consequences of fraternity membership can be devastating, and they devolve not on the 18-year-old “man” but on his planning-for-retirement parents.

Like the six-beer policy, the Fraternal Information and Programming Group’s chillingly comprehensive crisis-management plan was included in its manual for many years. But in 2013, the plan suddenly disappeared from its pages. When asked why this was so, Dave Westol, a longtime FIPG board member, said, “Member organizations prefer to establish their own procedures, and therefore the section has been eliminated.” However, many fraternities continue to rely on the group’s advice for in-house risk management, and it is well worth examining if you want to know what takes place in the hours following many fraternity disasters. As it is described in the two most recent editions that I was able to obtain (2003 and 2007), the plan serves a dual purpose, at once benevolent and mercenary. The benevolent part is accomplished by the clear directive that injured parties are to receive immediate medical attention, and that all fraternity brothers who come into contact with the relevant emergency workers are to be completely forthright about what has taken place. And the rest? The plans I obtained recommend six important steps:

1. In the midst of the horror, the chapter president takes immediate, commanding, and inspiring control of the situation: “In times of stress, leaders step forward.”

2. A call is made to the fraternity’s crisis hotline or the national headquarters, no matter the hour: “Someone will be available. They would much rather hear about a situation from you at 3:27 a.m. than receive an 8:01 a.m. telephone call from a reporter asking for a comment about ‘The situation involving your chapter at ____.’ ”

3. The president closes the fraternity house to outsiders and summons all members back to the house: “Unorthodox situations call for unorthodox responses from leaders. Most situations occur at night. Therefore, be prepared to call a meeting of all members and all pledged members as soon as possible, even if that is at 3 a.m.”

4. One member—who has already received extensive media training—is put in charge of all relations with the press, an entity fraternities view as biased and often unscrupulous. The appointed member should be prepared to present a concise, factual, and minimally alarming account of what took place. For example: “A new member was injured at a social event.”

5. In the case of the death of a guest or a member, fraternity brothers do not attempt direct contact with the deceased’s parents. This hideous task is to be left to the impersonal forces of the relevant professionals. (I know of one family who did not know their son was in any kind of trouble until—many hours after his death, and probably long after his fraternity brothers had initiated the crisis-management protocol—their home phone rang and the caller ID came up with the area code of their boy’s college and a single word: coroner). If the dead person was a fraternity member who lived in the house, his brothers should return any borrowed items to his room and temporarily relocate his roommate, if he had one. Members may offer to pack up his belongings, but “it is more likely the family will want to do this themselves.” Several empty boxes might thoughtfully be left outside the room for this purpose.

6. Members sit tight until consultants from the national organization show up to take control of the situation and to walk them through the next steps, which often include the completion of questionnaires explaining exactly what happened and one-on-one interviews with the fraternity representatives. The anxious brothers are reminded to be completely honest and forthcoming in these accounts, and to tell the folks from national absolutely everything they know so that the situation can be resolved in the best possible manner.

As you should by now be able to see very clearly, the interests of the national organization and the individual members cleave sharply as this crisis-management plan is followed. Those questionnaires and honest accounts—submitted gratefully to the grown-ups who have arrived, the brothers believe, to help them—may return to haunt many of the brothers, providing possible cause for separating them from the fraternity, dropping them from the fraternity’s insurance, laying the blame on them as individuals and not on the fraternity as the sponsoring organization. Indeed, the young men who typically rush so gratefully into the open arms of the representatives from their beloved national—an outfit to which they have pledged eternal allegiance—would be far better served by not talking to them at all, by walking away from the chapter house as quickly as possible and calling a lawyer.

So here is the essential question: In the matter of these disasters, are fraternities acting in an ethical manner, requiring good behavior from their members and punishing them soundly for bad or even horrific decisions? Or are they keeping a cool distance from the mayhem, knowing full well that misbehavior occurs with regularity (“most events take place at night”) and doing nothing about it until the inevitable tragedy occurs, at which point they cajole members into incriminating themselves via a crisis-management plan presented as being in their favor?

The opposing positions on this matter are held most forcefully and expressed most articulately by two men: Douglas Fierberg, the best plaintiff’s attorney in the country when it comes to fraternity-related litigation, and Peter Smithhisler, the CEO of the North-American Interfraternity Conference, a trade organization representing 75 fraternities, among them all 32 members of the Fraternal Information and Programming Group. In a parallel universe, the two men would be not adversaries but powerful allies, for they have much in common: both are robust midwesterners in the flush of vital middle age and at the zenith of their professional powers; both possess more dark knowledge of college-student life and collegiate binge drinking than many, if not most, of the experts hired to study and quantify the phenomenon; both have built careers devoted to the lives and betterment of young people. But two roads diverged in the yellow wood, and here we are. One man is an avenger, a gun for hire, a person constitutionally ill-prepared to lose a fight; the other is a conciliator, a patient explainer, a man ever willing to lift the flap of his giant tent and welcome you inside. I have had long and wide-ranging conversations with both men, in which each put forth his perspective on the situation.

Fierberg is a man of obvious and deep intelligence, comfortable—in the way of alpha-male litigators—with sharply correcting a fuzzy thought; with using obscenities; with speaking derisively, even contemptuously, of opponents. He is also the man I would run to as though my hair were on fire if I ever found myself in a legal battle with a fraternity, and so should you. In a year of reporting this story, I have not spoken with anyone outside of the fraternity system who possesses a deeper understanding of its inner workings; its closely guarded procedures and money trails; and the legal theories it has developed over the past three decades to protect itself, often very successfully, from lawsuits. Fierberg speaks frequently and openly with the press, and because of this—and because of the reticence of senior members of the fraternity system to speak at length with meddlesome journalists—the media often reflect his attitude.

For all these reasons, Fierberg is generally loathed by people at the top of the fraternity world, who see him as a money-hungry lawyer who has chosen to chase their particular ambulance, and whose professed zeal for reforming the industry is a sham: what he wants is his share of huge damages, not systemic changes that would cut off the money flow. But in my experience of him, this is simply not the case. Sure, he has built a lucrative practice. But he is clearly passionate about his cause and the plight of the kids—some of them horribly injured, others dead—who comprise his caseload, along with their shattered parents.

“Until proven otherwise,” Fierberg told me in April of fraternities, “they all are very risky organizations for young people to be involved in.” He maintains that fraternities “are part of an industry that has tremendous risk and a tremendous history of rape, serious injury, and death, and the vast majority share common risk-management policies that are fundamentally flawed. Most of them are awash in alcohol. And most if not all of them are bereft of any meaningful adult supervision.” As for the risk-management policies themselves: “They are primarily designed to take the nationals’ fingerprints off the injury and deaths, and I don’t believe that they offer any meaningful provisions.” The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.

