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The Thinking About Kids and Heat Has Flipped

2026-07-11T08:00:00-04:00

You know it’s hot when summer camps have to cancel bonfires and doctors warn that playgrounds could be dangerous. Last week, when a heat dome was descending on New York City, I grew a bit concerned myself. My children’s outdoor day camp promised to “pivot to ‘water games,’” as the email put it, and said that there would be fans and misters. “Of course,” the camp added, “if you feel the heat for the rest of this week will not set your camper up for success, feel free to keep them at home.”

And why not? The public-health advice is pretty clear on just this point: Kids are not, in fact, well equipped for scorching weather. “Children are especially at risk of heat-related illnesses,” says heat.gov, a website run by a collaboration of the CDC, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and many other federal agencies. Essentially the same message is repeated almost everywhere a mom or dad might go for guidance: in academic articles and UNICEF announcements, in messaging from the EPA and state public-health departments, in published interviews with specialists in pediatric medicine.

The weird thing is, actual heat-related-illness data seem to tell a different story—that kids are unusually resilient when it comes to heat. Take heat-related deaths: According to a large-scale study from the CDC, the lowest rate applied to those ages 5 to 14. The same pattern largely holds for heat-related hospitalizations and visits to the emergency room, at least in the United States: Children tend to have the lowest risk.

For a parent who wants to know whether his feisty 7-year-old will be safe at camp when it’s 99 degrees, this disparity between the standard public-health advice and the epidemiological evidence is baffling. I just want to know: Is my camper set up for success, or isn’t he?

This turns out to be a parable about the long and winding road that runs from mere hypotheses through lab results and real-world data, and then on to solid truth. The scientific thinking that produced the standard, blanket warnings about overheated kids is almost 50 years old. Its reasoning is sound. But decades’ worth of research has since produced a bunch of unexpected findings, and some aspects of the old idea have had to be adjusted—if not completely overturned.

In 1980, the founding father of pediatric exercise medicine, the Canadian Israeli physician Oded Bar-Or, laid out the case that kids might be uniquely vulnerable to overheating. His paper “Climate and the Exercising Child” noted that, for one thing, children’s bodies have more surface area relative to body mass than adults’. At mild or warm temperatures, this helps them cool off more quickly, as heat dissipates from their skin into surrounding air. But when the weather gets extremely hot—hotter than the surface of our skin, which might be 94 or 95 degrees—this process would be expected to reverse: At that point, children’s greater surface area ought to make them take on heat more quickly than adults. Bar-Or also pointed out that children have a smaller sweat response than adults at the same temperatures, and he suggested that kids may acclimatize to heat more slowly. Shortly thereafter, in the summer of 1982, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) put out its first official warning on the matter. This message has persisted, more or less, until today.

In the meantime, though, the underlying science has shifted. One of Bar-Or’s former graduate students, Bareket Falk, told me that in the ’90s, the lab gathered data suggesting that even when children were subjected to triple-digit temperatures, they seemed to fare no worse than adolescents or adults at maintaining their body temperature. Other research pointed in the same direction, and by 2008, Falk and other exercise physiologists were arguing against the status-quo assumption that kids had some major natural deficits in thermoregulation.

More recent work has only reinforced the changing view. “There’s been quite a reversal of the thinking,” Caroline J. Smith, the director of the Environmental & Occupational Physiology Laboratory at Appalachian State University, told me. Sure, children produce less sweat than adults do—but their sweating may be more efficient. “They actually have less electrolytes in their sweat, so it evaporates a little more easily,” she said. (The evaporation of sweat is what cools the body.) Falk, who is now a professor of kinesiology at Brock University, said that kids’ sweat forms in smaller droplets, which may also help the sweat evaporate, and that kids don’t tend to waste their sweat as grown-ups do, by pouring out so much that it soaks their T-shirts and drips off onto the ground. The AAP changed its policy in 2011, noting that the facts had changed: Kids are not, in fact, especially vulnerable to heat, it said.

But as before, the thinking on this question ran a little faster than the evidence. Even now, researchers have barely any data showing heat’s effects on young children, who are more challenging to study in the lab. “There’s a lack of knowledge, despite what you may have read,” Glen Kenny, the director of the Human and Environmental Physiology Research Unit at the University of Ottawa, told me. “There are studies that have been essentially designed incorrectly.” In his view, more and better research must be done, and until that happens, the old assumptions are still basically correct: “Do we know that children are more vulnerable? Yeah, because it comes down to both a combination of size and the development of the heat-loss mechanisms, your ability to sweat and your ability to increase blood flow.” He also said that short-term lab experiments tell you nothing of the pernicious, longer-term effects of overheating: Being hot for many hours, or many days, may affect a child’s body, degrade his mood, or hamper school performance.

So why don’t we see more cases of pediatric heat-related illness, if children are at elevated risk? Kenny said that it’s because children are looked after by adults. An elderly person, living alone, might succumb to heat exhaustion with no one around to help; a kid who ends up overheated at a summer camp will be tended to by counselors. In other words, kids may be physiologically more vulnerable and behaviorally at risk, just as the standard public-health advice suggests—but they’re socially protected. The stats might also miss lesser forms of heat-related illness, Perry Sheffield, a pediatrician and an environmental-health researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told me. “You know, if a child gets a little bit dehydrated and then throws up all night, then you’re not sending them to camp the next day,” she said.

At least for kids below the age of 10, defaulting to the old precautions may be reasonable, Smith said. In any case, the same principles of mitigating risk—staying hydrated, avoiding exercise during the hottest parts of the day, seeking shade, acclimating to the weather, wearing loose-fitting clothes—apply to young and old alike.

Still, if everyone should take precautions against the heat, what is really gained by saying that kids are at extra-special risk? Those who prefer this cautious guidance might say that no harm is done. But people do react dramatically to the idea that kids might be in danger. In the United Kingdom, more than 1,000 schools closed during last month’s record-setting European heat wave, and those choices naturally brought up memories of pandemic policies, and old debates over how such restrictions should be understood. Are the school officials following the science, or are they succumbing to alarmist tendencies in public health? Speaking as a parent, I wish there were a simple answer to that question.

The Social Ritual That Made Me a Better Man

2026-07-11T08:00:00-04:00

My early days of expatriation were disorienting. It was 2011, and I had recently gotten married and moved to Paris. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my friendships to that point had depended on proximity: Once I crossed the Atlantic, many of them dwindled to digital approximations of intimacy. I went long stretches without talking to Carlos, my closest confidant since high school, even though we’d been like family when we lived in Brooklyn.

At the age of 30, I was learning just how fragile friendship becomes in adulthood. A jungle of solitude is the norm, and it grows back when we’re inattentive. In 1990, Gallup found that one-third of men reported having 10 or more close friends. By 2021, according to polling from the Survey Center on American Life, just 13 percent did—a figure that has barely budged even since the pandemic. The number of men who said they had no close friends rose from 3 percent in 1990 to 17 percent last year.

But I found luck in Paris. By way of my sister-in-law’s partner, Steve, I was invited to join a tight-knit band of friends on their recurring guys’ night out. These men knew some simple and worthwhile truths, like where to eat, what to drink, and how to welcome a stranger. In a time of transition and self-imposed exile, the outings became a source of stability and nourishment. Most fundamental, they revealed to me how potent rituals are as antidotes to isolation—capable of making us not only happier but also better.

My weeks assumed a familiar and comforting logic when the text message arrived: “C’est booké!” On the appointed Thursday or Friday night, we’d meet at the local p’tit bar for fatty sheets of charcuterie and glasses of chilled burgundy, trading wisecracks with the mustachioed proprietor. Some evenings he’d present us with an off-menu concoction—slow-cooked pig’s feet, or a mason jar of fried ants that he’d rubbed in a sensational blend of Mexican chiles—that was without fail one of the best dishes I’d ever eaten. Our appetites opened, we’d venture into the Paris night for dinner.

[Read: Are they still your friends if you never see them?]

Though I might not have put it this way back then, I had been adopted into a kind of brotherhood. With my basic French and their accommodating English, we built a hybrid language in which we talked plainly about our fears and the people we loved. Steve was a successful business owner, five years my senior, who modeled a level of elegant generosity I still haven’t seen paralleled. His son, my nephew, was born within months of my arrival. Capable and never flummoxed, Steve was the first man around my age whom I’d seen inhabit the role of patriarch and provider. His closest buddies, Julien and Michaël, were musicians. By chance, I’d been listening to Julien’s deep-house records since college, and I often praised his work. This didn’t sit well with him, given his extraordinary humility, so he immediately set about reading my memoir to return the attention.

Among these men and others in their orbit, I found myself surrounded for the first time by friends who had spouses, children, and real responsibilities. Back in New York, no one in my social environment was seriously discussing the possibility of parenthood. I had often gone to restaurants, bars, and clubs with male friends, but we didn’t conceive of those evenings as guys’ nights out. We were guys, and we were out, but even among those of us who had long-term girlfriends, we never felt the need to demarcate these gatherings from any others.

That changed in Paris. As my savings diminished and—to my astonishment, though it had been planned—I became a father, the couple of evenings a month that I shared with Steve and the others became for me a safe and premeditated truancy from domestic commitments. The ceremony amounted to a pressure valve. Once released, it sent us home tired and inebriated but also kinder, happier, and more giving.

This wasn’t just in my head. In a 2017 study led by the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, researchers at the University of Oxford found that nights out with friends support mental and emotional well-being. Other research has shown that strong friendships are associated with increased generosity, lower rates of depression and anxiety, and even a more robust immune system.

Those long evenings provoked tears of laughter, sometimes sorrow, and occasionally both in the course of a meal. They affirmed the choices and sacrifices I had made: turning away from an established career path in America, and redirecting my energy and resources to less self-interested ends. Over the slow procession of weeks, months, and years, these nights out helped me grasp new and unforeseen opportunities that my growing family and French society could extend. They made me a better friend, partner, and father.

The end came not because of any grand falling-out but simply because some of us assumed new priorities. That the p’tit bar shut down didn’t help. Our collective bond, which once felt imperishable, began to decompose without the movable feasts that had sustained and renewed it.

[Read: How the passionate male friendship died]

I am old enough now to realize that my true fortune in life has been amassed in friendships. My marriage came apart several years ago, and I now split my time in America, where I’ve found another iteration of what I first experienced in France. My friend Carlos never left New York, and when I began to spend half the year in the city, we resumed our long conversation as though it had never been paused. The two of us, along with Ari, Carlos’s close friend of 20 years, have made our own guys’ nights out here. As divorcés and single fathers, each of us has confronted loss and disappointment. Each of us has also learned that even satisfied ambition and material success will never suffice. To an extent that would have probably been unthinkable to me as a younger man, Carlos, Ari, and I have formed a fraternity in which we do not feel the need to dissemble or compete.

Because of our squeezed itineraries and complex custody arrangements, these New York nights require the kind of rigorous planning that makes me grateful at least two of us are lawyers. Perhaps because these gatherings require so much forethought, spending the entire evening in a single establishment feels wasteful. So we go to three, fully aware that at our age the next drink will ruin Sunday morning.

Despite the joy that these outings provide—probably because of it—I still feel a sense of nostalgia and even something like grief for those old dinners in Paris. Relationships, whether platonic or romantic, change subtly. Couples who seem inseparable gradually grow untethered, and even best friends disagree in ways that leave them strangers. It is hard to perceive in the midst of laughter that this exquisite meal is never to be repeated. And yet, there comes a night when the group will have been seated, as it has so many times already at that familiar and well-set table, for what will be its final supper.

Look Closer: Pieter De Hooch’s Puzzle Box

2026-07-11T09:00:00-04:00

Pieter de Hooch was a contemporary of Johannes Vermeer in the Dutch city of Delft for a time; they painted similar subjects, in similar costumes, engaged in similarly quotidian activities. But they were quite different artists. De Hooch’s 1663 painting Interior With Women Beside a Linen Cupboard delivers exactly as little drama and numinous transcendence as its title promises. (It was formerly called The Good Housewife, which is hardly better.) The intrigue lies elsewhere.

De Hooch’s picture is a puzzle box—an ingenious construction of openings and closings, insides and outsides, revelation and concealment. The sturdy wall behind the standing women with their crisply folded stack of linen is breached in three different places, extending our vista with sudden depth. On the right is a stairway twisting up and out of sight, on the left a window, and in the center a door.

[From the May 2023 issue: How to look at a Vermeer]

These last two open onto the voorhuis, a foyer punctuated with a second, taller window and another doorway, beyond which we can see a sunlit snippet of the outside world—a bit of tree, the suggestion of a canal, and a building on the opposite side, with its own syncopated grid of windows, doors, and brickwork. (Look again at the spot of sky, diced by overlapping panes of glass, and you might catch a glimpse of the light and structure, the clarity and enigma, of Piet Mondrian.)

Our attention is being endlessly redirected. The brightest things in the picture—that bit of blue heaven and the red-and-white house across the canal—are also the most distant. Meanwhile, the one piece of incipient action is hidden in shadow: a child of 5 or 6, standing on the threshold between what we can see clearly and what we can’t, with a kolf stick cocked to send a small ball straight out of the picture and into our world.

[From the December 1972 issue: The inside story of the Mellon art collection]

Looked at one way, De Hooch’s scene is assertively ordinary. Looked at another way, it’s a lesson in the limits of visibility and knowledge. There’s the rectilinear orderliness of floor tiles and bricks, limpid windowpanes, and perfectly folded fabric. And there’s mayhem, writ small, in the unpredictable trajectories of a child and a ball.

This article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “Interior With Women Beside a Linen Cupboard.”

CIA Officers Can Sense the Threat Within

2026-07-10T08:00:00-04:00

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The CIA officer Ray Cline, who was the agency’s chief analyst during the Cuban missile crisis, once observed that when it comes to intelligence analysis, “objectivity is the only virtue that really counts.” By that standard, senior Trump-administration officials have fallen short, and they risk corrupting a system that’s supposed to remain apolitical and grounded in facts, according to a recent survey of CIA analysts.

Since Donald Trump returned to office, the number of CIA employees who said they are concerned that the objectivity of analysis is being undermined by political influence has gone up significantly, according to the survey, which is conducted annually by the agency’s ombudsman for analytic integrity. The results haven’t been made public, but they were described to me by several people familiar with them.

It’s not clear how many of the thousands of career employees involved in producing reports, briefings, and other materials for the president and his advisers responded. But their comments show how acutely some of them feel pressured to reach preferred outcomes instead of following the facts wherever they lead, the people familiar with the voluntary survey told me. They requested not to be identified by name so that they could speak candidly.

The survey, which covers last year and was sent to members of the agency’s analytic workforce, combines multiple-choice questions with an open-ended section where respondents can give feedback in their own words. Most analysts who provided written responses objected specifically to actions by then–Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, according to a person familiar with the survey.

Among the analysts’ concerns was last year’s dismissal of two senior career intelligence officers after one of Gabbard’s deputies tried to rewrite their assessment that Venezuela was not directing a criminal gang, Tren de Aragua. The administration wanted to claim the opposite to create a legal basis for deporting Venezuelan immigrants.

Respondents also cited Gabbard’s decision to revoke the security clearances of more than three dozen current and former national-security officials, without citing any evidence of wrongdoing. Some of them had worked on the intelligence community’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, which Trump derisively refers to as “the Russia hoax.” Gabbard, who left office last month, spent much of her time in office trying unsuccessfully to gin up evidence that intelligence leaders had engaged in a conspiracy to link Trump to Russia.

A majority of officers who responded to the survey said they were satisfied with how their own managers protected objectivity, according to a person familiar with the results. That indicates that at the rank-and-file level within the agency, integrity and adherence to standards remain generally intact, even if those principles have been put under pressure from above.

But the survey results should not be read narrowly as criticism of only Gabbard, people said. They reflect broader concerns about a political climate in which the president has routinely misrepresented intelligence to the public and directed his advisers to find evidence, however dubious, to support his claims about a stolen election in 2020.

“Trump ran on a platform, and ran his first term, in a way that made it clear that he saw the intelligence community more like a press and propaganda office,” Steven Cash, a veteran intelligence officer who also served as a staff member on congressional oversight committees, told me. “That’s fundamentally at odds with why there is an intelligence community.”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe and other senior agency leaders are aware of the survey’s findings. “CIA is committed to providing objective analysis to policymakers to ensure they always have a decisive strategic advantage, as evidenced by successful operations like Midnight Hammer and Absolute Resolve,” Liz Lyons, the agency’s director of public affairs, told me in a written statement. She was referring, respectively, to last year’s U.S. air strikes on facilities associated with Iran’s nuclear-weapons program and to the military operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

[Read: The real intelligence failure in Iran ]

The strikes on Iran last year, however, offer another example of the cost that officers can pay for not toeing the administration’s political line. The director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, was dismissed following a preliminary report that the air strikes had set back Iran’s nuclear capabilities by only a few months. Trump had said they were “obliterated.”

Generations of political leaders have been frustrated by analyses that don’t come out the way they want. And analysts have long bridled at influence from the top. In an essay for Foreign Affairs in 1987, then–Deputy Director Robert Gates wrote, “Far from kowtowing to policymakers, there is sometimes a strong impulse on the part of intelligence officers to show that a policy or decision is misguided or wrong, to poke an analytical finger in the policy eye. Policymakers know this and understandably resent it.” Gates, who went on to serve as CIA director and secretary of defense, wrote that in his experience, administration officials often tried to influence analysis by asking “carefully phrased questions” and, “on rare occasions,” trying to intimidate officers. “The pressures can be enormous.”

But intelligence officers have rarely had to worry that they might lose their job, or worse, for telling the truth. Officers whose names are not publicly disclosed have had their identities revealed and been harassed online. Some have told me that they worry that, in addition to losing their clearances, fanatical supporters of the president might show up at their home.

“In my time, I don’t think anyone was afraid they’d get fired or your name would suddenly make your way to Laura Loomer’s blog,” Cash, who served at the CIA from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, said.

[Read: Trump has a Bill Pulte problem ]

The results of the survey will be sent to Congress so that lawmakers charged with overseeing the intelligence community can judge for themselves whether the administration has brought undue influence to bear. The question could hardly be more timely. Trump has instructed his new acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, to find and disclose evidence that he actually won the 2020 election. Pulte will have access to essentially all of the classified information in the government’s possession, and will have the authority to selectively declassify reports. Lawmakers worry that he will give the public an incomplete picture of what really happened in the 2020 election, and that he will undermine confidence in the fairness of the midterms later this year.

The Senate is scheduled to hold a hearing later this month on Trump’s nominee to permanently serve as DNI—U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton. If senators want to know his views on the importance of objectivity, they could show Clayton what the officers he would lead have to say.

A Magical New Way of Looking at Soccer

2026-07-11T08:00:00-04:00

Last week, as I settled into my seat in the dark and blessedly cool basement theater of New York’s Guggenheim Museum to watch an experimental film, I was conscious that in just a few hours, people all over the planet would be turning on TVs and streaming from laptops and phones to see that night’s lineup of World Cup matches. This knowledge was partly what had primed me to view the film Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait; more important was the giddy expectation that I would be closer to one of the legends of the sport than any televised spectacle would allow.

Zinedine Zidane—or Zizou, as he is often called—ranks with Pelé, Diego Maradona, and Lionel Messi as one of the greatest players of all time. I’d last seen Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s film about him—which the Guggenheim had the good idea of screening this summer—soon after it was made, almost 20 years ago, and I’d found it riveting, if slightly perplexing. This time, I saw clearly: It’s a deeply humane masterpiece.

Most soccer games (allow me a moment to state the obvious) come to us in a standardized format: The camera shows the field from an elevated perspective at the halfway line. Replays in slow motion show the action from different angles, including from overhead or (an unhappy recent innovation) the referee’s body camera. But much of the footage is steady and consistent, designed to maximize our understanding of the game’s patterns and the way one action leads to another. The camera, above all, follows the ball—because the ball is ultimately what tells the story.

Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait is different. Instead of following the ball, the cameras—17 of them, set up around the pitch—follow the man. They follow Zizou. And through this simple switch of focus, the experience of watching soccer is totally transformed. Suddenly, you have no connection with the story of the game, no way to grasp its ebb and flow—the distinctive, dynamic equilibrium of attack and defense that is at the center of every match. All you’re seeing is Zizou.

Gordon and Parreno understand that soccer is spectacle. Their split-screen video work presents a magnetic individual performing in a massive, televised spectacle—a contest between Zidane’s celebrated team of Real Madrid Galácticos and Villareal FC. The game took place at Madrid’s Bernabéu stadium in the spring of 2005, but the film doesn’t really follow the game. Instead, it invites us into a totally fresh relationship with Zizou. It systematically breaks down the aura of legend around Zidane until you, the viewer, begin to identify with him on a level that only great art makes possible.

[Read: When France plays soccer, you can’t look away]

Sometimes the camera focuses on his feet. Other times we see his shadowy, sweat-soaked face in close-up. Here he is walking, now jogging, now running backwards. Very occasionally, he explodes into a brief sprint. The other players (including his legendary teammates Luís Figo, Roberto Carlos, and David Beckham) count for nothing; they flit in and out of the picture like pilot fish in a shark documentary.

If this is spectacle, it’s weirdly illegible (the one thing spectacle is never supposed to be). Parreno and Gordon’s collage aesthetic is designed to undercut the coherent, accessible narratives served up by televised sport. The split screen allows them to show synchronized footage from different perspectives. Like a Cubist painter integrating fractured, shifting views of the same café table, the filmmakers want us to see this very familiar phenomenon with fresh eyes.

So they mix it up. They zoom in and out. Sometimes the footage is blurred, as if Zidane is briefly underwater; other times it’s crisply focused. To keep our attention, Parreno and Gordon splice in snippets of overhead shots or official TV footage. One camera pans up to show us the stadium lights. Another shows us the dark and empty spaces beneath the stands. And the viewer sees the crowd too—sometimes as a great, heaving body, other times as individual figures, each with their own rapt expression.

The film’s sounds are as striking as its visuals. The microphones pick up the rhythmic thwack of leather on leather as Zizou executes a series of short passes with teammates. The audio then switches to the crowd’s chants, the swell of excitement as a promising move is executed, the applause after a missed attempt on goal or a desperate tackle. There’s also a soundtrack by the indie-rock group Mogwai, a sonic emulsion of dreamy, amplified guitars and semi-industrial drones, but this music cuts in and out, so the mood remains fractured.

Parreno and Gordon’s strategy of defamiliarization is so successful that, as you watch, Zidane, instead of being Zizou the legend, the god, slowly takes on the aura of an ordinary man going about his business. And quietly, improbably, the film generates a feeling that its subject could have been anyone—or maybe no one. As Zidane himself said (the quote appears on-screen at the end of the film), “Magic is sometimes very close to nothing at all.”

[Read: Something incredible every single game]

The filmmakers’ approach is counterintuitive because, on the field, Zizou was not at all like you or me. He walked like someone who’d spent most of his life on a horse, but he ran like a lioness, low to the ground, with power and preternatural balance. He seemed to pivot on the spot about three-tenths of a second faster than anyone else. Whereas Messi appears to have the ball on a string, Zidane had it orbiting in the air around him. This was helpful because he played in midfield, where his job was to receive the ball under high pressure and then distribute it to the wings or move it upfield. He was always improvising novel ways of getting out of impossible situations, and many of these escapes (you can see them in any number of highlights reels) had a sleight-of-hand quality.

Because of all this, I’ve started to think of Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait as contemporary art’s equivalent to Albert Camus’ The Stranger. It’s an exercise in existentialism. This association comes with pungent irony because the central act of The Stranger is the killing of an anonymous Arab on a beach in Algiers; Zidane, whose parents came to France from Algeria in 1953, is a protagonist, not a victim, and very close to being the least anonymous man in France.

Even when the ball was nowhere near him, Zizou was charismatic. He grew up in a housing project in La Castellane, a tough, working-class part of Marseilles. He began balding early, so he played for much of his career with something resembling a monk’s tonsure. His furrowed brow could make him look permanently angry. But he has a terrific, high-wattage smile that transforms his shadowy, hunted-looking eyes into mirthful slits. It was that smile that made so many fans love him instantly and deeply. (He finally cracks it near the end of this film, in response to something said by a teammate, and it arrives like a gift.)

Zidane had a 17-year playing career, representing his country and two of Europe’s greatest clubs, Juventus and Real Madrid. He went on to coach Real Madrid to three Union of European Football Associations Champions League trophies. But if you first heard of him only after this film was made, it was probably because of a headbutt—the astonishing eruption of violence that earned him a red card during the 2006 World Cup Final against Italy. Zizou stuck to his plan to retire after that World Cup, so the headbutt was his final act as a player.

If the filmmakers present Zidane as an Everyman equivalent to James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom or Camus’ protagonist Meursault, their approach is fertile because the same questions that hover around Meursault also surround Zizou. Why did Meursault kill the Arab? Why did Zizou headbutt Marco Materazzi? In both cases, the act was an impulsive, existential response with no single cause. Explanations exist, but none feels sufficient—by itself or even combined.

[Read: The other celebration of America]

These speculations are less incidental than they may sound, because the wild thing about Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait is that, although it was filmed more than a year before the World Cup Final fiasco, it ends with Zidane running to join a sideline scuffle and, for his trouble, receiving a red card.

I first went to this film thinking that it would be about the heroism of playing a high-level sport. But its meanings are both deeper and simpler than that. It’s about the heroism and pathos of being authentically human. Watching it, I felt as I do in front of Francis Bacon’s best portraits. Like Parreno and Gordon, Bacon (who studied pictures of cricketers and soccer players) used strong doses of artifice to lead us toward a deeper reality. He distorted his subjects’ features with lurid, lavishly expressive brushstrokes to bypass illustration, which he described as “a long diatribe through the brain,” and hit the nervous system directly.

Embrace the spectacle, Bacon seemed to be saying: Show the figure on the cross, the pope on his throne, the sportsman in the arena. Because only in intense, rarefied states will our illusions finally drop away, like redundant scaffolding, freeing us to perceive life on a more visceral level.

Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait does something similar, just in a different medium. It’s both a portrait of a specific man at work and a portrait of each of us. We get up every morning and go to work. We run around a lot, mostly to little effect. Things happen, or they don’t. People applaud, or they don’t. Someone says something funny, and you laugh. Maybe you run to support a friend only to end up headbutting someone. Suddenly (it was all so beautiful and baffling), your time is up, and you leave the arena.

America’s Homegrown-Parasite Problem

2026-07-11T09:00:00-04:00

The other night, I found myself in the unenviable position of trying to cook a salad. And I mean cook a salad: I spread fresh, delicious-looking gem lettuce in a pan and watched it wilt away into a sad, heated blob. America appears to be in the midst of an outbreak of—I’m sorry, but there’s no better way to say this—explosive diarrhea. More than 2,900 people nationwide have reportedly been sickened by the parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis, which has historically been spread through raw produce, including basil, cilantro, raspberries, and, yes, lettuce. The resulting illness, cyclosporiasis, causes bouts of diarrhea that, if left untreated, can wreak havoc on the digestive system for a month.

Cyclospora is most common in tropical climates and areas with substandard sanitation. It’s spread through contact with bits of human waste that have sat in a warm environment for a week or two, allowing the parasite to mature and become infectious. One of the first documented large-scale outbreaks of foodborne cyclosporiasis in the United States, for example, was caused by raspberries imported from Guatemala. In recent years, though, it’s started to seem that the U.S. has a homegrown-parasite problem on its hands. Americans were sickened in both 2018 and 2020 by outbreaks that were believed to be caused by domestic produce. The FDA set up a task force to deal with the issue in 2019. It apparently hasn’t stopped what is looking like a dramatic uptick in cases this summer. Michigan usually sees about 50 cyclosporiasis cases a year. During this current outbreak, it has recorded upwards of 1,500.

Officials and scientists are not yet sure just how dire the apparent rise in cyclosporiasis is and whether the cases around the country are actually connected. Although the CDC reports that 31 states are seeing cases, the majority are reporting fewer than 10, which is close to normal for the summer months.

They also don’t know what is behind this spate of illness. Don Schaffner, a food scientist at Rutgers University, told me his theory is that perhaps the largest cluster of cases came from people swimming in or otherwise consuming water from a common water source, such as Lake Erie, which borders the affected states of Michigan and Ohio. Michigan’s chief medical executive has said, however, that the state’s working theory is that the cases are tied to produce.

That lack of clarity has led public-health officials to offer somewhat unsatisfactory advice on how to keep yourself safe. My home state of Illinois suggests that people avoid food and water “that may have been contaminated with feces,” as if that were not always the goal. Other states recommend washing produce, but that won’t eliminate all of the risk, Schaffner said. Some experts believe that washing might help reduce the number of infectious particles that a person takes in, but they don’t know for sure how many a person needs to ingest to actually get sick, and some data suggest that the number may be very low. The only way to reliably kill the parasite is to cook your food thoroughly—hence my feast of wilted, warm greens.

