The Atlantic

Five Theories of the Jon Ossoff Moment

2026-07-24T16:52:00-04:00

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Everyone should be as lucky in their adversaries as Jon Ossoff. On Wednesday, President Trump held a rally in Marietta, Georgia, where he attacked the Democratic senator—or rather, he tried.

“Jon Ossoff, he’s terrible,” Trump said. “He reminds me of Pinky Herman. Do you ever see Pinky Herman?” The line might have landed better if he had gotten Pee-wee Herman’s name right. You’d expect Trump of all people to remember weird ’80s kitsch.

Ossoff has benefited before from the president’s approach. In a runoff on January 5, 2021, he unseated GOP Senator David Perdue—a defeat that many Republicans blamed in part on Trump’s meltdown after he lost the 2020 presidential election; he was focused more on false claims of fraud in Georgia than on campaigning for Perdue or Senator Kelly Loeffler, who also lost. Ossoff’s narrow win made him look like a bit of an accidental senator, but his 2026 reelection bid is shaping up differently. Republicans have struggled to mount a strong campaign against him, and even in a red-leaning state, most forecasters expect Ossoff to beat Republican Mike Collins, who limped to the nomination out of a messy primary.

Now buzz has begun over whether Ossoff might be a strong Democratic candidate for president in two years. The hype has grown stronger in recent weeks, even though Ossoff is less well-known and has a less defined image than some of the other possible candidates. Ossoff may not end up running for president—and, indeed, may not win his reelection race—but here are a few theories on why he’s capturing 2028 attention right now.

1. Roll the Tape

In the age of clippers, a politician who can deliver a strong message or moment in one to two minutes will inevitably draw lots of attention. Like his fellow Millennial Zohran Mamdani, Ossoff seems to have a knack for it. Ossoff appears to have coined (or at least popularized) the Epstein class as a way of tying the Jeffrey Epstein story to broader questions of corruption and inequality in the Trump GOP. When rumors circulated that Trump might declare Ossoff and his fellow Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock “illegitimate,” Ossoff had a crisp response. He’s also had politically effective exchanges with Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence (about who won the 2020 presidential election), and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (about past claims of victory in the still-raging Iran war) during recent committee hearings.

2. Finding His Voice

It’s not just what Ossoff says—it’s how he says it. For almost two decades, the Democratic Party has been plagued by guys (almost always guys) who sound like they’re doing their best Barack Obama imitation. Ossoff has been guilty of this in the past, but lately, he seems to have developed his own cadence. In the exchanges with Clayton and Hegseth, he adopted a forensic, almost monotone voice to interrogate them. (He’s not a former prosecutor or even a lawyer, and he doesn’t have the flair for courtroom drama that many of his colleagues do.) Witnesses’ fumbling looks bad by comparison, and Ossoff sounds righteously angry without being rageful. It’s a kind of grandstanding-by-not-grandstanding, and it stands in sharp contrast with Trump’s over-the-top infotainment style or J. D. Vance’s awkward pandering.

3. Earnest, Not Anxious

Politics has become fixated recently on the idea of “authenticity,” another way of saying whether a politician seems comfortable in his or her own skin. Ossoff comes off as earnest and a little nerdy: His stump speeches and questioning in hearings suggest a guy who has done a lot of preparation and doesn’t feel a need to hide that. But unlike some other Democrats in the 2028 hunt (Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and, most glaringly, Gavin Newsom), he also doesn’t look like he’s trying too hard. He doesn’t frantically jump into every ephemeral news moment, and he hasn’t taken up swearing to try to show that he’s not a regular senator; he’s a cool senator.

4. Not That Kind of Man

Both parties are focused on machismo at the moment. The secretary of Health and Human Services can’t stop working out on video (in jeans), and Hegseth is obsessed with testosterone, when he isn’t doing calisthenics (poorly). Many Democrats were so eager for an answer that they rushed to nominate an oysterman to the U.S. Senate despite, as my colleague Elaine Godfrey put it, “a bouquet of red flags.” Ossoff represents a different kind of masculinity, one that owes less to Sly Stallone and more to Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: square-jawed, but bound more by principle than muscle.

5. A Blank Slate

Trump has been talking a lot about Democrats as “Communists,” and at Wednesday’s rally, he tried to lump Ossoff in. That’s a tough order: Ossoff isn’t a DSA-aligned candidate and doesn’t have Mamdani’s or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s left-wing credentials. In fact, he’s a bit of a blank slate on the national stage, without a clear ideological profile or strong ties to any party faction. That makes him alluring to Democrats of all varieties, who can project onto him whatever they wish—at least for now.

Eventually, a national figure has to start staking positions and disappointing some people, and buzzy moments in Senate hearings don’t necessarily mint presidents, or else we might be in Booker’s or Harris’s second term. Then again, Ossoff may not want to be a national figure. He has repeatedly said that he is not running for president in 2028, and although that’s an obligatory statement for any senator running for reelection, it might also happen to be true. At the moment, Democrats seem to be thirsting for an alternative to the familiar likely names, and few things excite the heart like someone who insists that he’s not interested.

Related:

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The United States launched another round of strikes on Iran overnight after President Trump told Axios that he is “considering a massive attack” that would be “bigger than ever before.”
The Trump administration imposed new tariffs of 10 to 12.5 percent on imports from more than 80 countries after an earlier global tariff expired.

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A Planeload of Informants

By Kevin Sieff

The governor of Baja California is a 40-year-old attorney and former big-city mayor named Marina del Pilar. Her state, which includes the megacity of Tijuana, is a magnet for American tourists, and also for narcotics cartels. As a politician of some experience, she is presumably unfazed by the sorts of challenges that come with governing a volatile section of her volatile country.

And yet, in what has quickly become a very famous recording of a phone call that leaked last week, she has difficulty masking her shock about an unusual predicament. “Are they saying they want to extradite me?” she asks her interlocutor, who is apparently an intermediary for the FBI. The “they” in question is the United States government. Almost immediately, her tone becomes more businesslike, and she makes a not-so-cryptic offer: “Can’t they tell me what they want me to talk about? I might know or hear a lot of security-related things.”

In other words, the governor of the strategically important border state of Baja California was just caught on tape offering to become an FBI informant. The remarkable thing here is that she would not be the first; the list of current and former Mexican officials and drug traffickers who have offered to cooperate with the U.S. government is now lengthy.

Read the full article.

The U.S. Is Subtly Shifting Its Iran Strategy

2026-07-24T15:22:00-04:00

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy” is a military dictum usually credited to Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, and more recently to the boxer Mike Tyson in the form “Everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the mouth.” The United States, in its war with Iran, is an unusual counterexample, insofar as it appears that the Trump administration did not have a plan. It did however get punched in the mouth, and spat bloody Chiclets out all over the document it was forced to sign last month, pausing the war on terms favorable to Iran.

On July 14, the United States returned to the field of battle. The administration has said almost nothing about why it is attacking Iran again, and how this round will improve on the previous. The Washington Post reported last weekend that U.S. intelligence doubts that the new attacks will force Iran to change course. But the Pentagon does seem to have patched some of the holes in its initial strategy, or lack thereof. Regime collapse is unlikely, but a revised approach might still degrade the Iranian position.

In the initial assault, the U.S. killed Iran’s leadership, then set to work on Iran’s defense-industrial capability. But Iran inflicted so much pain on the economy of the United States and its allies that their will to fight petered out first. Iran inflicted this pain through drone and missile attacks and by closing the Strait of Hormuz. The patch for round two: move the bases for the American operation away from the most vulnerable American allies—the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia—and instead stage attacks from Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain. These three countries have vulnerabilities of their own, but they all have a long history of hostility to Iran, and therefore have less to lose from going all in with the United States. Falling back to Jordan also places valuable American assets slightly farther from Iran’s missiles and drones. The Iranian response has been painful and effective nonetheless: In Jordan this weekend, Iranian missiles killed three U.S. service members by blowing apart their barracks, and seem to have destroyed numerous air assets.

In round one, Iran characterized its responses as self-defense and tit-for-tat retaliation. American public diplomacy, nonexistent then as now, all but conceded this framing, which left the blame on the United States and Israel for the woes of their allies: the cratered tourism sector of Dubai, the destruction of a fifth of Qatar’s natural-gas capacity, and, of course, the maiming of the world economy resulting from the closure of the Strait. These points were each raw nerves, and Iran vivisected them adeptly while attributing the pain to the United States.

[Andrew Exum: The war is lost. Now fix what it broke.]

A political goal of the second round seems to be to change perception of the war from one of American aggression and Iranian resistance to one of Iranian aggression and hostage-taking. Iran has retaliated as before and hit American military targets. But to maintain its leverage, it has to focus on targets that push the blame for the war and its consequences further toward Tehran.

Iran has attacked civilian ships transiting the strait. In the most serious such incident, Iran killed an Indian merchant seaman and seriously wounded another nine on an Emirati-flagged oil tanker that was hugging the Oman side of the Strait, presumably to avoid Iranian interdiction, when an Iranian cruise missile hit its side and caused a fire. The Indian government summoned the chargé d’affaires of Iran’s embassy in Delhi to protest the strike. The Financial Times reported that missiles fired at eight vessels since July 8 have hit ships’ engines, near where crew sleep.

Iran has also launched attacks against Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea port of Yanbu, and has coordinated with its Houthi allies in Yemen to close the Bab al-Mandab strait, at the south end of the Red Sea. The Houthis are attacking ships that attempt to pass. Yanbu is Saudi Arabia’s alternate exit path for its oil—a bypass route that will allow it to avoid the menace of the Iranian navy and export without hindrance. Already about 70 percent of its crude exports pass through Yanbu, via pipelines from eastern Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis are raising that percentage as fast as they can. The Emiratis have a similar play: shipping through Fujairah, the emirate on the Gulf of Oman, also bypassing Hormuz and the Iranians.

The Iranians hate being cut out of the deal. But the theory that they have the right to shut down passage through international waterways, or charge tolls to pass through them, is based on extreme circumstances: War is afoot, and it can detain enemy commercial vessels. As the Emirates and Saudi Arabia fall back from the field of battle, this theory applies less and less, and Iran’s rationale becomes more and more untenable. The basis for attacking Yanbu and Fujairah is shakier still: Even if Iran had the right to control the strait, it would have no right to force other countries to squeeze their traffic through the Iranian tollbooth, when those countries have a sovereign right to routes that could bypass it. The recent outbreak of war occurred because ships tried to pass the strait simply by avoiding Iranian waters—an act that Iran, but not the United States, considered a transgression of the June agreement.

[Read: Who really controls the Strait of Hormuz?]

None of this change of perception will stop Iran from throttling maritime passages or striking Saudi or Emirati ports. These are, as all agree and the Iranians themselves state openly, the only sources of leverage for Iran, and it will under no circumstances give that leverage up. In the past weeks, the United States has declared that it will transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, sell weapons to Qatar, and load up the UAE with AI-enabling chips. These goodies will help the Gulf Arab countries zoom further past Iran, and none of them depend on the strait. But Iran has gone from attacking its neighbors because they are helping the United States to attacking them because the United States is helping them.

The objective of this strategic turn is the re-isolation of Iran. Among the blunders of the first round was to turn Iran from a pariah state into a sympathetic one. If it insists on disrupting international shipping—including, at least for now, ships from China—then it will move steadily back into the category of an internationally recognized bad actor, ready to collapse under its own incompetence. It will, in other words, be back where it was in January, before this whole mess began.

And what, if that happens, is Iran’s next move? Iran has performed well against a hapless foe. But if its long-term plan is to threaten its neighbors and close international waterways—formalizing an extortion racket, and keeping that up forever—then it is not the only party to this conflict that is strategically bankrupt.

Why Would Meta Download So Much Porn?

2026-07-24T15:15:05-04:00

Editor’s note: This work is part of AI Watchdog, The Atlantic’s ongoing investigation into the generative-AI industry.

Amid tech companies’ ongoing efforts to vacuum up as much data as possible to train AI models, Meta has taken public posts from its own platforms, scraped massive amounts of content from the rest of the internet, and pirated millions of books to train its AI models. Now the company is being accused of downloading much more illicit material: huge volumes of porn, nonconsensual celebrity nudes, blueprints for 3-D-printable handguns, and millions of passwords acquired by hackers.

Strike 3, the parent company of Vixen Media Group, a prolific producer of adult films, is suing Meta for allegedly downloading 2,973 of its copyrighted videos. But in its efforts to collect evidence about these purported downloads, Strike 3 also captured information relating to many other files that Meta may have acquired over the course of two years: They include images from “Celebgate,” a 2014 hack that resulted in the leak of private photos belonging to Jennifer Lawrence, Kirsten Dunst, and others, plus several collections of deepfake celebrity porn featuring the faces of Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Elizabeth Olsen, Gal Gadot, and others.

Strike 3’s file-transfer lists include ordinary movies and TV shows, alongside dozens of videos from GirlsDoPorn, which was shut down after six people associated with the site were charged with sex trafficking. Meta allegedly downloaded several individual episodes from the website and two “GirlsDoPorn MegaPack” archives. Strike 3 also presents evidence that Meta made some content publicly available in addition to downloading it.

When I reached out to Meta, a spokesperson told me via email that “these claims are bogus.” Meta also noted in a court filing that Strike 3, which regularly files lawsuits against people who download its work illegally, “has been labeled by some as a ‘copyright troll.’”

This is a complicated case. Piracy can be hard to track with precision, and both parties are clearly conflicted: Strike 3, in seeking damages, wants Meta to look bad, and Meta would prefer not to be associated with this kind of content. Yet if Strike 3’s data are accurate, they would show that participating in mass piracy is a by-product of modern tech development—whether or not any of the material collected is explicitly used to engineer AI models or other programs.

[Read: The hypocrisy at the heart of the AI industry]

Although Meta acknowledged the possibility that employees, contractors, or even visitors to Meta’s offices may have used the company’s networks to download the porn in question, its defense in court was that the material was accessed for “personal consumption” rather than as part of a company project. But neither the sheer volume nor the pattern of downloads looks like personal consumption. The file-transfer logs produced by Strike 3 show sequences of files that are unrelated except for a certain keyword or concept. For example, two files that were transferred consecutively on June 2, 2023—“Bajillion Dollar Properties S01E07” and “First Time Home Buyer Anal Fantasy”—are both loosely themed around real estate, but the similarities likely end there. Judge Eumi Lee, who denied Meta’s motion to dismiss the case, cited other such juxtapositions, such as consecutive downloads of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987-1996)” and a video labeled “Teen Sex Sessions 2 (2012).”

Strike 3 has argued that the content could be used for AI training. A Meta spokesperson told me, “We don’t want this type of content, and we take deliberate steps to avoid training on this kind of material.” In its legal defense, Meta pointed out that its terms of service prohibit users from using its AI products to generate images containing pornography. Even if Meta isn’t building a porn-generating bot, however, tech companies can use “unsafe” content to test guardrails for their systems—effectively telling the software what not to generate. (Lee noted that Meta’s terms of service are irrelevant to the question of whether it wants to acquire porn.)

It’s also possible that Meta is compiling an archive of material for no precise purpose, just as Anthropic acquired millions of books that it says it had no intention of using for AI training but wanted to keep for its “research library.” As AI-training techniques advance, there is no telling what kind of content a company might find useful in the future.

Nineteen of the allegedly downloaded files contain models of functional handguns that can be produced with 3-D printers. A file labeled “5.7 million passwords list” purportedly contains 5,718,107 passwords from accounts that were hacked from 2015 to 2019. The downloads also include password-cracking tools that can be used by hackers to break into people’s accounts. Other files include the movies BlacKkKlansman, The Banshees of Inisherin, and everything made by Studio Ghibli from 1979 to 2020; music by Dua Lipa, Elton John, and Paul McCartney; radio shows and podcasts such as The Howard Stern Show and 1619; and software including Microsoft Windows, Adobe Photoshop, Ableton Live, and NBA 2K23.

The files were downloaded through BitTorrent, a system that allows people to share files among themselves. When you download files via BitTorrent, you typically share those files with other people at the same time; if nobody is sharing the files, then nobody can download them. According to Strike 3’s data, which lawyers from the company told me it regularly gathers in an effort to track the illegal distribution of its intellectual property, devices on Meta’s networks also made some of Strike 3’s videos available to others—a practice known as “seeding”—for as long as three months after fully downloading them.

Meta additionally used BitTorrent to acquire large quantities of copyrighted books around the same time, as shown in testimony from another lawsuit. Some Meta employees were uncomfortable with this activity. According to court documents, Jelmer van der Linde, a former Meta employee who was asked to download books to train the company’s AI models in 2024, told his supervisor in a work chat message that it seemed like a “very very dark grey area. Legally, ethically …” He added that torrenting “copyrighted material is not very legal either.” He was transferred to a different project, and another developer downloaded the books instead. He has since left Meta and now works at the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford.

[Read: The unbelievable scale of AI’s pirated-books problem]

To verify Strike 3’s data, I reached out to Tom Chothia, a professor of cybersecurity at the University of Birmingham who has studied BitTorrent. He reviewed a technical description of Strike 3’s data-collection methods and told me that, assuming the records weren’t tampered with, “they have established that people at Meta were uploading” Strike 3’s videos.

One thing that complicates the case is that most of the torrenting did not occur over Meta’s corporate networks. Strike 3’s data show sequences of related file transfers across several networks, including Meta’s. Strike 3 argues that the other networks were used remotely in a coordinated way, perhaps to make the activity harder to trace. Meta has called the patterns a coincidence. But Lee found them compelling, writing that Meta’s coincidence theory “strains belief” and that the activity is likely indicative of “algorithmically coordinated behavior.”

Nearly 300 of the transfers were traced to a private residence in Mountain View, California. Strike 3 claims that this was the home of a Meta contractor’s father, and that the file transfers stopped when the contractor stopped working for Meta. In response, Meta argued that these downloads were “plainly indicative of personal consumption.” According to Strike 3’s logs, the files downloaded to the residence include, in addition to porn, Russian-language books, Chinese movies, and a wide variety of cracked software, among other things.

Unfortunately, in the AI era, illegal mass-downloading by tech companies is not uncommon. Other lawsuits have revealed that OpenAI and Anthropic have also used BitTorrent to download copyrighted books. Whether they have uploaded those books as well, or what other content they may have downloaded through BitTorrent, is not yet clear.

BitTorrent is a strange world in which to find respectable megacorporations. It is dominated by media piracy, and very little legitimate file-sharing occurs. But if AI models are intended to replace human creators, then they have to be trained on as much human-created content as possible. BitTorrent is perhaps the fastest and cheapest way to download high-quality work in large quantities. AI companies have claimed that their models can create original work, but so far, the development of artificial intelligence has involved a lot of theft of other people’s intelligence.

The Fear of Black Greeks

2026-07-24T14:18:02-04:00

This article contains spoilers for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

In a different time, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey would have been celebrated by the American right as a conservative film. Nolan’s interpretation of Homer’s epic poem is about the unintended consequences of breaking with tradition in pursuit of short-term gain.

Matt Damon’s wily Odysseus breaks the laws of war with the ruse of the Trojan horse that allows the Greeks to pillage Troy; Agamemnon, the leader of the expedition, makes a grisly sacrifice in the name of his own power and greed; the suitors lusting after Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, exploit Zeus’s law of hospitality to drain the kingdom of Ithaca; Odysseus’s men massacre the Trojans and defile the temple of Athena, ignore the warnings of the gods, and die gruesome and lonely deaths far from home. Odysseus’s original act of perfidy, Nolan implies, has broken the world: The laws of the gods no longer command respect, because he has illustrated that they can be broken with impunity.

In Donald Trump’s America, however, many on the right loathe this film. Trump’s disregard for rules and institutions is the reason his supporters love him, and this film argues that such disregard has disastrous long-term consequences. The film can easily be interpreted as a conservative critique of Trumpist radicalism. That, however, is not why so many on the MAGA right have attacked it. The actual reason they hate the film is that there are Black and trans people in it.

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, joined the online tantrum over the casting of the actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen, whose presence in Troy justified Agamemnon’s invasion. The trans actor Elliot Page plays Sinon, a poor boy from Ithaca who is brave enough to travel with Odysseus in place of the cowardly aristocrat Antinous, played by Robert Pattinson. Antinous lies repeatedly about his willingness to go to war in order to hide the fact that Sinon went in his place. One may detect in this a subtle critique of the reactionary masculinism represented by those crashing out over Page’s casting. There are those of us who talk about being brave, and those of us who have to be.

Musk called Nolan an “anti-White racist,” while other conservatives complained that Nyong’o was simply too ugly to play Helen. Although many tried to couch their complaints in critiques of the film’s historical inaccuracy, The Odyssey is a fantasy film that features magic and monsters. Moreover, these outbursts regularly occur whenever Black people are cast in popular feature films and series. Some reactionaries will always find a reason to demand all-white entertainment, regardless of whether there are mermaids, hobbits, or lightsabers involved. Their real problem is with people they consider beneath them getting roles that show them as the equals of white people—or really, specific kinds of white people. No one was complaining about the casting of actors of British, Australian, and German descent in Troy more than a decade ago; after all, they were largely blond.

The stakes are perhaps higher with The Odyssey than with The Lord of the Rings or The Little Mermaid, given the right wing’s tendency to treat the great accomplishments of human civilization as the exclusive patrimony of white people, and to project contemporary politics onto Europe in antiquity. “Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello,” Stephen Miller declared in a speech at the funeral for the assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk. “Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry.”

People “from third-world nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel,” are coming to America, Miller fumed on Fox News after the Supreme Court narrowly upheld birthright citizenship, “and they can just come into the country, have a baby, and then that baby is automatically a citizen?” This is a sort of racial stolen valor, which takes for white people of any background every accomplishment from ancient Athens to the Atlanta airport.

Similarly, after the Supreme Court determined Trump could revoke temporary protected status for Haitian refugees, the right-wing podcaster Megyn Kelly bellowed for the refugees to “go back to fucking Haiti” and said, “We know our country’s better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic and our culture and our values. You being here only dilutes it for us, those who built it and live it.”

But of course neither Kelly nor Miller “built this country,” and they have as much to do with, say, the writing of The Odyssey or the painting of the Sistine Chapel as I do—the fact that Kelly and Miller are white does not make these accomplishments theirs. People who espouse these views do not value the classics for what they can teach us about the ancient world or our own, but as bleached marble monuments to their own superiority.

There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s ancestors (although Miller’s were actually poor persecuted Jews from Eastern Europe, not ancient Roman senators). Honoring and celebrating the past achievements of those ancestors, however, is different from taking credit for them. All Kelly and Miller did was win the lottery of being born in the richest country ever, one whose institutions and traditions they are busy helping destroy with as much zeal as the Greeks in Nolan’s film defiled the temple of Athena.

When some on the right speak of reverence for “civilization,” what they’re doing is trying to anachronistically justify the hierarchy of race they would like to see enacted today by rooting it in antiquity. You cannot cast Black people in The Odyssey, because The Odyssey is a pillar of “Western civilization,” which they consider to be white. This faction of the far right imagines antiquity as a kind of idyllic Jim Crow universe of utterly separate civilizations, one in which the integration they despise could not possibly exist.

But Greece is not as far from Africa as the North American continent is, and the modern construct of race, a pseudoscientific product of the Atlantic slave trade, would not be invented until thousands of years after Homer. Black people are depicted in Greek art. Egypt, Libya, and “Aethiopia” are frequently referenced in ancient writings. As the Black classics scholar Frank Snowden Jr. wrote in the 1970s, at least one of the characters in The Odyssey, Eurybates, is specifically described as “black-skinned and woolly-haired.” As the Stanford classics professor Sarah Derbew notes in her book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity, Black people are referenced in plays by Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus. They also appear in the writings of Hesiod and Herodotus. One of the lost epic poems is The Aethiopis, in which Memnon, the Aethiopian king and an ally to Troy, plays a major role.

Black people were not as uncommon in the ancient Mediterranean world as Nolan’s critics seem to imagine. But even if they had been, color-blind casting makes sense as an artistic choice for portraying the classics precisely because race as it exists today did not exist when The Odyssey was written. And no contemporary actor can actually claim the same descent as Helen, who hatched from a swan’s egg.

As some have pointed out, Matt Damon is not even kind of Greek. If you want to perform Euripides in Tokyo, Lagos, Mexico City, or Washington, D.C., you’re going to run into trouble putting together a Greek cast, to say nothing of the fact that for much of the past two millennia, the Greek-speaking people living in what is modern-day Greece and Turkey would have identified as Romans instead. The stories of the classics survive and compel people across the globe because they are at once both alien and universal. They have been interpreted and reimagined for centuries, always reflecting the fears and concerns of the societies that retell them. The fact that the cast of Nolan’s Odyssey, an American film, looks like America is the least innovative thing about it.

As a teenager and a theater student at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C., I was assigned classic Greek plays as part of both my theater-history class and my English class. This being a public school in D.C., these classes were almost entirely Black, as were my teachers. My theater-history class was taught by Donal Leace, an actor and folk singer who made a tremendous impression on me. He taught us about the importance of these texts and how they shaped human storytelling, and I owe to him my lifelong appreciation for them. I have seen conservatives accuse liberals of dismissing the classics as the province of “dead white men,” but that was not what I was taught in the 1990s by Black teachers, in a Black school, in what was then a mostly Black city.

Shortly after graduating, I went to see Avery Brooks in The Oedipus Plays. I do not remember at the time interpreting his casting as an overt political statement, let alone thinking that anyone would consider these stories as the collective racial property of people born white thousands of years later, rather than as a form of sorcery allowing anyone in the present to speak to the past.

