The Atlantic

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 to 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’s 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.

The Surprising Lesson of the Granta Controversy

2026-05-22T13:40:00-04:00

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

As clichés go, “Know your enemy” is a pretty good one—a little melodramatic, sure, but widely applicable. It could, for instance, come in handy for authors and editors worried about artificial intelligence damaging their profession. This week, at least three distinct controversies popped up regarding AI use in literature: The Nobel Prize–winning novelist Olga Tokarczuk said that she uses AI while developing her novels; a nonfiction book about AI titled The Future of Truth was found to contain muddled quotes generated by chatbots; and a prize-winning story published in Granta, an august British literary magazine, was widely accused of being machine-made. Writing about the Granta case for The Atlantic this week, Vauhini Vara suggested that the online sleuths who suspected that the short story came from a large language model might be “more discerning than prize committees,” in part because the former were more likely to use—and therefore understand—AI.

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

Early this week, readers began pointing out common signs of AI writing in “The Serpent in the Grove,” which won a Commonwealth Short Story Prize and, with it, publication on Granta’s website. Its author, Jamir Nazir, has not publicly responded to the affair. But both the Commonwealth Foundation and Granta released noncommittal statements. Granta’s, in particular, evinced a shaky understanding of the tools used to detect AI. Its publisher, Sigrid Rausing, wrote that the magazine had fed Nazir’s story into the chatbot Claude—which said that it suspected AI use, although its assessment wasn’t easy to parse. (The story was “almost certainly not produced unaided by a human,” the LLM wrote, but it might have a “human core.”)

This is not the ideal way to go about investigating such suspicions. As Vara noted, “Claude is a general chatbot, not a tool designed for AI detection.” The most frequently used platform for detection, Pangram, is considered the industry standard. It certainly has its biases, as Vara acknowledges; such tools have been found to have a higher “false-positive rate for text written by non-native-English speakers,” which would describe many Commonwealth Prize winners. But when she used Pangram to test all Commonwealth Prize–winning stories dating back to 2012, the tool flagged no suspected AI among honorees prior to last year. By contrast, 100 percent of “The Serpent in the Grove” was flagged as likely to have been produced by AI; among this year’s four other winners, Pangram flagged 100 percent of one story as likely machine-generated and 89 percent of another. One winner from 2025 had 88 percent of its text flagged.

Like many organizations, Granta and the Commonwealth Foundation are in a very tough spot: To advance their noble goal of promoting exciting work, they need to build trusting, protective relationships with writers even as they hold them to exacting standards, all in the face of unprecedented challenges to literary integrity.

But managing the risks of LLM technology requires understanding it. Vara was able to apply better tools because, as a tech reporter and a novelist, she understands AI better than most people. For her 2025 book, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, Vara prompted a chatbot to expand on a personal essay she’d already published; she then included excerpts of the LLM’s writing and some of her exchanges with it. She was deliberately trying to show how AI can lead us astray, and her experiment worked: The results, she writes, are deeply flawed, both literally and spiritually false.

One lesson a reader could draw from Searches is that artificial intelligence is too compromising for a writer to use casually, especially at a time when, as Vara writes in The Atlantic, “so much of our language has been colonized by algorithms.” Asking a chatbot to generate ideas can easily slip into asking it to edit sentences—and before you know it, the words on the page might no longer be wholly your own. And yet, for an editor, or, say, a literary-prize judge, being ignorant of this process amounts to abdicating a new and essential duty of figuring out exactly where and how to hold the line. In order to protect human writing, they might have to get more familiar with their enemy.

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

This Literary AI Scandal Changes Everything

By Vauhini Vara

A magazine’s response to accusations of publishing AI-generated fiction points to a new phase in the struggle to keep literature human.

Read the full article.

What to Read

Wicked Enchantment, by Wanda Coleman

Coleman has the sterling reputation of being a poet’s poet—admired and imitated by those in the loop—but her status shouldn’t lead you to think that her concerns are narrow or obscure. The poems collected in this posthumous volume are aimed at anyone who has grieved, loved, lusted, worked, or sat down at the end of the day after “carrying groceries home in the rain in shoes / twice resoled and feverish with flu.” Coleman was deeply concerned with contemporary life and frequently inspired by her home in Los Angeles: Turn to her sequence of American sonnets to see how she tailors this renaissance form to fit her “ruined curbless urban psyche”; flip to “The First Day of Spring 1985” or “February 11th 1990” for poems that respond directly to events in apartheid-era South Africa. Some of the works I like best are those that speak to irrevocable losses: of her departed older sister, to whom she writes a sequence of letters, or her son Anthony, who died from AIDS complications. In “Thiefheart,” Coleman makes a song out of her losses and imagines taking the sting from them: “were I the queen of sleight of hand / i’d steal the poison from this muthaland.” — Walt Hunter

From our list: The summer reading guide

Out Next Week

📚 The Land and Its People, by David Sedaris

📚 Taormina, by Yves Ravey

📚 Unpaid: The Past, Present, and Future of Wage Theft, by Matthew Cole

Your Weekend Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Typo Vibe Shift

By Michael Waters

Some job applicants are intentionally adding typos to their cover letters to prove that they, and not an AI program, wrote them. Celebrities and CEOs are sending out error-ridden emails and Instagram Stories, and instead of getting a scolding, they are praised for sounding authentic. On some dating apps, where people are, somewhat absurdly, prompted to compose their profiles with AI, typos are apparently no longer an automatic repellent. Nicole Ellison, a University of Michigan professor whose 2006 study showed that dating profiles with spelling mistakes turn people off, now thinks people are warming to the Tinder typo. “A typo maybe signals that you actually do care,” Ellison told Time recently, “because you took the time to write it yourself.” A 2024 study even found that people view customer-service chatbots more warmly when they make and correct errors: A spelling mistake, it seems, is a kind of anthropomorphizing event.

Read the full article.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.

Explore all of our newsletters.

How Dropout Cracked Internet Comedy

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

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

How do you build a streaming service from scratch? On this week’s Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel speaks with Sam Reich, the CEO of Dropout, a comedy streaming platform that’s found success eschewing the growth-at-all-costs model of the mega streamers. The two discuss the pre-YouTube days of online video and how Reich acquired Dropout, formerly known as the internet site CollegeHumor, for $0. They talk about how comedy has evolved online, how to build a cinematic universe of content, and whether Reich sees Dropout as a feeder for places like Saturday Night Live. Reich shares his philosophies on how to make things that people love and why he steers away from the venture-capital and big-media playbooks.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Sam Reich: I’m an open book.

Charlie Warzel: Oh, very exciting.

Reich: I am a creased-open, dusty, worn library book with too many dog-eared pages.

[Music]

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to talk about how to make things online that people actually enjoy.

We are living through an era of pretty remarkable media consolidation—the streaming wars started out scrappy, and they have landed in this place where we now have this constellation of increasingly expensive apps and media catalogs. It’s a kind of an on-demand reconstruction of the old-school-cable package, but for arguably more money. The streamers themselves—they’ve become pretty hard to root for. Gone are the days of password-sharing, which means that people can find themselves in this constant rotation of tracking down individual shows, signing up for the free trial, bingeing, and then waking up in a cold sweat three months later, realizing that you’re still paying for Paramount+.

Streamers have given us genuine content abundance, which is great. But it’s not without its issues as well. These endless libraries have created a decidedly gilded problem of endless perusal and decision paralysis. The issue is real enough that there’s actually been an uptick in people investing in physical media—Blu-rays and other formats. That’s for better quality, but also so that they don’t spend forever trapped in this “What’s On” menu.

Which is all to say that it is supremely difficult to start a streaming service these days. And it’s even harder to start one that people will pay for and will actually seem to love.

Now, you may have never heard of Dropout TV. But in some ways, that’s the point. Dropout was founded in 2018 as part of CollegeHumor—the digital-media company that rose to prominence in the 2000s as one of the early “bored at work” video sites. CollegeHumor was part of a generation of online video pioneers—coming up well before YouTube and before short-form and streaming video became the lingua franca of the internet.

One of those pioneers was Sam Reich, who joined CollegeHumor in the mid-aughts, rising up the ranks, helping build Dropout, and eventually managing to pull off the deal of a lifetime. He purchased both Dropout and CollegeHumor from its parent company, IAC, for the low, low price of $0. That’s a story that we’ll get into in detail later.

