The Atlantic

How to Find Joy on a Quiet Day In

2026-07-04T08:42:00-04:00

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.

In his 2022 essay on how to want less, Arthur C. Brooks recalls a line from Ralph Waldo Emerson about the dangers of thinking that a new place or shiny thing will fix life’s problems. “At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness,” Emerson wrote in his essay “Self-Reliance.” “I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”

Staying home might not readily provide the intoxicating beauty Emerson describes. But once you give in to spending the day inside—with a good movie or the right book, or just dancing around the kitchen with your loved ones—you’ll find that beauty exists there too. As those experiences add up, you may even come to see your everyday surroundings as a place for adventure rather than just stasis. Today’s newsletter explores how to create joy, no matter how many or how few plans you have for the weekend and the summer.

Enjoying Home

Five Books That Will Redirect Your Attention

By Rhian Sasseen

When malaise strikes, a book can break the spell—if you choose the right one. (From 2025)

Read the article.

How to Want Less

By Arthur C. Brooks

The secret to satisfaction has nothing to do with achievement, money, or stuff. (From 2022)

Read the article.

Boredom Is the Price We Pay for Meaning

By Daniel Smith

When I became a father, I was forced to reckon with the emotion that consumed my days.

Read the article.

Still Curious?

Your summer project is watching these movies: Twelve franchises, genres, and filmographies to dig into
How to make life feel a little nicer: Last year, readers gave Elaine Godfrey their tips for seeking out small moments of joy.

Other Diversions

Courtesy of Carol G.

I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Carol G, 58, sent this photo of orchids at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C.

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

— Isabel

America’s Most Enduring Belief Is Also One of Its Most Dangerous

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

Two hundred years ago, on July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within hours of each other. Today, this is usually recalled, when it’s recalled at all, as trivia. But it was far from trivial when it happened. Americans were stunned that the two men most responsible for the Declaration of Independence—Jefferson its author, Adams its chief advocate—died on the same day, and that this day was the Fourth of July, and that this Fourth of July was the 50th anniversary of the Declaration. “There is something so strange in it,” Hezekiah Niles of Niles’ Weekly Register wrote, “that we hardly know how to reconcile the fact by the common doctrine of chances.” An eminent mathematician calculated the odds at one in 1.2 billion.

The events of that day were so extraordinary that many Americans took them as a sign of God’s favor. “A coincidence of circumstances so wonderful,” Secretary of War James Barbour said, “furnishes a new seal to the hope, that the prosperity of these States is under the special protection of a kind Providence.”

This essay has been adapted from Rasenberger’s new book.

Of all the ideas that have defined the United States—the melting pot, the American dream, American individualism—none has been more enduring than the belief that the nation was chosen by God. Jefferson and Adams seemed to confirm this by their deaths. But in life, they disagreed on the subject: Whereas Jefferson came to embrace the possibility that Americans were indeed divinely favored, Adams insisted they were not.

This year, as the country celebrates the document that Adams and Jefferson helped create, American providentialism is still being championed in the highest reaches of government. But it is skeptical Adams, not sunny Jefferson, whose warning and vision speak most directly to America’s predicament in 2026.

The most famous early iteration of American providentialism comes from John Winthrop’s sermon to his fellow Puritans in 1630, shortly before they sailed the Atlantic. Borrowing from the Sermon on the Mount, Winthrop spoke of the “city upon a hill” they would build when they arrived in Massachusetts. Winthrop made clear, however, that being chosen by God imposed a special burden on the Puritans to exercise justice and mercy: Failure to live up to their side of the bargain guaranteed God’s wrath.

A few narrow escapes and unlikely victories during the Revolutionary War—the midnight retreat from Brooklyn, the Hail Mary attack on Trenton—seemed to certify divine favor for the Continental Army. As the war concluded, Congress acknowledged “the many signal interpositions of providence in favour of the American cause” by placing the Eye of Providence on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States. (It remains today on the back of the $1 bill.)

In 1776, the Founders rested America’s independence on the idea that the United States would be a new kind of nation with a new kind of government, drawing its authority not from monarchy and might but from the self-evident laws of “Nature’s God.” There was a problem with this claim from the start: A nation that staked its legitimacy on alignment with Nature’s God also permitted human bondage.

Five years after writing the Declaration, Jefferson came as close as he ever would to admitting that slavery practically begged for divine retribution. “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever,” he wrote.

Despite Jefferson’s apprehensions about slavery—and some unorthodox religious beliefs—he eventually endorsed the proposition that America was “a chosen country,” as he said in 1801 during his first inaugural address. He believed that an “overruling providence” guided the nation with benevolence. Adams flatly rejected this. “We may boast that We are the chosen People,” he wrote. “We may even thank God that We are not like other Men. But after all it will be but flattery, and the delusion, the Self deceit of the Pharisee.”

This contrast helps explain the divergence between each man’s politics. Jefferson’s sanguine view complemented his conviction that the American people ought to boldly self-govern, unimpeded by the state. Again, Adams disagreed. The government must be strong and well structured, he insisted, carefully balanced among different branches to withstand the stupidity and avarice that Americans exhibited no less than anyone else. The assumption that they were special would make Americans oblivious to the need to fortify their government against tyranny.

A republic, by Adams’s definition, is an “Empire of Laws, and not of men.” He preferred a strong executive, but on the condition that its authority be checked by other centers of power, namely an independent judiciary and a legislature able to stand up to a rash president. He feared a power-hungry oligarchy, but he had none of Jefferson’s confidence in the wisdom of the “common people.” Indeed, he foresaw how an unbridled populace might try to defend itself from a self-serving elite. “The common people are continually looking up for a protector,” Adams warned. “They unite together by their feelings, more than their reflections, in augmenting his power, because the more power he has, and the less the gentlemen have, the safer they are.” That dynamic, he believed, would lead to despotism.

Even as Jefferson continued to own hundreds of slaves, he claimed to hope and expect that slavery would expire. Instead, the institution grew, spreading into territory that Jefferson secured in the Louisiana Purchase. The question of whether new states would be slave or free threatened to fracture the nation. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was at best a short-lived salve. Just one month after the law passed, Jefferson could hear the union’s death knell. He called it “a fire bell in the night.”

For a fretful nation, the providentially timed deaths of Adams and Jefferson in 1826 came as relief, a thumbs-up from the hand of God. The death of James Monroe exactly five years later—also on July 4—affirmed it.

Such miracles did not cause the rapacious age that followed—Andrew Jackson and the cotton gin had a lot to do with that—but they certainly juiced it. Slave owners insisted that human bondage fulfilled God’s will. “Slavery is said to be an evil,” James Henry Hammond, a South Carolina representative, said in 1836. “On the contrary, I believe it to be the greatest of all the great blessings, which a kind providence has bestowed upon our glorious region.”

In the 1840s, James K. Polk turned America’s chosenness into policy. His administration fulfilled—in the words of an approving journalist—the “manifest design of Providence” that the country take possession of all land between the Atlantic and Pacific, leading to the large-scale dispossession of Native Americans.

The Civil War interrupted the giddy spirit of divinely sanctioned conquest, but only briefly. Liberated from the original sin of slavery, America boomed and gloated through much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Under the crusading administration of President Woodrow Wilson, who maintained the hope that “we are chosen, and prominently chosen,” the nation sought to export its values of democracy and human rights to other countries.

Over time, chosenness morphed into a more secular and nuanced, but nonetheless double-edged, version of American singularity, called exceptionalism. Sometimes this was committed to good, such as the Marshall Plan and the Peace Corps, and sometimes to ill, as in a series of military blunders meant to quash godless Communism.

Though himself fiercely anti-Communist, Ronald Reagan voiced the most benign version of exceptionalism in his final address as president, on January 11, 1989, when he alluded to Winthrop’s city upon a hill. “I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life,” Reagan said. “In my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace.”

Now Donald Trump offers a new variation on the theme, and this time, harmony and peace don’t seem to be in the offing. After a would-be assassin struck Trump’s ear with a bullet in 2024, he began speaking of himself as saved by God. Taking office in his second term, Trump immediately dusted off the providence-fueled idea of “manifest destiny” as a pretext for making Canada the 51st state, among other expansionist ventures. He has threatened Armageddon in Iran—in the name of Allah—and posted images of himself as Jesus. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, for his part, invoked divine providence to glorify the killing of Iranians, an idea so un-Christian that it prompted an apparent rebuke from the pope.

Today, Americans will see the Trump administration drape itself in flags and gild itself in gold. In speeches acclaiming our nation and our leader, we will be told that we (some of us, anyway) are divinely chosen. We’d do well to consider Adams’s admonition. “We are not a chosen People, that I know of,” he wrote in a letter in 1812. “We must and We Shall, go the Way of all the Earth.”

“Instead of the most enlightened people,” Adams warned in another letter, “I fear we Americans shall soon have the character of the silliest people under Heaven.”

This essay has been adapted from Jim Rasenberger’s new book, A Perfect Coincidence: The Extraordinary Friendship and Astonishing Deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

*Sources: GraphicaArtis / Getty; Culture Club / Getty; MPI / Getty; Getty.

How to Define America in 30 Objects

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

George Washington, this nation’s first general, its inaugural president, the eponym of its capital city, left one of his most indelible marks on America from afar. Not one for a grand speech, Washington printed his Farewell Address in Philadelphia’s American Daily Advertiser on September 19, 1796, the same day he announced that he would voluntarily relinquish his power, departing the then-seat of government for his homestead at Mount Vernon.

No one said the speech aloud in a formal setting for decades, until the Civil War. Sensing that our Constitution was in crisis, a group of citizens from Philadelphia asked both chambers of Congress to recite the Farewell Address in 1862 to commemorate the 130th anniversary of Washington’s birth. In 1896, the Senate began the tradition of reading it every year. The custom, with the speakers alternating between our two political parties, continues to this day.

Washington originally wrote the address beside a brass candlestand, which was passed down through his family until 1878, when it was transferred to the United States government and then, a few years later, to the Smithsonian. Though permanently on display in the National Museum of American History, it has temporarily migrated across the National Mall this summer to the Smithsonian Castle in honor of the nation’s 250th anniversary, where visitors can take in this strikingly human artifact.

[Clint Smith: First the Kennedy Center, now the Smithsonian]

To the rest of the world, a country’s 250-year anniversary may seem somewhat unimpressive. Scholars suggest that China’s first dynasties date back more than 4,000 years. Ancient Greece was an America-and-a-half old when it constructed the Parthenon. Egypt’s King Mentuhotep II reunited his country’s upper and lower regions at the turn of the 20th century—B.C.E. Were the history of nations to be measured as a person’s life, America would scarcely be old enough to have learned how to ride a bicycle.

And yet, in only a handful of lifetimes, America has reshaped the world, as our notion of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness spread to the tiniest towns and the biggest stages. The words in the Declaration of Independence, 1,320 in all, have shaped modern society, inspiring well more than 100 similar declarations around the world since 1776 and transforming an unknowable number of lives.

Among the thousands of cities, hundreds of historical associations, 50 states, and five territories commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration this year, countless stories explain what life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have meant to Americans. Stories captured through torn songbooks and decorated journals, well-loved toys and patched-up jackets, family portraits and rumpled photographs, millions of which have found a home at the Smithsonian.

How the Smithsonian should commemorate the country’s semiquincentennial has been on the minds of researchers and curators for more than a decade. The anniversary is an opportunity to celebrate the impact of the Declaration and America globally as well as to demonstrate how the nation is a work in progress—how Americans have debated, voted, marched, and died to make concrete the ideals of the founding documents. How do you choose, from among all our nation’s treasures, which ones to tell these stories? And what, precisely, should Americans experience as they gather in our nation’s capital this summer?

No one, two, or even 1,776 responses are sufficient to answer those questions. That is why the Smithsonian is commemorating the 250th through manifold perspectives reflective of the entire country. The National Museum of American History is preserving a Revolutionary-era gunboat. The National Museum of Natural History is exploring the survival story of the American bison. The Hirshhorn is sending modern and contemporary art to every state, and the Folklife Festival is traveling cross-country, partnering with regional events across America. These endeavors are only a sample of the institution’s initiatives and events for the year, and yet, I felt that the Smithsonian’s observation of the 250th needed one more exhibition.

The Smithsonian

William Stone engraving of the Declaration of Independence

The Smithsonian

Thomas Jefferson’s portable wooden box desk

From the Smithsonian’s vast collection—more than 157 million letters, pieces of furniture, paintings, aircraft, and everything in between—my co-curators and I planned to select just a handful of artifacts that define our country. They would serve as an anchor, a capstone, a way to say “This is America, after all this time.”

While beginning to plan the exhibition, my co-curators and I landed on one nonnegotiable: We had to include Thomas Jefferson’s desk, the portable wooden box on which he drafted the Declaration of Independence, its ideas expanding in tandem with our nascent democracy as it traveled from Philadelphia to France to Monticello before arriving at the White House. The desk was where this nation was born, where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness became our promised land.

The desk, along with a William Stone engraving of the Declaration of Independence, would become the gravitational force of the exhibition. Each object orbiting the desk would be a prism through which we would celebrate our founding ideals.

As we evaluated objects from across the institution, we soon realized that we could not limit ourselves to our preliminary plan of including only 15. We considered 20, then 25, eventually landing on 30 items and an assortment of campaign buttons. Each decision was not only a choice to include something but a choice to exclude something else. We asked ourselves how this exhibition could be one in which every American sees themselves without it turning into a catalog of communities and identities, without it being exhaustive of every angle and interpretation of American history.

Organizing an exhibition is more like editing an anthology than writing a novel. Curating requires combing through archives, then culling them into something cohesive. Time can be the wrong organizational principle. Although splitting up history by centuries or decades is a useful tool for scholars, we knew it would overgeneralize the intimate and encompassing exhibition we were aiming for.

The key, we realized, was to return to Jefferson and the Declaration.

What does it mean to celebrate a document that symbolizes freedom for all but did not grant it? Why talk about the origins of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness if it took America another 87 years for emancipation, another 144 for the Nineteenth Amendment, another 239 for marriage equality?

“I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration,” Frederick Douglass said of the signers of the Declaration in 1852. “With them, justice, liberty, and humanity were final; not slavery and oppression.”

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the Declaration of Sentiments stated in 1848, “that all men and women are created equal.”

“The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all its dimensions,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. “And so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.”

From the country’s beginning, people have pushed and prodded, soared and fallen, for the truths that made 1776 an inflection point in the history of the world. Through Abigail Adams’s plea to “remember the ladies” and Nat Turner’s Rebellion, through Lewis and Clark’s adventures and the stories of John Steinbeck, through Jackie’s first stolen base and Sally’s first stellar ride, Americans have labored in countless ways to realize the nation’s promise. So while it may have been impossible to create an exhibition in which every American sees their exact reflection, we knew that we could capture our shared hopes. History has shown us that the very celebration of our shared longing for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ensures that those values will endure.

The Smithsonian

Harriet Tubman’s book of hymns

The objects, we determined, would symbolize these “American Aspirations,” the eventual name of the exhibition. Visitors would find artifacts such as the candlestand, where Washington chose humility over ego and began the peaceful transfer of power. They would see Harriet Tubman’s book of hymns, a testament to faith in a country where most states forbade her from learning to read or write. They would read the text of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech, which did not include its titular line until the singer Mahalia Jackson shouted out, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!”

And alongside the names well trodden by biographies and documentaries, we decided visitors would find stories that are more commonly footnotes, lives that have been obscured by time but are quintessential parts of our national story.

Aspiring to be like Washington, I placed my own ego aside and included the jersey and bat of Roberto Clemente, the right fielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates who helped defeat my beloved Yankees in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, breaking records and my 7-year-old heart. Clemente went on to become an all-time great—two World Series titles, 15 All-Star Games, 3,000 career hits. Born in Puerto Rico in 1934, he had every reason to enjoy his fame and money and keep his life focused on baseball.

Instead, he dedicated himself to philanthropic and humanitarian causes locally and globally. “I don’t think Clemente turned down many people who wanted his help—if anybody,” Joe Brown, the Pirates’ general manager, once said. In 1972, Clemente died in a plane crash on his way to deliver aid to victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua, leaving a legacy so revered that the Baseball Hall of Fame inducted him almost immediately afterward, waiving the traditional five-year waiting period. For all Clemente accomplished and all he stood for, he takes center stage in the exhibition’s “In Pursuit of Hope” section.

The Smithsonian

Clemente’s jersey

The Smithsonian

The Edison bulb

Another theme we chose—out of seven in total—is the pursuit of progress. Alongside more recognizable items such as Thomas Edison’s light bulb, the section features the earliest-known patent model of an automobile. Six years before Karl Benz’s first car and almost two decades prior to Henry Ford’s initial inventions, George Selden filed the first patent for a road engine, in 1879. Though he eventually got into reputational trouble for demanding royalties from car manufacturers, Selden represents the American spirit of ingenuity, of being unafraid to wonder what could be. Coincidentally, Selden was also an amateur photographer and helped mentor a man named George Eastman, whose name would gain fame as part of the Eastman Kodak Company.

Beyond the names that are less common in textbooks or that surface less readily in an online search, we felt it was crucial to recognize the idea of unknown valor. For every exhibition, book, and article that explores a sliver of our history, there are millions of stories that are not yet written—or that are still waiting for enough evidence to put together. Adjacent to famous wartime recruitment posters in the section “In Pursuit of Defending Freedom,” we have placed James Mifflin’s Medal of Honor. From roll-call slips on the USS Brooklyn, historians know that Mifflin was a Navy sailor who fought in the Battle of Mobile Bay in 1864, but not much more about what he did that qualified as “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty,” the requirements for the medal. Other than him being African American, we know little about his life. Yet the actions of these sorts of anonymous Americans, lost to history, have given us the freedoms we enjoy today.

The Smithsonian

George Selden’s 1879 road-engine patent

In the spring, the artifacts that make up “American Aspirations,” including some of the most valuable and revered objects in the Smithsonian’s collection, embarked on a journey across the Mall to the Castle, which since 2023 has been undergoing a facelift to improve its facilities and restore its historical features.

[Lily Meyer: The real fight for the Smithsonian]

Throughout my years at the institution, I have been a part of remarkable curatorial undertakings. I have traveled cross-country, digging through basements and attics for hidden heirlooms. I have stopped traffic on 14th Street in Washington, D.C., to lower a train car and guard tower into the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I have even ushered a space capsule along the highways of Japan, inflating and deflating the tires to get it under overpasses. To put the country’s most revered objects in one room is no small task, and I spent several nervous weeks wondering how the Castle would handle the physical tolls of building an exhibition. Could it support dozens of backlit display cases, thousands of visitors, and months of letting in the notorious D.C. humidity? The objects had to travel in vehicles with armed guards, then be placed in alarm-protected cases overseen by high-tech cameras and 24/7 personnel, all in an 180-year-old room actively under construction.

When I went to view the Castle, our preservationist handed me a hard hat. Amid metal beams and debris on the floor, I tried to imagine where the Declaration would go and how the objects would fit around it. When my colleagues nearby asked me what the exhibition would entail, I talked about how we were trying to portray a nation still being made, one working to attain the dreams of the Declaration.

I looked again at the dust of the unfinished Castle, and my worries dissipated. In that moment, I felt that I was in the most patriotic place I could imagine, a place that could help America remember what it once was, help us better understand who we are today, and point us to a united shared future.

Trump Is Getting Tired of Losing Election Cases

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

Earlier this year, President Trump claimed a new area of expertise: election law. “I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject,” Trump wrote on social media, and found an “irrefutable one” that he would soon present. He suggested that it would allow him to bypass Congress and gain approval from the courts to impose his will on the nation’s locally run election system, including requiring voters to show identification while casting ballots in the upcoming midterms.

It was a heady time for a man who obsesses over voting policy and is seeking to prove that the 2020 election was stolen out from under him. Two weeks before Trump claimed in his February 13 post to have broken new legal ground, the FBI had conducted a raid of an election warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials made off with more than 650 boxes of ballots as part of a criminal investigation stemming from Trump’s 2020 defeat, an unprecedented action that the president hailed as a major advance for his unsubstantiated claim that the contest was riddled with fraud. The House of Representatives had just passed the SAVE America Act, a bill that would force people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to show photo identification when casting a ballot.

[Read: A serious debate about an unserious bill ]

Now a sense of gloom has replaced the hope that Trump and his allies had when they thought they were on the verge of making good on his election promises, which also included eliminating most voting by mail and conducting mass purges of voter rolls. The SAVE America Act is doomed to fail in Congress, and Trump is at war with his own party over it. Nothing, so far, has come of the Fulton County case. And the president’s legal arguments are a lot more refutable than he claimed. Trump is consistently being rebuffed in court; the Justice Department has lost at least a dozen election lawsuits. Some changes to the election system that Trump laid out in a March executive order have been blocked by judges. The president is running out of time and low on options to change the country’s voting policies—which he has denigrated as “rigged” and reminiscent of developing nations’—because the courts, Congress, and the Constitution seem to keep getting in the way.

District-level judges have, over the past two weeks, ruled against Trump’s most significant executive orders on voting, blocked efforts by his administration to compel states to hand their voter rolls over to the Justice Department, and outlawed the Department of Homeland Security’s modified Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system. The administration has expanded the SAVE database, which previously focused on noncitizens, by adding Social Security records and other data from native-born Americans to conduct checks of people’s voter eligibility. A judge said that the expanded system “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.” Other judges are undercutting Trump’s assertion that he can remake the election system—which is administered by state and local officials—as he sees fit.

“The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani wrote in blocking much of Trump’s March executive order that aimed to give the U.S. Postal Service new authority to determine which Americans could vote by mail. She underlined the words does not for extra emphasis.

The administration’s “efforts have been rebuked by every court to consider them,” Cathy Bissoon, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Western Pennsylvania, wrote in a ruling that blocked the Department of Justice’s push to obtain voter data from the state. Bissoon noted that 10 courts had already blocked similar efforts in other states, before punctuating her comments with a footnote: “The administration’s demands have yielded one unexpected benefit, namely, bipartisan agreement. Five of the district judges are Trump appointees.”

They include U.S. District Court Judge Stephanie Gallagher, whom Trump nominated to the bench in 2019. She dismissed a DOJ lawsuit against Maryland seeking its voting records. “The Court joins every court to have addressed this issue,” Gallagher wrote in determining that an unredacted voter file is not something a state is compelled to give to the federal government. Trump has also lost in the Supreme Court that he helped reshape: Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote on Monday that states could allow mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, essentially dismissing the president’s argument that such late-arriving votes fuel fraud and distrust.

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told reporters on Monday that the Trump administration’s cold streak is remarkable. “It is losing literally every single case it’s involved in,” Becker said. “I was a former voting section attorney in the DOJ, and I can’t remember the DOJ or any administration losing more than one or two trial-court cases a year, at the most. We are well into the double digits with this administration, and the year is not even half over yet.”

A Justice Department spokesperson told me that the Trump administration is “devoting significant resources” to continue the legal battle, including through its “litigation to ensure voter roll maintenance and a clear focus on ensuring that American elections are decided solely by American citizens.”

Publicly, the White House is shrugging off the legal setbacks. “President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told me in a statement, asserting that existing laws give the Justice Department what it needs to compel states to maintain clean voter rolls. “This campaign pledge from the President is why millions of Americans sent him back to the White House.”

But the president has done little to hide his frustration over his inability to make good on that pledge. The stalled SAVE America Act has led to shouting matches and standoffs over strategy with Republican lawmakers, leaving Congress in a legislative quagmire. And this year’s losing streak is a continuation of the president’s dismal record in the courts when it comes to voting cases. After Trump’s 2020-election loss, the president and his allies filed dozens of lawsuits in an effort to overturn the results. In the end, they lost almost every case. A Washington Post review of court cases a month after Joe Biden’s victory found that 86 judges had ruled against Trump or his supporters.