Americans have little other recourse to protect themselves from cyclosporiasis and, thanks to ongoing uncertainty about the outbreak’s size, little way of knowing how likely they are to catch it. In healthy people, cyclosporiasis causes mostly mild (if uncomfortable) symptoms. But that lack of control still makes cyclosporiasis, like other foodborne illnesses, unsettling and frustrating. Right now, choosing to eat only cooked produce is one of the few decisions I can make to protect my fast-approaching wedding from being interrupted by frantic trips to the bathroom, so I’m going with it.

When a foodborne outbreak happens, public-health officials’ goal is to quickly identify its cause and warn people to stay away from the suspect food. Sometimes that happens quickly—in 2018, for example, investigators took just nine days to tie an E. coli outbreak to chopped romaine. The current investigation into cyclospora has already been happening for nearly a month. In the coming weeks, Americans might learn the cause, or causes, of the surge, which would make taking precautions much easier. And if the parasite has been in fact spread by raw produce, the contaminated products may already be off grocery-store shelves.

Cyclosporiasis, though, is particularly tough to track. Scientists can analyze the genetic sequence of most pathogens to identify clusters of related diseases, but that process doesn’t work as well for cyclospora, because the parasite is difficult to extract from stool and can’t be grown in a laboratory for testing the same way other pathogens can. And even if officials zero in on specific foods that they believe were contaminated, the public may never learn what specifically went wrong. The CDC’s website notes that “no one fully knows how Cyclospora gets into food and water.” Although past investigations of the parasite have turned up suspected sources, they have stopped short of concluding how those sources became contaminated. When bagged lettuce caused a cyclospora outbreak in 2020, for example, officials suspected that the parasite had been introduced to farms through a municipal water canal, but they were ultimately unable to definitively establish a causal link. The investigation may also be hindered by the Trump administration’s recent cuts to the CDC and the FDA. Until yesterday morning, the CDC was reporting that fewer than 200 people in the U.S. had contracted the parasite, despite ample evidence from states that the situation was much more severe. It has since updated that count to 843. (A CDC spokesperson declined to explain the earlier discrepancy between state reporting and its own case count, and did not respond to a follow-up request for comment after the new numbers were released.)

Cyclosporiasis, thankfully, is not the most serious foodborne illness that the world has to deal with. Although cyclosporiasis has landed nearly 100 Americans in the hospital so far this summer, no one has died. That’s much preferable to, say, the 2024 listeria outbreak tied to lunch meat that killed 10 people. In that case, a clear culprit was identified, and there were consequences for the company that produced the tainted meat, which has paid out millions in settlements. The United States may never get the same closure to its cyclospora problem.

The Timidity of America’s Top Generals

2026-07-10T11:45:08-04:00

What is the role of a general in a democracy? Many of today’s military leaders have a very particular answer: Focus on tactics, carry out orders, and otherwise shut up.

This is not what America’s top officers have always done. The country’s most senior generals and admirals are expected to provide unvarnished military counsel to the president and swear an oath to defend the Constitution. History is full of examples of officers who also spoke up about the ethics and strategic implications of the president’s choices. But with a commander in chief who has stated that he prefers “the sort of generals that Hitler had,” and a secretary of defense who has fired top officers for exhibiting insufficient loyalty, military leaders during the Trump presidency have defined their advisory role extremely narrowly.

Dan Caine, the general whom President Trump plucked out of retirement—and obscurity—to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has come to personify that circumspect approach. He presents military options and addresses tactical and force-related matters, but avoids big-picture questions of geopolitics and the probity of the administration’s actions, provided the administration deems them legal. Other top officers have followed his example.

Caine articulated his stance to the graduates of the National Defense University last month. The future top ranks, he said, must be clear about the limits of their role when they advise senior leaders about the risks and benefits of potential operations. Can we go do this? is a military question, Caine told the officers sweltering in their dress uniforms, one “that the joint force answers.” But “the should we? question lands at the policy level, and we don’t do that in our business,” he said.

Seen one way, Caine’s studious deference to civilian authority is an appropriate correction from the generals in charge of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who were famously strident about what they thought the wars should be about and how they should be run. Top officers such as Caine serve at the pleasure of the president and can be relieved anytime; their jobs are to provide military counsel, not to shape preferred outcomes.

But looked at another way, Caine and other generals are being overly timid and deferential, in part because Pete Hegseth demands it. The secretary of defense has forced out more than 20 generals and admirals, including some of the most respected career officers in the forces: Caine’s predecessor, Air Force General C. Q. Brown Jr.; two other members of the Joint Chiefs; and, most recently, Army General C. D. Donahue. Meanwhile, Hegseth has promoted less experienced officers. He has offered no explanation for each individual ouster, and the dismissals have fed a sense among his senior commanders that he prizes fealty and acquiescence over competence and experience.

[Read: An Army shake-up in the middle of a war]

Assertive generals, too, can offer bad advice. The Afghan and Iraq Wars, led by more outspoken military leaders, dragged on, cost trillions of dollars, and ended far short of victory. Yet the Iran war, led by more reticent brass, hasn’t achieved the administration’s stated objectives, either. Before the conflict started, commanders had crafted a contingency plan for the U.S. military to keep shipping moving through the Strait of Hormuz, which called for additional ships, troops, and other forces in anticipation that Tehran might attempt to close it. But the president chose a different course. Commanders faithfully executed the president’s guidance and were careful not to criticize it publicly, only to see Iran close the strait to commercial traffic, disrupting global commerce and prompting the Trump administration to agree to a tenuous cease-fire and a (thus far futile) return to diplomacy.

All of which raises the question: How should the American public expect generals to behave?

The answer is made urgent by how Trump himself views the military. In his first term, Trump berated his Pentagon leaders as “dopes and babies”; after leaving office, he accused his chief military adviser of treason. In his second term, egged on by Hegseth, Trump has sent troops into U.S. cities and used the military for his legally dubious campaign against suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean. He has also mused about deploying the military to monitor elections. That makes the balance that military leaders must strike—between deference to civilian leaders and their duty to the Constitution and the force they represent—an even thornier challenge. “If Trump 1.0 was the Olympic Games for these military leaders,” Carrie Lee, a scholar who specializes in civil-military issues at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a think tank, told us, “then Trump 2.0 is The Hunger Games.”

Questions about how the military and its elected leaders should interact are older than the United States. General George Washington weighed in on policy with the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War, repeatedly arguing that he did not have sufficient resources to defeat the British. When his pleas were rebuffed, he continued to advise the congress while adapting to what his civilian leaders wanted, with the goal of preserving the Continental Army. After victory, Washington famously resigned his military commission in 1783, before he became president.

One of the country’s most successful examples of civilian-military partnership came decades later, when President Abraham Lincoln gave General Ulysses S. Grant broad operational latitude to lead Union forces in the Civil War and Grant accepted Lincoln’s authority to set the conflict’s political objectives.

Perhaps the greatest civilian-military controversy erupted in 1951 when President Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur for publicly challenging the administration’s approach to the Korean War. The president’s decision to remove one of the nation’s most celebrated (if outspoken) generals preserved the chain of command, even though many people believed that MacArthur had legitimate concerns about Truman’s “limited war” strategy, which aimed to prevent escalation. Truman publicly explained his reasons for that decision, letting the rest of the force know what civilian leaders expected of them. (Historians generally agree that MacArthur, venerated battlefield leader though he was, had gone too far.)

This administration has been unique for its lack of transparency over why generals are ousted. And in the run-up to the war in Iran, there was no chance to hear from the generals and admirals who would lead that war. Americans heard much more forthright rationales from generals involved in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

[Listen: The military Pete Hegseth wants]

Before the 2003 Iraq invasion, General Eric Shinseki told members of Congress that he believed “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would be needed to occupy the country, an assessment that then–Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected. General David Petraeus later made the case for surging forces into Iraq in a bid to take on a burgeoning insurgency. In that era, Petraeus and General Stanley McChrystal were nationally known figures who expounded on grand strategy, held forth with the media, and rallied the public around policies the military supported in ways that some civilian leaders believed was out of line.

When Joe Biden was vice president, he blamed generals such as McChrystal for attempting to “box in” President Obama on Afghanistan and force him into approving a massive troop increase. Obama wrote in his memoir that, as the Afghanistan debate came to a head, Biden leaned in close to the president’s face and told him: “Don’t let them jam you!” The White House wanted the Pentagon, officers joked darkly, to “shut up and color,” like a kindergartner. (When Biden became president, he selected Lloyd Austin, a low-profile former general unlikely to challenge the White House, as his Pentagon chief.)

Many officers treat The Soldier and the State, by the political scientist Samuel Huntington, as their civil-military bible. The 1957 book advocates for civilian leaders to exercise “objective control” over a battle-hardened professional military class that remains apart from politics. But the most astute recognize the folly of the notion that the military can sidestep politics entirely. Particularly at the three- and four-star level, officers may refrain from engaging in partisan rhetoric and events, but they operate in the political realm, dealing with budgets, lawmakers, and the media.

America’s Founders feared a military powerful enough to threaten democracy, so they vested ultimate authority in civilians. But they premised that system on the assumption that those civilians would use their power responsibly and with congressional oversight. During the first Trump administration, Pentagon leaders pushed back on the president’s most egregious proposals. In 2020, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley was horrified when Trump suggested shooting unarmed protesters and deploying the military to police American streets. He and other Pentagon leaders worked behind the scenes to ensure a successful transition of power following the president’s 2020 defeat.

Milley, a voluble Army general whom Trump hand-picked as military chief, epitomizes the assertive and politically confident officer, as comfortable with opinion makers and foreign leaders as he is with the average grunt. But some current and former officers we spoke with believe that Milley overstepped at times—for example, when he spoke in support of studying critical race theory before Congress, providing fodder for right-wing complaints about a woke military; or when he took what many saw as a veiled shot at Trump as a “wanna-be dictator” in his 2023 retirement speech. (Milley became such a bête noire for Trump that Biden, fearing the general would be prosecuted when Trump returned to power, gave Milley a preemptive pardon.)

[From the November 2023 issue: How Mark Milley held the line ]

Many of those same officers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject matter, now believe that Caine and others are overcorrecting for Milley’s approach, especially in the face of Hegseth’s stifling of dissent and his campaign to remake the military according to his vision of a hypermasculine, ultra-loyal force. The pendulum, these officers believe, has now swung back too far.

Kori Schake, a defense analyst and a contributing writer for The Atlantic who has also written a book about U.S. civil-military relations, told us that Hegseth’s unexplained ousters, combined with a lack of public or congressional debate before military action in Iran, Venezuela, and the Caribbean, “have created a command climate that penalizes the honest evaluations of the military about issues on which the military is expert and the civilians are not.” Vladimir Putin’s cowed generals fostered the erroneous belief the Kremlin could score an easy victory in Ukraine; U.S. generals, Schake added, shouldn’t have the same fear of speaking up. “That’s very dangerous,” she said. “That’s how you lose wars.”

Caine is known as an even-tempered, assiduous officer; he is awake by 3 a.m. and on his first call by 4:30. In his office hang images of the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, General George C. Marshall (a fellow Virginia Military Institute graduate), and the compound where U.S. forces hunted down the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Caine has become one of Trump’s closest aides, particularly because the president relies on just a small coterie of national security advisers. During his first 365 days on the job, Caine made more than 330 trips to the White House.

Caine’s White House conversations remain private. His approach is “speaking truth to power, privately,” one person familiar with his thinking told us. But speaking before Congress and the press, he has repeatedly ducked questions about the wisdom of Trump’s controversial initiatives, including the deployment of National Guard troops in majority-Democrat cities and the decision to launch a war with Iran without congressional or public debate.

[Read: Trump’s new favorite general]

Caine has often cited classified information or his need to “maintain trust” with his civilian bosses, among others, to explain why he won’t publicly give even general assessments about major aspects of the war. Asked by Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, during one hearing whether Operation Epic Fury, the code name for the Iran war, had achieved its goals, Caine replied: “Sir, only political leaders decide victory or defeat, and I’ll leave it to them to opine on that.” Detractors say that his background may explain some of his approach: Unlike past chairmen, Caine had not previously served at the four-star level, where officers gain valuable political experience, or headed a large command.

Some officers have been more forthright. General Gregory Guillot, the head of Northern Command, acknowledged to lawmakers that it would be illegal to place armed troops at polling places except in the case of an armed rebellion, even though the president has suggested he might do just that.

But other senior officers have followed Caine’s tight-lipped lead, careful not to seem at odds with their bosses. Early in the Iran war, Hegseth declared that America would provide “no quarter” to its enemies. The military’s own rules prohibit such orders or statements because they imply leaving no survivors on the battlefield or executing prisoners of war. In a congressional hearing in May, Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat and former Army Ranger, asked Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, to affirm that the Law of War Manual prohibited such a declaration. “It’s clear from a U.S. military perspective, we follow the law of armed conflict,” Cooper demurred. He was trying not to enter the political fray by sparring with Democrats frustrated with Hegseth’s comments, one of his defenders told us. But what message was he sending to the troops he oversees? Crow was incensed. “You’re a combatant commander. You’re one of our most senior military officers with tens of thousands of service members under your command,” Crow said. “This is not leadership to not be able to say something as basic.”

At the same hearing in May, Cooper answered another question the way Hegseth might have—by punching back. Representative Seth Moulton, a Marine veteran, pointed out to Cooper that the Iran war wasn’t meeting its objectives. “I would like to know how many more Americans we have to ask to die for this mistake. Do you know?” Moulton, a Democrat, demanded. Cooper, perhaps because of Moulton’s reference to fallen troops, was visibly furious. “It’s an entirely inappropriate statement from you, sir,” Cooper shot back.

In our combined decades of covering Pentagon leaders testifying before Congress, neither of us had ever seen a military leader push back against an elected official so forcefully. Officers, no matter how much they might resent congressional grandstanding, are supposed to sit there and take it. That’s part of the job.

Cooper requested a follow-up conversation with Moulton after that hearing. The two men later huddled, in an encounter that hasn’t previously been reported. Cooper was still riled, people familiar with the exchange told us, and told Moulton that his remarks had crossed a line; he believed that the congressman, as a veteran, should have risen above politics. Moulton responded that he likewise thought Cooper had been political and had failed to sufficiently answer lawmakers’ questions. The two men shook hands before parting ways.

[Read: Hegseth, Rubio, and Caine had an auto-deleting Signal chat]

For a general who says he is not political, Caine briefly embraced an administration talking point on a key—and hotly disputed—element of the Iran conflict: What constitutes a broken cease-fire? Caine told reporters in May that Iran’s repeated firing at commercial ships, despite Trump’s declared cease-fire, fell “below the threshold of restarting major combat operations at this point,” a seemingly political judgment. But he quickly reined himself in. When asked what constituted “major combat operations,” Caine said that such assessments were “above my pay grade.”

Many people inside the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill have wondered whether Caine and other senior officers are hoarding their influence with Hegseth and Trump for when they really need it—during a constitutional crisis, for instance, such as an attempt to place troops at polling stations in 2026 or 2028. (Caine is due to step down in September 2027, but he may be extended.) Caine and other officers have promised to follow the law. But they are operating in an administration that has been willing to act first and litigate later.

History remembers both Washington and Marshall less for their tactical brilliance than for their strategic leadership. They astutely navigated the politics of their times, and their legacies were shaped not only by what they did in uniform but by the institutions they left behind. Caine and today’s other senior brass may ultimately be remembered for their choices about when to quietly defer to civilian leadership—and when the moment demands they speak up.

The Surprising Unity of Soccer

2026-07-11T08:00:00-04:00

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

One of my favorite parts of the World Cup is asking people a deceptively simple question: What team are you rooting for?

In some cases the answer is obvious, but in many it isn’t. I always root for Colombia, where I am from. Yet I live in the United States. My father is Mexican. My grandfather is Argentinian. When Colombia was eliminated, I didn’t stop watching—I simply found myself cheering for someone else. My loyalties don’t compete; they accumulate.

The World Cup asks us to pick a team, but in doing so, it reveals that identity is rarely confined to a single flag. People cheer for the place where they grew up, where their parents came from, where they studied abroad, or simply for a player they admire or an underdog that captures their attention.

It’s an unexpected kind of unity. The tournament is organized around national competition, but it reminds us how interconnected those nations really are. For all of the flags and rivalries, the World Cup has a remarkable way of reminding us how much we share.

On Sports and Unity

How to Cheer for America

By Clint Smith

When I watch the World Cup, I’m celebrating not what this country is, but what it can be. (From 2022)

Read the article.

Something Incredible Every Single Game

By Charlie Warzel

Inside America’s World Cup fever dream

Read the article.

How the World Cup Explains the World

By Hanna Rosin

Hanna Rosin talks with the Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer, the author of How Soccer Explains the World, about how this year’s World Cup displays a gentler form of nationalism that we haven’t seen in a while.

Listen to the episode.

Still Curious?

When France plays soccer, you can’t look away. Sally Jenkins discusses the joys of watching Les Bleus at the World Cup.
The feel-good story of the World Cup is too good to be true. Some of the people celebrating American excess are not what they seem, Will Oremus writes.

Other Diversions

Courtesy of Kristin E.

My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Kristin E., from Indiana, shares “a monarch butterfly on fall asters in my native-plant garden.”

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

— Rafaela

The Sports Overload Is Here

2026-07-10T16:12:00-04:00

This summer’s lineup of sporting events has been an embarrassment of riches. This morning, the No. 1 men’s tennis player in the world (Jannik Sinner) and the winningest men’s tennis player of all time (Novak Djokovic) played in the semifinal of the biggest tennis tournament in the world (Wimbledon). In the afternoon, Spain and Belgium are kicking off their World Cup quarterfinal match. If that wasn’t enough, the evening brings a full slate of Major League Baseball games, plus NBA Summer League debuts for half the league’s rookies. All of this comes after a packed June in which, at one point, the World Cup, the NBA finals, and the NHL finals all briefly overlapped.

If it feels like there is more sports to watch than ever before, that’s because there is. This year’s World Cup is the biggest ever, the tournament having jumped from 32 teams to 48. It may come around only every four years, but the sports calendar no longer stops. The MLB, NHL, and NBA have all added games over the past few years. In 2020, the NFL tacked on two extra playoff games; the following year, the league added an extra regular-season game for the first time in nearly 50 years. Since then, it has colonized ever more calendar territory, rescheduling games from its standard Sunday slate to the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas Day, and a number of late-season Saturdays. Every major league has expanded over the past few years, Stephen Master, an adjunct professor of sports media at NYU and the former global head of sports at Nielsen, told me: “There’s not a league that hasn’t been touched by it.” And while this isn’t the first time these leagues have grown, the recent across-the-board expansion surge is unusual, the experts I spoke with all said.

If you’re a sports fan like me, more games to watch can seem like a good thing. You don’t get the tiny African island nation of Cape Verde holding out for a miraculous draw against the mighty Spain without a 48-team World Cup. When leagues expand their playoffs—as, say, the MLB did in 2022—they give more teams a chance to qualify and more fans something to root for. But the glut of games can also be overwhelming, even if you aren’t someone who binges three different leagues. There’s simply too much.

The feeling of excess has to do in part with changes to the sports-media ecosystem. Before streaming, most viewers had access only to local, in-market games and a handful of national broadcasts each week. Now die-hard fans can watch everything (although doing so might require three separate streaming subscriptions on top of a cable package). If you want to consume all 570 hours of top-flight Spanish soccer over the course of a season, that is an option available to you.

But a good deal of blame falls on sports leagues themselves. More games means more money: more ticket sales, more corporate sponsorship opportunities, and more valuable media-rights packages. Master suspects that last factor in particular may go a long way in explaining the ballooning schedules. In 2005, 14 of the top 100 live TV broadcasts were sports, according to Nielsen; in 2025, they made up 95 of the top 100. As the bottom has fallen out of virtually all other live TV programming, networks have come to rely on sports—and they’ll pay through the teeth to keep them. At same time, they’re now competing for media rights against deep-pocketed streaming behemoths such as Netflix, Apple, and Amazon.

The more the value of TV deals swells, Master said, the more money leagues leave on the table by not expanding. In 2024, the NFL sold the rights to televise a few games to Netflix for $75 million apiece—this fall, Netflix will broadcast the first-ever NFL game on Thanksgiving Eve.

In aggregate, the expansions contribute to a feeling of oversaturation, of too-muchness. For a fanatic, either you’re always missing something or sports take over your entire life. How are you supposed to have a regular, socially and familially acceptable Christmas Day while also keeping tabs on five prime NBA matchups and three NFL games? For a casual viewer, the proliferation of games can detract from the experience of watching any individual one.

Consider the NBA. The league introduced a pre-playoffs play-in tournament in 2021 and another in-season tournament in 2023. Yet for many years now, fans have complained that the 82-game season is too long, as have such leading lights as LeBron James and the Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr. To preserve their bodies, players end up taking semi-regular off nights (“load management,” to use the term of art), making it next-to-impossible for fans to predict whether the player they’re buying a ticket to see will even suit up that night. The length of the season and inclusiveness of the postseason (two-thirds of teams get in) ensure that most games have little meaning.

The nature and extent of the problem varies league to league. But the drive to grow is universal, and so is the resistance. The move to expand the World Cup generated serious backlash, in part because the group stage of the tournament has become lower stakes and hopelessly arcane. And seemingly no one favors the College Football Playoff’s planned expansion from 12 to 24 teams, because it will render regular-season games less consequential and water down the quality of the playoff itself. A number of MLB stars, too, have called for a shorter season, because 162 games is just flat-out a lot. Unlike basketball or baseball, pro football is far from the point where regular-season contests become meaningless, but that hasn’t stopped its fans from debating whether the NFL is sapping some of the magic that comes from football’s scarcity.

Whatever fans think of these expansions, chances are they’ll tune in. Sure, they’ll complain about how the extra games are diluting the product, but “everyone says that,” Master said. “And then the ratings come out and they’re incredible.” This is not a matter of fickleness; it’s a fundamental misfiring of the free market. Generally, if a business offers a product and it sells, that means consumers want it. But when sports leagues add games, the experience for fans degrades in a way that doesn’t always show up in the dollars and cents. Just because a fan watches the 82nd game of the NBA regular season doesn’t mean they wouldn’t prefer, say, a 70-game season in which every game was a little more competitive.

There’s no going back. FIFA is considering further expanding the World Cup to 64 teams, and the generally strong showings from first-time participants at this year’s tournament will only bolster that push. Despite having tripled just a couple of years ago, plans to double the size of the College Football Playoff already seem to be in motion. And NFL owners are pushing hard for another week of games. “In the NFL, there’s a sense of inevitability that it’ll go to 18 games,” Scott Rosner, a sports-management professor at Columbia University, told me. “There’s almost too much money at stake for it not to.” Owners aren’t going to walk away from an extra $1 billion in revenue, and many players aren’t going to walk away from the extra salary. The experts I spoke with couldn’t think of a single example of that happening.

Sports have always been a business, but it can feel these days as though we’re moving into a hard-knuckled, wring-out-every-penny era. The ever-multiplying micro-sponsorships, the split-screen commercial breaks interrupting play, the carving up of media rights, the expanded schedules—it all chips away, little by little, at the viewing experience. Add all of that to the way betting is reshaping the landscape, and in the process something intangible about sports fandom is being lost. Ultimately, every business has one destiny: to grow.

Trump’s War-Not-War Is Doing Something Odd to the Economy

2026-07-09T13:54:03-04:00

Yesterday, the International Monetary Fund happily reported that the world had weathered the recently settled Iran war surprisingly well. That same day, President Trump declared the cease-fire “over” and promised, “We’re going to hit them hard again tonight.” The United States resumed bombing Iran. For months, businesses and consumers all around the world have been trying to deal with a bizarre situation in which Trump’s war is both happening and not happening at once.

In quantum mechanics, alternate states of the world can be said to exist together in superposition—Schrödinger’s famous cat is both alive and dead at the same time. Contemporary geopolitics has a similar weirdness. The Strait of Hormuz has been declared simultaneously open and closed. Cease-fires coexist with intermittent bombings. America has decisively won the war, the Trump administration has insisted many times; all the while, it has been negotiating a diplomatic settlement that Iran both does and does not seem to want.

[Tom Nichols: Iran, not Trump, is in control of this war]

Many countries have been muddling along anyway. Unlike in its pessimistic April report, which had warned of a potential global recession, the IMF was sanguine yesterday in declaring that “the global economy as a whole has, so far, weathered the shock from the war better than feared.” Global GDP growth is now forecast to be 3 percent—less than the 3.3 percent forecast before the war actually began, but not much worse than the IMF’s April projection. Global inflation should be 4.7 percent, mostly because of the war-induced increases in oil and natural-gas prices. Even economies in Europe and Asia that were dependent on imported energy from the Middle East performed surprisingly well, for two reasons: Energy importers tapped their oil and gas reserves, preventing shortages, and the artificial-intelligence boom has kept equipment exporters such as China and South Korea growing much faster than expected.

Strikingly, the United States, a net exporter of energy, has inflicted war-related costs on the rest of the world without harming its growth trajectory at all. It is one of the few advanced economies that the IMF expects to grow faster in 2026 than it did in 2025. American consumers have grumbled about higher gas prices, but the S&P 500 is up almost 9 percent since the joint American-Israeli operation that started the war in February. Perhaps that is why, after delivering one stress test to the rest of the world, Trump is willing to deliver another by resuming hostilities. But a few more months of war-not-war could have more dire effects. The natural-gas reserves that Europe typically builds up in anticipation of winter are now very low. Reserves acted to dampen price pressure at the start of the war; now the impetus to refill them as the cold months approach could act to accelerate price pressure.

A protracted conflict could produce a disjunction, in which the global economy is both harmed and unharmed at the same time. The IMF’s headline growth projection yesterday, 3 percent, is not terrible. Yet the projection is a blend of two opposing states. Most countries will actually experience only one or the other. Economies involved in the AI boom will shrug off the effects of the war as equipment sales, rising stock indexes, and perhaps even growing worker productivity promote confidence among businesses and consumers. But for poorer economies uninvolved in technology supply chains and dependent on imported energy, the harms of war will be impossible to overlook. These economies will likely suffer shortages in the case of further oil and gas scarcity as reserves run out and they are outbid on the remaining supply. Food supplies could even be endangered. The Strait of Hormuz is a key conduit for materials needed for agricultural fertilizer—the cost of which has already surged. If these prices become even steeper, the IMF warns, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa could experience serious food shortages.

[Read: ‘We may sleepwalk our way back to war’]

Complicating matters further, war tends to increase inflation (as is currently happening) and increase debt, which pushes central banks of big economies to raise rates to stave off overheating, slowing down overall growth in those countries. The Federal Reserve has held rates steady this year instead of cutting; it may increase rates later in the year if the inflation risk seems large enough. These rate moves also draw investment to rich countries and away from emerging-market economies such as Egypt and Pakistan.

The grim reality may come to pass, because the memorandum of understanding that Iran and the United States signed last month appears to have unraveled. American sanctions on Iranian oil, temporarily lifted, have now snapped back into place. “Reescalation of geopolitical tensions would hurt growth and compound inflationary pressures,” the IMF warned, including new trade tensions and heightened risk of “social unrest and domestic political instability.” Then again, things can both be and not be. Shortly after America began its promised bombing run yesterday, Trump told reporters that the Iranians were begging for mercy. “They called a little while ago. They want to make a deal so badly,” he said. “I just don’t know if they’re worthy of making a deal.”

The Rosenberg Boys

2026-07-10T07:00:00-04:00

For those old enough to remember, Michael and Robby Meeropol will always be the Rosenberg boys.

I never knew them as such, but it’s not hard to imagine what they were like, in part because there are so many pictures. In one, from June 1953, they are sitting outside the White House in shirts and ties, wool coats, and Brooklyn Dodgers caps. Six-year-old Robby holds his grandmother’s hand; to his right stands a rabbi.

The boys look uncomfortable, and solemn. Their parents, Ethel and Julius, have been convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and sentenced to death. Robby and Michael are there to ask President Dwight Eisenhower to spare their lives. Michael, who is 10, has written a letter that he will hand to a White House guard: “Please let my mommy and daddy go and not let anything happen to them. If they come home Robby and I will be very happy we will thank you very much.”

Out of the frame, but documented in other photos from that day, are the placards that protesters carried invoking Robby and Michael, the helpless boys made symbols of what many believed was a grave injustice about to be perpetrated against their parents. (Counterprotesters, carrying signs saying FRY ’EM and HANG ’EM, disagreed.) Similar scenes played out around the world. After Pope Pius XII called for clemency, the Vatican’s newspaper cited the “two little innocents on whose soul and destiny the death of their parents would forever leave sinister scars.”

I learned the broad outlines of the events that followed—the electric chair, and the orphans it left behind—half a century later, on a weekend visit to the home of my parents’ friends Robby and Elli in western Massachusetts. I was 8. I don’t recall how the subject came up or exactly what I was told, but I remember trying to picture the electrocution, and that I couldn’t sleep that night. I knew Robby mostly as the kind of adult who enjoys making bad puns and funny faces for kids’ amusement. The notion that, as a kid himself, he had been orphaned by the United States government didn’t seem to match his playful persona. I wondered, but didn’t quite know how to ask, how anyone could go on living after something like that had happened. And how could he possibly seem so normal?

