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Photos: Knicks Fans Celebrate Their NBA Championship

2026-06-14T13:13:34-04:00

Adam Gray / Getty

New York Knicks fans climb on buses in Times Square as they celebrate after their team won the NBA Finals, in New York City.

Darren Abate / AP

The New York Knicks celebrate with the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy after defeating the San Antonio Spurs in Game 5 of the NBA Finals in San Antonio on June 13, 2026.

Bruce Cotler / ZUMA Press Wire / Reuters

Brooklyn residents celebrate the New York Knicks’ NBA Championship win against San Antonio Spurs during a watch party at Satsang Unisex Salon.

Andres Kudacki / AP

Knicks fans celebrate as they watch Game 5 of the NBA Finals, in New York City.

Spencer Platt / Getty

People watch the New York Knicks take on the San Antonio Spurs at a watch party in New York City.

Kena Betancur / AFP / Getty

A Knicks fan waves a flag while standing on top of a traffic light pole after the New York Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs.

Jeremy Weine / Getty

New Yorkers flood the street in Harlem after the Knicks won the championship.

Spencer Platt / Getty

People celebrate after the New York Knicks won, on June 13, 2026, in New York City.

Victor J. Blue / Bloomberg / Getty

Knicks fans celebrate in New York on June 13, 2026.

Jeremy Weine / Getty

New Yorkers celebrate on a subway train on June 13, 2026.

Stefan Jeremiah / AP

Knicks fans watch Game 5 at a watch party in New York City.

Brenden Willsch / Imagn Images / Reuters

The New York Knicks 7th Avenue Squad celebrates outside of Madison Square Garden while watching the conclusion of Game 5.

Carlos Chiossone / ZUMA Press Wire / Reuters

Knicks fans erupt at a watch party as Jalen Brunson’s 45-point performance sealed a 94–90 Game 5 win over the San Antonio Spurs.

Adam Gray / Getty

Knicks fans celebrate in New York City on June 13, 2026.

Adam Gray / Getty

Knicks fans climb on buses as they celebrate in Times Square.

Hailey Swanson / Hailstorm Visuals / Sipa USA / Reuters

Fans celebrate at a watch party for Game 5 of the NBA Finals near Madison Square Garden, home of the New York Knicks, on June 13, 2026.

A Room Is Like a Mind, but Whose?

2026-06-14T12:00:00-04:00

In the small oblong that was our living/dining room, the carpet was maroon (the color of dried blood) and the walls were light yellow. Did my mother think this combination was cheerful? She did value cheer. It was somehow inconceivable to ask what she was thinking. The couch and two rockers were covered in a brown-and-white fabric depicting farm scenes. Gauzy drapes were pulled across the front windows, softening the bright sun on parked cars and a few ragged palms. There was a grandfather clock on the living-room wall and a wall clock in the kitchen. Between their booms and ticks, time loomed large in that house, though there was little to keep track of. In my memory, my mother is off at work and my father is in the black Naugahyde recliner reserved for him, drinking beer. I make a wide loop around him on my way through the kitchen and out the back door, headed for the patio swing.

Some scientist hypothesizes that space-time records each movement ever made, every loud swipe of the vacuum back and forth across the carpet, every difference between now and just then.

The ‘Broken Veteran’ Excuse

2026-06-14T08:00:00-04:00

Graham Platner’s victory this week in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary would have been a stunning achievement for a political newcomer under any circumstances. What makes it truly remarkable is that Platner pulled this off despite a decades-long trail of questionable behavior: a Nazi tattoo; contemptible written statements about sexual-abuse victims, Black people, and women; admissions of past substance abuse and marital infidelity; allegations of demeaning, disturbing, and physically threatening behavior toward former girlfriends. (Platner has denied any physical intimidation or violence.)

Platner and his surrogates have rolled out a catch-all excuse, meant not only to clarify how he could have made so many bad decisions, but also to shame people who criticize him: Platner, a Marine Corps veteran, was dealing with the heavy emotional burden and mental toll of the wars this nation sent him to fight. It’s not his fault. And he’s a better person now.

But that argument—and I say this as a veteran of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars—is nonsense, a convenient answer intended to divert the conversation from legitimate questions about Platner’s many flaws. It plays on Americans’ sympathy for those who have fought in war and overplays the distinction between veterans and civilians. Whether this justification is used cynically or sincerely—or ignorantly—it is insulting to veterans. Many of them suffer from their time in combat but don’t engage in the kind of behavior that Platner has. And many of them—despite, or because of, their wartime experience—are among our nation’s most accomplished, ethical, hardworking, and patriotic citizens and leaders.

Let me put this as plainly as possible: I know quite literally hundreds of combat veterans, and the soldiers I fought with, to my knowledge, all somehow managed to avoid getting Nazi tattoos. It doesn’t take much effort to avoid being inked with an SS symbol.

[Mike Nelson: Condemning a Nazi tattoo shouldn’t be this hard]

Platner himself has said repeatedly that much of his bad behavior stemmed from his war experience. “I’ve been very up front since the beginning of this campaign that that was a pretty dark period of my life after I came back from my combat service,” he recently told MS NOW’s Chris Hayes, admitting to “not being a good boyfriend” and “self-medicating with alcohol.” He has spoken about having PTSD and, in an interview with The New York Times, described an incident in which his friend was badly injured when their vehicle got hit by an IED in Iraq. The morning after his primary win, Platner said that he had only started to feel like himself again in 2021, and added, “I wake up every single morning just trying to be a little bit better and a little bit kinder than the way I was before.”

His surrogates echo this defense, which plays into the dangerous and condescending stereotype of American veterans as broken people. Speaking at a Platner rally a few days before the primary, Representative Ro Khanna acknowledged that some of Platner’s past relationships were “toxic and volatile,” before pivoting to: “But we need to have an honest conversation in this country. We broke thousands of young men by sending them into dumb wars.” Senator Chris Van Hollen has defended Platner, saying, “Let’s take a couple issues, including the comments he’s made in the past. I mean, he’s been very clear that he went into combat on behalf of the United States. He went through a really rough period, PTSD-type period.”

According to this logic, Platner is not responsible for his own actions. The burdens he carries excuse things he has done over the course of two decades—in the military, after returning to civilian life, and apparently up until he decided to run for Senate.

Some of these defenses are well-intentioned. They suggest an admiration for the sacrifices that veterans have made. Perhaps some civilians feel unqualified to judge people who have served and who may well still experience the effects of their time overseas. The chasm between those who have been in combat and those who’ve only watched news of it is massive and growing: A smaller percentage of Americans served in the global War on Terror than in any other major war over the past century. This can lead some civilians to be overly deferential to veterans, who are, after all, human.

But showing respect to the point of refusing to judge someone’s questionable actions is a version of what George W. Bush called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Some Americans seem to view Afghanistan and Iraq veterans almost as an alien species, whose experiences cannot be understood and who therefore have a separate set of expectations. This attitude reduces an incredibly diverse group of individuals to the “broken veteran” cliché.

In some cases, Platner supporters who are veterans themselves have tried to lend credibility to this explanation. In a Substack essay published shortly before the primary, Daniel Barkhuff, the founder of Veterans for Responsible Leadership, a super PAC that endorsed Platner, wrote: “He said dumb things. He did dumb things.” Platner, Barkhuff added, seems to have “the sort of impulsive aggressiveness that is curated and encouraged in ground combat units where 99% of your problems can be solved by getting more violent and faster than the other guy. None of that is hidden, and none of it needs to be excused.” Barkhuff explained that he himself has used offensive language in online arguments. But that analogy doesn’t amount to much of a defense of Platner, whose troubling history goes well beyond a few bad words.

Platner and his supporters frequently talk about his personal story as one of redemption and recovery after his time at war. “Graham clearly made a mistake. What I appreciated about him is he owned that mistake. He took responsibility for it,” Representative Seth Moulton said in reference to Platner’s tattoo. But has he owned his mistakes? Although Platner claims that he didn’t know the significance of his Nazi Totenkopf tattoo, others have disputed this. His former campaign political director said that Platner “knows damn well what it means.” A former romantic partner, Lyndsey Fifield, told The New York Times that Platner had referred to the tattoo years ago as “my Totenkopf.” When Hayes asked Platner about a text in which Fifield referred to the “Nazi tattoo on his chest” before the tattoo became public, Platner responded, “Well, she certainly didn’t send that text to me.” His denial proved even more absurd when an unnamed second former romantic partner told The New York Post that she’d had a conversation with Platner about the tattoo and its Nazi meaning in 2021, and shared screenshots demonstrating her awareness of the tattoo prior to the public disclosure.

In reaction to a New York Times story in which Fifield alleged that Platner had grabbed her, pushed her, and twisted her arm, Platner denied not only that behavior but also that he and Fifield had ever dated, despite contemporaneous texts and social-media posts suggesting that they had been in a relationship. Platner’s campaign has also attacked Fifield, who has been active in conservative circles, as a political operative, though the Times found no evidence that Fifield was acting on Collins’s behalf. Part of redemption is accounting for one’s faults, and targeting the people who bear witness to those faults is not accountability—it’s defensiveness. When Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski recently asked Platner whether additional controversies might come out, Platner said, “There’s nothing out there that’s actually concerning. People will make everything seem very concerning.”

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Yet more damning revelations about Graham Platner]

I have seen veterans deal with the very real stresses of America’s long wars—physical wounds as well as psychological ones that linger after witnessing death and carnage, or coming close to it oneself. The separation from home, family, and social networks to deploy to high-stress and high-risk environments, repeated cyclically over the course of decades, took a toll on every veteran of the War-on-Terror generation—whether they deployed once or a dozen times, whether they were directly in harm’s way or far from the explosions. Many veterans have sunk into substance abuse or engaged in questionable personal behavior, and I can understand why. Some no doubt have felt the need to “cut loose,” and we shouldn’t be surprised that the kinds of people who sign up to exit an aircraft mid-flight might also have a high risk tolerance in their personal lives.

But even if Platner’s pattern of behavior isn’t unique, that doesn’t mean it’s representative of the experiences or choices of the great majority of people who have served. And if all veterans who have suffered or stumbled deserve help and treatment, that doesn’t mean their hardship is a blanket excuse for immoral behavior. Everyone is responsible for the choices they make. That’s a lesson we learn in the military.

Anyone who claims that this kind of baggage is the cost of getting “regular” people—and specifically veterans—to run for office doesn’t realize how smug and out of touch that claim is. This argument implies that veterans are all a bunch of drunks with a history of contemptible beliefs and actions. We can’t claim to pay tribute to veterans while holding them to such low standards. This logic also ignores the many veterans who have entered public life without such questionable pasts.

Veterans are a part of American society, and many will continue to run for public office. But their status as veterans, though an important component of their story, should never excuse decisions they have made. Nor should veteran candidates use their service as automatic proof of their worthiness for office. If a candidate wishes to make his wartime service an essential part of why voters should select him, then he should highlight the traits he wishes to bring to the office, not dismiss the traits he wishes them to ignore.

So Much for Leaving Abortion Up to the States

2026-06-14T07:31:00-04:00

The 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, supposedly gave states the authority to decide for themselves whether to permit abortion. What should have been apparent then, and is obvious now, is that anti-abortion activists and their allies on the high court were never going to be satisfied with that.

Since October, the state of Louisiana has been seeking to block the distribution of mifepristone, a drug used to induce abortion, through the mail—not just in Louisiana, but anywhere in the United States. The state’s lawsuit against the FDA asserts that the Comstock Act—an anti-obscenity law championed by the 19th-century book burner Anthony Comstock—bans the mailing of abortion medication, and that the federal government wrongly repealed the in-person requirement for prescribing it.

“Louisiana is complaining about reported harms in Louisiana, but they would be imposing a nationwide requirement that patients pick up the pill in person from their health-care provider, even in states that protect abortion access, even in states that explicitly, in their laws, allow for telemedicine provision of mifepristone,” Andrew Beck, an attorney with the ACLU, told me. “Louisiana is really trying to impose its own policy choices on the entire country.”

Medication abortion accounts for about two-thirds of all abortions in the United States, which have actually increased since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization made it possible to send mifepristone through the mail. Providers were first able to mail the drug during the pandemic, a temporary measure that was made permanent by the FDA in 2023. Even in Louisiana, which has a strict anti-abortion law with few exceptions, the number of abortions has risen, according to the state’s lawsuit. This was in part because Louisianans were able to access abortion drugs through providers based in states where the procedure is legal. Indeed—abortion medication has made it possible for women who live far from any clinic to end unwanted pregnancies. Many of those pro-abortion-rights states had passed “shield laws” that protected providers in their jurisdictions from being sued or prosecuted by authorities in anti-abortion states.

Although Louisiana v. FDA is ostensibly about a federal regulatory decision and the safety of an abortion drug, it is really about access to abortion. Louisiana even began its complaint with the declaration that “the fight for life is far from over.” The FDA has asked the court to hold off on a ruling for now, as the Trump administration has said it is conducting its own review of the drug (all medical evidence indicates that mifepristone is safe). In the meantime, two drug companies are asking the courts to allow the continued distribution of mifepristone. The Supreme Court responded to this question on May 14, overturning a lower order that halted distribution and sending the case back for review. The late Justice Antonin Scalia once predicted that overturning Roe would get the Court out of the “abortion-umpiring business.” That prediction has not aged well.

In their dissents to the May 14 ruling, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito showed their hands. Thomas asserted that the Comstock Act banned sending abortion drugs through the mail, and that drug companies seeking to overturn the ruling were “not entitled to a stay of an adverse court order based on lost profits from their criminal enterprise. They cannot, in any legally relevant sense, be irreparably harmed by a court order that makes it more difficult for them to commit crimes.” Alito, the author of the Dobbs opinion, attempted to maintain the facade that Dobbs allowed pro-abortion-rights states to make it “easier to obtain an abortion than it was before, and that is their prerogative.” Yet he insisted that allowing providers in states where abortion is legal to mail the drugs to women where it is not was “a scheme to undermine our decision” in Dobbs. So much for the supposed abortion federalism the Court had put in place.

[Sarah Zhang: Abortion pills have changed the post-Roe calculus]

Whatever happens next, the legal battle reveals that the paradise of abortion federalism is a fraud. Either anti-abortion states will get to impose their policies on pro-abortion-rights states, or they will have to live with their residents being able to access abortion care from providers elsewhere.

“Those who oppose abortion are not satisfied with the Supreme Court’s ruling that it should be up to the states to decide abortion policy,” Nancy Northup, the president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, told me. “They want a national ban. They’ve always wanted a national ban. And this case, Louisiana v. FDA, is a type of effort to get at least a national ban on medication abortion.”

Lawmakers in anti-abortion states have sought to ban or criminalize the sharing of information about abortion, such as through a Texas proposal that would outlaw providing “information on the method for obtaining an abortion-inducing drug.” Anti-abortion states have tried to sue Planned Parenthood for providing accurate information about the safety of abortion drugs; Florida accused the organization of violating its racketeering law. Early efforts at restricting pregnant women’s travel have been stymied in the courts, but Texas’s bounty law, which allows a private individual to sue anyone who helps someone else get an abortion, is still in effect.

There’s no need to travel, however, if you can get what you need through the mail. Since 2023, the anti-abortion movement’s biggest priority has been trying to block the distribution of abortion medication nationally, either by reversing the FDA’s approval of mailing mifepristone or by getting the Supreme Court to rule that Comstock retains the authority to “enforce evangelical Protestant doctrine regarding sexuality,” as the historian Amy Werbel described the law in Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock.

Although the Comstock Act remains on the books, its prohibition on the distribution of “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion” has never been interpreted to cover legal abortions—and wasn’t even before Roe—according to a brief by former Justice Department officials. And its provisions on obscene material have been narrowed by court decisions in the century since its passage. Ironically, Werbel writes, Comstock’s crusades elevated his profile and influence, but also provoked a backlash that led to greater acceptance of birth control and open discussion of sexuality.

The safety of mifepristone is not seriously in question. A brief from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists notes that serious complications from medication abortion are extremely rare, occurring in less than 0.32 percent of cases; death has occurred in 0.00048 percent. A person is more likely to die from taking Viagra or getting a colonoscopy, the brief adds, and far more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications.

If Louisiana succeeded in halting the mailing of mifepristone, people could still access an alternative drug, such as misoprostol, but anti-abortion advocates aren’t simply trying to make one particular drug harder to get, and they surely wouldn’t stop with this case. Access to abortion through telehealth is an “existential threat” to the anti-abortion movement, Rachel Rebouché, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has helped pro-abortion-rights states draft shield laws, told me. “The average number of abortions has gone up, and people in banned states are getting pills. It’s a threat because you can try to police it, but doing so would be very expensive, very intrusive, and it’s probably going to create a massive backlash.” Louisianans probably don’t want cops ransacking their mail any more than New Yorkers do.

Before Dobbs was even issued, abortion-rights advocates knew that red states would try to impose civil liabilities on out-of-state medical professionals. This is because Republicans announced their intentions publicly: In March 2022, two months before the Dobbs opinion was leaked, Missouri Republicans were considering a proposal to impose civil liabilities on anyone who helped a woman get an abortion out of state. Texas’s bounty law, which also applies to out-of-state abortions, was passed in 2021.

Given that anti-abortion advocates see themselves as fighting for life (although not the lives of women dying in anti-abortion states—those don’t seem to count), they were never likely to let state borders confine their efforts. So abortion-rights advocates began pushing for the shield laws; in March 2022, Rebouché and two fellow law professors, David S. Cohen and Greer Donley, made the case for them in The New York Times. Shield laws have been passed in 22 states and Washington, D.C.

“We started to think, Let’s map out all the ways interstate conflict is gonna manifest—all the things that we think that states are gonna do to try to extend their abortion bans across their borders to patients, to providers, and the like,” Rebouché told me. “It can’t be that the end goal is just to ban abortion in a state. The end goal has to be to ban abortion everywhere.”

The point is that Alito’s timeline is wrong. Shield laws were not a response to Dobbs itself; they were a response to Republicans’ threats to extend their bans on abortion beyond their own borders once Roe was overturned.

“Many of the same anti-abortion politicians who were telling the Court, Hey, we should leave this to each individual state to decide its own policies—they immediately set about trying to impose their own restrictions on abortion care that was taking place legally elsewhere,” Beck said.

Shield laws are not directly at issue in Louisiana’s case. But Alito’s reference to those laws as part of a “scheme” to undermine Dobbs is a tell that he believes that New York should be compelled to help enforce Louisiana’s ban on abortion. Although the justices who overturned Roe blamed it for fomenting partisan rancor and division, the Dobbs ruling was always going to be worse in that regard, precisely because abortion cannot truly be banned as long as you can cross state lines to get one.

[Nicholas Florko: Marty Makary set the conditions for his own downfall]

Perhaps the last time the country’s federalist system faced this sort of challenge was during the antebellum conflict over slavery. Contemporary shield laws pose similar legal questions to the “liberty laws” of the 19th century, which varied state by state. In 1820, Pennsylvania passed the first, making it a felony to kidnap someone for the purpose of enslaving them, whether they were born free or not. (Many slave catchers did not bother to make that distinction, as the story of Solomon Northup, a free Black man who was kidnapped and enslaved, shows.) The centrality of slavery to both the economy and the Constitution, however, led Chief Justice Roger Taney to strike down these laws as unconstitutional in 1842. The justices concluded in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, a case involving the kidnapping of a free Black woman named Margaret Morgan, that the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause gave “the citizens of the slaveholding States the complete right and title of ownership in their slaves as property in every State in the Union.”

Like Dobbs, however, Prigg left some loopholes through which free states could maneuver. After Prigg, some free states passed laws compelling noncooperation by state authorities with slave catchers. Incensed, and contrary to their reputation for being committed to states’ rights, supporters of slavery in Congress passed a new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. In the 1859 case Ableman v. Booth, involving an abolitionist named Sherman Booth, who aided in breaking a former slave named Joshua Glover out of prison, the Taney Court held that any state laws interfering with the Fugitive Slave Act were unconstitutional. This imposition of pro-slavery federal power on antislavery states helped set the stage for the Civil War.

Abortion is not slavery, and abortion is unlikely to provoke another secession crisis, but anti-abortion advocates’ extraterritorial strategy has been tried before. They will keep trying to impose their will on pro-abortion-rights states, and where that does not succeed, they will demand that a sympathetic Supreme Court compel those states to submit. If that fails, they will seek to use the power of the federal government to ban or strictly limit abortion nationwide.

In his famous “House Divided” speech in 1858, Abraham Lincoln predicted that “we shall lie down, pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free, and we shall awake to the reality instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State.” If Lincoln’s warning holds true today, then America won’t be divided between states where abortion is legal and illegal forever. Either we will become all one thing or all the other.

An Underrated Sitcom That’s a Fire Hose of Funny

2026-06-14T07:00:00-04:00

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Rosie Hughes, a producer who works on the Radio Atlantic podcast.

Rosie can be found rewatching Search Party, which introduced her to the genius of John Early; replaying the funniest scenes from Stath Lets Flats; or starting a new round of online solitaire to avoid scrolling on her phone.

— Stephanie Bai, senior associate editor

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: There was something seriously wrong with Jamie Demetriou’s mind when he created the British comedy series Stath Lets Flats—but whatever happened to him really works for me. Demetriou plays a bumbling Greek Cypriot bro named Stath who “works” (he is not good at his job) for his father’s property-rental company. The bits in this show are absolutely relentless. Stath and his sister, Sophie (played by Demetriou’s actual sister, Natasia Demetriou), speak in what I, as an American, can only assume is a bastardized North London accent mangled by grammar so poor that you can’t help but laugh at every line. Stath can be a bit overwhelming: too many things to laugh at, not enough time to process them all. The show’s pacing is quick—it’s a fire hose of absurd dialogue and bizarre situations. For maximum enjoyment, I like to watch it with the TV remote in hand so I can easily rewind and replay the same scene multiple times.

The last thing that made me cry: On a recent flight home from Italy, I finally watched Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s zombie threequel, 28 Years Later—and I didn’t just cry; I wept. Like, I had to pause the movie and ask the person in the aisle seat (my husband, fortunately) to let me out so I could stumble to the bathroom and clean up my snot and tears.

I’m a fan of the zombie-apocalypse genre, but I’m also a wimp, so I save scary movies for long plane rides where I don’t have to worry about monsters under my bed. 28 Years Later isn’t just a movie about fleeing from the walking (or running!) dead, though there are plenty of thrillingly disgusting action sequences. It’s a story about the love between a mother and her child, played masterfully by Jodie Comer and Alfie Williams. As the child matures and faces the world, the mother is quickly fading from it because of a mysterious illness. Both must take on the role of protector for the other, quietly trading the responsibility back and forth in ways that seem imperceptible to the characters themselves. I won’t spoil the ending, but be warned: Bring tissues. [Related: A stunning reinvention of the zombie film]

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: A quiet song that I love is “Zombie Girl,” by Adrianne Lenker (two zombie references in one listicle!). A loud song that I love is “Your Best American Girl,” by Mitski. [Related: The dangerous desires in Mitski’s songs]

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: I am trying so hard to not be addicted to social media, which is why I do something much healthier and definitely not habit-forming at all: play online solitaire. If I’m not scrolling through an endless stream of algorithmically curated ads disguised as original content, that means I’m still in control, right?

Something I recently revisited: I’m rewatching the first season of Search Party, which debuted in 2016. The writing is clever and original, and the cast members have real chemistry. It’s also the show that introduced me to John Early, who I believe is one of the funniest comedians in the biz right now. Early plays the most despicable and narcissistic compulsive liar, a man who is willing to do anything and screw anyone for fame and fortune. He’s awful, and I love him.

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I have tickets to see the much-hyped revival of Death of a Salesman on Broadway late next month. I’ve heard nothing but phenomenal reviews so far, and my brother even praised it as life-changing. My expectations are impossibly high, but knowing the play and the cast, I think they just might be met.

The best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: The novel I recommend to everyone, even if you don’t like science fiction, is Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It tells two stories at once: of the last remaining humans fleeing Earth in search of a new planet to call home, and of a distant Earth-like planet inhabited by superintelligent spiders. I know what you’re thinking, and to be clear, I don’t like spiders either. But this book is about so much more than just that. Tchaikovsky’s world-building is complex without being tedious, and the story he weaves is unique—it changed how I think about civilization, language, survival, the fallibility of humans, and, yes, spiders.

My favorite work of nonfiction is The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, by Jonathan Rosen. It’s a book that somehow manages to be part memoir, part history lesson, and part policy critique, with just a dash of true crime. Rosen writes beautifully about growing up with Michael Laudor, his childhood friend who made headlines twice in the 1990s: first for attending Yale Law School as a schizophrenic, and second for murdering his pregnant fiancée a few years later. While reading the book, I often found myself staring at the author’s headshot on the back flap and wondering, Is Jonathan Rosen okay?

A piece of art that I cherish: My sister-in-law gave me a vintage, ceramic Paddington Bear tree ornament for Christmas last year. If my house was burning down, that little Paddington would be the one thing I’d save from the blaze. Passports and diplomas are replaceable, but ornament Paddington is not.

The Week Ahead

Toy Story 5, a movie about a fight between Woody and Buzz over kids’ growing attachment to screens (in theaters Friday)
Season 3 of House of the Dragon, a show about the Targaryen civil war (out Sunday on HBO)
The Emilys, a novel by Heather Abel about a New England town gripped by a mysterious condition that prevents people from going outside during the day (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic*

The Unglamorous Truth About the Average Tradwife

By Faith Hill

Can you remember the first time you heard about “tradwives”? I can’t, and yet I have the vague feeling that at some point a handful of years ago, all at once, the term became inescapable. On phone screens across the United States, beautiful women with glossy hair seemed to materialize en masse, flipping sizzling patties of meat and rocking impossibly calm babies. Conservative commentators embraced them as evidence that women want to stay home. Critics called them agents of a regressive right-wing agenda.

Now, in 2026, Americans seem just as captivated. This spring, Caro Claire Burke released her debut novel, Yesteryear, which follows a modern-day tradwife influencer who wakes up in 1855 and has to face what “traditional” life really looks like …

The truth, though, is that the tradwife—as symbol, TikTok genre, source of fascination, and wedge in America’s culture war—doesn’t easily map onto a real-life category of person.

Read the full article.

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American Democracy, 250 Years Later

2026-06-13T13:09:10-04:00

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

Last night, panelists joined a special edition of Washington Week With The Atlantic to discuss the state of democracy 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, and the successes and challenges of the American experiment.

Compared with the nation founded 250 years ago, the United States of today appears to be in an “epistemological crisis,” Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic, argued.“You have people who no longer share a lived reality, or no longer operate from a common baseline of fact and information.” What’s so striking, Alberta continued, is how people have “reached the conclusion that no one is looking out for them, that no one has their best interest in mind, that no one can be trusted.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, in this discussion about the nation’s 250th anniversary: Alberta; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Idrees Kahloon a staff writer at The Atlantic; Susan Glasser a staff writer at The New Yorker; Ashley Parker a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode, “America: The Next 250,” here.

What Are Frederic Church’s Stunning Landscapes Trying to Tell Us?

2026-06-13T09:00:00-04:00

“We know of nothing,” Henry James observed in 1875, “that is a better proof of the essential impotence of criticism, in the last resort, than Mr. Church’s pictures.” James wasn’t (in this instance) being spiteful. He was trying to sort out a real problem: What did the work of America’s preeminent painter actually mean? Serious art is supposed to mean something—that’s a given—but really, what is there to say about Frederic Church’s Valley of Santa Ysabel, New Granada? You see distant mountains, an effulgent sky reflected in placid water, lots of greenery, and tiny people not doing much besides establishing the scale of an adjacent palm. You can feel the stillness and weight of the air. “Why not accept this lovely tropic scene as a very pretty picture,” James asked, “and have done with it?” A century and a half later, we’re still stumped.

Church, whose 200th birthday rolled around in May, was America’s first art star. He won accolades in England and a silver medal at the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris at a time when “American painting” was still an oxymoron among many cognoscenti. In city after city, people queued up in the tens of thousands and paid good money to stand in front of his pictures. Queen Victoria secured a private viewing of The Heart of the Andes. Audiences marveled at the exactitude, the passage of light, the almost palpable presence of a distant place. “He ranges with a steady eye and an unwavering hand,” The New York Times intoned. Church’s death, in 1900, was marked by a six-month retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an institution he had helped found, housed in the great public park for which he had served as a commissioner.

By then, however, the world was moving on. In the years that followed, American landscape painting was shuffled off to storage to make room for modernism, and paintings like Church’s, with their glassy finishes and profuse detail, came to seem the embodiment of fuddy-duddy. When Olana, Church’s visionary 250-acre estate on the Hudson River, was threatened with destruction in the 1960s, a Times headline referenced the “Italian‐Moorish Home of U.S. Artist of Mid‐1800’s,” presumably because so few readers would recognize Church’s name. Some respect was regained in the ’70s, when scholars connected Church and his peers to the intellectual currents of Transcendentalism. But even now, if you’re looking for an empty bench in a crowded museum, the rooms housing American landscapes are a good place to start.