And then there is Peter Smithhisler, who is the senior fraternity man ne plus ultra: unfailingly, sometimes elaborately courteous; careful in his choice of words; unflappable; and as unlikely to interrupt or drop the f-bomb on a respectful female journalist as he would be to join the Communist Party. He is the kind of man you would want on your side in a tough spot, the kind of man you would want mentoring your son through the challenging passage from late adolescence to young manhood. He believes that the fraternity experience at its best constitutes an appeal to a young man’s better angels: through service, leadership training, and accountability for mistakes, a brother can learn the valuable lessons he will need to become “a better dad, a better teacher, a better engineer, a better pilot, a better ‘insert career here.’” Spend some time talking with Pete Smithhisler, and you can go from refusing to allow your son to join a fraternity to demanding he do so. Indeed, the day after I talked with him, I happened to be at a social gathering where I met two women whose sons had just graduated from college. “The fraternity was what saved him,” one mother said with great feeling. Her son had waited until sophomore year to rush, and freshman year he had been so lonely and unsure of himself that she had become deeply worried about him. But everything changed after he pledged. He had friends; he was happy. When he’d had to have some surgery while at school, his brothers had visited him almost around the clock, bringing him food, keeping up his spirits, checking in with his doctors and charming his nurses. “If only I could have gotten my son to join one,” the other mom said, wistfully. “I kept trying, but he wouldn’t do it.” Why had she wished he’d pledged a fraternity? “He would have been so much more connected to the college,” she said. “He would have had so many other opportunities.”

Smithhisler was honest about the fact that he is at the helm of an outfit that supports organizations in which young people can come to terrible fates. “I wrestle with it,” he said, with evident feeling. His belief is that what’s tarnishing the reputation of the fraternities is the bad behavior of a very few members, who ignore all the risk-management training that is requisite for membership, who flout policies that could not be any more clear, and who are shocked when the response from the home office is not to help them cover their asses but to ensure that—perhaps for the first time in their lives—they are held 100 percent accountable for their actions. And neither the fraternities nor the insurance company are hiding their warnings that a member could lose his coverage if he does anything outside of the policy. It’s front and center in any discussion of a frat’s alcohol policies; if you don’t follow the policy or if you do anything illegal, you could lose your insurance.

One way you become a man, Smithhisler suggests, is by taking responsibility for your own mistakes, no matter how small or how large they might be. If a young man wants to join a fraternity to gain extensive drinking experience, he’s making a very bad choice. “A policy is a policy is a policy,” he said of the six-beer rule: either follow it, get out of the fraternity, or prepare to face the consequences if you get caught. Unspoken but inherent in this larger philosophy is the idea that it is in a young man’s nature to court danger and to behave in a foolhardy manner; the fraternity experience is intended to help tame the baser passions, to channel protean energies into productive endeavors such as service, sport, and career preparation.

In a sense, Fierberg, Smithhisler, and the powerful forces they each represent operate as a check and balance on the system. Personal-injury lawsuits bring the hated media attention and potential financial losses that motivate fraternities to improve. It would be a neat, almost a perfect, system, if the people wandering into it were not young, healthy college students with everything to lose.

If you want an object lesson in how all of this actually works—how fraternities exert their power over colleges, how college and university presidents can be reluctant to move unilaterally against dangerous fraternities, and how students can meet terrible fates as a result—there can be no better example than the $10 million Title IX lawsuit filed against Wesleyan University and the Beta Theta Pi fraternity. The plaintiff was a young woman who had been assaulted in the house, and who—in one of the bizarre twists so common to fraternity litigation—ended up being blamed by the university for her own assault.

Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut, is undergoing the kind of institutional transformation that our relentless fixation on U.S. News & World Report rankings has wrought for a number of colleges and universities in the past three decades. As great as its faculty may be—and it has included, over the years, some of the most renowned scholars in the world—it is the undergraduate population itself that constitutes its most impressive resource. Wesleyan is one of those places that has by now become so hard to get into that the mere fact of attendance is testament, in most cases, to a level of high-school preparation—combined with sheer academic ability—that exists among students at only a handful of top colleges in this country and that is almost without historical precedent. Wesleyan is a school with a large number of aspiring artists—many of whom took, and aced, AP Calculus as 11th-graders.

Still, what the university is perhaps most broadly famous for is its progressive politics, manifest in any number of actions, from the hiring of five Muslim chaplains in the years since 9/11; to the use of the gender-neutral pronouns ze and hir in the campus newspaper; to the creation of a Diversity Education Facilitation Program. The Princeton Review, among other publications, has named Wesleyan America’s most politically active campus, an encomium that appears on the university’s Web site.

Given these sensibilities, Wesleyan might not seem the type of institution likely to have a typical fraternity scene, but as we have observed, fraternities are older than political correctness. There are three all-male residential frats at Wesleyan, all founded in the 19th century and occupying a row of large houses on High Street; over the years, they have counted some of the university’s most accomplished and loyal alumni among their members. If you raise the topic of fraternity alumni with a college president in a private moment, he or she will emit the weary sigh of the ancients. The group includes some of the most financially generous and institutionally helpful former students a school may have. But try to do some small thing to bring the contemporary fraternity scene in line with current campus priorities, and you will hear from them—loudly—before you even hit send on the e-mail.

By 2005, Wesleyan had taken such an action: it had pressured all three fraternities to offer residence, although not membership, to female students, if they wanted to be part of university-approved Program Housing. Wesleyan has a rare requirement. All undergraduates, barring those few who receive special allowances, must live either in dorms or in Program Housing. Integrating affinity group housing had lately been on the mind of the administration; recent lack of student interest in living in the Malcolm X House, for example, had ultimately led to that residence’s becoming racially integrated, a charged and in many respects unpopular administration decision. But there was no shortage of fraternity brothers wishing to live in their houses—nor were the houses owned by the university or located on university property, as the Malcolm X House was. Predictably, and perhaps not irrationally, many in the Greek community viewed this new edict as antagonistic toward their way of life.

Two of the fraternities nonetheless agreed to the new directive, retaining access to the buffet of advantages offered to frats that maintain an official relationship with their host universities. Alone among the group, Beta Theta Pi hewed to the oldest of fraternity values: independence. It refused to admit women residents, and thus forfeited its official recognition by the university. Strangely, however, Beta was able to have its cake and eat it too: its members continued to live and party in the house much as they previously had, renting dorm rooms on campus but living at the fraternity, with the full knowledge of the university. This put Wesleyan in a difficult spot; the house remained a popular location for undergraduate revelry, yet the school’s private security force, Public Safety (or PSafe), had lost its authority to monitor behavior there. Meanwhile, fraternity alumni registered their disapproval of the new housing policy in time-honored fashion: “I will reluctantly shift my Wesleyan contributions to the Beta house, to do my part to provide students with the opportunities I was afforded during my time at Wesleyan,” wrote a Beta alum from the class of 1964 to the university’s then-president, Douglas Bennet. (Due to the potential for the appearance of a conflict of interest, James Bennet, Douglas Bennet’s son and the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was recused from involvement with this piece.)

