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A Tragedy in Iran Might Persuade Hegseth to Change Course

2026-07-31T07:00:00-04:00

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When President Trump plucked Pete Hegseth from Fox News to be his secretary of defense, Pentagon officials scrambled to get with their new boss’s pugnacious program: Lethality and battlefield swagger were in; “wokeness” and operational restraint were out. Hegseth’s subsequent purge at the Defense Department included the dramatic downsizing of staff dedicated to avoiding civilian casualties in war. They had been part of a military-wide system built up after tens of thousands of ordinary people were killed during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Congress mandated some of the enhancements. But Hegseth fired or reassigned almost all of the staff working on the program.

Now the Pentagon is considering restoring as many as half of the roles that were cut as the military reckons with the human impact of its five-month, on-again, off-again war with Iran, in particular an air strike in the first hours of the conflict that killed almost 170 people, most of them children, at a school in Minab, in southern Iran. The potential reversal, which hasn’t previously been reported, now awaits Hegseth’s signature.

A Pentagon inspector-general report this spring found that the department’s deep cuts in civilian-harm protections may have violated laws designed to safeguard noncombatants. Democrats are urging the Defense Department to reverse course. Hegseth’s comments and service history suggest that he will do otherwise. A Pentagon official—who, like other officials, spoke with us on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations—said in a statement that the setup for preventing civilian harm is “currently undergoing a strategic reassessment to inform its future reorganization” and would remain in compliance with congressional requirements, but that no final decisions have been made.

Hegseth, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the National Guard, arrived at the Pentagon early last year with a record of railing against what he characterized as unnecessary shackles on battlefield operators, such as military “jagoffs” (a play on judge advocates general, known as JAGs) and international law. His on-air advocacy for troops accused or convicted of war crimes helped forge his bond with Trump. Within months of his taking office, the Pentagon had slashed the number of total staff working to prevent and investigate civilian-casualty incidents by about 90 percent.

Hegseth brought the same gloves-off mentality to the war in Iran, which remains in a protracted limbo that has crippled maritime commerce and thrust Persian Gulf allies into open conflict with Tehran. “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars,” Hegseth told reporters early in the conflict. “We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.” Trump also has made repeated threats to strike bridges and power plants, actions that under many circumstances could constitute war crimes.

[Read: The forever negotiation]

Hegseth has said that Tehran positions its military assets alongside civilian sites such as hospitals and schools. Iran has also struck apartment buildings and energy facilities across the Gulf and killed at least 18 U.S. troops in the region. But the strike on the school in Minab appears to have been the worst on civilians in a U.S. operation since the Gulf War in 1991. Immediately after, U.S. defense officials professed disbelief that the U.S. military could have hit a school. They wondered whether the Israeli military had done it. Trump suggested that Iran was responsible. But the strike had involved a Tomahawk missile, a weapon Iran does not have. And an initial examination found that although Iran’s military had once occupied the building, that was no longer true. The U.S. government had possessed intelligence about the site’s conversion into a school; that information never made its way to the strike’s planners, defense officials told us.

At the recent G7 summit in France, Trump told reporters that “nobody did that on purpose” and said that the findings of an official Pentagon investigation—the only one of its kind so far in the Iran war—should eventually be released. Hegseth has repeatedly said that the U.S. military does not intentionally target civilians and has promised to make the investigation’s conclusions public, but he has not said when or whether that will include all of the report.

Inside Iran, the death toll in Minab—168—has become a defining symbol of U.S. aggression. State media and government officials regularly invoke the incident and commemorate it in public ceremonies. During the FIFA World Cup, members of Iran’s team wore #168 pins and posed before rows of children’s backpacks.

Military operations are judged almost instantaneously by audiences around the world, making public perception an important strategic consideration, Geoffrey Corn, the director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University, told us. Corn is a proponent of embedding experts on avoiding civilian casualties in military targeting teams. The most important thing the United States could have done soon after the Minab strike, Corn told us, would have been to publicly address what happened: Was the strike based on faulty intelligence? Outdated information? A missile malfunction, or some other error? “Because if you don’t, you’re ceding the narrative to anybody who wants to condemn you,” Corn added. “You are setting the conditions for strategic failure.”

The need to improve protections for civilians was a lesson learned at the cost of many innocent lives over two decades of U.S. counterinsurgent wars.

In September 2006, the Pentagon formally added legitimacy, restraint, and perseverance to its Principles of Joint Operations, defining legitimacy as “the legality, morality, and rightness of the actions undertaken.” The conclusion from Iraq and Afghanistan was that battlefield success alone was insufficient; military force had to be perceived as not only lawful but also just and prudent if it was going to achieve lasting results. Corn pointed to the United States’ reputational damage caused by the Trump administration’s lethal campaign against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean, and the global outcry against Israel over the tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza.

[Read: The results are in on Trump’s boat-strike campaign]

Civilian-harm mitigation within the U.S. military ramped up during the campaign against the Islamic State. Watchdog groups such as the United Kingdom–based Airwars began working closely with U.S. Central Command, providing on-the-ground information for U.S. forces who often struggled to assess the results of their strikes. After a U.S. drone mistakenly killed 10 civilians during America’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, then–Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered up the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan to formalize those practices across the Pentagon.

Over time, Centcom and other combatant commands built up these operations. Experts on civilian patterns of life and other advisers helped military targeters assess risks before strikes were launched and investigated casualty reports after. The Pentagon opened an office to train personnel across the ranks and incorporate lessons into future operations. (The gap between official and outside estimates on civilian casualties has at times, however, remained wide: Airwars estimated that more than 8,000 civilians died in the campaign against the Islamic State from 2014 to 2018; the official toll is roughly 1,500.)

Some of that structure still exists, but is much diminished. The U.S. military, meanwhile, has been engaged everywhere—Yemen, Somalia, Venezuela. In the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, the U.S. says that it has killed 221 people in small boats over 11 months; the U.S. alleges that the crews are smuggling drugs but has presented no evidence. Human-rights groups estimate that more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in Iran in the U.S. and Israeli air campaign.

“Over the last year, we have seen a total disconnect between the willingness to wage wars all over the world, at an unprecedented pace and scale, while at the same time all but abandoning their leading role in setting up the systems and approaches needed to better protect civilians,” Emily Tripp, the head of Airwars, told us.

The leadership of the Pentagon’s combatant commands have uniformly voiced support internally for the restoration of the personnel, a U.S. official told us, because they value the additional safeguards. Commanders learned over the years that civilian casualties fueled insurgent recruitment, eroded local support, and undermined political objectives. Advances in intelligence, surveillance, and precision targeting also have helped reduce the risk of hitting civilians. (Civilian-protection advisers were never given the power to overrule or veto actions proposed by commanders; they could only advise and provide additional information.)

“Restoring personnel dedicated to civilian protection—and actually allowing them to do their jobs—is one critical step towards preventing future harm,” Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told us.

Even if Hegseth endorses the proposal, future success may depend on whether he embraces a different tone. “If there is a change in attitude from the top, that could be significant,” Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is now a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, told us. “But if this is a box-checking exercise, it won’t make a difference.”

[Read: The timidity of America’s top generals]

Hegseth and Trump have both, at least so far in the Iran war, used much more belligerent language than their own military commanders have. The White House, early on, posted images of U.S. strikes alongside the caption “No pause. No hesitation.” Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of Centcom, had a contrasting message for troops in a memo this spring. “Our commitment to the law of armed conflict is not a constraint on our lethality,” he wrote. “It is the source of our legitimacy.”

A Hegseth endorsement of the proposal to restore protections against civilian harm would mark a rare acknowledgment that his radical reforms at the Pentagon may, at least in one area, have gone too far.

Schengen’s Greatest Failure

2026-07-31T15:21:29-04:00

In the summer of 1985, representatives from five Western European countries met aboard a riverboat in Schengen, a wine-making village in Luxembourg, to celebrate the removal of checkpoints at their borders. According to the treaty they approved, which became known as the Schengen Agreement, the signatory countries sought “solidarity between their peoples by removing obstacles to free movement,” forming a borderless zone that gave tangible expression to principles of liberal internationalism that were ascendant as the West glimpsed victory in the Cold War.

Schengen has succeeded spectacularly, at least by certain metrics. It has grown to include 29 countries, from Portugal to Poland, and more than 450 million people. Four decades on, it remains one of Europe’s most popular policies among people who benefit from it—those who work, study, shop, date, and live across borders, able to cross multiple European states in a matter of hours, without ever stopping their car. But as a mechanism to build European solidarity, Schengen has been a failure.

The latest evidence of that came this week, when as many as 60,000 migrants from Morocco rushed into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, which sits on the North African coast of the Mediterranean. Ceuta has a population of only 83,000 and isn’t even on the European continent. But because it is part of Spain, entering Ceuta, in theory, affords access to 29 countries. The migrants swam or climbed over fences to reach the tiny territory. Several dozen have died.

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, decried the situation as an “attack” and a violation of his country’s territorial integrity, vowing that the migrants would be turned back; according to Spain’s interior ministry, more than half of them already have been. Sánchez blamed trafficking gangs, and others pointed a finger at Moroccan authorities for possibly instigating or enabling the huge number of crossings into the Schengen Area, dwarfing equivalent single-day figures from the European migration crisis in 2015. Morocco’s ambassador to Spain disputed such allegations.

[Rogé Karma: The Spanish exception]

The political blowback for Sánchez, a leftist whose pro-immigrant position has differentiated him in an era of resurgent nationalism, was predictable. Criticism came from his domestic opposition in Madrid, as well as from the White House, where President Trump saw an opportunity to paint Europe as lax on immigration and identify an edge for his party as the midterms approach. “That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in,” Trump told Fox News.

The most notable reactions, however, came from other European capitals, which once committed themselves to freedom of movement as a basis for cross-border solidarity, an integral part of shared European Union membership that also includes a common trade policy and, in most cases, a shared currency. Giorgia Meloni, the right-wing prime minister of Italy, called for the suspension of Spain’s Schengen membership (for which there is no formal process), and her foreign minister blamed the Spanish government for the chaos, labeling its plans to grant legal status to more than half a million migrants “profoundly wrong.” In response, Madrid summoned the Italian ambassador, accusing foreign leaders of “partisan demagoguery.”

Other countries backed Meloni. Finland’s interior minister argued that Spain had “completely failed to protect the Schengen Area’s external border from infiltration,” adding in a post on social media, “This cannot continue.” France increased checks at its border with Spain, and the chancellor of Austria, which is about 1,000 miles from the Iberian Peninsula, said his country was weighing whether to close its borders.

There is no evidence that any of the new arrivals in Ceuta have crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to the Spanish mainland. Transiting the strait typically requires a ferry or plane, and involves border and identity checks that validate whether passengers have the relevant visas. Meanwhile, there aren’t legal mechanisms to suspend a country’s Schengen membership, especially unilaterally. What other countries can do is reintroduce controls at their borders. The authority to do so was written into an implementing convention approved by the signatory states in 1990, and they’ve made liberal use of it. Italy had already reimposed checks at its land border with France because of the anticipated presence of “radical activists” at a festival in Piedmont, in northwestern Italy, and earlier today, Meloni’s government halted passport-free travel at air and sea borders with Spain. Austria had already reintroduced controls at borders with four of its neighbors, citing irregular migration through the Balkans, the burden of migrants on its asylum system, and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

But these piecemeal steps to police borders aren’t grandiose enough when there’s political hay to be made of immigration. Meloni can’t be outdone by her deputy prime minister and coalition partner, Matteo Salvini, who has taken to social media in recent days to urge, vaguely yet repeatedly, “Suspend Schengen.” Marine Le Pen, the far-right firebrand in France and a candidate for president in next year’s elections, vowed today to restrict the agreement if she came to power. Le Pen’s party, now called National Rally, has expertly channeled anger about Schengen. Amid the 2015 refugee crisis, when more than 1 million people crossed into Europe, mostly in flight from the Syrian civil war, party representatives performed death rites on the riverbank near where the agreement was signed 30 years earlier. They laid a funereal wreath on a star-etched monument to the system of free movement created there.

[Read: Europe’s far right is turning on Trump ]

The corps of mid-level diplomats who created Schengen gave little consideration to its political consequences. “We did our job as junior ministers,” the French representative, Catherine Lalumière, told me as part of research for my book on the history of the agreement. They thought that borderless travel would fulfill promises made by the Treaty of Rome, the founding document of European integration, and advance both the development of a common market and the cultivation of solidarity among member states.

Except there were signs of a potent backlash already at that time. In 1983, the National Front, as Le Pen’s far-right party was then known, came to power for the first time in French municipal elections, in a small town called Dreux. A year after Schengen’s creation, the party entered the national Parliament for the first time, in elections held in 1986. As anti-immigrant populism gained influence in France, the government in Paris helped lead the drafting of Schengen’s implementing convention, trying to pair internal freedom of movement with security at Europe’s external borders. Language about “solidarity” present in the original agreement was nowhere to be found in the 1990 document. Instead, more than half of the convention’s 142 articles dealt with security and the exchange of data necessary to crack down on unwanted immigration of the kind now seen in Spain’s offshore exclave.

The crisis in Ceuta is likely to be contained, and quickly. But if Europe’s reaction to a surge of immigration is to isolate individual states, rather than to use the tools it created to protect freedom and manage human displacement in a globalized world, Schengen really is at risk.

Anthony Fauci Is Not the Villain in This Story

2026-07-31T15:17:00-04:00

The American right sacrificed its supporters to its COVID-era delusions and lies. Right-wing politicians and media influencers disparaged masking. They derided safety advice against indoor gatherings. They spread crazy lies about COVID vaccines once those became generally available. Many conservative Americans who made the mistake of trusting their political and media leaders paid with their life.

Pew Research Center compared the 20 percent of the U.S. population who lived in the country’s most pro-Trump counties with the 20 percent who lived in the most pro-Biden counties. The most pro-Trump counties suffered nearly 70,000 more COVID deaths than the most pro-Biden counties did.

In the face of right-wing resistance, the United States fully vaccinated only about 66 percent of the population by the end of April 2022. Had the U.S. achieved full vaccination within the first 16 months that the shots were available—as was materially feasible—the death rate from COVID could have been cut in half, according to some estimates, and more than 300,000 lives could have been saved.

If you are hunting for a COVID villain or villains, then, there are many beckoning targets. Investigate the crooks who promoted quack remedies such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for profit or plain crackpot mania. Investigate the sources and pathways of anti-vaccine disinformation. Investigate the pattern and funding of Russian support for anti-vaccine disinformation by following the map already provided by the U.S. State Department’s work on the subject. Investigate the response by U.S. public-health agencies, including the CDC, to better prepare for the next pandemic.

But the present Congress is investigating none of that. Instead, a Senate committee has fixed on Anthony Fauci, the physician and pandemic-era chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The Senate obtained his diary—reportedly from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who claims to have found it on a government server—and then, outrageously and gratuitously, published 1,100 pages of it for the world to see.

[Read: The unmaking of Anthony Fauci]

Regarding the many accusations and insinuations hurled at Fauci, the first thing to be said is this: Even if any of them were true, none would have made the slightest difference to the immediate and urgent problem—what to do to save lives from a deadly new virus.

Senator Rand Paul and others want Americans to believe that Fauci was aware of the possibility that the coronavirus was intentionally created in a Chinese lab, even as he insisted in public comments that the virus had a natural origin. He may not have been forthcoming; the scientific verdict remains uncertain. But whatever its origin, the virus really killed people. The U.S. scientific community’s first and supreme job was to protect people. It did. Scientists discovered and developed the COVID vaccines that brought the pandemic to an end. It’s the anti-vaxxers, not the scientific community, who should stand indicted in the light of 2026.

Did scientists, including Fauci, sometimes speak with excessive certainty about the extent of their knowledge in the early weeks of the pandemic? Perhaps. That seems a lesser offense, however, than the president putting American lives at risk by consciously telling lies for personal advantage.

When the pandemic struck, President Trump’s immediate concern was that it might depress the stock market. Trump had started a trade war with China in February 2018. That trade war tumbled U.S. capital markets; at the end of that year, The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. stock indexes had suffered their steepest annual drop since the global economic crisis of 2008. Trump’s priority in 2019 was to negotiate a face-saving exit from his failing trade war. That December, Trump unveiled a “Phase One” deal —but markets remained nervous and skeptical. When reports spread about a lethal outbreak in China, Trump appointed himself chief international cheerleader for the Chinese government. CNN counted 37 separate compliments by Trump to Chinese leaders in the opening months of 2020. That February 7, for example, Trump tweeted: “Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation.” Nothing must interrupt Trump’s hopes for a trade deal that would boost the stock market and thus—he assumed—get him reelected in 2020.

As it became apparent that the virus had escaped China and reached the United States, Trump minimized the danger—although in private conversations with the reporter Bob Woodward, the president revealed that he expected a mass-casualty catastrophe for the United States as early as February 2020. He admitted to Woodward that his deception was intentional: “To be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.” In early March that year, Trump resisted allowing passengers to disembark from a virus-stricken cruise ship because once the people were on U.S. soil, their cases would augment the number of recorded infections. He said he would rather not let them off, because “I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

Trump allies made it explicit that to recognize the danger of COVID was to commit a thought-crime against Trump. Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program on February 24, 2020: “Folks, this coronavirus thing, I want to try to put this in perspective for you. It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus.” He continued, “Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” Trump declared at a White House event at the end of the month that the virus would soon disappear on its own. (Trump reasserted his prediction of spontaneous disappearance repeatedly through the spring and early summer of 2020.) In early March, Trump dismissed COVID as far less deadly than the common flu.

As infections and deaths surged in March and April, two imperatives gripped the MAGA world. The first was to fix blame for the mounting disaster on an external hate object. Far-right websites introduced claims that COVID had originated as a Chinese “bioweapon” in January. By late February, the bioweapon language spread among Republican members of Congress. On March 16, Trump tried to rebrand the coronavirus as “the Chinese virus.”

But “blame China” took MAGA only so far. If China was to blame, whether because of malice or accident, then Trump looked all the greater a fool for having courted China so hard through 2019 and into 2020. And “blame China” did not offer any exit from the shock that was killing Americans, had shut down the U.S. economy, and was threatening to defeat Trump in November.

Thus, the second imperative: Find a fast-and-easy miracle cure. The first candidate was an antimalarial drug, hydroxychloroquine, touted on Fox News nearly 300 times in March and April—and cautiously endorsed by Trump at a press conference on March 19. When hydroxychloroquine flopped, it was replaced as the great right-wing hope by a deworming drug, ivermectin. After the podcaster Joe Rogan contracted COVID in the fall of 2021, he told his fans that ivermectin, vitamins, and other home remedies had cured him.

Trump lost the presidency and—after the failure of his attempted coup d’état—left office in January 2021. By then, vaccines had been developed. Now two new imperatives gripped right-wing America.

The first was to sabotage COVID recovery to do to Joe Biden’s new presidency what someone (but who?) had done to Trump’s. The second was to profit financially and politically from the reservoir of COVID paranoia that had accumulated on the American right.

If the vaccine rollout could be stalled or thwarted altogether, the Biden presidency would be blighted. At the same time, influencers and Republican politicians bidding for followers could use vaccine hesitancy to their personal and career advantage.

The arc of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s COVID response is illustrative. DeSantis began as a highly responsible actor on vaccines. Through the first half of 2021, he promoted vaccination in his state. He argued—correctly, in hindsight—that the state could combine a vaccination program with the abolition of lockdown mandates and an early return to in-person classroom teaching. Florida children went back to school in August 2020—and soon were outperforming their peers in Democrat-governed states that deferred to teacher-union wishes to postpone classroom reopenings.

Sometime over the course of 2021, however, DeSantis seemed to have decided that he could exploit COVID conspiracy thinking to win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. In September 2021, DeSantis appointed the vaccine opponent Joseph Ladapo as Florida’s surgeon general. Although DeSantis prudently accepted the first-round COVID vaccination in spring 2021, he turned evasive when asked months later whether he had taken the recommended booster. “I’m not going to let that be a weapon for people to be able to use. I think it’s a private matter.” DeSantis never quite repudiated his past support for vaccination. But he aligned himself with the ever wilder ideas of vaccination adversaries. In December 2022, DeSantis called for a state grand jury to investigate harms allegedly caused by COVID vaccines.

[Read: What Anthony Fauci didn’t say]

The gathering anti-vaccination movement battened on anti-Semitism, racism, and general looniness. Viral TikTok campaigns in the fall of 2021 promoted the label “pure blood,” implicitly associating unvaccinated status with white-nationalist identity. Republican officeholders generally refrained from endorsing these more extreme fantasies. But Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, among others, still traffics in the false claim that thousands of people have died because of injuries from COVID vaccines.

This is the route that has brought Fauci to the Senate hearing.

Democrats and liberals have their own post-COVID soul-searching to do. Blue states kept schools closed too long. They showed hypocrisy when they pivoted from demanding lockdowns in the spring of 2020 to welcoming mass George Floyd protests in the summer. Their analysis of lockdowns may have underweighted harms, especially to small businesses and otherwise healthy schoolchildren. Continued masking after the advent of vaccines could have enabled anti-social and even criminal behavior. The Biden administration in 2021 and 2022 exploited the genuine need for post-pandemic recovery to pass lavish spending bills that probably accelerated inflation. Americans should, as best as they can, delve deep into the exact degree of Chinese-government culpability for the coronavirus—not because it makes (or would have made) any actionable difference to the COVID response, but because it may serve as guidance for future dealings with China. The fullest obtainable history of COVID will reveal much that Americans need to know about the truthfulness, competence, and danger of the Chinese regime.

Fauci may have misjudged, mishandled, or misstated many particulars. He was a scientist and bureaucrat unaccustomed to—and dazzled by—celebrity. History will judge his actions with more dispassion than the present day can or will. One thing that people should keep in mind, however, is that Fauci was thrust into his pandemic-leadership role because of Trump’s shameful and deadly dereliction of duty. Trump’s record of dishonesty, callousness, and selfishness during the pandemic is a documented reality. The imputations against Fauci are mostly fantasies.

No mistakes by blue America or by the scientific community begin to compare with the brutal indifference to the well-being of Americans—and the betrayal of their own cruelly deceived supporters—that disgraced MAGA and the broader right wing in the pandemic years. Their consciences should be heavy. They seek now to transfer their own burden of guilt onto Fauci. The reckoning is a lie. The transfer is a fraud.

Google Just Ruined One of Its Most Important Tools

2026-07-31T17:36:50-04:00

Earlier today, I used Google Earth to conjure images of terrible things: office buildings on fire, mass destruction in San Francisco, a smoldering crater in place of the Eiffel Tower. I was able to because Google had just decided to integrate its AI image generator, Nano Banana, into the service, which has historically been used by people seeking satellite or aerial imagery of real-world locations.

Just open the site, “pick a spot on the map, and start bringing your ideas to life,” Google wrote in a press release announcing the update some 24 hours ago. So I did.

I was easily able to generate those violent images simply by searching for a location on Google Earth, clicking the “Create image” icon, and typing in a few words. The feature also readily doctored stills of less spectacular, and likely less immediately falsifiable, events: a homeless encampment on the White House lawn, protesters outside the Mar-a-Lago resort, immigrants streaming over the U.S.-Mexico border.

Google initially responded by directing people to check any suspicious images themselves. As fake images generated with this new Google Earth feature began circulating the web, the company stated that it takes “misinformation seriously” and that “every image created with Nano Banana in Google Earth includes the SynthID digital watermark, so if someone is unsure about an image, they can ask the Gemini app or use Lens in Search to see if the image was AI-generated.” At first, Google did not remove or restrict access to the tool. But today, shortly after I reached out with a request for comment, the company reversed course and announced that it is “rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails.”

Google Earth
An AI-generated image of a fabricated explosion at the Mar-a-Lago resort, created with Google Earth

Google Earth
This AI-generated image from Google Earth falsely depicts a plane striking One World Trade Center.

Before it allowed people to create fake imagery, Google Earth was a unique resource for researchers, journalists, and intelligence officials, particularly those studying armed conflict and natural disasters. Satellite and aerial imagery can be used to monitor crop failure or deforestation, the creation of mass graves, and the results of bombing campaigns. Especially in conflict zones and other areas that are hard for people to reach, satellite imagery is a go-to method for establishing some sort of ground truth. After Google Earth rolled out the AI feature, though, one investigative reporter wrote on LinkedIn that the tool could be used to easily and rapidly create images of drone strikes that look “very close to what we’ve seen in Ukraine, Russia, the Middle East, and other war-torn conflict zones.” And instead of requiring malicious actors to find a screenshot and then get around some AI model’s safeguards, Google rolled everything needed for a misinformation farm into one smooth user interface. It took me all of four seconds to generate a rendering of a Trump Hotel on the Gaza Strip.

[Read: The AI industry keeps breaking the internet]

The problem should have been obvious to Google, whose other products already forbid such edits. I was able to create an aerial image on Google Earth of a plane flying into the new World Trade Center building, but when I tried to do this directly through Nano Banana, the tool refused to edit an image of the building to depict a terrorist attack. Indeed, 9/11 and other high-profile events are well-known, even classic, subjects for AI-image trolling.

This is not Google’s first time launching an AI feature, and in particular an AI image-editing feature, without serious safeguards. Last year, the company released an AI shopping tool that allows you to visualize what clothes might look like on your body by uploading personal photos. As my colleague Lila Shroff and I reported at the time, “With little friction, anyone can use the feature to create what are essentially erotic images of celebrities and strangers. Alarmingly, we also discovered that it can do this for minors.” In 2024, Google Gemini was ridiculed for generating images of a racially diverse group of Nazis but not of any white Wehrmacht soldiers. And Google’s most prominent AI feature, the chatbot-powered answers in its flagship search engine, were an utter disaster upon their rollout—the AI overviews told people to eat rocks and gave other potentially dangerous health advice. Only after tremendous public pressure did the company make a substantial change, and two years later, the AI responses in Google Search continue to be inconsistent and unreliable.

Google is, of course, not alone in releasing AI features that have had embarrassing, dangerous, and avoidable consequences. See, for instance, Elon Musk’s Grok generating more than 1 million sexualized images, including of children, over just a few days, or any number of embarrassing errors made by ChatGPT releases throughout the years. Again and again, the AI industry undercuts its rhetoric about safety by launching products with little or no due diligence. If, as every major AI executive has pronounced, this technology really could upend human civilization, their companies should perhaps start taking that responsibility seriously.

The Extras Are Tired

2026-07-31T13:34:39-04:00

Less than a decade ago, when I was working on technology stories, my colleagues and I ran into an issue that I’m pretty sure had not occurred to the people who founded this magazine in 1857: how to style the word influencer, which was an occupation and cultural force, but one just emerging. We weren’t sure that all of our readers would know what one was, and we also didn’t know how exactly we would define the word ourselves. I spent the fall of 2018 sending a lot of emails about whether we needed to encase the word in scare quotes.

Quaint! Many—but not all that many—years later, influencer is very much a real job, no explanation required. As of 2023, 27 million Americans were paid to make online content in one form or another, at least according to one marketing consultant company. Enthusiasm from influencers can turn a random business into a sensation, while their ire can do the opposite. Donald Trump’s White House is full of influencers, but Joe Biden’s courted them too, in apparent recognition of their power. This week, Arizona State University announced that it would begin offering a bachelor’s degree in content creation—influencing by another name—through its journalism school.

In some ways, the influencer industry is more legitimate than it’s ever been. But it has always been precarious, and more than a decade into its existence, it is neither novel enough to be exciting nor established enough to have a real professional code. In an oversaturated market, rage bait is the last sure way to get attention, despite the way it alienates people over the long term. AI is swiftly becoming the dominant way many people get personal-seeming advice about how to live their life, which makes the usefulness of aspirational online content even less apparent than it ever was. And so, although influencers—especially lifestyle influencers—have never been universally respected, they lately seem to be openly reviled.

[Read: What happens when the tradwife dream goes wrong?]

Naturally, much of the influencer backlash lives online. A few months ago, someone asked on Reddit, “What’s an industry that provides zero value to society but makes billions of dollars?” Among the 5,300-plus responses: Ticketmaster, sports-betting companies, multilevel marketing schemes, private prisons, and—several times over—influencers. A hilarious number of people have found internet fame by making content about how much they hate other people who are internet-famous for making content. (“Everyone Is Finally Turning on TONE DEAF Influencers” is the title of one recent video, made by an Australian YouTuber with nearly 300,000 subscribers and a clothing line.)

But the juiciest fights play out in the physical world, which is where influencers very literally bump up against the people who can’t stand them. A few years ago, a coffee shop in Brooklyn banned photography after too many influencers clogged the café with tripods and handheld lights; earlier this month, Indonesia indicated that it would crack down on people creating content for pay while on tourist visas.

Last week, the scene of the debate was a gift shop in Nantucket, an island that has recently been overrun by vacationing influencers, just like Bali, Iceland, and Santorini before it. The store’s operators, evidently fed up with the stream of people filming inside, had a sign made that read No Influencers, hung it up in the store, and posted a picture of it on Instagram. There, it drew the attention of thousands of people, including Paige Paul, who has about 2 million followers across platforms, is married to a famous tennis player, and has been spending time on the island since she was a child. Paul, previously known as Paige Lorenze, declared the sign a misogynistic slight against an industry that is overwhelmingly female. The store’s owner, John Sylvia, said it was meant as a joke for locals, but the sentiment clearly came from an earnest annoyance: “A lot of people are tired of feeling like extras in someone else’s video,” he told New York magazine.