Church’s bicentennial offers a chance to reconsider our prolonged indifference to the man and his art. A new biography by Victoria Johnson, Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World, makes a case for her subject as anything but a fuddy-duddy—a heroic adventurer, a public servant, a scientific ecologist, and a wildly ambitious orchestrator of pictorial magic. At Olana, which was rescued from the auction block and is now a New York State Historic Site, a wide-ranging exhibition, “Frederic Church: Global Artist,” incorporates dozens of beguiling oil sketches, larger paintings, and books and photographs from his omnivorous collection. It is accompanied by a book of essays addressing his global outlook, an erudite field guide to the estate, and a picture-filled hardback celebrating Olana’s landscape and architecture. All of this convincingly portrays Church as a relatable and appealing figure for the 21st century. How much it helps us understand his painting is another question.

The American art world that Church entered in the 1840s was more an aspiration than an entity. Great painting, everybody knew, was Europe’s bailiwick. American collectors bought European art, and many talented American painters hightailed it to Europe at the first opportunity. Beyond how-to books, the United States offered few means of studying art, few great paintings to imitate, and, thanks to American prudery, few chances to master the complex arrangements of human bodies considered indispensable to art’s most profound forms.

What America did have was land, and landscape painters enjoyed a status here rarely accorded them in Europe. There was Asher Durand, master of the winsome glade; John Frederick Kensett, poet of still waters; and, above all, Thomas Cole, the philosopher-king of landscape, with whom an 18-year-old Church arranged to study privately. Largely self-taught, Cole was a relentless observer of material fact. He instructed Church to depict nature’s objects as individuals—not just a tree, or even a hickory, but a specific hickory, with its own history and place in the world. The same went for rocks and weather. When Cole took his paints and easel outdoors, he was not, like the plein air artists of France, aiming to capture a subjective experience; he was taking lab notes on God’s handiwork.

[From the May 2022 issue: Susan Tallman on Winslow Homer, the Melville of American painting]

With a deft hand and remarkable visual memory, the young Church was a natural. By 19, he was exhibiting in New York City; at 22, he was the youngest artist ever elected to the National Academy of Design. Handsome, well-bred, and outdoorsy, he had the kind of looks that would suit the cocky football captain in a prep-school farce, yet by all accounts he was kind, well-liked, and witty. (It’s hard to top his description of 19th-century Hartford, Connecticut, as a “city of pleasant faces and office chairs.”) Church, his friend Worthington Whittredge wrote, was “fortune’s favorite from the beginning.”

Inspired by the German polymath Alexander von Humboldt’s travels in South America and his ensuing argument for the interdependence of all natural entities, the young Church embarked on a nearly seven-month expedition in Humboldt’s footsteps. Paints and sketch pads in tow, he made his way by boat, by mule, and on foot through the jungles of New Granada (now Colombia) and across the Cordilleras to the Ecuadoran volcanoes Cotopaxi and Chimborazo. The sketches he brought back became fodder for his 1855 breakout painting, The Andes of Ecuador.

Cinematic before there was cinema to compare it to, the painted vista slides over mountainous terrain, meandering streams, grasslands, and waterfalls to reach the snow-capped Cotopaxi under a sky throbbing with golden light. “From the rifted heavens the southern sunshine pours, like God’s benediction on my temples,” a critic for Harper’s Weekly effused, as if standing bareheaded atop one of his mountains. God was undoubtedly on Church’s mind—he planted a small wayside cross in the verdure at lower left—but so was Humboldt. Every pictured biome, from subtropical to highland plateau to alpine, is fitted with its appropriate flora, fauna, and geology. Every detail is accurate, though the picture as a whole is an invention, concocted from multiple views, locations, and studies. It told the truth, though not necessarily nothing but the truth.

National Gallery of Art / Corcoran Collection

Niagara (1857)

For a decade, Church went from adventure to adventure and from strength to strength. His operatic paean to Niagara Falls was proclaimed “incontestably the finest oil picture ever painted on this side of the Atlantic” (reproductions became a common wedding gift across the nation). In 1859, following a return to South America, where he’d hoped to witness volcanoes actively erupting, he unveiled The Heart of the Andes—a 50-square-foot statement of cosmological interconnectedness, painted in his New York studio with a portrait of Humboldt looking on. For exhibition, he placed it in a massive, casement-like frame, draped with curtains and accompanied by potted palms and gaslights to enhance the illusion of looking out a window into another world.

Reproduced on a book page or laptop screen, The Heart of the Andes can look deceptively ordinary—a bunch of trees, a waterfall, some distant mountains. Seen in person, however, it’s an immersive spectacle: Tiny butterflies, identifiable by species, flit among blooming epiphytes; red-breasted meadowlarks take to the air; an emerald-green quetzal perches on a branch. An Indigenous couple pay a visit to another makeshift cross, mist rises from a waterfall, and mountains rear up, first green, then brown, and finally glittering white. The painting was “a miracle,” Samuel Clemens (not yet Mark Twain) wrote to his brother when the picture reached St. Louis. “We took the opera glass, and examined its beauties minutely,” but a single viewing was not enough: “Your third visit will find your brain gasping and straining with futile efforts to take all the wonder in.” Even Londoners were enthralled, crediting Church with “a gaze of extraordinary clearness and vigilance; a gifted hand,” as well as “a tender and capacious spirit, which unites harmoniously the minute and the vast.”

This kind of attention was no accident. Church kept the press strategically apprised of his travel plans and his subsequent progress in the studio, ginning up excitement about forthcoming pictures. By 1860, he was enough of a celebrity that even his wooing made the papers—a “Page Six ” item avant la lettre. And although his travels were certainly motivated by a genuine urge to see and understand, he was not unaware of which destinations were likely to capture public imagination.

When the perilous search for the Northwest Passage sparked a wave of popular interest in the Arctic, Church set off by schooner in search of icebergs. In heaving seas and frigid cold, beset by violent seasickness, he rowed out in a dinghy to record them close-up. The payoff was a bevy of remarkable oil and pencil sketches (a stunning oil study can be seen in the Olana exhibition) as well as paintings. The standout is a grand, otherworldly picture, devoid of human and animal life but suffused with strange light, and the majesty and menace of colossal ice in moving water. When, two weeks before the painting’s debut, the United States went to war against itself, Church promptly changed its title from The Icebergs to The North.

This gesture was undoubtedly patriotic in sentiment—he was a staunch supporter of the Union cause—though confusing in argument. Exactly how does a calved iceberg signify the ideals of emancipation and a unified nation-state? Church’s antislavery bona fides seem solid: As far back as 1852, he had painted a white woman and a free Black man in casual conversation at the base of the Natural Bridge rock formation in Virginia—a provocative choice even if the figures are diminutive. Having political convictions, however, is different from being able to express them clearly in paint.

Dallas Museum of Art

The Icebergs (1861)

His wartime polemic, Our Banner in the Sky (1861), is a visual pun in which morning stars and sunrise clouds conspire to suggest a tattered American flag. It isn’t a good painting, but the lithographs sold well, and, like generations of successful artists, Church may have recognized that his most effective contribution to the cause would be money. He donated exhibition income, supplied paintings for fundraising auctions, and finagled loans of his three blockbusters—Niagara, The Andes of Ecuador, and The Heart of the Andes—to New York’s 1864 Metropolitan Fair for the benefit of Union soldiers.

The eventual victory was eclipsed for Church and his wife, Isabel, by the loss of both their young children to diphtheria within days of each other. Travel now served as a palliative—first a trip to Jamaica, then a year and a half voyage to Europe and the Levant, where Church painted the Holy Land, another subject with reliable sales. With a new baby and Isabel’s mother, they settled happily in Beirut for several months, making excursions to Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Damascus, and Baalbek. On his own, Church embarked on a dicey journey under Bedouin guard to Petra by horse and camel. (Ever attentive to the particular, he left us a winning sketch of his dromedary, inscribed with the animal’s name, Zraigan.)

The epic sky of his Jerusalem From the Mount of Olives (1870) races from furious clouds to radiant sun above an array of biblical landmarks so thorough, it required a crib sheet. But Church’s dominance of American art had begun to slip. Jerusalem was faulted for its lack of “atmospheric effect.” There were complaints of didacticism. He was also attacked by American Pre-Raphaelites (far more dogmatic than the English originals) who objected to what they saw as the flashy artifice of the dramatic light and weather in his work. And for sheer showmanship, he found himself overtaken by Albert Bierstadt, whose mountains rose more vertiginously, whose rays of godly light shone more theatrically, and whose claimed territory was not the exotic South or North or Middle East, but a West that the United States was coming to see as its own. Harper’s Weekly reflected the national mood when it contrasted the “sadness and desolation” in Church’s Andes with what it described as the “temperate cheerfulness” of Bierstadt’s Rockies, and their invitation to look upon Native lands as “the possible seat of supreme civilization” (one not, presumably, of Native design).

In 1875, trying to put a finger on his own dissatisfaction, Henry James described Church’s paintings as “the kind of art which seems perpetually skirting the edge of something worse than itself.” He wasn’t wholly wrong. Church’s numinous-sun-over-still-water routine had begun to look a bit like a shtick, equally applicable to scenes of the Hudson or those worked up from 20-year-old sketches of South America. The details were still there, but the thrill was gone. The River of Light (1877) is sufficiently anodyne that the National Gallery of Art’s website offers a three-minute online guided meditation focused on it.

Church’s priorities had shifted. Now a family man with four children, he was also deeply engaged in public endeavors such as the Met. Church took annual camping trips to Maine with friends and family, and he continued painting and traveling internationally until his death, but he had begun to feel the effects of what would become crippling rheumatoid arthritis. Church denied newspaper reports that he had lost the use of his right hand, but he does seem to have learned to paint with his left as well. The paintings grew smaller, but his landscape ambitions only grew larger.

Church had fallen in love with the Hudson River Valley as a teenager studying with Thomas Cole, and had been buying land there since 1860. Being short of neither confidence nor money, he set about building a familial “Feudal Castle” and transforming the surrounding property into living art. He dredged swampland to create a 10-acre lake and initiated a reforestation project that emphasized native species—planting hemlocks, maples, and hickories in the tens of thousands, some positioned to draw the eye as individual subjects of contemplation, others massed in color schemes that shift with the seasons. He laid out miles of winding roads that rise and dip, eventually opening onto a bell-towered, ogee-arched, polychrome mini-palace on a hill so high that its views stretch into four states. He and Isabel named it Olana for an elevated stronghold in a region of ancient Persia rumored to be the site of the Garden of Eden.

Contra the New York Times headline, the house isn’t so much “Italian-Moorish” as Persian-Japanese-Mexican-Kashmiri. Church had found London “big and dirty” and the ornamentation of Paris “very tiresome”; as for Rome, he wrote, “The Tiber is not the Hudson.” But he and Isabel had been smitten with the Middle East and its architecture, particularly the flow between indoors and outdoors. Formidable on approach, the Church house is unexpectedly porous once you’re inside, punched through with porches, balconies, atria, and outlooks, each strategically framing a view. (The land, along with the house and the belongings inside it—tens of thousands of them, including sketches, unfinished paintings, topographical photographs, and canceled checks to Brooks Brothers—were preserved by Church’s son and daughter-in-law until their deaths.)

The building is certainly overstuffed—pre-Columbian artifacts, Chinese breezeway tiles, Indian chairs—but never stuffy, and often playful. Look closely and you’ll find that the intricate window grilles are actually cut black paper compressed to the panes, and that the finials on the tower’s topmost railing feature Japanese teapots. Everything works in the same cinematic way as the paintings: Rooms and landscapes unfold as you move through them, sometimes with slow pans, sometimes with jump cuts. There are forced close-ups (with the exception of the dining gallery, none of the rooms feels very large), and 360-degree panoramas. “I can make more and better landscapes in this way than by tampering with canvas and paint,” Church told a friend. Olana is often described as his greatest work of art.

For all this worldliness, however, Church at 200 remains a distinctly American figure. The Olana website shows more than 70 locations where Church paintings are currently on public view. Only four are outside the continental United States, and those include Honolulu and Ponce, Puerto Rico. Only Edinburgh and Madrid require a passport.

If Church’s influence beyond the U.S. is essentially nonexistent, his influence within the U.S. has its own problems. Recapitulated by lesser hands, the natural grandeur he invoked so splendidly devolved into purple-mountains-majesty cliché. Church’s Mount Katahdin From Millinocket Camp (1895) looks so much like the cover of an L.L.Bean catalog that it can be hard to recognize what a fine painting it actually is.

The other big impediment for contemporary eyes is that Church’s career coincided with a paradigm shift in visual art—a change in not just what pictures mean, but how that meaning is conveyed. For 500 years, from Giotto to Eugène Delacroix, painting told human-interest stories—a baby in a manger, desperate sailors on a raft. Even most landscape painting was actually about people. The subject of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (circa 1817) isn’t the mountains or the weather—it’s the guy blocking our view of the mountains and weather.

And then the game changed. The year before James found himself befuddled by Church’s painting of sun reflected in the waters of New Granada, French critics found themselves befuddled by Claude Monet’s picture of sun reflected in the waters of Le Havre. Impression, Sunrise gave name to a movement that introduced a new kind of looking—one that found meaning in how pictures depart from reality rather than how convincingly they imitate it. The human-interest story moved from the people in the picture to the thoughts and emotions of the artist who put them there.

But Church wasn’t telling stories about people at all. Line his paintings up chronologically and you can watch the world depopulate—from a youthful New England landscape with European settlers front and center; to the small interracial pair in The Natural Bridge, Virginia; to his desolate icebergs whose lack of human narrative so perplexed British audiences that Church added a shattered mast to make it salable. (You can take this as a lack of artistic integrity or a lack of artistic pomposity as you like.) Neither is he putting his own subjectivity on view. His oil sketches are more disarming than the finished paintings because you can see the mind and hand at work: His act of discovery sits closer to the surface. That’s what sketches do—they give you access to the moment of creation. But in the finished paintings, he cedes the stage to his subject. At Olana, he disappears so completely that if you don’t stop in at the visitor center, you might miss the fact that the landscape was designed at all.

Courtesy of Fralin Museum of Art / University of Virginia / Mark Gulezian / Quicksilver

The Natural Bridge, Virginia (1852)

Contemporary art historians are trained to tease out the political messaging of artworks, but Church is elusive here as well. He “didn’t enjoy talking or writing about politics,” Victoria Johnson notes in her biography, which makes it hard to build a case for intent. Writing about the pairing of presidential portraits with The Heart of the Andes in the Metropolitan Fair, the editors of Frederic Church: Global Artist write that “the notion of divinely ordained westward expansion of the United States and colonization of Indigenous lands, is here extended farther south,” but they don’t claim that this is what Church had in mind. The fiery skies he painted in the 1850s and ’60s have been read as warnings about the sin of slavery, but the degree to which clear policy statements can be read into a sunset is questionable. Johnson and others have been attentive to the overlooked Indigenous histories of locations that Church depicted, but, again, these don’t tell us much about what Church knew or meant to say.

Anyway, even if viewers could be assured that his political instincts aligned perfectly with their own, it wouldn’t make the paintings good. Yet somehow all of these authors—from James onward—have trouble seeing his best work as just “a very pretty picture.” An idea must be in there somewhere, people feel, but what and where?

I recently went to check in on The Heart of the Andes at the Met, where it hangs in a partial re-creation of the 1864 Metropolitan Fair arrangement, along with Emanuel Leutze’s overweening Washington Crossing the Delaware and Albert Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak. The gallery was almost empty. The benches were indeed free, though The Heart of the Andes is a picture that wants to be seen up close, where you can make discoveries inch by inch, and roam from a sky that looks like a hymn to all Creation down to the shaft of sunlight that falls on a tree trunk, just where Church has “carved” his signature.

While I was taking notes on that free bench, a Japanese tour guide ushered a dozen or so people into the room, spoke at length about the Leutze, then led them out again. Washington Crossing the Delaware is perfect tour-guide material—it can be seen by a bunch of people at once, and its story can be told concisely, timed to the minute. After they exited, however, one little girl doubled back to take a photo—not of giant George in a boat, but of the narrative-free, choose-your-own-adventure Heart of the Andes.

Church’s painting is the anti-Leutze: It’s not a story to be memorized but a portal to a place that feels infinite and changeable. Perambulate the Met in its entirety and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a landscape that asks so instantly to be believed in. As at Olana, there is always something more to see, both profound and playful. Johnson (clearly fond of her subject) describes Church as “a painter in love with the whole cosmos, a man who, when he came face-to-face with the eternities of time and space, felt not fear or alienation but the thrilling connection of humans to all other beings and matter.” Call this a political idea or a spiritual one; it is, in any event, an idea.

So when the workings of the world, with its shouty messaging and manipulative storylines, get to be too much—when all of that strategized meaning feels like an imposition—go to the Met or Olana or your nearest Church. Give yourself time. Bring opera glasses.

This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “A Canvas as Big as the Country.”

The David Hockney Painting That Makes You Look, and Then Look Again

2026-06-13T08:00:00-04:00

When David Hockney in the 1960s turned his attention to a photograph of a splash-splattered swimming pool, he did what most of us today, immersed in an endless stream of digital images, do not. He kept looking.

For two weeks, the artist worked tirelessly from the photo to perfect his rendition in his acrylic painting A Bigger Splash, of the dancing droplets that erupted when some long-forgotten swimmer threw themselves into the deep end. The splash ended in an instant. Yet captured in Hockney’s most famous work, it lives on, an unremarkable backyard moment afforded the scrupulous attention of a royal portrait.

In devoting such deep focus, Hockney, who died Thursday at the age of 88, restored something that had been lost in that original image. The artist thought that paintings and drawings have a certain depth that photography on its own lacks. He spoke of this with intensity in his later years, saying in a 2013 interview with Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, that photography “colored our vision” and might eventually “break something.” The medium, he noted, feels temporary. By contrast, “drawing,” he said, “takes time. A line has time in it.”

If images today have a way of eating up time, keeping our fingers scrolling, Hockney’s works might be said to give it back. Perhaps this is why Hockney’s art can seem both in time and out of it. His paintings can feel like a respite for screen-addled eyes, even as they nod to technology’s ability to shape images.

Many will remember Hockney as the bespectacled British painter of “sun-soaked” Los Angeles scenes, a master of mid-century Americana. But beyond the California glam is an effort to reckon with new ways of seeing—to reclaim what’s been lost in the modernity he so coolly depicts.

[Read: David Hockney’s record-smashing $90 million painting]

An artist who wielded paintbrushes and iPads alike, Hockney had a fascination with the mechanics of image-making. He wrote a book pushing much-debated theories about old masters using mirrors and lenses to achieve realism, and he was intrigued by any “technology that is about pictures,” he told Govan.

In the 1970s and ’80s, he made collages from Polaroids that puncture perspective à la Cubism and seem to show time spread out all at once, like a map. And no approach was too office-coded, or too mainstream. He used fax machines to send drawings around the world. Intrigued by the way photocopiers work as both cameras and printing machines, he owned three for artistic experiments. More recently, he ventured into the immersive-experiences fad, turning a form that has become something of a trope—long-dead artists’ public-domain works being recirculated for profit—into something bespoke.

Hockney’s most known tech venture is undoubtedly his work with iPads, which was the subject of a 2021 show at the Royal Academy. The pieces have a whimsical quality to them, recalling afternoons spent playing with Microsoft Paint. Yet they’re also bold, even unapologetic, in their embrace of a technology that’s come to be associated largely with toddlers and Baby Boomers. The New York Times, in its obituary, dismissed this later work as “busywork.” But to me, the iPad pieces seem like a natural extension of Hockney’s visual language.

When I first saw Hockney’s art, in high school, it reminded me, oddly, of The Sims, the popular life-simulation video game in which you build characters and houses. His multipoint and aerial perspectives sparked memories of the game screen. His human figures hover at the edge of realism, like early-aughts computer graphics. Long before screens were a fixture of modern life, Hockney seemed capable of distilling the world into pixelated, minimalistic forms that amplified action: water streaming from a shower, the ch-ch-ch of California sprinklers against smooth buildings and flat landscapes.

When discussing A Bigger Splash, he remarked on the irony that he had spent significantly longer working on a split-second splash than he had on the more permanent house in the background.

Hockney often bemoaned what he saw as the loss of bohemia to the suburbs. Yet a quiet bohemia remains alive in his work—an insistence that much can exist within a passing, seemingly trivial moment. If we look slowly, perhaps, we can share in the time he left behind.

The Voters Who Believe That Trump Defends Their Values

2026-06-13T08:00:00-04:00

Given President Trump’s disregard for long-standing political norms and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, many Americans fear that he is hostile to democracy. According to this view, the 49.8 percent of voters who supported him in 2024 must simply be unaware of the existential threat he poses to our republic. The logic, to Trump’s critics, is therefore simple: Once voters fully grasp that democracy is under threat from creeping authoritarianism, then surely they will turn against Trump.

Yet this strategy has largely fallen flat. Why? The consulting and pro-democracy organizations where we work have spent the past few months with conservative Trump voters across three counties in Wyoming, Michigan, and South Carolina. We learned that many do indeed revere America’s founding design, including the Constitution, free and fair elections, the Electoral College, and the rule of law. But these voters feel that government institutions have drifted from their founding values and priorities, which they classify as faith, or the belief that moral authority precedes political authority; family, the primary unit of social life and obligation; freedom, mainly from government overreach; and place, or the importance of local community over national abstraction. The people we spoke with explained that by forsaking these values, the country’s political institutions have lost touch with the moral ethos that they believe should guide public life, and that these institutions were designed to protect.

Our research involved conducting in-depth interviews with and observing the daily lives of dozens of people along with their friends, families, and neighbors to better understand how they think about American democracy right now. Our goal was not to persuade or judge, but to figure out why public trust in national institutions has plummeted to historic lows and what might be done to build it back up.

We learned that the central question for the conservatives we met is not “Should America be a democracy?” Instead it is: “Has American democracy remained faithful to what makes it legitimate?” Democratic institutions are legitimate, in the view of conservatives, when they honor and protect the faith, freedom, families, and communities of their constituents. When institutions and the politicians who inhabit them fail to appreciate the centrality of these core values, they become illegitimate.

One participant, Sarah, a 30-something mother of three in rural Wyoming, grew up poor, the daughter of a single teen mom. From the time she was 10, her local church fed her family, cared for her when her mother couldn’t be around, and surrounded her with people who treated her with dignity. In 2008, at age 18, she strongly considered voting for Barack Obama for president. She appreciated his care for struggling Americans and believed his promises of change. The parents of her boyfriend at the time didn’t argue with her. Instead, her future in-laws listened and then asked: Who brought you out of poverty? The answer, Sarah realized, was not the federal government, but her church community—a view that she believed put her closer to the priorities and policies of conservatives rather than Democrats.

[Christopher Beam: The ‘democracy’ gap]

Nearly 20 years later, Sarah told us that virtually every major institution she has encountered in her life, including public schools, hospitals, and various federal agencies, has squandered her trust and fallen short of what her church gave her. Having witnessed the shortcomings of the public-school system firsthand as a teacher, Sarah now homeschools her children. When neurologists dismissed her young son's recurring seizures, she turned to networks of mothers online to crowdsource a diagnosis and treatment plan, which largely entailed avoiding certain government-sanctioned products and chemicals. (When we met her, her son hadn’t had a seizure for more than a year.) During the coronavirus pandemic, Sarah watched policies that seemed designed for urbanites arrive in her rural town without the consent of residents or evidence of their local efficacy. She threw herself into local activism, showing up to county meetings, local boards, and precinct caucuses. She now aligns herself with a chapter of the right-wing Freedom Caucus.

Across Wyoming, Michigan, and South Carolina, we heard stories like Sarah’s: Conventional institutions had failed participants, and faith and values-aligned organizations filled the gap. This is why calls to restore power to government institutions ring hollow, and why the Democratic Party’s faith in institutions can appear naive and godless. As Thomas, a rural South Carolinian who comes from a family with a long history of military service and civic engagement, told us: “Democrats see government as their god, while conservatives see their god as God, and government as sort of secondary.”

Disappointment and distrust in much of government—owing to the ways these institutions have seemingly abandoned the priorities that made them just and meaningful—have hardened into a worldview, one that dismisses democratic rules and norms as expendable if they don’t reinforce what’s morally essential. As Sam, a small-business owner in Michigan, put it: “Political norms are just like culture, right? Norms just mean how we have always done things. So I think that’s fine to disrupt.”

Which brings us to Trump. How can people with such a strong attachment to faith and family vote for someone who criticizes religious leaders and defies so many ethical standards? We learned that these voters evaluate Trump not as a model of their values, but as a defender of them. “I don’t like him as a person,” Cindy, a 50-something nurse in South Carolina, told us. “But I like him as a president.”

A number of respondents expressed gratitude for the way Trump has worked to protect their communities and livelihoods, particularly in coal country. Sarah told us, for example, that when Trump returned to office, her husband, a land surveyor in Wyoming, was nearly unemployed and the family was worried about making ends meet. But thanks to the president’s reversal of Biden-era restrictions on coal mining, her husband is now overwhelmed with work. Such moves have made Trump a hero in parts of the country where Americans have been unwilling or unable to pivot away from coal.

This view of Trump as a protector of the country’s core values and interests also helps explain how participants reconcile the president’s interventionist policies and growing executive power with their stated preferences for small, local governance. Many of the people with whom we spoke justified Trump’s aggressive use of federal power as a necessary response to hostile institutions that have violated their constitutional mandate. When the FBI investigates Trump, when government agencies mandate vaccines, and when the Department of Education influences local curricula, voters say these institutions have exceeded their legitimate authority. In cracking down on these institutional breaches, Trump is not breaking the rules but defending the foundation the rules were meant to protect. “Do I think Trump’s all the time, great? No. But I do think he’s fighting for everyone right now,” Kyle, a 20-something delivery driver in rural Wyoming, told us.

[Peter Wehner: The American pope vs. the American president]

Our research suggests that activists seeking to protect American democracy from authoritarian influences are pursuing a failing strategy. They are defending largely abstract democratic processes, such as norms and rules, on the assumption that everyone agrees that they are legitimate and worth saving. But such arguments are unlikely to resonate with voters who have come to believe that many of these norms and processes have abandoned the country’s bedrock values. Calls to defend democracy promise to alienate anyone who feels that democratic institutions have somehow failed them. Few care to preserve a system they feel stopped serving its purpose long ago.

The Encounter

2026-06-13T08:00:00-04:00

It was a simple plan, but somehow, as he and his men followed the shackled man through the hills, Khawar wondered if it should have been simpler still. If they had been able to shoot him close to the police station earlier in the day, a story about a thwarted escape might have played out quite nicely. But his skinny constable, Javed, had noted that at that hour, there were too many day laborers passing by who knew the man, which could have created “complications.” Now he wasn’t sure why they had come here—to the mines, of all places. Who had decided that? Only he could have given the order, but he couldn’t recall it; he was even having trouble remembering the drive over. The adrenaline was disorienting him, which he didn’t like to admit but was perhaps natural, given that this was his first encounter.

The prisoner, Usmaan, a man in his mid-40s who looked a decade older, was handcuffed. Ankles bound in bar fetters, he shuffled through the grass. He was tall, and his head hung down, his eyes on the ground as he tried not to trip, and Khawar was struck by the man’s caution, his care. Then he sniffed, and Khawar wondered if he might be crying. For God’s sake, how would that help now? Then again, Usmaan wasn’t the usual fit for an encounter, a protocol reserved for the worst of criminals—rapists, dacoits, or gangsters of renown. Sometimes it was the only option the police had for delivering justice to men who were either impossible to jail or capable of easily buying their way out of it. An encounter was an act on behalf of the decent in the face of an indecent world, really; that’s what he’d been telling himself these past few days. Only here, they were trailing an anonymous, shabby-looking man with little to his name, a man whom they could all hear murmuring—prayers, insults?—under his breath.

Up ahead were the abandoned barracks, glum and battered, behind a wire fence. The uranium mines had once brought the army, with its engineers and trucks, here. Khawar hadn’t come out this way in years; no one did, other than the villagers who grazed their animals on the hillside. The locals liked to complain about the mines, about the yellow sludge sliding down the hills. They talked incessantly of the dangerous waste they’d heard was buried in the mines, the damage it was doing to their animals and their children. And it was this that had brought Usmaan to their attention.

Two weeks ago, he’d dumped the bloated body of a cow on Sakhi Sarwar Road, the main route to the area’s most visited shrine. A single act of protest might have been ignored, but day after day, he’d dragged corpses—buffalo, goats, their tongues lolling from their mouths, their hooves strangely swollen—to the middle of the busy thoroughfare in his tiny Suzuki van. When they’d asked him why he’d done it, he’d said that no one cared, and so he’d had no choice but to make people see what was happening here by the mines.