This is not to say that Trump has not had success influencing America’s electoral system, particularly in the past year. The president has elevated MAGA-friendly election deniers into the federal government, sicced the Justice Department on his political enemies, and drafted multiple agencies into his relentless hunt to substantiate his broad claims of voter fraud. The Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling in April gutted the Voting Rights Act and cleared the way for several Republican-led states to redraw congressional maps and eliminate Democrat-leaning districts with large portions of minority voters. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court rolled back campaign-finance restrictions on political parties, which Trump hailed as “A BIG WIN FOR REPUBLICANS.” At the state level, pro-Trump lawmakers have implemented miniature versions of the SAVE America Act or found other ways to support the president’s vision for voting. At least 10 states have voluntarily turned over the personal information of millions of voters to the Justice Department.

[Read: The election deniers are winning ]

“They’re trying to appease Trump in these ways and implement his will in the states,” Gréta Bedekovics, the former director of democracy at the Center for American Progress, told me. In a report released Monday, Bedekovics and her co-author, Devon Ombres, found that at least 12 states have passed laws requiring documentary proof of citizenship for people registering to vote or mandating citizenship-verification checks for voters since 2024.

The setbacks that Trump has faced in court and Congress increase the likelihood that the midterm elections will proceed as election officials have intended, even though the president has, with little evidence, continued to denigrate the system as rife with fraud. On Monday, he lamented the “tremendous loss in the Supreme Court” on late-arriving mail-in ballots and said “it is more important than ever to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.”

The president’s growing desperation over election policy has begun to bleed into other parts of his agenda. Last month, he abruptly canceled a signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill, suggesting that it was a “yawn” compared with legislation on elections. He has likewise encouraged Congress to block other bills, including national-security legislation, if the SAVE America Act—which Trump has deemed a “National Emergency”—is not attached. Congress left town this week mired in disagreement over how to balance the president’s election obsession with other pressing priorities, including the annual defense-spending bill.

Time is running out. Judges generally frown on any major actions to change voting laws in the weeks before an election. Early voting for the midterms will begin as soon as September in some states.

With Congress gridlocked and the courts repeatedly brushing back Trump, there is growing fear among election officials that the president may try to influence election policy in unprecedented ways, such as seizing voting machines—something Trump has said he regrets having not ordered the National Guard to do in 2020—and deploying federal agents to polling places.

The courts have proved to be a solid bulwark against Trump’s push to disrupt the midterm elections. But the president is nothing if not persistent when it comes to trying to bend the rules in his favor. As a result, the sanctity of the vote could rely on whether other government institutions and, ultimately, the citizenry can also mount a stand against the president’s worst impulses.

What J. D. Vance Once Knew

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

TEN YEARS AGO TODAY, in the middle of the presidential campaign, an essay in The Atlantic set out to explain the appeal of Donald Trump. Its author traced that appeal to the social decline and cultural trauma he had known firsthand, in an impoverished childhood.

The author, J. D. Vance, had only days earlier published Hillbilly Elegy, which went on to sell roughly 3 million copies and made him, almost overnight, the country’s designated interpreter of working-class grievances. And he was quite good at it.

In the July 4, 2016, essay, Vance described the places from which the pain came—factories that downsized or ceased to exist, along with the jobs they had provided; the aesthetic decline in once beautiful and vibrant towns; families that were shattering or never forming in the first place; and anger and frustration with a government that had broken the trust with the people it was meant to serve. “During this election season,” Vance wrote, “it appears that many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever.” His name was Donald Trump.

In the midst of a social crisis, Vance observed, Trump offered “an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution.” But, he argued, such promises were a cheap high. “He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.”

[Anne Applebaum: Trump’s anti-patriotic trap]

“Trump is cultural heroin,” Vance wrote. “He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.”

“One day” is today.

THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY, while still quite dangerous, is also collapsing, cracking under the weight of its own choices. The main driver is the economy, which he sold as his strong point. We’re seeing tariff-driven price increases, gas prices that spiked from less than $3 to more than $4 a gallon during a 100-day war against Iran that America lost, wages failing to keep pace with the cost of living, and inflation ticking back up. Manufacturing jobs, which Trump promised to bring roaring back, are still being lost. Health care has gotten much more expensive on his watch, and millions have lost coverage.

At the top of the nation’s health agencies sits Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in a single year moved to cut the list of recommended childhood vaccines nearly in half, fired the government’s vaccine advisers and replaced them with skeptics, and presided over the worst measles outbreak in 30 years. The National Institutes of Health, the crown jewel of American biomedical science, has seen billions in research cut, clinical trials canceled, and labs closed, resulting in a “brain drain” that rival nations are racing to exploit. And the dismantling of USAID, along with the gutting of PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the bipartisan AIDS-relief program credited with saving more than 25 million lives—has, by credible estimates, already cost the lives of hundreds of thousands, most of them children, with projections of as many as 14 million more by 2030 if the cuts hold.

Americans are deeply divided and intensely polarized, with pessimism at or near a multidecade high. Faith in nearly every major institution—government, the press, universities, religious leaders—sits at or near the bottom of the modern record.

It’s no surprise, then, that Trump’s approval rating is anemic. (In one recent poll, it’s down to 30 percent.) His remaining support is soft, while the unhappiness with him is intense. Republican members of Congress are beginning to break with him. His MAGA base is fracturing. Former stalwart supporters, such as Tucker Carlson, are openly mocking the president. (“Shut up, bitch! I don’t take you seriously,” Carlson said 10 days ago.) Trump looks weak and lost, a husk of a man still performing the same routine to a crowd that is drifting toward the exits. The country is finally waking to the comedown Vance predicted.

THIS IS THE CONTEXT in which Americans are celebrating the nation’s 250th birthday. It’s not simply that things are going badly; it’s that their view of the United States is darkening. Pride in being an American has hit a new low. Nearly 80 percent of Americans believe the Founders would be disappointed with how the country has turned out.

Some of that sentiment reflects the fact that the president and those around him subvert the rule of law, decency, and democratic restraints. Many Americans believe the country is, in its current incarnation, betraying its ideals. They feel at odds with the nation they love.

And this is true as well: Among more and more Americans there is a sickening recognition of what the United States, during the Trump era, has become. They see it as a pitiable farce, a verdict that is hard to dispute when a nation has twice elected a carnival barker as its leader. For a historically proud people, that is an indignity and a humiliation. We are in the bread-and-circuses phase of the American story, the point at which a great republic, having lost its sense of purpose, makes do with spectacle.

Which brings me back to J. D. Vance. Ten summers ago he understood, better than most, the threat Trump posed to America. Vance, who described himself as a “Never Trump guy,” thought Trump was an “idiot.” He admitted to a friend at the time that he goes “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.” But then ambition made its offer, and Vance, who had seen the danger so clearly, discovered he could see his way around it. The first stop was the Senate; the next was the vice presidency.

Along the way, the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy—a teller of hard truths, a morally serious person committed to honesty even when it cost him, beholden to no one—became a cynic, a partner in a cruel enterprise, a peddler of lies he is surely clever enough to recognize as such, a man whose only fixed commitment is to his own rise to power.

In his memoir, Vance wrote, “Nothing compares to the fear that you’re becoming the monster in your closet.” It’s a poignant line, referring to a man raised amid the addiction and volatility he feared he might inherit. The monster Vance feared was a private one; the monster he became is a public one. His legacy turns out to be a much more destructive than the one he was afraid of inheriting.

AMERICA WILL OUTLAST TRUMP AND VANCE; the issue is whether they will be seen as a parenthesis the country closes or the opening of a different, dark chapter.

Abraham Lincoln, in his 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum on the subject of the perpetuation of our political institutions, warned, “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” What Lincoln meant is that the threat America faced was not external conquest; it was internal decay. If destruction is to be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.

[Ron Chernow: What would Mark Twain think of America at 250?]

Lincoln was responding to a wave of mob violence in the 1830s, including lynchings such as the murder of the abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy. The “props” that once supported a “political edifice of liberty and equal rights” were “decayed, and crumbled away.” Out of such decay might rise a demagogue, a future tyrant, feeding on what the Lincoln scholar Diana Schaub called “politically degenerative passions.”

The remedy, according to Lincoln, was a “political religion” based on reverence for the law and fidelity to America’s constitutional process. Lincoln was in turn relying on the wisdom of George Washington, and particularly Washington’s farewell address. America’s two greatest presidents shared an intense conviction: that a republic depends on some measure of virtue in its citizens and some measure of integrity in its leaders. Without them, the temple of liberty will fall.

The past decade in America has been a lost decade. Far too many Americans have cheered on the men tearing at the temple. But Americans can now see, later than they should have, the cost of the damage. It is within our power to make it whole. What remains is to find the will. There is a name for those who do: renewers of ruined cities, repairers of the breach, restorers of streets in which to dwell.

Hell Arrives in Washington

2026-07-03T18:35:22-04:00

On the eve of the United States’ 250th birthday, in the nation’s capital, people were sweating through their shirts, and tourists were pressing electric fans directly to their foreheads. The record-breaking heat wave that roasted the Midwest earlier this week has turned Washington, D.C., into hell. Temperatures peaked at 102 degrees Fahrenheit, with a heat index of 117. The sky was cloudless, and the humidity was encouraging me to lie down and cry. It was difficult to believe that D.C. has been four degrees hotter than this twice before, in August 1918 and July 1930. Tomorrow may be even more surreal, with another day of oppressive heat and throngs of tourists in town to see what the president has billed as the biggest fireworks display in human history.

On Tuesday, August 6, 1918, “so hot was it that the asphalt paving of the downtown streets became so soft that in places the heel marks of pedestrians were left in it,” The Washington Herald reported at the time. Josephine Lehman, a young woman who’d come to D.C. to work as a secretary in the Department of War when World War I began, wrote home to her mother that “the cement pavements burned one’s feet through the soles of the shoes.” In an apparent first, the head of the city police decided to let his officers patrol without their jackets. Indoors, conditions were unbearable. Fifty government staffers in the State, War, and Navy Building—now called the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building—were taken to the emergency room on account of the heat, the Evening Star reported at the time. City officials ordered ice-cream parlors to stop making ice cream in order to conserve the district’s ice supplies. They also waived occupancy limits at community pools, worried that people would pass out in line to swim. Each pool ended up holding 600 to 700 people.

The pools were packed to capacity as well on July 20, 1930—the second time D.C. hit 106 degrees. Thousands fled the city for the beach, which was “too hot for all but the most daring” anyway, the Herald reported. The paper also ran a photo of about a dozen kids splashing in the Reflecting Pool that day; a cop, standing in the background of the photo, seems happy to let them play. The Washington Daily News reported that “a Sunday throng” still showed up to the National Zoo, where staff hosed down the elephants and the hippo stayed in its bath. Meanwhile, thousands of people slept on benches, fire escapes, and parks across the city, especially in Potomac Park, just south of the National Mall. Those who chose to rest on the banks of the Potomac River could be seen by steamship passengers playing bridge and dancing in the river breeze. Just beyond the city, forest fires raged across Maryland. According to the the Washington Times, “sufficient help could not be mustered as volunteers were loath to brave the intense heat.”

Now D.C. residents and visitors have the option of staying cool indoors with air-conditioning. That’s good news, because many of the sites where residents cooled themselves in years past were closed to the public today. Yellow tape separated me from Potomac Park; when I made eye contact with a member of the park police, he wagged his finger at me. Because of fireworks and other planned festivities for the 250th, the National Mall is currently a maze of chain-link fences, megastages, Porta Potties, and temporary Greco-Roman structures. The incredibly shadeless Great American State Fair, where dozens of people were treated for heat-related problems today, was canceled until 5 p.m. At one point, I asked a member of the National Guard if it was possible to walk to the Lincoln Memorial, and he apologized for the heat. When I noted that he was the one covered in military fatigues (no officials seem to have loosened uniform standards in this heat wave), he admitted to “suffering” but said that he was surviving.

No one could cool off in the Reflecting Pool—a place where swimming is never encouraged and which is now additionally fenced off, thanks to the algae that bloomed after President Trump’s failed attempt to beautify it. Black bags of fireworks lined its perimeter, stationed for the spectacle to come. As close to the water as people could get were about five protesters in inflatable frog costumes, one of whom carried a sign that read TEAM ALGAE. As I spoke with one of the frog protesters, who gave her name only as Val and had stuffed ice packs into her sports bra to keep cool, about 20 fighter jets flew overhead, leaving a trail of red and blue smoke.

[Read: Science has a name for what’s plaguing the Reflecting Pool]

The fighter jets reappeared when I was checking on the wildlife at the National Zoo. No one was hosing off the elephants, but an employee told me that they have three wave pools to choose from and that staff will periodically run showers for them. The pachyderms seemed to be fine, if sluggish, until the sonic booms began. One of the elephants, 51-year old Swarna, began running around her enclosure in a circle, like a bucking bronco. As I waited for my Uber out, I sat next to a mother and daughter who had flown to D.C. for the Fourth of July and were advising Dad, who was still at the hotel, to skip the zoo: The heat was “worse than Disney.”

I ended my adventure at one of D.C.’s packed community pools. A mom of two, Lanay Brown, told me that she’d brought her kids and nieces to the pool most weeks since school had let out. Today was the first they’d had to wait in line to enter. Summery pop and rap blasted from a speaker. Max, who is turning 1 in four days, sat next to the kiddie pool in his own inflatable pool, biting it. His dad, Andre, who had moved to D.C. from Florida, told me that this is the hottest he’s felt since leaving the state five years ago.

I’m also a Floridian, but Florida, quite frankly, has never tried me like this. I waded into the pool in my dress and felt a relief I can only imagine was similar to what D.C. residents felt many summers ago. I went home thinking that this was maybe the most American day of my life, with the poolside rap and the warplanes and the many, many patriotic T-shirts. It was definitely the hottest.

How Elon Musk Became More Powerful Than Ever

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

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Elon Musk isn’t just the world’s richest man—he’s one of the most influential people alive. His companies have transformed industries, his wealth has shattered records, and his politics now shape governments and public debate. But how did he become this powerful? And is his dominance really inevitable?

This week on Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel talks with the historian Quinn Slobodian and the technology writer Ben Tarnoff, the authors of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, about the ideas driving Musk’s rise. They unpack the mythology of the billionaire genius, the ideology behind his politics, and whether the world’s most powerful CEO is stronger—or more vulnerable—than he appears.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Ben Tarnoff: A lot of folks ask us, “Well, what about Musk and science fiction?” And if you read the SpaceX prospectus that they had to file, it reads really like a work of science fiction—but one that he’s managed to operationalize toward a very concrete material end. Which is unlocking this extraordinary amount of money that he can use to continue to finance his projects.

Charlie Warzel: That SpaceX prospectus is this pretty unbelievable document. It is very future forward. The desire to mine asteroids, to promote space tourism, to “extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” This is very different than what SpaceX is actually doing on the ground.

[Music]

Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we are going to talk about the richest man in the world.

So what do we do about Elon Musk? This is a question that I spend a lot of time thinking about.

In recent years, Musk has become an omnipresent force in the global economy, in our culture, and especially in our politics. His money and his campaigning were likely factors in Donald Trump’s win in 2024. He then helped spearhead the DOGE takeover of the federal government: assisting in cancelling thousands of grants, cutting over 270,000 federal jobs, and dismantling agencies like USAID.

But Musk is first and foremost an industrialist. Tesla, his car company, helped create the modern EV market. SpaceX, his rocket company, has made genuine progress in aerospace, and their rocket-launching prowess has allowed Musk to create Starlink, the satellite company.

And most recently he helped take SpaceX public at an astronomical valuation, briefly becoming the world’s first trillionaire on paper. But his wealth now has no precedent. In fact, it is difficult to even comprehend it. At one point last month, Musk lost more money in SpaceX stock than Bill Gates’s entire net worth.

If you spend enough time thinking about all of this—Musk’s money and his politics—it can be easy to see Musk as something like inevitable.

But is that actually right?

Recently, Musk has spent his days on his social-media platform—the same one he’s turned into an algorithmic cesspool of conspiracy and racist dogwhistling—arguing with congressman Ro Khanna and others over the impact of his USAID cuts. Specifically, he’s fighting allegations that those cuts could lead to the deaths of millions of people in places like sub-Saharan Africa.

So he is at once unpopular, embattled. But also, he is pushing through it all like he always does, continuing to spin the story that has helped him amass his billions: that he is the industrial genius of the 21st century. The Henry Ford for our times.

So what do we do about Elon Musk? How do we think about him? How do we think about his money? How do we think about his power? How do we situate him in history, but also among his peers in Silicon Valley? Who, if anyone, can stop this guy—rein him in politically or economically? Is Musk too big to fail, or is he actually, surprisingly vulnerable?

To answer these questions, we need to reckon with Musk’s bigger project—the beliefs that govern every single thing that he does, from building rockets to posting “Great Replacement” conspiracy rhetoric. Because Musk is not just a person; he’s an ideology. And grasping Muskism is crucial for understanding not just the man, but the world that made him.

Now thankfully, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff have written just that book. Slobodian is a professor of international history at Boston University. And Tarnoff is a long-time technology writer and critic. Their book, titled Muskism, is an attempt to explain the richest man in the world. What he believes, the techniques he’s used both good and bad, and what Muskism seeks to accomplish. Is Elon Musk a genius? A fraud? Or is he something else entirely? Quinn and Ben join me now to talk about it all.

[Music]

Warzel: Quinn, Ben, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

Quinn Slobodian: Happy to be here.

Tarnoff: Thanks so much for having us, Charlie.

Warzel: So the book is called Muskism. First question is: Why did you guys choose to write a book about Elon Musk? This is a guy who is absolutely everywhere. He is possibly the best attention seeker we’ve got outside of Donald Trump—which is to say, it’s easy to be exhausted by this guy. Why did you guys choose to write this book and willingly devote a giant portion of your life to this guy that everyone’s already pretty tired of?

Tarnoff: I think we kind of stumbled backward into the subject. I mean, the point of origin really for us—thinking about Musk independently before we teamed up on this project—is that we both did a review of Walter Isaacson’s biography that came out a few years ago. And we both kind of, on our own, arrived at some similar thoughts about Musk in the course of reading and reviewing the Isaacson biography: namely that we’re very interested in Musk as an industrialist, how Musk organizes production, how he organizes the working day. We started to think about Musk more as an avatar of a particular kind of capitalism rather than the focus on his personal life or his biography, his relationships and so forth. And that’s I think how it really started, right, Quinn? That’s kind of the origin point.

Slobodian: Yeah. And I think in both of our reviews we independently made the Ford comparison. And more specifically the Fordism comparison. So we both started asking ourselves, you know, that what we know about Fordism as a social system might be or might not be relatable to a version of Muskism. The thought experiment that Ben raised at some point early in the process, which I keep on going back to, is: If there were like progressive social scientists or critics in the 1920s sitting around, you know, in their apartments in Berlin thinking about Henry Ford, would one of them just say to the other, “What do you think about Henry Ford?” And the other people just say, like, “He’s an idiot.” No; rather, they’d be like: “How is this man achieving the power he has? How is he reformatting and rewriting social rules and conventions and contracts?” And actually if you don’t do that work, you’re never gonna be able to oppose and ultimately hopefully defeat these people.

Warzel: Let’s just talk about Muskism. Like, what is Muskism? Describe the thesis of the book for me.

Tarnoff: So the one-line definition of Muskism that we provide in the book is that Musk is not primarily in the business of selling cars, rockets, or satellites, so much as he’s selling the notion that both individuals and nation-states can, in an increasingly unstable world, fortify their self-reliance by plugging into his infrastructures. But of course, in doing so, they deepen their dependency on those very infrastructures.

Warzel: How do you situate Musk historically? Like, how does he compare to the robber barons of old? Or how does he compare, how is his brand much different than, let’s say, Ford?

Slobodian: Well, I think that, you know, we were entering this debate amongst many kinds of competing frames for what’s happening in Silicon Valley. And some of the other categories people have posed often reach even deeper back into the past, right? And we wanted to, I think, both draw attention to the fact that capitalists have always made their money in some way by working in a sometimes fraught, but ultimately mutually productive, relationship to the government.

So the the idea of libertarianism in the strong sense—the way it’s often attributed to Silicon Valley thinkers, that they want to, you know, start afresh on a decommissioned oil rig out in the the Pacific, or, you know, live in a blank-slate society in Honduras or whatever—is of course true in some cases, but really misses the bigger story. And the bigger story is, as it always is with a leading fraction of capital, is like: How are you getting the government on your side? The first half of our book is called “Foundation,” and you could see it as an attempt for us to say, how, in kind of traditional ways, did Musk curry favor with the government? Figure out ways that he could roll out, you know, consumer-facing technologies that were backstopped either directly or indirectly by the government? Whether that’s just piggybacking on the R&D funding that created the internet in the first place, or the GPS constellations that were required for Zip2, his first city directory. Or federal deposit insurance. Eventually, the demands of the war on terror.

So there’s many ways in which he is a kind of classic modern industrialist, in that he finds advantage with changes in policy and changes in technology that he can make use of. Where he gets unique, I think—or where he becomes harder to compare to Lee Iacocca or even in some ways to Steve Jobs or Bill Gates—is the degree of his focus on frontier technologies that will fuse man to machine in ways that haven’t actually happened yet. So that second half of our book is called “Cyborg.” And that’s where it really gets into, like, Okay, we are in a different territory now. Once he’s no longer even seeing the worker-boss factory relationship as the lens through which he views money-making, but has started to see—and in fact, always saw—the computer as the control unit of reality. And that the way to make money, control politics, is to seize the mainframe. That then enters us into, you know—especially by the end of the book—the world of generative AI that there are very few comparisons to, I would say.

Warzel: How do you orient him among the current oligarch class? The current tech elite? Because it seems even in Silicon Valley that he is without peer in a lot of different ways. How do you situate him right now among his Silicon Valley peers?

Tarnoff: It’s interesting to think about Musk in relation to Silicon Valley, because he’s always been both of and not of the Valley. He’s not cleanly a Valley figure in the way that, say, [Peter] Thiel or [Mark] Zuckerberg are. He makes his first fortune in the Valley through the dot-com boom, but then he takes his winnings in the early 2000s and moves to Southern California and starts a rocket company outside of Los Angeles. And I think that is a real indicator of how he, on the one hand, is formed by the cultural milieu of the Valley; that style of thinking. But he really distinguishes himself from his peers, because in the 2000s—while all of his friends back in the Bay Area are building the platforms of the Web 2.0 era—he’s become a rocket-and-car industrialist, right? He’s always been fascinated with the hard physics of infrastructure. And we position him as someone who at various junctures has made moves that were, that appear in retrospect to be quite prescient.

So now it’s become somewhat of a platitude to say that Silicon Valley is infrastructural, that in the generative-AI era there’s a turn back to hard tech. But Musk got there first. I mean, he was doing infrastructure before it was cool. And it’s, you know, it’s interesting when you think about xAI. I mean, what are they actually good at, Musk’s AI company? As we know, they’re laggard when it comes to kind of frontier development. Grok is generally seen to be lagging behind the other top models. But what Musk is good at is putting data centers up really quickly.

This is actually what he does, is he builds things fast. And that, I think reputationally, has often actually sustained his favorability. You know, that he was the guy who built stuff, in contrast to the Zuckerbergs of the world. But it also positions him, I think, quite well for the new hard-tech era of Silicon Valley.