What followed was a long, strained period in which Beta brothers—among them a large percentage of the school’s lacrosse team—ran an increasingly wild house. In turn, the administration became increasingly concerned about what was happening there, and through back channels began pressuring the fraternity to rejoin Program Housing. But the brothers didn’t budge, and reports of dangerous activity—including assaults, burglaries, extreme drinking, and at least two car accidents linked to the house—mounted. Wesleyan had a powerful weapon at its disposal: at any time, it could have ordered the brothers to live in the dorm rooms they had paid for, consistent with the university’s housing policy. But for whatever reason, it was loath to do so.

Why wouldn’t the university act unilaterally to solve this problem? The answer may involve the deep power that fraternities exert over their host universities and the complex mix of institutional priorities in which fraternities are important stakeholders. Chief among them, typically, is fund-raising. Shortly after the university tightened the housing policy for its fraternities, a new president, Michael Roth, was inaugurated. He came to Wesleyan—his own alma mater, where he had served as the president of his fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi—with an audacious goal: doubling the university’s endowment. A man of prodigious personal, intellectual, and administrative talents, with a powerful love of Wesleyan, he was uniquely suited to this grand vision. But no sooner had he taken office than the world economy crashed, dragging down the Wesleyan endowment with it. The endowment was slowly recouping its losses when the university’s odd and secretive chief investment officer and vice president of investments was abruptly fired and then sued for allegedly profiting from his position—the kind of scandal that can make potential donors think twice before committing money to an institution. (He denied the charges; the case settled for an undisclosed amount in April 2012.) In this challenging fund-raising environment, taking decisive and punitive action against a fraternity would almost certainly come at a financial cost.

In February of 2010, the university tried a new tack: Wesleyan suddenly dropped the requirement for fraternities to house women. And yet still Beta refused to rejoin the fold and enter Program Housing. By March, the university at last took a decisive action. It sent a strongly worded e-mail to the entire Wesleyan community, including the parents of all undergraduates, warning students to stay away from the Beta house. The e-mail described “reports of illegal and unsafe behavior on the premises,” although it specified only one such behavior, a relatively minor one: the overconsumption of alcohol, leading to hospital visits. This one example hardly matched the tone and language of the rest of the e-mail, which was alarming: “We advise all Wesleyan students to avoid the residence”; “our concern for the safety and well-being of Wesleyan students living at the residence or visiting the house has intensified”; “we remain deeply concerned about the safety of those students who choose to affiliate with the house or attend events there against our advice.”

The university was entirely in the right to send this e-mail; it was an accurate report of a dangerous location. But many parents of Beta brothers were incensed—they felt that their sons had been unfairly maligned to a wide group of people by their own university. Thirty-seven Beta parents signed a letter of protest and sent it to Michael Roth. In it, the parents asked the university to “issue a clarification which retracts the unsupported statements.” No such e-mail was sent—nor, in my view, should it have been. But that angry letter, sent by those outraged parents, was surely noted in the offices of the administration. The Beta brothers, meanwhile, had announced a plan to hire an off-duty Middletown cop to oversee their events, while continuing to deny PSafe access to their house. Roth was unsatisfied, saying, “The notion that Public Safety would have to get permission to enter a place where Wesleyan students, as Wesleyan students, are congregating is unacceptable.”

The school year rolled on. Final exams came, and graduation, and then the students dispersed to their homes and internships and first jobs. Summer ripened into fall, and Wesleyan’s newest students bid goodbye to their high-school selves, packed up their bags and crates, and—with excitement and anxiety—traveled to Middletown. Surely these youngest, least experienced, and most vulnerable of Wesleyan’s students would be sent the important e-mail that the older ones and their parents had received about the dangerous and unaffiliated fraternity?

They were not. Yes, there undoubtedly would have been a cost to resending the e-mail: more angry Beta parents, fraternity discontent, pressure from Beta alumni and the national organization. But just as clearly, great good could have come from sending it; student safety was at risk. University trepidation and fraternity intransigence were about to produce a tort case. Its plaintiff: a young woman known to us as Jane Doe—18 years old, freshly arrived at Wesleyan from her home in Maryland, as eager as any other new student to experience the excitement of college life.

During Halloween weekend, Jane Doe got dressed up and went out with some of her friends to sample the student parties on and around campus. “I didn’t have any alcohol to drink all night,” she later told a police investigator in a sworn statement. “I usually don’t drink, and I hang out with people who don’t drink either.” At the Beta house, she was “immediately spotted by this guy” who did not introduce himself but started dancing with her. “I was happy that someone was dancing with me,” she told the policeman, “because I got all dressed up.” The man she was dancing with would turn out not to be a Beta member or even a Wesleyan student at all. His name was John O’Neill, and he was the ne’er-do-well high-school-lacrosse teammate of one of the Beta brothers. O’Neill lived in his mother’s basement and, according to a Yorktown, New York, police detective, had been arrested for selling pot out of an ice-cream truck earlier that year. That wild fraternity houses are often attractive party locations for unsavory characters is a grim reality. After O’Neill had danced with Jane Doe for about 30 minutes, half a dozen of his pals came over (dressed, as he was, in Halloween costumes consisting of old soccer uniforms) and asked him whether he wanted to smoke some pot upstairs. Jane agreed to go along, although she had no plans to smoke. The group arranged itself in a small bedroom, with Jane sitting next to O’Neill on a couch. He put his arm around her, which was fine with her, and she slipped off her shoes because her feet hurt.

The group then moved to a second room, where the men continued smoking. When the other men had finished smoking, they got up to leave, and Jane, too, stood up and began putting on her shoes, preparing to follow them out, but O’Neill closed the bedroom door and locked it. “What’s up?” she asked. He began kissing her, which she at first submitted to, but then pulled away. “He probably thought that I wanted to hook up with him, but I didn’t,” she reported. She started for the door again, but he grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her down onto the couch. “What are you doing?” she cried. “Stop it.”

According to the victim’s sworn statement, here’s what happened next. O’Neill got on top of Jane, straddling her chest and shoulders so she couldn’t move; pulled down his shorts; and shoved his penis into her mouth. She struggled, and bit his penis. He slapped her and called her a bitch. Then he pulled up her dress, yanked off her tights, and forced his penis into her vagina. “The more you try, the faster you are going to get out of here,” he said, and covered her mouth with his hand so she couldn’t scream for help. Some 10 minutes later, it was over. Jane pulled on her tights and ran downstairs and out of the fraternity house. On the street, hysterical, she ran into a male friend and asked him to walk her back to her dorm. Inside, she found a girlfriend who comforted her, staying nearby while she showered, giving her cookies, reading to her until she fell asleep. Following some spectacular bungling on Wesleyan’s part (for instance, no one was at Health Services to help her, because it was a weekend), Jane went to the health center on Monday, then to two deans and eventually, after her parents and brother strongly encouraged her to do so, to the police. The criminal-justice system began its swift, efficient process, resulting in O’Neill’s conviction. (He was initially charged with first-degree sexual assault and first-degree imprisonment, but eventually pleaded no contest to lesser charges of third-degree assault and first-degree imprisonment. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison.)

