The Atlantic

The Future of Socializing Will Be Sponsored

2026-10-13T08:00:00-04:00

At Café Soul, a semi-regular party in New York City, $30 buys you a chance to belt R&B hits, sip margaritas from commemorative glasses, try out Awkward Games’ icebreaker cards, and—as the ticket page promises—form “genuine connections.” When I arrived 45 minutes after the rooftop party started on a recent Saturday afternoon, the few 20- and 30-something guests were mostly sitting on mid-century modern couches, looking at their phones. But Tionne Barmer, who dreamed up the event, promised me that, in two hours, the rooftop would be packed: People would be enjoying the Patrón-sponsored bar, trying the brown-sugar cold brew (underwritten by On the Way Coffee), using Awkward Games cards to skip small talk, and maybe even flirting. (The event was also sponsored by Tinder.) They’d have a chance to make genuine connections, which is what Barmer was really selling. “People will pay for the entertainment,” he said, “and, on the side, they get community.”

Barmer has always had a talent for bringing people together, and now he’s making a living out of it. Some people call this job “event curator”; others have started using the term community builder. People like Barmer are, in essence, professional scene-makers. They were student-body presidents, sorority leaders, slumber-party queens, that one guy in the friend group who threw the best parties—and now they organize knitting circles, silent reading parties, adult summer camps, run clubs, and life-story sharing sessions to help young adults find one another. They sell their guests the opportunity for friendship, and they sell brands access to the groups they’ve gathered, not on Instagram or TikTok, but in real life.

If Barmer and others like him can make this a full-time profession (he quit his finance job only when his side gig as a community builder could match that income), it’s in part because Americans are in desperate need of shindigs. As The Atlantic has reported, in the past three decades, pretty much every measure of socializing—hosting dinner parties, going on picnics, volunteering—has dropped by double digits; in 2023, only 4.1 percent of us managed to make it to a social event or host one on an average weekend or holiday. “Everyone wants to attend parties, but no one wants to throw them,” Ellen Cushing wrote in this magazine last year.

Planning a party is, after all, a lot of work. Umama Kibria, a co-founder of Play Social Club, grew up helping her father host picnics for their Desi community. He’d cater meals and create elaborate The Price Is Right–esque games. Although he sold tickets to cover the cost of the food, he’d spend his own money on the decor, activities, and prizes. Kibria saw how the events drained his energy and finances. When she graduated from college, she started hosting large gatherings of her own, including grown-up field days and her own Desi picnics. Unlike her dad, she charged enough to make a profit.

What really shocked her father, Kibria told me, was how she was able to find brand partners who’d contribute $10,000 sponsorships so that she could periodically host free events. Between ticket sales, affiliated codes, equity deals, and consulting gigs, she made her dad’s hobby her full-time job. If she provides her peers with the social life they crave, she realized, “people will pay.”

They really will, Joan Li, an associate principal of wellness-industry insights at the market-research firm Mintel, told me. Many Americans now see social connection as a purchasable good. Just as DoorDash offers food delivery for people who don’t have time or don’t want to cook, solo entrepreneurs and businesses offer social calendars. This so-called IRL economy is in some ways a reaction against the internet and the ills of the influencer economy: People want to get off their phones and go somewhere to make an actual friend. But the job of “community builder” is also an outgrowth of influencer culture, Brooke Erin Duffy, a communications professor at Cornell who studies influencers, told me. Because social media is now saturated with creators monetizing their followers, anyone who can get people together offline and in-person could command a premium.

That’s part of the pitch that Pie (short for “People I Enjoy”), a new platform for hosts to advertise and monetize events, is making. “Think about the value of how much influencers get paid to make a video to, hopefully, get someone for three-to-five seconds in a feed, versus sticking someone IRL in front of a logo or a product for an hour. The value is so much higher there,” Nadya Okamoto, an influencer and a co-founder of Pie, told me. The thought of Michaels sponsoring knitting circles so that the company can stick its logo in front of people for longer might give some of us pause—it certainly bummed me out—but Pie, along with agencies such as Onbrand and Offline, which match brands with events to sponsor, are pushing to build a world in which socializing is also a marketing opportunity.

Right now, Pie offers participants in its Pie Creator Club, including Barmer, an average of $445 and up to $3,500 a month to organize gatherings. The company also co-hosted a dinner this summer at which community builders swapped best practices for “communitymaxxing.” It’s currently using venture capital to pay its creators, but long-term, Pie is wagering that businesses will pay community builders like they do online influencers, for access to their guests. And some brands are already betting on this new economy: Tinder launched an “Events” section of its app this past spring, and by the end of the year, plans to feature events in 75 cities, mainly through partnerships with party organizers like Barmer.