Warzel: I had somebody explain to me the other day that all the Silicon Valley guys are slowly moving down the line to just becoming, like, HVAC salesmen, you know? Because it’s the infrastructure stuff. But it speaks to that. I wanna talk a little bit about his worldview, the early ideas. Talk to me a little bit about the idea of the mech: what it is, how it influenced him early on. This fusing of man and machine that becomes so integral in his personality.

Slobodian: Yeah, I mean we get it to that in the first chapter, which is called “Fortress Futurism,” and is devoted to the South Africa of Musk’s childhood and youth. And there’s a challenge in writing about Musk and South Africa, because of basically a paucity of sources. And I’m a historian by training, so you prefer to have archival sources if you have them. But if you don’t, then you can say, Okay, what’s the context? What was happening in that country?

And everyone knows that apartheid was happening in that country, and it was an enforced model of white supremacy and race separation. But it was also, as we point out, a country that was doing the best it could to import high-tech technology to fortify itself against its external and internal enemies. So we point to the licensing of IBM mainframes that were used to sort the population and allocate them according to labor needs, the development of nuclear technology so that South Africa had an operating bomb by the early 1980s. But thirdly, building out their own car/auto sector by licensing the right to build, you know, Fords, Datsuns, and so on.

All of this is happening within a short drive of where Musk is growing up in the Pretoria suburbs. What does that aggregate to? Well, we point then, as well, to something we do have a kind of an archival trace for. Which is what was on TV when Musk was, you know, coming of age. And one thing you can find is that regularly screening were two TV shows which we know had an influence on him later. One was Transformers.

[Clip from Transformers]

Slobodian: Which is an alien race of transformable—

Warzel: Heard of it, yeah.

Slobodian: The premise is crazy, right? They’re aliens that somehow also transform into Earth-style vehicles, but anyway. And the other is Robotech, which was this American-Japanese co-production, less well known as Transformers. And the premise of Robotech is there is alien technology on Earth that allows for humans to fight back against the incoming aliens by fusing with the technology itself to become mechs. To become humanoid robots that gain extra capacity by the prosthetic, you know, mechanics that they are absorbed into.

And it becomes doubly interesting to us because one, it sets this scene of like a high-tech fortified enclave, which in some ways South Africa was. Which you can argue is the whole Musk business model now. I will sell you the tech to make your own fortified enclave, whether it’s a nation or a household. And second, it literally creates this image of man-machine fusion, which at least since Neuralink and OpenAI, 2015, 2017, he has been accelerating and ever more interested in. Up to Optimus, of course: the humanoid robot named after the semi-truck protagonist of Transformers.

Warzel: You all write, have this great line: “If South Africa was the nursery of Muskism, Silicon Valley would be its primary school.” What do you feel Musk gleaned from that primary-school element of Silicon Valley?

Tarnoff: So Silicon Valley is a place where Musk arrives quite young and at a quite opportune time in 1995, just as the dot-com boom is kicking off. You know, I think so much of Musk’s approach to building businesses is drawn from that period. But I would say perhaps what Musk is best at—because I think when someone has been very successful, and not just once, but over and over, you always have to ask, “Well, what is their special capacity?” What are they best at?

I think you could take the case of Steve Jobs. He wasn’t the programmer; he wasn’t even necessarily really the designer. He was, if you like, the kind of visionary. When you look at Musk, what comparable quality really distinguishes him from his peers? And what we look at is that from the very beginning, from the 1990s, he’s very good at securing investor confidence in his ventures. He’s very good at telling fantastical stories about the future that nonetheless have a kernel of plausibility such that investors are willing to part with their money to help Musk build that future. And in particular, he develops a technique that we describe as financial fabulism that he draws on.

Warzel: Going right where I was gonna go, yeah.

Tarnoff: Yeah, and, you know, I think a lot of folks ask us, “Well, what about Musk and science fiction?” Because this is a reference that he makes all the time. He’ll talk about [Isaac] Asimov, [Robert] Heinlein, Douglas Adams as figures who have inspired him. And we are, I think, more curious about Musk, not necessarily as a science-fiction reader, but as a science-fiction narrator of a sort. Someone who is actually drawing on the tropes and the techniques of science fiction toward a different end, toward actually accessing capital markets.

And if you read the SpaceX prospectus that they had to file, it reads really like a work of science fiction—but one that he’s managed to operationalize toward a very concrete material end. Which is unlocking this extraordinary amount of money that he can use to continue to finance his projects.

Warzel: So for the listeners, that SpaceX prospectus is this pretty unbelievable document. It is very future forward. SpaceX’s core business, you know—launching the rockets and the satellites—is not really reflected as much as all of the potential stuff, right? These assumed triumphs and ambitions, the desire to mine asteroids, to promote space tourism, to “extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” This is very different than what SpaceX is actually doing on the ground.

Slobodian: Yeah; I mean, I think it’s worth saying something first just to underline what you’re saying about what an interesting document that is. Sort of from a genre point of view, right? I mean, it’s kind of captured in the name of it, which is the prospectus. So it’s not describing what exists; it’s describing what might exist in a proleptic kind of imagined future. And at some point it says, you know, These are forward-looking projections. None of these should be taken as ironclad promises. They are based on technology that doesn’t even exist.

And I guess the way that we answer it, and we want to take the question seriously, we do not write this book as a, like, “Musk is just a liar” or “Musk is the king of the bullshit artists”—except insofar as all everyone raising money in Silicon Valley is in some sense a liar and a bullshit artist. It’s intrinsic to the form.

But there are a few things that he’s pulled off, and it’s not a long list, but it’s a serious list that we can reiterate them, right? I mean, he basically created the consumer-EV market, right? There was no mass-market EV until the Tesla. He brought the cost of putting mass into orbit down by over 90 percent over two decades at SpaceX, right? He’s doing Falcon 9 launches with partially reusable rocketry, at a pace that’s well over 10 times what anyone is even touching or even projected at being able to reach. So he makes possible the idea of a space economy, of the idea of in-orbit manufacturing, asteroid mining. Those things were pure science fiction before. They’re now mostly science fiction. And that difference is actually quite a serious one. Having done that fraction then buys you a lot of runway, I think, from the investor.

Warzel: To delve in on that more—or maybe take it from another side of it—I wanna ask you both to evaluate Musk’s acumen. Because there are those who talk about the self-mythology. You know: He’s the next Edison, the next Tesla. The next whatever. The genius inventor of our age. There’s also a lot of people who, you know, will just say: This guy’s extremely lucky. And then you have the last few years, where you have, you know, DOGE [the Department of Government Efficiency], which is just pure chaos; didn’t reduce the deficit.

Also the purchase of Twitter, which I think the history of has been slightly retconned. Where, you know, Musk decides to purchase it out of spite because of an argument that he’s having with people at Twitter. Then he tries to back out; a judge forces him to do it. It’s kind of this humiliating process that he then spins into, Okay, let’s turn this into a political weapon. But there wasn’t a grand strategy there, right? There’s this idea that he sometimes has this vision for whatever. But a lot of the day-to-day reality feels like it’s bumbling through. How should we be thinking of his actual skill set, to the degree that you all believe there is one?

Tarnoff: Well, I think the Twitter acquisition is a great place to begin, Charlie. Because, as you point out, this was a case of Musk bumbling through, as you put it, that now turns out to have been, I think we could say, a somewhat inspired move. That he’s transformed it into a tool for his own political purposes: as a kind of soapbox, a a megaphone for his own ideologies, as well as a testing ground of sorts for his AI ambitions. And arguably, even as an effort to transform what social media is, in a more synthetic direction. That now, rather than interacting with human beings, we’re interacting with AI companions of various kinds. I think that example is a good illustration of Musk’s genius. I think we would probably use that word just as I would be inclined to apply the same word to someone like Donald Trump. And he, like Musk, does not appear to be a particularly premeditated figure. As an improviser, seems to work as much by intuition. Nonetheless, we could say that he has innovated a new style of politics that’s been immensely consequential. That our political environment is unimaginable without the effect that Trump has had on it.

I think we would say the same for the political economic environment of Musk. I think folks get into these very polarized discussions, because those who like Musk want to claim him as a genius, and those who are critical of him want to attribute his successes to luck. Quinn and I are quite critical of Musk. I think our own political commitments are very, very obvious. We don’t try to hide them, but we really insist upon a point that Quinn made at the outset—which is that for those of us on the left who are concerned about the kind of world that someone like Musk is constructing, it’s really incumbent on us to achieve a degree of analytic clarity about what precisely is going on. And I think trying to make moral points here, to say, Well, because it’s luck, he doesn’t deserve his fortune. I think that that muddles things a bit. It doesn’t necessarily mean in our view that he deserves to be a trillionaire, but there is a degree of agency there that needs to be accounted for.

Slobodian: I think, if I can just add to that, does it make Musk or Trump a genius that they manage to—through some means or another—organize attention in the way they do? From their often totally unregulated, you know, production of, like, text? It’s almost more like thinking about how an athlete can operate than it is about how, you know, an Einstein or someone at a chalkboard can come to a theory and then figure it out in the abstract.

There’s a dynamic interaction between the technology, the audience, and the actor that allows for this thing to arise. And that’s where Musk somehow is just able to be this movable lightning rod that can do financial alchemy, but then also this attention alchemy.

Warzel: I think it all really dances around, or hinges on, or whatever words you want to use, the idea of shamelessness. Because that is sort of what makes these guys able to pivot in that way that you could ascribe as genius—to make use of whatever thing it is, right? X as a business: He alienated a lot of advertisers, took on a lot of debt. He spins it into xAI, his AI company, right? Okay, so now X is going to be used to, yeah, train Grok or whatever. But it’s all part of the same thing, right? Then he spins xAI into SpaceX and says SpaceX is really, in terms of total adjustable market, a majority-AI company. AI being the thing that everyone is very excited to value and has these huge future projections. There’s a shamelessness at the root of that pivot, right? And I think that the shamelessness is the tool that allows both of those men to elevate in that capacity.

Slobodian: Yeah. I think you could also see it as a kind of vulnerability. Or a kind of, what is interpreted by his fans as authenticity, right? I mean, it’s this appearance of non-mediation that you’re getting the real him, in the case of Trump, and the real him in the case of Musk.

The peculiarity of Musk’s interaction with social media, for us, was such a thing to focus on. Like, no other CEOs are just posting at anon accounts and, like, retweeting them and replying to them and posting just a wide array of things. And those things, they could be seen as almost like childlike. It’s like a childlike lack of self-reflection, which also comes through in his dreams of taking a rocket ship to Mars. I mean, people seem to be charmed by this impression, of a lack of calling himself to the normal account that the corporate leadership classes would tell you you had to, right?

In fact, I was reading accounts of Harvard Business School corporate-leadership seminars, and they’re just in shambles now, right? Because the very things that they are teaching would-be CEOs and executives to never do, the richest man in the world is serially doing. Like, one after the other. How do you teach people not to do that if it seems like you are so profligately rewarded? And the social-media platform is the only way to understand how all of those normal gatekeepers have been swept aside.

Warzel: How has Musk used X, in your mind, to shape the world more in his image over the last couple of years? And how do you think it will continue to shape social media?

Tarnoff: Well, I think the obvious one is politically. And, as you pointed out, Charlie, I don’t think this was necessarily a point of view that he had at least fully developed at the outset. But we know that the acquisition of Twitter coincided with his rising concern with what he described as the “woke mind virus.” 2022 is really when he starts using that phrase most consistently. And what he means by it is quite literal: the notion that the kind of progressive politics that he increasingly objected to in the early 2020s—and therefore a new kind of politics—could be engineered by seizing control of crucial nodes of the network and reprogramming them. Changing the kind of information that circulates in them.

That I think is a very good way to describe the transformation of Twitter into X, particularly in 2023 onwards. That it becomes a megaphone. Not only for him—you know, instructing his own engineers to amplify the reach of his posts—but for for his allies, and in particular for far-right political operatives around the world. That X under Musk’s tenure becomes a kind of nationalist international. A way for political parties of the far right to make connections with one another, to exchange memes, to find commonalities.

More recently, I think the story has become even stranger with the growing integration of Grok. That now, when you visit X, many of the interactions that people will be having are not with human beings, but with Grok. And Grok, of course, is explicitly a so-called anti-woke AI model and chatbot. There was some great reporting from Business Insider that we cite in the book that looked at the post-training pipeline of Grok, where human workers are providing reinforcement feedback to Grok and pushing it in more right-wing directions. There’s also Grokopedia, which is a Grok-authored right-wing Wikipedia clone.

So this is, I think, consistent with using X as a tool of political education, if you like. But now the direction of travel is to automate that process of propaganda. The way we’ve thought about it is that, you know, if it’s three in the morning, and you want to learn about the Great Replacement theory or the idea of white genocide, Grok will be awake. Grok is happy to have that conversation with you.

Warzel: It doesn’t even have to be if you want to learn about Great Replacement theory or something like that, right? I find the @Grok “Is This True?” convention to be just such a fascinating new vector for information. The fact that that is happening from normal people—not you know, edgelord, 4chan white nationalists who are on Twitter—but just people who are like, Hey man. I’m here for NBA Twitter, and I’m, you know, asking a question because I’m not sure if this thing that I’m seeing is actually real. That ability to tap into that is extremely powerful, I think.

Slobodian: In some ways, it’s the most interesting part of what’s going on and is emergent right now, I think. I mean, first of all is: It gives some incentive to the kind of “flood the zone” strategy that Musk has embraced for years, right? Because if you’re flooding the zone just to kind of colonize the discourse space, okay. But if you’re flooding the zone to literally, you know, pad the training data such that it’s more likely that what you’re saying will then get fed back to a Grok user, or a querier, then it actually has more of a function than just, you know, the Bannon style of just creating a fog of uncertainty, or trying to populate enough confusion that no rational thought can take place. So you’re actually, you know, piecemeal kind of bringing the chatbot’s training data over to your side.

There is also the thing that we write about in the Atlantic piece we published concurrent with the SpaceX IPO announcement, which is the possibility that if indeed what he promises in the SpaceX prospectus is realized—namely if Starlink becomes much closer to something like a global telecommunications provider—then it’s not very hard to imagine him building into, say, Starlink mobile a kind of zero-rating service so that you can use his apps without, let’s say, hitting your data caps. So if as long as you’re asking Grok, as long as you’re using X, as long as you’re using the money feature, which by the way is being rolled out these days on X, then maybe you would be able to have unlimited bandwidth. So if that happens, then he’s able to capture a way. You know, the channels that people might otherwise use to AI overview, from Google or Anthropic or ChatGPT.

But a third thing that I wanted to raise is: Although, as Ben said, and he’s absolutely right, we talk about in the book, Grok was intended as an anti-woke, maximally “truth seeking”—meaning against the woke perversions of his competitors—chatbot, it’s actually hard to make an anti-woke chatbot. And Musk says it himself that it’s surprisingly hard to split the difference between “woke libtard” and “mecha Hitler.”

Why? Because actually, by nature, LLMs are not polarization machines. They’re actually center-finding machines. They aggregate toward the middle of the bell curve, not the long tails on right or left. So interestingly enough, insofar as I dip in to see what’s going on on X, you actually find more often than not—Ro Khanna just did this himself—if you ask Grok about something Musk said, it’s just as likely that Grok says that he’s wrong as it says that he’s right. Because it’s hard to get the weights right to balance for someone who’s ultimately trying to produce a distorted version of reality.

Warzel: I wanna talk about Ro Khanna, actually. It’s a great segue. Lately, Musk has been on X trying to defend the DOGE tenure. He’s been fighting very publicly with Ro Khanna about figures that were published in The Lancet: that the cuts that Musk oversaw at USAID “could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million deaths among children younger than five years.” Do you think that DOGE’s legacy is going to haunt Musk? That this is cracking the myth of Musk that is so foundational to the Edison, Tesla, you know, identity?

Tarnoff: I think the reputational costs of DOGE at the time were pretty severe for him, particularly for the Tesla brand. But I think it will persist. And how I read some of the exchange with Ro Khanna is that Musk is increasingly thinking about, consciously or not, how he might position himself for a Democratic administration. That I think the midterms will probably go against the Republicans, to what extent we’ll see, but there’s a decent chance that the next occupant of the White House is a Democrat.

And if you know about how Musk makes money, if you zoom out and look at the whole arc of his career, it is—as Quinn has pointed out—always in interaction with the state. He’s always very good at instrumentalizing the state as a source of power and profit. He needs an active government partner, particularly with SpaceX. SpaceX is now really the focus of his empire, and it’s all about the state. I mean, not just the state as a customer, but the state as a regulator.

If you read the SpaceX perspectives, the key risks are mostly regulatory. You know, he’s very exposed to the possibility of a regulatory incursion. So I think he is doing some image management, trying to deflate that story. In anticipation of getting hauled before Congress, getting his contracts canceled, the possibility the Democrats could really go after him once they return to power.

Warzel: Is it good image management? Because Musk right now is on X, and he’s kind of being extremely defensive. Saying, like: I couldn’t find a child anywhere who—like, show me the children. This would be the biggest story in the world. Mind you, it is a very big story in the world. And there’s been reporting, including reporting that I and my colleague Hana Kiros have done on this. He seems like he’s Streisand-effecting himself here. He’s, you know, basically keeping the story in the forefront. Is he losing a step in that sense?

Slobodian: I think he is. No, I think he’s flailing on this front. I mean, what’s interesting is how rarely he actually rises to take the bait, I would say, of his critics. He’s actually very good from a tactical point of view of just creating his storyline parallel to whatever his critics are trying to say. In this case, as you say, I think because he’s directly trying to refute it. He’s talking himself into corners, right?

I mean, now he’s saying, I did USAID cuts because of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. I think it’s notable that the Musk book that really broke through actually this season as to a larger readership was the one called Into the Wood Chipper, about someone who was inside USAID seeing it getting shredded.

And it’s led me to ask: Why that has resonated with people? And I think that for especially kind of a liberal, Democratic-voting American readership, it actually still is very important for them to think of America as a positive force in the world. And something about Musk’s attack on that, I think a lot of humanitarian, maybe even also Christian inflected people, feel that. And it’s also, you know, obviously accumulated to such a level that Musk is no longer able to just mute it or try to change the narrative effectively.

Warzel: SpaceX IPO’d a few weeks ago. And it feels like the entire process of this IPO—the myths that he has spun, the financial fabulism, the endless posts, the trolling, all of it—encapsulates Muskism so well. And so I’m curious: If you all were on deadline for Muskism, if everything was pushed back a year, how would you be writing about the SpaceX IPO?

Tarnoff: Yeah; it’s a fun thought experiment, actually. I mean, I think you’re right that SpaceX embodies so many of the themes of Muskism. Partly because now it is truly a conglomerate that incorporates lines of business that don’t seem to have a lot to do with one another at first. So it is an AI company, a social-media company, an orbital-launch company, a satellite-internet company, prospectively a moon-factory company, and so forth. He often describes it as a “vertically integrated innovation engine.”

And I think that that also gives us a good opening for our argument, because for so much of our book we’re tracing Musk’s own fascination with the idea of vertical integration, which he arrives at quite early in the 2000s at SpaceX and Tesla. He is practicing vertical integration, trying to reduce reliance on external suppliers, building this enclave style of industrialism that—as Quinn mentioned earlier—we really attribute as an influence of apartheid South Africa.

But I think it really speaks to how Musk was, you know, deglobalizing before it was cool. And I think SpaceX really takes that to an nth degree; that it is, on the one hand, the most global company one can imagine. Because it’s up in space, operates in a hundred countries around the world. But it’s also simultaneously very much a creature of our deglobalized, deglobalizing times. It is a provisioner to militaries around the world that are feeling embattled and threatened in a new era of conflict. It really, you know, has long been a military contractor, but has achieved new visibility through the Ukrainian conflict, where drones rely on Starlink for navigation and guidance. So I think SpaceX is a real beneficiary of a world that is fragmenting, that is remilitarizing.

Slobodian: Adding onto that. I mean, I think though the very zenith of Muskism that we’ve witnessed now—with the biggest IPO in history, briefly over two-trillion-dollar valuation, launching him as a trillionaire—would suggest a kind of triumphant climax in a way, right? If there is a kind of grim, steel-manning of Musk that we perform in the book, then one could see it as the natural conclusion of that. But I would actually, if given the chance to add an epilogue with attention to this, write it in the inverse. Because actually, I have found this IPO as more revelatory of Musk’s many vulnerabilities as it is of his kind of omnipotence.

Ben mentioned before the risk factors that are spelled out in the SpaceX IPO, right? Not only the incredible key-person risk of everything hinging on Musk himself, which has raised many eyebrows across corporate-governance circles. But the many ways that his wish-casting is gonna hit a wall very quickly if he actually tries to realize it. So you recall that the 1 million satellites in orbit in the prospectus is spoken of as a kind of a fait accompli. It’s nowhere close to a fait accompli, right? That still would need to go through the FCC. They haven’t approved it. The American Trump FCC has not approved the 1million-satellite request. Let alone the International Telecommunications Union—to which they have to go next, to ensure that broadband and that space in orbit remains open—which will certainly say no.

So when you actually start to look at the ways that his collusion with Trump—his reputational, now really conflation with Trump—has accelerated across the last year and become. Now he’s become synonymous, right? You can’t think of Musk outside the MAGA orbit. I think that actually is the biggest damage he has inflicted on himself, for his own future-accumulation model. Because too many countries now that previously might have welcomed in Starlink, built a gigafactory—you know, laid out the red carpet—are now like: Whoa, am I also letting in a particular extreme faction of American politics when I do that? And do I want that? Is it worth it? What are the risks associated with it? So I actually think he’s creakier in his power than ever.

Warzel: How should people view Musk right now? Like, how do you view him? And how do you, what do you want readers to take away from what kind of person this guy is?

Slobodian: For me, I think a lot of it goes back to the question we were debating earlier, which is the question of agency. Like, how much of this is Musk doing stuff, inventing stuff, innovating stuff? And how much of it is him as a kind of antenna or a receiver for things happening, which he’s then able to sort of channel and then rebroadcast?

My feelings about him have, you know, deepened intensely toward real loathing. I mean, I think that his own actions over the last year and a half, since we started this book, have gone from depth to depth in terms of his inhumanity and his embrace of this theory we call suicidal empathy—so the belief that to feel emotional bonds with one’s fellow humans around the world is the central exploit and character flaw that we must suppress at all costs.

I mean, that goes basically against for me—not just for me, but for like, you know, the golden rule that has passed through most major world religions. Like the core of what humanity ought to be. And given the fact that he’s grown ever more wealthy and powerful, even as he has fallen deeper and deeper into these often quite sadistic pathways, then how much does that actually just tell us about where we are at collectively as a society? Of how much receptivity there is, how much signal he’s able to receive in that vein, that he then sees it as productive to resend out. So it’s made me also much more concerned, I think, about the state of the world. To think that one person could productively channel those vile instincts and be, you know, increasingly rewarded as he does so.

Tarnoff: Yeah, I think my feelings are quite similar to Quinn’s. I think I would only probably add that in the course of doing this book I came to appreciate how useful Musk can be as a teaching tool. How much he can show us about the kind of world we’re living in, and how we got here. And I think that sort of process of inquiry and reflection are quite useful for politics.

I mean, that sounds perhaps too cerebral, or I’m being self protective, or I’m diminishing the toxicity of someone like Musk. I don’t mean to appear that way. I really do feel that if we’re going to figure out how to begin to build the kind of political interventions that would not just reduce the power of a Musk, but to make Muskism—as we’re trying to broadly define it—inconceivable, impossible to practice, impossible to replicate, then there is a lot of intellectual work to be done toward that end.