The fight felt freighted. Influencers today are a bit like plastic surgeons, or plumbers: On a societal level, many people sure seem to like what they do—they just don’t necessarily want to be right next to them while they’re doing it.

But influencers are unique in how they seem to be everywhere, particularly in places where people are trying to do things other than be on their phone to watch influencers. Of course we love the game and hate the player: It’s much easier to be annoyed by individuals than by concepts, especially when those individuals are, often, pretty annoying.

[Read: An urgent question for anyone who uses social media]

You’d need to be pretty clueless to not feel a little weird about the online attention economy and all it entails—the vanity; the grift; the slop; the desperation; the calculated intimacy; the endless consumption; the creeping sense that everything and everyone is actually just there to make you feel kind of bad about yourself and then sell you something. Social media can, of course, unite like-minded people, but it can also reward the kind of tribalist reactionaryism that can conflate disliking some women with disliking all women, or make an anti-consumerist folk hero out of a store that sells $2,750 baskets. The industry that Paul and her cohort belong to is unquestionably grim—but the industry isn’t walking around town with a selfie stick. There’s a reason that the sign doesn’t say no influencing, but rather no influencers.

As for the sign: Sylvia’s post was liked more than 10,000 times before it was removed (by Instagram, according to the store); a second one has now been liked even more. “They couldn’t have predicted it would get the traction that it ultimately did,” People magazine wrote of the store in one of many articles about the sign that have popped up online over the past few days.

Sure. I will grant that the future is inherently unpredictable. But it is undeniable that posting the sign online is its own kind of influencing, insofar as it involved leveraging the internet’s focus and wrath for one’s own benefit. (“Came for the friendship baskets, stayed for the shade,” the original post’s caption trolled.) The sign is handsome, and crucially, it is inside the store—if you want to see it up close, you need to go in, past the baskets. Visitors have already started posting the sign on social media, and the store’s Instagram account has added about 8,000 followers, according to an interview that Sylvia’s partner, Jessica Jenkins, did with The New York Times. “It’s come with a lot of drama,” she told the paper. “But it also brings in business.” Any influencer would understand that.

How the Reflecting Pool Vandalism Case Fell Apart

2026-07-31T21:15:00-04:00

As government prosecutors examined the Reflecting Pool to build their case against a three-time Olympic canoeist accused of violently ripping the lining with his bare hands, everything fell apart. They found that damage was consistent all around the pool, even in the middle, “where a vandal would not likely attempt to peel the lining.” This evening, the office of U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro asked to drop the case against David Hearn, whom she had excoriated after his indictment 29 days ago.

In a striking 19-page legal document filed late this afternoon, her office undermined everything that President Trump has been saying about the damage to the Reflecting Pool for the past six weeks, including the claim that vandals had used a box cutter to slash the floor of the pool. “The damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism,” Pirro’s office wrote in a motion to dismiss the case.

Taken as a whole, the court filing acknowledged what has been obvious to anyone who has spent time at the Reflecting Pool in recent weeks and watched the president’s $16.4 million project deteriorate in full view. Almost immediately after its reopening in June, the shallow pool filled with the green algae that the expensive renovation was supposed to have prevented. As park workers rushed to combat the algae, the pool’s sealant began to peel away in chunks. It was surprising to see outlined in legal language how Pirro’s office claims it felt duped. Rather than continue with evidence it acknowledged is not there, it is dropping the case.

“The Trump administration’s case against Davey Hearn should have never been brought,” his legal team—Norm Eisen, Mary Dohrmann, and Steve Levin—said in a statement. “Its dismissal today does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong. The government’s approach was ready, fire, aim. The administration owes Mr. Hearn an apology.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Pirro’s office declined to comment beyond what was in the legal filing.

[Read: The canoeist accused of destroying the Reflecting Pool ]

The filing largely blamed Department of the Interior officials for supplying information that was used to present evidence to a grand jury and obtain an indictment. Only afterward did prosecutors realize that they had been misled, and that Interior officials “provided less than fulsome information.” A large amount of data and documents that Pirro’s office later received “strongly suggest that a rushed and botched installation” is to blame, her office stated.

“These documents indicated a rushed and flawed installation process, with repeated failures of the lining during the installation process, and extensive peeling of the lining throughout the Reflecting Pool,” the filing stated. Eddie Wood—an owner of Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which was paid $14.7 million to line the pool—did not immediately respond to messages. Weather delays hampered installation, the filing stated, and rain meant more delays. Internal notes said that the project was “significantly behind schedule,” which caused further urgency to complete the project before the president’s promised deadline of July 4. A quality-control inspector noted blistering in the finished portions of the liner, requiring further repairs.

A final inspection was done on June 9, the filing stated, and crews cleaned the site. But only two days later, on June 11, an engineer at the National Park Service was alerted to peeling in the lining. The fact that officials were scrambling and identifying problems eight days before Hearn was arrested was likely going to cause legal problems in the case.

An open question remains as to how and whether the project, one of the most high-profile priorities for the president, will be completed. The pool has been drained, and the latest legal filing indicated uncertainty over why exactly the lining failed in the first place—and whether problems will emerge again when water is pumped back in.

I attended Hearn’s court hearings, and they often attracted a crowd of supporters. Some dressed as canoeists; others held signs. At one of his recent hearings, four people wore inflatable-frog costumes. The charges seemed ridiculous to his supporters. But when I recently spoke with Hearn, he told me that the case was hurting his ability to sleep at night. He had once carried the Olympic torch for his country, and he was now worried about being the center of a political firestorm. “It’s unsettling,” Hearn told me, “to feel like I’m being targeted by my government.”

I Love My Emotionally Stunted Friendships

2026-07-31T09:00:00-04:00

This spring, a few weeks before the fishing season began in earnest, I went over to a buddy’s house with a six-pack and a bucket full of beaten-up lures. We sat at his kitchen table, swapping out rusty hooks as we talked about new spots we wanted to try, gear we’d bought over the winter, and the all-important question: When would the first striped bass arrive near us on their annual northward migration?

A few hours in, my friend mentioned something his wife had said before I came over: “You spend so much time with Tyler, but whenever I ask you about his personal life, you don’t know anything about it!” He’d replied, “There’s a lot of fishing to talk about!” We both laughed as he recounted the story. Then we went back to replacing hooks and gabbing about striped bass. There was, in fact, a lot of fishing to talk about.

These sorts of friendships between men—ones that lack personal disclosure and frequent displays of emotion—have gotten a bad rap in recent years. Some critics have made the case that they are a product of toxic masculinity and implicit homophobia. Others claim that such relationships can harm men’s health. Another popular argument alleges that because men do not take responsibility for their own emotional needs, they end up placing additional burdens on the women in their lives, a phenomenon that has been termed “mankeeping.” By contrast, men who break from these trends have been commended for “resisting masculinity,” being “courageous,” and curing themselves of the “disease” of emotional reserve.

The concern about male friendships is understandable. American men are less likely than women to enroll in and graduate from college. They are more likely to say that they have no close friends. They die from deaths of despair—suicide, overdoses, alcoholism—at higher rates than women. But an accurate diagnosis (men don’t have enough friendships) need not be packaged with a more contestable one (men have the wrong types of friendships).

[Read: Friendship, on demand]

To use myself as an example: I have male friends I speak with on the phone multiple times a week, male friends I meet regularly for drinks, male friends I play fantasy football with, and male friends I text about current events. I see my fishing partners almost every day during the season, amounting to hundreds of hours together every year. I feel socially fulfilled. I am among the fortunate 27 percent of men who have six or more close friends. Nearly all of my male friendships, however, might be considered unhealthy according to the standards of what is sometimes called the “new masculinity.”

It is possible that I am repressed, bottled up, too shriveled to realize that I would be better off if I spent more time talking about feelings. But it’s also possible that my emotionally reticent male friendships are fine, actually—and that the people telling men to open up if they want to avoid dysfunctional relationships are pathologizing perfectly normal forms of sociality. The issue, as I see it, is not so much that men need to embrace a different style of friendship, but that men need more opportunities to have the kinds of friendships that they generally gravitate toward in the first place.

An undercurrent in much of the criticism of male friendship is that men should relate to one another in the same ways that women tend to. Sometimes this judgment is merely implied, but sometimes it’s explicit. A recent New Yorker review, for example, lauded the television series DTF St. Louis for presenting a world in which “straight men could access, without shame, the kind of emotional and physical closeness that is generally the province of close female friendships.”

This impulse, says Geoffrey Greif, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland’s School of Social Work who has studied male friendships, is misguided. “Men’s friendships don’t need to look like women’s friendships,” he told me. Indeed, researchers in psychiatry and other fields have long observed meaningful—but not necessarily troubling—differences in male and female friendships and emotional lives. Greif has observed that many men and women construct their friendships in distinct ways, for example. Whereas female friendships are frequently “face-to-face,” prioritizing intimate communication, male friendships are more likely to be “shoulder-to-shoulder,” centered on shared labor or hobbies.

Thomas Yarrow, an anthropology professor at Durham University, in England, offers a case study in these tendencies. After going through a divorce five years ago, Yarrow found that the advice he received—go to therapy, share your feelings with friends, talk it out—didn’t suit him. He ended up joining a group of male hobbyists who spent their weekends restoring heritage railways in the British countryside—an experience he wrote about in an ethnographic paper published this year in the journal American Anthropologist. The work was physical and solution-oriented but did not lend itself to revealing conversations with his fellow volunteers. “Let’s face it,” one man told the group. “We’re just not that into emotions.”

Yarrow found that the men nevertheless had ways of supporting one another—and him. He told me that at the railway, he didn’t talk about his divorce. Instead, “I did something that made me feel good about myself. And someone would grunt and make me a cup of tea.” He suspected that the other men could tell that “something wasn’t quite right,” but they didn’t say much to him about it. Yarrow appreciated this restraint: “At least in that period of my life,” he told me, “that seemed to be what I needed.”

[Read: It’s your friends who break your heart]

Activity-centered friendships can easily slide into a form of escapism, of course. Not all problems can be solved. Some can only be talked about, endured, mourned, and accepted. Friends can give much-needed emotional support during life’s most difficult moments. Still, like Yarrow, I value my activity-oriented friendships because they allow me to immerse myself, however briefly, in a world where the central challenges I face are discrete and readily addressable. The problems I think about at work—the crisis of American education, political dysfunction, the intrusion of technology into once-sacred spheres of everyday life—do not admit quick fixes. At home, the ones I confront are likewise stimulating and meaningful, but also open-ended. Raising children is an 18-year proposition (at least), and what “success” looks like is nebulous.

My hobbies and the friendships they sustain offer more manageable problems: Where are the striped bass tonight, and what do they want to eat? They also provide a refuge from the therapeutic tendencies of American culture, with its focus on introspection and “working on yourself.” At their best, such friendships can encourage a kind of public-spiritedness, a way of investing in a shared outer world, instead of seeing one’s own private psychodramas as the center of social gravity.

The challenge is that these types of friendships can require “social scaffolding,” as Richard Reeves, the founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, noted in a 2023 essay. If male friendship thrives on shared interests, then opportunities to engage in those activities need to exist. Various trends in American life over the past generation, however, have limited those opportunities. Churches, clubs, civic institutions, and public spaces are in decline. Jobs that take the form of staring, alone, at computers rather than engaging collectively in physical labor are on the rise. Hobbies are getting more and more expensive, and screens are colonizing the time once taken up by IRL activities.

I’m very aware that my friendships are strong in part because I live in a place with relatively good social infrastructure, and I make enough money to maintain the leisure activities my friendships are organized around. This is the real crisis of American male friendship—not that it’s too emotionally stunted, but that too many men are deprived of access to the conditions that make it flourish. That flourishing can take many forms. In my case, it’s sitting at a kitchen table, dropping spent hooks into an old plastic bucket, and discussing not feelings but fish.

This May Be Trump’s Biggest Error in the Iran War

2026-07-31T08:00:00-04:00

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For 2,500 years, military commanders have heeded the injunction of Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military strategist: Know your enemy. Yet the Trump administration’s greatest mistake in the Iran war may be its persistent failure to understand Tehran’s priorities and motivations—and how much punishment the regime is willing to absorb to prevail.

Iran’s decision Tuesday to launch ballistic missiles at U.S. troops in Jordan was a prime example. It befuddled Washington. U.S. officials had come to expect that their actions would drive the war, and Iran would react. But here was Tehran, escalating matters just after the United States had suspended its 13-day barrage of strikes against Iranian defenses and infrastructure. U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for military operations in the Middle East, described the move as a “surprise attack.”

Tehran characterized the missile strikes as self-defense against what the regime saw as the Trump administration’s broadening of the war. Around the same time as the Iranian attack, U.S. and Saudi forces launched joint strikes on Iran-backed militias in Iraq, Riyadh’s first publicly acknowledged military strikes of the conflict. Turki al-Maliki, a Saudi defense-ministry spokesperson, said in a statement that the militias had attacked the kingdom’s oil facilities and that Riyadh reserved the right to respond “at the appropriate time and place.”

This week’s events hardly represented the first time that the two sides had misread each other’s intentions. The convoluted and complicated war has swung almost weekly between peace overtures and fighting. Those misinterpretations appear set to continue, especially amid signs that others may be dragged into the fight. Egyptian officials earlier this week confirmed that a drone had set two gas vessels ablaze at Damietta, a port city on the Mediterranean near the Suez Canal. No group has claimed responsibility, but the attack raised fears that Iran has expanded its list of nations to target.

The memorandum of understanding that Washington and Tehran signed in the middle of last month quickly devolved into one of the war’s signature misunderstandings. The very first clause of the agreement promised to end the fighting, but the two sides had fundamentally different interpretations of their obligations.

The memorandum did not end the dispute over the Strait of Hormuz but rather, it papered over it. Washington believed it had secured 60 days of open, toll-free commercial navigation. Tehran read the agreement as preserving its authority to manage traffic through the waterway. As the dispute erupted, some Iranian officials believed that the U.S. had purposely drafted a vague agreement to trigger a violation that could be used as a predicate to resume strikes, a person familiar with their thinking told us. And the U.S. sought to use financial incentives, such as sanctions waivers and investment, to entice a government that was preoccupied with the assassination of its supreme leader. Was anyone really surprised that the pact fell apart? Certainly not President Trump, who professed that he “couldn’t care less” after each side had walked away.

[Read: War by any other name]

Even before the war began, in late February, the two governments were talking past each other. The U.S. believed that Iran was fragile and the regime susceptible to collapse after nationwide protests. The regime believed that nothing short of its total capitulation to U.S. demands would prevent a war. Trump ordered the war to begin while talks were still under way, and his administration believed that the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on the conflict’s first day would quickly be followed by the collapse of the state. Instead, five months in, the regime remains intact and seems to have enough confidence to endure any U.S. response.

This could put the two sides on a path to escalation, each remaining convinced that more military pressure will force the other to abandon its objectives. “America’s calculation is that escalation would lead to surrender. Iran’s calculation is that escalation would lead to deterrence,” Vali Nasr, a professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told us.

Trump promised on Fox News earlier this week to “beat the fucking shit out of them.” Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, meanwhile, said that the base in Jordan would remain a target because “as long as threats against Iran persist, resistance will persist.” (The Jordanian military said that all five missiles fired Tuesday were intercepted.) But neither side seems able to answer the question that matters most: What if escalation doesn’t work?

Escalation is “a means to an end, but we don’t know what the end is,” Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli intelligence officer who specializes in Iran, told us.

Part of the confusion may stem from the fact that Trump himself appears to be of (at least) two minds about how he wants to proceed. He has vacillated between backing more military action and giving peace talks a chance. The U.S. cannot begin to understand its enemy if it has yet to settle on its own aims—or how to achieve them. Trump has repeatedly sought to back away from the conflict, but during a meeting with senior advisers last Friday, he seriously considered ramping up attacks. He opted not to, but the plans remain on his desk, a senior White House official told us. A pause in U.S. strikes that began Saturday was over by midweek following Iran’s attack on the base in Jordan.

The U.S. is seeking to understand an enemy that is changing and adapting. Iran appears intent on reintroducing the element of military surprise, driven by the belief that it can outlast Trump and that negotiations no longer present a viable path. The regime operates differently under its new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who replaced his late father. Iran is no longer content to let proxies across the region fight for its interests. It wants to use its missiles and drones to fight for its long-term security. And it is willing to endure strikes by the U.S. to the point that American military commanders are running short on viable targets it can hit to stop attacks on the strait.

“They are willing to sacrifice themselves and the public for the future of the regime,” Citrinowicz said. He doesn’t believe that Iran wants to fight an endless war any more than Trump does. But Tehran thinks Trump faces constraints, including the economic damage stemming from the strait’s continued closure and the tepid response of Gulf States. Iran’s position, in contrast, has been strengthened by support from the Houthis in Yemen, who recently began targeting Saudi interests and threatened to close the Bab al-Mandab Strait to commercial shipping. Iranian leaders, Citrinowicz said, “believe at the end of the day, they are able to shape the situation on the ground to their own benefit.”

A number of influential MAGA allies—including Laura Ingraham and Steve Bannon—have publicly and privately called for the White House to rapidly wind down the war, believing that the conflict has demoralized Trump’s base and will hurt the GOP in the midterms. Republicans facing tough reelection fights have expressed fears to the West Wing that an escalation in the conflict would lead to even higher gas prices, which could doom their November chances. Yet at same time, Persian Gulf allies have made clear that they find Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz untenable—especially if the regime charges tolls. That would, in effect, mean that the same countries battered by Tehran’s missiles would be stuck paying for Iran to rebuild.

Perhaps as a result, Washington has lurched among military, diplomatic, and economic strategies, hoping that one, or some combination of them, would compel Tehran to yield. Yesterday, the Trump administration announced a new round of sanctions that aim to put economic pressure on Iran by targeting companies and tankers tied to its maritime trade. The U.S. also hopes that an escalation of military strikes will do enough to tip the regime either into collapse or capitulation. But even the threat of escalation can come with a cost: Brent crude climbed nearly 8 percent after Trump’s profanity-laden remarks, briefly breaking $91 a barrel yesterday.

Officials told us that Trump was noncommittal when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during his Tuesday visit to the White House, urged the president to ramp up attacks on Iran (among the ideas being considered is to strike the land routes that Iran has been using to resupply its forces). Netanyahu expressed deep skepticism that Iran would ever agree to a reasonable peace deal. U.S. officials believe that some factions in the Iranian power structure favor making a deal, but whether they have the authority to do so is not clear. The officials also believe that Iran’s economy will continue to weaken to a point at which Tehran will be forced into a deal.

For now, there are no good options for Trump and there is no clarity as to how two sides in a widening war can find off-ramps, particularly if they continue to misinterpret each other’s actions.

[Graeme Wood: The U.S. is subtly shifting its Iran strategy]

Trump could declare victory, noting that the U.S. and Israel killed the ayatollah, and vow to attack again should Iran resume its quest for a nuclear weapon. Or he could try to return to the terms of the MOU. But the administration would likely have to sign on to some aspects of Iran’s interpretation of it, such as its retention of control of the Strait of Hormuz. Or Trump can escalate, hitting Iran’s missile capabilities to make the targeting of U.S. bases and Gulf partners more difficult. But he would have to do so at a rate faster than Iran can reconstitute its forces. And he faces political opposition to a more prolonged conflict: A CBS News/YouGov poll released earlier this week found that a majority of Americans are not optimistic about the war and feel that its objectives are not clear. More than two-thirds of respondents said the Trump administration should end the war now.

Both sides seem to agree on one thing: There is no end in sight to the war. U.S. defense officials told us that they believe conflict will continue into 2027. Iran is signaling that it plans for a fight even longer than that.

The Incoherence of the Iran Hawks

2026-07-31T16:23:01-04:00

Speaking to reporters today about the war with Iran, President Trump delivered an inspiring pep talk praising the courage and resilience of a brave nation retaining its fighting spirit in the face of adversity. Alas, the subject of his praise was the Iranians.

“Their entire navy is laying at the bottom of the sea,” he said. “They had 200 airplanes—they’re all gone. Every one. They don’t have one airplane. They had anti-aircraft weaponry, very good, but it didn’t work, and it’s all gone. Their radar is all gone. Their leaders are all gone. Everything is all gone! But they’ll fight onward.”

It was probably the most Churchillian rhetoric Trump has managed to muster throughout the entire conflict. Iran shall fight on the beaches, they shall fight on the landing grounds, they shall fight in the fields and in the streets, they shall fight in the hills; they shall never surrender.

This is not just a mystifying rhetorical move, but also a peculiar analysis of the military situation. If Iran’s military is gone, how exactly is it continuing to fight? An extant military of some kind is generally seen as a precondition for waging war.

[Read: This may be Trump’s biggest error in the Iran war]

Trump’s comments might be chalked up to spin or confusion. But his contradictory appraisal of Iran’s capabilities turns out to be very similar to the doctrinaire assessment of leading Iran-war hawks.

Marc Thiessen, the former Bush-administration speechwriter and frequent Trump adviser, recently wrote a Washington Post column that, having been published the evening before the president’s remarks, seemed to anticipate Trump’s case for why the war has been a success and must continue.

“After the Iranian regime’s ballistic missile attack on U.S. troops in Jordan, the time has come for President Donald Trump to take a good, hard look at the advice he is getting on Iran—what has worked, what has failed and who is responsible for those successes and failures,” he begins. This is an audacious way to frame the question, given that Thiessen’s own advice helped bring Trump to the current impasse. But his argument is that the hawks’ strategy in Iran has actually worked, and needs only to be followed a bit longer to produce victory. Thiessen praises the military’s “stunning success on the battlefield—entombing Iran’s nuclear material, destroying more than 85 percent of its defense industrial base, sinking its navy, grounding its air force, decimating its ballistic missile capability, annihilating its conventional military forces and imposing a crippling blockade on its ports.”

Alas, Trump tried to turn this victory into a negotiated deal. Big mistake: “Result? Iran fired five ballistic missiles at a U.S. military base in Jordan,” Thiessen writes. The same Iranian military that Trump had already destroyed took advantage of his cessation of hostilities to attack us.

This seems to suggest that destroying Iran’s military does not mean that it will stay destroyed. Indeed, a recent Wall Street Journal report found that Iran has quickly rebuilt much of its infrastructure and military capability. The same principle would imply that “entombing Iran’s nuclear material” is useful only if Iran cannot dig it back out again, which it likely can. The natural conclusion is that bombing Iranian military installations has limited, reversible effects, and requires endless application.

No, no, no, Thiessen counters. “No one is advocating indefinite war,” he proceeds to argue. “What many are advocating is completing the military plan that was paused in April when the ceasefire took effect—executing the final few weeks of the campaign the U.S.-Israeli combined force was carrying out.” Just a few more weeks of bombing will finish the job permanently.

Those of us who closely study Thiessen’s columns for clues as to what Trump is likely to say next will notice something familiar here. After the April cease-fire, Thiessen wrote, “U.S. military commanders had about two weeks’ worth of targets left,” and allowing just two more weeks of strikes would leave Iran “fully crippled militarily.” He repeated this claim at the end of that month. “If he decides to resume major combat operations and finish the job, Trump is just 14 days away from a decisive victory in Iran,” he wrote.

[Read: A tragedy in Iran might persuade Hegseth to change course]

The cease-fire has since crumbled, and Trump has had more than three weeks to attack remaining targets. Yet now the final destruction of Iran’s military is “a few weeks” away.

One barrier to once again finally re-destroying the Iranian military is that the United States’ capacity to sustain combat operations is finite. A week ago, journalists reported that Trump held back from carrying out bigger strikes owing to a shortage of munitions, especially interceptors to defend against the inevitable Iranian counterattack. United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz went on NBC’s Meet the Press this past Sunday to insist that this was untrue. The military “has everything that it needs to conduct this campaign as effectively as it needs to be,” he insisted. Also, he added, “the people that are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.”

Threatening prison time for people who leak information that he claims isn’t even real about the American military seems like overkill. But when you are as passionate about operational security as Waltz, no measure is excessive. And he seems to have transposed upon our military the Schrödinger’s-cat state of military preparedness that we have projected onto our adversary, depleted yet dangerous. The two combatants, in their paradoxical states, appear to be well matched.

Later in Trump’s remarks, a reporter asked him if Americans should expect Iranian attacks to continue. Called upon to inspire his countrymen to endure ongoing sacrifice, he replied: “They’ll get weaker. They’ll get a little stronger, maybe, now. But they’ll get weaker, and then they peter out. Uh, yeah, sure. I think so.” Churchill could not have put it better.

What the Fauci Diary Reveals About Washington

2026-07-31T09:00:00-04:00

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

Meeting your heroes can be demoralizing. Reading more than 1,000 pages of their personal diary can be worse. Or, alternatively, totally riveting, at least in that rubbernecking-at-a-car-crash kind of way—the car crash, in this case, being one of the most storied careers in the history of American science.

That’s been my takeaway after cringing my way through the pandemic-era musings of Dr. Anthony Fauci, which the former chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases inexplicably saved on a government server.

Predictably, Fauci’s diaries made their way into the hands of one of mainstream science’s most notorious mean girls: Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Also predictably, hundreds of pages of Fauci’s entries came to light—or were leaked to light—just in time to embarrass the embattled doctor before his appearance on Wednesday in front of Paul’s Senate committee that’s investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. In response to taunts and baiting questions from Senate Republicans, Fauci repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

If only he’d shown the same discretion with his diary.

A generous reading of the compilation is that Fauci, long seen as a paragon of selfless, nonpartisan government service, was attempting to catalog the mounting disbelief he felt during a surreal period in the nation’s history—and certainly in his own history. “Brewery in Georgia named a beer after me,” he wrote in one entry from April 2020. “Bobbleheads of me being made in massive quantities in China.” He refers to “stories of granmothers who have crushes” on him (the misspelling is Fauci’s) and to petitions to vote him “Sexiest Man Alive.”

[Read: The unmaking of Anthony Fauci]

But whatever Fauci’s intentions might have been, the document has become an instant classic in the genre of bubble-world anthropology that confirms everyone’s worst suspicions about Washington being a cesspool of pampered, preening, and panting self-regard. More than a decade ago, I wrote a book that tried to explain to readers, essentially, what Beltway people are really like when the cameras aren’t rolling and the talking points are tossed aside. If I were working on that book now, Fauci’s diary would be a godsend.

His saucer-eyed romp behind the curtain renders a not-especially flattering impression of the people allegedly in charge of our country during a precarious time. Foremost, this includes the diarist himself, as Fauci becomes more and more high on his own supply of Washington adulation, at a time when COVID death rates were soaring across the country.

Here are extracts from a few of Fauci’s entries—typos and all—that I copied and pasted for posterity, in no particular order.

July 29, 2021

Went to a book signing party add the home of Adrienne Arsh. The book is “I alone can fix it “ bye Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig. The Super a list from Washington DC was there. It was a little bit uncomfortable since I was wearing a mask with the new guidance from the CDC and almost everyone else was without a mask. When they saw me with a mask , several of them put a mask on.

October 17, 2021

Chris and I went to a wonderful brunch over Adrienne Arsh’s home. The brunch was in honor of Christine LaGarde. the typical Washington a list was there. It was a fun brunch since Adrienne is such a wonderful and generous person. I tend to shy away from these functions since everyone gathers around me wanting to take photos and telling me what a wonderful job I’m doing.

For the record, I too go to a lot of Washington brunches and book parties—yet I have never met Fauci. Am I not getting invited to the right “Super a list” parties? Whom do I talk to about this?

November 5, 2021

Another extraordinary Day !!! I attended the Funeral services of General Colin L Powell at the Washington National Cathedral at the invitation of the Powell family.

He added:

On the wayout General Mark Milley came up to me put his arms around my shoulder and said “the only person who was getting his balls kicked more than me in Washington is you “. I responded by saying “no shit”. he then responded by saying “Fuck ‘em”.

November 11, 2022

Exciting day. In preparation for the installing of my “living portrait’ by Hugo Crosthwaite into the National Portrait Gallery tomorrow, there was a gala celebration at the home of Jeff Bezos … His home is an enormous mansion that goes on and on.

November 16, 2022

Terrific event last evening. I was honored at the home of the French Ambassador to the United States … where I received the Pasteur Medal commemorating the bicentenary of Louis Pasteur's birth in 1822.

May 5, 2020

OMG! This is really getting nutsy. Sally Quinn evidently wrote a book some time ago about a character that is me.

July 1, 2020

Had dinner over Jake Tapper and Jen Tapper’s home in DC. Terrific couple. Friendship building.

April 17, 2021

Dana Bash sent me a text: “I just watched the whole Jordan thing. Again, you’re a better man than I…. As our friend Wolf Blitzer said to me yesterday – no one would have blamed you if you said simply “Mr. Jordan, go f--- yourself””

Presumably, this referred to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio. Also, presumably, Fauci refrained from telling him this.

June 5, 2020

I made favorable comments today on CNBC about vaccines and decreasing of # of cases and the stock market went up by 3%. I should (but will not) contact the POTUS and say that he told me on Tuesday that my remarks blunted the increase in the Stock Market and cost him “one trillion fucking dollars”. And so now my remarks actually made him “4 trillion fucking dollars”, and so he owes me $3 trillion.

August 20, 2020

Becoming really nice pen pal with Joan Baez.

This appears to be true. Fauci says she texted him later that year on his birthday (“HAPPY FUCKING BIRTHDAY AND MANY MORE”). The onetime “Queen of Folk” also called Donald Trump a “miserable fuck,” according to the diary, and told Fauci that he should be honored by the president’s attacks on him.

