The Atlantic

Why Trump Lost

2026-05-24T10:45:37-04:00

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The first surprising thing about President Trump’s impending defeat in the 2026 Iran war is that he already fought and won a successful war against Iran last year. In June 2025, U.S. and Israeli airstrikes badly damaged the Iranian nuclear program in 12 days of bombardment. Exactly how badly remains controversial. But they didn’t do nothing. If Trump had quit while ahead, he could have banked his gains from last June as a solid if imperfect win.

The second surprising thing about Trump’s impending defeat is that he does not seem to have cared at all about the only evident reason to resume fighting in 2026: the Iranian people’s rebellion against their brutal oppressors. Trump has never given any evidence of caring about Iranian democracy or human rights. He promised the Iranian people “Help is on the way” on January 13, but military operations did not commence until thousands were dead and the rebellion was already effectively crushed. During military operations, Trump made clear that he sought a deal with the existing regime. He made no effort to support or cooperate with Iranian dissidents before, during, or after the uprising.

The third surprising thing about Trump’s impending defeat is that even he himself seems never to have understood why he went back to war against Iran. What exactly did he think he would achieve? He kept saying that he wanted to ensure that Iran never developed a nuclear weapon. He also insisted that he had effectively prevented it from doing so in August. He seemed genuinely to believe that claim. If so, why resume the fighting? If, however, those words were wrong, then why not simply hit the nuclear sites again? Why the need for this bigger war?

Trump started the February 28 war for reasons of personality, not strategy. He is on his way to losing the war for the same reasons of personality.

Trump is arrogant. Think how often Trump mocks his predecessors as “dumb” and praises himself as “smart.” Those predecessors, from Jimmy Carter through Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, all had to ponder military responses to Iranian terrorism and aggression. They all ultimately decided not to wage a major war against Iranian national territory. Among the prime deterrents to action: the Strait of Hormuz problem. Trump apparently decided that a problem that was too hard for everybody else would magically disappear for him, because he is tough and growls in his official photographs.

Trump is reckless. Trump is not a plan-ahead guy. He plunges into desperate adventures without any clear endgame in mind. What really was Trump’s plan on January 6, 2021? After Mike Pence was seized by rioters and forced at gunpoint to recite the magic words Trump wanted him to say, what was supposed to happen then? The 81 million American majority who’d voted against Trump in 2020 would submit? The military, CIA, and FBI would follow blatantly illegal orders? In 2021, Trump provoked violence and hoped it would all somehow work out. He followed the same approach again in 2026.

Trump hates procedure. A lot of the apparatus of the modern presidency exists to force confrontations with unwelcome realities. Cabinet officers are confirmed by the Senate to assure the country that major offices are filled by people of character and competence. The National Security Council is supposed to process challenging data to ensure that the president receives necessary information. But to run the Department of Defense, Trump nominated and the Senate approved Pete Hegseth. Instead of choosing a national security adviser to replace Mike Waltz after Waltz’s resignation on May 1, 2025, Trump tapped Secretary of State Marco Rubio to take on the role. But to double up that particular job dooms the job not to be done at all, especially because Trump has shriveled the NSC’s staff and subjected it to loyalty tests demanded by his most screwball supporters.

Trump is panicky. For all his bluster and boasting, Trump cannot take the heat. Presidents who believe in their decisions ride out bad polls. Trump panics and reverses course. Trump has been signaling since mid-March that he wants an end to the Iran war at almost any price. The Iranians have read those signals. For all the damage the U.S. military inflicted on Iran, the Iranians seem to have gambled that they could outlast Trump. They’ve been proven right.

Trump is gullible. As Trump’s present secretary of state observed back in 2016, Trump is most fundamentally a con artist. But Trump is often a self-defeating con artist who falls victim to his own con. Trump demanded “unconditional surrender” from Iran. Instead, he’s negotiating an exit that concedes most of Iran’s demands and leaves Iran in a more dominant position over Persian Gulf oil traffic than it occupied before the war. But Trump seems genuinely to have convinced himself that he’s won a mighty victory, and he seems truly baffled that others decline to endorse his flim-flam.

Trump can’t lead. Trump’s method of governance is command. He cannot work across party lines, and he cannot speak to any part of the American nation beyond his MAGA base. A war leader, however, must be a national leader. War imposes costly sacrifices. Leaders who take the nation to war must explain those costs and inspire those sacrifices. Trump simply cannot do any of that work, and he has no idea how it could be done.

For three years in his first term, Trump benefited from the strong economy that he inherited. Then the pandemic struck, and his first instinct was to hunt for someone to blame. In this second presidency, his main work has been spectacular self-enrichment, even as the economy has sagged under the weight of his catastrophic trade wars. He made no case for an Iran war to the public and never sought approval by Congress. There are some Iran hawks on the Democratic side, especially in the Senate. Trump never tried to ally with them.

Trump’s vision of the presidency is authoritarian and kleptocratic: Issue orders, grab money, luxuriate in flattery, erect monuments to oneself. That’s no way to lead a nation through the hazards and difficulties of war. Now the war is ending on disadvantageous terms for the United States. Trump’s old methods will be turned to a new task: trying to deceive the American people and the world into believing that the war he lost was really a big win, the biggest ever, so big you cannot believe it. He’s likely to discover that, indeed, nobody does believe it.

How to Break Cuba

2026-05-24T08:01:34-04:00

In 1960, Washington watched aghast as Fidel Castro’s post-Revolution government seized companies and assets it viewed as the spoils of vanquished U.S. imperialism. Among the biggest prizes were two plants that sat above some of the largest nickel and cobalt deposits in the world. The United States had acquired one of them to secure a strategic supply of nickel for armor plating and aircraft engines during World War II. But the revolutionaries lacked know-how, and soon, the operations were struggling. “Cuban Mining Industry Virtually Destroyed in First Two Years of Castro Regime,” read a January 1961 New York Times headline, “PITS ARE CLOSED, FACTORIES SILENT.”

The Cuban regime turned to its Cold War patron, as it did for so much else in its early years. Soviet engineers and mining specialists retooled the Nicaro plant and the Moa Bay nickel complex into pillars of the island’s economy and icons of Cuban sovereignty, funding power plants and social programs. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Castro sought a replacement savior closer to home in a 1994 deal with Sherritt International, a Canadian nickel and cobalt miner and refiner. Cuba provided the ore and labor. Sherritt brought capital, refining technology, and access to global markets.

The U.S. tried repeatedly to sever that lifeline for Havana, including with a Bill Clinton–era law that barred any profits being recouped from property confiscated after the 1959 revolution. But the nickel and cobalt kept flowing. Nickel—raw or semifinished—was Cuba’s third-largest export in 2024, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, and China was the top recipient.

Now the Trump administration has targeted those industries anew as part of its all-points campaign to overpower the post-Castro regime. Other elements of that drive have been deliberately attention-grabbing. The Justice Department recently indicted 94-year-old Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother and successor, for the alleged downing of planes that killed three Americans and a U.S. resident 30 years ago. The USS Nimitz, an aircraft carrier, has moved into the Caribbean, much as the USS Gerald R. Ford approached Venezuela before the ouster of the dictator Nicolás Maduro. CIA Director John Ratcliffe recently made a highly unusual visit to his intelligence counterpart in Havana. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio marked Cuban Independence Day with a video message in Spanish telling Cubans that their government is to blame for their “unimaginable hardships.”

[Read: Cubans’ despair]

The blow that landed on May 1—packaged as a wonkish executive order—was much less flashy but did more immediate damage. The presidential decree imposed new sanctions on companies doing business with the regime, significantly expanding the comprehensive embargo and making it akin to those aimed at countries such as Iran, Russia, and North Korea. Within a week, Sherritt said that it would dissolve its partnership with the state-owned General Nickel Company, ending the Moa Nickel joint venture and other interests in electricity generation and natural gas.

Sherritt’s move spelled serious trouble for an economy already on the brink. For many months, the U.S. has enforced a blockade that stops Venezuelan and Mexican oil shipments from reaching Cuba. Factories have gone idle. Public transportation sputters. Long lines for basic goods stretch through Havana. Blackouts are commonplace. President Miguel Díaz-Canel described the U.S. sanctions as “collective punishment” on the Cuban people.

Then, last week, Sherritt announced it would only suspend its joint venture in Cuba and was in talks to sell a controlling ownership stake in Sherritt to Gillon Capital, with the apparent blessing of the U.S. State and Treasury Departments. Gillon is a Dallas-based firm that belongs to the family of Ray Washburne, a real-estate executive who served in the first Trump administration; neither firm responded to a request for comment.

Such a deal, if it goes through, could potentially bring the saga of Cuba’s mineral riches full circle by returning nickel and cobalt mines to U.S. ownership at a time when they have acquired a new strategic importance. Both minerals are used in manufacturing, including of cellphones and car batteries, and both help explain why the Trump administration is eager to bring Cuba to heel, one way or another.

Trump has not been seeking to normalize relations with the post-Castro regime so much as force a conditional surrender. Ratcliffe made the point to the Cubans last week while the president, Rubio, and several members of the administration’s senior foreign-policy team were dining on crispy beef ribs and roast duck in Beijing. The CIA chief’s mission to Havana was to “personally deliver President Trump’s message that the United States is prepared to seriously engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes fundamental changes,” a CIA official told me. Ratcliffe also warned that Trump’s threats should be treated as credible, the implication being that if the U.S. military could pluck Maduro from his home in Caracas, it could do the same to leaders in Havana. The U.S. carrier now lurking in the Caribbean serves as a constant reminder.

As with Venezuela, the United States sees Cuba as an unwelcome outpost of Russian and Chinese influence, not so much a Cold War relic as a current national-security threat sitting 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Ratcliffe’s discussions were held “against the backdrop that Cuba can no longer be a safe haven for adversaries in the Western Hemisphere,” the CIA official said.

The squeeze on Cuba’s nickel and cobalt operations fits into another area of geopolitical rivalry: the race for critical-minerals dominance. China is far ahead and uses its market power to dictate global terms. The Trump administration is trying to reduce U.S. dependence on Chinese supplies through sanctions, export controls, and an aggressive tariffs structure, as well as by imposing stiff penalties on businesses that rely on Chinese technology. Those are part of a broader effort to persuade mineral-rich countries in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia to redirect critical-minerals supply chains toward the United States. Diversifying away from China is often a condition of access to U.S. markets and financing.

[Read: All eyes on Cuba]

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is at the center of this initiative. He told me in a written response that the U.S. would like to see a critical-minerals partnership with Cuba that could create economic opportunities for “both the American and Cuban people.” But, he added, “the economic trajectory of Cuba will not change as long as the people who are in charge of it now remain in power.”

For decades, the red earth around the eastern Cuban town of Moa fueled the Cuban Revolution. The site of the joint venture with Sherritt still holds nearly a quarter century of remaining reserves, according to estimates from Sherritt. What its riches will power next may depend on the fate of Sherritt and its joint venture but Cuba could in theory become an important piece of Washington’s strategy for countering Beijing. Such a deal might also pave the way for other American businesses; Trump is enamored of the opportunities a pliant Cuba could offer domestic businesses, several U.S. officials told me, much as it did in the Fulgencio Batista era, leading up to the 1959 revolution.

But Havana, too, may have some leverage. The Trump administration blew up a Canadian company’s business in order to tighten the screws on the regime. But Cuba may be tempted to respond by offering shares in one of its crown jewels to an ally, or at least threatening to do so. “This is a good chance for China and Russia to step back in,” Diego von Vacano, a political-science professor and Latin America specialist at Texas A&M University, told me. In that case, the Trump administration might find that its drive to humble a tiny nearby regime hands further advantage to its chief adversaries in a much bigger, more important battle.

The Man Behind the Trump Administration’s Favorite Psychedelic

2026-05-24T08:00:00-04:00

W. Bryan Hubbard speaks a lot about divinity. He thinks that psychedelic drugs have divine origin and can put you in touch with a higher power. He also believes that his role in catalyzing the most prominent political action supporting psychedelics to date was divinely orchestrated.

And so meeting him at Trinity United Methodist Church in downtown Denver felt natural. The late-April light streamed through stained-glass windows while Hubbard, a broad-shouldered man with straight posture, settled into a pew. His brown hair was pulled back into a low bun, and he wore a plaid shirt and blue jeans. In a southern lilt, he described how he’s been generating previously unheard-of Republican enthusiasm for psychedelics, in particular for a drug called ibogaine. Though robust data from U.S.-based clinical trials about this drug are lacking, some researchers—along with a number of enthusiasts—believe that ibogaine may help people with opioid addiction and withdrawal, and perhaps PTSD and traumatic brain injuries too.

On a Saturday morning a couple of weeks before Hubbard and I met, Donald Trump signed an executive order that directed several federal agencies to accelerate research on psychedelics—including ibogaine—as treatments for mental-health conditions. Rumors about such an order had circulated among psychedelics insiders since the beginning of April, when Joe Rogan had hosted Hubbard and former Texas Governor Rick Perry on his podcast. When the headphones came off, Hubbard told me, he decided to ask Rogan for a favor: Would he contact the president about ibogaine? As Rogan recounted at the Oval Office, “Trump’s reply was, ‘Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval?’” (At the signing, Trump didn’t know at first how to pronounce the word ibogaine, though he did jokingly ask if he could have some.)

From the beginning of Trump’s second presidency, many psychedelics enthusiasts hoped that his administration would be favorable to the medical use of psychedelic drugs. MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression seemed to be the likeliest candidates, given that both regimens are in the late phases of clinical trials. But the final push for Trump’s most consequential psychedelics policy was linked to a drug whose benefits are supported by only a handful of preclinical studies and a single Phase 1 trial.

That strange turn speaks to Hubbard’s advocacy over the past few years. His success can be partly attributed to the fact that a meat-eating southerner and lifelong Republican is not the typical psychedelics spokesperson. But it also reflects a bigger shift in the political culture of psychedelics since the days of LSD-taking environmentalists and anti–Vietnam War protesters. Perry, a conservative as well, has been a prominent ibogaine supporter since he tried the drug in a Mexican medical clinic in 2023. Many high-profile combat veterans want medical access to ibogaine. Hubbard, who had posters of Ronald Reagan in his childhood bedroom, said that these days, he has more success proselytizing for ibogaine on the right than on the left. “I have been able to talk to the most religiously fundamentalist, white, Republican conservatives that you would imagine,” he told me. And many of them are on board.

In the dimly lit sanctuary of the church, Hubbard explained how he used to have the “typical conservative” view of psychedelics: “that these were a bunch of subversive, hippie drugs that made people roll around in the mud naked, and they had no beneficial or helpful purpose.” Then, in 2018, he read a Scientific American article that mentioned research on psilocybin for the treatment of alcohol-use disorder that piqued his curiosity. He estimated he had about a dozen psilocybin trips over the next four years.

In 2022, Hubbard, a lawyer, was offered a position as chair of the Kentucky Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission, in charge of distributing nearly $1 billion in settlement money from opioid companies to programs for addiction prevention, treatment, and recovery. Hubbard hosted town halls, where, he told me, “the sum-total message from the people who came to attend, was, We don’t think that you have either the competence or the honesty to do anything that’s going to help us.” Hubbard, eager for a new solution, turned to a psychedelics Substack writer he admired to ask if she knew of any compound that might help with opioid addiction. As he tells it, she responded, “Have you ever heard of ibogaine?”

Ibogaine is derived from a shrub called Tabernanthe iboga, which grows in Central and West Africa. In Gabon, iboga root is used in ritualistic ceremonies in the Bwiti tradition. Those ceremonies mark the transition to adulthood and can be grueling. “The experience was intended as a kind of temporary death,” the French anthropologist Julien Bonhomme wrote in a chapter of the book Expanding Mindscapes: A Global History of Psychedelics.

After the compound was isolated in Europe at the turn of the 20th century, an ibogaine-based drug was sold in France as a mild stimulant (low doses can increase energy), but it stopped being manufactured after athletes took it to enhance their performance. In 1962, an American with a heroin addiction, Howard Lotsof, received a gift of ibogaine from a chemist friend and noticed that his cravings disappeared after he took the drug. He shared it with other people who had heroin addictions and found that some of them also reduced their use and sidestepped major withdrawal symptoms. Some quit using entirely. Thanks to stories like Lotsof’s, even today, “ibogaine comes with this tremendous amount of mythology around its benefits for opioid disorder,” Joji Suzuki, an addiction psychiatrist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told me.

Lotsof tried to get scientists around the world to set up a proper clinical trial. But by the 1990s, such attempts had mostly stalled. Instead, advocacy groups raised money to send people desperate for addiction treatment, and later veterans, to ibogaine clinics outside the U.S., including in Saint Kitts, Mexico, and the Netherlands. In those settings, ibogaine leads to a trip that lasts anywhere from 12 to 36 hours. At first, a person has vivid, dreamlike hallucinations, often scenes from their own life. That’s followed by periods of contemplation, energized wakefulness, and, purportedly, a vanishing of withdrawal symptoms. The drug can also induce nausea and vomiting and has serious cardiac risks. Using it safely requires continuous heart monitoring, and some clinics now offer intravenous magnesium to reduce the chances of heart complications.

Few studies have examined ibogaine’s effects on opioid-use disorder and other conditions, and they tend to be on very small groups of people, many of whom sought out ibogaine on their own. In one observational study, 88 people who had gone to a clinic in Mexico between 2012 and 2015 filled out a survey. A majority said that ibogaine reduced their opioid-withdrawal symptoms, and at the time of the survey, 41 percent were abstinent. In a more recent, often-cited paper from Stanford, researchers scanned the brains of veterans with traumatic brain injuries before and after they went to a clinic in Mexico. Most of the veterans’ symptoms significantly improved. But the study had no control group, and the participants were atypical: male former Special Operations Forces veterans who were motivated enough to pay to travel for the treatment. Without further study, it’s hard to say how the effects they experienced might generalize to other populations.

[Read: Tripping on nothing]

Despite the scant hard evidence, Hubbard saw ibogaine as the solution his state needed. Within a year of learning about the drug, he drafted a proposal to dedicate 5 percent of the state’s opioid-settlement funds to researching ibogaine for opioid-use disorder. In addition to its potential to treat addiction, Hubbard believed ibogaine to be the ideal political candidate for state-funded psychedelics research in general. LSD and mushrooms came with baggage—notably the belief that they would make you go crazy or start wearing tie-dye—but no one had heard of ibogaine. It wasn’t a recreational drug, and had little potential to become one thanks to its often-punishing physical side effects. “I thought there was an opportunity to introduce ibogaine as a blank slate,” Hubbard said. In November of 2023, Hubbard and his wife even traveled to a clinic in Mexico to try ibogaine for themselves.

But then, political turnover killed the project. In late 2023, Hubbard alleges, a new state attorney general, Russell Coleman, pushed him out. “He expressed great displeasure with my public advocacy for ibogaine in Kentucky,” Hubbard wrote in his resignation letter. (Coleman did not respond to requests for comment.)

Hubbard, though, remained convinced that the need for new opioid-addiction treatments, as well as the potential benefits for veterans, made ibogaine the ultimate bipartisan psychedelic. In 2025, he and Perry founded their nonprofit, Americans for Ibogaine, and successfully lobbied for Texas to pass a $50 million fund-matching bill for ibogaine research. AFI has also been lobbying for a multistate partnership that would create a nationwide ibogaine trial. Lawmakers in red states—including Tennessee, Missouri, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and West Virginia—have led the charge on introducing, and in some cases passing, laws that support research on ibogaine. Even Kentucky recently passed a framework to study the use of ibogaine to treat substance-use disorders. Hubbard called it “full-circle justice.”

Psychedelics come with no inherent ideologies, of course. “Psychedelics seem to appear throughout history at moments when people are deeply questioning something,” Erika Dyck, a historian of medicine and psychedelics at the University of Saskatchewan, in Canada, told me.

