The Atlantic

Matt Damon Has a Gift for Your Mom

2026-05-10T14:18:56-04:00

As he introduced Saturday Night Live’s annual Mother’s Day show last night, Matt Damon had a confession to make. This year, he was sad to say, the cast’s moms weren’t at 30 Rock to kick things off with a dose of warm fuzzies. Instead, he offered a service to every panicked child in the audience who’d made it to the night before Mother’s Day without buying their mom a gift: a “personal,” direct-to-camera greeting that not only flattered its recipient’s looks but also reminded them that they deserved a night out. Why not head to the theater—perhaps to see the actor’s upcoming film, The Odyssey, a trailer for which conveniently played in the commercial break following Damon’s monologue.

In a way, he was offering a culture-wide apology for an unfortunate tendency: to overlook the one day a year dedicated to recognizing our moms and the often taken-for-granted toil of motherhood. But what if there were a way to make up for all those forgotten Mother’s Days? An everlasting thank-you card fulfilling the wishes of any mom who may be feeling unappreciated, exhausted, or neglected? Maybe one that comes with goo-goo eyes from Matt Damon?

That’s what “Mom: The Movie” is for. In the spoof of gentle, soft, focused crowd pleasers, SNL’s Ashley Padilla channeled the kind of maternal figure she’s honed over two seasons on the show—culturally out of touch, relentlessly cheerful, and covered in statement accessories. The central joke: Only in the movies would a family indulge its matriarch’s basic desires for companionship, sensitivity, and praise. More than that, she was the mom who’d gotten everything she’d ever wanted: Her adult kids had moved back into her house, two grandchildren were on the way, and she was Mrs. Matt Damon—Rhonda Damon, to be exact. Yet funny as it was, the “story by moms, for moms” had a twinge of sadness at its core. The movie-trailer framing and Padilla’s exaggerated reactions and line readings kept the sketch in the realm of comedy. But just as much of its humor came from portraying displays of everyday decency as the stuff of Hollywood make-believe, on par with the cinematic catharsis of a high-stakes Damon vehicle.

The comedic targets were hit hard and often, with punch lines that could resonate on either side of the parent-child divide. Rhonda tempted Damon with an offer to “slip into something a little more comfortable,” then tore at her Talbots-esque top to reveal a pair of saucy, shoulder-baring cutouts. A gaudy gift she gave her daughter was not only tolerated but proudly worn outside the house—which prompted Padilla’s motormouthed exclamation: “Is that the pink puffy purse I bought you with the big old gold chain?” And in a nod to anyone who’d ever had to give their mom a mid-movie rundown of which character was which and how they were related to one another, everyone on-screen wore a name tag.

When the trailer cut to three middle-aged women in the audience (played by Chloe Fineman, Sarah Sherman, and Jane Wickline) offering their reactions to the movie, a striking irony set in: The film in which a mom had a blast spending all her time with her adoring family existed to give her real-world counterparts needed time away from their families. That paradox was all over the movie’s fairy-tale elements, which allowed the intended viewers to escape their own dreary realities and live in Padilla’s glammed-up, scarf-festooned one. (The stark contrast between her cozy-chic house and the unremarkable, harshly lit theater lobby was a clear differentiating touch.)

Then again, one of the parody’s other turns argued that the fantasy had more in common with a screensaver than actual cinema. The sketch understood the parody’s target demographic well enough to recognize that with all the mental and physical energy that moms expend, they’re probably going to conk out before the second act. For the remainder of the runtime, a narrator explained in voiceover, the movie was little more than a nonstop parade of smiling actors and rearranged props.

The women were shown snoozing while the movie did its best to not disturb their slumber—revealing an additional, crucial poignancy. Moms were the subject of mockery, but they were depicted empathetically too. Because, sure, the average mother works hard enough the other 364 days of the year to deserve a Mother’s Day tribute that puts her modest dreams of grateful children and a thoughtful spouse on the silver screen. But maybe the best gift is a quiet, dark room where she can drift off for an extended period of alone time.

Ten Thousand Things Arising

2026-05-10T12:00:00-04:00

Not even if is a wildfire in close enough range.

Not even the present is within breath.

For years the answers came, the same

answer, or not the same at all,

spotted in a different tongue, then none at all.

The soft filling of the future tense

that would not fit into a grid, one I could name.

And right in the midpoint of what I thought was mid-

life, a new character padded onto the page.

Who traveled from the long after.

Leaking the afterlife.

And all that year, I couldn’t read, knowing language

could be directional, drawing close. Moving away.

But the character was recurring, then the main figure.

His mouth loaded, the bababa.

Between his diaphragm and hard palate:

phonic vibration and smear.

Strained visage behind my 37th year.

And how did we get here—you and I, I mean.

My child whose modifiers I tend and prune on the screen.

You were a no and then one

of ten thousand things arising in the mind’s snow.

Stay, you bid me, stay.

And from that point on there was no question laid

and there I was, now dragged by

the endless itching

of the clock’s hands, around and around

the now, now, now.

Was there ever a chase?

It’s getting late.

I shiver, touching you

here on the page.

This poem appears in the June 2026 print edition.

Marty Makary Set the Conditions for His Own Downfall

2026-05-10T08:00:00-04:00

Marty Makary, the Johns Hopkins surgeon who has led the FDA for the past year, is facing criticism from all sides. Vaping advocates are angry because of the FDA’s slow progress on green-lighting their products. Pro-life groups have called for Makary’s firing because he has not been tough enough on abortion. Current and former FDA officials have repeatedly warned that the agency is in turmoil. Even drug companies, typically cautious about criticizing regulators, have raised concerns about the state of the agency. Donald Trump has now reportedly signed off on a plan to fire Makary—although when exactly that axe might fall is unclear. On Friday evening, the president told reporters gathered at the White House that he knew nothing about Makary’s future.

Traditionally, FDA commissioners have been less dramatic figures; they have approached their role as steward of an organization whose strength stems from its independence. The logic of that position is simple: Putting a drug on the market simply because of a commissioner’s or a president’s preference, or burying politically inconvenient research, doesn’t inspire much confidence in the safety of America’s food and drugs. But Makary has shown again and again that he’s willing to put politics first, a strategy that may have created the conditions for his own fall from power. (Neither Makary nor the White House agreed to comment for this story.)

The problems began shortly after Makary’s confirmation. In June, he announced the launch of the Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher, a pilot program meant to dole out speedy approvals for drugs that “align with one of five critical U.S. national health priorities.” The program quickly became a tool for political influence. The FDA frequently does speed up review for important drugs, but drugs that are given a golden ticket must address a serious, unmet medical need. For the new program, all decisions to award vouchers were cleared by the White House, STAT News reported. As such, the vouchers appeared to have become a bargaining chip in negotiations with drug companies over their pricing. On the same day that the White House announced that Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk would drop the price of their GLP-1 weight-loss drugs and sell them on a Trump-branded website, both companies were also granted vouchers for new weight-loss drugs.

Makary and his deputies have also regularly overruled career staff, often with nakedly political motives. During his confirmation hearing, for instance, Makary promised lawmakers that he would “take a solid, hard look at the data” concerning the safety of the abortion drug mifepristone. And although Makary has claimed that FDA scientists have begun reviewing the data, news broke in December that he had also instructed FDA staff to delay the review until after the midterm elections. (At the time, the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA, denied any political motivations.) Vinay Prasad, whom Makary hired as the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, replaced a longtime FDA official who had disagreed with Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the safety of vaccines; Prasad quickly moved to limit young, healthy people’s access to COVID vaccines. Prasad was also behind the FDA’s short-lived decision to block the review of a new mRNA flu vaccine. He said that these decisions were motivated by a need for stronger evidence, but they also aligned with Kennedy’s personal skepticism of COVID and mRNA vaccines. Both of these decisions were reportedly made against the advice of FDA staff. (Prasad has since been pushed out of the agency.)

Ironically, the scandal that may cost Makary his job—the FDA’s reluctance to authorize the sale of flavored vapes—involves him ignoring the advice of FDA officials while apparently misreading, or perhaps disregarding, the politics of the issue. The commissioner has shown himself to be exceptionally skeptical about these products. He has publicly said that he does not believe the government’s own data showing that the epidemic of youth vaping has improved and only 5 percent of young people now vape. At a September 2025 press conference, he claimed that “the broken CDC that we inherited under the Biden administration” had used a flawed methodology to collect the data. (The long-running survey he alluded to is generally regarded as the best source of national data on youth vaping.) According to The Wall Street Journal, Makary personally overruled FDA scientists who recommended authorizing flavored vapes that include features designed to prevent use by anyone under 21.

But Makary was putting his own preferences before the president’s. Trump appears to see vaping as a political issue: During his campaign, he publicly promised to save the industry, and he reportedly confronted Makary about the FDA’s approach toward vaping. It’s unclear whether this frustration in particular is what has prompted Trump to seriously consider firing Makary, but shortly after the dressing down, the FDA announced that the vapes the commissioner had originally blocked would now be authorized.

Makary came into this job with gripes about the agency. His 2024 book, Blind Spots, is full of criticisms of FDA decisions that he says represent “medical dogma.” And in a recent CNBC interview in which he was confronted about the decision during his own tenure to not approve a skin-cancer drug, he sounded a lot like his predecessors by decrying political pressure. “You have a decision when you come in as commissioner: Do you throw science out the window and do whatever the media tells you to do, and whatever the lobbyists and corporate interests tell you to do, or do you do what’s right?” he said. And some of the recent flack the FDA has received has come from companies and commentators who thought that the agency was holding back approvals or asking for too much evidence. Not all of the controversial calls for better data came from Makary or Prasad, either; during the review of the skin-cancer therapy, for instance, the calls for more data came from longtime FDA officials.

It’s easy enough for an FDA commissioner to make enemies. What people put in their bodies is controversial, and an FDA commissioner has to make hard decisions about the products of powerful, well-resourced companies. Makary is not the first commissioner to buckle to political pressure, but he’s the only one who has so evidently made it a habit. The disparate critiques of Makary are interrelated: They show how, time and again, he’s put his or his bosses’ preferences first. These decisions may end his career as commissioner, but they’ve already set a dangerous precedent for political interference at the agency.

People Who Don’t Like People Are Making All Our Decisions

2026-05-10T07:30:34-04:00

In the beginning, God created Man and Man created cities. And from these cities sprang forth a service to cart Man around: the taxi. And it was good. So good that, over centuries, it barely changed. Visitors to ancient Rome could hail a cisium. In 17th-century France, they could take a fiacre. And 19th-century England had the hackney coach. Automobiles eventually replaced horse-drawn carriages, but other than that, the experience remained the same: Passengers hailed a driver who would help them load their luggage and perhaps make small talk about the city while ferrying them to their destination.

Then, in 2009, Man made the ride-share app. And it was very good. Many of the nuisances of taxis that had seemed unavoidable were eliminated overnight. Waiting in the cold with your hand in the air scanning for available cabs? Drivers refusing to take you somewhere after you’d already gotten in their vehicle? Cabs refusing to stop because of your race? Losing items, never to see them again? All problems that were gladly ushered into the past. The act of schlepping around a city was changed forever.

Ride-sharing has its own flaws: surge pricing in inclement weather, incessant rate hikes, late or canceled rides. But in all of the ways I’ve imagined improving upon the modern taxi, eliminating drivers themselves has never crossed my mind. And yet, the powerful minds of Silicon Valley and the investors who fund them are trying to do just that.

[Read: Move fast and break nothing]

Earlier this year, Tesla, which already has a driverless-taxi service, announced that its Gigafactory in Texas would begin producing robotaxis devoid of steering wheels or pedals. Waymo, the Alphabet-owned driverless-taxi service that launched commercially in 2020, recently raised $16 billion, and plans to expand into more than 20 cities. In November, Los Angeles and San Francisco, where Waymos were already operating, started allowing the vehicles to travel on highways and to certain airports. Waymo now has its sights set on America’s taxi mecca: New York City.

The pitch for driverless taxis follows the familiar contours of many of Silicon Valley’s recent technological advances: We should all be excited about a “dream” from the future finally being realized. The thrill of inevitable progress! A safer, easier tomorrow!

Driverless taxis are the next step toward tech’s hopes for broad adoption of driverless cars in general. Uri Levine, a co-founder of Waze, predicts that Generation Beta will not drive. “A generation after that,” he told Business Insider, if you tell a young person “that you used to drive cars yourself, they will not believe you.” One of the arguments for self-driving cars is that they would be free of the human errors that lead to crashes. “It’s going to be such a great technology,” Sebastian Thrun, the roboticist and former head of Google’s self-driving project, said recently. “Think of the 1.2 million lives we lose each year (to car crashes), mostly because they’re not paying attention. Think if we could get some of those lives back.”

That number is correct. But that figure is global, and more than 90 percent of the fatalities occur in low- and middle-income countries (ones that are not part of Waymo’s or Tesla’s expansion plans). Trade organizations such as the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, which advocates for “the safe and timely deployment of autonomous driving technology,” insist that driverless cars will save lives. But groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists are more skeptical, pointing out that “studies have shown that automated vehicles are less able to detect people of color and children.” They also worry that the cars could “displace millions of people employed as drivers, negatively impact public transportation funding, and perpetuate the current transportation system’s injustices.”

More certain than safety are profits. When companies talk about safety, it’s not just because they care about people, but because they want to sell their product. Self-driving cars are projected to be an $87 billion industry by 2030. And the robotic “passenger economy,” which includes driverless taxis and robot deliveries, could generate as much as $7 trillion by 2050.

Chances are slim that the average American will benefit much financially from any of that money. But we will lose something, as Big Tech yet again destroys human interaction and calls it “convenience.”

Most of us live in silos, clustered together with people whose jobs, educations, incomes, languages, and faiths are similar to or the same as our own. We have few occasions to brush against other ways of living, few ways to interact with people of different backgrounds. These moments are meaningful and rare, and the taxi cab is one place where they regularly happen.

Every new city that I visit comes with a personalized introduction from a taxi driver. Like the guy who used to do stunts in Hollywood and now has to pick up shifts driving cabs who regaled me with tales of stars and action movies in a more flush time in Los Angeles. Or the 60-something Navy vet who took up driving after his restaurants closed during the pandemic. He drove me to the airport in Pittsburgh and told me about having recently connected with a son he never knew he had, who’d found him on Ancestry.com. Or the young driver from Pakistan who was nervously preparing for his upcoming wedding. He got some free advice, as well as a nice tip.

Many of these drivers are immigrants. Many are people whom the economy has left behind—people who started driving to supplement day jobs and struggling businesses, or because they’re juggling caregiving responsibilities. Perhaps, Big Tech thinks that riders won’t miss them when they’re gone. Drivers can be annoying. They can talk too much. They can play music you don’t like. But they can also be generous and kind and surprising. Human interaction, imperfect as it is, is what makes us human.

[Read: The huge problem Waymo didn’t see coming]

And maybe that’s the problem for the titans of Silicon Valley. Compared with robots, humans take a lot of effort. “I cannot imagine having gone through figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT,” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said recently. Artisan, an AI start-up, advertises its services with the explicit slogan “Stop Hiring Humans.” We are living in the ultimate revenge of the nerds, driven by a crew of socially awkward tech bros who won’t stop until the society that they never quite fit into is obliterated.

Do we want these people dictating profound changes in our society? Technology advances, in part, because a small number of entrepreneurs or scientists get really hyped about something, and another small number of investors gets even more hyped about the massive financial opportunities that development represents. But the rest of us do have a say: We have a choice as to whether we want to adopt that technology or not. We can consider our preferences, and the long-term societal implications. We can resist the old-fashioned corporate greed that gets wrapped in the language of pro-humanistic societal advancement and care.

For two decades, I have watched us blindly fall for one sales pitch after another. Every app and advancement comes shrouded in promises of “progress” and “connectivity” and “convenience.” And in many early cases—such as the invention of ride-sharing apps—Silicon Valley truly did deliver a better mousetrap. But we’re getting diminishing returns. We are living in Silicon Valley’s future now, and we are lonelier, more anxious, and more polarized than ever before. Are the mousetraps better? Safer? Who knows. But the mice inside are miserable.

I Have Some Questions for the New Florida U.S. History Curriculum

2026-05-10T07:00:00-04:00

Florida continues to Florida. Dissatisfied with the AP U.S. History curriculum (too woke), the state is trying to provide—as Kellyanne Conway used to say—alternative facts.

I have some authority to speak on this issue because I wrote an entire book of bad, inaccurate AP U.S. History, so I know the kind of work that goes into this sort of thing. Who knew that this would be such an in-demand skill?

I have gone ahead and made a final exam inspired by this course framework, which you can read here if you want to see for yourself. Good luck!

1) Tell me a surprising fact about the Declaration of Independence!

a. If you go step by step through the Declaration of Independence, you will be stunned to discover that it is essentially ripped from the Holy Bible. “All men are created” is actually a thing that happens in Genesis. “All men’s” name was Adam! Eve was his wife.
b. You know how the Declaration is a covenant? You know where else there are covenants? That’s right: the Bible! Read Deuteronomy.

2) Tell me about Christopher Columbus.

a. I would love to. He was an explorer and entrepreneur who brought a “sense of mystery and wonder” to the New World.
b. Perfect body shape for a statue.
c. Didn’t he—
d. No.

3) Were any women involved in U.S. history before the Seneca Falls Convention?

a. Not to my knowledge.
b. George Washington must have had a mother?
c. Does Queen Elizabeth I of England or Isabella I of Castile count?

4) How long can you go before mentioning slavery?

a. Just watch me!
b. Did you mean “indentured servitude”?

5) Describe the Founding.

a. One night George Washington used an enormous cherrystone for a pillow and he had a curious dream where he wrestled at length with an angel (the angel was super buff), and then he woke up holding the Constitution clutched in one hand and a Bible in the other. I believe John McNaughton painted this.
b. Samuel Alito was there and saw it all, and he was so excited that he rushed outside to hang his flag—upside up this time.

6) Discuss slavery.

a. Rather not.

7) Talk about Andrew Jackson.

a. The election of 1824 was stolen from him by the evil John Quincy Adams (boo), but he won the next election that wasn’t stolen.
b. He was a populist—a great, wonderful thing to be.
c. He was involved in the Trail of Tears, which showed the limits of judicial power.

8) Is that what the Trail of Tears showed?

a. Did you have something else in mind?

9) Who are some important figures from the Civil War?

a. The gallant hero and brilliant tactician Robert E. Lee
b. His gifted, speedy, and pious lieutenant, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson (the only Stonewall you’ll see mentioned in this document)
c. Ulysses Grant, but only begrudgingly
d. Sherman (Boooooo)

10) Describe Reconstruction.

a. A horrible ordeal that we couldn’t pass through soon enough.
b. Big mistake.

11) Who was probably the villain of the Great Depression?

a. Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
b. Anyone who wanted to increase taxes, the surest prosperity-killer. (Hero Andrew Mellon agrees!)

12) Talk about the Laffer curve.

a. You know we love the Laffer curve!

13) Describe Joseph McCarthy.

a. A man vindicated by history! There were Communists everywhere, actually, and he was right to see it.
b. The man who presided over the “so-called Red Scare.”
c. Good friend of Roy Cohn, the mentor of the greatest American president to date.
d. All of the above.

14) Talk about the civil-rights movement.

a. On the one hand, it involved the federal government in the private business of the states.
b. On the other hand, it was an encroachment on state prerogatives.

15) What was Roe v. Wade?

a. A terrible encroachment on states’ right to choose.
b. Fortunately overturned by the Roberts court in 2022

16) Anything to add?

a. Prayer in public school was actually very normal for a long time, and more people should remember that!

Answers: We are all less informed for having taken this test.

One of the Best First Sentences in Modern Literature

2026-05-10T07:00:00-04:00

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 Honor Jones, a senior editor who has written about divorce, motherhood, and John le Carré. She has also published short stories in this magazine, including “Skin a Rabbit,” which was excerpted from her novel, Sleep.

Honor recommends punctuating a workday with art and croissants, reading anything by Lauren Groff, and assigning vibes-based ratings to pictures of horses.

— Stephanie Bai, senior associate editor

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Because this is Mother’s Day weekend I’m answering this one first. One of my kids discovered the Netflix movie Nimona, and I don’t think enough people know how great this movie is. It’s got a spunky heroine, two knights in love, and smart things to say about how authoritarians exploit fear. And for my 6-year-old: fight scenes with a rhinoceros.

An author I will read anything by: There are many, but one is Lauren Groff. While on a hike with two Atlantic colleagues this spring, I made them listen to me recount in detail the entire plot of “Between the Shadow and the Soul”—one of the stories in Groff’s new collection, Brawler. I feel bad because now they can never come to the story fresh, and because I went on for a really long time and they were trapped on a nature trail and couldn’t escape. So I’ll be briefer here: Groff commands the passage of time brilliantly, your understanding of the characters’ relationship changes right up until the very end, and the story is so sad. Groff has also written one of my favorite openings in all of recent literature, for her novel Matrix: “She rides out of the forest alone. Seventeen years old, in the cold March drizzle, Marie who comes from France.” I mean.

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: The paperback of my novel, Sleep, is coming out next week. I just got a copy so I’m newly appreciative of the paperback as an object. It’s so small and bendy; it fits so nicely in the hand! I want to say you should get it for your mom for Mother’s Day, but maybe not: The mother-daughter relationship in the book is … complicated, and the story follows a woman trying to parent her kids differently from the way she was raised. Better just get it for yourself.

The really big cultural event I’m looking forward to is the talent show at my kids’ school. Readers may not know how rare it is for a first-grader to achieve the distinction of being selected for this night. My daughter—very talented—is the silent partner in a magic show, who lost her voice in a tragic accident but gained the ability to read minds. Watching her on stage, I’m definitely going to lose mine.

A piece of visual art that I cherish: Lately, when I have a free day, I like to go to the Met to work. I normally get really tired in museums. After an hour and a half my legs hurt, and I’m dying to drink some water. But I feel like an idiot going all the way uptown and leaving so quickly when there’s so much more I should be looking at. Going to the museum to edit or write is the perfect solution. You can walk through a few galleries on the way to the café; spend $28 on a croissant and coffee; work until you start to get dumb; look at art again; spend another $28; look some more; work some more; look some more; go home. I always like to stop by “Leda and the Swan,” a sculpture by Jacques Sarazin (Gallery 548, near the croissants). It makes me think of Yeats’s poem about the same myth: “A sudden blow: the great wings beating still / above the staggering girl.” The swan is Zeus, and the “white rush” of his assault is terrifying. But this statue makes me smile because the swan is tucked up under Leda’s arm. It looks really snuggly, and it’s even smaller, I think, than an ordinary swan would be. If anyone has been mastered here, it’s not Leda.