This was true: No one did care. But Usmaan’s blockades had forced pilgrims to get to the shrine by the smaller back roads, where a group of newly assembled dacoits had taken the opportunity to lie in wait and rob them, often violently. Even if Usmaan claimed he had nothing to do with the criminals, he’d made it possible for the gang to operate. So when Khawar and his men couldn’t find any higher-ups from the actual gang to arrest, their patience with the man’s theatrics wore thin, and they decided that dealing with Usmaan would be good enough. It would reduce the recent criminal activity and restore both the flow of tourists and the reputation of the district’s police. So here they were, trailing this stooping man on a hillside caked in sandy effluent from the mines.

Something snapped; they all stopped to look around. But before they could start up again, Usmaan turned to face them, as if he’d decided this was as far as he’d go. Khawar stiffened, alert to trouble. He’d brought three constables with him— excessive, perhaps, but he’d felt the more bodies, the better, and now he wondered if his instincts had been right.

Usmaan cleared his throat. If he had been crying before, no trace of it remained now. The wind was blowing in long, hot gusts, and Usmaan’s kameez flapped up. He was balding, and the tufts of hair on either side of his head flew up too. He grimaced as the wind lashed his face. But Khawar could detect no tension in the man’s body, no indication that he was waiting for a moment to charge at them or run; he looked determined.

Khawar had thought about this moment a great deal the past few days; he’d pictured exactly how it ought to unfold. But as the man stared at each of them, unblinking, he realized that although he’d thought about the mechanics, he hadn’t fully confronted the business of killing a man. He’d known that it might come one day, particularly after his promotion to inspector, but he had expected that he’d function on autopilot, as he did most of the time: overseeing the logistics, getting the job done, filing the paperwork, fastidious as ever. And yet here he was—thinking!

He nodded at his men to indicate that they should unshackle the prisoner. They crouched around his ankles and leaned over his hands, and Khawar felt embarrassed, as if he were watching something untoward, something private. He turned to look at the hills. With the smell of dirt hanging in the air and the grass lying in sheets of dull gold around his ankles, he had the urge to take off his boots and socks and feel the earth under his feet, God’s name hovering somewhere around him.

The prisoner’s chains clanked. This wasn’t the time or the place. Or perhaps it was. Perhaps this was exactly what a man supervising the death of another should be thinking about: God.

Had Inspector Salim Mirza of Karachi, legendary for his record of encounters, felt the same during each of his? How many had Mirza overseen? The number was said to be in the hundreds—it had transformed him into a folk hero of law enforcement. Perhaps the … protocols were different in a city like Karachi. Not that Khawar had ever been there, but it couldn’t be like this: like shooting a man from a neighboring village whom you’d likely wandered past countless times on your way to buy cigarettes. Khawar suspected it must get easier. But surely everyone remembered their first—the first time must feel different.

When he turned back, the constables were still fiddling with the chains, for God’s sake. “What’s taking so long?” he yelled.

The constables straightened and gestured that they were finally done. Then they all turned to look at Usmaan. Pervaiz and Musa stood behind Javed, their hands in their pockets, surveying the prisoner and the rolling hills behind him as though there were a great deal to see out here in the middle of nowhere.

“Come on, then,” Khawar said, indicating that they should proceed. Javed made an After you, sir gesture. Khawar swallowed. He had no intention of being the one to shoot the man. Inspector Mirza might do that kind of thing, but Khawar was here to supervise.

“Go on,” he said, and Javed, his shoulders dropping now, nodded at the others. They reluctantly took their hands out of their pockets and fiddled with their cuffs, their belts, their mustaches, but they did not pull out their guns. Khawar was feeling queasy; if they didn’t get this done quickly, he might start to retch. Mirza, Mirza, he thought in a bid to calm himself.

“Come on,” he said again. The constables finally took out their guns.

“Ready,” Javed said. Khawar thought the prisoner ought to cry now, to whimper—it seemed the right time. But Usmaan only closed his eyes, as if in prayer.

“Something’s not right, sir,” Musa said.

“What?”

Musa widened his eyes, trying to communicate something, but Khawar had no idea what he meant. Of course it wasn’t right, nothing was right.

“Shouldn’t we shoot him … in the back? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?”

Khawar flushed. Musa was right. An encounter was supposed to look like, well, like an encounter, like they’d shot a man escaping capture. The man had to run. Khawar chewed his lip—how would he ask the man to do that?

“You need to—” he gestured into the distance, flapping his hand outward. Usmaan looked at him, but he made no move.

“I never meant for any harm to come to others,” he said. “You all know I am innocent, that I am no dacoit. I work my land, that’s all I do, it’s all I’ve ever done.”

“Look—”

“Did you know,” the man interrupted, “you can love an animal, really love it, sir? One that you’ve named, that you’ve fed, that’s fed you?”

For God’s sake. A ruse to distract them at the crucial moment. As if he had time for any of this.

“We were just trying to protect our lives, our children. We’ve tried everything else. Complaints. The courts. No one listens.”

“That’s enough,” Khawar said.

“Enough? They’ve buried barrels of poison in there. God only knows how much. They tell us it’s safe because no one lives here, but we do, we live here. I have a son. I want him to live. Instead, the water we give our children, the food we feed our animals, makes them sick.”

“That’s not true—and that doesn’t excuse the merciless robberies—”

Usmaan took a step toward him. “Robberies.” He scoffed, narrowed his eyes to look at Khawar. “You don’t care about what’s true, sir. Our children get strange bubbles on their skin, they have breathing problems. They get cancers, young children. They die. Younger than they have in generations.”

Khawar’s constables were staring at the man intently, their mouths open, their mustaches drooping.

“Please, sir,” Usmaan said. “You must listen.” But he wasn’t pleading; he was adamant, his tone defiant, even. The nerve of the man. What made him think Khawar, an inspector, should listen to him? Who did he think he was? Khawar needed to get this over with. Then he could go home—to the cricket highlights, to hot tea after dinner, and put all of this behind him.

“That way,” Khawar said. “Away from the sun.” Better chance of a clean shot. He glanced at Usmaan, embarrassed that they needed his help. Each of the constables was looking down; big-eyed Pervaiz seemed on the verge of tears. What was wrong with him, with all of them? He wanted to shake them, to cry out: They were pathetic! Surely Inspector Mirza would not have tolerated such nonsense. “Hurry up!” he yelled, and the constables shakily drew their guns.

Usmaan looked around the hills, took in some deep breaths as if calming himself. He closed his eyes for a moment, then he nodded and said: “Okay.” He turned his back to the guns that were trained on him. He started to walk, then sped up to a gentle trot headed toward a distant ridge; a second later, he was sprinting.

“Now,” Khawar shouted into the wind. The bang of gunfire rang out across the hills, but the man was still running. For God’s sake!

“Again,” Khawar called, and the constables fired. The man was still running.

“Fire!” he yelled, and they fired again and again. Still, the man ran. “Get him!” he screamed at his men. “Catch him!”

Usmaan disappeared over the top of a hill as they tripped and stumbled up the steep climb. Khawar’s heart was pumping hard as he ran against the wind, his only thought oh God, oh God. But where the hill plateaued, the constables stopped and looked around uncertainly.

“What? What is it?” he puffed as he caught up to them. Javed gestured to the open, yellow plain that lay before them. There was no one in sight. They staggered down the hill; they fanned out and searched. There was no place he could have fallen, no ditch into which he might have rolled. But he was gone, as if he’d never been there at all.

After an hour and a half of searching, Khawar led them back toward the car. His muscles were stiff with fear, and for good reason; they’d allowed a man slated for death to get away, which would have terrible repercussions, because men did not just disappear into thin air.

On the drive back to DG Khan, Javed drove. Pervaiz closed his eyes, then fell asleep. Musa chewed his fingernails. None of them had said a word when Khawar listed a string of possibilities for where they might look for the vanished man—known associates, family, clansmen. They all appeared fairly relaxed for a cohort of men facing a bigger problem than the one they’d started with.

Javed swerved to steer around a crow pecking at the remains of some dead creature in the road, and Khawar started.

“Stop the car,” he said.

“Sir?” Javed replied.

“Now,” he said. Now.”

Khawar got out and paced a little as the men sat inside. Dust blew across the fields. The wheat swayed. He recalled the interminable jangling of the chains, the mournful faces of the men as they’d pulled their guns from their holsters; they had seemed more worried about the prospect of getting rid of the man than they were about his disappearance. They weren’t terrible shots, and the man had not been that fast. He leaned down into Javed’s open window. “You missed on purpose, didn’t you?”

Javed held his gaze. He said nothing. The other constables looked away.

“Get out, all of you,” he said. The men climbed out of the car slowly. They stood, their eyes trained on the ground.

“Did he pay you? Are you connected to him? Is he from your clan or something?” Javed shook his head.

“Then why?” Khawar braced himself, but they said nothing. “It’s over, for all of you. Do you understand? I have a list of men ready to have your jobs. Jobs they’ll actually do—”

“Sir, it’s not what you think. He showed us. We couldn’t, not after we saw it.”

“Saw what?”

Javed glanced at Pervaiz, who nodded back. Javed took out his phone and scrolled through it, then stopped and held up a photo. Khawar squinted. He could just make out the edge of a shoulder, perhaps, a brown patch.

“What the hell is that?”

“It’s him. Usmaan. He’s marked by God, sir. See? There’s a birthmark. On his shoulder. God’s name. It spells God’s name.”

Khawar peered at the picture. Javed told him that Usmaan had shown them the mark last night in the holding cell. The picture wasn’t that clear—there were some long lines and a curve, true, but it didn’t look like anything more than an unusual birthmark. Only, Khawar couldn’t say that out loud to them, just as they could not have denied Usmaan’s claim once he’d made it; to deny seeing God’s name written could be dangerous, ruinous, a potential death sentence.

“It would be a crime to do anything to him, sir. A crime against God,” Javed said. “If he hadn’t had such a mark on him …” Javed shrugged. “And look at what just happened, sir. He disappeared—that must be the work of God.” The other men looked up at him now too. “I wasn’t sure before, but now, after what we just saw, I am. Sir.”

“He ran,” Khawar said. “He grew up around these hills, he knows the area better than we do. He knows some special hiding place out there, and that’s where he is, lying low.”

“No, sir.” Javed, usually so ready to acquiesce, was firm, “No, sir. We didn’t fire directly at him, that’s true, but we didn’t just watch him run away, he vanished.”

“Even when we brought him in, sir. Even before we saw the mark, there was something about him, sir. Something different,” Pervaiz said. “We could all tell. The villagers told us the same thing.”

Khawar squinted at the constable—baffled by him, by all of them. He looked at the picture again.

“It was a miracle, sir,” Javed said.

“Get back in the car,” Khawar said.

He had only half-entertained the idea that the man had vanished, not really believing it until Javed had said it out loud. A man marked by God. A man whom his three constables had conspired not to kill. Now they would all lose their jobs. The men were right to be afraid, perhaps of God (his wife would say so) but also because if this man had such a mark and others knew it, who could say what might happen to any of them for harming him?

Mobs had surrounded the homes of people for all sorts of alleged violations on far flimsier evidence. He thought of the photos he was sent sometimes on WhatsApp, pictures of the unlikely places you might find God’s name: watermelons cut open, wheat fields shot from above. The branches of the tree on the side of the road quivered. A kikar tree: a friend through joy and sorrow, Muneeza had said of the ones she’d planted in their garden. Perhaps there were words buried in the grooves on its trunk, or the crows in the sky, circling the carcass on the road, might be making letters. If you looked hard enough, if you believed in signs, God’s name might be anywhere you set your eyes.

When he got home, Muneeza was sitting wrapped in a chador on her prayer mat, with a glass of water beside her and her phone playing a prayer. He sat down on the bed. Once the tinny sound of the zikr was finished, she picked up the glass of water and drank it. This was some new ritual her pir had prescribed, another snatch of verse he’d sent her and the women in her WhatsApp group. Something to dispel the force blocking whatever it was that each of them sought: an end to menstrual cramps, better-paying jobs for their husbands, good exam results for their children—children, always children. Babies. He would find her scrolling through the zikrs, one male voice followed by another, on nights she couldn’t sleep, something frantic about her search, as if whatever wrongs they had suffered could be righted only through the selection of a certain passage, the correct words to speak to God.

When she got up, she rested her hand on his cheek for a moment, but when he reached for her, she was already gone. He wanted her to ask him about his day, the way she used to. But piety had become all-consuming; prayers could make the impossible possible, could make life, the pir said, and that was what Muneeza wanted most of all.

What would Khawar tell her if she even cared to listen? That he had abandoned a pile of paperwork on his desk? Or that he had tried to kill a man and failed? The revulsion hit him then—she would never believe that he could sit a man down in a car with such intent. It’s a job, it’s my job, he would say to her. You cannot hold my job against me.

She came back into the room, a small cloth purse with her. “Look,” she said, emptying out a handful of semiprecious stones. She smiled, delighted. “I have to grind these and wash with them.”

“And then what?”

“It will help to dispel the dark cloud that’s blocking us.”

He felt his eyes filling, though he wasn’t sure why. “And how much did you give him for this?”

“Anything we give him goes to the poor.”

She sat down by her bedside table and set about grinding the stones against a nail file, collecting the dust in a tissue for her bath. He surprised himself by grabbing the stones from the table, marching out to their small veranda, and hurling them into the dirt among the kikar trees she’d planted after the first miscarriage.

Perhaps it was his failure to do what had seemed a simple task this morning, perhaps it was years of waiting for God’s blessings to be visited upon them, perhaps it was months of watching his wife’s face open to strangers selling her prayers and holy relics, touching her head and hair with hands that claimed to have felt God’s power. Idolatry, he wanted to shout as he stared at the trees, the stones lost in the dirt.

She stood behind him. He wanted her to cry. To watch her scrabble around in the dirt, to feel the rightness of his belief. But she didn’t. She only said, “You will find those stones, and then you’ll bathe in the water too.”

She turned, walking away from him, and the desperation he felt was sharp as he followed her into the bedroom. He wasn’t thinking when he spoke, the words just came out: “I met a man marked with God’s name today. A birthmark.”

Muneeza stopped. She turned to look at Khawar, a blank slate.

He thought his legs might buckle under him, but he spoke, thrilled and terrified by the intensity of her attention. He detailed his desperation that morning, his horror at his failure, the dread at what might follow in the days ahead. If the truth got out, he was well and truly finished.

As soon as he stopped speaking, she began to pace, muttering frantically. He realized that he had not expressed much discomfort about the task itself, the plan to kill the man. She must think him a monster.

“Muneeza,” he said, trying to calm her intensifying panic.

She stopped. “It’s him,” she said.

“Who?”

“It’s him. Pir sain told me, he said there would be a man. A man who’d seen extraordinary things. A man who would bring a message.”

“What man? What message?”

“This man, this is obviously the man. Why else would this have happened? God saved him for a reason. You have to find him. He has a message that will help dispel the djinn that’s plaguing us.”

“This is the man who will lose me my job, Muneeza.”

“Killing is not much of a job.” She looked contrite for a moment, as if she, too, was startled by the frankness of her speech. But then her expression hardened, and she crossed her arms. He blinked. That is not my job, he wanted to yell, but it was exactly what he had just described. “My job,” he said, “pays for all of this—the endless feeding of your pirs, for the sadqahs, the ta'weezes, for the things you keep buying to make a miracle happen.”

“God saved him and you. He saved you from your own sin for a reason. You’ve been blessed.”

“Blessed? I’m a dead man. My life is over if this gets out.”

“A man marked by God—”

“Ya Allah! Is there nothing you won’t believe? Palm readers and fakirs, black magic. Now this. God’s mark. It’s not faith, it’s not devotion. It’s desperation. You’re so desperate, you’ll believe anything.”

“I’ve never denied that I’m desperate.” She closed her eyes and held in a breath, the way she always did when she wanted to stop herself from crying. She looked at him, defiant now. “What’s wrong with it? With wanting what I want? With needing it.”

He flushed; there was discomfort in her naming it, her longing, in its loud unfurling between them, so alive and uncontained when she wasn’t weaving it into her prayers.

“I don’t know. God could have turned him into a bird to save him, or showed him some invisible path out of there—I don’t know how—but I do know that what you saw was a miracle.”

“Just because I don’t know what happened doesn’t mean it was an act of God. I investigate things like this all the time. They are not miracles, they’re just the things we don’t know. Yet.” His throat felt tight, his rage strangling him.

When she spoke, her voice was steady, “God has given you—us—a second chance. You would be—” she stopped herself. “It would be foolish of us to ignore it.”

She glanced out the window; the sunset had dissolved into the dim light of dusk. She put her hand to her heart. “I’m late for Maghrib,” she said, and she left, disappearing from him as she always did.

He kicked over the small side table on which she had placed one of her embroidered doilies. He stared at the fallen table, the underside of the embroidery with its stitching crudely visible, as the bedroom door clicked shut.

For two days, he thought of nothing but the vanished man. He ignored Muneeza, who trailed him around the house, neglecting her prayers, asking what he intended to do. Would he find the man, could he? Would he at least talk to the pir, listen to his prophecy? Could she talk to the pir about it?

“You talk to no one, tell no one,” he snapped, bristling every time her WhatsApp pinged, saying nothing when she noisily cleared the plates from the table, sloshing curry onto his uniform.

“Oh, sorry,” she said, in a tone that didn’t sound at all sorry. She was seething, but so was he. Instead of comforting him, she had turned his professional crisis into a spiritual one. It was ridiculous for her to think that this—whatever it was—meant something, to even put the idea in his head. But in all these years of watching Muneeza pray and pay for access to God’s favor, hadn’t he longed for a sign? Hadn’t he told himself that all he needed to keep going was some message that they weren’t throwing away their money, their time, the years of their marriage on some futile hope? What if this was that very—but then he stopped himself; he couldn’t afford to waste time on such thoughts, on superstition. He had to think straight, rationally, to get himself free of this. The intercessions of holy men would achieve nothing.

At the station, he told his constables to avoid doing anything that might draw attention to what had happened; they were to appear occupied with station business. They trudged around town, around the station courtyard, silent and morose. If this was a miracle, it had not delivered much in the way of jubilation. Instead, a new kind of dread seemed to hover over them. The sense of God’s nearness, God’s truth, was perhaps enough to make even a constable reflect on his life. For God could hold your job against you, and a police officer might well be first among sinners to be punished. Javed even asked for leave to visit Sakhi Sarwar’s shrine, where Khawar presumed he intended to ask the saint to intervene preemptively on his behalf.

His own plan, if he had one at all, was to resolve the matter before his superiors found out, but he dithered and delayed, unsure of how to appease his bosses, his wife—God. Before he knew it, he was summoned to see the superintendent; secrets were not well kept in stations, and miracles, it seemed, were even less so. It was cowardly to blame his constables, but then, it was also the truth—they had not followed orders.

“Superstitious nonsense,” the SP said, with disgust. “I almost never see any of your men at Jumma, and some of them don’t even fast. And here they are, spouting this rubbish. It’s an affront to the sanctity of our beliefs, but I’ll leave that punishment to the Almighty.” He paused and looked at Khawar. “You’ll have to be firm. Appropriate disciplinary action for defying orders will be necessary. After you find and deal with the dacoit, of course.”

“Sir,” Khawar said. “Sir” to everything. He didn’t raise the matter of what the villagers might do if they heard that the police had killed a man marked by God. The only thing likely to appease them would be the return of the man himself. When, after a week, no mobs had arrived at the station, he knew that Usmaan must have returned to his village safely. That meant it wouldn’t be long before the SP and higher-ups found out the man was still alive too; no doubt a new pile of animals would appear on the highway soon. His only choice—if no one was prepared to finish the job—was to chase the man out of the area. Whatever Usmaan still had here—land, family, animals—he would have to be persuaded to abandon it all.

The constables said nothing when he gave them their orders, but they would not look at him. “You’re not going to do anything to him,” he promised. “You’re just going to bring him in, and I’m going to ask him to leave.”

He had thought about accompanying them, but he worried that their mistrust of him would lead them to sabotage the plan. Trusting them to find Usmaan ought to show that he meant him no real harm. That he, like them, was a believer, that he, too, had witnessed the miracle.

The moon was fat and bright by the time he heard a car pull up in front of the station. When he stepped outside, he found not the returned constables but his brother-in-law, Raza, parking his Toyota in the courtyard, with Muneeza in the passenger seat.

“Is everything all right?” he asked Raza, who squinted at him through cloudy glasses with tired eyes.

“Muneeza said she had to come,” Raza said. “Insisted. Not sure what’s so urgent that you’d have your wife come here in the middle of—”

“I didn’t ask her to come.”

Muneeza tapped the bonnet of the car, signaling that Raza could go, the look on her face pleading him to do so. “Thanks, Raza bhai.” He sighed, seemed about to say something more, but then reversed out of the courtyard, clicking his tongue at Khawar as he went.

“What are you doing, coming here?” Khawar snapped as the car left. “And why did you call your brother, of all people?”

“You haven’t called me back all day. Or responded to my messages. I wanted to see if there was any news. And I knew you wouldn’t have let me come.”

“Go home,” he said. “I’ll get someone to drive you.” His jaw was tight.

“I went there,” she said. “I went to the mines to see for myself. It all looks … normal.” She was exasperated.

“How did you get there?”

“Raza took me.”

He closed his eyes; soon, everyone in town would know about the man, the mines, the failed encounter.

“It all looks fine up there, but it’s not, is it? Maybe we can’t see the poison, but it’s there. He sees it,” she said.

“You don’t have to be a holy man to see it,” he said, thinking of the dead animals Usmaan had dumped in the middle of the road.

“Perhaps you have to be a holy man to speak out about it. Who else will speak of it?” He turned to walk away.

“What will you do when you find him?”

“I’m going to get him to leave the area,” he said.

“You can’t. He has to stay. The miracle happened there for a reason—so we wouldn’t forget it.”

“You have to go. Now.”

She looked at him closely. “You’ve found him, haven’t you? He’s coming, isn’t he?” She seemed to quiver, and then she walked toward a plastic chair outside the station doorway. She sat down; she would not be leaving. He started to speak, but she was already lost to him, her fingers gliding across the smooth beads of her tasbih, the light of the moon falling gently on her hands, on her lips as they moved silently. He went inside the station, pretending not to watch her from his window as she stared at the gate with perfect concentration. He’d always dismissed Muneeza’s rituals, her relics and saints and talismans—the practice of the poor, the ignorant, the illiterate. Those in frantic need. But what if some people just couldn’t see signs, no matter how clear—what if he was one of them? The kind who, even when God made His power visible, would only ever question it, doubt it? In the stories of the prophets, the glorious stories of the birth of his religion, the shadowy presence of the unbelievers also existed—the enemies, those who did not come around, who doubted, who just could not see what God was revealing to them. What if—and this made him shudder—he was like those men?

Another hour passed before the constables returned. He heard them banging on the gate outside the courtyard to announce their return or that they had a prisoner with them. He went to stand in the doorway, and Muneeza raised her head to watch as the car crawled into the courtyard. She called to Khawar and stood, ready to move toward the car.

“Wait,” he said to her, watching Pervaiz open the car door. The tall man stepped out into the darkness of the courtyard. Muneeza was breathing heavily. “Wait,” he said again. “What if it’s all just luck? All the good things, all the bad things.”

She clamped her lips together. “God wills the good luck, the bad luck. Everything is God’s will. He just asks that we show patience—faith.”

“What if there’s no message? What if this isn’t the right man?”

“Then we wait, we wait to see what God has in store for us.”

“Some days I’m not sure,” he said. “I’m not sure about anything. About what we’re doing, about what any of this is for.” He gestured to her tasbih, paused. He had said too much. She swallowed, looked around: Quiet, she meant. These were not things to say, not out loud.

The constables were heading toward them with Usmaan in tow. Once he stepped inside the station, once he was seen here, Khawar would have to make a decision; people would know what he, Khawar, had done, what he had not done. Even with the weight of this, what he really wondered was how much more of his life would be spent in pursuit of this want, her want; how many more places would they travel in search of messages and signs? How many more paychecks would be spent in pursuit of what he sensed was an impossible wish?

“I can’t go on with it. I can’t keep on with all this,” Khawar said, because he could not stop now.

“You can, you will,” she said, her eyes unmoving. “You will not deny God’s message.”

“God’s plans are better than your dreams. Isn’t that what your pir says?” he said. “Isn’t that the lesson we’re supposed to learn?”

She looked taken aback for a moment, her shoulders slumped. “Maybe. Maybe this is God’s plan.” She closed her eyes a moment, then opened them and stared at him. “But we don’t know that yet. And I’m not leaving ’til I know if God has sent him here. For us.”

As Usmaan reached the threshold of the station, she said, “Sain … pir sain,” and Usmaan stopped.

“You are?” Usmaan said. He sounded clear, firm, not at all fearful in the presence of men who’d seemed ready to shoot him a few days ago. She was silent. From inside the station came the sound of the radio. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked, a rickshaw spluttered.

Khawar braced himself, instinctively put his hand on his holster—wouldn’t it be, even now, the easiest solution? He reached into the edges of his mind for a story that would make sense, but just then, Muneeza stepped in front of Usmaan, shielding him.

“I heard what happened, sain. My pir said I should watch for a sign, and after I heard about the miracle … I came to find you.” She paused. “I’ve been waiting to hear … your message,” she said, as if Usmaan ought to know her.

Khawar wanted it to be true, he wanted to feel it could be true that God sent messengers and gifts and even punishments. That He could turn men into birds. That He could plant life in wounded bodies, in broken marriages. That people could be transformed from djinns into men, into decent men, even men like him who were, when so instructed, ready to walk other men to their death.

Usmaan squinted at Muneeza. The constables stared at her too, and then at Khawar, awaiting instructions, loath as they might be to fulfill them.

“I do have things to say,” Usmaan said, and Muneeza inhaled sharply, her face open with hope.

Khawar gestured that the constables should hang back, and he stepped back as well, his arms now limp by his sides, desperately trying to imagine what it felt like to know, to be sure the way she was—a sense of flight, or a warm wind blowing her hair about her face, the strands tickling her skin, what? And he watched as she, just as desperately, willed this stranger to gift her something, while the poisoned hills stood in the darkness behind them, silent and mysterious as God.

The Beauty of Doing Nothing Together

2026-06-13T08:00:00-04:00

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

There are times you meet friends for a long-planned dinner. And then there are times you invite them over just to hang out while you fold laundry. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate the second option.

Friendship in adulthood can feel like a feat of organization. We meet for brunch, make dinner reservations weeks in advance, or spend days trying to find a time that works for everyone. The activity itself becomes the point. Julie Beck recently wrote about the other kind of social life: one built around doing nothing in particular. Maybe you’re sitting on a couch while a friend answers emails, talking while someone packs for a trip, helping prep dinner. What you’re doing hardly matters. What matters is inviting someone into the ordinary parts of your life instead of waiting for an occasion that feels worthy of an invitation.

Today’s newsletter explores how some of the best time we spend with other people happens not when we’ve planned something special, but when we simply make room for them in the middle of an ordinary day.

On Togetherness

Fold Laundry With Me!

By Julie Beck

The case for a lower-stakes social life

Read the article.

Americans Need to Party More

By Ellen Cushing

We’re not doing it as much as we used to. You can be the change we need. (From 2025)

Read the article.

The Friendship Paradox

By Olga Khazan

We all want more time with our friends, but we’re spending more time alone. (From 2024)

Read the article.

Still Curious?

The anti-social century: Americans are now spending more time alone than ever, Derek Thompson wrote last year. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.
The friend-group fallacy: Many people yearn for a crew, but having one is not actually the norm, Jenny Singer writes.

Other Diversions

Courtesy of Helen M.

My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “Camas in a Garry Oak Meadow in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Breathtaking!’” Helen M., from Victoria, writes.

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

— Rafaela

Trump’s Gladiator Delusion

2026-06-13T06:00:00-04:00

The arena has been built. Its skeletal steel dome, erected on the spot where an Easter egg roll was held in the days of the republic, rises as high as the topmost arcade of the Colosseum, towering over the White House. UFC Freedom 250, to be streamed by Paramount, will feature seven bouts fought inside an octagonal wire-mesh cage. Many people have noted the similarities to ancient gladiatorial contests. President Trump himself will occupy an arena-level seat, positioned like a Roman emperor in his pulvinar—the imperial box—and surrounded by senators and dignitaries, if not the traditional six Vestal Virgins.

Criticism has been predictable—the event smacks of excess. To me, though, what is most striking about the plans is their overall lack of ambition. True, the president has suggested that he might keep the steel dome in place—“Maybe we’ll never, ever take it down.” But the Roman gladiatorial spectacle involved more than just fighting; it spilled over into city planning, law, public health. In his single-minded focus on mounting a cage fight on a single day, the president has missed significant opportunities.