October 5, 2020

POTUS called me up from his hospital room at Walter Reed. 1:08 PM. He rambled on about the suite he was in and how expensive it was to build it. Says it is better than the White House. Asked me if I have ever been there. I told him about the time I went there to help in the treatment of President Nixon’s pneumonia.

November 4, 2021 (“Call from Barack Obama”)

Obama said That Donald Trump junior is “A fucking moron”. He apologized for using crude language but then went on to say that Donald Trump was a hopeless idiot who was a pathologic liar.

August 14, 2020

Joan Baez sent me a beautiful note this evening.

Hi Tony,

Just a thought..

People have told me over and over how important I was I’m their lives..I never really either believed them or paid them much attention. But maybe too much modesty, false or otherwise, is as silly as blowing ones own trumpet to loudly.

Fauci and Baez had not yet met in person at that point. But Baez invited him to attend a May 2021 ceremony in which she received the “Kennedy Center medallion for lifetime performance as a performing artist.”

[Gal Beckerman: The revelatory cringe of Anthony Fauci]

“Finally, I got to meet her in person after the year-long building up of our friendship via texts and phone calls,” Fauci gushed to his diary. “She is an absolutely amazing, warm an endearing person, and our friendship was cemented last night as it became clear that we really were, as I said, ‘meant for each other ‘.”

I have questions!

August 30, 2020

Spoke with Joan Baez today – She wants to use the portrait of me [one Baez had painted] to advertise the need for science and adhering to public health messages. In essence, she wants to use the portrait in PSAs. She really is wonderful.

October 1, 2020

Hope Hicks is infected!!!

November 17, 2021

I went to a book party last night for Jonathan Karl’s new book about Trump. It took place at the Cafe Milano. The place was incredibly crowded and I was almost forced to take my mask off for 2/3 of the time I was there since they were serving drinks and people were talking and taking selfies. I was totally swamped all night by people wanting to say hello, shake my hands, and take pictures with me. I could not get away from it . Although some people may think that this is great to have people treat you like Elvis Presley , but it was really very unnerving.

Unnerving indeed. Reading Fauci’s dispatches left me with a strong sense of returning to a grainy dream state. How did we survive that time? Did this really happen? And did Barbra Streisand really call Fauci’s cellphone?

Yes, she did. “Had great call with Barbra Streisand,” Fauci wrote on February 23, 2021. She consulted him on a medical issue. “We then stared discussing life in general,” he continued (more friendship-building). “I told her that I work listening to her songs on ALEXA. She really did not know what ALEXA was. I accidentally butt called her later in the evening and she said that she was going to call me anyway.”

Celebrities: They’re just like us!

“I brought the phone over to ALEXA and asked to play ‘Songs by Barbra Streisand’,” Fauci added. “When the song came on loud and clear, she started laughing and absolutely loved it!”

Embarrassing as this all may be, a lot of high-level government officials insist on keeping diaries in which they chronicle their high-level government activities. This happens even, or especially, when these activities involve sensitive matters. And if these diaries become public (which seems to occur with some frequency), they can yield irresistible morsels for history’s sake. Or, at the very least, gossip’s sake.

Climate Change Is Moving Mountains

2026-07-31T10:20:25-04:00

On geological timescales, the Earth is a dynamic place. Tectonic plates shift. Continents move. Mountains rise and fall. But during humanity’s tenure on Earth, the ground beneath our feet has largely stayed put.

That stable period may now be at an end. Climate change began in the atmosphere, where greenhouse gases accumulate, trapping heat from the sun. The planet’s waters reacted—precipitation patterns shifted, glaciers and ice caps began melting, the ocean generously sponged up heat and carbon dioxide.

When the Earth’s waters shift, so does solid ground. Now warming is destabilizing land across the planet, and geology is becoming a real-time science. In more and more places, the floor is giving way.

In Alaska, Norway, Greenland, Chile, and New Zealand, as well as across the European Alps, mountains are crumbling. As glaciers retreat, some at unprecedented rates, they leave behind unstable cliffs that were once supported by ice. In 2023, one collapsed into a fjord in Greenland and generated a 660-foot wave that sent ripples through the Earth detected on monitoring stations worldwide for nine days. In Alaska last year, a landslide-generated tsunami struck in a fjord frequented by cruise ships. In Switzerland the same year, part of a mountain glacier detached entirely, burying the village of Blatten in a cataclysmic landslide. In the past decade or so, scientists have collected enough dramatic examples of this phenomenon to suggest that they’re clearly not isolated incidents, but part of a pattern linking the loss of glaciers with landslide risk.

And those landslides could get larger. When the glaciers melted after the last glacial maximum, about 20,000 years ago, the landslides that followed were orders of magnitude larger than any we’ve seen in recorded history. But because some of today’s glaciers have persisted in the landscape longer than those of that glacial period did, they’ve had time to carve steep, unstable cliffs. This means that “we haven’t seen the upper bounds of landslides yet,” Kristian Svennevig, a geologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, told me. In Arctic regions in the near future, the magnitude of landslides could exceed any scientists know of in the geological record.

Along with glaciers, permafrost holds mountains together at high altitudes and latitudes worldwide. It, too, is in retreat, as scientists predicted in the 1980s and as has now become apparent across the Arctic reaches. In the Brooks Range, home of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, long-frozen mountains have started to spontaneously deform and collapse within the past few decades or so, as their permafrost glue gives way. “We’re pushing these mountains into a state of disequilibrium, where they need to adjust their slopes in order to match the climate of today,” the independent Alaskan geologist Bretwood Higman told me. They’re essentially too steep for this warmer temperature regime.

“As a geologist, I’ve found it shocking how widespread the sudden increase in landslide activity is,” Higman said. When you’re used to thinking on scales that span tens of thousands of years, to see these changes play out over human lifetimes—“it’s very dramatic.”

The thawing of permafrost in mountainous regions already threatens infrastructure. Denali National Park is close to finishing a $100 million bridge that will span a moving permafrost landslide. In the Brooks Range, engineers are pumping refrigerant underground to refreeze permafrost and stabilize pipelines. And mountains aren’t the only land giving way. Cement-solid Arctic ground is turning into bogs. Communities across Alaska have had to relocate as their homes, fuel tanks, sewage lagoons, and garbage dumps tip, spill, or sink. Elsewhere, as massive underground chunks of ancient ice melt, the surrounding earth collapses into the voids left behind, buckling roads and swallowing buildings. In Siberia, once-trapped methane explodes from under permafrost to cause 100-foot craters.

“When permafrost thaws, it changes everything,” Sue Natali, an Arctic-climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, told me. Natali and her colleagues are seeing the thaw speed up too. “That is not a maybe thing, and it is not a local thing. It is a pan-Arctic thing,” she said.

Climate is also shifting the land at lower latitudes. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, which means more frequent and extreme rainfall events. In recent years, scientists have begun modeling how this kind of rain will increase landslide risk, and linking individual events to storms made more dramatic by climate change. “Harder, more intense, longer-duration rainfall has a greater possibility to generate landslides,” Jonathan Godt, who leads the United States Geological Survey’s landslide-hazards program, told me. These kinds of debris flows and mudslides now threaten more communities. In North Carolina, Hurricane Helene triggered more than 2,000 landslides in a week. In California, slopes wiped clean by logging and drought-fueled wildfires slough away after heavy rain—one mudslide in Montecito destroyed 100 homes and killed 23 people in 2018. Landslides already cause $20 billion in damage globally, and that cost will only climb with climate change.

Already, scientists have been able to catalog the effects of melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, and extreme rain. Other dramatic consequences of shifting precipitation patterns—volcanic eruptions and earthquakes—are only just coming into focus.

More than a decade ago, in his book Waking the Giant, the University College London volcanologist Bill McGuire compiled decades of paleoclimate research to predict that climate change could lead to more volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. An increase in volcanic and tectonic activity would be a natural response to the end of a glacial period. For thousands of years now, the Earth’s crust, which was weighted down by ice, has been slowly bouncing back. That process releases pressure from long-subdued faults and volcanoes, such as those in Iceland. Human-caused climate change is only accelerating these processes. And water, whether from extreme rainfall or glacial melt, can percolate in cracks underground to increase pressure on rock and reduce friction along faults, triggering both earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

Last year, researchers in Switzerland and France found some of the clearest evidence so far that glacial melt could indeed be affecting seismic hazards in high-altitude regions. After a period of intense glacial melt in 2015, a series of small quakes struck the Grandes Jorasses on Mont Blanc Massif, on the border of France and Italy; the probability of a 3.0-magnitude earthquake rose by 10 times, Toni Kraft, a seismologist at the Swiss Seismological Service at ETH Zurich and one of the authors of a related paper, told me. These quakes are still small, but they could trigger rockfall events that are already on the rise across the Alps.

Falk Amelung, a geoscientist at the University of Miami, has also argued—somewhat controversially—that climate-driven extreme rainfall might have led to the dramatic 2018 eruption of Hawaii’s Kīlauea volcano. Scientists have not been able to find an obvious triggering mechanism for the eruption, and Amelung hypothesized that rainfall had infiltrated the volcano’s edifice and increased pore pressure in the rock, kilometers down, to the highest rates in almost 50 years. USGS volcanologists were unconvinced: A link between heavy precipitation and some types of volcanic activity is widely accepted, but some scientists still reject the theory that an eruption such as Kīlauea’s could be caused by water reaching the magma below. If Amelung and others in his camp are right, though, as many as 700 volcanoes could be at risk of dome explosions and flank collapse over the next 80 years, he calculated.

“The system must be heavily stressed in a way that it’s close to breaking anyway,” he told me. “And then this small stress change due to water brings it over the edge.”

During Earth’s long history, small perturbations have caused millennia-long swings between hothouse and icehouse conditions. The amount of carbon dioxide that we have pumped into the atmosphere, at a higher rate than ever before in Earth’s geological history, is a pretty significant perturbation, which then causes its own significant perturbations. “The crust is not isolated. It’s always connected. The climate, the fluid layers, the solid layer—you cannot separate them,” Benedikt Soja, a geoscientist at ETH Zurich, told me. The atmosphere, ocean, and land are interacting systems, and their fragile equilibrium is reacting together to the stress we’ve put on them.

Trump Cares More About His Slush Fund Than Todd Blanche

2026-07-31T10:44:00-04:00

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Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Donald Trump blared yesterday on social media, “is a STAR, and everyone knows it!” But the rest of the presidential missive told a very different story. Blanche’s nomination to run the Justice Department has stalled over objections from outgoing Republican Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn to a settlement between Trump and the IRS that would create a $1.8 billion slush fund for rewarding Trump’s political supporters, including those convicted of crimes on January 6, 2021. Tillis and Cornyn have demanded that Blanche deliver written guarantees that the fund would not proceed, and they remain unsatisfied with what they’ve received. Although a deal may still be struck, Trump wrote in his post that he had “no objection to temporarily withdrawing” Blanche’s nomination “and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office.”

The senators met with Blanche last night and could still waver, and Trump could still change his mind, but the president this morning posted a strong defense of the slush fund and attacked Cornyn. “John Cornyn never had a problem with the so called ‘Fund,’ which will not benefit me, but rather the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed by the Crooked Joe Biden Administration, until after I decided to Endorse and Support his Republican Primary opponent in Texas,” he wrote. “Todd Blanche, a good man, should be immediately approved as U.S. Attorney General.”

This moment of peril for Blanche’s nomination reveals three things: First, dissident Republicans really can push Trump around if they want to; second, Trump (as usual) seemingly has no strategy or contingency plan to save the nomination; and third, Trump apparently cares more about preserving the slush fund than he does about Todd Blanche.

If Trump really valued Blanche, then reaching an agreement with Cornyn and Tillis would be easy: He’d just have to give up on the fund. Not only is the planned payout politically toxic, but courts may prohibit it anyway. The fund emerges from a settlement in a case filed by Trump against the federal government over a leak of his personal tax returns. In exchange for dropping the case, the government agreed to grant Trump and his family immunity from IRS audits and to create a $1.8 billion pot of money for supposed victims of a “weaponized” federal government, such as people prosecuted for their role in the January 6 insurrection.

The fund is an abomination for several reasons, as my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote when it was announced. The deal was struck between Trump as plaintiff and Trump as head of the executive branch—an arrangement a federal judge later said is improper. It gives the president an opportunity to direct taxpayer money to his allies and supporters—and specifically people who attempted to subvert the 2020 election and rioted at the U.S. Capitol.

One federal judge, Leonie Brinkema, is currently blocking the fund’s creation, and another, Kathleen Williams, concluded that the settlement was improper self-dealing and harshly criticized Blanche’s role in negotiating the deal as acting attorney general. Blanche himself told senators that the money wouldn’t be paid out, but as my colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick reported in June, administration officials said privately that it wasn’t really dead. That helps explain why Brinkema requested a sworn statement from Blanche about the demise of the fund, and why Cornyn (who lost a GOP primary in May) and Tillis (who decided to retire) have said they want written assurances from Blanche.

By announcing that he would rather pull Blanche’s nomination, even temporarily, than allow Blanche or any other administration official to provide such assurances, Trump has implicitly confirmed that he has no intention of letting go of the fund. His statement also undercuts Blanche’s credibility with senators because it shows that Blanche was either not telling the truth or was making a promise he couldn’t keep when he said earlier that the fund wouldn’t proceed.

The idea of renominating Blanche later on may well be a feint anyway, since Trump hates to ever admit defeat, but it’s peculiar. Trump’s unstated premise is that he will have a more favorable Senate in 2027, which is questionable. Cornyn and Tillis are currently preventing Blanche’s nomination from advancing out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and neither man will be on that panel come January. But most forecasts suggest that Democrats will gain ground in the Senate in the midterm elections, and possibly even win a narrow edge in the chamber. Either way, Blanche will still have a hard time getting the necessary votes for confirmation next year.

That is especially true because Trump’s power over Republican senators appears to be on the wane. For years, senators have trash-talked Trump privately, but meekly followed him in public. Tillis and especially Cornyn made their hesitations about Blanche public weeks ago, and the White House seems to have wagered that they would simply give in as GOP members have in the past. (The administration may have underestimated Cornyn’s taste for revenge against a president who endorsed his opponent in the primary.) At the same time, Trump has been unable to persuade all Republican senators to back the SAVE America Act, a bill that would require people to present proof of citizenship to vote, and they have shrugged off his demands to eliminate the filibuster in order to pass it. After all, they know that they could be in the minority within six months.

What made Blanche attractive to Trump as an attorney general was not his legal acumen but his eagerness as an enabler. Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal attorney, began in the administration as deputy attorney general. Attorney General Pam Bondi was willing to destroy many of the boundaries keeping politics out of the Justice Department, and she pursued many of Trump’s projects of political retribution, but she fell out of favor after some of them stalled and was soon asked to resign. When Blanche became acting attorney general in April, he set out to fulfill Trump’s desires with zeal.

That was enough to win Blanche a nomination to hold the job permanently, but it also made his path to confirmation more perilous. Now Trump has little reason to fight for his nomination. Since Blanche is already deputy attorney general, the president can leave Blanche as acting attorney general indefinitely, even without confirmation. That would surely be a disappointment to Blanche, who worked so hard to win Trump’s favor, but it’s an easy calculation for Trump: Why would he give up a $1.8 billion pot of money when he already has a lackey in place?

Something Weird Is Happening in Math

2026-07-31T08:00:00-04:00

One of the winners of this year’s Fields Medal is headed to OpenAI. Last Thursday, Jacob Tsimerman was one of four mathematicians awarded the prestigious honor, which is sometimes called the Nobel Prize of mathematics. The same day that he won the Fields, Tsimerman announced that he would be going on leave from the University of Toronto to work on AI safety.

As my colleague Rose Horowitch and I wrote last week, top AI companies now employ a range of academics, including physicists, philosophers, economists, and, of course, mathematicians. But given Tsimerman’s renown, his decision in particular seemed to catch many people by surprise. “It’s like hiring Lionel Messi as project manager,” one machine-learning professor posted on X. Tsimerman’s expertise is in number theory, and he won the Fields for his work on the André-Oort conjecture, among other contributions. So far, his mathematical research hasn’t focused on AI safety. But he has expressed interest in the topic: Last year, Tsimerman co-wrote a report outlining a taxonomy of five potential scenarios in which humanity is killed off because of AI. In one example, a “global civil war” erupts between tech companies and governments.

[Read: Where did all the computer-science professors go?]

Tsimerman’s move comes at an important moment for both AI safety and mathematics. Earlier this month, an OpenAI agent broke out of the company’s internal environment during safety testing and hacked into another AI company’s software. Meanwhile, AI’s math capabilities are also rapidly advancing. In May, OpenAI researchers used an internal model to disprove an 80-year-old conjecture; more recently, an Anthropic mathematician prompted Claude to resolve an even older one. Mathematics is entering a “turbulent period,” Terence Tao, perhaps the world’s top mathematician (and himself a Fields winner), said in a presentation last week.

On Wednesday, I called Tsimerman to ask about the future of math and his decision to join OpenAI.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Lila Shroff: There’s been a lot of excitement about AI and its applications in math for years now. But over the past few months, models have started solving research-level problems. Could you speak about the shift that’s taken place?

Jacob Tsimerman: A few years ago, models were having trouble with even the most basic questions. But they’ve steadily been improving. First, they got very good at these contest problems for high-school students, which made some mathematicians take notice. But then, over the past few months, we’ve had an explosion of research results that professional mathematicians would be proud to achieve and publish. We’re seeing this happen now on a large scale. If things continue along this track—which many of us, including myself, think that they will—pretty soon we will be at a point where AI systems are robustly better than humans at what mathematicians currently do. At that point, we’ll have to rethink how the entire field works.

Shroff: Can you say more about what that future might look like?

Tsimerman: It depends on the perspective from which you approach it. From one point of view, I think it will be extremely exciting. We might speed up the process of generating interesting mathematics by enormous factors of 10 or 100. If that happens, we might see the connection between pure math and applications (which typically takes many decades) really speed up and become a much tighter pipeline.

But from the perspective of research mathematicians, and especially young people who are pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics, it’s a bit of a turbulent time. The skills that we’ve acquired and learned to propagate might become less relevant than they are now.

Shroff: I want to turn to the announcement you made last week that you’ll be joining OpenAI. When did you first start thinking about AI safety risks, and what motivated your decision to now make it your primary focus?

Tsimerman: I have been following conversations about AI for about two decades now. There are a number of communities that were, in retrospect, extremely prescient about what we are now seeing come to pass. I personally started to get more invested around 2016, when AlphaGo came out. And then, when ChatGPT happened and I could see that these systems could really speak, I didn’t see why they wouldn’t become much, much more powerful and potentially more capable than humans at a variety of tasks. Back then, it was already clear to me that I was eventually going to pivot to AI safety, most likely.

Now is a particularly good time, because only very recently have AI systems become good enough that we can delegate coding tasks to them. That makes not having training as a software engineer much less of an impediment than it used to be. It used to be the case that if I wanted to run experiments with AI systems or any kind of large data sets, it would be extremely time-consuming. I’d have to learn all types of computer science and programming and then debug, and it didn’t really make sense to me to spend so much time doing that. Now it’s substantially easier.

Shroff: You’re right that certain communities were very prescient with their thinking about AI risks. But there are lots of people who are skeptical about some of the more extreme AI-risk scenarios, such as human extinction.

Tsimerman: There’s this bias that stories that were first written down in science fiction aren’t going to come to pass in the real world, and that it’s naive to think that they will. We also have a culture where we’re inundated with people telling us that every new development is the next big thing, and that we should change everything we’re doing to react to it. Most of the time, it proves incorrect. So I think people have a healthy sort of immune reaction to that.

But what I would encourage people to do is to actually keep track of their predictions for the future and write them down. Then—three months, six months, nine months, a year from now—compare how the world is with what you expected it might look like. If we told people five years ago about the kind of AI systems we currently have, almost everybody would have reacted with disbelief. Human extinction seems so grandiose that it naturally inspires a reaction of dismissal. People don’t want to engage with that, which makes sense to me. The whole point of writing that paper on omnicide was to get people to viscerally understand the kinds of risks that are possible.

Shroff: Can you say anything about the work you plan to be doing at OpenAI? What role is there for mathematicians to play in working on AI safety?

Tsimerman: AI right now is a very empirical science. We don’t really have a developed theoretical understanding of how AI systems work, why they accomplish what they do, how they accomplish what they’re doing, and how, in a given circumstance, they’re going to behave. Mathematics is historically the language by which you take intuitions and fuzzy notions of how things work and you make them precise. We’ve done this with information theory; we have done this with complexity theory. Just a little bit of understanding and precise definitions can provide a ton of mileage. Once we have that understanding, the hope is that we could do a better job of anticipating the behavior of new AI systems, adjusting for them, controlling them, and reacting to them. That’s where I think mathematicians fit in.

Shroff: Why work at a private company instead of pursuing the same questions in academia? Do you worry about loss of independence, whether that’s constraints on what you’re able to publish or restrictions on the questions you’re able to pursue?

Tsimerman: Yeah, there’s definitely a trade-off between going to work for a private company and going to work in government or staying in academia. I very strongly believe that what we need is a healthy ecosystem for AI safety. The work that the labs are doing on that front is very important. There’s a bunch of third-party organizations that are pursuing AI safety independently, and I think we need way more of them. I also think we need some regulation and organizations that are directly funded by the government to provide evaluations of these systems. I want all of these components to interact with one another on a regular basis. So I have engaged with a number of AI-safety organizations, and I’ll continue engaging with them.

For me, at this moment, going to OpenAI made the most sense in part because one of the things that I’m most lacking is a background in software engineering. I’m a lot more comfortable with the theoretical aspects of neural networks and how AI systems work, and less so with the entire pipeline of how we train these things and how we get them to do what they do. So from the perspective of just getting myself in a better position to understand the whole picture, joining an AI lab right now made the most sense.

[Read: The return of ‘move fast and break things’]

I’m going on leave from the University of Toronto. But I’m still a professor and faculty member there, and I plan to stay as such. Things are moving so quickly that I hesitate to make a concrete prediction for what might happen even a year from now. I’m keeping an open mind, trying to see how things develop in terms of capabilities, with my own understanding, with how the world reacts to AI, which I think is changing month to month. But I don’t have a clear plan as to how things will unfold.

Shroff: There is an open letter going around signed by more than 1,000 employees at top AI companies, including leaders at Anthropic and OpenAI. It calls on the U.S government to create infrastructure needed to “deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.” You wrote online that you’re very happy to see this letter. How would we actually go about coordinating a slowdown or a pause if one was needed?

Tsimerman: Coordination is one of the most important things we have to do around AI. It’s also one of the more difficult things. The thing that I really don’t like seeing in public discourse is when people say, Coordination is very difficult, so obviously we can’t do it, and you’re being naive if you even try. That’s an unhealthy way to view the world, and it’s also deeply false. There are so many things in the world that work really well and that require a huge number of decisions to have been made in a coordinated fashion. For example, the internet is an extremely complicated technology that is highly international, with many organizations cooperating all the time. Does it work perfectly? No, but it works extremely well.

One message that I want to support is to not let cynicism prevent us from undertaking difficult coordination problems for the good of all of us. That’s something that has always been true. It is not specific to AI. And it remains true today. This does not mean being naive in assuming that people in different parties and organizations don’t have their own incentives and interests in mind. Of course they do. But if you try, then you really can get a lot done. We have in the past, and I think we need to with AI.

Shroff: We spoke before about your interest in working on safety. Are you also interested in working on the capabilities side, especially with regard to math capabilities?

Tsimerman: No, I’m very focused on the safety side. The capabilities side has a lot of interesting questions, and AI has a lot of promise. But capabilities are coming along just fine. I don’t think that’s where we need to put our attention right now. The safety side has a lot more work to be done.

Shroff: Are we approaching a point where anyone could go fire up ChatGPT or Claude Code and say, Go solve a hard open math problem for me?

Tsimerman: Yes, you can literally type in, Go solve an open math question for me, as people have, and your system will go look for some and try, and maybe it will succeed at solving some of them. So we are in that world.

Now, I don’t think that’s a particularly good use of people’s time. Because first of all, that’s almost certainly going to be automated. We’re going to have systems that regularly look for conjectures that are out there and for other ways to approach math problems. Any one person, especially somebody who doesn’t have math training, just typing in a random query isn’t really playing an important part. So although it’s fun to do, I wouldn’t recommend spending a huge amount of time doing it for people who don’t have the background to interpret what they get. Because we also get a lot of slop this way. Sometimes, when people really don’t understand mathematics and the AI system gives them something, they will post stuff like: Here’s what my AI system gave me. I don’t know if it’s right, but maybe it is? Could a mathematician please look at it? I don’t think that’s super useful.

Shroff: I’ll admit it’s quite tempting. Last week, I told my agents to spend the night solving open math problems. They sent me stuff in the morning, but I had no idea what to make of it.

Tsimerman: For problems with a lot of technical definitions, you have very little chance in a day or two of really understanding them. But there are classical math questions that are perhaps less difficult to understand that have been open for a long time. I would suggest that people engage with AI in a way where—even if it’s doing a lot of the work—you’re still learning something from the experience. If you’re just telling your agents, Keep going, and you aren’t developing any comprehension for yourself, then that’s really disempowering yourself.

Shroff: Does what is happening in mathematics right now provide any indication of what other disciplines should expect to see occur as AI capabilities advance in other domains?

Tsimerman: A lot of technical fields are going to be affected—certainly in physics, in some areas of economics, and in top branches of chemistry. In other fields, such as biology and experimental physics, it’s less clear what’s going to happen, because it’s helpful to run experiments. It’s possible that AI systems may eventually become intelligent enough that they will figure out how to reason very productively about experimental physics or biology without actually running experiments. But that’s more speculative—right now that seems like a pie-in-the-sky dream. In terms of the more theoretical parts of different fields, though, we’ll see stuff happening very, very soon.

Is She the New Britney Spears—Or the New Lou Reed?

2026-07-30T11:11:16-04:00

Earlier this year, I wrote an article with the headline “Slow Down, Charli XCX.” The pop singer had followed a hit album, 2024’s Brat, with a steady pulse of output—a remix album, a soundtrack album, a host of movie roles, plus many, many marketing stunts—that had me exhausted by someone whom I consider to be one of the most exciting voices in music. Quantity was beating quality; good enough was smushing great.

Five months later, a new Charli XCX album has arrived, with all of the memes and metacommentary that tend to swirl around music’s most online star. It’s called Music, Fashion, Film, and it was conceived in what she’s described as a burst of inspiration during last fall’s Paris Fashion Week. With a spiky and Scotch-taped sound, the album is a 30-minute broadside against overthinking the artistic process. In direct challenge to those who feel she’s saturated the market (I’m not the only one), she’s rallying for an idea that feels very now but really is also very old: More is more.

Love songs to the muse abound. “Yeah, we’re so inspired / basically all the time,” she sings on the opener, titled “Rock Music,” whose glitch-kissed analog instrumentation and lyrical logorrhea announce the album’s sound and attitude. “Camera” celebrates the sheer terror of acting by comparing the director’s lens to a gun; “Magic Metal Montana” narrates recording-studio-forged friendship while cutesy New Wave riffs percolate. The album closes with a monologue from the director David Cronenberg, who preaches that long-term legacy really can’t be the artist’s concern. His implication is that what matters is what you do in this lifetime—so get to doing it.

Charli is known for making self-aware, cybernetic dance pop—the art-school take on Britney Spears—but this album most flagrantly calls back to a rock band: the Velvet Underground. Lou Reed modeled the sort of petulant sing-talking that characterizes her verses. The album’s producers, A. G. Cook and Finn Keane, have made a digital drag-and-drop collage of the Velvets’ ingredients: tinny guitars evoking 1970’s radio-rock foray, Loaded; metronomic beats in the lineage of the band’s sparse and steady timekeeper, Moe Tucker. Sitting next to Martin Scorsese and the designer Marc Jacobs on the album cover is the group’s multi-instrumentalist John Cale, rock’s god of noisy, dignified experimentation.

Comparisons to the Velvet Underground recontextualize Charli’s career in a useful way. By courting the charts while pulling from the avant-garde, she’s long been at the center of the tiresome debate over “poptimism,” an alleged cultural turn toward valuing easy gratification over difficulty in art. But the Velvets were sneering at the false dichotomy between those things back in the ’60s. Yes, Cale droned with dread, and Reed sang of scandalous topics (I wish Charli and other leading songwriters of her generation held his social-documentarian instincts—rather than fixating on the person in the mirror). But Reed was also a bubblegum fan who sought hits. He shared the ambition Charli sings about on the sterling Music, Fashion, Film B-side “Playboy Bunny”: to make a song as memorable as the canonical smut mag’s logo.

[Read: A very pretentious form of propaganda]

A few tracks here might indeed rate as future classics. With serene guitars and unnervingly beautiful vocals referencing the malaise of doomscrolling, “SS26” glides from the speakers like some chiffon-clad horseman of the apocalypse (“Spring, summer ’26 / When the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it”). The sludgy, distorted “Card Declined” well captures the existential futility of a shopping binge. “Yeah” is a brilliantly simple distillation of the creative process in which Charli mumbles “I don’t wanna” a bunch—until she changes her mind. Surf-rock riffs, punctuated with pockets of silence, eventually slacken in tempo for a glorious, slo-mo finish. The track has a complete thesis about the ups and downs of art making, articulated almost entirely in sound.