I later learned more: that Robby and Michael had been adopted after the executions, taken a new last name, and all but disappeared from the public eye. They went to college and graduate school, got married, had children of their own—only to reemerge as public figures in the 1970s, vowing to clear their parents’ names. From then on, they’d never really stopped talking about Ethel and Julius, or pressing the government for answers about its evidence and motivations for seeking their death. By the time I was old enough to observe their advocacy firsthand—at a public event commemorating the executions’ 50th anniversary, and later in a presentation Robby gave at my high school—I understood their basic posture to be one of resolute protest. Ethel and Julius, they maintained, had not been atomic spies. They had been scapegoated for their political allegiances, framed by prosecutors, and wrongfully killed.

This was not, I came to understand, an uncontroversial position. One year, my family’s Yom Kippur break-fast meal was very nearly derailed when my dad got into an argument with one of our guests about the Rosenbergs. Julius and Ethel, this guest insisted, were both guilty as charged, and to pretend otherwise was a pinko fantasy. The incident left me with yet more questions about my parents’ friend and the complicated historical legacy he’d inherited.

I’ve lately been able to ask Robby and Michael many of these questions directly—and to go beyond the abbreviated, textbook version of their family’s story, deep into the countless primary and secondary sources that, for nearly 75 years, have helped shape an ever-evolving debate about what, in this case, constitutes truth, and what justice really means. The facts are messier and more resistant to facile conclusions than either side of the argument might care to acknowledge. Even now, new ones continue to emerge.

Christopher Churchill for The Atlantic; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University Libraries

Michael ( left ) and Robby with items from the Rosenberg papers at Boston University, more than 70 years after the executions

Since the fall of the Soviet Union 35 years ago, government files have been declassified and grand-jury testimonies unsealed; key players have made dramatic confessions. Robby and Michael, the old men who were once such young boys, have had to make their own sense of these revelations. Not all of them have been easy to accept.

In April of last year, I spent a day with the brothers in Cold Spring, New York, where Michael and his late wife, Ann, moved in 2009. The town sits on a hill overlooking the Hudson River, and I got off the train from New York City that morning with hikers who fanned out to the nearby trails.

Robby was waiting to pick me up at the station in his red Toyota; he’d arrived early, as he is apt to do. On the short drive to Michael’s condo, we made easy small talk. I’d made clear that the article I was writing would be solely mine to shape, and they’d agreed that I could ask them anything. But I knew that once I turned my recorder on, I’d need to ask questions that might put me in league, in their minds, with the legions of other journalists they believed had fixated on the wrong angles, or missed the point of the Rosenberg case entirely.

Before I started reporting this story, I’d met Michael only in passing. We’d now talked on the phone a few times, and my main takeaway was that his being a retired economics professor made a lot of sense. His tendency was to carefully (and loquaciously) argue a point, and he had limitless enthusiasm for wading into the minutiae of legal details and chronology. Robby, by his own admission, preferred to focus on more general themes. As the three of us sat talking in Michael’s living room, Robby pointed out that his brother, being four years older, had spent far more time with their father than he had. Robby seemed to think of Julius more as a historical figure he happened to be related to, while Michael, on some level, still mourned the father he’d lost as a 10-year-old.

Julius was a co-owner of a struggling machine shop on the Lower East Side. On weekends, he would take Michael to ride the New York City subways and elevated trains for hours on end; they would stand at the very front, where they could look out at the switching tracks. Ethel stayed home with Robby. She worked hard at being a good mother—she sang to her boys, read Parents’ magazine, took a class in child psychology. In their small apartment near the Manhattan Bridge, the kids shared the lone bedroom while their parents slept in the living room.

Listening to Michael’s descriptions, you could almost forget that his early years were different from those of other postwar American kids: “I’d have a wooden baseball bat and a Spalding ball or a tennis ball. He”—Julius—“would pitch it to me, and I would hit it.” Michael was listening to The Lone Ranger on the radio when, one July night in 1950, FBI agents came to the door to arrest his father.

In his letters from jail and later prison, Julius tried to reassure his sons. “Don’t you worry,” he wrote; “we’ll be playing games again as soon as I can straighten out this trouble I’m in.” But on August 11, after Ethel appeared before the grand jury that had indicted Julius and refused to answer any questions, she, too, was arrested. Neither of them ever came home again.

After his mother’s arrest, Michael told an aunt that he wanted to run into the street and get killed by a car. He stopped eating. He drew endless railroad tracks, switching and merging and looping but going nowhere. When he complained to his grandmother Tessie Greenglass, with whom he and Robby were staying, she told him to send Ethel a telegram. But he didn’t want to upset his mother, so he said that he was “having a nice time. I miss you very much. Love, your son, Michael.”

The boys were eventually sent to the Hebrew Children’s Home in the Bronx, where attendants beat and ridiculed children. To Robby, it felt as if he and Michael were imprisoned, just like Ethel and Julius. He didn’t understand what his parents had been accused of doing. Instead, he harbored an anxious sense that some menacing force had broken up his family—and stood ready to do more damage if given an opening. He would try to avoid attracting attention, lest “they” take notice and wreak more havoc. He also developed a coping mechanism that I sensed had become a lifelong habit: “Whenever something was really bad,” he told me, “I always figured out some way to say, Oh, it’s no big deal. It’s not happening. It’s a form of denial, I guess.”

As I watched the brothers that day in Cold Spring, they struck me as, above all, brothers—by turns affectionate and peeved with one another, as likely to use a childhood nickname as to sigh in exasperation. They are fluent in the vigorous conversational cadence of older Jewish men raised in mid-century New York. “Verbal combat,” Robby later said, was a favored family pastime. But neither of them seemed eager to undergo much emotional probing.

At one point that afternoon, Michael spent a few minutes recounting the songs his parents had played for them as kids, enjoying himself as he quoted what Julius had called “nonsense” lyrics from “Oh! Susanna” and other “camp songs.” If not quite fully transported back in time, he appeared willing, at least, to try going there.

Without meaning to, I broke the spell. As Michael began to reflect on his relationship with Ethel, and his sense that he’d been a “bad boy,” frequently misbehaving, I tried to prompt Robby to add his own recollections from that pre-arrest period. “I don’t know,” Robby said, and paused. Maybe it was too much to expect a 3-year-old to have formed clear memories. In any case, he quickly changed the subject back to their decades of advocacy work.

Before I boarded my return train to New York City, Michael reminded me to look out the window on my left. A few stops away, in Ossining, the barbed-wire fences and high turrets of Sing Sing towered over the tracks. In opting to spend his retirement near his grandkids, Michael had ended up living half an hour from the site of his parents’ deaths.

Robby and Michael visited their parents in prison for the first time in the summer of 1951, after more than a year apart. By then, the boys had gotten used to the Hebrew Children’s Home, and then they had gotten picked up from it. Now they were staying with their “Bubbie,” Sophie Rosenberg, who played with them and cooked foods they liked. Still, they were eager to see their parents again.

Julius and Ethel were separated in prison, allowed to see each other only once a week or so. Mostly, they communicated through letters. Anxious to put the boys at ease, Julius wrote to Ethel that he planned to draw them pictures of trains, boats, and buses. “Hah! You can’t make me jealous with your boats and trains,” she replied. “I have an envelope full of rare specimens collected with painstaking care by that intrepid hunter of wild insects, namely, your wife!” She worried that Robby in particular “may be a little shy and strange with us.”

In another letter to Julius, Ethel imagined how they might explain their situation to the boys. “Of course, we feel badly that we are separated from you but we also know that we are not guilty and that an injustice has been done to us by people who solved their own problems by lying about us,” she wrote. “It’s all right to feel any way you like about them, so long as your feelings don’t give you pain and make you unhappy.”

At Sing Sing, the boys saw Ethel first, then Julius. Determined to prove his fearlessness, Michael asked to see the electric chair for himself. Ethel had suggested that Julius describe its effect as “painless electrocution,” similar to “a highly magnified electric shock that anybody might sustain.”

“The fact is both children are disturbed,” Julius wrote after the visit.

Bettmann / Getty

Robby and Michael visited their parents in prison for the last time on June 16, 1953.

Bettmann / Getty

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in a police van after their conviction

The executions had been set for May 1951, but the date kept getting pushed back as appeals made their way through the legal system. On subsequent visits, all four Rosenbergs were allowed to be together, and the mood of their reunions became lighter. As a family, they laughed and sang songs; sometimes, they played hangman. When Michael asked his parents if they were truly innocent, they assured him that they were.

“You boys are our greatest pleasure and joy in life and we love you more than anything else in the world,” Julius wrote in one letter. And indeed, it’s hard to read the letters, and the various accounts of these visits, and come to any conclusion other than that Ethel and Julius loved their sons. They agonized over the details of the boys’ care and cursed the government for separating them.

But it’s also hard not to question why they didn’t do more to prevent their sons from being orphaned—why they chose not to take advantage of the numerous opportunities they were given to cooperate with the authorities, and to live.

Ethel’s younger brother David Greenglass made a different choice. When Klaus Fuchs was arrested by the British in early 1950 for passing atomic plans to the Soviets, his testimony led American authorities to Harry Gold, a chemist. Gold in turn led them to David, who had been a machinist at Los Alamos during World War II, and his wife, Ruth.

The Greenglasses quickly confessed that they had been part of a spy ring led by Julius Rosenberg, through whom they said they had shared sketches of the atomic bomb’s design with the Soviets in 1945. Ruth said that Julius had told her to recruit David, and that Ethel was there and had been encouraging.

The FBI was certain that Julius had more valuable information, and hoped that he would confess and name names, just as his brother- and sister-in-law had. But Julius denied everything, and refused to point a finger at anyone else. So J. Edgar Hoover decided to adopt a recommendation from a subordinate, who wrote that agents should “consider every possible means” to make Julius talk—including bringing charges against Ethel. Hoover wrote to the attorney general: “Proceeding against his wife might serve as a lever.”

The Greenglasses’ testimony gave the government enough evidence for an arrest warrant. But like Julius, Ethel told the authorities nothing—nor did her arrest have the intended effect on her husband. The trial, though, brought out new testimony from the Greenglasses, who said that Ethel hadn’t just been a supportive bystander, but had typed up David’s hard-to-read notes on classified atomic science. Now the death penalty seemed like a real possibility for both Rosenbergs.

At the sentencing, Judge Irving R. Kaufman said that he considered the couple’s actions “worse than murder”—a crime with untold numbers of past and future victims. Russian access to the atomic bomb, Kaufman said, had “already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason.” Kaufman made clear that both husband and wife were to blame. “Julius Rosenberg was the prime mover in this conspiracy,” he said, but Ethel was a “full-fledged partner.” Both therefore deserved to die.

Subsequent revelations from multiple prosecutors in the case have shown that the judge didn’t come to this conclusion entirely on his own. Roy Cohn, who was an assistant U.S. attorney on the case, later said that prosecutors had had clandestine phone conversations with Kaufman, “especially about whether Ethel should be sentenced to death.”

The Rosenbergs’ co-defendant, Morton Sobell, a former classmate of Julius’s at City College, also claimed total innocence. Sobell was convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and sentenced to 30 years in prison (he was spared the death penalty because no evidence tied him to sharing atomic secrets). David was sentenced to 15 years in prison and served less than 10. Ruth, who was never charged, stayed with their two young children.

A few weeks before their deaths, the Rosenbergs were visited at Sing Sing by James V. Bennett, the director of the Bureau of Prisons. Bennett said he’d been sent by the attorney general with an offer: If they were ready to talk, officials would recommend clemency.

Ethel was outraged. “I made it short and sweet,” she wrote to her lawyer. “I was innocent, my husband was innocent, and neither of us knew anything about espionage.” What right did the government have “to try to forcibly wring from us a false confession, by dangling our lives before us like bait before hapless fish! Pay the price we demand, or forfeit your lives, is that the idea?” Bennett pleaded with her to change her mind.

The deputy attorney general later said of Ethel, “She called our bluff.”

In June 1953, the day after their 14th wedding anniversary, after several last-minute appeals—including to the U.S. Supreme Court—had failed, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, ages 35 and 37, had one final afternoon together, separated by wire mesh. Ethel wrote a letter to their sons that they would both sign: “We wish we might have had the tremendous joy and gratification of living our lives out with you,” it said. “Always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience. We press you close and kiss you with all our strength.”

The letter would have a much wider audience than just Robby and Michael, who were by then living with family friends in New Jersey. The uncertain fate of the Rosenbergs had become global news, and the couple’s letters were being distributed in dozens of countries via pamphlets and newspapers. From December 1952 to June 1953, 80 rallies in support of the Rosenbergs were held in Paris alone. One French diplomat told Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that the case was “the most troublesome issue affecting relations between the United States and Europe.”

Christopher Churchill for The Atlantic

“PLEASE don’t let my parents DIE. My little Brother and I need and miss them,” Michael wrote in a letter to
a left-wing weekly.

Last summer, Robby, Michael, and I visited the archives at Boston University’s library, where many of their parents’ prison letters are housed. As we looked through the collection, Michael said that, when it comes to his mother’s letters, he considers only two or three “really real”—that is, not written for public consumption. He has returned to one of these often.

Two days before the scheduled executions, Robby and Michael visited their parents for the last time. Michael left crying and screaming: “One more day to live, one more day to live!” But Ethel didn’t cry. Later, she tried to explain her behavior in a note she sent her sons via her lawyer. To show emotion “would have been so easy, far too easy on myself,” she told them. “I took the hard way instead of the easy, because I love you more than myself and because I knew you needed that love far more than I needed the relief of crying.” She continued:

I know, sweethearts, an explanation of this kind cannot ever substitute for what we have been missing and for what we hope to be able to return to, nor do I intend it as any such thing. Only, as I say, we need to try to remain calm and free from panic so that we can do all we can to help one another to see this thing through!

Just after 8 p.m. on June 19, Julius followed Sing Sing’s Jewish chaplain to the electric chair. As the rabbi prayed, the executioner secured the five leather straps. Before he delivered the fatal shocks, he put a leather face mask on Julius meant to prevent his eyes from popping out of his head. Julius was pronounced dead after he received three charges of electricity.

The rabbi then gave Ethel a final chance to live. Did she have any names to share? She said she did not: “I’m innocent; I’m prepared to die.” She was strapped in and masked. The executioner delivered three shocks. But doctors found that the three charges had not been sufficient; Ethel’s heart was still beating. It took two more jolts, and four and a half minutes total, to kill her.

Michael and Robby were watching a baseball game on TV when a news flash came on the screen announcing that their parents were about to be executed. The adults sent the boys out to play ball with friends. By the time they came back in, they were orphans.

I first read Robby’s memoir, An Execution in the Family, soon after it was published, in 2004. I was 11 then, and gripped by the kid’s-eye perspective of the early chapters. I retained two distinct mental images from the book. One was of the Hebrew Children’s Home. The other was of a train set, which served as a partial answer to the question of how the boys could have turned out as well-adjusted as they had; there was, strange as it sounds, a happy part of this story.

On Christmas Eve 1953, the boys went to a party at the home of W. E. B. Du Bois, who had advocated for clemency for Ethel and Julius. Inside the largest house the boys had ever been in was an enormous Christmas tree with a pile of presents underneath it, all for them. This was where Michael and Robby first met Anne and Abel Meeropol, who asked them that night if they wanted to move in with them. Their own two sons had been stillborn, and Anne and Abel, now in their 40s, wanted badly to be parents.

By the start of 1954, Robby and Michael were living with the Meeropols in Manhattan; the couple were fun and loving, and the boys quickly began calling them Mommy and Daddy. But one night in mid-February, after Robby had gone to sleep, New York City police officers knocked on the door of the couple’s apartment to demand that he and Michael be turned over immediately.

Ethel and Julius’s lawyer had died of a heart attack before he could legally transfer guardianship to the Meeropols. Now two child-welfare groups had obtained a court order to remove Michael and Robby from the Meeropols’ home, on the grounds that living with former Communist Party members was not in the boys’ best interest. Abel refused to open the door and, in Michael’s telling, informed the officers that, if they wanted to take Robby and Michael, they’d have to kill him first. Somehow, he and Anne were able to arrange with lawyers to keep the boys overnight.

The next day, a judge ruled that Robby and Michael should be considered wards of the state and sent them to an orphanage. But the day after that, the Meeropols and Sophie Rosenberg, the boys’ grandmother, appealed to the New York Supreme Court, which gave Sophie temporary custody. For the next several months, Robby lived in fear of being sent back to the orphanage. Eventually, in September 1954, he and Michael were allowed to return to the Meeropols’. Recounting this turning point as we pored over the archives at Boston University, Michael began to cry. Anne later told him, he said, that she and Abel had plans to flee to the Soviet Union with the boys if they were not granted custody.

Michael and Robby started using the Meeropol name almost immediately, allowing them at last to slip back into private life, and they were formally adopted in 1957. The family’s Washington Heights apartment was, as Michael and Robby remember it, always full of laughter, music, and funny voices; it had room for all of their toys, including a Lionel electric train set. The boys kept huge tanks of fish and had a cat named Fuzzy Shnooky Romeo. When Robby went away to camp, Abel drew him cartoon postcards with silly, smiling animals. “Daddy got us worms!” the fish exclaim in one. “Yum! Yum! Hooray!” Abel signed the postcards “Pop.” Robby still has them.

Christopher Churchill for The Atlantic; courtesy of the Meeropol family

In 1954, Robby and Michael went to live in Manhattan with Anne and Abel Meeropol, who later became their adoptive parents.

Both Abel and Anne had been public-school teachers; Abel had taught James Baldwin high-school English. Abel was also a songwriter—in the 1930s, he’d written the music and lyrics to “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching made popular by Billie Holiday—and had been successful enough that the couple could now live primarily off his royalties, in effect serving as full-time parents.

Anne and Abel rarely brought up the past with Michael and Robby, but when Ethel and Julius did come up, the Meeropols reinforced their sons’ impression of them as brave, principled people who had been wrongly executed. As they grew into adulthood, Michael and Robby came to treat that final letter from June 1953 as gospel: Always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience.

In the years immediately following his parents’ executions, Michael said, he didn’t cry at all. But when he was 16, a work of fiction—a 1947 novel by Willard Motley—finally cracked the defensive shell he’d developed. In his journal, he wrote:

I read the end of Knock on Any Door which describes a man’s feelings as he goes to his death in the chair. It shook me, and it broke me. I realized that the two dearest people in the world to me had gone through that agony and more. They probably worried about their “babies” and what would happen to them. My God was it awful. I cried and cried and cried so much. I feel terrible.

Oh to be half as courageous as those two wonderful people—Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. MY GOD

Abel saw him crying, and saw what he’d been reading, and gave him a long hug.

More than their childhood, Robby and Michael wanted to talk with me about the chapter of their lives that began in the 1970s, when they chose to “come out” as Rosenbergs after years of keeping quiet about who they were.

One night in early 1973, Michael heard that a trial lawyer named Louis Nizer, who had not been involved in the Rosenberg case, was reading out loud from his parents’ prison letters on TV. Nizer had just published a popular book about the case, The Implosion Conspiracy, which concluded that the Rosenbergs were guilty as charged. Michael called Robby, upset. The brothers believed that they held the copyright to their parents’ letters, which they saw as their sole inheritance. Why should Nizer be allowed to use them for his own biased ends?

On June 19, 1973, the 20th anniversary of their parents’ deaths, they filed a lawsuit. “We are strongly reaffirming our identification with and respect for our murdered parents and what they did for us both in their role as citizens as well as in their relationship with us as parents,” they wrote. It wasn’t long before the press showed up. “All of a sudden we were public,” Robby recalled. “And the sky didn’t fall.” In some ways, it was liberating to no longer be keeping such a big secret.

The legal bills were expensive, and they began traveling around the country to raise money, giving speeches under the auspices of a new National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case. They planned to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the government’s evidence, or lack thereof, about their parents. In 1974, Robby stood onstage at Carnegie Hall and declared, “In the next year we are going to blow the lid on this case.”

Touring the country, they met well-wishers who were emotional about seeing “the boys” as grown men, people who cried and hugged them and hung around a little too long. Robby and Michael found this draining. Their preferred approach relied more on logic than emotion. They vowed to follow the facts. They would become experts; they would make an unimpeachable case. They wouldn’t get carried away by anger or grief.

Still, revisiting the letters and reading the trial transcripts for the first time forced Michael to relive the pain of his parents’ deaths, he told me. Publicly, he remained composed, but in private, for a year or so, he “cried, cursed, raged,” struck anew by the pathos of his parents’ correspondence and the could-have-beens of their complex appeals process. By the late 1970s, the brothers were exhausted by the work of being professional Rosenbergs, and starting to worry that the effort was futile. Their FOIA lawsuit had yielded hundreds of thousands of documents, but there was no smoking gun—maybe there never would be.

[From the October 1983 issue: The Rosenberg file]

Sometimes, Robby and Michael told me, they wondered if there might be more to their parents’ story than what was in their letters. They never questioned that Ethel and Julius had been framed as atomic spies, but could they have committed some lesser offense that had made them government targets? Yet whenever the brothers asked Morton Sobell, their parents’ co-defendant, to tell them the truth, all they got was the same one-line answer: They were innocent.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, rumors started trickling out of Russia: According to erstwhile KGB agents now speaking openly for the first time, Julius Rosenberg had in fact been a spy, and a valuable one. But Soviet intelligence operatives aren’t anyone’s idea of reliable sources, and it was easy for Robby and Michael to brush their claims aside.

In July 1995, the U.S. government released a series of previously classified documents known as the Venona files. These decrypted Soviet communications from the 1940s told a similar story to that of the former KGB agents: Julius, along with Ruth and David Greenglass, had spied for the Soviet Union. The headlines crowed with the certainty of a fresh verdict: “NEW EVIDENCE PROVES COUPLE WERE SPIES, OFFICIALS SAY.”

To Robby and Michael, suddenly seeing their parents in the news again as spies was painful. The whole thing felt like a disaster—“like a ton of bricks,” as Robby put it to me. In a joint statement, they suggested that the NSA and the CIA had “cooked” the evidence to frame their parents. Venona, they insisted, changed none of their conclusions. One official release was not going to be enough to undo years of deep suspicion of the government.

Still, Robby and Michael parsed the new evidence carefully. The files, they noticed, contained only one mention of Ethel: She was politically aligned with her husband and aware of his activities, the decrypted text said, but “in view of delicate health does not work.” This seemed like an important clue. If you interpreted “work” to mean “spy,” as Robby and Michael did, that would suggest the damning typing story was pure invention on the Greenglasses’ part.

Ruth Morgan / New York Daily News Archive / Getty

Ethel’s brother David Greenglass told authorities that he had been part of a spy ring led by Julius Rosenberg.

Slowly, more clues emerged. In 1999, a former KGB agent published a book revealing findings from Soviet archives that had briefly been opened a few years earlier. This, too, implicated Julius as a spy. Then, in a 2001 TV interview, David Greenglass (who had been living under an assumed name since he got out of prison and appeared on the program in disguise) admitted that he’d lied on the stand when he said that Ethel had typed his notes. “I don’t know who typed it, frankly,” he said. “To this day, I can’t even remember that the typing took place.”

Greenglass did not express remorse for having sent his sister to her death, citing her “stupidity” for not cooperating with authorities. He said his conscience was clean. When the interviewer asked him what he would say to Robby and Michael, whom he had not seen since they were children, he replied, “I’m sorry that your parents are dead.”

Morton Sobell was the one person who could definitively answer Robby and Michael’s questions about their parents. He had been Julius’s friend since they’d met as engineering students at City College. He had stood trial with both Rosenbergs and, after getting out of prison in 1969, stayed in touch with Robby and Michael.

For nearly six decades, Sobell maintained his innocence. But in 2008, at the age of 91, he told a reporter that, yes, he and Julius had turned over military secrets to the Soviet Union during World War II. If you wanted to call that spying, then sure, they’d been spies. Ethel, he said, had known what Julius was doing. “But what was she guilty of? Of being Julius’s wife.” Robby and Michael felt as though, for the first time, a trusted source had stated it plainly: Julius was a spy, and Ethel was not.

The brothers were shocked by Sobell’s sudden admission. They had asked him again and again to tell them the truth about their parents, even if only in private. Why had he lied? Michael still thinks about this, he said: “What if Morty had been honest with us?” He could have spared them so many years of uncertainty.

Even so, the brothers told me that finally learning the truth was a relief. They were in their 60s by then—both grandfathers—and had had more than a decade to consider the information in Venona. They now understood that their parents’ prosecution hadn’t been a senseless witch hunt, as they’d once believed. Ethel and Julius hadn’t been targeted randomly, or simply for having been Jewish Communists during the McCarthy era. And because Sobell himself had been the one to say it publicly, Robby and Michael wouldn’t have to do the uncomfortable job of breaking the news to the remaining Rosenberg true believers, who still thought that any talk of spying was a government hoax.

I was taken aback by their matter-of-factness. Was that really it? Could their ultimate reaction to learning that Julius had spied for the Soviet Union have been gratitude that they didn’t have to be the messengers? I wanted to know how they felt about the actual spying—about the fact that their father had shared highly classified information in order to aid another, later hostile, country’s militarization, destroying their family in the process.

When I pressed them on this, Michael and Robby conceded that perhaps Julius had been, as Robby put it, “kind of a cowboy,” prone to taking big risks without much concern for the effect they might have. Maybe, Michael suggested, a more responsible choice for a spy would have been to not have children at all. Nonetheless, they both remain sympathetic toward their father, and continue to argue that he was unfairly prosecuted. Even if Julius was a spy, they maintain, he was not an atomic spy, and as such was not guilty of the charges for which he was executed.

Julius seems to have approached his spying with a sprightly, if naive, enthusiasm. He was 24 and working as a junior engineer for the Army Signal Corps in New York when he was recruited by Russian agents in 1942, drawn to the promise of helping defeat Hitler and the notion, however fanciful, that the Soviet Union represented a solution to America’s social ills. He went on to provide thousands of documents containing valuable military-industrial information, and became an active recruiter. His Soviet handler Alexander Feklisov recalled in his memoir that Julius could sometimes “be as carefree as a teenager,” such as when he greeted the Russian during an early street-corner meeting with a hearty “Hello comrade!” On another occasion, Feklisov wrote, Julius told him that, although he loved his wife and son (this was before Robby was born), his meetings with Feklisov were “among the happiest moments of my life.”

Unlike Julius, Ethel was never given a code name in Venona, which Michael and Robby took to mean that she was not a spy. Why, then, should she have sacrificed herself, leaving her sons behind, particularly after Julius was executed and she was given one last chance to cooperate? Why did she choose death?

The question nagged at me for months; no single explanation—psychological, political, or otherwise—felt completely satisfying. Part of me wanted to see Ethel as a victim, caught between her husband’s recklessness, the vindictiveness of powerful men who didn’t care whether she lived or died, and the fear that she was already too far down a path of deception to allow the world, let alone her sons, to learn the messy truth. I thought about the toll that years of what was essentially solitary confinement, as the only woman on death row, would take on anyone; it seemed likely that she was not, by the end, thinking rationally. But that way of looking at it denied Ethel agency. It was possible, of course, that she’d made the choice to die of her own free will—as a martyr for the Communist cause, to make the United States look bad, out of loyalty to Julius.

When I raised the subject with Robby and Michael, they readily agreed that Ethel could have saved herself, had she wanted to. “She did have names,” Robby said. “In fact, if she’d given the names of Sarant and Barr”—Alfred Sarant and Joel Barr, members of the spy ring who had already defected to the Soviet Union—“nothing would have happened.”

“So should she have?” I asked.

Both brothers replied immediately and emphatically. “Oh no,” Michael said. “I don’t see why,” Robby added. Making any choice other than the one she ultimately made, they argued, would have left Ethel with a permanent sense of guilt over turning on her husband and reversing her steadfast commitment to “see this thing through”—the battle she’d been waging, and the story of innocence she’d been telling her sons and the world for three years.

“Mom could’ve said, I knew Julius was a spy; I helped him a little bit. I knew the names of two of the people he worked with. That’s all I know; take it or leave it,” Michael said. “They would’ve taken it.”

“Who knows,” Robby muttered, but Michael’s counterfactual scenario seemed plausible enough to me, and I let him keep talking as he imagined what might have happened next.

“She would have served some time in prison, and repudiated her marriage, and repudiated all the people who had supported them, and pulled the rug out from under Rob and me when they said that ‘we were innocent.’ And then shown up in our lives.”

I knew he was trying to explain why this never would have worked. But even if their mother reappearing in their lives at a later date might have proved complicated, it was hard for me to believe that it would truly have been worse than not having her in their lives at all. “We might have grown up to hate her,” Michael continued. He wasn’t sure he could have forgiven her for turning on his father—or for exposing the reality, while she was still alive, that both parents had lied to their sons. “The thought of her living that life was so horrible that I think it was easier to just follow him into the grave.”