Since 2020, Reich has helped turn Dropout into an online-comedy success story. He’s built this beloved cast of characters and a slate of improvised series that stand on their own but are also imminently watchable as short-form video clips on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

Now, what makes Dropout so fascinating is that, on this algorithmic, growth-at-all-costs internet, the company embodies an old-school-internet ethos.

The stuff that comes out of Dropout is weird; it’s playful; it’s even joyous. Dropout ads encourage password-sharing. They don’t run advertisements on the platform. It seems like they’re not interested in courting the biggest audience possible, but the right one.

And the concepts of their shows are not ideas that a major media executive would green-light: There’s a show based around comedians playing Dungeons & Dragons.

[Clip from Dimension 20]

Warzel: Another where comedians are dressed up in elaborate makeup and then must create a character in minutes to go on a fake talk show.

[Clip from Very Important People]

Warzel: There’s a show where people give PowerPoint presentations.

[Clip from Smartypants]

Warzel: In other words, Dropout is executing a kind of indie-media playbook in a media category that is dominated by titans, and it’s finding a real kind of success.

I’m fascinated by Dropout, because I think it speaks to this moment online and in media where people are just exhausted by the scale and the big sell. And so I wanted to talk to Sam about how he’s built this platform, and what it takes to make things that make people feel good. We cover his early days and the Dropout acquisition, but also how he thinks about the internet, how comedy can be inclusive, what it takes to green-light shows, and why Dropout doesn’t follow the VC template. Here’s our conversation.

[Music]

Warzel: Sam, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

Sam Reich: Thanks, Charlie; it’s a pleasure.

Warzel: So I gotta get this out of the way early. I do a lot of research here, and the first place I start is just like: What is the bio? What is the person putting out there about themselves? And the first line you have started out at: “humble beginnings as the ‘village idiot’ at the New York Renaissance Fair.” And so I’m gonna need more. I’m gonna need more context here. Just tell me everything.

Reich: You know, it’s like every other aspect of my life: hardcore imposter syndrome. Even there, I was only a village idiot, one of four, for one summer. And there are a lot of people who can claim to be more entrenched and truly better at the Renaissance Faire than I could.

Warzel: Did you want to be more of a stage performer, more of an “in front of the stage camera,” whatever it is type?

Reich: For sure. I got the acting bug before I got any other bug. And I think that’s pretty consistent with other young people, because acting is the first thing that we have access to in high school. So we tend to be bit by that bug first. But really, every step along the way in my creative career was a concession, based on the fact that no one would cast me. So you know, there was an acting class where an acting teacher said, “You should market yourself as an actor based on the first impression you give when you walk into a room. For instance, Sam is short, so he should do comedy.”

And I already loved comedy, but in that moment, I was like, I wonder if that’s true. I wonder if I went hard at comedy, if I’d find more success. Super did. And then, you know, I was doing some work with the Theater Studio in New York. I asked them, “How many headshots and resumes do you get from actors per year?” And they said, “Roughly 50,000.” And I said, “How many director resumés do you get per year?” And they said, “Between four and five hundred.” And I went, I like those odds more.

Warzel: Yeah.

Reich: So I started directing. From directing to forming this little internet comedy group with a group of friends. Plucked out by CollegeHumor. Became a new-media executive at the age of 21.

Warzel: It’s like a Richie Rich situation, you know? It’s like, Put him in charge.

Reich: Kinda, yeah.

Warzel: There’s something there, I think, with also being good at the Internet and being good at making stuff for the Internet.

Reich: Sure.

Warzel: Which is like—you only have so much control, right?

Reich: One hundred percent. I think—I’m not the first person to make this observation—but I think the internet really captures a lot of theater people. Because there is a kind of a black-box studio, “the show must go on tonight, no matter what” quality to ending up on the internet.

You know, I really don’t envy folks who lock themselves in a room and try to write a screenplay over the course of a year or two. Because the feedback loop on that is so long that it’s hard to get good at it. Whereas if your feedback loop is 60 seconds to three minutes—as it is these days online—it’s easier to get good at that with consistent feedback from your audience.

Warzel: So I wanna start very basic for people. What is Dropout, for people who haven’t heard of it? How would you describe Dropout?

Reich: Sure. Dropout is a niche, maybe even you might say alt-comedy streaming platform. Right now, it focuses largely on unscripted comedy content. We are over time sort of moving away from that moniker specifically. And that’s basically it, Charlie. We charge X number of dollars per month, depending on when you’re watching this. It’s right now about seven bucks; it’s cheaper if you sign up for an annual subscription. And in turn you get our collection of original shows.

So we’re a little unlike most of our quote-unquote competitors, in the sense that most people producing original content are doing it with an AVOD [advertising-based video on demand] model, or an advertising model, on YouTube. And most people who are doing the SVOD [subscription video on demand] thing—meaning the subscription thing—are doing it with other people’s content. We are making our own content and monetizing that with a subscription, which puts us in a little bit of a category unto ourselves.

Warzel: I also have to acknowledge the history of Dropout. And you becoming the CEO of Dropout is like a bit mind-bending. You purchased it from IAC for $0. We don’t have to go deep, deep into the weeds, but: How did that all go down? How did you pull that off?

Reich: A lot of this is very lucky/unlucky, circumstantial. IAC for years and years had been trying to give birth to a bigger, better version of CollegeHumor. And there was always a plan to do that. Depending on the year, that plan might have come from any number of my bosses at the time. And some of those plans were better, and some of them were worse. I think I counted—at one point, I think I had nine or 10 bosses over the course of my tenure at CollegeHumor, some of them at the same time.

Warzel: Fun.

Reich: And we would never objectively fail at the things that we set out to do. We just wouldn’t achieve mammoth success with them, either. And you know, IAC, God bless, were incredibly patient with us over the course of those 10-plus years. CollegeHumor wasn’t hemorrhaging money. It just wasn’t making a lot of money. It was essentially, like, a break-even proposition as long as it was under IAC. So IAC wasn’t losing money. They were just losing a lot of time and effort trying to make something happen with us.

It was two years before 2020, so it was 2018, when we hatched this plan around subscription. Which is, you know—social media is taking a huge bite out of our ad-sales business. Like, all the ad dollars are now rolling up into social media. TV turns out not to scale very effectively. We had made Adam Ruins Everything at that point, but it’s hard to pitch and sell TV shows. What if we went to direct-to-consumer with our own subscription proposition? And IAC got excited enough about that to get on board. We started production in 2017. We launched in 2018. And by the end of 2019, we had 75,000 subscribers. So not nothing, but not enough relative to the amount of IAC’s money that we were spending on this.

And around the end of 2019, as they realized they would not carry on bankrolling us, they tried to sell us aggressively. And the problem with that, it turned out, was that because they had just invested a huge amount of money in Dropout, on paper, it looked like we were losing a lot of money. And the business plan that we had put forward for Dropout had us losing many millions of dollars before we flipped profitable. So anyone looking at the business was basically like, Well, I have to buy it for X amount, and then I have to bankroll it for Y amount, hoping it flips profitable. And then I make my money back over Z period of time? I mean, a real losing proposition.

I had this realization as I was going around town, trying to sell the company in order to save jobs, which is: Any great investment opportunity is one in which you know something that the rest of the world doesn’t know. Not to make this sound like insider trading, or not to be a proponent of insider trading. It’s basically like: I have a thesis that other people don’t agree with, but I’m really confident in my thesis. And I was really confident in the thesis that we could reboot this company. And no one agreed with me. And at a certain point, it was like, Well, maybe actually I can work that to my advantage, and I can pitch IAC on the idea of giving the business to me. But I didn’t have money with which to buy it—so this premise depended on there not being a better offer.

So it came down to me and one other offer, which came from a major conglomerate. And that offer was for, I think, like three million bucks, and it really was an asset grab. We’ll buy the YouTube channel, we’ll let go of everybody, we’ll figure out what to do with all of this IP, no promises. And my offer was $0; IAC would stay in the minority position in the company; I would assume complete control. Truly my pitch to IAC, over the phone, was: “I’ll make you more than $3 million. I don’t know; I can’t promise you a huge amount, but I’ll probably make you more than $3 million. And lo and behold, I have made IAC more than $3 million.