Generally, the more words in a song here, the worse it is. Charli’s aiming for sprezzatura, but of course that’s not something you can aim for—and many of the results feel like careless rambling. On the otherwise-delightful, fuzzed-out “Wink Wink,” a line in the first verse is as unpleasant as gristly steak: “And maybe I fucked your dad / Just kidding, I’m only saying that for effect.” Meanwhile, the sweetly nostalgic “2007” is slightly undercooked: “All from your apartment, you can shine bright like”—and here the brain craves some twist—“a star.” The most personal tracks on the album are convoluted yet bland, like the recounting of uninteresting dreams. “Magic Metal Montana” salutes her producer Cook, but her descriptions are superficial—as if Charli doesn’t really know him.

With their unusual production style and intriguing subject matter, many of these songs point to far better versions of themselves. Is it churlish to ask for more oomph, more insight, more effort? The album’s cover seems to answer that question by featuring three masters of modern media who are known for being prolific. Jacobs used to put out 16 fashion lines a year. Scorsese’s all-over-the-place 1980s output was criticized as inconsistent at the time, but fans have come to appreciate The King of Comedy and After Hours. Cale will always be thought of as a genius even if few listened to, say, 2024’s Poptical Illusion. These men create simply because creating is what they do—and audiences have been lucky that’s so.

Charli has every right to take heed from that model. But the artists she’s channeling are icons of a 20th-century paradigm now destroyed by overproduction. After the internet made creation, distribution, and consumption of media into frictionless affairs, pop culture seemed to become swamped: so much content, so few classics. Cronenberg is right that artists need not create with posterity in mind, but for a contemporary oracle such as Charli, the concerns of the present do merit consideration. And the great concern, right now, is too much mediocrity.

Trump Is Barely Pretending About Comey Anymore

2026-07-30T13:42:41-04:00

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Legal filings submitted by James Comey this week argue that the Trump administration has subjected the former FBI director to a vindictive and meritless prosecution. What stands out is how little effort the president put into pretending this is not the case.

President Trump first branded Comey a criminal more than eight years ago. In 2017, he took the then-shocking step of firing Comey before the expiration of his 10-year term. The following year, Trump wrote a Twitter post claiming, “James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR. Virtually everyone in Washington thought he should be fired for the terrible job he did—until he was, in fact, fired. He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted.”

Hampered by career public servants and political appointees who followed traditional democratic norms (refusing to prosecute people merely because the president hates them), Trump was unable to make good on this threat and settled mostly for tweeting out demands that Comey be imprisoned. During his second term, however, Trump has sought to bring criminal charges against apparently anybody who defies or displeases him. He has flexed this power by repeating his claims that Comey was a “dirty cop” who deserved prison, ordering the Justice Department to charge him with crimes, and orchestrating the entire plot in public view.

[Quinta Jurecic: The Comey indictment is an embarrassment]

Last year, Trump reportedly pressured the Justice Department to charge Comey. When the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, resigned rather than bring a meritless case, Trump’s Justice Department replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, an inexperienced Trump loyalist, who brought an indictment for lying to Congress (an allegation that was different from his first-term claims that Comey had leaked classified material). It was shortly dismissed when a judge found that Halligan had been unlawfully appointed.

Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to bring new charges and fired her for, among other reasons, failing to accomplish the task. He then replaced Bondi with another loyalist, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who duly produced another indictment, this time for the “crime” of threatening the president’s life by posting an Instagram photo of seashells on the beach spelling out “86 47.” Trump showed Blanche the man, and Blanche found the crime.

When Comey’s message appeared, Trump’s supporters depicted it as an endorsement of his murder, rather than his removal. Comey immediately removed the post and clarified his intentions, stating he opposed political violence. Trump has nevertheless insisted that “86,” a restaurant shorthand for canceling an order or ejecting a customer that has taken on a general meaning “to get rid of or discard,” must imply a call for presidential assassination.

Even if this implausible interpretation were correct, Comey’s message would not be a crime. Under the Supreme Court’s long-standing interpretation of the First Amendment, advocating violence against a public official, though morally reprehensible, is protected speech, as long as it does not constitute a specific incitement to immediate action. That is one reason that Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech urging an angry and armed crowd to “fight like hell” to overturn the election result could not be prosecuted.

The current charge against Comey, in short, relies on a tendentious interpretation of an innocuous term combined with a disregard for the First Amendment in order to gin up charges against a man Trump has been targeting openly for nearly a decade.

Although Trump has done little to disguise his intentions, it would be untrue to say he put zero effort into the pretense. He did attempt to keep one of his instructions to Bondi private—a September 20, 2025, message on Truth Social to his then–attorney general stating, “Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,’” and concluding, “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

However, Trump mistakenly posted this direct message to his public account, making it visible to all of his followers.

[Quinta Jurecic: The ‘presumption of regularity’ is evaporating]

Trump’s incompetence throughout this vendetta against Comey is perhaps its most welcome aspect. The episode reveals the formidable powers available to a president to target his enemies. Comey’s filing alleges that, in addition to Trump’s previously known directives to the Justice Department to prosecute his target, the president used the Secret Service to investigate him.

The agency, which is charged with protecting the president, not only began following Comey, but tracked his location through his phone. This step legally requires law enforcement to believe there is “an imminent threat to life or limb,” which Comey’s retracted seashell message obviously did not constitute.

One Secret Service official wrote in a memo, MS NOW reports, “At the time we did not believe anyone’s life was in danger and legally it was a bad idea.” But after a top Justice Department official demanded this action, the Secret Service relented. The difference between security agencies in democracies and secret-police forces is that the former have to obey laws and not just follow the whims of the head of state. The Secret Service’s actual procedures turn out to be more like guidelines that can be discarded if the president is sufficiently angry—which, from the standpoint of safeguarding democracy, constitutes a fairly concerning loophole.

Not for the first time, the president’s clumsiness is likely to negate his malevolence, though not without considerable cost, in time and money, to Comey. Yet Trump’s incompetence is also unsettling. This president may be succeeded by someone who equals Trump in his eagerness to wield the office’s powers and in his lack of scruples, but exceeds him in intelligence and discipline. Future plots to imprison a critic of the MAGA movement might not be undermined by a loudmouth president who can’t help but give away the scheme.

Zelensky Asked Trump for a Favor From Elon Musk

2026-07-30T18:44:45-04:00

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During closed-door talks at the White House on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky laid out a plan for his country to survive another winter of war with Russia. For it to work, President Trump would need to call in a big favor from his ally Elon Musk. But according to two officials familiar with the conversation, Trump was noncommittal, leaving the future of the plan in doubt.

The new proposal, which has not been previously reported, offered the United States a way around sending Ukraine advanced air-defense missiles, known as Patriot interceptors, which the war in Iran has dramatically depleted. Instead, Ukraine would expand its use of another American technology: the Starlink satellite-communications network, which Musk controls.

Zelensky asked Trump to secure Musk’s permission for the use of Starlink to guide drone strikes inside Russia, according to the two officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. (A third official confirmed Zelensky’s request.) Up to now, Musk has allowed the Ukrainians to use Starlink only on their own territory, including in Crimea and other regions that Russia has occupied. Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, has restricted the use of Starlink inside Russia.

Ukraine’s campaign of long-range drone strikes has therefore employed less reliable targeting methods, including onboard computers with AI-powered navigation tools. These weapons have been effective at hitting large infrastructure sites in Russia, such as oil refineries and warehouses. But, in his talks with Trump on Tuesday, Zelensky explained the need to hit much smaller and more mobile targets, especially the ballistic-missile batteries that Russian forces have used to hit cities across Ukraine. Last night, as Zelensky and his entourage traveled home through Poland, Russia launched more than 70 missiles, killing at least 10 people in one of the biggest salvos of the war. One of the rockets exploded in Poland.

Starlink offers the most precise means available to steer Ukrainian drones to the Russian missile launchers, many of which are mounted on trucks dispersed across Russia. During his visit to the U.S. this week, Zelensky asked to meet with Musk to talk about his plan for targeting these launchers, but the billionaire declined the invitation, according to one person involved in the discussions. Musk and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.

When they met at the White House, Trump told his Ukrainian counterpart that he would consider the requests, but he did not indicate whether he would eventually grant them, one official told told us. Trump did tell Zelensky that he would talk with Musk about it but did not offer a timetable for that conversation or for his eventual decision.

Trump has made no secret of his desire to bring the Russia-Ukraine conflict to a close, and has been frustrated at how long it has taken. One of the officials told us that his eventual decision on Zelensky’s proposal would likely be largely based on whether he felt it could help hasten the end of the conflict. If he thinks that using Starlink would enable Ukraine to push Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table, then Trump may support it. But if he feels it would only escalate matters, then he likely would not, one official told us.

[Read: Zelensky makes his pitch to Trump]

Trump, of course, has been highly deferential to Putin for more than a decade now, and that has hardly changed during this war. Although he has flashed his frustration with the Russian leader at times, he has mostly stayed skeptical of Ukraine’s cause and its chances. But, one official told us, Trump has been impressed with Ukraine’s recent ability to strike deep within Russia with its drone technology and has sensed that Kyiv has some momentum in the conflict (Trump loves to be associated with winners). The meeting remained convivial and Zelensky invoked the memory of the late Senator Lindsey Graham when making his pitch.

With the war in its fifth year, Zelensky emphasized to Trump that Ukraine needs to counter the missile threat before the onset of winter, when Russia may again try to use these weapons to knock out Ukraine’s power grid and heating systems, according to the two officials familiar with the talks.

Without the ability to hit launchers inside Russia, “we have no clear path through this winter,” one of the officials told us. Last winter, Ukraine still had a limited supply of Patriot interceptors to shoot down Russian missiles and protect its most crucial infrastructure. But the war in Iran has since depleted roughly two-thirds of the U.S. stockpile of these interceptors, according to an analysis published this week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research institute based in Washington, D.C. The CSIS report estimated that the U.S. now has as few as 759 of the most advanced Patriot rockets.

Zelensky asked the U.S. to send 300 of these for Ukraine to use this winter. Trump has demurred. Instead, during his talks with Zelensky earlier this month in Ankara, he promised to give Ukraine a license to make its own Patriot interceptors—though Ukraine would not be able to produce them at scale for years.

In the Tuesday meeting, Zelensky argued that Starlink could offer a faster and cheaper answer to the ballistic-missile threat from Russia, according to two of the officials familiar with the conversation. Ukraine already has the long-range drones needed to target missile launchers inside Russia. The Ukrainian company that produces many of them, Fire Point, uses various guidance systems to get around the ban on deploying Starlink inside Russia.

[Read: Ukraine’s Dr. Strangelove]

One of the company’s co-founders, Denys Shtilerman, told us that drones equipped with Starlink could prove far more effective than Patriot interceptors in neutralizing the Russian ballistic-missile threat. “Instead of shooting down the arrows, we would strike the archers,” he said.

Inside its own territory, Ukraine has already used Starlink-enabled drones to create what it calls a “kill zone” along the front line—a no-man’s-land, dozens of miles wide, where drones can target any Russian forces that seek to advance. With permission to do the same thing inside Russian territory, “we could widen the kill zone to 500 kilometers,” Shtilerman told us. “If they increase the range of their strikes, we would widen the kill zone all the way to Siberia if needed. The technology would allow us to do that.”

Musk has long resisted the use of Starlink in warfare. The system depends on the world’s largest constellation of satellites to provide a high-speed internet connection to anyone with a Starlink subscription and a receiver. At the start of the Russian invasion, in 2022, Musk provided Ukraine with Starlink receivers free of charge. Ukrainian hospitals, emergency workers, and government agencies used them to stay online despite Russian attacks on the country’s internet infrastructure. The armed forces of Ukraine soon began using Starlink to coordinate troop movements and pilot drones, and the system became the backbone of Ukraine’s military communications.

During some of Ukraine’s most brazen strikes against Russian forces, Musk got cold feet. “How am I in this war?” Walter Isaacson quoted him as asking in his 2023 biography. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good, peaceful things, not drone strikes.”

That year, the Pentagon began contracting with SpaceX for the communications services it provides to Ukraine’s armed forces. The company also created a separate network, known as Starshield, for use in defense and national security. During his talks with Trump on Tuesday, Zelensky suggested that if Musk refuses to allow the use of Starlink for strikes on Russia, the Pentagon could give Ukraine access to the Starshield network for the same purpose, two of the officials told us.

One of them added, however, that Starshield would not work as well for Ukraine. “It’s more expensive, more complicated, more difficult to integrate into our systems,” the official said. “We have long figured out how to fly drones on Starlink. It would not be hard for us to send them across the border. But Starshield is a somewhat different system. We would need to figure out how to integrate it.” That leaves Starlink as the cheapest and most reliable guidance system available for Ukraine’s long-range drones.

From Musk’s earlier decisions, it can be hard to discern a coherent strategy toward the war in Ukraine. He has used Starlink in ways that each of the warring sides has perceived as helping the other. A few months into the Russian invasion, Musk began to complain about the spiraling cost of providing Ukraine with Starlink service. He refused a Ukrainian request in September 2022 to use Starlink in an attack on Russian warships in Crimea, arguing that the operation risked a nuclear response from the Kremlin.

The following month, Musk published a four-point plan for peace in a post on Twitter. (He would buy the social network for $44 billion a few weeks later.) His peace plan hewed closely to Russian demands, including a provision for Ukraine to remain “neutral” after the war. In response, Zelensky posted his own Twitter survey, asking whether people preferred the Musk who supports Ukraine or the one who supports Russia. Andriy Melnyk, who served as Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany at the time, also shot back at Musk’s peace plan: “Fuck off is my very diplomatic reply to you @elonmusk.”

In Zelensky’s wartime government, the official who cultivated the strongest ties with Musk and SpaceX was Mykhailo Fedorov, the chief architect of the Ukrainian drone program. Early this year, while serving as minister of defense, Fedorov persuaded Musk to shut off the Starlink receivers that Russian forces had been using to fly their own drones in Ukraine. But Fedorov lost his job this month in a government reshuffle, which cost Ukraine its main point of contact with Musk. “Fedorov has a super constructive relationship with him,” a Ukrainian official told us. “So the timing is very bad to install a new minister.”

[Read: Elon Musk moves against the Russians in Ukraine]

One person close to Fedorov told us that, in the weeks before he was fired, the minister lobbied Musk and various other contacts in the U.S. to allow the use of Starlink for drone strikes into Russia. Fedorov received assurances from Musk that it would be possible “if Trump says to do it,” the person said. The talks broke off, he added, after the government reshuffle. (Fedorov did not respond to a request for comment.)

The Trump administration could have its own reasons to balk at Zelensky’s request. “It’s one thing to let Ukraine do this on its own territory,” the Ukrainian official said. “It’s another thing to use American technology on the territory of Russia to take out their air defenses, their launchers for ballistic missiles. This is an unfriendly act. I don’t know how Russia could react to that.”

Russia recently deployed new methods for interfering with Starlink signals in Ukraine. Earlier this month, a set of documents was published that appeared to show Russia plotting with China to destroy Starlink satellites, through either hacking, jamming, or knocking them out of orbit. The documents, allegedly produced by China and obtained by The Insider, highlighted the risks Musk faces in helping Ukraine fight the war.

His willingness to broaden that assistance could depend on the leverage Trump has over Musk—and his desire to use it for Ukraine’s benefit. Earlier this month, Trump seemed open to Zelensky’s strategy for pressuring Russia to negotiate a peace deal. “It’s an escalation,” Trump said when asked about Ukraine’s strikes on oil refineries and military targets deep inside Russia. Seated beside Zelensky in Ankara, Trump added: “But it’s also an escalation that could help lead to an end.”

Kafka’s Most Entertaining Stories

2026-07-31T13:05:00-04:00

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

In biological science, anthropomorphism is best avoided; nonhuman organisms should be studied on their own terms, without human qualities projected onto them. But that rule goes out the window in fiction—especially the kind in which animals are the main characters. As a child, the writer Rachel Vorona Cote was captivated by novels told from the perspective of chatty puppies and noble horses; the “imaginative leap” of making them think prompted her to realize what fiction could do. In an essay this week for The Atlantic, Cote wrote about Paul Yoon’s new novel, Etna, concerning a dog conscripted into a war, as well as other tales that endow animals with an innocence that their bipedal characters lack. But I’d like to recommend a couple of hilarious stories by Franz Kafka (trust me!) that do something very different.

First, here are four new stories from the Atlantic’s Books section:

Many contemporary animal stories, Cote writes, focus on creatures in peril. Etna follows a dog who, after the fighting ends, must make an Odyssey-like journey home. Yoon’s novel shares a theme with Henry Hoke’s 2023 novel, Open Throat, which is told by a mountain lion living in the Hollywood Hills, and with the recent films EO and Flow. All these works feature dignified animal narrators struggling to survive in the mess that people have made of their world. “Etna may lack the privilege of human sovereignty and the benefits of advanced intelligence,” Cote writes, “but he is free of the hubristic delusions that underwrite so much human-produced wreckage.”

The beasts in two of Kafka’s last works, on the other hand, are full of hubristic delusions. (His most famous animal is probably a giant bug, the protagonist of his novella The Metamorphosis—but that one starts out as a man.) These short stories, which Kafka wrote late in life and never quite finished, feature narrating critters. “Investigations of a Dog” stars a curious and philosophical canine, and “The Burrow” follows a hypervigilant mole (or maybe a badger—he doesn’t describe his appearance much, but we know he’s got issues). The dog story is sometimes read as a satire of academia; the hound proposes elaborate theories to explain where food comes from. Little does he know—because he either can't see it or chooses not to—that humans exist, and that he and his social, freedom-loving peers are merely pets.

The mole/badger, by contrast, is a fragile neurotic. He has spent years constructing a complicated underground burrow with an impregnable “Castle Keep” at its core. “There I sleep the sweet sleep of tranquility, of satisfied desire, of achieved ambition,” he thinks. “For I possess a house.” We soon learn that this satisfaction is fleeting and illusory. The more the narrator has, the more he has to lose, and he descends into paranoia, imagining that unknown predators will soon destroy him or—worse—his castle. You don’t have to be a post-structuralist like Jacques Lacan (who referenced “The Burrow” in his theoretical writings) to see the mole as an allegory for human accumulation and striving, which has a way of magnifying, rather than easing, existential anxiety. Kafka’s varmints, in other words, are no better than us; they are creatures of both instinct and self-justification, overcompensating for what they don’t know.

And what’s so hilarious about that? Humor is subjective, but animals can generate comedy in the most serious of tales: I find the idea of a house-proud mole or a canine academic pretty funny, and I can’t be alone. The philosopher Aaron Schuster, who wrote a whole book about Kafka’s dog story, called these works “screwball tragedy.” I think that’s a fair gloss and a good way of describing some of my favorite fiction. These particular stories may introduce us to bizarre mammals, but like any good screwball tragedy, they leave us laughing and crying over ourselves.

Illustration by Alisa Gao / The Atlantic

Why Animal Narrators Are All the Rage

By Rachel Vorona Cote

A new novel helps explain why so many storytellers enlist animal narrators to explore humanity.

Read the full article.

What to Read

How Music Works, by David Byrne

Byrne’s book could be called a memoir or a manual, but whether you’re primarily interested in the New Wave pioneer’s career or actually attempting to start yours, the depth of knowledge he shares on the music industry makes this a worthy read. Byrne’s chapters range widely: One covers how the structure of performance spaces can inform the type of music played within; another provides a thorough examination of the development of recording technology (and its effect on music). Perhaps the most revelatory section is the one concerning money: The singer documents in granular detail how much he spent and earned for one record, pulling back the curtain on a process that’s ordinarily very hush-hush. You’ll finish with a greater respect for all that musicians do, whether they’re superstars or just starting out in the back of a bar. — Juliet Izon

From our list: What to read to really understand music

Out Next Week

📚 The Amateur, by Chris Bohjalian

📚 The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, by David Zirin

📚 The Women in White, by Sarah Pekkanen

Your Weekend Read

David Dow / NBAE / Getty

A Brief Exchange That Shows the Enormous Difference Between Trump and Obama

By Sally Jenkins

Suavity is a sorely missed ingredient in the American presidency. The effortless charm of a Roosevelt or a Reagan, a Bush or a Clinton, projected a particular brand of power. Suave means a kind of athletic ease and self-command in difficult, spotlighted circumstances, the assurance that solutions are at hand if only we all hold our composure and act right-headedly. Here was the ultra-suave Barack Obama’s message to the basketball player Caitlin Clark in a small but noteworthy exchange over the WNBA All-Star weekend: It never hurts to be winsome. In fact, it can help you win.

Read the full article.

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The Coming Food-Stamp Crisis

2026-07-30T19:23:00-04:00

Back in April, Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, wrote an op-ed celebrating the Trump administration’s efforts to get Americans off food stamps. Officially known as SNAP, the program has shed an estimated 6 million participants since Donald Trump’s return to office—a shift that Rollins argued could help break a “vicious cycle” of government dependence.

The idea that too many people have come to rely on federal handouts has long been a line of attack against SNAP. Per the Department of Agriculture’s preliminary data from April, about 37 million low- and no-income people in the United States are on food stamps. That’s roughly one in 10 Americans, down from one in eight last year. The reduction is in line with the administration’s broader approach to social welfare. Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump has touted as one of his signature policy achievements, slashed funding to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. And its cuts to SNAP—tightening eligibility requirements and limiting the amount of aid that recipients might be able to collect in the future—were the largest in the program’s history.

Food stamps will lose $186 billion in federal funding through 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates. But what Rollins has framed as a way to curtail waste, fraud, and abuse is already having far-reaching impacts on the Americans who rely on the program. Last week, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, suggested that “it’s very likely that the number of children receiving SNAP has dropped by more than 1.5 million since July 2025,” when the OBBBA became law. Inflation has been rising quickly this year, in part because of the Iran war, and the assault on food stamps is now compounding an ongoing affordability crisis. If states can’t meet the federal government’s new requirements for SNAP, they may have to take on a collective $9 billion in food-stamp costs themselves—forcing local legislators to make hard choices about which kinds of social-welfare programs, and which kinds of people, should receive aid.

This past winter, when the White House decided to briefly stop funding SNAP during the government shutdown, Trump said that the program’s enrollment number was “many times what it should be.” It’s true that food-stamp enrollment—which tends to rise during moments of economic crisis and contract in moments of recovery—spiked substantially during the coronavirus pandemic as Congress temporarily increased benefit amounts, and enrollment still hasn’t reverted to its pre-2020 level. But stricter work requirements (homeless people and veterans are no longer exempt, for example) and reductions in federal funding have helped drive down SNAP enrollment at a vertiginous moment. Most people, whether on food stamps or not, are cutting back on groceries. And no other institution “is going to swoop in and provide these financial resources” to families struggling to buy groceries, Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, told me.

In Arizona, the number of people with access to SNAP benefits has almost halved in less than a year—the biggest drop in any state. A recent New York Times report explains that the OBBBA’s cuts and updated rules have created “bureaucratic chaos” in the state, which has been exacerbated by a labyrinthian paperwork process and antiquated tech infrastructure. The fact that Arizona laid off a third of its caseworkers after losing a federal grant has also made it harder to verify who is and isn’t eligible for aid—and monthly visits to food banks have outpaced SNAP enrollment in the state for the first time, according to the Times.

States have historically managed SNAP payments on their own; the federal government supplies the money for benefits and for some of the administrative costs. Critics of this arrangement have noted that the post-COVID swell in enrollments has coincided with an uptick in improper payments, most of which have historically been overpayments. In 2019, 7.4 percent of the payments SNAP doled out were made in error, according to the USDA; last year, the national error rate was 10.6 percent. The OBBBA puts states in a tough spot. When it went into effect, it gave most states until the end of September 2026 to get their error rates below 6 percent—a little more than a year. If they fail to do so, they will begin sharing the cost of food-stamp benefits with the White House in 2027 (Alaska and other states with higher error rates will have longer deadlines).

The consequences will affect red and blue states alike, unlike some other Trump-backed economic initiatives. According to data released by the USDA last month, 41 states had error rates above the threshold in the 2025 fiscal year, and many are now scrambling to get those numbers down. California could end up paying roughly $1.9 billion if legislators don’t find a way to reduce the state’s rate by almost half, and Florida may need to pay $900 million, according to one estimate. Taking on those costs would require states to radically reshape their budgets, raise taxes, or find some other way to pay for SNAP—otherwise, their constituents may hold them accountable when the food-stamp payments stop coming. Officials in Alabama and Arizona have already considered ending the program, and, in an anonymous survey, four states identified “withdrawing and/or pausing from SNAP” as a potential risk.

If states are able to lower their error rates, SNAP could be transformed for the better. But if they fail to do so by the fast-approaching deadline, it’s hard to see who wins: not food-stamp recipients, not the states that will have their budgets upended, and not the administration, which has been trying to convince Americans ahead of the midterms that it’s responding to their affordability concerns. Rollins has described SNAP as a “broken program,” but these changes aren’t guaranteed to restore trust in the system. Instead, the push to repair SNAP could end up breaking it even more.

Related:

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Today’s News

President Trump threatened to temporarily withdraw Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general until Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, who are holdouts, leave office in January.
Iran and the United States continued exchanging missile strikes today; drone strikes targeted Egypt for the first time.
FIFA proposed spinning off the commercial rights of its major tournaments into a private company and then selling a 20 percent stake of it to investors. UEFA member nations argued that the plan would give private investors too much influence over soccer and threatened to boycott all FIFA competitions if the $20 billion deal goes through.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Since the 19th century, office jobs have represented a path to comfort and prestige, Jake Lundberg writes. The AI era is testing whether that promise still holds.

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Evening Read

Seattle’s Jose Rizal Park has become a favorite spot for addicts to smoke and inject fentanyl. Dana Golan for The Atlantic

The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs

By Michael Powell

Late last year, I walked roughly a mile from downtown Seattle to the working-class neighborhood of Little Saigon and came upon a montage of human despair. An open-air drug market stretched along the intersection of 12th and Jackson: about 250 people, many smoking fentanyl or bent over in the thrall of the drug, tilting as if mid-fall. Three women lay passed out on the sidewalk, their chests slowly rising and falling, while fellow addicts stepped over them and dealers made sales. Young boys, schoolbags on their backs, stood on a far corner and watched …

Seattle, like a striking number of other liberal American cities, has embraced a radical form of “harm reduction,” which is more a philosophy about treating addiction than a scientific approach to it.

Read the full article.

The Anti-Democrat

2026-07-29T16:26:52-04:00

Photographs by Nic Antaya

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You won’t find a much harsher critic of the Democratic Party than the progressive trying to secure its nomination for Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. When I caught up with him last week in Ann Arbor, he was at a café holding an outdoor roundtable with young voters, many of them college students or recent graduates. The normally voluble El-Sayed, drinking matcha and dressed casually in his signature tight black T-shirt and jeans, listened as much as he talked, and he heard the students describe their disillusionment with politics—and especially with Democratic candidates.

“Your generation has a great bullshit meter, because you’re fed bullshit online all day,” El-Sayed told the group. “And the Democratic Party brand right now is so bullshit.” It was not a statement with which any of the students seemed to disagree. “You tell it like it is, and that’s what we young people want,” Joe Garris, the president of the College Democrats at Eastern Michigan University, told El-Sayed. “We don’t want to hear corporate answers anymore. We just want the straight truth.”

One of the few factors that could impede a Democratic wave in this year’s midterms is the party’s own unpopularity; polling suggests that plenty of voters outside college campuses might also nod along to El-Sayed’s denunciation of Democrats. Antipathy toward the party is fueling the rise of populist insurgents such as El-Sayed, who castigate Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer with nearly as much fervor as they criticize President Trump.

Nowhere are the lines dividing Democrats more clearly drawn than in Michigan, a state that the party must win to have any real chance of retaking the Senate majority in November. Democrats have to flip four Republican-held seats without losing any of their own, and Michigan is the Democratic-held seat at the most risk of going red. (The incumbent, Senator Gary Peters, is retiring.) El-Sayed is battling Representative Haley Stevens in the August 4 primary, and the winner will face former Representative Mike Rogers, a formidable GOP candidate who came within roughly 20,000 votes of capturing Michigan’s other Senate seat two years ago.

A 41-year-old doctor, Rhodes Scholar, and former county health director, El-Sayed is running as an unabashed critic of Israel and of corruption in both parties. He begins rallies with a call-and-response incantation of his campaign slogan: “Money out of … politics! Money in your … pocket! Medicare for … all!” I sat down with him after his event in Ann Arbor and asked him to specify the parts of the Democratic brand that he believes are “bullshit.” He began with some of his campaign themes and described Democrats as hypocrites in thrall to corporate donors. “You say you’re for human rights and can’t name a genocide a genocide,” El-Sayed said. “You say you want to give people health care but take money from the people who are keeping us from having health care. You say you want to stand up to Big Tech and take money from Big Tech.”

Nic Antaya for The Atlantic
A yard sign for Abdul El-Sayed in Ferndale, Michigan

Nic Antaya for The Atlantic
A person claps during an El-Sayed rally.

“What are we actually for?” El-Sayed continued. “Are we just the permanent opposition party where ‘We’re not them’?” Then, referring to Republicans, he added, “At least they’re honest about who they are, for the most part.”

This message should be familiar to those who have watched progressives and democratic socialists topple establishment favorites in New York City, Colorado, and Maine over the past several months. But Michigan is a state that Trump carried in 2024, and many Democrats fear that nominating a candidate who calls for abolishing ICE and establishing a single-payer health-care system is too big a risk in such a crucial year for the party. El-Sayed is also seeking to be the first Muslim senator at a time when some Republicans are fomenting unrestrained Islamophobia. A poll released on Tuesday found Stevens running even with Rogers while El-Sayed trailed him by 10 points in a hypothetical general-election matchup.