Michael seemed to be saying that by admitting her dishonesty, Ethel would have ruined their childhood and poisoned any prospect of a future relationship with her. But wouldn’t some people see the fact that she’d died for a story she knew was false—something the brothers were acknowledging—as a greater betrayal? Michael and Robby didn’t seem willing to think about it that way. In their telling, Ethel had died, at least in part, to protect them.

Hulton Archive / Getty

Ethel at her arraignment in August 1950

For the brothers to wish for any other outcome would be for them to wish for an entirely different life than the one they’ve had and, against all odds, mostly enjoyed. It would be to wish that they’d had a childhood with no Meeropols, and an adulthood with more secrecy, less purpose. Faced with something—someone—so ultimately unknowable, perhaps the best that anyone can do is decide on their own version of the truth and stick to it.

I am not, I realize, the first to raise these contradictions. The ghost of Ethel Rosenberg has haunted American life for decades, by turns exasperating and enthralling those—psychiatrists, playwrights, novelists, scholars, journalists, relatives—who have tried to wrap their arms around the meaning of her life and death.

Few today would dispute that the government’s case against Ethel was less than airtight. In 2015, after David Greenglass died, his 1950 grand-jury testimony was unsealed. “I said before, and say it again, honestly, this is a fact: I never spoke to my sister about this at all,” Greenglass had said. If that was true, then he had likely perjured himself when later, at trial, he gave the evidence that led to Ethel’s conviction and sentencing. To some, Ethel’s alleged encouragement of David’s recruitment is evidence enough of her active role in the conspiracy to commit espionage of which she was found guilty. But Robby and Michael argue that knowledge of a conspiracy is not the same as participation in it—and that the prosecution failed to produce any proof she did participate, beyond what came directly from the Greenglasses’ unreliable accounts.

Whether or not you believe that the Rosenbergs deserved to die, there’s no denying that the punishment they received was unusually severe. Harry Gold was convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and got out of prison in time to work as a clinical chemist in a Philadelphia pathology lab before he died at 60. Ruth Greenglass confessed to being a courier at Los Alamos and never spent a single night in jail. And, indeed, the case against Ethel was especially thin.

All of this ought, I think, to count for something in any honest assessment of the legal and ethical validity of the Rosenberg verdict. But I wasn’t sure that the injustice of the whole affair was enough to explain, logically or morally, the clarion confidence of Ethel’s claim that “I was innocent, my husband was innocent, and neither of us knew anything about espionage.” That was a lie.

Last summer, I visited Robby in western Massachusetts, where we sat in his sunny home office as his elderly gray cat threatened to knock over our water glasses. On the wall next to Robby’s desk, I noticed a calendar from the Union of Concerned Scientists. The cartoon for that month showed a uniformed military official lounging coquettishly on a bed, phone in hand. The caption read: “No, you dismantle your nuclear arsenal first.”

Other walls displayed framed mementos from the Rosenberg Fund for Children, the nonprofit Robby started in 1990 that supports the children of progressive activists who have lost their livelihood, been discriminated against, faced prison time, or died as a result of their activism (my parents have been longtime supporters of the RFC). Pointing to the images in his office, Robby told me that the organization has allowed him to connect with hundreds of kids and teenagers who can relate to what he experienced. They have sometimes asked why he’s not angrier. His response has always been that he considers his work to be a form of “constructive revenge.”

“My taste in vengeance is more intellectual than physical,” Michael wrote in the ’80s. Talking with him in the 2020s, I could see what he meant. Rather than cause for frustration, it seemed to be almost a source of comfort that there will always be another thread in the Rosenberg case to pull—more documents to uncover, more verbal combat to undertake.

Over the past decade, Robby and Michael have made a concerted push for Ethel’s exoneration. In December 2016, the brothers again stood outside the White House, this time to deliver a petition asking President Obama to exonerate their mother in light of the newly released grand-jury testimony. They held a photograph of themselves there as boys, delivering the plea to Eisenhower that went unanswered. This one did, too.

But a newly declassified document released toward the end of Joe Biden’s presidency once again gave them hope. In September 2024, the brothers received a copy, via their lawyer, of a handwritten 1950 memo by Meredith Gardner, the chief Venona code breaker. If the Venona files represented Gardner’s translated decryptions of the original Russian messages, this document, they believed, showed his own takeaways from those decryptions, and were thus a better reflection of the U.S. government’s top-level findings. Gardner wrote, for example, that Ruth Greenglass was known “to have been a Soviet agent.” Just below that are his notes on Ethel:

MRS. JULIUS ROSENBERG—A message of 27 November 1944 stated that Mrs. Rosenberg was a party member, a devoted wife, and that she knew about her husbands work, but that due to ill health she did not engage in the work herself.

Unlike the earlier releases, which stated only that Ethel did not work, this one specified that she did not engage in the work—the spying.

To Michael and Robby, this was the smoking gun that they had spent 50 years hoping to find. The first time they read the memo, they told me, they high-fived; Michael cried. They called on the Biden administration to exonerate their mother. Again, they were disappointed.

One virtue of Julius and Ethel having been dead for nearly three-quarters of a century is that their sons will never have to confront them about what they now know; one difficulty is that they will never get to. This impossibility seems to act as a kind of buffer. They can shake their heads at their father’s actions and tell themselves that their mother did the only thing she could, while reserving their deepest outrage for the one actor they still have the power to wrangle with: the United States government.

On several occasions over the course of my reporting, Michael brought up the petition that he and Robby had tried to deliver to Obama in 2016. Still eager for a reply, Michael sent a letter to the Obama Foundation in Chicago in the spring of 2025, and then another—by certified mail—to the foundation’s office in Washington, D.C. He never heard back.

Recently, Michael told me that he had given up on trying to elicit a response from the former president. “I thought it was a bigger deal than other people did,” he admitted. Robby, for his part, told me he preferred to look forward, not back. He is 79 now; his brother is 83.

But Robby didn’t mean that he was ready to stop thinking about his parents’ deaths or fighting for his mother’s exoneration—only that he didn’t want to waste any more time on old strategies that hadn’t panned out. The brothers are working with Representative Jim McGovern, Robby’s congressman, who last year made a floor speech in the House about Ethel and has advocated for her exoneration. They’d love to see a major Hollywood movie about their mother, they said, to reignite public interest in the case.

Listening to them, I thought about the train tracks Michael had drawn as a kid, endlessly looping back on themselves. Where, if anywhere, might these latest efforts lead? In some ways, the brothers have gotten much further in their quest than they ever anticipated they would; their deep satisfaction at the 2024 release of the Gardner memo came not just from its contents, but also from the somewhat improbable fact that they lived to see it, after 50 years of requests and lawsuits and petitions. It had given them a sense of forward motion, and a measure of vindication late in their lives. They knew far more than they once had. How could they stop now?

This article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “The Rosenberg Boys.”

The MIA Caucus

2026-07-09T18:00:00-04:00

Mitch McConnell has not been seen in public in almost a month. The senator from Kentucky and former majority leader was hospitalized on June 14, and his staff has declined to elaborate, instead recycling the same statement: “The Senator continues to improve, and is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters while the Senate is out of session.” Speculation, theories, and questions have filled the void this week, prompting McConnell’s allies to share that they had recently spoken with him. But they’ve faced a deluge of doubts themselves. Yesterday, the Kentucky governor sent a formal letter requesting a health update from the senator, while President Trump told reporters he had “no idea” how McConnell was doing.

McConnell is hardly the first member of Congress to go MIA. Representative Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey, a Republican running for reelection in a highly competitive district, disappeared for nearly four months this year and missed 142 House roll-call votes before resurfacing in late June. Kean explained that he had been receiving treatment for depression. In 2024, then-Representative Kay Granger of Texas, a Republican and former chair of the House Appropriations Committee, was absent from Congress for months before The Dallas Express reported that she was living in “a local memory care and assisted living home for some time after having been found wandering lost and confused.” Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who died in 2023, remained in office as her health rapidly deteriorated and her staff downplayed her condition.

Although a seat in Congress comes with baseline expectations of being on the job when the House or Senate is in session, there are no formal rules governing disclosure of medical conditions for lawmakers and no official procedures for declaring a member medically incapacitated and removing them. The norm on the Hill is to fiercely shield and protect the private lives of legislators—especially on matters as sensitive as mental or physical health. But in recent years, with Congress ruled by shifting and often thin majorities, it quickly becomes obvious when someone is missing, especially for key votes. And then the theories spread on social media.

[Read: Mitch McConnell and the president he calls ‘despicable’]

McConnell’s absence has prompted a flood of memes, some involving Ouija boards, AI-generated Mitch-zombies, Weekend at Bernie’s–inspired scenes, and reports of the kid from The Sixth Sense having reached the senator. The leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker challenged McConnell to publicly deny that the two are engaged in a romantic tryst. Scott Jennings, a Republican pundit, attempted to combat the speculation by sharing that he had spoken with McConnell “for just shy of 20 minutes” about a range of issues including Iran and Ukraine—only to spawn a new type of meme in which others used his post as a Mad Libs–style template for reporting fake conversations with the senator. Representative Thomas Massie, a fellow Republican Kentuckian who recently lost his primary to a Trump-backed opponent, sarcastically wrote that he spoke with McConnell for “about 20 minutes” about how he’s “really sorry about how my primary turned out.” CNN mistakenly ran a screenshot of a parody account claiming to have spoken with the senator.

In November 1980, Maryland voters elected Gladys Spellman to a fourth term in the House. Days before Election Day, she had suffered a heart attack; she survived but fell into a coma and never regained consciousness. Through a first-of-its-kind House resolution, passed in February 1981, her seat was declared vacant. That April, in a special primary for the Democratic nomination, Spellman’s husband, Reuben, finished second to Steny Hoyer, then a 41-year-old lawyer and former Maryland state senator. Gladys Spellman died seven years later. Hoyer climbed the ranks and spent two decades in top House Democratic leadership. Now in his 23rd term, he announced earlier this year he would not seek a 24th.

That resolution remains the lone example in modern memory of House members taking action to formally remove and replace a colleague who is unable to perform the job as a result of a medical crisis. To longtime observers, McConnell’s and Kean’s recent absences are not unprecedented or even that unusual; they’re par for the course. There is a long history of staff members attempting to shield ailing legislators from the prying eyes of journalists and political opponents, even if it comes at the expense of transparency with constituents. “This is a story as old as Congress itself,” Jim Manley, a longtime aide to Harry Reid who spent more than two decades on the Hill, told me.

Senator Carter Glass of Virginia spent his last four years in office, in the 1940s, absent from public view due to illness before dying in 1946; he did not answer a single Senate roll call after 1942. Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota suffered a stroke in 1969 and did not appear on the Senate floor for almost three years before deciding not to seek reelection in 1972. When John F. Kennedy served in the House and the Senate, as well as during his campaign for president, he hid his diagnosis of Addison’s disease—an adrenal insufficiency—from voters.

Numerous lawmakers in more recent years have stuck to their offices even as they grew visibly frail or as their mental capacity was called into question—and as their staff members demurred or outright denied that anything was amiss. Aides around Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia—who died in 2010 at age 92 and was the longest-serving senator in history—were especially tight-lipped as the lawmaker’s health declined. Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran’s frailness and disorientation were an open secret before he decided to step down in 2018, a year before his death.

[Read: A different kind of fading president ]

There’s always the possibility that these recent headline-grabbing cases of mysterious disappearances might mark a turning point toward reform. Congress returns from recess on Monday, and if McConnell’s absence continues, it could complicate the Senate’s business—particularly attempts to meet the late-September deadline to fund the government for the next fiscal year. McConnell sits on the powerful Appropriations Committee and leads the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which is responsible for military spending. Steven Smith, a social-sciences professor at Arizona State University who studies Congress, told me there should be a rule obligating members’ chiefs of staff or others to report their bosses’ absences, given that they are employees of taxpayers: “It could still be vague, but there ought to be some requirement to indicate that so-and-so is literally not on the job.” Scott Tillman of U.S. Term Limits, a group pushing for putting constraints on the number of times an incumbent can hold a seat, told me that the recent cases involving McConnell and Kean have made their case more salient. “People are really being deprived of representation—they elected someone to be there, and they’re not being represented,” he said.

Others are less hopeful that any of this will change anytime soon. “Each seat is extraordinarily valuable, as is each vote in the House and Senate,” Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University historian of modern American politics, told me. “This leads to keeping these issues as secret as possible.” Plus, when it comes to protecting members’ privacy, staffers’ jobs are on the line. “As long as God created staff,” Manley said, “there’s always going to be folks that are going to try and do what they can to keep this stuff out of the media.”

Believe the Hype About Teen Takeovers

2026-07-10T07:00:00-04:00

They usually start with a harmless-looking social-media post: a call for teenagers to “pull up” and “shake some ass,” as one online flyer put it. These get forwarded across the internet, and soon masses of young people are surging into an urban plaza or park, often terrifying any adult who happens to be nearby. Teen takeovers can be “amazing,” like an outdoor street party, I was told by one 17-year-old named Jaden who said he had attended many of them—“but only until the fighting starts.”

The fighting is what has made teen takeovers so polarizing in recent months. In Washington, D.C., they gained a new prominence in May, after a scuffle broke out in a Chipotle in the Navy Yard neighborhood. Within seconds, it flared into a violent rumble, with a group of young men in black hoodies throwing punches and hurling wooden high chairs at one another. The other customers cowered in the corners, while crowds formed at the windows outside, shrieking and recording the scene on their phones. By the time the police arrived, the combatants had fled and melted into a thick crowd of other young people in the darkness outside.

The phrase teen takeover became popular several years ago, when they began taking place in Chicago, Atlanta, Tampa, and a few other cities. The Chipotle brawl lasted less than a minute, and no one was seriously hurt. But its ferocity led right-wing broadcasters and influencers to start talking about a new kind of urban lawlessness enabled by liberal social policies. “Teen takeovers are plaguing Democrat-run cities across the country, including the nation’s capital,” reported The Daily Wire. Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah has invoked “violence by teenage gangs” as a reason to withdraw D.C.’s right to govern itself. Donald Trump weighed in on Truth Social in May: “Teen takeover in Chicago. Five officers badly hurt. Mayor and governor are terrible. Should call for help!”

Clips of the Chipotle fight were shared tens of thousands of times, usually with pointed commentary urging the authorities to crack down hard. Some have tried: In May, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington, promised to “aggressively prosecute parents” of teenagers involved in takeovers (an idea that has been championed by liberals for the parents of children who commit gun crimes). The Chicago City Council drafted, but did not pass, an ordinance that would also allow the police to charge parents.

Some observers—especially on the left—dismiss the recent rush of commentary as vaguely racist media hype, or as the latest chapter in society’s vain effort to quell the permanent volcano of adolescence. “We are sensationalizing teenagers, often lower-income children of color,” Kristin Henning, the director of Georgetown Law School’s Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative, said in an interview with NPR in May.

[Quinta Jurecic: The coming D.C. crime boomerang]

But after a few weeks of hanging around in D.C.’s takeover zones, I came to believe that something a little more troubling is going on, at least in some places. The people who are closest to the problem—parents, security guards, local businesspeople, and community activists—say that the current generation of teens is growing up in a world where truancy is far more common and where the isolation imposed by the coronavirus pandemic and social media has left a legacy of frustration.

“Some things changed in our society during that year or two we were all locked up—some of us moved on, others not,” Emeka Moneme, an urban planner and the president of the business-improvement district in the Navy Yard, where many of D.C.’s takeovers have taken place, told me. “These kids think they can perform in everybody’s space, and it’s taking a toll. There may be a perception problem, but there’s also a real problem, and we need to do something about it.”

One night on U Street, I got my own little taste of the takeover experience when a huge crowd of very young-looking people began running back and forth, seemingly playing cat and mouse with a group of police officers who were shouting for them to go home. One subgroup of teenagers went racing down the street I was on, shouting and smashing into people, and a girl who looked about 14 years old stopped and began jabbing me in the gut with her fingers.

“Hey, take it easy,” I said, fending her off as gently as I could. “How old are you?”

She stared back at me, glassy-eyed. “I’m drunk as fuck,” she said.

This was pretty mild stuff, as takeovers go. In February, hundreds of teenagers stormed a mall in the Bronx as store and restaurant managers hid behind locked doors. In Chicago, two violent takeovers took place on successive days over Memorial Day weekend, with crowds of teenagers battling the police; more than 50 people were arrested.

Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service / Getty

Officers attempt to disperse a group during a “teen takeover,” in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood Saturday June 6, 2026, in Chicago.

Most of the takeover participants I met in May and June were from D.C.’s poorest southeast wards, but that is not where takeovers happen. Instead, they usually occur in wealthier and more affluent urban areas, sometimes in restaurant hubs or public parks. That contrast can give takeovers the appearance of a spontaneous revolt, one that illuminates the extreme economic disparities of our era. One of the videos that trended on X a few months ago was filmed through the glass wall of an upscale restaurant, where diners recoiled at the sight of disheveled teenagers careening wildly through the street outside.

The teenagers I met told me that they organized on Instagram, usually at the last minute to prevent cops or anyone else from thwarting them. The same goes for the other herd activities that have become more common in recent years, such as spontaneous swarms of kids on scooters and “car meet-ups” where participants drive in circles or do doughnuts, sometimes hundreds strong—“so many, the police don’t know what to do,” Alan Henney, a veteran D.C. crime reporter, told me.

Takeovers are at once a timeless illustration of the volatility of crowds—perhaps especially adolescent crowds—and of the much newer potentialities unleashed by the internet a few decades ago. The first flash mob appears to have taken place in 2003, when the journalist Bill Wasik, then an editor at Harper’s, began sending emails to friends to create what he called “inexplicable mobs” in various places in New York City. His prank, only later dubbed a “flash mob,” became a worldwide fad and was adopted for all kinds of purposes, including political protest and robbery.

Takeovers may be liberating, perhaps especially for kids who have been staring at a screen all day. But they have left a trail of bad feelings and economic worries in the neighborhoods where they recur. All of the local business owners I met at Washington’s Navy Yard told me that they had suffered a noticeable drop in customers, which they attributed in large part to takeovers.

Violent crime has fallen sharply in D.C. and other major U.S. cities since a post-COVID high in 2023. Although takeovers have resulted in brawling and occasional looting, they do not seem to begin with criminal intent, unlike the semi-mythical gangs of “wilding” teenagers that haunted the urban imagination in the early 1990s. Even so, they have created an atmosphere of impunity and chaos that looms much larger than any measurable criminal consequences.

“It’s honestly crazy,” one restaurant manager who had rocks thrown at the door and who has witnessed fights and even some shooting told me (she asked that her name be withheld so as not to draw attention to her restaurant). “We have regular conversations with staff about what to do if we get attacked—lock the doors; keep ourselves and the customers safe.” The servers I spoke with at several restaurants told me that they scan the social-media feeds of local crime reporters throughout their evening shifts, to be ready if something happens.

The takeovers seem to have affected the real-estate market too. One afternoon, near the Navy Yard metro station, I overheard two young men talking about the Chipotle brawl. When I spoke with them, they told me that they had been planning on moving to a new condominium in Navy Yard but were now having second thoughts because of the takeovers. Other people told me stories about local landlords offering months of free rent to keep tenants from leaving.

Most frustrated of all are the people tasked with policing the takeovers. In the videos that have circulated in recent months, you can see the exasperation on the faces of the cops and security guards who are struggling to hold back a tide of teenagers and are often reduced to shouting, “Go home!”

“I hate it,” a security guard at the Nationals ballpark—one of Navy Yard’s big tourist attractions—told me. She was a young Black woman who gave her name only as Danyelle. “I think it’s really bringing the community down. These kids don’t have respect for the elders, for authority, nothing.” She said that she had moved to an apartment building in Navy Yard a few years ago and is now leaving because of the takeovers.

This groundswell of complaints, along with the telegenic scenes of urban disorder cycling through the internet, made teen takeovers a central issue during the D.C. Democratic mayoral primary this spring. The democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George criticized teen curfews—a mild measure endorsed by her centrist rival and the current mayor—as “dangerous,” because the curfews might lead to encounters between teens and National Guardsmen or other federal officers.

[Henry Grabar: The great crime decline is happening all across the country]

Although Lewis George won the primary, progressives’ skepticism about takeovers—and law enforcement generally—is becoming “a ball and chain around the Democratic brand,” Chuck Thies, a Democratic political consultant in D.C., told me.

Teen takeovers have coincided with a sharp rise in truancy since the pandemic, and most of the people I spoke with saw a connection. As of 2024, chronic absenteeism rates were still 57 percent higher than pre-pandemic levels. D.C. has one of the highest rates in the country; in a quarter of the city’s public high schools, more than 70 percent of students are chronically truant, meaning they have 10 or more unexcused absences in a school year.

Derrick Johnson, a freelance crime reporter who grew up in Southeast D.C., told me that he has witnessed the rise of truancy and social-media use among teenagers and believes that both factors are at the root of the takeovers. Social media, he said, simultaneously isolates kids and provides a forum that can nourish beefs among them; disputes can turn hostile when teenagers post improvised raps to boast or threaten rivals. These feuds have been especially dangerous in D.C., where gang-style neighborhood rivalries in the city’s poorest wards can put teenagers who cross into enemy territory at risk. Such constraints can lead them into truancy and away from the authority figures in their life.

“There’s something different about this generation,” Johnson said. “They don’t want to listen to anybody.” Johnson can relate: He was once a “disengaged teen” (he is now 35), and it was reporting on his community that saved him, he said. But he and his peers would never have gone around in groups “messing up these establishments,” even though violent crime was far worse in those days than it is now. “It seems like the internet is preventing them from learning how to talk about problems,” Johnson said.

Unlike some of the policy wonks and academics who opine about teen takeovers, Johnson has dealt directly with these kids. “I sometimes post about missing teens,” he said. “They message me back: ‘I’m not missing.’” He asks them why they’re not in school, and many of them say they need to make money because their parents don’t provide much of a home.

Johnson has witnessed another trend that has shaped the takeover phenomenon: the transformation of crime reporting. He is one of a handful of holdouts against the decline of local news, as many small newspapers and channels go out of business. At the same time, reporters’ access has been limited by the encryption of police-radio transmissions, which once allowed generations of reporters and photographers from Weegee onward to get to crime scenes right after the cops did. There are alternatives—the firefighters’ radios are for the most part still on open channels—but they are less reliable.

The result is that much of our crime news tends to rely on two sources: official announcements from the authorities and sensational internet coverage, such as the viral posts that made the takeovers loom so large this past spring. There has been less reporting about the neighborhoods most affected by crime, which is where many of the kids involved in takeovers come from.

Early last month, I attended a meeting about teen takeovers and youth crime organized by a nonprofit called Together We Rise, in a church auditorium in D.C.’s crime-ridden Ward 7. The participants included a mix of parents and local activists, along with a local city-council member and a cop. There was widespread agreement in the room that the takeover issue had been reported in a sensational way that unfairly vilified teenagers. But most of the people I spoke with told me they believed that the problem was real.

There was far less unity about possible solutions. Several participants said that parents and community leaders needed to step up. “We all have to do more to reach these kids,” a 72-year-old retired teacher, who went on to lament the absence of teenagers at the meeting, said. Others called on the city to provide more activities for youth, saying that there are fewer places, outside of home and school, for teenagers to hang out than in the past.

This has been a common refrain about takeovers, especially on the left—that they represent a failure of local government rather than of parenting. Eric Goulet, a lawyer and school-board member who has worked in D.C. politics for two decades, told me that he thinks the city should “find a way to incentivize businesses that cater to youth: roller skates, bowling, that kind of thing.” Some cities have experimented with related measures—keeping parks open and staffed at night, say, or improving street lighting and urban design.

[Charles Fain Lehman: New York City has lost control of crime]

There is another possible remedy for teen takeovers: The authorities may get better at preempting them. D.C. already seems to have curtailed them in recent weeks by using localized emergency youth curfews, with large groups of officers patrolling frequent takeover zones and standing guard outside the nearest metro stops. The more effective avenue may be patrolling teens online. Police departments around the country are assigning more officers to monitor social media, with the goal of showing up at takeover sites before the kids do. AI could make the job easier.

“Teen takeovers were born of a change in technology,” Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard and an expert on delinquency, told me. “It seems likely that technology will provide the solution as well.”

But the solution will depend on the root cause. If takeovers are ultimately about apps that help teenagers outwit their elders, better tech may be all we need. If takeovers are a symptom of deeper problems in the current generation of teens, they are likely to continue, even if under a different name.

What’s Behind the Latest National Guard Surge in D.C.

2026-07-10T17:56:00-04:00

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Donald Trump summoned the National Guard to Washington, D.C., last August in an attempt to “rescue” the city from “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.” Since then, the number of soldiers in the capital has ebbed and flowed as states have lent their own Guardsmen to the cause. A month ago, there were just under 3,000 members of the National Guard in the area; now there are more than 5,000.

Officially, this “summer surge” was framed as a way to address an anticipated spike in visitors and activity around the capital for America’s ongoing 250th-birthday celebrations. But the National Guard is also involved in a much broader project known as the Safe and Beautiful mission—a federal initiative to clean up the city that Trump once described as a “rat-infested, graffiti-infested shithole.” Troops from across the country are currently stationed in the city, but their remit is not entirely clear, and their effect on violent crime remains limited. Eleven months into Trump’s experiment, they remain an ever-present symbol of the administration’s power.

Last year, Trump declared a “crime emergency” in the city. Crime is a real problem in D.C., as it is in all cities. But the president’s framing of the situation as an emergency meriting the immediate assistance of outside forces (which are usually called in for dramatic upticks in civic unrest) doesn’t align with the numbers: Around the time when Trump first sent in the National Guard, violent crime in D.C. was hitting 30-year lows, in line with a national trend.

The precise tasks involved in keeping D.C. “safe and beautiful” have so far been ill-defined; troops have spent time directing traffic, clearing out homeless encampments, raking leaves, and mulching flower beds. Their presence has had mixed results on crime in the city. In May, the Niskanen Center released data showing that the deployment seemed to have decreased opportunistic property crime, such as theft, by 24 percent—a notable downturn. The data also showed that the deployment had had no measurable effect on violent crime, which had already been declining when the National Guard arrived. (The Guardsmen whom Trump deployed to D.C. are not authorized to make arrests, but they can detain individuals.) The advantage of the National Guard is its flexibility, Richard Hahn, one of the study’s co-authors, told me. D.C. police have been “struggling to hire police officers for 10 years,” he said, but with the Guard, “you can command these soldiers to go to the city and police it.”

Trump’s decision to deploy these soldiers has thoroughly spooked a populace that already distrusts the president. Roughly 80 percent of D.C. residents opposed the arrival of Guardsmen last year, according to one survey. The fear, as my colleagues Ashley Parker and Nancy A. Youssef put it at the time, is that “Washington is being used as a test case—the blueprint for Trump to deploy the National Guard across the country as a paramilitary police force—and that Americans are being conditioned to accept authoritarianism.” In February, a report from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security indicated that the National Guard was using a variety of advanced data-collection tools (including the Defense Department’s AI-enabled Maven Smart System) in support of its duties, raising “potential privacy and civil liberties concerns.”

Ever since the National Guard arrived in D.C., troops have been criticized for seeming to spend a lot of time just standing around. Just standing around can be a component of law enforcement—being a visible presence on the street is one way to deter opportunistic crime—but it also generates unease. Jeffrey Butts, the director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me that the fear this deployment has created is likely part of the point. “This is not about crime, and it’s not about policing,” he argued. “It’s politics and demonstrations of state power.”

Many Republican-led states have dispatched their Guardsmen to the capital, but a few states with Democratic governors have also quietly lent their support. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer sent approximately 170 of her state’s Guardsmen to D.C. as part of the summer surge. This week, a coalition of watchdogs and observers signed a letter urging her to withdraw the state’s troops and expressing concern that Guardsmen are carrying out operations unrelated to the July 4th celebrations. “When the governors put their Guard forces in the hands of the Trump administration, they are trusting the Trump administration not to misuse their Guard forces,” Elizabeth Goitein, a contributor to The Atlantic and a senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice—an organization that signed the letter—told me. “The administration, to put it mildly, has not earned that trust.”

Whitmer herself has expressed some skepticism about the administration’s plans for the troops. About two weeks ago, she wrote her own letter to the head of the Michigan National Guard warning him to “take all necessary measures” to keep the state’s troops focused on bolstering security for the festivities—and to keep them away from the more nebulous Safe and Beautiful mission. She added that if Michigan National Guard leadership is unwilling or unable to keep them focused solely on security for the anniversary festivities, she plans to withdraw the troops altogether.

Another blue-state governor, Tim Walz, recently made the decision to pull Minnesota’s Guardsmen from D.C. earlier than expected, although a spokesperson for the state’s National Guard told the AP that the decision was due to “the successful conclusion of festivities.” The AP also reported this week that the one member of the Kentucky Guard who’d been sent to D.C. had been diverted away from the 250th-anniversary celebrations “without the knowledge or consent” of the state’s governor or its Guard command, per a spokesperson for the Democratic governor. The Guardsman returned to Kentucky before the main events began. Hawaii’s adjutant general, Major General Stephen F. Logan, confirmed to me that the state’s troops, who began their duties in D.C. on Monday, will not be supporting the Safe and Beautiful mission either.