This is how Hubbard understands any Republican acceptance of psychedelics. The new support coming from the right, he believes, mirrors the left’s mindset in the 1960s: a response to the widespread distrust of powerful people and federal institutions, and the resulting sense of disillusionment. “The right’s embrace of psychedelics is its own countercultural response,” he said. (The fact psychedelics may help American service members is certainly a helpful selling point too.)

Hubbard told me that his own politics are informed by his ancestors, who were coal miners from the mountains of Virginia, western North Carolina, and East Kentucky. One of his greatest influences, he said, is the United Mine Workers of America, a union that organized around improving working conditions and increasing wages. He said his great-great-grandfather, along with four of his brothers, crossed the Ohio River to fight against the South during the Civil War. Psychedelics, by his reckoning, are crucial for “everybody who wants to have a shot at living with any measure of freedom or dignity.”

Listening to Hubbard muse about universal human rights and freedom, it’s easy to understand why he’s frequently compared to a preacher. His remarks about the medical benefits of ibogaine quickly morph into pronouncements of the sacredness of humankind. “I see the science as a gateway to the spirituality,” he said. The 4,202-pipe organ gleamed over us.

Psychedelics and religion are no strangers. These compounds are used as religious sacraments in both Indigenous traditions and contemporary psychedelic churches. The author Aldous Huxley, who wrote about his own mescaline experience in The Doors of Perception, went on to argue that psychedelics would lead to mass spiritual evolution. (More recently, psychedelics researchers and advocates have said the same.) One of the most infamous studies of the 1960s involved a Harvard Ph.D. student giving mushrooms to divinity students because of the drugs’ ability to reliably induce mystical experiences. Lucas Richert, a historian of medicine and pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me Hubbard is so effective because he taps into that legacy. Hubbard’s advocacy becomes “as much a moral argument or a nationalistic argument, as a biomedical or regulatory argument,” Richert said. Hubbard is also not the only 21st-century conservative making the connection: Perry recently wrote the foreword for a book called The Christian’s Guide to Psychedelics.

For all his success with the right, Hubbard worries he’s not reaching, and is maybe even alienating, essential groups, including public-health experts and medical professionals. The American Psychiatric Association, for example, released a response to Trump’s executive order welcoming federal investment in research, but cautioning that there was “currently inadequate scientific evidence for endorsing the use of psychedelics to treat any psychiatric disorder except within the context of approved investigational studies.” Other psychedelics researchers have expressed wariness at how simplistically advocates like Hubbard sometimes present the drugs: as quick, miraculous cures, rather than difficult psychological and physical experiences that don’t work for everyone and can come with challenging side effects.

Opinions may be shifting even among the public-health establishment. Nora Volkow, the longtime director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said in 2024 that ibogaine was unlikely to ever receive approval as a treatment for opioid addiction. But at the American Psychiatric Association conference earlier this month, her presentation included positive remarks on ibogaine and other psychedelics, the industry news site Psychedelic Alpha reported. Still, Hubbard remains concerned about his audience. The week after we met, he testified at the Ohio capitol in support of legislation to establish ibogaine research in the state. When I asked him how it went, he said, “I wish that some of the audiences that I had the opportunity to speak to had a lot more Democrats and were a lot less white. That’s probably my biggest preoccupation right now.”

[Read: The horseshoe theory of psychedelics]

Suzuki, too, told me he worries about the politicization of psychedelics. If Republican enthusiasm can remove bureaucratic barriers to research on ibogaine and other drugs, he said, “I’m fully in support of it.” But too much partisan support could risk undermining the credibility of his and other researchers’ work. “The impression that I would want to avoid is that this particular project or that particular drug is being approved only because of their alignment with the current administration.”

In an ideal world, politics wouldn’t be able to soil good research. But partisan strife has a long reach. In Denver, I had originally arranged to meet Hubbard at a different church nearby. But the day before the scheduled appointment, I got a rush of emails and calls from a woman who worked there. She told me that after searching Hubbard’s name online, she would not be willing to host us. The church is progressive, and Hubbard, thanks to his association with Trump and Rogan, could alienate the congregation.

When I relayed this story to Hubbard, he momentarily appeared taken aback, then recovered. The woman’s reluctance, he said, was a sign of how divided the country is—exactly why psychedelics were needed to “restore the nation’s soul.” Before we left the church, I looked back at stained-glass windows depicting Jesus rising from the dead, winged and crowned, representing a link between the divine and humankind. Psychedelics, I thought, are undergoing a resurrection of their own. But it’s unclear if their worshippers will be willing to gather under the same roof.

The Kardashians Explain It All

2026-05-24T08:00:00-04:00

One of the boldest questions Barbara Walters ever asked was less a question than an insult. The year was 2011, and Walters was interviewing three members of the Kardashian family—the sisters Kim, Khloé, and Kourtney—and their mother, Kris Jenner. The conversation was, in theory, a compliment to her guests; Walters had included the Kardashians in the most recent edition of her annual “10 Most Fascinating People” list. But now, sitting with the four women, she observed: “You don’t really act; you don’t sing; you don’t dance. You don’t have any—forgive me—any talent.”

Had Walters been hoping to manufacture some drama with the remark—one of her own talents was her ability to make famous people cry on national television—she had underestimated the celebrities before her. “But we’re still entertaining people,” Khloé replied, meeting Walters’s barb with practiced placidity. Kim, taking her sister’s cue, noted the challenge of making people “fall in love with you for being you.”

Their serenity should not have come as a surprise. The Kardashians were professionally versed in treating the real as not quite real. And they had heard versions of Walters’s critique before. From nearly the moment that their first show, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, premiered, in 2007, its success had been met with suspicion. In its affect, the series was notably listless: Everyone involved (even the strivers it depicted) seemed a bit bored. It followed people who were wealthy and pretty, and their efforts to get wealthier and prettier. That it entertained viewers seemed, to its detractors, an indictment—not just of the family but also of the people who kept watching it. KUWTK was a canary in the content mine: evidence of all that can go wrong when “reality” is remade for ratings.

The anxiety the show provoked only added to its allure. KUWTK endured for an improbable 20 seasons, fueled by fans and hate-watchers and the fact that, commercially, the two amount to the same thing. By the time its finale aired on E!, in 2021, the show’s run read like a vindication of the Kardashians and their critics. The family was famous for being famous, the naysayers said. The Kardashians agreed—and then rode the fame, along with their Lamborghinis, all the way to the bank.

Today, the Kardashians are, collectively, more than just billionaires. They are a conglomerate with a brand identity, a Fortune 500–size operating budget, and an openness to being publicly traded. Repackaged as Instagram posts, TikTok reels, and meme-friendly screenshots, they are also their own corporate assets, their own sponsored content. The Kardashians are endlessly selling things (diet aids, makeup, apparel). Mostly, though, they are selling themselves.

[Read: The pandemic clarified who the Kardashians really are]

This is what Walters was hinting at when she asked the Kardashian women—informed them, really—about their lack of talent. Fame, being a currency, is typically earned. Talent has traditionally been one route to fame’s wealth. It has also, however, been associated with a kind of godliness: a gift that is possessed and that might be given to the world at large. Walters, in questioning the Kardashians’ talent, was doing more than merely insulting her guests. She was also (forgive her) implicating them. Their fame, she suggested, was ill-gotten—lucre not quite stolen but gained as passive income.

The claim was not new. What was remarkable was that it failed to recognize the more salient feature of the family’s ascendance: The Kardashians did not amass their power despite their lack of talent; they rose because they understand, with the canny foresight of the early adopter, how talent is being redefined.

Even the physical goods the Kardashians have brought to market—Skims, Kim’s shapewear brand, was recently valued at $5 billion, and Kylie sold more than half of her eponymous cosmetics company, in 2019, for $600 million—have been extensions of their telegenic brand. They are things that defer to images: products that exist primarily because, in the attention economy, eyeballs are meant to be monetized. And the Kardashians keep making us look.

You may not be able to name all of the people in the family (whose most prominent members also include Kendall and Kylie Jenner; the five sisters’ brother, Rob; and Kris’s former spouse Caitlyn Jenner). But you are subject to them all the same—and to the images, carefully posed and flawlessly filtered, that Kardashian Inc. and its subsidiaries churn out with factory efficiency. The Kardashians reside in Hidden Hills (and in Calabasas, and Malibu, and the Coachella Valley); as pieces of content, though, they live everywhere. Awareness of them is no longer an opt-in proposition.

Their power, because of that, is hegemonic—and historic. When, in 2015, Cosmopolitan dubbed the Kardashians “America’s First Family,” the magazine was making its own bid for eyeballs; it was also making a point. Democracies have their dynasties, and the Kardashians are among Americans’ unelected leaders, shaping our language and tastes and beauty standards, one piece of sponcon at a time. The title of their reality show acknowledged that ethereal form of influence. We keep up with the Kardashians in the same way that we keep up with the Joneses: involuntarily and inevitably. Like the Medicis, had that family patronized only themselves—like the Carnegies, had they manufactured not steel but empty air—the Kardashians have ascended, in their case by proving that nothingness, in a culture that defers to images, can be the stuff of empires.

They are also, as the psychotherapist and author MJ Corey argues in her exhaustive new analysis Dekonstructing the Kardashians, perfect metonyms for American culture—humans who have, as media figures, adopted the epic and somewhat pitiable proportions of Las Vegas, Disneyland, or the WWE. The Kardashians are hyperreal and fantastical, aspirational and kitsch. In her preface, Corey offers a note of apology for the topic at hand, quoting the author David Sinclair—who, in writing about the Spice Girls, observed that his subject would require him to defend the group’s honor and his own.

The rest of Corey’s book, however, is unapologetic, and rightfully so: The Kardashians matter, Corey suggests, because of who they are, but also because of who we are. They are fun-house mirrors, their cosmetically enhanced curves reflecting us back to ourselves both as we exist and as we might hope to be.

[Read: The sadness of the Kardashians]

Corey’s book—spun out from Kardashian Kolloquium, the name of various social-media accounts that she has maintained over the years to track the doings of America’s shadow First Family—reads less as a biography of one clan than as a study of the culture that elevated it. This makes Dekonstructing the Kardashians particularly compelling: To deconstruct the family, to treat them as a text to be read, as canon to be accepted, is to understand the media moment. The book’s subtitle is, aptly, A New Media Manifesto. The Kardashians, Corey writes, are “a composite of historical touchpoints, media tropes, and shifting identities.” They are reliably overexposed and underappreciated. Offering themselves up as images to be analyzed—“even if I’m objectifying myself, I feel good about it,” Kim once said, like a Pandora unleashing a flurry of think pieces—they function, effectively, as myths.

This is their talent, their gift. Societies need shared stories, shared icons, shared lore. The Kardashians provide them. The family, Corey argues, embodies the postmodern theorist Roland Barthes’ notion that images are collectively authored: objects that find their meaning in the way that viewers interpret them.

Dekonstructing the Kardashians can be dizzying in its scope. Corey, at different points, compares Kim to Marilyn Monroe, a Coke bottle, a Disney princess, and Mickey Mouse. Theorizing about the family, she invokes Benjamin and Baudrillard and Hegel and so many other thinkers that the book can read as a brief history of modern, and postmodern, thought. Remarkably, though, the book’s argument justifies its breadth. Dekonstructing the Kardashians, somewhat like Naomi Klein’s 2023 masterpiece, Doppelganger, is both about its nominal subject (Klein’s being, most directly, the writer Naomi Wolf) and not really about it at all. Klein treats Wolf—with whom she is often confused—as a metaphor for the divisions (of information, of political conviction, of reality) that are unsteadying American culture. Doppelgängers, the “twin strangers” of German folklore, are omens. Klein’s own double, having recently turned to the “mirror world” of conspiracism and paranoia, is a person whose path hints at trouble ahead.

To some viewers, the Kardashians may seem like trouble. For Corey, they are most interesting when met on their own terms. Who are they, as people? Their audiences will likely never know. Nor should we much care. The operative question is what they are, and why—and how they keep people watching.

This is perhaps why the Kardashians have retained their capacity to infuriate. Their success calls viewers’ bluff. Their status punctures one of Americans’ most fragile pieces of lore: the idea that the country, through its economy, is also a meritocracy. In that myth, markets are agents of morality. Through the market’s transactions, the idea goes, talent is rewarded; hard work gets its due.

The Kardashians, captains of industry in a post-industrial age, defy the old myths. Kim and her siblings were born into an age of excess, when “greed was good,” aspiration was limitless, and admiration for “lifestyles of the rich and famous”—something converted from a sociological category to a piece of entertainment—was losing its association with shame. Today, they are their own economic engines. The family employs not only the traditional Hollywood retinues (agents, assistants, stylists, housekeepers) but also people who act as their personal marketing departments, legal teams, and brand consultants.

The apex predators of our ever-more-stratified media environment have found their place at the top less by preying on others than by proving their willingness to be consumed: their bodies, ourselves. The Kardashians expose everything—the precise make of her breast implants (Kylie), the diet she used to drop a reported 16 pounds in three weeks (Kim), the plastic surgeon who performed her recent facelift (Kris)—while revealing, in practical terms, very little.

Their ability to shape-shift, literally and otherwise, is crucial to their appeal. They are living memes, infinitely adaptable and communally shared. They say almost nothing and, in that, they could mean almost anything—which makes them sphinxlike too. The Kardashians deliver their riddles in the internet’s global vernaculars: images, hashtags, assorted outrages. Gazing down, graceful and inscrutable, they befuddle all who behold them partly because they mean to and are good at it, and partly because befuddlement tends to double as engagement on Instagram.

Perhaps the family’s biggest riddle is what exactly it is giving back along the way. The Kardashians have been rewarded handsomely for their entrepreneurial solipsism. This is why they have the gross domestic product of a small country. But it is also why their power can seem so gross. The Kardashians may not be the icons we want, but they are the ones the system has elevated. As long as we keep looking, they will be the ones that we deserve.

*Illustration sources: Andreas Rentz / Getty; Angela Weiss / AFP / Getty; Araya Doheny / Getty; Arturo Holmes / Getty; Axelle / Bauer-Griffin / FilmMagic; Bing Guan / Bloomberg; Dave Hogan / Getty; Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty; Getty; Jaime Nogales / Medios y Media / Getty; Jamie McCarthy / Getty; Jamie McCarthy / WireImage; Jared Siskin / amfAR / Getty; Jeff Spicer / Getty; John Shearer / WireImage; Kevin Mazur / Getty; MEGA / GC Images; Michael Loccisano / Getty; Phillip Faraone / Getty; Rachpoot The Hollywood Curtain / Bauer-Griffin / GC Images; Robin L Marshall / Getty; Rosalind O'Connor / NBC / Getty; Stefanie Keenan / Getty; Steve Granitz / FilmMagic; Taylor Hill / FilmMagic

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The ‘Vibecession’ Is Over. The ‘Permacession’ Is Here.

2026-05-24T07:15:12-04:00

According to Americans, it is bad out there. Real bad. This month, the University of Michigan’s index of consumer sentiment dropped to its lowest point since 1952, when the survey started. A poll of potential Republican voters found that just 43 percent rated the economy as “excellent” or “good” and 55 percent as “fair” or “poor”; for potential Democratic voters, the shares were 5 percent and 94 percent, respectively. Low-income families are nervous, and so are high-income ones. Students and retirees are dour. Rural and urban voters are dissatisfied. People are worried about the present and future. They’re concerned for themselves and their neighbors.

Indeed, households are feeling worse about their personal finances and the broader state of the economy than they did during the Great Inflation of the 1970s, when the cost of groceries doubled and the government was forced to ration gasoline; the Volcker shock, from 1979 to 1982, when the average interest rate on 30-year mortgages hit 18.6 percent and the country went into devastating back-to-back recessions; the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, when 200,000 firms collapsed, the unemployment rate flirted with 15 percent, and essentials such as infant formula became impossible to find; and the Great Recession, when the stock market lost half its value, the banking system teetered on the brink of implosion, and lenders foreclosed on 6 million homes.

I have been covering the “vibecession” for a few years now, and I thought I mostly understood it. Headline economic statistics are failing to capture the fragility and strain that consumers are experiencing. Families are struggling to afford child care and health care. The housing shortage is eating into incomes. Inflation is pissing consumers off every time they hit the grocery store. Inequality is cleaving the haves and the have-nots. A hiring freeze is preventing young people from embarking on their chosen career. But seeing the latest consumer-sentiment figures and comparing them with hard economic data, I found that my usual explanations fell short.

[Annie Lowrey: The everything recession ]

Americans are expressing some of the deepest, broadest, and stubbornest economic pessimism ever recorded. They’re doing so even though nearly every American who wants a job has one and the stock market is booming. Things aren’t perfect, and people have plenty of reasons to be disappointed. But I couldn’t come up with a coherent explanation for why people are this down about an economy this good, or why they are so mad right now.

Instead of trying to understand why the American people were right, I began trying to understand why they were wrong. We shouldn’t call it a vibecession anymore, I came to think. Vibes are temporary, and whatever this is isn’t going away. It’s a “permacession.” People have stopped believing that the economy can be good, and have lost the willingness to admit that they are doing well. That pessimism might be harder to fix than an actual downturn.

At this point, I feel obligated to harp on an unpopular and perhaps even offensive truth—a truth that Americans don’t want to hear and don’t want to believe, a truth that might get me ripped apart in the comments and actually-ed across the internet: This economy is delivering significant improvements in living standards for the majority of American families across the income spectrum. This economy is pretty darn great.

Ninety-six out of every 100 Americans who want a job have one. The rate of underemployment is low, and the rate of labor-force participation is high, meaning that there’s no pool of discouraged workers lurking behind the marquee jobs statistics. Young workers are struggling to establish themselves, given businesses’ caution around hiring. Still, the tight labor market has fueled wage gains that have swelled family budgets, even after accounting for inflation. Real disposable personal income, which measures how much spending power Americans actually have, is at a record high. Inequality has eased, following an extended period in which the earnings of low-income Americans grew faster than those of their rich peers. People are spending more than they ever have on rent and health care, sure, but also on DoorDash and meals in restaurants, vacations, cars, pets, clothing, and “wellness”—concierge doctors, supplements, red-light masks. Part of the reason app-based gambling has taken off is because dudes are flush enough to afford stupid prop bets.

A few years ago, or even one year ago, we had much more reason to worry. In 2022, nominal prices jumped 8 percent, forcing the Federal Reserve to jack up interest rates. Economists debated whether the country would need to undergo a brief recession to restore price stability, or whether we would end up in a 1970s-style stagflationary cycle. Pretty much everyone thought we would enter a double-dip downturn. Yet businesses and households shrugged it all off. Companies kept hiring. Investors kept investing. Families kept spending. Despite the doom and gloom, resilience has been the hallmark of the post-COVID economy. The United States has powered through a change of power in Washington, a trade war, a hot war with Iran, a sharp round of monetary tightening, and an extended government shutdown without the engine giving out.

Look outside this country, and American prosperity comes into sharper relief. Europe’s GDP per capita was 77 percent of the United States’ as of 2008. Now, the continent is half as productive. The American middle class is richer than the middle class of every major European economy. If France and Britain were states, they would be the poorest in the Union.

Look outside this millennium, and the current prosperity becomes dazzling. Americans feel worse now than they did at every financial nadir we have hit since the world wars. Many insist that the middle class had it better in the 1950s and 1960s, when a single income could cover a big suburban ranch house with a picket fence and a yard for the kids. Except that, for most Americans, it could not. The average American today purchases nearly twice as much stuff as the average American did in the early 1990s. Homes are twice as large as they were in the 1960s, when a significant subset of Americans did not have indoor plumbing.

What gives, then? Why do people feel so terrible? A few persistent trends are weighing on consumer assessments of the economy, and a few structural factors are keeping Americans from feeling as comfortable as their bank statements and the national accounts suggest they should.