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: Rooster, Steve Carell’s new campus-comedy show on HBO. It’s mostly gentle jokes in a cozy setting, and I’m good with that. Carell plays Greg Russo, the author of a popular detective series who never went to college but agrees to teach a course to be closer to his daughter, an academic who’s been screwed over by her very hot husband, a Russian-studies professor. With the exception of Russo, who says some useful things about writing, none of the professors seems to teach much, let alone do any research—they’re mostly concerned about whether students think they’re cool. And the show is way too interested in making jokes about cancel culture. But if you secretly want to be a heartbroken professor with a hapless but lovable dad, this series is for you.

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: Old pictures in Google Photos. I’m bad at organizing my photos, and I never access the app on purpose. It’s just something that pops up in the top right corner of my screen, labeled “memories” or “together” or “pet friends”—some image from 10 years ago I don’t remember having seen before, but that I have to look at immediately and for a long time, and then screenshot and send to some best friends, feeling bittersweet about time passing and my children growing up and how shockingly bloated my face got when I was pregnant. Much more satisfying than Instagram!

A good recommendation I recently received: Chang-rae Lee has a new novel coming out this summer called A Tender Age. It’s about guilt and innocence and a boy turning 11, and I’m really eager to read it. That’s why, when Lee recommended The Names, by Don Delillo, in an interview, I picked that up in the meantime. I’m working on a novel right now, and I want to steal so much from this book, but above all Delillo’s belief in language and his suspicion of it—how it can mean everything and nothing. Also, the courage it takes to try to describe America, in fiction or journalism.

An online creator I’m a fan of: Serra Naiman has lots of funny videos on Instagram, but I like it best when she rates horses. That’s the whole bit: photos of grazing/rearing/prancing horses, with detailed descriptions of their personalities. She gives each one a rating “so you know where they stand.” The rating is always 10 out of 10. One horse “is angry at all of her children for individual reasons”; “this horse wants people to know that he does not have an addictive personality, so he will be starting a podcast series where he tries every single drug known to man—he will not make it through”; “this horse is running full speed directly into the sea. Ten out of 10.” I showed these videos to my friends and our kids over spring break, and for a while we came up with our own versions: “This horse knows her bikini is making her children uncomfortable but won’t give in and wear a one-piece instead. Ten out of 10.”

The Week Ahead

Is God Is, a drama thriller that follows twin sisters hunting down their abusive father in their quest for revenge (in theaters Friday)
The Punisher: One Last Kill, a Marvel special in which Frank Castle (played by Jon Bernthal) tries to leave his violent past behind, until one last fight pulls him back in (out Tuesday on Disney+)
American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed, a memoir by Isaac Fitzgerald about his yearlong journey retracing the footsteps of Johnny Appleseed (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

The Rise of Emotional Surveillance

By Ellen Cushing

The good news, for me at least, is that the computer thinks I have a nice personality. According to an app called MorphCast, I was, in a recent meeting with my boss, generally “amused,” “determined,” and “interested,” though—sue me—occasionally “impatient.” MorphCast, you see, purports to glean insights into the depths and vagaries of human emotion using AI. It found that my affect was “positive” and “active,” as opposed to negative and/or passive. My attention was reasonably high. Also, the AI informed me that I wear glasses—revelatory!

The bad news is that software now purports to glean insights into the depths and vagaries of human emotion using AI, and it is coming to watch you.

Read the full article.

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An aerial view of the stranded whale, seen off the island of Poel on April 18 with its back covered with cloth for protection (Stefan Sauer / DPA / Getty)

Take a look at some photos of the efforts to rescue Timmy, a humpback whale off the coast of Germany, over recent months.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Checkmate in Iran

2026-05-10T07:00:00-04:00

It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored. The calamitous losses suffered at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and throughout the Western Pacific in the first months of World War II were eventually reversed. The defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were costly but did not do lasting damage to America’s overall position in the world, because they were far from the main theaters of global competition. The initial failure in Iraq was mitigated by a shift in strategy that ultimately left Iraq relatively stable and unthreatening to its neighbors and kept the United States dominant in the region.

Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.

President Trump likes to talk about who has “the cards,” but whether he has any good ones left to play is not clear. The United States and Israel pounded Iran with devastating effectiveness for 37 days, killing much of the country’s leadership and destroying the bulk of its military, yet couldn’t collapse the regime or exact even the smallest concession from it. Now the Trump administration hopes that blockading Iran’s ports will accomplish what massive force could not. It’s possible, of course, but a regime that could not be brought to its knees by five weeks of unrelenting military attack is unlikely to buckle in response to economic pressure alone. Nor does it fear the anger of its populace. As the Iran scholar Suzanne Maloney noted recently, “A regime that slaughtered its own citizens to silence protests in January is fully prepared to impose economic hardships on them now.”

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

Some supporters of the war are therefore calling for the resumption of military strikes, but they cannot explain how another round of bombing will accomplish what 37 days of bombing did not. More military action will inevitably lead Iran to retaliate against neighboring Gulf States; the war’s advocates have no response to that, either. Trump halted attacks on Iran not because he was bored but because Iran was striking the region’s vital oil and gas facilities. The turning point came on March 18, when Israel bombed Iran’s South Pars gas field and Iran retaliated by attacking Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world’s largest natural-gas-export plant, causing damage to production capacity that will take years to repair. Trump responded by declaring a moratorium on further strikes against Iran’s energy facilities and then declaring a cease-fire, despite Iran’s not having made a single concession.

The risk calculus that forced Trump to back down a month ago still holds. Even if Trump were to carry out his threat to destroy Iran’s “civilization” through more bombing, Iran would still be able to launch many missiles and drones before its regime went down—assuming it did go down. Just a few successful strikes could cripple the region’s oil and gas infrastructure for years if not decades, throwing the world, and the United States, into a prolonged economic crisis. Even if Trump wanted to bomb Iran as part of an exit strategy—looking tough as a way of masking his retreat—he can’t do that without risking this catastrophe.

If this isn’t checkmate, it’s close. In recent days, Trump has reportedly asked the U.S. intelligence community to assess the consequences of simply declaring victory and walking away. You can’t blame him. Hoping for regime collapse is not much of a strategy, especially when the regime has already survived repeated military and economic pummeling. It could fall tomorrow, or six months from now, or not at all. Trump doesn’t have that much time to wait, as oil climbs toward $150 or even $200 a barrel, inflation rises, and global food and other commodity shortages kick in. He needs a faster resolution.

But any resolution other than America’s effective surrender holds enormous risks that Trump has not so far been willing to take. Those who glibly call on Trump to “finish the job” rarely acknowledge the costs. Unless the U.S. is prepared to engage in a full-scale ground and naval war to remove the current Iranian regime, and then to occupy Iran until a new government can take hold; unless it is prepared to risk the loss of warships convoying tankers through a contested strait; unless it is prepared to accept the devastating long-term damage to the region’s productive capacities likely to result from Iranian retaliation—walking away now could seem like the least bad option. As a political matter, Trump may well feel he has a better chance of riding out defeat than of surviving a much larger, longer, and more expensive war that could still end in failure.

Defeat for the United States, therefore, is not only possible but likely. Here is what defeat looks like.

Iran remains in control of the Strait of Hormuz. The common assumption that, one way or another, the strait will reopen when the crisis ends is unfounded. Iran has no interest in returning to the status quo ante. People talk of a split between hard-liners and moderates in Tehran, but even moderates must understand that Iran cannot afford to let the strait go, no matter how good a deal it thought it could get. For one thing, how reliable is any deal with Trump? He all but boasted of replicating the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by approving the killing of Iran’s leadership amid negotiations. The Iranians cannot be sure that Trump won’t decide to attack again within a few months of striking a deal. They also know that the Israelis may attack again, as they never feel constrained from acting when they perceive their interests to be threatened.

And Israel’s interests will be threatened. As many Iran experts have noted, the regime in Tehran currently stands to emerge from the crisis much stronger than it was before the war, having not only retained its potential nuclear capacity but also gained control of an even more effective weapon: the ability to hold the global energy market hostage. When the Iranians talk of “reopening” the strait, they still mean to keep the strait under their control. Iran will be able not only to demand tolls for passage, but to limit transit to those nations with which it has good relations. If a nation behaves in a way that Iran’s rulers don’t like, they will be able to exact punishment merely by slowing, or even threatening to slow, the flow of that nation’s cargo ships in and out of the strait.

The power to close or control the flow of ships through the strait is greater and more immediate than the theoretical power of Iran’s nuclear program. This leverage will allow the leaders in Tehran to force nations to lift sanctions and normalize relations or face penalties. Israel will find itself more isolated than ever, as Iran grows richer, rearms, and preserves its options to go nuclear in the future. It may even find itself unable to go after Iran’s proxies: In a world where Iran wields influence over the energy supply of so many nations, Israel could face enormous international pressure not to provoke Tehran in Lebanon, Gaza, or anywhere else.

The new status quo in the strait will also occasion a substantial shift in relative power and influence both regionally and globally. In the region, the United States will have proved itself a paper tiger, forcing the Gulf and other Arab states to accommodate Iran. As the Iran scholars Reuel Gerecht and Ray Takeyh wrote recently, “The Gulf Arab economies were built under the umbrella of American hegemony. Take that away—and the freedom of navigation that goes with it—and the Gulf states will ineluctably go begging to Tehran.”

[Read: America is now a rogue superpower]

They will not be the only ones. All nations that depend on energy from the Gulf will have to work out their own arrangements with Iran. What choice will they have? If the United States with its mighty Navy can’t or won’t open the strait, no coalition of forces with just a fraction of the Americans’ capability will be able to, either. The Anglo-French initiative to police the strait after a cease-fire is a bit of a joke. French President Emmanuel Macron has made it clear that this “coalition” will operate only under peaceful conditions in the strait: It will escort ships, but only if they don’t need an escort. Yet with Iran in control, the strait is not going to be safe again for a long time. China presumably has some influence over Tehran, but even China cannot force open the strait by itself.

One effect of this transformation may be an expanding great-power naval race. In the past, most of the world’s nations, including China, counted on the United States to both prevent and address such emergencies. Now the nations in Europe and Asia that depend on access to the Persian Gulf’s resources are helpless against the loss of energy supplies that are vital to their economic and political stability. How long can they tolerate this before they start building their own fleets, as a means of wielding influence in an every-nation-for-itself world where order and predictability have broken down?

The American defeat in the Gulf will have broader global ramifications as well. The whole world can see that just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight. The questions this raises about America’s readiness for another major conflict may or may not prompt Xi Jinping to launch an attack on Taiwan, or Vladimir Putin to step up his aggression against Europe. But at the very least America’s allies in East Asia and Europe must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.

The global adjustment to a post-American world is accelerating. America’s once-dominant position in the Gulf is just the first of many casualties.

The DOGE-ing of the Humanities Is Being Reversed

2026-05-09T14:29:27-04:00

Winning a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities can take months of preparation and can require multiple attempts. So last year, when DOGE officials with no humanities experience yanked the funds of hundreds of grantees using little more than a chatbot and a haphazard search for terms such as BIPOC and gay, it stung.

“The NEH, NEA, Guggenheim, and maybe one or two other grants are considered just the gold standard for your prestige in the academy,” Elizabeth Kadetsky, an English professor at Penn State, told us. Her grant to research stolen Indian antiquities for a nonfiction-writing project was canceled last year. “Can you imagine if you win the Pulitzer Prize or the Nobel and they’re like, Oh, I’m sorry, never mind, you don’t have it?”

A federal court on Thursday ruled that the grant cancellations were unconstitutional, potentially reversing, for now, one of the many moves made by the Trump administration to influence how experts uncover—and then tell—the country’s story. Despite Trump officials’ efforts to impose their values and version of American history on knowledge-making institutions, doing so may not be as simple as they thought, particularly given their slapdash methods that have now been called out by a federal judge.

[Read: The real fight for the Smithsonian]

U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon ruled in favor of plaintiffs, Kadetsky among them, finding that DOGE personnel didn’t have authority to terminate NEH grants and that the cuts violated the First and Fifth Amendments. The NEH, responsible for funding research, education programming, and restoration work, “was not created as a vehicle for government expression,” McMahon wrote in her ruling, but rather to “support the intellectual and cultural work of private citizens, scholars, teachers, writers, and institutions.”

The court’s decision could reinstate funding for more than 1,400 grants totaling more than $100 million, though the administration could still appeal to pause enforcement. In response to questions about the outcome, the White House did not say what action it planned to take. The ruling “provides yet another example of liberal judges trying to reinstate wasteful federal spending at the expense of the American taxpayer,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle wrote in an email, adding that the Trump administration expects to be “vindicated” as the case proceeds. The NEH did not respond to requests for comment.

Almost immediately after President Trump returned to office last year, his administration began pursuing an ideological purge across the parts of the federal government tasked with conveying history and promoting the arts. It became clear that much of this effort was meant to sanitize American history by downplaying or omitting chapters such as slavery. Meanwhile, the Elon Musk–led Department of Government Efficiency ran unchecked across the American bureaucracy, slashing programs and gutting the civil service. Compared to, say, USAID, the NEH cuts might have been easy for Americans to miss.

But the canceled NEH grants were a shock to historians, state humanities agencies, and professional associations, who sued the agency. Videos of depositions from two 20-something DOGE employees released earlier this year became an internet sensation, in part because they captured the perceived overreach of a revanchist administration, and also because one of those workers seemed barely able to explain what DEI meant.

Plaintiffs we spoke with this week described the court ruling as a moral victory, though it’s yet unclear whether it will be a material one. “Even if it takes a really long time to ever see any of this money, and even if we don’t see the money, this is a win for us,” Paula Krebs, the executive director of the Modern Language Association, a plaintiff in the case, told us. “The country’s commitment to the humanities has been affirmed in court, and I love that.”

The ruling applies to research grants awarded to scholars, writers, research institutions, and other humanities organizations. The Federation of State Humanities Councils and Oregon Humanities also brought a separate lawsuit, which challenged the Trump administration’s termination of operating grants for state and other humanities councils across the country.

The NEH was founded in 1965, and is the only federal-government agency devoted to funding the humanities. Its overall budget of about $200 million is small compared to other federal-government agencies, and although it is led by political appointees, it is considered independent, with peer-review panels that make recommendations to a council of appointed experts. Last fall, the White House fired a majority of that board, retaining only four members who had been previously appointed by Trump.

Humanities organizations say that under the Trump administration, much of the typical process has been overhauled or discarded altogether to focus on presidential priorities. Trump’s 2027 budget proposed eliminating the NEH, along with its sister agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

But if the administration wanted to reform the NEH on philosophical grounds—or even in the name of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” the phrase often used by Trump and Musk—it didn’t try very hard to articulate a consistent reasoning. McMahon’s 143-page ruling details how the two young Trump officials, Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, scoured for cuts to humanities funding, relying on only their own biases and AI. Asked multiple times to define DEI in a January deposition, Fox struggled to articulate an understanding of it, repeatedly saying he would refer back to the executive order because he could not possibly capture the scope of DEI in his own words. (He was referring to a January 2025 executive order that described diversity, equity, and inclusion programs as “discriminatory” and called for their termination across the federal government.)

“DEI is a very broad structure,” Fox said.

At one point, he and Cavanaugh divided the grants, which had been awarded during the Biden administration, into buckets such as “Craziest Grants” and “Other Bad Grants,” labels that Fox said reflected their “subjective” views. They did a keyword search for terms including tribal, immigrants, diversity, inclusion, equity, equality, and marginalized. Cavanaugh and Fox relied on short descriptions and did not look at the applications’ text or accompanying materials. Fox then turned to ChatGPT to find more grants to cancel, according to the ruling.

Krebs’s group and other plaintiffs posted clips of Fox and Cavanaugh’s depositions in March in part to bring more attention—and viral infamy—to the case. Krebs said that the goal was to expose DOGE’s internal operations to public scrutiny. “What we need to do is get the actions of DOGE into the historical record because there had been no exposure of exactly what their tactics were,” Krebs told us. “We said even if we don’t win, if we get these guys into the public record, that will be a victory for us.”

Clips of the depositions resonated beyond humanities circles and seemed to illustrate the recklessness of DOGE’s actions in early 2025. “The videos really did expose how unqualified these guys were to make decisions about humanities grants,” Krebs said.

Fox testified that he sent ChatGPT each grant in question along with the prompt: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation.”

Among the canceled grants, McMahon wrote, was one that would have supported a museum’s whaling-history project. It was canceled because, per DOGE, it sought to “create an inclusive and impactful experience, which is aligned with DEI principles.”

The ruling gets spicy in parts. “This must represent the first time in history that an exhibit about the whaling industry—a cornerstone of New England’s economy during the 19th and early 20th centuries—has been thought to fall under the banner of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion,’” the judge wrote, “unless the whales’ status as a species endangered by the whalers places them in a ‘marginalized’ status.”

Oleh Kotsyuba, the director of print and digital publications at Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute, spent more than a year preparing an application to translate works of Ukrainian literature into English. He told us his funding was reversed last year and Harvard appealed the decision, emphasizing that the translations would help provide historical and cultural expertise about Ukraine to policymakers and the public. Kotsyuba said that they never received a response to the appeal.

Plaintiffs have perceived the moves at the NEH as part of a broader campaign against expertise. That has included stripping funding from the National Institutes of Health, cracking down on academic independence at universities, and promoting false information about vaccines and climate change.

“I see what’s going on as essentially a war on knowledge and the Enlightenment itself, which produced the United States,” Gray Brechin, the founder of Living New Deal, a nonprofit that preserves and documents the public artworks and history of that era, told us. The organization was supposed to receive a $150,000 grant.

“They want an ignorant society,” he added.

The pursuit of knowledge can be quashed, but the public funds have to go somewhere. In the case of the NEH, the money went to different pursuits of the Trump administration. The agency’s staff was reduced, and some agency funding was redirected toward the proposed National Garden of American Heroes, which Trump wants to build near the monuments on the National Mall. (It is unclear how much of the money meant for the restored grants has been spent in other ways.) The NEH subsequently prioritized fewer but larger grants, including $10.4 million to a Jewish educational and civic nonprofit associated with the right in both the U.S. and Israel, and a “special” $10 million award to the University of Virginia that would speed up humanities projects related to the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and the United States’ founding. The awards signaled a shift in funding strategy that concentrated support among groups aligned with Trump’s priorities, including the country’s 250th birthday.

If the administration’s efforts to shape the telling of history and the dissemination of culture came as a shock, the pushback—largely in the form of litigation—will be a slower burn. Trump’s attempts to influence American arts and culture have been tangled up in an ever-growing list of lawsuits. His plans for the White House ballroom and a 250-foot-tall arch, his attempt to close down the Kennedy Center for a renovation, his push to paint the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and changes thrust upon National Parks and even Washington, D.C.’s golf courses have been challenged.

Within the NEH, Thursday’s ruling was a welcome decision—even as staffers scramble to understand what it will mean in practice. Major questions remain about whether NEH-grant recipients will actually regain access to funds and whether a drastically diminished agency has the staffing capacity to realistically administer them, one staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal told us. “But the majority of staff, I think, were hoping for this outcome from this lawsuit,” the person said. “It’s a good problem to have.”

Trump’s Struggle to Find an Off-Ramp From the Iran War

2026-05-09T10:48:00-04:00

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.

Is the United States still at war with Iran? If the war is over, who won and who actually controls the Strait of Hormuz now? Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss these questions and whether Trump has an exit strategy from the fighting he initiated.

As the conflict enters its third month, Washington and Tehran are in a standoff over the terms that would enable peace talks to begin. As President Trump ramps up pressure on Iran to accept his conditions, the prolonged crisis in the Strait of Hormuz continues to threaten the global economy.

U.S. forces struck Iranian targets Thursday after two U.S. destroyers were attacked in the strait, but Trump called this response a “love tap” and said that the exchange of fire did not represent a break in the cease-fire. The war remains in a state of “suspended animation,” Jeffrey Goldberg, moderator and editor in chief of The Atlantic, said last night.

Meanwhile, Trump has grown “bored” with the war, an outside adviser told the Atlantic staff writer Jonathan Lemire. But Iran appears comfortable with keeping the conflict going, possibly for many more months, Lemire has reported. He noted last night that Iran has more control over the strait now than it did at the start of the conflict.

Joining Goldberg to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Lemire; Amna Nawaz, a co-anchor at PBS News Hour; and Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

Understanding Our Mothers

2026-05-09T08:00:00-04:00

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.

As I grew older, I began wondering about the version of my mother that existed before I did. Not just the parent who raised me, but the younger person she once was: the life she’d imagined for herself, the experiences that shaped her, the parts of her history that I will never fully know.

Many of us know our mothers in practical roles first: caretakers, disciplinarians, emergency contacts, occasional embarrassments. But the earlier versions of them often survive only in fragments. They might share an old photograph or make a fleeting comment about a life that existed before ours. Mothers can watch us become ourselves, but we rarely get to witness who they were before we arrived.

Over time, we begin to see our moms less as fixed parental figures and more as full people: loving and flawed, familiar and unknowable. Today’s newsletter gathers stories that try to make sense of that realization.

On Mothers

What to Read to Understand Your Mom

By Sophia Stewart

These stories offer a starting point—and perhaps some insights—for those seeking perspective on their parent. (From 2025)

Read the article.

Now I Know What My Mother Was Saying

By Elizabeth Bruenig

I always knew my mother loved me. I didn’t realize the full practical cost of her love until becoming a mother myself. (From 2025)

Read the article.

What Happens to a Woman’s Brain When She Becomes a Mother

By Adrienne LaFrance

From joy and attachment to anxiety and protectiveness, mothering behavior begins with biochemical reactions. (From 2015)

Read the article.

Still Curious?

How adult children affect their mother’s happiness: Plenty of moms feel something less than unmitigated joy around their grown-up kids. Make sure yours feels that she’s getting as much out of her relationship with you as she gives, Arthur C. Brooks wrote in 2021.
The problem with mothers and daughters: In their 2022 books, the writers Elizabeth McCracken and Lynne Tillman look back at the fraught ends of their mothers’ lives, Judith Shulevitz wrote.

Other Diversions

Courtesy of Kanika S.

My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “This is a picture of a California state flower that I captured in Los Feliz in the neighborhood of Griffith Park. I like taking pictures of flowers and this is unique with a white edge and a deep orange color. First time I ever saw such a color on a poppy flower,” Kanika S. from Los Angeles, California, writes.

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

— Rafaela

What Adults Lose When They Put Down Children’s Books

2026-05-09T08:00:00-04:00

Please don’t judge me, but in March 2020, when I moved across the country, I got rid of six boxes of books, including many classic works of literature and nonfiction. Gone were titles by Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey—I’d rather reread Pride and Prejudice) and Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities—plain old disinterest). Moby-Dick went (I’d tried for years, and failed). So did Joan Didion’s Political Fictions and Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (just never got around to them).