Mr. Leace, who died in 2020, gave this gift to generations of students at Ellington. As I was watching Nolan’s Odyssey, I recognized an actor playing Polybus, one of Penelope’s suitors: It was Corey Hawkins, an Ellington alumnus. Mr. Leace would have been proud.

What Truly Imaginative Fiction Can Do

2026-07-24T13:45:00-04:00

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

Last week, I woke up in Washington, D.C., to a simmering, suffocating haze. The thermometer reached triple digits, and so did the air-quality index, which my phone told me meant “very unhealthy.” If I lived somewhere else—in Delhi, maybe, or Kinshasa, or Los Angeles—where high temperatures and murky skies were more common, I might have been less surprised. But climate change means that such conditions are no longer confined to specific regions of the globe, and people everywhere are beginning to contend with once-rare events becoming almost routine. “To be unfamiliar with these outcomes is to be the outlier, not the norm,” Robert Rubsam wrote about climate change and natural disasters this week in The Atlantic. So why is it so hard to point to literary fiction that successfully conveys the uncanny sensation of waking up in a different world?

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

The writer Amitav Ghosh, in his 2016 book, The Great Derangement, argued that this is because the literary novel was built for a relatively stable planet. Now that the Earth has warmed significantly, he suggests we need new kinds of storytelling that can capture how it feels to live in an unpredictable world. His new novel, Ghost-Eye, attempts to do that. Unfortunately, Rubsam argues, it fails at its task. But when I read through the comments on his article, I saw readers arguing that plenty of writing does address global overheating, and expressing the opinion that the genre known as “climate fiction” wasn’t getting its due.

They’re right—lots of genre fiction deals with apocalyptic climate disruptions. Climate anxiety is also trickling into literary fiction, as Rubsam points out. He disagrees with Ghosh’s contention that authors are unable to adapt to extraordinary times. But he also encourages a broader manner of thinking, pointing to earlier fiction that successfully shows what it’s like to live through disruption: Juan Rulfo’s haunted response to 1950s Mexico, Pedro Páramo; José Donoso’s magical-realist novel of Chilean upheaval, The Obscene Bird of Night. By invoking novels from other eras, Rubsam moves beyond the idea of simply depicting specific symptoms of planetary warming, like a receding glacier or a dried-up aquifer. He’s writing about books that evoke the feeling that the world has shifted beneath your feet.

This debate over how well fiction adapts to “forces so great and impersonal that they seem to actively confound attempts at storytelling,” as Rubsam put it, reminded me of another Books article published in The Atlantic this week, by Hillary Kelly. Kelly also believes that a new novel—in this case Jem Calder’s I Want You to Be Happy—fails to make the strangeness of contemporary life compelling. But what most frustrates her is that Calder’s portrayal of Millennial ennui and directionlessness takes those qualities at face value and, in doing so, replicates them. “I want to understand alienation; I don’t want to feel alienated—and nothing more—by reading,” Kelly writes. Similarly, I don’t need fiction to describe how dangerous a flash flood is, or what it’s like for a tornado to rip through your town. I’ve experienced those things myself, and they’re certain to recur in my lifespan. I want my fiction to be bolder: to use language and imagination that bring me to a new kind of comprehension, not just a re-creation of what I already know.

Illustration by Vartika Sharma. Sources: Sean Gladwell / Getty; Eva Millan Photography / Getty.

The Crisis That Novelists Can’t Handle

By Robert Rubsam

Amitav Ghosh believes that climate change requires rethinking the novel. His new work of fiction fails that standard.

Read the full article.

What to Read

U and I, by Nicholson Baker

I can now say that I’ve been reading Baker for more than 20 years, or more than half my life. But I didn’t know that would happen when I found U and I in a college friend’s car, borrowed it, and never returned it. The subject, not the author, appealed to me then—I loved John Updike. And so did Baker, though love is probably not the right word. This book-length essay is not quite, or not merely, an appreciation of Updike; it’s a hilarious confessional “true story” of Baker’s anxieties, ambitions, competitive jealousy, and feelings of inadequacy in the face of Updike’s abundant body of work. It’s rich too, with wonderful observations on reading and writing in general, as in a passage considering how much more affecting a memoir becomes once the author is deceased: “The living are ‘just’ writing about their own lives; the dead are writing about their irretrievable lives, wow wow wow.” — Elisa Gabbert

From our list: Five books for people who really love books

Out Next Week

📚 I Made You Up Inside My Head, by Marta Pérez-Carbonell

📚 Melancholy I & II, by Jon Fosse

📚 The Winds of Maracaibo, by María Elena Morán

Your Weekend Read

Illustration by Ricardo Tomás. Source: DeAgostini / Getty.

Too Scared for Sex

By Faith Hill

Perhaps the “sex recession,” then, is merely a symptom of something bigger: an eroticism shortage, resulting from a great discomfort with uncertainty. If so, the stakes would be much higher than they were in 2006. It would mean that people aren’t just falling out of lust with their partner but struggling to connect, to feel deeply, and to be present for their own life. “Today, the question is not so much How do you sustain desire in the long haul,” Perel told me, “but How do we ignite it in the first place?”

Read the full article.

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Is AI the End of Cheap Tech?

2026-07-24T13:00:00-04:00

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Electronics are getting more expensive—and the culprit has a lot to do with generative AI. Amid all the talk of AI taking over people’s jobs, automating people’s workflows, and doing people’s homework, we’re learning that actually scaling this technology is a lot harder, and more expensive, than it seems. On this week’s episode, the host of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel, talks with his Atlantic colleagues Hana Kiros and Alex Reisner about why AI is such an engineering disaster, and how this memory shortage is affecting everything from MRI machines to smart fridges to kids’ access to technology in schools.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hana Kiros: This era of dirt-cheap consumer electronics seems like it’s at least temporarily over. I think that we might just enter sort of like a wartime era, like the way that during World War II we had like meatless Tuesdays or something. You know, people might just be rethinking their tech consumption.

[Music]

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain: a show where today, we’re going to talk about why electronics are getting more expensive, and what all of that has to do with AI.

Now, if you’ve been in the market for any kind of consumer electronics recently, you’ve probably noticed that the price tags look a little different this summer. Apple has raised prices on its MacBooks and iPads. Game consoles like the PS5: They cost more today than when they launched over five years ago. Samsung has raised the price of its Galaxy smartphones, and Apple is expected to do the same with iPhones. All of this has analysts predicting that the primary-smartphone market could decline by 14.8 percent in 2026, which would be a record drop.

Supply chains and manufacturing are complicated. But in the case of these rising prices, the culprit is actually somewhat obvious: Everything is getting more expensive because we are in the middle of a memory crisis.

Now, you’ve probably heard of RAM, which stands for Random Access Memory. It’s basically your device’s short-term memory. And there are different types of it; there’s dynamic RAM, there’s static RAM. But what you really need to know for this is that it is an essential component of TVs, computers, smartphones, gaming consoles, even many modern cars. And the price of these components is going up. Sharply.

The prices of certain memory chips have tripled, even quadrupled in the last trimester. And the reason is the generative-AI boom. AI companies are so hungry for memory that manufacturers can’t keep up, meaning that there are production shortages, and there’s no real end in sight. Carl Pei, the founder of the hardware company Nothing, summed it up succinctly earlier this year: “The era of cheap silicon is over.”

Now, if this is actually the case, it would represent a fundamental shift in how we use electronics. iPhone and Xbox buyers but also huge corporations, all of us, we have gotten used to purchasing electronics in similar ways—upgrading every few years when our machines get sluggish. Manufacturers build their technology with the expectation that the bulk of consumers will update to devices that are more powerful, more efficient, and have better memory.

And this may sound like a luxury to you, but the point is that it isn’t: The modern computing paradigm is one of uninterrupted progress. But the AI buildout—it might threaten all of that.

The AI-memory crisis, or as some people are calling it, the RAMpocalyse, is an emerging story. You may not be seeing or feeling it yet, but there are chances that you will very soon, because so many of the devices that we use every day are affected.

Now, to better understand precisely why this is happening and to chart the ways that the memory crisis just could ripple through the economy and our lives, I’ve invited on two of my colleagues who’ve been reporting on elements of this story. Alex Reisner is a researcher, a programmer, and a staff writer here at The Atlantic who investigates how artificial-intelligence systems really work. Hana Kiros is an assistant editor who has been writing about these price increases and the unexpected ways that they may be ushering in a new era of computing. And they both join me now to talk about it all.

[Music]

Warzel: Alex, Hana, thank you for coming on Galaxy Brain. Welcome.

Alex Reisner: Thanks for having us.

Warzel: So we are here to talk about the memory crisis—the RAMpocalypse, give it a name, whatever you want to call it—and specifically how this is causing a lot of things to get more expensive. But Alex, I want to start at the origins here; very basic steps. Can you walk us all through how generative AI works? Like what are these—what do these large language models require to operate?

Reisner: Yeah, so large language models require a lot of language to operate. They’re trained on millions, tens of millions of books, tens of millions of research papers—all the text that these companies can find they use to train these models. And basically what they’ve discovered is that the more of that text they use to train the models, and the more of that text the models store—meaning the larger the models are—the better they seem to work.

Warzel: Talk to me a little bit about the mechanics of that. In terms of—I think a lot of people are seeing news about data centers, how these data centers work. Can you talk to me about the nuts and bolts of the chips, the storage, the intensity of actual, like, hardware resources in creating these models and training them?

Reisner: Yeah, so because the industry’s strategy has been to make the models bigger and bigger, they need more and more resources, right? Like, they require a particular kind of memory: this high-speed, high-bandwidth memory that can process just enormous amounts of data quickly. And they also need to increase the number of data centers dramatically. And so we’re actually, what I’ve seen from other people’s research is that they’re planning to increase data-center capacity by eight times what it currently is. Which is just a massive increase compared to, you know, the previous 20 years.

Warzel: So, okay, you have these data centers; you have these large language models. They’re very resource intensive. You wrote a story about the AI-engineering disaster for us recently, that everyone should go and read. Your story notes that these companies “may be purchasing 70 percent of the world’s supply of high-end computer memory.” Now that’s a problem in its own right; we’re gonna get into that with Hana in a second. But this is also, as you argue the piece, an engineering disaster. You write that “the problem with generative AI, in the industry’s own jargon, is that it doesn’t scale.” What doesn’t scale here?

Reisner: Yeah; so I mean over the past 30 years we’ve seen other technologies rolled out, like major technologies. We now have kinds of devices that we didn’t have 30 years ago. We’ve got smartphones and tablets. Generative AI is really unprecedented in that it is engineered in a way that, it’s like the polish hasn’t been put on it in a way. It’s kind of in the stage that usually products that are kind of still in testing would be in.

Warzel: Why is it not polished? What about it isn’t polished?

Reisner: I think the simpler thing to say is that it’s really inefficient. And what I mean by that is two different things. So the first is, it includes algorithms that just don’t scale. And by scaling what we mean, usually, is—scaling is what venture capitalists look for in start-ups, right? Which is the ability to add new users and to grow really large without that costing a ton of money. And so they’re looking for companies that can build products that, for every additional user added, it actually costs less to support that user. And generative AI is the opposite. The more users are on the system, and the more input they have, the more resources and time and money they consume. So that’s the first thing.

And then the second thing is, as I said before, the industry has decided that these models should be as big as possible. That they’re better and more capable when they’re larger. And so they’re just being given more input. They’re made larger and larger. And so the combination of that with technology fundamentally that does not really get larger gracefully—that consumes exponentially more resources—is very bad.

Warzel: So there’s this chart in your piece from Epoch AI, this organization that tracks the operating costs of major AI models. And they used several public AI models to show the exponentially increasing costs of serving more tokens. Tokens are the words that users type to chatbots; you know, the number of words in a response. And when you think about the enterprise-AI companies, or the enterprise companies that are using this AI stuff that are “token maxxing,” right? That are trying to use as much as possible. It seems to me like this is costing more and more and more money. Is there any way to like to solve for that?

Reisner: I don’t know. I think one of the biggest and most important mysteries of the AI industry right now is how much it actually costs to run these systems. Like, there’s subscription prices if you use these systems. There’s like, you know, $20 a month or something like that. We have no idea what it’s actually costing these companies to run the systems. Is there a solution? Potentially. But the companies have been working on this for years already. It’s—they’re well aware of what I’m saying in the piece. This is not news to anyone in the industry. But it’s an extremely hard problem to solve, and they’ve made small progress here and there. But my understanding is that they’re nowhere near addressing the fundamental problem of exponentially scaling algorithms.

Warzel: So, Hana—Alex’s reporting here has established that these companies are building a technology. It’s incredibly resource intensive; it’s inefficient. Now we get into the second part of this, which is: What has this demand from AI companies done to chips and computer memory?

Kiros: Yeah; so for a long time a company like Apple could sort of twist arms and get the best deals possible for memory, because they were the first and most important customer in line. So memory manufacturers would say, Okay, everyone’s gonna buy the new iPhone, and so I’ll give Apple a really cheap deal on this part. Because I know I’ll make a lot of money off of this. But now the hyperscalers have come in. And they’re approaching memory companies and saying, basically: We’ll pay as much as you want for as much memory as you’ll give us. They just are a much more valuable customer than the consumer-electronic companies that are building the products that sort of run our daily lives.

So what’s happened now is: More of that manufacturing capacity is going to the hyperscalers, and now only the biggest consumer-tech companies are even able to get memory chips at the quantity that they need to to fulfill their orders. And they’re paying more for it. Because now, you know—one person that I was speaking to about Apple described them to me like an 8,000-pound gorilla in the supply chain. But now there’s an even heavier gorilla in in the hyperscalers, and they’re setting the price. And now the price is just higher for everyone. And as those build costs go up, you know, that’s being passed on to the consumer—and now the stuff that we buy is costing more too.

Warzel: Yeah, you wrote this great article for us in July calling this essentially an AI tax on a lot of consumer electronics, right? Describe to me what’s happening. Let’s use the MacBook as an example of what’s happening to a specific, very important consumer electronic.

Kiros: Yeah; so the cheapest computer that Apple offers, the MacBook Neo, is now a hundred dollars more than it debuted at quite recently for the same device. The base iPad model now costs 30 percent more. iPhone prices haven’t increased, but the prediction is that the iPhone 18 Pro will cost $200 more than the previous model. And some analysts that I’ve spoken to even expect the iPhone 17 to cost more, even though it debuted last season, for the same exact device. So what we’re seeing is just, you know—Apple was sort of one of the last companies to be hit. But we see this across, like, Dell, Lenovo. Every single gaming console costs more. Some indie gaming companies have shelved plans to make consoles, because the margins don’t make sense anymore. Because memory prices have pushed build costs up so much.

This has been going on for a while. But the Apple price increases sort of raised people’s eyebrows, because the Apple ecosystem is really sticky. So like, parents that have iPhones raise iPad babies, and then they buy their iPad babies Macs when they go to college. And so these like hundred-dollar price increases, across all of these devices, around Christmastime and back-to-school season is when we really expect people to start to feel it.

Warzel: And Alex, you wrote in your reporting that hard drives that you bought just two years ago for $350 each are now, when you looked, they were $800, right? And that these prices are just out of control. What are you seeing across the industry, when you look at it?

Reisner: Yeah; I mean, I need those hard drives for my reporting. I bought a whole stack of them two years ago, and I’m now sitting on a small fortune in hard drives. Which would be funny if I could sell them. But it’s really bad, because, you know, I may need more of them. Everything is going up in price. It’s not a time to buy computers, and unfortunately it seems like these companies, the manufacturers, are not really very close to solving the problem. It seems like the shortage is gonna continue for years.

Warzel: This is exactly where I wanna go with this. Because I can imagine people are listening and they’re wondering, in some sense, kinda what the big deal is, right? Why these companies can’t, like, get it together. Why can’t we just make more chips? I’d love Hana, and then Alex, if you have something to add here—what, in basic terms, is the fabrication process like for this? Why can’t they just make more chips?

Kiros: Well, reading about this, I was like: Wow, humans are so amazing. We can do really cool things. Because the fabs that they use to make memory chips are, like, many orders of magnitude cleaner than like a hospital clean room. A speck of dust can ruin millions of dollars’ worth of product. So these are just incredibly complicated manufacturing processes. And they’re only, like—most of the world’s memory chips are made by three companies.

And the lead time for making a new fab is like three to five years.

Warzel: Fab being shorthand for a fabrication facility, where these memory chips are made.

Kiros: And those efforts are in place, but also memory companies—they’re sort of cautious. Because let’s say demand disappears; you know, the AI boom is a bubble. Then they’ve spent billions of dollars building these fabs that now aren’t operating at full capacity. So the expectation is that, until 2030, we won’t have the capacity, like the manufacturing capacity, needed to really drive costs down.

And another thing that I’ve been thinking about is just that, during COVID, prices went up because the world stopped, and supply chains were really disrupted. And they’ve never really gone down. So there’s kind of a tendency for, you know, line go up. People get used to paying higher prices. And even when that extra manufacturing capacity comes online, I kind of find it hard to believe that Apple will say, like, Okay, and they’ll lower their prices. So prices just might be higher from now on.

Reisner: It’s also made worse by what people call the end of Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law was this kind of observation that was made in the ’60s that computer hardware was getting significantly faster and cheaper, at a pretty steady rate. And that was true from the ’60s until about 10 to 15 years ago. And components have gotten so small at this point that they’re having a really hard time shrinking them any further. We got used to computers getting always, like, continually faster and cheaper. And that’s really not happening anymore—that kind of automatic progress that we came to expect.

Warzel: Alex, you quote one AI engineer who told you that “the idea that one must rely on massive foundational models trained for millions of dollars by some big corporation in order to achieve success on hard tasks is a trap.” What is the trap here? Do these AI models need to be built this way? Is there a way beyond the LLM, you know, “training, feeding, more and more and more” paradigm?

Reisner: A lot of people in the industry—or some people in the industry, it’s hard to know how many—but there’s certainly a bunch of developers that are trying to build smaller models that scale better, that take fewer resources. None of these models that I’ve seen so far are really replacements for large language models, but they are good at solving certain problems. And some of them have been put into use already in places where companies are using other kinds of AI models. So there are kind of grassroots efforts to create different types of AI.

If you look back historically, you know, AI was about trying to figure out how people use their own brains and translate that into code. Trying to, like, simulate human reasoning that way. And the kind of old approach that was used in the ’60s and ’70s was something that scaled better, for the most part. And there’s some people now that say we should go back to that method, or, you know, combine that method with the current language-model method.

But I think there is so much momentum behind the chatbot products, essentially, that there is not much will within the industry to try to figure out how to do things differently. There’s so much money coming in to support this approach, even though it’s so bloated and inefficient, that I think the industry is just not that interested in changing course.

Warzel: So Hana, so let’s say we stay on the same trajectory here. Walk me through what this period looks like. How might this play out across different areas?

Kiros: Yeah; so I think it’s already hitting certain parts of society harder than others. So I’ve spoken with IT managers for like public schools and hospitals. And I was speaking to a guy who works with a school district in Missouri, and he was saying that basically they’re starting this school year in the red, because they are paying more per student per device. And, you know, they’re getting less money from the Department of Education. So these places where you have to buy bulk tech, and you can’t just, you know, charge students more for their education. Like, it’s creating headaches for the school system. The school system, they give kids when they enter middle school, and when they enter high school, like Chromebooks. And he mentioned that the school district is considering even just like—Maybe the kids don’t need a laptop during middle school, because we can’t afford to do that for them if this continues.

In health care, things like MRI machines use a massive amount of memory. In my reporting, I reached out to an MRI manufacturer, and they were like: Yeah, we might have to charge hospitals more for these machines if these prices don’t change. A health-care consultant I spoke to said that the hospital system she works with, they were installing basically these iPads, these tablets in hospital rooms that would allow people to like order their lunch and also see all of their vitals and, you know, their health charts. And they stopped the project, because those tablets require memory. And now it costs way more to buy them. And so in that way, we’re already seeing the effects of the memory shortage.

But there’s also this idea of like—we’ve talked a bit about this—“AI austerity.” The idea that I don’t like paying more for you know, something that I could have bought a month ago for way cheaper, right? So maybe I hold on to my tech for longer. Maybe I decide to buy something used. Like after the Mac and iPad price increases debuted, there was a giant surge in looking at resale markets for those products. So, you know, I think that we might just enter sort of like a wartime era, like the way that during World War II we had like meatless Tuesdays or something. You know, people might just be rethinking their tech consumption. This era of dirt-cheap consumer electronics seems like it’s at least temporarily over, and I think that people’s habits will probably change.

Warzel: I think when people think about the ripple effects, they don’t often think of the ways that chips and memory is now just in everything, right? Like, we’re not just talking about MacBooks, Chromebooks for kids, and iPads. And, you know, the MRI machine is a great example of this. Also, we’ve talked before offline about cars and things like that. You know—cars becoming basically just like computers on wheels, driving those prices up, changing, rippling, you know, through the market. Affecting used-car sales, all that stuff. So it seems like it is something that is not just actually confined anymore to what we would, you know, traditionally call the consumer-electronic space.

But Alex, I want to go back for a second here to the inefficiencies of the language models. Because you’ve reported, and you alluded to earlier, that some of these AI companies have found techniques for improving performance, but they’ve also not yielded significant gains. If it does improve, if they do find some ways to make some real, significant gains in terms of the efficiency, do you think that that changes the resources, like the intensive amounts of resources that these demand? Like, put a little more slack in the system in terms of the supply chain of all of that?

Reisner: I mean, if they were to solve the exponential-scaling problem, absolutely it would change everything, completely. I think AI would become a profitable business. But I think it’s sort of, at this point, just a fantasy. That’s a hypothetical scenario. There’s no evidence that that’s coming anytime soon.

Warzel: Part of the problem here is also outside of the models themselves needing more computing power. Our devices need more power too, right? Like, they are integrating AI technology and the features inside of them. Hana, is there a chance that our computers and phones will essentially have to, you know, dumb down in order to work if all this continues?

Kiros: When memory chips were dirt cheap, there was a big push to make everything smart. So like, you can have a smart fridge and a smart toaster, and it was just sort of a cheap way to justify charging more for your product. You know, I can imagine a “dumb renaissance,” basically, where we just—like, maybe your device doesn’t need to be connected to the internet of things to be good. What’s really being hurt by the memory-price increase is these ultra-cheap Androids that have razor-thin margins, that like the majority of people in like Africa, people in India use. Some Chinese companies that make those uber-cheap smartphones—they’ve just gotten out of the business entirely, because the margins don’t make sense. But for a lot of people, like you access banking through your smartphone. Like aid groups during famines; they identify who they reach through smartphones. So I think a lot of tech can be dumbed down. Like, I don’t need a smart fridge. But I do worry about smartphones being—people having to go from smartphones to dumb phones involuntarily because of price increases. Because a lot of those ultra-cheap Android phones no longer make economic sense, given the memory crisis and the price increases we’ve seen.

Warzel: I think it’s a great point to note that this will play out differently in different areas of the world. For some people, it will be an issue of I really want to upgrade because I like, you know, the new camera on the iPhone 18, versus I no longer can buy the phone I need to access a lot of very basic services, that we might take for granted here in America or in Europe or someplace like that.

Kiros: We’re kind of already seeing it. Global shipments of smartphones are down 11 percent, and that’s the lowest they’ve been since 2013. So there is already like a historic dip in smartphone buying. So I guess, you know, it seems like the price increases are marginal, but people are like reacting to them.

Warzel: There’s a brutal irony here, I think. Which is that these AI companies are spending unfathomable amounts of money, and they’re trying to build what they believe is a super-intelligence, or just very, very powerful models.

And yet, this technology that they’re building is, you know, theoretically driving up the price of the gadgets—so that they may become both incredibly smart and less accessible to people. Like, Alex, does this, to you, jeopardize the whole project? That these labs are trying to infuse generative AI into everything, but then everything becomes harder to get?

Reisner: Yeah. You know, it’s hard for me to tell what their plan really is. I think we would all like tools that help us do our work and make the world better. I’m not really sure what these companies are doing, right? Like, they primarily want to make a profit. In order to make a profit, they are advertising generative AI as something that is a useful tool. I think if you were to look at the actual cost of AI—which we’re really starting to see now in a very concrete way—and compare that to the actual benefits of AI so far, it’s a very strange ratio. Again, I think sort of unprecedented in the history of the tech industry. It’s just a really weird project that I think is motivated in part by just the idea of artificial intelligence and wanting to build an artificial human, which is something that people have wanted to do for thousands of years. I think there’s an almost religious need to just continue that project. And if getting funding for that means saying, Hey, this is really useful; everyone should have this; we’re gonna put this in everything—I think that’s how these companies are making money. It’s just by pushing the technology into everything.

Warzel: Hana, AI companies are not exactly beloved by the general public right now. Do you think that this is going to lead, or have you seen already, that this is leading to a consumer or actual, you know, person-on-the-ground backlash?

Kiros: Yeah; I think it already is. In the subreddits that I lurk in, people are like, you know: I can’t build a PC anymore, because of the quest to build a machine god. I think back-to-school season is when a lot of people will feel this, as they’re trying to buy like new tech for their kids going off to college. Or when the price increases hit the next iPhone, and people are thinking about buying a new one. And I think part of why it feels weird is that when you talk to people about like, you know: Will AI cure all disease and free us from labor? Like, maybe? But it just feels very amorphous. And I think that when it hits sort of the tangible digital stuff that helps run our lives like that? Yeah, you know, people aren’t gonna be crazy about that.