The longer these troops remain in the city, the more fear and anger they may inspire. The tension between the people and the troops has already exploded into violence; in November, two Guardsmen were shot and seriously injured. The deployment may have reduced some kinds of crime, but there’s more than one way to measure its effect on the city.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

The Trump administration has removed two members of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission and accepted the resignation of another, leaving the independent election-oversight body without commissioners, the White House announced yesterday; the move, it said, was part of its effort to secure elections.
President Trump said that he will not sign a bipartisan housing bill despite its passage by Congress. The housing measure will still become law without his signature.
Trump said that the United States has agreed to Iran’s request to continue talks but that the cease-fire is “over” after days of escalating strikes between the two countries. Qatari negotiators met with Iranian officials today to discuss traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, according to Reuters.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Emma Sarappo on what The Catcher in the Rye taught a teenage girl.

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Evening Read

Robby and Michael visited their parents in prison for the last time on June 16, 1953. Bettmann / Getty

The Rosenberg Boys

By Amy Weiss-Meyer

For those old enough to remember, Michael and Robby Meeropol will always be the Rosenberg boys.

I never knew them as such, but it’s not hard to imagine what they were like, in part because there are so many pictures. In one, from June 1953, they are sitting outside the White House in shirts and ties, wool coats, and Brooklyn Dodgers caps. Six-year-old Robby holds his grandmother’s hand; to his right stands a rabbi …

Out of the frame, but documented in other photos from that day, are the placards that protesters carried invoking Robby and Michael, the helpless boys made symbols of what many believed was a grave injustice about to be perpetrated against their parents. (Counterprotesters, carrying signs saying fry ’em and hang ’em, disagreed.) Similar scenes played out around the world. After Pope Pius XII called for clemency, the Vatican’s newspaper cited the “two little innocents on whose soul and destiny the death of their parents would forever leave sinister scars.”

I learned the broad outlines of the events that followed—the electric chair, and the orphans it left behind—half a century later, on a weekend visit to the home of my parents’ friends Robby and Elli in western Massachusetts.

Read the full article.

What The Catcher in the Rye Taught a Teenage Girl

2026-07-10T11:09:00-04:00

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

Around the time I turned 15, I was convinced that the only person who really got me was a 17-year-old boy named Holden Caulfield. Although Holden is fictional, the protagonist of J. D. Salinger’s classic novel The Catcher in the Rye felt three-dimensional to me. Yet in the 75 years since the book’s publication, he has been flattened by pop culture into a character Salinger didn’t create: an irritatingly male, misanthropic whiner. I think this depiction is unfair, and my colleague Lily Meyer agrees with me. Holden represents “a case against nihilism and a vision of a gentler sort of manhood,” she wrote this week in The Atlantic. He’s someone teenage boys can learn from, Meyer suggests; I know from experience that he has something to teach teenage girls too.

First, here are five new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

To be fair to his haters, Holden is fairly down on everyone he encounters. In his view, the boys at his school are phonies, as are pretty much all of the adults he knows. But Holden is not heedlessly pushing the world away. He’s struggling with the knowledge that the values society is supposed to reward—honesty, most of all—are not what actually help people get ahead in life. He’s grieving the loss of his brother Allie, who died of leukemia. He feels betrayed by his parents, who shipped him off to a military school several states away from home. When he puts his trust in a beloved teacher, his confidence is betrayed. He watches as boys his age learn how to manipulate girls, how to quash negative emotions, how to lie and use hypocrisy to come out on top. Holden hates it all.

As a similarly confused and unhappy teenager, I found in Holden—as I wrote in a ninth-grade assignment—“someone who is not quite a role model, but surely a relatable figure.” Finally, one person was reacting in a way that may not have been exactly mature or ideal, but at least felt appropriate for the tumult and distress of adolescence. The great secret of Catcher, though—what gets lost in its reputation—is that Holden’s attitude is itself phony. He’s a tender kid who famously worries about the ducks in cold, icy Central Park, and who adores and hopes to protect his little sister, Phoebe. His indifferent attitude is just a self-protective persona he’s trying on. As a 21st-century girl, I had an entirely different set of stressors, but it helped to see, even through fiction, that not every boy around me was satisfied by simply obsessing over sports or bragging about sex. Holden was an important reminder that on the inside, no teenager was exactly who they were pretending to be.

That year, I’d been employing defense mechanisms similar to Holden’s—until I encountered Catcher’s final lesson, which is that his armor can’t block out his pain and fear. He has a breakdown, and although Salinger is too subtle a writer to give his book a tidy ending, Holden ends up more comfortable with the idea that we all have to grow up. Revisiting the novel 15 years later, I’m moved by the sense that life is very long. I’m no longer Holden’s peer, and I feel almost maternal toward him. He’d never listen—and neither would my teenage self—but I want to tell him, with the benefit of hindsight, that he won’t be stuck feeling this way forever.

Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Wisdom of Holden Caulfield

By Lily Meyer

Beneath all the alienation, The Catcher in the Rye, which turns 75 this year, has a surprisingly hopeful—and ethical—outlook.

Read the full article.

What to Read

A Woman’s Game: The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Women’s Soccer, by Suzanne Wrack

In 2019, the U.S. women’s national soccer team—a charismatic, politically active group that had openly feuded with President Donald Trump—took the pitch for the World Cup final against the Netherlands, and came out as heroic winners. America was watching: The match represented a modern pinnacle of popularity for the women’s game in the U.S. and globally. Wrack’s comprehensive history of women’s soccer begins in the early 20th century, when it was so popular that England’s Football Association, claiming that the sport was “unsuitable for females,” actually banned women from playing for more than five decades. The book then continues to the present day, when the game has reached new heights. Wrack is straightforward in her storytelling, but she’s clear about what the act of play truly means. Victory isn’t the only thing on the line: Women playing elite soccer defy those who attempt to belittle their accomplishments—something the USWNT, who took constant heat from Trump, understands vividly. — Will Leitch

From our list: Seven books that will change how you watch sports

Out Next Week

📚 Famous Men, by Julie Buntin

📚 Ada, by Mark Haber

📚 Not With a Bang, by Temi Oh

Your Weekend Read

Illustration by Lewis Chamberlain

The Demon Next Door

By Stephanie McCrummen

“[Southland’s] owner was Lisa Misosky, and she was chatting with customers one afternoon when she found out that people in town were accusing her of demonic activity, and not in a metaphorical way.”

Read the full article.

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The End of Reading Is Here

2026-07-08T05:55:00-04:00

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Twenty-three hundred years ago, the legend goes, King Ptolemy I of Egypt asked his court adviser to assemble a comprehensive collection of the world’s written works. Ptolemy, who had served under Alexander the Great, envisioned a library that would safeguard the sum total of humanity’s knowledge. His successors inherited this mandate. Royal forces ransacked every ship that arrived at Alexandria, searching for scrolls. These were stored at the Mouseion, a shrine to the Muses modeled after Aristotle’s Lyceum. Aristotle’s own book collection was said to be among the holdings.

Much of the history of the Library of Alexandria has been lost. But we know that it was the site of many of the premodern world’s greatest intellectual achievements. The king paid scholars to live and work in the library, and the collection was available to anyone “eager to study, an encouragement for the entire city to gain wisdom,” a visiting Greek rhetorician wrote. It was at the library that Eratosthenes calculated Earth’s circumference and Zenodotus edited the earliest manuscripts of Homer’s epics. Euclid, who wrote the Elements of geometry, may have studied there as well.

This run of scholarship would not last. By 400 C.E., the library had disappeared. Many scholars regard its destruction as the greatest loss of knowledge in history and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Historians have spent centuries parsing fragments of papyrus in an effort to understand what went wrong.

Traditionally, the answer was believed to be war. During the Siege of Alexandria, in 48 B.C.E., Julius Caesar started a fire that incinerated at least 40,000 scrolls. The library survived in diminished form until the fourth century C.E., when followers of the archbishop of Alexandria sacked the pagan temple that housed the remaining manuscripts. But contemporary historians tend to dismiss the importance of these dramatic incidents in favor of a more mundane cause of death: negligence.

Maintaining the collection was an enormous expense. Humidity, mice, and insects slowly ate away at the papyrus scrolls. Scribes had to continually copy old texts before they deteriorated and became illegible. Eventually, the challenges of maintaining the library became greater than the will to preserve it. “It is not that the disappearance of a library led to a dark age, nor that its survival would have improved those ages,” the classics scholar Roger Bagnall has written. The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived.

Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again. Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.

The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse.

The books that people do read are simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago. Longer sentences aren’t inherently better. But their former ubiquity suggests an age when Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature. In 1958, the English translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was the best-selling novel of the year, according to Publishers Weekly. Pasternak writes in long, complex sentences: “On that warm gray morning in the mountains, Zhivago felt sorry for the Tsar, was disturbed at the thought that such diffident reserve and shyness could be the essential characteristics of an oppressor, that a man so weak could imprison, hang, or pardon.”

Last year’s top-selling novel was Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest in the Hunger Games young-adult series. Brian Bannon, the chief librarian at the New York Public Library, told me that young-adult fiction is one of the library’s most popular offerings—including among decidedly not-young adults. (Other titles in the top 10 include the children’s books Partypooper, the 20th installment in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, and Dog Man: Big Jim Believes.) The most popular novel written for adults was the romantasy adventure Onyx Storm. Whatever the book’s pleasures, it isn’t Pasternak: “A muscle in his square jaw ticks as he stares down at me, rippling the tawny-brown skin of his stubbled cheek.”

Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do. Most Americans now get the news on their phones and laptops, and 40 percent say they prefer to watch or listen to online news rather than read it.

This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis. And it’s true that Americans’ basic reading skills are declining. Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for the past decade. Amanda Kordeliski, who is on the board of the American Association of School Librarians, told me that she and her fellow librarians have had to buy new books to accommodate students’ diminished reading levels. Some of the most popular are graphic novels: updated classics such as the Magic Tree House series for elementary-school students, and manga for middle and high schoolers.

In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument. About the same number scored below “basic,” meaning that they may struggle to draw conclusions from concepts explicitly included in a text, or to use context clues to determine the meaning of an unknown word. Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.

And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.

Things are about to get worse, and fast. The next generation reads much less than today’s adults did when they were kids. Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales, Benjamin Powers, the director of Yale and the University of Connecticut’s Haskins Global Literacy Hub, told me. (In the study of 236,000 American adults, only 2 percent read to a child on a given day.) From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read. Robert Townsend, a program director at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recently ran focus groups asking high-school students how they felt about reading for pleasure. He told me that most thought of it as an alien practice.

Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.) Not long ago, a Harvard sociology professor, troubled by course evaluations in which students said they resented the amount of dense reading they were assigned, asked Rennix to speak to his class in defense of reading. She had to explain—to students at America’s most elite university, taking a course in a discipline rooted in written observation, argumentation, and analysis—that excerpts and summaries cannot capture the depth and sophistication of a complete primary text. Rennix told me that some students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”

[From the November 2024 issue: Rose Horowitch on the elite college students who can’t read books]

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Penguin Books.

It may seem self-serving for a writer at a 169-year-old magazine to carry a torch for reading. But the people who make a living from words are not the only ones who lose out in a postliterate age. Reading is more than a skill, or one mode of communication among many. The media we use to interact with one another shape the world we inhabit. Early humans spent millennia communicating only by voice. The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun.

Reading has never been natural. Humans have no innate cognitive machinery designed to string letters into words and connect them to their real-world analogues. To read, people had to repurpose regions of their brain used for speech and object recognition. The practice first emerged 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. For millennia afterward, most of the population was illiterate. Literacy became a mass phenomenon relatively recently, after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440.

The written word is fundamentally different from oral language. Writing detaches the message from the messenger, allowing for a more dispassionate spread of information than was possible in oral societies. Because writing a phrase takes longer than speaking it, writing forces the author to slow down and reflect. Written language tends to employ more complex sentence structures and vocabulary than spoken language. And unlike speech, it doesn’t disappear into the ether. Readers can return to a text and plumb it for new meaning and understanding. Because writing endures, individuals can temporarily forget what they’ve written but trust that it won’t be lost forever. This frees up the mind to think of new ideas and make new discoveries.

“More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness,” Walter J. Ong, a historian and Jesuit priest, wrote in his 1982 book, Orality and Literacy. He argued that literacy created the conditions for inner concentration, extended focus, and logical deduction. It allowed for a new kind of rational, linear, and analytical thought.

Ong cited case studies by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the 1930s, when peasants were starting to receive rudimentary reading and writing instruction. Luria met his subjects at teahouses, in field camps, and around evening fires. There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer. Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words.

Later scholars would attribute some of these new modes of thinking to other aspects of living in a literate society, not to reading alone. But Ong’s larger argument stands: Print cultures value lengthy, organized arguments. “Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist—all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading,” Neil Postman wrote in 1985. The advent of reading and writing was a precondition for philosophy, modern science, history as an academic enterprise, art criticism.

These changes were hugely destabilizing. As literacy spread through societies, it contributed to political upheaval and revolutions. In the American colonies, the leaders of the patriot cause employed newspapers and pamphlets to foment anti-British sentiment. “The ancient Roman and Greek Orators could only speak to the Number of Citizens capable of being assembled within the Reach of Their Voice,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1782. “Now by the Press we can speak to Nations; and good Books & well written Pamphlets have great and general Influence.”

America’s Founders used a print document to construct their new nation and believed that the system they had devised would work precisely because citizens would be informed readers. Franklin was himself a newspaper publisher and established America’s first lending library. “These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans,” he wrote in his autobiography, and “made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries.” Early on, Americans came to see staying informed as a civic and even moral imperative.

Of course, the new republic was not always a haven for sober analysis. The Founding Fathers attacked their enemies in the papers, spreading lies to incite the public against their opponents. One ally of Thomas Jefferson’s called John Adams “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

Nor was access to reading evenly distributed. For a long time, large numbers of Americans couldn’t pass the federal government’s literacy test—especially in the South, where preventing Black literacy was a pillar of white-supremacist government.

But from the beginning, literature was a crucial source of entertainment, meaning, and connection for many Americans. They shared a set of references from the Bible and English literature. Charles Dickens was sufficiently beloved by American readers that when he got his hair cut during a visit to New York City in 1842, admirers flocked to collect clippings from the barber.

In the 19th century, composing a letter was an art form, and even correspondence with loved ones was written in an elegant, formal style. “It’s weird for us to see it now: a Civil War soldier writing to his wife, and he’s covered with mud in this tent, and he writes as if he’s Shakespeare,” John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, told me. “And you think, Can’t he loosen up with his own wife? But the thing is, that is him basically sending her roses.”

Samuel D. Lougheed served in the 8th Regiment of the Union’s Missouri Volunteer Infantry, which fought at Shiloh and the Siege of Vicksburg. In October 1862, he wrote to his wife: “Tis hard to lie down covered with your own gore on a battle field and die. Tis hard to see the mighty prancing war horse, trampling the dying and dead beneath their merciless feet. No dear wife, near to speak a word of comfort. No living sister or Mother to administer relief in that hour the most sad in the history of humanity. O the humanity. O the horrors of war.”

In 1962, Marshall McLuhan, the patron saint of media theorists, predicted that the Western world would become what he called “post-literate.” In The Gutenberg Galaxy, published that year, he suggested that such an age had already begun—that electronic media were already supplanting the written word. At the time, 90 percent of homes had a television, compared with 9 percent only a decade earlier. Television was becoming Americans’ main source of news. The average household spent more than five hours a day in front of the TV set.

Viewed from the present, the America of the 1950s and ’60s doesn’t seem postliterate. After the war, the nation had become wealthier and more highly educated at a remarkable pace. Its appetite for the written word and its veneration of the intellectuals who produced it seemed poised to grow and grow. In 1964, Time, which then had a circulation of more than 3 million, ran a cover story on John Cheever, the author known for his dark fables of suburban malaise. The article, “Ovid in Ossining,” opened with an extended quotation from the invocation of Metamorphoses. In Cheever’s famous story “The Five-Forty-Eight,” the protagonist boards the titular train and is greeted by a then-familiar, now-exotic sight: a car full of commuters reading the evening newspaper.

But television was changing the rhythms and habits of American life. In 1985, Postman, a friend and disciple of McLuhan’s, published Amusing Ourselves to Death. He argued that television had hijacked Americans’ attention and turned politics into cheap entertainment. “The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining,” Postman wrote. “Television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself.” At the time, the average American household watched more than seven hours of television every day, a number that would rise to nearly nine hours by 2010.

If TV crowded out the silent time necessary for reading, broadband internet and the smartphone make it nearly impossible. Not too long ago, at-home screen entertainment was finite. Shows aired on a certain day, at a certain time. If you wanted to watch an old movie, you had to put your shoes on and go to a video store. Books could compete in that environment. Some people, at least, would turn off the TV and read a book before falling asleep.

Now entertainment is limitless. There’s no hard stop—one show bleeds into the next. People watch TV with their phone in hand, monitoring social media or texting with friends. Netflix has reportedly told directors and screenwriters to assume that the audience isn’t paying attention and to constantly remind viewers what’s going on. In this environment, people have to be really determined to read. Most aren’t.

When people do read, they might find that they’re absorbing less information. That’s especially true if they read on their phone. The endless scroll, hyperlinks, and notifications invite surface-level reading, with constant invitations to look elsewhere. Studies have shown that people comprehend less when reading on a digital device than on paper, perhaps because of all these distractions. Devoting extended, undivided attention to a text can now feel like too much to ask. Audiobooks have become a popular alternative to print books at least in part because listening to a book allows for multitasking: You can read while doing the dishes or driving to work.

Faced with shrinking attention spans and declining comprehension, schools might have been expected to resist the impulse toward shorter passages and shallower reading. Instead, they spurred it on. A 2025 survey found that most middle- and high-school English teachers assigned zero to four books a year. Successive waves of education reforms have led districts to favor short passages over full books, the better to mimic multiple-choice reading-comprehension exams. Many of the most popular school curricula now rely on excerpts. Annemarie Cortez, the principal at an elementary school in Corona, California, told me that many administrators are instructing teachers not to assign full books; they’re supposed to be running discrete reading drills with short excerpts.

Meanwhile, digital devices have flooded American classrooms. In a New York Times survey, more than 80 percent of elementary-school teachers said students receive a school-issued device by the time they enter kindergarten. Lupita Villalobos, who teaches 3-year-olds at a pre-K in Duncanville, Texas, told me that the district gives each student a tablet to use during school. She’s prevented her students from using the devices, as she knows how much time they spend on them at home. “I had a student who had a very strong reaction to starting school,” she said. “Typically, students cry maybe the first couple weeks and say they want their mom. But this student would cry for her tablet.”

In the recent past, people were at least reading something online, but that’s changing fast. Social media, once mainly text-based, has been overrun with short-form videos. TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels dominate the attention economy, especially among young people. According to a recent data analysis by Jean Twenge, a psychology professor who studies generational change, by eighth grade, the average kid spends four and a half hours a day on social media. For much of that time, it appears, they are watching videos, often at 2x speed. Even text messages have taken on characteristics of the spoken word. People use all caps to indicate heightened emotion and avoid the formality of proper punctuation, which now seems stilted, even stern. Like many 20-somethings, my friends and I have mostly moved on from texts, preferring to send one another voice recordings instead.

The written word has survived for thousands of years and overcome successive challenges from new technologies. It’s clearly resilient. Reading rates might fluctuate, but optimists argue that the long arc of history points toward universal literacy. Martin Puchner, a comparative-literature professor at Harvard, studies how literature has shaped history. He’s spent decades tracing how communication technologies have changed, and the panics those changes have triggered. For much of his career, he was skeptical of fears about the end of reading. “If the long history of changes in writing technologies has taught me anything, I think it’s that one should always resist the kind of doomsday scenarios,” he told me.

And yet, even Puchner now believes that the doomsday scenario has arrived: A return to text, away from video, seems awfully unlikely. Maybe McLuhan and Postman weren’t wrong in predicting that our society would become postliterate. They were merely early. The world that these theorists foresaw half a century ago is now here. The literate era will prove to be a brief interlude between the oral and digital ages.

Reading shaped the modern mind. Its disappearance will reshape it. Cognitive scientists are starting to understand what these changes might look like. I asked a dozen of them what happens to our brains when we stop reading. Several were amused by my rudimentary question. “Everything that happens to you changes the brain,” Dan Willingham, a professor at the University of Virginia, told me. “Literally reading a word changes your brain for a few hours at least—and, if you know how to measure it right, for much longer than that.” He was trying to reassure me: If everything changes the brain, then almost no single action matters all that much.

But what if you consistently replace one kind of action (reading a word) with another (watching an Instagram Reel)? One of the most robust findings in neuroscience is that people’s brains master what they practice. If we fill our time with short-form videos instead of books, our reading skills atrophy. We have less background knowledge to aid comprehension. There’s no danger of spontaneous mass illiteracy, but the complex cognitive skills that reading fosters start to degrade. The library of the mind falls into disrepair.

Reading books is a workout for the attention span. The more you read, the easier it is to read, and the more you’re rewarded with new understanding. Eventually the process is more pleasurable than it is challenging. But as with physical exercise, the converse is true as well: The less you read, the more difficult it is to read, and the rockier the path to acquiring knowledge.

Social media offers instant gratification. John Hutton, a pediatrics professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center, compares scrolling TikTok to a lab rat pushing a button and getting a dose of cocaine: Eventually, all you want to do is push the button. In 2004, the average attention span on a screen was two and a half minutes, Gloria Mark, a psychologist at UC Irvine, told me. By 2012, it had dropped to 75 seconds. Five years ago, it fell to about 47 seconds. “We become accustomed to having content change rapidly,” Mark said.

Watching videos is a more passive form of engagement than reading. Hutton recently collected brain images of children, all 3 to 5 years old, as they took in stories in different formats. When children watched an animated video of a story, they used the region of the brain associated with imagination about half as much as they did when looking at static illustrations while listening to an audio recording. Children also used their cerebellum—a part of the brain associated with learning—less when watching a video. “They don’t really have to use their imagination as much, because things are happening on the screen,” Hutton told me. “The brain’s just doing less work to understand and learn from what they’re seeing in the animated, compared to the illustrated.”

The paradox is that although video contains more information than text—not just language but sounds and moving images—it does not stimulate deeper thinking. To the contrary, video thrusts so much information at the viewer at once that it’s difficult to focus on any one piece of it. The frames keep changing regardless of how much the viewer has noticed or comprehended. Few people pause and rewind to reflect on what they might have missed.

Young people today have never experienced a world without ubiquitous short-form video. In other studies, Hutton found that children who had more screen time and spent less time reading had less well-developed white matter in areas associated with executive function and language. This suggests that they were less accustomed to using those skills. Benjamin Powers, at the Haskins Global Literacy Hub, told me that students arrive in elementary school with a poor ability to maintain focus and a low tolerance for mental exertion. “In classrooms, this shows up as students who can decode or retrieve information but struggle with comprehension that requires inference, synthesis, or holding ideas in mind across longer texts,” he said.

In a 2024 survey of third-to-eighth-grade teachers, more than 80 percent said that their students’ reading stamina had declined since 2019. Scores on the ACT’s reading and English sections have been falling for the past seven years. They’re now at their lowest level in more than three decades. SAT reading and writing scores have declined too, even as administrators have shortened and simplified the passages assessing reading-comprehension skills.

When these students get to college, their professors find that they have to teach them how to comprehend a text—in other words, how to think. “I’m teaching in German, so we’ve always been used to teaching them how to read, which is something that people in English departments are now realizing that they have to do,” Jonathan Fine, a German-studies professor at Brown University, told me. “Before you can even get to ‘What’s the larger point?,’ it’s: ‘Is this ironic?,’ what a metaphor might mean, just trying to get the very words and grammar to get them to notice everything, so that they can hopefully then make the larger connections.”

That may sound like an exaggeration, but higher education will almost certainly have to become more remedial. In a study of English and English-education majors at two regional universities in Kansas, published in 2024, researchers asked students to read the first seven paragraphs of Dickens’s Bleak House. The novel follows members of the Jarndyce family through a lengthy legal dispute over their inheritance. It begins:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

The researchers quoted students’ attempts to parse the passage. “So it’s like, um, the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no … so everything’s been, like, kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill,” one student said. At least a quarter of the subjects interpreted the figures of speech literally, leading to the inference that dinosaurs walked the streets of 19th-century London. Dickens continues by describing the Lord Chancellor as he is “addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief.” Another student interpreted this passage as “describing him in a room with an animal I think? Great whiskers? A cat?”

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Chapman & Hall.

That students would struggle with unfamiliar references is not surprising. But the researchers gave them access to the entire internet. They could have looked up Michaelmas term or Lord Chancellor or Lincoln’s Inn Hall if they had chosen to do so. Students didn’t even know how to go about figuring out what they didn’t understand, or they didn’t bother. Most of them did not realize that the passage takes place in a court of law. Only 5 percent had an accurate, detailed understanding of what they’d read.

These changes aren’t confined to college campuses. American adults’ ability to answer logic questions, reason effectively, and analyze patterns declined from 2006 to 2018. American adults also tend to have a smaller vocabulary than those with an equivalent level of education did half a century ago. Recent studies suggest that the Flynn effect—the steady rise in IQ between generations since the 1930s—has reversed over the past two decades. Average IQ scores are declining by about three points a decade, Elizabeth Dworak, a research psychologist at Northwestern’s medical school, told me.

The cognitive shifts aren’t all negative. Dworak’s research finds that American adults are improving in certain forms of spatial reasoning. Postliterate culture could convey advantages that we don’t yet understand. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates famously argues that the advent of writing “will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” He was right. But as writing eroded individuals’ memories, the media theorist Andrey Mir has observed, it improved society’s collective memory.

Could the generations growing up with their brains hooked to endless video feeds be developing some kind of novel, as-yet-undetectable cognitive brilliance? Perhaps. But for now, the decline of reading seems to be ushering in a less rational, analytical, and sophisticated mode of thinking. It’s difficult to see any advantages in that.

In 1982, Walter J. Ong observed that modern civilization was entering a phase of “secondary orality,” in which a once-literate society reverts back to some of the conventions of preliterate cultures. Because spoken words disappear as soon as they’re uttered, oral cultures value repetition to aid memory. Bards in oral societies make use of stock phrases and mnemonics to keep track of their train of thought. They traffic in epithets and “enthusiastic description of physical violence,” in Ong’s words, because conflict is more memorable than dispassionate discussion. Speakers can’t edit their words the way writers can, so they press on without admitting their mistakes. If they later contradict themselves, they don’t expect the audience to recall their earlier statements. Meaning depends on the identity of the speaker, not on any concept of objective truth.

It is unlikely that Donald Trump has familiarized himself with Orality and Literacy. But if he did, he might recognize himself in Ong’s description. Trump’s communication style is perfectly suited to an oral society. He employs epithets—“Low-Energy Jeb,” “Little Marco,” “Sleepy Joe”—that are easy to remember and repeat. He contradicts himself as though there is no record of his previous statements. Even his writing is almost indistinguishable from his speech. (It makes sense; Trump reportedly prefers dictation to composition.) His online posts are full of idiosyncratically placed punctuation, capital letters, and exclamation points. Many are memes with little text: One featured an image of an American warship hitting an Iranian airplane with a laser beam and included the phrase “Lasers: Bing, Bing, GONE!!!”

Trump is our first postliterate president. It is difficult to imagine him being elected leader of a country where information is primarily spread through text. Ahead of the 2024 election, an NBC News poll of 1,000 voters found that Joe Biden had a 49-point lead among respondents who read newspapers. Trump has pioneered a style of communication that exploits our distracted, disputatious age. “So many people, particularly in the academic and journalistic circles, think of him as a political revolutionary,” Roderick Hart, a communications professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “And I see him much more as a rhetorical revolutionary.”

In the 1985 book No Sense of Place, the media theorist Joshua Meyrowitz observed that television and other electronic media inundated Americans with new kinds of information about their prospective leaders. Print media gave the public access only to politicians’ polished remarks; video let Americans see their presidents sweat, sneeze, and stammer. Voters began to focus on “dating criteria” instead of “résumé criteria,” he told me.

“More than in the past, authorities today must often ‘look and sound good’ rather than write and reason well,” Meyrowitz wrote in No Sense of Place. He predicted that the decline of print and rise of electronic media would ultimately push people toward populist leaders. They would shun authority and institutions in favor of the candidate who made good television. He published his book soon after Ronald Reagan, a former actor, had won reelection.

“I reread the book recently and I kept going, Holy shit, this is even more true than when I wrote it,” Meyrowitz said. Social-media platforms give Americans unprecedented opportunities to watch their representatives’ every move. Their algorithms reward simplistic, inflammatory, emotionally resonant content over complexity, nuance, and rigor. Ideas that comport with folk theories of politics—all leaders are equally corrupt ; immigrants steal jobs; policy problems have easy, commonsense solutions—prevail over the findings of subject-matter experts.