What I did not—and never would—get rid of: The Snowy Day, Miss Rumphius, The Little House, Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, Blueberries for Sal, and about 50 other children’s books. My copies have been with me since the 1970s and ’80s. They sit, always, in a place of honor, alongside artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. In 1991, when I left home for college, they moved with me from Davis, California, to New York City. From the East Village they traveled to Brooklyn, then Queens, then Brooklyn again, following me on a professional trajectory (half a dozen jobs) and a personal one (one marriage, one divorce). During my most recent move, purging my adult library created more physical space for my kid one—Caro’s books are roughly 20 times the width of an average Dr. Seuss title—but more important, the sifting represented a setting of priorities. The picture books took precedence.

Again, I’m inclined to ask readers not to judge me. It’s a defensive crouch that comes from experience: I have heard numerous people suggest that in no way is “kid lit” on par with words written for grown-ups. (At least one of Margaret Wise Brown’s contemporaries dismissively referred to her genius works—Goodnight Moon, Little Fur Family—as “baby books.”)

This kind of snobbery is what Mac Barnett, the author of many dozens of children’s books—including The First Cat in Space Ate Pizza, the Jack Book series, and Sam and Dave Dig a Hole—calls a “literary misdemeanor.” In his new book, Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children (this one’s for the adults), Barnett writes, “When we dismiss children’s books, what we’re really doing is failing to recognize the potential of children.” To this, I would add that in dismissing children’s books, adults fail to recognize the potential of people.

[Read: 65 essential children’s books]

Reading children’s literature in adulthood isn’t just a nostalgia impulse or an exercise to undertake in the context of sharing stories with kids. Incorporating these books into a literary diet—whether or not a person has children—can help anyone to see and hear with fresh eyes and ears, to find or rediscover wonder in the large (mountain ranges, the moon) and the small (a hummingbird, a smile, a square). In my home office, surrounding myself with kids’ books puts me in a state of mind that complicates and enriches my thinking. The books have also nudged me toward some of my more original ideas. (I recently took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Los Angeles airport because I was interested in writing about how certain aspects of large airports work—here’s looking at you, Richard Scarry.)

A useful concept, “childness,” may sum up this way of experiencing the world, Alison Waller, the author of the 2019 book Rereading Childhood Books: A Poetics, told me. The term comes from the literary critic Peter Hollindale, who identified “a common ground where remembering adult and remembered child might come into contact,” Waller writes, “and where they may, indeed, find something to share through childhood experiences more generally.” When we chatted, she was quick to stress that childness does not mean childlike. The latter, she said, contains an element of judgment; the former acknowledges that for many people, aspects of childhood stay with them—sometimes vividly—into adulthood. (As the renowned children’s-literature editor Ursula Nordstrom put it, “I am a former child, and I haven’t forgotten a thing.”) Rereading childhood books, Waller suggested, might be a way to acknowledge that our younger selves are “part of a continuum of identity.”

In Make Believe, Barnett writes movingly about the “perceptive, flexible, and open-minded” nature of a child’s mind. Kids, he argues, are better at make-believe than adults, and may be better equipped than adults to engage deeply with stories, because they have to be. So much in the world around them is new; so much is possible; so much of childhood is “a long series of experiments—testing out hypotheses and making adjustments.”

During a recent conversation with Barnett, I began to wonder if rereading picture books could encourage creative plasticity in adults, a return to a seemingly simpler, but perhaps more sophisticated, way of encountering literature (and, by extension, life). Many children’s books, after all, engage in leaps of logic. They can be strange, spooky, sometimes existentially unsettling. It takes an attentive, receptive intellect to process that type of weirdness, to follow along with a writer’s or illustrator’s nonsense and suspend judgment or disbelief.

Barnett writes that one way adults “define ourselves as older is by rejecting the things we very recently loved.” But older is not always wiser. When we spoke, he pointed out that encountering words and pictures together invites people to enter a liminal zone. “The words are doing some of the work,” he said, “and the pictures are doing some of the work, and they create this space in between that really asks the reader to come in and interpret and to make sense of it. They demand a reader’s active engagement.” That is, children’s books activate a part of the brain that some adults—caught up in the day-to-day business of work or child-rearing or simply survival—may have unwittingly allowed to go dormant.

This past week, I popped into Wolfcat Books, a new children’s store in Los Angeles that, when I visited, was preparing for its soft launch—though its proprietor, Andrea Meller, told me that she hesitates to call it a “children’s” shop, because to her mind, children’s books are for everyone. (She has a quote from C. S. Lewis affixed to her door: “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”) We chatted about how reading kids’ books, especially picture books, can induce an experience not unlike visiting an art museum—or, as Meller pointed out, working in theater (as she once did). “You can kind of do these wild things in theater because it’s in the moment,” Meller said. “When I found picture books again, as an adult, I felt that same sense of freedom, where there are these rules that we think of with literature, but in picture books they’re all broken. The main character can be eaten in the middle.”

Barnett writes about that sort of openness to quirk, too. “Kids read without tightly held notions of what a story can or should be,” he observes in Make Believe. “An unconventional structure or new approach bothers them not a whit.” I see the same spirit in the stories of some of my favorite writers and journalists, people who, with contagious curiosity, attack their work with a formal innovation and exuberance that one might call evidence of childness: Think John McPhee on oranges; Maggie Nelson on the color blue; The Atlantic’s Caity Weaver on bread.

Many picture books remind readers to be brave. And the best (here I think of The Giving Tree and Where the Wild Things Are) refuse to shy away from some of life’s heaviest topics: love, death, loss, fear. They also push readers and writers to savor the music of words, use language with economy, and pay attention to the tiniest details. I’ll never forget reading a letter, from Wise Brown’s archive at Hollins College, that she wrote to a fellow alumnus. “Did you know that if you listened during the day on Fifth Avenue when the light changes and the traffic stops,” Brown observed, “you can hear a loud sound of feet?”

Who says that? Who notices that? An adult who can summon a child’s delight at the absurdity and surprise in the everyday.

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The Real Cost of Withdrawing U.S. Troops From Germany

2026-05-09T08:00:00-04:00

While the high-security corridors of Washington and Berlin are occupied with a frantic, transactional debate over NATO burden sharing and the fallout of the Iran blockade, a far more profound rupture is occurring in the quiet streets of the Rhineland-Palatinate.

President Trump announced last week that the United States will remove 5,000 troops from Germany, possibly as the beginning of a larger drawdown. Pentagon planners anticipate a phased reduction over the next 12 months that could see the total U.S. presence in Germany drop significantly. Some analysts believe that the administration ultimately favors rotating troops in and out of Europe rather than permanently basing them there.

Americans have been stationed in Germany by the tens of thousands since the end of World War II. Some 50,000 Americans—including military personnel, civilian employees, and their families—populate the Kaiserslautern Military Community, which includes Ramstein Air Base. The remainder of the U.S. presence is concentrated in strategic hubs such as Wiesbaden, the headquarters of the U.S. Army Europe and Africa, and the training grounds of Grafenwoehr and Vilseck in Bavaria, where thousands of soldiers maintain a rotational readiness. The initial 5,000-troop reduction will likely be drawn primarily from forces stationed around Vilseck and Grafenwoehr.

[Read: Europe without America]

Pundits in the United States are framing the move as a strategic rightsizing or a punitive diplomatic strike. But to view the exodus from Ramstein and Landstuhl through the narrow lens of defense budgets is to miss that it portends the tragic collapse of an 80-year-old social contract. The withdrawal from Germany is a step toward the liquidation of the shared West—a cultural and human project that was never written into a treaty and, once lost, can never be reacquired.

For eight decades, the American presence in Germany was the bedrock of Western stability, not only because of the nuclear warheads or the C-130 transport planes, but also because of the bakeries, the playgrounds, and the cross-cultural marriages that formed a “Little America” in the heart of Europe. As the first 5,000 troops depart over the next few months, the conversation between two cultures will fade into silence.

The dominant media narrative suggests that Germany is ready—or at least being forced—to finally embrace strategic autonomy. This is a polite fiction. When a stabilizing power withdraws, it rarely leaves behind a robust local alternative. It leaves a vacuum that is filled less often by autonomy than by resentment and predatory external influences.

In the towns surrounding Ramstein Air Base, the “divorce” is a visceral economic and social shock. These bases were never just logistical hubs; they were also among the largest employers in rural regions that have known no other reality since 1945. Thousands of German nationals work directly for the U.S. military in this corridor, and many more jobs are indirectly tethered to the American consumer. When Washington pulls the plug on a brigade combat team, it will eviscerate a middle-class ecosystem. The local German Bäckerei (“bakery”) that tailored its recipes to American tastes for three generations isn’t going to pivot to a new European security architecture. It is simply going to close. The tragedy of the Ramstein withdrawal is that it kills the most important conversation of all: the one between neighbors.

The “Little Americas” of Kaiserslautern, a bustling hub known as K-Town that serves as the gateway to Ramstein, and Wiesbaden, the sophisticated Hessian capital that hosts the Army’s continental command center, provided the U.S. with something that trillions of dollars in diplomacy could never buy: ground-level affinity. For 80 years, a young German growing up in the Rhineland didn’t view America as a distant superpower on a screen; they viewed it as the family next door that shared its Thanksgiving turkey. This human integration was the soul of the alliance.

[From the January 2026 issue: The new German war machine]

The U.S. administration has suggested that the troop withdrawal was meant to punish German Chancellor Friedrich Merz for criticizing Washington’s Iran policy. But in fact it punishes the pro-American German middle class. In 10 years, a generation of German leaders will have grown up without an American neighbor. They will view the United States as a distant, volatile landlord: transactional, unreliable, and, ultimately, foreign.

Washington claims, not for the first time, that it is pivoting to the Indo-Pacific. But gutting the European garrison in this pursuit is counterproductive. As the U.S. seeks to build new “latticework” alliances in the Philippines, Vietnam, and across the South Asian rim, it is simultaneously destroying the only successful blueprint it has for long-term influence.

Influence is not a commodity that can be switched on like a light bulb when a crisis erupts in the South China Sea. It is a slow-growing crop. The Ramstein model is one of deep, messy social and economic integration, and it is exactly what the U.S. will need if it hopes to stay relevant in an Asian century. By discarding it in a fit of pique, Washington is signaling to every Asian ally that American commitment is now a seasonal product, subject to the vagaries of the current election cycle.

Over the next year, departing troops will leave behind ghost towns that will stand as monuments to a lost era of American leadership. Washington is trading hard-won cultural capital for a momentary win in a diplomatic spat. The silence in the Rhineland won’t just be the absence of jet engines; it will be the sound of the American century drawing its final, lonely breath.

Just Show Us the Spaceships Already

2026-05-09T07:57:01-04:00

Spaceships. That’s all I’m asking for. Just one actual stinking spaceship. I’d also take an actual alien body—I’ve been told that the government has some of them as well. Instead, the first “alien files,” released yesterday, appear to be the same old, same old: stories, but no hard evidence—certainly not of the kind I’d want to see as a scientist, or that could truly advance the debate about UFOs and their alien connection.

I am disappointed.

A lot of expectation led up to this document “disclosure.” Just a few months ago, President Obama prompted wild speculation with a misinterpreted comment about the reality of extraterrestrial life. Not to be outdone, President Trump then posted on social media that he would direct the release of “Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).” I’m an astrophysicist whose day job includes searching the cosmos for intelligent life. I was skeptical, though intrigued, about the possibility of finally getting scientific evidence that extraterrestrials existed and are regularly visiting our planet.

That’s not what happened. What I’ve seen so far of the website constituting yesterday’s release looks more like fuzzy images and retracted accounts of ordinary people and members of the military seeing “something.” Some of the documents—which the Pentagon has said it will continue to release on a “rolling basis” every few weeks—go back decades. One image of a silver oval, an FBI employee’s “graphic overlay” on a picture of a field, intended to depict eyewitness accounts, is almost laughable in its simplicity. Low-resolution images of flying blobs cannot begin to answer the existentially important question of alien life.

The history of UFOs and claimed government conspiracies hiding their alien origins goes all the way back to the Roswell incident, in the late 1940s, when the first UFO report made national headlines. Then in 1956, Edward Ruppelt, an Air Force captain who led early Air Force UFO studies, published a book claiming the existence of a document ominously called “Estimate of the Situation.” Ruppelt asserted that this top-secret report concluded that UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin. No version of the document, however, has ever been found. Still, Ruppelt’s claims set the stage for decades of fever-dream UFO- and government-conspiracy mongering. UFOs became a kind of shorthand for “kooky”—so much so that the false association between UFOs and the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence nearly killed all such government research.

Then in 2017, The New York Times published a detailed exposé about a Pentagon program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. The principal goal of the AATIP was the study of UFOs (rebranded as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAPs). Along with the story came the release of two UAP videos shot from cameras on Navy fighter jets. The videos show fuzzy blobs that some people claimed were moving in ways that no terrestrial vehicle could match. A handful of Navy pilots also came forward to tell their stories about encounters with these so-called tic-tac UAPs. Suddenly, serious people were taking the possibility of alien vehicles seriously. The modern era of “disclosure” had begun.

The videos were compelling, and I was happy that the pilots could tell their stories without fear of reprisal. Personal testimony, however, is the worst form of scientific evidence. Many studies show that people can have a difficult time recounting details that match with hard evidence, even when they want to. As for the videos, the more I looked at them, the dicier they appeared from a scientific point of view. They are predigested clips with no context—not the kinds of things that make for a thorough scientific investigation into a history-making discovery.

Even more damning, much of the behavior seen in the videos could be explained by motion in the cameras themselves or by other effects. In fact, the subject of another video released at the time, called “GOFAST”—which alien advocates claimed shows a tic tac skimming the ocean at tremendous speeds—was later revealed to be an object moving thousands of feet in the air at a speed of about … wait for it now … 40 miles an hour. That’s called a balloon. A Pentagon program that came after the AATIP, called the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), lists GOFAST as a UAP sighting that’s firmly in the explained category.

The next step in the new age of disclosure was congressional hearings, which was when things started to get really interesting—or, depending on your perspective, when they went off the deep end. Since 2022, Congress has held a number of hearings on UAPs, but most notable was one in July 2023 in which the former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch testified under oath that the U.S. government had been retrieving “nonhuman” spacecraft and “biologics.” (In an interview, he came right out and said that he meant dead alien pilots.) He also claimed that this supersecret program involved both military and private contractors and that breaking secrecy came with costs.

Now, that is the kind of X-Files material people are really thinking of when they talk about disclosure.

Except it wasn’t. Not really. When Grusch was pressed for details, he would generally respond, “It’s classified.” He had also not personally seen any of the supposed secrets that he was disclosing, he acknowledged. He’d merely heard about these top-secret programs. Never in the hearings did Congress get actual evidence that the government has alien spaceships in garages and alien bodies in freezers.

This left people outside the UFO-true-believer camp in a tough spot. Grusch had high security clearance, so in theory, he should have known what he was talking about. Sean Kirkpatrick, the first director of the AARO, suggested that people like Grusch stumble into a self-reinforcing belief system that has existed for decades within parts of the military and intelligence community: In an article for Scientific American, Kirkpatrick called it “a textbook example of circular reporting.” This kind of circularity can never really answer the questions it’s posing, because it’s relying on the same information from the same people, over and over again. A real disclosure would look very different, because only one thing matters: hard evidence.

At its best, this would be the actual physical spaceship, on display for all to see and examine. If the government can’t get a whole ship floating on its “suspensors” or whatever, then give us some pieces of all of those crashed alien vehicles. UAP aerial maneuvers that defy the laws of physics would demand materials unlike anything that human technology has produced. Give us samples of the crashed vehicles that can be sent to laboratories around the world for fully transparent, fully scientific analysis. Ditto for “nonhuman biologics.” If disclosure is going to have real teeth for anyone besides true believers, then show us some real alien teeth, or skin, or tentacles. Until there are samples that can be shared with scientists around the world, the whole story is just that—a story.

If for some reason no actual samples are in the offing, then give us reports that have real data in them. If UAPs have made inhuman aerial maneuvers, then show us the actual radar data, including the radar systems used, so that independent researchers can plot trajectories and see whether anything involved really did break the laws of physics. If artifacts have been recovered, share high-resolution, detailed images whose veracity can be confirmed. The kinds of tests that a modern scientific lab would run on a sample of supposedly alien metal are not hard to imagine—let’s see the numbers from those tests, along with a detailed description of the instruments used to get the data. This is exactly what would get recorded in any other scientific investigation: collection methods, data tables, charts, graphs.

The same should be true for those alien bodies. I can go online and get the detailed results of my blood work from last week. Where are those kinds of data for the aliens? If all of this is real, the resulting investigation would have to generate pages and pages of basic physiological test results. Those results should be the disclosure documents.

None of this was in the pages released yesterday. Instead, they are the kind of stuff we’ve seen before. They include FBI records of “eyewitness testimonies, and public reports concerning Unidentified Flying Objects and flying discs documented between June 1947 and July 1968.” Some of this material had already been released. There is an “FBI memo from 1958 reporting a UFO sighting by a Detroit man.” The site also has many reports of more recent sightings, including lots of videos, many of which seem profoundly unimpressive (although I should note that I have not been able to look at all of them yet). Some documents seem to fall under the broad category of “space”—such as a 1996 Air Force report, “Modeling Unlikely Space-Booster Failures in Risk Calculations.”

This was not the disclosure that I, as a physicist bound to honor the rules of science and quality data, was hoping for.

In the end, this latest trove of documents makes me think of the John F. Kennedy assassination and the endless swirl of conspiracy theories that still surrounds it. Since 1992, multiple rounds of documents relating to that ill-fated day in 1963 have been released. None of it has resolved what happened for the conspiracy-theory prone. Perhaps nothing ever will. This may be what happens with UFOs/UAPs. It’s easy to imagine that a decade from now, we’ll still be rehashing the same claims and the same arguments about those claims.

Meanwhile, the science of astrobiology is pushing onward. Using ultrapowerful telescopes, astronomers will continue the slow, steady work of looking for alien life where it lives, on alien worlds. One day, likely over the next few decades and perhaps long after the current UFO-disclosure frenzy is over, my fellow astronomers might give us hard evidence that life is either common or rare in the galaxy. That will be the only disclosure day history remembers.

Admit It, That Protein Shake Is Basically Soylent

2026-05-09T07:45:00-04:00

From the beginning, Soylent was shorthand for a certain kind of guy. A guy who worked in tech and probably wore a hoodie. A guy who, despite his six-figure salary, lived in an unfurnished apartment. Soylent Guy, above all else, did not have time for quotidian tasks such as cooking and chewing. One way you knew this was that he slugged the nutrient-dense slurry known as Soylent.

Remember Soylent? In the mid-2010s, Soylent promised to change the world by solving a timeless problem: Everybody has to eat. Instead of chopping vegetables or defrosting a meal, you could fertilize yourself, like a needy rhododendron, with a blend of oat flour, maltodextrin, brown-rice protein, canola oil, fish oil, and just enough sucralose to mask the flavor. For a brief moment, Soylent was beloved—at least in Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists helped turn it into a $170 million brand. It was also a dystopian punch line: What if you stripped life of all joy and bottled the result? Ha! In 2023, Soylent was sold off for a fraction of its former valuation.

John Coogan, who co-founded Soylent in his early 20s and now co-hosts the popular tech-business talk show TBPN, chalks up the company’s decline largely to inexperience. “We were always trying to be a little bit too clever,” he told me. But perhaps Soylent’s greatest fumble was that it came too soon.

You can find Soylent-like drinks almost everywhere these days. Fairlife—a line of protein shakes that bills itself as “a satisfying way to get the nutrition you’re looking for”—is so popular that it has become Coca-Cola’s fastest-growing U.S. brand. One of its competitors, Huel, recently sold to Danone for $1 billion. You can buy nutrition drinks from Rebbl and Orgain and Koia and Oikos, along with many, many other companies whose names have the wrong number of vowels.

If you are one of the many Americans who chugs these shakes on the regular, perhaps you might balk at the comparison to Soylent. (You don’t even wear a hoodie!) The point of nonfood nutrition is no longer to fuel yourself so that you can sit at a computer longer. You are instead becoming healthier, hotter, more beautiful, more jacked. The shakes are engineered for our protein-obsessed times. Fairlife’s Nutrition Plan shake, for example, comes with 30 grams of protein in a mere 150 calories. But many of the shakes do not stop at protein. They want to talk to you about adaptogens and your gut health, your antioxidants and your immune-boosting support. Only some of them explicitly identify as a meal replacement. Instead, they are “next-level nourishment” to “fuel every move.” They go from “gym bags to lunchboxes to morning smoothies” and match pace “with your everyday, get-strong hustle.”

[Read: America has entered late-stage protein]

Still, there is a striking resemblance to Soylent, and not only in form. These shakes aren’t meals, but they aren’t not meals. “There was a time when you had eggs for breakfast and a sandwich for lunch and a TV tray for dinner,” Leigh O’Donnell, an analyst at the market-research firm Kantar, told me. But we have become a nation of snackers. Instead of having three meals a day, she said, many Americans now eat “maybe six … somethings.” This is because of our lifestyles but also because of our newfound dietary needs. GLP-1s, for example, have created a new customer: people trying to mitigate potential muscle atrophy, a side effect of rapid weight loss, by consuming more protein, ideally in a form that doesn’t require eating all that much. The current high-protein, low-calorie, micronutritionally supplemented ready-to-drink shakes may not exactly constitute a “meal” in the conventional sense, but they certainly constitute a “something.”

The shakes are portable and easy and wildly efficient, in that they deliver a lot of meticulously calibrated individual nutrients and require no thinking. As a person who is not generally doing anything particularly demanding with my body (or, arguably, my time), I know that traditional eating should be just fine. All else being equal, eating food, not too much, mostly plants is probably superior to downing ultra-processed shakes. And still, I find myself drawn to these drinks. Food is fraught and confusing, but the shakes are reassuringly precise: This much protein! This much fiber! These carbohydrates! This unquantifiable but still notable immune-boosting defense! I am, as the protein-shake brand OWYN promises, getting “Only What You Need.” This was, of course, the promise of Soylent: You could glug down everything you needed and get on with it.

In recent years, “what you need” has only escalated. The list of nutritional necessities now “contains all these things that you didn’t even know you needed five minutes ago,” O’Donnell said, “whether it’s turmeric or potassium.” Obviously, you can be generally healthy, eating your beans and grains and salads, but can you reach the pinnacle of your potential? Can you maximize, in one single serving, your protein, your fiber, your ashwagandha, and your time? That’s the appeal of something like Ka’Chava, an “all-in-one nutrition shake” enhanced with antioxidants, probiotics, prebiotics, and digestive enzymes. Or consider Rebbl, which includes, in addition to protein and fiber, 2.2 milligrams of zinc and “adaptogenic Reishi mushroom extract.” Even Soylent itself has pivoted its messaging to keep up with the times, updating not only its recipe but also its mission. “We’ve shifted from being a meal replacement company to a complete nutrition company,” then-CEO Demir Vangelov told the tech newsletter dot.LA a few years ago. In an interview with Food Dive, he went further: “Every one of our consumers, they know what they believe they need in terms of protein, in terms of carbs, in terms of fiber and vitamins and minerals, and they’re curating their nutrition across their week to fit those needs.” (Soylent did not respond to several requests for an interview.)