Warzel: I do think that that trade-off is a bit radicalizing to some people. Alex, have you seen or felt in your reporting anywhere this feeling of backlash?

Reisner: I haven’t talked to many people yet who are really aware that these price increases are as bad as they are. I have talked to a lot of people who are just confused about why they’re supposed to be using AI. And the differences between what the companies say it can and will do, versus what they actually—the benefits they actually see from using it.

Kiros: In the U.S., at least I think it will be, I don’t think it’s necessarily apocalyptic. I think a lot of people are crafty. Like, I found out about the memory crisis in March because I bought a Mac on Facebook Marketplace, and the guy I bought it from was like, You’re getting such a good deal. You know, these prices are gonna increase. Like, I’m increasing my used-Mac prices. So I think that it’s annoying, and, you know, it’s painful. I think people sort of autopilot, like: Oh, I’ll buy the next new thing. That might be disrupted for some people. But you can, even if used prices are going up, you can get used electronics.

Companies may also be crafty. They might, you know, come up with smarter ways to allocate memory. Apple, really coolly, has this thing called unified memory that’s quite unique; that allows more tasks to be done with like less memory. So I feel like they’re—I don’t want to make it seem as if, like: Mac price goes up a hundred dollars; now my family can’t eat. I think that people will find ways to get a lot of the tech that they need. You know, I think a lot more people will probably buy used, or just delay refreshing the tech and try to stretch their old tech out for longer.

Reisner: Yeah, although I watch the price of used smartphones pretty carefully. And I will say that that has been going up significantly in the last six months, which is something I’ve just never seen.

Kiros: Yeah.

Reisner: And it’s also important to note that, like, it is the most affordable devices that are being hit the hardest by this. I actually am not sure that certain people are going to be able to continue having a computer in the house, you know, when their current one doesn’t work anymore. Or like the smartphone that they really want. I think that is really gonna cut off access to technology for a lot of people.

Warzel: So this is a good segue into my next question. Which is: What do you both anticipate that the future looks like here? Like, what are some possible visions for how all this plays out? And I’m talking about both the inefficiency of the hyperscalers as they build out and then, you know, how that may or may not affect whether these prices just keep going up. Whether, you know, the crunch on the memory industry continues to intensify.

Reisner: I think—I mean, the word bubble is used a lot. and I think if we are in a bubble and it does in fact pop, you know, who knows? I think the AI industry is in a very weird position. It’s trying to sell a product that may not be profitable. It may not have the resources to even continue selling that product. Its own costs may go up so much that these companies can’t continue. The whole AI thing could in some sense fall apart. It’s a little hard to imagine companies of that size really tanking, but we have seen that in the past. I don’t know; it’s very hard to predict what’s gonna happen. But I think certainly everything can’t continue going the way that it is. Like, the path that we’re on is not really sustainable. Something’s gonna have to change.

Kiros: I think something that sort of caught my attention is that GoPro told the federal government that the company was at risk of bankruptcy because of the memory crisis. And like, GoPro is a name that I know. I guess they don’t have enough pull to get the memory that they need at a price that’s sustainable. And so I think what we might see happen is Apple, Samsung, Dell, like Lenovo, like bigger companies that really buy it in bulk and have giant markets—like, they’ll be able to get the memory they need to fill orders. They’ll be paying more for it, so stuff will cost more, but they’ll have what they need.

Whereas smaller companies are saying, you know, We can’t even get memory companies to pick up the phone when we’re trying to fill orders. So I think we could get to a point where companies, I guess B tier and below—I think if we put like GoPro at B tier, they just can’t make their products anymore. And then we end up having sort of like a leaner group of gadget-makers. Like, I think of indie gaming consoles, I feel like that’s maybe a thing that doesn’t make sense. Or like, just anyone but the biggest dogs kind of losing out.

Warzel: That feels radicalizing to me, again, in this way that like—if this actually starts to keep going in the way that it does, right? If trends continue, I think consumers, politicians who are, you know, looking to latch onto something. Watching these hyperscalers—these already huge, massive companies—driving other companies out of business, I think is a really bad look for these companies. I think it is something that could be just really galvanizing, really tangible for lots of people. Especially if they watch companies go out of business simply because they can’t get these memory companies to pick up the phone.

But I wanna end here, which is that: Reading all of your reporting, I’m struck by this possibility that we could really end up in a bit of a vicious cycle here. AI companies need to hoover up memory to run. If they succeed in scaling up and getting people to adopt the technology, then the demand is going to keep going up. This means the prices will keep going up. And so it feels like if these companies win, we get trapped in this paradigm, right? And we, the consumers, ultimately end up losing. Footing the bill for a lot of this.

If this is a bubble and it bursts, and the companies start to falter, then obviously we see prices go down. But that happens in tandem with what would be a serious financial crisis, given the historic investment in AI. Is there a future here that doesn’t feel really bad, or look really bad to consumers?

Kiros: I think it’s possible that the era of dirt-cheap computing that we’ve been in since the 1960s is like, you know, gone. And that was cool. And the transistor, you know, brought that about. And it’s also like—I think the optimist take is that maybe this causes engineers to like, get good, and there’s like resource constraints, and we design systems, architectures and software and hardware that is more efficient. And we get, you know, whatever the next transistor is, you know. And we enter this era of like more efficient tech design.

But I think that having a TV used to be a luxury; having a fridge used to be a luxury. Like maybe, I guess, if we don’t engineer our way out of this, or if memory capacity never catches up with demand, we might just be paying more for electronics. And we’ll have to adjust our expectations and the way we live our lives.

Warzel: Hana, Alex—thank you for coming on Galaxy Brain.

Reisner: Yeah. Thanks, Charlie.

Kiros: Awesome; yeah.

[Music]

Warzel: Thanks again to my guests, Alex Reisner and Hana Kiros. Before we go, though, a quick note from me. Talking to Alex and Hana, I’m struck by the ways that this memory-crisis dynamic actually rhymes with a different issue in the tech world: this term that is coined by Cory Doctorow of enshittification.

Enshittification is essentially the idea that tech platforms entice people with free or very useful and efficient services—and, over time, those services monetize, they get worse, and they exert more power over the people who’ve become locked into that ecosystem.

What’s happening with memory is, in some ways, very similar. We’ve all gotten used to a style of computing that gets better and cheaper over time. In the case of smartphones, we now use them to replace all kinds of physical items in our lives—from wallets to cameras to maps. We rely on them. And the companies who build these devices, they’ve locked us into their ecosystem over a long period of time. Apple, Android, you name it.

But now, almost 20 years into the iPhone era, it’s possible that we’re starting to see the turn of the screw. Now dependent on these products, they’re becoming wildly expensive—in order to help create the AI technology that is supposed to infuse these devices and make them even more powerful.

You could call this enCHIPification.

And it’s not clear how all of this is going to play out. It seems plausible to me that the people who can will continue to pay, even if prices become astronomical. Those who can’t, though, may be left out. Stuck with devices that aren’t powerful enough or easily repairable enough to work well. This would deepen the digital divide—which is a technological form of wealth inequality that’s already very real across the globe. Now it’s possible, of course, that things could snap back; that demand will change slowly over time without a market crash or without a bubble bursting. But what seems really clear here is that the biggest, best-positioned technology companies and manufacturers in the world—they have this distinct advantage. They can hunker down; they can ride out this crisis. Others who can’t afford to will not be so lucky.

And so, regardless of what happens, it is clear that the AI boom is drastically reshaping the world in all kinds of unexpected ways. The hyperscalers and boosters argue that what they’re building is an unalloyed good for humanity. But what is inarguable is that, whatever it is they’re actually building, it’s coming at a genuine cost.

Okay; that’s it for us here. If you liked what you saw, 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 colleagues, 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.

Remember Tesla?

2026-07-24T11:58:00-04:00

Nothing captures the decline of Tesla better than the Cybertruck. When the stainless-steel pickup hit the road in 2023, Tesla was the world’s biggest electric-car company. At the time, Elon Musk predicted that he’d eventually sell 250,000 Cybertrucks a year. In the first half of 2026, according to one estimate, Tesla sold roughly 7,000.

Tesla has faced several self-inflicted wounds. Musk’s affiliation with Donald Trump and his tenure at DOGE was a turnoff for electric-car buyers who lean to the left—which is most of them. A promotional event with the president himself on the White House lawn didn’t seem to do much good. Tesla’s worldwide sales fell 9 percent in 2025. The problem is not just a matter of Musk’s politics: He has gotten pretty bored with selling cars—or at least ones with steering wheels. Besides the ill-fated Cybertruck, Tesla hasn’t released a brand-new passenger model since 2020 as Musk has shifted the company’s focus to robotaxis and robots.

[Read: My day inside America’s most hated car]

It can be easy to write off Tesla, or even forget about it entirely. All eyes are now on Musk’s other trillion-dollar venture, SpaceX, with its grandiose goals of launching data centers into orbit and colonizing Mars. But Tesla has become more important—not less—to the future of electric vehicles in the United States. Of the roughly 463,000 EVs that Americans bought in the first six months of this year, more than half were Teslas, according to figures from Cox Automotive—a jump of nearly 8 percentage points from this time last year. The Tesla Model Y alone claimed more than a third of EV sales.

In some ways, Tesla’s comeback has more to do with the failures of other car companies than its own success. Last year, Congress nixed the EV tax credits meant to encourage Americans to go electric. The Trump administration followed suit by rolling back regulations on tailpipe emissions. The entire automotive industry has been scrambling as a result. EV sales have cratered by about 24 percent so far this year, though they are showing some signs of recovery.

Tesla isn’t immune to any of this. In the U.S., its sales slumped by an estimated 11 percent through June of this year. But the broader downturn makes Tesla that much more crucial to keeping the electric dream alive. In recent months, numerous automakers have yanked EVs from the market, delayed new arrivals, and canceled their plans to debut new EVs. Last year, Ford axed the F-150 Lightning, a battery-powered pickup that was supposed to anchor Detroit’s electric future. (Ford is hyping up a cheaper electric pickup truck—but it’s still in development and won’t come out until next year.) Just last week, Honda pulled the plug on its last remaining fully electric option, the Prologue SUV, after killing off a slew of upcoming models.

[Read: America’s car industry can’t go on like this]

Then there’s the matter of price. The cheapest Tesla will run you a little under $39,000, which is hardly a bargain, but is thousands below the going price for a new car these days. It’s all the more remarkable considering that Tesla makes money from the cars it sells—a feat that has eluded much of the industry. Automakers continue to grapple with the high cost of batteries and of designing new kinds of cars. Consider that from 2022 through 2025, Ford lost $16 billion selling EVs. The company expects its electric-car business to simply break even in 2029. That’s partly why so many automakers sprinted for the haven of high-margin gas-powered vehicles once the going got tough.

As sales of new EVs flounder, used ones are picking up the slack: Americans gobbled up an estimated 128,000 of them last quarter, smashing records. Since Tesla has sold EVs in large numbers for so long—its first mainstream hit was the Model 3 sedan in 2017—it carries the market. One of the cheapest paths to an EV that can run 250 to 300 miles or more in a single charge is a used Tesla.

Musk’s car company is crucial to the future of EVs in another way. It dominates the infrastructure of the electric era: plugs. One of the biggest speed bumps to wider electric-car adoption is the challenge of where to recharge. Tesla has been blanketing the country with its Superchargers since its early days in 2012, and now operates about half of all fast-charging plugs in the United States. This is great marketing for Tesla, of course. But it’s also a win for almost anybody looking to give up gas. In recent years, Tesla has opened up most of its formerly exclusive stations to other EVs.

No matter what Musk says about Tesla’s AI future, he may have no choice but to pay attention to his car business. This week, Tesla reported that despite surging revenue, its operating profits in the second quarter of 2026 were the lowest in six years, in part because of massive expenditures on AI. Musk is also hemorrhaging cash at SpaceX. All of that money has to come from somewhere. Beyond America’s troubled EV industry, Tesla is doing more than just surviving. A spectacular second quarter of deliveries worldwide stunned Wall Street analysts and points to the beginnings of a bigger rebound. (Musk did not respond to my request for comment.)

The EV market would be in far worse shape right now without Tesla. But the real shame is that Tesla could be doing so much more to get drivers to go electric. The automaker has managed to hang on in the U.S. by serving up little more than the microwaved leftovers of its limited, aging lineup. While Tesla’s automotive innovation has stalled, Chinese companies are releasing one affordable, high-tech model after another. Perhaps Tesla could roll out a truly budget EV. You know, something like the $25,000 car Musk once touted onstage but reportedly shelved in favor of the Cybercab, a robotaxi without a steering wheel. A less polarizing, smaller pickup could probably do a whole lot better than the Cybertruck has. At this point, almost anything would clear the bar.

America Is About to Go Over a Peptide Cliff

2026-07-24T11:19:59-04:00

BPC-157 is rumored to heal almost anything: a sore shoulder, a bum knee, a pulled hamstring, ulcerative colitis. Maybe even traumatic brain injuries and multiple sclerosis, too. The drug—part of a class called peptides—has been around for decades. But it has recently experienced a surge in popularity, thanks in part to great peptide publicity from influencers, podcasters, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services. Thousands of Americans are taking it. And almost all of them are sourcing it from sketchy online vendors, many of which are supplied by manufacturers in China.

But BPC-157 may soon become easier to obtain through more reputable channels. An advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration voted yesterday to recommend that compounding pharmacies be allowed to make the peptide, even though it has little human-safety data and hasn’t passed through the normal FDA drug-approval process. For BPC-157 enthusiasts—and they seem to be legion—it’s welcome news. For telehealth companies, it might mark the beginning of a peptide gold rush.

Before yesterday’s vote, the prospects for BPC-157 appeared bleak. At the meeting of the Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee—which last month added eight new members, many with ties to telehealth companies and wellness clinics—FDA researchers argued that the scientific evidence supporting BPC-157 was weak. They insisted there weren’t enough data to be sure that BPC-157 is safe, that it works, or even which sequence of amino acids it necessarily contains. As one FDA official put it: “We don’t actually know with any certainty what it is.”

[Read: The peptide boom is getting out of hand]

Those doubts didn’t convince the committee, which voted 8–6 to recommend that BPC-157 compounding be allowed. Among those who voted yes was Kris Wusterhausen, a recent addition to the committee who is a doctor and the founder of a Texas wellness clinic that recommends peptides, including BPC-157. “Once you’ve seen the effects of BPC, you can’t unsee it,” Wusterhausen said after his vote. (“All committee members underwent the same ethics review and vetting process required of all FDA advisory committee members,” Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, told me in an email.) The decision is only a recommendation, and the FDA would still need to sign off on an actual rule change. But ultimate approval seems likely given Kennedy’s demonstrated enthusiasm for peptides. In a conversation with the podcaster Joe Rogan in February, Kennedy called himself a “big fan” and said he was eager to make them more accessible.

Several telehealth companies have said they intend to offer BPC-157 to customers if the FDA follows through on the committee’s recommendation. The telehealth industry, after all, is more or less built on compounding pharmacies; Hims & Hers actually bought its own in 2024. Anant Vinjamoori, the chief medical officer of Hims, told the committee that allowing his company and others to sell the drug is the safer choice. The published human data supporting BPC-157 may not be strong, but, he argued, forbidding American companies from providing it would “move it deeper into a market with no production or sourcing standards, no physician, no monitoring, and no record.” That view was echoed by Jeffrey Egler, the chief medical officer at the telehealth company Noom.

Vinjamoori and Egler do have a point. Many popular peptides are readily available online because they’re marketed for “research use only.” That loophole allows companies to get around the regulations for human use, and customers to avoid a conversation with a health-care provider. The companies making and selling them are generally difficult to track down or not based in the U.S., which means American authorities have little recourse to enforce standards for quality or legality. In some cases, the drugs contain impurities; customers have no way of knowing whether they’re actually receiving the peptide they purchased unless they pay for third-party testing. U.S.-based compounding pharmacies, by contrast, are licensed by state boards of pharmacy. And in order to get BPC-157 from one, patients would need to get a prescription from a doctor.

Then again, allowing American companies to sell BPC-157 for human use could create the impression that the peptide, which hasn’t passed through the rigorous process the FDA uses to approve new drugs, nonetheless has the agency’s blessing. Brian Lee, an associate professor of clinical medicine at the University of Southern California, who serves on the committee, argued as much yesterday. He voted against allowing compounding pharmacies to sell it.

[Read: The longevity scam]

BPC-157 isn’t the only peptide the committee voted to recommend. TB-500, which is often paired with BPC-157 in a combo known informally as the “Wolverine Stack” (named after the comic-book character who can heal quickly after being injured), also received the go-ahead yesterday. So did the peptides KPV, which is promoted for reducing inflammation, and MOTS-c, which is touted for boosting metabolism and improving endurance. This morning, the committee finally rejected one peptide: Emideltide, which is thought to induce sleep. Two more will be voted on later today.

Each peptide that’s recommended this week represents the possibility of a new profit stream for compounders and telehealth companies. By some estimates, the total market for these seven peptides could be worth billions of dollars. And, if they’re ultimately approved, it will also serve as another example of Kennedy getting his way over the objections of the researchers who work for him.

Photos of the Week: Alpine Swing, Disaster Simulation, Lumberjack Championship

2026-07-24T09:00:00-04:00

Stefan Rousseau / PA Images / Reuters

Members of the press photograph a dead mouse caught by Larry the cat, Chief Mouser to the U.K. Cabinet Office, during incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s first cabinet meeting at Number 10 Downing Street, in London, on July 21, 2026.

Stringer / Reuters

A woman stands with her cat near an apartment building hit by a Russian air strike in the town of Pavlohrad, Dnipropetrovsk region, Ukraine, on July 20, 2026.

Tatyana Makeyeva / AFP / Getty

Local residents walk past the smoke of a fire at a logistics complex for the Russian e-commerce firm Wildberries, in the town of Elektrostal, outside Moscow, Russia, on July 18, 2026. A Ukrainian drone attack on two logistics centers in Russia killed eight people and injured 24, officials said on July 18, 2026.

Thibaud Moritz / AFP / Getty

A French civil-security aircraft flies above a wildfire burning in a forest surrounding Cotignac, in southeastern France, on July 23, 2026.

Denis Balibouse / Reuters

Rope parties climb the Breithorn from the Matterhorn Glacier Paradise on a warm summer day in Zermatt, Switzerland, on July 17, 2026.

Chen Bin / VCG / Getty

Tourists visit Ice Curtain Cave, an artificial ice-and-snow attraction in in Jiaogang Lake Scenic Area on July 18, 2026, in Huainan, Anhui province, China.

Go Nakamura / Reuters

Participants practice evacuating an underground facility during a typhoon-survival training session at a disaster-simulation training center in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China, on July 15, 2026.

Bay Ismoyo / AFP / Getty

Villagers collect spring water with bottles at Gunung Batur village in Cilegon, Banten province, Indonesia, on July 17, 2026, after struggling to access groundwater at their homes in part due to the impact of El Niño, which has brought a prolonged dry season and triggered extreme drought, threatening food security in various regions of Indonesia. The country’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency has warned that the country’s dry season will be more intense and prolonged than average.

Mosa'ab Elshamy / AP

Riders speed down a road during the 17th stage of the Tour de France cycling race, on their way to Voiron, France, on July 22, 2026.

Juan Karita / AP

Players vie for the ball during a women’s amputee soccer clinic in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, on July 17, 2026.

Ali Habib / ZUMA Press Wire / Reuters

Josh Kerr of Great Britain celebrates after setting a world-record time of 3:42:66 to win the Emsley Carr Mile during the Novuna London Athletics Meet at London Stadium on July 18, 2026.

Kai Pfaffenbach / Reuters

During the World Cup Final at New York New Jersey Stadium, Spain’s Ferran Torres celebrates after scoring a goal against Argentina on July 19, 2026. Spain went on to win the match, 1-0.

Dan Mullan / Getty

FIFA President Gianni Infantino (right) appears to urge Donald Trump to leave the stage as Spain’s national team prepares to lift the FIFA World Cup winner’s trophy, celebrating their victory against Argentina on July 19, 2026, in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

Bernat Armangue / AP

Players from Spain’s national soccer team celebrate with supporters at Cibeles Square in Madrid on July 20, 2026, after their World Cup win.

Vipin / AP

Supporters of the Cockroach Janta Party scuffle with police as they attempt to march toward India’s Parliament, demanding the resignation of the education minister, in New Delhi, India, on July 20, 2026.

Ana Beltran / Reuters

A wildfire spreads over the Burgohondo mountains, in Ávila, Spain, on July 23, 2026.

Abdul Majeed / AFP / Getty

Residents wade through racing floodwater following heavy monsoon rains at Landi Kotal, in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, on July 20, 2026.

Nenad Mihajlovic / AFP / Getty

An aerial view of the low water level of the Danube River, captured near Bačka Palanka, Serbia, on July 19, 2026

Djordje Kojadinovic / Reuters

A man jumps into the Drina River during a hot summer day near Bajina Bašta, Serbia, on July 18, 2026

Ramon Espinosa / AP

Artwork by the Cuban artist Osmany Betancourt stands on exhibit in Havana Bay, Cuba, on July 19, 2026.

Gonzalo Fuentes / Reuters

Nicolas Prodhomme rides during the Stage 16 individual-time trials at the Tour de France in Thonon-les-Bains, France, on July 21, 2026

Long Wei / VCG / Getty

A humanoid robot takes photos for visitors during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference on July 17, 2026, in Shanghai, China.

Idriss Bigou-Gilles / AFP / Getty

A member of the Béhourd Sport Carcassonne club adjusts their armor as they prepare to compete against one another in a “buhurt” medieval full-contact-combat exercise during a historical festival in Mirepoix, France, on July 18, 2026.

Ellen Schmidt / AP

The final springboard-chop event takes place during the Lumberjack World Championships on July 18, 2026, in Hayward, Wisconsin.

Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty

Tourists enjoy the new BalancAIR, a giant swing at the top of the Grand Chamossaire peak, above Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland, on July 20, 2026.

Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty

An aerial photograph of a giant land-art fresco by the French artist Guillaume Legros, known as Saype, depicting a boy drawing, captured above Villars-sur-Ollon on July 20, 2026

Wu Dongjun / VCG / Getty

An aerial view of the Qianchun Interchange in Guiyang, Guizhou province, China, captured on July 19, 2026. The five-layer interchange consists of 11 ramps and eight exits and entrances.

VCG / Getty

An aerial view of a paddy-field painting at the Dao Meng Space Scenic Area, in Shenyang, Liaoning province, China, captured on July 21, 2026

Smoky Skies Are Coming Back

2026-07-24T07:45:00-04:00

The air is bad this summer. Really, it’s historically disgusting. Smoke from wildfires has gusted over people’s homes, spreading haze and yellowing the sky. Last week, four midwestern cities—Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Toledo—reached the highest levels of particulate pollution they’ve recorded in two decades. For more than 100 million Americans across at least 20 states, the weather was grim: fumy with a chance of scattered lung conditions.

The air was bad like this two years ago, during that summer’s set of conflagrations—and let’s not forget the epic plumes of 2021, which turned the full moon over New York City a ghastly shade of red. Welcome to the new America: the land of burning throats.

In some respects, our skies have gotten cleaner in the past few decades; average levels of fine particulate matter have been cut nearly in half since 2000. But wildfires have been getting bigger and more frequent, and sending off plumes of air pollution that come and go in noxious episodes. The climate trend goes in only one direction, so this will be our future. That means we’ll need to have a better sense of when it’s safe to be outside, when it’s time to skip our morning stroll, and when we ought to keep our children home from camp. We’ll need to learn to live with smoke.

Enter the air-quality index: a weather metric for the age of wildfires. Perhaps you have never heard of the AQI or noticed it only last week, in news reports and weather-app alerts, when the smoke was getting thick. Chances are that you’ll be looking at it quite a bit in years ahead. But the AQI’s color-coded warnings, which run from wary orange (“unhealthy for sensitive groups”) to Grim Reaper maroon (“hazardous”), are useful only in the broadest sense: They may call attention to the risks of breathing smoke and remind you to be careful. As a tool, the AQI is inconsistent overall—its forecasts can be slow and imprecise, and its particulars don’t always have a bearing on direct experience. If wildfire events will get only more common, then this lousy measure must be fixed.

Globally, there’s no agreement on what constitutes unhealthy air—and no standard index of air quality. America’s version of the AQI was first created 50 years ago, as a way to standardize recording and reporting of pollutants and to clarify communications to the public. The system works like this: The concentrations of five pollutants—particulate matter, ozone, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide—are measured throughout the day at thousands of monitoring stations across the country; the readings are then combined and measured against safety thresholds that are based on regulatory limits. The AQI score is assigned such that a value of 100—which is supposed to mark the line between safe conditions and potential hazards—corresponds to standards set by the federal government.

Even just that fact can be a problem, Kevin Cromar, the director of the Health, Environment, and Policy program at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, told me. The regulatory limits for pollutants are, in theory, a reflection of those pollutants’ risk to human health. But that connection may be indirect, and the thresholds certainly aren’t calibrated perfectly for use by members of the public, who might use the AQI to figure out whether it would be safe to take a walk.

Another problem stems from the distribution of air-pollution sensors around the country. Where these are abundant, as in major cities, the reliability of any given reading might be high. But other parts of the country are more like sensor deserts, where AQI scores are interpolated from readings made in far-off places, and precision is reduced. The variation in uncertainty is not communicated to the public. AQI reports tend to look the same—a single number—no matter where you are.