[Bhumika Tharoor: What Donald Trump will never understand about fighting]

For instance, where’s the school? Ancient arenas typically had a gladiator-training facility nearby, so that combatants could march in procession to the arena. (The UFC fighters in Washington plan to march from the Oval Office.) The biggest gladiator school in the Roman Empire was the Ludus Magnus, whose remains can be seen today in an excavated rectangle near the Colosseum. People close to Trump have dreamt of a latter-day Ludus Magnus for years. The onetime presidential adviser Steve Bannon has floated the idea of founding a “gladiator school for culture warriors” at a secluded monastery outside Rome. Creating a mixed martial arts facility close to the White House would be easy enough. The ruins of the Ludus Magnus look strikingly similar to the current ruins of the East Wing. Dorms, classrooms, feeding stations, training cages, trauma bays—all could easily fit on the ballroom site. The secretary of education, Linda McMahon, is also the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment; she has the background to pull this off. And yet, so far, we’ve heard nothing about such an obvious idea.

The link between violent spectacle and the pardon power is a long-standing one, but here, again, ambition has been stunted. Roman emperors, sometimes urged on by the crowd, were known to grant pardons (to criminals) and freedom (to the enslaved) after an especially noteworthy performance. Thus, in a moment celebrated by the poet Martial in his Liber de Spectaculis, the emperor Titus freed two gladiators on the opening day of the Colosseum. Recipients of the emperor’s mercy were given symbolic wooden swords to carry with them in perpetuity. As president, Trump has granted pardons or commutations to roughly 2,000 individuals. And yet he has demanded a demonstration of physical prowess in the arena from precisely none of them—not even from the January 6 insurrectionists, many of whom would have been up to the challenge.

George Santos, Dinesh D’Souza, Michael Flynn, Lil Wayne, Conrad Black, Roger Stone, Rod Blagojevich—there has been no shortage of talent eager to engage with the clemency process, and desperate petitioners would likely be willing to compete. One might have expected the host of The Apprentice to have seen the possibilities: an offending head bent down in supplication; an imperial thumb turned up in magnanimity; the presentation of a little wooden sword to be worn forever. But no—not a word.

Finally, there is a missed opportunity in the field of health care, which Trump has been vowing to reform—“we’re going to come up with plans”—for more than a decade. The job of gladiator came with the best medical care Rome could offer: A gladiator was valuable, like a racehorse, and worth substantial investment in maintenance. Sudden death couldn’t be helped, of course, but physicians tended skillfully to injuries suffered by the survivors. Galen, known as the father of modern medicine, started out as a doctor for gladiators—the equivalent of a residency on The Pitt.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Why Trump wants to celebrate his birthday with a cage fight]

But even as gladiators got special treatment, benefits flowed to the wider population. A mixture of oil and sweat scraped from the bodies of combatants, and rubbed on one’s own, was thought to have therapeutic power. Similarly, drinking the blood of wounded or fallen gladiators was believed to enhance a person’s life force (and, more specifically, to cure epilepsy). The Roman writers Celsus and Pliny the Elder attest to these beliefs; people lined up to avail themselves of bodily elixirs. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, has cast doubt on the efficacy of various drugs and vaccines while promoting the benefits of raw milk (and personally conducting forensic examinations of dead animals). He might well have the kind of open mind that would regard the fluids of cage fighters as beneficial for all Americans. Again, the White House has remained silent.

To be fair, the president has ordered commemorative coins to be struck. A triumphal arch has been designed. Perhaps the cage fighters will enter proclaiming some version of the gladiator’s oath. But as Martial related, the opening of the Colosseum was followed by games for 100 days. When a latter-day Liber de Spectaculis is written, Sunday’s events will be described as falling well short of the one benchmark that seems to matter to the president: talis qualem mundus numquam vidit—“such as the world has never seen.”

The U.S. and Iran Might Actually Have a Deal

2026-06-12T19:10:31-04:00

If it feels as though Washington and Tehran have been on the verge of a deal before, it’s because they have. At least 38 times during the months of negotiations to end the war in Iran, President Trump has suggested that an agreement was within reach, only for new disputes, military escalations, or competing narratives to push the finish line further away.

Diplomacy has unfolded against a backdrop of strikes and counterstrikes, threats of wider conflict, and cease-fires that Trump has defined as “shooting in a more moderate manner.” The president has made a stream of public claims that were subsequently contradicted by events, sometimes only hours later. Even today, after senior administration officials said that negotiators have largely settled the text of a memorandum of understanding, the agreement remains unsigned.

The latest proposed deal would combine nuclear restrictions, economic incentives, and a broader regional de-escalation effort. It would specifically address the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz; Iran would end its disruption of shipping traffic and, in exchange, eventually receive access to frozen assets and phased sanctions-relief on its oil exports. It would also start the clock on negotiations over the fate of Iran’s nuclear material, and establish a framework under which Iran could receive financial incentives if it fulfills its obligations. Negotiators have made substantial progress in recent weeks and have drafted language that both sides appear prepared to accept, although no signing date or location has been finalized. “We’re not quite at the finish line yet, but we are very close,” a senior Trump-administration official told reporters on the condition of anonymity in a call this afternoon. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, confirmed on X that the two sides are close to an agreement, and his ministry said that most issues have been resolved. Even a temporary deal might allow Trump to declare the war effectively over. It would also enable the Iranian regime to demonstrate that it remains standing, despite weeks of pounding from U.S. and Israeli air strikes.

The nuclear provisions remain at the center of the negotiations. The idea, officials told us, is that Iran would make an indefinite commitment to not developing or acquiring a nuclear weapon (which they had done before the war), and it would take steps toward dismantling its nuclear program, including the on-site destruction and removal of the enriched uranium needed to fabricate a weapon. But administration officials acknowledge that commitments alone will not be enough, and consistent compliance is far from guaranteed.

“I don’t think the Iranians trust us, and I don’t think the United States trusts the Iranians,” the senior administration official said. “We’re trying to set up a process whereby we can build that trust, bring this thing to a close, accomplish something meaningful for both Iran and the United States of America. And that’s how we set up this negotiation. It’s not based around trust, not based around empty promises, but based around verifiable steps that are good for the United States and good for Iran.”

[Read: Trump dreads an Iran deal worse than Obama’s]

Officials from nations that are on the periphery of the conflict told us that they are deeply skeptical that Iran would adhere to such an agreement. Some worry that the terms were rushed, in part because Trump has made clear that he wants to see an end to a conflict that was intended to last only six weeks and is now in its fourth month. The war has rattled global markets and sent gas prices in the U.S. soaring while dividing Trump’s own MAGA coalition. “The Iranians are positioning to milk it,” one Persian Gulf official told us.

Administration officials argue that recent developments have strengthened Washington’s negotiating position and assert that Iran’s ability to exert control over the Strait of Hormuz has weakened, which has allowed more oil to move through the waterway in recent weeks than during the early stages of the conflict. One official also argued that Iran’s conventional military capabilities and its ability to project power throughout the region have been significantly degraded, creating incentives for Tehran to pursue economic relief through diplomacy. At the same time, officials acknowledge deep mistrust on both sides and caution that enforcement questions remain crucial. Under the proposed framework, Iran would receive economic benefits only when it meets specific milestones, and pressure would remain in place if those commitments are not fulfilled. But experts are skeptical that the deal will play out in a manner that the administration might hope for.

“If the Iranians have their way, and I suspect they will, it will amount to less than meets the eye,” Jon Alterman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told us. Iran’s “view is that they’ve won,” he said. “The region’s biggest power and the world’s biggest power came together to take them on, and they’re still standing.” Iran’s adversaries, meanwhile, are “at each other’s throats and are looking at daunting fall election scenarios. The Iranians see lots of silver linings, and cause for patience,” Alterman added.

The administration views the agreement as part of a broader regional peace effort involving Iran, Israel, Lebanon, and Arab Gulf states. The Trump administration, the senior official said, is confident that Israel and Gulf partners can support the framework, but the official stressed that no country would be expected to surrender its right to self-defense.

A key element of the agreement is the system of inspections and checks that is designed to ensure compliance before Iran receives economic benefits. Administration officials said that negotiators spent weeks refining language governing the destruction and disposal of enriched material, an issue that received direct attention from Trump and became one of the most heavily negotiated sections of the text. In the past three months, the U.S., Iran, Israel, and the broader Persian Gulf region have all been reshaped by the war. But none of the combatants can claim to be unbruised by a conflict that has cost billions of dollars, driven up oil prices, and restricted supplies of key commodities, such as fertilizer.

[Read: How Iran killed its economy]

At least four times over the past two months, U.S. forces destroyed Iranian missile launchers, drones, and other targets in what it called “self defense strikes,” a description that underscores how much military capability Iran still has in place. Iran has launched multiple strikes on America’s partners in the Gulf. This month alone, Iran targeted a commercial airport and a U.S. installation inside Kuwait. Previous efforts by intermediaries to bring the two sides together failed, and Trump earlier this week threatened to take control of Kharg Island, though many have dismissed his words as bluster. The draft agreement is a signal that neither Washington nor Tehran wants a return to an air-and-missile campaign. Like most contemporary wars, this one may ultimately end not with a clear victor but with a deal that leaves all parties involved exhausted and with less than what they might have hoped for.

Leave Your Airplane-Window Shades Open

2026-06-12T16:49:00-04:00

Photos of air travel in decades past can cause almost visceral pain for a modern flier. Faded or sepia images show sharply dressed people eating real food in spacious seats. Sometimes the pictures are juxtaposed with the sardine-tin discomforts and unappetizing food of contemporary air travel, and they’re usually accompanied by well-deserved swipes at air carriers. But passengers deserve some blame too. One thing I notice in those photos is that the window shades are always up.

Nothing can make a lengthy flight packed in an aluminum tube feel good, exactly, but having the shades closed is a reliable way to make it worse. On a recent long-haul trip, I was struck that as soon as passengers boarded the plane—well before sunset—nearly everyone in a window seat within my line of sight closed their shades.

Proving empirically that this is a trend would likely be impossible, but I’ve sensed this happening more in recent years, and Redditors and advice columns have noticed too. The culprit is easy to identify. My (hypothesized) trend corresponds neatly with the growing ubiquity of in-flight entertainment systems, which have gone from a novelty on long flights to a standard service. The moment passengers are forced to switch their phones to airplane mode, they become desperate to get their digital fix. As the screens have become standard, airlines have phased out their in-flight magazines, which often included delightful and quirky prose by good writers. At the very least, they had a crossword and a sudoku.

When the shades are drawn so quickly, passengers miss out on both the fascinating machinations of infrastructure—the strange vehicles, markers, and signs that make airports work—and the natural beauty of the landscape. If the window shades are up, as my colleague Henry Grabar wrote for Slate a couple of years ago, “you will see the ballet of the tarmac workers, parks and lakes you never knew existed, patterns of development and infrastructure, customs of land ownership, and finally, the lines of the earth itself.”

I remember being glued to the window as a child, first watching the takeoff process, then attempting to recognize landmarks as we ascended. After that, I would be mesmerized while trying to read the shapes of the landscapes or clouds. At the end of the flight, I’d eagerly search for first glimpses of wherever I happened to be landing, trying to figure out what was in store once I got off the plane. When I fly with my children today, they still eagerly jockey for the window seat—as siblings have for as long as they’ve been flying—but as soon as one of them has won the privilege and gotten seated, they start asking to get on the entertainment system. In their defense, everyone around them is doing the same thing.

The tyranny of the entertainment system doesn’t just produce an unnaturally gloomy cabin. It also makes anyone who tries to resist it into a bad guy. I like to read on flights, especially if I am deprived of a view out the window; it’s some of the best uninterrupted time I can get with a book. But I still wince before turning on the reading light above my seat. No passenger has asked me to turn it off—yet—but they do recoil and stare when I turn it on. I can blame them only so much; it feels weird to be the only or one of the only people using it, and given how tightly packed the seats are, others are going to get some of the glow. (The final episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm closes with an argument over whether a passenger has the right to open her window shade in order to read.)

When I whined about this to my Atlantic Daily co-pilot, Will Gottsegen, he told me that he’d experienced the same thing. “People are now so unused to seeing people read a book on airplanes that they’re mystified when someone tries it,” he said. He also pointed out that passengers on many flights can turn the light on only if they find the button in the entertainment system: “You can’t even perform the one non-screen activity without engaging with the giant, greasy screen inches from your face.”

Those screens have become so oppressive that the Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund is working on a black comedy about a flight from the United Kingdom to Australia in which the entertainment system goes down and passengers “are forced to face the horror of being bored,” per Deadline Hollywood. No release date has been set, but it honestly seems like something I’d consume on a flight. It can’t be too awful—it’s got Keanu Reeves and Kirsten Dunst—and at least no one will glare at me for watching it.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Shares of SpaceX opened at $150, about 11 percent above their $135 initial-public-offering price, which gave the rocket and satellite company a valuation of roughly $1.8 trillion. The debut made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
A federal judge denied a last-minute appeal from the Kennedy Center’s board to keep President Trump’s name on the building’s exterior, ruling that Trump’s name must be removed from the building by today and that plans to close the institution for two years must be halted.
Pakistan’s prime minister said that the United States and Iran have agreed on the final text of a peace deal and are working out next steps; officials said that the agreement requires approval from Tehran.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Emma Sarappo on a surprisingly human story about aliens

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic*

The Boeing 747 Begins Its Final Descent

By Ian Bogost

Through the heat haze, airplane tails rose from the desert. As I steered off the interstate toward Pinal Airpark, in Marana, Arizona, I got my first view of a corpse in full: a stark-white Boeing 747, its wings sheared off, its passenger doors open to the dust and wind, a rickety set of airstairs inviting no one aboard. The plane was a memory, a ruin, but its swooping, humped nose was still striking—a visage that signaled the freedom of movement in the Jet Age.

I was arriving at this desolate site north of Tucson, where airplanes go to die, to mourn the 747, the original jumbo jet—a.k.a. the Whale, the Longreach, the Sky Cruiser, the Mother of All Airliners, the Queen of the Skies. For 50 years, the aircraft was the principal host of Important Journeys: a young student’s trip to study abroad in Paris, a first-generation American’s pilgrimage to their ancestral home in Hungary, an Iranian family fleeing the 1979 revolution. Combining the immensity of an ocean liner and the elegance of a swan, the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful. Over the past two decades, airlines have stopped using it as a passenger plane and replaced it with smaller aircraft that are more efficient, but far less majestic and memorable. The 747 was once a symbol of American might, invention, progress, and populism. Now it embodies the decline of all of those values.

Read the full article.

Don’t Even Try to Play This Album in the Background

2026-06-12T14:05:22-04:00

At times, the defining mood of the 2020s seems to be disassociation. The culture of these years will be remembered for lots of things that dulled and distracted the senses: easygoing country music, friendly AI chatbots, ketamine nasal sprays, conspiracy theories that were preferable to the truth, and droning podcasts about all of the above. Feeling is out; vibing is in.

But the case against this line of thinking is simple: Olivia Rodrigo.

In early 2021, the then–Disney star’s single “Drivers License” pierced the pandemic-weary zeitgeist like a geyser in a desert. The song’s soppy piano and screamed choruses served to interrupt the flow of any playlist by triggering the listener’s sympathy and, perhaps, alarm (Is she okay? Am I okay?). Her albums Sour (2021) and Guts (2023) flaunted clever wit and theater-kid poise with adventuresome work from the rock producer Dan Nigro—but the real asset was her ferocity. As she hopped between punk crunchiness and bedroom-pop intimacy, every trembling lyric was backed by palpable, well, guts.

Her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, makes that earlier work sound like kids’ stuff. That’s not to dismiss what she did before—she was bottling a particularly teenage form of spite, hot and thin like boiling water. Now that she’s all of 23 years old, the emotional brew is thicker and even messier. The album narrates what she has called her first “adult” relationship, and it was initially meant to be entirely made up of love songs. Then she and her guy broke up, and the work got darker. The result is a wild listening experience—so intense it verges on sickening.

She’s in unstable territory from the first moments of the lead track, “Drop Dead.” A synth riff evokes the wistfulness of a John Hughes movie, but it’s rhythmically shifty, like she’s about to bolt. Rodrigo sings about a first date in a slithering, secretive tone of voice—then starts stabbing one note over and over for the chorus. The effect is unnervingly happy. One imagines the narrator of the Proclaimers’ most maniacal hit undertaking their 500-mile journey with a double dose of Vyvanse.

Quite soon, Rodrigo is fully crashing out. “I feel right, I feel wrong, I feel totally insane,” she sings on the stunning “Stupid Song,” which sets the honeymoon phase to pulsing piano and galloping drums. The track apes the softly anthemic approach of U2, Coldplay, and the National—until all of that elegant uplift topples like an overly ambitious wedding cake. Next, the ballad “Honeybee” sounds midnight-stark until a choir appears like sudden floodlights, beautiful and harsh. A duo of jangle-pop delicacies, “Maggots for Brains” and “U + Me = <3,” wave red flags as if they’re pom-poms. “And sometimes, at a low point / I even wish for a tragedy,” Rodrigo sings, “’Cause I know he’d come over / And take real good care of me.”

The starkly self-incriminating nature of those lyrics marks a nice evolution in the contemporary canon of heartbreak pop. Rodrigo came up under the influence of Taylor Swift, who taught a generation of singers how to write post-breakup disses lightly dashed with antiheroic confessions. But now Rodrigo is pulling at a thread underlying the modern crisis of young romance: the way that dating has become bound up with goal-seeking and social performance. The album opens with her stalking the perfect guy on her phone; midway through the track list, she has the relationship she dreamed of yet is still unable to feel secure. The villain isn’t only her man—it’s also “all the pretty girls in the foreground of my mind,” as she sings in “The Cure.”

[Read: Two paths for the pop star]

As she explores these tensions, Rodrigo portrays herself as straining against the confines of her art form: She wants her man “more than any stupid song could ever say,” and she warns that “it’s too hard to describe this / In a way that feels honest.” But really, she’s quite adept at getting her point across, combining vivid anecdotes (a cry on the curb at LAX), fascinating inflections (full-abandon yodels, facetious sultriness), and highbrow crudity (“They say modern love’s a cruel endeavor / And to that I say, ‘Fuck it, whatever!’”). This queen of lyrical literalism is even starting to experiment with metaphor, though she hits low points with the bland medical imagery of “The Cure” and figurative misfires of “Begged” (“I’m an anchor in the ocean / You know I could never leave”—but what if the captain were to crank the winch?).

In any case, as Rodrigo surely knows, music is precisely the medium with which to convey unspeakable feelings. Leaving pop punk behind, she and Nigro mine a stately, orchestrated sonic lineage running from 1980s New Wave through ’90s alt-rock to 2000s indie—musical traditions that have served to dress up grubby neuroses (obsession, self-hatred) in cinematic splendor. The album is laden with references to the Cure, including a great cameo from Robert Smith. Rodrigo clearly understands that his band’s essence lies not only in its dreamy guitars but also in the total abjection beneath them.

Still, as Rodrigo’s songwriting matures, the heavy referentiality of Nigro’s production is starting to seem silly. The nostalgia bait on her previous albums was refreshing—she was a Disney teen, yes, but she had the taste of a High Fidelity clerk. Zoomers and Boomers unite! By now that sort of novelty has worn off. When I listen to the future karaoke classic “Expectations,” I want to admire the songcraft—the loop-de-looping hooks, the satisfying call-and-responses. But my brain is pulled toward figuring out whether the song sounds most like Cyndi Lauper, Gary Numan, or the B-52s.

The imitative nature of the production is, really, how Rodrigo is most in line with the pop norms she otherwise defies. Burrowing into the past with our phones, streaming the familiar at the expense of the new, is one method people use to numb themselves to the present. Rodrigo, brain on and heart open, makes art about the terrifying thrill that comes with giving the here and now everything you’ve got. Were she to write her own musical language, she’d cut an even deeper mark.

A Surprisingly Human Story About Aliens

2026-06-12T13:30:00-04:00

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

Among my friends and family, I am notorious for being a skeptic. I don’t believe in ghosts; I find all cryptozoological sightings unconvincing; I dismiss astrology out of hand. But (and this might surprise my inner circle) I am quite open to the possibility that some form of extraterrestrial life exists. I agree with what Alexandra Oliva wrote in The Atlantic this week: “Considering the sheer number of stars in the cosmos, and the possibly larger number of planets that revolve around them, the idea that humans are alone in the universe strikes me as unlikely. So, instead, I wonder: What is that life like, and will we ever encounter it?”

Oliva recommended six books in which the presence of aliens prompts readers to think more deeply about humanity. Do I believe that another planet’s life-forms would be anything like us—social, intelligent, self-aware? Well … that’s where my skepticism kicks back in. But I suppose I can’t rule it out, and imagining what another species might value prompts me to reconsider which traits make us fundamentally human and which ones might not be unique to us at all. Oliva’s list made me think of a book I read recently and adored. The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell, is nominally about an interstellar voyage to initiate first contact, but it’s actually about sex, love, God, and the problem of evil.

When The Sparrow begins, readers know this: Decades ago, human beings received a radio transmission from a civilization near the sun’s closest neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri. The Jesuit order of the Catholic Church sent a small mission to Rakhat, the planet that had sent the message, hoping to reach the beings who lived there. In 2060, a priest named Emilio Sandoz, the mission’s only survivor, finally makes it back to Earth—and his colleagues in the Society of Jesus desperately want to know what went wrong out there.

Sandoz is a traumatized, unwilling witness. He was the group’s linguist, charged with helping his crewmates communicate with the inhabitants of Rakhat. As a Puerto Rican Jesuit, one descended from both the island’s indigenous Taino people and Spanish conquistadors, he is aware of the role the Society of Jesus played in European colonization. He can’t help but see parallels with this new age of exploration, in which he is helping his order establish a foothold in a genuinely new world. Sandoz had believed that this mission was divinely ordained, but the mistakes he and his colleagues made, despite all their preparation and faith, doomed them in ways he is ashamed to discuss. The mystery of how the mission ended is the book’s driving force.

But much of the story takes place in the early 2010s and the ’20s, when the group the Jesuits will eventually send to space comes together through social ties and a dose of serendipity. This section, which features no extraterrestrials at all, is what I loved most about the novel: The beings these explorers plan to encounter are a device to bring out the characters’ most human qualities; the story focuses not on aliens but on the human ingenuity, expertise, and relationships that will be required to make any contact a success.

The people who go to Rakhat are not all Jesuits, nor are they all Christians. These characters—not only priests but a married couple and multiple young singles—talk, fairly openly, about sex and family; they consider what it means to truly love someone, and the different forms that love can take. At first, they’re united by a roving curiosity and hunger for knowledge; later, they are bound by a clarity of purpose. Knowing that only Sandoz will return from Rakhat is gutting. But seeing them prepare to go, while their targets are still hypothetical, is deeply moving. Their task requires them to access what is best, bravest, and most admirable about humanity—something any of us can believe in.

Illustration by Aldo Jarillo

Six Surprisingly Human Stories About Aliens

By Alexandra Oliva

These stories about extraterrestrials all resonate here on Earth.

Read the full article.

What to Read

American Diva: Extraordinary, Unruly, Fabulous, by Deborah Paredez

In pop-culture parlance, diva has lost most of its positive sheen (the Italian word originally meant “goddess”) and instead refers to a prima-donna type: a person who is too much of everything. While these traits can be off-putting, they are also, Paredez argues, a show of strength—an attribute that has not always been regarded kindly in women, especially women of color. The author, a self-proclaimed “diva devotee,” aims to return both the term and the artists labeled by it to their rightful renown in this combination of memoir, criticism, and music history. Household names such as Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner get their due, as well as others whose talent, determination, and, yes, fractiousness cement their place in the canon, including the otherworldly Grace Jones, the salsa queen Celia Cruz, and the triple threat Rita Moreno. Paredez reframes what might be pejoratively called diva behavior as, instead, the actions of women with the confidence to know that they matter. Readers will come away with a deeper understanding of artistic brilliance, even when its avatars may be difficult or messy. — Juliet Izon

From our list: What to read to really understand music

Out Next Week

📚 I Eat the Stars, by Sarah Wilson

📚 Charity & Sylvia, by Tillie Walden

📚 The Heart of Man, by Jón Kalman Stefánsson

Your Weekend Read

Illustration by Avalon Nuovo

I Trained as a Dancer. Then I Saw the Robots Move.

By Valerie Trapp

Earlier this year, I watched a video that caught me entirely by surprise: A clip from the CCTV Spring Festival in China, in which more than a dozen humanoid robots performed an intricate martial-arts routine. They backflipped. They high-kicked. They wielded swords and dropped into potentially pant-splitting lunges. A side-by-side comparison with their movements just the year before was astounding: The robots, made by the company Unitree Robotics, could now move with a fluidity that looked less like the archetypical “robot dance” and more like ballet, albeit a dead-eyed version.

I was impressed, but—I must admit—a part of me felt threatened. And jealous. Despite my more than two decades of dance training, those robots could perform moves that I never could. (Like backflips! I cannot backflip.) The video plopped me back into a time of complicated emotions, when I was enchanted by dance but constantly saw it as a catalog of tricks I had largely failed to master.

Read the full article.

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Jomboy on Robot Umpires and the Future of Baseball

2026-06-12T13:00:00-04:00

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Baseball has never been synonymous with change. But in recent years, Major League Baseball has transformed radically, and this season it has embraced technology via the ABS pitch-tracking system (also known as “robot umpires”). Has the experiment worked? Can baseball evolve in the 21st century without losing a piece of itself? Does the tech make the game less human? On this week’s Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel brings on Jimmy O’Brien, founder of Jomboy Media, to talk about baseball’s overhaul, how to become a lip-reading legend on YouTube, and why Americans love slow sports.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jimmy O’Brien: I don’t think the fan nor Major League Baseball—and Rob Manfred has said this—realized how much of an entertainment spectacle it was going to be in stadium to have the big board show up, and the animation. And I think that’s a huge part of it.

[Music]

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we are going to counterprogram the World Cup fever by talking about baseball. We’re talking balls and strikes, robot umpires, and how the national pastime has learned to embrace technology and stay relevant in the 21st century.

But first, I am here to ask for a quick favor. We’re doing an audience survey: How did you learn about this podcast? What do you think of the show? We put together this quick little questionnaire, and it would be so helpful if you could answer it. The first 100 respondents will get a $20 gift card. You can go to TheAtlantic.com/Survey, and we’ll have the link in the show notes as well. That’s TheAtlantic.com/Survey. Now, back to baseball.

If you’ve watched any major-league games this year, you’ve probably noticed a new wrinkle. Occasionally, after a particularly close pitch, a player—usually the batter or the catcher—will challenge the umpire’s call, like this [taps head].

This funny little gesture will initiate a review by ABS. And that stands for the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System: aka, robot umpires. Basically, ABS uses tracking cameras—a lot like they do in tennis—to map the ball’s precise movement and to figure out whether the ump made the right call. Teams get two challenges to start, and if they challenge successfully, they can keep going.

At the beginning of the season, nobody knew how things were going to shake out. Would the challenges be boring, or would they mess up the flow of the game? Would they reveal that major-league umpires were secretly awful, or way better than expected? Even before the first strike was called, ABS represented this broader debate over how much a beloved sport should evolve from its roots, or whether relying on hyperaccurate technology makes the storied game just less human.

And in that way, baseball is going through what all of us are going through in this era of extreme technological change: It’s trying to figure out how to evolve without losing a fundamental piece of itself.

So, how has ABS changed baseball? Has the MLB been able to walk the line between tradition and evolution? To answer these questions, we’ve enlisted none other than Jimmy O’Brien, who you might know by his nickname Jomboy. Jimmy is the founder of Jomboy Media, a company with a mission to showcase all the glorious weirdness of sports, but especially baseball. He’s the co-host of the popular New York Yankees podcast Talkin’ Yanks, and more importantly, the viral star of countless YouTube video breakdowns. O’Brien is famous for his lip-reading skills and the way that he helps reveal the narratives that make all the sports we love worth watching.

O’Brien and I talk robot umps, baseball’s identity—but we also get deeper into how he built his media empire. We talk about how he finds all those iconic moments throughout the 162-game seasons, how players react to his videos, and why Americans actually love slow sports. O’Brien joins me now to talk through it all.

[Music]

Warzel: Jimmy, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

O’Brien: Thank you very much for having me. I feel not smart enough, but I appreciate it.

Warzel: I think you’re smart enough. You’re definitely smarter than me on this subject, and I’m sure a lot of other stuff. So this is very good. Today, I wanna talk about ABS: Automated Balls and Strikes. We’re a technology podcast, but we use that as an excuse to talk about things we love. We love baseball. We wanna talk about baseball. Talk to me about ABS broadly. Just for someone who’s not been watching baseball this year—what is it? How does it work?

O’Brien: Yeah. The very quick answer, because this will ring truer to a lot of people: robot umps. Robot umpires. That’s what for a decade, people have been saying. Like, We need to go to robot umpires and robot umps. And this is basically it. They just didn’t brand it as “robot umps.” So instead of the human calling balls and strikes in a baseball game, [players] now have the capacity to challenge the human. And then the secondary system is the Automated Balls and Strikes, which uses, you know, the technology to check to see if it was actually a strike or not a strike.