Inequality is perhaps the most fundamental. The top 10 percent of American earners make as much as the bottom 90 percent. The richest 1 percent of households account for more wealth than the entirety of the middle class. Inequality has frozen intergenerational mobility (a kid born to poor parents has less than a one-in-10 chance of making it to the top fifth of the income ladder) and driven a wedge in life expectancy (rich men live 15 years longer than poor men). This slows growth, destroys social trust, increases judgment and moralism, and saps societal happiness.

Add to this a cost-of-living crisis that has squeezed working families. For more than two decades, the cost of essential services—child care, health care, higher education, and elder care—has crept up faster than the overall pace of inflation. Since the Great Recession, a huge and growing housing shortage has led rents and mortgages to skyrocket. Millions of Americans are living in apartments they consider too small or too shabby, in neighborhoods they do not really want to live in. Millions are putting off getting married, purchasing a home, having a child, starting a business, or switching careers thanks to housing costs.

When the pandemic hit, the price of everything jumped, increasing the salience of the affordability crisis. Once the supply chains unsnarled, the tight labor market came with a strange, uncomfortable downside: Rising wages for low-income workers translated into raising prices for middle- and high-income consumers. Janitors, home-health aides, line cooks, day-care teachers, manicurists, and taxi drivers started making more. Teachers, accountants, social-media consultants, inventory managers, and payroll administrators did not exactly like it.

Then there’s polarization. Republicans and Democrats view the economy far more differently than they used to. What was a 20-point gap in partisan economic expectations during the Reagan and Obama administrations has become a 50-point gap during the Trump administrations. “The size of the partisan divide in expectations has completely dominated rational assessments” of the economy, argues Joanne Hsu, the director of the University of Michigan’s surveys of consumers.

These factors help explain why the vibes got so awful after the Great Recession. But they don’t explain why people are so much more fed up today than they were a year ago or three years ago. Maybe voters are ticked off that prices haven’t come down in the way Trump said they would, Paul Krugman has argued. Maybe the 2022 price spike was “uniquely challenging relative to historical antecedents,” Jared Bernstein and Daniel Posthumus have theorized. Perhaps voters need a few more years of wage gains beating price hikes before they feel good again. Maybe families are furious that gas prices are spiking right before summer-travel season. Or maybe this has less to do with the real economy than you might think.

Americans seem to be mad about everything, or in spite of everything. Rates of teen pregnancy, domestic abuse, vehicle crashes, and violent crime have plummeted. Nobody cares. Scientists have saved babies, extended lifetimes, and cured cancers. Nobody cares. Researchers came up with a drug that takes the struggle out of dieting. Nobody cares. The unemployment rate goes up. Nobody cares. The unemployment rate goes down. Nobody cares. Inequality goes up. Nobody cares. Inequality goes down. Nobody cares. Or rather, everybody cares. And they’re cynical and furious.

As Sam Peltzman of the University of Chicago has found, the country has experienced “a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness,” across “nearly all typical demographics and geographies.” Roughly 20 to 25 percentage points more Americans described themselves as “very happy” than “not so happy” from 1970 to 2020. Then, the “not so happy” group swelled and the “very happy” group shrank, narrowing the gap to zero to five percentage points, where it has remained. He calls it the “happiness crash.”

[From the February 2025 issue: The anti-social century ]

The crash coincides with a collapse in institutional confidence: Americans are giving up on the Supreme Court, the military, corporations, the education system, religious groups, medical professionals, and scientists. It also coincides with a collapse in civic trust. Fewer people think that their neighbors are trustworthy; fewer believe that the political system can or will deliver for them. Fair enough, I guess. Institutions haven’t exactly acquitted themselves well since the Great Recession. Still, the internet nurtures these Hobbesian, splenetic views. We never got back to socializing in person after COVID, as my colleague Derek Thompson has noted. And the social media we replaced our friends with lost the social part. In a few decades, we have gone from comparing ourselves with our neighbors to comparing ourselves with our friends on Facebook to sucking on a gavage tube of unabashedly consumerist, questionably accurate, highly emotional, and extremely polarizing short-form video content, milled for us by attention-farming software.

TikTok videos and Instagram reels make people fiscally delulu—I hate myself—encouraging manic spending and inculcating “money dysmorphia.” At the same time, they give people a delulu—yet I can’t stop—sense of how the economy is doing. I searched for phrases such as how jobs are doing and keywords such as hiring and economy 2026 while writing this story. I was not presented with a bunch of videos about how the jobless rate is 4.3 percent, or the surprising fortitude of the American economy, or the fact that Gen Zers are off to a better financial start in life than Millennials were at the same age. Instead, I saw a bunch of fake ads for fake jobs, nonsensical class analyses, and slop about how AI is crashing the whole labor market, along with crypto spam. This kind of negativity drives engagement. To be fair to TikTok, even the real news has gotten far more dire. Because we live in a complicated, unequal, and expensive economy, there’s always a true but incomplete scary story to tell.

People are distressed about gas prices and inflation and the housing market. Or they’re distressed about everything, and gas prices and inflation and the housing market are fuel for their dissatisfaction. Or they’re distressed about everything because they’re shotgunning horror stories about how fragile the economy is while watching people redecorate their casitas in earth tones, and so they’re redecorating their bedroom in earth tones, and they’re terrified because Donald Trump is in the office or because one day he won’t be. (I think.) And if you point out the prosperity we are all experiencing, if definitely not enjoying, people berate you for being snooty and/or naive.

In a roundabout way, the country’s affluence might be contributing to its pessimism. Seventy years ago, voters were overwhelmingly concerned with life-and-death issues: war, hunger, disease, violence. Today voters are more worried about social concerns: the environment, minority rights, immigration, health policy, casitas, I guess. They have shifted from materialism to postmaterialism, in the framing of the political scientist Ronald Inglehart. And postmaterialism has driven the rise of identity politics, which revolve more around who a person is and what they want rather than what they truly need.

I don’t see an easy salve for what’s ailing us, even if prices at the pump go back down. People aren’t going to change how they spend their time. Social-media platforms aren’t going to change what kind of content they deliver. Voters aren’t going to become less jaded, polarized, riven by contempt, puffed up on self-righteousness, or susceptible to fearmongering, just as they won’t become more trusting of major institutions. If measurable improvements in the economy have little effect on measured sentiment, a crucial feedback loop between good politics and good policies is broken. We may end up with the economy we fear we already have—and if that happens, I suppose you could say that we asked for it.

A Perfect Show That Doesn’t Make Sense

2026-05-24T07:00:00-04:00

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

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Michael Scherer, a staff writer who has covered how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the most powerful man in science and the challenge that rising political violence poses to journalists; he has also done a sit-down interview with Donald Trump about his political comeback.

Michael’s recommendations include reading any piece of writing from George Will, whom he considers to be the preeminent political columnist; listening to electronic-music sets on SoundCloud; and watching the late climber Dean Potter’s miraculous ascents in The Dark Wizard.

— Stephanie Bai, senior associate editor

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: I thought my generation had played out the self-referential wink-wink with shows such as Scrubs and Arrested Development. Then a representative of Gen Z showed me the Netflix live-action show One Piece, a rollicking pirate tale that is pulled from manga, and that is also a ’90s teen sitcom, a high-school theater production, and a fantasy-canon blender. The sets make Disneyland look real, and the acting is the opposite of method. The kids fire muskets and swing katanas in printed T-shirts and plastic jewelry. None of it made sense, until I realized that playing with the expectations of genre remains a great way to celebrate the timelessness of youth. (For a counterpoint, the self-appointed theologian Peter Thiel has other thoughts on One Piece’s insights on the Antichrist.)

A musical artist who means a lot to me: I’ve lately fallen down the rabbit hole of electronic music—the kind that plays in clubs while I’m sleeping, for people on drugs I don’t take. Most interesting DJs post uninterrupted, multi-hour sets on SoundCloud. (If you are curious for a place to start, look up Dekmantel Podcast, episode 267, with Djrum, circa 2020.) There are those who work in beats of black and white, slotting in gray industrial math, and those whose songs experiment with color and shapes. I prefer the latter. This led me to Avalon Emerson, a DJ who has more recently taken a turn toward bedroom pop. Her new album, Written Into Changes, is a Skittles rainbow of emo flavors.

A good recommendation I recently received: Subscribe to County Highway, the bimonthly broadsheet for magazine lovers. The masthead’s motto is perfect: “America’s only newspaper.”

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: “Wasting time” suggests agency, which I lack. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once told me about his own addiction struggle, When you dance with a gorilla, the gorilla decides when you stop. The moment I find myself without intent, the device attacks my brain and spits out the pieces. I keep X and Bluesky for work but deleted Instagram and TikTok for sanity. The rest of my screentime is spent reading the news and doing Wordle with my wife.

The last thing that made me cry: The final scene of Train Dreams, the adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella. “You just go through what you go through,” the Forest Service worker Claire Thompson says early in the film. “In the forest, every least thing’s important. It’s all threaded together so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins.”

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: I started Caity Weaver’s May cover story about the best free restaurant bread in America thinking it would be a fun romp, only to find unmistakable proof that the heyday of magazine writing has not passed.

A piece of journalism that recently changed my perspective on a topic: “America’s secret weapon is a blue note in a minor key,” The New York Times declared in 1955. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, the 2024 documentary about the State Department’s use of jazz diplomacy in Africa amid CIA assassination plots, sets Nikita Khrushchev’s fist and Allen Dulles’s deceit against the Cold War’s swinging anti-colonial score. Never seen a documentary so ambitious.

An author I will read anything by: I thought conservatives in bow ties were baffling, like dogs in handbags, when I first arrived in Washington. Two decades on, I have come to see George Will, a pioneer of the look, as the finest political columnist of my lifetime, for the scalpel point of his pen and his unwavering commitment to the American project. (At 85, he still churns out articles twice a week.) Even when I disagree, I learn.

Will was recently asked in a Substack interview about H. L. Mencken, the all-time heavyweight champion of the newspaper column who made the medium a devastating literary sport by targeting all manner of clodpoll, mountebank, and booboisie. “I think he’s ruined a lot of promising writers,” Will responded. “Because they try to write like him, in that tone of voice. And the tone of voice was okay for him, but he wasn’t a very attractive person.” Will knows that we still live in Mencken’s “carnival of buncombe,” a political comedy run by unmitigated scoundrels. But may we also retain Will’s understanding of the essential pull toward decency.

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: The Dark Wizard, on HBO Max. There are adventure-sports documentaries about athletic achievement, or the world’s wild edges, or the agony of defeat. This one is about someone who viewed “the death consequence” more as a medication than a spiritual pursuit. The late climber Dean Potter, once Yosemite’s king, is not cast as a hero, a heel, a messiah, or a particularly good friend. But like James Salter did in his 1979 novel, Solo Faces, the filmmakers find the human condition laid bare on high granite walls.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Jerry Garcia played “Sugaree” in concert with the Grateful Dead more than 350 times, but never better than on May 19, 1977, at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta—a locked-in band, three epic guitar solos, 16 minutes of bliss. At a higher volume, I still play Pavement’s 1992 edition of its debut single, “Summer Babe (Winter Version)”—perhaps the best drum groove in rock, with an 11-second howl like no other. Every time I sit around, I find I’m shot.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: I got to see Czesław Miłosz read “Esse” back in 1998 or 1999, a poem that starts with a fleeting infatuation on a metro train and ends up comparing love’s desire to the writer’s task: “A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.” But we keep trying.

The Week Ahead

Spider-Noir, a Marvel series starring Nicolas Cage about an alternative-universe Spider-Man, set in New York City during the Great Depression (out Wednesday on Prime Video)
The Breadwinner, a comedy movie about a man with three young daughters becoming a stay-at-home dad (in theaters Friday)
The Land and Its People, an essay collection by the humorist David Sedaris on travel, family, and caregiving (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Typo Vibe Shift

By Michael Waters

Toward the beginning of the 2002 film Secretary, a domineering lawyer (played by James Spader) barges into the office of his assistant (Maggie Gyllenhaal) with evidence of a work infraction: a memo she has written that has “three typing errors.” Spader’s character spits out a reprimand. “Do you know what this makes me look like to the people who receive these letters?”

Setting aside that his screed turns out to be foreplay, Spader’s character was channeling a widespread cultural revulsion: Typos were the ultimate shorthand for careless work. A spelling mistake was proof that the writer hadn’t bothered putting much effort into a piece of correspondence, that their instructions or advice shouldn’t be taken seriously—and perhaps that the recipient shouldn’t invest time in reading their note at all.

More than two decades later, as AI-generated writing has flooded workplaces, social media, and dating apps, old hallmarks of sloppiness—typos chief among them—are getting a new gloss.

Read the full article.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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I Am Begging You to Read Terry Pratchett

2026-05-24T06:00:00-04:00

Will we ever live to see a successful screen adaptation of a Terry Pratchett novel? The Amazon television series Good Omens, which ended this month, came closest—but that book, a comedy about an angel and a devil teaming up to avert Armageddon, was co-written with Neil Gaiman, and the source material ran out after the first season in any case.

Pratchett is the funniest English writer since P. G. Wodehouse, with a sharp, satirical edge disguised by the trappings of the fantasy genre—vampires, dwarfs, witches, and wizards. Many fans thought the original covers of Pratchett’s novels went too heavy on busty maidens and strapping men with big swords, undermining their literary merit, and a similar problem has beset the various screen adaptations from Sky and the BBC. I suspect that casual viewers can’t compute the idea of watching something with the comic tone of a Charles Dickens or Tobias Smollett novel while being distracted by CGI trolls.

To some extent, Good Omens bucked the trend because the chemistry between the lead actors, Michael Sheen and David Tennant, was so strong. (The pair enjoyed each other’s company so much that they even made a lockdown drama, Staged, filmed in their own houses with their own real-life partners.) But I worry that the persistent unfilmability of most of Pratchett’s work will mean that he fades out of public consciousness. At his peak, Pratchett was Britain’s best-selling novelist, but he died from early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2015, and left clear instructions with his assistant that the hard drive containing his unfinished work should be run over with a steamroller. He therefore cannot be turned into the Tupac Shakur of fantasy literature, with his estate bringing out new novels to satisfy demand. So I’m begging people to try the existing canon.

The literary novelist A. S. Byatt once suggested that all 12-year-olds should be issued a Pratchett book to get them into the habit of reading. Pratchett had, she said, “caused more people to read books than anyone else—because he tells them something they want to know, that they can laugh at, and because he writes really good English.” As it happens, I was around 12 when I picked up my first Pratchett—Mort, the story of Death recruiting an apprentice to lighten his load of harvesting the souls of the departed. I loved it instantly. Pratchett’s gift was to blend deep philosophy and complete silliness. His answer to the question “What happens when we die?” is that everyone chooses their own path, and the wicked are stuck in hells of their own making. At the same time, he gives Death a white horse called Binky.

Mort is the fourth book in a long series set on a disc-shaped planet resting on the back of a sky turtle. I subsequently read the remaining 40 Discworld books—and most of Pratchett’s other work, including his early journalism. I have even read a biography of him, which suffered from the fact that Pratchett was happiest writing novels in his study, rather than, say, having doomed affairs or shooting his wife or having an intense relationship with bullfighting, like some other great male writers I might mention. Whenever someone asks me to recommend an author to read on a long flight, I suggest Pratchett. His books careen along on an unfurling narrative tide, making an eight-hour journey feel short. Some of the jokes will make you wince. Some require a working knowledge of classic films, Shakespearean tragedies, or Norse mythology. Some of them you will only get 20 years later.

[Julie Beck: Terry Pratchett’s joyful, absurd, human fantasy]

Where should you start? Not at the beginning. Pratchett took a while to warm up, and his first few Discworld books feature stock characters and a lot of sword-and-sandals pastiche. (One features a riff on Conan the Barbarian, called Cohen. The joke is that he’s old and wheezy, unlike the famous Arnold Schwarzenegger character.) Mort will take you neatly to the other books that follow the character of Death. Reaper Man, a reworking of the 1934 film Death Takes a Holiday, is among the first Discworld novels to incorporate real pathos alongside the gags. That will lead you to a much later book in the series, Hogfather, which deals with Pratchett’s greatest theme, the power of stories to bend reality. In the book, Death learns that if children stop believing in the Hogfather, their version of Father Christmas, then the world will end. So when the Hogfather is kidnapped, Death has to fill in. Being a terrifying skeleton with very little understanding of human nature, he is not very good at it.

If you don’t want to commit to a series, then the best stand-alone novel is Small Gods, set in a theocracy, Omnia, where the state religion is enforced by a brutal inquisition. Despite all the violent bureaucracy devoted to worshipping the god Om, only one simple monk, Brutha, actually believes in him. In the book, Pratchett sketches a compelling account of the development of religion, beginning with “small gods” whispering to shepherds in the desert and competing with thousands of other minor deities for a simple altar made of stones, which they can trade up and up to a full-blown religion. You could meditate on the historical shift to monotheism by reading a weighty biography of Julian, the last non-Christian emperor. Or you could do it by reading Small Gods, which has jokes in it.

One of these relies on the reader knowing the difference between three ancient Greek schools of philosophy, so you can see why hard-core fans get annoyed when Pratchett is dismissed as a lightweight. (“His philosophy,” the narrator says of one character, “was a mixture of three famous schools—the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans—and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, ‘You can’t trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s have a drink.’”)

Pratchett’s two greatest characters—his equivalent of Sherlock Holmes, or Elizabeth Bennet, or Hamlet—are Granny Weatherwax, a witch living in a remote mountainous kingdom called Lancre, and Samuel Vimes, an ex-alcoholic guardsman who unwillingly becomes duke of the Discworld’s biggest city, Ankh-Morpork. Neither of them has been successfully translated to the screen; Weatherwax featured in an obscure animated series in the 1990s, and the less said about BBC America’s The Watch, the better. As I wrote when the series aired, I knew it was a travesty when I saw that “Vimes, that hater of fuss and fanciness, is wearing eyeliner.”

Vimes and Weatherwax are clever, wary loners who can’t stop themselves from doing what is right instead of what is easy. Both are happy to be seen as intimidating, because they understand the value of mythology. In private, though, Vimes dotes on his wife and baby son, and Weatherwax eventually acquires a white kitten that she lets sleep inside her pointy witch’s hat. Pratchett uses both characters to explore the gap between true leadership and mere politicking, suggesting that societies need ideals of justice but frown on the people who step up to enforce them. “Discworld is not about how to be good, but about how to do good, and why even the smallest acts of kindness matter,” the New York Times Book Review columnist Olivia Waite wrote last year, nominating Pratchett as an “essential” author alongside Agatha Christie, Patricia Highsmith, and James Baldwin. “Empathy—like humor or creativity or hope—is a muscle. You don’t train for a marathon by running around the world: You start with small distances and work your way up.”

Pratchett’s politics are not easy to pin down. He was strongly opposed to abuses of power, exploitation, and dumb aristocrats who looked down on working people. One of his most famous passages, from Men At Arms, explains why it’s so expensive to be poor:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This “Boots Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness” has since been adopted by anti-poverty campaigners. One created a “Vimes Boot Index” to track price hikes in staple foods. “My father used his anger about inequality, classism, xenophobia and bigotry to help power the moral core of his work,” Pratchett’s daughter, Rhianna, told The Guardian. “One of his most famous lightning-rods for this was Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch—a cynical, but likable, man who attempts to better himself whilst railing against the injustices around him.”

At the same time, Pratchett was not an anarchist—Vimes is a policeman, which is depicted as a heroic profession—or an identitarian. He uses the city of Ankh-Morpork to explore the energy and dynamism of cultural mixing, but also the violence and distrust that can accompany it. (The trolls and dwarfs have a particularly fractious relationship.) He also takes shots at obsessive left-wing activists, personified by the zombie Reg Shoe, who is so committed to giving out socialist leaflets that he simply refuses to die.

[Sophie Gilbert: The heaven and hell of Good Omens]

Pratchett’s work is a hectic jumble, rich and rewarding, endlessly varied and surprising. Writing this article has prompted me to revisit Moving Pictures, a book in which the invention of cinema threatens the fabric of reality. It was written in 1990, but its lessons are equally applicable to the modern internet, with its AI deepfakes, Russian-backed propaganda, and paid political influencers. New generations of readers deserve to learn of the book, even if Moving Pictures never becomes a movie.