Warzel: Quinn, Ben, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain and talking more about this guy, man.

Slobodian: It almost never ends. Well, thanks for all your work, Charlie. It’s been a great help to us as well.

Tarnoff: Yeah; thank you, Charlie.

[Music]

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

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

It Wasn’t Just the Founders

2026-07-03T11:00:00-04:00

Who is responsible for American independence? The most common answer invokes a short list of familiar names: Washington, Jefferson, Adams. Despite their mistakes and biases, these men deserve the credit they’re typically given. But by focusing so much on the Founders, the conventional telling of America’s origin story leaves out perhaps its greatest heroes.

American independence wouldn’t have been possible without the thousands of people who spurred the mass political movement that came before it. Recalling their role is essential today, as many of us—their successors—lose faith in our collective ability to address problems. They have left an unsurpassed example of how to resolve common grievances, cultivate empathy, and perfect the democracy they gave us. Indeed, the Founders would have been hopeless without them.

To begin to piece together a fuller history of the Revolution, start with the work of Peter Force. Born in 1790, Force grew up hearing stories from soldiers who had battled the British, which instilled in him a lifelong interest in the fight for independence. In the 1820s, as he built a successful career as a printer, Force realized that a combination of storms, insects, fire, and plain indifference had placed Revolution-era documents at risk in all 13 original states. After lobbying the government for funds, Force marshaled scribes across the new country to scour local archives and send back copies of material dating from 1774 to 1776. Force’s plan came to fruition in 1837, when the government published nine volumes—most of them considerably more than 1,000 pages—under the magisterial title American Archives.

[From the November 2025 issue: The unfinished Revolution]

In the introduction to the first volume, Force explained why he had taken on such an ambitious challenge. “A complete collection of the materials for a history of this country would not only be a proud monument to the memory of our ancestors,” he wrote, “but would serve as an invaluable guide to us and our posterity, by exhibiting the vital spirit which has pervaded the past, the true foundations upon which our institutions rest, and the essential principles upon which their existence and perpetuity depend.”

Force’s collection didn’t just preserve the memory of the Revolution; it showed the indispensable role that everyday Americans played. In addition to letters from Washington and other leaders, Force included a large number of reports from communities across the country. He organized the documents chronologically, allowing historians such as myself to trace how the rebellion against Great Britain was progressing on any given date in communities separated by hundreds of miles. His work tells the Revolutionary story through thousands of Americans debating the merits of political change, weighing the risks of armed resistance, and reassuring friends and neighbors that they were engaged in a worthy cause.

Take May 19, 1774, a date that does not figure significantly in traditional narratives of the Revolution. The Archives includes reports on three gatherings that day in far-flung towns, each protesting the military occupation of Boston, which closed the city to normal commerce and threw many people out of work. In Farmington, Connecticut, “near one thousand people” resolved that the British, “being instigated by the Devil, and led on by their wicked and corrupt hearts, have a design to take away our liberties.” The protesters insisted that the “pimps and parasites” who advised the king to oppress the colonists “be held in utter abhorrence by us and every American.”

On the same day, a political committee in Westerly, Rhode Island, compared the British troops to the Roman legions once dispatched to level Carthage. “This horrid attack upon the town of Boston, we consider not as an attempt upon that town singly, but upon the whole Continent,” the group declared. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, another committee voiced its belief that “a plan may be devised, and resolutely pursued by all as may prevent the cruel effects” of the occupation.

Many histories of early Revolutionary activity focus on New England—and Boston in particular—but Force’s collection extends throughout the mid-Atlantic and the South, revealing how each region was responsible for erecting America’s national consciousness.

On June 6, 1774, inhabitants of Prince William County, Virginia, concluded that “no person ought to be taxed but by his own consent,” and that Boston “is now suffering in the common cause of American liberty.” In all likelihood, few residents of Prince William County had ever visited the city, but they had no trouble empathizing with Bostonians for enduring the military occupation. The same day, more than 200 miles north, residents of Lower Freehold, New Jersey, decided that “the cause, in which the inhabitants of the town of Boston are now suffering, is the common cause of the whole Continent of North America.” Thanks to the determination of these and many other communities, the bonds of empire began dissolving well before July 4, 1776.

[David Brooks: America needs a mass movement—now]

The committees in these towns and cities played an especially important part in mobilizing the American people, yet they have received only passing analysis by historians. Committees began to appear as early as 1765 and had become vital centers of a wide range of political activities by 1774. Some were composed of only a dozen or so local leaders, either appointed by officials or elected by the people. Others involved more than 100 members, many of whom had little previous political experience. By one estimate, more than 10,000 men joined committees who—in the words of a Massachusetts reverend—“had not before been honored with the confidence of the people.”

“The great bulk of those who were the active instruments of carrying on the Revolution were self-made industrious men,” David Ramsay, a Continental Army veteran and one of the first historians of the war, wrote. “These, who by their own exertions had established or laid a foundation for establishing personal independence, were most generally trusted and most successfully employed in establishing that of their country.”

Few if any of the committees called for democracy, which probably would have smacked of anarchy to them. Yet as they went about their business—not only condemning British rule but also gathering arms and enforcing commercial boycotts—they practiced a kind of democracy nonetheless. Britain’s oppression invited the people to take charge of their government, inaugurating a period of broader political participation.

Topsfield, Massachusetts, offers a striking example of how these committees understood the significance of what they were accomplishing. On June 14, 1776, on the eve of independence, residents gathered to confront “the greatest question that ever Came before this town,” a local committee reported. Just a few years earlier, the prospect of casting off British rule “would have been Treated with the uttmost contempt. We then thought ourselves happy in being the Subjects of the King of greate Britten,” the committee continued. “But the Sene is now Changed; our minds and sentiments are now altered. She that we call our mother Country and Pairent State is now without any Just Cause or Injury done by these Colonies, become their greatest enemies.”

By that point, America had hundreds of Topfields, each inspiring and legitimating the work of the Founders. Indeed, several days earlier, delegates at the Continental Congress had noted that they could declare independence only when “the voice of the people drove us into it.” America’s leaders knew that the people “were our power.” They still are.

The ‘Have It Both Ways’ Theory of Great Books

2026-07-03T11:00:00-04:00

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

This week in The Atlantic, Michael O’Donnell took aim at a film critic who is himself notorious for takedowns. Point by point, O’Donnell debunks the arguments in A Sudden Flicker of Light, David Thomson’s new book about how cinema has harmed society. O’Donnell dispenses quickly with Thomson’s idea that “movies are more prone to violence” than literature is: “If depictions of violence truly warp us, then we had better set aside not just gangster pictures but Homer, Shakespeare, Shelley, and Melville too,” he writes. But then he addresses the critic’s “most interesting point”: Movies “veer toward extremes, favoring crime and spectacle instead of stories about ‘the frequently amiable muddle.’”

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

O’Donnell questions this dichotomy between gangster fantasy and quiet realism—why should we be forced to choose between The Godfather and The Tree of Life? He likes each of these movies, as do I. But his invocation of classic literature made me think of another category of work entirely: memorable fiction that critiques and indulges the human hunger for lust, violence, and recklessness. Great books can have it both ways.

Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes’s 17th-century epic about a deluded knight, is frequently called the first modern novel. A satire of the fantasy genre of chivalric romances, it became a best seller not only for its pratfalls and biting wit, but also for set pieces full of action, danger, and passion. You could say something similar about Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which some critics consider the best novel of them all; its tragic housewife keeps chasing lovers after becoming besotted by romance novels. Bovary is in some sense a morality tale, but what lifts it above didacticism, along with its bone-deep interiority, is that its romantic plotlines are as addictive as the genre works that have ruined poor Emma Bovary.

From this perspective, a reader can start seeing such doubleness everywhere: in the way Shakespeare turned gory revenge plays into meditations on human folly while satisfying his audiences’ darkest appetites; in Nabokov’s Lolita, whose seductive sentences satirize sexual predation while also making the novel irresistible. So much ink has been spilled in debating literary dichotomies: Should fiction provoke empathy, or just pleasure? Is literary fiction inherently better than genre work? Many enduring books, like many classic movies, explode these categories. And they ask important questions about why our lizard brains are so strongly drawn to the stories they are telling.

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Movies Are Good, Actually

By Michael O’Donnell

A film critic’s new book attacks the medium for diminishing culture. Rarely has David Thomson been more wrong.

Read the full article.

What to Read

The Suicides, by Antonio di Benedetto

The plot of Di Benedetto’s 1969 novel sounds like a classic hard-boiled mystery: A reporter attempts to find the connection among three seemingly unrelated suicides. But his slipshod investigation yields no tidy conclusions. This book is preoccupied with self-inquiry; its protagonist takes plenty of procedural detours to cross-examine his fascination with death and his troubled relationships with women. I realize that “moody narrator obsesses over own mortality and the opposite sex” may not seem so original to some people, but the prose here—exacting, unsentimental, and ideas-rich—is worth the dip into familiar waters. Di Benedetto’s writing lingers in the brain; to a receptive reader, it can feel like a secret handshake between dryly mordant minds. Years later, in Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives, the Chilean writer would name an obscure, unforgettable brand of mezcal after The Suicides—the ultimate “if you know, you know” for those familiar with the value of loving a book that nobody else does. — Jeremy Gordon

From our list: The summer reading guide

Out Next Week

📚 The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life, by Ian Bogost

📚 You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, by Rachel Aviv

📚 Country People, by Daniel Mason

Your Weekend Read

Herndon and Dryhurst with their son in their Berlin studio Mattia Balsamini for The Atlantic

What AI Will Do to Art

By Spencer Kornhaber

Shills are trying to sell something, and tech bros cheer progress at all costs, but Dryhurst and Herndon see themselves as realists. Because AI is already transforming our world, they think the way artists can help guide that transformation is to engage with it. Still, their ambitions are quite idealistic, even verging on evangelical. While many of their peers are worried about saving human culture from destruction, they’re trying to build a new and greater one. At one point Herndon asked me, “What if everything you fear, but good?”

Read the full article.

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All Men Are Created Equal, but What Does Equal Mean?

2026-07-03T11:00:00-04:00

“Heaven created all persons in the same rut.” This is how one early Japanese translation of the Declaration of Independence rendered the self-evident truth mentioned in its most celebrated sentence. To many Americans, this may sound like an eccentric misunderstanding of “all men are created equal.” After all, the egalitarian arithmetic of the Declaration’s claim seems clear enough: Every person carries the same weight. How else could colonists claim equality with the King and hold him to account?

But this Japanese translator realized something important: When Thomas Jefferson set pen to paper in the summer of 1776, the meaning of the adjective equal was less self-evident than its mathematical associations suggest. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language had listed no fewer than eight definitions, including “like another in bulk, excellence, or any other quality that admits comparison,” “in just proportion,” and “upon the same terms.”

Applied to political matters, many of Johnson’s definitions directly contradicted one another—in ways that still matter today. “In just proportion” summarizes what modern liberals and progressives have in mind when they argue for policies such as affirmative action. Respecting people as equals, they believe, sometimes means taking racial differences into account. Meanwhile, many conservatives gravitate toward “upon the same terms.” In their view, being equal means that people are the same in all ways that matter legally; policies built on group differences must therefore be rejected as treating people unequally before the law.

Many contemporary controversies boil down to a simple disagreement over which particular definition of equal applies. And there is much to debate, given how many social inequalities Jefferson and his co-authors left behind.

The Founders were hardly the first or the last egalitarians to conclude that some members of society were, as George Orwell put it, “more equal than others.” The Declaration’s reference to creation points us all the way back to the Book of Genesis, in which God creates men and women “in his own image.” But this divine similarity evidently did nothing to preclude slavery, patriarchy, and the many other social hierarchies depicted elsewhere in the Bible. Likewise, human equality was nowhere to be found in democratic Athens, where only native-born Athenian men were recognized politically as one another’s peers.

[From the November 2025 issue: Whose independence?]

In the early third century, a Roman imperial jurist named Ulpian declared that “as far as concerns the natural law, all humans are equal.” But he didn’t mean that all humans (male or female, slave or free) should be afforded equal rights. His point was that, much like the sun or rain or death, the laws of nature fell indifferently on everyone, regardless of their wealth or status.

For the next millennium and a half, claims about equality proved remarkably consistent with sexism and slavery, as well as monarchy and universal empire. For most of our forebears, the claim that all humans were “upon the same terms” in the eyes of God simply did not mean that they were also sufficiently alike in excellence to be treated as social or political equals. Indeed, as in modern meritocracy, a major purpose of emphasizing human beings’ intrinsic equality was to make excuses for their unequal fates. If some people suffered or lost out, they must have done something to deserve it.

Only in 17th-century England did equality become a basis for political demands by ordinary people. One day in the summer of 1646, a celebrity activist named John Lilburne appeared before the House of Lords and failed to kneel or even remove his hat. Summarily imprisoned by the nobles for contempt, Lilburne wrote a pamphlet asserting a “general Proposition”: “That every particular and individual man and woman that ever breathed” was “by nature, all equal and alike in power, dignity, authority, and majesty.”

Popularly known as “Freeborn John,” Lilburne had a talent for getting himself thrown in prison on behalf of various causes. Today, we might call him an “outrage entrepreneur.” But after his imprisonment, Lilburne’s Proposition became the defining cause of the radical Leveller movement, which subsequently dedicated itself to unlocking all of the revolutionary possibilities lurking in the word equal. The Levellers demanded universal male suffrage almost 300 years before modern Britain enacted it. And in an extraordinary 1649 appeal to Parliament, a group of Leveller women insisted that because they, too, were created “equal unto men,” they must also have the right to petition their representatives.

The Leveller movement mostly failed. But Lilburne’s Proposition lived on as a kind of early meme—one that eventually made its way into the Declaration of Independence. As it happens, Lilburne was also distantly related to Thomas Jefferson, a cousin several generations removed. Whether the Virginian was aware of this personal connection is unclear.

But in a letter written in June 1826, Jefferson summarized his view of equality in language borrowed from another Leveller, Richard Rumbold: “The mass of mankind has not been born, with saddles on their backs,” he wrote, “nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them.” (Jefferson died two weeks later, on the same day as his great friend and political rival John Adams: July 4, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.)

[Listen: American history as a Rorschach test]

Still, the meaning of equality was muddled enough in Jefferson’s mind that he could, by the end of his life, claim ownership over hundreds of men and women born into slavery at Monticello—at least two of whom, we now know, were named “Lilburn.”

What does this uncomfortable coincidence in Jefferson’s life tell us about the declaration that he drafted? Some readers might agree with The New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project,” which argues that “our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.” As an approach to social justice, some commentators have even come to reject the term equality and sought to introduce the term equity in its place.

The supposed difference comes through in a popular 2010s meme, showing two cartoons of people trying to watch a baseball game over a fence. In a panel labeled equality, each person stands on a box of the same size, and not everyone can see the game. In a panel labeled equity, the shorter people get extra boxes in inverse proportion to their height. But far from proving that equality is an outdated concept, the meme is merely showing us that two of Samuel Johnson’s competing definitions of it remain in force.

If nothing else, I hope that the strange, contentious history of equal might help us reframe our political disagreements in a more transparent and constructive way. Because the conflict usually isn’t between those who favor equality and those who oppose it. Rather, it’s between people with conflicting views of what it means to be equal in the first place.

Many different meanings of equal were certainly in play when the Declaration was written, and they help explain why its “self-evident” truth has endured for 250 years. All of them also have a role to play as we pursue equality in the present day. Perhaps, as that early Japanese translator suggested, all Americans are indeed created in the same rut. But what happens next is up to us.

A Twist in This Year’s Strangest Literary AI Scandal

2026-07-03T09:19:00-04:00

Jamir Nazir has become the face of the AI-writing crisis. In May, the largely unknown 62-year-old Trinidadian writer was named a regional winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Prize for his short story “The Serpent in the Grove.” But after it was published in the literary magazine Granta, signs began to emerge that the story—about a cocoa farmer who cheated on his wife and then tried to kill her—may have been AI-generated. Among other indicators, Pangram, an imperfect but industry-leading AI-detection tool, flagged the story’s text as 100 percent artificial.

Inscrutable lines plucked from Nazir’s dense prose were mocked and memed. A young woman in the story “had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” Another “smiled like sunrise over a sink.” Soon, other winners’ stories came under suspicion. The Commonwealth Foundation defended the authors, saying that all had testified that their work was original, but it pledged to investigate further.

On Tuesday, the Commonwealth Foundation announced that “The Serpent in the Grove” had been chosen from among the regional winners as this year’s overall prize winner. “The team worked hard to understand Jamir's creative process and learn how he shaped his story over time,” a spokesperson for the Commonwealth Foundation told me in an email. Razmi Farook, the organization’s director general, had previously issued a statement on the results of its probe: “After a thorough consultation with our judges and careful consideration of all available information, we are satisfied that AI was not used to write the winning stories.” He noted that the investigation did not make use of Pangram or other AI-detection tools, because of their inability to provide conclusive evidence as well as “concerns regarding artistic ownership and consent.” Instead, the foundation said that it had held “detailed discussions” about the regional winners’ creative process and examined “working drafts, time-stamped documents and notes” that showed how they developed their stories.

In a phone interview on Tuesday afternoon, Nazir told me that he feels vindicated—and relieved. “Look, I didn’t use it!” he said about AI. Now that he has won the prize, Nazir said, he is free at last to explain his process and clear his name.

We talked for more than an hour about his writing process, his health (he referenced complications with both diabetes and cancer), and his views on technology. On several occasions, he seemed to avoid answering my questions directly; when he did, some of the answers were circuitous. I was surprised to hear him opine that AI-generated writing will soon be widely accepted in literature, even as he maintained that he didn’t use AI tools in creating his story. He seemed bullish on AI overall, viewing it as a revolutionary technology, though he worried about the repercussions of saying so. Although he couldn’t name any works by Derek Walcott, a writer he cited as one of his main literary inspirations, he said that he had prepared a collection of short stories in Walcott’s style, which he hopes to publish soon.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Will Oremus: How did it feel to win this award after all of the controversy you’ve endured since you were named a finalist?

Jamir Nazir: Yes, there’s been a lot of controversy preceding this win, and it’s been really hard. To hear people smearing me, and reading all of the crap. They didn’t know there was a real human and a real family behind the story.

One of my most joyful moments in receiving the news that I won the award was sharing it with my mother, who will be 82 in August. My nephews have kept her informed on lots of the negative things. I didn’t take a sword and plunge it into her side, but I felt as though I supplied the sword by entering the competition. So it made me feel so good when I could tell her that I had won despite all the nonsense that they were seeing.

Oremus: I know you’ve said you didn’t use AI while writing this story. But I’m interested to hear more about your writing process. People were curious how you produced this work that was so dense that it almost reads more like poetry than prose.

Nazir: I was born with diabetes. And as a result of that, conventional typing on a keyboard—it’s extremely difficult for me. As I’ve gotten older, the neuropathy has gotten worse. Sitting for long periods of time at a desk gives me some back problems. So what happened is I decided: Look—no better place to write than the couch. And as a result of that, I found out that I can use the speech-to-text function of the Google keyboard on my Android phone …That’s what’s actually producing words, and then I edit them and so on.

That has given me the opportunity to significantly polish text. Because you know, on an Android phone, when the keyboard comes up, you only have a very small space, about three and a half inches, to see the writing. So I would look at those lines, and hold those words in my mind, and keep reviewing them, keep polishing.

But to back up a bit: Why the hell—sorry for the expression—would I need AI? It was absolutely not needed in this story, because I lived this. The story actually has a lot of real people, real places, and real situations. Even the little bread shop I wrote about in the story actually exists—not in my small, little village here now, but where my wife came from, which is another small village.

Oremus: You’ve explained why you think the AI-writing detectors might have mistakenly flagged your story. How did you convince the Commonwealth committee that you didn’t use AI after all?

Nazir: They requested a lot of documentation. They made it clear it was voluntary to produce these materials, because they were not part of the initial rules. But I had to produce all of the previous drafts, and also my character profiles I had sketched out. And of course, I originally had to sign saying that no AI was used.

Oremus: You’ve talked about how the unusual writing style in “The Serpent in the Grove” stemmed from your love of poetry. Who are a couple of your favorite poets who have inspired you?

Nazir: The first one whose poetry I fell in love with was a guy known as Pablo Neruda from Chile. And his teacher or mentor was a lady known as Gabriela Mistral. Both of them had a profound impact on me. Then there is Derek Walcott, a Caribbean poet who, like Pablo Neruda, is a Nobel Prize winner. The thing that got me attracted to Walcott was his complete disregard for the traditional Western sentence structure, which people cite as one of the things that proves my writing was AI. But Walcott created his own style.

I looked at how they all write, and I write poetry in their style too. AI must have been fed all their work. And another thing to that: I have significant poems that I’ve posted in several poetry groups on Facebook. Once it’s on Facebook, AI companies will have data-mined that, right? So they have all of that as a reflection of my style as well, right? I wonder if they can attempt to claim it as their own, as AI-generated. Do you think that’s possible?

Oremus: So you mean that AI gets trained on human writing, and then it generates similar writing?

Nazir: Okay, say AI has been trained with the writing of Will. So it understands what Will does, right? Now, when it sees Will’s writing again—if somebody puts Will’s article through an AI detector—because it’s familiar with that style and construct, it tells itself, This must be generated by an AI system. I’m wondering if it is possible.

Oremus: I don’t know. That’s not how a tool like Pangram works. It’s looking for statistical patterns in the language that are more commonly produced by AI systems than by human writers.

Nazir: But is that true? Why, then, has no court of law in any country, even the tiniest country in the world, accepted as admissible any AI-detector system? Not one country. So that shows you, in terms of the reliability—I’m not saying it’s not helpful, but I think there’s still a lot of refining.

Oremus: You had mentioned some of your inspirations earlier, including Walcott and Neruda. What’s your favorite Walcott work?

Nazir: Walcott has a lot of Caribbean poems, right? And I cannot—there are several, and they talk about the destruction of a village because of the sea. And I wrote something like that. It’s quite a change. And I am advertising a little bit, but I have a collection that I have written, my Caribbean collection, sort of Walcott-style. I tried to edit it as much myself as I could, and it’s ready for publication. So hopefully this award will give me the platform to publish this.

Oremus: But do you have a favorite of Walcott’s poems?

Nazir: A story of Walcott’s?

Oremus: Yeah.

Nazir: To be honest with you, I can’t think of a specific favorite right now. I am getting a little bit of brain fog in recall. I had an excellent memory, and now it haunts me because at times I can’t remember even basic stuff. I think it’s a part of the condition, the illness. And I’m on chemotherapy as well. So that is a hard thing.

Oremus: Some of your posts on LinkedIn, as people have pointed out, are a very different style from your fiction. Which, of course, makes sense, right? I mean, fiction is a completely different mode of writing. But I wondered if maybe you used AI on the LinkedIn posts.

Nazir: No, no, no. I did research with AI. But in terms of the actual writing—I had grown accustomed to very technical and precise writing. I think that AI is a good tool for research— that’s the most value.

And on the same topic of that, what about the typewriter? When the typewriter was first invented, writers kicked hell and said, The thing is writing. You’re supposed to use a quill or your fountain pen. And there was a big hullabaloo. We passed that, and then next came new word processors. I can tell you word processors are machine assistants, because they can check the spelling, right? They can search, find and replace, suggest synonyms, et cetera. Modern-day word processing can do almost everything. Where’s the uproar? It settled down. Now I think the same thing will happen with AI.

Oremus: Because you think that eventually AI will be accepted as just another tool for writers the way that a word processor is, what is so bad about using it? Why not use it?