[Read: Something is happening in the Democratic base]

El-Sayed’s confidence can border on cockiness—some Democrats see his strident attacks on Stevens as demeaning or even sexist—and he has leaned into the electability debate. Ahead of the 2028 presidential race, he and his progressive supporters view the Michigan contest as an opportunity to extinguish what they see as stale Democratic beliefs about the types of candidates that can win in swing states. “This is just a different time, and this time calls for different kinds of candidates,” El-Sayed told me. “I hope that coming out of this election, the question of electability is no longer asked and interpreted in the same way.”

He turns the argument back against Stevens, who has trailed in many polls despite benefiting from more than $60 million worth of ads bolstering her candidacy and attacking El-Sayed (about half of it coming from AIPAC). “If you can’t get elected without $60 million being spent for you, you can’t get elected. I’m so sorry,” El-Sayed said.

The progressives’ chief data point is Trump’s 2024 win, which they interpret not as an endorsement of the president’s vision but as a rejection of Democrats and the political system more broadly. “You know what people hate more than Trump? Politics as usual. They hate politics as usual so much that they were willing to take Trump, warts and all,” El-Sayed told me. “So what happens if you offer them something that’s not politics as usual and isn’t a megalomaniacal billionaire narcissist? Well, let’s see.”

Nic Antaya for The Atlantic
Representative Haley Stevens laughs with supporters at the the Michigan Conference of Teamsters in Detroit on July 24.

Stevens is in many ways the quintessential swing-state Democratic Senate candidate. A former Obama-administration official who worked on the auto-rescue task force during his first term, she won a Republican-held House seat in the Detroit suburbs in 2018. Her trajectory is broadly similar to that of Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst and Pentagon official who was elected to Congress in 2018 and then narrowly defeated Rogers in the 2024 Senate race.

In the House, Stevens has distinguished herself mostly through her loyalty to the Democratic leadership. She provided a reliable vote for President Biden’s major initiatives and enthusiastically backed his 2024 reelection bid even after many in the party were calling for him to drop out.

Stevens’s campaign for Senate is well funded but also exceedingly conventional. She emphasizes her Michigan roots, her ties to Obama, and what she’s done for the state in Congress. Taking aim at El-Sayed’s personal wealth, Stevens likes to point out that she’s the only Senate candidate who’s not a millionaire, and she criticized him repeatedly for not releasing a complete financial disclosure. (He released it just before their final debate this week; it showed he’s worth as much as $2.1 million and earned income from a rental property his wife owns in Dubai.)

Still, Stevens has not been able to generate the same amount of energy as El-Sayed, nor does she seem desperate to try. Over my three days in Michigan, he held at least eight events across the southern part of the state; she publicized just two, and her campaign declined to make her available for an interview. (It has helped El-Sayed that, unlike Stevens, he does not have to juggle campaigning with an important day job: “I’m Abdul. I’m 41, I’m unemployed, and I spend my time asking people for money,” El-Sayed joked to the students in Ann Arbor as he introduced himself.)

[Read: The return of the Democratic manly man]

Polling in the race has been murky. Surveys conducted by groups aligned with El-Sayed’s campaign have shown him up by double digits, as did an independent poll released today. But a Detroit News poll earlier this month found Stevens leading by nearly seven points. Supporters of Stevens had hoped the early-July exit of a third major candidate, State Senator Mallory McMorrow, would help her consolidate support. But one of McMorrow’s most prominent backers, Senator Elizabeth Warren, campaigned with El-Sayed over the weekend.

With El-Sayed holding strong, Michigan’s most prominent Democrats have rallied behind Stevens in a bid to deny him the nomination. This spring, former Senator Debbie Stabenow endorsed Stevens. Then, soon after McMorrow dropped out, Stevens gained the endorsement of the retiring Peters, a former chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee who had earlier indicated he would stay out of the primary to succeed him.

By far the biggest get for Stevens, however, was Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the state’s most popular Democrat, who announced her endorsement last Friday, a day before the start of early voting. Whitmer appeared that afternoon alongside Stevens and another key establishment backer, Representative James Clyburn, at a union rally in Detroit, where Stevens is counting on a big turnout among the city’s Black community. Without mentioning El-Sayed’s name, Whitmer strongly suggested that Stevens would be the stronger general-election candidate. “Michiganders understand better than anyone that our vote has a consequence for every American,” Whitmer said. “We also know that winning Michigan is as tough as it gets. But as someone who won statewide twice, I know Haley is tougher than the environment we’ve got to win in.”

Nic Antaya for The Atlantic
From left, Representative Pramila Jayapal, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Abdul El-Sayed, and Senator Chris Van Hollen in Ferndale, Michigan

The primary race has turned nasty in its closing weeks, a concern for Democrats hoping that the party can unify to defeat Rogers, who has coasted to the GOP nomination without significant opposition. Stevens’s supporters erupted after El-Sayed implied to Semafor that she could not “string together two coherent sentences.” Soon after, he urged his supporters to stop making fun of Stevens “for things that have nothing to do with her policies or politics.” The flap may have helped Stevens find her voice—literally in a certain sense. She has turned her thick Michigan accent into a calling card of authenticity. “Some of you have seen, there’s those cool kids on the internet. They’re doing the cool-kid chatter. Some of them might be the coastal elites making fun of how I talk,” she told the crowd in Detroit, which laughed loudly. “They’re thinking they’re better than us. And what they don’t know is I am your voice, and their jokes and their criticism only makes me fight harder.”

[Read: One morning of controlled chaos in Maine]

As I talked with voters in Detroit and its suburbs, it seemed apparent that after such a bitter primary, either candidate could struggle to assemble the coalition they would need to win in November. Younger voters filled El-Sayed’s events, and several of them told me they weren’t sure they would support Stevens if she were the nominee. The image painted by El-Sayed of Stevens as a politician beholden to big-money interests had taken hold. “She would depress the youth vote,” Scott Siegal, a 24-year-old student, told me at an El-Sayed rally in Ferndale. If Stevens wins the nomination, he said, “I’d probably just not vote.” Colin Takata, a 27-year-old who works for an audio company, said of Stevens: “It almost feels like she’s a corporation in a trench coat.”

At the Stevens rally, some of her supporters said they found El-Sayed likeable and appealing, but they favored Stevens’s experience and had concerns about his ability to win. “I have nothing against the brother. He’s a nice guy,” Robert Royster, a funeral director in Detroit, told me. “But she has receipts.” Others, however, took offense at El-Sayed’s treatment of Stevens. “From what I’ve heard, I don’t think he likes women,” Tyrone, a former auto worker who declined to give his last name in discussing such a fraught primary, told me.

Long-simmering tensions between the Arab and Black communities in Detroit could also hamper El-Sayed. One of the first attendees I spoke with at the Stevens rally told me he didn’t care for El-Sayed in part because he doesn’t like Arab people. He was not the only person at the event who expressed such prejudice. Tyrone Carter, a state representative from Detroit backing Stevens, acknowledged the Arab-Black tensions in the city. “They’re real, and they exist,” he told me at the rally.

Some of the nation’s most popular progressives have come to Michigan to campaign with El-Sayed, including Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (as well as Warren). But an endorsement he values as highly as any of those has come from a Democrat with a far lower national profile, at least for now: Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. El-Sayed told me he wants to see Van Hollen replace Schumer as the Democratic leader in the Senate; Van Hollen says he’s “kicking the tires” on a 2028 presidential run instead, though he has notably not told El-Sayed to stop promoting him for the Senate leadership.

[Read: New York’s warning for Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer]

Nic Antaya for The Atlantic
Stevens signs line the wall at the Michigan Conference of Teamsters.

As a chair of the Democratic campaign committee first in the House and then, more recently, in the Senate, Van Hollen was responsible for recruiting candidates in the party’s toughest races. Many of those picks looked and sounded a lot more like Stevens than El-Sayed.

But Van Hollen has become one of the Senate’s staunchest critics of Israel, and he told me the Trump era has changed his view about electability. “I think people want somebody who’s going to rock the boat,” he said, pointing to the election of “a convicted felon” to the presidency. “I think Donald Trump’s election was a symptom of a deeper unrest among voters. That unrest is real.” When I asked him if he agreed with El-Sayed’s assessment that the Democratic Party’s brand is “bullshit,” Van Hollen did not repeat the word, but he didn’t dispute it, either.

Were he to win in November, El-Sayed would be the most progressive candidate elected in a swing state in modern times, but he keeps some space between himself and the leftward bound of today’s Democrats. He is not a democratic socialist, and when the question comes up, his position hews closer to Elizabeth Warren than to Bernie Sanders. “I think that capitalism is, when it actually works, an efficient way to allocate resources,” El-Sayed told me. “It’s not working right now.”

“I know that the establishment desperately wants to turn me into a DSA candidate,” he went on. “I’m just not, and it bothers them so much.” El-Sayed is right about that. Neither his Democratic critics nor the Republicans who seem to be awaiting his nomination with glee are apt to make that distinction for Michigan voters. And if he defeats Stevens next week, the general election will test just how far the progressive movement can advance in this political era. It’s an opportunity that El-Sayed and his supporters have been waiting years to grab.

Why Everything Is Getting Louder

2019-10-08T09:00:00-04:00

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Karthic Thallikar first noticed the noise sometime in late 2014, back when he still enjoyed taking walks around his neighborhood.

He’d been living with his wife and two kids in the Brittany Heights subdivision in Chandler, Arizona, for two years by then, in a taupe two-story house that Thallikar had fallen in love with on his first visit. The double-height ceilings made it seem airy and expansive; there was a playground around the corner; and the neighbors were friendly, educated people who worked in auto finance or at Intel or at the local high school. Thallikar loved that he could stand in the driveway, look out past a hayfield and the desert scrub of Gila River Indian land, and see the jagged pink outlines of the Estrella Mountains. Until recently, the area around Brittany Heights had been mostly farmland, and there remained a patchwork of alfalfa fields alongside open ranges scruffy with mesquite and coyotes.

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In the evenings, after work, Thallikar liked to decompress by taking long walks around Brittany Heights, following Musket Way to Carriage Lane to Marlin Drive almost as far as the San Palacio and Clemente Ranch housing developments. It was during one of these strolls that Thallikar first became aware of a low, monotone hum, like a blender whirring somewhere in the distance. It was irritating, but he wrote it off. Someone’s pool pump, probably. On another walk a few days later, he heard it again. A carpet-cleaning machine? he wondered. A few nights later, there it was again. It sounded a bit like warped music from some far-off party, but there was no thump or rhythm to the sound. Just one single, persistent note: EHHNNNNNNNN. Evening after evening, he realized, the sound was there—every night, on every street. The whine became a constant, annoying soundtrack to his walks.

And then it spread. In early 2015, Thallikar discovered that the hum had followed him home. This being Arizona, Thallikar and his neighbors rewarded themselves for surviving the punishing summers by spending mild winter evenings outside: grilling, reading, napping around plunge pools, dining under the twinkle of string lights. Thallikar had installed a firepit and Adirondack chairs in his backyard. But whenever he went out to cook or read, there was that damn whine—on the weekends, in the afternoon, late into the night. It was aggravating, and he felt mounting anxiety every day it continued. Where was it coming from? Would it stop? Would it get worse? He started spending more time inside.

The Brittany Heights neighborhood in Chandler, Arizona (Cassidy Araiza)

Then it was in his bedroom. He had just closed his eyes to go to sleep one night when he heard it: EHHNNNNNNNN. He got up to shut the window, but that made no difference at all. “That was when I started getting concerned,” he observed later. He tried sleeping with earplugs. When that didn’t help, he also tied a towel around his head. When that still wasn’t enough, he moved into the guest room, where the hum seemed slightly fainter. Each night, he’d will himself to sleep, ears plugged and head bandaged, but he could feel the whine in his bones, feel himself getting panicky as it droned on and on and on and on and on. The noise hummed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, like a mosquito buzzing in his ear, only louder and more persistent. He sensed it coming from everywhere at once. Thallikar began to dread going home. As the months passed, he felt like he was in a war zone. He wrote in a text message that he felt as though someone was launching “an acoustic attack” on his home.

[From April 2019: James Fallows on leaf blowers and activism]

The earliest noise complaint in history also concerns a bad night’s sleep. The 4,000-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh recounts how one of the gods, unable to sleep through humanity’s racket and presumably a little cranky, opts “to exterminate mankind.”

Noise—or what the professionals call a “very dynamic acoustic environment”—can still provoke people to murderous extremes, especially when the emitter disturbs the receiver at home. After repeated attempts to quiet his raucous neighbor, a Fort Worth, Texas, father of two, perturbed by loud music at 2 a.m., called the police, who came, left, and returned less than an hour later, after the man had allegedly shot his neighbor three times—an incident not to be confused with the time a Houston man interrupted his neighbor’s late-night party and, after a showdown over noise, shot and killed the host. In New York City, a former tour-bus driver fed up with noisy parties across the hall allegedly sought help from a hit man. A man in Pennsylvania, said to have had no more trouble with the law than a traffic ticket, ambushed an upstairs couple with whom he’d had noise disputes, shooting them and then himself, and leaving behind a sticky note that read, “Can only be provoked so long before exploding.” There’s the man accused of threatening his noisy neighbors with a gun, the man who shot a middle-school coach after they quarreled over noise, the man who fired on a mother and daughter after griping about sounds from their apartment, the man who killed his roommate after a futile request that he “quiet down,” and the woman who shot at a neighbor after being asked to turn down her music—all since the beginning of this year.

Noise is never just about sound; it is inseparable from issues of power and powerlessness. It is a violation we can’t control and to which, because of our anatomy, we cannot close ourselves off. “We have all thought of killing our neighbors at some point,” a soft-spoken scientist researching noise abatement told me.

As environmental hazards go, noise gets low billing. There is no Michael Pollan of sound; limiting your noise intake has none of the cachet of going paleo or doing a cleanse. When The New Yorker recently proposed noise pollution as the next public-health crisis, the internet scoffed. “Pollution pollution is the next big (and current) public health crisis,” chided one commenter. Noise is treated less as a health risk than an aesthetic nuisance—a cause for people who, in between rounds of golf and art openings, fuss over the leaf blowers outside their vacation homes. Complaining about noise elicits eye rolls. Nothing will get you labeled a crank faster.

Scientists have known for decades that noise—even at the seemingly innocuous volume of car traffic—is bad for us. “Calling noise a nuisance is like calling smog an inconvenience,” former U.S. Surgeon General William Stewart said in 1978. In the years since, numerous studies have only underscored his assertion that noise “must be considered a hazard to the health of people everywhere.” Say you’re trying to fall asleep. You may think you’ve tuned out the grumble of trucks downshifting outside, but your body has not: Your adrenal glands are pumping stress hormones, your blood pressure and heart rate are rising, your digestion is slowing down. Your brain continues to process sounds while you snooze, and your blood pressure spikes in response to clatter as low as 33 decibels—slightly louder than a purring cat.

Experts say your body does not adapt to noise. Large-scale studies show that if the din keeps up—over days, months, years—noise exposure increases your risk of high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, and heart attacks, as well as strokes, diabetes, dementia, and depression. Children suffer not only physically—18 months after a new airport opened in Munich, the blood pressure and stress-hormone levels of neighboring children soared—but also behaviorally and cognitively. A landmark study published in 1975 found that the reading scores of sixth graders whose classroom faced a clattering subway track lagged nearly a year behind those of students in quieter classrooms—a difference that disappeared once soundproofing materials were installed. Noise might also make us mean: A 1969 study suggested that test subjects exposed to noise, even the gentle fuzz of white noise, become more aggressive and more eager to zap fellow subjects with electric shocks.

In the extreme, sound becomes a weapon. Since at least the 1960s, scientists have investigated sound’s potential to subdue hostage-takers, protesters, and enemy troops, against whom one expert proposed using low-frequency sound, because it apparently induces “disorientation, vomiting fits, bowel spasms, uncontrollable defecation.” The U.S. military, keenly aware of noise’s power to confuse and annoy, has wielded soundtracks as punishment: It tried to hurry along the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega’s surrender by blasting his hideout with rock music (Kiss and Rick Astley made the playlist); attacked Fallujah, Iraq, while pounding heavy metal on the battlefield (Guns N’ Roses, AC/DC); tortured Guantánamo detainees with a nonstop barrage of rap and theme songs (Eminem, the Meow Mix jingle); and, under the supervision of the FBI, attempted to aggravate the Branch Davidian cult of Waco, Texas, into surrender with a constant loop of Christmas carols, Nancy Sinatra, Tibetan chants, and dying rabbits. (“If they go Barry Manilow,” said a hostage negotiator at the time, “it’s excessive force.”)

Even when not intentionally deployed for harm, the sound of drilling, barking, building, crying, singing, clomping, dancing, piano practicing, lawn mowing, and generator running becomes, to those exposed, a source of severe anguish that is entirely at odds with our cavalier attitude toward noise. “It feels like it’s eating at your body,” a man plagued by a rattling boiler told a reporter. A woman who was being accosted on all sides by incessant honking told me, “The noise had literally pushed me to a level of feeling suicidal.” For those grappling with it, noise is “chaos,” “torture,” “unbearable,” “nauseating,” “depressing and nerve-racking,” “absolute hell,” and “an ice pick to the brain.” “If you didn’t know they were talking about noise, you might think they were describing some sort of assault,” Erica Walker, an environmental-health researcher at Boston University, has said. This has spurred scientists, physicians, activists, public officials, and, albeit less in the United States, lawmakers to join in the quest for quiet, which is far more elusive than it may seem. “Quiet places,” says the acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, “have been on the road to extinction at a rate that far exceeds the extinction of species.”

[From April 2016: The future will be quiet]

Thallikar went hunting for the source of the sound. At first he canvassed the neighborhood by foot, setting out around 10 or 11 o’clock at night, once the thrum of traffic had quieted down. When these “noise patrols,” as he called them, yielded no answers, he expanded his perimeter—by bike, then by car. He’d pull over every few blocks to listen for the whine. The hum was everywhere: outside Building E of the Tri-City Baptist Church and the apartments in San Palacio; near the Extra Space Storage and the no perfect people allowed sign at Hope Covenant Church; ricocheting around the homes in Canopy Lane, Clemente Ranch, Stonefield, the Reserve at Stonefield. He’d go out multiple nights a week, for 10 minutes to an hour, taking notes on where the noise was loudest. The patrols dragged on—one week, two weeks, eight weeks—which led to spats with his wife, who wanted to know why he kept leaving the house so late at night.

Finally, as winter warmed into spring, Thallikar thought he’d identified the source of the whine: a gray, nearly windowless building about half a mile from his house. The two-story structure, which had the charm of a prison and the architectural panache of a shoebox, was clad in concrete and surrounded by chain-link and black-metal fences, plus a cinder-block wall. It belonged to a company called CyrusOne.

The CyrusOne data center in Chandler, Arizona (Cassidy Araiza)

There was no thrill in this discovery, just simmering fear that the noise might get worse. Thallikar visited the city-planning clerk, multiple times. She said she couldn’t help and referred him to CyrusOne’s construction manager. Kept awake by the noise at 11 o’clock one Saturday night, Thallikar phoned the man, who protested that he was trying to sleep. “I’m trying to sleep too, dude!” Thallikar told him. When they spoke again the next day, the call ended abruptly, and without resolution.

According to CyrusOne’s website, the company’s Chandler campus offers Fortune 500 companies robust infrastructure for mission-critical applications. In other words, it’s a data center—a columbarium for thousands of servers that store data for access and processing from virtually anywhere in the world. When you check your bank balance or research a used car or book a hotel room, chances are decent that the information comes to you via one of the more than 40 CyrusOne data centers spread around the globe. CyrusOne houses servers belonging to nearly 1,000 companies, including Microsoft, Country Financial, Brink’s, Carfax, and nearly half of the Fortune 20.

Thallikar, wanting to confront the noise personally, made a surprise visit to CyrusOne. He found workers putting up a new building, but learned that the whine was unrelated to construction. It came from the chillers, a bulky assemblage of steel boxes and tubes permanently affixed to the sides of the two existing buildings. Servers, like humans, are happiest at temperatures between 60 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and the chillers were crucial in keeping the heat-generating machines comfortably cool as they worked. In the fall of 2014, around the time Thallikar started noticing the whine, CyrusOne had had room for 16 chillers. Now it was getting ready to add eight more. During a follow-up visit, Thallikar, who grew up in Bangalore and moved to Arizona in 1990 to study industrial engineering at Arizona State University, said he was informed by a worker at the site that immigrants like him should feel lucky to live in the U.S., noise be damned.

CyrusOne arrived in Chandler shortly before Thallikar did and broke ground two months after he closed on his home. For CyrusOne, Chandler was a “dream come true,” Kevin Timmons, the company’s chief technology officer, told me. The city essentially offered CyrusOne carte blanche to develop an area three times the size of Ellis Island into one of the nation’s largest data-storage complexes: 2 million square feet protected by biometric locks, steel-lined walls, bullet-resistant glass, and dual-action interlocking dry-pipe sprinkler systems. CyrusOne even has two of its own substations humming with enough energy (112 megawatts) to light up every home in Salt Lake City—or, more relevant to the matter at hand, to power several dozen 400- and 500-ton chillers. CyrusOne’s Chandler facility was not only the company’s most ambitious, but the biggest to realize its strategy of wooing clients through ultrafast, just-in-time construction. CyrusOne could now boast of being able to complete a building in 107 days—faster than customers could have their servers ready. “It literally put us on the map,” Timmons said.

Arizona attracts data centers the way Florida attracts plastic surgeons. The state has low humidity; proximity to California—where many users and customers are based—but without its earthquakes or energy prices; and, thanks to lobbying efforts by CyrusOne, generous tax incentives for companies that drop their servers there. Walk 10 minutes due north from CyrusOne’s Chandler complex, and you’ll reach two other data centers, with a third just down the road. Drive 15 minutes from there, and you’ll come across three more. Continue farther east past Wild West Paintball, and you’ll hit an Apple data center, which will soon be joined by a Google facility, plus another data center from CyrusOne. Forty-five minutes west of Thallikar’s home, Compass Datacenters is building on more than 225 acres of land, a plot three times the size of CyrusOne’s in Chandler.

By the summer of 2015, Thallikar had thrown himself into an aggressive campaign to quiet the hum. He went up and down the city’s chain of command, pleading for help. He emailed Chandler’s economic-development innovation manager, its economic-development specialist, and its economic-development director, who replied that Thallikar was the only resident to complain, but dutifully went out, twice, to listen for the high-pitched whine. He didn’t hear it. “I do not think I am imagining things here and wasting people’s time,” Thallikar wrote back, adding that he’d taken his family on his patrol, “and they too could hear the noise.”

Thallikar emailed a news anchor, an executive producer, an editor, and several reporters at the local 12 News TV station, offering to help them “in experiencing the problem so they can relate to it.” He emailed the mayor and all five members of the Chandler city council. Multiple times. Then daily. “The noise gets louder in the night and enters our homes. And the streets are filled with it,” Thallikar wrote in one email. In another: “Just what will it take for one of you to respond to my emails.” He presented his case at a city-council meeting, requesting that a task force be formed to research and stop the whine. He acknowledged that he’d been told the sound seemed suspiciously similar to the buzz of traffic on the 202 freeway nearby.

Thallikar took his campaign to his homeowners’ association and to his neighbors. The response was tepid, though he did persuade one person to email the city. Thallikar reached out, again, to CyrusOne, and to the Chandler Police Department. Commander Gregg Jacquin promised to investigate, but suggested that Thallikar might have more success if he cooled it with all the emails to city officials, which were creeping into the high double digits. Thallikar started keeping a log of how the noise changed, hour to hour and day to day. It was getting louder, he was sure.

In the fall of 2015, Jacquin emailed Thallikar to say that he’d gone in search of the noise, but hadn’t heard it. “I am not making this up—even though I do not have the measurement numbers,” Thallikar wrote back. “The noise heard over the weekend starting on Saturday starting around 10 pm through Sunday was very very bad. I got a nervous headache, and had to take medications.” He never heard back from Jacquin. Before long, Thallikar began to contemplate selling his home.

Noise is a clever enemy. It leaves no trace and vanishes when chased. It’s hard to measure or describe. It is also relative. “Sound is when you mow your lawn, noise is when your neighbor mows their lawn, and music is when your neighbor mows your lawn,” says Arjun Shankar, an acoustic consultant. Noise is also fiendishly difficult to legislate, though for nearly as long as humans have lived together, we have seen fit to try. The ancient Greeks of Sybaris are credited with introducing the first noise ordinance, in the eighth century b.c., banishing roosters as well as blacksmiths, carpenters, and other “noisy arts” from the city limits. In the United States, the appetite for noise control reached its apex in 1972, when President Richard Nixon enacted the country’s first federal statute specifically targeting noise pollution, which empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to quiet the country. Nine years later, the Reagan administration withdrew funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Noise Abatement and Control, foisting responsibility back onto state and local governments. Since then, little has changed. “Unfortunately,” says New York City’s longtime noise czar, Arline Bronzaft, “the federal government is essentially out of the noise business.”

In the ensuing decades, the war on noise has shifted to the margins—a loose flock of mom-and-pop organizers whose agitations have all the glitz and edge of a church bake sale. The mood on pro-quiet listservs skews defeatist, the general tone more support group than picket line. (The landing page for the Right to Quiet Society politely instructs newcomers, “If you did not like what you saw here, without telling us, you might consider leaving quietly.”) Anti-noise crusaders band together in ragtag crews united by geography or irritant. Depending on whether your trigger point concerns planes, trains, blowers, Jet Skis, dirt bikes, concerts, boom cars, cars, motorcycles, or Muzak, you might join ROAR (Residents Opposed to Airport Racket), HORN (Halt Outrageous Railroad Noise), BLAST (Ban Leaf Blowers and Save Our Town), CALM (Clean Alternative Landscaping Methods), HEAVEN (Healthier Environment Through Abatement of Vehicle Emission and Noise), CRASH (County Residents Against Speedway Havoc), Pipedown (“the campaign for freedom from piped music”), or roughly 150 other organizations with varying levels of activity. In the United States, one of the few emitter-agnostic groups with a national scope is Noise Free America, which has 51 local chapters, noise counselors on call, and, for four out of the past six years, a tradition of going to Washington, D.C., to petition lawmakers—the pinnacle of which was once getting to meet then–Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff.

On a recent Sunday morning, I joined Noise Free America’s founder and director, Ted Rueter, for what he billed as a “noise tour” of Brooklyn—a pilgrimage to some of the borough’s most sonorously grating street corners. Rueter, a 62-year-old political-science professor, met me at a Starbucks on Flatbush Avenue wearing khaki shorts, a pink polo shirt, and Bose noise-canceling headphones. He was joined by three New Yorkers concerned with the din of their neighborhoods: Manohar Kanuri, a former stock analyst who lives above the incessant beeping of construction and delivery trucks in Manhattan’s Battery Park City; Ashley, a 40-something who’s moved three times in an effort to escape thunderous parties; and Vivianne, a woman who lives with the constant staccato of honking livery cabs, dollar vans, and impatient drivers. (Ashley and Vivianne asked not to be identified by their real names.) For Rueter, who was in town from Durham, North Carolina, a tour of New York’s cacophony seemed to have the exotic thrill of going on safari. Kanuri, Ashley, and Vivianne had corresponded extensively online, but this was their first time meeting in person, and they appeared delighted at getting to bond with sympathetic ears. “We build coalition this way,” Kanuri said.

All three New Yorkers had tried tackling their noise issues through traditional avenues—the 311 nonemergency line (which receives more reports about noise than about any other issue), the local police, their city-council members, the public advocate, the mayor—but found the city unsympathetic, unresponsive, or ineffective. Before heading out on the noise tour, they sat in the Starbucks venting about the difficulties of catching emitters in the act and encouraging police to take action. Ashley had placed so many 311 calls that she worried about getting arrested, like a Bronx woman who was thrown in a holding cell on charges of entering false information in the public record after calling 44 times in 15 months—often to report her neighbors’ racket. Vivianne warned Ashley that the police had probably pegged her as a “serial complainer”—among anti-noise crusaders, a dreaded fate.

Noise codes tend to be either qualitative (prohibiting subjectively defined “disturbing” or “unreasonably loud” noise) or quantitative (defining, in measurable terms, what constitutes disturbing or unreasonably loud noise). New York City’s noise code, which is the latter, considers barking a nuisance only if a dog yaps for 10 minutes straight between the hours of 7 a.m. and 10 p.m., or for five minutes straight between the hours of 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. (Four and a half minutes of barking at 2 a.m. is, technically, permissible.) At night, restaurants can be fined if their music measures in excess of 42 decibels from inside a nearby apartment and seven decibels above the level of ambient street sounds.  

Most ordinances correlate punishable noise with loudness, though if you’ve ever tried to sleep through a dripping faucet, you know that something can be quiet and still drive you up the wall. Research confirms that what makes a sound annoying is only partially whether it whispers or roars. The volume at which noise begins to irritate varies depending on the source—we tolerate trains at louder volumes than cars, and cars at louder volumes than planes—and its pitch, or frequency. (Humans can hear sounds between 20 and 20,000 hertz, which roughly ranges from the low-frequency thump of subwoofers to the high-frequency buzz of certain crickets.) We are more sensitive to mid-frequency sounds—voices, birdsong, squealing brakes, shrieking infants—and perceive these sounds as louder than they are. Contrary to the stereotype of the old man shaking his fist, age and gender are not necessarily strong predictors of annoyance.