Imagine how much J. R. R. Tolkien’s reputation would have suffered if we had only Amazon’s tepid The Rings of Power and not the Peter Jackson films. And observe how HBO is remaking Harry Potter as a television series, now that the Millennial viewers of the original films are parents themselves. (A fresh audiobook, with a full cast rather than a single narrator, was also released last year.) And recriminate with me about The Seeker, the ham-fisted movie version of Susan Cooper’s sublime The Dark Is Rising, which killed the idea of adapting the rest of her five-novel fantasy series stone-dead. Pratchett could easily suffer the same fate, and fade from public view. All I can say is: not if I have anything to do with it.

AI-Writing Scandals Are Getting Very Confusing

2026-05-23T12:13:00-04:00

Steven Rosenbaum has decided that the real villain behind the bogus quotes in his book is a chatbot. Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that The Future of Truth, Rosenbaum’s much-discussed book about how AI shapes reality, contains more than half a dozen fake or misattributed quotes. Rosenbaum pinned some of them on his use of AI. He claimed responsibility for the errors and said he was investigating what went wrong. By the time I spoke with him on Thursday, though, he was pointing his finger elsewhere. ChatGPT “fucked up the book,” Rosenbaum said.

Rosenbaum, a media entrepreneur and the executive director of the Sustainable Media Center, said he came to rely on AI tools as both a resource and a conversation partner while he worked on the book (which he also notes in the book’s acknowledgements). During our conversation, Rosenbaum struggled to reconcile AI’s sometimes staggering capacities with its penchant for head-scratching hallucinations—such as an imaginary quote from the tech journalist Kara Swisher that he included in the book without verifying it. In recent days, he has come to feel “seduced and betrayed” by AI, suggesting at one point that it might have undermined him on purpose. “Depending on your paranoia level, it’s either quirky or evil or sneaky,” he said.

It’s been a rough week for human authorship all around. On Monday, a viral post showed a Nobel-winning novelist seemingly admitting to using AI to sharpen her story ideas, before later claiming she had been misunderstood. On Tuesday, allegations mounted that the Trinidadian author Jamir Nazir had used AI to write “The Serpent in the Grove,” which won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. By Wednesday, two of the other five prize winners had come under similar scrutiny. (The Commonwealth Foundation, which administers the prize, initially said in a statement that it had confirmed that none of the winning writers had used AI. Yesterday, the foundation issued another statement saying it “takes seriously the allegations” and was reviewing the evidence.)

[Read: This literary AI scandal changes everything]

Since ChatGPT arrived, automated writing has become ubiquitous: A recent working paper estimated that more than half of all new books released on Amazon now contain AI-generated text. Chatbots’ prose has generally been good enough to fool schoolteachers and inflate Amazon product ratings—not earn glowing blurbs from prominent authors and win literary prizes. Recently, something has changed. As AI tools have improved and gone mainstream, the technology has penetrated intellectual spaces once thought to be fortified against its advances. This spate of scandals is forcing a fresh reckoning over what to do about the crisis.

One response has been to call for a redoubling of efforts to root out AI writing and reinforce the stigma against it. If shame won’t stop people from using AI to do the hard work of writing, maybe ridicule will. In Defector, Patrick Redford derided the “pathetic behavior” of writers who use AI. “You idiots!” he wrote. “Those models are the enemy!”

Treating any use of AI in serious writing as taboo is understandable. Up until now, it’s been relatively easy to use the hallmarks of AI-generated prose as a proxy for shoddy writing and thinking. Maybe we can keep that up a while longer. As I read The Future of Truth, I ran across an unusual amount of clunky repetition, formulaic transitions, and perplexing passages. One particularly tinny paragraph begins, “As we delve deeper into the mechanisms of misinformation, it’s essential to understand how it not only proliferates but also profits.” I ran the 146-word passage through Pangram, an AI-detection tool that is imperfect but reputed to be less flawed, at least, than some others. It registered the writing as 100 percent AI-generated. When I asked Rosenbaum whether he had let AI write any parts of his book, he said, “Absolutely not.” When I mentioned the Pangram result, he said, “I’m not going to get into that game.”

The bigger challenge may be that “AI writing” is not just one thing. There’s a wide spectrum between text that is untouched by machine intelligence and writing that is concocted entirely by a chatbot. At the maximalist end, most of us can agree that a writer wouldn’t deserve a prize for typing, “Write a haunting, 3,000-word literary short story set in Trinidad” into Claude and then slapping his name on whatever it spits out. On the minimalist side, it’s presumably fine for a writer to do some Googling in the process of researching a piece that is otherwise entirely her own. Then again, what they find may still be imbued with AI: Google search is answering more questions directly via chatbot, and the results are turning up more AI-written web pages. Good information comes from primary sources, not synthetic text.

Generic chatbots have been joined by purpose-built AI research and writing tools that can carry out complex tasks. A growing number of professional writers, following the lead of software developers, openly profess to incorporating AI tools into their workflows. The tech reporter Alex Heath, for instance, trained a version of Claude Cowork to write in his style and crank out first drafts of his stories, as Wired reported in March. My own use of AI is comparatively primitive but worth disclosing here: In line with The Atlantic’s internal guidelines, I sometimes use chatbots like a slightly smarter thesaurus to suggest the most apt word to plug into a given sentence, and I occasionally ask them to suggest expert sources on a specific topic. I also use an AI-powered tool to transcribe interviews, backstopped by my own notes.

[Read: The human skill that eludes AI]

Exactly where to draw the line on acceptable uses of AI is not as obvious as it might seem. In Rosenbaum’s case, the scandal can’t just be that he used AI while working on his book, because he acknowledged that up front. He got in trouble because he had used AI badly, failing to check its work on a task at which it is famously unreliable. Or consider that The New York Times, which has endured a spate of AI writing scandals, maintains two different standards. Its freelancers can use AI tools for “high-level brainstorming” and a lmost nothing else. Newsroom employees are encouraged to experiment with what the paper’s guidelines tout as “a powerful tool that, like many technological advances before it, may be used in service of our mission.” The leading trade group for book authors, the Authors Guild, eschews edicts but warns of the ethical risks of various AI uses.

Condoning AI for research but forbidding any use of its prose might be the most intuitive stance. It is certainly the most convenient: We have no reliable way to tell when AI was used to brainstorm ideas, research facts, or help a writer shape the framing of a story. But as the neuroscientist Tim Requarth pointed out in Slate, it is those hidden uses of AI in the writing process that give rise to our most valid concerns. The real threat the technology poses is not the overuse of the word delve in academic papers or the profusion of strained metaphors in literary fiction. It’s that we lose something essential when we outsource to machines the hard work of discovering the truth and interpreting the world around us (or, in the case of fiction, the worlds within us). It’s that the biases embedded in language models trained on dubious sources and controlled by tech companies will seep into the narratives that shape our understanding of reality. Are we sure that using AI to turn a phrase is worse than using it to decide what to write about in the first place?

If nothing else, the pileup of scandals should force us to think more precisely about what it is we fear from AI writing. If the problem were simply that it was bad, then its steady improvement would be cause for relief rather than alarm. On the contrary, the problem seems to be that AI tools are getting too good, at least superficially, and that people are placing too much faith in them. Even though Rosenbaum cursed ChatGPT, he told me he couldn’t imagine giving it up. That feeling might pose a greater threat to writing than anything he lays out in his book.

Hegseth’s Leadership of the U.S. Military

2026-05-23T11:20:48-04:00

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

Last night on Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to examine Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s role and influence in the Trump administration, and what his leadership may reveal about how he’s trying to reshape the U.S. military.

Over time, there has been “a tradition where defense secretaries attempt to minimize their overtly partisan behavior,” Missy Ryan, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said last night. “Because they are the safeguards of America’s sons and daughters, they try to, in the name of national security, act more as a nonpartisan actor.” But Hegseth, she argued, “has totally discarded that tradition, and we’re seeing him lean into his role as a partisan fighter.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Helene Cooper, a national-security correspondent at The New York Times; Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News; Ryan; Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

Putin Can No Longer Hide His Catastrophe

2026-05-23T08:45:00-04:00

Regimes that go to war usually work hard to convince their population that the decision to fight was justified and that any sacrifices will be manageable. In this spirit, Russian President Vladimir Putin has tried for more than four years to protect the population of Moscow from the consequences of his invasion of Ukraine. Festivals and other events have gone on much as they did before, and the effects of supply shortages in the capital have been limited. Even though more than 1 million Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded, the government has apparently avoided enlisting too many from Moscow or St. Petersburg, preferring to take its cannon fodder from faraway Russian imperial possessions.

But Putin can no longer lull Muscovites into thinking that his war does not involve them. Earlier this month, the annual parade commemorating the defeat of Germany in World War II was startlingly short and devoid of most of the usual military hardware, because the Russian dictator was terrified of Ukrainian drone attacks. A week later, Ukraine launched hundreds of drones and cruise missiles on the Russian capital. The action, an audacious counterstrike to a mass Russian attack on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities two days earlier, showed that multiple rings of air defense around Moscow have been thoroughly compromised. The narrative that Putin has constructed—about a mere “special military operation” that need not trouble Russia’s elites or middle class—is now unraveling completely. Any pretense that Moscow itself can stay out of the war has vanished.

[Anne Applebaum: Putin’s war comes home to Moscow]

In armed conflicts between nations, major momentum shifts occur when one of the combatants loses control of events—when its rulers can no longer convincingly tell themselves or their public that their side is on the cusp of victory. Although the 1968 Tet Offensive by North Vietnam and the Vietcong was a military failure, the attacks along the length and breadth of South Vietnam made many Americans conclude that the U.S. effort to prop up the Saigon government was doomed.

A more relevant historical parallel involves Japan during World War II. From the Pearl Harbor attack onward, Japan’s domestic propaganda described the country’s early victories as far more decisive than they were and constantly assured the public that the country was winning its war with the United States. That tone continued even after the Battle of Midway in June 1942, during which American forces halted and began reversing Japan’s territorial advances. In that engagement, Japan lost four large-fleet aircraft carriers; the U.S. lost one.

Despite this major setback, Japanese authorities continued to tell the country’s population that the war was going excellently. They spun outrageous lies, claiming that Japan had sunk two American aircraft carriers at Midway and lost only one of its own. Military leaders went to extreme lengths to conceal the truth, even keeping wounded sailors in isolation for long periods afterward.

In June 1944, however, this charade became impossible to keep up as the United States moved to seize the Mariana Islands—a campaign whose success would put the Japanese homeland within range of the B-29 Superfortress bomber, then the newest American technological bomber. Japan focused its remaining strength on the fight to hold the islands. But it was defeated in the Battle of the Philippine Sea—which came to be known also as the Marianas Turkey Shoot because of the lopsided American success. In the Battle of Saipan, the Battle of Tinian, and the Battle of Guam, the U.S. seized control of the strategically crucial islands. Those victories meant that Tokyo would soon come under direct air assault. The Japanese government had no choice but to speak the truth: The war was not going as well as portrayed and would soon get a lot worse.

All nations face economic and logistical constraints, and even authoritarian systems have their own internal politics. The loss of the Marianas brought down Japan’s militarist prime minister Hideki Tojo and emboldened relative moderates within the country’s elite.

How the news of Ukraine’s growing strength—and Moscow’s exposure to future attacks—will alter public opinion in Russia is difficult to judge, not least because of censorship. To keep the population ignorant, Putin’s government has tightened restrictions on the use of the internet. But in recent days, videos have circulated of Russians expressing shock at their capital’s vulnerability. Russian newspapers have been forced to write stories about Ukrainian capabilities. One even referred to the drone attack as “audacious.”

Ukraine previously struggled to deploy accurate long-range-weapons systems but now appears to have improved its targeting capabilities and production capacity. In the counterstrike on Moscow, Ukrainian systems undeniably hit a range of strategic targets: an electronics-component factory, oil infrastructure, and other facilities. Even Moscow’s main airport shut down for a while because of the attack. Having penetrated Moscow’s defenses once, Ukraine will almost certainly do so again. President Volodymyr Zelensky is signaling as much.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Ukraine has finally given up on Trump]

If Zelensky is correct, Putin will have to be more honest with the Russian people about the catastrophe he has unleashed on them. More than four years into what was supposed to be a three-day campaign, Russia is not on a trajectory to victory.

None of this means that Russia will instantly fold. Its forces continue to launch deadly attacks on Ukrainian cities. Putin has periodically hinted at using Russia’s nuclear weapons, only to be slapped down by his more powerful ally, Chinese President Xi Jinping, but he is again making noise about such an escalation.

But the basic dynamics of the war seem to have shifted. Russia has weakened. Even without American help, Ukraine appears to be getting stronger and, more and more, is shaping the war in its own favor. The better the Russian people understand this, the worse Putin’s predicament gets.

The Meanest Tradition in Entertainment

2026-05-23T08:00:00-04:00

In 1997, Garry Shandling’s meta-sitcom, The Larry Sanders Show, aired an episode chronicling the behind-the-scenes preparations for a roast of the eponymous fictional late-night host. Though the event promises to celebrate Larry, it ends up being a disaster. Jerry Seinfeld drops out at the last minute. Bill Maher mainly performs jokes from his own act. Dana Carvey and Bruno Kirby use the stage to bicker with each other. Meanwhile, Larry quietly stews over barbs about his vanity and perceived homosexuality—mostly delivered by people he doesn’t respect, who appeared only because they were cajoled or pressured.

“This is the worst fucking night of my life,” Larry eventually remarks, not long before before the prop comic Carrot Top, the evening’s surprise guest, takes the stage to skewer him. Although Larry’s publicist insists that the roast is a Hollywood rite of passage, the episode humorously illustrates how the industry has sapped all of the romance out of the showbiz tradition. Instead of being a raucous tribute to a friend, it’s become something akin to a networking event, another venue to cultivate notoriety.

I thought about this episode while watching Netflix’s The Roast of Kevin Hart, in which multiple comedians and celebrities gathered to poke fun at the actor-comedian. This was no Hollywood rite of passage, but a humiliation ritual posing as a party. At Hart’s roast, no insult was off the table: height jokes, one-liners about Hart’s phoned-in movies, jabs at Hart’s father’s crack addiction, references to Hart’s frequent co-star the Rock that sometimes doubled as references to Hart’s father’s crack addiction, smirking nods to Hart’s many product endorsements, and even more height jokes. Unlike Larry, Hart seemed to take the canned insults in stride by hamming up his feigned outrage and ostensibly genuine laughter for nearly three hours. But to me, the environment felt artificially joyous, and cemented how the roast has evolved from a venue for comedic expression into an opportunity for sanctioned cruelty, all in the name of admiration.

The first-ever roasts were closed-door toasts to theatrical luminaries, such as Oscar Hammerstein, by members of the private New York Friars Club in the early 1900s. It was only in 1968, nearly 20 years after the Friars Club started hosting annual member roasts, that one was televised, on Kraft Music Hall, an umbrella title for several musical variety series that aired on NBC. In 1973, Dean Martin borrowed the format for the final season of his self-titled variety show in an attempt to boost its flagging ratings. It ended up being a huge success. A subsequent series of specials branded as The Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts aired for a decade and featured mid-century A- and B-listers—many of whom were good friends or had been working together for years—cracking wise about famous roastees, such as Frank Sinatra and Mr. T.

In 1998, Comedy Central began producing and televising the traditional Friars Club roasts. A few years later, the network launched its own line of specials, which took inspiration from the Friars Club and Dean Martin ceremonies but also courted controversy by embracing a raunchy one-upmanship sensibility. Though a veneer of good-natured joshing persisted, a coarser approach defined by “Roastmaster General” Jeff Ross, a frequent writer of and participant at those roasts, replaced the kinetic playfulness from the Dean Martin days. On a recent episode of Dana Carvey and David Spade’s podcast, Fly on the Wall, both veteran comics pointed to the 2002 Chevy Chase roast as the moment when the format jumped from fun to foul. “I could tell there was pain in his eyes,” Carvey said. “I thought, Is this like an execution or something?” (In that same episode, Carvey announced that he has agreed to be roasted at a future date.)

After falling off the air for a few years, the tradition was revived for 2024’s The Roast of Tom Brady, Netflix’s first-ever live roast special, featuring Brady, the former Patriots quarterback. A hit for the streamer, the roast was viewed more than 2 million times on its debut night, and featured Brady taking cracks about his divorce and the New England Patriots’ cheating scandals on the chin. (His good-sport facade faltered only once, after Ross made a crack about the prostitution scandal involving the Patriots’ owner, Robert Kraft; Brady went over to Ross and appeared to admonish him.) The special was a relative commercial success partly because of its choice of victim. Brady, a pro-athlete sacred cow beloved by fans and hated by rivals, was a prime target for teammates and comedians alike, who all relished taking him down a peg.

Early in the Hart special, Brady himself appeared onstage to snark: “I guess it wouldn’t be a Kevin Hart project if it wasn’t a shitty sequel.” To the credit of whoever wrote that joke for Brady, The Roast of Kevin Hart was indeed bloated and repetitive. Throughout the night, every roaster doubled down on variations of the same obvious observations. (Because of the way roasts work today, Hart wasn’t the sole target of the evening’s gibes: Lizzo is fat; Pete Davidson has a dad who died on 9/11; Sheryl Underwood is Black and had a husband who killed himself.) Callouts regarding political allegiances and dubious sexual histories were deployed—often in rigid, clumsy ways.

Roast material tends to be circumscribed by a limited range of preapproved topics. Any “shocking” jokes have been carefully choreographed to inspire gasps from the crowd while flattering the unflappability of the roastee. Hart may not have known that Shane Gillis, the night’s host, would say that he could be lynched only from a Bonsai tree. But despite the racist overtones, the statement was within the range of what was acceptable—it, too, was ultimately just a height joke.

Early on in the special, Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-CEO, could be seen grinning in the audience. His presence was a clear symbol of brand support for Hart, who has been in the streamer’s fold for years, and most recently hosted the Netflix comedy-competition series Funny AF. “I did say that Kevin was a Hollywood puppet,” Katt Williams, a longtime critic of Hart’s, remarked onstage. “I meant that the head of Netflix literally has his whole hand up Kevin’s ass and can make him do anything.”

[Read: Stand-up comedy, all joking aside]

Of course, Netflix has also produced four of Williams’s stand-up specials since 2018, and many of the other guests also regularly feature on the streamer’s programming. Following Williams’s logic, Sarandos could make most everyone on the dais do just about anything. The overwhelming Netflix presence at The Roast of Kevin Hart, combined with a grin-and-bear-it vibe from the participants, made it feel less like a comedy show and more like a branding event.

That calculated atmosphere became downright phony whenever the comics acted like deploying slurs or racist and misogynistic jokes was an act of bravery. “Freedom of speech is alive today,” Underwood announced during her routine, as she publicly thanked Netflix and Hart for showing “that we can all come together and crack jokes on each other and still respect each other.” But any respect for Hart exhibited by the performers was partly downwind from the money and attention they received by appearing onstage. A longtime roast attendee, Hart knows that there’s plenty of profit in performing a loud, rude style of stand-up at the expense of craft or taste. Whether she intended to or not, Underwood said the quiet part aloud when she praised Hart by saying he was a “great businessman and a great performer”—in that order.

Ironically, one of the most memorable roast moments in the tradition’s history came from a subversion of these faux-cruel expectations. At Bob Saget’s roast in 2008, Norm Macdonald was instructed by the show’s producer to be as shocking as possible. Instead of skewering his friend, however, Macdonald delivered antiquated material modified from a book of corny one-liners. “I don’t know how to insult people and call them names and stuff,” Macdonald later said of his routine. “Because I would feel really bad, because everything you say, it has to be true, you know, or it doesn’t make any sense.” Nasty words tend to blend together, but unique points of view stand the test of time.