[Read: Soylent, meal replacements, and the hurdle of boredom]

Soylent had a bold, even ridiculous vision for a post-food future. So far, it has not materialized. After several days of searching, I finally got my hands on a bottle of Soylent through the magic of the internet. It tasted strikingly similar to the other shakes on the market—dominated by notes of their low-calorie sweeteners. Coogan, the Soylent co-founder, has given up the stuff. “I have a very regimented schedule now where I have breakfast with my team every morning,” he said. But when you walk into a grocery store and glance at the refrigerated row of shakes, with their minimalist packaging and maximalist promises, the original dream of Soylent can seem comparatively quaint. The goal is no longer to match food. The goal has become to transcend it.

Is Marco Rubio the Happiest Cabinet Member?

2026-05-09T06:00:00-04:00

It’s a low bar, perhaps, but no one in the Trump administration seems to be having more fun at the moment than Marco Rubio. Last weekend, he was acting as a DJ at a family wedding, headphones to his ear with head and hand pumping to the beat. Midweek, the secretary of state was at the podium in the White House briefing room, spitting rap lyrics and cracking jokes. (“Two more questions!” he said, before entertaining seven more.) And toward the end of the week, he was in Vatican City, being escorted through marble hallways by members of the Pontifical Swiss Guard for an audience with Pope Leo XIV, who has been criticized by the president and vice president.

Rubio comes across as the happy warrior, not the angry one—the one offering lighthearted jokes more than brash confrontation.

In a more normal time, he would seem like just another glad-handing politician. But consider the moment: Gas prices are rising, the GOP midterm outlook is dimming, and the war that President Trump launched against Iran continues with no tidy ending in sight. The president faces record-high disapproval ratings. Three Cabinet members have been ousted, and others worry they could be next. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is up on Capitol Hill testifying about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and FBI Director Kash Patel faces questions about his alleged excessive drinking, which he denies. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is navigating the war with Iran and a closed Strait of Hormuz. Vice President Vance, despite his original reservations about that war, has been pulled in as a negotiator and defender.

But Rubio—the guy who once became a meme because of the way he sat uncomfortably on an Oval Office couch, looking exhausted with his many jobs—suddenly looks joyful and light. He seemed to be everywhere all at once this week, followed by a hum and then a buzz of: Hmm, he sure looks like he’s running in 2028. That’s the murmur that once followed Vance. Although people close to Rubio and Vance downplay any rivalry—insisting that they are close friends and ardent allies—it’s hard not to see a shadow Republican presidential primary beginning to emerge. Vance made his first trip to Iowa as vice president on Tuesday, to campaign for vulnerable midterm candidates, raise money for the party, and stoke interest in his own political future.

Toward the end of the Tuesday briefing, a reporter from the Christian Broadcasting Network lobbed a softball question at the country’s top diplomat: “What is your hope for America at a time such as this?" Rubio took a big swing. “It’s the hope I hope we all share. We want it to continue to be the place where anyone from anywhere can achieve anything, where you’re not limited by the circumstances of your birth, by the color of your skin, by your ethnicity,” he said.

He continued for nearly a minute in what sounded awfully like a stump speech I’d heard before—and, in fact, it was. Rubio had delivered, in portions nearly word for word, the same formula in his 2016 campaign. He said it on the campaign trail, and he said it from the debate stage. On Wednesday, Rubio’s official State Department X account released a campaign-style video, in which his lofty words played over a montage of Rubio and Trump and American flags. It even included a clip of Ronald Reagan as music from the Superman movie Man of Steel swelled. It has been viewed more than 4 million times.

Rubio is the secretary of state, but last year he also became the national security adviser. For a time, he was also the acting head of the National Archives and USAID. And this week, he was tasked with filling in for White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who had given birth a few days prior. “Another job?” the official White House X account posted to preview his briefing-room appearance as must-see TV. “Don’t miss it!”

At the podium, Rubio deadpanned and joked, bantered and riffed. He spoke in Spanish at the request of a Telemundo reporter and called on an Italian reporter he said he recognized from his tenure as a senator. He tried to work the room, lamenting that no one had a name tag on (“Back row, yellow tie!” “In the pink.” “I need to get a laser pointer!” “Right there in the white!”) He was learning, he explained; he was “winging it, guys.”

“They gave me a little map—I don’t know where I put it—of the people here. Some of you had, like, red X’s. I’m kidding. No, that’s not true.” He next tried to call on someone wearing black before multiple people butted in, prompting Rubio to marvel: “This is chaos, guys!”

[Read: The Pentagon may not be giving Trump the full picture of the war]

He parried questions about Iran and gas prices, trying to reframe the debate. Sure, Iran is pushing gas prices up, he argued, but imagine how little leverage the United States would have if the regime also possessed a nuclear weapon. “A nuclear-armed Iran could do whatever the hell they want with the Straits, and there’s nothing anyone would be able to do about it,” he said. (The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said in March that the development of a weapon was not imminent.)

Close listeners would have detected Rubio’s use—perhaps to make the complexities of geopolitical diplomacy and threat of nuclear warfare slightly more digestible—of early-’90s rap lyrics: He said that top officials in the Iranian government were “insane in the brain” (a nod to Cypress Hill’s 1993 hit) and added that “they should check themselves before they wreck themselves” (a paraphrase of Ice Cube’s 1992 song “Check Yo Self”). Toward the end, Rubio said he would take a last question. He pointed to Jacqui Heinrich of Fox News. “Many people want to know: What is your DJ name?” she asked. “My DJ name?” he responded. “You’re not ready for my DJ name.”

About 36 hours after leaving the briefing room, Rubio was preparing to arrive at the Vatican. He was the parishioner with the pontiff, a secretary of state with the head of one of the world’s largest religions, a Florida man connecting with the guy formerly known as Robert Prevost from Chicago, the former football player with the ardent White Sox fan. Perhaps most crucial, Rubio was the conduit between a U.S. president who has become a constant critic of the pope and an American-born pope marking the one-year anniversary of his elevation. For Rubio, it was one of his highest-wire acts of diplomacy yet.

Rubio is a practicing Catholic who regularly attends Mass, but he has an eclectic religious background. For a period after moving to Las Vegas as a child, he converted to Mormonism—immersing himself in its theology, studying church literature, and joining a neighborhood-church-sponsored Cub Scout pack—but after watching a televised papal Mass during Easter Week in 1983, he switched back to Catholicism. His family has regularly attended a megachurch affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, but he has maintained his home in the Catholic Church and written about its deep influence on his life.

Rubio presents a less outspoken version of Catholicism than Vance, who in several weeks is releasing a book on his 2019 Catholic conversion. Vance last month threw an eyebrow-raising brushback pitch to the pope, who had criticized the U.S.-led war in Iran. “I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” Vance said. Later, after the pope sought to defuse some of the tension, Vance said he was grateful for the pope’s remarks and that “he will be in our prayers, and I hope that we’ll be in his.”

Rubio earlier in the week downplayed the idea that he was on a special mission to smooth things over, saying: “No, I mean, it’s a trip we had planned from before, and obviously we had some stuff that happened.” The White House referred me to the State Department on questions about the president’s hope for the trip, and the roles of Rubio and Vance. “Secretary Rubio decided to go to the Vatican (as is normal for a secretary to do), and no one ‘asked’ or ‘told’ him to,” a State Department official told me, requesting not to be identified to discuss the planning of the trip. Last year Vance led a delegation, which included Rubio, to attend the pope’s inaugural Mass. Vance had also met with Pope Francis a few weeks earlier, a meeting that occurred hours before his death.

[Read: The tiny White House club making major national-security decisions]

In the lead-up to Rubio’s trip, Trump seemed to make diplomacy as hard as possible. He had called the pope “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy.” In an interview three days before Rubio was to arrive, Trump said that the pope had been “endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people.” “He thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” the president told the conservative-radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. The remarks were baffling to the Vatican. Outside the papal residence at Castel Gandolfo the next night, Pope Leo spoke with journalists and, reading between the diplo-speak, said Trump should stop mischaracterizing his position. He said it should be clear, through the decades, that the Church has routinely spoken out against nuclear weapons.

No tension was evident in the few images and video footage that emerged from Rubio’s two-and-a-half-hour visit inside the Vatican, where he also met with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, secretary of state of the Holy See. Rubio and Leo posed for a stiff photo: the secretary of state in a blue tie and an American flag pin, the pope in all-white vestments and a silver cross necklace. While acknowledging that the pope is “a baseball guy,” Rubio for some reason presented him with a small crystal football bearing the seal of the State Department.

“What to get someone who has everything?” Rubio asked, even though the pope, famously, gives up all material possessions. The pope presented Rubio with several gifts, including a pen made from the wood of an olive tree. “Olive being, of course,” the pope reminded him, “the plant of peace.”

By yesterday afternoon in Rome, when Rubio addressed reporters for about 20 minutes at the end of his trip, he seemed to grow more defensive about whether any progress had been made. He had updated the pope, he said, on the situation with Iran and how seriously the U.S. takes the nuclear threat. He emphasized his respect for the pope as a spiritual leader and said that, “obviously, the church has always interacted on behalf of a mission for peace and a respect for all of humanity.”

Would he recommend that the president stop criticizing the pope? “Why would I tell you what I’m going to recommend to the president?” Rubio responded. “But beyond that, the president will always speak clearly about how he feels about the U.S. and U.S. policy.”

Did he ask the pope to stop criticizing the Iran war? Rubio refused to say and then made plain that that wasn’t why he was there: “This was a trip that had been planned even before all these things had happened.”

Would there be a phone call between the pope and the president anytime soon? “Um, I don’t know. Maybe? I don’t know. I mean, it could happen.” By the end of the week, it was clear: The same could be said about a 2028 presidential run.

Software Ate My Homework

2026-05-08T16:41:45-04:00

A student emailed me yesterday, panicked, in the early afternoon. She was worried about her final project in my university course, which was due at midnight. By the time I saw the email, three hours had elapsed. By the time we got on Zoom to discuss the matter, another 90 minutes.

That’s when I learned about the outage. Canvas, an online service used by as many as 40 percent of North American colleges, among them Washington University in St. Louis, where I teach, had gone down globally—victim to a ransomware attack. Just like ride-share apps replaced the physical act of hailing a cab, “courseware” such as Canvas has replaced more analog systems at almost every college and university, which now use the tool to run classrooms, manage assignments, and handle grading. When Canvas goes down, college classes cease to operate.

My heart sank because already I could anticipate a million little irritations that would add up to a huge headache for everyone, as students worried about how to submit their work, whether they would be penalized, whether they could be given an opportunistic extension—and I worried about whether I would have to reschedule my weekend to complete grading by Monday. Students had already started emailing—Submitting my project just in case. Better safe than sorry. I get it—I’d threatened to refuse late submissions, but only because I had endeavored to push the deadline as late as possible in the first place, to give them as much time as I could. Of course, I wouldn’t hold this against them, but I understood their anxiety. Students are all anxiety, today. Every interaction begins and ends with worry.

Later in the day, while I waited for the crisis to resolve, I watched the episode of Mad Men in which Don forces Megan to eat orange sherbet and then abandons her at a Howard Johnson’s in Plattsburgh, New York. Communication in this era was simpler: pay phones, whose calls may or may not reach their recipients. Ambiguity and uncertainty were assumed and understood. Some answers would not come right away; you would just have to wait. I considered how nostalgia for the 20th century is, in part, a longing for a time when human interactions felt more direct and therefore more successful, even when they failed. Now, people feel trapped by the tools we use, unable to interact in a human way by means of them—and forced to do so less efficiently besides.

But in the moment, with the student’s nervous face on my computer screen, I faced a more immediate problem. Having changed her plans for the project at the last minute, she wondered if her new plan for her video game—the course is an Atari 2600 game-programming class—would make the result, and her grade, worse. The question was reasonable. Students have been encouraged to orient themselves toward performance; faculty have been advised to meet them where they are; college costs a lot of money and mainly serves to professionalize students, even when they are learning to program a 50-year-old computer.

But I could not answer her question, despite wanting to. The reason was the rubric, a name for the detailed liturgy of how a professor will assess an assignment. Rubrics are meant to avoid arbitrariness, but they also serve other instrumental goals: normalizing “learning objectives” so that universities can assess “learning outcomes” for accreditation and other bureaucratic purposes. This, in part, justifies the use of software such as Canvas, which allows instructors to write rubrics and grade against them, and (in theory at least) for assessors to roll up such results into reports and data. My assignment existed only inside Canvas, and my rubric along with it. I could not log in to see my own grading criteria and thereby offer my student advice about how to maximize the seven hours remaining until the assignment was due.

As those hours elapsed, I read more about the outage, which sounded serious. Hackers who had previously targeted Google and Ticketmaster had purposely chosen now, when college finals are happening, to threaten Instructure, the company that makes Canvas, that they would leak the personal information of 275 million Canvas users, among them teachers such as myself and the students in my class, if the company didn’t pay up. That leverage was possible because so many universities have outsourced course management—a concept that didn’t exist when I was a student—to a handful of companies providing it via cloud-based “software as a service,” and at great expense. In place of the usual Canvas webpage was an image of robots fixing a cartoon rocket above the text, “Canvas is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance,” a message that seemed like a lie.

[Jenny Anderson: What happened after a teacher ditched screens]

Neither Canvas nor my university were yet offering alternatives for how to close out the semester successfully and fairly, but I knew I needed one. Students are notorious for not checking their email, but I couldn’t figure out how to email them anyway; communication between teachers and students is now managed in Canvas, which I could not access.

My heart sank again as I fell upon an answer. Over the past five years, my campus, like many others beset by the deficiencies of IT systems first made in the 1990s or 2000s, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Workday, the cursed but ubiquitous enterprise-resource-planning software that might afflict you at your job, to operate our enrollment, registration, and other student-facing systems. I had recently had an exchange with a colleague in the provost’s office, wondering if we could make the students upload their photo to Canvas so that professors like me could use the thing as a face book of sorts. That feature is in Workday, she reminded me.

I logged into Workday and navigated its alien Instructor Teaching Dashboard to locate my course and its roster. I was able to send an email to the students via an awkward and unfamiliar Workday form. I had no idea if it worked. My goal was not to communicate information, but to assure: Don’t panic. I will decide what to do next once information becomes available. Implied in my message: Please do not email me, because the last thing I need is 30 more emails asking the same question I also cannot answer.

It was 9:45 p.m. I navigated to Canvas out of curiosity. It worked! I sent a Canvas Announcement, a private-label version of an email—a type of communication that I was never certain students actually received. I extended the deadline from midnight to noon and notified them of this fact. I’d have to rejigger my schedule a little, but this was the software-as-a-service life, the way of being that no one chose, yet all of us now suffer under. I thought about a trip to the dentist earlier in the week, during which, out of impatience, I’d rebuked the staff for sending so many text-message reminders about my appointment, an act that the dental office had not even really intended to do but that was simply a consequence of whatever patient-management software it must use, the dental equivalent of a courseware assignment rubric.

The next day arrived, and with it more emails from students. Canvas had gone down again. Not Canvas itself, actually—this time, my university had disabled access to it, out of an abundance of caution, which is to say, in order to avert further trouble.

The university had promised an update by 9:30 a.m. It was now 9:40. In the faculty Slack, one of my colleagues in computer science reflected on the wisdom of so many universities putting their faith in one outsourced software provider. A staff member relayed IT’s advice to submit a ticket regarding any Canvas/Workday problems. I felt my blood boiling—more software was being prescribed to solve the problems created by other software. I composed and then deleted a Slack reply that would have only inflamed the situation.

Now 9:45 a.m.: Canvas was back! I logged in from my home office, which required carrying out two-factor authentication via Duo. Thanks to false-confidence attacks on Duo 2FA, that process now required the entry of a three-digit code, not just the pressing of a button. I composed a Canvas Announcement reiterating the noon deadline that I had already decided upon. I also sent the same message via Workday, just in case. In each message, I described my intention to send the same message via the other software service. Why? Out of an abundance of caution, I suppose. Caution for what? I no longer knew.

[Lila Shroff: Is schoolwork optional now?]

I replied to all of the students who had emailed me their work directly. “Please also submit to Canvas”—I had to ask this, because I grade in Canvas, because that’s where the rubric lives, that’s where the records live, that’s where I hold everything in my head at once, if ineptly. I hoped they wouldn’t reply. One replied, “I already did so.” Just in case. Out of an abundance of caution.

Another emailed for the first time. Her phone had stopped charging, she reported, and it was now dead. That meant she couldn’t login to Canvas, not because it was down, but because logging in off campus requires two-factor authentication, and 2FA requires a working mobile phone. She attached the materials to the email. Just in case.

I hit “Reply,” to assure her that I had received it, that I understood, that none of us had chosen any of this, but that now we must live together in its murk. “What a world,” I wrote, and then pressed “Send.” I worried briefly that this reply would not be interpreted definitively enough, and that a follow-up requesting explicit confirmation would arrive. An hour passed absent such a reply, and I heaved a sigh of relief, as a morsel of ambiguity connected her and me, a tiny thread of human understanding eked out of a world run by software.

The GOP’s Stunningly Swift Gerrymandering Drive

2026-05-08T16:37:11-04:00

For more than four decades, the Ninth Congressional District of Tennessee stood as a bulwark, ensuring that the Black voters who compose a majority of the city of Memphis could choose their representative in Washington. With a nod from the Supreme Court, the state’s ruling Republicans took barely a week to wipe that district off the map.

Tennessee yesterday enacted legislation that splits much of Memphis among three separate districts, diluting the votes of Black residents and all but guaranteeing Republicans an additional House seat. The move was the first, and surely not the last, GOP legislative response to the Supreme Court’s decision last week gutting enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Across the South, Republicans are rushing to redraw congressional districts that, because of the Court’s 6–3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, they believe they are no longer required to reserve for nonwhite voters, who predominantly cast ballots for Democrats.

Voting-rights advocates expected GOP-led states to use the ruling to escalate a nationwide gerrymandering race. But the speed and blunt force of the Republican response has been astonishing. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry invoked emergency powers usually meant for natural disasters to suspend a primary election that was already under way to give lawmakers time to redistrict. Alabama Republicans held votes during a tornado watch while a storm flooded the state capitol to allow for new primary elections if federal courts clear the state’s path to redistrict. South Carolina legislators also took an initial step toward gerrymandering the district of Representative James Clyburn, one of the nation’s most prominent Black leaders.

Collectively, the moves could increase the GOP’s chances of retaining its narrow House majority in this fall’s midterm elections. Republicans received another major judicial boost this morning, when Virginia’s highest court struck down a statewide referendum designed by Democrats to give them as many as four additional House seats.

The Virginia decision will help Republicans in the short term, but the Callais ruling, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by the Supreme Court’s five other conservative members, could benefit the GOP and reshape congressional representation in the South for years to come. “This feels like the echoes of the ‘southern strategy’ of the ’60s,” Anneshia Hardy, the executive director of the advocacy group Alabama Values, told us. “This is diluting Black political power.” When the Court issued its ruling last week, Hardy had just finished speaking at an event at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery. She got back to her car and wept.

In Louisiana, more than 42,000 voters had already cast ballots in the state’s May 16 primaries when Landry halted the elections for U.S. House races. The move prompted chaos and confusion, election officials told us. Years of attacks on the integrity of elections have already sowed distrust among voters in the system, making the difficult task of election administration all the more challenging. Among election workers, “it’s crushing for morale,” David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, told us. He equated Landry’s move to ripping a tablecloth off an already set table.

To complicate matters further, Landry postponed only the House primaries. He did not call off the state’s highly competitive Senate primary, leading to worries that turnout for that race will plummet. In southern Louisiana’s Lafayette Parish, Registrar of Voters Charlene Meaux-Menard told us that many of the parish’s 160,000 voters are baffled about why three polling locations are open for voting, because they thought the entire election was canceled. The Republican visited the sites and wrote on Facebook that the election was still on: “The voters are confused—besides us—having to do this new process,” she said. “They’re thinking the election is not happening at all.”

In Tangipahoa Parish, an hour east of Baton Rouge, Andi Matheu, the registrar of voters, told us that her biggest challenge is getting the message out to 80,000 voters that an election is under way. She said many people seem to be reading only news headlines but not the information in the stories. “The headline says ‘Election Suspended,’ and that’s not true,” she said, exasperated. “Then it’s like a bad game of Telephone—somebody tells somebody else, who tells somebody else. And by the time it gets to the fifth person, we’re never going to have elections again in Louisiana.”

While election officials in Louisiana are scrambling, Republicans in the GOP-controlled legislature are now deciding whether to carve up one or both of the House districts in New Orleans and Baton Rouge that Black Democrats currently represent. Either way, their choice will likely contribute to a steep decline in Black representation in Congress.

By the time the Callais decision came down last week, Florida Republicans were already voting on a newly gerrymandered map that presumed the Court would weaken Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Tennessee Republicans were ready too. On Wednesday, they introduced a map slicing up state Democrats’ lone remaining stronghold in Memphis and its suburbs. The proposal cleared both chambers of the legislature yesterday, overcoming loud protests that included a tense confrontation between a Democratic lawmaker and state troopers. (The lawmaker’s brother was arrested). “They destroyed the votes of one community for their own political partisan gain,” Democratic State Senator London Lamar told us. “They knew that they would take away the Black vote, and it’s just downright disgusting and egregious.”

Kermit Moore, the president of the Memphis chapter of the NAACP, described his reaction as “anger and disgust.” “This mid-decade power grab by the Republicans is unlawful, unethical, and is taking the power away from a community that had the chance to vote and elect their own representative,” he told us. (For nearly 20 years, Memphis has voted to send a white progressive, Steve Cohen, to Congress. “That doesn’t matter,” Moore said when we brought this up. “Blacks had a choice in who represented them, and Steve Cohen has been that choice.”)

Although the Supreme Court has already blessed Louisiana’s move to immediately redraw its congressional districts, the legality of the GOP’s gerrymandering push elsewhere is not as clear-cut. The Alito decision directly invalidated only Louisiana’s map. “These other states are using” the Callais decision “as pretext to do what they wanted to do anyway,” Omar Noureldin, a former Justice Department official who now leads the litigation team at the watchdog group Common Cause, told us. Democrats and voting-rights advocates are holding out a slim hope of challenging Tennessee’s map, but the burden for proving intentional racial discrimination under the new standards established in Callais will be exceedingly difficult to meet. “I’m not optimistic,” Noureldin said. In Florida, voters in 2010 approved a constitutional amendment explicitly outlawing partisan gerrymandering, but Democrats remain skeptical that the state’s entirely Republican-appointed supreme court will toss out its new map.