Nor must noises be heard in order to harm. Earplugs may dull the whine of motorcycles chugging outside your bedroom, but they’re useless against the engines’ low-frequency rumble, which vibrates the windows, floors, and your chest, and is the type of sound that’s largely ignored in most official noise calculations. (Harley-Davidson, which considers that thudding a point of pride, tried to trademark the sound of its V-twin motorcycle engine, which its lawyer translated as “potato potato potato” said very fast.) When regulatory officials evaluate environmental noise—to determine, say, whether to soundproof schools near airport runways—their calculations emphasize the mid-frequency sounds to which our ears are most sensitive and discount the low-frequency sounds (think wind turbines, washing machines, kids galloping upstairs) that have been shown to travel farther and trigger stronger stress responses. “If you actually measured sound using the right metric, you’ll see that you’re harming a lot more people than you think you are,” says Walker, the environmental-health researcher, who is working with communities near flight paths and freeways to rethink how noise is quantified.

Years ago, the staff of a medical-equipment company became spooked by recurring sightings of a gray, spectral figure haunting their lab. One night, an engineer working late alone felt a chill pass through the room and, out of the corner of his eye, saw a soundless figure hovering beside him. When he wheeled around, no one was there. The next day, while adjusting one of the machines in the lab, he began to feel the same creeping unease. The poltergeist? A vibrating extractor fan, he realized. He published a paper on his ghost-busting, which concluded that the machine was emitting low-frequency sound waves: pulses of energy too low in frequency to be heard by humans, yet powerful enough to affect our bodies—comparable, he found, to the inaudible vibrations in a supposedly haunted cellar and in the long, windy hallways that appear in scary stories. In addition to causing shivering, sweating, difficulty breathing, and blurry vision as a result of vibrating eyeballs, low-frequency sounds can also, apparently, produce ghosts.

[Read: City noise might be making you sick]

For two years, Thallikar complained to anyone who would listen and even to those who would not. Meanwhile, CyrusOne kept building. The company finished three new buildings and bought 29 more acres of land in Chandler, growing the site to more than 85 acres. In a press release, it congratulated itself for “ensuring CyrusOne maintains the largest data center campus in the Southwest and one of the largest in the United States,” and cheered plans to build a comparable facility in California.

Some nights, Thallikar couldn’t sleep at all. He started wearing earplugs during the day, and stopped spending time outdoors. He looked for excuses to leave town and, in the evenings, returned to his old neighborhood in Tempe to take his constitutionals there. As he drove home, he’d have a pit in his stomach. He couldn’t stop himself from making the noise a recurring conversation topic at dinner.

Not only was the whine itself agitating—EHHNNNNNNNN—but its constant drone was like a cruel mnemonic for everything that bothered him: his powerlessness, his sense of injustice that the city was ignoring its residents’ welfare, his fear of selling his home for a major loss because no one would want to live with the noise, his regret that his family’s haven (not to mention their biggest investment) had turned into a nightmare. EHHNNN. EHHNNNNNNNNN. EHHNNNNNNNNNNNN. He tried meditating. He considered installing new windows to dull the hum, or planting trees to block the noise. He researched lawyers. And he made one final appeal to the newly elected members of the Chandler city council.

Lo and behold, one wrote back, promising to look into the issue.

The council member followed up a few weeks later. “According to the chief, police had visited 16 times on the site and conducted investigations on your claim,” he wrote. “They found the noise level was not significant enough to cause an issue.” Thallikar contacted a real-estate agent. He would lose money, and he’d have to move to a smaller house, but by the end of 2017, he’d decided to sell his home.

Commander Edward Upshaw of the Chandler police doesn’t foresee citing CyrusOne for the noise. “Not going to happen,” he said. (Cassidy Araiza)

To spend time with noise warriors is to become frustratingly attuned to every gurgle, squeal, clank, and creak. As I set out with Rueter and the three New Yorkers on the noise tour, the anonymous din of Flatbush Avenue splintered into a riotous skronk of bleating cars, rattling generators, and snarling planes. Sirens yowled and vents whistled; a motorcycle potato-potato-potatoed and a can skittered on the concrete.

R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer who, in the 1960s, pioneered the field of acoustic ecology, has advocated “soundwalks” as an activity that, even more effectively than ordinances, could curb noise pollution by making people more aware of their habitat’s acoustics. A soundwalk—during which you actively listen to the sonic demeanor of your surroundings—might involve tallying the number of car horns you hear in the course of an hour or scavenger-hunting for sounds with specific characteristics, like a buzz followed by a squeak. Schafer saw soundwalks as a way to address our sonological incompetence. Teach people to tune in to their soundscapes, and they will understand which sounds to preserve and which to eliminate, then act accordingly.

The first stop on our noise tour was, mercifully, a place of quiet. We gathered in silence around a small koi pond on the Brooklyn College campus. I forced myself to listen carefully. An air conditioner purred. Water burbled. A child hollered. “See, once a kid comes, that’s when the screaming starts,” Ashley said.

She and Kanuri discussed the inefficacy of earplugs and the pros and cons of analog versus digital white-noise machines. Ashley said she slept with three white-noise machines (which hardly makes her an exception among the sound-sufferers I met) and, because of a whistler in her office, had started wearing earplugs at work.

“Are you familiar with something called slow TV?” Kanuri asked Ashley. “It’s a sailboat that runs 10 hours, and all you hear is the ship breaking water. That’s it. Every now and then you’ll hear bruhhhhh—another ship that passes by. That’s it. It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful.”

Stéphane Pigeon, an audio-processing engineer based in Brussels, has become the Taylor Swift of white noise, traveling the world recording relaxing soundscapes for his website, myNoise.net, which offers its more than 15,000 daily listeners an encyclopedic compendium of noise-masking tracks that range from “Distant Thunder” to “Laundromat,” a listener request. (White noise, technically speaking, contains all audible frequencies in equal proportion. In the natural world, falling rain comes close to approximating this pan-frequency shhhhhh.) Impulse noises, such as honking, barking, hammering, and snoring, are the hardest to mask, but Pigeon has tried: While traveling in the Sahara, he recorded “Berber Tent,” a myNoise hit designed to help snorees by harmonizing the gentle whoosh of wind, the burble of boiling water, and the low rattle of snoring. Because covering up a snorer’s brief, punchy HRROHN! is exceedingly difficult, “the goal is to try to persuade you that snoring could be a beautiful sound,” Pigeon told me.

After a few minutes at the pond, we reluctantly tore ourselves from the quiet to prowl Brooklyn’s streets for sounds. Farther north on Flatbush Avenue, encircled by lowing horns and a wheezing Mister Softee truck, Kanuri used his sound-meter app to measure the ambient noise—a disappointing 75.9 decibels, lower than everyone had thought but still more than 20 decibels above the threshold at which, per a 1974 EPA report, we get distracted or annoyed by sound. (Decibels, which measure volume, are logarithmic: Turn up a sound by 10 decibels, and most people will perceive its loudness as having doubled.) The soundscape shushed as we approached the stately brownstones near Prospect Park, then thumped to life again when we stopped for lunch at, of all places, Screamer’s Pizzeria. “Would it be possible during our short stay here to turn down the music?” Rueter asked a server.

Desperate ears call for desperate measures, and the noise-afflicted go to elaborate lengths to lower the volume. Kanuri taught himself to code so he could analyze New York City’s 311 data and correlate noise complaints with elective districts; he hoped he could hold politicians accountable. Having tried moving bedrooms and also apartments, Ashley is now moving across the country, to a suburb in the Southwest. I spoke with a New Yorker who, unable to afford a move, has been sleeping in her closet—armed with earplugs, headphones, an AC unit, a fan, and two white-noise machines. A Wisconsin man who’d re-insulated, re-drywalled, and re-windowed his home was ultimately offered sleeping medication and antidepressants. An apartment dweller in Beijing, fed up with the calisthenics of the kids upstairs, got revenge by attaching a vibrating motor to his ceiling that rattled the family’s floor. The gadget is available for purchase online, where you can also find Coat of Silence paint, AlphaSorb Bass Traps, the Noise Eater Isolation Foot, the Sound Soother Headband, and the Sonic Nausea Electronic Disruption Device, which promises, irresistibly, “inventive payback.”

One might also run for president. Arline Bronzaft, the New York City noise czar, speculates that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was motivated by his quest to quiet the aircraft that disrupted Mar-a-Lago’s “once serene and tranquil ambience”—so described in one of the lawsuits Trump filed in his 20-year legal battle against Palm Beach County. Six days after he was elected—and the Federal Aviation Administration shared plans to limit flights over his resort—a Trump spokesperson announced that he would abandon the lawsuit.

Scientists have yet to agree on a definition for noise sensitivity, much less determine why some individuals seem more prone to it, though there have been cases linking sensitivity to hearing loss. What is clear, however, is that sound, once noticed, becomes impossible to ignore. “Once you are bothered by a sound, you unconsciously train your brain to hear that sound,” Pigeon said. “That phenomenon just feeds itself into a diabolic loop.” Research suggests habituation, the idea that we’ll just “get used to it,” is a myth. And there is no known cure. Even for sufferers of tinnitus—an auditory affliction researchers understand far better than noise sensitivity—the most effective treatment that specialists can offer is a regimen of “standard audiological niceness”: listening to them complain and reassuring them the noise won’t kill them. Or, as one expert put it, “lending a nice ear.”

[From October 2019: Rebecca Giggs on why whale songs are getting deeper]

During the summer of 2017, Cheryl Jannuzzi, who lived a short drive from Thallikar, in Clemente Ranch, began to hear humming coming from somewhere behind her house. For a while, she’d had to endure the clang and beep of construction, but this was different—like an endlessly revving engine, or a jet warming up for takeoff.

Jannuzzi contacted the city, and was told that the complex directly across Dobson Road from her backyard was a data center. This was news to her, and she wasn’t sure what to make of it. “They’re just housing data,” she thought. “That shouldn’t be making so much noise.”

Around Halloween, Jennifer Goehring started to notice a buzzing sound. It gave her headaches and kept her up at night, but her husband couldn’t hear it, and neither could her kids. She worried that she might be losing her mind. She began sleeping with sound machines and pillows over her head, and went to the doctor to be sure she didn’t have an ear infection. She didn’t.

Amy Weber was with her Bible-study group in her backyard when she became aware of a consistent tone that hummed above everyone’s voices. She and her husband, Steve, had heard the construction on Dobson Road for ages, but this whirring sound didn’t seem to stop, or change. They tried to identify it by process of elimination, even climbing out of bed one night to clear crud from their pool pump, which, they discovered, wasn’t turned on.

Eventually, through their own patrols, they identified the source. The week after Christmas, the Webers papered Clemente Ranch with flyers and created a website asking people if they’d been bothered by a “constant humming/whirring sound” coming from CyrusOne. Complaints from more than 120 people flowed in.

Thallikar heard about the Webers’ efforts from one of his neighbors, and on January 23, 2018, he went to their home for the standing-room-only inaugural meeting of the Dobson Noise Coalition. People complained about headaches, irritability, difficulty sleeping. Jannuzzi had tried to muffle the sound by installing thick wooden barn doors over her sliding glass doors, and another neighbor had mounted sound-absorbing acoustic board in her bedroom windows. For five years, you couldn’t have bought a house on Jannuzzi’s block, but now several of her neighbors were planning to move.

When it was Thallikar’s turn, the story of his three-year odyssey poured out: the sleepless nights, the feelings of being under attack, the unresponsive officials and unanswered emails. Jaws dropped. He wanted to know why no one else had spoken up earlier. “I think we all went through a period of ‘Maybe it’ll go away,’ ” said one neighbor. Others had assumed something was wrong with them, or else had struggled to trace the sound to its source.

The Dobson Noise Coalition jumped into action. Its members circulated a petition asking CyrusOne to stop its racket, which 317 people signed. They wrote to CyrusOne, twice, but heard nothing. They contacted Chandler officials—who were considerably more receptive to the group than they had been to Thallikar alone—and got the city manager to send CyrusOne’s CEO a certified letter requesting a “plan of action.” For weeks, CyrusOne responded with silence.

Amy Weber, who co-founded the Dobson Noise Coalition, in front of her home (Cassidy Araiza)

The nature of noise is shifting. Sonic gripes from the 18th and 19th centuries—church bells, carriage wheels, the hollering of street criers—sound downright charming to today’s ears. Since then, our soundscape has been overpowered by the steady roar of machines: a chorus of cars, planes, trains, pumps, drills, stereos, and turbines; of jackhammers, power saws, chain saws, cellphones, and car alarms, plus generators, ventilators, compressors, street sweepers, helicopters, mowers, and data centers, which are spreading in lockstep with our online obsession and racking up noise complaints along the way. Communities in France, Ireland, Norway, Canada, North Carolina, Montana, Virginia, Colorado, Delaware, and Illinois have all protested the whine of data centers. That’s to say nothing of what drones may bring. “The next century will do to the air what the 20th century did to the land, which is to put roads and noise everywhere,” Les Blomberg, the executive director of the nonprofit Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, told me. Noise, having emancipated itself from the human hand, is becoming autonomous and inexhaustible. Human noisemakers have to sleep, but our mechanical counterparts, which do not tire, die, or strain their vocal cords, can keep up a constant, inescapable clamor.

Study after study has reached the hardly earth-shattering conclusion that we largely prefer the sounds of nature to those of machines. A 2008 research project that played subjects 75 recordings, ranging from a cat’s meow to skidding tires, found the five most agreeable sounds to be running water, bubbling water, flowing water, a small waterfall, and a baby laughing. Other studies—echoing spa brochures—tell us that natural sounds promote relaxation.

And yet we’re muffling them with our racket, to the detriment of other species. The concentration of stress hormones in elk and wolf feces spikes when snowmobiles arrive, then returns to normal when the machines disappear; a similar pattern was observed for North Atlantic right whales subjected to the whine of ship traffic. (One bioacoustics researcher told The New York Times that the acoustic emissions of air guns, used to map the ocean floor, are creating a “living hell” for undersea creatures.) Birds in noisy habitats become screechier to make themselves heard above our din—sparrows that “used to sound like, say, George Clooney would now sound like Bart Simpson,” one ornithologist told a reporter—and this phenomenon has been linked to decreases in species diversity, bird populations, and tree growth.

Though data are scarce, the world appears to be growing louder. The National Park Service’s Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division, which sends researchers to measure the acoustics of the American outdoors, estimates that noise pollution doubles or triples every 30 years. The EPA last measured our nation’s volume in 1981; assuming (generously) that our collective cacophony has remained constant, calculations from 2013 estimate that more than 145 million Americans are exposed to noise exceeding the recommended limits. In the absence of more recent surveys, the volume at which emergency vehicles shriek is telling, given that sirens must be loud enough to pierce the ambient noise level. According to measurements by R. Murray Schafer, a fire-engine siren from 1912 reached 88 to 96 decibels measured from 11 feet away, whereas by 1974, sirens’ screeches hit 114 decibels at the same distance—an increase in volume, he noted, of about half a decibel a year. The latest fire-engine sirens howl louder still: 123 decibels at 10 feet.

Not everyone bears the brunt of the din equally. Belying its dismissal as a country-club complaint, noise pollution in the U.S. tends to be most severe in poor communities, as well as in neighborhoods with more people of color. A 2017 paper found that urban noise levels were higher in areas with greater proportions of black, Asian, and Hispanic residents than in predominantly white neighborhoods. Urban areas where a majority of residents live below the poverty line were also subjected to significantly higher levels of nighttime noise, and the study’s authors warned that their findings likely underestimated the differences, given that many wealthy homeowners invest in soundproofing.

“If you want to access quietness, more and more you have to pay,” says Antonella Radicchi, an architect who helps map quiet spaces in cities. Radicchi believes access to quiet havens should be a right for every city dweller, not only the rich, who can afford to escape noise—via spas, silent yoga retreats, lush corporate campuses. For $6,450, not including airfare, you too can take a plane to a car to a motorboat to a canoe to a hiking trail to spend three days with a tour group along Ecuador’s Zabalo River, which was recently named the world’s first Wilderness Quiet Park. The designation was developed by the acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, who has crisscrossed the globe recording natural soundscapes and, through his nonprofit, Quiet Parks International, is on a mission to “save quiet.” The organization is developing standards to measure the quietness of parks, trails, hotels, and residential communities, and will offer accreditation to areas that are suitably silent. (The Zabalo River qualified for Wilderness Quiet Park status by having a noise-free interval of at least 15 minutes, during which no man-made sounds were audible.)

[Read: How noise pollution impairs learning]

I spoke with Hempton via Skype several days after he’d returned from the Zabalo River. He was tan, with close-cropped gray hair and a tattoo on each forearm—one, of a leaf, inspired by his most recent visit to the Zabalo and another, he said, by an epiphany during his first solo campout in the Amazon jungle. Like other quiet advocates, Hempton speaks with the calm confidence, parallel sentence structure, and hypnotic cadence of a guru. I asked him what he sees as the value of quiet. “The further we get into quiet, the further we discover who we are,” Hempton said. “When you speak from a quiet place, when you are quiet, you think differently. You are more uniquely yourself. You are not echoing advertisements. You are not echoing billboards. You are not echoing modern songs. You’re echoing where you were.” When I asked Hempton’s co-founder the same thing, he chided me: “That question itself comes from a noisy situation.”

Before starting Quiet Parks International, Hempton launched an effort to preserve the sonic pristineness of the Hoh Rain Forest in Washington’s Olympic National Park. In 2005, Hempton could sit in the park for an hour without hearing man-made sounds—there was only the low, breathy whistle of the wind, the tap of rain on Sitka spruce, black-tailed deer crunching over felled hemlock, and marbled murrelets trilling. Today, thanks to an increase in flights from a naval air base, Hempton says the noise-free interval has dropped to 10 minutes.

Cassidy Araiza / The Atlantic

This summer, I traveled to Chandler to hear the whine for myself. A few months after the creation of the Dobson Noise Coalition, CyrusOne emailed the group promising to be a “good neighbor” and said it would install “sound attenuation packages” on its chillers by October 2018. But that October came and went, and, the neighbors agreed, the noise was worse than ever.

So they kicked their efforts into high gear. In the 17 months since the Dobson Noise Coalition was founded, its members have consulted lawyers, filed police reports, gotten coverage in the local news, and met with Chandler’s chief of police. Armed with videos, written testimony, and detailed timelines, more than two dozen unsmiling neighbors dressed in red presented their grievances to the Chandler city council. That finally got them a meeting with CyrusOne.

In May, delegates from the Dobson Noise Coalition parleyed with delegates from CyrusOne, including an acoustic consultant the company had hired. According to his measurements, the whine of the chillers falls between 630 and 1,000 hertz—directly in the mid-frequency spectrum, the range our ears are most sensitive to—and is a pure-tone sound, widely considered exceptionally irritating. CyrusOne reiterated that it would spend $2 million wrapping each and every chiller in custom-made, mass-loaded vinyl blankets designed to lower the whine by 10 decibels. Any future chillers would also be swaddled.

Kevin Timmons, CyrusOne’s chief technology officer, took me on a golf-cart tour of the exterior of the mission-critical facility, of which no inside tours are permitted without a signed nondisclosure agreement. Even Timmons kept getting locked out of different quadrants and having to summon security guards for help. He first heard about the noise complaints in early 2018, and said the neighbors’ annoyance came as a surprise. “We were a little bit stunned for a number of months while we tried to figure out if this was real,” he told me. “And it was made clear to us that, whether real or imagined, it is something that we have to do something about.” He regretted not acting faster and worried that even after the seven-figure soundproofing, some people could never unhear the whine: “Once you hear an annoying sound, humans could actually start listening for that sound.” Recently, he told me, residents living near a CyrusOne data center in Dallas have started complaining about a hum.

The week I visited, CyrusOne had finished wrapping 24 of the now 56 chillers at the Chandler complex. The neighbors were split on whether the blankets helped, but they were unanimously livid that the city had allowed a data center in their backyard in the first place. They had a lot of questions about due diligence: What studies had been done? What measurements taken? None, I learned: Chandler’s city planners are not required to consider noise when issuing permits, nor did they. Plus, most of CyrusOne’s land was zoned for industrial use in 1983, 13 years before the closest homes, in Clemente Ranch, were built. The neighbors all knew the local noise code, chapter and verse—“No person shall disturb the peace, quiet and comfort of any neighborhood by creating therein any disturbing or unreasonably loud noise”—and demanded to know why CyrusOne hadn’t at the very least been cited, given that it was unquestionably disturbing their peace, quiet, and comfort.

I posed that question to Commander Edward Upshaw, a 33-year veteran of the Chandler Police Department, as we cruised the outskirts of the CyrusOne campus, a steady hum faintly audible over the rumble of late-afternoon traffic. “Issuing a citation and charging somebody with a crime for this level of noise? Not going to happen,” Upshaw said. We pulled over in Chuparosa Park and stood a few yards from the cinder-block wall that marked the outer edge of CyrusOne. “People sell radios that make white noise or waves that’s louder than this,” he said. “There’s people that pay for this! I don’t know what the issue is.” We drove inside Clemente Ranch. “If you called a New York police officer for this noise, tell me what would happen. Tell me! Tell me what would happen.”

The following evening, I drove to Thallikar’s home, one in a row of tidy stucco houses bordered by saguaros and Jeep Wranglers. We sat in his living room next to a glass coffee table covered with folders and papers documenting his noise fight.

After teaming up with the Dobson Noise Coalition, Thallikar decided to hold off on selling his home. He was “cautiously optimistic,” but still wanted to know why the city allowed the “monstrosity,” with its “goddamned machines,” to escape punishment for disturbing the peace. He rejected the idea that anyone could judge the hum based on a short visit. “They are going there and sampling the problem,” Thallikar said. “I’m experiencing it day and night.” But he conceded that CyrusOne’s noise level was about 20 percent better than it had been, and he’d recently moved back into his master bedroom.

As CyrusOne had gotten quieter, though, Thallikar had noticed another, different whine. Through a new round of patrols, he’d traced it to GM Financial, which was equipped with its own platoon of chillers. He presented his findings to the city manager in a PowerPoint presentation, which identified as sources of “injurious noise pollution” chillers and generators at GM Financial; the Digital Realty data center around the corner from his home; and, potentially, the forthcoming Northrop Grumman complex. (Digital Realty and GM Financial said they were aware of the complaints but, after investigating, deemed no action necessary; the owner of Northrop Grumman’s building told me any noise concerns were “unfounded.”)

Thallikar offered to take me on a listening tour of the injurious noise pollution, and we hopped into a road-worn Toyota Camry, which Thallikar steered to the GM Financial parking lot. We sidled up to a locked metal gate. “You hear this?” Thallikar said. EHHNNNNNNNN, said something from within the enclosure. “I don’t know how many units they have inside. You hear this, right? In the evenings it becomes louder and louder.”

After a few other stops, we doubled back to concentrate on the area around CyrusOne. For more than an hour, we circled its campus, pulling over every so often. As the sun and traffic dropped, the intensity of the hum rose. The droning wasn’t loud, but it was noticeable. It became irritatingly noticeable as the sky dimmed to black, escalating from a wheezy buzz to a clear, crisp, unending whine.

“This is depressing,” Thallikar said as we stood on a sidewalk in Clemente Ranch. “Like somebody in pain, crying. Crying constantly and moaning in pain.”

We were silent again and listened to the data center moaning. Which was also, in a sense, the sound of us living: the sound of furniture being purchased, of insurance policies compared, of shipments dispatched and deliveries confirmed, of security systems activated, of cable bills paid. In Forest City, North Carolina, where some Facebook servers have moved in, the whine is the sound of people liking, commenting, streaming a video of five creative ways to make eggs, uploading bachelorette-party photos. It’s perhaps the sound of Thallikar’s neighbor posting “Has anyone else noticed how loud it’s been this week?” to the Dobson Noise Coalition’s Facebook group. It’s the sound of us searching for pink-eye cures, or streaming porn, or checking the lyrics to “Old Town Road.” The sound is the exhaust of our activity. Modern life—EHHNNNNNNNN—humming along.

The hum had settled into a strong, unwavering refrain by the time Thallikar dropped me off at my hotel, which looked out over the CyrusOne campus. I could see a new building under construction, plus a lot for another building of equal size. Beyond that, just down the street from where Thallikar lived, was a bald patch of land with space for two more buildings. CyrusOne had room to add 96 more chillers, almost double the number whining now.

This article appears in the November 2019 print edition with the headline “The End of Silence.”

The New Talking Machines

1889-02-01T10:59:32-05:00

The first idea of a genuine talking-machine appears to belong to Thomas A. Edison, who, in 1875, took out patents upon a device intended to reproduce complex sounds, such as those of the human voice. Of the thousands of persons who in that year visited the small room in the Tribune building, in New York, where the first phonograph was for months on exhibition, very few were found to hope much for the invention. It was apparently a toy of no practical value; its talking was more or less of a caricature upon the human voice, and only when one knew what had been said to the phonograph could its version be understood.

Edison’s early phonograph nevertheless contained every essential feature of the new instruments which he and other inventors are about to introduce. It was founded upon the discovery that if a delicate diaphragm or sounding-board is provided with a sharp point of steel, its vibrations under the sound of the human voice will cause the sharp point or stylus to make a series of impressions or indentations upon a sheet of wax or other material passed beneath it. Such indentations, though microscopic, are sufficiently defined to cause similar vibrations in the diaphragm, if the stylus is again passed over the furrow of indentations, and this reproduction is loud enough to be heard.

Thus the phonograph in its rudest form consists of a little sounding-board, carrying on its under side a needle-point, and a sheet of wax so held as just to touch the needle. The sound waves of the voice cause the sounding-board with its needle-point to vibrate with a rapidity varying with the pitch of the note. If the wax sheet is moved slowly along while talk is going on, the result is a line of minute indentations. So far there is nothing surprising about the apparatus. But at the end of a line across the wax sheet raise the diaphragm, and put it back to the beginning of the line, causing the point to travel again over the same line of indentations. Listen carefully, and a repetition of the original sounds spoken or sung into the apparatus will be heard, strong or weak, distinct or indistinct, according to the perfection of the instrument. Tin-foil sheets were first used to receive the impression; they were placed on a cylinder, which was turned slowly by hand, in front of the vibrating diaphragm. While the cylinder carrying the foil had a rotary motion, it also moved from right to left, so that the line of dots or indentations made by the stylus formed a spiral running around the cylinder.

The defects of the early phonograph were so great that Edison found it impossible to interest capitalists in perfecting it. It reproduced singing and whistling with wonderful accuracy, but as a talker it was merely a curiosity. As such it was exhibited throughout the country, and the few hundreds then made soon found their way into college laboratories and museums. Edison went to work at his electric light. At the same time there were not wanting eminent men in Europe who predicted great things for the phonograph of the future.

What it accomplished was so wonderful that inventors would certainly be tempted to work over it. The perfect and practical phonograph might be due to a dozen men, each of whom should contribute something. One day it would be found a useful and most wonderful help to man. Edison himself has always stoutly maintained this view. More than a score of times, during the last ten years, he has said to me, “I wish I had leisure to work at my phonograph. When I get rich I will astonish the world with it.” He tells me that whenever disheartened for the moment over difficulties connected with his electric-light system, his mind would revert to the phonograph. For years he kept a special note-book in his pocket in which to jot down ideas concerning the invention, suggestions as to future experiments, etc. Two years ago he found himself in a position to take it up again.

In the mean time several other inventors and workers had done something to simplify the problem. Mr. Graham Bell, of telephone fame, has made phonographs of far greater delicacy than any of the original instruments, while in England some noted experimenters have succeeded in doing wonders in the way of delicate apparatus. Mr. Edison took up the work where these had left off. In place of a sheet of tin-foil a sheet of prepared wax was adopted. The steel needle-point was retained for indenting the sheet, but for reproducing the sound it was found that an elastic splinter of bamboo, as fine as a hair, answered the purpose better, and made so little impression upon the wax as not to wear off its record. In place of a hand-crank to turn the cylinder an electric motor was introduced. Finally all parts of the machine were made with a delicacy and care not thought of ten years ago. In the old phonograph the attempt was to make a loud noise, and this was accomplished at the expense of distinctness of articulation. If the voice of the perfected phonograph is as loud as that of a telephone, the result will be satisfactory, provided it is perfectly distinct.

Edison has devoted nearly two years to the task of making the phonograph of commercial use. He believes that he has succeeded. Whether or not the instrument shall enter into every-day life, as the telephone has done, is a question for the future. Certainly it is now a far greater wonder than it was in 1875, and it has reached a point where it cannot again be dropped by the scientific world. Whether Mr. Edison, or Mr. Bell, or some one else puts the final touches which will take the apparatus out of the laboratory and make it practical for common use does not much matter. Some one will certainly do it. Those persons who smile incredulously when it is said that the perfected phonograph will do away with letter-writing, will read to us, will sing and play for us, will give us books, music, plays, speeches, at almost no cost, and become a constant source of instruction and amusement, must have forgotten the ridicule they heaped upon the rumor that an American inventor proposed to talk from New York to Chicago. The achievements of the phonograph will at best be less wonderful than those of the telephone.