Nazir: No, I’m not saying it’s bad. But because of this current time, where the debate is on, like it was on for the typewriter or the word processor, I wouldn’t encourage any writers in any kind of literary competition to utilize it now for fear of people criticizing them. Look—I didn’t use it! It’s not only me, Will. It’s also all these people who are painted with this AI brush, right? So I imagine you should stay away from it for any literary competition for the next two or three years. I think that discussions will be held and so on, and then people will get an opportunity to vent.

I don’t know if I’m walking on dangerous ground here with you, because as I was told a lot by the wife and other people, Do not show any appreciation for AI. I see it as being a tool incorporated in the future. Because a lot of people use it—a lot of people.

American Brands Seem Lukewarm on America’s Birthday

2026-07-03T09:00:00-04:00

July 1976 wasn’t exactly a moment of unity in America, coming just after Roe v. Wade, Watergate, and the end of the Vietnam War. Nonetheless, the nation’s bicentennial was a display of patriotic capitalism. IBM released a bicentennial punch card. 7-Up had a series of cans that could be stacked into an Uncle Sam pyramid if you collected them all. Cadillac released a 1976 Eldorado Bicentennial Edition, complete with red and blue pinstripes. There were even all-American condoms with the slogan “One Time for Old Glory.”

“Like a sudden swarm of 200-year locusts, commemorative kitsch is appearing everywhere: plates, mugs and glasses decaled with an eagle or the likeness of George Washington or John Adams or the flag or Archibald Willard’s familiar Revolutionary fife-and-drum trio,” a 1975 article in Time magazine reported. Brand America was all over the place—to the point that some deemed the nation’s 200th birthday the “buy-centennial.”

“Commercialism was a big theme, and a big critique, of the bicentennial,” the historian Beverly Gage told me.

America’s 250th birthday has felt more restrained, brand-wise. The anniversary comes at a time when companies have become wary of sending any sort of political message. A few years ago, many were posting black squares on “Blackout Tuesday” or spending millions of dollars on Pride celebrations. Now corporate America is more likely to stay silent on anything deemed risky—even, in some cases, celebrating our nation’s founding. Patriotism can still sell in 2026, but not like it used to.

Granted, in a certain sense, the 250th celebration is a corporate event. America250, the bipartisan initiative that is coordinating semiquincentennial celebrations, lists 68 official sponsors on its website. Among them are most of the major U.S.-based airlines; a number of heavy-hitting restaurant chains, including Starbucks and Chick-fil-A; and supercenters such as Walmart and Target. But the majority of these companies don’t seem to be drawing much attention to their America250 partnerships. Starbucks, for instance, hasn’t released any branded products or announced any special events. The company’s involvement with America250, or even the nation’s 250th celebration in general, seems to start and end with its contribution to America Gives, an America250 program that is “designed to make 2026 the largest year of volunteerism in U.S. history.” The same is true for Chick-fil-A and Target, except that Target also appears to be selling at least one America250 shirt online. What could be taken as humble generosity might also be seen as brand protection in today’s political climate. (I contacted spokespeople for all three brands, but none would speak on the record.)

Compare these brand exercises to what’s going on with the other big event happening this summer. The 250th birthday falls at the same time as the U.S.-hosted World Cup. Companies such as Levi’s, McDonald’s, and Old Navy are mass-producing World Cup products, while skimping on 250 merchandise. For instance, Old Navy is selling two clothing designs celebrating the semiquincentennial; by comparison, the company is offering nearly 200 World Cup products. In addition to service initiatives, many companies seem to be favoring experiences over 250-branded merchandise. In 1976, Levi Strauss gave away “Denimachines”—red, white, and blue Ford vans filled with goodies. This year, it opened an exhibit about the company’s history at its San Francisco headquarters. Some companies are offering small promotions—a $2.50 Burger King Whopper Jr., limited-edition birthday-cake Cheerios, an American-blueberry coffee creamer from Chobani. Jeep is going bigger, selling an America250 Wrangler, but it’s something of an outlier. Other brands, including Patagonia and Visa, aren’t touting any 250 campaigns or collaborations.

[David Frum: Trump’s 250th celebration is a fiasco]

This muted approach isn’t exactly surprising. Americans as a whole are less patriotic than they used to be. This summer, a record-low 53 percent of U.S. adults said they were “extremely” or “very” proud to be an American, according to a new Gallup poll from this week. The American flag and other patriotic symbols have become heavily politicized. The Gallup poll underscores this: 69 percent of Republicans reported displaying the American flag, whereas only 26 percent of Democrats did. In 1986, those numbers were 50 and 42 percent, a much smaller divide.

“I think there are all sorts of symbols that were supposed to be unifying symbols—the flag, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ the date 1776,” Gage said. “All of these have now been branded right-wing in one manner or another, and so there’s some reclaiming that needs to happen for people who don’t want to give up those symbols to that particular politics.” Gage recently published This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History, after observing that Americans seemed ambivalent about their country’s upcoming birthday. “I wasn’t sure that there would be much coming from on high, and by which I mean either from the federal government or from commercial outlets,” she said.

Some brands might have chosen to remain quieter for America’s 250th birthday because the celebration seems very Trump-ified. Although America250 was authorized by Congress, last year the Trump administration created a rival organization, Freedom 250, whose offerings have been more partisan. President Trump has made a point to get his face or name onto pretty much everything he can related to the 250th: a 24-karat-gold collector’s coin complete with a depiction of Trump at his desk; a limited-edition “patriot passport” with an image of Trump scowling next to the equally timeless image of the Founding Fathers signing the Declaration of Independence. Although it hasn’t been approved, Trump-administration officials have pushed for the creation of a $250 bill featuring his portrait. By contrast, President Gerald Ford didn’t put his image all over official bicentennial merchandise in 1976.

One major exception to the shy-guy approach to commercial patriotism is Coca-Cola. “We as a company are beyond excited about this,” Shakir Moin, Coca-Cola’s president of marketing for North America, told me. Moin was one of only two representatives at major companies who agreed to speak with me on the record, out of the 10 that I contacted for an interview. Brands, he said, have a “cultural responsibility to show the best of America.” Moin did in fact sound excited when I spoke with him. At one point, he insisted that I watch Coca-Cola’s America250 commercial in the middle of our call. A new version of “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” played in the background, as a montage of all-American scenes went on for three minutes: A teenage couple kissed on a lakefront; a crew of friends floated lazily down a creek in inner tubes; a dad and son sat chatting on a hay bale; people danced at a honky-tonk. An America250 logo flashed at the end. I involuntarily let out an “aww” as Moin smiled with pride. On top of the commercial, Coca-Cola is hiring local artists to paint 50 murals across the country this year—one in every state—and has released a line of collectible state-branded cans.

I asked Moin if he was worried about going all in on patriotism during a time like this. He told me that America and Coca-Cola are both “passionately optimistic,” so it only made sense to celebrate. Moin said he’d shown the ad campaign to multiple sample audiences before launching. “In every single one of them, I would have people in tears,” he said, adding that Coca-Cola hasn’t received negative feedback on the marketing campaign.

Even if they aren’t official sponsors of America250, brands can benefit “tremendously” from patriotic products, Mark Hellendrung, the president of Narragansett Beer, told me. His company has brought back its bicentennial can for the big 250th and has stickered 100 of the limited-edition cans, Willy Wonka–style; anyone who gets their hands on one will receive a themed prize pack, and one lucky winner will get a vacation to Boston for the 250 celebration, including a pub crawl in the Boston seaport district. “We got a complaint or two about it, but we got a compliment or five or 5,000,” Hellendrung said. “In addition to the whole patriotism side of it, they love the aesthetic design of it.”

[Beverly Gage: I took to the road and found hope for America]

Some research actually supports Moin and Hellendrung’s thinking. A 2024 study from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation found that 93 percent of American consumers would view companies well or very well if they are publicly involved in the country’s 250th-birthday celebrations. The same study found that 86 percent of Americans think that Independence Day should be more important than it currently is. Gage, for one, isn’t convinced that consumers care much about semiquincentennial marketing one way or the other, though. “There probably just wasn’t a whole lot of incentive to take action and do the kind of planning you would need to have to have a big campaign,” she said.

Even if Americans are ready to celebrate the 250th, that’s no guarantee that they want to do it by spending big on rebranded consumer goods. Maybe throwing a bald eagle on a beer can will help companies win over customers. Or maybe a bald eagle on a beer can is just a bald eagle on a beer can.

What This Fourth of July Is Really About

2026-07-03T09:00:00-04:00

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.

To mark the occasion of America’s centennial, the people of Taunton, Massachusetts, invited James Russell Lowell—distinguished poet, founding editor of The Atlantic—to compose and read an ode for the Fourth of July. Lowell didn’t much like what he produced. When the magazine published that poem, at the end of 1876, he noted in a disclaimer that he still wasn’t sure it was done “to his satisfaction.” Reading it now, his struggle is evident. “An Ode for the Fourth of July, 1876,” is dense and difficult, larded with obscure classical references. But more than that, the poem is riddled with doubt. Had Americans become “degenerate, / Unfaithful guardians of a noble fate”? Was the America of 1876 worthy of the America of 1776? Was this “the country that we dreamed in youth”?

Lowell’s halting effort came in a major anniversary year much like our own—a year of conflict, division, and disorientation. As I wrote in our June issue, the country’s centennial celebrations embraced the Industrial Revolution and presented technology and invention as the markers of national glory. Even history was mechanized: A Detroit inventor fashioned a nine-foot-tall diorama that enacted “The Resurrection of General Washington,” which visitors to the Centennial Exposition could find among the sideshows outside the gates. At the appointed hour, the father of the country would rise from his tomb and salute two soldiers standing at attention, and a descending eagle would crown him with laurels. To some observers, this focus on the wonders of material progress felt out of step with the year’s many convulsions: the violent end of Reconstruction, ongoing labor conflicts, and a bitterly contested election. Lowell could perhaps be forgiven for not quite finding the words to reckon with the moment.

If Lowell couldn’t produce the finest piece of patriotic verse, he did articulate one durable sentiment toward the end of the poem, when he reflected on the Revolution and what it had made. The Founders were too smart to believe they were simply setting in motion a mechanism that required nothing of subsequent generations. He insisted that our governing system was not:

A cog of iron in an iron wheel,
Too nicely poised to think or feel,
Dumb motor in a clock-like commonweal.

Instead, the Founders had created something more organic, a “deeper-rooted state, / Of hardier growth, alive from rind to core” that required constant tending. Lowell would elaborate and sharpen this point in a lecture he gave on democracy in 1888. Returning to a similar image, he said that Americans believed that their Constitution had started “a machine that would go of itself.” Their basic faith in the machine had made them complacent and “neglectful” of their own political responsibilities.

As Americans across the political spectrum celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, many of us find that the task of defining its meaning, in verse or otherwise, is no easier than what Lowell faced in 1876. We, too, celebrate amid corruption, democratic backsliding, political division, and elemental technological and economic change. We, too, are struggling to make sense of ourselves in relation to our quaint beginnings in tricorne hats and knee breeches. And we, too, see great promise and much work to do in tending to the legacy of our founding.

The result has been a strangely disconnected, deflated occasion that’s somehow both noisy and quiet. For all the bombast surrounding the official proceedings, beginning with the UFC fight at the White House, elsewhere the mood has seemed subdued. After the Donald Trump–backed Freedom 250 initiative announced a lineup of musical artists for a concert series on the National Mall, most canceled, claiming that they didn’t understand the partisan nature of the event. The Trump rally that replaced the scuttled performances, full of familiar attack lines on broad swaths of the American public, was hardly a unifying event. Attendance has been sparse for the Freedom 250 “Great American State Fair,” and visitors to the National Mall are greeted with fenced-off areas and a heavy National Guard presence. On the Fourth, families will have to wait until 11 p.m. or later to see fireworks in the capital, in order to accommodate a late-night Trump speech.

Even a resurrected George Washington may not be able to revive the proceedings. A fleet of six “Freedom Trucks,” mobile museums deployed at the behest of the administration, feature interactive depictions of the first president, powered by artificial intelligence rather than gears. As my colleague Kelsey Ables reported last week, these AI-generated Washingtons speak about American liberty and institutions as providential gifts as much as human achievements.

Such a vision runs counter to Lowell’s understanding of the American idea. The republic, he insisted in his poem, was both a gift and a “toil-won” inheritance, earned by the Founders and sustained by subsequent generations; the ongoing work of maintaining America’s promise is what July 4, at its core, celebrates. Our history is not just a source of validation but also one of obligation. The poem is hard to write, but we have to keep trying.

Related:

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Photo Album

Original caption from 1938: “Brooklyn, New York: Coney Island. Those who were not fortunate enough to spend the Fourth of July weekend away from the city are shown as they packed the sands at Coney Island. Police estimated there were one million persons in this crowd. You count ‘em.” (Bettmann / Getty)

Take a look at these photos of joyful July 4 celebrations across the decades.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Photos of the Week: World Cup, Wine Battle, White Kimono

2026-07-03T09:00:00-04:00

Chip Somodevilla / Getty

A rainbow arcs over the giant, crumbling concrete busts of former U.S. presidents, including George Washington, at the Presidents Heads, following an evening rain storm on June 27, 2026, in Williamsburg, Virginia. Forty-three presidents, from George Washington to George W. Bush, are represented as 15-foot-tall, 11-ton concrete busts that were once part of Presidents Park, a 10-acre theme park in Williamsburg that closed in 2010 because of financial troubles. Sculpted by the artist David Adickes of Houston, Texas, the busts were rescued from demolition by the local builder Howard Hankins and stored on his private property. Plans are under way to relocate the busts to a nearby location for display and preservation.

Ethan Miller / Getty

A 300-foot-wide by 150-foot-tall American flag is suspended across the Hoover Dam on June 30, 2026, in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Nevada. The 2,000-pound flag and surrounding canyon walls are being illuminated by a lighting display nightly at dusk, through July 4, 2026, to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States’ Declaration of Independence.

Tom Nicholson / Reuters

People hang from a bridge above the Canal Saint-Martin after public swimming was permitted in certain areas because of high temperatures during a heat wave in Paris, France, on June 26, 2026.

Jordan Tovin / Reuters

An advertisement featuring Lamine Yamal of Spain’s World Cup national team gets towed along the East River past the Brooklyn Bridge on June 26, 2026.

Julian Finney / FIFA / Getty

Erling Haaland of Norway celebrates after a 2–1 win during the FIFA World Cup 2026 Round of 32 match between Côte d’Ivoire and Norway at Dallas Stadium on June 30, 2026, in Arlington, Texas.

Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP / Getty

A jockey balances on a wooden plow adapted for a race, attempting to steer two bulls through a flooded paddy field during Pacu Jawi, a traditional bull-racing event, in Simabur village, Tanah Datar Regency, West Sumatra, Indonesia, on June 27, 2026.

McKlein Photography / LAT Images / Getty

Oliver Solberg competes in his Toyota GR Yaris Rally1 during Acropolis Rally Greece, Round 8 of the 2026 FIA World Rally Championship, on June 26, 2026, in Loutraki, Greece.

Sakis Mitrolidis / AFP / Getty

A Greece Air Force Canadair CL-415GR water-bomber aircraft drops water over a forest fire in Liti, a village north of Thessaloniki, on June 30, 2026.

Michael Ciaglo / Getty

A man walks down the road after being turned back from going to his home as the Aspen Acres fire burns on July 1, 2026, in Pueblo, Colorado. As of yesterday, more than 35,000 acres and 100 structures had burned in the fire, one of several blazes that are currently burning across the state after a warm and dry winter.

Matias Baglietto / Anadolu / Getty

People gather at Parque Avellaneda for the annual Luz de Fuego celebration, centered on the burning of the Gran Fantoche de las Miserias (“The Great Puppet of Miseries”), in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on June 27, 2026. The traditional San Pedro and San Pablo Bonfire celebration features the burning of a massive handcrafted structure, built by local residents, symbolizing the collective release of personal and social hardships. Participants create their own symbolic puppets to cast into the flames, representing struggles such as war, hunger, violence, unemployment, and discrimination. Rooted in the cultural traditions of San Juan Night, the ritual combines fire, music, and community performances in a collective act of remembrance, renewal, and hope for a better future.

Ertuğrul Baştan / Anadolu / Getty

People walk along a coastal promenade in the Ganita area during a sunset in the Ortahisar district of Trabzon, Turkey, on June 27, 2026.

Marton Monus / Reuters

A drone view shows people cooling themselves in a pool during a heat wave in Budapest, Hungary, on June 27, 2026.

Michal Čížek / AFP / Getty

A woman cools off in the Vltava River in Český Krumlov, South Bohemia, Czech Republic, on June 27, 2026, as record-setting high temperatures hit the region during a heat wave.

Andreea Alexandru / AP

A couple walks by a public fountain on an extremely hot day in Bucharest, Romania, on June 27, 2026.

Ricardo Arduengo / Reuters

Yohancy Gil and her husband, Sergio Guanipa, stand on ruins as they wait for news from rescue teams looking for their children under the rubble at the site of a collapsed building in the aftermath of earthquakes, in La Guaira, Venezuela, on June 30, 2026.

Yasser Al-Zayyat / AFP / Getty

Lesser crested tern chicks flock together on Kubbar Island, off the southern coast of Kuwait, on June 27, 2026, during the annual breeding season, when thousands of seabirds nest on the island.

Valentyn Ogirenko / Reuters

Yana Hrynko, senior researcher of The National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War, shows bird’s nests made partially with fragments of fiber-optic lines that were found by a Ukrainian serviceman on the front line and then passed to the museum, in Kyiv, Ukraine, on June 23, 2026. Both Ukrainian and Russian troops use drones controlled via long lines of optic fiber to bypass electronic warfare jamming, leaving miles of ultra-thin lines tangled in trees and scattered across the land in Ukraine’s frontline regions.

Alina Smutko / Reuters

People take shelter inside a metro station during an overnight Russian missile-and-drone strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, on July 2, 2026.

Tierney L. Cross / Getty

A visitor views the U.S. Capitol behind the 110-foot Freedom 250 Ferris wheel on the third day of the Great American State Fair on the National Mall, pictured from the Washington Monument, on June 27, 2026, in Washington, D.C.

Mohamed Elshahed / Anadolu / Getty

Children with physical and intellectual disabilities receive treatment and recognition at the Future Children Center in Cairo, Egypt, pictured on June 30, 2026. The center provides physical therapy and rehabilitation services tailored to each child’s individual needs, aiming to improve motor skills, enhance mobility, and support their integration into daily life.

Charlie Riedel / AP

Fans celebrate during a watch party for the World Cup match between Team USA and the national team of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the KC Live! entertainment district in Kansas City, Missouri, on July 1, 2026.

Devi Rahman / AFP / Getty

A participant is briefly lifted into the air as a giant dragon-train kite catches the wind during a kite festival in Bantul, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, on June 28, 2026.

CFoto / Future Publishing / Getty

A dancer dressed in the attire of the Tang Dynasty, using a wire rigging, flies over the Wenfeng Pagoda and scatters peony petals in Luoyang City, Henan Province, China, on June 27, 2026.

Mike Egerton / PA Images / Reuters

Naomi Osaka wears a traditionally themed on-court outfit ahead of her match against Elsa Jacquemot during the ladies’ singles on Day 1 of the 2026 Wimbledon Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, in London, on June 29, 2026.

Lindsey Wasson / AP

A person calling themselves “Seattle Cloud Guy” jogs by during the Pride Parade in Seattle, Washington, on June 28, 2026.

Özgen Beşli / Anadolu / Getty

An insect alights on a wildflower blooming in a high-altitude area in Kars, Turkey, on July 1, 2026.

Cesar Manso / AFP / Getty

Revelers douse one another with red wine during the Batalla del Vino (“Battle of Wine”) in Haro, in the wine-producing region of La Rioja, Spain, on June 29, 2026. Every year thousands of locals and tourists climb a mountain in the northern Spanish wine-producing region to celebrate Saint Peter’s Day by soaking one another with red wine using water pistols, buckets, or any other available container.

Peter Kneffel / DPA / Getty

A crow flies past an oversize statue of a lion lying on its back and holding a beer mug, which is waiting to be installed on the grounds of the Theresienwiese for Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany, on June 30, 2026. The 191st Oktoberfest will take place from September 19 to October 4, 2026.

These Justices Are Not Impartial

2026-07-03T08:25:00-04:00

In 1898, the same Supreme Court that upheld Jim Crow segregation as constitutional also upheld the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, by a 6–2 vote. This was a profoundly racist Court in a profoundly racist era—around the peak of the lynching epidemic—that nonetheless could find no way around the plain text of the Constitution, and was forced to affirm that people of Chinese descent could be citizens.

Nearly 130 years later, in our much more enlightened time, that bedrock guarantee drew more opposition at the Supreme Court. This week, in Trump v. Barbara, a 6–3 majority struck down President Trump’s executive order repealing birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors. But only five justices voted to invalidate the order on constitutional grounds. The other four indicated varying degrees of openness to narrowing birthright citizenship, if not exactly along the lines that the Trump administration had sought.

By ruling with such a slim majority, “the Court has just handed right-wingers a new bloody shirt to wave in every single political campaign,” Aderson Francois, a law professor at Georgetown University, told me. “The main legacy of the decision is that for the next few years, this will become the new Roe v. Wade.” After all, conservatives now know they are only one vote away from eliminating birthright citizenship by judicial fiat.

The Fourteenth Amendment has not changed since 1898. What have changed are the Republican Party and the modern conservative movement. Trump believes that “if you import the Third World, you become the Third World.” His rise to power began with his willingness to be a standard-bearer for a movement that cast the first Black president as an illegitimate invader and demanded to see his birth certificate. Trump’s second-term campaign promised “mass deportation” of those very same “Third World” immigrants, and since taking office, he has established an effectively whites-only refugee policy, specifically for white South Africans, illustrating that his objection is less to immigration itself, or to immigrants from the “Third World,” than to immigrants who are not white.

Lawrence Glickman: Americans once understood birthright citizenship

Trump’s logic holds that the growing number of nonwhite people in America is a threat to the nation, whose fundamental character is racial, and that the country is the exclusive property of white Christians rather than all of its people. Birthright citizenship is an obstacle to this idea of America because it makes anyone born here a citizen, regardless of their race, religion, or origin—even if that origin is “the Third World.” As Trump goes, so goes the Republican Party. Neither the text of the Constitution nor more than a century of precedent have proved a match for the partisan-motivated reasoning of several supposedly impartial right-wing justices, whose views on what the Constitution says shift with the ideological currents.

The Plessy v. Ferguson decision upholding Jim Crow segregation under the rubric of “separate but equal” is only the Supreme Court’s most well-known act of vandalism against the Constitution after Reconstruction. In the 1876 case U.S. v. Cruikshank, the justices said that the Fourteenth Amendment did not prevent private discrimination, overturning the convictions of white men who had massacred Black men. In the 1883 Civil Rights Cases, they overturned the Civil Rights Act, saying that Congress could not ban discrimination by private actors. In the Insular Cases, a series of decisions related to the territories wrested from Spain after the Spanish-American War, the justices ruled that the people living in American imperial possessions were “alien races” and “savage tribes” unfit for self-rule but not for American domination.

The same Court was nonetheless forced, in the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, to conclude that the Fourteenth Amendment conferred citizenship on a Chinese American man born in San Francisco. The justices did this despite the existence of racially targeted immigration restrictions that they likely agreed with as a policy matter. And they observed that the birthright-citizenship clause’s references to “jurisdiction” were meant to exclude only “children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation and children of diplomatic representatives of a foreign State.” The decision confirmed “the ancient rule of citizenship by birth within the dominion.”