John O’Neill was not a member of Beta Theta Pi, but fraternities are no strangers to acts of violence committed in their houses by nonmembers. The fraternity followed the standard playbook, expressing sympathy for all victims of sexual assault and reasserting its zero-tolerance policy for such crimes. The brothers cooperated fully with the police and other authorities, which led to the capture of the criminal; and the actions of the individual assailant were forcefully asserted to have been in no way conducted under the auspices of the fraternity.

But back on campus, this level of coolheaded professionalism was nowhere to be seen. A second e-mail regarding Beta was sent out, this one attesting to reports (plural) of sexual assaults at the fraternity house “during recent parties”; noting that these reports “renewed our concern” expressed in the e‑mail sent before Jane Doe’s enrollment; and strongly encouraging students to stay away from the house. Next, Michael Roth issued an edict that he would come to regret: no Wesleyan student could so much as visit any private society lacking recognition by the university. His declaration was obviously intended to shut down Beta or bring it into the fold—but it did so in the same roundabout manner in which the university had been dealing with Beta all along. Its implications were unintentionally far-reaching, and Wesleyan students immediately protested it, holding “Free Beta” rallies; in one instance, a car full of young men shouted the slogan as Jane Doe walked miserably back to campus after visiting the police station. That student sympathies would array themselves so strongly on the side of a fraternity in whose chapter house a sexual assault had occurred, and so negligibly on the side of the young victim of that assault, was the kind of eccentric Wesleyan reaction that no one could have predicted.

Meanwhile, a nonprofit organization called FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, got involved, sending an open letter to President Roth informing him that his action posed a grave threat to Wesleyan students’ right to the freedom of association, violated the university’s own “Joint Statement on the Rights and Freedoms of Students,” and might have consequences extending even to the local Elks Lodge and the Middletown Italian Society—hardly hives of Wesleyan undergraduate activity, but the organization had made its point.

The embattled president retrenched: he published a statement titled “Housing Policy and Threats to Student Freedom,” in which he deemed his previous policy “just too broad,” retracted most of it, and—in what has become a hallmark of his tenure—lavishly praised the student activism that it had engendered. “I want to thank the vocal Wesleyan undergraduates for reminding their president to be more careful in his use of language, and to be more attentive to student culture. Of course, I should have known this already, but hey, I try to keep learning.”

Strictly speaking, the newest policy should not have ended the Free Beta protests, nor should it have assuaged activists’ concern about threats to student freedom—because Roth also asserted in his statement that nothing had changed in regards to Beta: if the fraternity did not join Program Housing by the start of the next semester, the fraternity would be “off limits” to all students. Anyone who violated this rule would face “significant disciplinary action.” It was high-handed treatment, it trampled on students’ freedom of association, and it was entirely within Roth’s rights. Wesleyan is a private university, and as such can establish requirements about students’ private behavior essentially at the whim of the administration—the “Joint Statement on the Rights and Freedoms of Students” be damned. And it worked. The Free Beta protests ended, the fraternity agreed to rejoin Program Housing, student activism moved on to its next pressing target of opportunity, and the Beta brothers enjoyed a defrosting of their relationship with the university.

It turned out that in the heel of the hunt, with the situation at the Beta house becoming so out of control that the Middletown police department was aggressively investigating the alleged violent rape of a Wesleyan student, the university finally decided to act unilaterally against Beta, imposing a potentially unpopular decision that would surely go a long way toward improving student safety. Why hadn’t it done so earlier? Why had it spent so many years in protracted, back-channel negotiations with the fraternity, in a pointless campaign to cajole it into voluntarily rejoining Program Housing, when it could have pulled the trigger on this effective solution at any time? And—most pressing of all—why had it taken the assault of a freshman to get the university to finally take decisive action?

All of these questions were perhaps most pressing to Jane Doe, who had not gone back home to Maryland to nurse her wounds in private. Justly outraged by what had happened to her, as well as by what she saw as her own university’s complicity in it, she had joined forces with Douglas Fierberg, and together they built a case of formidable moral rightness.

Jane Doe filed a $10 million lawsuit in federal court against, in the main, Wesleyan and Beta Theta Pi, asserting that the events leading up to, including, and following Halloween weekend 2010 constituted a violation of the rights guaranteed her through Title IX legislation. It’s hard to see how she wasn’t right about this. She ended up withdrawing from a top university because that institution refused to take actions that could have prevented the assault, or, at the very least, to provide her with information she could have used to protect herself from it.

Wesleyan’s affirmative defense—part of its answers to the lawsuit’s complaint—was of a mien familiar to anyone with knowledge of how the civil litigation of rape cases unfolds. It was expedient, a shrewd legal strategy designed to protect the university from a guilty verdict and a huge settlement. It was also morally repugnant. Wesleyan’s president has said the university is engaged in a “battle against sexual assault”; has averred—as recently as last April—that “survivors of assault must be supported in every way possible”; and has committed himself to ending the “epidemic” of sexual violence at Wesleyan. But here’s how the university supported this particular survivor of sexual violence, who dared to stand up against the mighty force of Wesleyan with her claim of mistreatment: it blamed her for getting raped.

According to Wesleyan—courageous combatant in the “battle against sexual assault”—Jane Doe was responsible for her own rape because she was “not alert to situations that could be misinterpreted”; “did not remain in a public place [but rather went to a private room] with a person with whom she was unfamiliar”; “failed to make reasonable and proper use of her faculties and senses”; and failed “to exercise reasonable care for her own safety.” I disagree. Jane Doe’s sworn statement describes a series of sound actions taken toward the care of her own safety—including making the decision not to drink or use drugs, attempting to exit a room when she was about to be left alone in it with an unfamiliar man who had used drugs, and attempting to fight him off when he began attacking her. But she was physically restrained by a powerfully built man intent on assaulting her.

Surely there are many collegiate sexual encounters that fall into legally ambiguous territory; a number of Americans, among them reasonable people of good will, believe that “regretted sex” on the part of jilted coeds is as responsible for college “rape culture” as is male aggression. This is not one of those cases. This was a violent assault that occasioned a police investigation, an arrest, criminal charges, a conviction, and a jail sentence. To suggest—let alone to assert in federal court—that this event was the result of Jane Doe’s negligence would be ugly if it were part of a rape case involving, say, the U.S. military. For it to be asserted on behalf of an American university against one of its own young students is even more astonishing. What it reveals is less Wesleyan’s true attitude toward assault and its victims (surely there was distaste within the Wesleyan inner sanctum for the line of attack waged in the university’s name against its former student) than the marshy ground of the progressive politics that underpins so much of the university’s rhetoric. It’s fine to announce a war against sexual violence—but, once the chips are down, it’s quite another thing to write a $10 million check. Wesleyan’s sexual-assault victims could be forgiven for assuming that, no matter what, their institution would never blame them for their attack. (Michael Roth and Wesleyan repeatedly declined to discuss the case, or anything related to this article, on the grounds that they did not want to comment on confidential matters pertaining to a lawsuit. Later, when The Atlantic sent President Roth an advance copy of the article a few days before publication, the university provided an official response. Douglas Fierberg, Jane Doe’s attorney, also declined to talk about her case or anything relating to it, citing similar reasons.)