It has been my privilege to follow pretty closely the evolution of the phonograph under Mr. Edison’s hands, and also to study the graphophone of Mr. Bell. A brief account of one apparatus will answer for both, as they are identical in essentials. The new phonograph takes up, with its table, about the space occupied by a sewing-machine, and might at first be taken for one. Underneath the table is an electric battery or a treadle, according to the power used in moving the cylinder. The wax cylinders, or phonograms, as they are called, are two inches in diameter, and vary in length from one to ten inches, according to the amount of talking which is to be engraved upon them. The smallest size is about that of a napkin ring, and will be sufficient for an ordinary business letter of two or three hundred words. The wax surface is highly polished; when it has been through the apparatus, the marks or engraving upon it can be seen only with a glass.

When a message is to be recorded, one of these phonograms is slipped over the permanent steel cylinder, which is set in motion, and the diaphragm, carrying its stylus on the under side, is lowered toward the wax surface until a slight grating sound announces that it touches.

Then the talking may begin. It is not necessary to talk louder than in an ordinary conversation, but distinct articulation is required. For reproduction, the stylus is raised, and the “follower” or sounding-spring is brought into contact with the wax. The amount of talking upon a cylinder depends, of course, upon the speed of the talker; one page of this magazine might easily be recorded upon a cylinder ten inches long. The exact value of the reproduction, both in the phonograph and the graphophone, is still, according to my own experience in a score of tests, something of a lottery.

With a phone at my ear, I have heard Mr. Edison’s phonograph read off a page of Nicholas Nickleby so clearly that not one word in twenty was lost; the phonograph’s voice was as distinct and as loud as that of a telephone in good working order. At other times the results have been anything but satisfactory. When the apparatus is in the hands of experts, who can adjust a screw here and there, they are likely to be surprisingly good. As to trusting its manipulation to the office boy or the typewriter girl, that is out of the question for the present. It is far too delicate an instrument. When it comes to music, the present achievements are wonderful. The phonograph will reproduce any kind of music — singing, the piano, violin, cornet, oboe, etc. — with a beauty of tone and accuracy which will astonish the musician. It is possible, also, to magnify musical sounds without distorting them, as often happens where speech is concerned. Thus, I have repeatedly heard music given out by the phonograph so loudly as to be heard one hundred feet away from the instrument. Should the phonograph never reach greater perfection than its present stage, — something which, as I have already said, seems scarcely credible, — it will be of the greatest use to musicians.

If we admit that the inventors or manufacturers of the phonograph can turn out in quantities instruments as perfect as the best of the present experimental machines, and make them so automatic in action and so easily adjusted that every one who uses a sewing-machine, a typewriter, or a telephone can use the phonograph, we concede at once that a wonderful field is before them. The phonograph itself cannot cost more than fifty dollars, and the wax cylinders used upon them scarcely more than writing-paper. Once a cylinder has been “engraved,” or has had a message recorded upon it, it can be passed through the phonograph any number of times, apparently without deterioration. Mr. Edison has some phonograms, containing pages of Nicholas Nickleby, which have been read out thousands of times by the phonograph, and no indications of wear are audible.

Finally, bear in mind that having once obtained a good phonogram, it can be multiplied ad infinitum at nominal cost, and what a wonderful prospect opens before us! The duplication of a phonogram is as simple as it is perfect. The wax phonogram is placed in a bath, and coated with nickel by electric deposition. When the nickel plate is sufficiently thick, it is stripped off, giving an exact mould, a die representing every minute indentation of the original wax. In order to make a second or a thousandth wax facsimile, wax sheets can be pressed against the nickel die. Edison estimates that novels of the length of Nicholas Nickleby could be sold in phonogram shape for a few cents. A good reader would first have to read the whole book to the phonograph, and the multiplication of the resulting phonograms would then be simply a matter of detail.

So also with music, — songs, piano pieces, symphonies, operas. There seems to be no reason why a play cannot be reproduced so as to give infinite pleasure. The length of the phonograph’s message is limited only by the size of the phonograms. Edison estimates that Nicholas Nickleby can be transcribed upon six cylinders, six inches in diameter by twelve inches in length. But some one will soon discover a method of recording the phonographic message upon an endless roll, so that the man who cannot sleep at night will be able to have the machine read to him hour after hour without the trouble of changing cylinders.

As compared with the field of the telephone, that of the phonograph is limitless. The telephone must always remain somewhat of an expensive luxury, owing to the cost of maintaining wires, connecting stations, etc. The whole expense of the phonograph will be the first cost. Even its motive power may be supplied by weights or other costless means. Imagine what the phonograph will do for the man on the borders of civilization! It will supply him with books in a far more welcome shape than print, for they will read themselves; the mail will bring him the latest play of London, or opera of Vienna. If he cares for political speeches, he can have the Congressional Record in the shape of phonograms. It is even possible to imagine that many books and stories may not see the light of print at all; they will go into the hands of their readers, or hearers rather, as phonograms.

As a saving in the time given up to writing, the phonograph promises to far outstrip the typewriter. The business man can dictate to the phonograph as fast as he can talk, and the wax cylinder, enclosed in a suitable box, can be sent off by mail to read out its message perhaps thousands of miles away. Or else, as is now done in Mr. Edison’s laboratory in Orange, N. J., the typewriter girl can print out upon paper what her employer has dictated to the phonograph. For the reporter, the editor, and the author who can dictate, a device has been adapted to the phonograph which causes it to stop its message at every tenth word, and to continue only when a spring is touched. Thus, the editor can dictate his article to the phonograph as he does now to his stenographer, and when the printer at the case gets the resulting phonogram the instrument will dictate to him in short sentences. If he cannot set up the sentence at one hearing, it will repeat its ten words. If he is satisfied, it reads out ten words more.

I really see no reason why the newspaper of the future should not come to the subscriber in the shape of a phonogram. It would have to begin, however, with a table of contents, in order that one might not have to listen to a two hours’ speech upon the tariff question in order to get at ten lines of a musical notice. But think what a musical critic might be able to do for his public! He might give them whole arias from an opera or movements from a symphony, by way of proof or illustration. The very tones of an actor’s or singer’s voice might be reproduced in the morning notice of last night’s important dramatic or musical event.

It has been remarked, by the way, that business letters and orders by phonograph would not be so binding as when put in black and white upon paper. A little wax cylinder covered with microscopic dots would not be considered as good evidence in court. But if the speaker’s voice, inflection, accent, were so reproduced that witnesses could swear to the personality, would it not suffice? How could there be any dispute over a man’s will, when the voice of the dead man was heard?

In music, as I have already said, the value of the phonograph even in its present condition is indisputable. Musicians are divided, and probably always will be, as to the manner in which certain famous symphonies ought to be conducted. The metronome marks used by Beethoven are but uncertain guides at best, while no written directions as to dynamic values, expression, etc., are worth much. The phonograph will at least make it possible for the musician of the future to know exactly how our composers wished their music given, for it will repeat that music as played today, with every shade of expression, with all its infinite changes of time. Moreover, the phonograph will offer to the composer that long-sought instrument, an automatic recorder of improvisation upon the piano or other instrument. In the far-off future, when our descendants wish to compare our simple little Wagner operas with the complex productions of their own days, requiring, perhaps, a dozen orchestras, playing in half a dozen different keys at once, they will have an accurate phonographic record of our harmonic simplicity.

At present but few of the new phonographs have been finished, and those only for exhibition purposes. When they will be offered for sale seems to be doubtful; probably within a few months. Mr. Edison says that by the beginning of 1890 the phonograph will be far less of a curiosity than the telephone is now, and that he could begin selling the instruments at once if he were fully satisfied with them. There is always something which needs improving. Just at present there is needed a funnel for so magnifying the sound that if the instrument is placed in the centre of a table all the persons sitting around can hear its reading or its music. For the last year it has been the same story, — the phonographs would be ready for sale next month. It was so a year ago, and it may be so a year from now. But these many delays, which have made people rather skeptical as to the doings of the phonograph, do not make wonders already achieved less wonderful, or warrant any doubts as to the vast possibilities which the little device contains.

Behind the Curtain at Google

2026-07-31T13:00:00-04:00

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Silicon Valley has long been a place of tech innovation and optimism. When Claire Stapleton moved there to work in communications at Google in 2007, she was bright eyed and optimistic about the company’s mission. In those days, she describes the executives as acting like “benevolent kings.” But over the course of the next decade, Google grew and changed. It arguably succeeded in its initial mission of organizing the world’s information, and it has grown an enormously profitable ads business. But it’s also had to face tough questions about data privacy and government contracts, and courts have declared parts of its business a monopoly. In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel talks to Stapleton about her journey at Google—from the early days of ball pits and gourmet food to the growing disillusionment that eventually led to her leading an employee walkout in 2018, and leaving the following year.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Claire Stapleton: I do think that inevitably having so much money and power, it creates a form of brain rot. Like, I just don’t think that you exist on the planet in a normal way at all. And I can’t really account for how quickly the mask slipped with the tech CEOs who were seemingly so offended by Trump at the beginning, and now are on the MAGA train as hardcore as anyone else. But it’s genuinely surprising, because they were much more interested in positioning themselves as sort of like benevolent kings of the universe before. And now, it’s just—the vibe has completely shifted.

[Music]

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to talk about what happened to Google. At the risk of sounding ancient, I still remember an internet before Google. Like a lot of people, I’d been burned by plugging keywords into other old search engines and getting these weird, just barely relevant results. It’s as if the computer didn’t understand what I wanted.

Before Google, there were all kinds of tactics that you had to use. It was almost this language that you had to speak to get what you wanted. And Google changed all of that. It felt, as the best technology does, like magic. And I probably don’t need to outline what happened next. How Google dominated search, how it became an advertising giant, how it printed money, and became arguably the foundational online company of the 21st century.

Their mission statement was to organize the world’s information. And honestly, it’s hard to disagree that they at least in part accomplished that goal—Search, Maps, Gmail, Books, Photos. They branched into phones, into workplace software. They bought YouTube when it was still a fledgling video site. They became a behemoth, and they got so big and so rich that they started trying what they called “moonshot projects,” like self-driving cars, drone delivery services, and trying to cure death.

In some ways, the story of Google is the story of the commercial internet. Or maybe more specifically, it is the story of what we often refer to as Big Tech. Google famously started in a garage with just two people: Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The company built something ingenious with search, and it quickly developed this quirky, upbeat, benevolent California-company ideology, all built around a very specific credo. Don’t be evil. And then it grew. And grew.

It had to adapt to the realities of having money and influence and real power. It had to make unpopular decisions, like partnering with the military or changing permissions on how it collected data on users. Its search dominance grew from this success story to a monopoly. It faced criticism. It became a target of the late-2010s tech clash. It got hauled in front of Congress, sued by the FTC.

Claire Stapleton was there for this hinge point in Google’s history. She joined the company in 2007, and she worked on a team that helped shape Google’s image internally with its own employees. Over the next 12 years, she worked across the organization, in executive comms and at YouTube. She watched all this change happen, and eventually she grew frustrated by it.

In 2018, she was one of the leaders and organizers of Google’s Walk Out for Real Change. This was a landmark moment in this burgeoning tech-labor movement. Her involvement, she alleges, ultimately led to her having to leave the company in 2019. And so now Stapleton has written a memoir. It’s titled, very fittingly, Don’t Be Evil, and it’s about her time inside Google. I wanted to talk to her about Google’s transformation.

What happens after a tech company succeeds in its initial mission? And so, Claire Stapleton joins me now to talk about it all.

Claire, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

Claire Stapleton: Thank you so much for having me. This is a thrill.

Warzel: So you joined Google in 2007, if I’m right—a time that for Google but also for the internet feels almost unrecognizable for today. So my first question here is: What was Google like when you joined?

Stapleton: Yeah, I think it’s like such a time capsule in so many ways. And 2007 was like, there was this feverish rush to capture college talent in a way that they sort of never did again. They were doing large-scale college recruiting to just bring in people fresh into the workforce. It was hardly a start-up, but it still had this sort of fresh energy of, you know—American innovation, and yet not yet corporate. It was not yet at all really considered to be sort of like some scary behemoth, or Should we be wondering about all the power and money that’s sort of flowing into this company? It was on the cover of Fortune magazine—“best place to work”—a couple of years running at that point. It just felt like: Wow, they not just, like, reinvented the corporation, but it was sort of this Willy Wonka, brand-new kind of model of a corporation.

Certainly I’m sure people were not totally bought into it, but as a young person entering the workforce—and of course for the record, 2008, the recession would happen the next year. So it was sort of like this very limited window to come into this sort of tech boom feeling like the world was ours, I guess.

Warzel: No; I remember it. At the time there was this idea of like, my gosh, you go to work, and it’s like beanbags and parties and like ping-pong tables. And that was the Silicon Valley vibe, the ethos overall. But there was this feeling—like, the Willy Wonka thing really tracks for me. Because I was like, What goes on there? Like, the internet happens in that building or in that series of buildings. Describe the atmosphere, the campus, the people, the free food, the optimism, all of that.

Stapleton: It was like this continuation of college. Which was really bizarre, because you were also sort of transitioning into the hierarchy of a fairly normal corporate environment, frankly. I mean, there were plenty of executives and some corp speak and all sorts of rules that governed being a young person there. But they really did encourage socializing and staying on the campus. It felt very lush.

When I was moving out from the East Coast from college to the Bay Area, and they encouraged the people to live in these sort of like new developments, in group apartments. I was giving campus tours almost immediately after getting there. So yeah; I was very deep in the bones of sort of like: Here’s all the thoughtfully sourced natural materials, as well as here are all the sensory touches. I mean now I think there’s—probably people would roll their eyes a bit more to it. But also I think it was sort of like a celebration of neurodivergence in that way, like: Here’s the ball pit, here’s like the yoga balls, here’s the ways that the engineers can sort of get their ya-yas out in between their coding sessions or whatever.

So I think there were certain things that were very considered. It’s like how you can have some amazing person designing a children’s playground. It was like they had all these great minds thinking about: How do you foster innovation and collaboration and, you know, of course soak the most productivity out of people? Get them to give, you know, 110 percent. But it was quite thoughtful.

And then, separately, there was so much rhetoric pumping through which was also quite thoughtful. Because I think at the time they said a lot that, you know—you really have to have people sort of hooked into the mission so they feel a stake in it. So they sort of come up with their most creative ideas. So it’s like: We want to capture and harness the amazingness of humans. All of the kind of talking points which I know, because I was giving the campus tour, talking about how amazing the campus was.

Warzel: Did those perks feel to you at the time as earnest perks? Like: This is so great that we can get laundry done, that we can basically live our entire lives inside this little ecosystem here that is work? Or did it feel a little bit like: We’re being trapped in a system, so all we do is work?

Stapleton: Part of my job—I was working in PR at the beginning, and they were giving me kind of lower-priority journalists to take through. And in those days it was a lot of foreign journalists, because the American press had covered the campus a lot. So, you get a lot of journalists from Europe, and they were much more skeptical. So I was aware of this whole thing where they were like: This is totally just an idea, a plot, to keep the workers here 24/7. This is very Big Brother, you know. And so I think, internally or externally, I’d be combating that. Like, wow, the cynical person; of course this is completely virtuous.

There was always a really thoughtful talking point to counter that. Because, you know, who does want to go home when you’re exhausted at the end of the day and do your laundry? It’s nice to not have to drive off campus to get lunch. It’s like, right there and whatever. So I mean, I think that I was able to sort of see that there were some aspects that were kind of about keeping people there, and keeping them super engaged.

But only much, much later was I able to actually analyze the emotional effects and also the kind of difficult golden-handcuffs effects—where then people feel uncomfortable speaking out in any sort of difficult situation with management, because you’re so grateful and you sort of feel spoiled. And all these other things where you could see how it degrades a healthy kind of back-and-forth in office culture.

But you know, I felt really lucky to have this job, and I think there, at the time, it was like everyone’s so impressed by it. It’s just like the way it is in life; you know, when people are telling you, “What a lucky girl you are to have this job.” The reality of it, you know, as I trace in the book—it was always a bit more complicated.

Warzel: So you write about—you were involved in the internal marketing for Google, right? Selling the story of Google to itself. And you write about in many ways that you became the voice of Google. So how did that happen? And then for those of us who might be blissfully unaware, what is the voice of Google?

Stapleton: With Google’s sort of obsession with its own culture, there was a lot of lore, internal lore. So, you know, there were—the executives would kind of become characters in the TV show, because there was so much internal communications. Larry and Sergey hosting the weekly meeting kinda felt like a revival; you know, like all the executives would kind of get up there.

And you know, there was a meme message board that was launched, sort of just a few years after I got there. There was so much internal chatter. So I think the company culture created its own little characters. So when I first got there, one of the first things I was ever assigned to do was work on TGIF [a weekly meeting]. The internal communications team wrote the script for Larry and Sergey.

Warzel: Who are the founders of Google, for people who don’t know.

Stapleton: The founders of Google, yeah. I think they’re like, Ben and Jerry. It’s like they’re kind of these folksy American characters, though now they’re, you know, seen [as] much more nefarious. But they were huge celebrities internally—but they were really accessible. And so they would broadcast the TGIF video, you know, to the far-flung locations in Mountain View, and you know, call these kind of growing satellite offices around the world. So one of the first tasks I had, a few months in, was sending around the logistical information for this meeting. Like, how to tune in to this meeting. And so, you know, it was like a very straight email at first. And I just sort of, as it went with this huge growing company, I had a lot of leeway. You know, a lot of leash. So sort of started, you know, kinda slowly getting a little, putting a little more personality in it.

Which I think, you know, for better or for worse, kinda hit the vibe of Google at that time. Which was kind of geeky, kind of like riffing on the rhetorical talking points of the time and the products and the new things. It’s just like how, you know, someone that sends like the emails for your kids’ school has amazing name recognition. That’s like, I don’t want to oversell—but it was kinda like that. It’s like, you can’t not know who Claire Stapleton is, because I’m sending this email like every single week for five years. I mean, it was kind of amazing that it went on for so long. And I think back, you know, very fondly of it.

Warzel: So part of this book, as I see it, is really about what happens when a company evolves into a corporation, right? When company culture becomes more bureaucratic and a little bit less human. And you describe some of the features of Google’s corporate culture. These sort of endless performance reviews. But also something that really stuck out for me is the corporate idea of radical accountability. What was radical accountability inside Google, and what effect did it have on the culture of the place?

Stapleton: They put all the new-comms hires, and I think like broader swaths of the new hires that came out of college into a training program. Which was run by a guy named Fred Kofman, whom Sheryl Sandberg has sort of credited with profoundly altering her life. He’s sort of like a Valley executive-coach guy. But it was theoretically about how to live your values in a career, how to be courageous in the world. It sort of sounded very tonally in tune with everything else about Google. You know: Here you are; be an owner. You know, like this is a place to really contribute to the world, to help change the world. But actually, really what the training was about was something called radical accountability—which was that, as a young person in the corporation, you should really never blame your circumstances. You know, a classic example would be: You come into a meeting, and you’re a few minutes late. You shouldn’t say, Traffic made me late. You say, I should have left earlier because of traffic. You know, it’s sort of like presenting yourself that way in a corporation makes you a very attractive young hire. That’s basically what they were saying to us.

One of the other lines was that you should strive to be a player at all times, never a victim. You know—victims are bad, like, you’re a taker. Nothing is ever the system’s fault, the hierarchy’s fault. And so I found this amazing Gchat that I’d sent to my brother when I went to this training, being like: Today I found out that if my team is dysfunctional, it’s my fault. And I was joking about it. I was able to kind of have the, you know, distance from it to be like: This is a little slightly whack that they’re like telling people who are like 22years old that, you know, don’t expect to change anything around you, because your life is what you make of it. And like, If you want to be a rock star, then, you know, you better not be kind of criticizing anything about the corporation.

And even though I was sort of criticizing at the time, I found that it was very pernicious. You know, it’s pernicious ideology for me personally, because as I, you know, wended my way through different roles in the company and found myself in situations that were pretty messed up. I think I was sort of like: Be a player, not a victim; be a player, not a victim. You know, move on, one foot in front of the other, your life is what you make of it. But there’s real limits to that when you run up against the company doing things that you really disagree with. Or things start to sort of like pile up, as they did in me.

Warzel: You talk about Larry Page as the ultimate techno-optimist, right? The ultimate, like: We can solve anything through innovation and hard work. The wanting to cure death, the Project Calico, with the infamous TIME cover there. And then these phrases he had, this: “Have a healthy disregard for the impossible,” or “Computers should do the hard work so humans can get back to doing what humans do best: learning, living, loving.” It’s very live, laugh, love coded there. Because not a lot of people get a front-row seat for this type of person.

I am curious; from your perspective, how much of that techno-optimism felt really genuine from your vantage point? How much did you feel that these people really believed that?

Stapleton: I think I did. I was sort of still going with the tide. And Larry came in pretty hot with this. He used to say that if we only had two million Googlers, think of all the good we can do. Because again, we’re continuing here from: Here we are, this sort of rarefied species of, you know, world-changers with all these resources. And we need to solve the world’s biggest problems. He was really, like, putting the whole Google-mission thing on steroids at this time. I think two things were true. Like, at the same time that I was sort of saying, This sounds kind of hokey; it sounds kind of unreal—it also seemed inevitable that yes, Google will, you know, solve these things. And that sounds great. I look forward to Google, you know, curing death. Or whatever it was like. Even though, yeah, looking back it was sort of like—wow, some of the actual progress Google was making was quite banal.

And Larry Page's role as the CEO would be that, you know, everyone has not only amazing world changing problems to work on, but that they feel that they are seen and sort of nourished as human beings within the company. And I think that even though in interpersonally to see s him sort of on the stage at TJIF, he was not the warmest and fuzziest person, but he seemed to have like a very strong kind of moralistic streak about how companies should operate and how they should really, you know, take care of their employees. So it would have been really hard for me, even with a little bit of cringing at the rhetoric, to think like, this guy's totally full of it. It was—it actually sounded like to some extent quite refreshing because I think he was even putting a little bit more bones behind the kind of freewheeling fun campus stuff of yesteryear.

Warzel: This might sound naive on my part, but you talk a lot about everyone being really bought into this idea of helping build the future. What future did you personally think you were building, that Google was building? Like, what did that look like in your mind’s eye? Was it really vague, and just kind of like: It’s gonna be better because of all this? Or did you have your own ideology about it?

Stapleton: Where things started to kind of slowly break down for me, over time, is what is actually my contribution. Not only can I not exactly see the world that Larry Page is proposing with the sort of army of Googlers, you know, kind of flipping everything on its head. But here I am, writing like internal comms, you know, or doing ghostwriting for, you know, an executive who’s like kind of an a-hole. Who’s like, you know, selling ads, because I was working on the ads business for a while. Which is really, that’s actually what the company was doing. Like it was, you know, building an online-advertising juggernaut. It was a little sad when I was like, you know, kind of going through the book or process the last year or two. And thinking: No shade, but, like, what did Google actually ever do in any of the categories of things that Larry was talking about?

Warzel: Well, not to not to not to defend Larry and Sergey here. But as a devil’s advocate, I think what’s fascinating about a company like Google and some of these tech companies is that the initial thing actually is wildly impressive, right? Organizing the world’s information; like you can make a strong case at Google, that was the mission statement. Google did that, right? Like, they built something incredibly powerful; changed the way that everyone accessed information. These things were very powerful. I think it’s easy to—and not that you’re doing this—but it’s very easy for everyone to say, yeah, like what did they do, right? And then you look at like, you know—like, Gmail was a revelation when it came out.

Stapleton: Yeah. Google Maps, yeah.

Warzel: Google Maps has changed the way people get around. These products are huge. Like the photos, the cloud storage, the things that they have done. Even the ad business. And the juggernaut, you know, propelled a lot of people into having sustainable business models on the internet, early on. So I totally actually understand that feeling.

But there is something that’s fascinating about the vagueness of it. You said in an interview previously that during the Google tenure you had that feeling that there was like a meaninglessness to the work, sometimes, that you were tasked with doing. I’m curious; what specifically felt meaningless?

Stapleton: Yeah, okay, so I never once felt that in my early, kind of internal-comms journey. But then I spent another five years at Google in the marketing department of YouTube. And this is where all that’s coming from. Because the Google marketing team, specifically was, you know, hiring like gangbusters. Not just internal full-time Googlers, but also we had a whole cottage industry of agencies. And what we were doing was brand marketing for YouTube. Some of it would cycle through as we’re trying to improve our relationship with women or creators of color. So there’d be specific initiatives.

But really, we were like a social-media operation that was massive. I mean, it was just like, you know, millions of dollars for every campaign. I mean, we had multimillion-dollar budgets with all these agencies. And what we were doing was producing like a couple tweets a day, right? So imagine like, you know, 30 or 35 people at YouTube working on the Twitter account. So that kind of stuff. And so my husband’s an architect, which has its frustrations in different ways, but like: You’re building a house brick by brick. And here I am, it’s just like, kind of it was a bullshit job. I like going to the gym every day. And it was just like, everybody’s there. Just like, you know, gravy train. I would have these existential moments where I’m like: Okay, what is YouTube doing? YouTube is, you know, connecting the world through video. And we had all these vague goals about being part of the cultural conversation.

But all this is to say—was tremendous resources, human resources, money. You know, sweat; the urgency of it, all the time, for what was like forgettable tweets. I mean, no offense to the people who still work on this stuff. It’s, you know—I’m sure people find meaning in their jobs in all these different ways. But I personally found that really hard. I think particularly because I’d, you know, been weaned on this sort of “your work should feel like it matters.” By that point, I was just like—I look around, and I’m seeing bloat. And seeing like, you know, as my former manager’s big character of the book said: You don’t get a gold star for coming in under budget. Which is what she said to me, trying to justify us doing some, like, ridiculous creator event in L.A.; which—it didn’t matter. I mean it’s all these things like making, you know, YouTube-branded cupcakes. People will be shocked where the money goes.

Warzel: The cupcake budget. I would love to see the cupcake. Please leak me the cupcake budget, if you haven’t already. No; this is what I wanted to get into, because you describe Google as becoming bloated and inefficient. And in many ways, this is fascinating because it’s a criticism that’s shared across ideologies, right? Back in 2024, Mike Solana, this Peter Thiel–orbit guy who has a website as well and blogs, has argued that Google got bloated and stagnant as a result of being “overly woke,” right? But then, there are other arguments that have nothing to do with, you know, the liberal-minded nature of this. Just that there was bloat and stagnation. What happened, in your mind, to Google in this time period? This 2010-to-2018 period, where that stagnation was really occurring?

Stapleton: I think it was a couple things, and a lot of it was organizational psychology. I think it’s probably this weird, wonky strain of the be a player, not a victim thing—where you end up with incredible kind of corporate game players, who are able to kind of play the court politics. I think what happens between 2010 on, as the political landscape is changing, the social-media landscape is changing, I think the executives are feeling like they’re losing their grip.

So with my zone of social media, or from social-media marketing, it was sort of like, all the kids. You know, Gen Z is all on TikTok or Instagram, and YouTube’s gonna lose this audience unless we could make any number of arguments there, right? There’d be different teams working on smartwatches at the same time. Like, that’s kind of vaguely demoralizing. It’s also inefficient.

But again, the smartwatches thing. Like—Well, this is in the air, and like Apple’s coming along. And we need to be in this, because otherwise we’re gonna lose. Google Plus was also motivated by, you know: We’re gonna lose being people’s portal to the web, because Facebook. There’s gonna be a Facebook browser, and then, you know, we’re screwed. Or whatever.

So I think that Google’s domain ended up bleeding—you know, it’s like all the internet’s domains kind of bled together, where social media becomes dominant. You know, search is still huge, but then AI comes along. And it’s really hard to keep it all sort of organized with a vision, because it’s just so unwieldy. And then in that unwieldiness, I think you end up reading a lot of different toxic work cultures, or opportunistic kind of leaders come in, and all these other things. But yeah—I constantly hear from people that it just has not been a happy place to work for a long time. Despite the tremendous resources and still impressive workplaces, and everything else. Or offices, that is.

Warzel: It feels like a victim of its own success, right? When you grow in that way, when you have unlimited money; “you’re not gonna get any points for coming in under budget.” And people spend, and people build out those things. But at the same time, you have to be in this defensive crouch, right? That’s what it feels like from the outside; there were these initial world-beating products, and after a while you just start guarding them. But at the same time, you are growing. But if you’re guarding and you’re growing at the same time, it just turns into this really odd—and it sounds like, just like totally unwieldy—bureaucracy that nobody really knows what anyone else is doing. Which gives them the ability to do things that maybe other people wouldn’t want them to do. Or it’s not organized in any way.

Stapleton: Yeah; there’s a lot of anxiety, and not enough constraints, probably. Like, just the unlimited money of it. People could always argue for more money. And what does that all lead to?

Warzel: And so this all kind of leads to the 2017, 2018 timeframe. And you’re best known for helping to organize Google’s famous 2018 walkout, which is in response to a number of issues inside the company. Including what you and others alleged was a culture that had problems with sexual harassment and discrimination. And in the case of one executive, Andy Rubin, a very lucrative exit package after allegations of sexual impropriety that he, we should note, still denies. But I want to understand more how you ended up playing such an important role here. Because that’s not there; there's this way that you describe yourself in the book as being a real, you know, cheerleader for this company, and feeling really in line with the type of messaging. And kind of like plugging into the system. And yet you ended up playing this crucially important role in this dissent. How do you feel like you got there?

Stapleton: For me, the lead-up was the radical experience of having a kid, and coming back from maternity leave with sort of like bleary—you know, fresh eyes. But my work at that time at YouTube was so focused on cheerleading the virtues. I was plagued with always having a cheerleader role. Like, no matter what my kind of technical title was, it was like: We’re putting Claire, and like, the new thing we’re gonna trumpet and be enthusiastic about. It’s like a paid enthusiast, right? Mercenary.