In his majority opinion in Barbara, Chief Justice John Roberts reiterated that understanding, noting that “the Citizenship Clause uses jurisdiction in its ordinary sense—referring to the power of the United States to govern those within its territory.” Roberts added, “If Congress intended to limit American citizenship to the children of those domiciled in the United States, nothing in the succinct language of the Citizenship Clause conveyed that design.” But the chief justice and Justice Amy Coney Barrett were the only Republican-appointed justices willing to accept the plain language of the clause, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Their Republican-appointed colleagues, left to argue against the plain text of the amendment, fumbled for legal theories that would give Trump at least some of what he wanted.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined with the majority on the judgment but argued that birthright citizenship was imposed by the 1940 Nationality Act and that it could therefore be repealed by a simple act of Congress. Justice Clarence Thomas claimed that the birthright-citizenship clause and the Fourteenth Amendment writ large were intended to benefit only the newly emancipated. (This interpretation, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted, is belied not just by the authors of the amendment but by the words of the formerly enslaved themselves.) Thomas, whose opinion Gorsuch joined, focused on the idea that the amendment granted birthright citizenship to those “domiciled” in the United States. That word does not appear in the amendment itself; it is a main focus of the dissent in Wong Kim Ark. But even Thomas would not go as far as Trump had demanded, which was to deny citizenship to the children of all undocumented immigrants. After all, many undocumented have been “domiciled” in the U.S. for years and came here intending to stay.

Samuel Breidbart, an attorney with the Brennan Center, told me that distinguishing between short-term and “domiciled” immigrants is a minefield. “Establishing domicile is a very fact-intensive inquiry. It would require substantial administration and evaluation of each individual case to know: Does somebody intend to remain here? Have they established domiciles? What are the prerequisites for doing so?” Breidbart said. The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, he added, “knew that you could not have exemptions, because you could not have a rule that would be so unwieldy, so unworkable. You needed a clear rule, a broad rule, an inclusive rule. That’s what the Fourteenth Amendment established.”

The only member of the Court extreme enough to give Trump everything was Justice Samuel Alito. His opinion largely focused on illegal immigration as a policy problem, including a digression listing several countries where most undocumented immigrants in the U.S. come from, ostensibly to note that those nations grant citizenship to children born elsewhere. It is unclear what this has to do with the text of the amendment, and it could easily have been handled in a footnote; its inclusion in the body of the dissent seems intended to emphasize the alien nature of the people under discussion. Whether undocumented immigrants are from Mexico or Guatemala has no bearing on whether “all persons born” means “all persons.”

The dissenters also dismissed the English-common-law history of birthright citizenship as a “feudal principle,” a “medieval rule,” and a remnant of “the darkness of the middle ages,” having more “to do with being a subject than a citizen.” Legal traditions from hundreds of years ago are apparently vitally important if one wants to ban abortion or strike down restrictions on firearms, but they become barbaric anachronisms the second they diverge from the policy goals of the Republican Party.

The Fourteenth Amendment was passed in the aftermath of the Civil War to overturn the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which held that Black people could never be citizens of the United States. In antebellum politics, Democrats had long advocated for the phrase “all men are created equal” to be taken metaphorically rather than literally. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina famously declared that “ours is the government of the white man,” and the Fourteenth Amendment, which overturned the Dred Scott decision, was meant to silence forever this “horrid blasphemy,” in the words of Representative John Bingham, one of its authors.

“We began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it, ‘all men are created equal except negroes.’ When the Know-nothings get control, it will read, ‘all men are created equal except negroes and foreigners and Catholics,’” Abraham Lincoln famously wrote to Joshua Speed in 1855. “When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

In the decades after Reconstruction, these lofty aspirations towards multiracial democracy were suffocated by white terror in the South and white indifference in the North. By the time that Wong Kim Ark was decided, the popular consensus was that the “Anglo-Saxon” race had a global destiny to dominate the lesser races to spread the paradise of “civilization,” at gunpoint if necessary. This was a matter of bipartisan agreement—Republicans needed white supremacy to justify territorial expansion, and Democrats needed it to defend Jim Crow. Perhaps that very consensus on white supremacy saved the Fourteenth Amendment—it had no partisan valence to turn the justices against it. Still, the fact remains that even these men, knuckle draggers by modern standards, lacked the arrogance to rewrite the birthright-citizenship clause of the Constitution to better fit their prejudices.

That would not occur until the present, and the cottage industry of Trumpian legal apparatchiks who would conjure any fiction to justify the president’s whims. Thomas observed in his dissent that “the President’s initiative generated a groundswell of new scholarship.” Indeed it did, to the extent that you can call it such. That some right-wing legal academics rushed to fabricate a justification for Trump’s goals is not to the credit of the scholarship or those scholars, nor to the justices who embraced them. In reaction to the ruling, some right-wing figures made no secret of their disappointment that five justices had not seen fit to reconstitute a subordinate caste of people in the United States whose rights could be violated with impunity.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts accused the Court in a social-media post of having “cheapened the sacred value of American citizenship,” because “universal birthright citizenship erases any uniquely American birthright—a distortion that was never the meaning or intention of the 14th Amendment.” This language of degradation or devaluing is used by two of the dissenting justices—Alito wrote that the majority opinion “degrades” American citizenship, and Thomas asserted that the decision “devalues” it.

Kevin Roberts and others go further than the dissenting justices but nevertheless echo their view that sharing American citizenship with those they disdain “degrades” that citizenship. Yet, as the chief justice wrote, citizenship is “the right to have rights.” This seems too narrow to me—inalienable meaning what it means—but either way, that right is not “degraded” by sharing it with people unlike yourself.

The language of degradation is illuminating because it echoes antebellum and Reconstruction discourse. As the historian James McPherson has written, defenders of slavery warned that abolitionists wanted to “degrade the white man to the negro’s level”: During the Civil War, “Democrats and even some Republicans reasoned that to pay Negro troopers the same wages as white soldiers would degrade the white man.” The historian Manisha Sinha documents opponents of Reconstruction who saw equal rights as an attempt to “degrade the white race to the level of the black race,” which was a crime “against the civilization of the age and against God.”

Elsewhere, less tactful conservatives expressed directly what the dissenting justices chose to do in euphemism. Stephen Miller, who runs immigration policy for the Trump administration, told Fox News that “we have people from all over the world, from third-world nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel.” He went on: “They can just come into the country, have a baby at a hospital paid for by you and me, and then that baby is automatically a citizen? That baby can sit on a jury when he turns 18 and sit in judgment of you and sit in judgment of me and sit in judgment of our loved ones? Can decide who our mayors are? Our governors are? Our presidents are?” Miller’s long-standing view is that what ruined America was the repeal of eugenics-inspired immigration restrictions that had banned immigration from Asia and Africa and from nations in Europe deemed to be composed of lesser white races.

There is very little difference between Miller’s position—if you come from a “Third World nation,” you are inferior—and that of antebellum Democrats and the opponents of the Fourteenth Amendment at the time it was adopted: American citizenship is degraded by having to share it with the biologically inferior. The justices are elite lawyers with the ability to obfuscate this project and ignore its aims, but the rest of us need not pretend. To put it bluntly, Miller’s objection, as articulated here, is not to birthright citizenship. It is to the idea that “all men are created equal.”

[Adam Serwer: The Court that will believe absolutely anything is ‘race-neutral’]

The politics of Trump are but the latest iteration of the politics of John C. Calhoun, who feared that going beyond the annexation of Texas to seize Mexico would “incorporate a people so dissimilar from us in every respect—so little qualified for free and popular government” that it would lead to “certain destruction to our political institutions.” In a similar vein, Calhoun argued that racial equality would lead to “a degradation greater than has ever yet fallen to the lot of a free and enlightened people.” It is no irony that Trump and his enablers, much like Calhoun and his partisans of human bondage, prove themselves time and again the greatest threat to the destruction of those institutions.

Thus the blasphemy that Reconstruction-era Republicans sought to expunge survives. Jackson had it right when she observed that the “Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.”

There is little left to Trumpism however, once you remove its desire for subordinate classes. Despite the narrow ruling on birthright citizenship, the project to transform inalienable rights into what James Madison called “parchment barriers,” little more than rights on paper, continues apace. In its rulings on trans rights and voting rights, the Roberts Court has been a willing partner in inverting the purpose of the Reconstruction amendments, sanctioning invidious discrimination rather than stopping it. Like the Plessy Court, a majority of today’s justices were unwilling to remove the cornerstone of nonracial citizenship in America, and that is worth celebrating. But this is less a victory than a reprieve.

The Hispanic Founder

2026-07-03T08:00:00-04:00

One of the biggest Independence Day celebrations outside of North America takes place in Macharaviaya, Spain, a mountain town, population 500, in the southern province of Málaga. Thousands of people attend the festivities, during which villagers wearing 18th-century period costumes reenact the 1781 Siege of Pensacola, a turning point in the American Revolution. The flag of the United States features prominently. To the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” an actor delivers a dramatic reading, in Spanish, of Francis Scott Key’s poem “Defence of Fort M’Henry,” on which the song was based. The evening ends with fireworks.

Macharaviaya observes the independence of the United States because a hero of the American Revolution, Bernardo de Gálvez, was born there. Gálvez was the Spanish governor of Louisiana whose troops, including Spaniards, Spanish Americans, American Indians, and Black people, both enslaved and free, defeated the British in Florida. He had a hand in securing Spanish silver from Havana that George Washington used to pay and provision the troops fighting for him in the Battle of Yorktown. He also helped draft the Treaty of Paris that ended the war. Washington later recognized that Gálvez had been crucial to the revolution’s success. After the war, Spain claimed Florida and held on to it until the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty, which made it a territory of the United States.

[Gal Beckerman: The two kinds of American patriotism]

Macharaviaya’s Independence Day celebrations may sound like nothing more than a funny bit of trivia—quirky festivities in honor of a mostly forgotten historical figure. But they also serve as a rejoinder to the arguments now common on the right that America’s Anglo-Saxon heritage is what ties its people together. When President Trump welcomed King Charles III and Queen Camilla to the White House in April, he lauded the “Anglo-Saxon courage” of the revolting British colonists and said that the culture, character, and creed of a “small but mighty kingdom from across the sea” had laid the foundation of our national identity. But if a Spaniard played such an important role in the founding, and if Pensacola—which sits in a deep-red county of a deep-red state—was liberated from Great Britain due to the bravery in battle of Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic people, then their descendants today are “heritage Americans” as much as anyone else the nativist right might bless with that moniker.

Any history book will tell you that Spaniards arrived in North America more than 100 years before British colonists landed at Jamestown. Spanish was the first European language spoken in the Americas. And many place names in the United States—San Antonio, Los Angeles, Santa Fe—remind us of the nation’s Spanish roots. Yet despite such deep ties, many Americans regard Hispanic culture as perpetually foreign. Perhaps celebrating Gálvez and his role in the American founding can change this dynamic.

Gálvez isn’t exactly unknown, even if he’s less familiar to American schoolchildren than the Marquis de Lafayette. Galveston, Texas, was named after him. In 1980, for the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Mobile, where troops led by Gálvez defeated the British, the U.S. Postal Service issued a Bernardo de Gálvez commemorative stamp. The city of Pensacola celebrates Gálvez Day in May, to commemorate the Siege of Pensacola. In 1783, to commemorate that battle’s second anniversary, the Continental Congress resolved to have a portrait of Gálvez hung in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. That portrait was finally unveiled in 2014, after a Spanish immigrant made it her mission to have the 200-year-old resolution fulfilled in the U.S. Capitol. The same year, a joint resolution from Congress made Gálvez an honorary American citizen because he had “played an integral role in the Revolutionary War and helped secure the independence of the United States.” Gálvez is one of eight people to receive the honor, alongside Winston Churchill and Mother Teresa. Carlos del Toro, the secretary of the Navy under President Biden, announced in 2024 that the Navy would name a new warship the USS Galvez.

Guillermo Fesser, a Spanish journalist who wrote a children’s book called Conoce a Bernardo de Gálvez (“Get to Know Bernardo de Gálvez”), told the audience at the July 4, 2024, celebration in Macharaviaya that many in the United States see Hispanics as “bad hombres,” or as dangerous figures who “arrived last night to abuse your daughter or steal your jobs.” He said that he has talked with “dozens and dozens” of students at schools across the United States, where he tells them that Gálvez’s army “saved George Washington’s ass.” In Gálvez’s army, Fesser said, “there were people from Africa, there were people from Europe, there were people from America, and there were mixed people from the three continents.” When he looks out at students not only in Hispanic strongholds such as Florida and the Southwest, but also across New England and the Midwest, he said, he sees “the army of Gálvez, each one different from the other, from all the colors, families, and faiths, and that’s what makes the United States such a great country.”

Yet if Gálvez can connect Hispanics in the United States both to Spain and to the founding of the U.S., his legacy also reopens an old debate about Hispanic American group identity. Are Hispanic and Latino synonymous? Are Spaniards part of the group, or not? Is Enrique Iglesias Hispanic? Rosalía?

In recent years, some Hispanics have sought greater connection with Spain. A good number of them, especially the descendants of conversos—whose families continued to practice Judaism despite their formal conversion to Christianity, fled or were expelled from Spain during the Inquisition, and eventually landed in places such as New Mexico and Florida—sought Spanish citizenship under the Spanish Law of Return, in effect from 2015 to 2019. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have emigrated to Spain in recent years, as the United States has become less welcoming. “They are not strangers,” Fesser said in Macharaviaya of these new arrivals. “They are the heirs of those who left with Gálvez and then returned, and I hope we will say to them, ‘Welcome home.’”

Jorge Guerrero / AFP / Getty

Actors parade during the Independence Day celebrations in Macharaviaya, Spain, on July 4, 2015.

Yet other Hispanics are inclined to see Spaniards as very different from them. People who came, or whose families came, directly from Spain to the United States represent 1 percent of all Hispanics. Members of that tiny minority have higher levels of education, rates of homeownership, and median incomes than other Hispanics. Some who don’t embrace their Spanish ancestry view those who do as part of the colonizing minority, not the colonized majority. If you watch Hispanics reveal the results of their DNA tests on YouTube—it’s a thing—you’ll see people who are visibly amused, maybe even delighted, to learn that a significant percentage of their ancestry comes from Africa, Asia, or Indigenous America, and some who are visibly bummed when a significant percentage of their DNA is from Spain.

Shaking their reputation as bloodthirsty conquerors has been a challenge that Spaniards have tried to overcome at least since Bartolomé de las Casas wrote his 1542 treatise, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, about Spanish cruelty toward indigenous people of the Americas. Genocide, the spread of disease, and, as Protestants saw things, the popish Catholicism of Spaniards contributed to the rise of a Black Legend about Spain—la leyenda negra—that remained alive in the United States for hundreds of years after the 16th century. Honoring Gálvez as a hero of independence and the leader of a multiracial army has become a way for Spaniards to attempt to redefine how they are seen in the U.S. One main goal of the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute, a New York nonprofit founded in 1954 and funded in part by the Spanish royal family, is to make Gálvez, and Spain’s contributions to the independence of the United States in general, a more central part of the public story of the independence of the United States. The institute’s America&Spain250 initiative promotes, as its annual report from last year put it, “awareness amongst Hispanic and Latino communities, descendants of Spanish Americans, of their foundational role in the history of the United States.”

Earlier this year, the institute sponsored a contest for American high-school students to produce an original podcast “exploring key figures and events connected to the shared history of Spain and the United States.” The winners were two students at Benjamin Franklin High School in New Orleans, who focused on Gálvez’s legacy in the city. One of the students, Elodie Colón, said in a video announcing the winners, “As a Latina woman living where Gálvez once governed, I think the representation of someone like me caught between languages and countries is something that really needs to be seen more often.” She continued, “We have the power to make that happen and to show young Hispanic children that they don’t have to fit the traditional mold of an American hero to change America.”

According to Teresa Valcarce, who immigrated from Spain in 1999 and became a U.S. citizen in 2007, her yearslong quest to have the portrait of Gálvez hung in the home of Congress, to make good on the 1783 resolution, was motivated by a desire for children like Colón to understand their connection to the founding of the United States. In a 2014 ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Capitol, Bob Menendez, then a senator from New Jersey, with Mayor Antonio Campos of Macharaviaya and other distinguished visitors from Spain listening from just a few feet away, argued that Gálvez should be seen as a founding father for Hispanics. Menendez said, “When we look to the contributions Hispanics have made to this nation, let’s first look at the man in this portrait who symbolizes that contribution.”

[Ali Breland: Are you a ‘heritage American’?]

Leveraging a representative hero of the Revolution to lay claim to an equal share in America is itself something of an American tradition, encompassing such figures as Tadeusz Kościuszko, Crispus Attucks, Deborah Sampson, and Haym Salomon. But Gálvez’s promoters on both sides of the Atlantic also expect too much of him. They want him to be someone Hispanics in the United States can see as a reflection of themselves. Gálvez promoters also want all Americans to see his army as a symbol of the promise of our multiracial democracy. But at least some schoolchildren getting off a tour bus at the Capitol will look at the portrait of Gálvez, in his fancy European clothing, and conclude that he’s a representative more of the Spanish elite than of their ancestors. And many Hispanics of African or Indigenous descent still reckon with legacies of inequality and racial exclusion that their service in the U.S. or Latin American militaries did not ameliorate. These are old rifts within Hispanic communities that the figure of Gálvez alone, and our presence at the time of independence, cannot reconcile.

Even so, placing Gálvez in the pantheon of the American Revolution really might help all Americans, even skeptics, see that Hispanics belong in this country. If we can plant our flag in the founding moment, we just might be able to change how we’re viewed. In Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda cast people of color as Founders as a provocative gesture toward inclusion. The figure of Gálvez requires no such reimagination, because he’s a real historical figure who was actually in the room where it happened, so to speak.

When France Plays Soccer, You Can’t Look Away

2026-07-03T08:00:00-04:00

This week, I am French. I’m as French as a deposed dauphine, as French as a film plot of perfumed deceit. During the World Cup, there is just no profit in being American. Yes, I’m shamelessly bandwagoning, and deserting my nation on its 250th birthday. But my sentiments are with the country that will win this World Cup if feet have anything to do with it: France, a team that scores goals as easily as guys named Didier blow smoke from Gitanes. Is that a cliché? Well, the word cliché is French, is it not? As am I.

One of the more marvelous things about the World Cup is that its 39 days afford you the time to develop unreasonable affections for teams not your own. You don’t need to know a thing about France, or tactics or formations, to fall under the spell of the team’s sorcery with a ball, or to see its potential for world dominion, or just to love how its players flip their sweat-soaked hair. Who but Les Bleus could wear the bright-red knee socks of uniformed schoolgirls and make them seem like flair? When the players rush down the field in those socks, they look like a battle painting in motion.

The French make so much happen. They’ve scored 13 goals in just four games, a torrid pace for a sport in which, quite often, absolutely nothing happens. This is the nature of football, as they pronounce soccer in other countries: To profess enjoyment of a 1–0 final score is to pass some kind of fan-purity test. Which I, a Texan by blood, tend to fail. But you’ll experience no low-score-induced boredom in this World Cup if you are French. And so, for this week I am French. As French as jealousy in the rain, as French as the perfect little scarf.

[Read: The passion of World Cup fans]

France’s toe-tapping captain, Kylian Mbappé, has scored six of the team’s goals, including two in a 3–0 knockout of Sweden to reach the round of 16. Mbappé moves with the sweetest jolt of current in his legs you may ever see on a green field, and he now has 18 goals in 18 career World Cup games to trail the immortal Lionel Messi, of Argentina, by just one (Messi has 19 in 29 games). Mbappé’s surges into open space make him unmissable even to the most novice viewer; his sprint was once clocked at 23.6 miles an hour, on par with Usain Bolt’s average cruising speed in the 100-meter dash. Mbappé said the other day that he thought that France had played a little “timid” early in the tournament, which provokes one to wonder what kind of attack he could mount with a fully confident team.

Amazingly, for all his striking power, Mbappé may not be France’s most crucial player. Some observers believe that the 24-year-old attacking midfielder Michael Olise is. Olise is one of France’s three notable front-liners who are making their World Cup debut, along with the 21-year-old Désire Doué and 23-year-old Bradley Barcola. All of them are flashy players. All are appealing, budding stars with varied family roots, helping make this a team that almost anyone can connect with. Barcola, born near Lyon, has dual citizenship in France and Togo. Doué, from Angers, is the son of an Ivorian father and a French mother. Olise was born in London to British Nigerian and Franco Algerian parents, and he grew up speaking both French and English at home. Since 2024, he has played professionally for Bayern Munich, which required further acculturation. At his first Oktoberfest, he was introduced to schnitzel and “those round potato things,” as he described the traditional dumplings called Knödel. “I’ve never known anything like it,” he said of the festival.

[Read: The feel-good story of the World Cup is too good to be true]

Although Mbappé’s goals command the most attention, Olise is the team’s chief enabler, a sleight-of-foot artist whose tricksy passes can provoke sharp intakes of breath, and who leads the entire tournament in assists, with five. As Barcola said of Olise, his performance on the field “brings danger.” The combination of Olise’s footwork and Mbappé’s speed creates a don’t-know-where-to-turn predicament for France’s opponents. After Sweden’s loss in the round of 32, its coach, Graham Potter, said, “We had to be perfect, and even if we were, I’m not sure that would have been enough.”

France has so overwhelmed its opponents, in fact, that the team’s biggest concern could become overconfidence; it faces Paraguay on Saturday and will be the strong favorite to advance to the quarterfinals. The veteran French midfielder N’Golo Kanté addressed the issue this week by saying, “There is something that we cannot hide, that we have a lot of quality in the team.” But, he said, “We cannot see ourselves too beautiful or too strong.” See ourselves too beautiful or strong? How French is that? But they are beautiful, and they are strong, and that is why, for now, I am French.

Washington Is Turning Into a Fortress for the Fourth

2026-07-03T08:00:00-04:00

This year’s Fourth of July fireworks show on the National Mall is the first such event to be designated a “National Special Security Event,” which requires the kind of screening procedures and police presence usually reserved for presidential inaugurations and Super Bowls. It’s a reflection of the logistical complexity and anticipated crowd size of America’s 250th birthday party, but also, unfortunately, its potential appeal to attackers at a time of rising threats.

President Trump has promoted the event as “THE LARGEST FIREWORKS SHOW IN HISTORY,” and the NSSE designation puts the Secret Service in charge of planning and protecting it. On a day when temperatures are forecast to be in or near the triple digits, getting in may be more like going through an airport than going to a party. That’s not least because the president has placed himself at the center of the festivities and has plans to give “a really long speech just to show that I can do anything.”

Security and intelligence agencies routinely monitor for specific threats against high-profile events, but Secret Service, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security officials told us they are not tracking any specific, credible threats targeting the July 4 event. You’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise while walking around downtown Washington, D.C., in recent days. The normally wide-open expanse at the city’s heart has been ringed with security fences for weeks, ahead of World Cup–viewing parties, the Great American State Fair, and the 250th event on July 4. “I’ve lived here most of my life, and I’ve never seen it look like this on the Mall,” Mayor Muriel Bowser told reporters on Monday.

As is customary, federal agencies do not comment on the number of security personnel they plan to deploy, but the Trump administration has already mobilized thousands of National Guard troops in Washington. Tara McLeese, the special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Washington field office, told reporters this week that in addition to hundreds of federal agents and officers visibly on duty, a variety of unseen resources “will be used to disrupt any bad actor.”

McLeese said that “there is no area in the country where law enforcement is better prepared and works closer together.” The security agencies’ coordinated plan, she said, “will ensure the safety of our protectees and the tens of thousands of Americans who will be there to enjoy a momentous day in our history.”

Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesperson for the Secret Service, told us that the volume of threats that his agency is monitoring overall “has never been higher.” Threat reports requiring Secret Service investigation so far this year have increased 40 percent compared with the same period last year, according to the agency. Security officials say there has been a particular uptick in threats from “nihilistic violent extremists,” many of whom aim to use violence against law-enforcement personnel or symbols of government.

[Read: The glorification of mass murder]

The war in Iran has potentially heightened the threat. “I’m very concerned about a lone actor inspired by Iran, rather than an actual all‑out professional attack,” Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant director of the FBI, told us. “That’s the hardest thing to detect—that lone actor who’s been inspired.” Figliuzzi said that potential attackers see the Fourth of July—and especially its 250th anniversary—as “striking at the heart of what they think America stands for.” At least one lone-wolf attack took place on July 4 in recent years—in 2022, a gunman killed seven people and injured many more in a parade shooting in Illinois.

Current and former officials also told us that they were on alert for cyberattacks on crucial infrastructure—whether from Iran or other state actors—because the Fourth of July provides an opportunity to inflict summer-travel chaos. Drones represent another area in which the risks have grown as technology has advanced. DHS has issued warnings about the potential use of drones as weapons at public events, and federal officials say they will enforce a strict no-fly zone and deploy counter-drone teams to police the skies.

The security operation surrounding the July 4 event comes just weeks after federal authorities announced that they had disrupted an alleged domestic-terror plot in Washington. At least eight people have been charged with conspiring to attack the Ultimate Fighting Championship event at the White House, planning to use guns and drones equipped with explosives in an attempt to kill government officials and other attendees. FBI investigators have indicated in court records that the group also discussed possible World Cup–related targets on July 3 and 4. It is unclear whether the FBI has located other individuals involved in the plot discussions, or whether they remain at large. (The FBI declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation.)

The agencies responsible for securing Washington prepare and regularly practice for a range of scenarios. “The muscle memory is there, and whether it’s Fourth of July fireworks or inaugurations, or, you know, umpteen protests and events, they’ve got it down to a science,” Figliuzzi said. Other U.S. cities staging Fourth of July events—especially those hosting World Cup games—are considered softer targets for would-be attackers.

Police plan to close streets and bridges around the Mall, as well as the waterways adjacent to the event. Attendees who want to enter the secure viewing area around the Washington Monument will not be able to bring in chairs, coolers, backpacks, or metal or glass containers. Anything else will have to fit inside a clear-plastic bag or small purse, and will be subject to inspection.

[Read: The true believers at the great MAGA fair]

Fourth of July fireworks on the National Mall typically start around 9 p.m., when the sky is dark enough. But this year, Trump will occupy the prime-time slot. As Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and the other capitals of the original 13 colonies begin celebrating the 250th anniversary of their rebellion with bombs bursting in air, the president will take center stage in Washington. The White House has not said whether he’ll deliver a written speech or make the kind of semi-improvised remarks more typical of a MAGA rally. But at some point, he’s planning to show off his new Air Force One jet—given to him by the government of Qatar—with a flyover of the crowd. Trump said on Wednesday that he will use the occasion to demonstrate his stamina despite the summer heat. It’s not customary for presidents to give a speech on the Mall for July 4, but it’s in keeping with Trump’s approach of making himself the star of the nation’s semiquincentennial celebration.

At some point around 10:30 or 11 p.m.—the timing depends on how long Trump speaks—the pyrotechnics are expected to begin. Freedom 250, the Trump-aligned group that has commandeered this year’s July 4 festivities, said it will shoot off 850,000 shells—nearly 50 times more than usual—from 10 locations around the city, including the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Potomac River barges, and West Potomac Park. The show is scheduled to last for 40 minutes, roughly twice as long as the typical D.C. Fourth of July celebration.

Law-enforcement officials told us that the president’s central role in the July 4 events and the extending of their length late into the evening have added complexity—and risk. As the threats facing the country have grown, the law-enforcement and intelligence agencies tasked with keeping the country safe have been dealing with a shortage of man power and expertise. Many top officials have quit or been fired since Trump returned to office, and Figliuzzi described an FBI now staffed with what he believes is “the youngest cadre of special agents in charge and assistant directors in the modern history of the FBI.” Some officials acknowledge—in private—that politically motivated purges have left the country’s law-enforcement and intelligence agencies understaffed and more prone to mistakes. (Asked about those allegations, an FBI spokesperson cited the bureau’s track record of thwarting violent plots and said that its agents are “dedicated professionals working around the clock to defend the homeland and crush violent crime. This FBI has provided the American public with results.”)

Security agencies can’t afford errors when dealing with a large-scale, high-stakes event such as July 4 in D.C. Organizers say the viewing area around the Washington Monument has a capacity for 150,000, and they expect it to be full. “Every generation gets one moment that they remember for the rest of their lives,” the Freedom 250 site says. “In 2026, generations of Americans will look up at the sky and remember the incredible sights of the 250th anniversary.”

[Read: The capital is a mess]

Aside from violence, the most obvious threat to the event Saturday in D.C. will be the weather, as temperatures stay in the 90s even into the evening and a chance of thunderstorms develops as the crowds grow. The extraordinary fireworks barrage is also expected to produce an inordinate amount of smoke, so a low layer of clouds and lack of breeze could leave attendees gasping from the show—but not in the way intended.

Why Trump’s ‘Freedom 250’ Logo Is Everywhere

2026-07-03T07:00:00-04:00

As the United States neared its 250th birthday in recent months, a new spin on the Stars and Stripes appeared outside homes and on banners dangling from government buildings. A twist on what’s known as the “Betsy Ross flag,” with 250 inscribed within its 13-star circle, the celebratory image scans as neutral yet elegant. But just as the Trump administration overhauled this year’s semiquincentennial celebration with partisan events and political rallies, the Ross flag, too, was co-opted by the White House.

Versions of the Ross flag, now a logo for Freedom 250, the White House–endorsed semiquincentennial planner, have been popping up in political contexts and elsewhere. (There are variations of the logo, one with only 250 in the center, and the other with Freedom 250.) Just looking at the design, it might be hard to see what the fuss is about, but those frustrated by Freedom 250 see it as yet another way the White House took control of the celebration from a nonpartisan rival, implicitly excluding Americans who do not agree with the president.

Last September, America250, the nonpartisan organization authorized by Congress in 2016 to plan patriotic activities for the anniversary, applied for a trademark for the design with 250 in the center, as shown by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office documents that were cited in a report released by House Democrats yesterday. The $5,350 application was for nine usage categories, that include flags, jewelry, digital media, paper goods, printed media, clothing, and toys. Yet in April, America250 quietly transferred ownership of the trademark application to Freedom 250, a public-private partnership created by the White House that has been putting on events with a partisan flair, such as mobile museums that offer a conservative, Christianity-infused retelling of the country’s birth and the Great American State Fair, where conservative and religious groups have booths and visitors can take home a replica U.S. passport with Donald Trump’s face printed in it. According to a person familiar with the matter, the White House’s Task Force 250, the governmental arm behind Freedom 250, made the Ross handover a condition for America250 to receive $50 million from the Interior Department. Only half of those funds have been distributed thus far, Michael Scherer reported last month in The Atlantic.

(The design is on its way to becoming a registered trademark but has been held up by the opposition of a marine-product company that sells an almost identical flag for boats.)

A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told me in an email, “As with all of our signature 250 events, resources have been made available to ensure these historic occasions are a success,” adding that “the Memorandum of Understanding signed with all 250th related entities made that clear and we are proud to be partners in celebrating these iconic events honoring our 250th thanks to the bold leadership of President Donald J. Trump.” Freedom 250 denounced the report from House Democrats wholesale, describing it as “nothing more than a partisan smear from politicians who would rather manufacture division than celebrate America’s 250th birthday alongside the rest of the country.” The Patent and Trademark Office declined to comment, and the White House directed questions back to Freedom 250. America250 did not respond.

The Trump administration hasn’t exactly been known for its design forte lately. Look no further than the “Temu arch”—a blocky model of the monument that Trump wants to build near Arlington National Cemetery—propped up on the National Mall for the state fair. Yet in demanding exclusive access to the Ross design, Freedom 250 would receive more than a logo: the design has a sort of legitimacy, conferred through a historic symbol linked to the country’s founding and solidified through the ensuing centuries. That a national symbol could effectively become part of a financial ultimatum reflects only how political this birthday party has become.

Freedom 250 operates separately from the nonpartisan America250, which has largely been planning patriotic events outside of Washington, D.C. The confusion has already sparked controversy, including a number of musical acts dropping out of a concert series on the Mall when they became aware of the political charge of the event organizer, Freedom 250.

America250’s logo—a red, white, and blue ribbonlike rendering of 250 that some have likened to the French flag—hasn’t left much of an impression, nor has the commission’s mascot, George the Star. The Ross-flag-inspired Freedom 250 logo, meanwhile, has been spreading. A version of the design has been incorporated into much of Freedom 250’s merchandise, such as totes and T-shirts. The flag appeared behind Trump at his recent rally opening the fair. It is featured on pins that the Department of Interior is reportedly requiring staff to wear. It’s been integrated into the scenery of Washington too. A giant flag, with Freedom 250 at the center of the stars, hangs outside the Department of Agriculture building, while another version of the design is incorporated into banners lining the Department of Commerce. Both are high-traffic areas near the Mall sure to be populated by many fireworks-seeking tourists this weekend. In the report on Freedom 250’s activities, Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee describe the ubiquity of the Freedom 250 branding—which in some places uses the flag design in its entirety and in others just the circle of stars—as the objective. “Saturating the country with the mark makes the hijacking of a national commemoration appear ordinary through sheer repetition,” they write.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty

The design has also taken on a life of its own, seemingly far from Freedom 250’s publicity apparatus. Versions of the flag with just 250 in the circle are sold both through Freedom 250’s store and in online flag shops. It can be spotted on storefronts and in workspaces. One particularly enthusiastic life-insurance company said that it had donated the spin-off flag to 250 groups across the country, such as the Arkansas State Police and Mississippi’s Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum.

The White House encouraged the use of the image through an initiative called “Logo for the People,” which allows groups to apply for the designs, including the flag, and aims to put “official Freedom 250 logos and assets in the hands of every community, school, business, and family.” That branding reached even further into the country this week, when the Social Security Administration announced that a Freedom 250 logo would appear on commemorative cards distributed to babies born from yesterday through the end of the year.

The origins of the 13-star flag have long been disputed. For years, Americans have been taught that Ross, a Philadelphia seamstress, made the first U.S. flag. (Last week, at the Great American State Fair, I spotted a Ross impersonator sewing a 13-star rendering.) Historians say that there is no archival evidence confirming that Ross made the flag and that there were other flags that represented the 13 colonies at war (see: the Grand Union Flag). “It’s not such a tidy or linear history, because history usually is not tidy or linear,” Marla Miller, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the author of the book Betsy Ross and the Making of America, told me. Still, the circular design took hold in the popular imagination, giving it added meaning this anniversary.

For some vexillophiles, the issue is not so much who is propagating the spin-off Ross flag but the design itself. In adding characters to the flag, some say, Freedom 250 is violating the U.S. flag code, although the code is toothless. As Marc Leepson, the author of Flag: An American Biography, told me, “The President of the United States is not going to get arrested by the flag police.” But for an administration that has preached the sanctity of national symbols and is keen on casting itself as the steward of all things America this summer, the potential breach carries a note of irony.

Roland Miller, the author of Old Glory: Iconic Flags and the Stories They Tell of America’s 250-Year History, told me that the Freedom 250 design “doesn’t seem kosher.” More than that, “so many people have sacrificed so much to serve our country under the flag,” he said. “Any disrespect, to me, is certainly not patriotic.”

Michael Scherer contributed reporting.

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The Fourth of July That Saved My Family

2026-07-03T07:00:00-04:00

On July 4, 1976, as America celebrated its bicentennial, four C-130 aircraft flew blind over the dark waters of the Red Sea and across the Horn of Africa. The pilots took their planes beneath the sweep of commercial radar, their crews relying on basic radio, manual navigation, and raw nerve. The planes were carrying Israeli commandos to a disused airport-terminal building in Uganda, on the shores of Lake Victoria.

Inside that terminal were 106 hostages. Two of them were my American parents.

For nearly a week, Palestinian and German terrorists had held the passengers from a hijacked Air France flight hostage inside the airport terminal, threatening to kill them unless imprisoned terrorists held in five countries were released.

I was six months old, blessedly oblivious to the hijacking, staying with my grandmother in New York and waiting for my parents to come home from their first international trip.

As the planes touched down, the commandos launched their rescue mission. One hundred and two of the hostages were rescued; three were killed in the process; and one, a 74-year-old woman who had been taken to a nearby hospital several days earlier, was murdered after the rescue byorder of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who supported the hijacking.

Growing up as the child of Entebbe hostages, I knew my life was a gift bestowed by the courage of strangers. Had those planes not taken off or had the mission failed, my family’s story would have been very different. I grew up with parents to raise me. I never take that for granted.

[Anne Applebaum: Trump and Vance ruined the Fourth of July]

My parents’ rescue on America’s Independence Day was especially meaningful because my family is proof that the promise of American freedom is real. Seven of my eight great-grandparents were murdered in the German death camps of Europe. The grandmother who watched me when my parents were held hostage had survived Auschwitz. After World War II, my father and his parents had been trapped in Hungary as it fell to communism. Yet in coming to America, they were given an opportunity to build a better life, a life in which they were free to practice their faith without fear.

Courtesy of the Israel Defense Forces and Defense Establishment Archives

In this video (edited for length by The Atlantic), the author's parents are seen disembarking a plane at Ben Gurion Airport, in Tel Aviv, on July 4, 1976.

The passage of time has only sharpened the lessons of Entebbe for me. There is a price to be paid for freedom. Capitulation to terror doesn’t work; it is not in the nature of terrorists to compromise. And I grew up understanding that I had a responsibility, a duty, to protect innocent people from terrorism. That, along with my family’s gratitude for America, is why I pursued a career in the U.S. intelligence community. I knew from the time I was little that the world is not inherently safe. Safety is given to us by intelligence analysts reviewing threats 24 hours a day, by commandos ready to deploy at a moment’s notice, and by leaders who find the courage to make the toughest calls. We will always have among us those ready to take hostages, and we will always require good people who are willing to stand up to them and capable of doing so.

We are marking the 50th anniversary of the Entebbe rescue—and soon the 25th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in history, on September 11, 2001. Our intelligence services and military have made technical advances in data collection and analysis, in satellite surveillance, and in hostage rescue. But even as democratic governments have become more proficient and more technologically adept at thwarting terrorists, some in our societies have become insensitive, or even callous, about the civilizational consequences of terror and violence.

Today, a rescue operation on the scale of Entebbe’s would be monitored in real time from a secure operations center, streamed via high-definition drone feeds, and supported by encrypted satellite networks and teams of intelligence analysts. I’ve observed those operations firsthand.

In 1976, the men who flew to Entebbe were very much alone. They traveled nearly 2,500 miles from home into a hostile country, landing on a blacked-out runway with a decoy Mercedes designed to mimic Amin’s limousine. A radar glitch, a malfunctioning fuel gauge, or a watchful guard could have meant failure. Indeed, the mission’s commander, Colonel Jonathan Netanyahu, was killed by a shot from a Ugandan guard in the airport’s control tower.

When we talk about military service, we often speak in the abstract language of patriotism and duty. But service is each individual’s decision to risk their life for something they believe in. Those paratroopers knew that this operation was proceeding with extremely limited training and intelligence. Yet they went anyway, driven by the chance to save lives.

Before the commandos could board those C-130s, their political leaders had to make the decision to send them. The hijackers had threatened to execute the 106 captives if their demands were not met. In the chaotic days following the hijacking, the path of least resistance was obvious: negotiation and compromise.

The prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, however, knew that negotiating with terrorists would encourage the next hijacking. Rabin and his defense minister, Shimon Peres, argued against negotiations, noting that if Israel gave in, “everyone will understand us, but no one will respect us.”

The political courage required to make that call was immense. Families of the hostages were actively demonstrating, demanding that the government negotiate. The odds of failure were sizable. Yet true leadership requires the courage to absorb risk when the long-term stakes are high. The ultimate responsibility of a leader is to choose not the easiest option, but the one that best preserves the state’s security and core interests. In that vein, the Kenyan government also showed political courage by allowing the rescue planes to refuel in Nairobi and the injured to be treated there.

Terrorism evolved from the 1970s era of hijackings and hostage-takings, designed to capture global media attention, to the religiously motivated, large-scale bombings of the early 2000s. Post-9/11, aggressive counterterrorism fractured those centralized networks. Yet a dangerous intellectual effort continues that romanticizes terrorism and rebrands the deliberate slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of civilians as a justifiable, even an aesthetic, form of “resistance.” We see this in the Middle Eastern context, and we see it here at home: Just consider the number of people who express sympathy for the murderer of a health-care executive or the would-be assassins of President Trump.

The irony is that even as we have advanced in our technical ability to discover and disrupt terrorism, some in Western societies have grown forgiving of violent people who feel that the only way for them to achieve their goals is through murder.

[From the July 2026 issue: How America gave up on its own history]

Fifty years ago, the hijackers at Entebbe also cloaked themselves in the language of liberation. But my parents did not see freedom fighters in that terminal; they saw captors who were willing to use the lives of grandmothers and children as currency. Nothing justified their threats to turn a civilian airport terminal into a slaughterhouse. When we tolerate the romanticization of political violence, we cede the moral high ground and pave the way for another 9/11 or another cowardly attack on a school or music festival.

Every time I’ve worked on a policy or an operation designed to disrupt an attack, I have thought of those C-130s flying through the African night to rescue a young couple with a six-month-old baby at home. During the period when I led the NSA’s intelligence operations, I would stop into the 24/7 operations center, especially at night and during holiday weekends, to visit those who were “on the watch” as their fellow Americans were enjoying time with family and friends. One team, devoted to recovering hostages, continuously monitors intelligence regarding American or allied-citizen hostages around the world. It can be tedious work, sometimes spanning years. At times, I would convey to them my parents’ story and how a family waiting somewhere was grateful for their dedication.

My parents came home that July Fourth 50 years ago. My family’s history taught me that freedom is fragile. Entebbe taught me that it survives only because people choose to defend it. As we celebrate America’s founding and freedoms, let us take a moment to reflect on those lessons and the link between them. It is not just our technical skills and our brave men and women in uniform and in America’s intelligence services who keep us safe. Leadership matters, and so does the recognition that terrorism should never be excused or tolerated.

What I Learned From ROTC

2026-07-03T06:00:00-04:00

My military career was part-time, uneventful, and inglorious. I leveled out as a captain in the Army (a courtesy, really, because I got the promotion as I went on inactive status), and other than training stints, my only duty was as a reservist, first in a technical-intelligence company and then in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. I first visited an active war zone 20 years after being commissioned, and then only as a middle-aged civilian Pentagon adviser. My highest decoration was the Army Commendation Medal, which was merely a formal acknowledgment that the military had not detected any criminal behavior on my part.

And yet military training, beginning with participating in the Army’s Reserve Officer Training Corps, was a pivotal experience. I joined up as a graduate student at Harvard, believing that it would be good for me to have some modicum of military time under my belt if I wanted to write about such matters going forward. This was, in 1980, somewhat unorthodox, but the colonel who ran the MIT ROTC detachment was expert at finagling unusual appointments. I slipped through, despite having a dislocated shoulder.

Harvard did not have ROTC back then, supposedly because of discrimination against gays in the military—which was real—although that was also something of an excuse for a still-liberal university haunted by the Vietnam War to keep uniforms off of its campus. Half a dozen or so oddball undergraduates trekked every week to MIT, there to be instructed chiefly by two sergeants. Sergeant Ross and Sergeant Mac taught me a lot, beginning with how to read a map and issue a patrol order, but much more about valuing people with practical skills. When we were commissioned, they would call us sir or ma’am, but with a twinkle in the eye. We and they knew who was learning from whom.

Service in the Army quickly teaches one to respect people who can shoot straight, get rations on time, repair busted equipment, and, even more important, instruct and motivate other people to do so. Leading a patrol on an exercise one night in a cold and rainy Fort Devens training area, when all of us were short on sleep, cranky, wet, lost, and feeling sorry for ourselves, made me realize that how well we had done on our SATs and final exams really did not matter. Grit and discipline were the ticket, and when I found myself gripping the lapels of a brilliant future physicist and saying, “No, goddamn it, you’re going to keep on!,” I realized that sweet reason occasionally gives way to other motivations.

[From the July 2026 issue: Being Black in Pete Hegseth’s military]

Military experience is, sooner or later, humbling. One night, for example, I walked smack into a tree, scratching a cornea, after a flash-bang went off near me. It was a very stupid injury. Military experience teaches stoicism too. During summer camp, I had to shimmy out on a rope, hang from it, and ask permission to drop 20 feet into a muddy stream. Favoring my bum shoulder, I put my weight on the other, which promptly also dislocated. “Cadet,” the sergeant growled, “you didn’t ask permission to drop.” “I know sergeant. My shoulder just dislocated.” “Oh. Jones, take the cadet to the docs.” No sympathy expressed, and, I realized, none needed.

There were the inspiring moments too—I have a tingle at memories of marching to the mess hall at the break of day, the sun rising over snow-covered central Massachusetts hills, a more senior cadet calling cadences—macabre, humorous, occasionally a bit solemn. “Move out with a purpose” was the phrase, and so we did. Or the time when on a very long run in the Arizona sun, one of my comrades nearly collapsed, and the rest of us took turns to carry him across the finish line.

Most organizations are rife with awful leaders, sometimes at the very top. The military, and perhaps the Army above all, understands the importance of teaching the leadership basics. “The person in charge eats last.” “Your priorities are always—always—your mission, your people, and only then yourself.” “Set the example.” “Lead from the front.” “You are accountable for your people and their gear.” Simple maxims all, learned almost entirely by the experience of living them. It amounted to Leadership 101, and it has stood me in good stead. I have often wished that everyone in a position to lead had to internalize those basic ideas.

I do not know what kind of wartime soldier I would have made; I do know I would have been a terrible peacetime soldier. I have always worn my hair short but hated the idea of being told I have to. I was terrible at polishing my rank insignia and spit-shining my boots. Marching in step was a challenge. But I am glad I had to do those things.

[Listen: Has Trump corrupted the military?]

The Army, being composed of human beings, has not only an unusually high percentage of straight arrows and even heroes but also its share of fools, dullards, bullies, and liars. Firsthand experience of those things, too, was invaluable. Because military service is now so far from the norm, particularly among American elites, we tend to either idolize soldiers or treat them as a different species. Even a modicum of military service is an antidote to either failing.

In many ways, military experience of this kind is common to any good army. But it was also distinctively American. Baron von Steuben, the Prussian drill master who helped train the Army at Valley Forge, is supposed to have said, “In Europe, you say to your soldier, ‘Do this’ and he does it. But I am obliged to say to the American, ‘This is why you ought to do this,’ and then he does it.” I can believe it. The ideal in the Prussian army of his time was kadavergehorsam, literally “corpse-like obedience.” America’s war of independence was won with a different breed of soldier.

Military humor in those days, and now, retained more than a bit of the flavor of Bill Mauldin’s wonderfully seditious Willie-and-Joe cartoons from Stars and Stripes during World War II. The jaundiced view of officers, the not-so-subtle mockery of stuffed shirts and blowhards, the poking fun at the absurdities of military life reduced the various military castes to a common and realistic human scale.