[Read: The fight-club rule on gerrymandering]

The legal outlook is different in Alabama, which even after Callais remains under a federal court order not to redraw its congressional districts until the 2030 Census. The state is trying to get the injunction lifted, but that directive, along with impending primaries on May 19, initially caused Governor Kay Ivey to hold off on calling the legislature back for a special session. She soon changed her mind, and GOP lawmakers approved bills that would set a new election for House races if the Supreme Court rules in its favor.

Whether South Carolina redraws its map might depend on internal GOP politics as much as the courts. Republican leaders were hesitant to act until recently, in part because targeting Clyburn’s seat could put GOP-held districts at risk in a Democratic-wave election. But following the Callais decision, President Trump has ramped up his pressure on red states to gerrymander as aggressively as possible—even if they have to scrap primary elections that have already occurred. “If they have to vote twice, so be it,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The president’s bullhorn became louder two days later, when most of the candidates he backed in Indiana state-Senate primaries defeated incumbent Republicans who had defied Trump by voting down a gerrymandering proposal in December. “There was no intent to redraw congressional district lines in South Carolina. Then the pressure came from up above to do that, and all of a sudden, we were off to the races,” Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a Democrat and the longest-serving member of South Carolina’s state House of Representatives, told us. Still, Cobb-Hunter said she wasn’t sure that Republicans would ultimately vote to redistrict, nor that they would definitely gain a seat if they did. “I’m just not convinced that what they think is going to happen will actually happen,” she said.

[Read: The fear taking hold among Indiana Republicans]

Whether or not Republicans succeed in redistricting South Carolina, they have over the past week retaken a decisive lead in the nationwide gerrymandering battle. Democrats had briefly evened the score in Virginia, but the nullification of their election victory combined with the post-Callais GOP moves in the South will make their bid to retake the House more difficult. If they are disappointed by the aggressiveness of the Republican response to the Supreme Court’s ruling, they do not claim to be surprised. Nor does Hardy, the Alabama advocate. “This is not un-American. This is very much so American,” she told us. “This is a textbook example of how power operates in this country.”

The “Bad-Good” Genre of Music

2026-05-08T16:01:00-04:00

I have a confession to make: I love listening to bad music.

This realization came to me a few months ago, while I was working on an obituary for the guitarist Steve Cropper and relistened to his 1980 record, Playin’ My Thang. Cropper’s work as a member of Booker T. & the M.G.’s is unimpeachable; this album, however, deserves impeachment, conviction, and removal. If for some reason you make it past the double red flags of the cover art and title, well, here are a few comments posted on the music-collecting website Discogs: “I already know after one play that this will never spin again on my player.” “Easily in my all time worst.” “Always put off buying this as the cover is so awful but sadly the cover is the best thing about the record.”

I can’t disagree. And yet, once I put my used copy on the turntable—Playin’ My Thang mercifully never got a major-label CD release—I couldn’t stop listening. It’s so bad, and so good. There are many such records that I love and listen to frequently, although I cannot defend their quality.

Let’s lay out a few rules for the category, which I’ll call “bad-good.” First, the selection cannot be made for reasons of pure snobbery. I’m not here to pick on bands that just aren’t very good in general. Many people adore the Shaggs, the legendarily atonal outsider group, but it doesn’t belong here; we’re looking for bad music made by good musicians. Nor is this about looking down on any genre. These are bands working in genres that take themselves seriously (sometimes too seriously). I also differentiate between bad-good albums and guilty pleasures. A guilty pleasure is generally something that makes us feel good, even if it might be looked down upon by the self-appointed arbiters of good taste. My hipper music friends sometimes make fun of me for liking Sheryl Crow and dismiss her, but her songs are sturdy and catchy. Bad-good music must be objectively cringe.

Kicking off my bad-good playlist is the Brazilian keyboardist Eumir Deodato’s arrangement of “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” the Richard Strauss composition famously heard in 2001: A Space Odyssey. This recording reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1973, which is pretty incredible because it’s a nine-minute instrumental version of a classical work and also because it’s impossible to listen to without laughing. The track kicks off with a slinky electric-keyboard pattern under the famous fanfare and goes from there.

While we’re on groovy vamps, let’s move to “(You Think You’re) So Hot,” by the duo of Neal Schon (better known as the force behind Journey) and Jan Hammer (better known for his keytar-driven Miami Vice theme). Both men played in important early-1970s groups—Santana and Mahavishnu Orchestra, respectively—but don’t expect the same quality here. What you’ll get is a cocaine-funk bass line and dueling solos from Schon’s guitar and Hammer’s synth. It’s somehow both trashy and pretentious.

Changing vibes, next up is the great jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery’s version of Pete Seeger’s anti-war song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” The tune’s earnest lyrics and singsongy melody don’t lend themselves to jazz arrangement, but that didn’t stop Montgomery’s producers, who slapped a faux-baroque-horn introduction and treacly strings all over it. Montgomery plays barely more than the melody. AllMusic says that “this strictly for-the-money effort can be safely passed by,” but I disagree: The combination is just too befuddling to hate.

This kind of ill-chosen pop cover was a staple of jazz in the late 1960s and ’70s. Montgomery’s fellow guitarist Grant Green had some excellent takes on popular songs (check out his rendition of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”). You won’t find any of them on Easy, his final recording, though. The critic Stanley Crouch once argued that Lionel Richie’s music has “so little melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic character that even the most imaginative jazz musicians” wouldn’t perform it, but Green says Hold my wine cooler and breezes through the Commodores’ “Easy” and “Three Times a Lady.” Even stranger is a rendition of “Nighttime in the Switching Yard”—perhaps the only time a jazz musician has covered Warren Zevon.

But the peak of the bad-good category is, for me, Green’s previous record, The Main Attraction. The cover art is once again a tip-off: Green grins in a brown check blazer against a trippy black-and-white background. The title track, which filled all of side A on the original vinyl release, sounds like the theme song to a lost blaxploitation film you might find on TV in the middle of the night. Green doesn’t even play a note for more than a minute. Here again is a bloated horn section, this time augmented by wah-wah guitar. Yet the song just gets so deep into a funky pocket that I keep coming back to the record. (There’s a reason Green is a favorite source for hip-hop samples.) If you make it through all 19 minutes, you’re rewarded with “Future Feature,” a flute-driven jingle ready-made for a ’70s action-show soundtrack. It’s horribly cheesy, and it rules. Really, what else can you ask for from a song?

Related:

Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture? (From 2025)
Tom Nichols: The rock & roll hall of fame should not exist. (From 2025)

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Virginia’s top court struck down a Democratic-backed House map that could have helped the party gain up to four seats, handing Republicans a major redistricting win ahead of the midterms.
The United States and Iran exchanged fire near the Strait of Hormuz yesterday. President Trump said that American forces destroyed Iranian attackers during the clash; he also said in an interview today that the conflict is “over when it’s over” but that the U.S. “certainly have won militarily.” U.S. Central Command said that it fired today on two more tankers accused of violating the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports.
ABC has accused the Federal Communications Commission of violating the First Amendment by targeting political content it disagrees with, escalating a growing clash between major media companies and the Trump administration.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Boris Kachka on the kind of nonfiction that wins Pulitzers

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Evening Read

Adam Silver Goes to War

By Tim Alberta

Adam Silver is one of America’s most powerful men. Part businessman and part diplomat, he leads a multibillion-dollar international conglomerate and exercises soft power across continents. But on the day we met, the commissioner of the National Basketball Association appeared aimless, drifting awkwardly through the roped-off VIP area of a sports-business conference in Nashville …

The commissioner is carefully stage-managed. Media engagements are rare; rarer still are the probing questions that might be asked of someone leading a business valued at roughly $200 billion. Early last year, I’d approached the NBA about a profile—not just of Silver but of the game itself, a holistic look at the evolution of professional basketball. The answer: a hard no. Hence the trip to Nashville.

I had been warned, when talking with his contemporaries, that Silver is kept in bubble wrap. Now I witnessed it up close. Silver’s longtime flack, Mike Bass, was refusing to answer my texts—we stood 50 feet apart, separated by the VIP rope, as he stared at his phone—asking for an introduction. Meanwhile, officials from three separate teams, whom I’d planned to meet in Nashville, had all canceled. It seemed like a coordinated snubbing. Which left me no choice: When Silver wandered within reach, I slipped the rope and thrust an open hand in his direction.

Read the full article.

The Truth Is Still Out There

2026-05-08T14:00:00-04:00

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

“There has been a threat to publicly release government material long shrouded in secrecy.” This sentence could have been intoned by a TV newscaster anytime in the past few years, about any number of real or alleged cover-ups—of Joe Biden’s mental decline, or the names in the Epstein files, or the origins of COVID‑19. In fact, it comes from the trailer that aired during the Super Bowl for Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s new movie, opening June 12. For people who believe in aliens, or who would like to be able to believe in them, that title leaves no doubt about the kinds of secrets in question: Disclosure refers to the long-awaited moment when the U.S. government will admit what it really knows about visitors to our planet.

When President Trump promised, in a social-media post in February, “to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life,” he implied that disclosure might be just around the corner. It wasn’t: This morning, the Pentagon released a tranche of historic images on a new website, war.gov/ufo, which feature plenty of black-and-white murk but nothing that looks even a little like an alien spacecraft. Still, if history is any guide, this disappointment won’t put an end to the belief that the government is hiding a spaceship or an alien corpse; according to one of the best-known UFO legends, both were retrieved from a crash site near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Or the proof could be something less tangible—a clear image of a nonhuman craft in flight, a radio signal from an extraterrestrial civilization. However it happens, disclosure will finally reveal the truth—not just about aliens, but about the authorities that have been deceiving us for so long.

This isn’t a new theme for science fiction, or for Spielberg. His career as a director took off in a post-Watergate climate when Hollywood was obsessed with official conspiracies and heroic whistleblowers—think of Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men, Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Spielberg brought this suspicious, anti-establishment mood to his early blockbusters, starting in 1975 with Jaws, in which the mayor of a northeastern beach town tries to cover up a deadly shark attack.

[Read: The blockbuster that captured a growing American rift]

But the perfect genre for a story about government lies was the UFO movie, as Spielberg showed with Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. “All I wanna do is know what’s going on,” says Roy Neary, the working-class hero played by Richard Dreyfuss, after a brush with a UFO. Unfortunately, powerful forces are determined to keep him from finding out. The term gaslighting wasn’t as popular then as it is today, but every military and government official in the movie is engaged in exactly that—trying to convince Neary, and other ordinary people like him, not to trust their own eyes.

“Now, there are all kinds of ideas that would be fun to believe in—mental telepathy, time travel, immortality, even Santa Claus,” a condescending government spokesman says to a group of UFO witnesses. At the film’s climax, the Army invents a story about a chemical-weapons spill as an excuse for evacuating a swath of Wyoming where the aliens are expected to land. If they hadn’t finally shown themselves at the end of the movie—in a sky-filling, strobe-lit mother ship too awe-inspiring to conceal—there’s no doubt the U.S. government would have gone on hiding the truth forever.

Sunset Boulevard / Corbis / Getty

On the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which came out in 1977

Universal / Getty

Elliott (Henry Thomas) and E.T. in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

That’s just what it tries to do in Spielberg’s next alien movie, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, from 1982. When the government learns that Elliott, a young boy, is hiding an adorable alien, his entire house is sealed off in a plastic tarp—a quarantine that also serves as a perfect concealment. When the boy and the alien manage to break out, they are pursued by agents with guns, escaping with the aid of a bicycle and the power of imagination.

The lesson of these movies is clear: Trust yourself, not the government. It’s a message deeply in the American grain, and science fiction has been amplifying it for decades. In the long-running TV series The X-Files, the FBI agents Mulder and Scully battle the “Syndicate,” a conspiracy at the highest levels of power to sell out the human race to alien invaders. The Men in Black movies play the idea for laughs, imagining a world where law enforcement keeps tabs on aliens living among us in disguise. The titular agents use a “neuralyzer” device to wipe the memory of anyone who stumbles upon the secret.

Merrick Morton / Everett Collection

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson in the X-Files movie (1998)

Niko Tavernise / Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment

Josh O’Connor and Emily Blunt in Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day

Disclosure Day promises a new kind of UFO story, in which government secrecy is defeated and the world finally learns the truth. Spielberg may be a half century older than when he made Close Encounters, but he clearly hasn’t lost his power to read the mood of American culture. In the past decade, a profound shift has taken place in the way we talk and think about UFOs. To quote the title of a 2025 documentary on the subject, we are living in “The Age of Disclosure.”

The most important sign of this change is that aliens have become respectable. It used to be that only supermarket tabloids such as the National Enquirer reported on UFO sightings; now they are seriously discussed in mainstream media and congressional hearings. Even the term UFO has fallen out of favor, tainted by its long association with crankery. Government officials and true believers alike now prefer to talk about UAP. At first the acronym stood for “unidentified aerial phenomena,” but aerial was soon changed to anomalous, to include all kinds of “space, airborne, submerged, and transmedium objects.” That is how UAP are defined in the mission statement of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, a government agency created in 2022 “to synchronize efforts across the Department of Defense, and with other U.S. federal departments and agencies, to detect, identify and attribute objects of interest.”

Our age of disclosure was born on December 16, 2017, when The New York Times published an article headlined “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” The story revealed that, from 2007 to 2012, the Defense Department had allocated approximately $22 million to the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a secret task force charged with investigating reports of flying objects that maneuver and accelerate in ways that ordinary aircraft cannot.

Such sightings aren’t new. Americans have been noticing inexplicable things in the sky since World War II, when pilots over Germany reported being followed by glowing balls that they nicknamed “foo fighters.” The term unidentified flying object was coined in the early 1950s to describe such phenomena in a neutral, noncommittal fashion. But of course, what made UFOs fascinating was the possibility that they could be extraterrestrial spacecraft.

In 1966, public concern about the issue prompted the Air Force to convene a panel of scientists to review UFO reports. The committee, headed by the physicist Edward Condon, bluntly concluded that such sightings were meaningless, blaming them on “inexperienced, inept, or unduly excited” observers who mistake ordinary sights like planets and balloons for flying saucers. “Nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,” the committee reported, and “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified.”

That verdict led the U.S. military to stop officially taking notice of sightings, even by its own pilots. But the 2017 revelations about AATIP seemed to prove what advocates of disclosure had always maintained: Though the Pentagon publicly denied that it had any evidence of aliens, it actually knew they were real. In fact, it possessed videos of encounters between UAP and American military aircraft. The Times and other news outlets published several of these videos online—low-resolution black-and-white footage of what looked like a small blob zooming over the ocean.

All of this respectful attention drove a transformation in public opinion. In 1996, a Newsweek poll found that 20 percent of Americans believed that UFOs were “probably alien ships or alien life forms.” When a YouGov poll asked the same question in 2022, that figure had increased to 34 percent. Even people who don’t think aliens have been here are now much more likely to believe that they will be here soon. In 1996, 69 percent of Americans thought that humanity would not contact aliens in the next half century; by 2022, only 39 percent did.

No wonder politicians who would once have scoffed at UFOs began to see them as a winning issue. Disclosure has never seemed closer than it did on July 26, 2023, when the House Oversight Committee held an open hearing on UAP as a national-security threat. Witnesses with apparently unimpeachable credentials testified under oath that the U.S. military has been hiding its knowledge of UFOs for decades. David Fravor, a retired Navy pilot, said that in 2004, his fighter squadron encountered a “white Tic Tac object” in the sky off the coast of San Diego. The craft had “no rotors, no rotor wash, or any sign of visible control surfaces like wings,” yet it was able to outrun fighter jets.

David Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer, made even more explosive claims. “I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP-crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program” that operated in secret, “above congressional oversight,” Grusch testified. In interviews with journalists, he was more explicit, saying that the U.S. government possessed both intact spacecraft and extraterrestrial bodies.

Last year’s documentary The Age of Disclosure includes similar claims. Pilots talk about seeing objects with no wings or engines that seemed to defy the laws of physics, or at least the limits of human technology; Fravor mentions an oval-shaped object that could move at speeds of “32,000 miles an hour.” The narrator of the film, Luis Elizondo—a former Army intelligence officer who worked on AATIP—talks about a Defense Department effort he calls the “Legacy Program,” which has “been capturing, retrieving, and reverse engineering UAPs since at least 1947. On numerous occasions, these retrievals included the bodies of nonhumans.”

These are exactly the kinds of admissions that disclosure was supposed to bring, and though the more outlandish claims were denied by the government and treated skeptically by the mainstream media, they couldn’t be ignored—not when they were taken seriously by people such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom appear in The Age of Disclosure. Who could blame UFO believers for thinking that the world was about to change in profound and disconcerting ways? “This is Disclosure. This is it Right Now,” a Reddit user announced on r/UFOs, a forum with hundreds of thousands of weekly visitors, in the aftermath of the House hearings. “If you have loved ones, it may be a good idea to begin deciding how you will broach the subject, especially if they are dependents.”

In the Disclosure Day trailer, one character asks what would happen “if you found we weren’t alone. If someone showed you, proved it to you.” But showing and proving are exactly what Elizondo and other self-styled whistleblowers have never been able to do. For all the attention paid to UFOs over the past decade, we still have no evidence that they exist. The public may be more willing to listen to claims about downed spaceships and alien life forms, but we haven’t actually seen any. The murky Pentagon UFO videos have not been followed by clear pictures of alien spacecraft, which could theoretically be taken by anyone with an iPhone.

The most parsimonious explanation for this failure is that there is nothing to disclose. But UFO believers are compelled to reject this idea, because the U.S. government is better equipped than any entity on Earth to detect the arrival of extraterrestrials. If they have been here, some kind of cover-up is a logical necessity. At least one person is certain enough to bet on it: In February, the prediction market Kalshi recorded two wagers, totaling almost $300,000, that the U.S. government would announce the existence of aliens by the end of the year. Inevitably, the news prompted speculation that the bettor was a Trump-administration insider who knows that something big is coming.

[Read: This looks like an insider bet on aliens]

Disclosure isn’t just about logic, however. It is awaited with an almost religious fervor because it will give UFO believers the same kind of affirmation that the coming of the Messiah will give religious believers. Faith, the New Testament says, is the evidence of things not seen. But at the end of days, when God finally becomes visible, faith will give way to knowledge: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.” UFOs are not supposed to be supernatural; if they exist, they must obey the same laws of physics that reign here on Earth. But for now, they remain objects of faith because we have never been able to see one face-to-face. Disclosure will show that this faith was justified all along—that the believers were right and the skeptics wrong.

If this sounds a bit like a revenge fantasy, that’s understandable. UFO belief, like traditional religion, tends to attract the scorn of what the Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher called “cultured despisers,” people who consider themselves too sophisticated to fall for a popular error. How sweet it will be when disclosure proves that the experts and elites were wrong—worse, that they were actively suppressing the truth that nonexperts always knew was out there.

This dynamic of condescension and vindication has become central to American life over the past decade. It drives all kinds of populist causes: vaccine skepticism, the MAHA movement, Roswell-level conspiracy theories such as QAnon and Pizzagate. Every kind of “truther” makes a demand for disclosure—to stop hiding the truth about why the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11, or where Barack Obama was born, or how Trump’s ear got bloodied in Butler, Pennsylvania.

[From the June 2020 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on a dangerous new phase of American conspiracism]

It’s tempting to dismiss these as fantasies born of ignorance and nourished by paranoia. And the cultured despisers are right, most of the time. There is no convincing evidence that the Earth has been visited by aliens, just as there is no convincing evidence that vaccines cause autism. And yet, the Pentagon really was hiding videos of flying objects that could not be readily explained. Jeffrey Epstein really was friendly with royals and presidents. These things were disclosed only after years of public pressure from people who weren’t content with the official story.

And when people are convinced that they know a secret, world-shaking truth, they are willing to wait a long time for vindication. This is another way in which UFO disclosure resembles the coming of the Messiah: Both are constantly running behind schedule.

In 1950, Donald E. Keyhoe, a pilot and fiction writer, published a book called The Flying Saucers Are Real, in which he argued that the government’s apparent UFO denials were actually “part of an elaborate program to prepare the American people for a dramatic disclosure.” After all, the news that there are aliens among us would likely have devastating consequences. People would panic about a possible invasion of the planet and turn against institutions that had been hiding the truth. Nations would compete to benefit from the newcomers and their technology, and religious authorities would have to rethink the foundations of their faith.

It makes sense that the custodians of such knowledge would want to release it little by little, to help humanity prepare for the shock. In fact, UFO believers have long speculated that Hollywood stories about aliens play a role in this acclimatization process. Some online theorists are already arguing that Disclosure Day itself is part of such a campaign: “Is this all just coincidence + perfect marketing timing for the movie? Or has someone been dropping clues?” one Redditor asked after the first trailer appeared.

Keyhoe promised that “the official explanation may be imminent.” In 2024, Elizondo used virtually identical language in his book, Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, looking forward to “imminent government disclosure about nonhuman intelligence.” Three-quarters of a century is a long time for disclosure to remain imminent. But if it proves once and for all that humanity is not alone in the universe, isn’t it worth the wait? Religious believers have been waiting thousands of years for the apocalypse, the vision of the End Times described in the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation. Apocalypse and disclosure are, in fact, Greek and Latin ways of saying the same thing: Both refer to uncovering, the removal of concealment. And as long as we’re convinced that some great, mysterious truth is being hidden, we don’t have to confront an even more unsettling possibility—that there’s nothing out there to believe in at all.

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

The Kind of Nonfiction That Wins Pulitzers

2026-05-08T13:00:00-04:00

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

The Pulitzer Prizes, whose 2026 honorees were announced this week, reward excellent American journalism, music, drama, and books. Public conversation about the six categories of book awards tends to focus on the fiction prize, especially in years when the winner is unusually commercial, such as 2018’s Less, or obscure, like this year’s Angel Down, or not chosen at all, as in 2012. The medal for poetry gets little attention, and critics seldom scrutinize the four nonfiction selections. But if you do look closely at the history, biography, memoir, and general-nonfiction honors, a noticeable pattern emerges. The picks typically share a particular quality, according to my colleague Gal Beckerman, who often writes about nonfiction. The juries go for “books that cover social issues in human (almost novelistic) ways,” he told me. “These are about serious topics, but approached with literary flair.”

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

This year’s honorees fit Beckerman’s mold. Jill Lepore, the winner in history for We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, grounds sweeping ideas about the evolution of democracy in earthy portraits of the people who fought over them. An excerpt published in The Atlantic begins, “Bushy-browed, pipe-smoking, piano-playing Antonin Scalia—Nino—the scourge of the left, knew how to work a crowd.” When the Atlantic staff writer Megan Garber described why Lepore’s earlier history These Truths was among the best books of 2018, she wrote: “Who else but Lepore would think to describe James K. Polk as having ‘eyes like caverns and hair like smoke’?” In a similar vein, the new winner in general nonfiction, Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us, was on our 2025 Atlantic 10 list because it brought to vivid life five families struggling to remain housed—people who, as we put it, “might otherwise remain out of sight.”