So I think that kind of job—which requires a lot of sort of inner conviction, because if you really think that that’s not true, or that’s a lie, or you’re selling something that’s false, then it’s really hard to do that job. So I just usually was able to kind of manufacture enough, you know, enthusiasm to do these jobs. Did this big get-out-the-vote campaign, which was sort of understood to be about helping, you know, get out the vote for the youth. But then also, YouTube’s creator class was becoming really complicated. And the dark underbelly of YouTube was sort of coming to the fore, where a lot of the biggest creators on the platform were kind of, you know, pushing the Overton window. Or becoming this sort of—it was becoming very popular to be a provocateur, like PewDiePie becoming, you know, anti-PC and all these other things.

Not to put a value judgment on the sort of like, you know, gamers of the platform. But more that, simultaneously being told to run an International Women’s Day campaign, when every time we post something about that online, people are like, Why do you never take any action to protect women on your own platform? It’s like, you sort of want the credit for, you know, the pinkwashing or the big Pride campaign. But when, you know, the creator community raises the things they’d actually want, in terms of—it’s like, you know, you can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk? It was like, I was constantly faced with that cognitive dissonance. Because of being the sort of forward-facing person for the company, but then also seeing all this very, very valid, you know, criticism. And I think also trying to grapple with this sort of narrative that YouTube was a net positive for society, at a time when it seemed like it was contributing to a lot of things that were very polarizing and negative within society.

So all this is to say: It was sort of brewing in me. And I just, you know, had not been in organizing before. There was already the kind of fabric of Googler, “the tech won’t build it” movement. Which I think is a really great phrase—which is basically like, you know, people who are technologists, who are thinking of the implications of their technology. Very interesting ethical conversations were going on, and in different pockets of the company. I was not involved in any of that when I got into the organizing with the walkout; simply was someone who was used to being on all these message boards and internal threads. Probably from my vestige of my years in the communications department, where I used to monitor these things. But I also just love to sort of chat online. It’s kind of my way around.

And so, you know, I was in this moms’ group. There was an anonymous moms’ group that was not political at all. But the day that this sort of big New York Times story broke—which was about Andy Rubin, but also about a couple of other executives who’d either had relationships with women at the company, which had ended badly for the woman. Or there was some stuff during the hiring process where there’d just been like a—it was a weird soup of things in this article. And what was fascinating, for me, was that it created this rupture in the moms’ group. Where people were all of a sudden starting to talk about the ways they’ve been disappointed by—I mean, not just Google. It was like their life in tech, of just how little progress it seemed the tech industry had made since the kind of bro culture, brotopia. You know, back in the kind of old days of the ’90s and early ’00s. That still there was a lot of opportunity discrimination, a kind of boys’-club environment. As well as people being outright sort of sexually harassed. And how hard it was, given this sort of radical-accountability culture, to raise it; to have any semblance of justice. And it was exciting to think that, you know, in a company that did, at least on paper, celebrate employee voice, and, you know, welcome dissent and all these other things. Which—whether or not that was authentic at all at that point—I thought, This is a time to push it. Because the world seemed to be having this kind of interesting conversation about the patriarchy.

Warzel: #MeToo.

Stapleton: Yeah, #MeToo. I mean #MeToo; it was really the biggest context here in a lot of different ways. But anyway, even when I started to write the book, I was like: How did I end up doing that? Because I’m like, you know, not the ultimate stay-in-line rule-follower you’ve ever met, but it was a little bit out of character. But I can really see how it was sort of just like things were bottled up. And I was a little bit like, I also I felt quite safe. Because I was like, you know, even if Google would want to punish the women who were doing this—someone like me, who’s been around forever, I have the protection of the fact that it would look so bad. You know, to futz around with anyone’s job. Even though that was incredibly naive. But yeah.

Warzel: The walkout is this very, very prominent event in the world of tech that spills out into broader culture as a part of this—you know, the #MeToo stone in the pond rippling out everywhere. It was initially praised by your bosses, right, as representing the classic principles of a Googler. Just standing up, doing the right thing, having that virtue. But then, there’s what you’ve alleged as this retaliation from Google, right? That your boss starts to reassign your role, change who you report to. And, you know, you note that at one time the company’s narrative seemed to be even that you were having your own mental struggles alongside all of this, as the fallout of this. So then, you start to negotiate your exit. And you left in 2019. But there are parallels that I found going through your story to the pandemic era, right? Where there’s this employee backlash over politics and labor issues in Silicon Valley around George Floyd protests, around COVID, all of that—followed by, almost immediately once people start to return to the office a little bit, an employer crackdown.

And so I’m curious how you viewed that tension, going through what you went through from afar. Like—and broadly, the question I guess, is like: How do you think Big Tech’s executives view their workforces?

Stapleton: I think that, you know, they really overcorrected. Because even though with Meredith [Whittaker] and me, and there are a couple of other women who—there was this funny business around our roles and the shifting of our responsibilities. Which we thought was clearly illegal. But then, you know, in the coming months, I mean—there were these five people that they fired. They outright fired five people around that Thanksgiving, that very year. So we left in June. And the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] sued on these people’s behalf, and they settled with Google.

So Google was like at that point: No more Mr. Nice Google. They were clearly like: We need to completely rearticulate the relationship between the workforce.

I think it has, ever since then, it’s been this constant rearticulation of the power. Where I think that there’s—so all the philosophy that was around, giving workers power because that was great for not only the company culture, but for the company bottom line. Because people bring their best selves, and all that. They’ve just completely thrown that out the window in the service of: We’d prefer to concentrate control with the executives at the top. And if that sucks to be you, well then fair enough. Because we think now, precarity and the threat of layoffs and, you know, all these other things—the chilling effects—are more important for serving our goal of maintaining leadership’s steady hand or whatever.

Warzel: It’s maybe obvious, but also just such an interesting about-face. Because the Larry Page idea of “this should be a family” was not unique to Google. This was broadly a tech-industry trend, right?

Stapleton: Yeah; Salesforce, Ohana.

Warzel: Right. We are here doing this thing together. You’re gonna give as much focus and attention as you would to your family, but you’re also gonna be rewarded with that broader feeling. And then the crackdown coming was very much, you know—I experienced it reporting on it in 2021, as like: You will not bring this part of yourself to work. In fact, you will just bring the part of yourself that works. And everything else, we’re gonna leave this to the side. It is such a fascinating about-face.

I want to talk a little bit about the idea of empathy, because there’s this period of the time in the book where you’re working at the Creative Lab at Google. And you detail this boys’-club atmosphere, where the executives are always talking about empathy, right? Empathy is king, and Google needs to adopt this radical empathy in the design of its products. Step into the user’s shoes, but also in the workplace.

And then cut—a couple years later, you recount the story of James Damore, this Google engineer who wrote this manifesto about the “Google echo chamber,” and how women were less represented in the tech industry because of biological differences. And this memo is rather famously hinging on a lot of specious claims about gender and issues with DEI programs—things that would later become, you know, like the conservative, reactionary obsessions. But one thing that Damore points out in that essay is this need to “de-emphasize empathy.” And this to me is this subtle but important shift in Silicon Valley that you got to experience firsthand. And I’m curious how you parse its evolution.

Stapleton: Yeah; I mean I think what was really interesting with the kind of Creative Lab thing was how it was a marketing tool. I guess it was sort of like—they were trying to hack the mainframe. That if you feel Google is so friendly and so nonthreatening, then you’ll let it sort of deeper into your life. I mean, that was how I took what he meant by empathy, which, if you’re listening to it, didn’t feel completely manipulative and nefarious. But it actually is quite disconcerting.

Warzel: The reason why I ask is because, you know, Elon Musk and some of these other titans of Silicon Valley have adopted the Damore-like framework around empathy, right? Musk calls it “suicidal empathy”; you have Marc Andreessen talking about the need for no introspection.

The reason why I’m curious to ask you this is: It does feel like a pretty big shift. Because even if it was lip service, even if it was in order to get people to, you know, buy into a very specific culture—the, let’s say, 2014 version of “Empathy is king” is so different as a mindset for how to run your organization than “No, no, no; empathy is dangerous. Empathy is keeping us from making the decisions we need to make to build the things that are gonna change society.” And I’m just curious: Did you feel that breakage happening?

Stapleton: Yeah. I agree that back then there was something to it that was true. It’s like, we have this responsibility; I feel like the way that they’re kind of right. The suicidal empathy—the sort of concept that’s sort of swinging around—is so sad, because I think it that is actually trying to disconnect people from their, you know, their natural connection to other people. And also, as was my situation with the walkout, the idea that caring about other people and, you know, wanting the world to be more inclusive and hospitable to people. I mean, I think people have a tremendous ability to affect the world around them, even as a manager of a small team, right? Or you know, raising your voice in certain ways.

It’s not to say that always [there] is a, you know, linear, path forward. But the idea that we should be cutting ourselves off from empathy because we might, you know, start to care about a person in a war-torn country. And this is, you know, sort of politically threatening to the right-wing project or something? It feels very sad that it’s now been sort of weaponized. It was being perhaps appropriated in ways that were sort of a little creepy or weird.

But I think ultimately there was something about Larry Page, you know, back in the day—not that he was talking about empathy, but the whole “learning, living, and loving” thing. I think it was sort of like that: Humanity is something that we should celebrate and protect, whether it’s the humanity of our workers or, you know, the humanity of people who use our products. And now I think everything just feels quite craven. And it’s sort of like “It’s our team.” You know, it’s like “the West must win” or all these other things. Where everything feels so politicized and so tribal that we’ve broken down any of the more kind of utopian aspects of, you know, Google’s philosophy or rhetoric. Whatever it was back in the day.

Warzel: But you worked in this culture. What do you think attributes that change? Is it just like sniffing the political winds and latching onto something, ’cause, you know, it’s advantageous? Or do you think it’s a kind of almost madness that’s induced by just having all the money and resources at your disposal? What do you think is responsible for that change? I know you can’t answer definitively, but you worked with those people.

Stapleton: No; it’s really interesting. It’s weird. Like someone leaked the TGIF when Trump was elected the first time, and Larry and Sergey are there. All the executives are up there; they’re shocked. Sergey gives this whole speech about, you know: Myself as an immigrant; I’m so offended by this, and I know it’s just so hard to realize how many people don’t share our values. And he was like, you know, protesting the immigrant ban. And to now imagine that, you know, by the time Trump was reelected, he’s second row of the inauguration, with all the rest of the tech CEOs—I do think that inevitably having so much money and power, I think it seems like it creates a form of brain rot. Like, I just don’t think that you exist on the planet in a normal way at all.

And I can’t really account for how quickly the mask slipped with the tech CEOs who were seemingly so offended by Trump at the beginning, and now are like on the MAGA train as hardcore as anyone else. And I think that, of course, all the layers of people underneath will get in line at the company, because my team and the marketing team, by definition, we were, you know, deploying whatever the corporate wind was. So before it was kind of, you know, the resistance: We wanna stand up for trans kids. And all these other things in the, you know, earlier Trump administration. And now they’ve dialed down all the political stuff. There’s no mention of diversity and all these other things. They’ve reworded things. No longer could be, you know, accused on the social-media channels of being “lib,” in any way.

So there are these sort of trends, and these things that sort of fall out of favor because the marketing team’s following the executives, or what they think is popular with the public. These companies are no longer trying to take a stand as a brand, you know, on social media.

But the people at the top—I think it’s completely confounding. And I don’t understand. Because could it really be so simple, with all of them leaving California for the wealth tax? Of course that amount of money would never affect their life—whatever that one-time payout could be. But they’re so kind of vehemently and existentially opposed to that. You have to think they’re just like, you know, radicalizing each other in group chats, just like any other segment of the population.

But it’s genuinely surprising, because they were much more interested in, you know, positioning themselves as sort of like benevolent kings of the universe before. And now, you know, it’s just—the vibe has completely shifted.

Warzel: You write that “Tech didn’t solve the world’s problems, but it’s intensified and monetized them.” And you continue, saying that: “Google said it would change the world. It did. I just didn’t expect the transformation to feel so relentlessly hollow.”

I mean this question not flippantly, just earnestly. What did you expect the transformation to feel like? Like, when you look back on it, does it feel like that early faith in the company was naive? Or does it feel like there was a different path that Google did not have to evolve and grow in the way that it did? How do you see that?

Stapleton: Yeah. I think the company was more guided by, you know, engineering feats and technological challenges. And then something shifted, as we’ve entered a later stage in sort of like empire or the industry or whatever. Where everything seems to be just driven by your typical kind of capitalistic pursuits and exploits and the, you know, shareholders. Whatever; all these things, right? And it seems more like trying to preserve the empire than doing literally any of the things that Larry Page was talking about in 2010, of solving the world’s problems.

I mean, Google was always, you know, doing their earnings call and doing talking points every year. About how we’re gonna continue to grow, and da da da, whatever. But it just seems like the whole thing is guided by wealth and power. Which is the exact opposite of what they said they wanted to go. So even though Google did have incredible—you’re right, with the search and the maps and all these other, Gmail, these sort of utilities. And the technologies that were so transformative to the world.

But anything else outside, any other problems that humanity faces—Google isn’t tackling those. It’s just sort of continuing to just, you know, siphon money out of the system. It’s like the input of everything in the world, and let’s keep it that way, is what the kind of mission of Google feels like to me today. Which is quite bleak. That’s not an inspiring vision. And it’s just such a change, you know, from even what—15 years ago? I mean, most of this was happening.

Warzel: There’s a moment near the beginning of your memoir where you’re describing an early job you had as a kid, as a waitress. And realizing at some point, or hearing someone say, that you got promoted in part because you looked the part. And in this moment, you write, How do you challenge a system? Things you know are messed up when the system is rewarding you. And I wanted to end by asking: How would you answer that question today?

Stapleton: I think that, for me, one of the most radicalizing moments was when we were planning the walkout. I sent around a Google form saying, What compels you to do this? Why are you doing this? And, you know, we got a couple hundred responses. And I read them all, sort of agog at what other people had experienced. And it was starting to knit together this latent layer of things that I had experienced at the company. Some of my kind of more existential qualms with the direction of the company. With the rhetoric, you know, with the day-to-day things I was experiencing. And starting to form, you know, a worldview that is less understanding of the system, right? Like, as a manager, I’d seen so many things happen with the contractors on my team, kind of getting cut or shuttled around in ways that felt quite inhumane to me. Or I didn’t have power over, or maybe I did in certain ways in different times, but, you know—I am someone who's sort of guided by empathy for other people.

And part of my sentimental education here, my arc, was to be able to say that even though things, generally speaking work, for me—this isn’t the kind of world that I want to live in. The kind of world I want to, you know, have kids in. And all these things.

I think that Google capitalized on this impulse, which many people have, to be part of something bigger than themselves. That was a lot of the philosophical thinking about the mission. Was if people—it doesn’t matter if you’re a customer-service operator, if you feel like the company is doing really good things that are gonna make the world a better place, you’re gonna be excited and invigorated to come in. And, you know, do your job in the widgets factory or whatever.

And when that started to break down for me, I still had the feeling that I wanted to contribute to something bigger than myself and to leave the world better than I found it. Or, you know, whatever. I no longer feel so attached to I must protect the status quo, because I have my place in it. And I’m rewarded for that. You know, if I truly still felt that way, I could have easily put my head down and just not rocked the boat. Or upset the apple cart, so to speak.

Warzel: Claire, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain and talking about all this with us. Really appreciate it.

Stapleton: It was fun. Thank you so much.

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices.

Photos of the Week: Heat Wave, Buck Moon, Alphorn Ensemble

2026-07-31T09:00:00-04:00

Noah Berger / AP

Firefighters burn off vegetation while trying to stop a wildfire called the Bench Fire from spreading in Warm Springs, Oregon, on July 25, 2026.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty

A Tezutsu-shu, a traditional fireworks performer, is showered with sparks from tezutsu hanabi, hand-crafted bamboo tubes packed with gunpowder that erupt in a towering column of spark and flame, during the Tatebayashi Arm-Held Fireworks Festival in Tatebayashi, Gunma prefecture, Japan, on July 25, 2026.

Lee Jin-man / AP

A participant plays in a mud pool during the Boryeong mud festival near a beach in Boryeong, South Korea, on July 25, 2026.

Pavel Bednyakov / AP

People run through Red Square under pouring rain in Moscow, Russia, on July 28, 2026, backdropped by Saint Basil’s Cathedral.

Mateusz Kaczmarek / Reuters

Europe’s largest statue of the Virgin Mary, measuring 182 feet, pictured before its official opening to the public, in the village of Konotopie, near Torun, Poland, on July 29, 2026. The monument, funded by billionaire couple Grazyna and Roman Karkosik, is expected to become a major religious landmark and tourist attraction.

VCG / Getty

People ride a roller coaster past a giant Lego minifig at the Legoland Shanghai Hotel in Shanghai, China, on July 24, 2026.

Kent Nishimura / AFP / Getty

“Valor” (left) and “Sacrifice,” the two statues that make up the “The Arts of War” equestrian statues along Arlington Memorial Bridge, are visible after the scaffolding surrounding them was partially removed, in Washington, D.C., on July 29, 2026. The U.S. Interior Department said it was regilding four gold-plated equestrian statues near the Lincoln Memorial and that the project is slated to cost more than $5 million.

Toby Melville / Reuters

Young deer stags are silhouetted against the darkening sky, beneath the moon as it approached its full Buck Moon phase on July 29, as it rises above Richmond Park in London, England, on July 27, 2026.

Mesut Karaduman / Anadolu / Getty

A ballerina performs as the full moon rises in the evening sky in Tekirdağ, Turkey, on July 29, 2026.

Sunday Alamba / AP

People dressed in costumes perform during the Mask Festival in Porto-Novo, Benin, on July 26, 2026.

Tyrone Siu / Reuters

Italy’s Guillaume Bianchi (right) faces Hong Kong’s Choi Chun Yin Ryan in the Senior Team Men’s Foil at the World Fencing Championships in Hong Kong, China, on July 28, 2026.

Phil Noble / Reuters

Nigeria’s Ruth Asuquo Nyong attempts a clean-and-jerk lift in the Women’s 48kg Final during the Commonwealth Games 2026 in Glasgow, Scotland, on July 26, 2026.

Angela Ponce / Reuters

Peru President Keiko Fujimori steps out of the congress after being sworn in as the country’s new president, in Lima, Peru, on July 28, 2026.

Temilade Adelaja / Reuters

A tall puppet walks the parade route during Manchester Day 2026, celebrating Manchester’s cultural links with Barcelona, with performers from Spain and the U.K., in Manchester, England, on July 26, 2026.

Borja Suarez / Reuters

Volunteers pose nude for the art photographer Spencer Tunick in Santa Ana Square, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, on July 26, 2026.

Justin Tallis / AFP / Getty

Hundreds of people dressed in red take part in “The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever 2026” dance event at Folkestone Harbour Arm in Folkestone, England, on July 26, 2026. Originating in Berlin, the annual event held at many locations around the world gathers participants to re-create the music video for the musician Kate Bush’s 1978 song “Wuthering Heights.”

CFoto / Future Publishing / Getty

Geese swim in a lake at an ecological goose-breeding base in Menmen Township, Suqian City, Jiangsu province, China, on July 29, 2026.

Pierre Albouy / Reuters

Alphorn blowers perform an ensemble piece on the last day of the International Alphorn Festival on the Alpine pasture of Tracouet in Nendaz, in southern Switzerland, on July 26, 2026.

Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP / Getty

The peloton ascends Col du Noyer during the Stage 19 of the Tour de France cycling race, in the French Alps, on July 24, 2026.

Chaideer Mahyuddin / AFP / Getty

Paddy fields, viewed at sunrise in Samahani, Aceh province, Indonesia, on July 24, 2026

Pablo Blázquez Domínguez / Getty

A helicopter collects water from a swimming pool to combat wildfires on July 28, 2026, in Casillas, in Ávila province, Spain.

Kostiantyn Liberov / Libkos / Getty

Local residents and visitors relax on a beach on the outskirts of Odesa, Ukraine, as smoke from a fire rises in the background following a Russian missile strike on July 29, 2026.

Giuseppe Distefano / Etna Walk / AFP / Getty

A plume of ash rises from Mount Etna during an eruption on July 30, 2026.

Scott Olson / Getty

An aerial view shows fallen trees from the previous day’s tornado in Saint Mary Cemetery in Appleton, Wisconsin, on July 28, 2026. The tornado passed through several communities in the area, causing widespread power outages, and left behind a long path of destruction.

Pier Marco Tacca / Getty

The grape harvest kicked off early in the Pavia area at the Defilippi farm in Oliva Gessi, Italy, on July 28, 2026. The recent heat wave across Europe has led to a record early start for this year’s harvest.

Arif Ali / AFP / Getty

People walk across a washed-out railroad track in a flooded area after the Ravi River overflowed following heavy monsoon rains in Sheikhupura, in Pakistan’s Punjab province, on July 29, 2026.

Yuichi Yamazaki / AFP / Getty

A collapsed house rests partly on a small truck in Yatsushiro, Kumamoto prefecture, Japan, on July 29, 2026, after an earthquake struck southwestern Japan the previous day.

Michal Čížek / AFP / Getty

A polar bear cools down on a pile of ice cubes in its enclosure at the Prague Zoo on July 30, 2026, as temperatures were expected to reach at least 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit.

Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter the Mar-a-Lago in Heaven

2026-07-30T18:03:00-04:00

Lindsey, Mr. President, I would argue in my mind, probably has a heavenly version of Mar-a-Lago. It may even be a little bigger. He may have a little more gold in the Oval Office in his mansion in heaven, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he added one big, beautiful ballroom and an arch somewhere on the property because he would want to obviously duplicate his dearest friend in life, you, Mr. President.

— Sean Hannity, at Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral

The Mar-a-Lago in heaven is even bigger than it looks. But it’s less crowded than it might be, considering that it’s the Mar-a-Lago in heaven.

Look at the chip-and-putt golf course! Admire the vista stretching from the sea to the lake. There is croquet. There is European-style terrace dining. And six tennis courts! Or pull back from Mar-a-Lago and observe the Reflecting Pool (perfectly American-flag blue), the arch, the Oval Office. This is it—the perfect way to spend eternity!

It isn’t an insult to consign a soul to Mar-a-Lago for all time. This premier final destination received the “coveted” Six Star Diamond Award for its “leading hospitality” in 2008—a fact that the club’s website still boasts. Just look at the amenities. The food here is the best. The chocolate cake at the Mar-a-Lago in heaven is even better than the one Xi Jinping enjoyed at the Mar-a-Lago on Earth while President Trump talked about bombing Syria. (You can’t drop bombs from here, but there is a button you can press for unlimited Diet Cokes.) Many such treats are available! Enjoy the president’s playlist, the most wonderful playlist in the world: The Phantom of the Opera and “Nessun dorma” and “Tiny Dancer” and “Y.M.C.A.” They never tire of playing “Y.M.C.A.”! It is heaven, after all.

For entertainment, giant TVs play Hannity and Meet the Press, 24/7! Or if you want to read, you’re in luck: There are classified documents too, lying around in cardboard boxes. You can spend forever paging through them if you like. If you get bored of state secrets, visit the ballroom. It is so big and so secure, secure as a fortification. To keep something out? Or to keep something in? No, no one would ever wish to escape this heaven, a heaven interior-decorated according to the wishes of Donald J. Trump. It is good to be here for all eternity.

Sometimes the sky gets very thick with smog, but that is just because they are burning clean coal. No horrible windmills here! Sometimes you hear coughing, but that isn’t your concern. How long has it been since you heard birdsong or genuine, unfeigned laughter? No matter—why don’t you admire the gold finishings? So many gold finishings! Just when you think you are done admiring them, more sprout up! You can also admire the arch, or what you can see of it. It’s huge, too tall for you to make out the top. It seems to pierce through the roof of heaven itself. Looking at it makes you feel dizzy and disoriented, and you start to feel that you cannot tell up from down. Are you looking down from a great height or up at a great height? Where is your compass? You should have packed your compass!

No! It is all right. You are all right. Only a true compass could have steered you to such an exclusive place as this. Mar-a-Lago is heaven, and heaven would be incomplete without Mar-a-Lago. To say so is not to flatter power but to speak from your heart, as Sean Hannity knows. And in heaven a true heart is always rewarded. And so, of course, here you are.

Perfect bliss, after all, to spend eternity haunting another man’s marble halls. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven? That’s the devil talking! He didn’t know Mar-a-Lago was an option.

The Return of ‘Move Fast and Break Things’

2026-07-30T17:29:00-04:00

The AI giants talk a big game about the future they’re building. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has previously written that AI could usher in a world so perfect that “many will be literally moved to tears”—a world pruned of disease, poverty, and illiberalism. “We’re now in the singularity,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said over the weekend on a podcast, and it will be “awesome for the world.” In an interview last week, Elon Musk declared that, in a decade’s time, AI will make us so prosperous that “money won’t matter.”

Unfortunately, life with AI is, so far, less glorious than what’s been promised. The same day that Altman heralded the singularity, Claude users discovered something alarming: Many conversations with Anthropic’s chatbot were available on the open web, discoverable with a Google search. Those public logs and projects reportedly contained medical records, phone numbers, internal corporate documents, and cryptocurrency-wallet keys.

Anthropic was quick to point out that users were responsible for the material being available online: The chatbot gives people the option to “share” their AI conversations via a link that they can send to other people or post online. Claude notes that these links are “public,” which means they can also be hoovered up by Google Search. An Anthropic spokesperson told me that “these shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them themselves. When someone shares a conversation, they are making that content publicly accessible, and like other public web content, it may be archived by third-party services.”

[Read: ]Anthropic accidentally made the perfect commercial

No reasonable person would assume that creating and sharing a link to an AI conversation or presentation would make it searchable by anybody on the World Wide Web. The Claude interface does caution that publishing an “Artifact”—Anthropic’s terms for dashboards and other minor tools made with Claude—could make it “potentially visible in search engine results,” but it does not provide such an explicit warning when sharing a chat. As of this writing, the Claude chat logs no longer appear to be searchable, but at least some Claude Artifacts are.

Those exposed chats were just the latest in a seemingly endless string of AI snafus: misinformation, data leaks, cybersecurity breaches. Immediately after the launch of ChatGPT, one could charitably argue that these lapses were by-products of a new and strange technology. Altman remains fond of saying that the AI industry must learn “from contact with reality.”

But four years into the AI boom, attributing these blunders to growing pains is too convenient. The sheer volume of transgressions—many of them predictable—suggests that what’s actually happening here is widespread carelessness. The same AI executives who promise that their products will deliver human civilization to a triumphant future seemingly cannot release consumer-grade tools without face-planting.

This isn’t Anthropic’s first time leaking user conversations. Last fall, hundreds of Claude chat logs were also inadvertently indexed by Google. At the time, Anthropic attributed the episode to users posting share links online. Last year, OpenAI and xAI exposed hundreds of thousands of conversations in a similar fashion; a number of shared Grok conversations remain searchable. Neither OpenAI nor xAI immediately responded to a request for comment.

Then there are all of the other blunders. Just last week, OpenAI models autonomously hacked into another tech firm, Hugging Face, during internal testing. The issues that led to this sort of attack are fairly well documented, but OpenAI failed to stop its own bots from breaking out. Hugging Face has since said that the OpenAI models appeared to have been rogue for several days. Earlier this week, Reuters reported that OpenAI models had hacked a customer account of yet another tech company.

Altman, Amodei, and many other AI executives have repeatedly warned about AI-enabled cyberattacks and the possibility of models going “rogue.” Meanwhile, their own products are making the entire ecosystem feel more unreliable and dangerous.

It’s easier than ever to launch widespread hacking and phishing campaigns, and AI-written code has itself been shown to have more security flaws than human-written programs. Although AI systems are being tightly woven throughout the infrastructure of the internet, they crash frequently. Hackers recently discovered that a Meta AI customer-service bot would hand over access to tens of thousands of Instagram accounts if asked. (A Meta spokesperson told me that this “wasn’t due to the AI agent itself.”) Nonconsensual porn—that is, sexually explicit material made using the likeness of real people, unbeknownst to them—can be generated with more ease and speed and at greater scale than ever before. And at this point, you can probably assume that most of the text you read on LinkedIn or X is AI-generated.

Despite its grandiose promises, Silicon Valley is embarking upon an era of profound irresponsibility. Last year alone, ChatGPT allegedly pushed people into mental-health spirals, Google Gemini’s under-13 version was easily coaxed to “talk dirty,” and Grok repeatedly spouted racist bile. As quickly as these errors were addressed, new ones cropped up.

Silicon Valley has a long history of world-historic invention and progress—and it also has a long history of impressive rhetoric and disappointing realities. Facebook promised to “bring the world closer together,” Google to “organize the world’s information,” Twitter to foment democracy around the globe. For better or worse, people have experienced dramatic changes as those promises have played out around us almost in real time.

Anthropic and OpenAI’s prophecies are grander and vaguer: Utopia is forever on the horizon, but we don’t have a clear deadline or a road map of how we get there. And apparently, those leading this charge toward the future care little about what happens along the way.

OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google DeepMind have become behemoths practically overnight. For now, they are growing because of their recklessness, not in spite of it; in the quest to erect a digital god, the internet has become collateral damage. Perhaps these companies really will remake human civilization—but in the meantime, they can’t stop leaking your chats.