Don’t Put Too Much Pressure on Your Summer Vacation

2026-05-23T08:00:00-04:00

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

With summer around the corner, now’s the time when many families begin imagining the version of themselves they want to be for just a few months. Some people book elaborate international trips. Others return to the same beach every year, or pile into the car to hit the road with no real itinerary at all.

There is no single right way to spend summer as a family. What makes this season meaningful is often less about the trips taken and more about what families want from them: a break from routine, time together, or simply a few weeks that feel different from the rest of the year.

Today’s newsletter explores stories about summer travel and the strange expectations attached to family vacations.

On Vacationing

The New Millennial Parenting Anxiety

By Faith Hill

For those determined to pass down their globe-trotting values, vacations have become ever more ambitious and goal-oriented—and exhausting. (From 2025)

Read the article.

How to Have Your Most Fulfilling Vacation Ever

By Arthur C. Brooks

Turning your leisure into learning offers the happiest holiday experience of all. (From 2023)

Read the article.

The New Family Vacation

By Michael Waters

More and more Americans are traveling with multiple generations—and, perhaps, learning who their relatives really are. (From 2023)

Read the article.

Still Curious?

Beach vacationers are doing it wrong. To really take a break, try vigorous exercise, Richard A. Friedman argued in 2022
On failing the family vacation: “How I got dumped, went on a cruise, and embraced radical self-acceptance,” Kim Brooks wrote in 2024.

Other Diversions

Courtesy of Myriam K.

My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Today the submission came from my own grandmother, who was very excited to share her picture. “Climbing the mountain near my house in Bogotá, a little higher up at 2,600 meters, the tropical nature thrives in a climate that can drop to 3 degrees Celsius at dawn. The bromeliads bloom beautifully,” Myriam K. from Bogotá, Colombia, writes.

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

— Rafaela

The Bad Beer That’s an Incredible Beverage

2026-05-23T08:00:00-04:00

One of the many humiliations that arrive in your 30s is the grudging recognition that a parent was right about something. For some people, their parents were right about a financial decision they recommended, or a romantic relationship they disapproved of. My dad was right about a 96-calorie American lager produced in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

“It’s hard to get in trouble drinking Miller Lite,” was my father’s advice, dispensed repeatedly throughout my young adulthood—usually after he’d spied me carefully tipping an over-hopped beer out of a florid can and into a stupidly shaped glass. For years, I wrote off his wisdom as the curmudgeonly philosophy of a man too stubborn to join the Craft Beer Revolution. Why would anyone still drink mass-produced piss water when you could stock your fridge with $21 four-packs made with love and genius by regional artisans? It was like watching a black-and-white boob tube in the age of 4K flatscreens.

In my 20s, I turned enjoying craft beer—and booze in general—into a minor hobby. I stood in long lines to buy limited releases from various “gypsy brewers.” I nursed recurring obsessions with Monastrell wines from Jumilla. I hunted down vintage bourbon; National Distillers–era Old Grand-Dad was a particular fixation.

In retrospect, I can see that this was something of a defense mechanism. After growing up working-class, I went to college and then graduate school at fancy private institutions, which put me in constant contact with people who had family money, or were simply from hipper places than I am. You may have a trust fund and come from a stock of people who “summer,” I reasoned, but I’ll be damned if you know more about food or alcohol than I do. I viewed drinking decent tipple as part of what it meant to be civilized. To some extent, I still believe that. But now I also believe that most of the time, it’s Miller Time.

[Read: ]The surefire way to elicit squeals of delight from a grown man

The conversion happened slowly. It began with a search for a beer that I could drink while watching Monday Night Football, but that also wouldn’t leave me feeling grimy when I woke up to teach my 8 a.m. class. As I entered my third decade of life, I’d found that microbrews, with their high alcohol content, made me feel a bit suboptimal the next day, even when I consumed only one or two. Before long, my Miller Mondays made me realize that this 4.2 percent ABV “macro-lager” had many applications I had not previously considered: It was a treat for mowing the lawn. It prevented me from getting too drunk at weddings. It could be reliably consumed during a hot-afternoon cookout without requiring me to take a nap. This small pleasure was even cheap! At my local bottle shop, a sixer of tall boys rings out at $7.49.

The problem with craft beer is how easily it can make you, as my dad says, “get in trouble.” One double IPA is not enough, but two is one-half too many. Two sours is one-half too few, but three is instant heartburn. Boozy imperial stouts are best consumed in eight-ounce increments, but they tend to come in 22-ounce bombers. The math doesn’t math. Miller Lite, by contrast, is an honest beer. If you find yourself Miller Lite drunk, most likely the issue is not that you shouldn’t have had that last beer; you shouldn’t have had those last four.

Miller Lite is not a great beer. It’s not even an okay beer. Miller Lite is a bad beer but an incredible beverage. It is neither complicated nor offensive, and it derives its magic from this bland alchemy, this delicate equipoise of fizzy nothingness. Miller Lite does not demand your attention. It does not slap you in the face with flavor; in fact, you’d be hard-pressed to identify any flavor at all. Gun to my head, I’d say it vaguely recalls … sandwich bread? Frozen corn? Off-brand Cheerios, maybe? The tasting notes provided by the Miller Brewing Company include such descriptors as “light to medium body,” “clean,” and “crisp,” all of which are not tastes but textures, as if the most flattering thing the manufacturer has to say about its own beer is that “you will notice it in your mouth.” A review on the brew-rating website Beeradvocate notes that Miller “is a beer best observed in bunches”—a beverage whose most favorable quality is quantity.

This is a beer that provides you with absolutely nothing to think about. It offers a break from the quest to find novel gustatory experience that has come to substitute for culture among much of the American professional class. To drink Miller Lite is to declare that you are a well-adjusted adult—that you do not require excitement at every juncture, that you are capable of sitting with your thoughts, that you have the patience and strength of character to build a buzz slowly.

[Read: Big Beer is not so big anymore]

No other low-alcohol macrobrew can fulfill Miller Lite’s role—it is sui generis. Michelob Ultra is for golfers. Corona Light is for vacation. Pabst Blue Ribbon is for ironists. Natty Light is for frat boys and people who use the phrase the war of northern aggression. Bud Light and Busch Light taste like raw dough. Coors Light has those childish mountains that turn blue and also tastes like raw dough. Narragansett Lager, Boston Lager, and Yuengling are good but not available everywhere. Guinness is good on draft but bad in any other format. Labatt Blue Light is Canadian.

That leaves Miller Lite: humble, measured, available from sea to shining sea in cans, canisters, and bottles, in kegs and on tap. It is a beer for people who appreciate the sweetness in simplicity. Who need exactly six beers and have between $7 and $11. Whose fathers were, regrettably, right.

The Absurd Misunderstanding Fueling the Debate Over The Odyssey

2026-05-23T07:30:00-04:00

A beautiful movie star is cast in a beloved story. The character is fictional—she isn’t even fully human. Nonetheless, activists and purists insist that the actor is the wrong race.

I’m speaking of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, the 2017 film adaptation of a popular Japanese manga series. Critics accused the movie’s creators of “whitewashing” the heroine, a cyborg whose physical form is entirely prosthetic and whose race and gender are, in fact, mutable. She’s implanted with the consciousness of a Japanese woman, but her memories have been suppressed and edited. The story is an examination of how unstable identity is, and how untethered it can be from the body. Yet for detractors, the politics of representation—the simple fact that Johansson isn’t Asian—overrode the power of the film’s philosophical inquiry.

Audiences are willing to suspend all manner of disbelief in service of a good story—except, apparently, when it comes to race. Hence the controversy surrounding this year’s most anticipated movie, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. The director cast the Kenyan Mexican actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman of the ancient world. The resulting fury says much more about today’s myopic understanding of identity than it does about classical antiquity.

[Read: Christopher Nolan on the promise and peril of technology]

Elon Musk used to be a fan of Nolan’s, but he quickly reconsidered when rumors began circulating that the director had cast Nyong’o. “Chris Nolan has lost his integrity,” Musk said on X in January. Then, earlier this month, the right-wing provocateur Matt Walsh rekindled the debate. “Christopher Nolan knows that he would be called racist if he gave ‘the most beautiful woman’ role to a white woman,” he said on X.

Musk has been posting about it ever since. “Chris Nolan is pissing on Homer’s grave,” he wrote. “Chris Nolan has shown total contempt for the Greek People.” These complaints have garnered tens of thousands of likes and reposts. Yet Musk doesn’t seem terribly bothered by Matt Damon’s role as Odysseus, despite the actor’s lack of Mediterranean ancestry.

Such selective indignation relies on an idiosyncratic reading of Greek myth. In the most famous telling, Helen of Troy is not born but hatched. Zeus appears to Helen’s human mother, Leda, under the guise of a swan. After a sexual encounter, Leda lays eggs. Out comes Helen (and her sister Clytemnestra, also played by Nyong’o). Which is to say, Nolan’s critics seem to be committing themselves to the idea that Zeus—the god of gods; the onetime waterfowl—was “white.” His offspring, therefore, could not possibly be portrayed by someone with dark skin.

The particulars of this argument are absurd, but they’re ultimately beside the point. Art’s great gift is to allow us to transcend divisions of language, color, and nation, even of time and place—to imagine ourselves in lives other than our own. I do not need to be Russian or to see myself physically mirrored in Ivan Karamazov to be transported to Dostoyevsky’s world. Indeed, I can identify with Ivan on a far deeper level than that of blood and skin, which “do not think,” as Ralph Ellison observed.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: Saving classics from identity politics]

American audiences risk squandering that gift by obsessively policing the boundaries of racial identity. This pathology spans the ideological divide. Right-wing identitarians are quick to condemn progressive hysteria about racial representation and cultural appropriation. Now they’re aping the flawed thinking they claim to despise.

The Nolan controversy seems to have inspired particular fervor because of The Odyssey’s exalted place in the Western canon. Some progressives dismiss the canon as a collection of dead white men—yet another result of hyper-racialized thinking. By contrast, many on the right have tended to emphasize that it speaks to the universal human condition, regardless of race. The canon’s champions have seen clearly how works such as The Odyssey reveal the perverted logic of racial-line drawing. Today, they would do well to heed their own wisdom.

*Illustration sources: Heritage Images / Getty; Theo Wargo / Getty; Photo 12 / Alamy; TCD / Prod. DB / Alamy.

There’s Never Been a Better Time to Study Computer Science

2026-05-23T07:30:00-04:00

It’s a weird time to be studying computer science. Recent grads have a higher unemployment rate than those in just about every other major—yes, even philosophy. The internet is littered with rants from newly minted programmers who can’t find work. On one such YouTube video, the top comment reads: “Your first mistake is not being born earlier.” Students, meanwhile, are fleeing the field. Undergraduate enrollment in computer science dipped by more than 8 percent last year, representing the largest absolute decline across any major in several years. The falloff at the graduate level—14 percent—was even more severe.

Learning to code was supposed to be a ticket to a good tech job. It wasn’t just Silicon Valley that spread the gospel of computer science: “Support tha american dream n make coding available to EVERYONE!!” Snoop Dogg once tweeted. Now the decision to major in CS is more complicated. Nowhere has AI refashioned work as dramatically as it has for programmers. Coding bots have become much more powerful over the past few years, and they excel at precisely the kind of programming that might previously have been delegated to entry-level workers. An Anthropic co-founder, Jack Clark, recently warned that “the value of more junior people is a bit more dubious,” as some 90 percent of the company’s new code is apparently now AI-generated.

The popular narrative around CS has flipped to such a degree that some Silicon Valley insiders are now actively discouraging people against the major. John Coogan, a co-host of TBPN, a popular tech-news podcast, recently asked if it would be a “contrarian move” to study computer science “at a time when coding jobs are going away.” But studying computer science is not contrarian, and the major’s waning relevance has been overstated.

It’s true that the work situation is more dicey than it once was. “Forget Python, study Plato,” The Economist advised students last week. But although the unemployment rate for new CS grads is spiking, they have a relatively low rate of underemployment—that is, comparatively few are working in jobs that don’t usually require a college degree. (Consider that nearly half of philosophy majors are underemployed.) When it comes to wages, new computer-science grads are also still significantly outearning their peers. One explanation for why CS majors have such high unemployment rates is that they may be less likely to settle for lower-paid roles. If you’re optimizing for earnings, trading software for Socrates might not make so much sense after all.

[Read: The computer-science bubble is bursting]

None of this is to dismiss the AI threat to software jobs. The aforementioned employment data tracks students who graduated in 2024. AI has improved significantly since then, and the capabilities are likely to continue to increase, allowing bots to take on more sophisticated work. But the decline of manual programming—that is, writing code by hand—doesn’t obviate the need for computer scientists. Even as AI tools become more powerful, leveraging bots to build reliable and secure software still takes training and expertise. With the AI revolution in full swing, we are hurtling toward a future in which even more of the global economy is mixed up with the software industry. If anything, the AI-ification of work seems likely to require more people who understand computer systems at a deep level. Across the tech industry, demand for mid- and senior-career engineers is rising. The trouble, then, is how to adjust today’s computer-science programs to equip students for work when the field is changing so fast—especially when entry-level coding jobs that once were guaranteed are now far less certain.

“I don’t know where the world is going,” Michael Hilton, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, told me, “but I know the things I taught three years ago are not the right things to teach today.” As bots have become more capable, Hilton keeps updating his curriculum—he encourages students to use AI for coding. Other professors are moving in the opposite direction. Valerie Barr, a computer scientist at Bard College, told me that in her introductory class, coursework is now mostly done on paper. “I’m back to how I taught in the 1980s, when we didn’t have laptops and there was one computer lab for the whole campus,” she said. Barr believes that students who learn coding fundamentals the old-fashioned way will be the ones to come out ahead. “You cannot make effective use of AI tools if you don’t know something about what you’re asking the tools to do,” she said. In much the same way, grade schoolers learn how to do basic algebra by hand before they are allowed to use calculators.

The split over whether to embrace coding tools points to a larger divide in the discipline: Is studying computer science about training students to be good software developers, or teaching them the computational theory that underpins the field? As coding becomes automated, we might see a further fracturing between the two domains. On the theory side, the AI boom has put a premium on highly skilled researchers with a deep understanding of machine learning. Future students may enroll in new AI-related majors that take the conventional CS major and then layer in more specialized AI training. Such programs already exist at several colleges: MIT introduced an AI major in 2022, and it’s already become the second-most-popular major on campus—behind computer science. And some students who are interested in CS for its own sake will still go deep in other non-AI subfields, such as cryptography. Today’s AI boom is possible only because people pursued neural networks when they were uncool.

At the same time, new courses could offer students an introduction to software development without the theoretical baggage and proof-writing they might have otherwise had to wade through. Geoffrey Challen, a computer scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, plans to offer a new course this fall in which he will teach students to develop software “without writing, reading, debugging, or viewing a single line of code,” he told me. Northwestern is also slated to offer an “entry-level creative coding” class for students without technical backgrounds. For all the talk of AI-literacy programs that teach students how to use chatbots, the real innovation might be in developing courses that train students in basic software-development skills. Most colleges require introductory writing courses because it’s understood that clear written communication is an important cross-disciplinary skill—even for students who plan to study physics or math. Classes that teach students how to use AI coding tools could become commonplace, providing students of all backgrounds with a baseline software-engineering skill set.

The days of computer-science grads being all but guaranteed cushy tech jobs may be coming to an end, and the next few years will almost certainly be tumultuous as the job market continues to adjust. But we’re on the precipice of a new era when learning to develop software will be easier than ever, opening the door to students who might not otherwise have chosen to study computing. Perhaps a new golden age of CS education has only just begun.

Barney Frank Was Like No One Else

2026-05-23T07:00:00-04:00

When former Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts died on Tuesday at 86, he was already a human version of a historical artifact. Frank was famous in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but like most of our politicians, he was mostly forgotten once he voluntarily left Congress, 13 years ago. Then suddenly, late last month, Frank was back in the public eye because of a characteristically brash and courageous decision: He announced that he was about to die.

Obituary writers had a lot to work with when they wrote about Frank’s unconventional life and career. One obvious subject was Frank’s homosexuality, the source of much of the drama in his life. Another obvious topic was Frank’s gift for humor and wisecracks. And most significant was his imposing intellect, which usually made him the smartest man in the room, whatever the room. These were all rare attributes for a member of the modern-day House and Senate, where partisan banality reigns. In his distinctive manner, Barney Frank was a towering figure, although his own figure was usually bulging, and came packaged in wrinkled suits and deeply scuffed shoes.

Here I should pause to explain my relationship with Frank, which goes back to the first year of John F. Kennedy’s presidency: 1961, when I was 18 years old and Frank was 21. We were delegates to a convention of college students—mostly elected officers of student governments, though nobody had elected Frank or me. The event was called the National Student Congress. I quickly realized that Frank was a star of the show. That was partly because of his quick wit and his knowledge of all the issues that the student delegates would debate, but more substantively because of his mastery of Robert’s Rules of Order, which spelled out procedures for a gathering of this kind. Frank understood, then and years later in the House, that mastery of the rules could be very important at crucial moments.

[James Kirchick: Barney Frank’s second coming-out]

At the student conference, Frank and I spent hours collaborating on a resolution recommending the abolition of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. We laughed a lot. I didn’t realize then that I was more interested in the girls we were working with than he was. That week was the beginning of a friendship that lasted for nearly 65 years.

Journalists befriending politicians is rightly a sensitive subject, and usually a bad idea. But Frank and I became friends two years before I began a career in journalism, and 11 years before he first ran for office. I hope and believe that we avoided the obvious pitfalls of our friendship, but it’s not my role to absolve us now.

After Frank won his seat in the House in 1980, his new colleagues were often intimidated by his intelligence. But his leader in his last decade in office, Nancy Pelosi, loved it. She told The New Yorker in 2009, “It’s brilliance that saves time, because he simplifies the complex for us. He is an enormously valuable intellectual resource for the Congress.”

That resource provided relief for numerous Democratic House members, who, like most Americans, were blindsided by the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the subsequent financial crisis that rocked Wall Street and the country in 2008. Frank met with many colleagues that fall to reassure them that the economy would recover from the shock, and that he, as chair of the House Financial Services Committee, would help them. He promised to produce tough legislation to reform the financial system and prevent similar crises from happening in the future.

Such promises are not uncommon in modern American politics, but fulfilling them is exceedingly rare. Frank and his Senate counterpart, Chris Dodd, did fulfill their promises. The Dodd-Frank Act was one of the most consequential legislative initiatives of our era.

Frank was proud of his intellect, and of the way he used it, mastering arcane subjects such as financial derivatives and subprime mortgages. He read voraciously. Two weeks before he died, he was asking people he met to recommend books. And in the last year of his life, he wrote a book of his own, his fourth.

Yale University Press has scheduled his lively critique of the progressive activists in the Democratic Party for publication in September. The book is called The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy. Frank finished work on it just months ago and sent the manuscript to several friends, asking for comments and reactions. I was one of those who got the manuscript.

I, too, wrote a number of books during my long career at The Washington Post, but I couldn't imagine writing another one in my 80s, when powers of concentration and memory for details are diminished. I said as much to Frank, and he seemed surprised. His 80s were clearly different from mine.

His book gives no hint of the advanced age of its author. It is energetic, even polemical. Frank was fed up with the lefties who consider Medicare for All and the rights of trans athletes more important than winning elections. He wanted to restore the political power of practical liberal Democrats who believe in using government to improve the lives of non-rich Americans. He feared that the left-wingers in the party only made Democrats less popular with voters. This has been a theme in Frank’s politics since the early 1960s, when he eagerly debated Tom Hayden, a co-founder of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society, before campus audiences.

Mentioning Frank’s debates with Hayden creates an opportunity to tell my single favorite Frank anecdote: At one campus appearance to debate Frank, Hayden insisted on sitting with the audience, refusing to set himself apart by using the chair he was offered on the stage. He spoke first, then found a place in the crowd. Frank came to the podium and began his own remarks. “Tom,” he said, nodding toward Hayden’s seat in the crowd, “you are such a grass root, I don’t know whether I should debate you or come down there and water you.”