Politicians on the right and the left have figured out how to exploit these new platforms. Reihan Salam, the president of the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, described to me how this plays out. “You name an enemy and you polarize the public,” he said. “You don’t allow for nuance, because nuance is just a confusion when you’re in a struggle for power.”

Politicians who promote the distrust of institutions and elites do better under such circumstances. “You create this fantasy that, actually, it’s all really, really simple, and one charismatic person can just achieve these wins that are visually compelling and emotionally compelling,” Salam said. This is precisely the kind of demagogic figure the Founders hoped a well-read populace would see through. “When you think about our constitutional order, how it was meant to work, it absolutely cuts against that,” Salam said.

Marshall McLuhan once said, “The liberal world by definition is literate.” The inverse appears to be true as well.

If Trump is the first postliterate president, he won’t be the last. The political strategist David Plouffe, an architect of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, recently argued that candidates should focus each day on content creation. He advised shrinking every idea into something short enough for screen-addled voters to concentrate on. “If it can’t be communicated in an Instagram post or 10-second TikTok, go back to the drawing board,” Plouffe wrote in a New York Times op-ed. That may very well be good advice on how to campaign for office in the postliterate era. As a way to practice informed self-government, it portends disaster.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Penguin Books.

I haven’t even mentioned artificial intelligence yet. A number of digital technologies have hijacked attention and made focused reading all but impossible. Generative AI is the first tool to threaten the continued existence of writing.

Writing is hard. Orwell likened the experience to a “long bout of some painful illness.” AI promises a simple remedy. The trouble is that writing is not merely the act of transcribing fully formed thoughts—if it were, it wouldn’t be hard. Writing is the way people figure out what they think, and how to convey those thoughts to someone who doesn’t already share them. Cal Newport, a computer-science professor at Georgetown University, argues that the process of writing forces people to think in an orderly, linear fashion. It exposes flabby thoughts and shoddy reasoning. And the time and focus it takes to form thoughts into words, sentences, and paragraphs allow the author to make new connections and discover new insights.

This feels true to me. My job is to write. With apologies to Orwell, the prospect of a painful illness fills me with less dread than a blank page. But there’s satisfaction in the struggle. The writing process is how I refine and formalize inchoate ideas and gain new understanding. By evaluating my arguments and discarding those that aren’t convincing, I find the ones that are. Writing is hard because the writer is learning. If AI eliminates the challenge, it also eliminates the learning.

Early studies have suggested that this is exactly what happens when people use AI to write. The process is easier. The product is often better than what someone could compose on their own. But it comes at the expense of mental development. One study in Brazil determined that undergraduates who used AI for studying performed significantly worse on a surprise test than those who studied without AI. The students trailed their peers even on questions that demanded reflection and effort instead of specific knowledge. Another study of hundreds of individuals in Britain found that frequent AI use for cognitive tasks is negatively associated with critical-thinking abilities.

Modern life demands a lot of tedious writing. Some of it can surely be offloaded to machines without too great a cost. But a career spent studying the historical adoption of new technologies has convinced Newport that it’s almost impossible to automate away one problem without creating others. Over and over, people think they’re using a tool to bypass a single tiresome task. “And then there’s all these unexpected second-order impacts,” he told me. Email was supposed to be a more convenient substitute for faxes, phone calls, and meetings. Instead, responding to emails became an immense time suck of its own. These unforeseen consequences end up transforming intellectual life.

The skill of deep thinking will likely become rarer and rarer in a world where much of the population uses AI to avoid writing. It will also become more and more important. AI is creating a superabundance of text. It has led to a threefold increase in the number of books released on Amazon each month since 2022, when ChatGPT was launched. Over the same period, scientific-journal submissions have also surged. Many were written at least in part by artificial intelligence.

AI produces crisp, professional prose. Presented with human- and AI-produced text side by side, even M.F.A. candidates have been shown to prefer the work of the machines. If AI writing is pleasing and convincing, however, it is also unoriginal, often inaccurate, or both. People will therefore need their powers of discernment and comprehension more than ever. They will need to know what they think and how to make their own judgments. These are the exact skills that the use of AI threatens to erode.

What’s at risk is nothing less than the ability to think for oneself. If people become overreliant on AI to write for them, they could lose the capacity to interrogate or even develop their own views. These are quintessentially human capacities. “If we gave those up,” the NYU philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah told me, “we’d stop being the kind of humans that we are. We’d be very different creatures.”

One hundred twenty-six years ago, The Atlantic published an essay by Arthur Reed Kimball describing “one of the most serious of the unchallenged changes of modern American life.” The ability of the nation’s citizens to write well and think deeply was under attack. The enemy of eloquence and sustained attention? The newspaper. In “The Invasion of Journalism,” Kimball argued that the daily paper, with its sports pages and gossip columns, its miscellaneous items and slang, was eclipsing the book and the literary magazine. Even those who claim to read the newspaper to learn of pressing events in Washington or Europe, he argued, will turn first “to some interesting ‘story,’ perhaps a curious bicycle adventure, perhaps the capture of a clever burglar.”

[From the July 1900 issue: The invasion of journalism]

Before the newspaper, the novel was seen as a threat to good reading habits and moral stature. Thomas Jefferson thought that one of the greatest obstacles to educating women was their passion for fiction, which seduced them away from “wholesome reading.” Once a woman has fallen for novels, he wrote, “nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy.”

Those inclined to dismiss the present assault on reading point to this venerable tradition: decrying some new technology or medium as distracting and debasing the American people. Perhaps, 126 years from now, this essay will seem like the latest such exercise in hand-wringing. Looking back at these laments, I noticed that the people most invested in the old modes are usually the quickest to predict that all will be lost.

By some measures at least, books continue to thrive. Last year, print-book sales were higher than they were a decade ago. Barnes & Noble opened more than 60 new stores. Almost 400 independent bookstores sprang up in 2025. Substack has seen an explosion of subscriptions for long-form writing. Celebrities such as Dua Lipa and Reese Witherspoon have used their fame and influence to launch wildly successful book clubs. Audiobooks have become a billion-dollar industry.

But the optimists overlook a crucial thread in the data: Text is thriving among a dwindling proportion of the population. Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year. “It’s becoming a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids,” Leah Price, a historian of reading at Rutgers University, told me. Readers spend more time reading each day than they did two decades ago. They appear to be even more passionate about print than their predecessors. But the people devoted to text, who derive cultural understanding and intellectual connection from the written word, are now part of a subculture. The fact that you are reading this article almost certainly makes you a member of it.

Now that being a reader is optional, it can function as an identity marker. When you see someone on the train reading printed matter, it feels like a statement. Perhaps inevitably, such statements have become the stuff of online ridicule: Brandish a book too ostentatiously in public, and you might find yourself accused of “performative reading.” The label presumes the person is only trying to telegraph that they are highly educated or possess superior literary taste—why else would they lug a book around?

We’ve been here before. When society first transitioned from orality to literacy, only a small minority could read. As the only individuals who possessed this valuable skill, they occupied a privileged position, and were paid handsomely for their work. At the Library of Alexandria, scholars in residence lived in the city’s royal complex.

Today, reading is again clustered among a small minority of the population, but being a person of letters confers less status than it once did. The remaining readers are marginalized, mocked, and in many ways irrelevant. For most people, a life of letters is an economic dead end. Employment at newspapers has fallen by 75 percent in the past two decades. Job openings for academics in the humanities are likewise in decline, and fewer and fewer of the remaining positions are tenure-track. In 2024, only 8 percent of college graduates earned a bachelor’s degree in a humanities discipline. That year, both English and history departments awarded 40 percent fewer degrees than they did in 2012. There’s a fear among historians, whispered during panels and conferences, that they will be the final generation to systematically examine the past.

The notion of a popular literary figure appearing on the cover of a print newsweekly read by millions of Americans is impossible to imagine today. There is no such figure, and there are no such widely read newsweeklies. Instead, many Americans are proudly postliterate. The president has spoken about his taste for bullet-pointed briefings, and aides have said he likes pictures and charts. The world’s richest men brag about getting their information from X posts, podcasts, and conversations with chatbots. Young people who seek wealth and influence are encouraged to mimic them.

Cultural and economic power tends to flow to people who are skilled at using the most popular communications technology. Today, those people are streamers, podcasters, and influencers. Joe Rogan commands the kind of audience that journalists could only dream of. He has more than 14 million followers on Spotify and more than 20 million subscribers on YouTube. MrBeast, a YouTuber who stages elaborate stunts, such as a real-life Squid Game, regularly gets hundreds of millions of views. Video-game streamers such as IShowSpeed and TheBurntPeanut are among the most popular media figures in the country. These personalities shape what young people aspire to and talk about, and even how they speak.

Books used to be an essential source of knowledge, memory, wisdom, and morality. They were written by older generations and passed down to the young in a vertical transmission of culture, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt told me. Now information moves horizontally, from young person to young person. This dynamic makes figures such as MrBeast and TheBurntPeanut the guardians of American culture. The decline of reading didn’t turn the world upside down. It turned the world sideways.

Young people want to pursue jobs that will catapult them into the elite—which today means that people coming of age want to be influencers. A 2023 Morning Consult poll found that almost 60 percent of Gen Z respondents said they would be a social-media personality if they could. Amanda Kordeliski, of the American Association of School Librarians, is also a librarian in Oklahoma, where she has set up recording studios for students. “Podcasting is the hottest, most popular thing. I could buy a million microphones and there would still be a waitlist to get into the audio labs,” she told me. “Everybody wants to be an influencer.”

In September, Syracuse University launched its Center for the Creator Economy, and will soon offer its inaugural minor for aspiring influencers. “This center speaks directly to the aspirations of current and prospective students,” Mark J. Lodato, the dean of the university’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, said in a press release. “It’s about meeting them where they are—and preparing them to lead in the world that’s coming.”

The arrival of that world isn’t yet a certainty. Some people have noticed what we’re giving up, and they’re choosing a different path. Nearly two dozen states have banned cellphones during the school day. After Texas’s ban went into effect at the start of this past academic year, a Dallas school district saw 200,000 more library books checked out compared with the year before, a nearly 25 percent increase. Rex Ovalle, a high-school English teacher in the Chicago suburbs and a member of the National Council of Teachers of English, told me he’s seen pushback against excerpts; some teachers are adding whole books back into their curriculum. Felton Thomas Jr., the executive director of the Cleveland Public Library, said that its youngest patrons have joined senior citizens in preferring print books to digital copies. If these acts of defiance against a postliterate culture seem futile, the holdouts lose nothing by trying.

I was raised in the postliterate era. I was born shortly after the dot-com bubble burst and entered first grade around the time the iPhone was released. In seventh grade, I got my first phone and promptly made an Instagram account. If you make an internet reference—any internet reference—I will (regrettably) almost always get it. Most of my knowledge of a world premised on reading comes from what I’ve read in books.

I had the advantage of growing up in a family of readers. My dad read to me almost every night, all the way through middle school. (As the father of a moody daughter, he often didn’t know what words to say to me. When we read together, he could borrow someone else’s.) My older sisters couldn’t wait to recruit me into their book club. Our favorite was The Boxcar Children, about four orphaned siblings who create a home in an abandoned train car. In the book, the children have scarcely found food and shelter before the two sisters decide to teach their younger brother to read. They carve wood chips into letters and use blackberry juice for ink. When I turned 10, my mom passed down her childhood copies of Rabbit Hill and Johnny Tremain. She had written her signature on the inside cover when she got them. I added my own.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Dial Press.

During high school, I got it in my head that I should read the classics. My teachers kept recommending their favorite books. I wanted to share in their knowledge and understand their references. I slogged through Jane Eyre and fell for Anna Karenina. Although I was alone while reading, I didn’t feel that way. These books contained the wisdom of generations. As James Baldwin said (in a 1963 Life profile, just a week after he appeared on the cover of Time): “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.” I felt like I was part of an unbroken chain of knowledge and culture.

In the years since—I’m not quite sure when—the habit slipped. The change was subtle. I became busier. I started scrolling on my phone before bed instead of reading. My attention began to wander every few pages. What did it matter if I read less? No one was checking on my progress. And the books would always be there. I could pick them up later.

When the Library of Alexandria disappeared, the knowledge inscribed on its scrolls was lost forever. We can only guess what else Eratosthenes and Euclid might have written. The text turned to dust. That won’t happen today; all of the words in the great library could be stored on a single computer chip. Nowadays, even the most obscure academic monographs are scanned and digitized. Google Books and the Internet Archive represent libraries of unfathomable proportions. We can navigate to them with a few keystrokes, not a perilous journey across the Mediterranean. There’s little risk of their texts succumbing to humidity or mice.

But the threat of apathy remains. What we’re losing is the ability and inclination to read those texts. An astonishing wealth of information and wisdom has been bequeathed to us. What we’ll do with this inheritance is up to us.

This article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “The Age of Reading Is Over.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Madonna Is Finally Giving the World What It Wants

2026-07-10T07:30:00-04:00

Madonna looks like she’s hiding something on the cover of her 15th album, Confessions II. She’s seated atop a speaker box with her leotard and legs peeking out from beneath a rippling veil of rich purple. The effect is regal, holy, sexual, and funereal—a chic update of her trademark sacred-profane flavor combo. But there’s one twist: She’s covering herself up.

Mystery isn’t usually Madonna’s thing. From the start, she’s been determined to make the world look at her, all of her—in her bed, on a cross, cone-bra’d, bare. As a young woman conquering MTV, she found power in visibility; more recently, her insistence on staying in the frame has served as a dare. In 2023, my colleague Sophie Gilbert described Madonna’s social-media presence—her surgically sculpted, sexagenarian face bobbing around on TikTok—as breaking the pact between the public and its female stars: “If you age in private, the deal goes, you can reemerge triumphantly as royalty in your silver era. But Madonna never signed up for dignified placating.”

Confessions II is, at last, Madonna’s turn to dignified placating. That may sound like a strange description for a club-friendly album marketed with a “Grindr Exxxclusive Picture Disc,” but then again, hedonism has been her home base since “Like a Virgin.” A sequel to her last great album, 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, Confessions II bounces along steadily and nostalgically, like the officially sanctioned biopic she’s recently had to put on ice. Really the most interesting thing about the record is the acclaim it’s generated (trust the New York Post to crudely clarify the cultural narrative: “Taylor Swift has a tacky MSG wedding and Madonna releases an amazing album—it’s bizarro world”). Fans are raving that Madonna has tapped back into her essence—but unfortunately, a lot of her is missing.

As on the first Confessions album, which he helped create, the producer Stuart Price tours through a menagerie of dance styles: swinging house, rushing big beat, meditative drum and bass. Many of these subgenres were commercialized into hokum long ago—the jazzy breakbeats of “Betrayal” would kill over appetizers at Tao—but Price’s touches are impressively refined. The songs develop in overlapping surges of sound, making listeners feel like they’re surfing the curl of an endless wave.

But whereas the first Confessions had a molten brightness to its mood—recall the irrepressible, ABBA-sampling hit “Hung Up”—this one is frosty. The lead track, “I Feel So Free,” opens with a synth pulsing like a lost satellite and Madonna whisper-rasping almost meekly. She feels like she can’t trust people, and her antidote is the “safety in numbers” of the dance floor. She starts cooing in the manner of Donna Summers’s “I Feel Love”—but the expected blastoff into ecstasy doesn’t quite arrive. The track is about freedom, but it’s making a statement about restraint.

One reason for that restraint is to highlight her words. Last year on the wellness influencer Jay Shetty’s podcast, Madonna expressed her desire to spread the wisdom she’s learned from Kabbalah; many of the ideas she conveyed in that conversation are now translated into songs, near verbatim. She commands listeners to focus on their intentions and to believe in love—beautiful notions that are also utterly hackneyed in pop music and rendered artlessly here. “Everything begins with consciousness,” she says flatly on “Good for the Soul.” Later, over drippy strings on “Everything,” she paraphrases Saint John of the Cross and Harvey Dent: “Wherever there’s the greatest amount of darkness / That’s where you’ll find the greatest light.”

Real transcendence approaches only when she quits preaching and Price risks interrupting the breathing exercise. “Everything” and “Bring Your Love” emphasize propulsion and sonic surprise while Madonna plays a campy character, raging at modern phone culture in the former and giggling girlishly with Sabrina Carpenter in the latter. Even better, “Danceteria” reconstructs the titular nightclub where Madonna came up in the ’80s. As she raps about rubbing shoulders with Jean-Michel Basquiat and hiding cocaine from the DJ, the arrangement shape-shifts: a hip-hop break here, an acid-house strobe there. Some listeners will call the track corny; others will love it as theater. The edge of taste—that’s where she belongs.

[Read: How Lizzo became one of pop culture’s great flops]

Later on the album, the tempo slows and she delivers personal revelations—with circumspection. “Bizarre” is a catchy cut apparently about holding a torch for Sean Penn; “Betrayal” dresses down her late mother-in-law. At this point in her life, Madonna’s clearly wrenched by scores unsettled and closures denied, but one gets the sense that she’s holding back her rawest feelings to avoid upsetting the flow. “Fragile” is the most effective ballad on the album because Madonna, movingly if gauzily, transmutes the 2024 death of her brother Christopher into her own self-actualization tale. Another highlight, “The Test,” features her daughter Lola Leon singing with idiosyncratic cadences and word choices that demonstrate how generic her mother’s have been.

The problem here isn’t all the woo-woo. Madonna has been trying to enlighten us since 1998’s Ray of Light, but back then—and for most of her career—her personal quest was tied to an artistic one. With her ear to the underground and her eye on the mainstream, Madonna has kept trying to push the sound of pop forward. Once, that entailed trip-hop and yoga mantras. What would it mean to make a modern Madonna album right now? Sort through forgotten efforts like the EDM-fried MDNA (2012) and the trap-tastic Rebel Heart (2015), and you’ll find many botched answers to that question—but also, here and there, tracks so crazed with ambition that they make Confessions II sound like AI.

Trading her restless spark for pleasurable consistency theoretically could have at least won her some top-tier bangers, but one revisit to the first Confessions drives home how middling the songwriting is here. Nothing screams for another greatest-hits collection; nothing is likely to inspire the next wave of pop. Instead, she’s given fans a perfectly okay summer soundtrack. Overrating that gift risks sending a sad message: that what the world ultimately wants from Madonna, and any bold performer in her vein, is the safest version of herself. Behind the veil, I suspect she’s hiding her boredom.

The Wonder of Everyday Life

2026-07-07T10:23:00-04:00

Sign up for Ordinary Extraordinary, Ian Bogost’s guide to making everyday life vivid again. You’ll receive one edition every Saturday for the next eight weeks.

What if your life could be richer and more delightful without your having to change anything you’re currently doing?

For most of us, when we think about making our lives better and happier, we think of meaningful work, healthy bodies, and thriving interpersonal relationships. Those goals are important. But they can also take years to achieve, and it’s hard to know if and when you’ve even succeeded. Other types of pleasures also exist. Simpler, smaller, and easily achievable ones—the delights of experiencing the moments life offers by connecting ourselves to the physical world.

Some time ago, I wrote an ode to the stick-shift car. I thought it was a trifle, but a surprisingly large number of you read it. The small, seemingly insignificant experience of controlling an automobile by clutching and levering its gears turned out to be deeply meaningful. I became infatuated with what that discovery meant.

In the four years since publishing that article, I wrote a book about the topic: The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life. It’s about the sensory enchantment of everyday life: acts such as shifting a car’s gears, holding a mug of tea, or hearing the crunch of a twig underfoot. I learned so much about what makes these small pleasures delightful, why they can feel rare, and why we might struggle to take them seriously.

Now I want to help you rediscover the experiences you are already having—experiences from which you might not have thought to derive joy. Ordinary Extraordinary is my new newsletter series here at The Atlantic. The lessons we’ll explore together are easy, because they don’t require you to change your habits or reinvent yourself. You just need to learn how to accept the sensory gifts the world offers you, all the time.

We will look at familiar topics—including nature and health, family and social life, and even running errands—but in a slightly unfamiliar way. Instead of assuming that you have to change your life to make it better, we will focus on living the life you already have, just a little differently. Along the way, I hope you will ask questions and share ideas with me directly, too.

Sign up to receive one edition every Saturday morning for the next eight weeks. Join me as we inhabit the world more fully together.

What if It’s Not the Phones?

2026-07-09T07:00:00-04:00

When the 82-year-old psychologist Peter Gray describes the way he grew up, he punctuates the anecdotes by saying that modern parents would be arrested for letting a child have such fun. When he was 4 years old, he would walk to a store in Minneapolis to buy cigarettes for his grandmother. When he was 11, he would sometimes stay home from school in Hill City, Minnesota, to operate a newspaper printing press owned by his mother and stepfather.

His parents were not arrested, and that’s because the childhood they permitted him to have was basically normal at the time, even if his family did have a newspaper printing press in the house. As a boy, Peter was obsessed with fishing and baseball; neighborhood friends taught him how to ride his bike and catch grasshoppers. Although Gray’s career as a scientist would begin with laboratory studies of rat hormones, he eventually found his way to writing about his childhood, in a fashion. Over the course of his 30 years in the psychology department at Boston College, he mixed principles of biology and anthropology to put together an evolutionary theory of play.

Gray’s academic work defines play as a self-directed activity done only for its own sake. This, he came to believe, enables kids to figure out how to solve their own problems, nurture their own relationships, make their own rules, and manage their own disappointments. But he says that our society has spent the past 70 years or so interfering with that process. We’ve made it harder and harder for kids to do anything: They’re kept indoors for greater portions of the day and given less unstructured time; they play organized sports supervised by adults; they don’t go anywhere alone. Gray grew certain that this loss of independence has been harmful to their mental health.

Gray’s theory, which he laid out in a 2013 book called Free to Learn, quickly found a welcome audience. The book was celebrated by advocates of free-range parenting and won endorsement from academic luminaries such as Steven Pinker. When Gray’s fellow psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his co-author Greg Lukianoff published their 2018 best seller on the threat of safetyism, The Coddling of the American Mind, they used the title of Gray’s popular TEDx talk “The Decline of Play” as a chapter header. Haidt, who is an Atlantic contributor, told me that Gray was “the star academic” in the section of his book that deals with play. “I wish every school in America could hear a talk by Peter Gray,” he said.

Only recently has Gray expanded his idea in a way that is not quite so crowd-pleasing. Children’s need for unstructured play and exploration (guided by some safety rules and common sense) applies not just to vacant lots and city parks and backyards in the suburbs, he says, but to other settings too. It now extends to the wild spaces of the internet. “To grow up well, children have to be able to play in the world that they’re growing up in,” he told me when we spoke at his home in late winter. Kids should be free to play without their parents’ supervision, Gray insists, even when they go online.

Gray has always been a playful academic. As a graduate student at Rockefeller University during the late 1960s, he once filled every mailbox at the school with a note proclaiming that neckties were no longer required in the dining hall because they stifled thought by cutting off circulation to the brain. But the turning point in his career came a decade later, when his son, Scott, took up the mantle of rebelling at his school. Gray and his now-late wife moved him to a nontraditional school in Framingham, Massachusetts, where children received no formal coursework and directed their own education.

Scott thrived in his new environment, and Gray, who saw how much happier and more engaged his son became, pivoted from doing lab experiments on rats to making more philosophical explorations of play and learning. He also studied his son’s new school, publishing survey data on the careers and lives of its alumni, as well as detailed observations of how its students played.

Eventually, Gray would have enough of structured academia himself. By 2002, he’d made sufficient money off of a well-regarded psychology textbook that he was able to resign from Boston College and live comfortably in the small town of Millis, Massachusetts. The back of the wood-paneled house that he shares with his second wife is made entirely of glass, providing a broad view of the Charles River. By his account, his retirement has been as idyllic as his childhood. Gray sometimes kayaks against the current, up the river, for exercise.

When I visited him on a frigid day in March, he was wearing the uniform of a practical person—simple shoes, navy trousers, light layers topped with a grandpa cardigan. David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist and friend of Gray’s who is a professor emeritus at Binghamton University, described him to me as an old man with a “very boyish look.” I would say he is more like a child’s drawing of a nice old man: pure-white hair, a reedy frame, smile lines.

Wilson also described his friend as a pied piper, apparently intending this as a compliment. And from his riverside retreat, Gray has been involved in leading a movement. In 2017, he joined up with Haidt and two others to found the nonprofit Let Grow. The organization, which raised about $2 million in contributions in 2024, encourages parents and teachers to stop watching kids so intently, and tries to fight “neglect” laws that frame a lack of child supervision as criminal or reckless behavior. Let Grow has also developed a program called Play Club, through which schools can offer age-mixed free-play time when the kids (mostly) supervise themselves.

Gray and Haidt both served on the group’s board of directors. They had a collegial relationship, even though there were some minor differences in approach and worldview. The first of those was on the subject of kids and video games: Gray thought that video games provided kids with fruitful ways to play without adult control and was adamant about their value; Haidt respected that position but wasn’t so sure. The two psychologists also disagreed, from time to time, on whether kids should be using social media. But these seemed, at first, like secondary issues.

Then, in 2023, Haidt sent Gray a prepublication copy of his next book. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness opens with an extended metaphor comparing smartphone and tablet use to a spine-melting trip to Mars, and goes on to make the case that personal technology has caused a full-scale youth-mental-health crisis. Its argument seemed to fit the moment: Children were reporting that they didn’t like how much time they spent on social media and didn’t feel like they were in control of their habits; some were truly suffering. The Anxious Generation gave them—and their parents—language to describe what was happening.

[Read: End the phone-based childhood now]

Haidt’s book went on to spend more than two years on the New York Times best-seller list. It was translated into dozens of languages and excerpted in this magazine. And the policies that it suggests, to remove smartphones from schools and bar kids younger than 16 from social media, quickly came to seem like obvious solutions. (In the past few years, they’ve been taken up by legislators in the United States and abroad.)

But when Gray first read the manuscript in his lofted study overlooking the river, he was appalled. “The book frankly makes me mad,” he told me. “I have to say that. I think it’s unethical.” Although The Anxious Generation goes on at length about the benefits of free play, and even makes specific mention of Let Grow, its message overall was for Gray inimical to the nonprofit’s mission. As he sees it, the analysis improbably suggests that taking away phones would prompt kids to run around exploring as their grandparents had done. The few freedoms that kids had left were private communications with their friends and some independent movement, permitted only so long as they could be tracked and called. More than that, Haidt’s book implies that kids cannot be trusted to delve into the online world on their own, or even taught to do it safely. The internet is too dangerous for children—too full of scary strangers and powerful temptations—much in the same way that parents and pundits had decried the perils of the physical world generations before. Haidt had wanted feedback on the manuscript. Gray told him he disagreed with its premise.

Months later, after the book came out, Gray stepped down from the Let Grow board so that the other members wouldn’t feel caught in the middle of a conflict. Then he posted a critique to his Substack. Gray wrote that he took “no pleasure” in rebutting his colleague’s work. “I have tried to avoid it but no longer can,” he wrote. “As a society we have almost a knee-jerk reaction to believe that the solution to any problem experienced by kids is to deprive them of yet one more freedom, and this book is helping to jerk some of those knees even further.”

The two men haven’t spoken a word to each other since their falling-out. “Jonathan Haidt is a likable person,” Gray told me. “He’s polite. He’s generous.” Gray said he is a fan of Haidt’s previous work: “His strong point has always been kind of large, somewhat philosophical arguments based on general observations and a certain amount of evidence, and he’s very good at that.” But Gray viewed Haidt’s newest large, somewhat philosophical argument as not only incorrect but immoral.

The first time we spoke, Gray referred to social-media age minimums as a violation of human rights. When we met in person, I asked him whether that was truly his position. He repeated that it was. Before The Anxious Generation was published, Gray had been working on another book about the broad topic of play. But he scrapped that one after posting his rebuttal, and instead began to write a full-length counterpoint to Haidt’s ideas for an imprint at Penguin Random House. That book, titled Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety, is due to publish in September.

The new book will argue that the mental-health crisis affecting children is real, but has nothing whatsoever to do with what Gray describes as the “moral panic” over smartphones and social media. The real problem, he says, has to do with schools—and in particular with the 2010 rollout of the Common Core standards, which narrowed teachers’ options for creative curricula and increased the amount of time that the average American student spent taking tests.

To make that case, Gray points to the American Psychological Association’s annual Stress in America study, which surveyed kids in 2009, just before Common Core was introduced, and in 2013, just after. In 2009, 43 percent of U.S. teenagers said that performing well in school was a source of stress in their lives. In 2013, this number jumped to 83 percent. Gray found analogous survey data from before and after similar educational reforms in Sweden and England were put in place.

[Read: The flip-phone cleanse]

School policies were not the only things that changed from 2009 to 2013; smartphone use, for example, skyrocketed across the same few years. But lots of evidence affirms the notion that in America, at least, children are more stressed out by school than by any other aspect of their lives. Young people often say that they hate school, and youth suicides are far more common during the school year. In 2024, 68 percent of U.S. teenagers surveyed by Pew Research Center said that they felt a great deal or fair amount of pressure to get good grades—significantly more than those who said they felt pressure to look good or fit in. Studies of teens in North America and parts of Europe also suggest that school pressure has increased more for girls than it has for boys over the past two decades, which is consistent with the fact that, in some respects, the teen-mental-health crisis has been more intense for girls.