Warzel: Missed opportunity, not calling it “robot umps,” in your opinion?

O’Brien: I think that is such a big talking point that they just wanted to get away from that.

Warzel: So this is something that has been, as you said, people have been calling for it for a while. It’s obviously divisive. What have people’s initial reactions been through this saga as it’s been coming to the majors?

O’Brien: In the last five years, Major League Baseball has made an incredible amount of rule changes. Unprecedented amount of rule changes. They went from maybe the sport that had the fewest, and it was just stuck in its past, to one of the quickest-adapting sports. And a big one was robot umpires and you know, using the advancement in technology to call balls and strikes, which is what everyone wants the most.

But then there’s a whole generation of people that don’t want it, because they grew up being told you have to accept the human element and the fate of it. I personally think that they’re a product of their time. And the baseball-viewing audience that is my age, Millennial or younger, is a product of our time, where we’re like, No, we can just use the technology. We’re all: We all know it exists. So there’s that divide of, is it good or is it bad? And they did a ton of testing to get it to where it is now.

Warzel: Why do you think Major League Baseball decided to go ahead with the implementation? What did the testing show?

O’Brien: Major League Baseball has one big thing they want to do: They want to get more balls in play. Baseball, when the sport was invented, it was an action-based sport. It was dynamic and kinetic. 2017 through 2020, it was very stale. Like they called it “three true outcomes”: It was home run, walk, or a strikeout. So not a lot of base running, not a lot of singles, not a lot of stolen bases. So a lot of the [new] rules they’ve made are to make it more dynamic, to make the game feel alive and strategic within it. The way sports go is: The league sets the rules, and the teams try to skirt them in whatever legal ways. Sometimes illegal, but for now, legal ways strategically to do it. And then the league counters and says, Okay, good job. You did that. But it’s not as entertaining. So now we need to make a new—you know, and people get upset about it. But that is the best way an entertainment product should be treated.

You know, every umpire has a different zone. It became: Do veteran players get this pitch, and they don’t get this pitch. Game situations dictate the strike zone. And you’ve got players that are making their living on their personal stats. So because it’s a 10-0 game, and I got subbed into this game as a bench player because it’s a blowout, but now this umpire wants the game to go quicker because it’s a blowout, so I have a different strike zone. How am I supposed to hit my home runs and my doubles, which gets me paid as a player in the future?

Warzel: Right. That’s so interesting.

O’Brien: So I think there’s just so many elements where like—maybe this should be a little standardized. And then also the technology allows it to be. So I always said, I’m in favor of this whenever we have the technology that reflects the game.

Warzel: Now that it’s implemented, I mean, I found it really amazing just how quickly it got in there. I can’t remember. I was watching a Mariners game. I think it was against the Yankees. And the Yankees had like six challenges in like one half inning, and they just kept winning and winning.

[Clip from Yankees vs. Mariners game on April 30, 2026]

Warzel: And it was just like: Oh, wow, this is just fundamentally a piece of the game, so quickly. But how are people reacting and feeling about it? I think umpires are a little at sea, right? You’ve got the fans, the players. What’s been the scope of the reaction to it as it’s been implemented?

O’Brien: I think overall, if you just go positive/negative, it’s positive. And then there’s a lot of intricacies within there. I don’t think the fan nor Major League Baseball—and [MLB Commissioner] Rob Manfred has said this—realized how much of a entertainment spectacle it was going to be in stadium to have the big board show up, and the animation. And I think that’s a huge part of it. Like, if [the ABS result] just showed up, and it was a static image and showed you where the ball crossed. But to see the movement of the pitch, or that it was going, and it turned like—and then the whole stadium is reacting to it.

And then, you know, as humans, we love people either being vindicated or being ridiculed on the spot, you know? So if an umpire says “Strike,” and the batter challenges it, and then it’s a ball, it’s like, Haha, we got you. Or the batter challenged it, and then it’s like the batter’s way wrong, it’s like, My god, you’re such a fool. So there’s just so many elements of drama that it’s given us that I don’t think people realized. And then within “okay, this is good,” there’s people that are upset how their team is using it; upset that their team is bad at it. Happy, thrilled, that their team is good at it. I think a third-party viewer that doesn’t have any stake in the game or the team would have to just sit there and say, This is entertaining and good. We got the call right.

Warzel: Yeah, I saw an article about the Red Sox just like not being good at this, right?

O’Brien: They’re awful at it. Yeah.

Warzel: But what’s fascinating is they’re like, the strategy that we had, right, was like: We don’t want to make a lot of these challenges. We want to sort of wait on that. And that now, you know, a couple months into the season, that’s not playing out for them. So now they have to rethink their strategy. Like, I think there’s that level too, right? Which is like, organizationally, are we good or are we bad at this? And that’s so fascinating.

O’Brien: It’s a interesting thing. On our show Talkin’ Yanks, we interview the manager of the Yankees. And I’ve been asking him a lot about that, of strategy. And they had a lot of meetings about it—about leverage of the situation, when’s a good time to challenge it, when’s a not-good time to challenge it.

The rule is they have two [ABS challenges per game]. And if they get both wrong, they lose them. So if you get it right, you maintain your two—so you can keep going as long as you are correct. The catchers can challenge to help their pitchers out, and the batters can challenge. So the way it’s played out: Catchers are way more accurate, which makes sense. They are a still target. They’re watching the ball come the entire way. Batters have movement, and they have a view at an angle. And the pitchers can also challenge, but they’re moving so much, and they’re wobbly, and they have the most bias. Most teams have said, “You’re not allowed to challenge as a pitcher. You just have a bad viewpoint.” And a lot of starting pitchers, a lot of pitchers, have come out and said, “Yeah; we shouldn’t.”

But I asked Aaron Boone, the manager of the Yankees. I said, “Hey, has this actually helped you have just more baseball conversations with your players, about the stakes of the moment?” About, hey—you may think this is a big-leverage pitch, but no, this is the bigger-leverage pitch. Like, this changes the at-bat more. And, you know, he said, “Yeah, a little.” Like he said, “We always have those convos.” Which, I think, he doesn’t want to feel the backlash of saying “yes” and be like, “You should have had those convos anyway,” since he deals with the New York media.

But I think it’s fun. I think a lot of teams are figuring that out, because a lot of teams are saying, Save them to the late innings. Well, a lot of games are won in the third and the second inning, fourth. You know, you never know what inning is going to win you the game, and you’re going to score the three, four runs you need. It’s not just the seven, eight, nine [innings]. The game could be out of hand at that point.

So some teams are only allowing the catchers. The Miami Marlins, basically—the hitters, I don’t know if they’re not allowed to, they might have stricter rules, but just the catchers are challenging. And then you have another team like the Baltimore Orioles; their catchers are challenging way less, their hitters are challenging way more. And I don’t know if that’s, you know, just the way it’s going. But it seems like those are kind of strategies within.

Warzel: What about umpires? Because I feel like really, it’s got to be a confusing year to be an umpire in Major League Baseball right now.

O’Brien: Yeah. The biggest thing that they had control over is gone. I will say: The strike zone has changed throughout baseball. Way back in the day, there were two leagues, and the leagues were known for different things. One league, the umpire would wear the chest protector under his shirt. And then in the other league, he would hold it like a sword. That changed the position they would set themselves up, and change where their head is, where they’re viewing the ball.

The other thing is: Some umpires, older umpires, were taught if this, my microphone is the catcher’s head, to put their head on the side of it. And like the batter’s here, and he’s here. Now it’s a lefty batter, and I’m here to protect themselves from getting hit with foul balls. And then newer umpires have come in, and they put their head right behind the middle. They mirror the catcher. And those guys are way more accurate, but it’s a little more dangerous.

So it’s nothing new that they’re changing the zone, in a way. But this is more mandated. And I think umpires are going to feel like they’ve lost some control, and embarrassed at times. They’ve also been vindicated. It’s like 54 percent of the time [a call has] been overturned, which means, you know, 46 percent of the time they’re vindicated. So it’s a little coin flip where they’re right. And even the ones that get overturned that are so margin, as a viewer, you’re not blaming the umpire. You’re like, Damn, that’s tough to do.

So I think that it’s not as bad as it feels for the umpire. And, over time, I think the audience is going to learn how hard this is. People are throwing faster than ever. The ball’s moving more than ever. So really, I don’t think it’s that “they can’t do it.” I think it’s impossible to do this. So if we have the technology that can …

Warzel: So I can see how ABS could be liberating for players and fans who have watched the likes of umps like Ángel Hernández or Joe West, these kind famously bad umpires. Is ABS a rejection to umps who are just really bad?

O’Brien: I don’t think it was, ’cause the players actually don’t want it. The players were really not in favor of ABS. I love the players, but they don’t always know what’s best for the game. They want what’s best for their careers. So pitchers really didn’t want it. I think there’s an understanding from the league that we just have to adapt. Getting calls wrong when we don’t have to get calls wrong is not a good product anymore. You know, I met with the MLB rules committee. And I gave them my point of view that, my age group and younger, we’re like: Just fix it. You have the right call. I don’t need to live in the obscurity and just trust the situation.

But my dad, he grew up like, Hey, umps don’t win and lose you the game. They’re going to make mistakes. And then they take it as a knock against the abilities of the ump. But my age group is like, No; it’s too hard for them to do. And you have a computer. I think the league went more that way.

Warzel: To that last point, has it turned off older generations to some degree, do you think?

O’Brien: I bet they complain about it on their couch, and watch it.

Warzel: That’s the real national pastime. Complain about it on the couch and consume it, baby.

O’Brien: You know, like how many people—National League fans—said they would stop watching when the DH [designated hitter] came? And now, you know, you have [Juan] Soto on your team, on the Mets, for 15 years. Are you complaining that you had the ability to sign Soto now? No.

Warzel: Do we need umps anymore? Are we moving toward more robot? Or just, I know they’re not replacing them yet, but do we need them?

O’Brien: Well, you would still need them for tempo, and for other rules, and just speeding the game. Getting the guy in the box, maintaining pace of play. And there’s a lot of other protocols that they keep in mind to make sure the game runs smoothly.

In the minor leagues, a team plays a series against another team—six games in a row. They play three games during the week, and three games on the weekend. So they tested out that the first three games would be: Every single pitch used the ABS system. So the umpires didn’t make a single call. They had it in their ear, and there’s strike, and then they would say, “Strike.” Ball, and they would say, “Ball.” Every pitch was called in this way. Then the weekend series, and it’d be the same umps—there’s three umpires [per crew], so each umpire would do one where they had every pitch in their ear being told what it is, while they’re watching it. So: instant feedback, instant training. Then on the weekend they would do it, and it was a challenge system. You only get one, two, or three, they tested out.

And what happened was the fans voted that the challenge system was better. The players voted the challenge system was better. It was faster. It was quicker. We don’t need [ABS] all the time. It’s fun as a spectacle, and the strategy of when to challenge—rather than constant. And what also happened was the umpires drastically improved the more they did this. So I would guess what MLB is saying, is banking on, is that this first year, there’s always going to be weird side effects. But we actually think our umpires, the major-league umpires, they didn’t have this last couple of years. They weren’t in the minors. So some that got called up might be great at it. But the older umps doing [major-league games] for 20 years, 15 years—this is their first year getting the constant feedback. I think we’re going to see them improve now that they know the strike zone and they’re getting instant results. Hey, you got that one wrong. Hey, you got that one right. And they’re getting that over the course of the game, whether the batter challenges it, or the catcher challenges it, or not.

So I think over time, umpires are going to get better, and it’s going to be better for them. And the audience is going to realize, This is really hard. I don’t think they should be asked to do this.

Warzel: So we talked a little bit earlier about Major League Baseball making a ton of changes, right? Banning the shift, pitch clocks, size of the bases. And it feels like the goal is obviously to adapt the game, make it more interesting to audiences—but also recruit maybe newer audiences by making the game more exciting. How much of it is, like, “Baseball got boring,” or how much of it is like, “We just demand more from all of our sports”?

O’Brien: Well, the truth about Americans is: We like slow sports. We like second-screen sports. And if you go into Europe, or a lot of other countries, they like what I would call ping-pong sports—where you sit in a seat and your eyes go like this. Hockey, soccer, rugby. Field hockey is very popular in Scandinavian countries. And there’s no breaks in action, it’s just go. In the U.S., baseball, football are stop-and-start. And in the Ken Burns documentary [Baseball], Bob Costas opens it with a line that “Baseball breathes conversation.” You go to a ballpark, and you’re not sitting there glued and have ping-pong eyes just watching. You’re talking, conversing. And that is the screen time now, for kids and people on the couch. So I think they’re in a great spot there.

And the games got really long, and really late into the night. Which was hurting crowds and youth and getting people to go and stay there four hours. Three, three-and-a-half hours. So they slowed the game down. But it’s not really about run time. It’s about pace—like how much happens in between. And with the shift—which, the defensive players would move to where the analytics told them “This is where this guy’s most likely going to hit the ball”—you’re taking away all the athleticism. Basically, it became a computer model. The guy would take a piece of paper out of his back pocket, and you’d see him count 10 steps, and the ball would get hit right to him. And you’re like, Well, that’s boring. Like, what am I here watching? The coaches move their chess pieces, or watching athletes do athletic things?

It was kind of like—when the ball is put in play, it should be a good product and not boring. And they’ve changed that a lot. I really, really am happy with the changes they’ve made. And I think, you know, it took a lot of courage to do that … especially a sport that’s so old and stuck in its times. And, you know, basketball: You’re seeing all the conversations happen now about this. Like, did the three-point line really kill it? Is the foul-baiting killing it? And they’re saying, like, We got to think about this. And I wonder what they’re going to do. Because baseball just had those conversations, and they acted on them.

Warzel: You know, this change—to make the game more accessible, more exciting, bringing new audiences in. You are part of that, I think, for a large audience of people. Jomboy, the ability to go online and break these things down. Learn new things about the game, experience it in a different way. How do you see your role in making the game more accessible, alongside this?

O’Brien: It’s really cool to hear that, when I do get told, like: “You got me back into baseball,” or “You got me into baseball in general; you helped me understand, like, some nuance to it.” Because it’s a sport full of nuance and full of drama. And I really like the stats and the analytics. I get deep into them. But I know that that isn’t what draws people in, and it wouldn’t draw me into a sport. So I do my best to make content and make videos that are for someone who does not watch baseball—but the baseball die-hard viewer also finds value or interest in it.

So all my videos, especially like the breakdowns: I really try to keep in mind, like, I want someone to watch this who does not know the rules. They don’t know why this is happening. But I’m not trying to make Baseball 101. You know, you’re going to have to figure it out a little bit, but I’ll make it more accessible. So if that’s helping grow or get more people into it, then, yeah; it’s rewarding. It’s cool. But I don’t know how much; it’s not quantifiable. I don’t want to take credit for anything I’m not doing.

Warzel: Well, one of the reasons I ask is: Major League Baseball has taken a minority stake in the company [Jomboy Media]. There is, in some ways, that relationship. How does that change how you do any of what you do, with that relationship there?

O’Brien: Yeah, it was really cool. It took a while. It took us to get big enough and strong enough and trusted enough for them to come in and partner and help us out. And a lot of people made that happen, so that was fun. But it did take a while. I think for a while, they just wanted to shut us down. Or, you know, hope we didn’t succeed. But we broke through.

Warzel: Wait, why is that? Just because of the copyright issues?

O’Brien: Yeah, that. Voice, not knowing. You know, I just think some people can sometimes be, I don’t want to say scared, but like—what’s the word I’m looking for? You know, nervous about something new that they don’t have … not control, because they don’t have control over a lot of media outlets that write everything. But, you know, just like: What are these guys doing? This is new. Huh? Let’s keep an eye on them.

I perceived it. When it happened, I thought it was only going to help the back end, because I said, “Hey, nothing’s changing on the front end of what we’re doing. You know, you don’t have a say in my voice or what we’re doing. You have to trust that we’re going to continue operating as we have been in the past.” And we have laid the groundwork that we’re not out here doing hot takes. We’re not doing take downs. I’m not trying to ruin or sabotage … like, we are not really trying to ever post anything that’s ultra-negative for the sake of negativity. But if I dislike something, you know, I will dislike it. And they said, “Yeah, we know it. Like, your voice is different than our voice, and we want you to have your voice.”

So I thought a lot of it was going to be just opening up sponsorships and sales, which has … the back end has been great. We’ve also gotten access to the archives. I get angles now that the fans don’t always see, and I’m able to share that. So it has helped, you know, tell the story a lot more, which has been so fun.

Warzel: One of the hallmarks of your online-content game is the breakdowns. And a lot of times that can be confrontations, right? Fights between managers and umpires.

[Clip from a Jomboy breakdown]

Warzel: Do people get mad at you for that? Does Major League Baseball say, like, “Hey, can we not maybe constantly just show how much the managers are cursing?” Or what have you. Like, what’s the reaction?

O’Brien: No, I really haven’t. And that’s been rewarding. Like, not rewarding, but in a way I’m nervous about that a lot. And then I’ll go meet managers, or Chris Rose—who does this show with us where he interviews them, will show them clips and ask about it. And a lot of times they’re laughing. You know, like, “Yeah, I was mad.” Because I think that’s how they handle it. Like, they yell at the umpire—and then the next day, they joke with the umpire on the field. And it’s just part of the culture of the sport. It’s really odd.

Hockey has fistfighting in the middle of a hockey game. Which, if you came from another country, you’d be like, “Why are they ... that doesn’t add up. Why are they boxing?” And like, how did that become? And baseball has just tirades and just screaming at each other in the middle. And you’re just like, “It’s part of the culture; it’s what they do.” And it doesn’t really carry over all the time.

So, yeah; a lot of managers laugh at it. And I’m trying to present it—you know, I really don’t try to beat my audience over the head, with like, Hey, it’s the heat of the moment. Don’t give these guys too much flack here. You know, we all get flustered. But I try to deliver it in that way. Like, you know, Hey, he’s hot. He’s mad. You say dumb things when you’re mad.

So yeah—I haven’t had anyone come out and being crazy upset with me. And I also view it as that’s in between the lines of the field. Like, if I catch someone in the dugout just talking to a teammate, that feels like I’m spying and, like, giving secrets. If it’s not game related, or they’re trash-talking someone, I don’t really want that. But if it’s in the middle of the field, or I see them talking strategy, I’ll share that. Because I think it’s very interesting.

Warzel: You’ve been described to be by numerous people as a generational lip-reader. How did you develop this skill? Because it doesn’t seem like you’re making it up. It seems like this is a genuine skill. You are really freaking good at that. How did you learn how to do that?

O’Brien: So I don’t consider myself able to read lips, even though obviously I can. Within the context of a baseball game or a sports game, I can do it. People will send me videos of strangers, or like, you know, political things, like: “What are they saying?” I’m like, “I have no idea. I don’t know the context.” So it’s more so I can understand what they’re … I can guess they’re probably talking about this. And then it’s like, you know, pulling a thread where I get one word, and then it unravels.

Some people are so hard that I can’t do it. Some managers I can do so easily. Luckily, Aaron Boone; like, I don’t know if it’s because I’ve read his lips so much, because I do a lot of Yankees content. But I did one of him the other day, and it was just, first try. I just went through it. Other times what I’ll do is: I’ll watch it, and I will be able to get more than the average person just watching it and reading their lips. And then sometimes it’s a real study—of, like, zooming in, slowing down. What could he be saying? What could that word be?

That’s one part of it. I do think the other part that I’ve had some actors reach out and tell me, is my ability to voice it like ADR [automated dialogue replacement]? Like, in their cadence and the intonations and hit the … you know, I don’t really do accents, but the inflections brings it to life. And that’s where in the post-edit, you know, I’ll be like, If it’s off, it looks like I’m making things up. So in the edit, I gotta be able to say this, and sync it to their lips perfectly—so people really understand this is what they said, and it looks very natural.

Warzel: Who’s the actor fan that’s reaching out? Who’s part of this?

O’Brien: There’s a couple. Bill Hader has reached out. There’s like random people that, you know, we’ve been texting for a while about stuff. He’s awesome.

Warzel: So when you are doing these breakdowns—there’s a lot of baseball happening all the time. There’s a lot of games. There’s a lot of moments.

O’Brien: Oh, yeah, 15 games a day. People don’t realize that.

Warzel: How do you figure out what to clip, what to choose to do, in all of that morass?

O’Brien: There’s big ones that are just, you know, they hit you over the head. Like, Okay, got to do that. That happened. You know, if Aaron Boone gets ejected, usually that’s a big one. If there’s a brawl, fight, benches clear—those are big ones. What can happen is there’s so many ejections that I could just do ejections nonstop. But not all of them are interesting. Right now we’ve had so many ejections over ABS, and the different reasons players, umpires, managers are upset about ABS. And so, at this point in the season, I think I covered all these. And unless they say something interesting, I’ve done this story.

So I try to find ones that maybe aren’t lip-reading, maybe are more storytelling. I really like to have ones that I am delivering something that no one knows about. It’s not me lip-reading a story that they’ve already seen. It’s like, This wasn’t a video until I did it. I like those. There was one where the Marlins coach got ejected; it’s a favorite one I did. And no one realized that they didn’t know who [the umpire] ejected. He just ejected someone in the dugout, and the manager was like “Who?” And [the umpire] was like, “Choose anyone.” And [the manager] was like, “Choose anyone?” Like, who did you choose? “I said, ‘Choose anyone.’ They got to go.”

[Clip from a Jomboy breakdown]

O’Brien: And that wasn’t clear in the broadcast. So when I was like looking at it, sometimes I’ll go 25 percent and be like, This doesn’t have anything that’s interesting to me. And then I’ll see that, and I’ll be like, Whoa, okay, hold on. Let’s get this out fast. This is fun. This is new. So yeah. I mean, for my own interest, I don’t want to do the same story over and over again.

Warzel: I think something that you do so well—that baseball does so well—is allow this room for narratives to develop, right? And I think there’s this tension with all of this stuff that we’re talking about, with the innovations in Major League Baseball, that it is speeding up so much. The pitch clock really has changed how fast games happen. There’s not that much time for those narratives, maybe, to develop as there used to be. Do you worry that we’re just flying too close to the sun here with all of this? That baseball is at risk of losing something very core to itself?

O’Brien: Not entirely. I understand what you’re saying. Directors of games have less time to tell their story now. So now, a guy will hit a home run, and you won’t see the replay until maybe a batter later because the game’s going. They used to have more time in between pitches to show these replays, to show the manager’s face and other people’s faces, and build up that story. And now it’s a little quicker. And especially when you see a national [game], like the World Baseball Classic—those were crews that maybe hadn’t done baseball in a while since pitch clock and all that. And they were late to pitches, because they just didn’t realize the time crunch they’re on. So that’s been fun for me to watch that happen.

I think that baseball narratives come in weeks, not games. It’s: This guy’s hot right now. This guy just has hit three home runs in his last three games. Tune into this moment. I also think the easiest narrative they have is starting pitchers. Starting pitchers are their boxers. They’re their marquee names. And we went away from starting pitchers dominating. The young core of starting pitchers that are entering the game now are pitching seven innings. Because the narrative of baseball is, “Okay, Paul Skenes is facing Aaron Judge. Here’s their first-inning at-bat. Okay, well now he got him out with fastballs. Now he comes up again. Okay, now Judge walked. Okay, now he comes up a third time. Does he give him breaking balls now?” And that’s where the broadcast and the broadcasters have to tell that story.

Warzel: You are consuming weapons-grades amounts of baseball. You’re clipping these things; you’ve been doing this for a while now. Do you have a Mount Rushmore of absurd, ridiculous incidents? Clips, moments?

O’Brien: It’s always hard, because it’s just like, sometimes the bizarre ones … that Marlins one, I think, always that’s my one I tell people to watch. It’s so funny. There was one where the both managers got ejected in the same moment, which cracks me up. Any Ángel Hernández one gets ridiculous.

[Clip from a Jomboy breakdown]

O’Brien: There was one: The umpire C. B. Bucknor called a guy, this year … he just wasn’t looking at first base, and called him out. And he was safe by a lot.

[Clip from a Jomboy breakdown]

O’Brien: It’s so bizarre. It’s like one of the worst missed calls. I rarely will send my videos out to other people. But since I already name-dropped him once, I texted Bill Hader, and I was like, If you haven’t seen this one, you got to watch it. Now, I don’t really promote my own videos to people in my life like that. But like, you got to see what just happened. It’s crazy. He just wasn’t … it’s his one job.

Warzel: Oh, man. That’s phenomenal. Well, Jimmy, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain—talking about this, demystifying all of this. But also finding the ways that a sport can evolve alongside the culture and produce something that, I think, is generative for a lot of people, including the content gods. So thank you for coming on.

O’Brien: Well, I appreciate it very much; yeah. Thank you for having me.

[Music]

Warzel: That’s it for us here. Thank you again to my guest, Jimmy O’Brien, Jomboy Media. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday, and 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 is 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. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Six Books That Take You to Space

2026-06-12T11:40:00-04:00

When I look at the night sky, I don’t wonder whether alien life is somewhere out there; I think it probably is. Considering the sheer number of stars in the cosmos, and the possibly larger number of planets that revolve around them, the idea that humans are alone in the universe strikes me as unlikely. So, instead, I wonder: What is that life like, and will we ever encounter it?

Searching for extraterrestrials is, generally speaking, the province of scientists. But I’m a writer, and many of us also seek answers to equally fundamental questions about our fellow humans. As I found while working on my own novel, writing about aliens can be strangely helpful in this pursuit. Just as astronomers use telescopes to examine celestial objects light-years away, novelists can invoke imagined civilizations to reveal truths closer to home, in part by forcing their characters into contact with alien environments and worldviews. These fictional interactions challenge assumptions about relationships and consciousness, allowing authors to ask how universal our values really are. In the following six books, each writer looks to space to skillfully explore what it means to live on Earth.

Contact, by Carl Sagan

This groundbreaking novel, first published in 1985, examines the divide between blind faith and evidence-based belief—and how readily one can blur into the other. When the Earth’s population receives an alien radio signal that includes instructions for building a mysterious machine, people must decide together what to do with it. In many ways, Contact celebrates humans’ ability to work in unison, even as it acknowledges how easily our pursuit of progress can lead to self-destruction. The science advocate’s passion for teaching comes through in his clear prose and clean explanations, and his novel offers a sense of hope that is rare in modern speculative fiction: When the advanced alien beings ultimately appear, they show their goodwill by taking the form of the humans’ “deepest loves.”

[Read: America is killing its chance to find alien life]

Dawn, by Octavia E. Butler

Salvation and exploitation go hand in hand in this story by one of science fiction’s all-time greats. Dawn’s main character, Lilith, awakens in the care of an alien species long after Earth has been destroyed by nuclear war. These beings, the Oankali, seem magnanimous, but Lilith soon learns that they are not selfless; they are acting on a biological imperative to merge their genes with those of other taxons. Lilith is charged with preparing other awakened humans to help repopulate a revitalized Earth, but she knows that if she accepts and succeeds, future generations of her species will become something very different from her. Complex and unflinching, Dawn explores thorny issues involving consent and power; most forcefully, the novel contemplates what it truly means to love another being.

Singer Distance, by Ethan Chatagnier

In the alternate reality of Singer Distance, an alien civilization exists on Mars—but it’s not much interested in humans. Chatagnier’s Martians blaze mathematical proofs across the surface of their planet, big enough to be visible by telescope, but they eschew all other forms of communication. They deign to acknowledge our existence only when we display a correct answer across the Earth in turn. The story opens in the 1960s, during a long communication gap, as a group of MIT graduate students sets out to solve a proof that stumped the greatest minds of the previous generation (including Albert Einstein). This gorgeous novel explores obsession from multiple angles, asking how far people will go to find the answers that they feel they need. And when a breakthrough with the Martians does come, it’s enabled by another universal language—art—to beautiful and touching effect.

[Read: An alien movie for a post-truth moment]

Providence, by Max Barry

Seven years before the start of this novel, an alien species slaughtered everyone aboard a human spaceship—Earth’s first contact with extraterrestrials. Providence follows the four-person crew of an interstellar warship on a multiyear mission of revenge. Through each voyager’s distinct perspective, the book explores artificial intelligence, social media, and the effects of extended isolation. One character doesn’t care about these aliens’ civilization; he is content just to kill as many as possible. Another is driven to discover more; a third is focused on maintaining the morale of the others, even as she herself unravels. And their captain has to balance their individual needs against the requirements of the mission. Barry provides riveting, rewarding action without sacrificing smarts or character development. This quick read explores mankind’s dueling urges to connect and destroy, our divergent responses to the unknown, and how far some among us will go to protect ourselves and the people we care about.