Warzel: Hell yeah. So you joined CollegeHumor in 2006, director of original content, true pillar of pre-social-media joyful internet content. I’m curious, because you did mention when social media came it kind of ate up part of the business; made everything a little bit harder. What did you learn during that pre-social-media time about making things for people on the internet? Some of those early core lessons? Because I feel like a lot of Dropout captures to me some of that joy of that time.

Reich: You know, it’s so funny you should say this. Because Ricky Van Veen—who founded CollegeHumor, who I’m still good friends with—was introducing me via email to someone and said, Sam runs Dropout, from CollegeHumor; I can take zero credit for what it’s become. And I reached out to Ricky immediately, and was like: That is total BS that you can take no credit for what Dropout is.

Like, those early seeds were absolutely in my early CollegeHumor and early internet education. One of them is the strength of personality. In just about the earliest version of CollegeHumor, people were gravitating toward the people who worked there. And we were sort of noticing that having like a recurring cast gave our audience something to latch on to.

The second has to do with attention. And how you capture attention online, and how you capture it quickly. Even back then—I mean, even before the social-media days—we were in the attention economy and trying to figure out how to get people to stop and to watch us. When we were making programming for television, when television was really just a matter of channel-flipping, there was a little bit of this philosophy, which is like: How do you make people stop flipping? In the context of the internet—when people have literally the entire world of media forever at their disposal—it becomes even harder to get someone to stop.

And so we learned lessons to do with virality, some of which are still super true today. Which is: People have to be clear on the premise of something, pretty immediately, when they start watching it. Stuff needs to be visual or to have a visual hook in order to be able to grab people. Like, talking heads are normally not enough. Obviously a lot has changed about Dropout versus CollegeHumor. Long-form content as opposed to short-form content; unscripted content as opposed to largely scripted content. But that early training was paramount.

Warzel: This is great that you led me nicely into, like, I wanted to talk about that cast of characters. Because I think that you all have built this sort of Dropout Cinematic Universe of personalities. And I think when I look at a lot of different media properties, a lot of the things that they have in common are people will wander in from another space, right, that you have this previous relationship with that you really enjoy. Like, you can get a little more like cynical about the parasocial relationship, or whatever we’re calling it.

Reich: Yeah.

Warzel: But I think at the heart of it, it’s like—there’s this continuity. If somebody wanders in that you like and trust from this one thing, you’re like, Well, I want to see how they do in this environment. Right. And then, I love this environment. I love this show.

And I’m curious, like, how that system works. How did you go about building it? Was it one block at a time? Was it just kind of organic as it happened?

Reich: I think it was super organic and accidental in a lot of ways. I think, like to your point, we are an unusual company insofar as if you look at other media companies, particularly those who are doing comedy, a lot of them are non-ensemble. Like, they have like a few lead creatives at the forefront, particularly if you’re looking at like YouTube channels, right? Those are creator-led channels, as opposed to sort of ensemble-led. And Dropout, CollegeHumor has always been an ensemble. There has never been a star of the platform. Sort of on the flipside, you have companies that are strictly IP focused, right? Like the Jukin Medias of the world or the Cut, for instance, who will do sort of concept after concept with no particular set of talent attached. We again fall into this sort of middle space: where people like the conceit behind the shows, and they like the talent involved.

Alchemy-wise, that’s what’s working for us here, particularly as we endeavor to do comedy: The No. 1 reason why people do not want to watch comedy—new comedy—is stranger danger. It’s hard to laugh at someone you don’t know. You don’t trust them well enough to know that they’re funny and to relax around them.

I think it’s part of the reason why drama is—actually we’re more likely to take a risk on new drama than we are on new comedy. We sort of don’t doubt that someone can act in front of us, but we do doubt that they can make us laugh. And by having a cast that ports over from show to show, we’re basically solving that problem. Which is to say: Once you’re a Dropout fan, if you’re a Dropout fan, you will probably like everything that we put in front of you, so long as you like the people involved.

And I’m sort of putting that in front of you as if it’s a well-thought-out strategy, when actually we’ve totally lucked into this, right? Where a lot of what we do as leadership, we call “a gentle hand on the wheel.” Which is to say: You notice something is working, and then you start to like lean into it a bit.

CollegeHumor, basically, starts using its editorial staff in videos over and over again. At a certain point, now as editorial members leave, they’re replaced by people whose full-time job is acting and writing. And we call those folks “cast.” To: We hemorrhage our entire full-time-employee base, and really can only afford to work with anyone on a contractor basis.

And what that naturally does is open up the relationship in such a way where cast can now go out and do anything. We have nonexclusive relationships with cast, but we can call the Dropout family a much bigger group of people and split them between more projects. There is a larger group of people called “Dropout talent” than there ever was called “CollegeHumor talent.” It’s kind of ideal.

I get asked all the time how we find new talent. And sometimes it’s a bit intentional, and more often it’s an accident—where someone will recommend that someone else participate in a show, or like we should check this person out, they seem really funny. They come and do a day with us, or two days with us. Or I have them on Game Changer or Make Some Noise. I’m wildly impressed by them, they start appearing in more things. And it’s just, you know, like a friendship. Like, we hung out, and the chemistry was there.

Warzel: Well, and it makes sense, too, that you would want that organic thing, right? Because I guess one way to think about it is: If you’re building that trust in order to get people to laugh, the new people that come in to the ecosystem in a way sort of have to be vetted by the other people in the thing.

Reich: Sure.

Warzel: Like, if everyone’s kind of, “This person’s a little weird, and we just kind of have to tolerate them for this, you know, one-hour show that we’re doing together”—you know, that makes everything weird. So I think the natural nature of that is, it’s gotta accelerate the ability for you guys to, you know, change the environment. Bring on new people.

Reich: I think that’s true, but I would also give the cast a lot of credit and say that they are such sort of welcoming and open-minded people. It means that even if we were—and there are plenty of situations where we shoehorn someone into a show, and we trust that our cast is gonna get along with them. Because we think they’re really interesting, and we wanna work with them. And the cast is always incredibly welcoming.

But they, too—their social circles are always expanding, and they’re doing live shows with different people. And I get emails all the time from folks to say, “Are you aware of this person? You should be.” Which—it’s not like our cast is at all economically incentivized to do that. They’re just excited to see talented people thrive.

Warzel: Do you think about the talent-feeding going the other way too? Like, Jeremy Culhane is an SNL [Saturday Night Live] cast member in this current year; he’s been in a bunch of Dropout stuff. Like, do you think about the old Second City, Groundlings, UCB—that kind of pipeline to these, you know, legacy properties in the comedy pantheon or whatever? Do you think about it going that way? And like, what we want to do is also provide this thing to be an accelerator for those pathways?

Reich: No; I mean, listen, I think it’s an unfortunate reality of there being very few middle-class media companies that exist anymore. You have sort of creators on the one side, and then you have these, like, monolithic institutions on the other, like SNL. And because there’s nowhere in the middle, there’s no stepping stone. There’s no getting from here to there.

And if we at times behave as a stepping stone, I think that’s a really important community service that we can perform. And I’m not at all above it. Anytime anyone refers to Dropout as a stepping stone, it’s not like I’m like, “We’re more than that.” Like, I don’t feel that way at all. I think that we are trying to do something a little different, vis-a-vis our relationship with exclusivity.

And I think this is super important, because I see people—I would never take credit for this—but I think Jeremy’s a really great example. If SNL had asked Jeremy to be exclusive, you know, I don’t know what his reaction would have been. My guess is he would have done it anyway. SNL is incredibly powerful and a huge opportunity. But Jeremy has permission from SNL to come work with us and continues to all the time, like whenever he is back in L.A. or off SNL.

Our attitude about folks like Jeremy or Vic Michaelis, who is in Ponies, or Lou Wilson, who is Jimmy Kimmel’s announcer, is: We are very content to be your favorite second thing you do. Like, by all means go out and find a primary job, and then come play with us all the time. What I think/hope that means is that, as time goes on, folks like Jeremy and Vic and Lou will always find the time to come back and work with us, even as the rest of their career blossoms and transforms. They don’t have to sort of step on us and move on from us. They can like come back and play with us all the time.