In some countries, air-quality scores are calibrated to reflect whatever mix of pollutants happens to be airborne on any given day. The United States is more single-minded: It focuses only on whichever pollutant has a concentration that most exceeds the standards, and disregards the rest. If, say, there was enough nitrogen dioxide on Monday for an AQI score of 105 and enough ozone for a score of 103, our air-quality reports would give only the former number: 105. Now imagine that on Tuesday, the nitrogen dioxide held at 105, while ozone levels dropped to 30. The resulting AQI report would look the same as it had the day before—again, 105—even if the air felt much better in the lungs of a person with asthma. Given this design, Cromar said, the meaning of the index may even be inverted from time to time, with a higher AQI corresponding to a lower risk of health effects.

This sort of issue would be easy to ignore under conditions like last week’s, when a single factor—particulate matter from wildfire smoke—dominated readings. But the mixed-pollutant problem points to a deeper issue with AQI: It can be hard to know what the numbers really mean. AQI reporting isn’t standardized across weather apps and news reports. In some places, you might see the measure as a total average for the day; in others, you’ll get a moving average (known officially as NowCast) that tries to show you how air quality is changing by the hour; still others, such as the basic weather app on my Google phone, offer up a mysterious hybrid of the two. Cromar told me that even people in his field—which is to say, the most sophisticated consumers of this sort of information—may be flummoxed by the range of AQI reports. “It’s a mess,” he said. “There’s just a lot of different information out there, and it’s unreasonable to expect the public to somehow make sense of all that.”

Then there’s the fact that different people may react in very different ways to the same concentrations of particulate matter, or the same readings on the index. In a smokier era, we’ll each have to learn for ourselves how the AQI numbers that show up on our phone relate to our sensations and experience. Cromar said that we’ll have to form new types of weather intuitions: Oh, the AQI is 135; I know what that feels like—I’ll put off my shopping ’til tomorrow.

Or maybe we could just get rid of AQI completely and have our apps provide us with raw measurements instead: a daily digest of pollutant concentrations, laid out in micrograms per cubic meter. At first, these data would be cryptic—who besides the biggest air-pollution nerd would know the difference between 35 μg/m3 of particulate matter (yellow-level risk, per the AQI) and 60 μg/m3 (red-level risk)? But then again, none of us was born with the understanding that 35 degrees Fahrenheit is cold and 60 degrees is pretty nice. I also had to learn, at some point in my adult life, that 35 percent relative humidity is very dry for where I live, whereas 60 is about average. This is true for every number in our weather apps: the daily highs and lows, the chance of rain, the UV scores, the pollen counts. You have to gain a feel for what they mean.

We’ve already formed internal models when it comes to measured temperatures, wind-chill factors, and the heat index. Now the weather’s turning, and it’s time to do the same for smoke.

Too Scared for Sex

2026-07-24T07:30:00-04:00

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A little more than 20 years ago, Esther Perel was not yet an author or a podcast host. She was definitely not a household name. She was simply a psychotherapist with an observation: Many of her clients were in loving, supportive romantic relationships—and they weren’t having good sex, or any at all. At the time, the prevailing wisdom among psychologists was that a couple’s sex life was a reflection of their bond. Cultivate closeness, the thinking went, and you will feel safe to explore and to shed inhibitions. But Perel kept noticing the opposite: Emotional intimacy and desire seemed often to be at odds.

That idea is fairly commonplace now—but that’s because Perel helped popularize it. In her 2006 book, Mating in Captivity, she described a kind of Greek tragedy that can thwart couples. Two people in heady early love, fearing uncertainty and aloneness, rush to get closer. But in doing so, they smother the spark of mystery that made the other person so desirable in the first place. Her book was a massive best seller, translated into more than 30 languages. Now she speaks in sold-out concert venues. Earlier this summer, The Invite, a film based partly on Mating’s ideas, was released in theaters. (Olivia Wilde, the director and star, is a stan.) In May, when I went to an event Perel hosted in New York City, a line of attendees young and old stretched down the block, several carrying bags with one of her catchphrases: If you’re too busy for sex, you’re too busy.

Perel has covered plenty of other subjects over the years. Still, her initial thesis has only gained relevance. Two decades after the book’s release, American culture is in a bit of a sensual drought—and people want to know why. According to some data, the average married couple have less sex now. Young adults are entering partnerships later and less often, and a striking number of them don’t even want to see sex on TV.

But Perel has said she doesn’t want to focus on statistics. The endless measurement of sex—how often people are having it, with how many partners, starting at what age—strikes her as part of the problem: It’s a distinctly unsexy and terribly narrow way to understand desire. She’s interested, instead, in eroticism. Perel’s “erotic” can entail sex, but it doesn’t have to. It’s a state one enters into when they’re playful, intrigued, open to the unknown. And because it means venturing away from security, it always involves some risk.

Eroticism, as Perel sees it, can begin only when one has achieved a baseline sense of safety. She has said she came to this understanding in part because of her husband’s career as a psychologist working with torture survivors. Once, she asked him how he knows when someone has truly come back—when they’ve gone from being not dead to alive. He told her it’s when they can be creative. In order to explore, to be open to new ideas and experiences—all core to eroticism, in Perel’s view—people have to feel stable enough to let their guard down. They have to unclench.

One doesn’t need to be a torture survivor to be in the habit of clenching: scanning for danger rather than being silly or raunchy or mischievous. “If you are in a state of vigilance,” Perel said, “you cannot be playful.”

Americans do seem more vigilant than playful these days. According to one 2025 poll from Marquette University Law School, 66 percent of 18-to-29-year olds and 60 percent of 30-to-44-year olds agreed that “most people can’t be trusted.” Rates of avoidant attachment style—the tendency to keep distant, essentially—have been rising. Political priorities have become dominated by a yearning for security: protection against financial instability, crime, replacement. And politicians are rushing to acknowledge (or exploit) those fears. These are not the conditions in which eroticism thrives.

[Read: Why happy people cheat]

The result is that while readers have continued lapping up Mating in Captivity, Americans have broadly become worse at taking Perel’s advice. The central premise of the book is that partners can keep the erotic alive by accepting that they will never know each other completely. But the average couple have arguably become more intertwined. For a recent story on Americans’ particularly intense disdain for infidelity, I spoke with a sociologist who said that many people are disturbed by the idea that their partner could have needs and fantasies they don’t know about. Cheating is so despised, she argued, because it’s a reminder that no matter how much of yourself you share and how close you are to your partner, you’ll never be inside their mind.

The fear of an unrecognizable partner is, at the moment, a notable obsession of popular culture. Take Strangers, Belle Burden’s mega-best-selling memoir about being left by her husband—suddenly, with no explanation. Over the course of the book, she replays their relationship in her head, searching for clues; she wonders whether something in his childhood set this in motion. When his previous behavior doesn’t leave a bread-crumb trail straight to his present actions, Burden makes it sound as creepy as if she’d been stuck in the house with her husband’s evil twin. On the Netflix horror series Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, the primary source of dread is not the jump scares or the protagonist’s strange in-laws but the looming question of whether her fiancé isn’t who she thought he was. And in the April film The Drama, a man named Charlie (played by Robert Pattinson) learns something about his fiancée, Emma (Zendaya), that upends his understanding of her right before their wedding. Again and again he rewrites his vows, desperately searching for a cohesive story about his relationship.

[Read: The most tortured relationship in America]

You might think that in the past two decades, Americans would’ve grown accustomed to uncertainty. But Perel believes that many people are struggling to cope with that precarity. Why learn how, when you can use Google Maps to see exactly how delayed your train is, or ask ChatGPT to give you a breakdown of anything you don’t immediately understand? In a superficial sense, the world is more graspable and predictable than ever. Sometimes, though, that can make a person more afraid of ambiguity, more attached to the fiction that we can ever know what’s around the corner—or in our partner’s head.

On top of that, Perel said, the kinds of communities and rituals people traditionally relied on when facing enigma and loss aren’t so common anymore. Fewer Americans are looking to religion to answer the big questions—how to live, what happens after death, why bad things happen to good people—or to let them wrestle with these issues communally. Fewer socialize regularly with their neighbors. The average family size keeps shrinking. A lot of people don’t know where else to look for certainty but their partner. So they cling for dear life.

An aversion to the unknown isn’t a problem just for couples; it’s a problem for people without partners too, and for the culture at large. Single people are approaching first dates as if they’re interviews, ready to review the candidate, on the lookout for red flags. Or they’re not dating at all, sometimes even when they want sex or love. In my own reporting on romance, I hear from a lot of people on the defense against hurt feelings or wasted time. The weight of the world—the dismal news alerts, the rent bills, the doomscrolling—isn’t putting them in the mood for lighthearted banter or seductive dancing or organic inquisitiveness.

Americans seem to be losing their taste for pleasure, sexual or not. In growing numbers, they’re short-circuiting their appetites with GLP-1s. They’re covering their homes in beige, following influencers who quietly tidy, and half-heartedly streaming mild comedies while they scroll. “The culture of these years,” my colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote recently, “will be remembered for lots of things that dulled and distracted the senses: easygoing country music, friendly AI chatbots, ketamine nasal sprays.” And dulled senses are an enemy to eroticism.

Perel believes that part of the problem is that people think they’re meant to heal first—to overcome burnout, to process trauma, to somehow refresh themselves until they’re shiny and new, ready for life to get more fun and more dynamic. But if you open the door to the uncertain and unpredictable, you let in suffering along with joy. The erotic isn’t what comes after pain; it’s a way of living with it.

[Read: Teens are forgoing a classic rite of passage]

Maybe that’s the path forward for couples and single people alike: to lean into the precarity, not because it’s easier or more pleasant but because they’re interested in where that will lead. Perel tells partners that they don’t need to try creating distance or adding novelty to their relationships; all they need to do is accept that it already exists. In fact, they should revel in the fact that they’ll always have more to discover about each other. (A lot of couples go out for dinner with friends and have fascinating, deep conversations, she told me—and then as soon as they’re alone again, “they switch to talking about who’s going to the ball game tomorrow.”) And what if single people started treating dates as adventures—opportunities to get to know someone new and do something different? Her advice, regardless of relationship status, is essentially this: Never give yourself over to numbness.

In The Invite, Olivia Wilde’s film, two couples have a dinner party. One of those pairs seems electric with chemistry and presence; they laugh, touch each other with affection, speak aloud the observations that might have been politely contained. The other pair has had the life “seeped out of them,” as Perel put it to me. They’re on autopilot. They’re a little like a lot of people, in an age of blunted pleasure. The question of the film is whether the vitality of that first couple might wake them up.

Spoiler alert: The movie is ambiguous on that point. But it does contain a hopeful note—much like The Drama, actually. Both films show their stunted couples attempting to start over, reenacting the beginning of their relationship, when everything was terrifyingly and beautifully undetermined. “I’m Emma,” Zendaya’s character says, and Charlie returns her handshake across the table. The viewer can only guess whether they’ll be brave enough to remain curious.

This article originally attributed polling on American trust to the Badger Institute. In fact, Marquette University Law School conducted the survey.

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Why So Much Millennial Fiction Is Boring

2026-07-24T07:00:00-04:00

Perhaps every generation believes that it is unsuited to its own era. As an elder Millennial, I can’t help but see how perfectly primed my cohort was for feelings of inadequacy and distress. Raised on the standard American diet of promise and progress, many in my micro-generation arrived in high school just in time for the Columbine shootings to undermine our sense of safety. As many of us entered the age of military fitness, the Twin Towers fell and the United States embarked on a forever war. The Great Recession greeted our arrival into the job market, and coronavirus-pandemic lockdowns coincided with the years when a lot of us were becoming parents. Now our early middle age is marked by inflation, environmental chaos, and AI’s potentially existential threat to job stability. Even if most generations complain about discontent, mine may have a particularly strong case for it.

What’s a fiction writer to do with all of that joylessness? Plenty of authors in generations past made it their subject. Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, and Tess Durbeyfield didn’t lead lives of unmitigated bliss. But contemporary fiction has a particular task: to explain and make interesting the deep disaffection of this era. It isn’t sadness, exactly, that lurks inside the hearts of Millennials and their similarly cursed younger siblings Gen Z, but something closer to lack—of security, of certainty, of sensual engagement with the world. The novelist who wants to write about how young people (barely) get by in the world today has to explain why all of this overwhelm often translates into paralysis—without boring readers to distraction.

Like its cousin the internet novel, the novel of alienation needs a stylistic foil to make it sing. Methodically charting the flatness of ennui won’t get you very far; when your readers feel as listless as your characters do, they’re likely to reach for their phone in search of dopamine hits. Instead, you have to jolt your audience into an uneasy kinship.

In I Want You to Be Happy, Jem Calder’s first novel, the author fails at this delicate task, and not spectacularly but anemically. His premise is simple: Chuck, a 35-year-old recently unengaged copywriter, meets the 23-year-old Joey, a barista with no better career prospects in view. For a few months, they casually date—a classic “situationship,” dogged on both sides by ambivalence and occasional apathy. Eventually, the relationship comes to an impasse, and each has to decide whether it’s worth their energy to carry on.

But energy is scarce in Calder’s writing. Chuck and Joey have the kind of colorless sex that Calder describes in a monotone: “He asked her the universal male sex-act-recipient questions.” The couple also have very little to say to each other in between beddings. One date features “some discussion comparing alcohol and coffee,” and during a long weekend in the country, among their most intimate remarks is: “The showers here are good.”

[Read: These Millennials can’t get out of their head]

Both partners are flailing: Chuck is put on a performance-improvement plan at his firm for poor productivity and frequent hangovers, and Joey cannot afford to buy a cocktail or live anywhere better than the squalid bedroom that she rents in a shared house. But they regard their positions with little emotion beyond self-pity. In fact, that’s how they look at all of life. Neither has any hobbies or intellectual pursuits: Nobody so much as waters a plant or visits a museum. Both claim that they want to be a writer, and these dreams generate some intriguing tension, but readers rarely get a glimpse of what they produce. Joey reads two books that we know of, a work of poetry she admires for reasons that she does not explain and another described only as “boring.” Although I Want You to Be Happy is set in present-day London, no one probes the sorry state of the post-Brexit British government, except to comment vaguely that life is too expensive and friends are leaving the city. Most important, no one displays even a wisp of curiosity. The inner lives of Chuck and Joey are as untextured as the phone screens they tap incessantly.

Curiosity, perhaps more than any other characteristic, is what pulls a reader along for a fictional ride. A character may simply want to find out how their new neighbor is getting along (The Great Gatsby), or whether they’ve married the right person (Middlemarch), or whether they’ll catch the damn whale (you know the one). But along the way, a single musing can turn into many more, like branching rows of dominoes setting off new lines of inquiry about the world. Even in novels centered on Millennial inaction or stasis, such as Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett, a kind of attentiveness is necessary to advance beyond rhetorical water-treading.

Other writers have successfully captured the malaise afflicting the under-45 crowd and offered nutrient-dense characters. In her clever 2021 debut novel, Three Rooms, the British writer Jo Hamya uses social realism to chronicle the downward mobility of a bright young thing, an Oxford postdoc researcher who moves from university-adjacent housing to an acquaintance’s couch and then to her childhood bedroom, her future dimming a little bit more with each domestic downgrade. By setting the action in 2018 and 2019, during the prolonged debacle of Brexit negotiations, Hamya links the degradation of the college degree to the stagnation—in the government, the economy, the culture—that has impeded progress for an entire generation.

Hilary Leichter’s 2023 novel, Terrace Story, is similarly concerned with the indignities of the housing market, but this novelist employs a different artistic lever to keep the wheels turning: She uses dark fantasy to set our world in grim relief. A magical terrace appears inside the apartment of a young family struggling to pay the rent, offering them a chance to see how the other half lives. But it also cleaves the family apart, sending them spinning toward strange futures on a warped planet Earth. Despite these complications, Terrace Story delivers a brilliant contemporary fable that chronicles how young people stuck in the saddest timeline can still make meaning.

Not every successful novel of alienation turns on financial deprivation. In fact, the central problem in Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, which dispenses with dialogue entirely in depicting two vacant creative professionals, is the comfort and style of their apartment. Scandinavian armchairs and monstera houseplants are all that this couple have: The accumulation of purely superficial identity markers, which they offer up online as proof of some mythical, unrealized happiness, leaves them weary and adrift. Using hyper-specific examples (Kraftwerk LPs, the German migrant crisis of 2015 and 2016), Latronico creates a book that functions as a time capsule—one that beautifully realizes his characters’ disenchantment, precisely imagining what it’s like to become trapped by an artificial, digital version of oneself.

[Read: The unhappy literary families of the internet age]

Some recent satires fail to reach the same heights of ingenuity, but they still have the consolations of humor. In her 2021 novel, Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler’s snappy bons mots thoughtfully ridicule our contemporary culture of disdain even as they indulge in it to a wearying degree. And in the slightly exasperating Banal Nightmare, from 2024, Halle Butler has a knack for capturing the ludicrous way that therapy-speak has turned a generation of wobbly neurotics from patients into self-ordained shrinks.

Calder, however, lacks even a hint of humor. I Want You to Be Happy has the ambience of a dentist’s waiting room: lots of barely stifled dread accompanied by relentless scrolling. Calder may have mistaken writing about boredom for writing boredom. His prose about phone usage emphasizes physical acts (“He gaze-unlocked his phone, thumbed to his conversation with Joey, absently flexed his free hand open and closed beside the screen, then relocked his device”) rather than immersing us in the stuff that has his characters (and so many of us) in its thrall. Cellphones are, to be fair, a problem for novelists: Their presence eliminates the face-to-face dynamism that so much classic literature uses to its advantage. (Just imagine Mr. Darcy proposing in text-speak.) But phones are also surprisingly similar to novels—both ask people to doggedly follow and emotionally invest in the lives of strangers. They are a narrative boon to any writer interested in human longing. All of which makes Calder’s book a major missed opportunity.

The novel’s lack of interest in what’s going on inside its characters’ phones becomes indistinguishable from a disinterest in what’s happening in their minds. Designing purely surface-level characters to comment on the ways that technology homogenizes culture is the kind of exercise that can create only distance between readers and characters. I want to understand alienation; I don’t want to feel alienated—and nothing more—by reading.

Young life is certainly exhausting and at times degrading and disconcerting, but is it really as boring as it is in this book? As a reasonably settled 42-year-old, I might not be the best person to ask. But as a reader, I’m certain that if novelists want to make clear just how disappointed they are in their life and the world, they’re going to have to do it with flair. Because they’re competing with the dancing pixels, and the pixels are winning.

The Social Security Reckoning Is Finally Coming

2026-07-24T07:00:00-04:00

Americans have been hearing about the looming demise of Social Security for decades. The number of old people receiving benefits has been increasing much more quickly than the number of working-age adults whose taxes pay for those checks. Yet politicians have let the problem fester for so long that the public could be forgiven for thinking that the crisis would never actually arrive.

But it’s arriving. For the past 16 years, Social Security has paid out more than it has taken in. This has required dipping into its trust fund, built up over the decades when the Baby Boomers were in their peak earning years. That fund is on track to run out by 2032. When it does, benefits will have to be cut by an expected 22 percent across the board to line up with the tax revenue that funds them.

Pretty soon, politicians won’t be able to kick this can down the road anymore. Senators elected this November will be in office in 2032. So will the next president. They will have no choice but to come up with a way to save the federal government’s largest and most popular program, lest they be blamed for its partial collapse. The available solutions are politically tricky but not particularly mysterious. They involve raising taxes, increasing the national debt, and cutting benefits, or some mix of the three. Even if our leaders settle on a way to keep Social Security solvent, however, they are unlikely to address the deeper problem underlying the budgetary one: A program designed to reduce poverty has morphed into a transfer of wealth to the richest members of our society.

In 1935, when the Social Security Act was signed into law, the average person entering the workforce could be expected to die at about 65 years old. Those who lived past that age tended to be too disabled to work, leaving them reliant on their children, if not a local charity or poorhouse. Social Security was designed to ameliorate this problem by levying a tax on workers and their employers, and paying benefits to the elderly roughly in proportion to how much they earned during their career. When the checks first went out, in 1940, the average recipient received $22.60 a month, or about $550 in today’s dollars. Such payments did not require too much sacrifice—just a 1 percent tax on the first $3,000 of a person’s earnings, matched by their employer—because there were many times more workers than there were beneficiaries.

The program ballooned over time. Congress voted repeatedly to expand benefits faster than inflation. But the biggest changes weren’t purposeful. Because benefits are proportional to what a retiree earned during their working years, America’s increasing salaries necessarily made the program grow. So did rising life expectancy. The average 65-year-old now has about 20 years left to live, up from 13 years in 1940. Meanwhile, the pool of workers paying into the system has not kept pace. Fertility rates have fallen, and fewer babies mean fewer workers in the future. The number of workers for each beneficiary has gone down 24 percent since 1990, as more and more is being asked of a smaller share of the population.

[Idrees Kahloon: An oligarchy of old people]

The unfortunate fact is that Social Security was never guaranteed to work forever. The tax formula is simple: Each worker, along with their employer, pays 6 percent of their income, up to $184,500. The benefit formula is not. The Social Security Administration takes your highest-earning 35 years of work and calculates your average monthly earnings from those years, adjusted upward for subsequent growth in average wages. A progressive formula determines how much of that you’ll be paid monthly: Assuming that you elect to start receiving benefits at age 67, you’ll get 90 percent of the first $1,300, 32 percent of the next $6,500, and 15 percent of the remaining.

The benefit side of the equation and the tax side of the equation do not add up to the same number. Thanks to the wage adjustment and long life expectancies, most people receive substantially more money than they paid in. In the aggregate, revenues have lagged behind benefits. “There’s no reason those formulas would be compatible with each other,” Andrew Biggs, a former deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration, told me. The only reason they ever were was that America used to have enough workers to support its population of retirees.

Preventing the program’s insolvency is a math problem that involves tweaking the tax side, the benefit side, or both, until they equal each other. This is not conceptually difficult. Steven Kull, a political psychologist at the University of Maryland, runs a poll every so often in which he shows participants the possible reforms, telling them how much each change closes the funding gap. “The biggest theme is that people solve the problem,” Kull told me, with “majorities taking steps that eliminate most or all of the shortfall.” Respondents tend to be confused as to why their elected leaders haven’t fixed the issue. “The common answer is, That wasn’t that hard. What’s all the fuss about?”

The problem is not that the math is difficult, but that every possible move comes with downsides. “Social Security reform is ultimately about breaking promises,” Biggs said. Either you raise taxes above the rate that people are used to, or you cut benefits for people who were counting on them. Historically, Democrats have preferred the former path, proposing to raise taxes on the well-off to pay for the program’s shortfall while leaving benefits alone. Republicans have traditionally wanted to shrink the program—although typically in a somewhat progressive manner. After President George W. Bush’s unpopular privatization push failed, for example, he proposed a slow flattening of the program by making the benefit formula less generous for all but the bottom 30 percent of recipients.

The Democratic approach has always been more politically popular. Donald Trump was the first Republican to accept that fact. In 2015, as he marched to the Republican nomination, he promised not to touch Social Security, breaking with GOP orthodoxy and thrilling the base. Ever since, the Republican discussion on saving the program has had a distinctly muted tone. A March 2024 white paper by the Republican Study Committee—a caucus that includes most House Republicans—proposed raising the retirement age and “gradually moving towards a flat benefit.” Neither Trump nor Speaker of the House Mike Johnson commented on the proposal. Project 2025, produced by the Heritage Foundation, was more shrewd. The 900-page document contained advice for the future administration on how to properly regulate the shrinking population of greater sage grouse, but it contained no guidance on Social Security.

Democratic plans still revolve around raising taxes while keeping benefits constant or even increasing them. But they now tend to include a feature designed to keep the party’s upper-middle-class base happy: the “doughnut hole.” Many of the current Democratic plans uncap the payroll tax, but typically only for earnings above $400,000, meaning that dollars earned between $185,000 and $400,000 would go untaxed, and everyone who makes less than $185,000 would pay the highest payroll tax rate of all.

Representative John Larson, a Connecticut Democrat, has introduced many Social Security–reform plans over his 14 terms in Congress. “I personally don’t think that there should be a doughnut hole,” he told me. But, he explained, “during the presidential campaign, Biden said that we should lift the cap over $400,000.” Larson came to understand why. “Every town hall I go to, I say, ‘Raise your hand if you’re making more than $400,000,’ and I’ve yet to have a hand go up.” As Democrats have become the party of the pretty-well-off, they have more and more voters who make more than $185,000 but less than $400,000.

The doughnut hole is one weakness, but every plan has its shortcomings. Last month, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, and Senator Bernie Moreno, a Republican, announced a proposal to uncap the payroll tax entirely. Their idea gets points for bipartisanship, but it would close just two-thirds of the shortfall, at most, if implemented. Within three years, benefits would again exceed revenues.

A few plans get the math to work out with sufficiently large tax hikes. Proposals by Larson and Senators Bernie Sanders and Sheldon Whitehouse would uncap the payroll tax (with a doughnut hole) and raise taxes on investment income. These are large tax increases: A wealthy self-employed couple making $800,000—imagine married doctors in private practice—would face a marginal federal tax rate of more than 50 percent.

Perhaps the biggest problem with these plans is not the new taxes—it’s what the new taxes pay for. Conceived as an anti-poverty program, Social Security today pays out most of its benefits not to the poor but to the middle class and the rich. The bottom 20 percent of older Americans receive just 7 percent of the total benefits. The economics of old age have changed a lot since the 1930s. The prices of assets—homes and stocks—have soared. As a result of these trends, the elderly are now America’s wealthiest age group, living without children in homes that are on average roomier than everyone else’s. No longer are most of them financially dependent on their children; if anything, their descendants are more likely to ask them for help.