If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, by Kim Choyeop, translated by Anton Hur

In Kim’s first story collection translated into English, she takes a few different approaches to what connecting with extraterrestrials might be like. One story challenges the notion that contact with another species is likely to lead to conflict, instead tying the evolution of human morality to a symbiotic relationship with an alien race. What might it mean if, perhaps, the basic goodness of children were rooted not in innocence but in another world’s wisdom? In another story, set in the far future, a scientist who had disappeared decades earlier reappears in an emergency shuttle, claiming to have been saved by a technologically primitive alien race. In this scenario, our two species share many physical similarities but have one major divergence: These aliens do not appear to believe in death. This culminates in one more hypothetical: What if art could literally transport a soul?

[Read: The truth is still out there]

The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Arik Kershenbaum

In his nonfiction exploration, Kershenbaum asserts that our understanding of the evolution of life on Earth provides a solid scaffolding for projecting what alien organisms might really be like. An exoplanet with an Earth-like environment, for example, could give rise to species with similar adaptations to those we have here—which isn’t to say that giraffes roam on faraway worlds, but instead that where the equivalent of tall trees grow, creatures with the equivalent of long necks are likely to evolve. Intelligent species—ones we might think of as our peers—may also display adaptations such as language and cooperation, because they play key roles in our own survival. The zoologist’s thought experiment, both enthralling and logically sound, addresses perception, communication, and intelligence, and he wonders whether we might one day expand the word humanity to include alien species. At the same time, the book challenges readers to upend how they see the animals with whom we already share our planet. Is there any sense in which they might be considered human too?

The Women Who Don’t Own Clothes

2026-06-12T09:00:00-04:00

You can spot the packages at most any UPS Store in any city. Sometimes they’re left in their own designated corner, dark gray amid a sea of brown cardboard. They have sprouted up in mail rooms, sorority houses, and even my own four-girl apartment. On their side reads a word that meant nothing 10 years ago—Nuuly.

“When I’m returning my Nuuly bag, at least one other girl in the UPS line also has a Nuuly bag, and then I look into the back room and there’s a whole pile of them,” Sarah Lewis, a 25-year-old working in advertising in New York City, told me. She said that on the one hand, it felt like being a member of a secret sisterhood, and on the other, it was a bit odd that “some girl in my building has probably worn the skirt I rented last week.”

Nuuly, which was founded in 2019, is just one of the many clothing-rental services encouraging young women to opt out of actually buying clothes and instead subscribe to a revolving closet. BNTO, Rent the Runway, and Fashion Pass all offer similar plans for similar prices, but Nuuly, with 477,000 active monthly subscribers, is by far the largest. For $98 a month, customers get to rent any six clothing items on the Nuuly app. The items arrive in a matter of days. There is no fee if you stain or damage something, and no fee for sending your clothes back late. If a customer can’t bring themselves to let go of a certain item, they can purchase it at a discounted rate.

Nuuly is owned by URBN, the fashion behemoth that includes Anthropologie, Free People, and Urban Outfitters. It was born into the sharing economy. Uber and Airbnb had taken off, and people had proved themselves willing to ride in strangers’ cars and stay in their homes. But would women really be comfortable wearing other people’s clothing? Apparently, yes, especially as Instagram’s popularity was peaking and no one wanted to be caught online wearing the same outfit twice. Nuuly observed “this need for constant newness,” Kim Gallagher, the company’s executive director of marketing and customer success, told me. Suddenly, it was a new world for the young shopaholic.

That was seven years ago. I’ve been subscribing almost since the beginning, and I recently did the math: I’ve spent about $8,000 on Nuuly. Maybe $10,000 on clothing rentals overall if I count other services such as Rent the Runway. And what do I have to show for it, besides a decent Instagram grid? Maybe I’ve fooled a few folks into thinking I can afford the clothing I wear, but when I came home from returning my latest box and stood in front of my micro closet, I saw only the bare basics and the skeletons of a few trends I regret ever partaking in. This was my wardrobe?

People in their 20s and 30s are switching jobs often; they’re less religious than past generations; they can’t afford to own their homes; they’re even opting out of romantic relationships. In all sorts of ways and for all sorts of reasons, members of the Gen Z and Millennial generations seem to be shrinking from long-term commitments. The impulse is affecting the most significant areas of our lives—jobs and marriages and children—but it’s also transforming some of the most pedestrian. You used to be able to know a lot about a person from the records, cassette tapes, or CDs they collected. Now people can just sign up for Spotify and listen to everything without owning anything. They can rent all of their movies on Amazon Prime. And just look in our closets.

[Amanda Mull: The only thing you can’t subscribe to now is stability]

“I sent my Nuuly out this week,” Laura Taylor, a 29-year-old who works in education programming in Atlanta and has rented from Nuuly since 2019, told me. “I literally was standing in my closet thinking, I have nothing.”

Clothing is an identity marker. What we wear shows people who we are. Renting clothes can help people who can’t afford to buy new outfits every month home in on the style they want to have. But the eternal renter faces a paradox: If she replaces her permanent wardrobe with a revolving series of blouses and trousers, is the sampling in her closet on a given month even her wardrobe anymore? Consider it the shopaholic’s ship of Theseus. To really be ourselves, maybe we have to give up on always being someone new.

Gallagher told me that Nuuly grew out of a moment when customers’ desires for newness collided with their rising concerns about shopping’s environmental impact. The latter is central to Nuuly’s marketing campaigns: “Sustainable fashion from head to tote.” But it seems to be false—in two ways.

A 2021 study published in Environmental Research Letters compared five scenarios for a pair of jeans: someone buying and eventually tossing the jeans; wearing them for a really long time (called “extended use”); reselling them, perhaps to a thrift store; recycling the jeans into new items; and renting them out to multiple people through a service such as Nuuly. The study found that the rental-service option actually produced the most emissions and thus had the highest climate-change potential, for one obvious reason. Typical clothing delivery is one-way, and rental companies double the trip. Getting nearly 500,000 packages to subscribers every month makes a nasty carbon footprint. A separate study found that people who rented clothing didn’t necessarily reduce their clothing consumption overall.

The fact that customers don’t have to pay for damaging the clothes probably leads to yet more waste. “With Nuuly, there’s no real appreciation for the garment, so there’s no wherewithal to take care of it and intend for it to live a long life,” Sheridan Mark, a production specialist in the fashion industry, told me. People are much more careful with items that they own and hope to keep for years. Nuuly is “less curatorial and more disposable,” Mark said.

When I asked Gallagher about the lifespan of the average Nuuly item, she told me it was difficult to nail down, but that Nuuly goes to great lengths to salvage damaged clothes. “Our goal from when we’ve launched has been more life in your clothes. So we are always trying to extend the life of the clothes that are in our ecosystem,” she said “It’s obviously better from an environmental-impact standpoint, but it’s also better from a business standpoint. The longer we can keep things in circulation, the better.” She said the company had performed 2.7 million repairs and stain removals so far this fiscal year.

Customers themselves don’t seem to care about any of this. When I polled 30 women who rent their clothes, only two said that sustainability was their main reason. Twenty told me that it’s a nice bonus but not a driving factor. And eight said they were completely indifferent.

What do they care about?

Those on a tight budget can borrow six items for the same amount they might have spent on one nice shirt. “I couldn’t afford my personal style without Nuuly,” Megan Murphy, a 29-year-old woman working in politics in Washington, D.C., told me. Murphy tried Rent the Runway and Fashion Pass, but she’s been a Nuuly loyalist for five years. Like most of the women I spoke with, she told me that she started renting soon after college, when she landed her first big-girl job and needed to dress accordingly, but didn’t have the income to do so.

Murphy is now nine months pregnant, and she said that Nuuly has freed her not to worry about her changing body. “I haven’t had to try to squeeze into clothes or feel like I’ve had nothing to wear,” she said. “I was able to go to a black-tie wedding without even thinking about it.”

Everyone mentions wedding season. The majority of Nuuly’s customers are 25 to 35. “There’s nothing like the time where you’re going to weddings many weekends; you’re going to bachelorette parties; you’re dating; you’re going to bridal showers,” Gallagher said. The only downside is that everyone seems to be wearing one of the same 15 dresses to every wedding.

“There’s one specific wedding dress that’s green and blue, long sleeves, that I’ve seen on like 50,000 people,” Taylor told me. But she doesn’t mind whether whatever she’s wearing gets recognized. “I love to say, Oh, thanks—it’s Nuuly. And then everyone’s like, Oh my God—I love Nuuly! And then you start the conversation from that.” She doesn’t feel as if there’s a stigma around renting instead of owning. “I feel like everyone is using some type of service now,” she said. “It’s like the sisterhood of the traveling dress. I think it’s so sweet.”

[Daniel Indiviglio: Netflix for clothes]

No one told me that they regretted how much they’d spent renting clothes. “My body changes so much. I think in some capacity Nuuly has saved me,” Taylor said. She mentioned a $150 pair of jeans she bought a couple of years ago that no longer fits. “That makes me more sick than what I spend on Nuuly.” She likes that she gets to wear something that feels good for a month, and that someone else will go on to enjoy it. She never has to live with buyer’s remorse.

Despite all of this convenience, we are missing out on something. If you type Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy into the Nuuly search engine, 61 chic styles pop up. A few months ago, when the show Love Story, about the romance between Bessette-Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr., was released, seemingly every girl in America was attempting to recreate her clean “quiet luxury” look—a mix of sleek black turtlenecks and tailored beige jackets. Nuuly posted a Plan a ’90s day in NYC mood board on Instagram, with links to rentable looks. But Bessette-Kennedy, the original queen of the capsule wardrobe, famously repeated outfits. Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy would never have used Nuuly, I thought.

Most people want to have pieces that feel important to them, that make them feel good not because they’re on trend, but because they’re meaningful. They want to have a personal style. Heather Hurst, a popular New York–based stylist and writer, sees clothing-rental services as a useful step toward that goal. “I think approaching it from that mentality of I’m going to use this to study what I would like to invest in is a little bit more productive than just renting for all of eternity,” she told me. “If we think of style kind of as a muscle, you’re not really strengthening it” if you’re always rotating out the pieces in your closet, and not building on what you already own, she said. The key is knowing when to quit the subscription and invest in clothes that you want to keep for a long time.

Hurst doesn’t blame young women for getting locked in the subscription cycle at a time when little in the world feels stable or secure. They can’t afford a house; their future spouse is nowhere to be seen. But we’re just talking about a trench coat here. It’s a classic piece, suitable for many seasons, whether you have a face full of natural collagen or a head of graying hair. Maybe it’s time to save up and commit to one.

When I picture the people I love, I usually envision each one in a signature outfit. I think of my namesakes, who both died years ago, in their trademark looks: Annie in her black-and-gold beaded caftan from Sierra Leone, always entirely too beautiful for anywhere we were going, and Joy in her embroidered emerald tunic and matching pants, never without a flashy clip-on earring. I’m not even 30 yet, and I need another outfit for another wedding, and I like those low-rise micro shorts that I know can’t possibly age well. But I don’t want my future grandchildren to remember me in a series of rented Anthropologie tops—always on trend, but never actually mine.

Photos of the Week: Basilica Blessing, Tree Tunnel, Parrot Prediction

2026-06-12T09:00:00-04:00

Ryan Murphy / AP

New York Knicks fans cheer at a watch party during Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs, on June 8, 2026, in New York City.

Lindsay Dedario / Reuters

Niagara Falls is illuminated as part of the lighting-up of 11 state landmarks announced by New York Governor Kathy Hochul for Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs, in Niagara Falls, New York, on June 8, 2026.

Philip Fong / AFP / Getty

Lightning strikes above a residential estate in the Tsuen Wan district of the New Territories in Hong Kong on June 6, 2026.

Darrin Zammit Lupi / Reuters

Visitors attend the Museums by Candlelight event, an evening of candlelit heritage sites, at St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, Malta, on June 6, 2026.

Dan Kitwood / Getty

Fireworks erupt during the inauguration of the Tower of Jesus Christ by Pope Leo XIV at the Basilica of the Sagrada Família on June 10, 2026, in Barcelona.

Emilio Morenatti / AP

Priests gather around Antoni Gaudí’s Basilica of the Sagrada Família as Pope Leo XIV blesses the newly completed central Tower of Jesus Christ on June 10, 2026.

Jospin Mwisha / AFP / Getty

Members of a Congolese Red Cross team wearing personal protective equipment carry the coffin of a woman suspected of having died from Ebola, ahead of her safe burial at her home in Bunia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on June 7, 2026.

Ulises Ruiz / AFP / Getty

Emergency personnel check simulated victims during an interagency drill on a train staged as a weapons-of-mass-destruction attack, as part of security preparations for the upcoming 2026 FIFA World Cup, in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, on June 6, 2026.

Jam Sta Rosa / AFP / Getty

A responder carries a rescue dog while conducting search-and-rescue operations in a collapsed building after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake in General Santos City, Philippines, on June 9, 2026. The earthquake on June 8 killed at least 35 people, according to provincial authorities, after toppling buildings and sparking tsunami warnings across the region.

Jeff Chiu / AP

The wrestler Victor Von Richter, left, reacts after being hit by Astro Knox, right, in a Lucha Libro pro-wrestling match at the San Jose Public Library Educational Park Branch in San Jose, California.

Alex Bierens de Haan / LAT Images / Getty

The F1 Grand Prix of Monaco winner Andrea Kimi Antonelli celebrates by jumping into the sea with his team, at Circuit de Monaco on June 7, 2026, in Monte Carlo.

Lou Benoist / AFP / Getty

The French skipper Thibaut Vauchel-Camus sails his Ocean Fifty multihull Solidaires en Peloton from Saint-Malo, Brittany, to Fécamp, Normandy, as part of his preparation for the Route du Rhum solo-transatlantic-sailing race, on June 10, 2026.

Kent Nishimura / AFP / Getty

Contractors drive a vehicle in the partially filled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool during renovation work at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on June 4, 2026.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty

Construction continues on the Ultimate Fighting Championship “Claw” and the octagon fighting ring on the South Lawn of the White House on June 11, 2026, in Washington, D.C.

Thierry Monasse / Getty

Charmille of Haut-Marêt, a hornbeam-tree tunnel, during a rainy spring afternoon on June 5, 2026, in La Reid, Theux, Belgium. The path is a historic 573-meter-long tree tunnel made from about 4,700 hornbeams trained over a metal framework to form an arched walkway.

Ian Forsyth / Getty

An owl returns to its young after hunting over fields in Saltburn-by-the-Sea, England, on June 10, 2026.

Kevin Dietsch / Getty

U.S. Representative Pete Aguilar misses a catch during the Congressional Baseball Game at Nationals Park on June 10, 2026, in Washington, D.C. The annual game that began in 1901 pits Republican and Democratic members of Congress against one another while raising money for charity.

Ghaith Alsayed / AP

Farmers spray water in a burned agricultural field next to a fallen projectile near the town of Najha, Syria, on June 8, 2026, after debris from Iranian missiles fell in the area.

Ariel Ochoa / AP

Fishing boats burn in Manta, Ecuador, after a fire broke out at the Port of Manta on June 6, 2026.

Essam Al-Sudani / Reuters

Gas flares burn at the Rumaila Oil Field as an Iraqi Energy Police officer secures the area in Basra, Iraq, on June 8, 2026.

Michael Tullberg / Getty

Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee of Rush perform during the opening night of their first American tour in 11 years at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, California, on June 7, 2026.

Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty

Journalists surround a lawyer in Sion, Switzerland, on June 5, 2026, prior to a hearing regarding a deadly New Year’s Eve fire in the Swiss ski resort of Crans-Montana. The blaze broke out in the early hours of January 1 at a bar called Le Constellation, killing 41 people, mostly teenagers, and injuring 115 others.

CK Thanseer / Reuters

Supporters look on as others stand up a cutout of Argentina’s Lionel Messi ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, in Kozhikode, India, on June 9, 2026.

Pedro H. Tesch / AFP / Getty

An aerial view of a street painting depicting the Brazilian football star Neymar, designed by the Brazilian artists Rafael Jung, Nosg, Bart, Chimia, Joca, and Jefferson, in Novo Hamburgo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, on June 10, 2026, one day ahead of the opening of the 2026 FIFA World Cup

Christophe Ena / AP

Flavio Cobolli of Italy serves to Alexander Zverev of Germany during their men’s final match at the French Open in Paris on June 7, 2026.

Aurelien Morissard / AP

Katerina Siniakova, of the Czech Republic (right), and Taylor Townsend, of the U.S., pose with their trophy after winning the women’s doubles final match against Anna Danilina, of Kazakhstan, and Aleksandra Krunic, of Serbia, at the French Open, in Paris on June 7, 2026.

Sebastian Willnow / DPA / Getty

A blue-throated macaw sits in front of a video camera at Leipzig Zoo on June 9, 2026. In the zoo aviary, parrots were asked to act as oracles for the opening World Cup match between Mexico and South Africa, picking the winner. One ended up grabbing the ball marked “Mexico” from a box with its beak.

Yasser Al-Zayyat / AFP / Getty

The sun sets behind Kuwait City’s landmark Kuwait Towers on June 9, 2026.

The New Science of Psychedelic Drugs

2026-06-12T08:00:00-04:00

Nature is always performing chemistry experiments, and in the dark and sticky corners of its forests and jungles, it creates compounds that have hyper-specific effects on the human mind. In China’s Yunnan province, a yellow mushroom with a droopy cap sprouts up in the mountains, usually in the shade of long-needled pines. Many people of different ages and cultural backgrounds have eaten this mushroom and experienced the same hallucination. They report seeing elf-like figures that parkour around on clothes, on furniture, and on walls. These little people seem to like dancing and performing acrobatics. Large groups of them will march in formation. This “lilliputian hallucination” can last for a day, and closing your eyes is no escape. The tiny humans sometimes linger in the blank space of your mind, staring back at you in a teasing way.

For thousands of years, humans have searched nature for mind-altering substances through a process of trial and (sometimes fatal) error. People have choked down foul roots, boiled woody vines, and scraped bitter bark off of tree trunks. They’ve milked toad glands and chugged the urine of reindeer that were themselves tripping on fungi. These experiments have revealed hundreds of plants and fungi that contain psychedelic compounds.

Now that psychedelic research has been legitimized, scientists at university labs and biotech start-ups are wondering whether they can create a better one. It’s a seductive idea, that some new and perfect drug might be hiding in the near-limitless parameter space of synthetic chemistry. Who wouldn’t want to take a little pill that could help you slough off your old self and see the world anew, a half-day therapy that would leave you with a feeling of enlightenment, if not in the exalted state itself?

“Nature’s compounds aren’t always optimal,” Manoj Doss, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. Take ibogaine, a naturally occurring psychedelic derived from an African shrub. A single dose of it seems to help people liberate themselves from opioids, quelling their cravings and mellowing their withdrawal symptoms. But ibogaine is a dirty drug, a blunt biochemical instrument that travels all across the body and puts particular stress on the heart. “If we could remove ibogaine’s cardio risks and preserve its therapeutic benefit, that’s something we should do,” Doss said. And indeed, a gentler analogue has already been developed in the lab, although it hasn’t yet reached clinical trials.

Doss has noticed a proliferation of lab-modified psychedelics. He recently heard that researchers had synthesized a promising new compound in the same class that includes MDMA. This one is supposed to be “the best ever,” he said. “It’s said to be less intense than MDMA, and socially lubricating, but not the full out ‘I love you!’—and it’s followed by way less of a crash. It just kind of cruises to the end.”

Psilocybin, the “magic mushroom” compound, could also be improved. It’s hardly toxic—no one dies from overdosing on psilocybin—but its effects are at times unpleasant or even tragic. People who use psilocybin recreationally may become confused and jump off a building, David Yaden, a researcher at the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Even in the lab at Hopkins, where the drug is carefully tested as a treatment for a number of mental-health disorders, patients can have adverse reactions. In that setting, every user will be screened for cardiac issues and a family history of psychosis, and guided through their trip by two professional facilitators who have a doctor on call—and even then, some users experience a psychotic break or profound dissociative episodes. It’s an intense experience, Yaden said, “like running a marathon or climbing a mental mountain. Some people don’t do well with it.”

[Read: The meditation start-up that’s selling bliss on demand]

One way to make psilocybin trips less intense is to shorten them. A standard trip on the drug tends to last six to eight hours, and like other powerful psychedelics, it can leave a residue on the windowpanes of your consciousness that may not rinse clean until you’ve slept. Several companies are now working on milder versions of psilocybin that can be delivered via nasal sprays, injectables, and Listerine-style strips. They activate similar receptors across the nervous system but metabolize more rapidly, shortening the trip. A psilocybin analogue developed by Reunion Neuroscience appears to produce a high that lasts just three or four hours, according to findings from a Phase 2 trial of 84 women with postpartum depression. The drug showed signs of being clinically effective too, though Yaden is not yet fully sold on the idea that shorter-acting psychedelics can have the same therapeutic pop as a daylong trip on psilocybin. He’d like to see more evidence.

In San Francisco, a start-up called Mindstate Design Labs is trying to extend this work on engineering psychedelics beyond the modest goal of inducing shorter and more easygoing trips. “We don’t want to just develop a more convenient psilocybin,” its CEO, Dillan DiNardo, told me on a recent call. “We want to provide mental states that aren’t yet reliably accessible.” The company is starting with a compound that aims to enhance aesthetic perception, for example. “It makes the world around them into a sort of sensory feast,” DiNardo said. In theory, it could be used to treat a person suffering from anhedonia, and it would have obvious recreational appeal.

Mindstate started by compiling a large database of more than 70,000 trip reports. Some of the reports were pulled from Erowid, an online library of information about psychoactive substances. Others are from books that contain first-person psychedelic accounts, which DiNardo said the company transcribed. And still more were taken from clinical materials. The reports contain descriptions of the subjective effects of hundreds of psychoactive drugs, including many that were first synthesized by Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, the underground researcher who almost single-handedly drove the field of psychedelic chemistry forward from the 1960s to the 1990s. (Ann Shulgin, his widow, was a co-owner of Mindstate until her death, in 2022.) Then the company used an AI model to turn that database into a drug-discovery engine. By linking the subjective reports from each psychoactive compound to its receptor-binding profiles, it tries to predict the underlying neurobiology of specific emotional states.

[Read: The weak science behind psychedelics]

DiNardo claimed that Mindstate’s AI works like AlphaFold, the model from Google DeepMind that has wowed structural biologists—and the Nobel Committee for Chemistry—by predicting the three-dimensional structures of proteins. We won’t know whether this is true for a long while. Only one of the company’s compounds has reached the testing phase in humans, and it wasn’t discovered by the model; Shulgin synthesized a version of it in the 1980s. Human trials for the other drugs that Mindstate has in development could be years away. Doss, the UT Austin psychiatrist, told me that he is skeptical of Mindstate’s approach to automated drug discovery. The trip reports may constitute the richest database of recreational pharmacology that we have, but they’re still “crap,” he said. They’re colored by all kinds of biases and limited by people’s inability to cram psychedelic states into words.

Boris Heifets, an anesthesiologist and a neuroscientist at Stanford University, also has doubts about Mindstate. “I am cheering them on and I would love to be wrong, but my deep suspicion is that they’re barking up the wrong tree,” he told me. He thinks that simply adjusting the intensity of a trip will have the most important effects on the psychedelic experience. He also said that in his lab, he’s seen evidence that altering a person’s pre- and post-trip experiences can have more transformative clinical effects than tweaks to the drugs. “That context of care is an enormous determinant of a patient’s outcome,” he said. If this context didn’t matter, he continued, then anyone who took these drugs on their own might end up cured of mental illness or otherwise enlightened. The average rave attendee would be a guru.

Recreational users of psychedelics do tinker with the experience on their own terms, by choosing to trip with different kinds of people or in different kinds of places—in cities, or on mountaintops, or while camping at the beach. On the one hand, “you could imagine that being in the natural world and feeling awe would be beneficial,” Yaden said. “On the other hand, if people are more engaged with their perceptual environment and the novelty that’s around them, they might lose the benefit of being left with the workings of their own mind, which might be part of what produces insight during these experiences.” Testing this in any formal way would be dangerous, however. A clinical trial of psilocybin in the wilderness could easily result in a participant running away, or worse.

[Read: The man behind the Trump administration’s favorite psychedelic]

But even indoors, in labs, scientists could try to engineer a particular psychedelic high just by varying the conditions. They might provide patients with preparatory materials that go beyond the typical one-page handout. They could encourage patients to engage in certain kinds of introspection, invite them to bring in a photo to focus on during their session, or ask them to look into a mirror for a sustained period while they’re tripping. They could pipe in a greater variety of music. (Doss said that he hates “the Hopkins playlist,” which consists primarily of Western classical music.) Yaden said that not nearly enough of this kind of work has been done.

But even if researchers did perform all of these experiments, and many more, there’s no guarantee that they’d be able to observe and analyze any shifts in experience that were triggered. The “perfect trip” may always be beyond the reach of engineering, biochemical or otherwise. Psychedelic journeys might be too ineffable and too particular to a person’s individual consciousness for the methods of science. We may instead be stuck with storytelling, folk knowledge, and the nuggets of wisdom that have come down to us in ancient texts. For 17 centuries, Chinese Taoists have been preserving one such text called Baopuzi. It was written by the scholar Ge Hong, and it tells of a “flesh spirit mushroom” that could, when eaten raw, allow one to “see a little person” and experience transcendence.

The Whimsy and Heartbreak of America’s Garage Sales

2026-06-12T08:00:00-04:00

Photographs By Max Highstein

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We have limited time on this Earth to get a good look at one another’s belongings. We need to move on this—fast—because the years we spend alive could well be our only opportunity for snooping. And it’s so interesting to see what everyone has!

Drink coasters shaped like pieces of well-known fruit, a woven cage for transporting a chicken, a new-in-box gelato maker—these are the stones from which the cathedral of man’s experience is raised.

To be a secondhand shopper is to see the riches of the world and be satisfied that they are enough. Don’t turn any sand into spanking-new champagne coupes on my account. It is also to indulge the wanton impulse of every person to spy on other people. Archaeologists have been cataloging dump sites since at least the early 19th century, when Danish scientists began pawing through heaps of mollusk shells that had been discarded by their Stone Age ancestors. Indeed, studying what people throw away (eventually, people throw away almost everything) is one of the most efficient ways to learn about them.

One needn’t be an archaeologist to snoop through others’ trash. In the United States, the layman can do this any day of the week, especially Saturday, if the weather is nice. This spring, I decided to see what I could learn about my fellow Americans’ lives—and how much I could improve my own life through their discards—for $100.

1. Garage Sales

You never know when God will bring a wonderful new Christmas decoration into your life. My family got our light-up snowman when our neighbor shot himself. I discovered this as a child after he appeared on the landing of our front steps (the snowman!—Christ). My mother, I suspect, had intended to pass him off as a light-up snowman that she had bought brand-new. But my mother never bought anything as big as three feet tall brand-new. Also, his paint was burned off in just the same spots as the snowman that had, for years, served as a jolly sentry outside our neighbor’s front door—a position that was now vacant, while our own home was, in a first, conspicuously and festively guarded. “You stole their snowman?” I asked. “I did no such thing!” my mother yelled. (She was constantly doing no such thing.) “They were throwing it away!”

The point of this story is: You need to be shopping for Christmas decorations year-round. If you’re not buying jingle bells in July—if you’re not steeling your heart against others’ misfortunes in order to scour the residue of their lives for Christmas bibelots that are no longer of any use to them because they have, with all due respect, shot themselves—you are overpaying.

Perhaps you think you don’t need any more Christmas decorations. You do; imagining that you possess a sufficient quantity of Christmas decorations evinces a dullness of spirit that lets me know that any Christmas extravaganza you think you’re pulling off is anemic at best, and not even worthy of the term. Perhaps you will protest that you do not observe Christmas. That’s absolutely no reason not to decorate for it. You should be tossing up ornaments for every holiday you can get your hands on—secular winter decor is fine—simply because they catch the eye, and people who walk by your home will enjoy the pizzazz.

This is why I am so pleased to see, on one block of a community yard sale surrounded by naked scrubland, a white pickup truck’s bed overflowing with boxes of colorful Christmas balls. Hung off its lowered tailgate is a handwritten sign reading FREE. These balls are just the sort I seek: cheap plastic ones covered in glitter, which look as pretty as anything on Earth when hung outdoors, to dazzle in the sun. I need them (I fear the information barreling toward us from the bottom of this paragraph will make my reader question the appropriateness of that verb) to meet a private goal I have set. This past winter, while laboriously freeing the trees and bushes outside my home of the Christmas barnacles I had affixed there months earlier, I decided, for the first time, to count how many ornaments I had hung. I recall, as I load the boxes from the pickup truck into the back seat of my car, that the total was extremely close to a shocking milestone. The number 1,000 is blaring in my head, even though that sounds crazy. Did I really hang approximately but not quite 1,000 small Christmas ornaments outside my house? That would explain why it had looked absolutely sick. And now, thanks to this infusion of free ornaments, I will be able to hang a clean 1,000 next Christmas. Well—

Would you believe that I was wrong? I check the note on my iPhone, where I recorded my tally. It turns out that I already have, stored in my garage, nearly 2,000 ornaments. And now I have more. “Take it all!” urges a cheerful woman, emerging from the home that belongs to the pickup. No problem.