Frank suffered from congestive heart failure for many years. Last month, his doctors told him they had no way to keep his heart beating after another episode. One might come at any time. Frank decided to enter home hospice care in the slightly scruffy farmhouse in Ogunquit, Maine, that he had shared with his husband of 14 years, Jim Ready.

At that point, Frank picked up his telephone and began calling friends and relations to personally convey the grim news. Nobody said we get to live forever, he liked to say. In fact, Frank and those he called all knew that for a man with chronic heart disease who’d waged a lifelong struggle to control his weight, making it to 86 was quite amazing. Nevertheless, hearing the news from Frank himself was a challenging experience.

[From the April 2015 issue: The cross-generational politics of Barney Frank]

That phone call was brave, rooted in facts, difficult to make and to receive. It illustrated how different Frank was from so many members of today’s House, wedded to peddling baloney on social media and hoping for a chance to appear on Fox or MS NOW.

The Founding Fathers imagined that they were creating a new republic whose property-owning men would take seriously the obligations of citizenship. The Congress created in Article I of the Constitution was clearly intended to be the dominant branch of the new government. It would, they expected, attract admirable, gifted men who would guide the new nation to a bright future.

Frank’s life and career remind us how much America has changed in the 21st century. Is it conceivable that a new Barney Frank—an unusually intelligent and well-educated independent thinker, no personal fortune, and a funny regional accent—might launch a political career in our time and succeed the way that Barney Frank did? I wish for my three grandchildren and their entire generation that the answer might be yes, but I’d laugh at myself if I claimed that it was.

What would the Founders make of Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House of Representatives, most often seen in public wearing a nervous grin? Neither Johnson nor the overwhelming majority of today’s House and Senate members measure up to the citizen-scholars and philosophers that 18th-century American statesmen dreamed of. Nor does their repeated abandonment of congressional prerogatives and powers fulfill the Founders’ expectations.

But Barney Frank did.

College Should Be Way More Fun

2026-05-23T07:00:00-04:00

One afternoon last fall, a class full of Amherst seniors forgot I was there. In the 19th-century octagonal room where I taught my course on fiction, they were deep in an argument about the tempestuous ending of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw—about whether the ghosts haunting two children in a gothic country house are real, about whether they exist only in the deteriorating mind of their governess, about why one of the children dies at the novel’s conclusion, about whether he even dies at all. The famously ambiguous novel is strewn with evidence to support incompatible interpretations, and my students found it all. The discussion became loud, animated. People smiled, then laughed. Nobody was waiting for me to tell them the answer; the room was theirs, all eight sides of it.

A large language model on one of their phones would have exhausted the debate with just a few keystrokes. Try it: Ask ChatGPT or Gemini if the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw are real, and they will with alarming speed give you a few bullet points for rival interpretations—and then stand ready for the next question. Ask one to pick a side, and it will do so with triumphant certainty. (“Definitively? No—the ghosts do not exist,” ChatGPT told me.) Or it might offer you a cheeky riff to tie things off, as Claude recently did for me: “The ‘real’ answer may simply be that James wanted the question to haunt you.” The ghosts are haunting, get it?

My point is not that the LLMs are more right or wrong than their human counterparts, but that the speed at which they churn through the argument is the exact opposite of the slow, messy conversation that unfolded in front of me last fall. What makes The Turn of the Screw so generative isn’t that it has a hidden answer waiting to be unlocked. James built the ambiguity in on purpose, and lingering over that uncertainty, turning it over, is the entire point. (“The story,” as one of the characters famously says, “won’t tell.”)

That kind of intellectual experience—irreducibly human, stubbornly inconclusive—is precisely what artificial intelligence cannot offer. AI is a certainty machine: Ask a question, get an answer. But the most important questions don’t work that way, and learning to live inside them, and to enjoy living inside them, may be the most valuable thing that a liberal education can teach. In all the hand-wringing about higher education and its future, we risk turning our colleges into joyless job preparation, political death matches, or both. We’ve forgotten the most important thing of all—that thinking can be deeply pleasurable.

Anxiety about the outsourcing of human thought to computational models is perhaps the dominant strain in our educational discourse at the moment, and plenty has been written about how to protect our campuses from intellectual erosion at a moment when nearly nine in 10 students are using AI in their studies.

Cal Newport, the computer-science professor and productivity writer, has offered one kind of solution: Treat “cognitive fitness” like physical fitness. Universities, he’s said, should become “citadels of concentration,” functioning like a “Navy SEAL boot camp” to prepare students for intellectual hardship. As any athlete will tell you, if you are going to succeed, you have to put in the hard work of the weight room. Lift, rest, repeat.

I’m a fan of Newport’s. But when we treat education solely as a grim, rigorous workout meant to stave off cognitive decline, we forget that the reason athletes engage in intense physical preparation is so they can participate in games and contests that are deeply pleasurable. (As Crash Davis famously demands of his teammates in Bull Durham, “Fun, goddamnit!”) Athletics is not the same as preparation for war, nor is the work of deep thinking. Both are social activities that require hard work, yes, but both are accompanied by the possibility of something else: joy.

We cannot lose sight of that pleasure, and not only because of AI. Over the past few years, educators have watched students succumb to the rush to righteousness—an urgent reflex to seize the “correct” moral or political position and then vociferously defend it by disputing the legitimacy of all others. It is a rejection of the slow work of wrestling with ambiguity. What Newport’s “boot camp” metaphor misses—and what the ideological piety that plays out on social media completely neglects—is that the play of ideas is the essential counterweight to both intellectual laziness and rigid dogma.

Intellectual play is less like a modern sporting event and more like those endless playground games of tag and Wiffle ball you played as a kid. It is a social mode of inquiry propelled by boundless curiosity and a healthy skepticism. Play prevents thinkers and the institutions they inhabit from becoming rooted, fixed, and dull. As Richard Hofstadter put it long ago in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, “Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties.”

An undergraduate education must facilitate this kind of slow thinking and its playfulness. It is through play, not painful reps at the intellectual gym, that we do the crucial pedagogical work of teaching our students how to think with both creativity and rigor. It is through play that we are invited to embrace the messy, circuitous, and experimental nature of human curiosity. When professors play as intellectuals, we introduce our students to one of the most valuable gifts we have to offer: the pleasure of the life of the mind.

One persistent criticism of the work that we do on college campuses is that it seems hopelessly frivolous and out of touch. How can a roomful of students debating The Turn of the Screw have any relevance to the profound civic and technological challenges of our own time? It’s impossible to ignore that humanities enrollment has been in decline for well over a decade because of the fear that this kind of activity offers nothing in the way of a marketable skill or quantifiable return on investment.

Yet what we need now, and will need even more as machine thinking works its way deeper and deeper into the workplace, is the capacity for human judgment—judgment that is human not only because a person made it but also because they have learned to think together with other humans about challenges that have no clear answer or solution.

When students debate whether the ghosts in James’s novel are real or imagined, they are not merely settling a literary dispute. They are practicing the capacity to hold two competing interpretations in mind simultaneously, to test each against the available evidence, and to remain genuinely uncertain without becoming paralyzed. They are learning that a question worth asking is, in many cases, one that resists a clean answer.

These are precisely the cognitive habits that have atrophied in our public life. Our most urgent challenges, whether the governance of artificial intelligence, the erosion of democratic norms, or the challenge of building shared meaning across fractured communities, are not engineering problems with determinable solutions. They are interpretive ones that involve weighing trade-offs and competing values. They require citizens who can listen carefully, argue charitably, tolerate complexity, and resist the pull of the obvious. The seminar room, at its best, is where that tolerance is built.

About 90 years ago, one of my predecessors as president of Amherst College, Alexander Meiklejohn, wrote that the art of democracy is “the art of thinking independently together.” That’s what we learn when we engage in intellectual play, and that is what a democratic society requires—the capacity to engage not only in a contest of ideas but also in the joyfulness of our collective striving. To be sure, it’s a long road to travel from the ghosts of Henry James to a revival of our democratic life, so we should have some fun along the way.

Why College Students Are Booing AI

2026-05-23T07:00:00-04:00

College students have been booing commencement speakers who dare to mention artificial intelligence. The boos were heard at the University of Central Florida, when Gloria Caulfield, a real-estate executive, called AI “the next Industrial Revolution.” And at the University of Arizona, when former Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned “the architects of artificial intelligence,” last year’s Time people of the year. And also at Middle Tennessee State University, when Scott Borchetta, a Nashville record executive, told graduates that AI is “rewriting the production process.” Boos, audible enough to be captured on video.

Those videos spread quickly on social media. The posts first cited the fact of the booing, which is undeniable. As that fact spread, others drew conclusions. NBC News reported that the term artificial intelligence proved “wildly unpopular” because it was “striking a sore spot.” The Wall Street Journal cited the boos as evidence that “The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam.” Fox News said the boos against Schmidt represented grads letting Schmidt know “exactly what they thought of AI.”

Watching the clips, and then the reactions, and then reading stories about the reactions, and then taking in blog-style, big-idea conclusions about what the reactions meant, I felt the internet drawing me toward an interpretation that was supposed to be obvious—that young people loathe AI, and that they hate AI because it and the power brokers who invented, wield, and praise it have stolen from them the last vestige of a future that those brokers had already stolen in large part before they did so by means of AI.

[Read: Greetings, class of 2026! Have you heard about AI? Wait, why are you booing?]

But as a university professor and administrator, I also know that new graduates by and large love AI. The technology has already changed college students forever, I wrote at the start of this academic year. My colleague Lila Shroff and I discussed how AI had broken high school as well. Three years ago, the first year of AI college ended in ruin, as students raced to see what AI could do—and what they could get away with by using it—while professors and universities found themselves ignorant and unprepared. Even students at small, elite liberal-arts colleges, such as Amherst and Vassar, have found themselves wrestling with AI’s ability to help them cheat their way out of the bespoke, high-touch, and expensive education that made attending a small college appealing.

The public seems to want these boos to mean something definitive and specific—the way an AI chatbot is supposed to provide a certain answer, right or wrong. To me, the booing sounds more like a cosmic howl.

Artificial intelligence exposed the wicked problems in higher education that long predated AI: bureaucratic universities, transactional students, overburdened faculty, risk-averse administrators, and a culture obsessed with achievement. From up close, the crisis was never a single failure but an accumulation of compromises. Students gamed the rules. Professors cut corners. Administrators chased mandates and opportunities. All of them were responding rationally to institutions that rewarded ambition, efficiency, and advancement over learning itself.

I thought of this knotty mess when I watched the clip of Borchetta, the record-label CEO, getting heckled at Middle Tennessee State University. “Deal with it,” Borchetta said after the boos began. “It’s a tool,” he said of AI. “Make it work for you.” Borchetta had given $15 million to name the university’s college of media and entertainment, making him one of the types of people whose wealth and influence now drives academic policy.

Watched in isolation, the clip suggests a tidy story. A rich guy who got his sneers at students whose theirs he now threatens to automate away, while also lecturing those very same students that they better accept this future as both inevitable and desirable. Borchetta’s label, Big Machine Records, signed a young Taylor Swift in 2005, an accomplishment that later devolved into a spectacle of creative credit, ownership, and control after Big Machine sold her masters to Scooter Braun. How much more symbolism does one require to cast AI as bad news, and people such as Borchetta as evil overlords for wielding it with so little thought?

But listening to Borchetta’s entire speech—which I had to scroll past a Google AI overview of the controversy it supposedly summarized to find—I felt as if I were visiting an alternate universe. Borchetta told, in brief, the story of Napster, whose 1999 appearance caused record executives to “lose their minds.” They saw only the threat, and for that reason, Borchetta said, they could not see the future—which was music streaming. And that future was not great for recording artists. Record executives like him, and the artists he distributed, went from wholesaling albums for $12 or so to “literally chasing fractions of pennies around the world,” he said. Borchetta presented streaming as a foreign invader that was unwelcome but too powerful to defeat.

Whether Borchetta deserves praise for how he navigated this situation is debatable. In addition to signing Swift and growing acts such as Tim McGraw and Rascal Flatts, Borchetta’s Big Machine also embraced digital marketing—including on Myspace—earlier than other labels, making him seem prescient. But the Swift dispute, which arose in 2019, during the $330 million sale of Big Machine, also made Borchetta seem like an executive who put his own interests ahead of the artists he also claimed to champion.

A conflict between an artist and a record label is not a new story (Prince versus Warner, George Michael versus Sony, and the Beatles versus Capitol are but a few precedents). But the Swift-Borchetta dispute took place at a moment of ambiguous and massive cultural change, when “creators” began overtaking artists as the owners and operators of their own work and catalog. And part of the change was the emergence of artists who advertised themselves as executives, which is exactly how Swift came out of the fiasco—as a billionaire who found the balance between label power and individual power.

“What will be the stories we tell from this turbulent moment in time?” Borchetta asked his audience. He leaned on commencement-safe aphorisms such as There is no limit to what you can do to encourage the graduates before him. He told them to “be fearless.” He urged them not to let the entertainment industry convince them that “there are no seats left at the table.”

It is always easy for a wealthy and successful person to present their own success as deliberate and replicable rather than accidental, and Borchetta certainly delivered that message. But on the whole, over the 15 minutes he spoke, Borchetta did the job he was assigned. He encouraged graduates to believe in themselves, to chase their dreams. The line that “AI is rewriting production” came at the end of this message, as the latest in a line of changes that had included streaming and social media as prior examples. When the time for the boos came, Borchetta’s unrehearsed response, “Deal with it,” seemed like a concurrence with the student view rather than a rebuke of it.

I wasn’t in the room, and I can’t speak to the intentions of the students who booed. But they may have been expressing dissatisfaction less against AI in particular than against the complex problem of how to be a creative person in the second quarter of the 21st century. “Then do something about it,” Borchetta finally said to the AI boos. In context, Borchetta was not a clueless AI booster hawking the tech to college graduates who can’t stand it. “Invest in the skill and the art of creation,” he said in conclusion. “AI is not going to change that.”

After watching the actual speech, rather than the clip extracted from it and posted to TikTok or broadcast on cable news, I felt a tug of discomfort. This pang has become familiar as I’ve thought, written, and lived in this new era of AI: that the harm the technology is accused of bringing about—a slurry of automated thought and expression built of approximated, statistical sentiment rather than considered, individual judgment—motivates AI detractors as much as proponents. That “AI thinking” is now all thinking, and that it amounts to not thinking much at all.

The whole notion of opposition to or support of AI has started to seem irrelevant. A host of conditions—among them handheld computers and social media, cable news and supermarket tabloids, technological opportunism and historical ignorance—produced a situation in which “The Class of 2026 Hates AI” emerged as a convenient headline, one compatible with the social-media music-discovery process that Borchetta accurately explained.

[Read: The AI backlash could get very ugly]

And, you know, maybe the class of 2026 does hate AI. Surveys suggest that it is widely unpopular in the United States, and for good reason. AI is not yet responsible for the wholesale collapse of the job market, but companies have certainly used AI as an excuse to cut jobs or not fill new ones. The entry-level-job market is worse than it’s been in almost four decades, and those are the opportunities that today’s graduates were promised when they were coaxed to strive toward the accomplishments that got them into college in the first place.

Whatever pressure AI is exerting on opportunity seems doomed to make students even more focused on aspiration and success. That pressure will only worsen the state of affairs in colleges and universities, which are also beset by the financial chaos of the second Trump administration, a cascade that may threaten the very idea of American college life. The boos don’t mean nothing, but they probably don’t mean something easily summarized, either.

So an easy answer is: Just blame AI anyway. If the same forces of power and control that turned Napster into Spotify, and Google into Gemini, would stop turning the screws yet again, and even more tightly, on the torture machine that has been constricting us for years and decades, then we would be free. I suppose that is true, but it is also a fantasy. And the future is built not from a fantasy but from the present, and the present is given to us in its current form.

This is different from saying AI is here, so deal with it. In the ideal version of the college classrooms of 2026, a topic such as this would be given the time, space, and attention to unfold slowly, deliberately, and systematically. “It’s complicated!” the ideal version of a professor like me would say, and the student would want to learn more, and would exit the classroom and cross the quad talking about it, and would come to office hours and write a thoughtful paper and be inspired to pursue a calling or invent an idea or just reverberate inside the complexity of the question, and by extension the complexity of most questions, or most good ones, anyway. I wonder if such a future can still exist for college students (or professors, or writers), or if it has already been abandoned. I worry that this time, the answer is a simple one.

Why Would Europeans Believe Trump Now?

2026-05-23T06:30:00-04:00

Europe, which for nearly eight decades counted the United States as its military guarantor, just received a lesson in the fickleness of American power.

Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth abruptly canceled the deployment of an armored brigade to what the Pentagon often describes as a “model ally,” Poland. The move caught senior members of the Polish government by surprise. Because European officials were never briefed on the change, they were left to speculate about possible motivations: Perhaps the decision was a product of MAGA’s generalized disdain for Europe. Or maybe it was specific payback for Europe’s failure to help with the Trump administration’s war with Iran.

The Pentagon’s press office rushed to frame the decision as a carefully calculated modification of America’s force posture in Europe. But that was a harder argument to sell after top Army leaders told Capitol Hill they had learned only days earlier of the decision, which had been made above their heads.

Regardless, the Pentagon pressed ahead. Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said Thursday on social media that he had met with the Poles to reemphasize “our message that the U.S. is driving real burden-sharing for a European-led conventional defense.”

Minutes later, President Trump reversed the cancellation. He explained his choice not in terms of geopolitical strategy but as stemming from his personal fondness for the country’s right-wing president. “Based on the successful Election of the now President of Poland, Karol Nawrocki, who I was proud to Endorse, and our relationship with him, I am pleased to announce that the United States will be sending an additional 5,000 Troops to Poland,” Trump wrote on social media. “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

The announcement provoked disbelief in Europe: the rapid about-face, the personalized approach to war planning, and the lack of coordination between the president and his own secretary of defense. “This isn’t even a policy,” one European defense official told us. The Army was just as surprised and couldn’t say which forces would be bound for Poland. “President Trump will never say sorry. But I would interpret this as a sorry,” Rob Bauer, a retired admiral of the Royal Netherlands Navy and a former senior NATO official, told us. “It’s basically a kick in the ass for the secretary of defense.”

Current and former U.S. officials told us that America’s unpredictability has consequences that go beyond NATO’s force posture. They said that Moscow will be paying close attention to what changes in the alliance reveal about its cohesion and the political will of its most powerful member. Adding to the whiplash over the Poland deployment, American officials informed their NATO counterparts yesterday that Washington intends to reduce the number of forces it makes available to the alliance in the event of a crisis, a move first reported by Reuters. A defense official told us that the changes were directed by Hegseth and “represent an opportunity for our allies to demonstrate they have heard President Trump’s call for them to step up and take primary responsibility for Europe’s defense.” But Jim Townsend, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy, warned us that taking these forces—among the most ready and capable available to the alliance—off the table has the potential to do real damage. “They’re cutting into muscle now,” he told us.

The U.S. has long called for Europe to shoulder responsibility for more of its own defense. But its stated benchmark for proving that commitment—spending 5 percent of GDP on defense—no longer guarantees continued American troops, weapons, or protection. In the absence of a clear U.S. strategy, European officials say that Washington has instead cultivated uncertainty—either because the Trump administration itself is unsure how it would respond to future Russian aggression or because it sees the lack of clarity as a way to force Europe to do more for itself.

Strategic ambiguity, the U.S. policy of intentionally not saying whether it would defend Taiwan militarily in the event of a Chinese attack, is no longer a policy reserved for the Indo-Pacific. It now defines Washington’s approach to Europe as well.