This January, after publishing a withering series of reports on fraternity malfeasance, the editors of Bloomberg.com published an editorial with a surprising headline: “Abolish Fraternities.” It compared colleges and universities to companies, and fraternities to units that “don’t fit into their business model, fail to yield an adequate return or cause reputational harm.” The comparison was inexact, because colleges aren’t businesses, and fraternities do not operate as divisions of a corporate structure helmed by institutions of higher learning. They are private societies, old and powerful, as deeply woven into the history of American higher education as nonreligious study. A college or university can choose, as Wesleyan did, to end its formal relationship with a troublesome fraternity, but—if that fiasco proves anything—keeping a fraternity at arm’s length can be more devastating to a university and its students than keeping it in the fold.

Clearly, the contemporary fraternity world is beset by a series of deep problems, which its leadership is scrambling to address, often with mixed results. No sooner has a new “Men of Principle” or “True Gentlemen” campaign been rolled out—with attendant workshops, measurable goals, initiatives, and mission statements—than reports of a lurid disaster in some prominent or far-flung chapter undermine the whole thing. Clearly, too, there is a Grand Canyon–size chasm between the official risk-management policies of the fraternities and the way life is actually lived in countless dangerous chapters.

Articles like this one are a source of profound frustration to the fraternity industry, which believes itself deeply maligned by a malevolent press intent on describing the bad conduct of the few instead of the acceptable—sometimes exemplary—conduct of the many. But when healthy young college students are gravely injured or killed, it’s newsworthy. When there is a common denominator among hundreds of such injuries and deaths, one that exists across all kinds of campuses, from private to public, prestigious to obscure, then it is more than newsworthy: it begins to approach a national scandal.

Universities often operate from a position of weakness when it comes to fraternities—for far too long, this is what happened with Wesleyan and Beta Theta Pi. The one force that may exert pressure on the fraternities to exact real change is the lawsuit. Plaintiffs have stories to tell that are so alarming, fraternities may, perhaps, be forced to do business differently because of them.

Perhaps.

Last spring, Wesleyan sent yet another e-mail about Beta Theta Pi to the student body. It reported that in the early-morning hours of April 7, a Wesleyan student contacted PSafe to report that she had been attacked at the Beta house. Interviewed by Wesleyan campus police, she reported that while she was at the house, an unknown male had knocked her to the floor, kicked and hit her, and then attempted to sexually assault her. During the assault, the suspect was distracted by a loud noise, and the young woman escaped. She was later treated at the Middletown hospital for several minor injuries.

In August, quietly and while students were away, Wesleyan and Beta Theta Pi settled with Jane Doe, who now attends college in another state.

* This article originally quoted from an 1857 letter we believed to have been written by a Sigma Phi brother. While the letter was sent to a member of Sigma Phi, its author was not a member.

Wushu, Teqball, and More: The 2026 Asian Games

2026-09-30T10:18:45-04:00

Toru Hanai / Getty

Sorrasak Thaosiri and Jirati Chanliang of Thailand compete against Ahmad Kassem Arabi and Mohamad Hafez of Lebanon at the teqball men’s doubles final on day one of the 20th Asian Games at Nagoya City Higashiyama Sports Center on September 20, 2026, in Nagoya, Aichi, Japan.

Long Lei / Xinhua / Getty

Li Jianming of China competes during the Nanquan round of the men’s Nanquan and Nangun final of Wushu in Nagoya, on September 22, 2026.

Andy Chua / Reuters

Japan’s Kotomi Kato swims in the women’s 200-meter breaststroke final during the 2026 Asian Games at the Tokyo Aquatics Centre on September 24, 2026.

Mark Baker / AP

Malaysia’s Mandy Cebelle Chen competes in the women’s wushu taijijian final in Nagoya, on September 20, 2026.

Anushree Fadnavis / Reuters

Athletes take aim during the compound men’s individual 1/16 eliminations at Okazaki Central Park Multipurpose Square on September 28, 2026.

Anushree Fadnavis / Reuters

China’s Ziyu Zhang and teammates shake hands with Team Indonesia players after China won the women’s Group A basketball game on September 21, 2026.

Naoya Azuma / The Yomiuri Shimbun / Reuters

Thailand’s team competes in the artistic swimming mixed team free routine at Hamamatsu Swimming Center ToBiO in Hamamatsu City, on September 28, 2026.

Andrew Couldridge / Reuters

Japan’s Miwa Harimoto, alongside Hina Hayata, competes against China’s Man Kuai and Manyu Wang during the women’s doubles table tennis gold-medal match in Toyota, on September 28, 2026.

Toru Hanai / Getty

Jean Claude Saclag (left) of the Philippines and Daisuke Maruyama of Japan compete during the mixed martial arts men’s traditional -65 kilogram semifinals on day two of the 20th Asian Games at Nagoya City Inae Sports Center on September 21, 2026.

Katsura Tanioka / Getty

Pichet Pansan of Thailand scores a point while Muhammad Ubaidur Rohman of Malaysia attempts to block during the sepaktakraw men’s team Regu Group A match on day two of the 20th Asian Games on September 21, 2026.

Chalinee Thirasupa / Reuters

Japan’s Yuma Yamamoto looks dejected after finishing fourth in the women’s 5,000-meter final at Paloma Mizuho Sports Park on September 28, 2026.

Mark Baker / AP

China’s Yang Yang celebrates his lift during the men’s 60-kilogram weight-lifting final in Nagoya, on September 24, 2026.

Aaron Favila / AP

China’s Liu Xing competes in the men’s cycling BMX freestyle final in Nagoya, on September 27, 2026.

Yong Teck Lim / Getty

Kirin Petkiree of Thailand competes in the skateboarding men’s street final on day eight of the 2026 Asian Games.

Lee Jin-man / AP

Kazakhstan’s Yasmina Toxanbayeva splashes water on her face as she competes in the women’s marathon walk in Nagoya on September 27, 2026.

Yong Teck Lim / Getty

Marufa Akter of Bangladesh bowls during the cricket women’s bronze-medal match against Pakistan at Korogi Athletic Park on September 22, 2026, in Nisshin, Aichi.

Jiji Press / AFP / Getty

Japan’s Yuki Kurihara competes in the Puyo Puyo Champions final of the esports event at the 2026 Asian Games on September 26, 2026. Japan’s 11-year-old esports prodigy Yuki Kurihara won the gold medal, defeating a series of opponents up to three times his age.