I was pleased to see two other Atlantic 10 picks show up on the Pulitzer’s list of finalists; both of them combine big ideas with a literary level of detail. In the history runner-up King of Kings, a granular revisiting of the Iranian Revolution and the grave American missteps that exacerbated it, Scott Anderson flits among the points of view of diplomats, Cabinet officials, and radicals to render the event with a sense of contingency—a feeling that anything could have happened. And no book that I read last year integrates its intellectual and human elements better, to my mind, than A Flower Traveled in My Blood, Haley Cohen Gilliland’s account of the relentless grandmothers of the young people kidnapped and disappeared by Argentina’s government during the 1970s. I’ve been telling people that you could easily make three different, equally excellent movies out of her book, which was a general-nonfiction finalist—and that none of them would capture its best parts.

This week, I also thought back to a Pulitzer finalist from a different time, Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, which is being rereleased this month on the 30th anniversary of the deadly Mount Everest disaster it describes. I had regarded the book as almost purely an adventure tale—until I encountered Krakauer’s introduction to the new edition, which was adapted into an Atlantic article this week. It turns out that the Everest disaster had a lot to do with climate change, over-tourism, and national sovereignty—a set of intertwined social concerns that have grown only more salient over time. That’s why it belongs among these works—books by very different authors that all fit into the same broad canon, because they marry grand insights with stories that are irresistible.

What to Read

Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan, by Darryl Pinckney

This was, hands down, my favorite book of 2022. Pinckney, a celebrated novelist and critic, animates not just his relationship with his teacher and longtime mentor, the legendary writer and editor Elizabeth Hardwick, but an entire milieu: the world, by turns rarefied and gritty, of literary New York in the 1970s. Pinckney introduces the reader to a number of men, and he invokes the devastations of the impending AIDS epidemic in a wholly original way as he suggests that they will be lost to the disease in the years to come. Both somber and hilarious, this memoir elevates gossip to high art, taking readers through Pinckney’s years trawling the East Village in the era when he wrote his earliest articles for The New York Review of Books. It may well send you back to read, or reread, some of the figures covered in its pages—Hardwick and Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell and Mary McCarthy. After that, you may yearn to read this volume all over again; I did precisely that. — Nicholas Boggs

From our list: Eight of the most fascinating biographies to read

Out Next Week

📚 The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, by Katherine Mansfield

📚 2084, by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis

📚 Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, by Barry Walters

Your Weekend Read

Illustration by Wenjing Yang

The Attention-Span Panic

By Franklin Schneider

Attention, these days, is something that many Americans seem to regard as an inherent virtue whose purity they can try to protect or allow to be despoiled. A diminished attention span is a sign of personal weakness, or even intellectual debasement. On social media, people talk of having “German-shepherd attention spans” and liken their condition to “brain damage.” To reduce one’s attention span, so the logic implies, is to reduce one’s humanity.

But this might be an outdated way of thinking about attention—and one that blames the individual for dispensing something that, more accurately, is being extracted. Some of the most lucrative companies on the planet, after all, are those that harvest attention. Perhaps many people feel bad about their attention span not because it’s too short, but because they sense that they’re running themselves ragged by giving away a precious commodity for far less than it’s worth.

Read the full article.

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Flipping Off Phones

2026-05-08T13:00:00-04:00

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

On this week’s episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel talks with his Atlantic colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany about what our phones are doing to us. Tiffany recently wrote about swapping her iPhone for a flip phone as part of a movement called “Month Offline.” Kaitlyn talks through her personal experience: the joys and inconveniences of a dumbphone and the difficulty of unplugging completely. Warzel and Tiffany talk about the growing smartphone backlash, legal cases against “big tech,” and how, even if many people are convinced that their phones are a problem, the science remains far from conclusive regarding direct harm.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Kaitlyn Tiffany: There’s been this sort of clamor for something to happen for long enough that even people who wouldn’t really care to be reading the news of tech policy every single day will be internalizing this idea of like: Social media and smartphones are really bad for us, and I should be trying to use mine less.

[Music]

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to talk about what our phones are and aren’t doing to us.

“It’s Obviously the Phones.” That was the title of a viral Substack essay that came out in March of 2024. Magdalene Taylor, a writer who focuses on sexuality and culture, was trying to articulate why fewer Americans were having sex or going out with friends. There were, she argued, all kinds of factors at play here for increased isolation and alienation in American life. But all of them, she argued, felt abstract compared to the one that was staring her in the face: “The problem,” she wrote, “is obviously our phones.”

“It’s Obviously the Phones” is less an argument that cites endless empirical evidence as much as it says: Look around. Look how everyone is behaving. How could these devices that we carry around with us every moment of the day not be changing us? Now, about a week after Taylor’s essay, Jonathan Haidt, a contributor who is here at The Atlantic, published an essay that had the title “End the Phone-Based Childhood Now.” It came out just before he published The Anxious Generation, in which he argues that a new childhood around screens and devices has unleashed a mental-health epidemic among teens and young adults.

The book was an instant best seller, and it acted as an accelerant for this debate, between the Haidt camp and those who argued that Haidt’s claims are not quite supported by science. According to one criticism of Haidt in the journal Nature, “Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.”

Now, I’ve found this debate endlessly fascinating, and also really frustrating. Studying the effects of phones or social media are often quite difficult to do at scale, because you can get stuck in this chicken-egg situation, where it’s unclear if social media is causing a behavior or exploiting people who are more susceptible to it, or if none of that matters at all and the end result is just “this causes harm to people.”

Here’s one recent example of the dynamic. Just this week, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a large study on the effects of phone bans inside schools. And the results are … honestly complex. Schools that made students keep their devices in locked pouches during the day obviously saw phone use decline significantly. But in the first year, according to the study, student suspensions increased by an average of 16 percent. Now, after an adjustment period, students did, however, report a better sense of personal well-being. But the survey—which tracked more than 40,000 schools since 2019—also showed that strict phone bans had “close to zero” effect on average test scores. The bans also did not improve student attendance or online bullying.

See what I mean? This is far from tidy.

And as a journalist who covers technology, I’m really wary of theories that take this complex and messy social behavior of humans at internet scale and just try to tie it all up in a bow. As a human who uses technology and has a tortured relationship with his own phone, I’m constantly feeling some personal version of “of course it’s the phones.” In my own life, I’ve found that heavy screen-time use outside of my job definitely tracks with periods where I’m feeling anxious. And it’s very clear to me that extended time on my phone and on social-media apps has profound short-term effects on my attention span and the way that I feel—both physically and about the world around me. Like a lot of people, I experiment with phone-free time, and I daydream about what it would be like to just get rid of the device forever.

Now, recently, my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany did just that. Kaitlyn’s been covering the internet and social media for years. And over the last decade or so, she’s been chronicling these debates—about social media, phones, screens, and the really messy, not-always-conclusive research about what they’re doing to us all. In that tradition, she recently traded her iPhone for a flip phone to report on a burgeoning tech movement called “Month Offline."

What I’ve always appreciated about Kaitlyn’s work is that she is not afraid to eschew easy answers for nuance. And she’s also somebody whose own relationship to technology honestly just seems a lot less tortured than my own. So I brought her on today to talk about what she learned ditching her smartphone, and where she stands now on the great phones debate.

[Music]

Warzel: Kaitlyn, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

Kaitlyn Tiffany: Hi, Charlie. Thanks for having me.

Warzel: Okay, so I want to start with this. You have been writing about technology for a long time. We’ve known each other and worked together for a while. I wanted to start, before we get into anything: What is your relationship to your phone as it exists in 2026?

Tiffany: My relationship to my phone … I think my phone is very beautiful. I have this, since we’re doing video I can show.

Warzel: Oh, yeah.

Tiffany: My sister made me this Mets glittery phone case. I think an iPhone is very satisfying to hold. It’s wonderful what it can do. I love using it. And then other times—which I think is a very relatable experience that many people talk about—at other times, I feel sort of like I don’t really know what I’m doing with my phone. Like, I’m just doing phone. You know, you can kind of sit down and be like, I’m gonna have a cup of coffee and stand up in 10 minutes and go about my day. And then 45 minutes later, be like, Oh, I was just doing phone. You know, I don’t really know what occurred during that time. But most of the time, I think of my phone as just like this lovely, useful device that once in a while causes me to enter a time warp, if that makes sense.

Warzel: Yeah, I also find talking about how, like, they’re beautiful is … I think it’s underdiscussed. Like sometimes my case will get all like messed up, and I’ll take it out of the case for the first time and experience the phone just, you know, without any of the stuff on it. And I’m just like, this is just so … I marvel at it again for the first time. Like: This is lovely; let me clean off the screen and really get to, you know, play with this thing.

Tiffany: Yeah, totally.

Warzel: And it feels like this, yeah. And I also, I very much feel the time-warp thing. I like the idea of having a name for it, of just doing phone. I find I do that the most on weekend mornings, when I like have the whole world in front of me, and I don’t have to be working. And I’m like, I just lost this period of time. I don’t know what happened. Mine is definitely very tortured. Yours is sort of less of that. It’s more just like, you’re wary of those moments when you get sucked in, and you try to not have that happen. How would you describe the quality of that relationship? Like, what adjectives would you use to describe it?

Tiffany: I feel like it’s not tortured most of the time. There are times where I realize in a startling way that I need to recalibrate. Which is like, for instance, when I’m trying to look at my phone while I’m brushing my teeth or something. That’s when I’m like, Okay, this isn’t how I want things to be. I need to deliberately not do this.

Warzel: The reason why I wanted to kind of set that baseline is you recently wrote about undergoing a sort of detox experience, or dry January, for your phones. Tell me about Month Offline. What is Month Offline? How did you become aware of it? What’s the deal?

Tiffany: Yeah, it started last year in D.C. as basically literally what it sounds like: a group of people who would do a month offline. But in this case, offline is referring to the iPhones or smartphones specifically. Which is sort of interesting, because I think that’s kind of a cultural thing we’ve started doing too, saying “the internet” and meaning “Instagram, on my phone.” But in any case, it started with a group of people who switched fully to dumb phones, flip phones, for a month. And committed to doing that and meeting up once a week to talk about what was good about it, and what was hard about it, and et cetera.

And it’s evolved since then. So now it’s in D.C. and New York, but it’s also kind of a phone company. So the flip phones that you get now, if you participate, have this pretty interesting—I think, like, technologically intriguing—custom operating system. So that your iMessages, your WhatsApp messages, your regular texts and phone calls will be forwarded from your smartphone to this dumb phone, more or less seamlessly. I had like a few issues with it. And then it also has Google Maps, Uber, which I never used, Microsoft authenticator. Like a couple of other things that people were saying, “Oh, you know, I could really use this, and then I would be willing to switch to a dumb phone.”

It’s $25 a month for the phone plan, and they’re starting to build up this sort of company that treats a flip phone like an accessory to an iPhone. Almost like an Apple watch. And the idea is that you would be able to leave your smartphone at home for extended periods of time. They did tell us to always leave our phones plugged in and charging and on, because the forwarding didn’t work as well, I suppose, if they were off.

But yeah; that’s the general idea. So I signed up to do the March cohort and went to these meetings in Bushwick [Brooklyn] with about 30 other people, I would say. And used a flip phone.

Warzel: Could a person just go and get the phone and not have the experience of … like, are they just straight up selling phones for people who want them? And you could subscribe to this plan, this thing?

Tiffany: Yes. It’s called Dumb Co.—Dumb.co. And you can just get the phone. They’re not making their own hardware. They’re TCL flip phones. It’s like a flip phone that they are sourcing and then preloading with this custom OS, and then shipping to you. And yeah, you can just buy one online.

Warzel: Okay, so now, so you sign up for the thing in March. First time at the meeting: Describe for me the crowd. Like, who is participating here? And was there a very standard pool of, like, gripes or concerns or reasons for it? Like, paint that picture for me—because I have one in my head of like a Bushwick cell-phone-free meetup thing. And I want to hear from you what it was like.

Tiffany: To be clear, I’m a huge Bushwick fan. I love Bushwick. I know what the cultural trope is of Bushwick. But I think it’s a fantastic neighborhood: really interesting, lots going on, lots of different kinds of people. I will say, though, what you are picturing is probably pretty close to accurate. Everyone there, to my knowledge, everyone there that I spoke to was around the ages of like, 26 to 32. Mostly, you know, creative-class jobs, maybe tech jobs, some grad students, almost all women. I think of the 30, there were maybe four or five men.

And yeah, like super nice, thoughtful people. But I think all kind of on the same wavelength of like, I have a job or a lifestyle that kind of requires me to look at a smartphone or a laptop a lot, and that is bleeding into me doing it all the time in my personal time. And maybe a little bit of just angst about how you’re living your life in general, you know? Like, I think people talked about losing all this time to their iPhones, and not having time to read or write songs or make new friends. Or, you know, go do whatever they would want to do in New York City. They weren’t experiencing acute, specific harms that they mentioned from anything they were doing online. It was just like—the loss of time. All the time they felt they were losing.

Warzel: What’s your mindset going into this? Is it like, This could be good for me? Is it just, I just want to have the experience and just sort of see what it does? Or was it, I’m actually more interested in the ways that, like, I can watch, you know, other people give feedback? How much of this was for yourself, and how much of it was for just the reporting experience of being around this group?

Tiffany: I think it was mostly for the reporting experience. Like I said, you know, I don’t find it hard to put my phone away if I think of it. If I think, like, I’m using my phone a little too much, it’s easy for me to correct that. So I kind of knew it wasn’t gonna do that much for me personally.

But I was really interested in it mostly because in New York, over the past couple of years, there has been this palpable shift, or rising energy around being anti-smartphone, anti–social media. Literally walking around the streets, there’s posters everywhere that say, you know, Big Tech is watching you or Kick the screen time. Or the ads for Month Offline say Flip off. There’s just a lot of it everywhere.

The anti-AI spirit is pretty palpable in New York, too. You know, our colleague Mateo wrote about the Friend AI subway campaign that was defaced all over the city. So I’ve been curious, I guess, about how much of that is real, and what kinds of people are interested in it. Whether it’s just sort of smaller hobbyist groups, or whether there’s kind of a popular appeal. And so I think that was kind of the main motivation—was to actually meet some of these people who are contributing to this, I guess, for lack of a better word vibe that I’ve been getting.

Warzel: Month Offline is a pretty small group to begin with at the moment. But do you think this is indicative of something broader at the moment? Or is this kind of like a cultural, you know, like a coastal elite kind of vibe that’s there? Like, has it crept? Do you think this like ennui and culture kind of is everywhere, and we’re just not like hearing about it or seeing it as much? Or do you think that there really are these, like, locuses of, you know, the laptop class and like the creative class who are just like feeling this? What’s your sense of that geographically?

Tiffany: I think it’s both. I think there is an aspect of the tech backlash that is kind of an elite phenomenon, which you can see in some of the polling. People above a certain income level are more panicky about certain aspects of social media and technology. And that feels notable and strange, and I think probably comes from, I don’t know. like maybe what we’re just talking about. Like, if you have a laptop job, maybe you worry about yourself more because you’re doing the thing more.

But I think there is a pretty broad anti-tech backlash in our culture right now—from the pretty popular phone bans in schools, the various attempts to regulate social media that haven’t really gotten anywhere because they generally run into pretty obvious legal problems. But we’re just starting to see a wave of personal-injury lawsuits against social-media companies. And I think there’s been this sort of clamor for something to happen for long enough that even people who wouldn’t really care to be reading the news of tech policy every single day will be internalizing this idea of like, Social media and smartphones are really bad for us, and I should be trying to use mine less.

I think they’ve also just kind of become uncool a little bit. And that’s just anecdotally speaking, but I have younger sisters who I just … I do not think that they find Instagram influencers or TikTok personalities or any of that stuff very cool. They don’t take pictures on their phones of things while we’re doing stuff. I think they mostly play Scrabble on their phones. I don’t know.

Warzel: Yeah. So, okay. So you are doing this experiment. You are bringing a flip phone with you as a primary device for a month out in the wild. What is the reaction from people when you take this brick out, flip it open, and try to engage in some way? Are people looking at you strange? Are they excited? What was the reaction?

Tiffany: Yeah, people are excited about it. Like, you know, I had friends who would want to look at it. They want to hold it; they want to flip it and flip it and flip it. You know, the guy at the coffee shop or somebody at the bar would say, “Oh, my God, it’s a flip phone. Where’d you get that? I kind of want one.” Et cetera. Like there was—I felt like anyone who saw it was kind of like tickled and intrigued, but probably also because they were all like roughly my age. So flip phones were hot stuff, you know? Those were the best phones you ever had, the most exciting thing you ever purchased or received, probably. So that was kind of the vibe.

Warzel: Yeah, no; they were great. They were like super, super durable. There was this, like, tactile pleasure that you got with it. It was like, a little bit of a device that didn’t work all that well, to navigate any kind of, like, early part of the connected world. It made phone calls really reliably well. But it also had this fidget-spinner-like quality to it, right? Where you could just, like, click around with it, and it was pleasurable in that way.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Warzel: So people liked it. How did it go for you? You wrote about some initial struggles. I think you said, quote, “At times like these, it felt as though this experiment in freeing myself was doing just the opposite.” What were those times? Explain the struggles.

Tiffany: Yeah; well, the main thing was that, as you know, we have a specific two-factor authenticator app that we are required to use for our jobs, for our work laptops. So I actually couldn’t leave my iPhone at home. I had to bring it to work with me every day, inside the yellow cardboard box that I had been given to stow it. So it was a little silly in that sense. I was just carrying it in a cardboard box; it’s like thumping around while I’m walking.

And then the one time that I actually did leave the house without it—I mean, I left the house without it a few times on the weekend. And this was on the weekend. I was going to a coffee shop to do some work on my computer and realized that I was locked out of it. I had to call my fiancé on my flip phone and be like, “Can you please bring me my iPhone so that I can touch the iPhone with my thumb, and then put it back in the box so that I can use this computer that is sitting in front of me currently?” That felt a little ridiculous.

And then I also talked about in the story, one of my sisters got into a medical residency; texted our family group chat. The text did not come through to my dumb phone. Neither did anybody’s, like, reaction texts to it. And I just coincidentally, five or 10 minutes later, texted them all, you know, “If you guys were thinking about drafting Seiya Suzuki early in our family fantasy baseball draft, he just injured his knee in the World Baseball Classic, so.” And she was like, “What?”

Warzel: That’s fantastic.

Tiffany: It was small things like that where I think I just was like, This is a needless inconvenience. But I think I also came in being like: It’s interesting that we got to this place. Where we have to pretend that something, or we believe that something as useful as an iPhone, is actually a hindrance to our happiness and functioning. Like, it’s good that I can look up where I am on Google Maps. But part of what we were talking about in this month offline was like, you know, maybe it was better when you couldn’t look up where you were on Google Maps, and you had to get lost, and you had to ask people for directions, and you had to try to remember where the roads were, like what the streets were, where you lived.

And I was sympathetic to that. Like, I do kind of pride myself on knowing my way around New York. But I’m also like: Why are we creating problems for ourselves? You know? And some people kind of … this is a new thing people were talking about this year. Friction-maxxing. Like making things deliberately harder, because it makes them in some way more meaningful or authentic. It’s like—some people kind of can’t make things harder for themselves. Like, they’re hard enough already.

So there is sort of a tension there. Where I was thinking kind of all throughout, I totally get what everyone is saying. I totally understand why someone would do this. On the other hand—are we directly talking about the problems we think we’re talking about if we’re talking about how it’s kind of morally wrong to use Google Maps?

Warzel: You bring up this point, that it’s like—are we really attacking the right problem here? Like, maybe the problem is not the maps, and not all that. It’s that you have scheduled eight different things in eight different places that you have to, like, rush to. Where you don’t have time to plan it out or think about it. And that the problem with the connectivity is that it’s making you try to do too much at once, right?

It’s not that the tools exist; like, the tools may be fine on their own. But it’s the effect—the compounding effect of using the tool in so many different ways. This is what I think a lot of people feel when they feel overwhelmed by the connectivity in their lives, right? It’s like: Okay, I’ve got my calendar, I’ve got eight inboxes, 10 feeds I have to clear, all this stuff, meetings. Like, that’s not the problem necessarily, that that’s an outgrowth of the technology. But it’s not a problem with the tool. It’s a problem with, like, all the tools interacting on each other and making you feel insane.

Tiffany: Yeah, totally. I think something people talked about a lot that that resonated with me actually was, with the flip phone, just kind of feeling less available to people. And once I explained to people, like, “I’m using a flip phone this month,” it didn’t really bug them that I wasn’t constantly replying in group chats instantly. Or when I left the office wasn’t available on Slack, unless I went home and opened my computer. And my editor knew that.

I think that, yeah—the sort of frantic feeling actually went away a little bit. In the sense that you don’t have this tool that empowers you to be like, Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da, doing one thing after another—then you can’t do those things. So you have to just not. And that was pretty chill.

Warzel: It is pretty chill. I went to this golf tournament a couple weeks ago that famously doesn’t allow phones, right? There’s like a couple hundred thousand people in this huge open area, and you can’t have a phone for, whatever, eight, 12 hours. However long you’re there. There were certain people that I was trying to meet up with during the day, and you have to do the old-time thing of like, “We’re going to pick a place; we’re going to pick a physical location; we’re going to meet there at this time, right? Set your watches. I’ll see you.”

And the one thing that I thought about the entire time—it was usually pretty easy to actually execute those meetups or whatnot. The thing that I loved, that just felt so great about that, was like: I don’t have a choice. But to show up once I’ve made this commitment, right? Because, like, the window is closed. I have left the ability to say, “Hey, I’m gonna be 15 minutes late. I’m gonna be five minutes late.” And all of that like logistical, because we can be in such constant communication. And all the little changes are like, you know, canceling at the last minute when someone’s already showed up. Like, you just don’t have that option.

And the thing that I just kept thinking of is: Oh man, think about how it’s not that these devices are bad, or that, you know, I absolutely hate my phone in that way. But I just thought there is this simplicity of like: You still have the connection, but you don’t have to have all those, like, micro-things interfering. Which take up a lot of time, and a lot of energy, and a lot of, you know. That’s kind of, I think, what exhausts people.

Tiffany: Yeah. I had also with the flip phone, like when I was meeting up with people, I could text them. But with my iPhone, I have my fiancé and some of my friends, like I have their location on Find My Friends. So I can kind of be constantly resolving the anxiety of like: Where are they? How soon will they be here? Should I, like, take a lap before I go into the restaurant so that I don’t have to stand there? And when I had the flip phone, I was like, Well, I can’t resolve that question, so I guess I better not think about it. And I’ll just go to the restaurant and if they’re there, they’re there.