[Jessica Riedl: The elixir of the payroll-tax cap and other social security myths]

If the public craves a trillion-dollar tax increase on the well-off, there are better ways to spend the money. The federal government already spends about six times as much for each elderly adult as it does each child, even though children and their parents are more than twice as likely to be poor. Uncapping the payroll tax would not close the Social Security shortfall, but it would provide enough money to pay an allowance of $4,500 a child to every family in the country every year. Reforming Social Security by cutting benefits for rich people and raising them for poor people would make the most financial sense and return the program to its roots. President Franklin D. Roosevelt designed Social Security for the elderly not because they were uniquely deserving but because, as he put it in his signing address, they were so “poverty-ridden.” But that scenario—flattening Social Security and focusing future generosity on the young—doesn’t seem particularly likely. Social Security’s popularity comes from its universality, and if well-off people see their benefits reduced, the program could lose some of its widespread appeal. As I reported this story, many wonks recited to me the old political adage, “Programs for the poor make poor programs.”

Indeed, most voters, when faced with the choice, prefer tax increases to benefit cuts. A poll last year by the National Academy of Social Insurance, a network of social-safety-net researchers, showed that the three most popular reform options were slightly different ways to uncap the payroll tax. The next most popular was an increase in benefits. Even raising the payroll-tax rate on everyone by one percentage point ranked above cutting benefits only for the rich. “Broad-based bipartisan majorities say that they’d even be willing to chip in a little bit more themselves,” Rebecca Vallas, the head of NASI, told me, “if that’s what it takes to prevent benefit cuts.”

A social safety net that so heavily favors the old and rich over the needy and young is probably not what most Americans would design if they were starting from scratch, but it’s what we have. The likeliest outcome of whatever Congress comes up with in the next six years is that same dynamic, only more so.

The White House’s MAHA Gatekeeper

2026-07-24T06:30:00-04:00

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The world’s most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, reached out privately in April to the world’s most powerful man, Donald Trump, to discuss the healing power of ibogaine, a psychedelic made from the root bark of a Central African shrub that researchers are studying as a treatment for addiction and trauma. Trump responded by text, “‘Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval? Let’s do it,’” Rogan announced weeks later, when he stood behind the president in the Oval Office for the signing of an executive order on psychedelic therapies. “It was literally that quick.”

But it wasn’t that simple. After hearing from Rogan, the president told his team at the Department of Health and Human Services to change the policy, and the team sent a draft executive order to the White House Domestic Policy Council. That’s when things got messy. In the days that followed, Rogan’s allies engaged in battle with a mid-level White House health adviser, Dr. Heidi Overton. As a deputy assistant to the president who focuses on health policy, Overton ran a process to revise the draft in coordination with other stakeholders, including the Departments of Justice and Veterans Affairs.

Members of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement were furious, convinced that Overton, not for the first time, had undermined Trump’s own desires. The friction, which has not been previously reported, became so intense that Rogan and W. Bryan Hubbard, the CEO of Americans for Ibogaine, a nonprofit that champions the drug’s therapeutic benefits, threatened to pull out of the signing ceremony if they did not have a say in Overton’s final edits, according to three people familiar with the events.

Overton’s efforts on the Domestic Policy Council shrank the roughly 1,400-word HHS draft to about 900 words by the time Trump signed his name. Entire sections were removed, including those calling for a psychedelic-therapy czar and treatment-funding reforms, according to a draft we reviewed. A $250 million research fund became a $50 million partnership with states. In the end, the document accelerated review for some drugs and pushed the government to reschedule psychedelic substances that perform well in large clinical trials, enough to persuade Rogan and Hubbard to show for the signing.

Overton is one of the most powerful public-health officials in Trump’s orbit who has little public profile. Her job, as a senior health-policy official on the White House Domestic Policy Council, is to convert the president’s priorities into the scope and language of documents that will advance the White House’s agenda. But Overton’s detractors describe her as one of the biggest obstacles to MAHA actually realizing its priorities—“the controlled opposition,” one person who has worked with her told us. They accuse her of slow-walking marijuana rescheduling, trying to limit MAHA changes to federal nutrition guidelines, and delaying or weakening several other initiatives. “As an unelected bureaucrat, Heidi Overton sought to use her pen to override the intended exercise of presidential power,” one person outside of government who was familiar with the psychedelic-executive-order process told us. “It was a derogation of representative democracy.”

Leaders of the West Wing and HHS, by contrast, say the 37-year-old physician represents democracy at work. They have rushed to her defense, describing her as a star scientific wonk with a medical degree and a doctorate in clinical investigation who knows how to balance competing interests to achieve Trump’s goals. “The president adores her,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told us. Since the start of Trump’s second term, the White House has trusted Overton to coordinate nearly all of its major health policies, including MAHA priorities such as revisions to childhood-vaccine recommendations and the redesign of the food pyramid.

“In President Trump’s administration, the Domestic Policy Council is the White House office that is and should be depended on to make sure things are correct, legally durable, done with policy consistency, and, in this case, medically sound,” White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told us. “Any suggestion that Heidi Overton or the Domestic Policy Council is slowing things down is being made by an uninformed person. Things move at a light speed in this administration.” The White House has been sufficiently impressed by Overton’s work that she has been named as one of three finalists to become the next Food and Drug Administration commissioner, a promotion that would give her direct power over the pharmaceutical industry, medical devices, tobacco products, and most of the nation’s food.

The fight over Overton’s role in the first 18 months of Trump’s second term is certain to become more public if she faces Senate confirmation later this year. It has already revealed a growing rift between the White House and a group of MAHA policy makers over the pace and limits of reforming federal health policy.

[Read: Why is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. so convinced he’s right?]

Sky-high expectations for radical change at the start of the administration yielded some dramatic shifts on vaccine recommendations, nutrition guidelines, pharmaceutical regulation, and agricultural policy. But the team that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. built has faced pushback on pesticide regulation and other areas where they sought to disrupt decades of federal policy making. Overton, as the traffic cop of health policy at the White House, has found herself at the center of those fights. This story is based on interviews with 17 people with direct knowledge of Overton’s work. Nearly all of them requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly or feared retribution from the White House if they publicly criticized her. Overton declined to comment for this story.

Kennedy, the founder and public face of the Make America Healthy Again movement, who has from the start of the administration found himself limited by the interagency process that Overton runs, is nevertheless one of her most vocal defenders. At the signing ceremony for the psychedelics executive order, he thanked Overton while acknowledging the behind-closed- doors fights that had taken place. “It was often frustrating but always right,” he said of her advice. “She brings exceptional dedication, meticulous attention to detail, and strategic leadership to every policy she touches, turning our vision into meaningful results for the American people,” Kennedy told us in a statement.

But supporters of Kennedy’s MAHA ambitions say that he has been frustrated at times with the limits that Overton and the White House have put on him. “Time after time her views were to dig in and resist the president’s agenda until his friends called him directly and overrode her,” another person familiar with her work told us, pointing to issues such as psychedelic treatments for veterans and marijuana rescheduling.

At the HHS headquarters building last year, a joke began circulating about all of the policies that Kennedy advisers believed Overton was holding up, according to three sources: Policy proposals that go to the White House fall into what they call the “Overton window” of inaction—a play on the social-science term named after an unrelated researcher that describes the range of acceptable change in a political system.

Overton began working for Trump in 2019 while doing a surgical residency at Johns Hopkins University, where she became an ally of the last FDA commissioner, Marty Makary. She joined the White House at a time of crisis, serving on the front lines of the nation’s COVID response. Allies say that the experience left her skeptical of the established public-health infrastructure, pushing her to finish her doctorate in clinical investigation at Hopkins and perhaps making her receptive to the reforms called for by the MAHA movement. After Trump’s defeat in 2020, she joined Brooke Rollins, her former boss at the White House Domestic Policy Council, at America First Policy Institute, a think tank that doubled as a Cabinet-in-waiting for a second Trump term.

Rollins became agriculture secretary when Trump returned to the White House. Overton helped Kennedy put together his team for HHS, people involved told us. She supported Trump’s embrace of the MAHA agenda, people who interacted with her at the time told us. Top Trump advisers trusted her to support the cause while running the scientific traps, keeping an eye on the political risks, and managing the contentious inter-department fights that Kennedy’s proposals would inevitably create.

One of Kennedy’s first major MAHA drives was to replace what he called the “unreadable” scientific groundwork by the Biden administration to revise federal nutrition guidelines. He launched a new push for “gold standard science,” prompting a monthslong rush to develop new evidence reviews to back up the guidelines that Kennedy wanted to issue. Those effectively flipped the 1990s USDA “food pyramid” to prioritize the consumption of proteins, healthy fats, and fibrous vegetables—what Kennedy considers real food—over refined grains and ultra-processed foods. Rollins, at USDA, and Kennedy, at HHS, made a show of working closely together. But behind the scenes, their departments engaged in sometimes acrimonious battle, and Overton was in the center, mediating the back-and-forth.

HHS officials became convinced that Overton was siding with USDA. Wary of a legal deadline to produce the new recommendations, she chafed at Kennedy’s idea of throwing out all of the Biden administration’s work. She wanted to keep the parts that the Trump administration had no qualms about, such as research done on saturated fats. And some HHS officials viewed her as sympathetic to USDA concerns about a lack of consultation with the new scientific advisory panel that HHS had appointed, two people said.

“At one point, her recommendation was Can we just use the old science?” one person involved in the process told us. “Long story short, she did everything she could to prevent the real-food thing from being a success.” HHS officials became so concerned that Overton was favoring USDA and undermining their efforts that they created a binder, documenting every communication among her and USDA officials in a bid to better counter her arguments, according to two people familiar with the effort.

Overton’s allies say that to suggest that she did not want a major remake of nutrition guidelines is just wrong. They point to the end result as evidence. Overton also subsequently led the policy process that resulted in USDA committing $700 million to a regenerative-farming program, championed by Kennedy, that seeks to avoid heavy dependence on chemical fertilizer and pesticides. She also helped write the first MAHA executive order last February, which reframed the government’s health priorities around countering chronic diseases, reversing declining life expectancy, and reducing supposed overreliance on medication.

But other changes came more slowly, to the frustration of MAHA advocates. Recently, Overton has been involved in drafting new policies for the use of peptides, short chains of amino acids that are available on the gray market but that, in many cases, have scant scientific evidence to support their safety or efficacy. An FDA advisory board is meeting this week to consider whether to recommend easing regulations on seven popular peptides, allowing them to be made by compounding pharmacies, which prepare custom medications that in many cases aren’t available from traditional pharmacies.

MAHA advocates support greater peptide availability, often portraying them as preferable to conventional pharmaceuticals. Kennedy himself has acknowledged using peptides. Overton, however, is viewed by some as wary of the lack of scientific research into some of the compounds. For her supporters, this is proof that she is doing her job. For her opponents, it is evidence that she is a bureaucratic institutionalist representing the kind of inaction that MAHA had hoped to break. “Heidi is a skeptic of anything that is not pharma, and that would include peptides,” a person familiar with the matter told us.

Overton was also in the middle of a fierce internal debate over marijuana regulation. Trump made a 2024 campaign promise to reclassify the drug from Schedule I (a criminal designation that highlights abuse potential for substances without medical value) to Schedule III (lower abuse risk and an allowance for medical prescription and study). Law-enforcement agencies and conservatives were wary of marijuana’s harms, and the Trump administration stalled on the initiative for almost all of last year.

Marijuana entrepreneurs and one of the president’s wealthy friends, Howard Kessler, eventually triumphed with direct appeals to the president, creating a playbook that Rogan followed in his outreach on loosening the regulation of psychedelics. Those direct appeals were designed, to some degree, to bypass the interagency process, people familiar with the matter told us. Once Trump decided to move, he relied on Overton to make the change happen. “I’ve never been inundated by so many people as I have about this particular reclassification,” Trump said at a December signing of an executive order that finally directed the marijuana-classification change. Kessler developed a direct relationship with Overton during the process and has since been working with her on other health issues.

In late December, Trump pushed for another MAHA health initiative to be codified in short order, calling for a new childhood-vaccination schedule to be in place by the end of the year. Once again, Overton was in the middle of wrangling between the White House and HHS. She and department officials created an initial draft, but HHS lawyers initially rejected the proposal as lacking enough scientific backing and therefore vulnerable to legal challenge. At a meeting that month in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, Overton dressed down HHS officials for not presenting a document that would pass legal review, according to a person who attended. “I think she felt blindsided,” the person said.

HHS staff worked through Christmas and New Year’s to footnote the document, recruiting Martin Kulldorff, a former Harvard biostatistician who now works in Kennedy’s office, to help. The new rules were introduced in January. A federal judge blocked them in March, ruling that the agency had not done a proper scientific review even after the later revisions.

Kennedy suggested last year that Overton take the job overseeing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, an offer that she declined, according to two people familiar with the situation. But in recent weeks, Overton has made clear that she is open to running the FDA, a larger and more powerful agency. White House officials are also considering two others: Jeff Vacirca, a cancer physician serving as the CEO and chairman of the board of New York Cancer & Blood Specialists, and the senior Pentagon health official Stephen Ferrara. A decision is expected soon.

Trump’s psychedelic order came together in weeks. Shortly after Rogan reached out to Trump, they saw each other at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event in Miami. “He came to me and said, It’s done. We’re going to take care of it. It’s a good thing for the soldiers. It’s a good thing for everybody,” Rogan later recounted on his podcast.

[Read: How to have a ‘don’t-know mind’]

Some in the White House were caught off guard and questioned the wisdom of unleashing psychedelic mental-health treatments that had not yet been studied like other approved pharmaceuticals. Officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs were concerned about patients suddenly demanding treatments that the department was not ready to provide. Overton once again stepped in. “She wanted to make sure it was being done the right way,” Chris Klomp, a senior adviser to Kennedy, told us. “What I observed with the psychedelics is that Heidi ran a process to try to align all these different pieces.”

But Klomp said that he was not surprised that the process ended with some people unhappy. “The Domestic Policy Council is in no small part a quarterback aligning all those different parties,” Klomp said. “If you don’t understand that process, you can at times feel pretty frustrated.”

MAHA activists, who view Trump’s presidency and Kennedy as a rare opportunity for major change, see Overton’s more cautious, deliberate approach as anathema. Overton’s allies say that this is a misreading of her role, which is to build consensus and deliver a lasting outcome. Now, as Trump considers moving her to a much larger position, the debate may soon find a wider audience.

Inside the Feud Over Ukraine’s Drone Success

2026-07-24T06:00:00-04:00

Drone warfare took a while to catch on in Ukraine. Like any revolution, it required a struggle. The opposition came mostly from the older generals trained to fight using artillery and tanks. Early in the war with Russia, many of them saw drones as toys, better suited to taking aerial photos of wedding parties than flying missions over the battlefield. But a coalition of junior officers and tech enthusiasts saw early on that drones could hold the key to Ukraine’s defense, even its victory.

The course of the war has proved the younger generation right. Drones now account for more than 80 percent of all battlefield casualties. They have made tanks and artillery look like lumbering relics in the war zone. Through long-range strikes against Russian oil refineries and other infrastructure, drones have also forced Moscow to play defense. But it took years for the technology to gain broad acceptance.

“We had no financing at first,” Mykhailo Fedorov, the main proponent of drone warfare in Ukraine, told me in an interview last year. The first attack-drone units formed in Ukraine in 2023, about a year into the full-scale war with Russia. “We were going around, asking for money from businesspeople, fundraising on Facebook,” he said.

At the time, Fedorov served as the minister of digital transformation, a position that gave him no power to buy weapons on the state’s behalf. Through persistence, showmanship, and a knack for technocratic knife-fighting, he circumvented the rules of military procurement, turning his ministry into a hub for Ukraine’s nascent drone program. “The revolution happened inside the bureaucracy,” he told me.

So did the counterrevolution. Its leaders sat a couple of miles away, behind the neoclassical facade of the General Staff headquarters. Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, was chief among them. He trained in the Soviet school of military theory and often clashed with Fedorov over the role that drones should play in the Ukrainian arsenal. Their conflict intensified at the start of this year, when Fedorov took over the Ministry of Defense, a post that finally gave him control over the purchase of weapons.

[Read: Ukraine’s Dr. Strangelove]

Over the past six months, Fedorov and Syrsky frequently took their complaints about each other to the arbiter in their disagreements, President Volodymyr Zelensky. This month, their constant infighting became too much for the president, and he decided to fire first Fedorov, and then Syrsky. But he did not resolve the questions at the center of their conflict. Should Ukraine, in the middle of a war for its survival, continue to restructure the machinery of its defense in ways that no military power has ever attempted? Or would that strategy end up weakening the forces tasked with holding the line against Russia?

Ukraine’s war effort now faces a leadership vacuum, and neither camp has a clear mandate to complete Ukraine’s history-making experiment in warfare or to reverse it. The drone revolution, having already reached a point of no return, has now lost its greatest advocate in the top ranks of the government. The result could be a level of indecision that the military cannot afford.

On Monday, the day before he was fired, General Syrsky issued a call for the tech accelerationists inside the government to pump the brakes. Drones alone cannot defeat the Russian army, and the culture of Silicon Valley cannot supplant the need for military discipline, Syrsky argued in a column for Militarnyi, a Ukrainian publication focused on defense. “It is an obvious gamble,” he wrote, addressing the push for Ukraine to outsource the work of soldiers to artificially intelligent machines. “Any experiment of this scale is paid for by our lands and our people.”

Some parts of the piece reminded me of an old man shaking his fist at a passing drone, frustrated that the world he knows is moving on. But Syrsky, who is 60 years old, made a lot of cogent points that I have often heard from senior officers. In any war, the top generals need to synchronize the forces under their command to make them function as a single organism, with weapons and tactics that work in concert with one another. The nature of the war in Ukraine has made that challenge particularly daunting.

The front line spans more than 600 miles, and its Ukrainian defenders include a dizzying array of units from various branches of the military. Early in the war, many of them got into the habit of raising money to purchase weapons and gear for themselves. Crowdfunding campaigns on social media brought in enormous sums from around the world, and much of it went toward the purchase of drones on the open market.

[Anne Applebaum: The other Ukrainian army]

The practice spawned a parallel system of procurement in the military, whereby low-level commanders routinely placed orders from the suppliers of their choice. Fedorov championed this practice. From his post in the ministry of digital transformation, he launched an online bazaar akin to Amazon that sells drones and other high-tech weapons to the military. Soldiers of any rank can scroll through thousands of gadgets on the Brave1 marketplace, including wheeled robots, remote-controlled bomber drones, and microchips to upgrade them with AI-powered targeting and other capabilities.

The market has no precedent in modern warfare. By law, the armed forces of Ukraine, like every major military in the world, centralizes weapons orders via the defense ministry. Fedorov saw that system as far too cumbersome and prone to corruption. It could not deliver weapons fast enough, he argued, and it did not cater to the ever-changing requirements of soldiers at the front. In January, when Zelensky promoted him to defense minister, Fedorov tried to supplant the traditional procurement system with a version of the marketplace.

Syrsky saw that as a threat to his authority, and it’s hard to blame him. When junior officers can decide how to equip their men, keeping everything in sync across the battlefield becomes more difficult. The lower ranks might appreciate the freedom and adaptability of this arrangement, but their commanding officers in Kyiv do not. “The General Staff provides the ministry with a complete list of what is needed for war,” Syrsky wrote in his Militarnyi column, listing artillery, mortars and “dozens of other items.” He added: “Everything must be purchased, not just what is currently in vogue.”

By the time Fedorov lost his job last week, his years of advocacy for high-tech warfare had been vindicated. Ukraine now produces several million drones a year, easing its dependence on foreign military aid. Most of the credit for that belongs to the intricate clockwork of drone factories, start-ups, software developers, training academies, and military innovators that help keep the Ukrainian war machine running. Fedorov, who is 35 years old, has long been the face of this ecosystem and its chief advocate inside the halls of power. It should therefore not have surprised Zelensky that firing Fedorov caused a fierce public backlash. Thousands of demonstrators gathered in Kyiv and other cities across Ukraine to demand his reinstatement. Many of the protesters called for Syrsky to be ousted instead.

The president obliged by firing the general, but he did not bring back the minister of defense. As a consolation, he offered Fedorov a position on the National Security and Defense Council, an advisory body that usually acts as a retirement home for senior officials and military brass. Fedorov declined, in part because the council has no authority to purchase weapons. Nor can it enact the ambitious reforms Fedorov left unfinished.

[Read: Building tanks while the Ukrainians master drones]

In place of these two seasoned members of Zelensky’s team, the president installed a pair of lesser-known figures. Although both are experienced and well regarded in the military, they lack the institutional chops and perhaps also the inclination to carry on the bureaucratic battles that felled their predecessors.

The most obvious quality they have in common might be their youth. The new acting minister of defense, Yevhenii Khmara, and the new commander of the armed forces, Mykhailo Drapatyi, both belong to the same generation as Fedorov and Zelensky. They never studied in the Soviet academies where Syrsky learned the military doctrines he has relied on throughout this war.

But that does not mean the younger generation has won a mandate to continue Fedorov’s more radical agenda. Zelensky has not granted it. His new appointees will likely face the same resistance from the older cadres in the general staff. Without Fedorov in charge of the ministry of defense, Ukraine’s revolution in warfare will lose its standard-bearer and a lot of its momentum—just when those innovations appeared to be paying off.

A Planeload of Informants

2026-07-24T06:00:00-04:00

The governor of Baja California is a 40-year-old attorney and former big-city mayor named Marina del Pilar. Her state, which includes the megacity of Tijuana, is a magnet for American tourists, and also for narcotics cartels. As a politician of some experience, she is presumably unfazed by the sorts of challenges that come with governing a volatile section of her volatile country.

And yet, in what has quickly become a very famous recording of a phone call that leaked last week, she has difficulty masking her shock about an unusual predicament. “Are they saying they want to extradite me?” she asks her interlocutor, who is apparently an intermediary for the FBI. The “they” in question is the United States government. Almost immediately, her tone becomes more businesslike, and she makes a not-so-cryptic offer: “Can’t they tell me what they want me to talk about? I might know or hear a lot of security-related things.”

In other words, the governor of the strategically important border state of Baja California was just caught on tape offering to become an FBI informant. The remarkable thing here is that she would not be the first; the list of current and former Mexican officials and drug traffickers who have offered to cooperate with the U.S. government is now lengthy.

The phone exchange, released by the Mexican journalist Héctor de Mauleón, seemed almost too Narcos to be real, until del Pilar confirmed its authenticity. Her predecessor had arranged the phone call, she said, after the U.S. revoked her visa last year. As more recordings leaked in recent days, the country was transfixed. Columnists theorized about what del Pilar might know that she would be willing to trade for more favorable treatment. The Americans seemed to want her testimony for a bigger case—but who was their target?

In order to fully grasp why politicians like del Pilar are considering cooperating with U.S. investigators, it is vital to keep in mind the current, overwhelming Mexican reality, which is that the country’s leaders believe that President Trump will intensify America’s intervention in Mexico. Their gravest concern—a plausible one—is that Trump will launch military strikes against the country.

Since his second term began, Trump has periodically threatened military action inside Mexico, alluding to air strikes or operations that would “take out the cartels.” Mexican officials have repeatedly rejected the possibility. “There will be no invasion of Mexico,” President Claudia Sheinbaum said last year. But quietly, Mexican officials have discussed what it would mean if they were attacked by their neighbor and largest trading partner. Would it be a special-forces operation, like the one that seized former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro? A drone strike on a fentanyl lab? Some Mexican officials are reading books about the Mexican-American War, searching for historical precedent.

Because the threat of military intervention is so dramatic, not enough attention has been paid to a type of intervention that is already taking place, one that could pave the way for strikes. In a break with long-standing precedent, American prosecutors have used informants to pursue members of the Mexican government, apparently “moving up the food chain,” as one U.S. official described it to me. Del Pilar has become the most famous example of such cooperation. The State Department canceled her U.S. visa last year while law-enforcement agencies investigated her and her then-husband. In the leaked audio recordings, the supposed FBI representatives refer to “sanctions” and “charges” against her, though no charges have been filed. Del Pilar makes clear that she is willing to offer information gleaned from state security meetings in order to avoid being extradited. She says vaguely that what she hears in those meetings “isn’t what I hear elsewhere,” possibly referring to sensitive information that might help investigators. On Sunday, del Pilar released a video saying she was merely trying to find ways to reinstate her canceled visa. I messaged her spokesperson to ask about this, but she didn’t respond. The FBI has also declined to comment.

Several former Mexican officials facing U.S. charges have turned themselves in, apparently agreeing to cooperate with authorities to reduce their sentences. Dozens of newly extradited drug traffickers, too, are believed to be cooperating. Their accounts appear to have allowed U.S. investigators to build cases against members of Sheinbaum’s Morena political party. At least four have been indicted. Many more have had their visas revoked.

It’s a high-risk escalation in the Trump administration’s fight against narco corruption—and possibly also a pretext for a unilateral attack. Trump could use evidence of the government’s links to organized crime in an attempt to justify using force in Mexico. This week, the Trump-appointed head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Terry Cole, gave a speech describing “the deadly connection between cartel networks and the Mexican government.”

“They are one in the same,” he said.