Restoring Childhood goes on to make another, even more surprising argument: It says that computers and video games have actually been responsible for improving children’s mental health. Teen suicides rose in every decade from the 1950s through the 1980s, Gray writes, as restrictions were increased on children’s freedoms. Anxiety and depression seem to have been rising too. But that trend was temporarily reversed by the arrival of the digital world. Suddenly, kids had a new place where they could connect with one another, make their own rules, and solve their own problems. They were among the early adopters of the new technologies, and so became authorities in their households, giving them a chance to feel competent and helpful. Teen-suicide rates never went back down to the levels of the 1950s, but they did decline by about 40 percent from 1990 to 2010. “Everybody was ignoring that,” Gray said. “Nobody was writing about that.”

Just two years ago, Penguin Random House put out The Anxious Generation. Now the publisher seems confident that people are ready for a counternarrative: Gray says that he received a $500,000 advance for his newest book. Wilson, the Binghamton professor and Gray’s friend, told me that he read the book in manuscript form and found himself convinced. “I want it to have the exact same exposure and impact as Jonathan’s book,” he said. “I would like it to be as splashy as it could be and to set up conversations at every level as to which of these interpretations is correct.”

You will not be surprised to hear that Haidt has a very different reading of the evidence. When I asked him what he made of the claim that computers were actually a boon to children’s mental health from 1990 to 2010, he instead proposed that any improvement during that period might have resulted from the phasing out and banning of leaded gasoline. (Lead exposure has been tied to developmental disorders and mental-health problems.) As for Gray’s critique of his smartphone-and-social-media hypothesis, Haidt said that it was overly reliant on the dissenting opinion of what he characterized as a minority of researchers. In particular, he mentioned Candice Odgers, a psychology professor at UC Irvine, and Christopher Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University.

Gray does feature Odgers and Ferguson in Restoring Childhood, but these are not the only scholars who have taken issue with the science as presented in The Anxious Generation. I spoke with more than a dozen people who study technology and child development, and many expressed concern that Haidt overstates the strength of correlational findings and suggests causation where it hasn’t been proved. (A 2024 report on teenagers’ use of social media from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concludes that “the scientific literature on the health effects of social media use is mixed and inconclusive.”) Several of them also quibbled—as did Gray—with Haidt’s emphasis on controlled experiments that found people’s mental health improved after breaks from social media. They said these are flawed because participants consciously or subconsciously know the results that are expected of them. (Haidt, when I put this to him, replied: “If all you can say is, Well, maybe they could guess the hypothesis, then you basically are saying all psychological research is useless.”)

[Read: What did people do before smartphones?]

But if the quality of Haidt’s arguments and evidence is up for debate, the same is true of Gray’s. The dangers facing kids on social media, for instance—in an ecosystem that was specifically designed to capture their attention for profit—aren’t quite analogous to those they’d find offline. Or take the crucial data from the Stress in America surveys, which are presented in Restoring Childhood as a meaningful signal of the harmful effects of Common Core reforms. Reported levels of school stress did double from 2009 to 2013, according to that work, but the numbers roughly doubled for other common stressors, too, including family finances—so any school-related effect on stress does not appear to be unique. When I asked Gray about this issue, he said it had been “nagging” at him, and that he was going to add a footnote to the book about it before publication. I pointed out to him a few weeks later that the surveyors had also changed their methodology between 2009 and 2013. The phrasing of the questions had shifted; the first survey had asked respondents to select their top two stressors, but the second one asked them to assign scores to a list of possible stressors. Gray was caught off guard by this, and he went on to ask his publisher to adjust or remove any reference to the Stress in America surveys. That request arrived too late to change the print edition, but Gray said he plans to make the edit to the ebook and audiobook.

Restoring Childhood does offer other lines of evidence, though. “I think there’s a reasonable hypothesis here,” Ferguson told me when I asked about Gray’s book, which he had read in advance, and blurbed. He said he thinks that focusing on schools as the source of children’s mental-health decline makes sense, but added that he would like to see more evidence that the school environment had gotten that much worse. “My memory of schools in the ’70s and ’80s was: They also sucked,” he said.

Odgers, who also provided an endorsement for Restoring Childhood, told me that she appreciates the fact that the book is “broadening the conversation” about children’s mental health to include “a major stressor as reported by young people, that we actually see in the data.” But she expressed frustration at the logic used by Gray and Haidt alike. She noted their shared willingness to apply one explanation (video games, unleaded gas) to the mental-health improvements of the 1990s and 2000s, and then a completely different one (Common Core, social media) to a later section of the same trend line. No serious epidemiologist would reason in this way, she said. Both Gray and Haidt tended to downplay other obvious factors, such as the severe adult-mental-health crisis that unfolded during the same years. “Caregiver mental health is by far the strongest predictor of childhood mental health,” Odgers said.

Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University, also pushed back on the idea that Common Core is the primary cause of mental-health problems among American kids. “This is a common trap that we fall into when trying to figure out what’s going on with those declines,” he told me. “We try to answer the question of ‘What one big thing can explain this?’ The answer, in my view, is that there isn’t one big thing.” This was generally the thesis of Etchells’s own book Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time (And How to Spend It Better), which came out the week before The Anxious Generation did, sold only a few thousand copies, and received hardly any attention at all.

Come September, the fight over that “one big thing” will be renewed. Which change that happened 15 years ago was the real source of so much misery for children? “You can’t run experiments on history,” Haidt said, so we’ll never be able to prove that smartphones and social media caused the steep decline in youth mental health. “We just have to say which hypothesis is more plausible,” he said—and he’s yet to hear one more plausible than his own.

When I met with Gray, he said that he has total confidence in his idea: “The evidence is really very overwhelming.” Later on, I tried to press the issue: Couldn’t there be some other factors in the mix? What if Common Core had been just one of many causes of the problem? “It would be nice” if there really weren’t any one big thing, he said, but he simply didn’t feel that this was the case. “So far, I haven’t heard of any other possibility that has the same plausibility.” He’d been studying the numbers and considering the alternatives, and he didn’t see how his theory could be wrong.

Why We Long for the Most Difficult Days of Parenthood

2022-10-19T13:35:28-04:00

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

Most trips to the grocery store are not particularly memorable, but there’s one I’ll never forget. It was the spring of 2019, and my then-four-month-old was in a car seat nestled into the shopping cart while her sister squirmed in the built-in seat. I was going about my usual business as a newly minted stay-at-home mom of two under 2—desperately cramming my to-do list into the brief and unpredictable windows between nursing sessions, diaper changes, and temper tantrums—when an older woman cut into my bleary-eyed view. “Enjoy it,” she told me. I nodded, smiled, and turned away to reach for something on a shelf, and she doubled down: “I’m serious, enjoy it. It goes so fast.”

This is something parents of young children hear ad nauseam and in a variety of ways: Don’t blink; cherish every second; it will be gone in a flash. It’s simple-enough advice—so simple that it hardly seems worth saying at all. Yet people feel compelled to give it, perhaps because it’s very difficult advice to follow.

[Read: Becoming a parent during the pandemic was the hardest thing I’ve ever done]

I’ll stop to make the usual caveats: I love my daughters. I wouldn’t trade them for the world. But there’s no question that the first few years of their lives have been the hardest of mine. Some stretches, particularly at the height of the pandemic, were nothing short of grueling. Things have gotten more manageable since, but I’ve never turned down an opportunity to get away from my kids for a couple of hours. I rejoiced when my 3-year-old started preschool this fall. I wouldn’t say I’m cherishing every second.

It is a small comfort that I am not alone in struggling to relish this phase of parenthood. Research on parenting and happiness is mixed, but much of it suggests that child-rearing isn’t particularly enjoyable. In the United States (and in some but not all other advanced industrialized nations), becoming a parent takes a toll on well-being, which doesn’t recover until the kids leave the house. Nevertheless, if my elders are any indication, many people come to recall the chaotic early years of parenting very fondly. There is even some data to back this up: In a study published last year, researchers asked people over the age of 50 in several European countries to retrospectively assess when they were happiest. Respondents consistently pointed to their early 30s—a finding partially explained, for those who had kids, by the fact that those years lined up with when their kids were born.

It’s hard to know what to make of the knowledge that in time, I’ll pine for these days I often find myself laboring through. By some accounts, the me of the future will simply misremember what life is like right now. The sociologist Daniel Gilbert once likened a day spent caring for a 3-year-old to a baseball game that remains scoreless until the bottom of the ninth. Fans remember the thrilling moments of the game-winning home run and not much else. According to that theory, I’ll forget the screeching and the mess of getting my 3-year-old out the door in the morning, and remember only the delight that passes across her face when we first make eye contact at school pickup.

But conversations with parents of children who have flown the nest suggest it’s more complicated than that. Most of those I consulted had not forgotten the crushing difficulty of that era. Yet they found themselves longing for it anyway.

Alison Woods, a children’s-book author and mother of three, told me that when her kids were small, she once told her own mother that she wished she could run away. Christine Hohlbaum, an author and a mother of two, has spent much of her writing career calling attention to the chaos and strain of caring for small children. Still, they and other parents I spoke with admitted that as their roles and relationships with their kids evolved over time, they came to view those early years in a new light.

For one thing, as parenting gets easier in some ways, it gets harder in others. The earliest years of parenting are most demanding of time and energy, most likely to cause “role overload,” and most disruptive to one’s sleep, work, and marriage. Yet they are not necessarily the worst for well-being. According to some research, parental satisfaction and fulfillment declines, and stress rises slightly, as children age into school and then adolescence. This makes some sense: Although the duties of caring for a small child who can do nothing for himself are all-encompassing and relentless, they are also fairly straightforward. But as children age, their problems become more complex. “Instead of ‘I have a boo-boo; I need a kiss,’ you’re looking at ‘I’m not sure what I want to do with my life’ and ‘My crush doesn’t love me back,’” Vered DeLeeuw, a food blogger with two grown daughters, told me. And while a parent’s responsibility to solve their children’s problems diminishes as those kids approach adulthood, the desire to do so never does; the pressure of tending to their children’s every need is supplanted by the helplessness of being unable to do so. “All you can do is give advice when they ask for it, then step aside and let them deal with life’s challenges,” DeLeeuw said. That means watching your kids make mistakes and accepting that there is suffering in this world from which we are unable to shield them.

[Read: There is no road map for the longest phase of parenthood]

Other parents note that the nature of the relationship between parent and child changes over time in ways that are hard to stomach. One of the reasons parenting gradually gets less demanding is that parents become less central to a child’s happiness. School and friends, and eventually partners and work, take precedence, and parents shift into the child’s periphery. Although the utter physical dependency of a small child on their parents can be overwhelming, it comes with an intimacy that is impossible to preserve as the child matures. “I have a great relationship with my daughter now,” Marie Graham, a mother of one from Salford, England, who runs a wellness company, told me. “But the intensity of the relationship you have with your young child, you’re never going to re-create.” Regardless of how close my daughter and I remain, there will come a time when she no longer seeks comfort by crawling into my lap. Whatever liberation comes with that transition will be bittersweet.

All of this is difficult to appreciate as it happens, for various reasons. Beyond the particular financial and logistical strains of raising kids in modern industrialized economies, early parenting is physically uncomfortable, Hohlbaum pointed out. It’s hard to admire the curl taking shape in a child’s hair when you haven’t had a full night’s rest in months and are covered in another human’s bodily fluids. Likewise, the joys of parenthood can be overshadowed by the fear of screwing it up. “We’re really trying not to make any life-defining mistakes,” Woods said. Graham suspects that the singularity of the bond between a parent and a young child gets lost in the overwhelm and monotony of living it every moment of every day.

Only with distance from the minute-to-minute anxieties of caring for a small child does its sweeping beauty come into full view. But this isn’t so much a shortcoming of youth as it is a gift of age. The experiences that follow early parenthood enrich our understanding of it, allowing us to ponder it anew. Hindsight allows us to put suffering into context and recognize the purpose it served in our lives. Hohlbaum likened it to laying bricks in a road: Only after we find out where the path leads are we able to see the purpose each brick served in getting us there. People with grown children have a deeper appreciation for the initial years of parenthood, because they are observing it from a perspective that only time can grant.

There’s no sense in trying to cherish every moment of early parenting as it happens, Graham told me. Too much is going on, and much of it isn’t enjoyable. But keep an eye out for the precious moments amid the tumult and chaos, she said. Do what you can to imprint them in your memory—write them down, or share them with friends. Collect them like gems, so that when your arms are finally free and your eyes are a little clearer, you can turn them over in your hand.

Beach Vacationers Are Doing It Wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The reason our minds wander]

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

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

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

[Read: Go for a walk]

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

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

Lilies

2022-05-22T08:00:00-04:00

The poet Mary Oliver was a legendary observer of nature. She chronicled scuttling hermit crabs and mossy hollows, “freshets of wind” and the “wild, clawed light” of the sun.

Her reverence for the natural world was clear—not just because she described it so frequently, but because of her exquisite detail. Oliver wrote with the kind of precision that came from the heightened attention of deep love. Indeed, she said that discovering the woods around her Ohio home—as a child enduring grave hardship—saved her life.

Oliver’s work isn’t just about flora and fauna, though; it’s about how people relate to nature. When her poems paint the living things of this world, she herself is part of the picture—seeing, smelling, hearing, writing. In “Lilies,” her presence is explicit. As lovely as the flowers are, she can’t relate to their detachedness. If she were one, she wrote, “I think I would wait all day / for the green face / of the hummingbird / to touch me.”

It’s this hunger—for connection, for meaning, for answers—that makes us human, Oliver implies. Admittedly, it sounds nice to live like a lily, melting “without protest” on a cow’s tongue. But this poem makes me feel a funny kind of pride to be part of our ever-suffering species. The most human qualities, the ones that can make us feel so lonely, also drive us to think and create. Perhaps they once drove a little girl to wander into the Ohio woods, and to look for words to capture what she found.

— Faith Hill

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The Hidden Cost of Optimizing Everything

2026-07-10T13:00:00-04:00

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Modern life is built to make things easier, faster, and more efficient. But what if, in smoothing away life’s everyday frictions, we’ve also lost something essential? This week on Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel talks with The Atlantic’s Ian Bogost about his new book, The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life, and why the tiny rituals, sensory pleasures, and routine interactions we tend to overlook may be the very things that make us feel connected—to one another, to the world around us, and to ourselves.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Ian Bogost: So think about this in, like, really simple terms: You’re cooking dinner. Your goal is to produce a dinner. But the experience of cooking—of hearing the sizzling onions in the pan, or of chopping up the vegetables, or of opening and closing the refrigerator and feeling the gasket as you do so—all of that stuff, which is really gratifying, that’s the experience of cooking. And it doesn’t make sense to think about it in terms of goals and outcomes that you can optimize.

[Music]

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to sweat the small stuff.

There’s this line from the author Kurt Vonnegut that I love. It’s from a 1995 interview in Inc. magazine where Vonnegut recounts, just as personal computing is really taking off, his love for doing things in a more analog way.

There’s this one trip to the post office he talks about: heading to the newsstand, waiting in line, making small talk with the shopkeeper. The satisfaction of sealing the envelope and bringing it to the woman he has a crush on behind the counter. He ends the anecdote with the following: “I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I’ve had a hell of a good time. And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

That quote has been banging around in my head over the last few years, as the world continues to embrace the kind of technological progress that sands down the edges of our lives and keeps our faces in our screens. There’s Amazon, Doordash, parking-lot pickup, which can be genuine godsends for people. But it’s a convenience that also comes with a trade-off of not having to live in the world, among other people in the same way that we used to. In terms of farting around, our devices offer endless, engrossing distraction from the physical world. In part, our technologies have created this world where everything can be quantified. This has birthed this optimization culture and a broader obsession with metrics and efficiency.

My guest today argues that, while not all of this is bad, it can come at a genuine cost. Many people have, without really deciding on it, become more disconnected from a sense of place, from a sense of self, and from the tiny, visceral, sensory experiences of being present in the world just like Vonnegut describes.

Ian Bogost is my colleague here at The Atlantic, where he writes about technology. He’s an author; a professor and administrator at Washington University in St. Louis; and a game designer. But he’s also one of the keenest observers I’ve ever met: not just of how technology changes us but of all those little quirks that make up our lives.

And that, coincidentally, is what his new book, The Small Stuff, is about. In it, Ian makes the case that some of our societal obsessions—self-optimization, career satisfaction, this constant fixation on whether we are adequately happy or not—those are all aimed at the Big Stuff. But our lives are actually dominated by the Small Stuff: the Vonnegut-style farting around that gives texture to our days. This, he argues, is good news, because the Small Stuff is abundant, and it’s actually much easier to notice, to control. And doing so can bring us a sense of genuine gratification, the kind that so many of our technologies just automate away.

Now, you may be thinking that this all sounds just a bit nostalgic—a couple of guys lamenting about the good old days. But Ian’s argument in The Small Stuff isn’t some screed against technology. It is, however—in a moment where AI is rapidly automating the world—a book about cultivating and strengthening the qualities that make us different than the machines, that bring us joy. That make us human. And so, Ian joins me now to talk about it all.

Sign up for Ordinary Extraordinary, Ian Bogost’s guide to making everyday life vivid. You’ll receive one edition every Saturday for the next eight weeks.

[Music]

Warzel: Ian, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

Ian Bogost: Thank you so much, Charlie.

Warzel: So we’re here to talk about the small stuff. You have a book that is all about the small stuff. Can you tell me broadly what is the thesis here of paying attention to the small stuff?

Bogost: So the idea is that we have become disconnected from our sensory lives. That’s sort of the thesis of the book. And this happened slowly over years and decades. It happened in part because of technology, but not entirely because of technology. And we kind of didn’t notice that that was happening. And we maybe, we blamed smartphones instead of a whole host of other factors. But the result is that we feel disconnected, you know? Like, decoupled from the world that we live in, from the physical world.

And that connection, that sensory connection where you engage with the world with your senses, which is what I call gratification: We’ve lost a lot of that. We forgot about it. We were too busy optimizing, planning for the future, trying to make our lives more purposeful or happier, that we forgot how to be gratified. And that’s what I think we should reclaim.

Warzel: You allude to some surveys. There’s a lot of information out about this—

Bogost: There’s a lot of them.

Warzel: That we’re in a bit of a “happiness crisis,” but—

Bogost: “Happiness crisis” is the way that it’s always described, yeah.

Warzel: Right, yes. Which is a funny thing. I imagine a happiness factory, and there’s just like red alarms going off and like minion-style workers pulling levers.

Bogost: Yeah, a wrench is in the happiness machine and is no longer able to produce happiness widgets for the masses.

Warzel: Exactly, which is a crisis by all accounts. Happiness, you also say, is this kind of amorphous thing. And you were just alluding to it there with gratification, but you have happiness, satisfaction, and gratification as these three types of things. Can you walk me through the differences in that?

Bogost: Yeah, totally. So at a high level, think of happiness as your overall sense of contentment with your life. How things are going, broadly speaking. And it’s usually related to big stuff: to your connection to your family or your spouse or your kids. Your sense of satisfaction at work and whether you feel purpose at work. Whether you’re connected to your community, whether your life means something and is worthwhile. It’s really big stuff.

It’s also very hard to define. I’m not sure that anyone really knows what happiness is, despite millennia of attempts to define it. And it’s usually kind of like retrospective; like you sort of look back at happiness, or you plan forward for it. Like, How can I be happier? Oh, I need a different job; I need a different wife. Whatever it is. So that’s happiness.

Satisfaction is a little simpler. It’s more like pride in accomplishment. So the satisfaction test is like: You put your hands on your hips, and you look at something you’ve done. And you think, Oh, yeah; that was a good podcast I just recorded. That’s satisfaction. And satisfaction is also a big-stuff kind of contentment. So you only feel satisfied when a project was big and worth doing. You know, like you finish a big woodworking project, or you write a book like I just did, or even you make a nice meal and you serve it to your family. And then you feel satisfied.

Gratification is weirder. It’s much smaller. It’s—I describe it as the sensory enchantment of everyday life. It’s little tiny connections to the world. So the sound of my voice in your ears right now, or the feeling of a warm mug as you hold it in the morning, full of coffee. Or the texture of the shirt on my body when I touch it; the sound of leaves or twigs crunching under my feet when I walk; the feeling of the sun on my skin in the summer. Those are sensory encounters. And gratification is just the sort of connection, the sense of connectivity to the physical world that they deliver, that those encounters deliver.

Unlike happiness and unlike satisfaction, it happens right away. You either take it, or it’s gone forever. Because it’s instantaneous. It’s in the moment. And they’re usually tiny—like small scale. Because your senses are always receiving information from the world. It’s also—there’s a huge surplus of gratification, unlike happiness or satisfaction. You feel like there’s only a limited amount of it. I better make the right choice. What if I move to the wrong city? What if I work on the wrong project? I’ll miss out. But this idea of just being in the world every moment: I think we’ve massively underestimated the power of that.

Warzel: You argue, though, that gratification—and particularly instant gratification—get a very bad rap. Societally, culturally. Why do you think that is, and why do you disagree with that?

Bogost: Yeah. I trace this to a series of behavioral-science experiments that began in the late 1960s. A Stanford psychologist named Walter Mischel and some of his colleagues and then successors began running a series of experiments on young children. And they became known as the “marshmallow-test experiments.” And what they would do is, they would take little kids from the Stanford preschool, and they’d put them in a room. And they’d have a researcher go in and offer them a small treat—usually a marshmallow, but sometimes it was a pretzel or something else—and tell them: You can have this treat now. Or if you wait, then you can have two of them. Or you can have a bigger one. And they used this experiment as a way to determine whether individuals with more self-control, or what they perceived to be more self-control, would be more successful in their lives.

But even, despite what the studies said about any of the individuals who participated, they introduced this idea that gratification is bad. And that instant gratification is indulgence—that it’s kind of like sin, and that it’s associated with addiction-like behaviors. Maybe not addiction writ large, but addiction-like behaviors. So, you know: eating too much, sex, gambling, alcohol, even the marshmallow itself, right? Which is a treat. You shouldn’t have too many treats, should you, right? Like—why don’t you wait? And you can eat something better later.

So that whole idea, I think, turned gratification into this bad word. And instead of focusing on the moment and what would be pleasurable in the moment, you should always delay. You should always defer. You should always wait ’til later. Something better is likely to come along if you withhold that indulgence in order to invest that effort, that time, what have you, in future outcomes. So I think that’s completely wrong.

Warzel: Well so, we can get into why it is. But the immediate, like—as I’m listening to you talk about all of this—the immediate ideological analogue here is optimization culture, right? That, as you write, kind of splits the world into this binary of “productive and good” versus “dangerous and indulgent.” Like you said, almost vice-esque. Where does optimization culture fit into the gratification argument?

Bogost: The forces that have disconnected us from everyday life—I have this name, dematerialization, for all of those different forces. Technology, bureaucracy, efficiency, even economic factors: They have been leaning toward optimization and efficiency for years and years and years now. And so we’ve been sort of slowly led to believe, so much that we don’t even realize we’re believing, that all that matters are outcomes. Especially measurable outcomes. And so anything that isn’t focused on a future goal feels like it’s not worth doing, or that it’s less worth doing than something else. And one way to think about the gratification problem is in terms of the difference between goals or outcomes and experiences. Because the experiences are different from the outcomes that they might produce.

So think about this in, like, really simple terms: You’re cooking dinner. Your goal is to produce a dinner. And you know, maybe you want to do it at a certain cost, or it has to taste a certain way, or you have to feed a certain number of people, or it has to be ready at a certain time. And there’s all sorts of factors that go into it. And you hope it tastes good. You hope people enjoy it and they praise you, all that kind of stuff. But the experience of cooking—of hearing the sizzling onions in the pan, or of chopping up the vegetables, or of opening and closing the refrigerator and feeling the gasket as you do so—all of that stuff, which is really gratifying, that’s the experience of cooking. And it doesn’t make sense to think about it in terms of goals and outcomes that you can optimize. What would it mean to optimize the sound of onions sizzling? That you should like continuously do it? No; that doesn’t make any sense. It’s just a part of the experience.

And so, because we’re so focused on goals—and so, like, singularly focused on goals and outcomes—optimization culture, efficiency culture plugs right into that idea. Which is also kind of the premise of happiness thinking. You know: Happiness is about future outcomes. It’s about doing things that are worth doing, rather than things that feel good in the moment. You’re supposed to set aside those things in order that you can produce a greater sense of purpose and ultimately happiness.

So you might think of optimization as the sort of like workhead version of happiness, in a way. It’s like happiness, but for outcomes. And for that reason, it’s related to that idea of missing out on what’s happening in the moment in order to produce supposedly better future results. It just doesn’t take much thinking to realize everybody realizes this all the time, right? You’re like: Wait a minute; what am I doing, though? Why am I doing any of these things? What is the experience of doing them? And I think that disconnect, which all of us have all the time, is where we start feeling guilty instead of feeling good about the moments that we’re having.

Warzel: And it’s also just this very like puritanical way of being, right?

Bogost: Oh, yeah. Totally.

Warzel: Like, I think so much about all the influencers I see. You know, like they’re not experiencing any of the life. They’re, in a way, just speed-running it to get to the goal, right?

Bogost: Right. And then the goal only leads to another goal. One of the things that’s been so confusing to me about the whole of, like, Silicon Valley–style success culture and wealth culture is that it never ends. And everyone I know personally or know of who’s been immensely successful in business in the technology industry—which I think is driving a lot of that efficiency discourse that you’re talking about—the moment they achieve massive success, financial success, renown, all of that, it’s just: Well, what’s next? What’s your next play? There has to be more of it. They don’t even like open a winery or a distillery or whatever it is. Like, something that’s wasteful, right? It’s like: We’re gonna start up my new venture, invest in another fund, do more, more, more, more, more.

Warzel: Well, this actually happened. There was a thing that went viral the other day of Mark Zuckerberg talking about his farm that he has in Hawaii, where he’s trying to become the absolute best, most efficient farmer. I want the absolute best cows possible. And he’s talking about this experience of, you know, the macadamia trees, and all: And that’s what we’re gonna feed them, but then how do we process it so it’s maximally efficient for these cows to eat? And the way he’s describing it is in this “efficient” way, where it’s like—this is this guy’s hobby. And yet at the same time, it is just approached with what seems like zero joy. It’s just: I have to get to the maximally efficient outcome.

Bogost: No, sure. Totally. Yeah.

Warzel: I want to talk a little bit about that. The dematerialization thing, and this disconnecting people from the physical world that they inhabit. What does that look like? Like, where do you feel that most acutely?

Bogost: The example I always go to first—the one that everyone understands immediately—is you go into a public restroom at an airport or a convention center or a hotel or wherever you are. Your office building. And the toilet flushes for you with a sensor, and the faucet turns on, maybe if you’re lucky, with a sensor that you wave your hands under, and the soap is dispensed in a similar way. And when you need to dry your hands, you go and you wave them under another sensor. You’re no longer engaging with those ordinary objects. And that kind of experience—which seems very unimportant. Like, do you really need to flush a toilet, especially in public? What are you telling me? But if you think of those little experiences that you no longer do, you no longer engage in, in the same deep-sensory way that you once did.

And while they seem tiny and immaterial, maybe, and unimportant and even silly to mention individually—in the aggregate, it all adds up to this sense of decoupling. Of disconnection. Some of them are technologized, you know? During the pandemic, we started scanning QR codes at restaurants so that we’d not have to touch stuff. And now, like most menus, or large number of menus, at restaurants are just QR codes. And now you don’t get to touch that kind of thing anymore. That’s not a part of your life any longer. You know, so there is sort of a giant pile of stuff like that, right?

Warzel: Yeah. Well, what’s interesting too—like, just to use the QR-code one as an example—is the daisy-chain effect that happens with that, right? Where it’s not just like, Yeah, it can be annoying, or I’m used to having a menu; I like the tactile feel of the menu. There’s all that. But the QR code replaces the need for someone to come to the table and say, “Hey, what do you want?” Because you’re ordering through the app, and then, with that you’ve lost that one interaction there. And then that continues to daisy-chain throughout the thing.

Bogost: And after a while you’re like, Why, I don’t need that. I clearly didn’t need that. It’s much more efficient to do it that way. So that must have been valueless the whole time. But it wasn’t.

Warzel: Right. And you make another argument with remote work that’s kind of similar, that I’d like to hear more about. Partially because I wrote a book about remote work a while back.

Bogost: Right.

Warzel: But this idea, that the sameness of knowledge work is part of the reason why people don’t feel that pull to go in the office, right? I’m clacking on a keyboard doing the same thing there that I would be doing in my office with headphones on. Can you elaborate more on that, and how that’s just like that “sameness” element, and how that’s affecting how we move about the world?