Mohd Rasfan / AFP / Getty

China’s Yan Langyu competes in the final of the men’s trampoline gymnastics event at the Nagoya City General Gymnasium on September 27, 2026.

Yuichi Masuda / Getty

Djuraev Akbar of Uzbekistan competes in the snatch during the weight-lifting men’s 110-kilogram final on day 10 of the 2026 Asian Games.

Toru Hanai / Getty

Yuka Ueno of Japan celebrates winning the gold medal against South Korea in the fencing women’s foil team gold-medal match at Aichi Sky Expo on September 26, 2026.

David Gray / AFP / Getty

Indonesia’s Sumaya (left) plays a point against Myanmar’s Wai Khin Hnin during their women’s singles final teqball match in Nagoya on September 20, 2026.

Katsura Tanioka / Getty

Team Malaysia players celebrate winning the sepaktakraw men’s Team Regu gold-medal match against Thailand at Nagoya City Mizuho Park Gymnasium on September 25, 2026.

Yong Teck Lim / Getty

Samedy Sim of Cambodia competes during the men’s shot-put final on day seven of the 2026 Asian Games on September 26, 2026.

Katsura Tanioka / Getty

Dharmveer Choudhary of India starts the men’s 4x400-meter relay at Nagoya City Mizuho Park Athletic Stadium on September 29, 2026.

Yong Teck Lim / Getty

Kirill Prokhodov of Kazakhstan celebrates after defeating Hyomin Jang of South Korea to win gold in the fencing men’s epee team finals on day eight of the 2026 Asian Games on September 27, 2026, in Tokoname, Aichi.

Only Trump Gets to Criticize the Supreme Court

2026-09-30T08:45:34-04:00

President Trump thinks it should be illegal for people to criticize the Supreme Court. Other people, though. Not him.

“I believe it’s illegal what they do,” Trump said on the campaign trail in 2024, about those who criticized judges’ decisions. “I believe they are playing the ref. They’re constantly criticizing some of our greatest justices and a lot of great judges.” He continued, “Playing the ref with our judges and our justices should be punishable by very serious fines and beyond that.” (Trump may have meant “working the ref”—a common strategy in sports of trying to pressure a ref to make decisions in your team’s favor.)

Trump criticizing the Supreme Court, however, is perfectly fine and not illegal at all. Earlier this month, a day after a majority of the justices rejected Trump’s effort to restrict voting by mail in the midterms, Trump lashed out in a post: “These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves.” Trump accused the justices of being “bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left.”

As is nearly always the case with the president’s accusations, this was an illuminating projection. Trump fears that public pressure on the Supreme Court can sway the justices and how they rule. So when they don’t side with him, he assumes that’s what happened, and he trashes the Court in the hope that it will side with him the next time. He views criticism of the Supreme Court much as he views laws in general: When Trump or one of his allies wants to do something, such as use taxpayer dollars for cultish campaign ads, it’s legal. When his opponents want to do something, it’s illegal.

[Quinta Jurecic: The Supreme Court recognizes the danger of Trump’s election plan]

In fairness, all partisans more or less expect the jurists they appoint to interpret the law in a favorable way in salient disputes. As the legal reporter Jeffrey Toobin recounted in The Nine, in 2005, the conservative legal activist Manuel Miranda advised then-President George W. Bush, “No more Souters and no more Kennedys,” meaning that Bush should appoint reliable right-wingers, not justices who might turn out to be much more liberal than expected (David Souter) or conservative but not conservative enough (Anthony Kennedy). To continue the sports analogy, the Supreme Court today looks a lot like Italy’s 2006 Calciopoli soccer scandal, in which big teams were accused of influencing matches by ensuring they got assigned sympathetic referees—except what was a scandal in sports is standard for the highest court in America. The conservative legal movement hasn’t spent decades capturing the judiciary just to have a few squishy justices go rogue.

The fact that Trump makes this subtext text is a little embarrassing, but it’s not like he’s saying anything Americans don’t already know and understand.

More important is that Trump’s demands in the voting-by-mail case were utterly lawless. Trump issued an executive order in March directing the United States Postal Service to decide which voters receive their mail-in ballots based on whether their name matches newly created federal voter-registration lists, which are likely to be incomplete. In short, it would have allowed the USPS to determine who gets to vote by mail.

Trump has frequently accused voting by mail of being rife with fraud. Voter fraud is, in fact, extremely rare, and no evidence suggests that Trump’s order would prevent it. Although he has politicized the issue, mail-in ballots are actually used by voters across the political spectrum; Trump himself votes by mail.

A brief filed by election-law experts calls Trump’s claims “weak and speculative.” The real damage, the brief states, is to voters: “The rule threatens to disenfranchise millions of elderly voters, disabled voters, military voters and all others including the most vulnerable who depend on mail voting, in both red and blue states.”

[Duncan Hosie: The Supreme Court isn’t interested in facts]

It doesn’t matter how “weak and speculative” a case Trump makes, though; Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are still likely to vote for it. They were the only two justices to publicly dissent from this month’s decision. (It is somewhat strange that the Trumpiest justices aren’t the ones he appointed). As it stands, the USPS voter-list scheme seems unlikely to be implemented before the midterms, though Trump may try again before 2028.

Trump has taken a few high-profile losses at the Supreme Court recently—in the tariffs case and in the birthright-citizenship case—but the Court has been more than willing to do his bidding most of the time. According to an analysis published by The New York Times in July, Trump’s second-term win rate at the Supreme Court was 62 percent, higher than any president since George W. Bush and far higher than in his first term. In the rare big cases he loses, Trump tends to lash out at the justices, hoping to bring them to heel.

“The Supreme Court has really let our Country down!” Trump complained on social media after the voting-by-mail decision. “It is a Court that will go down as having rendered some of the most destructive, hurtful, and damaging decisions in our Country’s history.”

This is the Supreme Court that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, sanctioned Trump’s overt racial discrimination toward Haitians in Mullin v. Doe, fabricated a right to presidential immunity that appears nowhere in the Constitution in Trump v. United States, and gave Trump unfettered control over agencies that are supposed to be independent. Considering that record, few could disagree that the justices have “rendered some of the most destructive, hurtful, and damaging decisions in our Country’s history.” Trump’s real complaint is they haven’t done that enough.

GLP-1s Are Rewriting the Story of Weight Loss and Mental Health

2026-09-29T13:25:05-04:00

Noom, the popular weight-loss app, prompts its users not only to log their meals and exercise but also to gaze at paintings. The “Mindful Art Break” feature includes images of such works as Claude Monet’s Woman With a Parasol—Madame Monet and Her Son and Franz Marc’s The Bewitched Mill, neither of which seems to have anything to do with body fat. Breath work, meditation, and lessons in cognitive-behavioral-therapy techniques are also available on the app. One user, in a testimonial the company sent me, said that Mindful Art Break helped them “contemplate something other than weight loss.”