Warzel: I know you guys are rooted in comedy above all, but as we’re talking about the cast of characters and everything, really, it’s hard to miss how inclusive the network and Dropout is. And not just like the diversity and the types of people featured, but also just like: I think there’s a lot of small and meaningful touches. Like as small as, you know, pronouns and title cards and things like that. That does feel different and welcoming in this way, especially on internet spaces. And I’m just wondering: Is that part of a concerted effort by you all to really message to an audience, make sure that they feel seen? Tell me about how that vibe that I get watching was created there.

Reich: You know, I would talk about this in a very similar way that I would talk about the cast in general. Which is to say that I think we—as a gentle hand on the wheel—have sort of steered into the direction of something that was very naturally occurring anyway. We live in Los Angeles. It’s a very diverse place. It’s a very progressive place. We work with these people because they are the funniest and most talented people around. But I think if you’re making comedy in a metropolitan area, it’s going to be diverse.

You know, Brennan [Lee Mulligan] sometimes says, when we set out to do Dimension 20, we set out to do the comedy D&D show. And then the reaction we got from its audience was, “You have made the diverse D&D show.” And that was sort of surprising, you know? It’s not the mantle that we necessarily set out with. There is a way in which, once this snowball gets going, if you have a diverse assortment of people involved in creating your content, the people they then recommend to come to the table are also probably diverse people.

And this collection of diverse people will have wants and needs in order to feel taken care of, such as pronouns on-screen. And all we are doing is sort of behaving as community leaders—which is to say we want everybody to feel comfortable and treated with respect. And so, we naturally lean in that direction.

It’s funny; pronouns were appearing on-screen maybe even for a full year before they started appearing on call sheets, on our production call sheets. And we suddenly woke up and realized, Well, why on earth aren’t we doing that? And if we’re not doing that, why aren’t we wearing name tags on set so that people with those pronouns can feel treated properly? I mean, there’s all sorts of just very naturally occurring ways in which one step leads to the other leads to the other.

And I say this so much that I think I’m almost in danger of seeming like I don’t care about the ethics of all of this. And of course I do. Like, all of this has its foundation in ethics, but there are really just purely sensible reasons why this happens. Unfortunately, the bar is just incredibly low.

Warzel: There’s that. The other reason, and I hope this doesn’t … like, I’m not setting you up to make a political statement or anything. But I feel like part of why I wanted to ask that is the algorithmic nature of social media shows me two parallel worlds of comedy, right?

Reich: Oh, damn.

Warzel: What you are all building is this very decidedly different world. And then there is the Kill Tony sphere of like, I am here to push boundaries in a very, you know, purposely provoking way. Or also just, mean-spirited comedy versus a comedy that is a little more like, We want you to relax and feel included and, you know, entertained, in this other way. And I’m just wondering if you see Dropout as reaction to that type of thing? As an oppositional force, a palate cleanser? Or in relation at all to, like, that fork-in-the-road difference in how people pursue comedy.

Reich: Yeah; you know, it’s interesting. I probably don’t personally see it as quite that binary. And I would be sad if I thought that Dropout didn’t, in its own way, have permission to be a little edgy sometimes.

I do think that there is a difference between creating comedy that feels sort of cutting edge—to use a term that I like a little bit more than the term edgy—and punching down. Like, we are in a moment that is scary enough politically that it’s hard to laugh at punching down. Listen, I grew up on a lot of that comedy, because it’s hard to avoid when you were a teenager in the ’90s. I was a huge Family Guy fan when it was on the air. I’m not allergic to edgy comedy by any stretch of the imagination.

But when a community of people is actually being threatened, to go after them feels real bad. There are comedians out there who are making this their thing. And part of the reason why they’re doing it is marketing, where they’re like appealing to this, whatever this is, “anti-woke,” right? When a group of people can gather these fans in my space, these fans who are willing to spend money on me. Their thing has like more to do with anti-wokeness than it has even to do with comedy, I would say.

Warzel: So how do you all come up with new show ideas? How do you know what to green-light? What’s not a fit? When to cut bait? I think the bigger part of this question is actually asking: How do you make stuff online in 2026? We talked about attention spans being fractured, but there’s something about Dropout. Two nights ago, I watched six comedians play a board game for an hour, and I’m just like, Give me another one. Can you bring me a little into the room? How do you guys make stuff for people in 2026?

Reich: One thing that has set Dropout apart since we broke off from CollegeHumor is we have an internal development and production mechanism. Which is to say, particularly if you look at the slate of shows that we’ve done up until this point, the vast, vast majority of them were ideas that came from inside as opposed to outside. Very Important People is based on a series that I created 13 years ago, starring Josh Ruben, for CollegeHumor called Hello, My Name Is. And is a reboot of that show. A lot of people have no idea that that’s the case. And why should they?

Part of the reason why that is is because we need to be very particular about what we put on Dropout, given that we’re trying to check a lot of boxes at once. The boxes that are difficult to check at the same time, most difficult to check at the same time, are the ones of “this works in long-form, widescreen format,” and “it works in short-form, vertical-video format, such that it can effectively market itself.”

Just in the last year or so, we’ve maturized the development effort considerably. So there’s now more new, very talented team members working on it. We’re doing more development on the outside of the company. Which is to say, more traditional kinds of development where writers and creatives are developing ideas on their own, and we’re coaching them through that process. But what remains is our hands sort of in the mess with the creatives—which is to say, we want to lead them to the promised land. And we feel like we have a lot that we can do to help them.

Development in Hollywood, particularly now, has a little bit of a pass/fail mentality where it’s like creatives often partner with production companies, and the production company is going to try to help craft the idea. By the time they’re pitching it to the network, it better be fully baked. It better have a star attached, you know, and then it passes and fails in that room. Whereas our attitude about it is, “Let us make this show with you.”

Warzel: Yeah, an issue that I think is very prevalent in media, especially in Hollywood and television, is this nature that things need to be absolutely tested to, right? Like, they have to be focus grouped, to have an absolute core audience. You know that those people are going to be bought in. It has to play well in this market or this market or this thing. You guys have so much more flexibility, but is there a sense like with Dimension 20, a D&D series. Do you come at it and say, “There is an audience of underserved people who’ve grown up with this, who love this, who care about this, who think it would be great, and we want to give these people this type of thing”? Or is it just, you know, genuine love for the game and a good idea, and it’s a huge surprise that it’s a hit?

Reich: I think it would be irresponsible to develop shows without some kind of a thesis. So, for sure—we have a thesis about the kind of shows that make sense for Dropout and the kind of shows that don’t, right? We call it our development sieve, or our creative sieve. If you imagine a sieve, like: What ideas are getting passed through, and what are getting caught by the sieve and rejected? Traditional networks sometimes call them mandates.

But ours are pretty loose and pretty experimental. Like, part of the fun of running Dropout—and we think the fun of being a Dropout subscriber—is that we’re gonna do stuff that other people aren’t gonna do. Like we’re focused on offering something differentiated. We wanna be seen as “better internet” and not “worse Netflix.” And when we’re talking about innovation, when you’re trying to encourage innovation, you simply cannot afford to be all that stringent with what shows get experimented with, and what concepts get experimented with, and what concepts don’t get experimented with.

I would say if there is one criteria that rises to the top, it’s that someone needs to be really passionate about this thing. But arguably, the stranger and more experimental that is, if it has someone who’s really passionate about it, the better. Differentiation—uniqueness, novelty, more thesaurus terms for that word—arguably is the most important facet of Dropout content.

Warzel: You’re building this business in a way that a VC or a media executive definitely wouldn’t. And I mean that as a compliment, because it just doesn’t seem like you guys want to grow, but you’re not obsessed with scale. You’re putting the words “yes, you can share your password” in the marketing campaign, right?

Reich: Yeah.

Warzel: Do you feel at this moment that it’s a superpower for you all? To just zag in that way?

Reich: I do think there’s a bit of that. Look, I’m like in some ways contrarian to my core. And so I think when other people are doing something, we’re inclined to do the other thing partially just out of a rebellious instinct. Like that’s just true, probably.

I think what’s interesting when people tell me, like, “You’re not doing what a traditional network would do” or “You’re not doing what a VC fund would do.” In a lot of ways that’s true. And yet, despite all of these things, we’re saying: “Dropout doing its people well, treating its people well, or not being interested in growth at all costs, or championing sustainability or profit share or whatever you want to point to, it’s working.” It’s really working, commercially. Meaning, we have grown a lot every year despite ourselves.

So one of two things is true. Either zagging is just its own commercial benefit, or everyone else has something slightly wrong that we’re getting right.