The most senior member of Sheinbaum’s party to face charges is Ruben Rocha Moya, the governor of Sinaloa. He was indicted in April for alleged drug trafficking. Prosecutors have accused him of supporting a faction of the Sinaloa cartel, which in turn used kidnappings, intimidation, and ballot theft to help Morena candidates win elections. Sheinbaum has defended him, claiming that the indictment lacks evidence.

“An action of that magnitude has no precedent in the history of our bilateral relationship,” Sheinbaum said at a political rally in May, referring to DOJ’s request for the arrest, for extradition purposes, of 10 Mexican citizens. “Is this a genuine, legitimate interest in helping Mexico? Is it a genuine commitment to combating organized crime? Or are we witnessing segments of the U.S. far right using our country to position themselves ahead of their 2026 elections?”

Ironically, it was Sheinbaum’s cooperation with the United States that helped bolster the American caseload. As Trump threatened to invade Mexico, her administration last year quietly increased its security ties to Washington, an apparent peace offering aimed at deterring an attack as well as an effort by Sheinbaum to rein in organized crime. The Mexican government extradited or transferred more than 100 alleged criminals to the United States from February 2025 to January 2026—many times the previous flow. Then, in February, the Mexican military killed Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” partially based on U.S. intelligence.

Many of the newly extradited Mexicans—facing the possibility of life in prison—have become cooperating witnesses in exchange for the possibility of reduced sentences, according to current and former U.S. officials. El Mencho, meanwhile, left behind ledgers documenting bribes and payments, according to one U.S. official, which could be used as evidence. And now del Pilar and other Mexican officials, threatened with yet another round of extraditions and canceled U.S. visas, are apparently talking to U.S. law enforcement. If those cases advance, and Mexican officials offer damning information about their colleagues, it could lead to another cascade of indictments.

“That’s the challenge for Sheinbaum. Once you uncork the bottle, there’s no controlling what comes out,” Robert Patterson, the former acting administrator of the DEA, told me. “And a credible investigation doesn’t pick and choose who it touches or who it holds to account.”

[Read: Claudia Sheinbaum’s impossible dilemma]

For years, even as the United States pursued Mexico’s most famous drug kingpins, investigators observed an unofficial red line: The Justice Department did not indict senior sitting officials or politicians. Those cases could shatter diplomatic relations. U.S. officials complained privately about pervasive corruption in Mexico, but they never attempted to extradite the worst offenders while they were still in office.

Even when prosecutors charged former Mexican officials, the response could be explosive. Months after arresting former Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos in 2020 on drug-trafficking charges during a visit to Los Angeles, the United States bowed to political pressure and returned him to Mexico. He continues to live as a free man. It was a lesson in the way U.S. prosecutorial goals could be flattened by Mexican politics.

Yet Rocha’s indictment and the pressure on del Pilar suggest a radical change. The United States is now willing to pursue members of the ruling party, in spite of the rift it might cause. It’s a strategy that has confused many current and former U.S. officials, particularly given the unlikelihood that Rocha will ever be extradited. He has temporarily resigned from his post but has denied the charges against him. “I’m scratching my head on what the goal is here,” said one former narcotics prosecutor.

The most frightening scenario to many officials on both sides of the border is that the United States might use Rocha’s case as a pretext to strike Mexico. They point to what happened after Maduro was indicted on drug charges. Mexico, of course, is not Venezuela. It is the United States’ biggest trading partner, the largest democracy in the Spanish-speaking world, home to some 1.5 million U.S. citizens, and visited by approximately 40 million every year. The fallout from any unilateral U.S. action would hit both sides of the border.

And yet, for the first time in more than a century, the United States is not backing away. Last week, the State Department designated two lesser-known drug cartels—the Juárez Cartel and Los Viagras—as “foreign terrorist ⁠organizations” and “specially designated global terrorists.” Some within the Trump administration believe that those designations would offer some kind of legal authority for an attack, though international-law experts largely differ.

As the U.S. has shifted its legal strategy in Mexico, the cartel landscape, too, has changed dramatically. Nearly all of the drug kingpins of the past two decades are in prison or dead. Most famously, El Chapo is sitting in a maximum-security prison in Colorado. El Mencho was killed by the Mexican military. Ismael Zambada García, “El Mayo,” was—bewilderingly—delivered to U.S. authorities on a New Mexico airstrip in 2024 by one of El Chapo’s sons, Joaquín Guzmán López, who apparently hoped to earn favorable treatment from U.S. prosecutors. Another son, Ovidio Guzmán López, is also cooperating after being extradited in 2023.

[Read: The incredible story of the cartel Olympics]

The campaign against cartel leaders has been so successful that, even if the United States wanted to decapitate a drug-trafficking organization, it’s unclear whom they would target. “For an administration that thrives on publicity, if the goal is to make a big splash by taking out someone who is a big household name, that well is running very dry,” Adam Isaacson, the director of the defense-oversight program at the Washington Office on Latin America, told me.

Some experts had been concerned that the absence of kingpins could lead to a power vacuum and a spike in violence. That hasn’t happened. Homicides in Mexico fell by nearly half from September 2024 to May 2026.

With the pressure on its government rising, Mexico has begun to make its own demands of the United States. Last week, Sheinbaum said that she would request criminal charges in the cases of Mexican citizens killed by ICE. The week before, she demanded clarity about the U.S. role in the surrender of Joaquín Guzmán López in New Mexico. And her administration reminded the Americans of another grievance: Since January 1, 2018, Mexico has requested the extradition of 269 alleged criminals whose cases have yet to be approved by the United States.

After years of deriding Mexican inaction on security, the United States appears to have found a willing partner. Now it risks forfeiting that cooperation. On Monday, as if to demonstrate what could be lost, Mexican authorities arrested Janero Van DeMario Garrett, allegedly a member of the Sinaloa cartel. “The arrest was made possible thanks to mechanisms of international cooperation and the exchange of information with the DEA,” Mexico’s security minister wrote on X.

The alleged criminal, it turned out, was a U.S. citizen.

The Art of the Giveaway

2026-07-23T20:12:18-04:00

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What kind of negotiator gives the other side everything that it wants with the hope of eventually getting something in return?

It’s a question that even some of President Trump’s own allies are asking after his administration signed a landmark deal to develop a civilian nuclear program in Saudi Arabia using American technology. The deal’s opponents, in the United States and Israel, worry that the new pact might ultimately allow for uranium enrichment—and if so, that Trump just gave Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman the tools he needs to build a bomb. What did the U.S. require in return? Pretty much zip.

That, at least, is how things stood when the agreement was finalized yesterday. Then, just before 8 a.m. today, Trump took to social media to deliver what seemed like an after-the-fact ultimatum: The deal, he wrote, is “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords,” the Middle East initiative launched in Trump’s first term that is designed to normalize relations between Israel and countries in the region.

Trump-administration officials argued that the deal is an “America First” policy triumph because the 30-year, multibillion-dollar agreement gives American companies (which already do huge business in Saudi Arabia) a central role in developing the kingdom’s nuclear infrastructure while shutting out foreign competitors. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters today that the arrangement “will ultimately benefit American industry workers and supply chains.”

It may not benefit Trump’s image as a consummate dealmaker, however. The framework of Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham accords and, in return, getting defense guarantees and U.S. help to develop a civilian nuclear program has been on the table for years. It came close to fruition during the Biden administration. But the kingdom received a defense package in November and the nuclear deal this week. Neither agreement stipulated the normalizing of relations with Israel as a precondition. “Leave it to this administration to negotiate after the signatures are barely dry,” Elisa Ewers, a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told us.

When the agreement was unveiled yesterday, U.S. lawmakers and Israeli politicians were startled by its lax conditions for Riyadh. Trump by this morning may have decided to provide reassurance with his Abraham Accords announcement—so he did what he often does.

“The president wakes up every day, and every day, at least on Middle East policy, is an improvisation,” F. Gregory Gause, a professor emeritus at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, told us. “He was getting some pushback on the Saudi deal, and so he added this sweetener to it for people in Congress who might feel that if the Saudis had a regular diplomatic relationship with Israel, they would be less concerned.”

Trump, he noted, may improvise again and remove the stipulation if the furor dies down. Last week, the president said that the U.S. would impose a 20 percent fee on the value of the cargo on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz to counter Iranian efforts to control the waterway. The next day, the president reversed himself. “So it could be that by tomorrow, this goes away from the president’s mind,” Gause said. But if he gives the Saudis what they want without asking for anything in return, he also would have thrown away all of his leverage.

In 2023, top officials in the Biden administration shuttled between Washington and Riyadh, believing that they were on the precipice of a major breakthrough: Bin Salman, known as MBS, was close to joining the Abraham Accords, a development that officials saw as a bulwark against Iran’s rising nuclear threat in the region. Talks to flesh out the details were scheduled for mid-October of that year. But the negotiations unraveled after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the devastating Gaza war that followed. In the aftermath, Saudi leaders concluded that normalization was politically untenable.

Biden-administration officials then looked for other ways to entice the Saudis to both restart normalization talks and help secure the Gaza Strip. They focused on a mutual-defense agreement, which included nuclear cooperation, even though President Biden had made known his dislike for the crown prince after the 2018 murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Jon Wolfsthal, a former adviser on U.S.-Saudi nuclear cooperation, told us that the Biden administration had calculated that “if the U.S. didn’t get in the game, particularly as a nuclear provider, one of America’s adversaries might, and that is much worse for U.S. national security.”

But with the 2024 election looming, Saudi Arabia’s government gambled that a Trump victory would bring more favorable terms, and the talks stalled.

[Read: Iraq’s man in the middle]

The Saudis were right. Saudi leaders already saw in Trump a partner whose approach was similar to their own: pragmatic, transactional, and largely unbothered by concerns about human rights. The relationship extended beyond official diplomacy. MBS had developed a close rapport with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner during Trump’s first term, communicating with him directly over WhatsApp. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund had previously committed $2 billion to Kushner’s private-equity firm.

Following his return to the Oval Office, Trump grew fixated on getting Saudi Arabia to normalize ties with Israel. As in his first term, Trump picked Saudi Arabia for his first official overseas visit, arriving with an entourage of American business executives in an effort to foster deeper corporate ties, particularly in technology. During a meeting in Washington, D.C., in November, Trump, raising his voice, pressed MBS to join the Abraham Accords. MBS insisted that the only way to achieve this would be by agreeing on a path toward Palestinian statehood. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the prospect of a sovereign Palestinian state.) Still, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia reached an understanding on a defense agreement, which would include the sale of advanced F-35 fighter jets.

Months later, Trump tried to link an expansion of the Abraham Accords to his plan for peace with Iran, suggesting in a conference call with several regional leaders that they sign up, according to U.S. and Middle Eastern officials. After that conversation finished, he called MBS personally to press the issue once more. But Trump got the same answer. Still, talks over a Saudi civilian nuclear program continued.

The Trump administration says that this week’s deal is designed to help Saudi Arabia develop civilian nuclear power only. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who signed the agreement, said in a statement that the terms “uphold the highest standards of nuclear safety and nonproliferation.” The Saudi government said that the deal supports its domestic efforts to diversify energy sources, and that the government is committed to the “highest international standards” of nuclear safety, security, and nonproliferation.

But Saudi Arabia has also talked about becoming a nuclear-weapons power if Iran were able to develop its own weapon. Preventing Tehran from doing so is a central goal of the U.S. conflict, but its outcome is uncertain, as is the fate of Iran’s nuclear program. “Saudi Arabia does not want to acquire any nuclear bomb, but without a doubt if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible,” MBS told CBS News in 2018.

Advocates of nonproliferation contend that the U.S.-Saudi deal lacks the necessary guardrails to prevent that: no measures to prevent the sharing of uranium-enrichment and plutonium-separation technologies, no commitment by Saudi Arabia to comply with the safety standards of, and monitoring by, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Under the agreement, American companies would build nuclear reactors in Saudi Arabia, and the two countries would study whether Saudi Arabia should eventually enrich uranium on its own instead of importing nuclear fuel. Enriching uranium is necessary to produce the fuel for nuclear-power plants but can also be a key step toward making a nuclear weapon. “Your best route to avoiding proliferation is this kind of very, very close relationship with the United States, with U.S. technology, that we control, that we monitor, and that is of a long duration,” Victoria Coates, a former deputy national security adviser to Trump, who now works at the Heritage Foundation, told us.

Trump denied that enrichment is on the table. The deal notes that the U.S. will ultimately decide, after a study is conducted, whether enrichment shouldn’t take place, and if that’s the conclusion, Saudi Arabia would be barred from pursuing it on its own or with another country for 10 years. But giving the U.S., rather than international inspectors, that authority could lead other regimes to choose their own inspectors too, opening the door to broader proliferation.

[Read: The forever negotiation ]

“Making all of this subjective—and ‘you can choose your own inspectors,’ and all those other things—is a really bad route to go down,” Jon Alterman, a global-security scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told us. In theory, he said, the agreement could give Iranians the license and precedent to credibly say: “We have Russian inspectors, we have Chinese inspectors, so we’re doing just what the Saudis are doing.”

Alterman noted that the U.S. even has a model for a better arrangement: a 2009 agreement with the United Arab Emirates. “The Emiratis built a genuinely robust and safe domestic nuclear program,” Alterman said. “There are robust safeguards against proliferation. And it deepened the partnership between the UAE and the United States.” But that’s not what the U.S. asked of Saudi Arabia this week.

North Carolina’s Threat to Legal Assistance for the Poor

2026-07-23T17:24:00-04:00

When Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina in September 2024, it left behind it a trail of death and destruction—and a huge number of legal headaches. Residents struggled to understand the process of receiving help from FEMA, people were beset by scams and price gouging, and tenants whose homes had been destroyed or made uninhabitable puzzled over their rights.

Pisgah Legal Services, a nonprofit that provides civil legal aid in the region, had 120 staffers, and all of them were somehow affected, Jaclyn Kiger, Pisgah’s executive director, told me. Within about a week, though, Pisgah Legal had hosted three clinics; it ultimately helped thousands of Helene victims.

Civil legal services like these may not be well understood, but they serve an essential role in ensuring that everyone has access to justice. The Supreme Court’s landmark 1963 decision in Gideon v. Wainwright established that any criminal defendant has a right to legal counsel. But most legal issues are civil, not criminal. This includes any number of disputes between parties, but also issues such as evictions, scams targeting senior citizens, and domestic-violence protective orders. Recourse to courts in such cases can be lifesaving, but they are not free, and they are not easy for ordinary people to handle on their own.

Since 1981, every state has created programs to fund civil legal services with Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Accounts. It’s an elegant solution: Lawyers frequently hold money in accounts for clients, accruing interest that doesn’t truly belong to any party. IOLTA-funded programs use that interest to provide legal support without any cost to taxpayers. Kiger told me that Pisgah Legal received nearly $2 million in fiscal year 2025; overall, NC IOLTA provided clients roughly $12 million for civil legal services that year.

But in a budget passed this month, the Republican-dominated North Carolina General Assembly effectively cut this funding off. The budget permits $2 million in IOLTA funding in the coming fiscal year for civil legal aid, but that will sunset in the future. (Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, signed the budget—the first that the state has managed to pass in more than a year—while criticizing elements of it, including the IOLTA cut, which he said “cruelly punishes low-income people who need access to justice.”) Most IOLTA money will be redirected to criminal legal services for indigent defendants, which the state is already constitutionally required to fund. Providers I’ve spoken with recently are crestfallen but also baffled. Although they all support funding for public defenders, they note that civil legal aid gets no other state money. “Hundreds of thousands of low-income people in the mountains are going to suffer,” Kiger said.

Civil legal services have historically been a bipartisan priority, popular among both parties and lawyers as well. Last year, a coalition of leaders of some of the state’s biggest law firms wrote a letter to the state supreme court backing IOLTA funding for civil legal services. “We believe a fair and functioning court system is not a partisan goal—it is a constitutional one,” they wrote. “By enabling litigants to participate effectively, IOLTA-funded legal aid strengthens both the efficiency and fairness of judicial proceedings.”

But some North Carolina Republicans have objected to the fact that some of the state’s biggest providers of civil legal aid also engage in progressive political advocacy or do legal work related to immigration or social-justice issues. The driving force behind the change in this month’s budget is state House Speaker Destin Hall, who is also an attorney in private practice. “IOLTA funds were shifted to ensure they’re not being utilized to bankroll progressive political pet projects like the NC Justice Center or provide government services to illegal immigrants. Instead, those funds will be used to provide legal services to underserved communities,” he said in a statement in June.

To that end, the general assembly placed political limits on a small portion of civil legal aid. The budget allows IOLTA money collected before July 2025 to be distributed, but only $2 million a year until the funds run out, and only to providers who don’t engage in political advocacy or take cases involving transgender health care or federal immigration law. This is less a way of removing politics from legal aid and more a way of instituting a different set of ideological priorities, and in any case, it applies only to this small and disappearing pot of money. The overarching goal appears to be not just going after progressive groups, but ensuring reductions in civil legal aid per se. This has led providers to speculate that the general assembly is less worried about “wokeness” and more interested in defending business interests. “I think it comes down to who we serve,” Kiger said. “We are serving the most vulnerable among us.”

When I contacted Hall’s office to try to understand the decision, a spokesperson asked me for detailed questions but never replied when I sent them. Ashley Campbell, who leads Legal Aid of North Carolina, the state’s largest civil-legal-aid firm, told me that she sought meetings with Hall but was rebuffed. In a statement, the executive director of the North Carolina State Bar lamented that “months of good-faith efforts” by the bar and NC IOLTA leaders had failed to sway the general assembly: “This loss of funding will prove devastating to the tens of thousands of low-income North Carolinians facing legal concerns that threaten their housing stability, income, access to health care and benefits, and safety from domestic violence and human trafficking.”

The defunding of IOLTA in North Carolina is a major event in the state, but it could have national implications. As I have been reporting for more than a decade now, many of the major currents in national politics have originated in the Old North State. The state has also been used as a proving ground, including for Donald Trump–style attacks on elections. Right now, the partisan warfare over civil legal aid in North Carolina is an outlier; Texas GOP legislators even strengthened IOLTA funding in 2023. But a failed Montana bill last year tried to weaken IOLTA, and Trump has proposed eliminating or drastically reducing funding for the Legal Services Corporation, a national civil-legal-aid group established by Congress. People I spoke with in North Carolina worry that the state budget could provide a template for other states as well. If that happens, access to justice could become just another luxury good.

Related:

North Carolina is a warning. (From 2022)
North Carolina is the canary in the election coal mine.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

President Trump said the nuclear agreement signed with Saudi Arabia yesterday is contingent on the kingdom normalizing relations with Israel by joining the Abraham Accords, a condition that had not been publicly disclosed when the deal was announced.
A member of Vice President Vance’s Secret Service detail is under administrative investigation and may face a criminal inquiry over allegations of compromising operations and information security. The Secret Service has not disclosed what information was allegedly compromised.
Global oil prices surpassed $100 a barrel for the first time since May, after Houthi militants claimed to have struck two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Jake Lundberg explores what an office murder in 1841 revealed about the American workplace.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Alisa Gao / The Atlantic

The New Chilling Effect

By Jacob Blane, Annabelle Garland and Sam Gross

If you’re looking for a reason to despair over the state of American education, there are many places you could start. You could, for example, worry about the all-consuming phones—or the gambling and TikTok addictions that come with them. You could worry about the free fall in literacy, the decline in math fluency, the rise of AI, the insanity of college-obsessed parents, the sharp increase in truancy, the teen mental-health crisis, and on and on.

Yet something that deserves more attention is damage to free expression—not in the classroom but in the public sphere of high school: the realms of student newspapers, student government, and other aspects of everyday life. School is meant to prepare students for the real world, but too many institutions are training kids to be silent.

Read the full article.

The War Is Lost. Now Fix What It Broke.

2026-07-23T16:51:23-04:00

The sooner we acknowledge that the United States has lost the war with Iran and stop fighting, the better. Because we now have a lot of work to do.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was pressed to explain before the Senate what the United States had accomplished in its war with Iran. Sputtering with fury at times, he claimed that Washington had won “a historic military victory.” But even if that were so, as a certain dead Prussian once counseled, nations do not fight wars to achieve military objectives. They fight wars to achieve political objectives.

The United States has not secured any of its political objectives in the war with Iran, and indeed, it has produced a situation in July that is markedly worse than the one antebellum: Iran’s former supreme leader, an elderly man known for his extreme views but also his caution, has been replaced by a group of leaders who are, if anything, more extreme and far less cautious about confronting the United States and its partners in the region.

The Strait of Hormuz, which was open prior to the start of the conflict, is now largely closed. And the Arabian Peninsula’s other choke point, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, appears to have been shut by Iran’s partners in Yemen, the Houthis. In the spring, American energy executives sounded like Chicken Little as they warned of oil and gas shortages that a reduction in Chinese oil imports helped forestall. But Exxon and Chevron have more recently cautioned that an energy crunch really is inevitable if the situation does not improve, and that this could threaten the entire global economy.

[Tom Nichols: The American people need the truth about the Iran war]

The U.S. does not have a workable military solution to this problem. Iran can threaten tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz with little more than inexpensive drones. And, thanks to this conflict, Tehran has discovered that it has powerful psychological leverage over shipping companies and their insurers—so much so that it hardly needs to lay mines to block the strait.

For the U.S. to finance this war beyond the $37.5 billion that the Pentagon admits it has already spent—the actual number is surely much higher—would be to throw good money after bad. The Trump administration needs to face up to having lost so that it can focus on preventing the effects of an embarrassing but ultimately manageable defeat from spreading beyond the Persian Gulf. This will involve rethinking some fundamentals—such as how the region’s oil reaches world markets, how the United States wages war, and how Iran can be deterred from making trouble for American interests in the future.

The Strait of Hormuz is now, and likely indefinitely will be, under a degree of Iranian control that did not exist prior to the conflict. Washington and its allies, together with private-sector investors, will need to devote considerable time and money toward securing alternate routes for Middle Eastern oil to reach global markets. Some infrastructure already exists. The East-West Pipeline that runs across Saudi Arabia was built during the Iran-Iraq War, which was the last time oil tankers struggled to navigate the strait. This pipeline moves roughly 7 million barrels of oil a day. The Saudis are considering doubling that capacity. The United Arab Emirates has a similar pipeline that bypasses the strait, and whose volume will also likely need to double. Oil and gas pipelines, like other oil infrastructure in the Gulf, are vulnerable to Iranian drone strikes, but they are relatively easy to repair.

The United States should encourage the Saudis and Emiratis to run branches of their pipelines through Yemen and Oman, to keep those countries invested in maintaining the free flow of oil and gas out of the peninsula. Chevron is apparently speaking with Iraq about a new pipeline—through Syria, no less—to move that country’s oil to market. The sooner these conduits are built, the better. (Also, just a friendly suggestion, but this maybe wasn’t the best month to crow about ending federal subsidies for wind- and solar-power generation.)

The Iran war has brought a few things into focus—among them, that the United States needs to rethink its approach to warfare in the region and beyond. For all of the time that the U.S. Central Command undoubtedly spent planning and rehearsing for a confrontation with Iran, the conduct of this war betrays a certain failure of imagination that has cost the U.S. military a great deal. The United States appears to have assumed that its abundance of precision weaponry would give it a huge advantage over the Iranians—which it did, for at least a few weeks. But precision weaponry was not decisive.

Relatively low-cost Iranian missiles and drones have wrought havoc upon U.S. bases and other targets in the Middle East. American planners should have anticipated as much: Ukrainian drones have been inflicting devastating damage on Russian military assets for several years now, demonstrating just how quickly the nature of warfare has changed. Yet American troops are getting killed in their barracks by cheap Iranian missiles and drones, and their leaders haven’t thought through adequate countermeasures.

This failure belongs not only to the Trump administration but also to the military services and their leaders. The Iran war is almost certainly the easiest drone war that America will ever fight. Countering this cheap and widely accessible technology will only get harder. The United States has to dramatically rethink its posture in the Middle East and around the globe until it figures out how to contend with that.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Fighter jets are passé]

Finally, Washington will need some fresh ideas if it is to reestablish deterrence with Iran. Prior to last summer, Iran had not made a serious move to stop oil and gas from flowing through the Strait of Hormuz in decades, and likely held back from making rapid advances toward a nuclear weapon, in large part because American military power deterred these actions. But as the American scholar Thomas Schelling noted, the power of a deterrent lies in the threat of its use. Once you actually do the thing you threaten to do, the enemy no longer fears what might happen.

The Trump administration has now squandered not one but two deterrents. Last year’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities did not, as President Trump initially claimed, “obliterate” the country’s nuclear program. I oversaw the contingency planning for such an operation for two years at the Pentagon. The strikes did what we planned them to do: They degraded Iran’s nuclear program, but only temporarily. Likewise, Hegseth is correct that we have done incredible damage to Iran’s conventional military and the industrial base that supports it. But the United States sought above all to deter Iran from doing two things: striking American partners in the region and disrupting maritime traffic. Is Iran now more deterred from taking these actions—or less so?

The answer is clearly the latter. The administration needs either to reach an accord with the Iranians or to establish a credible new deterrent, and fast. The promoters of this war—including The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board and the hawks at various Washington think tanks—have gotten everything they asked for. And it has been a disaster. So now what?

The Trump Family Sparks a Revolution in Albania

2026-07-23T16:40:00-04:00

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In the summer of 2021, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, were cruising the Mediterranean by yacht when they stopped for a swim off the Adriatic coast. They splashed over to an island and hiked, barefoot, across its hilly, rugged terrain. “Effectively that’s how we found it,” the president’s eldest daughter would later recount.