After the Cold War, the U.S. shrank its presence in Europe, which had constituted more than 400,000 troops scattered across 100 communities. In 2013, the U.S. Army removed the last of its main battle tanks from Germany. Then Russia annexed Crimea. Then it tried to decapitate the Ukrainian state. In response, the United States surged forces eastward. NATO rediscovered deterrence, and Europe relearned the importance of geography.

[Read: Europe without America]

The current U.S. military footprint in Europe includes roughly 68,000 permanently based active-duty troops, according to Pentagon manpower data from late 2025, alongside thousands of rotational forces. The new levels are near the minimum allowed under the latest Defense Authorization Act, which generally restricts the Pentagon from reducing U.S. troop levels in Europe below 76,000 for more than 45 days.

The aborted plan to hold troops back from Poland actually arose from Trump’s spat with another longtime ally: Germany. After Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, criticized the U.S. war in Iran, the president vowed to pull U.S. forces from his country. But yanking troops from Germany would have been costly and time-consuming: Families would have needed to pack up, and weapons be sent home. Instead, the thinking, described to us by American officials, was that stopping the next rotational force, most of whom were headed to Poland, would send a quick message to Europe: Speaking out about the administration comes with consequences. The result: Members of the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, based in Fort Hood, Texas, who had been preparing to depart for Poland, were held back.

Europe’s fear is no longer troop reductions themselves. Rather, it’s that American security guarantees now appear contingent on Trump’s glandular impulses. They know that an alliance managed through whim rather than strategy quickly becomes brittle—subject to the kind of ruptures that Moscow is looking for.

A February report from Harvard’s Belfer Center warned that Russia sees a “unique window of opportunity to fracture NATO’s security architecture.” Rather than launching another full-scale invasion, as in Ukraine, the report argued, Moscow is more likely to pursue smaller, more limited operations designed to probe alliance unity and political resolve.

European officials said the movements of several thousand U.S. troops need not be cause for panic, especially as European countries gradually grow the ranks of their armed forces. The German defense ministry, for instance, announced this week that nearly 30,000 people applied to join its military last month, an increase of 21 percent compared with the same month last year.

More alarming would be the withdrawal of infrastructure or what are sometimes called “strategic enablers,” including refueling tankers, integrated-air-defense systems, and intelligence networks. These assets form the backbone of NATO capabilities on the European continent, and allies still rely extensively on the United States for them. Fearful of provoking Trump into removing infrastructure, senior European leaders are mostly staying silent about the troop movements, officials told us.

[Read: Why Europe is talking about nukes]

Some American lawmakers are being less cautious. Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, a Republican and an avatar of his party’s old-guard thinking on foreign policy, told us that the brigades in question are significant. “They are a deterrent against Russian threats to the eastern flank of the alliance,” he said.

Bacon said that Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich, the commander of U.S. European Command and NATO’s supreme allied commander of Europe, shares his view and specifically advised the administration that canceling the deployment to Poland was “not low risk.” But the Pentagon went ahead anyway. “So this was a decision by the secretary of defense over his four-star general in Europe,” Bacon said. A spokesperson for U.S. European Command declined to comment beyond pointing to recent statements by Grynkewich, who told reporters, “I will not get ahead of any political leadership in the United States.”

When Trump sought to reduce the U.S. military presence in Europe during his first term, members of his Cabinet tried to satisfy the impulse without weakening NATO’s defenses. Mark Esper, who served as defense secretary in 2019 and 2020, advised Trump to take forces out of Germany and position them closer to Russia’s border. “My view was, let’s move them further east: Romania, Bulgaria, Poland,” he told us this week. “I don’t have a problem with moving them around.”

Some of those moves have since been reversed. In October, the U.S. Army said that it would take about 3,000 troops out of Romania, a NATO member that borders Ukraine, and send them home to their base in Kentucky “without replacement.”

This week, at a security conference in Prague, the former Secretary General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen asked Esper whether the allies can still trust the U.S. to defend them: “If Russia were to attack, for instance, one of the Baltic states, would the United States live up to its commitments in NATO’s Article 5?” Esper said that yes, the alliance’s core pledge of mutual defense would hold. He expressed surprise that no one in the audience applauded his answer. That may have been because they did not all believe him.

Among the hundreds of European officials and military officers who gathered for the annual Globsec conference, Rasmussen’s question dominated the debates, and many of the participants seemed to believe that the U.S. under Trump had decided to abandon them. But the summit’s host, Czech President Petr Pavel, tried his best to put a positive spin on that reality, arguing that it should inspire the Europeans to develop their own defenses.

Out of the Gerrymandering Darkness, a New Hope for Reform

2026-05-23T06:00:00-04:00

Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick and Tom Suozzi occupy a lonely space in Congress. Their respective parties—Fitzpatrick is a Republican from Pennsylvania, Suozzi a Democrat from New York—are waging a nationwide gerrymandering fight that neither wants any part in. With the seat-for-seat battle expanding to new states seemingly by the day, Fitzpatrick and Suozzi are calling for a truce—if only anyone would listen.

“There’s got to be people that come to the table and agree that it’s in the best interest of our nation to not do this, that it’s a race to the bottom,” Fitzpatrick told me.

National leaders in both parties, however, are in no mood for peace. President Trump has directed Republicans to seize every opportunity to draw House seats in their favor, in hope that the GOP can create a buffer big enough to overcome the president’s sagging poll numbers in the midterm elections this fall. The Supreme Court’s decision to weaken the Voting Rights Act last month freed Republicans to redistrict even more aggressively across the Deep South, building on the party’s gains in Texas and a handful of other states last fall.

Democrats, who hit back in California but lost a court fight in Virginia, have vowed their own escalation in blue states next year. “We’re going to win in November,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries vowed to reporters last week, before adopting a bit of fantasy-flick hyperbole: “And then we’re going to crush their souls as it relates to the extremism that they are trying to unleash on the American people.”

The gerrymandering frenzy will likely extend for at least two more years, which in turn will only exacerbate the polarization and partisanship that has gripped Congress and steadily diminished its standing. “We’ve just made this so bad for our country,” Suozzi told me. “We have got to address this problem, or we’re going to fall further into this spiral, this death spiral.”

Fitzpatrick and Suozzi are co-chairs of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, a group that in an ideal world might comprise the entirety of Congress—after all, what else is a legislative body for?—but in these dysfunctional times make up a few dozen lawmakers along the center political axis of both parties. With the House so closely divided over the past decade, the caucus has occasionally exerted influence over policy—when it’s been able to avoid its own issues. I spoke with Fitzpatrick and Suozzi in a joint phone interview earlier this week, during which they told me that the caucus had resolved to make a concerted push against gerrymandering.

Both Fitzpatrick and Suozzi have some incentive to make this stand, as do many of their problem-solving colleagues. Fitzpatrick represents one of just three GOP-held districts that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, whereas Trump narrowly carried Suozzi’s Long Island constituency. Their purple seats are the kind that both parties target in redistricting, and the two hope that demonstrating their distaste for partisan warfare can help them win crossover voters in November.

[Read: The House of Representatives is turning into the Electoral College]

The Problem Solvers Caucus met inside the Capitol last week to discuss what to do about the redistricting “death spiral,” at a gathering that took place a short walk away from where House Democrats were beginning to plot their next round of revenge on gerrymandering Republicans. The challenge for the Problem Solvers is that they are constrained both by an internal struggle for consensus and by their relatively narrow view of Congress’ power to regulate a practice that’s nearly as old as the republic.

Fitzpatrick joined every other Republican in opposing a Democratic bill in 2022 that would have, among many other things, banned partisan gerrymandering nationwide and forced states to use independent redistricting commissions to draw House maps. Although he supports independent commissions, he told me that Congress couldn’t require their use. Instead, he said, Congress would have to use its funding power to encourage political reforms such as nonpartisan redistricting and open primaries—another popular idea to combat polarization. But the caucus has yet to endorse even that proposal. “We haven’t come to a decision as to what we’re going to advocate for yet,” Suozzi told me when I asked what the caucus planned to do about gerrymandering. “We’ve come to a decision that it’s a problem.”

Outside Congress, election reformers are even glummer about the gerrymandering race, but they have far grander ideas about how to fix the nation’s politics. A few of them think—or at least hope—that Americans will grow so infuriated by the whole mess that a new opportunity for change will emerge.

In early 2020, the political scientist Lee Drutman published a book in which he decried the “doom loop” created by the nation’s two major parties. Seven years later, he says that the system is now even “doomier and loopier.” He told me that he is not sure how much worse Congress can get. “Things are pretty ugly and pretty nasty and pretty bitter,” Drutman said, “but I guess you should never underestimate how low the floor can go.”

[Read: The fight-club rule on gerrymandering]

Drutman advocates for a system known as proportional representation, in which each House district elects not just one but multiple members determined by the percentage of the vote each party receives. Congress would include representatives from several parties, as opposed to its current configuration of Republicans, Democrats, and a small number of independents who align with one caucus or the other. The idea might seem like a pipe dream, but it has been drawing more discussion in the past few years (including in this magazine). Last week Harris, who is considering another White House bid, mentioned multimember districts during an interview in which she called for the party to hold a “no-bad-ideas brainstorm” to “strengthen democracy” and respond to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

The Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by five other conservatives, set off a fresh rush by Republican-dominated states to gerrymander in advance of the midterm elections, and threatened to decimate the ranks of Black representatives from the South in Congress. Tennessee eliminated its lone majority-minority district barely a week later, and GOP leaders in both Louisiana and Alabama announced new elections so that they could redraw districts currently held by Black Democrats. (Louisiana suspended a primary election that was already under way to do so.) South Carolina Republicans are now debating whether to carve up the district long held by Representative James Clyburn; in Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp called a special session of the legislature so that the GOP majority—which Democrats hope to displace in November—could redistrict for the 2028 election while the party still holds power in the state.

Drutman said that the Callais ruling could end up being the “hinge point” in the debate over systemic political reform. It was a moment in which “the rules changed,” he said. Aside from proportional representation, Drutman mentioned other ideas that have gained currency in recent years, particularly on the left. They include increasing the size of the House from its current 435 members and expanding the nine-member Supreme Court, along with campaign-finance and ethics reforms.

Democrats considered some of those changes when they last held power in Congress, and Harris mentioned Supreme Court expansion as part of her proposed brainstorm. (She also cited the possibility of statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.) As the party seeks to reclaim both the White House and durable congressional majorities over the next few years, it must debate whether to prioritize reforms that will enhance its power or those intended to decrease partisanship in the system as a whole.

The voters who stand to lose the most in the power struggle between Republicans and Democrats are those who don’t register with either party—and who represent the fastest-growing share of the national electorate. In a Gallup poll released earlier this year, 45 percent of respondents identified themselves as independents, the highest percentage Gallup has ever recorded. As the two parties shrink in stature, they are trying to consolidate their power, in part by drawing districts stacked in their favor and also by closing primary elections to independent voters and opposing efforts to open them up. In a gerrymandered district where only voters registered with a party can participate in the primaries, candidates aim to appeal to a small slice of the electorate that tends to be much more partisan than the population as a whole, deepening the divide across the country.

To many reformers, changing primary rules to expand access for independent voters is a more effective way of combatting polarization than farther-reaching proposals such as proportional representation and increasing the size of the House. The parties’ “push to maximize partisan advantage in ways that silence voters will lead to a populist backlash, and I think in that backlash is our opportunity,” Nick Troiano, the executive director of Unite America, a group that opposes closed-party primaries, told me.

Unite America invested heavily in statewide ballot initiatives to replicate Alaska’s unique voting system, in which four candidates advance from a nonpartisan primary to a general election run on ranked-choice voting. The campaigns lost nearly everywhere they were on the ballot in 2024, but Troiano thinks that had they been before voters this year, in the midst of this redistricting brawl, they might have fared better. “I don’t think that strategy was a failure. I think the timing was off,” he said.

The trouble for any election reform in this hyperpartisan moment is that as soon as one party—or even a prominent party leader, such as Harris—takes a liking to a proposal, the other party becomes more skeptical of the idea. (Ranked-choice voting, which for a while enjoyed bipartisan appeal, fell victim to this dynamic after its adoption in Maine coincided with Democratic victories.)

Open primaries face resistance among leaders of both parties because the model explicitly challenges their dominance. In California, top Democrats have never loved the state’s voter-approved nonpartisan primary, and the risk that the party might get shut out of the runoff election in the governor’s race this November has prompted a new effort to scrap it. Democratic leaders in Colorado and Nevada opposed primary-reform ballot campaigns. Louisiana Republicans ditched the state’s so-called jungle primary in 2024.

But at least a few Republicans are entertaining the idea of open primaries as a partial remedy to polarization and the legislative paralysis it can cause. Fitzpatrick has said that if Pennsylvania had an open primary, he’d run for Congress as an independent rather than as a Republican. A closed primary, he told me, effectively disenfranchises more than one-third of voters. “As a matter of justice, it’s wrong,” Fitzpatrick said. “And it has a corrosive effect on the House floor. You can tell the people who live in closed-primary states. They conduct themselves very differently.” (Fitzpatrick ran unopposed in his primary on Tuesday, but his occasional breaks with Trump have attracted the president’s attention. “He likes voting against Trump,” the president told Fox News’s Jacqui Heinrich, who is engaged to Fitzpatrick. “You know what happens with that? It doesn’t work out well.”)

[Listen: America has always had a gerrymandering problem. This is new.]

Garret Graves, a Republican from Louisiana who served in the House for a decade until last year before an earlier round of redistricting split up his district, shared a similar perspective on closed primaries. “There were hundreds of times where I had members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, who said to me, in summary, I know this vote is the right thing to do, but I can’t do it, because I’ll get primaried,” Graves told me. Closed primaries, he said, “distort democracy. They distort free markets.”

Yet Graves was looking not to his former colleagues in the House but to the public and even the courts for a solution. He suggested that a lawsuit challenging closed primaries as unfairly disenfranchising voters could succeed. “I would really welcome something like that,” Graves said. As for Congress, he seemed to think that the chances it would act on closed primaries were as small as the likelihood that the parties would lay down their arms on gerrymandering anytime soon. “I have zero hope,” Graves said.

What Is Hunter Biden Doing?

2026-05-22T17:34:00-04:00

It was something of a political hall of mirrors: Hunter Biden arriving at Candace Owens’s house, sitting in a book-filled room decorated with a crucifix and orchids in the shape of a heart, holding a coffee cup labeled conspiracy theorist, and answering a range of questions from a podcast host who has called him “an alleged sex predator” and “A DEGENERATE THAT SHOULD BE IN PRISON” who comes from a “SCUM family.” The first question: “The cocaine that was found at the White House, was it yours?”

To say this was an unusual pairing is an understatement. To claim it was Frost/Nixon is an overstatement. But it said something about modern-day politics—and the weirdness of online culture—that the son of a former Democratic president and a right-wing podcaster were sitting there together, conversing for nearly two hours, finding common ground on being misunderstood, on being targeted by a powerful president, and on questioning the circumstances of Charlie Kirk’s death and whether the assassination attempts against Donald Trump were staged.

Owens apologized for treating Biden like “a caricature” and joining the “political machine” that attacked him during one of the lowest moments of his life (“I’m really sorry that I contributed to that. Like, I just feel really shitty”). He lavished her with praise (“You’re probably the most effective communicator I’ve ever heard behind the microphone”). She encouraged him to spend time in confession (“Don’t worry,” he responded, “I’ve been to confession”), and he giddily proposed that they go see Pope Leo XIV together: “For real, let’s go to the Vatican.” Biden offered book recommendations (“Have you ever read The Devil’s Chessboard?”), and Owens complimented his intelligence (“Not to be rude, but I thought you were dumb”).

Much of the conversation focused on Biden’s recovery story, human details of which Owens seemed largely unaware. “I just didn’t even consider: He’s a crackhead. That’s actually a very relatable thing,” she said at one point. (Never mind that in December 2024 she devoted a segment to President Biden pardoning his son, in which she mentioned “crack” more than two dozen times over about 20 minutes.) To anyone who has read Hunter Biden’s 2021 memoir, followed his federal court cases, or heard him in previous interviews, there were a lot of familiar themes: The guy who has long had addiction issues, and been in and out of rehab through much of his adult life. The guy who spiraled further after his brother died. The guy who watched as compromising photos, his private text messages, and more than a decade of emails became public fodder and complicated his dad’s campaign and presidency. “It forced me into a choice,” he said. “And the choice was: Do I get out of bed and live, or do I die? And it became that much of a dichotomy. And I chose to live, and it wasn’t easy.”

Biden has spent years living under Republican attacks. Owens herself led many of them alongside other fixtures of the hard right. Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene once, during a congressional hearing, held up graphic images of Biden engaged in sex acts. Yet earlier this week, Greene wrote on social media, “I am so interested in this interview. This is what real journalism looks like along with where the political underground of America is moving.” Both Owens and Greene have been repeatedly criticized for making anti-Semitic comments, downplaying the Holocaust, and playing into anti-Jewish tropes.

The most revealing moment came toward the end, as Biden recounted the attacks he faced. “They tore off all my clothes, tarred and feathered me, and put me in the center of town, and said, ‘Look at him.’ And I survived,” he said. Owens locked eyes with him and apologized several times. “Genuinely, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I did partake in just the inhumanity of just Look at this guy at the worst moment of his life, with prostitutes. He’s on crack, he’s on drugs, and we should make fun of him.” Biden began tearing up, wiping his eyes. “For you to say that to me, I truly mean it, just from a purely selfish point of view, means the world. And I truly didn’t come here for that.”

But why was he there? Why did he recently reactivate his account on X? And what’s next for the man many Republicans have loved to hate and many Democrats have hoped would disappear?

I have gotten to know Hunter Biden quite well over the past few years. I spent months in 2021 combing through a copy of his hard drive—the product of an infamous laptop that he allegedly dropped off at a computer-repair shop and never retrieved—and learned way more about him than I cared to. The research produced a number of stories about his business pursuits, about his relationship with Tucker Carlson, and about how he benefited from his family name.

I also wrote about Biden’s attempts to become an artist, along with the ethical concerns his ambitions raised in the White House and the congressional investigations that followed. That all can seem quite quaint now. For some time, Biden has been privately angry about the Trump family and their business pursuits that involve far more money and foreign countries, pose far more conflicts of interest—and get far less scrutiny. That anger burst out in the interview with Owens.

[Read: MAGA’s next top influencer]

“I had two shows and probably sold a total of 20 paintings,” he said. “And you had a problem—not you; well, you too—had a problem with me being this emblem of corruption?” Owens agreed, and said she would forever distance herself from the Trump family and now sees their business pursuits on a far different scale of corruption. “I wish I could go back to the days where I thought, like, Hunter Biden’s art was the most corrupt deal that was done in politics,” she responded.

Owens largely steered clear of the topic of Joe Biden, explaining that it would be “completely demonic” to try to get Hunter to say anything bad about his dad. Not that he would. He views himself as something of a defender of the Biden legacy at a time when so many Democrats have ridiculed the former president for deciding to run for reelection. But Owens did try to get him to address the subject of Kamala Harris, who replaced his dad on the ticket. Biden demurred, saying that he didn’t know her well and that she was always nice to him. “I’m not dodging the question,” Biden said, “but I don’t want to shit on the vice president.”

The free-ranging interview also provided a window into what I’ve long seen as Biden’s willingness to entertain ideas that can seem far-fetched, his deep skepticism of certain parts of the federal government, and a worry over the vindictiveness of the current administration.

Although his father granted a sweeping pardon to him for crimes committed in the past, Biden expressed worry about being framed or targeted by Trump in the future. Before getting on flights, he said that he has a witness watch him pack his bags, afraid that someone might plant drugs. Given his track record, he said, no one would believe that he’s clean and sober.

At one point, Biden asked to keep one of Owens’s trademark coffee mugs (the ones with Conspiracy theorist on them), and they both suggested that the assassination attempts against Trump and the murder of Kirk, a close friend to Owens, could have been staged. They have every right, the pair agreed, to question whether they were. “It’s almost as if they’re just saying, like, eff you,” Biden said of those who dismiss their questions.