Warzel: I mean, that’s I think what people want now more than anything, in this era of saturation. We’re talking a lot about making things for people in 2026. Like, a lot of people use the word taste, but I think ultimately what people want is to be led by curiosity, to be led by interest. And that is what feels authentic. And I think even if that is just the rebellious spirit,

of “We just don’t want to be doing that thing, because that’s boring, because everyone else is doing it.” I think even that is a signal to people that this is something worth checking out.

Reich: Sure.

Warzel: Sam, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain talking about all this stuff with us.

Reich: Such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

[Music]

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

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

Israel’s Human Wrecking Ball

2026-05-22T12:55:00-04:00

On Wednesday, after Israeli forces intercepted a protest flotilla headed to Gaza and brought the participants to an Israeli port, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli minister of national security, posted a video on social media. The short clip shows the far-right politician taunting the detainees with nationalist slogans as the handcuffed prisoners are forced to kneel. One activist shouts “Free Palestine!” and is pushed to the ground by security personnel. “This is how we receive supporters of terror,” Ben-Gvir posted.

The latest provocation by Ben-Gvir proved something that many Israelis have suspected for years: Ben-Gvir is not merely a nightmare for Israeli liberals, but the fulfillment of the fantasies of Israel’s enemies. He provides them with precisely the ammunition they need to argue, time and again, that Israel, in its fight against Hamas and Hezbollah, is the aggressor, and a cruel one at that. Ben-Gvir is a gift to the terrorist groups and the countries that seek Israel’s destruction. The flotilla activists did not actually plan to “break the siege” of Gaza, as they claimed. They wanted to provoke Israeli authorities and document their reaction. In their wildest fantasies, they could not have imagined that the Israeli official in charge of the country’s police would fulfill their hopes by posting videos humiliating and taunting them. And they must be equally delighted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pathetically restrained reaction.

In February 2021, on the eve of parliamentary elections, Netanyahu declared that Itamar Ben-Gvir “is unfit” to serve as a minister in the government, adding “his positions are not mine.” Netanyahu lost that election, and Naftali Bennett became prime minister. But after Netanyahu won the next election, in November 2022, his views on Ben-Gvir suddenly evolved, and he appointed this previously unfit man to his cabinet. As absurd and outrageous as that appointment sounded in the early days of the “full-right government,” it has turned out far worse than anyone could have predicted.

Placing Ben-Gvir in charge of the police and prison services was akin to appointing an arsonist to run the fire department—which, incidentally, also falls under his authority.

[Michael W. Sonnenfeldt: The challenge for American Jews]

Ben-Gvir, in addition to being an authoritarian racist, is a bona fide criminal. He has been found guilty in Israeli courts of eight offenses, including rioting, obstructing a police officer, incitement to racism, possession of propaganda material for a terrorist organization, and support for a terrorist organization.

For decades, Ben-Gvir operated on the extreme fringes of Israeli politics. Raised by Iraqi Jewish parents in a secular home, he became religious at age 12 and a few years later joined the Kach movement, later designated in Israel as a terrorist organization. He never served in the Israeli military, disqualified by his membership in Kach. In October 1995, he gained national notoriety when he ripped the hood ornament off then–Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s Cadillac and declared, “Just like we got to this emblem, we’ll get to him, too.” Weeks later, Rabin was assassinated by the far-right extremist Yigal Amir.

Over the ensuing years, Ben-Gvir continued his provocations. He participated in demonstrations against Jerusalem’s Pride parade; hung a portrait in his home of the Meir Kahane supporter Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Palestinian worshippers in the 1994 massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs; and repeatedly inflamed tensions surrounding the Temple Mount. In May 2021, after being elected to Parliament, Ben-Gvir established a makeshift office in a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, enraging local residents.

And it was this man whom Netanyahu chose to appoint as minister of national security. Since his installation, the national security of Israeli citizens has steadily deteriorated. With Netanyahu’s tacit approval, Ben-Gvir has worked to transform the police into a kind of political militia operating on his behalf, often against opponents of the government. Ben-Gvir involves himself in the appointment not only of senior police officers but also of lower-ranking positions. Every appointment at the rank equivalent to commander in the U.S. military requires his approval, and he personally interviews candidates. Haaretz previously reported that Ben-Gvir’s wife, Ayala, was involved in the removal of Tel Aviv District Commander Ami Eshed because he had not used sufficient force against anti-government protesters.

[Daniel B. Shapiro: Smirking past the gallows]

As a result, Israelis’ sense of personal security continues to erode while the police fixate on targeting left-wing activists and backing far-right activists who harass anti-government demonstrators. The murder rate reached a new high in Israel over the past year, as did youth violence. And settler violence has surged to frightening levels amid the paralysis and indifference of the police force. As a matter of policy, the police routinely ignore violent attacks carried out by settlers against Palestinian civilians. Many of these incidents end in the deaths or injuries of Palestinians at the hands of armed settlers.

And Netanyahu? He looks away. He is silent about Ben-Gvir because he’d rather keep him at his side rather than turn him into an enemy—even when he knows the damage this causes to Israel, even when Israeli citizens themselves are harmed. After the October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel by Hamas and the kidnapping of 251 people to Gaza, Ben-Gvir took a series of inflammatory measures that worsened conditions for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Ronen Bar, the former chief of Israel’s domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet, warned Ben-Gvir that these actions were harming the Israeli hostages held by Hamas, even exposing them to severe physical abuse. Bar asked him to stop. Ben-Gvir ignored the warning. So did Netanyahu. When Israeli hostages were later released from Gaza, several described how they had been brutally beaten and tortured while Hamas captors told them: “This is because of Ben-Gvir.”

In any functioning democracy, a prime minister or president would dismiss a minister like Ben-Gvir. In the Israel of 10 or 20 years ago, a man like Ben-Gvir would never be allowed near the cabinet room. The fact that this racist thug has been handed policing power by Netanyahu says more about the state of Israel’s democracy and political values—and in particular about the prime minister’s values—than many Israelis might like to admit. But our prime minister is someone for whom political survival consistently takes precedence over the good of the country. It is safe to assume that he will allow Ben-Gvir to continue to light the country on fire to advance his hateful goals.

Ken Paxton Is Actually Doing This

2026-05-22T10:59:51-04:00

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

President Trump took 11 weeks to choose between Senator John Cornyn and State Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate primary runoff—so long that most people figured he’d never actually decide. Which is why, when Trump finally endorsed Paxton on Tuesday, the news hit a crowd of Republican retirees at a Tex-Mex restaurant like manna from the MAGA heavens.

Paxton was due that day for a meet-and-greet at Matt’s Rancho Martinez in Allen, but he was running late. Suddenly, the sound system, which had been vibrating gently with a selection of the Country Top 40, began blasting “Y.M.C.A.” People read Trump’s Truth Social post aloud from their phones and waved their arms in time with the president’s unofficial anthem. A man near me with slicked-back hair shouted into his phone, “We did it!” And by the time the next song came on—Thunderstruck! Ahh-ahh!—waiters were circulating with trays of free margaritas. “I have chills!” one elderly woman told me happily. Another lifted her plastic cup to the sky and shouted over the din, “What a time to be alive!”

It really is. Donald Trump is a historically unpopular politician. Gas prices, high inflation, and the war with Iran have all systems flashing fire-engine red for Republicans in November. Yet here was the president, throwing his political weight behind Paxton—a man who has been indicted, impeached, and allegedly unfaithful to his wife. In Washington, D.C., Senate Republicans were apoplectic at the president’s casual betrayal of one of their own. But here at the Rancho, an endorsement from Trump was welcomed like a hug from Oprah or the title of “Sole Survivor,” an American prize of inestimable value. These Texas Republicans love their attorney general the way that they love Trump: wholeheartedly, with no questions asked.

By choosing Paxton, the president is rewarding his—and his base’s—unwavering devotion. He is likely also guaranteeing Paxton a primary victory over Cornyn. And in so doing, Trump may have cemented a set of very difficult circumstances for his party. If Paxton wins on Tuesday, Democrats will probably be better positioned to win statewide in Texas than they’ve been in the past 40 years.