Warzel: There’s just less, like, cognitive load, right? Like I think that that is just one of the things that this produces is there are just scenarios you don’t have the ability to port through your head. You’re just like: I’ll be there. It’ll happen when it happens, or it doesn’t happen, you know?

Tiffany: Yeah, totally.

Warzel: Were there things that surprised you during the month? You know, things that felt either strangely joyous, or things that you were shocked about in your own life? One thing that I think about a lot is: People tend to say when they do whatever, unplugging things of any nature, that it’s really, really awful and hard at first. And there’s this like a ton of like, phantom scrolling, ghost scrolling or whatever. And then something just clicks, and it’s just like: Okay, I’m done with that. Like, it’s really hard to kick in the beginning, and then after a minute or a couple of days becomes very easy. I’m curious what your general experience was.

Tiffany: I think the main difference that I noticed, that I wasn’t expecting—because I had never really thought about it before—I love going on a really long walk. And so usually if I’m walking around Brooklyn or wherever, I would be listening to a podcast or listening to music or something. And in the past, like I would not think like, Oh, because I’m listening to this, I’m not engaged in my surroundings. Like I’m looking around, I’m saying, Oh what a beautiful tree, what a beautiful dog, whatever.

But not having that, I ran into people that I know more. And I was like, maybe they’re always around, and I’m just not seeing them. I’m not noticing people. I think I was just more engaged in hearing other people’s conversations, and kind of participating more in things that were around me.

And the degree to which I was using Instagram Reels as a nighttime pacifier, kind of—I was never the type of person who needs to stay up for hours, like inadvertently scrolling. But I loved the feeling of getting in bed, like getting all cuddled into my duvet and scrolling through Instagram reels for like 10 minutes before bed, and just seeing what the girls were up to. The girl in Kentucky who’s redoing her kitchen, the girl in the van life and whatever—just like what all my girls are up to. And it was really hard to give that up, to just get in bed and be like, I have no treat. I just have my thoughts. I just have my worries about everything I did wrong today, and everything I might do wrong tomorrow. That’s it.

Warzel: Good night.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Warzel: Yeah, in that sense, did you feel like then it created … you know, people talk about with food, having like “food noise,” right? Like even when you’re not hungry or whatever, you know, this idea of “when I’m gonna eat, what I’m gonna eat”—how, you know, a lot of people struggle with that type of thing.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Warzel: Did you find that this created, like, “scroll noise” for you? Or something like that?

Tiffany: Yeah. I think there were definitely times where I felt this irritation. Like, the same kind of irritation you might … just generalized irritation you might feel if somebody forced you to stop drinking coffee or something. I was just like, This is so stupid. But I was like, this isn’t fair. Like, I want to listen to my Bravo podcast, and I feel like I’m being punished. Yeah, I did have that a little bit.

Warzel: Okay, so with that in mind, this is like a decent way, I think, to segue into the broader conversation, which we touched on a little bit. About, you know—I feel like you’ve spent basically the last four or five years, wrestling with this question. This big debate that has been happening between, you know, the “it’s the phones, it’s definitely the phones” crowd—like social-media addiction. And the idea that like, it’s actually really hard to prove what is happening. It’s difficult to measure what is happening.

You wrote for us at The Atlantic here, in 2023, this long feature on the topic with the headline “No One Knows Exactly What Social Media Is Doing to Teens.” And this idea that there’s this uncomfortable reality here, right? That the mental-health and social-media connections are actually tough to net out. I was wondering if first, if you could just tell me a little bit about digging into that topic, working on that feature. Obviously, things have evolved since then; we can get into that. But what’s drawn you into that? And what have you kind of learned again, wrestling with that nuance?

Tiffany: It’s notable that six or seven, eight years ago, we were talking about this urgent need to reign in the powers of big tech companies. And we were talking about it in terms of intervening in what they were doing. We were talking about, like, antitrust solutions or privacy legislation or something that would limit their ability to make money the way that they were making money and amass power the way they were amassing power.

And then I think something shifted, maybe during the beginning of the pandemic and slightly afterward, where instead we started talking about how to protect kids from the internet by limiting their access to it. And it was being presented as something that had a really firm scientific basis and, you know, urgent kind of public-health component to it. So I just think that’s really important to understand as best as we can. And there are a lot of scientists who have been trying for a long time to understand it.

It’s really complicated, because, as we’ve been talking about in this conversation, a lot of things get sort of flattened or simplified into the same sentence. You know, like: Are boys and girls relating to this technology differently? How could we possibly know? Because this technology changes all the time, and by the time a study comes out, people are using the technology for different things. It’s very complicated and, I think, really interesting. And also really, really important, despite the fact that there are certainly people who would argue, “I don’t care what the science says; I know what I’m seeing, and we need to act now in dramatic fashion.” Yeah, I just—I think it’s important to know exactly what we’re acting on.

Warzel: Where do you feel we are on that continuum right now? You know, like, of the, “Of course it’s the phones” to like, “It’s really unclear.” Where is that discussion at the moment?

Tiffany: I think culturally we’re at “Of course it’s the phones.” I think scientifically we’re at, “You know, we spent a decade looking for proof of population-level harms of a direct relationship between social media and anxiety and depression and other terrifying mental-health outcomes. And that relationship on a population level has not materialized.”

That doesn’t mean that social media or heavy smartphone and screen use isn’t bad for certain people, or isn’t bad in certain ways. Something can be bad before it approaches the level of directly causing someone to develop a mental illness. Culturally, we’re at a place where we aren’t speaking with a lot of nuance. Scientifically, I think there are researchers who are digging more into the nuance, but they’re not really getting a lot of attention for those studies.

Warzel: In one of your articles—I believe around the social-media trials that recently happened, one in California, one in New Mexico, in which both ruled against the social-media companies—you quoted this professor of psychology. Name is, I’m probably getting the pronunciation wrong here, but Pete Etchells, I believe, in Bath University in England. And he told you that he found the situation, just the general situation, in this quote, really frustrating. And to quote you: One side denies that anything’s wrong. The other side compares social media to cigarettes, even though that makes little sense. And he says, “We’re not talking about a biological substance you could consume that has a demonstrable chemical effect.”

I think that’s really interesting, right? Because you have, on one hand, something that we are consuming in our brains. And even if we’re not consuming it directly, it does have this broader cultural effect. Social media affects how we communicate with each other, how we perceive ourselves against other people in the world. Like, it’s clearly acting on us. And yet these easy comparisons—or maybe not even easy—but these comparisons that feel in the moment, especially when people struggle with them, that are so apt. Like, yes, cigarettes or alcohol or whatever.

It’s like one thing is actually being physically consumed into our bloodstreams and changing that, versus sort of a cultural consumption. And that feels to me like a really important and also super-annoying distinction to have to make, when people are feeling a certain way. That you have to be like, “Well, actually, it’s not cigarettes, because you’re not smoking social media.”

Tiffany: Yeah, I had one of my notes apps of like story ideas that make no sense. I had one at one point that most it was like, “Headline: Most things just aren’t that much like other things.” This is so stupid, but…

Warzel: No, no; this is a classic writer thing. You have to have a notes app full of like totally crackpot ideas that make no sense to anyone but you. Otherwise you’re doing it wrong.

Tiffany: Yeah; it’s just like when you’re talking in metaphors, then it becomes like, okay, okay. But like, that’s useful to a point. Like, it’s not what we’re literally saying, which I actually have been sort of reflecting on as a reporter. I feel like seven or eight years ago, I was certainly part of a cohort of journalists who were writing about, you know, the extractive nature of social media. The way that it was like, gaming and profiting off of our attention; the algorithm does XYZ. And I think that was taken extremely literally. And now people can just say “the algorithm,” and it’s like there’s a boogeyman in the room.

Warzel: It’s really hard, because I see that too. I see a lot of just general, you know, “if X then Y,” with like phone behavior or tech behavior, right? And getting completely and totally rid of all of the human agency in the process. But then, I’m also like, Well, it is these algorithms too, to a degree. And you have to have that part of the conversation. I don’t know; I struggle greatly with that, because I think I don’t want to let all of that off.

And I do think that algorithmic social media has very clearly caused a ton of problems. I mean, would you agree with that? Where do you sit on that?

Tiffany: I think I toggle back and forth, yeah. Because, first of all, when I talk about being someone who grew up on the internet and loved the internet, a lot of what I’m talking about is an era before everything was centralized onto a handful of platforms that can feel either very boring and uninspired, or very infuriating and like nausea inducing and just awful.

There are other times where I, once in a while, still think, like, Yeah, this is really useful. Like when I was 14, I had no idea what was going on in the world beyond, like, the one newspaper article a week that I would read because my history teacher told me I had to. Whereas my sisters were, you know … people scoff at learning news on TikTok and on social media, but you can get a general sense of what’s going on. Like, I think they were very in tune to lots of different discussions about the news, about culture, about politics. I think they were probably way more media literate than I was. It probably took them not as much time as it does people of generations older to understand what is fake and real.

So yeah; I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I mean, to be clear, I think all of these companies have done egregious, destructive, insidious things. But I don’t know. On the other hand, it’s kind of like—to be galaxy brain about it—it’s sort of like, Well, this is the internet that we have. And we are kind of just talking and talking and talking and talking about whether it’s good or bad.

Warzel: This whole conversation just ties me up in knots, right? Like, it’s funny too. Because when you were describing your feeling of not being able to, you know, watch your thing at the end of the day, have your little social-media treats … we all have our little social-media treats, I think, or whatever. And that feeling of like: It actually made me physically kind of angry, a little bit, or frustrated. Or that feeling of like, I had to, you know, abstain from coffee. The thing that I find so interesting about that is like: That’s how people feel when they go off. Like coffee is a stimulant, right? It is a thing that does something to your brain.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Warzel: And yes, when you go off it, like you have a withdrawal effect of some kind. It’s very clear. I’ve taken my detoxes and done those things from social media before my time off; there is a change in my brain of some kind. But I feel like a rewilding of my attention in a way, and also the frustrations of having to not have that on me. And so I think it’s such a great example.

And I think like this, what you did, of going and actually trying to interact with technology in a different way, kind of go back a little bit. I think it’s really helpful and grounding to anyone who’s trying to navigate all of this themselves. Because you get to sort of see that it’s both more complicated and less complicated at times, you know? Like you feel these things that are like these poles, that I think are really serious and worth taking really seriously as a society.

Like, what is this constant connectivity in these ways doing to us as we walk through the world? And then also, at the same time, I think it’s always so telling that it’s not that bad when you do take them away. Then what was the pull, really, as much as we think? I don’t envy having to write about this, because it is so hard and so difficult to capture all of the distinct cultural feelings.

Tiffany: One of the reasons it’s so hard for us to talk about this and come up with solutions is on a certain level, we’re asking, like: “What is a good life?” Like, “What would it mean for me to be happy?” And so all of those things are mixed together, it becomes understandably emotional and fraught. And so much of it is anecdotal.

Warzel: I really like that feeling of so much of this is, yes—how to be happy. How to live in the world and make choices that you feel good about. And how much of agency one feels they have in that process, right?

One of my predictions for this year, just in my head, was this feeling of this cultural backlash to the phones. And kind of cloaked in, as you said earlier, like, an uncoolness, right? That just sitting as life is unfolding around you in public, and being just immersed in the little black squares, is loser behavior, right? It’s just like, it’s anti-social. And it’s like, it’s just not cool. It’s gauche, right.

Tiffany: Yeah, right.

Warzel: And I think that that, more than any of this stuff to some degree, can like—I think a cultural driver like that has the potential to actually have the most, more than even regulation of any kind. It’s like: If we all kind of decide that being glued to this thing in public is lame, that will change how we interact.

I think you’ve seen more moving toward phone-free spaces or concerts. Like artists saying, “Please just put the phone away; try to enjoy the experience.” And it’s not like they take them away necessarily always, but it’s creating a space and a norm that like, if you’re doing this at the concert, when they say not to, people are gonna be like, “Hey man; put that away.” You know, it’s like enforcing that norm.

It feels like eventually that’s going to continue to grow, just because of all of this ennui that we’re talking about. Do you feel like we are headed toward … maybe not a political, but like just a cultural, durable recalibration to how we perform with these devices in public?

Tiffany: Yeah, I hope so. Although I also noticed actually, during this month, I was talking to people about how they were saying, “You know, society’s organized around your smartphone now.” And it is kind of notable how hard it is to do certain things. Like, as you know, I am obsessed with the Mets. You cannot go into Citi Field without a smartphone. That is the only way to enter the stadium, is by displaying a mobile ticket.

Warzel: There’s no paper-ticket option or printout?

Tiffany: There’s no paper tickets. You cannot show a PDF; it has to be like the animated thing. And there’s certain things like that now, where I’m like, That is just wild. Like, it’s just wild that you simply can’t go in there unless you’re going with a friend, and they do it for you. Or I was talking to the guy, Jack Nugent, who made the OS. And he said, “Yeah, I have that problem too. I load the tickets at home on my phone, and then bring it in airplane mode with me to the stadium.”

Warzel: Just a lot of work.

Tiffany: I’m like—that’s annoying. But yeah, I think we could see people shifting culturally away from just developing new norms or reaffirming ones that people just haven’t really been following that much. In terms of like, “Don’t have your phone out at dinner.” Why would you need to be on your phone when you’re around other people? I think there’s cultural stuff that we can do that would make people feel a lot better, honestly.

Warzel: I think a lot of the time in reporting on this for the last whatever—as we both have, well more than a decade—I think a lot of times we get into these big broad conversations about technology, and expect these easy answers when you kind of like zoom out and look at it. It’s like, this amount of connectivity, the speed of the change and development: It is a completely wild sociological revolution, right?

And the idea that we would have some kind of easy fix, or like society would snap into understanding how to use this stuff right away, is actually the thing that’s most kind of irrational, I think. And I do wonder if, over time, or if we will look back on some of these years with all of this. I’ve seen other people in Gen Z describe the phones in schools as being like: “This was a social experiment that was conducted on me—whether or not it was okay to just give me this device when I was in eighth grade and just let me use it in school all day.”

Tiffany: Yeah.

Warzel: And I think that that idea of this is, in some ways, an experiment we’re running on all of ourselves at once. And eventually, society is going to probably say, like, “Okay; these are the norms.” Right? You’re going to be socially shunned if you behave this way in public in a way that like, 10 years ago, that was just how everyone was. Because we didn’t know any better. I think we may be in for a norm shift. I’m hoping for a norm shift.

Tiffany: I do physically interrupt lots of photo shoots on the streets of SoHo around the Atlantic office, so I’m doing my part. Give them the eye roll. Give them the “I’m walking here,” you know.

Warzel: That’s your right as a New Yorker; you’ve got to do that. Kaitlyn, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain and trying to provide some nuance where historically there is not.

Tiffany: Of course. Thank you so much for chatting with me.

[Music]

Warzel: That’s it for us here. Thanks again to my guest, Kaitlyn Tiffany. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. And you can subscribe to 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 coworkers like Kaitlyn, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. That’s TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you on the internet.

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

‘This Is Not Going to Be the Next COVID’

2026-05-08T12:55:56-04:00

The MV Hondius, the cruise ship where an outbreak of hantavirus was confirmed over the weekend, is moving once again. On Wednesday, after three people were evacuated, the ship departed from Cabo Verde. By Sunday, it will arrive at the Canary Islands, where the Spanish government says it can dock. So far, though, three people have died in the outbreak, and the ship’s remaining passengers still need to be monitored for illness. Local leaders would rather the ship go somewhere else. And a chorus of TikToks that have each been viewed and liked millions of times call for a different approach: “Sink that ship.”

That’s probably (hopefully) a joke. But a perusal of the internet—both the memes and the upswell of concerned armchair epidemiologists—suggests that some people at least semi-sincerely fear that a pandemic is imminent. “I don’t want your rat poo virus. I have summer plans,” one woman posted on TikTok. (Hantavirus infects humans mostly through contact with excretions from infected rodents.) Yesterday, I saw that an old friend had posted on her Instagram story about a patient who had been medically evacuated to a town next to hers in Switzerland. “I just finished mentally recovering from Covid man,” she wrote next to a crying emoji. A new TikTok of a guy doing the Renegade—a dance inextricably linked to the early pandemic and the new influencers it minted—has been watched 20 million times and counting.

That people are concerned, or at least keeping an eye on hantavirus, makes sense. But all of the epidemiological evidence so far suggests that the general public has very little to worry about. “This is not going to be the next COVID,” Marion Koopmans, a virologist at Erasmus Medical Center, in the Netherlands, told me.

Hantavirus is a respiratory illness that starts out much like the flu: fever, aches, and chills. In severe cases, breathing becomes difficult, and the heart struggles to pump blood. Andes hantavirus—the species that the World Health Organization confirmed is causing the outbreak on the MV Hondius—has a fatality rate of about 40 percent.

Most types of hantavirus cannot spread among humans; everyone who gets sick must have been exposed to an infected rodent’s bodily fluids. But Andes hantavirus can, on occasion, be passed among people in extremely close contact. In one study of Andes hantavirus in Chile, sex partners of the infected had an 18 percent risk of catching the virus, but the risk to other members of the household was just 1 percent. In countries where Andes hantavirus is endemic, contact tracing classifies as high-risk people who are either sleeping next to or caring for the infected, Koopmans, whose work focuses in part on the transmission of zoonotic disease, said.

The cruise-ship outbreak is the first of its kind. But experts I spoke with told me that it’s no more alarming than the normal spread of the virus in countries where it’s endemic—it’s just a logistical nightmare because of the number of governments involved. “It’s very serious for the people exposed, and there’s some transmission to people that are very close contacts. But beyond that, there is very little risk,” Koopmans said. Alasdair Munro, an immunologist working to develop a hantavirus vaccine, told me in an email that the only way a pandemic could result from Andes hantavirus is “if the virus had somehow mutated,” becoming a fast-moving infection that, like measles or COVID, can spread more readily. “So far there is no indication of that,” he added.

Cruise ships are great breeding grounds for viral transmission. They assemble a group of people from around the world, keep them in close quarters with one another’s germs, and then release them back to their homes. But the contained setting of this outbreak has delivered at least one win for public-health officials: “We know precisely who was exposed and where all of those people are,” Munro said. That includes passengers who disembarked two weeks ago on the remote island of St. Helena. The WHO is holding regular meetings to coordinate contact tracing and medical evacuations of people aboard the ship who are showing symptoms.

The United States elected to leave the WHO earlier this year, and public-health experts are already critiquing what they’ve deemed to be a lackluster federal response. (The Department of Health and Human Services did not return a request for comment.) Still, health departments in five U.S. states—Arizona, California, Georgia, Texas, and Virginia—have identified people within their state’s borders who were on the cruise ship, and are monitoring them for symptoms. Signs of infection can take as long as eight weeks to appear, which can make for onerous contact tracing and quarantine protocols. But that long incubation period is still factored into containment strategies, Munro said.

During a press conference yesterday, a reporter asked how the WHO’s leaders could be so confident that Andes hantavirus won’t start a pandemic. COVID, the reporter noted, had also started small. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s acting director of epidemic and pandemic management, pointed out that whereas COVID had been novel, hantaviruses are not. The experts I spoke with emphasized that the only thing unusual about this outbreak is that it occurred on a luxury cruise ship. Unexpected things, of course, can and do happen in epidemiology. But all evidence suggests that hantavirus will remain an intimate tragedy.

The online response, meanwhile, has felt more like a soap opera. People on TikTok are posting daily updates on the “hantavirus drama,” thanking the Spanish passenger who “got the tea” on passengers who disembarked early and vowing that they’d choose social isolation over going back to Zoom parties. Nurses that worked through COVID are dissecting the news on Reddit. Marjorie Taylor Greene is posting about ivermectin. Hantavirus is almost certainly not the next COVID. But it has provided the world with an excuse to revisit and rehash a time when a virus actually did change all of our lives.

Trump Is ‘Bored’ With the War He Started

2026-05-08T12:28:32-04:00

President Trump really, really wants the war with Iran to end. He has declared victory many times, including about three weeks ago, when Iran briefly reopened the Strait of Hormuz. He has repeatedly extended his cease-fire deadlines instead of following through on his (sometimes-apocalyptic) threats to resume hostilities. This week, his administration abruptly abandoned an effort to escort ships through the strait in part because of a fear that it could provoke violent, escalating confrontations.

Trump is tired of the war, which has proved far more difficult and lasted far longer than he had expected. His party is warily watching rising gas prices and falling poll numbers. He doesn’t want to be bogged down in a Middle East conflict like some of his predecessors were. He doesn’t want it to upend his high-stakes summit next week in China. He is ready to move on.

But Iran, it seems, does not want the war to come to a close. Or at least not with any sort of outcome that could be acceptable to American negotiators. Trump is now in a bind. The president, five aides and outside advisers told me, is convinced that he can sell any sort of agreement as a win. But at least for now, the man who wrote The Art of the Deal can’t even get Iran to the negotiating table. Today, Washington is still waiting for Iran to respond to the latest offering, a one-page memorandum of understanding that is far more of an extension of the cease-fire than a treaty to end the conflict.

Trump is left with a vexing question: How do you end a war when your opponent won’t budge? And while Trump grasps for an exit, the hard-liners in Tehran have used the war to tighten their grip on power. Iran seems hell-bent on pulling off something it’s historically done well: humiliating an American president.

Trump never thought it would turn out like this. After the impressive military operation to snatch Nicolás Maduro from Caracas, the president set his eyes on Iran, telling confidants that it would “be another Venezuela,” a pair of outside advisers told me. They, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy. Trump believed that the U.S. military was unstoppable, and that he had a chance to topple Tehran’s theocracy, a prize that had eluded his predecessors. He was redrawing the world’s maps and expected a victory to come in days, a week or two at most. The initial U.S.-Israel onslaught killed Iran’s supreme leader and included waves of bombings that reportedly obliterated much of the country’s missile capabilities. But Tehran did not capitulate, and instead attacked its Persian Gulf neighbors and seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes. With a mix of mines, small attack boats, and drones, Iran effectively closed the waterway. Energy prices soared. The conflict settled into a stalemate and then a fragile cease-fire. One high-profile, official round of negotiations failed. No more are scheduled.

Outwardly Trump has expressed nothing but confidence. Sometimes, he downplays the war, calling it a “little excursion” or “detour” or “mini war.” He has proclaimed imminent victory nearly every day, a braggadocio that’s matched by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at his Pentagon briefings. Behind closed doors, the volume is lower, but U.S. officials do believe a naval blockade of Iran’s ports, installed last month, is working and squeezing the country’s economy. Facing collapse, two officials predicted, Iran will be forced to negotiate.