This coincidence—one household possessing such a quantity of superfluous Christmas decorations that its members are moved to put them in their driveway and impel passersby to remove them; my having sufficient space to store 2,000-plus Christmas decorations—is a manifestation of the same conditions responsible for the birth of garage sales in the United States seven decades ago.

In the years following World War II, single-family homes spread across the nation like fireweed. In a distinctively American architectural feature, many of them were joined to a small dungeon dedicated to the tidy storage of automobiles—and other items. Loosed of the wartime imperative to manufacture anti-aircraft guns and submarine torpedoes, factories were free to make bone-rattling dishwashers and mint-colored refrigerators. In the first five years after the war, Americans’ spending on household furnishings and appliances surged 240 percent.

In From Goodwill to Grunge: A History of Secondhand Styles and Alternative Economies, the historian Jennifer Le Zotte writes that the novel spaciousness of suburban homes (in contrast to cramped city apartments) was, paradoxically, responsible for the birth of private sales intended to help homeowners pare down the contents of their dwellings. Unlike people living in cities, suburbanites had room to hold on to old things indefinitely. Subject to the same storage maxim that explains why a purse of any size is always full—the amount of a person’s belongings will expand to fill the space available—the roominess of the suburban home and garage, Le Zotte writes, “made it possible for a single family to acquire and retain” so many “unwanted items” that, eventually, they had to have a yard sale.

Conveniently, this period coincided with a spike in popularity of a hobby that had been inaugurated during the Gilded Age: collecting old American things. Before the late 19th century, Le Zotte writes, wealthy Americans, if they bought any antiques at all, prioritized the acquisition of “foreign-made items.” The deluge of affordable new goods that flooded the country post-industrialization, she suggests, caused shoppers to perceive a “scarcity” in items that were original or unique; items traceable to the country’s colonial past came into vogue. Postwar prosperity gave more Americans the leisure time, disposable income, and car space to begin antiquing. Le Zotte reports that by the 1970s, more than 10 million garage sales were taking place in the United States every year, and people were paying more than $1 billion (cumulatively) for their neighbors’ discards.

But statistics fail to convey the humanity of yard sales—the caprice, whimsy, and high spirits, as well as the cunning, weirdness, and heartbreak, that charge and thicken the air when two people agree to perform an off-the-books monetary transaction. Years ago, at a different community yard sale (surrounded by different naked scrubland), a woman sold me a canvas-mounted collection of 19th-century barbed-wire samples on the condition that I look her in the eye and promise that I would mount the contents of an additional box of loose 19th-century barbed-wire samples that she was including in the low price. She had made an identical promise to the person from whom she herself had purchased both the mounted and unmounted barbed wire, and felt guilt for decades at having failed to keep it (though not so much guilt that she ever got around to doing so). I assured her that I would do it—and let me tell you the lesson I began learning the second I got everything home: It is real, real easy to not ever get around to meticulously mounting dozens of stray pieces of rusty barbed wire when you already have a dynamite display of diverse varieties—“10 Point Spur” (1887), “Crandal’s Champion” (1879), “Sawtooth Ribbon Wire” (1881)—hanging fetchingly above the television in your living room. Eventually, I solved this promise by fobbing the loosies off on my friend Renee, who, having no such dynamite display, was compelled to mount them (she claims, and I choose to believe her).

Max Highstein for The Atlantic

The efficient yard-sale shopper is not an empath. For every bubbly homeowner encouraging you to take this vintage Coleman cooler—featuring the 1980s MTV logo floating in the ocean—off her hands for free, there is a downcast seller attempting to unload dozens of Precious Moments figurines at $10 to $20 a pop because, she says, she doesn’t want to bring them all to Texas, where she is moving to help take care of her mother, who has dementia. (Or maybe she privately does want to take them? Not going to get many bites at those prices.) For every delightful discovery of a charmingly wacky neighborhood where one resident’s garage-door mural features an alien camouflaged among the paddles of a prickly pear cactus, and another homeowner has installed a rooftop statue of an orange pig with blue angel wings, there will be a haunting encounter with a nearly silent man hoping to sell a single button-down shirt for 50 cents. If you don’t have the stomach to witness people’s lives up close, do not ever stop at a yard sale.

PURCHASES:

Christmas balls for outdoor display: $0
Skull carved from stone (for Halloween) and mercury-glass Christmas ornaments: $5
Open jewelry cleaner: $0
Fleece blankets in sunset colors featuring vaguely southwestern motifs (stepped diamonds, serrated zigzags, geometric crosses, etc.): $0
Coleman cooler with MTV logo: $0
Another Christmas ornament (vintage): 50 cents
Saddle blanket: $4
Gallon ziplock bag of vintage European-beer coasters: $0

TOTAL: $9.50

2. Thrift Stores

The early crocuses of thrift stores began popping up in this country in the late 1800s, just as officials in her cities were making an honest push to persuade Americans to please stop dumping their trash in the street. The first shops owed much of their success to two forces: the bountiful waste coincident with mass industrialization, and anti-Semitism. “Junk shops, pushcarts, and pawnshops,” Le Zotte writes, had largely been “the province of Jewish immigrants,” who were “relegated to marginal economies.” An 1890 survey revealed “peddling” (often of scraps and secondhand items) as the second-most-common profession among Manhattan Jews. In the turn-of-the-century zeal for orderly streets, Le Zotte writes, Jewish junk dealers were “viewed as a public sanitation hazard, and even a moral menace.” Cities all over the nation attempted to shut them down.

But could there be a nice, Christian way to deal junk? This question was answered in the thundering affirmative by two groups of late-19th-century Protestant social activists whose retail legacies continue, even now, to thrive across all 50 states.

In the late 1890s, Reverend Edgar J. Helms, the young pastor of Morgan Chapel, in Boston’s South End, came up with another one of his schemes to aid—and, more specifically, to Americanize—the immigrant communities (Italian, Greek, Syrian, Polish, Irish) flourishing around his church. Helms instructed church members to collect unwanted clothing to donate to women and children, spread the gathered garments across the pews, and invited those in need to help themselves to it. There resulted such a frenzy of grabbing—“pandemonium,” according to an institutional history self-published in 1924—that the church, on subsequent occasions, charged the poor a few pennies. This money was used to hire unemployed women to repair any garments that arrived damaged. (In time, the operation would expand to encompass many other types of repairs, including the Frankensteining of new poppets from heaps of severed limbs and loose heads in what the self-published history called “an amazing doll shop.”) The pastor’s initiative proved so popular that the church began distributing feed sacks to well-off homes, so Boston housewives could continually set aside castoffs for donation. These sacks eventually came stamped with a label: THE GOODWILL BAG.

But it was the Salvation Army that truly pioneered what Le Zotte calls “the large-scale philanthropic salvage goods system.” This organization’s roots stretch back to 1860s England. Early adherents practiced a public evangelism that The New York Times characterized as “propagating Christianity by rowdy prayers and tambourines.” Members might dress in random articles (coats, helmets) of discarded military gear—or else in torn, dirty rags as a manifestation of their empathy with the abject poor. New, fashionable clothing, it was implied, was materialistic and ungodly.

In New York, restrictions on itinerant peddlers benefited the Salvation Army’s retail operation, which sold the same sort of pre-owned wares from storefronts, rather than from rickety pushcarts. Pamphlets detailing how goods were disinfected prior to sale shellacked an additional veneer of respectability onto the enterprise.

The Salvation Army Thrift Store closest to my home in Santa Fe seems to have relaxed last century’s strict emphasis on cleanliness. Skylights the color of sticky fly tape give the interior a distinct yellow cast, like an image from an old newspaper. Next to a limp rack of sleeveless tops stands a postapocalyptic forager-warrior mannequin in jeans, a faded plaid shirt, and a black baseball cap from the plus-size-women’s brand Torrid. Slung around his torso: an olive-green bag designed to carry a gas mask. Each time I see this figure out of the corner of my eye—as in, every single time I visit this store—I mistake it for a large living person and leap in fright. As I shop around him, the mannequin’s parted, down-turned lips give him the dazed yet dismayed expression of a chiseled male model watching extraterrestrials eviscerate a cow from a distance of several yards.

A more pleasant, or at least less yellow, shopping experience is to be had at Savers, a for-profit chain that speaks of a murky connection to charity in announcements that blare over the speaker system at regular intervals: “Shopping in our stores doesn’t support any nonprofit,” begins the riddle, “but donating your reusable goods does.” Oh no! Or good? Well, anyway, the thing about Savers is that it is big, huge—picture the inside of Mount Rainier, except all one level and very brightly lit.

And it has everything. All day long, in the parking lot, people are driving up, popping their trunks, and unloading a bag, or two, or sometimes an entire car’s worth, of any objects that they want to be rid of without the implied finality of throwing them in the trash. Most of them will still end up there. Clothes especially. The EPA classifies clothing as a “nondurable good”—meaning that the agency expects people to wear every piece of their clothing for less than three years. This improbable estimate may even be too conservative: The U.S. International Trade Commission reports that consumers jettison about half of all “fast fashion items” (which it defines, rather bitchily, as “inexpensive, low quality clothing that quickly cycles out of style”) within one year.

Of that unwanted apparel—about 13 million tons in 2018—85 percent is annually sent to a landfill or incinerated. Most of the rest is donated to charities or thrift stores; of this, half will be recycled into “lower-value” products such as industrial rags and insulation. (“Bottle-to-fiber” recycling is so popular that a recycled PET bottle is now more likely to become polyester fabric than another bottle. It is far less common to turn plastic clothing into drinking vessels.) Only about 20 percent of the textiles donated to thrift stores is actually sold to shoppers.

The vast wall of dangling accessories at Savers includes multiple pieces of abalone jewelry—each one of which I must pick up to admire its iridescence, the closest nature has come to reproducing the most flamboyantly beautiful phenomenon on Earth: the gasoline rainbow. I do not purchase any abalone jewelry on my recent visit, because I already own too much, and all of it looks bad on me, and I’ll buy it another time. But I do snap up two pairs of vintage drop earrings with open-backed bezels—a pair with green stones that, in sunlight, have the translucent glow of a watermelon rind made of jelly; and a pair with stones that from certain angles are the black-blue of crow feathers, and from others appear as clear as raindrops—for $2.99 each.

Max Highstein for The Atlantic

A week later, finding myself in New York City, I approach a few dealers in the Diamond District to ask what they make of the pairs of earrings. I am told, variously, that they are from the Victorian era; that they are from the 1990s; that they are from the 1980s; that one pair is emerald and one is glass; that one is synthetic emerald and one is glass; that both sets of stones are glass; that one is oil-treated emerald and one is synthetic sapphire; that the metal might be copper; that the earrings were probably made in America; and that they are “not very important.”

Back in Santa Fe, I take the earrings to Stephen’s, a consignment shop, where a young man named Nicholas, who professes that jewelry is “not really” his “forte,” immediately guesses that they are gold-plated silver, Etruscan-revival style, probably made in South Asia between the 1970s and 1990s. He offers to quickly test the stones. The green stones he deems most likely chrysoprase—a budget alternative to jade. The blue ones surprise him. His electric probe indicates that they are a stone called spinel, which he hadn’t realized could be blue; he wants to look that up. I ask how he learned all of this.

“I don’t even know where to begin,” Nicholas says. “Probably trying to impress girls”—which makes me laugh.

“Does it work?” I ask.

He looks up from the earrings to make eye contact for the length of a lightning flash. “A little bit,” he says.

Blue spinel, he reads off his phone, is the rarest spinel, primarily found in Asia. But, he warns, this is an AI summary, which tends to exaggerate worth. Specialist reference books, which he doesn’t just walk around with, are more reliable. “People say, ‘Oh, everything’s getting put on the internet now, so there’s no need for books,’ ” Nicholas tells me. But “some of these books are never going to be reprinted or digitized.” Reputable books about Chinese porcelain, he says, “can cost thousands and thousands of dollars.” Despite their hugely discrepant individual assessments, Nicholas and the various Diamond District dealers all provide the same ballpark estimate for the earrings’ worth: somewhere in the vicinity of $100 to $140 for the pairs. But, says Nicholas, the reward of thrifting isn’t found in raw resources; it’s about interpreting the item as a whole. “As far as a made product goes,” he says, “I think you did good.”

What else is there at Savers? A framed photo of a chandelier, and one of a Dairy Queen in Staten Island, its sidewalk overflowing with kids bundled in winter coats (and one reindeer sweater). An ivory-satin beaded clutch with a tag inside reading MADE IN W. GERMANY BY HAND, hanging, like a pork shoulder off a miniature meat hook, next to a wallet designed to look like a Krabby Patty from SpongeBob SquarePants. Shein garments, fine as paper napkins. A demure floor-length dress with a tag that reads MS. CONDUCT CALIFORNIA MATERNITY. A CSI: Crime Scene Investigation DNA laboratory for kids. A big bag of someone’s old nail polish.

I walk around the store for several minutes carrying a straw bucket bag, in an effort to discover if I wish to purchase it. I feel drawn to all woven-straw items because of my surname, which is Weaver. Anytime I see one, I picture myself thousands(?) of years ago (however many would make sense is the amount I picture), on an amber afternoon, sitting placidly while expertly weaving the very object I am looking at in 2026. The other people in my village/town/field—coming and going from their own peaceful tasks that are also their last names (baking, milling, cart … ing? Carting around this and that, I suppose, and God loved them for doing it)—pause for a moment and admire the intrinsic utility and inspiring artistry of my emerging creation, which to me is nothing, because I am a weaver; this is simply what I do. In real life, of course, I would not have the faintest notion of how to begin to create a functioning shoulder bag out of straw, could not do it if you gave me 500 hours, would not even know where to procure the different colors of straw (is it straw?). How much does Savers want for this bag? $7.99. They are dreaming.

In any event, the best thrift stores in town are two shops a five-minute drive apart, both called the Cat. They are the best because their proceeds are donated to the local humane society, and, in every American city, people reserve their very best castoffs for charities that benefit animals. (Or else animal lovers part with their best things more quickly, in order to benefit animals.) After scrounging around in a jumble of bifocals at one of these locations, I come up with a pair of Gucci eyeglasses, which I buy for $1.

PURCHASES:

Big bag of someone’s old nail polish: $1.99
Woven-straw purse shaped like a pig: $5.99
Golden egg-shaped purse embossed with stylized bird with graceful swooping neck: $14.99
Earrings with chrysoprase stones: $2.99
Earrings with possibly rare blue-spinel stones: $2.99
Gucci glasses: $1
Ted Baker glasses: $1
Pink carrying case for glasses: $1

TOTAL: $26.16*
*Reflects discounts from a coupon a stranger placed in my hand

3. Estate Sales

For the true secondhand connoisseur, nothing surpasses an estate sale. These affairs offer up, for fondling, the entirety of a home’s viscera upon the death of its caretaker. Members of the public are invited in as dermestid beetles are invited into the carcass of an American woodcock, to leave only the perfect, picked-clean bones behind. Art, furniture, personal papers, open cleaning supplies, expired spices, the paraphernalia of half-started hobbies, washcloths, underwear, used lipsticks—these and much, much, much more are available for buying.

The modern American estate sale is a hybrid of a garage sale and a thrift store, with items priced individually, and shoppers left free to browse without close supervision. Although estate sales are occasionally overseen by a decedent’s friends or family, the task of administration is most often left to a professional company, whose employees can traffic huge quantities of loved ones’ belongings unsentimentally.

The arrangements of personal effects at estate sales are memento mori more sobering than any skeleton ever carved into marble. A ziplock baggie of sunblock, bought with the expectation of future hours outdoors; a partially eviscerated Lamb Chop (America’s most popular plush dog toy), priced—ambitiously, considering the extruding fluffy white brain matter—at $2 (and what will happen to the dog?); plastic bins of manila folders with tidy cursive labels like DIRECT TV 10-22 2019; 2025 FORD ESCAPE; NUTRUITION [sic]; and, I realize only when I look, later, at a photo I snapped on my phone, POLICE REPORT.

I love to meander through a stranger’s home and discover who had a secret indoor swimming pool (more common than you’d think), what sorts of tchotchkes they kept around (a crocheted tissue box designed to look like a red-and-white teapot; you pull the tissues out through the spout, like steam), and whether they used nicer conditioner than I do (a dead woman’s nearly full bottle of Kérastase is currently perched on the edge of my bathtub).

Nearly always, a home will have, laid out in the kitchen, a (give or take) 39-piece set of Lenox dishware in the (give or take) “Maywood” pattern, priced at (get a load of this) $245. This is almost certainly one of the few times this millennium that the light of day has bathed these pieces. Formal dining rooms began disappearing from American homes in the last century, replaced by open kitchens, through which all members of the family can cavort freely, like a splash pad; contemporary Americans apparently have little use for the plate. What we want now are “pasta bowls”: wide, shallow craters we can fill with food in any state of wetness, a single mass or particulate items, perhaps requiring mild agitation before consumption (tossed salad; ★★★★★ weeknight sheet-pan bibimbap). The bowls are great because we can hold them in one hand or cradle them on our laps while eating, thus minimizing the mess incurred upon the dining table’s elimination. In 2016, an executive from the company that manufactures Fiesta tableware told The Wall Street Journal that bowls accounted for roughly one-third of the brand’s sales and showed the largest sales growth of any dish type; there is, a marketing director for Waterford, the crystal company, confirmed, “far more demand now for bowls.”

I tend to start in the master-bedroom closet—virtually every piece of clothing I own is something another woman no longer wanted, or perhaps did still want but then she died—and afterward skulk to the garage, to peruse holiday decor. Inevitably, as I nose my way through dead strangers’ belongings, my mind slips to my own estate sale, the one that will spring from my death. These thoughts follow a pattern: First, I am exhilarated by the thought of what a fantastic sale that will be, and long to attend it myself. Next, I resent the scavengers who will descend on my home, attempting to wheedle their way to even better deals on my already reasonably priced possessions. I want my widowed husband to be there, to make sure that all sticker prices are honored. But I also want everyone to leave my grieving husband alone. And, now that I think about it, my husband definitely wouldn’t care about enforcing my pricing system. He yearns for the break-resistant, low-stimulation furnishings of a private suite in a psych ward; the minimalist modernism of an uninhabited cave by the Black Sea; a many-drawered palace in hell where items are “put away” when not in use. He would just want the chore of ridding himself of my 10 trillion fabulous possessions to be finished as quickly as possible. Also: When I was married to him, this man didn’t know the value of a dollar. To him, a dollar was worth a penny; to me, every dollar was worth $9.80. I grow irritated at my husband for letting things go too cheaply (though I do want them to be priced cheaply!). I wonder if I can convince my favorite cousin to take charge of this.

Inside a house in Bernalillo, I find just the kinds of things that make me preemptively sad for my sale: a lanyard from a Carnival cruise; a VHS tape labeled X’MAS IN N.C.; an inexpertly (not that I could do better) hand-painted commemorative plate, depicting a blue-eyed couple above the words GRACE AND VERNON | MARRIED DECEMBER 14, 1928. I wish I knew these people enough to want to purchase their memories. I think of the framed invitation to my beloved grandparents’ wedding, hanging on my living-room wall. To me, a priceless item. To the shoppers at my estate sale, a random piece of strangers’ ephemera not worth a dollar. In a bedroom closet in Bernalillo, on a shelf bearing a gray-haired wig and wig shampoo, I find a government card dated five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, stating that the cardholder, a resident of Kansas, is eligible to defer his draft by reason of hardship to his dependents. The woman ringing up my Christmas decorations lets me have it for free.

Weeks later, I go to the kind of estate sale you dream about: a wealthy woman’s ranch with a county-road address. Old wagon wheels, almost as tall as I am, are strewn throughout the grounds. Her closet contains a lace wedding dress from the 1920s. A skylight makes her toilet glow. In one(!) of her barns sits an equipal, a leather seat descended from Aztec thrones, the color of burnt sugar; also a great big straw carrot that I swiftly place on the “hold” table. (My editor has asked me to explain “why” I go on to purchase this carrot for $2. To never stare down another sunrise without being the legal owner of a great big straw carrot—is this not obvious?)

Max Highstein for The Atlantic

Since moving to New Mexico, I have learned to cock my ears for the whistling-firework-tail call of the lesser goldfinch. Inside the ranch house, my ears prick up at an even more striking sound: An elderly shopper is murmuring a joke to his friend in New Mexican Spanish, a vanishing dialect dwindling even in the few towns in which it is spoken. In an interview with The New York Times in 2023, one linguist compared the isolated conditions in which it evolved to a colony of astronauts who landed on Mars and then lost contact with Earth for a dozen or so generations. To overhear it is a rare treat.

This is a radiant Saturday morning—the perfect conditions for yard and estate sales, which usually give the proceedings a frantic air. But in the jewel-colored rooms of this home in the wilderness, people are idling: delighting in the little white Christmas lights strung across the exposed wooden vigas in the kitchen; reading the tiles in the woman’s colorful shower that spell out the names of her favorite horses; lingering in the art studio and on the sweeping back balcony to listen to wind hiss through the trees. I have never been in a home where it was more obvious that the owner lived there exactly as she wanted to. Then, singly and in pairs, we gather up our chosen fragments of this stranger’s life (marked down to half price), and load them into our cars.

PURCHASES:

Large animal hip bone: $10
Cowskin rug: $30
Photo print of cattle in snow: $5
Huge carrot made of straw: $2
Beaded Easter eggs and more Christmas ornaments: $7
Horseshoe jewelry rack: $10
Pre–Pearl Harbor draft card: $0

TOTAL: $64

GRAND TOTAL: $99.66
LEFT OVER: $0.34

This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “Cheap Thrills.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Americans Are Already Paying Dearly for the National Debt

2026-06-12T07:30:00-04:00

Fiscal hawks like to drum up interest in the national debt by making the astronomical numbers more tangible. The United States owes $31.6 trillion to public creditors, more than $290,000 for each household. You could spend $1 million every day for almost 86,000 years before having to borrow more. But no one really cares. Talking about how many times all of the dollars laid end to end would go to the moon and back (6,000, as it happens) is just not going to get people to think differently about the national debt.

What should matter is that the consequences of this debt are not off in the future, but already here. The government’s deficits have saddled many American families with higher costs, largely from rising interest rates. The Budget Lab, the policy research center at Yale where I am the executive director, recently estimated that congressional-spending decisions since 2015 have raised Treasury yields by almost a full percentage point, which affects what American households pay to borrow. For someone taking out a 30-year mortgage at last year’s median home price, this rise in long-term interest rates has increased their borrowing costs by about $2,500 a year, or roughly $76,000 over the life of the loan. (The Budget Lab has built a tool to help users calculate their own extra mortgage costs.)

The problem is not just for Americans who are lucky enough to buy a home. The bloated government budgets and waning federal revenues of the past decade are driving up costs across the board. Compared with a world in which these fiscal-policy changes did not take place, the annual borrowing costs on a typical auto loan are now up by about $120, and by about $770 on a typical small-business loan. Credit-card borrowing rates are also hovering near record highs.

Although affordability has become a watchword for politicians who understand that rising prices are hurting American families, lawmakers seem to have forgotten that reducing federal deficits would help bring down prices. In the 1990s, Congress and the White House prioritized bringing deficits down by both cutting spending and raising revenue—moves that lowered borrowing costs for American families by about 0.6 percentage points, according to Budget Lab calculations. But few lawmakers seem to be suggesting the spending cuts and tax increases necessary to lower costs now.

[Jared Bernstein: The national debt’s unforgiving math]

The relationship between federal spending and household costs is mostly one of supply and demand. When the U.S. government needs to borrow funds to cover existing and new promises, these demands compete with those of all borrowers, which drives up interest rates for everyone. Lenders only have so much money to offer, so they can charge more for loans when demand is high. When investors have fewer borrowers competing for their funds, they will lower interest rates to appeal to more people.

Much of the big legislation of the past decade, such as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, pandemic stimulus bills, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, has grown the deficit. Lawmakers have passed some legislation to improve the fiscal outlook, such as the Fiscal Responsibility Act in 2023, which cut spending and clawed back unspent coronavirus-relief funds, but most federal policy has lately involved spending money that the country doesn’t quite have. This is hurting consumers, businesses, and the federal government.

The cost of the war in Iran, which the Pentagon put at $29 billion last month (other estimates are higher), will put slight upward pressure on interest rates (0.002 percentage points), according to our calculator. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which we estimate will raise the deficit by $2.4 trillion over the next decade (not including interest costs), will raise interest rates on a typical 30-year mortgage by 0.4 percentage points by the end of 2030—about $1,060 annually for a home bought at the 2024 median price with a 20 percent down payment—and by 1.5 percentage points by the end of 2055.

Most economists support deficit spending during temporary crises, such as a recession, or in cases where an investment can be expected to generate more government revenues in the future, such as funding for infrastructure. But the United States has been spending far more than it takes in for well over two decades.

[Listen: What happens if the U.S. defaults?]

The main remedies for these problems—higher taxes and spending cuts—are generally politically unpopular. Every budget fix will have its critics, but some options are more palatable than others. Better funding for the IRS, for example, could help close the “tax gap”—the amount of taxes legally owed that are not paid in a timely way—which the IRS estimated at about $700 billion a year in 2022. Other levers include raising the retirement age and reducing Social Security benefits for high earners, who also tend to live longer; reforming Medicare Advantage, a program that has been shown to allow private insurers to overcharge the federal government; and removing the tax exemption on employer-provided health insurance, so that these benefits can be taxed as income. The Congressional Budget Office regularly publishes policies that could help close the deficit, and Americans need to decide what we’re willing to pay for and what we’re not.

A big challenge in making these hard choices is that the costs and benefits are asymmetrically understood: Whereas the costs of deficits are diffuse, the costs of policies that close the deficit are acutely clear only to those affected. For example, the Budget Lab has estimated that closing the carried-interest loophole could raise more than $100 billion in federal revenues over 10 years, which would help lower mortgage rates by 0.0064 percentage points. But this collective benefit is too slight for most people to know or care about it. The few people who benefit from this tax break, however, in industries such as private equity and venture capital, very much do care, so they are far more likely to push hard to keep it than the millions of affected Americans are to push to end it.

Politicians respond to electoral consequences. Right now there is nothing stopping them from doling out tax cuts and spending promises while also driving up interest rates. Voters may complain that their lives are becoming unaffordable, but hardly anyone seems to appreciate that federal deficits are partly to blame. If we want to see lawmakers actually address this problem, economists need to do a better job explaining the stakes. This means that instead of talking about the fact that our national debt could fill all 32 NFL stadiums with two tiers of construction pallets filled with $100 bills, we should be talking about how deficit spending is making it harder to pay our own bills.

The Data-Center Panic Is Overblown

2026-06-12T07:00:00-04:00

Data centers are allegedly an unmitigated disaster: They guzzle water, strain electric grids, and raise prices, all while offering almost nothing in return. Little wonder that according to a recent Gallup poll, 71 percent of Americans oppose the construction of new AI data centers in their area. Politicians of both parties are proposing moratoriums on new builds, and local officials who have approved construction in the past are losing reelection because of it.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently captured a popular feeling about the pointlessness of building new data centers for the purpose of powering AI: “Oh, we’ve got to build a data center and charge you more because we want to do videos where I can put your head on Marlon Brando’s body and you can be Don Corleone.”

But the data-center panic is overblown. Most of the complaints inflate the costs of data centers and overlook the fact that, in some contexts at least, they can bring real benefits. If saying no is good politics, it isn’t always good policy.

Let’s start with the claim that data centers do not create good jobs. As Tucker Carlson put it on his show last month, they are “vinyl-clad warehouses in which sit not people making things, but computers computing things.” Sure, data centers produce a brief construction boom—but “that’s not permanent labor,” Greg LeRoy, the founder of an anti-data-center policy group, told Grist.

[From the April 2026 issue: Inside the dirty, dystopian world of AI data centers]

Data centers may not be the employment equivalent of 1950s-style assembly plants—and their promoters frequently exaggerate the possibilities—but new research shows that they do bring good jobs at attractive wages. Comparing counties that opened data centers with similar ones that did not, the economists Dany Bahar and Greg Wright found that the developments increased overall local employment by 4 to 5 percent. Construction employment rose 11 percent, and information-sector employment rose by 22 percent. Many of the jobs that data centers provide—opportunities for electricians, engineers, and plumbers—are of precisely the sort that AI can’t replace (yet). And the people who fill them, Bahar told me, tend to be locals, not new residents drawn from afar. Bahar and Wright found that the employment gains outlasted the construction phase by at least five to six years; average wages in the counties studied ticked up 3 to 4 percent after data-center construction.

The complaints about job creation may also be out of date. Much of the existing data is from co-location facilities, whose owners are essentially landlords renting out space for various companies’ computers and hardware. But data centers in the AI age are generally “hyperscale” facilities, larger projects that are owned and operated by individual companies such as Google and Amazon. Bahar and Wright found that hyperscale centers create far more information-sector jobs than the co-location centers of the past.