In the beginning, there was a pen. A $1,000 Montblanc, to be specific, the writing instrument of choice for celebrities, heads of state, and other kinds of people who recognize the cultural cachet of a customizable gold nib. Paxton apparently knows a good pen when he sees one, and in 2013, then–State Senator Paxton did see one—next to a metal detector at the Collin County Courthouse, where a fellow attorney had accidentally left it behind. Paxton picked it up and pocketed it. Later, after a call from an officer, Paxton returned the pen to its rightful owner; it had been a misunderstanding, a simple mistake, a Paxton spokesperson said. But that didn’t stop the ads. “This is Attorney General Ken Paxton, rummaging through the metal-detector trays and stealing that $1,000 pen,” the narrator says in one from 2018.

Texas hadn’t seen anything yet.

Over the next decade, Paxton would build a rap sheet of legal and ethical entanglements so long and complex that it is difficult to quickly sum up. I’ll try: In 2015, his first year as attorney general, Paxton was charged with defrauding investors in a tech company. (The charges were dismissed after Paxton agreed to do community service and take an ethics class.) In 2020, some of Paxton’s aides reported their boss to the FBI, accusing him of using his office to benefit a particular donor; Paxton later fired those staffers, who sued, alleging retaliation. (The FBI investigated Paxton, but the Justice Department ultimately declined to prosecute. A judge did find that the attorney general had violated the state Whistleblower Act, and Texas paid the aides $6.6 million.) In late 2020, Paxton became a star player in Trump’s “Stop the Steal” attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election, by suing to invalidate the results in four states that Joe Biden won.

By 2023, Paxton was the subject of a full-blown impeachment investigation based in part on the above allegations. Ultimately, the Texas House, including the majority of Republicans, voted to impeach him. Paxton was eventually acquitted by the Senate, with Trump’s help. But during the Senate trial, sordid details about his personal life spilled out, including witness testimony that Paxton had cheated on his wife, State Senator Angela Paxton. Later, in 2025, Angela announced that she was divorcing Paxton on “biblical grounds,” which is the Baptist way of saying that Ken was at it again. (Paxton has denied allegations of an affair.)

Despite all of this, Paxton continues to win. He’s been reelected twice since 2014, serving 11 years as attorney general. Cornyn has run attack ads, but the rushing river of Paxton controversies is tough to channel. Earlier this year, the Cornyn campaign released a six-minute ad unpacking all of Paxton’s corruption allegations that no voter could reasonably be expected to sit through. Later, the campaign tried a different approach, publishing an AI-generated spot centered on Paxton’s alleged infidelity that was both hard to follow and painfully campy.

Ask any Paxton supporter what they make of these accusations, and they will usually reply with some version of “Fake news!” or “He who is without sin can cast the first stone.” Many of them simply seem exasperated. “Who cares?” a man named Eric told me in Allen. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry!” The truth is that grassroots conservatives in Texas stand by Paxton because he has consistently stuck by them. By the time Trump entered the White House, Paxton had already positioned himself as an enemy of the establishment, a warrior against the deep state. As attorney general, he sued the Obama administration more than a dozen times, with mixed success; later, he filed more than 100 lawsuits against the Biden administration. (Both of these facts are applause lines in Paxton’s stump speech.)

As attorney general, Paxton sues like he breathes. This month, he won a $10 million settlement from the Texas Children’s Hospital that required it to stop gender-transition surgeries for minors. He also ordered Texas public schools to show proof that they were displaying copies of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, which, considering the quantity and credibility of all the allegations against him, is a bit like the fox giving the henhouse a lesson on etiquette.

Paxton’s superpower is that he is highly adaptable to the changing dynamics of his party and, like the president, appears to be completely lacking in shame. He has always simply “ignored electability as a concern,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a political-science professor at the University of Houston, told me. “He has no brakes.”

Voters I interviewed proudly made the same comparison. People thought Trump couldn’t win in 2016, a man named Doug Snyder told me after writing a $1,000 check for Paxton in Dallas. “Guess what? We’ve got the hats. And we’ve been to Mar-a-Lago,” he said.

Politics needs more leaders like Paxton and Trump, Diane Truitt told me at the same event—alpha males, she elaborated, like Bambi’s dad “coming out of the forest with those huge antlers.”

Which brings us, as always, back to Trump. Senate Republicans had urged the president to endorse Cornyn, who has been in the Senate for 23 years, and whose white-haired politesse evokes a bygone congressional era. Last week, in an apparently desperate effort to secure Trump’s affections, Cornyn tried to rename a highway after him. But Trump was not to be swayed. “John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

Paxton’s supporters can rattle off Cornyn’s sins without even pausing to think: He was slow to endorse Trump in 2016, and wasn’t enthusiastic enough about Trump’s efforts to build the border wall. Worse, he voted with Democrats to pass a gun-control package after the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde. He is, in short, a RINO, or Republican in Name Only. Paxton’s advertising campaign against Cornyn has been ugly. This month, the attorney general put out an ad arguing that the incumbent senator supports “Muslim mass immigration” and featuring Cornyn saying “Inshallah.” (“Ken Paxton has never said anything in Arabic,” a spokesperson for Paxton told me.)

Next week’s primary will be close, but Trump’s endorsement will probably give Paxton the edge. Whichever man wins will go up against James Talarico, a baby-faced state lawmaker and Presbyterian seminarian whose campaign has centered on faith and economic populism. Talarico is, in some ways, eminently attackable: He has said, for example, that “God is nonbinary” and argued that opposition to abortion isn’t rooted in scripture. Paxton is already workshopping nicknames for him, including “Six-Gender Jimmy” and “Low-T Talarico.”

But many Texas political observers and strategists believe that Cornyn would be better-positioned than Paxton to beat Talarico in November, given Cornyn’s ability to fundraise and his palatability among general-election voters. Especially in a year when the political environment seems so favorable to Democrats, running someone as controversial as Paxton, they argue, would be risky. The Cook Political Report has already said that if the attorney general wins next week, “Texas would move into a fully competitive race.”

This is, of course, the outcome that many Republicans dread most: that Paxton will be unable to win over the moderate Republican and independent voters he’ll need to succeed in November—and that Texas will make Talarico the first Democratic senator it’s elected since 1988. If Paxton is the nominee, “we’re in deep kimchi, which is Korean for ‘shit,’” Jerry Patterson, a Republican, former Texas land commissioner, and Cornyn supporter, told me. (Patterson is evidently not a fermented-vegetable fan.) “We’ve excited a new group of voters,” he added, referring to Trump and Paxton supporters, “and now we’re paying the price for it.”

At least for now, the voters Patterson is talking about seem to exist in an alternate reality—a place where Donald Trump’s endorsement can only be a good thing, where MAGA reigns and margaritas abound. “I don’t know where they’re getting those numbers from,” a woman named Mary told me in Allen, when I asked about the president’s dwindling national popularity. At the Rancho, voters don’t see Ken Paxton as an electoral liability any more than they believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square. For them, November is looking particularly bright.

Photos of the Week: Chief Mouser, Pet Gala, Soapbox Race

2026-05-22T09:00:00-04:00

Alessandra Tarantino / AP

Vietnamese women wait for the weekly general audience with Pope Leo XIV, in St. Peter’s Square, at the Vatican, on May 20, 2026.

Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty

Bogie, a Chihuahua dressed as the British singer-songwriter Sam Smith, poses during the 2026 Pet Gala at Cineplay in New York, on May 18, 2026. The annual canine-fashion event, created by the pet couturier Anthony Rubio, showcases dogs in elaborate, custom-made outfits inspired by the year’s Met Gala.

Mario Tama / Getty

A bison with molting (shedding) fur stands near a tree in Yellowstone National Park, in Wyoming, on May 19, 2026. National Park Week will celebrate America’s 250th anniversary with a weeklong celebration in August featuring hundreds of commemorative events at many of America’s 433 national parks under the theme “Celebrate America’s Story.”

Kin Cheung / AP

A Chelsea Pensioner sits in the Campaign to Protect Rural England garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, in London, on May 18, 2026.

Dmitri Lovetsky / AP

Employees of the Museum of Urban Sculpture clean the statue of Russian Czarina Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg, Russia, on May 19, 2026.

Channi Anand / AP

A man stands under a roadside water tap to cool himself on a hot day on the outskirts of Jammu, India, on May 19, 2026.