[Read: Finally, a Democrat who could shine on Joe Rogan’s show]

“It’s so disrespectful that we’re not even getting good psyops anymore,” Owens responded. “Like, we’re supposed to believe he’s survived four—what are we at, four assassination attempts? The first president that’s ever survived four assassination attempts? They lie to us about things.”

The two also think something else has changed. “There is a meanness. A willingness to adopt very, very un-American tactics against our opponents because it’s become a zero-sum game,” Biden said. “It’s not just, I disagree with you. It’s, You need to be punished. You need to be punished for what you believe.”

As to Owens’s first question about the cocaine found at the White House in July 2023—which, at the time, spawned its own conspiracy theories—Biden said it most certainly wasn’t his. He’s been sober, he said, since June 1, 2019. “I’m an easy target. And understandably so. I’ve been, I think, probably the most famous addict—and famous person, because of the grace of God, in recovery.”

Tulsi Gabbard Takes the Exit Ramp

2026-05-22T17:19:09-04:00

It’s a measure of Donald Trump’s low regard for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as well as its soon-to-be former occupant, that while the commander in chief was making final preparations to invade Venezuela and kidnap its president, Tulsi Gabbard was posting photos of herself from a beach in Hawaii.

Gabbard, who informed Trump of her resignation today, spent 15 months as the director of national intelligence—on paper, at least. By law, the DNI is supposed to serve as the president’s chief intelligence adviser. Gabbard never was, and many of her stances were at odds with administration actions. Trump was contemptuous of even her modest efforts to speak truth to power. In the spring of 2025, when Gabbard testified to the intelligence community’s consensus view that Iran “is not building a nuclear weapon,” Trump replied, “I don’t care what she said.” Gabbard has long opposed U.S. military intervention in Iran and did not publicly come out in support of Trump’s decision to go to war. One of her top lieutenants quit in protest of the war.

In her resignation letter, Gabbard told Trump that she would step down on June 30, having recently learned that her husband, Abraham Williams, has a rare type of bone cancer. “Abraham has been my rock throughout our eleven years of marriage,” Gabbard wrote. People who know the couple have told me that they are exceptionally close; Williams, a video producer and cinematographer, has filmed Gabbard throughout her time in public service, including when she took a trip to Syria to meet the dictator Bashar al-Assad while serving as a Democratic member of Congress. Contrary to the Washington cliché, there’s every reason to think that Gabbard really does want to spend more time with her family. But the Iran war likely made leaving an easier choice.

It’s surprising that Gabbard lasted this long in her job. CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who served as DNI in Trump’s first term, has assumed the unofficial—and unenviable—role of chief intelligence adviser to a man who operates on gut instinct.

[Read: The real intelligence failure in Iran]

Because the president was not interested in Gabbard’s views on intelligence, she tried to get his attention in other ways. Gabbard accused former U.S. officials of mounting a “yearslong coup” against Trump. She railed against the so-called Russia Hoax and attempted to undermine the conclusion, by a bipartisan Senate committee, that Russia had indeed interfered in the 2016 presidential election. And she took revenge on Trump’s perceived political enemies by revoking the security clearances of current and former intelligence officials. None of this won the president’s public admiration, and it did lasting damage to the intelligence community. Gabbard’s decision to place politics ahead of objectivity has deterred intelligence analysts from making assertions that might run counter to the administration’s preferred storylines, current and former officials have told me.

To bolster her baseless claims, Gabbard declassified U.S. intelligence material—sometimes over the objections of the CIA—and publicly misrepresented what those documents actually said. Gabbard’s claim to have “uncovered weaponization” in the intelligence community gave Trump another dubious talking point in his unrelenting campaign of political revenge. Gabbard fired two senior intelligence analysts after they wrote an assessment that contradicted Trump’s efforts to link Venezuela’s president to a criminal gang. Trump’s tortured claims played a role in justifying his attack on Venezuela—a supreme irony for the supposedly anti-interventionist DNI.

By law, it was Gabbard’s responsibility to advise policy makers on life-and-death decisions and help them make sense of the torrent of intelligence that streams into U.S. spy agencies every day. Instead, she made her position a platform for promoting distortions and undermining public confidence in the very institutions she’d sworn an oath to lead.

The ODNI has long been a weak agency. It never really fulfilled the mandate that was set out for it two decades ago, when Congress tried to correct the failures that had led to the 9/11 attacks by creating another layer of bureaucracy on top of the already-unwieldy intelligence community. “Gabbard’s tenure has demonstrated just how easily an organization like ODNI that lacks clear mission and impact can become overly politicized and move away from the kind of objectivity and truth-seeking required for good intelligence work and U.S. national security,” William Walldorf, a professor of politics and international affairs at Wake Forest University and a senior fellow at the think tank Defense Priorities, told me.

Toward the end of her tenure, the most salient question to ask about Gabbard was: Why does she stay? She had suffered the humiliation of being shut out of the big meetings and dismissed by the president, only to see the United States bogged down in a new war. When I’ve posed the question to people who have worked with Gabbard in the legislative and executive branch, they tend to offer a simple explanation: She wants power (and they don’t mean that as a compliment). Former congressional staff described her to me as the most ambitious person they’d ever met in Washington. American and foreign intelligence officers told me that she is unfailingly charming and warm in person; in less flattering language, they called her calculating, cautious, and keenly aware of the importance of cultivating her image. In every sense, then, a natural politician.

[Read: The election deniers are winning]

Gabbard ran for president once, as a Democrat. If she decides to give it another shot, she has an opening among Trump supporters. The president’s decision to attack Iran is polling poorly among voters. Gabbard remains admired among formerly MAGA-friendly media influencers who have lost patience with the president and feel that he has betrayed his pledge to not lead the nation into wars of choice. The podcaster Joe Rogan, who called Trump’s war on Iran “nuts,” is a friend of Gabbard’s, and he recently praised her as “amazing” and “the same person on air, off air”; he concluded succinctly, “She’s cool as fuck.”

Because Gabbard wasn’t involved in some of the president’s most unpopular decisions, she can’t easily be blamed for them. That gives her a strange credibility in an administration that prizes loyalty over candor. Being an outsider in the Trump administration may turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to Gabbard’s career.

The Ahmadinejad Option

2026-05-22T16:10:00-04:00

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that at the outset of the war, the United States and Israel sought to install former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran’s leader, after the anticipated fall of the Islamic Republic. The inauspicious first step in this brilliant plan was to blow up part of Ahmadinejad’s compound in an air strike on February 28 in the Narmak district of Tehran. Days later, I noted that the attack—then assumed to be an assassination attempt—may have been intended to free him from house arrest imposed by the Iranian regime. The Times confirms this interpretation. It says that Israel and the United States had “consulted” Ahmadinejad about this plan, but that he “became disillusioned” with it after the strike.

The idea that Israel and the United States might back Ahmadinejad in a coup has drawn guffaws from several different groups. The first is people who stopped paying attention to Ahmadinejad in 2010. Americans and reform-oriented Iranians reviled then-President Ahmadinejad for his Holocaust denial, his backward attitudes about gay people, and his advocacy of a strong, nuclear-armed, expansionist theocratic state. For Israel to support him in 2026 is ironic, even hilarious. But Ahmadinejad began breaking with the hard-liners in 2011, and the government kept him under guard because they knew his dissent was real and potentially significant.

The second group to scoff at this plan is much better informed. Fully aware of Ahmadinejad’s turn, they note instead his irrelevance. Reformists still despise him because he blocked them as president. The regime despises him because of his dissent. He has not held office since 2013. “It is difficult to understand how anyone could have believed that Ahmadinejad might become Iran’s next ruler,” the Iran analyst Raz Zimmt wrote on X, “given his complete lack of an organizational support base upon which he could rely to serve as a genuine alternative to the Islamic regime.”

This second group is correct: Backing Ahmadinejad as a coup leader is like backing a coup against Donald Trump led by Al Gore. If the United States and Israel believed that Ahmadinejad could storm the headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and subdue tens of thousands of armed men, then the intelligence directorates of both countries should be closed and replaced by drunken baboons, or the Quincy Institute. But I doubt the plan was as foolish as that.

[Graeme Wood: Why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still useful]

Immediately before the war, I spoke with a longtime supporter and associate of Ahmadinejad, Jaber Rajabi, who described two potential outcomes for a regime-change operation, depending on how Iran’s enemies went about it. The method he warned against was wiping out the whole government and handing the country to the former shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, to oversee the mass imprisonment or even execution of those who worked for the former regime. Rather than acquiesce to this fate, Rajabi told me, the regime would fight to the last man. But he contended that regime change was not only possible but potentially achieved with just a few killings—he suggested the number might be as small as a dozen—using a different approach: amnesty for almost everyone else. Ahmadinejad’s value as a leader depended on which plan Iran’s enemies chose.

Rajabi’s politics are influenced by having fought against the United States in Iraq, and having watched his enemy founder there because it wrecked Saddam Hussein’s government rather than preserving and reforming it. To change the regime in Iran, he said, one would have to leave it basically intact. The new government would need a caretaker figure with broad popular support to declare that the war was over, that the new Iran no longer wants to destroy any other country, that it welcomes investment and relations with most or all of its former enemies, and that it would soon hold internationally monitored elections. Rajabi did not say that Ahmadinejad would be that caretaker, but he did say that networks closely aligned with Ahmadinejad were ready to put such a plan into action.

Explosions in Tehran, Iran in February 2026 (Arash Khamooshi / The New York Times / Polaris / Redux)

In the early phases of the war, had the regime buckled as some thought it might, Ahmadinejad would indeed have been a handy option for Israel and the United States. But quickly it became clear that the actual strategy would be the devastation of the government and economy on all fronts. Instead of killing a few, Israel and the U.S. killed many. Instead of leaving most of the Iranian government and security forces intact, they aimed for obliteration. Instead of Ahmadinejad being freed so he could preside over a transition like South Africa’s, he was freed in the midst of a war that looked more like an Iraq-style regime change that would leave the state in shambles.

If Ahmadinejad had signed on not as the leader of a coup, nor as the ruler of a dystopian kingdom of rubble, then his disillusionment after the war’s early phases would be expected.

[From the May 2026 issue: Someday in Tehran]

Finally, one should consider the story itself and its confirmation by U.S. officials. If they were once fond of Ahmadinejad, these officials’ attitude must have changed, because the predictable consequence of their reporting will be grim for Ahmadinejad and anyone tied to him. The story says that he recently traveled to Hungary and Guatemala, two countries friendly to Israel. Working with Ahmadinejad was until recently grounds for suspicion by the regime. Now that he is an accused foreign asset, it might become grounds for much worse, possibly even execution.

Whoever leaked or confirmed this report must be at best indifferent to this possibility. The two groups most threatened by Ahmadinejad (or indeed by anyone who might be part of a third way, between total regime change and total regime preservation) are the regime itself—which can now justify the most severe persecution of its opponents—and regime opponents who would be glad to see eliminated a rival who would, if permitted, have let much of a hated regime survive. Life is tough when you have enemies on all sides.

How Trump’s Culture War Derailed a New Smithsonian Museum

2026-05-22T13:53:35-04:00

Ever since President Trump started playing armchair museum curator last year, the White House has employed a number of strategies to try to influence exhibitions at the Smithsonian. It has sent threatening letters, published a memo that reads like an exhibit hit list, and even resorted to an occasional bit of online trolling.

The Smithsonian has certainly undergone a small number of changes as a result of the pressure, but compared with, say, the Kennedy Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities, it has shown that it is not so easily breached. Yesterday, however, House Republicans appeared poised to push forward a different strategy on behalf of the president: bake Trump’s influence into a Smithsonian museum before it’s even built.

Their target, the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum Act, was originally simple. It permitted the transfer of land on the National Mall to the Smithsonian for construction, and it had more than 200 bipartisan co-sponsors. But in March, GOP lawmakers added an amendment giving Trump final authority over the museum’s location and prohibiting the institution from including transgender women.

[Read: A cautious new approach to Trump’s impeachments at the Smithsonian]

At a hearing this week, Representative Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, a Republican, said that the changes had been made with the “technical assistance” of the White House. Democrats noted the irony of a man—the president of the United States—potentially having so much control over a place dedicated to telling women’s stories. (The White House did not respond to a request for further details on its involvement.)

When the amended bill went up for a vote in the House yesterday, it flopped. Six Republicans opposed the legislation alongside 210 Democrats. Those six Republicans, all men, seemed to object to the idea of the women’s-history museum in general; three of the four who had been in office in 2020 had voted against the original bill that intended to establish it.

Now the Women’s History Museum is caught in legislative purgatory, brought about by a party that isn’t sure if it wants to control the institution or eradicate it.

It’s a notable shift. In an era of political polarization, the museum had until recently seemed to be the rare cause that almost everyone could rally around. The bill’s circuitous path reflects how nothing—even a museum dedicated to celebrating more than half of the nation’s population—is safe from the institutional interference that began last year when Trump took over the Kennedy Center and threatened the Smithsonian. The museum doesn’t even have a site, but the fight for its soul is on.

In 2014, when Mitch McConnell tapped the longtime Republican activist Jane Abraham for a commission studying the need for a national women’s-history museum, the Republicans and Democrats in the group wondered whether they’d be able to get past their partisan differences.

As the members introduced themselves, it became clear that much more united them than divided them. “So we simply kicked politics to the side, rolled up our sleeves, and got to work,” Abraham said in a February House hearing. They were opinionated and outspoken, sure, but they found consensus. They’d go on to unanimously recommend in 2016 that Congress create a Smithsonian women’s-history museum.

In 2020, Trump signed legislation establishing the institution; he even praised the project last year, calling for a “big and beautiful” museum. The museum’s advisory council is ideologically diverse, with the likes of the actor Rosario Dawson and the repeat GOP political appointee Barbara Barrett, the former U.S. secretary of the Air Force. A congressional staffer told me that in recent years, when she’s been asked about bipartisan issues she works on, the museum, for a long time, was essentially the only thing left to reference.

The Smithsonian is a public-private institution, with about 62 percent of its funding coming from the federal government. As museums go, the institution is generally known for its measured—and, at times, dry—approach.

[Read: The real fight for the Smithsonian]

Still, a number of moves during Trump’s second term set the new museum up for scrutiny. One of the first executive orders the president signed in January 2025 asserted that the U.S. government would recognize only two genders, according to what it called the “biological reality of sex.” Then the president began to attack the Smithsonian directly, criticizing its “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology” and writing that it focused too much on “how bad slavery was.”

The administration created a list of Smithsonian materials it found offensive, including a display at the American History Museum that mentioned transgender athletes, a portrait of Anthony Fauci, and a painting of migrants crossing the southern border. More recently, the Trump administration has threatened to revoke the Smithsonian’s funding if it does not comply with demands to hand over materials for a sweeping content review.

Smithsonian programming and exhibitions are directed by the institution’s staff, who have operated largely without direct interference from the White House—though that has not stopped the Trump administration from trying to take control.

Internally, the Women’s History Museum has been somewhat adrift. The first founding director, Nancy Yao, left in 2023 amid conflict over how she’d handled sexual-assault allegations at a previous job. Elizabeth Babcock, who was appointed in 2024 as another founding director, departed quietly last year to lead Chicago’s Adler Planetarium. Months later, the Women’s History Museum still has only an interim director.

One person involved in the museum’s development told me that Congress’s discussion of what would go in the museum is premature, given that it doesn’t even have a location yet; this person also said that the debate over including trans women undermines the entire project. “Republicans are so invested in eliminating discussion of trans people from a museum like this that they’re willing to have there be no museum at all,” the person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the project.

The attempted politicization of this particular museum, apparently with the White House’s blessing, seems to contradict legislation that the president himself signed: A 2020 appropriations bill promised to establish a women’s museum that ensures, “to the extent practicable, an equal representation of the diversity of the political viewpoints held by women of the United States.”

The Women’s Museum joins another major project in limbo—the National Museum of the American Latino, which has a similar land-transfer bill that has not moved forward in Congress. The Smithsonian recommended locations on the Mall for both museums in 2022: one southeast of the Washington Monument, mirroring the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the other near the Tidal Basin, across from the Holocaust Memorial Museum. For now, at least, those coveted National Mall sites will remain empty.

The Sheep Detectives Is More Than Just Fluff

2026-05-22T13:48:42-04:00

Compared with cinema’s menagerie of big-city talking animals, the ovine stars of the movie The Sheep Detectives lead idyllic lives: They sleep among cozy bales of hay. They graze on the English countryside’s beautiful, grassy hills. Each has been thoughtfully named by their beloved shepherd, George (played by Hugh Jackman)—there’s Lily, Mopple, Sebastian, Cloud, Ronnie, Reggie, Wool Eyes, Sir Ritchfield, and Zora. And every night, George reads murder-mystery novels to them; the flock has come to appreciate what makes a good whodunit.

At first glance, the movie they’re in seems like the kind of unassuming barnyard romp made mostly to amuse kids—until George is murdered one horrible evening, leaving his fluffy family unmoored. The sheep decide to investigate his death, but their choice to become gumshoes turns out to be the least unexpected development in the film. Based on the novel Three Bags Full, by Leonie Swann, The Sheep Detectives is an audacious fable about how joy and sorrow go hoof in hoof. Much of the mystery that unspools will seem familiar to anyone who’s ever cracked open an Agatha Christie novel, and the sheep’s antics will bring to mind the many verbal animals across cinematic history: Paddington, Babe the pig, Charlotte with her web. But such nostalgic warmth only enhances the film’s sweetness. The result may just be the most tonally surprising feature of the year so far, a rare, unabashedly earnest PG-rated film that has enchanted audiences with the deceptively simple power of well-deployed tropes.

[Read: A very silly movie about some very good dogs]

The script, by the Chernobyl and The Last of Us writer Craig Mazin, deploys common notions about whodunits and talking-animal tales to its advantage. Several of the human suspects may appear to be obvious threats, but they are often in need of shepherds of their own. Even the butcher, who heads to George’s farm after the shepherd’s demise to scout how many creatures he may be able to slaughter, falls asleep as he literally counts sheep—a cheeky, economical gag implying he isn’t that devoted to bloodlust. The antics of the flock, meanwhile, get treated with much more seriousness. Consider the moment when Lily (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the smartest in the group, discovers George’s body: She believes he’s not moving because he’s playing a game in which the first to twitch loses, and only accepts reality when Mopple (Chris O’Dowd) gently points out that George is dead. The scene, between two CGI creatures, feels profoundly real because the tone is so carefully balanced: Their guilelessness makes their exchange devastating, but not maudlin.

With apologies to my own species, the sheep of The Sheep Detectives outshine the human characters at every turn. Lily and her cohorts are refreshingly intelligent, with their own traditions that they struggle to uphold or reject. There is, to put it in mildly dramatic terms, substantial lore the flock follows: It shuns a (wildly adorable) “winter lamb” simply because he was not born in the spring, and whenever anything upsetting occurs, the sheep collectively choose to wipe their memories; after George’s death, the despondent group almost opts to forget him entirely. As such, investigating the case tests their instinct to ignore what causes them pain and instead accept that fear, grief, and loss are necessary for a fulfilling life.

That lesson, of course, isn’t new. But The Sheep Detectives pulls it off while juggling the beats of an engrossing crime thriller and the goofy humor of a Saturday-morning cartoon. That genre-mixing reminded me of Project Hail Mary, the science-fiction movie from earlier this year that contends with large-scale environmental disaster while starring a lovable faceless alien named Rocky. The two films share some obvious DNA: They’re both adaptations of novels, released in the U.S. by the same studio (Amazon MGM), involve sophisticated special and visual effects, and feature nonhuman characters that make me want to cry when I think about them. But more than anything, they commit to sincerity—a quality that’s become rare in today’s cinematic landscape of downbeat sequels, melancholy “comedies,” and grim plotting. In The Sheep Detectives, such devotion to emotional satisfaction makes even the most overused clichés seem fresh and affecting. For us human audiences, those feelings are hard to forget.