Bogost: Yeah. So there’s a category of workers, of white-collar workers, that I talk about in the book that are called professionals. We used to call them professionals. I know a professional just kind of means a white-collar worker now, but it used to mean someone who had to get, like, certification—like an architect or a doctor or a lawyer. And that’s an interesting class to look at, because those people typically also had work lives that involved being in particular places. Maybe they had an office, but the doctor’s also in the clinic or the hospital or moving from exam room to exam room. And the lawyer may have to go to a different office to do a deposition, or they have to go to court. And the architect has to be on a job site, for example, wearing their hard hat. Like you would see in a stock image or something like that. And even a journalist, right? Like, would have to be on site: reporting, talking to people, being in another space. tThat wasn’t just them at their computer, making phone calls or sending emails.

And as more and more of those kinds of jobs that used to be really bound to specific places, in addition to the general like white-collar worker who’s in office, you know, “email jobs,” as we call them now. Everyone got to the point where they didn’t choose not to do that. And it wasn’t just because of work from home, COVID stuff. It was that all sorts of factors. Economics, in terms of it was much easier to just be on Zoom instead of going places.

That sort of stole away from us the ability to do all the stuff that comes with those kinds of movements through space and time that don’t have anything to do with your job. If you were a court reporter or you were an attorney, and you ended up in the same courtroom or a series of different courtrooms. And you know, like, which one had the best coffee at the little coffee-vending machine, and then you get to press the button on the vending machine. Or go down a certain kind of stairway that had a certain feeling when you wore your heels against it. All of that gratifying experience of just moving in and being in the world has nothing to do with your job, actually. Nothing to do with your work, but through which you derive contentment. That just evaporates.

And I think because of all of those factors—some, not all—but some of the sense that we have of our work being meaningless, of not knowing why we’re doing it or not knowing why we’re doing it in an office versus at home, is that we don’t know that we lost that. We haven’t thought about that as a loss. Even in a normal office, you know, you’ll hear line workers saying, Well, management just wants us here so they can control us. Right? Or because it’s easier to manage, you know, if we’re all in one place.

But the truth is that all that weird stuff that happens when you’re getting a Diet Coke, or you’re getting coffee, or you’re, you know, stumbling to lunch together, or you run into someone in the elevator—those kinds of experiences don’t just produce more efficient or better work, although they might. They’re also experiences of connectivity with your colleagues, with other people, with other materials in the world.

And you see, Charlie’s got this, you know, interesting kind of plum-colored shirt on today. That’s nice. So it looks like a nice texture. Where did you get that shirt, Charlie? Actually, what did you do this weekend? And I got this shirt. You have this—you see someone’s eyes, and you see that, you hear their voice, and you’re just engaged with them in a different way. You smell the cologne or perfume that they’re wearing. You see the way that they walk to and from. You kind of feel their physical presence nearby you. All that stuff isn’t just about, like, being more efficient or productive. It’s also about being more alive in the world.

And so I think one of the reasons why our work feels just so stripped of meaning isn’t just because the work itself is meaningless. Or isn’t because, like, They’re making me do it in the office, and I’ve got to trundle to work. You know, gotta get in the car, I gotta get in the subway. It’s also because we stopped expecting those kinds of—we stopped looking for those kinds of experiences, even when we’re having them. And nowadays, you can go into an office and it’s just: Everybody’s just in their headphones. Just alone, you know? They’re not engaged with it anymore, because they kind of forgot that it was a part of their lives in the first place.

And I guess one thing I want to say here is, this kind of dematerialization effect—it’s not your fault. Like, you didn’t choose this. Nobody decided: You know what, I want to have a more efficient life. And so I no longer want to know what my colleagues are wearing, in order that I might see the colors of their garments. No one chose any of that. It happened slowly, and it happened in ways that we didn’t really have a say in.

Warzel: Well, and the thing. I think some people might hear you talk about this and immediately their mind will go to: Well, I don’t wanna make work my entire life. I don’t wanna make this my—you know, I like the fact that it’s completely decoupled. But I think what you’re actually talking about in the journalism example, you know, is one that I’ve actually thought about quite a bit. And I think it’s the same for a lot of different professions. But in journalism it actually, it has a different valence. You know, we have this erosion of local news in the world, right?

Bogost: Yeah.

Warzel: And as part of that, there’s a lot fewer journalists who are going around in communities, right, in small-town communities. There’s a lot of national journalists who will parachute into places, you know, like ourselves or whatnot. And something I’ve thought about, living in various small towns across America throughout my life, is that some of those people now have such resentment of the media. For reasons good or bad, or whatnot, in part because they don’t have any relationship to these types of people, right? If I’m just calling it, if I’m not in the world doing my job—in the world with other people, having the mundane experiences, right? Like, someone kinda cut in front of me in line to get into the courtroom. And I’m like, No worries. Go ahead, you know. And someone goes, Wow, that’s like; thanks. That’s gracious, right? And just clocks something tiny, like that.

Just these interactions that mean “nothing.” Those are the things that build these—they don’t just make us happy too, but they build these other, like, societal bonds, right? They just link us in ways large and small. But that lack of gratification, broadly speaking, has this effect of kind of making us more distrustful, more suspicious of other people. Because we have less of those humanizing interactions.

Bogost: Yeah; one of the ways I think about gratification is as like a foundation. If you think about it as foundational. So it seems unimportant, because it’s made of these little tiny bits. And it’s easy to discount and discard it. But what you’re saying is something related—which is that just being human, like being a part of the world, a full member of society, also means being in it physically with other things and with other people.

And the less that we do that, or the more that we scorn doing it, or the more that we think that it’s kind of unimportant, because it would be much more efficient if I just got online to do it that way instead, or we just send a reporter into your small town to go to the local diner and pretend like they care about the people that they’re talking to, right? Or whatever the joke is about how national reporters work. That then, we can just get the information, you know, like: Let’s just get the story and then get back out again. When what you miss in that experience is the experience. You know, what is it like to be in this place? What does the air feel like?

And I don’t know about you, but when I do this work as a journalist, when I go somewhere, it radically changes the story, right? It’s a completely different experience, because you’re engaged with the world in a holistic way. And that’s just irreplaceable, in a way. You just, you can’t end-run around it. You can’t pursue efficiency in order to excise it, because the experience matters fundamentally.

Warzel: You write that “technology has allowed personal intimacy and connection to flourish too much, and anywhere.” That struck me just as a sentence. But also because there is a way in which someone can read that, say that feels a little counterintuitive to your argument. So draw that out for me. Tell me a little bit more what you mean: Technology has allowed intimacy and connection to flourish too much and anywhere.

Bogost: Maybe the best way to sort of put a pin on it is—you know how at some point in the last 15 years, everybody you know, you can’t make plans with anymore. Where it’s like, Well, we’ll see. And everyone’s kind of waiting for something better to come along. And you’re like, Yeah, no, I’ll come out tonight. And then, I’m sorry, like I just can’t make it. I’m tired. Or I’m sick. When really it’s: I don’t really feel like doing it, or There’s this other thing, or even just I am watching Netflix instead. Because there’s an enormous surplus of information online. We have too many choices and too many options.

I’ve written about this before for The Atlantic. You know, the sense that before the smartphone, we were pretty bored actually. Like, there wasn’t as much to do. And you would like read the back of like, you know, whatever magazine was at the dentist’s office or look at shampoo bottles or watch the clock spin. And that felt soul-destroying at the time, but it also engaged you more deeply with everything that was kind of outside of your head.

And now we live in this world of symbols, all the time, that we can generate and we can exchange. And I think that that gave us the sense that we—it’s sort of like we don’t need our physical bodies. Like, anything I want is in infospace. I can consume it as an idea. I can create it as an idea. And this is, to some extent, where like the singular singularitarian dream comes from. I can just upload my brain, and it doesn’t matter that I have a body anymore. Because I can discard it and be the same person that I actually am. Because all that matters is my connection to information, like the most extreme version of it. But we kind of believe it on an ordinary day-to-day level too.

And it’s just wrong. And you know it’s wrong anytime you have a real earnest encounter with a person, or you’re speaking to someone across a counter, and it’s just you and them. And maybe you’re even having dispute, and you’re trying to resolve it, and you’re looking into their eyes—and they’re another human being and not just an account with an anime icon. And it forces you to live in a different headspace because you’re in a different physical space. So like, the way that technology has changed us isn’t just about the extent to which we use it. That’s what you normally think: I’m just using this too much. But it’s also that we use it differently. We live our lives differently because of it.

Warzel: I kind of agree with you here. But also there’s an element that some people may uncharitably read as, you know, wanting the good old days back, right? So if someone’s gonna approach you about the small-stuff argument and say, Yes, as you said, so much of this is frivolous, but it’s also just—it’s not coming back. I don’t know, how do you approach that person?

Bogost: Yeah, right. There is a counter-response to this force, this force of dematerialization that’s been going on for a little while, that sort of reads as nostalgia. Like the drive to kind of analog culture. Or we’re gonna try to reclaim—I’m gonna have a dumb phone now instead of a smartphone, or I’m gonna spin vinyl. That drive comes from the same problem that I’m at, that I call dematerialization. But instead of moving forward, what it does is say: We have to go back again. And we’ll try to reclaim these little bits that are available to us. That’s the nostalgia version.

The “friction-maxxing” version, I think, is equally wrong in a different way. What it’s saying is, like—if the problem is efficiency, if everything got too smooth and easy, then we should make it hard again. And that’s even weirder as a conclusion to come to, because the thing about gratification that’s so striking to me is how easy it is. It’s not hard at all, or it doesn’t have to be.

So the answer to the question is that we can’t go back. You’re right. But we don’t have to.

This has been the hardest thing to get across and to try to convince people of, as I’ve been working on this project—that there’s an enormous surplus of sensory life that’s constantly available and happening all the time. Because we believe that we’ve lost it or that someone has taken it from us. Or that we’re siphoning it into our smartphones, or that we used to have it, but now my job is too terrible, or I can’t own a home anymore.

And those things are all true—but you’re still a body in the world, and you’re still engaged with that world at every moment of every day of your life. So that’s a very different way of approaching the reclamation of this loss than, like, trying to lament the past or trying to invent new technologized and kind of efficiency-driven ways of procuring it in the future.

Warzel: I am someone who struggles pretty hard with ambition, being in my own head, constantly focusing on what you’re calling the big stuff, right? I have a big-stuff-focused brain.

Bogost: Yeah, I think a lot of us do.

Warzel: Which also means that I’m constantly trying to do the opposite, right? I’m trying to do the work of focusing on gratitude, of being more present in moments to keep the other stuff at bay. And when I start doing it, I have this sensation that I’ll be walking down the street, and it’s a really nice day, and I hear the birds all of a sudden, right? Or I see a great cloud. And it brings me this level of what you will call gratification. But the sensation is small. I’m not overwhelmed by it, right?

And then the big-stuff part of my brain just takes over, and it goes: That’s it? That’s the “solution?” And this then just triggers the big-stuff brain to just start worrying away, with these promises of like: No, no; there’s a stronger satisfaction. If you make this, you know, jump in your career, if you do this thing, like that’s going to be the kind of satisfaction that makes your knees buckle. How do you square that and the small feeling of it with the promise that the big brain offers?

Bogost: I’m gonna give you the galaxy-brain answer to this question, which is that you can have both. I’m not asking you to choose between ambition or purpose, or even happiness and gratification—but to recognize that what are you gonna do instead of taking in that smell of the salty surf? Like, what would happen instead? What would you lose if you didn’t? All that you’d lose is that gratifying experience of having done so.

You can keep on advancing in your career and trying to solve the problems in your marriage and trying to improve the lives of your children and trying to connect with your community through volunteership. Or whatever it is that you think will make you happy and give you purpose. You can keep doing that, and you can also feel the sand between your toes. Right. And you know, when I say this, it’s like: Of course, duh. Like obviously. You can do that.

And yet, we’ve still kind of forgotten it, haven’t we? Or we feel guilty about it in the way that you’re describing. Or maybe it’s not even guilt—maybe it’s a sense of habit, or a sense that even that little shard of mental space that’s processing my senses would be better spent planning my app, or whatever it is that you do for a living.

Warzel: Right, right. We’re talking a lot about the embodied nature of things and paying attention to our bodies. And I wonder if you ever think about this book, and the arguments, in some ways as a kind of handbook for cultivating the things that make us different than the machines. Because some of the debates that we’re having over artificial intelligence and superintelligence—and the differences between machines simulating human consciousness and human consciousness—is that we’re the ones that have the bodies. We’re in meatspace. We know what it feels like to get a sunburn. We know what it feels like to be caught in the rain.

Do you think about that as it relates to a future where we’re going to be interacting a lot with things that simulate human intelligence or consciousness, but they’re not embodied?

Bogost: Right. They simulate a certain kind of human intelligence that’s decoupled from embodiment. Here’s the weirdest thing, though, to me. The way that AI is pushing people, and maybe I’ll just speak for myself, the way it’s pushing me back into the physical world as much as it is continuing to undermine that connection to it. A lot of the work that I do with AI is me asking questions that then force me to do things with my hands, you know?

Warzel: Really?

Bogost: Yeah, like I’ll give you an example. I have a new kitchen counter getting installed this week. Okay. And the stone guys, they had to move the range, and they knocked off the knob for the oven control. And because of the way my range is built, that means like a whole replacement of this whole thermostat assembly, because it was like just a piece of zinc that broke off.

And, you know, in the past I would have been like angry at the workers, or I would have been calling up, you know, my contractor or the appliance-repair people. And now I’m like: I mean, I wonder what part this is. I bet the chat can tell me, and it can tell me. And, you know, like how would I repair this if I wanted? You could go to YouTube and do that for you, but it’s something different. Like, I’ll take a picture and I’ll show you. I see which one you have.

And you know, it’s trying to use what it can do as an information system in order to sort of push me, by invitation, to reengage with part of the physical world that was available to me the whole time—but that I had determined wasn’t something that I knew how to engage with anymore. And I’ve had like just dozens, maybe hundreds of those kinds of experiences over the past couple of years. That aren’t about, like, automating my work or stealing the experience of doing whatever it is I might be doing, communicating with other people, right? All the stuff people are worried about. But are more about reminding me that that world is out there. It’s available to me.

And so in that way, I’m encouraged that this—almost like this dialectic of the info space and the physical space might still be traversable. That we might be able to move between them more readily and with greater fluency. There’s some future of the AI thing that looks like that—and not where it steals all of our work and all of our connectivity with ourselves and with the world. I don’t know if we’ll be able to achieve that, but I certainly think there are signs that we could steer it in that direction.

Warzel: When I think about that, I think that there’s a good point there. Which is when you’re asking these types of machines, a computer that is truly interactive. Like, I can ask a follow-up question to computer, and computer can figure this thing out. That to me, when it’s pointed towards the physical world: How do I fix this? How do I do this? You know, that seems to me to be very true. The concern is that so much of it also is like an accelerator for all of these other systems that push us into the disembodied zone, right?

Bogost: There’s no question.

Warzel: It makes all of the things that make the knowledge work and the computerized bureaucracy bad. It’s just like—it’s a particle-accelerator situation for that.

But I wanna kinda land the plane here and just talk about practical solutions. We have stop and feel the sand between your toes. We have those types of things, which I’m not discounting at all. Give me some things that people can do to help the small stuff feel more present in their lives.

Bogost: One of the easiest things is just to talk about it, to give it voice. I think this sense of ridiculousness or embarrassment or smallness that “the small stuff” embodies, it makes it feel weird. I have a section of the book where I talk about peeling protective film off of products that come with it. And this is the kind of thing where I’m like: If I told anyone in the world, Hey, you know how, like, really gratifying it is to peel that protective film off? It’d be like, My gosh, you’re totally right. Right? But it doesn’t—you’re not willing to take the first step, to take the leap into believing that and just talking about it.

Just saying, you know: Here’s a gratifying experience that I’m having right now, and you’re having with me, and let’s just vocalize it. That does a lot. It normalizes it. It’s really simple, too. It doesn’t require that much work, and you can do it every day.

Another one is—I talk extensively about the internet. And the internet isn’t bad. It’s not like: “Put your phone down, get off of the internet.” There’s a lot of kind of vicarious gratification that the internet has to offer. And we’ve talked a little bit about it with those repair videos, the like TikTok drain-clearing videos I’m obsessed with. The way that like ASMR YouTubers pay attention to towels and garments and bottles, and those sorts of things. That’s not an end in itself. But it is, again, a way of being introduced to this idea of being reminded that the sensory world is interesting and meaningful.

Another technique I think is really useful is do something that’s physically different that involves a different kind of sensory life than your norm. And that might mean that like, if you work at a computer all day, then do something different with your hands. Make something, go garden, but treat it as a true hobby. And the hobby, it doesn’t need to be related to the outcome: like having a good garden or knitting sweaters that you can sell or give away or what have you. It’s really just about a different sensory activity than the one that you experience in your ordinary life. That’s another thing you can do. Just introduce a diversity of sensory experiences as much as you can.

And I think one more thing that I’ll throw out there is: Just take it. Just stop worrying so much about whether this stuff is good, or it’s gonna, you know, prevent you from accessing some future version of yourself that’s even better. The more that you know that these gifts are just here. These sensory gifts are available, if you accept them. The more you kind of exercise that mentality and carry it out, then the more familiar and comfortable you will be with it.

I know this sounds ridiculous, maybe, and it also sounds harder than it really is. But the sense of like, we say this all the time: Oh, it’s a nice breeze that I’m feeling today. It’s quite warm today. It’s really chilly. That tastes a little different than I expected; there’s a little more dill in that than I anticipated when I put it in my mouth.

All of that—that’s exactly, that’s it. That’s all the stuff you’re already doing. But then just surfacing it and not worrying so much about whether it’s weird, or whether you’re cheating yourself out of some future version of yourself in order to encounter it. When really what you’re losing if you don’t is the experience of living in the moment.

Warzel: I think that’s an excellent, excellent place to leave everything. This is all, I think, really beautiful. And thank you for sharing it. I really appreciate it.

Bogost: Yeah. It’s so fun to talk positively about the world, you know, as a technology critic. To be like: You know what? It’s actually okay. So thank you so much for talking to me about it.

[Music]

Warzel: That’s it for us here. Thank you again to my guest, Ian Bogost. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel, or on Apple or Spotify or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my fellow journalists, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. That’s TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you on the internet.

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

Photos of the Week: Rabbit Beach, Puffin Census, Wild Horses

2026-07-10T09:00:00-04:00

Mike Blake / Reuters

Marseel Bahnan, originally from Iraq, poses with her face painted in the colors of the U.S. flag during a World Cup watch party in San Diego, California, as the United States played against Belgium on July 6, 2026.

Nathan Howard / Reuters

Lightning strikes behind the illuminated Washington Monument as people gather to watch the fireworks during Freedom 250’s Salute to America as the United States celebrated its 250th anniversary on Independence Day, in Washington, D.C., on July 5, 2026.

Qu Honglun / China News Service / Getty

A visitor poses while exploring in Yanzi Cave in Qiannan Bouyei and Miao autonomous prefecture, Guizhou Province, China, on July 5, 2026.

Valery Hache / AFP / Getty

People stand in front of a coffee shop during a heat wave in the French Riviera city of Nice on July 6, 2026.

Jorge Guerrero / AFP / Getty

Participants run ahead of bulls from the Fuente Ymbro bull ranch during the first running of the bulls of the San Fermín festival in Pamplona, northern Spain, on July 7, 2026.

Jose Jordan / AFP / Getty

A bull jumps into the sea after chasing runners during the traditional Bous a la Mar (“Bulls in the Sea”) at Denia’s harbor near Alicante, Spain, on July 6, 2026.

Brett Davis / Imagn Images / Reuters

Argentina’s Lionel Messi is thrown in the air in celebration by teammates after a match as Argentina qualified for the quarterfinals of the World Cup by defeating Egypt on July 7, 2026, in Atlanta, Georgia.

Miguel Oses / AP

Revelers celebrate as the traditional rocket marking the start of the San Fermín festival launches, kicking off nine days of uninterrupted festivities in Pamplona, on July 6, 2026.

Stefan Sauer / DPA / Getty

Participants line up at the water’s edge in the harbor of Parow near Stralsund, Germany, at the start of the International Sound Swim on July 4, 2026.

Huang Zhengwei / VCG / Getty

Tourists watch muddy water rushing out of the Xiaolangdi Dam on the Yellow River during a water-sediment regulation operation in Luoyang, Henan province, China, on July 5, 2026.

Abdul Saboor / Reuters

People watch as a firefighting plane makes a drop, battling a fire near the A9 motorway near Béziers, France, on July 3, 2026.

Ding Minghua / VCG / Getty

Heavy rainfall drops from the sky above Qianshan, Jiangxi province, China, on July 5, 2026.

Wakil Kohsar / AFP / Getty

Water is sprayed to cool off people gathering to mourn Iran’s slain supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the Grand Mosalla on the second day of funeral ceremonies in Tehran, on July 5, 2026.

Majid Saeedi / Getty

A person kicks a large banner depicting U.S. President Trump with a target on his head during funeral ceremonies for Iran’s slain supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran on July 5, 2026. Khamenei and members of his family were killed on February 28 during U.S.-Israeli strikes.

Adriano Machado / Reuters

A man uses an angle grinder at the site of a collapsed building in the aftermath of the June 24 earthquakes in La Guaira, Venezuela, on July 4, 2026.

Ricardo Arduengo / Reuters

A dog rests as rescuers (not pictured) work at the site of a collapsed building in the aftermath of the June 24 earthquakes in La Guaira, Venezuela, on July 5, 2026.

Li Yalong / China News Service / Getty

A tourist wearing an astronaut suit takes part in a space-roaming experience at Alien Valley Geopark in Sunan Yugur autonomous county, Gansu province, China, on July 6, 2026.

Blanca Cruz / AFP / Getty

A model presents a creation by Iris Van Herpen for the Women Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2026–27 collection, as part of Paris Fashion Week, on July 6, 2026.

Konstantinos Tsakalidis / Bloomberg / Getty

A rescuer walks away from a burning factory during a wildfire near Oraiokastro, a suburb of Thessaloniki, Greece, on July 4, 2026.

Tiziana Fabi / AFP / Getty

People wade along Rabbit Beach on the Italian island of Lampedusa, a protected nature reserve with limited daily visitor access to avoid over-tourism, on July 6, 2026.

Wang Wangwang / VCG / Getty

Fishermen work at a marine ranch in the waters of Sansha Town on July 4, 2026, in Xiapu county, Fujian province, China.

Sebastian Barros / AP

Fans watch the World Cup Round of 16 soccer match between Colombia and Switzerland on a terrace rooftop in Bogota, Colombia, on July 7, 2026.

Luis Cortes / Reuters

A Mexico fan reacts as they watch the Mexico versus England World Cup match on a big screen in Mexico City on July 5, 2026.

Yuichi Yamazaki / AFP / Getty

A stuffed bear, (wearing a sign that reads “bear”), used as a target, stands in bushes during an emergency-response drill for bear and other wildlife intrusions, in Isehara, Kanagawa prefecture, Japan, on July 3, 2026.

Temilade Adelaja / Reuters

An Atlantic puffin, seen during the 2026 annual census, monitoring the seabirds’ breeding population, on the Inner Farne Islands, Northumberland, England, on July 6, 2026

Jens Büttner / DPA / Getty

A fish eagle, about five weeks old, is lifted out of its nest by a utility worker for banding in Neustadt-Glewe, Germany, on July 6, 2026. Bird experts are currently banding the chicks that hatched a few weeks ago, with support from the energy provider WeMag.

Samuel de Roman / Anadolu / Getty

An aloitador holds a wild horse during the first curro in Sabucedo, Spain, on July 4, 2026. The Rapa das Bestas of Sabucedo is a festival held every year during the first week of July, where aloitadors immobilize and cut the manes and tails of wild horses.

Jens Büttner / DPA / Getty

A dancer welcomes visitors to the airfield grounds at the Airbeat One electronic-music festival in Neustadt-Glewe, Germany, on July 9, 2026. About 200,000 electronic-music fans from more than 60 countries were expected to attend the festival.

What Happens When the Public Record Shrinks

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Twice a day, all across the country, the National Weather Service launches a fleet of latex balloons into the stratosphere to collect what’s known as “upper-air data”—detailed measurements of temperature, humidity, and pressure. Before they pop, the balloons collect information that guides the world’s forecasters, and helps the rest of us figure out how to prepare for the days ahead. Lately, though, the NWS has reportedly been sending up fewer balloons than it once did, eroding meteorologists’ confidence in their own predictions.

These lapses point to a broader phenomenon. Partly as a result of staffing cuts and funding reductions, government-sourced information has been slowly disappearing. Some organizations have halted surveys and tracking projects; others have deleted archives and databases. Taken together, this new reality risks clouding our understanding of the economy, public health, and the environment—all of which could make it harder to assess the state of the country and the world.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which houses the National Weather Service, lost about 15 percent of its staffers last year through layoffs and buyouts. Meteorologists told Politico that those cuts have affected the schedule of NWS weather-balloon launches in the western United States, creating “sizable data holes for crafting severe weather forecasts.” CBS News reported that similar reductions in weather-balloon launches have been happening elsewhere across the country, and that meteorologists now have fewer data to work with.

Accurate forecasts are essential in preparing for large-scale disasters; they can even save lives. Alan Gerard, a weather analyst and former NWS meteorologist, emphasized on his Substack earlier this week that although the precise impact of these launch changes remains unclear, “meteorologists’ confidence in the models and their own ability to analyze some situations has been damaged by the lack of upper air data.” (A NOAA spokesperson told me that “the majority of upper air sites are operating on schedule,” that “any sites conducting fewer launches are due to temporary resource or equipment constraints,” and that “NOAA’s weather model performance shows no evidence of overall degradation on any approved launch schedule.”)

The administration’s cost-cutting has also affected some of the global data collection that the U.S. used to fund. When the Trump administration pulled funding for some foreign-assistance programs last year (this is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide), the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization ended up cutting more than 100 of its programs. Some were focused on monitoring outbreaks of disease and infestation among animals—and among the pests its investments helped track was a parasitic fly called the New World screwworm, which has been disrupting cattle farming in Central America and Mexico over the past few years. Last month, it crossed into the United States, endangering the country’s already dwindling supply of beef. Monitoring alone may not have stopped the screwworm’s spread—and there is no evidence to suggest that U.S. funding cuts led to the current outbreak—but cataloging these flies’ movements has long been a crucial part of prevention.

In making certain data private or changing collection methodologies on the orders of the president, this administration is effectively punching holes in the public record. Data.gov removed nearly 3,400 data sets during the first month of Donald Trump’s second term, scrubbing information from the Census Bureau, the Office of Justice Programs, the CDC, and more. The CDC tracks pregnancy risk in the U.S. in an effort to prevent infant mortality; staffing reductions have reportedly made that information inaccessible. Since 1995, the USDA has been tracking the number of American households experiencing food insecurity; the Trump administration discontinued a survey of that data in September, claiming in a press release that this information was “politicized” and “costly” to produce, and did “nothing more than fear monger.”

The government’s data are far from infallible (and, as history has shown, can be manipulated). But the cumulative effect of these recent changes is an erosion of public understanding—and potentially of good policy making. The Federal Reserve, for example, bases its interest-rate decisions around the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ jobs data, among other sources. Last year, when the government shutdown delayed the release of that data, then–Fed Chair Jerome Powell likened the experience to “driving in the fog.” It was the first time in 77 years that the BLS failed to release the U.S. unemployment rate. Relying solely on private data, the Fed was forced to cut rates without a comprehensive read of the American labor force.

Earlier this year, when the Trump administration axed an online archive called the CIA World Factbook, which compiled information about countries around the world, my colleague David A. Graham wrote that its demise was yet another component of the White House’s broader war on information. “Democracy,” he explained, “requires voters having access to accurate and shared information so that they can assess the claims that the government makes.” When missing balloons magnify inaccuracies in weather forecasts, they lend credence to the idea that the government’s information may be getting more unreliable—and that, just maybe, we don’t need to keep funding NOAA after all.

In this way, partial information blackouts can generate more and more distrust in American institutions, creating a vacuum where conspiracy theories can thrive. Transparency may not put a full stop to misinformation, but it can be a powerful remedy.

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Last night, the Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner suspended his campaign after being accused of sexual assault (which he denied). Democrats will choose a replacement nominee to challenge Republican Senator Susan Collins.
The U.S. and Iran exchanged fire for a second successive day, with both sides expanding their attacks as the fragile cease-fire continued to unravel.
The family of a Mexican man fatally shot by an ICE officer on Tuesday in Houston is demanding an independent investigation. Federal agents claimed that he tried to ram an ICE agent with his vehicle, but didn’t provide additional evidence.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Jake Lundberg on how New York fits into the American story.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Alisa Gao / The Atlantic*

The Newest Way to Go Analog

By Nancy Walecki

When the iPod Nano was first released, in 2005, it cost $199 and was sold on the promise of limitlessness. This year, Celeste Stange bought her magenta 8-gigabyte model on eBay for $69 and the exact opposite reason. Every time she’d pick a song on Spotify to stream, she’d think about the millions of other songs she could listen to instead and get paralyzed by musical FOMO, she told me. “Now I only have what’s on here.”

Read the full article.