VCG / Getty

A Long March-8 carrier rocket carrying a new satellite group blasts off from the Hainan commercial-spacecraft launch site in Wenchang, Hainan province, China, on May 17, 2026. The satellite group is the ninth batch of the Spacesail Constellation, a planned 15,000-satellite communications constellation competing with SpaceX’s Starlink system.

Matthias Bein / DPA / Getty

Visitors walk through the illuminated Barbarossa Cave in the German state of Thuringia on May 16, 2026.

Anmar Khalil / AP

People walk near the Imam Ali shrine during a heavy dust storm in Najaf, Iraq, on May 18, 2026.

Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty

Fog rolls by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco on May 20, 2026.

Caroline Brehman / AP

Flames pick up during wildfires in Simi Valley, California, on May 19, 2026.

Vincent Carchietta / IMAGN Images / Reuters

The New York Mets center fielder Tyrone Taylor is doused by teammates after the Mets defeated the New York Yankees at Citi Field in New York City on May 17, 2026.

Ethan Swope / AP

A helicopter drops water on the Sandy Fire in Simi Valley, California, on May 18, 2026.

Jehad Alshrafi / AP

Palestinians react to a fire following an Israeli strike on a residential building in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, in the Gaza Strip, on May 15, 2026.

Moses Sawasawa / AP

A woman cries as Red Cross workers carry the coffin of a person who died from Ebola at a health center in Rwampara, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on May 20, 2026.

Kim Soo-hyeon / REUTERS

A girl carrying a lantern takes part in a lotus-lantern parade ahead of Vesak Day, the birthday of Buddha, in Seoul on May 16, 2026.

Toby Shepheard / Reuters

Larry, the Downing Street cat and chief mouser to the Cabinet Office, is enticed by treats into No. 10 Downing Street in London on May 17, 2026.

Alaeddin Cogal / Anadolu / Getty

A ground squirrel has a nibble in Sultan Sazlığı National Park in Kayseri, Turkey, on May 17, 2026.

Sergei Grits / AP

A thrush feeds a fledgling in a city park in Tallinn, Estonia, on May 21, 2026.

Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times / Getty

The Krusty Krew catches some air in the Patty Wagon while competing in the Red Bull Soapbox Race along First Street in downtown Los Angeles on May 16, 2026.

Derik Hamilton / AP

Ryan Preece climbs from his burning car after a crash during the NASCAR All-Star auto race at Dover Motor Speedway in Dover, Delaware, on May 17, 2026.

Eric Gay / AP

Workers help prepare SpaceX’s Starship rocket for a test flight from Starbase, Texas, as the sun sets on May 20, 2026.

Ahn Young-joon / AP

A humanoid robot reacts in a boxing demonstration during the Galaxy Robot Park opening commemorative media day in Seoul on May 15, 2026.

Thomas Peter / Reuters

Ukrainian service men react as they set foot on Ukrainian soil at an undisclosed location after being exchanged in a prisoner-of-war swap with Russia, amid Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, on May 15, 2026.

Luca Bruno / AP

Thousands of fans cheer as a bus carries triumphant Inter Milan soccer-team players outside San Siro Stadium, celebrating their 21st Italian Serie A top-league title in Milan, Italy, on May 17, 2026.

John Locher / AP

A festival-goer poses for photographers as people sit by the beach along the Croisette, during the 79th annual Cannes Film Festival on May 15, 2026.

Benoit Tessier / Reuters

The temporary artwork La caverne du Pont Neuf (“The Pont Neuf Cave”), conceived by the French street artist J.R. as a tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, is revealed to the public after being inflated overnight on the Pont Neuf Bridge, in Paris, on May 21, 2026.

Purnima Shrestha / Reuters

Climbers walk in a long line as they head to summit Mount Everest in the Solukhumbu district, also known as the Everest region, Nepal, on May 18, 2026.

The Goodbye Stephen Colbert Wanted to Say

2026-05-22T08:45:52-04:00

The end of a long-running late-night talk show tends to play out in one of two ways: as a mournful funeral, or a joyous wake.

In the case of hosts such as David Letterman and Johnny Carson, who picked the date and manner of their retirements, the send-offs were upbeat. Stephen Colbert, Letterman’s successor as host of CBS’s The Late Show for the past 11 years, is leaving his job under more forced, awkward circumstances. The network announced in July that it had canceled Colbert’s often politically sharp program for what it claimed were financial reasons; critics, and the host himself, questioned whether the move was in fact motivated by the CBS corporate owner Paramount’s desire to avoid further conflict with the Trump administration. Colbert has spent the intervening months doing the same show that put him atop the late-night ratings heap, and Thursday night’s series finale was, in many ways, an ordinary installment. And despite the circumstances, the host kept things bright, roping in a cavalcade of celebrities to send things out happily.

[Read: The most surprising part of Stephen Colbert’s late-night run]

The marquee name for Colbert’s final interview (and musical performance) was Paul McCartney, though Colbert did jokingly nod to the rumors that Pope Leo XIV would be joining him by referring to McCartney as “infallible.” But the idea that the pope would appear spoke to the overall image of Colbert’s Late Show as a thoughtful, more philosophical hour of comedy from its competitors—an ethos that will be hard to replace, now that CBS is putting him out to pasture. Colbert spent his final week on the air adhering to that tone: He waxed nostalgic with his friend and former The Daily Show collaborator, Jon Stewart; invited Bruce Springsteen on to perform his anti-ICE protest anthem, “Streets of Minneapolis”; and put himself in the hot seat to complete his own “Colbert Questionert,” designed to eke out more intimate answers than usual from his celebrity guests.

Thursday’s program opened with Colbert addressing the audience, reflecting on the “reciprocal emotional relationship” he had developed with Late Show viewers over time. In that speech, he also laid out the energy with which he wanted to say goodbye—cheerful, but still deeply empathetic. “We call this show the joy machine,” he said during his kickoff, “because to do this many shows, it has to be a machine. But if you choose to do it with joy, it doesn’t hurt as much when your fingers get caught in the gears.” He continued by referencing The Colbert Report, the satirical Comedy Central program that launched him to this job. He recalled explaining on that show’s premiere episode, in 2005, that “anyone can read the news to you—I promise to feel the news at you.” Speaking about Late Show, he said, “I realized pretty soon that our job over here was different. We’re here to feel the news with you. And I don’t know about you, but I sure have felt it.”

After his introduction, the episode proceeded normally, for the most part. Big shot guests popped up in the studio audience, including the actors Bryan Cranston, Paul Rudd, and Ryan Reynolds, who did a few bits and pattered about the host going off air; Colbert moved through the usual jokes about the day’s news. After the monologue, he shifted to his desk for the show’s recurring “Meanwhile” segment, which echoes his slightly more pugilistic style of comedy on The Colbert Report. Then he welcomed McCartney, whose appearance gave Colbert one last affable mega-celeb to chat with, and evoked the history of the Ed Sullivan Theater, where The Late Show had been filmed since it premiered more than 30 years ago. The Beatles, of course, made their American TV debut in the studio back in 1964.

McCartney, ruminating on his first visit to the United States, recalled the band’s impression that the country was “where all the music we loved came from.” “So that’s what we thought—America was just the land of the free, the greatest democracy,” he said. “Still is,” he added with a bit of a wink. That comment was about as pointed as the humor got, though McCartney was likely a far livelier guest than the pope might have been. After a final pretaped segment that involved Colbert’s fellow hosts in the field—Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, John Oliver—Colbert performed a song with Louis Cato of The Late Show’s house band, alongside Elvis Costello and the former bandleader Jon Batiste, before joining McCartney on stage to sing “Hello, Goodbye.”

It was all pleasant, light, and bouncy—very much in line with the “joyous wake” version of late-night farewells; the entire crew of the show even took to the stage to dance with Colbert and McCartney as the night closed out. For all the awkward optics of his exit, and the iffy political implications that come with the loss of The Late Show, Colbert clearly wanted to remind everyone that he was an entertainer first and foremost. He may not have picked the timing of his departure, but after a proud run of more than 1,800 episodes, Colbert chose to leave with his head held high.

Donald Trump’s Paint Jobs

2026-05-22T07:30:00-04:00

For more than a century, the area around the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has served as a staging ground for civic participation. With its grand scale but subdued character, it is a place where much of the meaning is made by the people using it: the millions of visitors who have descended upon “America’s Front Yard” for marches, tourism, and celebrations.