Why, then, would a weight-loss company offer such a program? Noom launched a stand-alone emotional-health program called Noom Mood in 2023, the same year it added GLP-1s to its offerings. Then, last year, the company integrated core Mood tools into the flagship app “after seeing major overlap with weight, stress, and self-care needs,” Emily Passer, Noom’s head of communications, told me. Other weight-loss services—especially newer ones that offer GLP-1 medications—are getting into mental health too.

Mental health and weight are, of course, intimately linked. As someone who lost almost 70 pounds by strength training and getting treatment for an eating disorder more than a decade ago, I can certainly attest to the importance of mental-health support during any sort of body change. But Noom and other weight-related companies are leaning into a common strategy to entice customers: To be palatable (and successful), a weight-loss company must now profess care for its customers’ psychological health, not just for their waistline.

Wondr Health, a weight-loss platform that partners with employers, offers information about managing stress and anxiety and says that its program begins with “behavior change.” Weight Watchers, which filed for bankruptcy last year, announced in December its “fully integrated platform for the GLP-1 era,” including features related to behavioral health and community support. Kim Boyd, the company’s chief medical officer, told me that weight loss and mental health shouldn’t be treated as separate pursuits. “It’s all happening in one person, and those things are really, really connected,” she said.

“Mental well-being is a huge trend right now, and I could see how it would be good business to capitalize on it,” A. Janet Tomiyama, the director of UCLA’s Diet, Stigma, and Health Lab, told me. Other industries have done just that in recent years—see Ulta Beauty’s “feel-good” wellness initiatives and Bumble’s “interest badges” for therapy and mindfulness. The messaging is playing to widespread sentiments. In a May 2025 survey, YouGov asked U.S. adults to rank how essential various states of being or behaviors are to overall physical health; 79 percent of respondents said that “having good mental health” is essential. When the National Academy of Sports Medicine asked personal trainers in April what their goals were for their average client, mental clarity and stress relief came in just under weight loss and well ahead of athletic performance.

And yet, mental-health support from a weight-loss company might feel incongruous, in no small part because the tools of weight loss and the drive to lose weight have historically not improved people’s mood. Tomiyama said that in a 2010 study she co-authored, the stress hormone cortisol spiked when women were randomly assigned to start a diet. Plus, Tomiyama said, because many people who diet gain the weight back, they end up feeling as if they’ve failed. “We have scientific, causal evidence that diets ruin people’s mental health,” she said. “So I’m not surprised that these companies are noticing that through their customer base and realizing they have to do something about it.”

Now more than ever, though, dramatic weight loss doesn’t have to involve dieting at all. Instead of cutting calories and fighting against related hunger, people can take a GLP-1 and feel fuller from less food. One small, non-placebo-controlled study on how a GLP-1 called liraglutide affected mood and behavior suggested that the drugs significantly improved depression symptoms. The research is complicated, though: Other studies have found no significant effect on mood, and still others suggest that, at high doses, GLP-1s are linked to depressed mood, possibly because of their dopamine-dampening effects. Anecdotally, some GLP-1 users experience anhedonia. But others feel more optimistic, perhaps because, unlike dieting, the drugs can turn down the dial on so-called food noise.

The social effects of GLP-1s are also less than straightforward. On the one hand, people who are overweight or have obesity face a lot of stigma and can be treated poorly, which is famously not ideal for your mental health. So perhaps GLP-1s can improve mood simply by being an effective way to lose weight. On the other hand, Tomiyama conducted another study that found that people who lose weight through GLP-1s are socially stigmatized even more than people who have never tried to lose weight in the first place, perhaps because of perceptions that GLP-1 users opted for the “easy way out.” People who go off GLP-1s and gain weight back are stigmatized too. Boyd, from Weight Watchers, said that the mental-health-related struggle she observes most from the company’s clients is shame around GLP-1 use being seen as a cheat code. She knows of one woman who was storing her neighbor’s GLP-1 medications in her fridge because the neighbor didn’t want her husband to know she was on them.

It’s no wonder, then, that people who take these drugs might want some extra help for their mental health. In a 2024 survey of 300 GLP-1 users, 75 percent reported that they were interested in behavioral-health support, and 63 percent believed that they would achieve better health outcomes while taking GLP-1s if they also received such support. They might be right. Spencer Nadolsky, an obesity specialist who founded an online medical-weight-management platform that offers both GLP-1s and behavioral and emotional support, told me that psychological support “doesn’t necessarily lead to a lot more weight loss in general, but it improves outcomes in other realms of the weight-loss journey,” including patients’ feelings about the process and their general quality of life.

The cynical view—one I’ve taken myself—is that any gesture toward mental health by an entity selling weight loss (or anything else) is an empty marketing-and-sales tactic. How effective these interventions are at actually supporting customers’ mental health, and whether companies will continue offering them if mental-health support exits the zeitgeist, remains to be seen. But in my experience, weight loss on its own also isn’t enough to meaningfully improve mental health. When I got treatment for my binge-eating disorder, the pounds were coming off because I was eating less and because I was exercising in a way I liked. My mindset and lifestyle seemed to be changing for good because I was talking through the anxiety and depression that drove my bingeing in the first place.

I think back to the times I sat in early-2000s Weight Watchers meetings with my mom, where conversations revolved around the scale—or when a doctor told preteen me to “eat healthier” to lose weight without asking what I even knew or thought about healthy eating, or how difficult it was for me because I had a disorder. It would have been nice to have someone even pretend to care about my feelings. Hopefully, this new concern on the part of the companies will last.

Why Did Wallace Shawn Liken Israelis to Nazis?

2026-09-29T12:55:26-04:00

This past weekend, a deplorable minute-long video appeared on my X feed. In it, the instantly recognizable actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, most famous for his role as Vizzini in the classic 1987 film The Princess Bride, delivers a hateful rant belied by his grandfatherly demeanor and dulcet tones. He says,

The Israelis invaded somebody else’s territory, they took people’s homes, and they did many of the things that the Nazis did to the Jews. You can’t be more evil than what they’re doing. They are doing evil that is just as great as what the Nazis did. And in some ways, it’s worse, because they kind of boast about it. Hitler had the decency to try to keep it secret. For some reason, Hitler didn’t want people to know he was doing these things to the Jews. It was a secret. The Israelis are almost proud of it and don’t keep it a secret. And it’s demonically evil.

Shawn’s analysis of the situation in Israel and Gaza is a moral inversion of the truth. The only party in this conflict to have committed an act of genocidal intent was Hamas. It was Hamas whose members recorded their savage rampage into Israel on October 7, 2023, their house-to-house massacring of Jewish civilians so gruesomely evoking the behavior of the Nazis eight decades earlier. It was Hamas whose insatiable lust for Jewish blood was blocked only by force of arms. And it’s Hamas that boasts about the murder of innocent people—Palestinian and Israeli.