But the real question is the timing: A number of experts have forecast that Iran can withstand pressure from the blockade for months, not weeks. A U.S. intelligence assessment delivered to policy makers this week agrees, suggesting that Iran could make it at least three or four more months. If so, and Iran continues to keep the strait closed, then prices will continue to rise in the West, including in the United States during a midterm-election year. It then becomes a matter of pain: Which side can withstand the most economic hardship?

[Read: Trump voters are over it]

Patience is not Trump’s strength. One outside adviser, who speaks with him regularly, told me the president is “bored” with the war. Others believe he is frustrated at Iran’s intransigence. And while Trump at times feels detached from the political concerns of his party, Republicans have been inundated with complaints about rising prices, particularly at the gas pump. Many in the GOP were already preparing themselves to lose the House; the longer the war goes on, they believe, the more likely it is that the Senate could flip too.

Despite the negotiating impasse, Trump is reluctant to resume hostilities, aides and advisers have told me. There is concern about the dwindling supply of American munitions, and Trump this week expressed reluctance about killing more people. Some U.S. allies in the region (including, at times, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) have voiced concern that the resumption of American attacks would make them, once more, targets of Iran’s retaliation. Yesterday, Iran opened fire on U.S. naval vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. retaliated by striking sites in Iran. But despite the spasm of violence, Trump insisted that the cease-fire was still in place and downplayed the strikes as “a love tap.” He also, advisers have indicated, wants to tamp down any military action ahead of his trip to Beijing next week to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. China has broadcast its unhappiness with the war and the closing of the strait; Trump wants to be able to claim that the fighting is ending as he pursues new trade and business deals with Xi.

As a further complication, the U.S. has largely exhausted its list of significant military targets, advisers have said. To continue to escalate, which is Trump’s signature move, he’s had to threaten civilian targets such as power plants, bridges, and even desalination plants. At one point, he threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” an overt threat to commit war crimes. Trump also has options for a limited ground invasion—seizing highly enriched uranium or attacking Kharg Island, a hub of Iran’s energy sector—but he is leery about risking the lives of American troops.

[Read: The Pentagon may not be giving Trump the full picture of the war]

And so Trump keeps issuing deadlines to force Iran to cave, but Tehran keeps calling his bluff. For weeks now, Trump has blustered about resuming attacks but, each time, has found a way to back down. With the exception of a few hawkish voices, most in Trump’s orbit remain reluctant to restart the attack even as the stalemate continues. With the naval blockade in place to counter Iran’s closing of the strait, the administration on Monday unveiled Project Freedom, which deployed the U.S. Navy to help some ships escape the waterway. Although a few ships managed to cross the strait on the first day, Trump quickly abandoned the plan. Iranian forces fired on a South Korean cargo ship, there were clashes with U.S. warships, and the Pentagon said it destroyed seven small Iranian boats. But administration officials did not want to risk a major escalation of hostilities, particularly a possible attack on an American naval vessel. Some Gulf allies, fearing retaliation, moved to cut American access to their bases and airspace.

Trump also claimed that he was suspending the operation because a deal to end the war could be close. But he has been here before without success. American officials privately admit that, with Iran’s leadership fractured, they’re not sure with whom they are negotiating or who in Tehran is empowered to make a deal. Pakistani mediators have attempted to restart talks, but more moderate elements in Tehran have been largely bypassed by the hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The formal negotiations, led by Vice President Vance, ended without a deal. Another round of talks slated for the end of last month never happened, because the Iranian delegation left Islamabad before American officials could arrive. It was an unmistakable rebuke.

Publicly, the White House continues to cast the war as going well, with spokesperson Olivia Wales telling me in a statement that “President Trump has all the cards, and he wisely keeps all options on the table to ensure that Iran can never possess a nuclear weapon. The highly successful blockade is strangling Iran’s economy, and the United States has proven that we maintain land, sea, and air superiority.”

Even without a formal agreement, Trump has considered declaring decisive victory and moving on. Secretary of State Marco Rubio went so far as to say earlier this week that the war was over. But doing so now would leave the conflict’s goals, as outlined at various times by the president and his aides, unfulfilled. Yes, the Iranian navy has been largely destroyed. But Iran still possesses, by some estimates, more than half of its ballistic-missile capabilities. Its proxy groups, such as Hezbollah, are still fighting. There has not been real regime change. Its nuclear stockpile remains a threat, and there is no deal to dilute it or ship it out of the country. Iran will almost certainly leave the war with more control, either implicitly or explicitly, over the Strait of Hormuz than it enjoyed before the conflict, including knowing that it could again shutter the waterway and inflict global economic pain.

Trump wants the war to end. He wants a deal. But deals take two parties, and there’s no evidence that Iran is interested in bailing Trump out of a dilemma of his own making.

Pope Leo’s Pro-Life Challenge to Conservative Catholics

2026-05-08T10:00:00-04:00

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Throughout year one of his pontificate, Pope Leo XIV has been especially vocal about two issues: immigration and war. The first American pope has spoken of the “inalienable rights” of migrants and lamented the growing, global “zeal for war.” He told a delegation of U.S. clergy last fall that “the Church cannot be silent” in a time of mass deportations, and said in March, a month after the United States began attacking Iran, that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.”

His opposition to the conflict has provoked President Trump’s ir e and earned him rebukes from prominent right-leaning Christians. The Fox News anchor Sean Hannity deemed Leo “more interested in spreading left-wing politics than the actual teachings of Jesus Christ.” Vice President Vance advised the pope “to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Regarding the pope’s statements about immigration, the podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey accused him of confusing “toxic empathy and Biblical love.”

These critiques, however, miss something crucial about Pope Leo’s reasoning. His statements indicate that he’s not disregarding Church teaching to weigh in on political issues of the day. Instead, he’s making a moral case, rooted deeply in Catholic thought, for how the faithful should treat the vulnerable—a case that results in resisting war and protecting migrants, and also opposing abortion.

In September, for example, the pope remarked, “Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.” In a January address to Vatican diplomats, he voiced his support for Christians who defend “the unborn, refugees, and migrants.” In March, before a group of Polish faithful, the pope said that “in a time marked by the madness of war, it is important to defend life from conception to its natural end.”

[Read: The American pope vs. the American president]

The idea that being anti-abortion, being against war, and being protective of immigrants all stem from similar principles is not new. In 1983, during the Cold War arms race, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin delivered a speech in which he popularized a phrase connecting these issues and several others: “a consistent ethic of life.” It has reverberated in the American Catholic consciousness ever since.

For Bernardin, 20th-century technologies had magnified the scale at which life could be harmed. Catholics, he argued, needed a framework that would encompass the protection and promotion of life. It would decry the intentional taking of innocent life, whether noncombatants in war or, in the Catholic view, unborn children through abortion. It would also be concerned with caring for the world’s most defenseless people—among them the poor, the homeless, and “the undocumented immigrant.” Bernardin said, “Our moral, political, and economic responsibilities do not stop at the moment of birth.”

To have a consistent ethic of life did not mean conflating the distinct moral considerations raised by abortion, immigration, and war, or treating them as equally significant. Rather, it meant that a person should strive to notice the “interrelatedness” of these issues and foster a culture that cared about them all. “A systemic vision of life,” Bernardin said, “seeks to expand the moral vision of a society, not partition it into airtight categories.”

The consistent ethic of life, implicitly or explicitly, continued to crop up in Catholic circles over the subsequent years. In his 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (“The Gospel of Life”), Pope John Paul II emphasized that Catholics ought to be “profoundly consistent” regarding their solidarity for society’s vulnerable, including immigrants. The document denounced assaults on “the right to life” in the context of abortion, and the waging of violent conflicts as well.

Pope Leo’s worldview was also shaped by these ideas. In 2023, when he was Cardinal Robert Prevost, he delivered an address in Chiclayo, Peru, in which he praised Bernardin’s framework as coherent and “anchored in respect for human dignity.” The future pope described discovering ways to “teach and promote precisely this kind of thinking” as one of the “greatest challenges” facing Catholics. As his fellow prelate had done four decades prior, Prevost mentioned modern warfare and the rights of migrants, as well as abortion.

[Read: The real religious ‘renewal’ happening in Gen Z]

American Catholics have long been divided on how to be consistently pro-life. Some liberal Catholics have worried that their conservative brethren condemn abortion while ignoring issues such as poverty and immigration. Some conservative Catholics have said that liberals misuse the ethic of life “to deflect criticism away from pro-abortion politicians and those who support them,” as one writer put it. These debates reflect that Catholics, like Americans more broadly, are polarized by party, and that Catholics who do try to emulate Bernardin’s framework lack a natural political home. “Popes don’t fit into any political category in the U.S.,” Cathleen Kaveny, a law and religion professor at Boston College, told me, “and Catholics don’t really either, in terms of official Catholic teaching.”

Catholic skeptics of the pope’s remarks about deportation policies and the Iran war have pointed out that the Church teaches that abortion is “intrinsically evil”; when a country should wage war and how it should regulate immigration, however, are subject to “prudential judgments.” In a sense, they’re right. Catholics can have good-faith disagreements about how restrictive immigration policy should be, or the moral justifications of a particular armed conflict (though Church teaching says war is permissible only in very limited circumstances). But by intertwining these three issues, Pope Leo has made dismissing concerns about immigration and war as mere “prudential” matters harder for Catholics. This is not because Church teaching has changed recently—it hasn’t—but because present conditions regarding immigration and war have made a “prudential” disagreement less tenable.

[Read: The most urgent issue for the U.S. Catholic Church isn’t abortion anymore]

Immigration debates over the past year, for example, have not been solely or even primarily about optimal migrant flows or procedural requirements. They’ve been about arbitrary detentions and roundup s, and about callous rhetoric and imagery. The Trump administration’s policies have threatened immigrants’ ability to practice their faith: Catholic dioceses have reported that Mass attendance is down because many congregants are afraid of being apprehended by ICE at church. Last summer, detainees at a Florida detention center were denied access to Mass for about a month. (An official reportedly told a priest that the facility was too crowded to accept visiting clergy.) Likewise, the current debates about war have not simply been about the efficacy of a given military strategy. They’ve also been about the administration’s apparent disregard for the safety of noncombatants, as demonstrated by Trump’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”

Abortion—a “pre-eminent priority,” according to U.S. bishops and for many lay Catholics—clearly remains important in the pope’s mind. But Leo has clarified that other threats to the promotion and protection of life should alarm the Catholic conscience, too.

Democrats Might Actually Win Iowa

2026-05-08T09:26:03-04:00

Updated on May 8 at 5:24 p.m. ET

There are a few ways to think about Iowa. You might imagine America’s 29th state as the land of corn and pigs (20 million hogs can’t be wrong, reads my favorite T-shirt for sale at the Eastern Iowa Airport). Maybe you associate it with Field of Dreams, Caitlin Clark, or the future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk.

You might also picture Iowa as flat, like a pancake. But you would be wrong. Iowa is not even in the top five flattest U.S. states, which is a fact I was considering last month as I watched Josh Turek size up a daunting set of stairs in a hilly Cedar Rapids neighborhood. After a moment’s consideration, the 47-year-old Democrat, who uses a wheelchair, shook his head, deciding against it. It would be the only house that Turek would skip that afternoon as he knocked on doors in the warm spring sunlight. At all the other homes, he followed the same elaborate routine without appearing to break a sweat: lowering his body out of his chair and onto the ground; hoisting himself backwards up a step using just his arms; yanking the wheelchair up after him; and repeating that until he reached the doorbell, which is when he would announce, “Hi! I’m Josh Turek, and I’m running for the U.S. Senate!”

In his bid to replace Republican Senator Joni Ernst, Turek is hoping to correct what he believes is another popular misconception about Iowa: that it is a red state. For the past decade, if not longer, many Americans have thought of Iowa this way—and for good reason. Although voters here famously helped propel Barack Obama to the presidency by choosing him in the 2008 Democratic caucuses, they later chose Donald Trump in three consecutive elections. Every member of Iowa’s congressional delegation is, at present, a Republican. Terrace Hill, the governor’s mansion in Des Moines, has housed a member of the GOP for the past 15 years.

But lately, a sense of deep frustration—with rising costs, with Trump, with Republican leadership in general—is rippling across Iowa.

As a result, Iowa Democrats have found themselves in an unusually charmed electoral position. This year, they’ve got a more-than-decent chance of winning back not just a Senate seat, but at least two seats in the House, plus the governor’s office. The November midterms could, in other words, mark the beginning of a shift for Iowa, a turn back toward the state’s more aubergine roots. “Voters are in a mood to send a message, and it’s not gonna be a great message,” one state Republican strategist, who requested anonymity in order to be honest about this, told me. At least that’s the Democrats’ hope.

The task will be tough, mostly on account of the math: Active registered Republicans in the state outnumber Democrats by 200,000. But other factors, including a surprisingly strong slate of candidates and the remarkably grim conditions facing Trump’s party nationally, have collided to make circumstances for Democrats here sunnier than they’ve been at any point in recent memory. “Iowa is a commonsense state masquerading as a red state,” Turek told me after an hour of door-knocking. For the past decade, Iowa Democrats have been repeating some version of this phrase like a prayer or an incantation. In November, they’ll have a chance to prove it’s true.

Turek has an undeniably striking backstory—the kind that tends to stay with voters. Born with spina bifida from his father’s exposure to Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, Turek has used a wheelchair since he was a child. After college, he was a professional wheelchair-basketball player and a four-time U.S. Paralympian, before working for a wheelchair and mobility-assistance company. He grew up in a working-class family in Council Bluffs, a part of southwest Iowa that, despite its traditionally conservative bent—his own father voted for Trump not once but all three times—Turek was able to win when he ran for the state legislature. “I know that I can win” Iowa, he told me, “because the district that I represent is more red than the state as a whole.”

But there is another compelling candidate in the Senate primary, one known to many Iowans as a progressive folk hero. Iowans first met Zach Wahls back in 2011, when he was a 19-year-old college freshman testifying before the Iowa House Judiciary Committee about his two moms. As a high schooler, I watched as Wahls’s young face appeared on the local news, and later, on Ellen. (His now-wife was watching, too, and would catch his attention with a blog post titled, “Marry Me, Zach Wahls.”) Now a 34-year-old state lawmaker, Wahls was the youngest person ever chosen to lead the Iowa Senate Democrats. He stepped down from leadership in 2023 after a messy internal Democratic dispute, and reemerged to launch this Senate bid, during which he has positioned himself as part of a new generation of Democrats who loudly reject the stale maneuverings of one Chuck Schumer. Winning statewide in Iowa will be “a hell of a lot harder” if Democrats can’t “be honest with people about the failures of the national Democratic Party leadership,” Wahls told me.

[From the March 2026 issue: Do the Democrats have a plan?]

But the truth is that Turek and Wahls are not all that different, ideologically. They seem equally likely, at least according to the polling on hand, to beat Ashley Hinson, the former newscaster turned representative who is the Republican nominee—which is to say, a little bit likely. Hinson’s biggest weakness in November will be the simple fact of her party affiliation, not to mention the pledge she made last year to be Trump’s “top ally” in the Senate, a vow that came before the president’s approval ratings plummeted like foreign demand for U.S. soybeans.

The Iowa playing host to this Senate race is different from the one I grew up in—and markedly so from the one my father did. Which is why some of the Democratic campaign rhetoric has taken on a Kodak Gold nostalgia. Turek, for example, invokes former Senator Tom Harkin’s “prairie populism” at every turn—Harkin endorsed Turek today—while Wahls conjures the bygone era of the blue-collar, river-town Democrat.

For much of the past 50 years, Iowa voter registration was roughly split between Democrats, Republicans, and no-party voters. Governorships passed back and forth between the parties like a pendulum. Thousands of pragmatic Iowa voters repeatedly chose to send Harkin, a Democrat, and the Republican Chuck Grassley to the Senate. But by the early 2010s, amid the rumblings of a new working-class realignment, Iowa Republicans began to outnumber Democrats. That shift cemented in 2016, when once-reliably-blue chunks of the state turned berry red, and then scarlet. Republicans took control of the state legislature. By 2024, Trump defeated Kamala Harris in Iowa by 13 points.

The focus of Turek, Wahls, and every other Democratic candidate in Iowa this year is on what they say are the consequences of that rightward shift. Some of the trends that these campaigners will highlight during the next six months include the historically high price of gas and fertilizer, and the fact that Iowa has one of the slowest-growing economies in the country. Voters will be reminded that Iowa Republicans banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and implemented a private-school voucher program that has undercut public education. They will hear the alarming statistic that Iowa has the second-highest rate of new cancer diagnoses in America.

Perhaps unsurprising, given the national party’s unique ability to wrest defeat from the hay baler of victory, Iowa Democrats have not managed to gain much traction before now. But circumstances are shifting fundamentally. In a previously unthinkable twist, more Iowans are now more unhappy with Trump than happy with him. Ernst’s polling numbers collapsed before she announced that she wasn’t seeking reelection, and this year, Governor Kim Reynolds was ranked the least popular governor in the country for the eighth quarter in a row.

Against this backdrop, Turek and Wahls aren’t the only Democrats trying their luck; candidates are running to replace Republicans in all four of Iowa’s House districts, at least two of which seem very competitive. Many more are running to take back the state legislature. The candidate currently getting the most attention is Rob Sand, the 43-year-old state auditor running for governor.

A baby-faced former prosecutor, Sand cuts a pleasantly inoffensive figure. He goes to church, and he hunts. He seems smart but not intimidatingly so—a good ol’ boy who reads. Sand’s ads, in which he pushes government efficiency and jail time for politicians who misuse taxpayer dollars, are difficult to categorize ideologically, which is, of course, intentional. He often professes his frustration with the two-party system, and one gets the impression that Sand is a Democrat in the same way that a platypus is a mammal: only technically. Even Republicans acknowledge this. “He tries to—and does—sound like a post-partisan truth teller,” the Iowa GOP strategist told me.

[Read: The most dangerous Democrat in Iowa]

Sand has raised more money than any other candidate in the governor’s race. None of his would-be opponents—including GOP-primary front-runner Randy Feenstra, a religious conservative whom much of the MAGA base views as insufficiently loyal to Trump, or Zach Lahn, an “Iowa First” Republican with a breathy new TV ad about taking schools back from “the Marxists” and protecting the “Western tradition”—seem to have the juice to beat him. Recent surveys have Sand leading Feenstra by 8 to 12 points.

Here is the part of the story where icy water rains down on all of the Democrats’ dreams. They will probably not take back either chamber of the Iowa state legislature. And on the federal level, let’s not forget that Democrats have had false hope before. In the last days of the 2024 election season, a report from the renowned Iowa pollster Ann Selzer showed Harris leading Trump by three points among likely voters in the state. Trump trounced her by four times that margin.

The truth of the matter is that politics is a numbers game, and the Democrats will probably enter November with an enormous voter disadvantage. Even if they can persuade some independents to pull the lever for them, will it be enough?

Only 15 or 20 people showed up to the United Auto Workers hall in Burlington to see Wahls speak on April 23. Burlington, my hometown, is one of those Iowa river communities that used to be home to a highly organized labor movement and a reliably Democratic electorate. That movement is weaker now, as manufacturers keep leaving, including, most recently, the Case New Holland backhoe-manufacturing plant. I arrived early to Wahls’s event, where a handful of people were taping up posters and unpacking containers of Billy Sims Barbecue. A gray-haired woman introduced herself. “I’m Tall Mom,” she said. It took me a second to realize that she was Terry Wahls, the taller of Zach’s mothers. The shorter one, Jackie Reger, was busy pouring ice over a bucket of pop cans. Tall Mom and I spoke for a minute about her son, until she broached the subject of Turek and the fact that he, not Zach, had been endorsed by the national political-action committee VoteVets. “One thing I think is interesting—” Tall Mom began, before a Wahls campaign aide rushed over to assign her an urgent task.

Iowa’s Democratic Senate primary hasn’t felt nearly as ugly as the one currently playing out in Michigan, or the race that just wrapped in Texas. Still, discussion about Turek and Wahls has lately taken on a fevered quality. Wahls is accusing Turek of being a Washington insider; in response, Turek has accused Wahls of spending too much energy campaigning against Schumer, rather than Republicans. Online, East Coast party strategists post elaborate X threads about Who Is More Electable.

[Read: Things are about to get ugly in Texas]

The people who will actually decide the race—Iowa Democrats—seem caught in the middle. Talking to them about Sand is one thing; the state auditor seems so universally beloved by state Democrats that one wonders how he escapes party events without being smothered by kisses. But talking with those same voters about Turek and Wahls reminded me of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, when Iowans, tasked with choosing the most electable candidate from a pack of popular ones, seemed frantic. Now, as then, they are painfully aware of the opportunity before them, and desperate not to squander it.

Wahls is better known in Iowa. Plus, he’s younger. “It’s time for new leadership,” Tom Courtney, a former state lawmaker, told me in the UAW hall. Iowa labor groups have mostly aligned behind Wahls. He’s more electable, former Representative Dave Loebsack told me, because he’s had more experience in the state house, and therefore more experience working with people who don’t agree with him.

But Wahls has never campaigned against a Republican, and many Iowans see Turek as more electable, given that he has twice beaten Republican opponents in a competitive district. “When we made the decision, it was not cavalier; it was extremely thoughtful,” Sue Dvorsky, a former chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, told me. Given the uncertain political dynamics, it is “critical who we put at the top” of the November ballot, she said. Turek “wins,” she added. “And he wins hard, hard places.” The race might ultimately come down to geography. Hailing from a part of the state so incorrigibly blue as to have earned itself the nickname the “People’s Republic of Johnson County” will be a difficult burden to overcome. “It’s not anything Zach has done,” Jeff Link, a Democratic strategist, told me. “It’s the fact that he’s from Iowa City.” (During my interview with Turek, he assured me that he would never, under any circumstances, deign to live in eastern Iowa.)

We don’t have much in the way of pure, unbiased polling. A survey sponsored by VoteVets had Turek up 20 points over Wahls. Another, brought by a Teamsters local union, showed Wahls up 18. Which helps to explain all the deliberation and careful couching from Democrats, who seem to recognize the hurdles ahead. They’ve watched demographics shift, counties transform, and voters lose interest, all in the span of a decade and a half.

[Read: Trump voters are over it ]

Still, opportunity glimmers.

During Turek’s door-knocking expedition in Cedar Rapids, he’d rang a few bells at the houses of voters who weren’t home, left a flyer, and carried on. But as he rolled through the neighborhood, with me trotting alongside him, three different residents—two on foot, one by car—chased him down to say hello. They’d been so disappointed to have missed him, and each was eager to assure Turek that this year, things just feel different in Iowa. One of them, a former teacher named Tom Holmes, spent a moment lamenting the “Republican domination” of the state. But Holmes also had urgent advice for the Democrat: “Keep it going, keep it going, keep it going.”

This article originally misstated the nature of Turek's previous electoral victories.