As an academic and public servant, I have had the great good fortune of living in the company of soldiers, including some of the finest of this generation. I saw many of them doing infinitely harder things than I ever had to do or could have done. But my experiences as a graduate-student cadet and second lieutenant were even more powerful. And as the 250th anniversary of this country’s birth comes around, I think of the American soldiers without whom this country would not be as free, as prosperous, and as promising as it remains today, even in a dreadful political season. There are many individuals, groups, and institutions to thank on July 4 for what we have today. The U.S. Army, to my mind, should be in the front rank.

The Father of American Pop Music Turns 200

2026-07-02T18:28:00-04:00

Two-hundred years ago, on July 4, 1826, the United States celebrated its 50th birthday. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. And another enduring voice was born: the songwriter Stephen Foster.

The timing is fitting, for Foster is a quintessentially American figure. His name is not as famous as it once was—nor as famous as successors such as Cole Porter or Irving Berlin—but his influence on music remains huge. Songs like “Oh! Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” and “Old Folks at Home” remain familiar, even if many assume that they are traditional folk songs. Foster effectively invented the idea of a professional songwriter; founded the American songbook and pioneered the now-standard verse-chorus structure; and inspired the intellectual-property law of music. His untimely death set the template for the doomed, dissolute musician. Meanwhile, the racist elements of his music, and the racial dynamics of his era, continue to complicate his legacy. What could be more American than that?

Foster was born into a prominent family in Pittsburgh. He had neither the interest nor aptitude for business or much else, but he managed to find a niche writing songs, often either for minstrel bands or to be sold as sheet music. “All he had was his ability to create poetry and melody and put them together,” Deane L. Root, a professor emeritus of music at the University of Pittsburgh and a Foster scholar, told me. By doing that, he created the model for the professional songwriters who have followed—Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, Motown’s Holland-Dozier-Holland team, Nashville’s Music Row, and modern-day hitmakers such as Max Martin.

The guitarist Bill Frisell has been recording Foster’s music since the early 1990s and even named a group “Beautiful Dreamers” after the Foster composition, but he first encountered the songs as a young child. “It’s just the perfect model for what a melody and the form of a song can be,” he told me. “There’s a million other composers, but just thinking of popular-song form, in a way this seems like ground zero for so much stuff that we have now.” Frisell has recorded “Hard Times” as both a rollicking swing tune and a wistful lament, which he said is a testament to the song’s craftsmanship. “The melody just gets so deep down in you. It’s like the trunk of a tree, or the roots of the tree, and then you can start climbing around up there.”

Musical skill, then as now, was not enough to guarantee financial stability. Early in his career, Foster had a major hit with “Oh! Susanna” in 1847. But despite writing dozens of songs, he struggled to earn a consistent living, making $10 to $15 a song—$400 to $500 today. “He didn’t have an agent, he didn’t have a lawyer who could work this for him. He didn’t have somebody who knew the business on his behalf, writing up contracts with publishers and theater owners and all the rest,” Root said. Foster died destitute in 1864, after falling and injuring himself in the bathroom of a hotel on the Bowery, becoming perhaps the first of many famous wastrels in American popular music. According to legend, Foster was drunk, though experts dispute this.

Foster’s songs became ubiquitous—people sometimes mistook them for folk songs even during his lifetime—and were performed everywhere from back porches to opera houses, in every genre imaginable. But the man himself became best known only after his death, thanks to a fierce reputation-building effort by his brother. In the 1890s, Root told me, Foster became the first American composer to have his work collected in a book. This raised his profile and made him a model for a new generation of songwriters, who copied his verse-chorus structure. When Berlin and others formed ASCAP, now the leading performance-rights organization, to handle royalties in 1914, they had Foster in mind as a cautionary tale.

Speaking about Foster without talking about race is impossible. Frisell told me he’d lain awake the night before we spoke, thinking about how difficult it was to discuss. The leading popular music of the era was minstrelsy, which, as the musician Melvin Gibbs writes in his new book, How Black Music Took Over the World, “presented the version of Blackness that white audiences were willing to accept.” White minstrel musicians would either commercialize Black culture (a pattern that persists in popular music) or else perform exaggerated stereotypes of it. Many of Foster’s songs were written for Christy’s Minstrels, a major minstrel troupe of the 1840s and 1850s that performed in blackface, and his lyrics traffic in slurs, pro-Confederate sentiments, and revisionism about the horrors of slavery, even though he’d witnessed it himself. (Foster’s personal politics are tough to pin down; he also wrote pro-Union songs, and he seems to have been most interested in getting a paycheck.)

“My Old Kentucky Home” is that commonwealth’s state song, and it’s a staple of the Kentucky Derby. The lyrics describe the sorrows of a family separated by slavery, and Frederick Douglass praised the song for awakening abolitionist sentiments. Yet the words also include a slur that was sanitized in 1986—jarringly late. Some of the many Looney Tunes segments that feature his music were later withdrawn from circulation because of their offensive material. But the great Black bass-baritone and civil-rights activist Paul Robeson also recorded “My Old Kentucky Home” in its unexpurgated form, forcing listeners to confront the original content and context.

The musician-scholar Rhiannon Giddens, a leading interpreter of 19th-century American songs, told me that discussing Foster’s context is difficult because minstrel entertainment is so little understood today. “I don’t know if he was any more racist than the average person” of his time, she said. “He was just trying to make a buck.” She finds Foster more interesting for what he represents than who he was as an individual.

For a May concert at Carnegie Hall, part of commemorations of the nation’s 250th anniversary, she closed a set with “Hard Times.” Giddens doesn’t perform Foster’s music much, looking to spotlight lesser-known work, but she decided it was the right piece for the moment. For me and for many others, it’s Foster’s finest work. The song is untainted by dialect, with a memorable tune and powerful lyrics, and I have found it a salve during recent hard times. Whatever the flaws of Foster and his music, Giddens said, “The man could write a tune.” When she and her backing group played “Hard Times,” it brought down the house, just as it has done for some 170 years now.

Related:

Stephen C. Foster and Negro minstrelsy (From 1867)
Track of the year: “Hard Times Come Again No More” (From 2016)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Russia hit Kyiv with almost 500 drones in a large-scale attack last night that killed at least 21 people and wounded 85 more, according to the city’s mayor.
At least 2,295 people are confirmed to have died in the Venezuelan earthquakes, and nearly 50,000 people remain missing.
A U.S. Olympian was indicted for destruction of property after he was arrested for allegedly touching a chunk of detached coating in the Reflecting Pool last month. The Olympian says he did not remove or destroy any of the coating.

The Other Case for Birthright Citizenship

2026-07-02T18:12:53-04:00

Updated at 8:43 a.m. ET on July 3, 2026

“We’re in a new world now,” Solicitor General John Sauer told the U.S. Supreme Court during oral argument this April in the birthright-citizenship case Trump v. Barbara, “where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen.” Chief Justice John Roberts quickly shot him down, replying, “Well, it’s a new world,” but it’s “the same Constitution.”

Roberts’s quip foreshadowed his opinion on behalf of the Court holding that near-universal birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the text of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause. His opinion is a meticulous rendition of U.S. history up to the 1868 ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, drawing on abundant evidence that the citizenship clause was intended to apply to nearly everyone born in the United States. The decision was a major defeat for one of President Trump’s signature policy initiatives. Notably absent from Roberts’s opinion, however, was any discussion of whether birthright citizenship is a good idea in 21st-century America.

And that’s a pity, because birthright citizenship brings many practical benefits to the United States today—arguments that the nation needs to hear, given the campaign being mounted against it. By contrast, the three dissenting justices did not hold back, devoting many pages to claims that birthright citizenship is destructive and even dangerous in our modern, mobile world—assertions that are almost entirely unsupported and yet that went unrefuted. Defenders of birthright citizenship have made strong legal arguments in its favor; they need to start making the policy case for it as well.

It’s an easy case to make. The children of immigrants are about 10 percent of the total U.S. population. They power the U.S. economy and serve in significant numbers in the government and the military. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants and their children, more than 10 percent of the current members of Congress are children of immigrants, and six out of 45 U.S. presidents, including Trump, had at least one immigrant parent. They are so well integrated into the fabric of the nation that most of us have no idea which of our neighbors and colleagues were born to immigrant parents unless they choose to tell us.

[Read: The most surprising part of the birthright-citizenship decision]

Not all of these examples of successful children of immigrants would have been excluded from citizenship under Trump’s executive order, of course, but some certainly would have. (And in any case, it is impossible to know who qualifies for citizenship under Trump’s executive order without first scrutinizing their ancestry—which is yet another reason to reject it.) The larger point, though, is that children of immigrants have proved to be one of America’s greatest assets.

If Trump’s executive order had gone into effect, it would have denied citizenship to about 255,000 newborn children a year going forward—a result that would have been not only a nightmare for them and their families but also bad news for the nation’s economy. Economists have found that citizenship status brings with it higher earnings. Even green-card holders who have the right to work and live in the United States indefinitely earn more after they naturalize. If all of these children remained in the U.S. without citizenship, they would contribute less to the tax base and to our already-strapped Social Security system. Worse, if they were deported (or if they self-deported), their absence would accelerate the demographic decline that is transforming us into an aging society with too few workers to support the retiring Baby Boomers.

In addition to these economic challenges, denying birthright citizenship undermines America’s founding principle that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The United States cannot claim to be a democracy and simultaneously deny the right to vote and hold office to a significant percentage of its inhabitants and their offspring in perpetuity, excluding them based on their “blood” and without regard to the fact that they are here. This is the essential truth that the framers of the citizenship clause recognized back in 1868, which is why they established birthright citizenship to protect not only the newly freed slaves but also the children of immigrants arriving from around the world. It remains just as true today.

In dissent, Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito collectively devoted thousands of words to describing what Alito called the “grotesque result” of granting citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants and birth tourists.

Let’s start with “birth tourism”—the assertion that foreign women are coming to the United States on tourist visas to give birth to U.S.-citizen babies and then leave, which has become the focus of much of the conservative outrage over birthright citizenship. At the oral argument, Sauer stated that birth tourists from China and Russia number in the millions. But when the chief justice asked him directly whether he knew “how common that is or how significant a problem that is,” the solicitor general was forced to admit, “No one knows for sure.”

In fact, the U.S. government makes no effort to track birth tourism, which alone suggests that it is not a major crisis. The Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for restricting immigration, makes a rough guess of 26,000 birth-tourist babies a year—fewer than 1 percent of the 3.6 million total births recorded in the United States annually.

If birth tourism seems troubling despite its small numbers, I have good news: It is already illegal. Under a federal regulation in place since 2020, the United States can deny a tourist visa to a woman whose primary purpose in coming to the U.S. is to give birth. That prohibition can be enforced by Customs and Border Protection officials at U.S. airports and at the country’s borders. Following its Supreme Court loss, the Trump administration announced plans to start prosecuting violators of that law; why it didn’t do so earlier is unclear. (I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the government more than a year ago asking for records regarding this policy’s implementation but have yet to receive a response.) In short, there is no need to take a hammer to birthright citizenship when we can use a scalpel to target birth tourism specifically.

What about Sauer’s claim that we live in a “new world” in which “8 billion people” (the entire world’s population) are a plane ride away from giving birth on U.S. soil? That is laughable.

True, airplanes didn’t exist in 1868 (though steamships did, and millions of foreigners traveled to the United States in the 19th century). Also true, however, is that today, international travel requires a passport and often a visa—neither of which was needed in 1868. Back then, there were few immigration restrictions and no federal immigration officials. Today, the nation spends billions to screen entrants using cutting-edge biometric tools, and thousands of Customs and Border Protection officers are stationed at every international airport and port of entry in the country. Most of the world’s 8 billion people cannot even board a plane to the United States or a nearby country because they lack the requisite documents, even assuming they can afford the price of a plane ticket.

[Adam Serwer: What the birthright case is really about]

The issue of granting birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants also concerned the dissenters. Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who concurred in the result, described illegal immigration as a “new circumstance” that the “Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment could not have fully anticipated,” then concluded that “presumably” they would not have wanted to grant the “birthright citizenship benefit” to the children of these lawbreakers. Justice Alito argued that birthright citizenship provides a “powerful incentive to enter or remain in this country illegally.” These justices are correct that the United States, like the rest of the developed world, is wrestling with the relatively recent problem of large-scale illegal immigration. Where they go wrong is assuming that birthright citizenship has anything to do with it.

By design, U.S. law makes it extremely difficult, often impossible, for undocumented parents in the United States to gain legal status based on a child’s citizenship. And studies have shown that the primary incentive for irregular migration is jobs for the parents, not birthright citizenship for their children. That is why the rate of such migration drops precipitously during U.S. recessions. Moreover, European countries do not have birthright citizenship, yet they also struggle with waves of immigrants fleeing violence and poverty for a better life.

If the government truly wanted to deter undocumented immigrants, it would crack down on the many thousands of U.S. citizens and corporations that violate immigration law by hiring them. Yet no administration, Republican or Democrat, has made a serious effort to enforce immigration law against U.S. employers of undocumented immigrants. The few times that Trump briefly attempted broader enforcement—for example, by targeting Wisconsin dairy farms, whose workforce is roughly 70 percent undocumented—he faced significant pushback from his own supporters. Far from deporting those workers and penalizing their employers, Trump is allowing this—he is expected to announce a special guest-worker program just for these dairy farmers (the majority of whom happen to be Trump supporters) in the coming weeks.

All of this should make us wonder about the real reasons Trump has expended extraordinary time and effort to end birthright citizenship. Perhaps it has nothing to do with illegal immigration and birth tourism. Perhaps it is instead an attempt to redefine the meaning of American to exclude the descendants of newcomers, many of whom are not white. If so, Trump lost—but unless supporters of birthright citizenship defend it on policy as well as legal grounds, his view of who should be an American may ultimately prevail.

Even Trump Can’t Believe How Well This Book Has Sold

2026-07-02T18:01:40-04:00

Literary agents and book editors are in the business of selling stories, so drama comes easily to them. Even temporary sales slumps breed alarmist pronouncements; book parties in disfavored genres begin to feel like wakes, sending off one more spirit to the inevitable afterworld of the remainder shelf. The novel has apparently been declared dead 30 times since 1902. But lately, the focus of industry laments has been nonfiction—from highly topical work to the more historically focused “dad book”—which has declined precipitously after a few years dominated by newsy books about Trump and his presidency (even Omarosa had her moment). The trend, if sometimes exaggerated, is certainly real. As of last month, according to BookScan, sales of titles dealing with politics and current affairs were down 19 percent from a year earlier. Yet even as conventional wisdom solidifies around the idea that no one wants to read about reality anymore, along comes an exception, perhaps a harbinger of a shift in publishing—or at least in Donald Trump’s position in the collective consciousness.

Regime Change, a new chronicle of Trump’s second term by the New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, was published last week and quickly achieved stratospheric sales for a nonfiction book. I’m not really in the habit of quoting press releases, but Simon & Schuster is correct in characterizing a book that sells more than 300,000 copies in a week as a “blockbuster.” Most nonfiction books on the best-seller list can get there after moving fewer than 10,000 copies over seven days. For the publishing folks I spoke with, the numbers that Regime Change is generating are a genuine source of hope, as well as some head-scratching.

Part of the confusion stems from the fact that the book in question is nearly 500 pages about Trump. One prevailing industry assumption is that critics of the president are thoroughly wrung out after more than a decade of content about his behavior, his psychology, and the swirl of chaos that surrounds him (never mind the number of Truth Social posts he produces in a night). The too-muchness of Trump and his era has even been linked to one of the recent bright spots of publishing—the double-barreled escapism of romantasy. The first Trump term generated regular best sellers in the Trumpology genre—including Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury and a trilogy from that old stalwart of White House chroniclers, Bob Woodward—but this time around, as the headline of an Atlantic article by Paul Farhi put it earlier this year, “Trump Books Aren’t Selling Anymore.”

So what is happening here? Trump expressed his annoyance with the success of Regime Change after receiving what he called a “very quick and boring briefing” on the book. The agents and editors I spoke with were more sanguine—and not completely surprised. The word I heard most when I asked about the book was cyclical—as in, publishing has its ups and downs, and this might provide reason to hope that politics books could be making a comeback.

[Read: The apotheosis of Donald Trump]

The path of Regime Change’s success is, after all, a familiar one. Haberman and Swan have one of the biggest print platforms in the world at The New York Times. About two weeks before their book was published, they shared an adapted excerpt in the paper containing choice tidbits from their reporting, about meetings that Trump’s advisers held in the Situation Room to try to contain fallout from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Laying such a honey trail of details is a tried and tested method of book promotion; think of every Woodward book. It just hasn’t worked so well recently—certainly not for books about the 2024 election, including one by three star reporters that barely grazed the best-seller list. What helped in the case of Regime Change, one editor told me, was that, unlike the inner workings of Trump’s White House, the Epstein affair seems to generate near-bottomless interest. So the excerpt itself was well chosen.

Haberman and Swan may have benefited, too, from a more open field. Because publishers have been avoiding these sorts of books, Regime Change offers perhaps the first major comprehensively reported account of Trump’s second term. The literary agent Jim Rutman is skeptical that these sales mean anything for the larger nonfiction landscape; he told me that even in a diminished market, “there was always likely to be some available space for the exceptional few.” In this winner-take-all system, what publishers want, another prominent agent, Elyse Cheney, told me, is a “category killer,” which is what this title is. If readers are going to buy only one book about Trump, it should be the book about Trump.

Although these dynamics might help explain why Regime Change broke through, they still don’t answer the question of why a reading public tired of Trump decided to shell out for another book about him. To figure that out, it might help to look at the Trump administration itself. The president’s popularity has hit new lows; his ability to carry out his agenda is diminished. Trump cannot extract himself from a war that almost no one seems to want or understand why he entered in the first place. Even Republicans in Congress are now pushing back against some of his most outrageously self-interested moves. And the midterm elections are nearing, which means that voters can soon take action. If Trump’s critics, the people most likely to pick up this book, felt helpless against the barrage of executive orders and power grabs that marked the past 18 months, they are approaching a moment when they can do something about it. They have something to look forward to, a potential change in the status quo.

This makes reading about Trump feel less like trying to focus while getting beaten up and more like thinking back on the fight the next day. A similar dynamic may have been at work in the equally blockbuster-y performance of Kamala Harris’s memoir, 107 Days, last year. Readers were ready for a postmortem of that brutal presidential campaign. And now they might be ready to think about the first year of Trump’s second term—about DOGE and ICE and the tariffs and Venezuela—from a place of not just slight remove but relative safety, in which the power behind these wild changes is waning and a coming election might curtail it for the rest of Trump’s term. Regime Change reads like an account of the crescendo and operatic downfall of Trump; even the accumulation of details about his bathroom preferences somehow feels like a final degradation.

[Read: Trump books aren’t selling anymore]

One of the pleasures of a good book, even a nonfiction one, is the illusion of closure. You can literally close it whenever you like, even though you know that the real world and its news continues, nonstop. Trump has deprived us of the particular luxury of hindsight for more than a decade now. Every sense of an ending—the Access Hollywood tape, the first and second impeachments, the election of Joe Biden—has proved to be a false one. Perhaps, as that realization settled in, books about him grew less appealing. But if hundreds of thousands of people are buying this latest one, it might be because we have reached a point where it’s possible, once again, to imagine what comes next.

The $10,000 MacBook Pro Is Here

2026-07-02T13:47:00-04:00

There are many things you can buy for $10,000: A nose job. With luck, a used car. A middling ticket to the World Cup final. Or you could purchase a MacBook Pro. That’s how much the highest-end, fully loaded version of Apple’s laptop now costs—$3,000 more than it did last week.

Maybe you don’t need the most powerful MacBook Pro. But last Thursday, Apple announced price hikes on most of its products. Apple’s cheapest laptop, the MacBook Neo, debuted for $600 just a few months ago. Now it’s less of a steal at $700. Apple’s base tablet model costs 30 percent more. Although iPhones are the same price (for now), every Mac and iPad model is now more expensive. So are other gadgets: Even the HomePod mini, a smart speaker that debuted six years ago, will set you back an extra $30. The day the new prices hit Apple’s website, people ran to Costco and Best Buy hoping to take advantage of some lag between the new and old world.

The products are more expensive because they now cost more to make. Specifically, one particular component has become considerably more expensive: RAM, short for “random-access memory.” RAM is essential in practically every electronic device. It’s what allows you to toggle between the 30 different tabs you might have open right now. And this year, the price of RAM has quadrupled.

Blame the AI boom. Data centers use a gargantuan amount of memory chips. Amid the frenzied AI build-out, the world doesn’t have enough to go around. In a statement issued the day of the price increases, Apple wrote that “the rapid expansion of AI data centers” had forced its hand: “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.” Seemingly every laptop maker has already jacked up prices at this point. In October, Microsoft raised Xbox prices by up to $70; last week, the company announced another $100 hike. The effects of the memory shortage extend beyond laptops and gaming consoles. A coalition of trade groups recently wrote to the Trump administration that the memory shortage was jeopardizing the “production and availability of automobiles, medical devices, and other manufactured goods.”

If there’s one company that should have been able to weather this crisis, it’s Apple. In the world of consumer electronics, Apple is “an 800-pound gorilla,” Corey Cohen, a computer historian who authenticates vintage Apple products for museums, told me. The company is so big and exacting that it has long been able to essentially name its price for computing parts. Apple CEO Tim Cook has squeezed suppliers to secure better deals and sought to own as much of its production process as possible. Apple’s custom chips also shunt around electrical signals much faster than its competition, so its devices can do more with less memory.

Now Apple’s grip on the global supply chain is slipping. RAM is one of the most expensive components that Apple does not make itself. Instead of prioritizing Apple, RAM manufacturers are selling chips to AI companies that are willing to spend near-infinite amounts of money to acquire memory in the name of building more powerful bots. Apple’s problem extends beyond memory chips to any product AI companies decide they need. In 2013, the CEO of Taiwan Semiconductor, the world’s biggest chipmaker, spent $10 billion to invest in manufacturing Apple processors. Now AI companies are its most valuable customers, and Apple is reportedly fighting for enough production lines to fulfill its orders. Apple is reportedly low on a material known as T-glass, which is made almost exclusively by a single century-old Japanese textile company, and which AI companies have been buying up. (Apple did not respond to a request for comment.)

Compared with other electronics companies, Apple is still in an enviable position. Smaller tech companies are struggling to get memory manufacturers to even pick up their calls: GoPro, the action-camera maker, warned last month that it might go out of business because of the memory shortage. Apple enjoys margins fatter than most consumer-tech companies could dream of. “They’re sitting on a pile of cash, right?” Cohen told me. “Apple could survive selling zero products for years and not be in the red.” Raising prices is a choice by the company to cede as little ground on profits as possible.

No one enjoys paying more for the same thing. The ubiquity of Apple’s products makes its price hikes feel especially noticeable, and analysts I spoke with expect prices on iPhones to rise soon. The iPhone 18, set to be released this fall, could be up to $200 more expensive than its predecessor. The increases can easily compound when you are stuck inside Apple’s walled garden. Most iPhone users also own an iPad, and a third of Apple’s customers own the holy trinity: tablet, smartphone, laptop. iPhone parents raise iPad babies who get Macs during Apple’s annual back-to-school sale.

Memory prices may come down in the next few years as new RAM factories come online. But Apple’s prices are unlikely to ever go back. “Prices generally are a one-way ratchet,” Wamsi Mohan, an Apple analyst at Bank of America, told me. “Customers acclimate to paying more.”

Many Americans already worry that AI will take their jobs, dry their rivers, and run up their utility bills. A pricier laptop may not be the greatest worry, but it’s certainly not going to help sell anyone on the AI future.