But in recent weeks, the western end of the National Mall has become a construction zone, the latest spectacle in President Trump’s effort to imprint his legacy on Washington, D.C., by renovating it. Workers in protective suits have completely drained the water and are now coating the concrete basin with a vivid blue, while tourists gawk at the tarped-off project rather than the monuments that the pool was designed to mirror.

In Trump’s view, the makeover, which he hopes to complete before the nation’s 250th birthday, on July 4, is coming along swimmingly. Last weekend, he shared photos of a sample test that crews conducted in the basin to inspect its reflective properties. “Looking really good,” Trump reported on Truth Social—and there’s a chance that the rushed project might turn out fine. In the photos, a shallow strip of water reflects puffy clouds and pale stone in striking blue detail. It was an improvement over an earlier rendering, in which the water looks like a blue you might see on a new Corolla.

Critics have called the partially painted pool “ridiculous” and tacky and have taken to posting pictures of the site from the sky near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Supporters (and various government social-media accounts) have praised Trump for leading what they describe as a long-overdue beautification project of the nation’s capital. On Wednesday, Trump took a victory lap for his administration’s fix-up job on many fountains around D.C., writing on Truth Social, “The ‘Granddaddy’ of them all will be The Reflecting Pool.”

But whether the pool will ultimately enhance or diminish the National Mall is far more difficult to determine at this stage: How the paint job will look when the pool is fully filled, whether problems such as leakage and algae will return, and how the Trumpian glow-up will play against the rest of D.C.’s carefully restrained civic core are all unclear. The Mall is meant to symbolize the virtues of democratic governance and the separation of powers. Which is precisely why major aesthetic changes to Washington’s most prominent spaces have historically undergone round after round of public review.

Trump has prioritized his own ideas about how the city’s stately, low-slung landscape should look. It will be years before that vision is realized, and lawsuits or politics may halt parts of it. But already, he’s left a mark on the city: a work site where the White House East Wing used to be, a Mar-a-Lago-style patio over the former Rose Garden, signs with his name and banners with his face on buildings.

And paint. Last year, Trump had the exterior columns of the Kennedy Center changed from gold to white, and he is currently seeking approval to paint the Eisenhower Executive Office Building so that it matches the White House, its immediate neighbor. With the Reflecting Pool, he’s ordered up a giant blue rectangle. It would be among his first completed changes to Washington’s landscape and an emblem of his administration, one in which stewardship may come second to pageantry.

It isn’t easy to give Washington, D.C., a makeover.

Major changes to the city’s monumental core are supposed to face layers of review from federal entities including the National Park Service, the National Capital Planning Commission, and the Commission of Fine Arts. Trump allies lead both commissions, the latter of which is composed entirely of his appointees now. Both have allowed projects such as the White House ballroom to leapfrog the usual process. The East Wing was demolished in October, before the White House brought plans to the federal panels, which approved the project earlier this year.

Projects affecting federally designated historic landscapes also are subject to a Section 106 review process under the National Historic Preservation Act, which considers not only structural and environmental impacts but also potential changes to a site’s “feeling and association,” Charles Birnbaum, the president and CEO of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, which filed a lawsuit against the Interior Department last week to halt the changes to the Reflecting Pool, recently told me. Altogether, the reviews can take years and many of them involve public hearings, environmental assessments, and design revisions. But the Reflecting Pool has gone through the process before.

[Read: Trump’s giant face is everywhere]

From 2010 to 2012, the Obama administration spent more than $34 million to restore the pool’s structure, which was sinking into the marshland. The rehabilitation also included enhancements such as a new tinted bottom to improve the water’s reflectivity and a circulation-and-filtration system to prevent algae blooms in the shallow basin. Even with extensive planning and review, the project still fell short. Workers were clearing out the algae less than a month after the pool’s reopening.

To a president hoping to do some building in D.C., the lengthy reviews may feel like red tape. But despite the slowness, high costs, and failures that can result, federal reviews also serve as aesthetic checks on Washington’s symbolic spaces. The Mall was designed as a carefully choreographed civic experience in which the more than 2,000-foot-long Reflecting Pool serves as a vehicle for “conversation, commemoration, and civic gestures,” Birnbaum stressed. “It is all about movement,” he said. “You’re actually seeing your own reflection in conversation with the monuments, which are ever shifting as you move. They’re also ever shifting if the sunlight moves.”

Crucially, he said, the pool bottom’s dark-gray tone reflects two memorials—Washington and Lincoln—in a single unbroken image.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Hisham Ibrahim / Getty; Julia Demaree Nikhinson / AP.

There’s nothing wrong with blue, a popular color for backyard pools. But in reflecting pools, color can alter the water feature’s effect—a delicate choice that inspires a passionate response from experts.

“The blue should be the goddamn sky. Not the bottom of the pool,” the landscape architect Laurie Olin told me recently as we observed crowds wandering the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, close to the center of the National Mall. “It’s not meant to be calling attention to itself.” The sculpture garden—one of Olin’s most lauded projects—offers its own evidence. Patches of blue sky and slow-moving clouds shimmered across the rippling surface of the garden’s central fountain as visitors paused along the gravel path to admire the reflections. “What it takes to make things look simple quite often is an enormous effort,” he said.

Speaking to reporters last month during a White House event, Trump said he first floated a brighter idea for the basin. “‘What about turquoise, like in the Bahamas?’” Trump recalled asking a contractor. “He said, ‘Well, this is Washington, sir. We can give you turquoise, but why don’t you try—like, we have a color. It’s called American-flag blue.’” Trump has claimed that the project, which began in April, was prompted by a friend visiting from Germany who complained that the water looked filthy and disgusting. In an effort to move at “Trump speed” for the nation’s 250th anniversary, the president gave out a no-bid contract, an exemption meant for urgent situations, The New York Times reported.

[Read: The Trump Library symbolizes his presidency perfectly]

Trump further defended the move by claiming that bypassing a multiyear plan to rebuild the pool and hiring a swimming-pool contractor would be more cost efficient. He estimated that the work would cost about $1.8 million, but the Interior Department told the Times that it expected to pay $13.1 million. Trump said the coating would act as an industrial sealant to stop 16 million gallons of water from leaking each year, but according to the Times, staffers at the Interior Department have begun to notice bubbles, small holes, and inconsistent colors across the pool’s surface as the work continues.

The darkened color of the pool bottom will also make the water in the basin hotter in the summer, because it will absorb more heat, Olin said, potentially creating more algae and a film of scum.

After Trump took over the Kennedy Center last year, among the first physical changes he ordered up was the repainting of its roughly 200 gold-toned columns to “Site White.” Trump said the pillars, which were a defining feature of the architect Edward Durrell Stone’s design and resemble the strings of an instrument, were “fake looking.” Testifying in federal court last month, Kennedy Center Executive Director Matt Floca defended the decision. “It’s easy; painting is easy,” Floca said when asked why the institution prioritized repainting of the columns over other issues that Trump and its leadership said have left the center in tremendous disrepair.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Darren E. Tromblay / Getty; Michael Lee / Getty.

The president’s more recent proposal to paint the historic Eisenhower Executive Office Building white has alarmed preservationists and architects. The building’s granite, slate, and cast-iron exterior were designed to weather over time and emphasize the natural texture of the stone. Painting such surfaces not only risks damaging the building physically by trapping moisture within porous materials, but also erases the architectural character of the structure itself, Olin said.

Landscape architects often invoke a philosophy known as “architecture parlante”—the idea that a building’s physical form quietly communicates its purpose and values, Olin said. In Washington, D.C., the stone, reflective water, and muted palettes are meant to project strength, permanence, authority, history, and restraint.

“One of the reasons why Washington is celebrated as such an exemplar and icon when it comes to city planning and landscape architecture and civic design is because of its visual and spatial bone structure,” Birnbaum said. “And the reality is all of these projects are impacting the visual and spatial structure of how we both move physically and also how our eye moves visually through these landscapes.”

Although landscape architecture has both practical and aesthetic aims, Olin said that spaces such as the National Mall are meant to uplift people emotionally and spiritually as much as they are meant to function practically and ecologically.

“They’re all equally important,” he said.

The challenge is balance. And a striking blue basin at the bottom of the Reflecting Pool could upset that equilibrium.

“It’s like a drug,” Olin said. “It’s trying to stimulate people artificially.”