Michael Mandel, the chief economist for the Progressive Policy Institute, told me that employment gains are likely to grow as new data centers attract businesses that use AI. Companies using the technology for advanced applications—such as for autonomous vehicles and medical research—may benefit from proximity to these centers, because information can travel faster from source to user. The margin is imperceptible to most people using Claude or ChatGPT, but for companies that depend on real-time AI-powered decision making at scale, tiny differences in latency matter. The kinds of businesses that will drive the AI economy are thus likely to set up in communities that invest in data centers.

Another popular complaint about data centers concerns their water use. Critics argue that AI wastes billions of liters of water every year and that this is an “environmental justice crisis.” Food and Water Watch cites AI’s “enormous thirst for water” as a reason to ban new data-center construction, which it and 200 other environmental organizations urged Congress to do last year. Some tech companies have fueled these complaints by refusing to disclose the amount of water they’re using. In a recent congressional hearing, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez alleged that a Meta data center in Georgia had degraded the local water supply so much that citizens were left with undrinkable water—she held up jars of their brown, sediment-filled water as props.

Data centers certainly do use water. They are basically warehouses of tightly packed, high-powered computers, and when computers run, they get hot. Most data centers—though not all—use water for cooling. But many of them use a “closed loop,” which doesn’t actually waste much, because the water is recycled repeatedly for the same purpose. And many statistics about data centers’ water use are misleading in that they include “indirect” water use too. The Substack writer Andy Masley pointed to one typical and widely cited paper, in which the amount of water that AI supposedly “wastes” includes the water that naturally evaporates off rivers and lakes in Washington State. Why? Because those rivers and lakes are dammed for hydroelectric plants, which generate electricity, which is then used by (among other things) a data center. The water-quality issue AOC pointed out in Georgia is not a general feature of data-center construction and appears to have affected only four households.

In 2023, data centers directly consumed 66 billion liters of water. That number sounds alarming, until you realize that America’s golf courses used almost 2 trillion liters that same year. California’s almond farms use far more than that. At the national level, all data centers combined currently account for less than 0.5 percent of the country’s freshwater use.

Maybe localities where water is scarce—say, Phoenix, Arizona—should think twice about building water-cooled data centers. But even in such places, many of the talking points are exaggerated. In her best-selling book Empire of AI, the journalist Karen Hao alleged that one Google data center in a Chilean city could use 1,000 times more water than the entire population uses in a year. A more accurate projection found the data-center water use to be equivalent to the amount used by about 20 percent of the city’s residents. (Hao, to her credit, later acknowledged that her calculation was wildly off base.)

Data centers do use a troubling share of electricity. Fengqi You, a professor of energy-systems engineering, told me that concerns about energy supply “are not to be dismissed.” But here, too, You stressed, “location really matters.” Plenty of places where data centers are being built have more electrical supply than they currently use. Others, though, have grids that are already strained. And if new data centers substantially juice demand while supply stays fixed, prices may rise for everyone, including everyday consumers.

America has needed more and better energy infrastructure since before data centers became an ongoing concern. “We’re putting pressure on a sector which itself has not prospered,” Mandel, the economist, said. But a lack of supply is not inevitable. Critics often seize on the fact that electricity prices have been rising in Virginia, where data centers account for almost 40 percent of the state’s electricity use. But electricity prices are rising faster in some states with far less data-center development—for instance, New Jersey and Maryland. And Texas, which is building more data centers than Virginia, has kept prices low by increasing capacity.

Loudoun County, Virginia, might be the best place to figure out how data centers affect the communities where they’re located. Over the past 20 years, Loudoun has come to house 53 million square feet of data centers and more computing power than all of Beijing. Contrary to what critics believe, the experience of Loudoun suggests that when a data center comes to town, the economy improves.

Data centers occupy only about 3 percent of the county’s land area but account for almost half of its property-tax revenue—a projected $1.3 billion in 2026. I asked Buddy Rizer, the county’s chief development officer, what that revenue has meant for the people of Loudoun. “We’ve been able to build 32 schools and 16 fire stations and six libraries and miles of roads and more than 1,000 acres of parks and recreation, and started an affordable-housing program,” he told me, “all while lowering the tax rate on our citizens.” Loudoun has slashed its homeowners’ property-tax rate by nearly a third over the past decade.

[Listen: Why everyone hates AI data centers]

That’s not to say that Loudoun’s transformation has been entirely smooth. The county made mistakes, including zoning noisy data centers too close to residential areas. Even Rizer admitted that he would do things “a little bit different” a second time. And most localities courting data centers will not be looking to build on the scale that Loudoun has. Still, Rizer said, he has told his counterparts in other counties that “having one or two data centers could double their tax revenue in a year.”

Just how profitable data centers are for local governments depends in part, of course, on how they are taxed. Loudoun imposes what’s called a “tangible personal property” tax on businesses, which allows the county to tax the valuable equipment housed in data centers in addition to their square footage. Plenty of counties around the country have similar taxes already in place. Conversely, some states offer sales-tax breaks to data centers in order to court them; if those are too aggressive, they can offset gains.

The reasons for resisting data centers may ultimately have less to do with the tangible costs than the symbolic ones. These unlovely warehouses of supercomputers are the physical infrastructure upon which artificial intelligence is built. They give concrete form to a technology whose promises and perils can otherwise seem abstract. And so they are a stand-in for all that Americans fear about AI: the disruption of education and work, the prospect of simulated relationships and machine-generated art. A moratorium bill advanced by Senator Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez articulated these fears in populist terms: “We cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy, and the future of humanity,” Sanders said.

The AI future can seem mysterious and foreboding, and the issues surrounding it, therefore, can seem alien. The logistical trade-offs of building new data centers are, by contrast, very familiar. They are the same challenges that have always faced big industrial projects, and are amenable to the same kinds of solutions. Data centers will make sense in some communities and not in others. The best question to ask may not be whether to build, but where and how.

The Boeing 747 Begins Its Final Descent

2026-06-12T07:00:00-04:00

I. The Boneyard

Through the heat haze, airplane tails rose from the desert. As I steered off the interstate toward Pinal Airpark, in Marana, Arizona, I got my first view of a corpse in full: a stark-white Boeing 747, its wings sheared off, its passenger doors open to the dust and wind, a rickety set of airstairs inviting no one aboard. The plane was a memory, a ruin, but its swooping, humped nose was still striking—a visage that signaled the freedom of movement in the Jet Age.

I was arriving at this desolate site north of Tucson, where airplanes go to die, to mourn the 747, the original jumbo jet—a.k.a. the Whale, the Longreach, the Sky Cruiser, the Mother of All Airliners, the Queen of the Skies. For 50 years, the aircraft was the principal host of Important Journeys: a young student’s trip to study abroad in Paris, a first-generation American’s pilgrimage to their ancestral home in Hungary, an Iranian family fleeing the 1979 revolution. Combining the immensity of an ocean liner and the elegance of a swan, the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful. Over the past two decades, airlines have stopped using it as a passenger plane and replaced it with smaller aircraft that are more efficient, but far less majestic and memorable. The 747 was once a symbol of American might, invention, progress, and populism. Now it embodies the decline of all of those values.

Jim Petty, the airpark’s manager, led me out the back door of his small office to his truck, and we peeled out toward the long rows of forsaken aircraft. I had been calling Pinal a boneyard, but Petty told me that he doesn’t like the term. Some planes get brought here for a checkup, others for intensive care or storage. Some ailing vessels are delivered here with every intention of flying again, like an elderly relative sent to a short-term-care facility. But if rehabilitation proves impossible, Pinal becomes their final destination.

Sign up for Ordinary Extraordinary, Ian Bogost’s guide to making everyday life vivid again. You’ll receive the first edition of the limited-run newsletter course in early July.

Petty parked us under a TWA 747 that had been sitting there for almost 30 years. Its enormity eclipsed the hot desert sun. The tires alone were more than four feet tall, a memorial to outsize ambitions. From 1970, when the first 747 entered service, to 2023, when Boeing stopped building the plane, the company manufactured 1,574 of them, including the two that still serve as Air Force One. Most 747 routes spanned oceans and continents, giving travelers a speedier option than the Queen Mary had across the Atlantic, or the California Zephyr across the West. For generations, these jumbo jets flew to London, to Osaka, to San Francisco. But more recently, 747s have been flying to Pinal—drawn here by their own obsolescence.

“Some day,” Petty said, “there’s just going to be one left.”

II. Birth of an Icon

Starting the engines brings a sudden hush followed by a smooth roar. At 300-some metric tons, fully loaded, and with a wingspan that would cover two-thirds of a football field, the plane could be tricky to drive but was supple to fly. On the ground and about three stories up, pilots were aware of all they couldn’t see. Once airborne, though, a sense of infinity dawned out the cockpit windows, and of sheer mass behind the pilots. In the cabin, the heft makes the plane feel almost still, even at 500 miles an hour and 35,000 feet; it is the only plane I have ever flown in whose takeoff and landing were imperceptible to the senses. Paul Gallaher, a longtime 747 captain, told me he couldn’t remember a hard landing. He said that it was the plane every pilot wanted to fly, the top rung of a commercial-aviation career.

Like most technological innovations of the 20th century, the 747 project was catalyzed by the military. In the early 1960s, Boeing produced designs in response to a government request for a large military transport aircraft. Lockheed won that job and produced the C‑5 Galaxy. Boeing’s loss steeled its resolve and freed up engineers to work on the biggest airplane ever built for commercial service. Boeing acquired 780 acres of land in Everett, Washington, just north of Seattle, and erected an assembly complex that included the largest building in the world by volume—at a cost of $200 million ($2 billion in today’s dollars)—to house up to eight 747s under construction. About 2,700 engineers labored on the project.

Aviation executives called a risk like this the “sporty game”—a shameless mid-century, flannel-suit euphemism for staking an entire company on a single long-odds bet. Had the 747 project faltered, Boeing would likely have gone down with it.

Thomas Gray, who joined Boeing in 1961 as an electrical engineer, calls himself the “first passenger on the first 747,” responsible for in-flight testing. “Whether it was strain, arrows, airspeed, whatever,” he told me, “we had to measure all that data onto a tape machine.” Gray, a lanky man with a gray mustache, volunteers as a docent at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, just across from Boeing Field. For 17 years, the 747 served as his office. This was the Wild West of commercial aviation, after planes had been proven but when the Jet Age was still new and exciting.

Watching the plane’s first flight from the blast fence, in 1969, Gray remembers telling a fellow engineer beside him, “One of these days, there are going to be 747s lined up to take off.” He was right. Boeing’s earlier jets—the 707, 727, and 737—carried fewer than 200 souls. The 747 could carry north of 490 passengers, plus a massive amount of cargo, and still fly thousands of miles farther than most existing jets. Juan Trippe, who ordered 25 747s for Pan Am in 1966 at a cost of $5 billion in today’s dollars, saw the plane as an instrument of human flourishing. “The new era of mass travel between nations may well prove more significant to human destiny than the atom bomb,” he said at the time, calling the aircraft “a great weapon for peace.”

The jumbo jet would make the world smaller in the same way that railroads and ocean liners had in the century prior. This was the age of seemingly impossible endeavors undertaken and accomplished despite extreme risk; five months after the 747 first took flight, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. This spirit of rarefied American invention, fueled by both government investment and private capital, was meant to serve all humankind.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Francois Pages / Paris Match / Getty; Jim Gray / Keystone / Getty; AFP / Getty; Classic-ads / Alamy.

It worked. From 1969 to 1979, the number of people flying every year more than doubled, to 640 million. Flying was glamorous—in part because it was expensive, but also because the 747 was built for human comfort as well as fuel efficiency.

Speed was expected to supplant comfort, eventually. In anticipation of supersonic flight, the 747 was designed to shift into cargo duty sometime by the end of the ’70s; its cygnine hump allowed containers to be loaded through its nose, which opens like the mouth of a cartoon shark. But the supersonic passenger jet was a bust, and the 747 persisted. Its accidental longevity defined an era.

III. Legroom and Caviar

The British architect Norman Foster once called the 747 his favorite building of the 20th century. Like the ocean liners and railcars it replaced, the 747 is more than a vehicle. It is also a dwelling.

The upper-deck lounge became the first and most important room in this building—though somewhat incidentally. The charge to make the plane capable of loading cargo through its nose required the flight deck to be situated above the main section. Once the flight deck was placed high, over the cargo slot, the plane needed to sweep back accordingly for aerodynamics, one retired Boeing engineer told me. What to put in that space?

A cocktail bar, obviously. Air France and United installed lounges with rotating seats to allow passengers to mingle. Air India put in bright-red carpeting and sofas, with images of apsaras on the bulkhead behind them. Qantas offered the nautical-themed Captain Cook Lounge, with lantern sconces, intricate woodwork, and rope-wrapped swivel seats and cocktail tables.

Boeing named its first 747 the City of Everett, after its birthplace, and painted it in Boeing’s corporate color scheme: white with a red cheatline, a gray belly, and a black glare panel. Gray and his colleagues used the City of Everett for testing; it was never outfitted with an interior. The aircraft now lives at the Museum of Flight. Visitors can take a tour inside but are generally not allowed up the spiral staircase to the upper deck and cockpit.

I negotiated an exception. When I ascended the tight stairwell, I was surprised to see it decorated as a lounge, complete with antiqued mirrors on the rear bulkhead, blue carpeting, and vivid, mod-printed seating. At some point in the City of Everett’s long life, an upholstery shop had redone the upper-deck seating with old Braniff Airways fabric.

Peggy Verger and Cheryl Grimm, two former United flight attendants, met me in the lounge to share memories of service on early 747s. For Verger, luxury wasn’t really the point of the plane’s interior design. “We’ve lost the personality of flying,” she said. At first I thought she was talking about the style—the Pucci-designed Braniff uniforms, or Eero Saarinen’s modernist terminals. But she meant personalities. She meant people. “We loved talking to the people,” Verger said. “The lounges, the wide aisles. We were tight with the passengers. ‘So how’s your dog?’ We were much more social.”

Travelers turned in their seats to their neighbors. They stood up and chatted with someone across the aisle. They moved through the cabin to a lounge, or to ask for a coffee. Sometimes, after giving children pin-on airline wings, the stewardesses—as they were called at the time—would recruit them to help pass out nuts or matches. “It just was all so different,” Verger added. “The passenger was a person.”

The food in first class was rich: hand-carved meats, lobster, caviar. Even fliers in the back ate like royalty; on a 1970 Pan Am flight from JFK to Heathrow, a coach-class passenger would have enjoyed filet mignon. Small sofa lounges were tucked into the front or rear of some aircraft. One Continental Airlines 747, called the Proud Bird of the Pacific, had a spacious Polynesian Pub in the coach cabin, with floral-print seats around low-slung pedestal tables. American Airlines built a coach lounge with black-and-white geometric carpet and red upholstered seating that anyone might mistake for a hotel lobby. American installed a piano bar there, too, although it used an electric organ (pianos are hard to keep in tune when subjected to the forces of takeoff and landing).

Features like these inspired Continental, in 1971, to advertise its 747 flights as “Air Cruises.” Grimm recalled constant activities and contests. Passengers celebrating a birthday or an anniversary could order a cake or a bottle of champagne. “It was just a nice party,” she said.

The cabin’s ceilings rose to eight feet—even at the window seats—and the exterior walls stood nearly straight up and down, allowing even the tallest passengers to stand upright, like a human instead of a sardine.

Use of the whole space was encouraged. Why make a building for people to remain seated in? A TWA pamphlet about 747 service from the early 1970s encouraged passengers to exercise on their flight: “Walk 13 times up and down the cabin and you’ve actually covered one mile.” Continental once boasted of removing 41 seats for four extra inches of legroom in coach. Even on a three-hour domestic flight, the experience of the airborne building was deemed as important as the transportation itself.

Wide-body airliners made global flight accessible to many people, but industry growth slowed by the mid-1970s. The 1973 oil shock made fuel more expensive, altering the fundamentals of the airline business. Hijackings surged, leading to the invention of airport security. In 1978, deregulation transformed the economics of the domestic airline industry. Fares dropped dramatically, and more people began to fly. As the clientele became more pedestrian, flying felt less cosmopolitan.

And the comforts started to vanish. The social spaces and coach lounges began disappearing so the airlines could cram in more passengers—including into the upper deck, which became certified for passenger seating during taxi, takeoff, and landing. The new hub-and-spoke model of air service started displacing milk-run paths. Domestic flights on the 747, such as the Chicago-L.A. leg of the Proud Bird of the Pacific, became rarer. Instead, the aircraft mostly flew people over oceans. The most beautiful building of the 20th century was becoming just another vehicle.

Fox Photos / Getty

A first-class lunch served in the nose of a Boeing 747, 1970

IV. Metal Tubes With Wings

Before the September 11 attacks closed terminals to the unticketed, anyone could pass through the metal detectors and go right up to the gate. You could do this to welcome or send off a loved one. You could meet up with a friend on a layover. Or you could just see the planes.

Cheryl Grimm remembers passengers bringing their friends to the gate, just to see her 747 taxiing. Pilots remember it too. Mark Vanhoenacker flew 747s for British Airways out of London until 2019, just before the airline removed the plane from service. He told me about disembarking at his favorite destinations—Cape Town, Tokyo, Vancouver—and looking over his shoulder in childlike wonder. I can’t believe I flew that airplane a third of the way around the world, he’d think to himself.

The aircraft began service in the middle of the Vietnam War. In 1975, after the tragic crash of a C‑5 Galaxy military transport aircraft meant to evacuate Vietnamese orphans, two chartered Pan Am 747s stepped in as a part of Operation Babylift. That effort was accused of both propagandism and abduction. But many citizens were desperate to leave Vietnam, and they did so voluntarily, in the bosom of the Mother of All Airliners.

For that reason, Peggy Verger understood crewing the 747 as a patriotic act. She remembered a group of Vietnamese refugees boarding a flight of hers in Tokyo. “And when they got off—they were doctors and lawyers, and a lot of them spoke English—they would say things like Thank you for letting me come into your country,” she said, stopping to press her heart. “Tears coming down.” Grimm remembers similar scenes, on flights to Vancouver before Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule. Or Russian immigrants on flights to New York: a whole family, from the grandmother to the children, taking up an entire row of the airplane, each with just a little sack of belongings. Grimm would think to herself: Thank you, Lord, for letting me be born in America.

The 747’s fusion of aeronautical ability and symbolic power earned it many roles beyond passenger liner and freighter. By 1977, Thomas Gray, the Boeing engineer, was running test flights for a heavily modified Whale to carry the space shuttle Enterprise atop it. NASA used the plane to shuttle the shuttle from its landing sites back to the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. One icon of America had settled the global skies, and on its shoulders sat another, set to conquer the cosmos. The sight of the pair mated together suggested that the 20th century’s progress would never end.

It did, of course. The shuttle program closed in 2011, as 747s were already disappearing from the skies. Today, beholding a 747 in person has become harder, especially in the United States. The charter carrier Atlas Air flies some, as does the freight operator Kalitta, but even their numbers are dwindling as companies move to more efficient two-engine aircraft. Lufthansa flies the most scheduled passenger flights on the 747—between Frankfurt and destinations that include Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.—and Korean Air also still runs the plane overseas. But the 747 has moved downmarket: China, Iran, and Russia use them for bus-like domestic routes. Even when foreign carriers fly 747s, though, the sight of one of their planes invokes American ingenuity, because the aircraft was designed and built by America.

When the 747 is gone, other aircraft will service high-capacity, long-haul routes: the Boeing 777, for example, and the Airbus A350. But none of those planes will symbolize global access and renewal, because nothing about any other plane is symbolic. They all look and feel the same. They are just metal tubes with wings. When we are on a plane these days, we are really inside our headphones, sewn into our seats, yearning for it to end. The miracle of flight itself goes unnoticed, as even daytime travelers draw their shades. They do so to sleep, or to increase the contrast on their screen. Striking up a conversation is taboo. Six miles aboveground, you feel buried rather than aloft.

V. The Flying Oval Office

The last 747 on Americans’ radar is the one carrying Donald Trump. Air Force One has been a 747 for nearly 36 years, since George H. W. Bush first ascended its staircase on September 6, 1990, to fly from Andrews Air Force Base to Topeka, Kansas, for a fundraising luncheon.

Air Force One is heavily modified and highly customized—its 4,000 square feet of interior space include a medical facility and two kitchens that can serve 100 gourmet meals—but from the outside, it still looks the same as any other 747, from Pan Am onward, apart from the color scheme and presidential seal. In previous eras, the most powerful person in the world boarded the same equipment that you might use to take a Hawaiian vacation. But there was something regal about a president descending those steps, or waving from the top of them, on foreign soil. The plane is a literal ship of state. On September 11, 2001, amid a nationwide ground stop while the country was under attack, Air Force One was George W. Bush’s “flying Oval Office,” to borrow Boeing’s phrase. Trump loves to do domestic flyovers—of his rallies, of a Washington Commanders game in November—and show off the sheer size of the plane at low altitudes.

But Air Force One has aged. The two 747s that currently share the duty are the same ones that Bush 41 flew on. In 2018, the first Trump administration struck a $3.9 billion deal with Boeing to make two new planes, based on the 747-8, the aircraft’s final variation. The planes were meant to be delivered by 2024, but they have not arrived. The project has been plagued by technical issues, supplier disputes, and alleged tomfoolery—empty mini tequila bottles were reportedly discovered on one of the airplanes under construction. Boeing has absorbed more than $2 billion in cost overruns on the project. (“We continue to make steady progress” on the project, a Boeing spokesperson told me.)

The stumble couldn’t have come at a worse moment for the company. Around the same time that Trump ordered the new Air Force Ones, Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft began experiencing software problems that eventually led to disaster, including two accidents that killed 346 people. All planes in the fleet were grounded. Boeing paid large penalties and settlements in the ensuing years, and faced increased competition from Airbus, its European rival. In January 2024, an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 suffered a door-plug blowout due to improper installation. The company that once played the sporty game to invent the jumbo jet couldn’t seem to make new versions of its bread-and-butter mid-range aircraft.

By spring 2025, still without his new Air Force One, Trump began to consider accepting a luxury-appointed Boeing 747-8 as a gift from Qatar instead. Despite concerns about corruption and national security, the government took the gift, valued at $400 million. Only a “stupid person” would decline a “free, very expensive airplane,” Trump said at the time. The cost of modifying the plane for presidential use is classified; “probably less than $400 million” is what Air Force Secretary Troy Meink told Congress last year. The Air Force announced on May 1, 2026, that the aircraft is scheduled to fly this summer, with a new red, white, and blue livery. Will the American taxpayer end up paying for both the retrofitting and the new planes? “Yes,” an Air Force spokesperson told me.

Another problem plagues a presidential 747, whether or not an emir delivers it: It is not a plane of the people anymore. It is a rarity, more often an opulent private palace than an instrument of common carriage. The likeliest way for me to fly on a 747 in the United States, at this moment, would be in a press seat on the president’s plane.

A common route for Air Force One these days is from Andrews Air Force Base to Palm Beach International Airport, for Trump’s weekends at Mar-a-Lago. I figured that the White House, and even the president himself, might welcome me aboard, to experience the greatest passenger plane in the sky over the greatest country in the world. The White House nearly gave me a seat in late January, but then the trip filled up. On one of the flights I was not aboard that weekend, Trump told reporters that he had opened airspace in South America so that some immigrants could “go back to Venezuela and stay, perhaps.” America has traveled a long way from Peggy Verger’s huddled masses yearning to fly free.

In recent years, the 747 has amounted to an old plane for an old-man president. What will its next iteration symbolize? If a new Air Force One finally rolls off the beleaguered Boeing line, it will still be a fully American lodestar, however faded its shine. If instead Trump flies on a gift from a foreign power, it won’t matter how American its bones are.

VI. Farewell Tour

Flying is more a part of life than ever, but it feels disappointing at best, and inhumane at worst. This year, a Homeland Security shutdown created hours-long security lines; an elective war with Iran spiked the cost of fuel and ticket prices. Old dreams were forgotten too. The possibility of supersonic passenger travel has been abandoned in favor of trim-tab adjustments, such as Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, with its bigger windows and less arid cabins. The competition that deregulation once spurred has all but dried up. The few airlines that are left, having been allowed to consolidate into oligopoly, have abandoned the medium-size cities that were their former hubs, such as Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Memphis. The big four U.S. carriers—United, Delta, American, and Southwest—have effectively become banks: The difference between profit and loss comes down to the loyalty points they sell to their credit-card partners each year. Cramped passengers are ruled not by bonhomie but by hair-trigger aggression, while flight crews seek compliance rather than kinship. No frills are left to entice or distract passengers. The main benefit of sitting in first class is that you might still be served free cocktails, while a coach passenger is left with a puny bag of carbs, one cup of soda, and complimentary (for now) trash collection. Forget about power and freedom. Commercial airplanes no longer symbolize anything except a desire to be anywhere else. Nobody cares what kind of plane they fly in anymore, so long as they are on it as little as possible.

Adriana Zehbrauskas For The Atlantic

Planes sent to Pinal Airpark, in Marana, Arizona, for repair, storage, or scrapping

A quarter of the 21st century has now elapsed, but the 20th century, its engines cut, has managed to stay aloft. It is now finally landing, at Pinal Airpark in Arizona. “I flew the last passenger U.S. airplane to the desert,” Captain Steve Hanlon told me by phone from Atlanta, where he works for Delta as a flight-simulator pilot instructor. In 2017, Delta retired the aircraft (Ship 6314) and the rest of its 747 fleet for the same reason every other airline did and will: A four-engine jumbo jet is more expensive to operate than newer, if less striking, alternatives. Ship 6314 went on a farewell tour of former Northwest and Delta hubs, including hangar parties in Seattle, Detroit, Atlanta, and Minneapolis and a more somber affair in L.A. “Don’t say it’s ‘sad,’ ” Hanlon remembers the Delta corporate reps telling him. They also changed how he referred to the vessel—“she,” as sailors have done since antiquity—in an interview for a corporate press release. “Instead they put ‘it,’ ” he said, scoffing.

The scene aboard Ship 6314 was celebratory. A pilot and a flight attendant, who had met on a 747 military charter years earlier, were married in the air. But Hanlon, who had been flying 747s for 20 years, felt the pull of an ending as he held the Whale’s yoke, setting the aircraft down gently on the Pinal runway, with his co-captain, Paul Gallaher, by his side. “It was sad,” Hanlon told me. “Like putting my favorite dog down.” It was the last time either man would fly a 747.

Ship 6314’s phantom neighbors include the 747 that once transported the Ohio televangelist Ernest Angley, who used the plane to spread the good word before financial issues brought him back to Earth. Japan’s equivalent to Air Force One is also here. So is a 747 that was intended for Saudi Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz and cost $300 million; it flew for less than 50 hours and is now being scrapped at Pinal—the aviation equivalent of parting out a brand-new Bugatti.

When Jim Petty, Pinal’s manager, parked us under the long-forsaken TWA 747, he pointed out the grid of missing skin where aluminum from the fuselage had been cut in tidy rows to make plane tags, a type of aviation collectible. Nearby, a former Korean Air vessel’s nose cone had been removed clean, as if seared off with a hot knife. A galley intercom phone hung from a chasm in the tail of another 747, swinging as if dropped from a phone booth in a film noir. Just above it, Petty pointed out a hawk roost. “For five years they came here,” he said. “I always thought it was cool that a bird made its nest in a plane.”

When all of the useful parts have been claimed from a corpse, industrial scavengers tug the remains to a cement pad, where excavators tear the vessel into bits of metal, Petty explained. The scrap gets loaded onto 18-wheelers and hauled away for recycling. “It’s never used again to make an aircraft,” he said, “but it goes into wheels for cars, or beer cans.” Pointing at the Diet Coke he gave me upon arrival to quench my desert thirst, Petty noted that it might once have been a small piece of the Queen of the Skies.

Almost all of the engines had been harvested from these planes. Removing the weight can cause the planes to tip upward, and point their noses to the sky. The blades of one abandoned engine, lying at Pinal since 2014, issued a tinny clatter as they spun in the breeze. “It makes me think that the plane wants to head out,” Petty said. “It wants to go.” But both of us knew better. It was a death rattle, and for more than just a type of airplane.

In the faux–Braniff lounge aboard that first 747, at the Museum of Flight, I had asked Cheryl Grimm and Peggy Verger for their best memory of the aircraft. The former flight attendants couldn’t summon a story, and instead fell back on a feeling. “You were just happy to be there,” Verger said. Grimm could only echo that bygone affection: “You were just happy to be there.”

*Illustration source images: Adsr / Alamy; Jim Gray / Keystone / Getty; Diana Walker / Getty; Gene Glover / Agentur Focus / OSTKREUZ Archiv / Redux; Francois Pages / Paris Match / Getty; © SAS Museum Oslo Norway.

This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “Queen of the Skies.”