The Albanian island that the Trump heirs stumbled on, Robinson Crusoe–like, is called Sazan, once the site of a top-secret military base. Sazan is not undiscovered territory to Albanians; it’s their country’s largest island. Because it was uninhabited for many years, vegetation and wildlife flourished, making it a cherished nature preserve. Luckily for the Trump couple, Albania’s prime minister, Edi Rama, was a guest on the same yacht one of the nights they were on board.

Three years later—and about two months after Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024—an investment committee led by Rama gave preliminary approval to the couple’s plans to develop the island into an opulent resort. The venture extends to nearby land next to a coastal lagoon, which serves as a crucial habitat for flamingos, sea turtles, and other species. The couple’s partners in the project include a pair of Qatari brothers who have financed ultra-luxury developments across the Middle East and South Asia and an Albanian conglomerate with holdings in energy, construction, infrastructure, insurance, and tourism. In a recent podcast interview, Ivanka Trump described the project as “the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live.”

Many Albanians see matters differently. Hundreds of thousands have joined daily protests against the plans, in one of the country’s largest social mobilizations since the end of Communist rule 35 years ago. The uprising, called the Flamingo Revolution, takes its name from the wild birds that breed in the wetland habitat. Protesters have carried inflatable flamingos and placards with drawings.

The unrest has it all: accusations of organized crime and drug trafficking, competing claims of foreign influence, a cameo by Kanye West. For the participants I spoke with, the demonstrations are about accumulated frustration with Albanian politicians who have failed to give the country a solid economic foundation. “You can interpret it as an anti-Trump demonstration in the sense that it’s opposed to a Trump-like system we see here,” Fatos Lubonja, a writer and dissident who was imprisoned during Albania’s Communist dictatorship, told me: “government decisions made in secret, for the benefit of the few, motivated by money linked to oligarchs.”

The beauty of the landscape discovered by the American president’s daughter “belongs to all Albanians,” Lubonja said. He paraphrased Dostoyevsky: “And beauty will save the world.” But Rama, a former professional artist, won’t hear it. “I can be lectured about many things—about economy, about legal affairs, about agriculture, about health care,” he said in a recent interview. “But there is one thing that nobody can lecture me, which is beauty.”

The Flamingo Revolution seems, at first glance, the unlikeliest of anti-Trump protests. Albania, a nation of fewer than 3 million people, is one of the most pro-American countries in the world, and has been since the United States opposed Albanian partition all the way back in 1920. More recently, Washington backed Albania’s entry into NATO, in 2009, and has upheld its security in a historically volatile region that’s sometimes called the powder keg of Europe.

In the 18 months since Trump returned to power, I have traveled extensively in European countries with some of the strongest postwar ties to the U.S., including Britain, Germany, and Denmark. One of the questions I hear most often is why the Americans opposed to Trump aren’t mounting larger and more sustained demonstrations against him. The question arises especially when I ask European diplomats why the leaders of their countries don’t stand up more forcefully to an American president who insults them and entertains annexing their territory. They turn the inquiry back on me, asking, Why aren’t Americans standing up? Millions have marched in “No Kings” protests; the mobilization in the spring was one of the largest single-day protests in American history. Still, the point remains. Trump made at least $2.2 billion during his first year back in office, as wage growth slowed. He is pursuing an unpopular war, unauthorized by Congress and unsanctioned by international law. Even pro-American Europeans want to know: Why aren’t people in the streets every day?

[Read: Trump is learning that bullying has consequences]

In Albania, a small country on Europe’s Balkan Peninsula, they are. Today marks the 54th consecutive day of protests triggered by the Trump-family development project. Few would have pegged Albania as the center of the international anti-Trump opposition. But a tour through the country’s recent history suggests that it isn’t as unlikely as it appears.

Albania was once one of the most isolated countries in Europe. It was ruled, from the end of World War II until 1985, by a ruthless and paranoid Communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, whose fear of foreign invasion spawned the construction of an estimated 173,000 bunkers. Albania earned the nickname “Europe’s North Korea.” The Communist state was abolished in 1991, and the anti-Communist opposition swept to power in parliamentary elections a year later. But the transition to a market economy wasn’t easy. Breakneck privatization under a system known as “shock therapy” devastated local industries and drove mass unemployment. In 1997, the collapse of massive, state-sanctioned pyramid schemes wiped out the life savings of about two-thirds of Albanians. A small cadre of politicians has competed for control of the country ever since. Because of its recent experience, the population is highly attuned to signs of autocracy, Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American University who has studied the demographics of the No Kings protests in the U.S., told me. Familiarity can breed complacency. But in this case, it’s inspiring fierce resistance.

The Trump family triggered the uprising, but the target of the protests is Rama. The leader of his country’s Socialist Party, Rama came to power in 2013, as Albania was still sloughing off its insular identity. Albania became a candidate for European Union accession the following year. Rama was once a vehement Trump critic who greeted the prospect of the mogul’s nomination in 2016 by remarking, “God forbid!” He foresaw harm not just to the United States but to the “democratic world.”

Rama is now much more supportive. He hailed Trump’s “remarkable victory” in 2024 and, a year later, echoed the president’s assertions of divine providence, adding, “When Trump says that God saved him to Make America Great Again, he tells only half of the story. The other half is that he saved Trump also to make Europe wake up and get its act together.” Rama is one of the only European leaders to accept an invitation to the Trump-chaired Board of Peace. Domestically, he has sought to improve the Albanian economy by upgrading the hospitality industry. He told The Guardian last year: “We need luxury tourism like a desert needs water.”

That’s in line with Kushner’s ambitions. “I was very, very impressed with his vision for what he wanted to do with Albania,” Trump’s son-in-law told an investment conference. Kushner continued: “I really didn’t know anything about the country. I didn’t understand the history, and the darkness of the history with the Communism, and the terrible leadership actually led to it being fully undeveloped as a nation.”

It’s not Kushner’s first attempt at high-end development in the Balkans. Last December, he pulled out of plans to build a Trump Tower in Belgrade, at the site of the former Yugoslav defense ministry, which was bombed by NATO in 1999. His investment firm withdrew from the project hours after the country’s organized-crime prosecutors indicted the culture minister for allegedly forging documents as part of the process to remove the building’s cultural-heritage status. The company issued a statement saying the plans would not proceed, because “meaningful projects should unite rather than divide.”

In Albania, people involved in the resort project maintain that construction isn’t yet under way, even though environmental activists say fencing has gone up, trees have been removed, and sand dunes have been flattened. The country amended its environmental regulations in 2024, cutting a path for the development by lifting construction bans in protected ecological zones. The move drew a warning from the European Parliament about compliance with environmental standards as part of Albania’s bid to join the bloc. Rama’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment, but Asher Abehsera, one of the Trump couple’s partners in the endeavor, told me in a statement, “Our goal is simple: celebrate Albania’s natural beauty, create jobs, and build something future generations can be proud of.”

He added: “Its future will ultimately be determined by Albania and the Albanian people.”

Large-scale demonstrations began in Albania at the end of May, after video circulated of private security guards punching and dragging a protester along a beach in Zvërnec, the coastal enclave where part of the Trump-family project is planned. “This was the tipping point,” Ditmir Bushati, a former Albanian foreign minister, told me. “It started as a dispute over access to the sea and access to nature, and it was transformed in a couple of days into a protest about who should decide the future of the country.”

Thousands mobilized in Tirana, the capital, with signs proclaiming that the nation was not for sale and declaring, I don’t want Albania like Dubai. Rama also dug in his heels, issuing a statement saying, “There is absolutely no chance that the investment will stop as long as I am here.” As the protests grew, they became a platform for frenzied speculation and conspiracy theories. Some protesters saw parallels to Kushner’s support for a proposed “Gaza Riviera,” fearing that Albanian land would be used to resettle Palestinians. Further afield, online commenters called the development “another Epstein island,” a reference to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s hideouts in the U.S. Virgin Islands. A separate controversy, over government-backed plans for a Kanye West concert outside Tirana, added to the grievances. Attention came from all ideological corners. Senator Bernie Sanders welcomed the protests as a dissent against “global oligarchy.” Alex Jones, the right-wing conspiracy theorist, enthused about an impending “civil war.”

Vlasov Sulaj / NurPhoto / Getty

The prime minister argued that the protests had been hijacked by foreign actors, blaming “Trump haters” as well as “enemies of Israel and Albania.” Albania, where about half of the population is Muslim, has strong ties to Israel rooted in historical goodwill. During the Second World War, Albanians motivated by an ancient honor code called besa, literally “to keep the promise,” hid thousands of Jewish refugees; it was the only European country with more Jewish residents after the Holocaust than before. In this century, Albania made itself a target of the Iranian regime when it agreed, at the request of the United States and the United Nations in 2013, to host exiled members of the dissident group Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK. In 2022, Albania expelled Iranian diplomats after concluding that Tehran was behind a wave of cyberattacks aimed at government institutions and critical infrastructure. In recent weeks, Rama has accused Iran of waging a “hybrid war” by spreading disinformation about the development and inflaming opposition to his government’s plans. Iran has denied the accusations.

[Read: War by any other name]

Protesters appear intent on proving that the uprising is authentic and homegrown. Bushati, the former foreign minister, has celebrated the protests as “the best investment in our image as a people and in our path towards the European Union.” He said as many as 200,000 people mobilized over the July 4 weekend and dismissed claims of foreign interference. “Iran has zero influence in Albania,” he said. “This is a country living happily in the U.S. orbit.”

Iranian influence hardly seems necessary to destabilize the resort plans. The land on which part of the project is planned is contested. Sazan, the island, is owned by the state, so a lease would ultimately be necessary; the Trump-linked consortium currently has what’s called “strategic investor” status, which helps accelerate permitting and negotiations for a long-term agreement. The coastal land in Zvërnec, however, is private. Entities linked to the Trump couple purchased it from a Miami-based businessman, Artur Shehu, who insists that his family’s claim on the land dates to Ottoman times. Locals in Zvërnec argue that they are the rightful owners. It’s a messy picture because land was requisitioned by the state during the Communist period; when properties returned to private hands in the 1990s, ownership was often disputed.

The saga became considerably more dramatic this summer, when an Albanian agency devoted to countering financial crimes, the Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime, said it was investigating whether Shehu had forged deeds to the property. Finding out whether he has lawful title to the land is just one part of a broader probe by the agency into allegations that Shehu and his associates had trafficked cocaine into European ports and then laundered the money for real-estate projects. A message sent to a number associated with Shehu went unanswered; his attorney denied the allegations to Reuters. The Trump couple and their partners in the venture are not accused of wrongdoing. A spokesperson for the venture said, “The Albanian legal system is the appropriate venue for resolving questions about land ownership and the integrity of prior transactions. We respect that process, and as always, we will cooperate with any lawful process as required.”

The Flamingo Revolution reflects dissatisfaction with Albania’s democratic institutions 35 years after the fall of Communism. Yet the popular mobilization, combined with the anti-corruption inquiry that seeks to validate some of its core claims, is evidence of democratic maturity. Albanian society has developed antibodies to signs of state capture. The irony is that an initiative emanating from the American president’s family would trigger such a powerful immune response.

How the American Office Became Inevitable

2026-07-23T16:26:00-04:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.

One of the most gruesome murders in 19th-century America happened in a New York City office, just across the street from city hall. In 1841, Samuel Adams, a printer of no apparent relation to the famous Revolutionary, paid a visit to John Colt, the author of a popular bookkeeping manual and brother to a famous gunmaker. Adams had gone to see Colt about the $1.35 he believed he was due. In the argument that ensued, it’s not clear why Colt reached for a hatchet—he claimed self-defense—but he did, and he used it to bludgeon Adams to death. To hide the deed, Colt cleaned up the blood, stripped the corpse, and stuffed it into a large wooden crate in the room. The next day, he had the crate loaded onto a ship bound for New Orleans. The stinking body was soon discovered in the hold, and Colt was arrested not long after that.

Twelve years later, in 1853, Herman Melville was still thinking about the murder. Curiously, his sympathies rested with the killer—the man he called “the hapless Colt” in his great tale of office work and alienation, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” The story’s narrator theorized that the crime would not have happened if the men had met anywhere but in an office. It was that setting, “entirely unhallowed by humanizing domestic associations,” that drove Colt to such “irritable desperation.”

What is it about the office? From its beginnings, it’s been a place of anxiety and conflict, if not usually of the murderous variety. It was, in Melville’s time, a novel space born out of the growing scale of capitalism. Industrial production, steam-powered transportation, and ever more trade required a new realm of work managing and tracking the massive volumes of information being produced. Young people, mostly men from the countryside, flooded into cities to meet the demand, and perhaps to make something of themselves. They kept accounts, tracked commodities, copied correspondence, and recorded legal documents. In the process, they complained a good deal about this tedious and odd kind of work, even as it became a pillar of modern economic life.

In the 19th century, “clerks” quickly became a sizable portion of the urban workforce (already the third-largest category of laborers in New York by 1855). Writing in The Atlantic in 1861, Thomas Wentworth Higginson explained the attendant shift in human labor concisely: “All hand-work is constantly being transmuted into brain-work.” In a world that had long equated labor with the physical act of making things, such a shift was seen as not terribly manly, and potentially dangerous to society as a whole. In an essay endorsing a robust program of “gymnastics” for clerks, Higginson lamented that these “dandies of the desk,” these “artisans of the brain,” would wither away, creating a nation of weaklings.

But the problem went beyond the body. Repetitive mental work in such unhallowed spaces also punished the mind and the soul. After sitting all day, Higginson said, the average clerk “leaves his place of business at nightfall with his head a mere furnace of red-hot brains and his body a pile of burnt-out cinders.” Not everyone went slowly insane under such circumstances, as Bartleby does in Melville’s story, but the experience was disorienting all the same. The misery of what Higginson described as “over-writing one’s self” was not just a literary idea; as the scholar Thomas Augst has shown, the diaries of this first generation of clerks record a similar sense of self-negation. “Everything is at its highest pitch of dullness. No life in anything, but all seems as inanimate as lifeless matter,” one entry states.

The inefficiencies of early office work drove developments in information technology and modern management practices. Adding machines, cash registers, mimeographs, punch cards, and eventually computers maximized productivity while creating stricter office systems and carefully prescribed processes. Beginning in the late 19th century, the office also produced a new gender division of labor, as more of the repetitive work—typing, filing, stenography—fell to a secretarial class of women with limited prospects for advancement.

The quiet struggles of the office never quite went away. The modern capitalist economy continued to expand, and the machines and systems developed to manage it all didn’t reduce the work: Generating and processing more information seemed to only generate more information to process. In Sinclair Lewis’s 1917 novel The Job, the heroine, Una, sees it all quite plainly. “She knew that the machines were supposed to save work,” Lewis wrote. “But she was aware that the girls worked just as hard and long and hopelessly after their introduction as before.”

Although many workers chafed against the confines of office life, demand for these jobs only grew. For men, what we now call white-collar work has become the route to social mobility, affluence, and a measure of status. For women, despite the exploitation and the very real limits on advancement they have faced, office work has offered them more financial independence and public standing than ever available before. Today, the white-collar workplace is often seen as the most reliable pathway to middle-class comfort and standing.

This model of progress was evident even in the games played at the time. In 1889, Parker Brothers released the board game Office Boy, which had a simple premise: You began on the margins, with one small act of initiative—Apply for Situation as Office Boy—and moved toward the center, Head of the Firm. Positive qualities—promptness, diligence, cheerfulness—sped up your ascent through the ranks; negative ones—laziness, dissipation, late mornings—slowed it down. The lesson was plain. Your future was in your hands, and with a little bit of luck and pluck and a good roll of the dice, you just might be the boss.

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The Fear of Missing The Odyssey

2026-07-23T11:23:58-04:00

Christopher Nolan shouldn’t have many personal box-office records left to break. He’s had a long career involving a slew of hits, critical and commercial, including Oscar wins, a viral theatergoing campaign, and a wildly successful Batman trilogy. But leveling up is exactly what he did with The Odyssey last weekend, when his latest blockbuster opened to $264.1 million worldwide—more than his Best Picture winner Oppenheimer started with in 2023, and more than any other R-rated theatrical release this year. Nolan is a proven quantity at this point, but Hollywood still has every reason to cheer such a gargantuan start for an adaptation of a centuries-old poem.

The Odyssey’s haul thus far is a welcome sign for Hollywood. The movie now seems likely to bring in more than $400 million in North America, which would make it only the second R-rated film to ever do so. The achievement is the most recent example of what’s been working for cinema of late: a sense of originality. The Odyssey tweaks Homer’s classic story into a moodier version of the swords-and-sandals epic—and represents a rare swerve away from tired sequels, cheap remakes, and creaky cinematic universes. More pointed, however, its achievements offer two major lessons for the industry to draw from: Bet on quality, and don’t shy away from spectacle.

After all, The Odyssey’s initial success has both a highbrow and a lowbrow element to it. The Odyssey benefits from its august source material and auteur-branded advertising, the appeal of which has only grown in the years since “Barbenheimer” powered Oppenheimer to a nearly $1 billion worldwide gross. But on top of that, it has been marketed as a big-screen experience that audiences simply cannot skip. The Odyssey was the first movie shot entirely in IMAX’s large, nearly square aspect ratio, meaning viewers literally miss out on seeing some of the image when the film is projected on a regular screen. Ticket sales for IMAX screenings accounted for more than 20 percent of the opening gross around the world, representing a growing trend for blockbusters; 53 percent of the domestic total came from all “premium large formats.” The technical details behind the filmmaking appeal to cinephiles who appreciate the nitty-gritty of the production, while that hype also trickles down to those less in the know—audiences, perhaps not wanting to wait for a streaming release, are packing it in at regular auditoriums too. And as they keep seeking out the most impressive way to watch the film, audiences will continue to reinforce the idea that The Odyssey is a major theatrical event.

[Read: The problem with The Odyssey’s IMAX hype]

That formula worked for Amazon MGM’s sci-fi dramedy Project Hail Mary earlier this year, another heartening success that was billed as a visual spectacle filmed specifically for IMAX. Scale isn’t the only factor that compels audiences, however; A24 and Focus Features, the studios behind the horror phenomenons Backrooms and Obsession, held off on streaming releases, as viewers stateside continued to prioritize the theatrical experience. Meanwhile, 2026’s most notable failures have followed rulebooks that seem less and less valuable. The first new Star Wars movie in seven years, The Mandalorian and Grogu, had the saga’s lowest-grossing opening weekend ever. Supergirl, DC Comics’ continuation of a new superhero universe that was sparked with last year’s successful Superman, crashed and burned. Most shocking, Disney’s critically panned live-action remake of Moana will likely lose the studio at least $100 million, two years after the animated sequel Moana 2 made more than $1 billion worldwide.

Theatergoers are more frequently rejecting retreads of stretched-thin intellectual property, released by studios that seem afraid of taking the slightest gamble. Industry analysts could have warned Disney that there was little value in remaking Moana, a beloved classic that is nonetheless not quite 10 years old. Yet audiences had been mostly rewarding these efforts until now, even if reviews were poor or word of mouth was tepid. This year seems to be the culmination of a growing shift by viewers away from franchise tentpoles (though some series entries, such as the new Spider-Man and Avengers sequels, are expected to still punch through); moviegoers are seemingly moving instead toward efforts that feel more special. Imitating Christopher Nolan is something of a fool’s errand, of course, given that he makes one movie about every three years and tends to be pretty painstaking about it. But investing in and celebrating filmmakers’ biggest visions—and the grandeur of the visuals they’re creating—is proving again and again to be a risk worth taking.

Is the Age of Reading Over?

2026-07-23T09:00:00-04:00

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Over the past 18 months, scholars have debated—and likely will continue to long into the future—why voters returned Donald Trump to the presidency. One intriguing theory: It’s because Americans don’t read books anymore. Fewer than half of all adults reported reading a book of any kind in 2022; only 38 percent read a novel or short story. And the proportion of Americans reading for pleasure on any given day is plummeting, according to the latest Atlantic cover story, “The End of Reading Is Here,” by Rose Horowitch.

We are all awash in text, of course: messages from friends, headlines, captions on videos. But not the kinds of rich, layered sentences that have shaped our brains for centuries and given rise to many academic disciplines. Hence, we are a populace susceptible to a man who can capture attention, stir emotion, and breezily contradict himself, because his words are not etched in stone, or anywhere, really.

Horowitch joins Radio Atlantic to discuss what it means to live in a postliterate society, what we’ve lost, and how we might recover.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: We’re going to have a conversation about the end of reading today. This idea, proposed in the most recent Atlantic cover story, is that the age of reading is turning out to be a short anomaly in human history and that we are fast entering a postliterate society.

But before we do that, I want you to think about the arc of your own relationship with books. How did you read as a kid? In school? When did that change? Did you notice it change? What’s the last book you read, absorbed, and enjoyed?

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

I’m guessing that you’ve heard someone lament about how students—in middle school, high school, or even in college—don’t read whole books anymore. Maybe you have a teacher friend who complains about having to assign excerpts or increasingly simple texts. Maybe you are a young student, and books seem annoying and time-consuming to you. Or maybe you’re an adult and just find yourself trying to read but instead reaching for your phone every couple of pages.

The argument we’re discussing today is much broader than mere phone distraction and spans back to ancient Egypt. It’s about how reading shaped the human mind and then human society, and how that’s now veering in a different direction.

Rosin: Do you think more people actually read your full article or heard about the debate on TikTok?

Rose Horowitch: I hope that people read it, but I don’t know.

Rosin: I’m talking today to the author of that cover story, Rose Horowitch, who is not the elderly professor type that you might normally assume wrote an Atlantic story called “The End of Reading Is Here.”

Horowitch: It’s so funny because I initially had a joke in there, like, You probably think I’m retirement age, reading this whole piece.

Rosin: Rose is actually in her 20s.

Horowitch: Yes.

Rosin: She did grow up learning to love to read. But then as she got older, she found it harder.

Horowitch: That’s a story probably a lot of people can relate to, of reading much more than when you were young and then gradually noticing it disappear.

I think I was noticing more so when I would try to read a book that I would just, after every couple pages, want to check my phone in case I missed a notification. Or I would take a look at my watch to make sure that I didn’t have any notifications. So I had to start putting my phone in drawers or putting it in another room so that I really could not check it. So that was more what I noticed, yeah.

Rosin: Right. So that’s your experience, and from your article, I’m seeing that’s the experience of lots of people. So just lay out the basics. In what ways and among whom has reading books declined?

Horowitch: So reading books has declined very broadly, even among the groups of people that, you know, have been the most stalwart readers: Women and retirees and college graduates, they’re seeing a decline. We know that in the past two decades, the share of Americans that read a book or an article on any given day has declined by 40 percent.

And that, as of 2022, which is the last year that we have really great data for, fewer than half of all Americans read a book at all in the year, and only 38 percent read a novel or short story. So we know that reading is just really in decline kind of across demographic groups.

Rosin: And is it the types of books people now read, has that changed as well? I’m feeling very superior now ’cause I just finished my book last night, but anyway, keep going. (Laughs.)

Horowitch: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Yeah.

Horowitch: So the types of books—we know that when people do read, the books that they’re reading are shorter and simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago. And I spoke with the head of the New York Public Library, and he was saying that young-adult fiction has really become one of their most popular offerings, even among people who are not young adults. So we’re definitely seeing that when people do pick up a book, the book that they read is shorter and the sentences are simpler and the vocabulary’s simpler, and that’s a real change as well.

Rosin: You’ve written a lot about the decline of reading. I feel like it’s your subbeat now. (Laughs.)

Horowitch: Yes.

Rosin: When you were doing research for this particular story, was there statistics or a comment from a teacher or something that really stuck with you or surprised you?

Horowitch: I think some of the things that have been most chilling for me in reporting this out were the things that were really about children reading. And so we know that only 2 percent of American adults read to a child on any given day. And we do see that kind of every year older a child gets, the less they like to read.

I spoke with one researcher who did focus groups, and high-school students described reading for pleasure as an alien practice. And so that really stuck out in my mind, just like, Okay, how did we get to this point, when kids view reading this way?

Rosin: The way this argument is framed—and you just used the word chilling—is: There’s a problem. Who should we blame for the problem? Or a lot of people will read the article that way, and some will immediately go to Kids today, they’re always on their phones, and this generation of students. Some will say schools just gave up, and it’s this iteration of education that’s the problem.

Do you, in your head, have a clear answer for who to blame?

Horowitch: Well, it’s difficult to know exactly how much each factor plays into it. I definitely don’t think that it’s just kids these days.

Rosin: That’s why I’m glad you wrote this story—

Horowitch: Right.

Rosin: —and not the retiring professor. Right.

Horowitch: Yes. As a member of Gen Z, I’m like, If it’s kids these days, it’s me. But I think this is a story of technologies crowding out the time that people would’ve once spent reading books. We know that when the television was first invented, American households were spending tons of time watching that. Then obviously streaming, internet, smartphone, social media—it all just takes up so much of our time now that might have previously been devoted to reading a book.

Rosin: We’re in some ways inundated with text. I feel on a daily basis I read a much higher quantity of actual words than I used to. So what is the difference?

Horowitch: Yes, exactly. So people often talk about this as a literacy crisis, and I don’t think that that’s right at all. Our literacy rate is historically very high. We are probably reading more words than ever with social media, the number of emails you get for your job, and text messages with friends and everything.

And so the difference is that we’re almost swimming in so much text that we just don’t actually have the time or, sort of, attention to kind of focus for an extended period on a rich or complex work, because our attention is turning to so many different things. And so that’s why I called it really a postliterate age instead of an illiterate age.