The Shawn video, which comes from a 2025 interview with the podcaster Katie Halper, resurfaced at a time when rhetoric accusing Israel of “genocide” is at a peak. Representative Ro Khanna, a likely Democratic presidential candidate; Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont; and the Young Democrats of America are just some of the voices on the left that have accused Israel of “the crime of crimes.” The sudden prominence of this wholly unfounded allegation, and the casual way in which so many people are hurling it, underscores the degree to which progressives have been radicalized since the 2023 Hamas attack.

[James Loeffler: The hatred that broke American politics]

Shawn is a longtime member of Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist organization that attributes “all” of the violence of October 7 and in the preceding decades to “Israeli apartheid and occupation—and United States complicity in that oppression.” A growing number of celebrities, several of them Jewish, have expressed similar ideas. The reemergence of Shawn’s video happened to coincide with the publication of a GQ interview with the actor Adam Brody, who plays a rabbi on the Netflix series Nobody Wants This, the third season of which is coming out next month. Brody, who has been canvassing for Democratic candidates in the run-up to the midterm elections, was asked about Gaza. “Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide,” he answered, as if he were ordering a cheeseburger. (He also said that, although he hadn’t previously spoken publicly about the issue, “I have spoken a lot about it privately.”)

The willingness to declare the war in Gaza a genocide has become a litmus test on the left and is likely to play a significant factor in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary. The purpose of the claim is not to establish the facts about an undoubtedly horrific conflict but to increase the stakes in a decades-long effort to delegitimize the Jewish state. Israel’s actions in Gaza lack dolus specialis—the legal term for “specific intent,” which, according to a precedent set by the international tribunal that investigated the Rwandan genocide, means that the perpetrator acted “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” Whatever the extreme rhetoric of some Israeli political leaders, Israel has not attempted to use its abundant military superiority to exterminate the Palestinian people. If it were bent on doing so, it would not have sent ground troops into Gaza and incurred hundreds of fatalities; nor would it have worked with the World Health Organization to vaccinate Palestinian children against polio after an outbreak. Some critics of the Jewish state have been accusing it of genocide since its founding, in 1948; others began making the charge only days into its military response to the Hamas attack—as if nothing the Israelis do short of surrendering their country is permissible.

Early in the interview, Halper refers to Shawn—son of the legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn—as a “recovering liberal,” a term usually used to denote an older conservative looking wistfully on their younger, left-wing past. But Shawn, who accepts the label, places his opposition to Israel in a broader rejection of liberalism—the very tradition that has allowed Jews to achieve so much in America.

Until the age of 40, Shawn was a “fairly typical American liberal centrist,” he tells Halper, according to a transcript. “Basically, I believed in the good intentions of Americans, and I believed in the American democratic constitutional system, and I thought many of the Democrats were good people.” Shawn’s views began to change, however, once he realized that “the United States tried to suppress movements for greater liberty in other countries in the world, the goal of that was to benefit the privileged class of my own country, and I was a member of that class. So I actually turned very much against myself and people like me, and I certainly went through a period of extreme nausea and self-hate.”

Shawn’s political epiphany occurred during the early years of the Reagan administration, and his views about U.S. iniquity were solidified by his time living in Central America. “I loved being in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas,” Shawn said in a 1991 interview with the Los Angeles Times of the Soviet-backed Marxist-Leninists then running that country. “I personally felt a deep contentment there based on the feeling that maybe things could be done better.” The Sandinistas were peacefully ousted in a democratic election but returned to power in 2007 under the leadership of Daniel Ortega, who canceled this year’s election and has banned the opposition from participating in future ones. If Shawn has criticized Ortega for these genuinely tyrannical actions, there is no public record of it.

[David Frum: Anti-Semitism is becoming mainstream]

Part of what’s so chilling about Halper’s interview with Shawn is that a man of such refined aesthetic tastes and with such a humane demeanor, as exemplified in his critically acclaimed 1981 picture, My Dinner With Andre, could embrace such brutal, uncompromising politics. Exquisitely nuanced in conveying human motivations and emotions in his performances, Shawn is Manichaean and maximalist in his politics. “If you don’t see that it’s evil to do those things to other human beings, then you’re in a different universe from me,” he said of Israeli actions in Gaza, according to the transcript of the Halper interview. “I don’t know how to communicate with you.” There is nothing defensible motivating Israelis; they are driven by an infernal delight in “killing the innocent” and “bombing hospitals.” The notion that Jews might have an equally valid claim to the land, or that the land ought to be divided between the two peoples, is anathema to Shawn. President Woodrow Wilson “was wrong to say that each people should have their own state,” he says. “That hasn’t turned out to be that great, this idea that each ethnic group should have its own state.” And yet, Shawn’s supposed opposition to ethnic-based statehood makes a curious exception for Palestinians, whose right to self-determination he supports.

If one accepts the proposition that Israelis are acting like Nazis, there’s no way of avoiding at least a partial justification of October 7. “Even in talking about the horrible attack on October 7 on the Israelis, it’s a little absurd to pretend that that came out of nowhere,” Shawn told Halper. At the same time, he insists that he is “in no position to judge the Palestinians” and is “more of a pacifist as time passes.” Shawn and Halper pride themselves on their expansive empathy, but it’s an empathy that doesn’t extend to Israelis. “I have a lot of hate in my heart,” Halper tells Shawn. “Not to sound corny, but it is based, I think, on the flip side of love. The reason I hate the people I hate is because I love the people that they are killing, oppressing, maiming, torturing.”

Shawn’s moral myopia is most fully on display when he blames other Jews, and not anti-Semites, for anti-Semitism. “What Netanyahu has done is unimaginably horrible for Jews, and let’s hope that nobody associates Israelis or Netanyahu with Jews, with you and me,” he tells Halper. “I hope nobody blames me for what they’re doing. But gee.” Few on the left would blame anti-Black racism on the behavior of African governments, and many spoke out forcefully against the spike in anti-Asian hate crimes in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, which originated in China. But Jews whom they deem to be behaving badly can be held responsible for attacks on other Jews.

Shawn was remarkably candid about his motivations in 2009, when he told a British Jewish newspaper, “I find it horrifying that Jews are seen—particularly by a young generation who do not know the history—as victimisers who are very self-righteous about what they do. From a moral point of view it was better when we were victims.” This is the position Jews were in before the creation of Israel: stateless and at the mercy of the powerful. Anti-Semites throughout history have preferred to see Jews cowering before their oppressors. Shawn is entitled to express “self-hate,” but there’s no reason the rest of the world’s Jews should subordinate themselves to this point of view.

Whatever moved Shawn to make his remarks last year, they have reappeared at a time when anti-Semitism is flourishing in America like never before. That his comments received so little notice at the time they were spoken shows how routine casual accusations of genocide had already become, and how thoroughly knowledge of history had depreciated. Today, such calumnies are uttered as flippantly as if they were items on a menu, perfectly encapsulating the moral derangement of our times.

*Illustration sources: Faiz Qreqa / AFP / Getty; Valerie Macon / AFP / Getty ; Atlantide Phototravel / Getty.