Rosin: Explain postliterate. That’s a really important word in your argument. What does postliterate mean?

Horowitch: Right. So what I was trying to get across is that reading is not just one mode of communication or one skill among many. When reading and writing first appeared about 6,000 years ago, it transformed society, and it changed the way people thought and politics and culture. And so I was trying to get across that I think that we’re living through a civilizational shift on that scale, where we’re gonna see changes in our consciousness, changes in the candidates we elect, and what our culture values, and even how we tell the story of our civilization.

So that was what I was trying to get across by postliterate, that we can still read, but it’s an age where text is just not the kind of medium that we use to spread information or knowledge or culture or entertainment, and that that will have really far-reaching effects.

Rosin: That was an excellent and fast summary, but I also feel like one thing about this argument is: It can seem like an elite argument that you and I and the people who read The Atlantic care about. It’s sort of ironic that you write—I don’t know how many words it was—a 7,000-word, very-well-written piece to explain how your generation doesn’t really read or have an attention span anymore.

So I actually wanna dig in a little more slowly and deeply to why reading is important, ’cause we can summarize it quickly and just say to people reading is important. But I think until you actually understand the shifts that happened in human evolution or our brain via reading, it doesn’t seem that important. I can be like, I read what I want. Leave me alone.

So maybe we’ll start with the work of Walter Ong.

Walter Ong: Now, I understand that my task is to try to talk to you. Would you mind if I took my jacket off? It’s a little bit warmer in here—

Rosin: I love his work because he’s a priest, so everything he writes about and thinks about has a spiritual dimension. He was also a teacher. So talk about his work around oral traditions versus written traditions and how they change the brain.

Horowitch: Right. So I think the one thing that Ong really understood was that writing text is just a very different process than speaking it.

Ong: Writing has reinforced the old. It’s made talkers talk more, but it’s made them talk differently.

[Music]

Horowitch: We tend to use more complex sentence structures and vocabulary. When you write something down, it gives you distance because you can see it reflected back at you. So you can go back to it and get new understanding. You can kind of take on a more complex analytical task. It’s a more dispassionate spread of information because you don’t immediately see the person who wrote it at the same time.

Ong: It was the first time it ever occurred to him that every one of those definitions in the dictionary was something that somebody said this word means. The word didn’t come equipped with it. Somebody had to figure that out and say, This is what it means.

Horowitch: And so he was arguing that it’s just very different and that this ushers in a sort of entirely new mode of thinking, a kind of rational, linear, analytical way of thinking. And that that is a precondition for a lot of the modern types of study that we think about today. Philosophy and modern science and history as an academic discipline, that those things required reading and writing.

Ong: They can learn facts, but they cannot learn how to think in the way in which you have to think. The thought patterns that you have to be able to use cannot be mastered without writing.

Rosin: Yeah, there’s this quote you reference from Amusing Ourselves to Death, the 1985 Neil Postman book: “Writing freezes speech.” And I think what he meant by that is that speech happens fluidly, but writing inserts a pause; and that pause allows us to reflect, shape our thoughts; and all this metacognition is happening when you write that doesn’t necessarily happen in speech, because speech is constantly moving. Is it something like that? Because I never actually thought in detail about what reading does to your brain versus writing.

Horowitch: Yeah, so I think there’s two elements to it. One is that we just speak a lot faster than we write. And so it forces you to slow down and think a little bit more about what you’re putting out there. And then at the same time, when it is frozen before you, you can see it reflected back at you, this message, and so you can return to it for new understanding, think about how to reorder it, edit it, all these things that we can’t really do with speech, ’cause it just disappears into the ether.

And so it sort of allows for this kind of logical way of thinking, and that, yeah, that quote from Postman really stuck out to me too.

Rosin: I’m just realizing that podcasting, therefore, is for Neanderthals because— (Laughs.)

Horowitch: No. No, because it’s secondary orality. It’s mediated through this kind of writing, ’cause we’re talking about writing.

Rosin: Okay. Secondary orality. I’ll take it.

Okay, so that’s the long period that we’ve been through now, where we’ve evolved our brains, evolved a lot of human intellectual disciplines via reading, and now we’re entering towards postliteracy. What are the characteristics of a postliterate society, as opposed to the literate society you just explained?

Horowitch: Yeah, so as part of my reporting for this piece, I interviewed a lot of cognitive scientists and was kind of trying to understand, Okay, what does happen to our consciousness? And I think what we see is that we know from neuroscience that what you practice is what your brain gets good at. And so as we’re reading less, we’re going to have less background knowledge to aid in comprehension. We’re going to have a less rational, analytical mode of thinking.

We’re more accustomed to switching our attention and less accustomed to a kind of linear, extended focus on something. Even two decades ago, the average attention span on a screen was two-and-a-half minutes. And five years ago, it was 47 seconds.

Rosin: There are some times when you describe it dispassionately, it almost sounds like a superpower, you know? Because speed is often thought of as good. We test students on how quickly they can do things. Tests are always timed. So I don’t know, just as you were talking, I was thinking, Could speed be some kind of intellectual superpower that we just don’t understand yet?

Horowitch: Right. Well, I was trying to leave open that possibility. We do see, even as we see on tests, that it appears that IQs have been declining for the past two decades. At the same time, we are doing better on some forms of spatial rotation. So I definitely wanted to leave open the possibility that there could be these cognitive benefits that we just don’t understand and that this is a trade-off, but what we get will end up being worth it. And I think it’s too soon to tell if that’s possible.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break, who might thrive in a postliterate society? A clue: He’s currently president.

[Break]

Rosin: Okay, so that’s on the level of, like, an individual brain. There’s also an entire civilization because you start—

Horowitch: (Laughs.)

Rosin: (Laughs.) —the story at a broad civilization level. We can start at the easiest place, is with Trump. You describe him as the ideal president for a postliterate society. What does that mean?

Horowitch: Yeah, so what I meant by that was that it’s sort of difficult to imagine Trump being elected in a country where information is primarily spread through text. But he really understands how to kind of grab attention and keep it in this postliterate age.

So we see that he actually has kind of retrieved a lot of conventions from preliterate times. He contradicts himself as though there’s no record of what he said before.

[Music]

President Trump (in May): You’ll never have a leak. It’s very strong. If you had a knife, you can’t even cut it, it’s so strong, so powerful. It’s like powerful rubber.

Reporter (in June): National Guard and police have been all over the Mall. How would these vandals have gotten so close to do something like that?

Trump (in June): We didn’t have a lot of them then. Who would think that somebody would go into a pool and take a knife and start cutting it?

Horowitch: He speaks with a lot of emotion, you know, often anger, and that’s just easier to remember than when someone gives a sort of dispassionate speech.

Trump: I think it’s a disgrace. And I say that, and I say that, and that’s something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do. I think it’s a disgrace.

Horowitch: We also see that he uses these kind of epithets that almost call back to Homer in the way that the poet described people. He says, “Sleepy Joe,” “Crooked Hillary,” and that’s just way easier to remember and repeat. And you just start to associate it.

Trump: I call him Crooked Joe and Sleepy Joe. I find them to be equal actually. I do polls. Which is better: Crooked Joe? Or Sleepy Joe? And they poll about even.

Horowitch: So we see that Trump has kind of understood how to entertain people, go viral, present things as very simple and authentic, and that’s helped him get elected.

Rosin: The piece you wrote caused quite a stir, and especially among people who love books.

People who love books tend to read The Atlantic, so maybe we’re getting a skewed sample. But let’s just say it caused quite a stir in the book-reading public, especially the publishing world. Is there any pushback that you’ve received that you think is interesting?

Horowitch: Well, I think it’s interesting—there are a lot of positive signs for reading, which I did try to indicate in the story. Print-book sales were higher last year than they were a decade ago, and so that is certainly a fair critique.

But at the same time, I tried to indicate in the piece, when I noted that, that what we’re seeing is that the people who are devoted to text are perhaps even more devoted to it than ever before. They spend more time reading than they used to, but they’re just becoming a smaller and smaller minority in society.

Rosin: One thing I was thinking about is the democratization of text. When you wrote about people reading shorter sentences or YA novels, maybe one way of looking at this is that there used to be gatekeepers, people who would tell us what was literary, what was considered good to read, whereas now maybe you read what you want, which might be Colleen Hoover, which might be fan fiction, which might be someone’s online manifesto. And is that necessarily bad in the same way everything’s been democratized? Because if more people are buying books, it just means maybe they’re buying not literary books, but books.

Horowitch: No, and that—I think that is a fair critique. And it sort of fits in with audiobooks almost, that they make it more accessible to read. And so I definitely do think it is a good thing if stories and information has been democratized and are accessible to more people. I think the challenge is just: Even as these things have become more widely available, we are still seeing a huge decline in reading. So it’s like, have people taken advantage of them? It’s not clear to me.

Rosin: Yeah. And is your worry that because you write so much about reading inside the educational system, that down the road people will even stop reading those kinds of books because reading is just so much less fluidly integrated into education at all levels?

Horowitch: Definitely we see in schools that teachers are just assigning far fewer books. I think a survey from last year found that most middle- and high-school teachers assign between zero and four books a year. And so we do see a big change where there’s a lot more emphasis on excerpts and on reading-comprehension drills.

I guess my concern would be: You want everyone to have the option to read any work that they would want to, and so just making sure that students are equipped with the skills and mode of attention and practice that they can read whatever they want to instead of having some of it be unavailable to them.

Rosin: Right. And I suppose there’s also a return to the analog, like reading retreats and that kind of thing. So there’s some kind of self-conscious niche, like I’m a reader. So it’s almost like your identity is you are a reader, and you go out to a reading club, and that’s who you are. It’s not everybody. It’s not a sign of a literate society. But it is your people.

Horowitch: Yeah. One thing that really struck me in that Postman book was that before radio and television was invented, there was no way to be a reader, because there was no way to not be a reader. If you knew how to read, you had to. That was the only way to get information.

And so it’s only now that being a reader is optional, that it really can be an identity marker. And we are seeing with some young people that there really is this drive towards more analog technologies. It seems to be a backlash to living in a digital age where everything feels ephemeral.

I spoke with the head of the Cleveland Public Library, and he was saying that the young people that come in, they want a print book because they want something that feels tangible and concrete and that they can hold. So there certainly is that countervailing sign.

Rosin: I know. It’s so funny. It’s like a print book is like a vinyl record.

Horowitch: (Laughs.)

Rosin: (Laughs.) Like, there will be stores that are like, We sell books and vinyl records.

The bombshell of AI: One thing I noticed is that AI has an oddly formal way of speaking to you. Like, it’s a lot more like the letters you quoted from the average Civil War soldier than it is like texting. And so I know that, superficially, it seems like, Of course AI will destroy deep thinking and reading, but I also sense that AI returns a level of kind of full-sentences formality. Like, Here is how you should think through things. There is a kind of a return to discipline and what it’s presenting to you in a way that I find interesting.

Horowitch: No, it’s funny. It’s sort of the ultimate irony that we talk about this technology that’s just gonna destroy thinking or whatever, and it’s text or, at least, now it communicates with us via text. And so the point that I tried to make is that we are actually living in a time where there’s more text.

AI has led to a threefold increase in the number of books released on Amazon, more scientific papers being published. And a lot of this text at first brush appears polished and professional and something that you might trust and take in. And so that’s why I think it’s more important than ever to cultivate your powers of critical thinking and discernment, because AI is creating this superabundance of text, and we need to be able to sift through it.

Rosin: Maybe that’s a useful way to think about this argument, that it’s not just about books. It’s not just about novels. It is about taking note of a world in which, because you are inundated with text, you can have this feeling that you are, in fact, reading a lot, but maybe pay attention to the ways in which whatever reading you’re doing is eroding an ability to think critically, think deeply, think independently. Just note that evolution or change.

[Music]

Horowitch: No, and I think that that has been true for so long. But one thing that I think we might be seeing now is that for a while at least, a lot of information on social media was presented in text. And now we sort of see with new capabilities just so much more short-form video.

TikToker 1: The United States of America is becoming postliterate.

TikToker 2: The end of reading is here, so I wanna talk about why this is a reality that I refuse to accept. Over the weekend, I read The Atlantic’s August cover story, about the death of reading.

TikToker 3: According to the National Endowment for the Arts, fewer than half of American adults reported having read any book in 2022.

Horowitch: So I do wonder if we will get to a point where we’re not even reading more text, because it’s just videos now.

TikToker 4: I’m about to talk about the death of reading on the app that is allegedly killing it. Stay with me.

Rosin: Yeah, there was a really interesting interview with one of the leading figures at The New York Times who talked about the Times shifting very explicitly towards video, and that seemed like a moment. Partly just because we’re journalists, but we do think of The New York Times as a bastion of sort of literary, straight newsgathering. So it’s something interesting. And them acknowledging the future is video, we haven’t really even talked about that. We’ve been pretending as if we’re going to continue to live in a world inundated with text, but that may not be true at all.

I know you interviewed a lot of professors, researchers. Did they have ideas beyond, Woe is me. I wish more people would read books? Do they have method strategies, anything they employ that wasn’t just kind of, Do like we used to do?

Horowitch: Well, I think there are some signs that there’s a little bit of a backlash brewing. Certainly, we see it against tech in schools, you know, states banning cellphones during the school day. And when Texas did so, a district in Dallas saw 200,000 more library books checked out. So I think that—

Rosin: Wait—explain the experiment again. What exactly happened?

Horowitch: So Texas banned cellphones during the school day, and nearly two dozen states did it. And then the year after that happened, there were 200,000 more library books checked out at this Dallas school district than there had been the year before. So it did seem that I guess when people had more time and there was nothing else they could do, they were like, Okay, I’ll read a book.

Rosin: That actually seems very simple and significant ’cause so many schools are banning cellphones during the day that it’s just out of sheer boredom. You’re like, Okay, fine, I’ll read a book. My teacher says it’s interesting. I’ll try it out.

Horowitch: Right. Exactly. And so we don’t know that it inherently leads to better grades or people doing better in schools. It seems like the evidence is mixed there. But it does seem like it definitely forces people to just, Okay, we have so much more time back, so either we’re gonna hang out with each other, we’re gonna get a book, maybe do all of the above. So that’s a change. But in terms of things that we can do to kind of address this, I guess the challenge is, because I think it is such a big shift, it would require something of similar magnitude to move back to reading if that’s something that we decide is worth it and something we’re not willing to give up.

And here I think it’s useful to return to how I opened the essay, which is with this metaphor about the Library of Alexandria. I wrote about that because the Library of Alexandria is known as this real intellectual center of this earlier era. And for a long time, people thought that the library was destroyed by an act of war, that Julius Caesar burned it. What the new consensus is among historians is that: No, these external attacks didn’t matter that much. The library died because people didn’t care that it lived. They neglected it, and then it eventually fell into disrepair. And so I think that is a really useful way to think about the present, that we just have to decide because we’re doing this to ourselves, that we want to choose differently.

Rosin: Did doing this research change your own reading habits at all?

[Music]

Horowitch: I definitely have tried to read more. And I think what I find is just when I do have time, I always love reading and get back into it. But there’s always that little first hump that I have to get over, to kind of retrain my brain. I don’t know if that’s actually what’s happening inside my brain, but it feels like I can’t just get through it, and then I start to get engrossed, and then I stop looking at my phone as much. And so it’s definitely made me think about that much more and notice it more clearly.

Rosin: I feel like that’s a no. (Laughs.)

Horowitch: (Laughs.) I’m trying to be positive. I’m like, No, I should read more.

Rosin: Shouldn’t we all.

Well, Rose, thank you so much for joining me today.

Horowitch: Thank you for having me.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Yvonne Kim fact-checked. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Music’s New Superstar Is Here—And She’s Rather Relaxed

2026-07-23T08:00:00-04:00

Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey are two of music’s great masters of emotional excess, and it’s long seemed fitting that they’ve shared one of Billboard’s highest achievements: the longest-running Hot 100 No. 1 for a solo woman. That record was set over 14 weeks by Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” in 1992 and 1993, and then matched by Carey’s “We Belong Together” in 2005. (We’re talking about non-holiday tracks; the 22-week reign of Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is in a class of its own.) The enduring dominance of songs by these two volcanoes of vulnerability seemed to prove an iron law of pop: Greatness comes from giving all of oneself.

Their record has now been equaled by the 27-year-old country singer Ella Langley, a very different artist indeed. The Alabama-born Langley has been rising in country music for a couple of years now, but her second album, this year’s Dandelion, has leapt the genre’s fences to reach a general audience. Three Langley tracks are in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. The single “Choosin’ Texas” may soon notch its 15th week at No. 1, breaking Carey and Houston’s records. Where those women belted loudly, Langley offers moderation—an appealing commodity in this cultural moment.

Understanding that moment means understanding how the meaning of the Billboard charts has changed since Houston and Carey’s days: Thanks to streaming, what matters is how often a song is played, not only how many copies it sells. That shift has helped country music—which generally seeks to weave itself into everyday life rather than stick out through spectacle—become the popular sound of the 2020s. When Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 in 2023, it was the first country song to do so since 2005 (unless you count edge cases such as Taylor Swift’s 10-minute “All Too Well,” which charted in the country world despite sounding more like pop folk, and Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” a source of categorization controversy). Since then, 10 other country tracks have made it to the top.

Out of all the arrivals to Nashville’s gold rush, Langley doesn’t seem like an obvious candidate for success. Her voice tends to stay in a middle range, with only a slight hint of huskiness. Her arrangements aim for modern classicism, placing familiar instruments—guitars, mandolins, Wurlitzer pianos—in polished productions that forgo twists or anthemic buildups. Her tattoos and brunette bangs hint at a bohemian persona, but her glossy-looking album covers and easygoing interview responses aren’t very edgy. To hear what’s unusual about her, you have to listen closely, and pick up on what she’s not saying.

“Choosin’ Texas” is a breezy, sad track that sounds like an even gentler version of the Eagles. The narrator is from Tennessee; her man is from Texas; Langley realizes he’s leaving her for a girl from his home state. The details are precisely chosen clichés: She’s tipped off by “the way he’s two-steppin’ round the room”; in a lovely, pedal-steel-drenched second verse, she muses that he must’ve “forgot about the Smoky Mountain rain.” She doesn’t sound mad, or even annoyed, by this betrayal. Because she knows she “wasn’t a match” for the spark of a Texas girl, she “shoulda known better than to take him back to Abilene.” She’s soberly analyzing her defeat—and trying to teach herself a lesson.

Most of Langley’s work features that kind of wry self-talk. Her hit “I Can’t Love You Anymore,” a collaboration with Wallen, is like a lecture from her brain to her heart: “What part of over don’t I understand?” she chides herself when she gets to daydreaming about an ex. On “Weren’t for the Wind,” a single from her 2024 debut, Hungover, she mixes and matches grammatical tenses to suit the layers of her own flakiness: “I’d make a promise but I know later / I’m bound to change my mind.”

[Read: The next great American mega-genre]

Introspection is hardly foreign to country music, but Langley’s coolly reflective approach stands out in a genre defined by social collisions—by scenes of cowboys and cowgirls settling scores. Langley’s mentor Miranda Lambert, a co-writer on “Choosin’ Texas” and an executive producer for Dandelion, broke out in the 2000s with scorching revenge anthems such as “Kerosene” and “Gunpowder & Lead.” Wallen specializes in whiskey-drunk seductions to skeptical girls who can’t resist his charms. The inevitability that underlies many of Langley’s songs recalls “I Can’t Make You Love Me” by the Americana legend Bonnie Raitt, but in the place of Raitt’s devastation, Langley shrugs with acceptance.

One of Langley’s best—and most telling—songs is another current smash, “Be Her.” Over a groove punctuated by polite handclaps, Langley airs her jealousy about a woman who “drinks wine by the glass, not by the bottle,” who “knows being rich is just a state of mind,” and who “stays talkin’ to Jesus.” In other words, she’s fascinated by a good girl—one who’s internalized the advice of her parents, the Bible, and definitely some wellness podcasts. Although the reference points here are Christian, the outlook scans a bit Buddhist: The song’s subject doesn’t desire “much of anything.” Perhaps the person Langley wants to be is not someone else but rather a dream of her own enlightened future self.

The song is a perfectly Gen Z take on “Jolene”—Dolly Parton’s country classic of female jealousy—in that it’s about self-control rather than sex appeal. Striking a balance between mellowness and fun is an imperative for a cohort that’s drinking less, hooking up less, and staying in more. Many other country stars of the moment, including the oft-canceled Wallen and the former drug dealer Jelly Roll, present as sinners struggling for redemption. Langley’s closest sonic predecessor, Kacey Musgraves, has long searched for transcendence—though in more woo-woo terms than Langley does, and with (on Musgraves’s lusty new album) the sort of neediness that often gets written off as cringe.

Langley could never be cringe. She wants love but doesn’t sweat attachment; if her guy is gonna leave her for Texas, she’s not going to siege the Alamo. Partying, sex, adventure—on Dandelion, she treats these less like life’s great temptations and more like small, manageable indulgences. Her music accordingly pares down the signature elements of a genre in which reckless abandon and defiant self-expression have long been central. I think I enjoy Langley’s pale and pleasant songs, but I can barely remember how they sound when I’m not listening. Like nonalcoholic beer and an early bedtime, she’s a delicacy for the overcrowded now.

The New Chilling Effect

2026-07-23T07:00:00-04:00

If you’re looking for a reason to despair over the state of American education, there are many places you could start. You could, for example, worry about the all-consuming phones—or the gambling and TikTok addictions that come with them. You could worry about the free fall in literacy, the decline in math fluency, the rise of AI, the insanity of college-obsessed parents, the sharp increase in truancy, the teen mental-health crisis, and on and on.

Yet something that deserves more attention is damage to free expression—not in the classroom but in the public sphere of high school: the realms of student newspapers, student government, and other aspects of everyday life. School is meant to prepare students for the real world, but too many institutions are training kids to be silent.

The three of us are the editors of our high-school student newspaper in Washington, D.C., with a staff of about 60 student journalists. We ask a lot of questions. We want to know when and why things happened. We cover big policy changes (a ban on phones) and small schedule changes (an earlier start date to the school year). We cover all kinds of controversies—among them, senior pranks, changes in faculty, and debates about assemblies and theatrical productions. Writers argue in our opinion section about calculator theft, the cure for teenage sleep deprivation, grade inflation, AI policies, and more.

[Christopher L. Eisgruber: The myth of the campus snowflake]

Although many teachers at our school agree to interviews, some consistently decline them. They tell us they’re afraid that saying the wrong thing will result in a stern lecture from a boss or come up in a future job interview. They say they do not want their views at a specific moment in time to be permanently findable on the internet. That’s their right, of course. And we could use more people in society who know that they don’t have to opine on everything just because they can. But we ask teachers for interviews because they are experts who often have more information about the inner workings of the school than we do. We want our publication to be like a small-town newspaper, one that gives its readers a comprehensive view of how our community thinks and feels, and one that advances the cause of seeking the truth and reporting it. But our readers cannot get a full view of the community when people are too afraid to talk.

And people are definitely afraid. This problem, as we see it, is much bigger than our school newspaper. The era of social media came with the promise of hyper-democratization—no longer do you need to be an established pundit to get your message out. (All of us, born in the 2000s, struggle to imagine it any other way.) Although there is much to celebrate about the ways in which the internet has connected us, the permanence of the internet has given rise to censorship pressures—both individually and institutionally. People are so nervous about saying the wrong thing that they choose to say nothing.

Taken to the extreme, a culture of silence can be extraordinarily harmful. As a society, we have to accept that people’s opinions change over time. We can start by treating high school as a time for students to take intellectual risks. In this phase of life, students discover their interests and form their opinions. They try out for sports teams and join clubs and meet new people. And through that experimentation, they come into themselves and grow more independent. The adults who care about students—parents, teachers, school administrators, prospective employers—should encourage them to speak up, to debate, and, yes, even to fail. And they should do so without stepping in to intervene at every turn.

Recently, the Montgomery County, Maryland, school district made local headlines after officials required administrators to review student newspapers prior to publication and outright censor certain reports based on vague standards. School officials tend to approach such matters with varying degrees of subtlety: One administrator at our school floated the idea of a prior-review system for our articles and instructed us on how we should contact sources, while another told us our decision to publish an article about them was reprehensible.

Administrators owe it to their students to support a culture of free expression, and high schoolers need to keep contributing to that culture by saying what they think. Free expression is a principle that seems easy to uphold in theory, but requires some degree of courage in practice. To start, we must reaffirm that our individual and collective right to free expression transcends the substance of anything that any one of us might say. A robust—and sometimes messy—marketplace of ideas is in the best interest of all of us.

[Read: In praise of ‘difficult’ kids]

In Des Moines, Iowa, in 1965, five students wore black armbands emblazoned with peace symbols to school in protest of the U.S.’s escalating involvement in the Vietnam War. Local high-school administrators suspended three of the five students. The school district soon found itself justifying the suspensions in a three-year legal battle that ended with a Supreme Court victory for the students in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District.

The Des Moines administrators said they blocked the armbands because of the possibility that the silent protest could create a disruption, even though no disruption occurred. If a police officer were to prohibit a person on the street from wearing a black armband because that person could hypothetically incite a large protest, any reasonable American would rightly see the officer’s actions as a violation of the First Amendment. The same logic should apply across society.

Of course, creating a culture of openness and respectful debate requires more than staving off government interference. If large groups of people decide that silence is safer than risking disagreement, and if they instruct children to be silent in turn, our fundamental right to free expression will crumble from within.