As I wandered around Café Soul, which was part of a series that Barmer had designed to get people off their phones, signs reminded guests to LIVE IN THE MOMENT. And as the party picked up, they were doing just that: Hundreds of people formed a dance circle, then opened it up for a man in head-to-toe stone-washed denim, who dropped it low, backed it up, and gave his new friends what may be one of the most electric performances of T-Pain’s “I’m Sprung” ever given at 3 p.m. on a Saturday. But people did also have their phones out to film themselves dancing and lip-syncing; one guy in plaid culottes and tiny green sunglasses was filming on a tripod. These events still need to generate online content to be financially viable, Andrew Roth, a co-founder of Offline, told me. Most people find out about these communities through social media, and companies expect that any event they sponsor will generate posts featuring their products. Still, he said, influencers get paid millions of dollars to keep us on our phones—why not reward the hosts getting us (mostly) off them? Roth described a future in which “you already have your monthly book club, and it just so happens this one you’re going to get paid for.”

This proposition is akin to an older phenomenon—the Tupperware parties of the 1950s, Duffy said, when women hosted friends in their living room and exhibited the latest and greatest in food storage. Plenty of people have also paid to socialize at their country club or local Rotary chapter; others have found ways to turn their hobbies into a business, without a venture-backed app to help them do it. At its worst, a world in which a book club is sponsored by Barefoot Wine could make people feel like their every waking moment is a marketing opportunity, even more than they already do. When I played a round of icebreaker cards with two women—who had first met, they told me, at a makeup class at Nordstrom, hosted by another so-called IRL community called Girls That Gather—I had fun, but I felt a bit like I was inhabiting a simulacrum of “community.” Yet all the hosts I spoke with seemed like they were earnestly trying to make sure that their events did not feel that way.

Many of them asked me which communities I was a part of. I’d tell them about Sundays at church and Wednesday Bible study in my living room. A couple of them told me that they were essentially trying to build a secular community from the same template: Churches give people a physical place to repeatedly congregate in a large group setting, and also offer ways for smaller groups to gather throughout the week. Safi Aziz, another full-time community builder, told me he sees events as helping fill the gap left by the decline of public institutions. “If we’re no longer gathering as much over religion” or other organizational ties, he said, “all we really have left to gather over is common interest.” (In his case, that common interest is game nights, which he runs through his company, Joust.)

But unlike these IRL communities, church doesn’t promise a great time. Authentic communities can’t be optimized, because they’re fueled by friction: showing up when it is inconvenient; being kind to one another even when Barbara is being a pain in the neck. They build trust because they ask something of you, besides just money, as the price of admission.

So far, professional community builders mostly seem to be offering people an easy way to party—and thank God for that. Even if someone goes to an event and doesn’t connect with anyone, they’ve still gathered with a group of people that weekend. That is the first step of being part of a community, and something America certainly needs.

The Town That Fought a Giant

2026-10-13T08:00:00-04:00

Villains, in 21st-century literature, are hard to come by. Very few novelists write real Bad Guys or build their books around clear struggles between good and evil—and with reason. Such storylines, when executed poorly, can easily become didactic; a villain can turn into a cartoon. Yet some of the most satisfying stories out there, the ones that people have adapted and retold for centuries, are tales of good versus evil: Paradise Lost, Le Morte d’Arthur, a decent chunk of the Brothers Grimm.

As recently as the mid-20th century, literary novelists were still writing evil characters: “Big Bads,” we might call them. Yet the gap between the sinister Cathy in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and the somewhat redeemed version—the girl boss of the brothel, as The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz recently put it—in Zoe Kazan’s new Netflix adaptation indicates that writers are leery of villains now. Reading the canon suggests that this might foreclose on a rich vein of drama and meaning. So does reading the distinctly contemporary work of the Appalachian writer Madeline ffitch.

ffitch is a longtime environmental activist, and her 2019 debut novel, Stay and Fight, follows three women raising a child off the grid in eastern Ohio while battling a natural-gas company that becomes their nemesis. Still, though the company has a slimy functionary, it’s essentially an impersonal version of evil. But in her newly released follow-up, Avalon, Rise, ffitch gives her villain a face and a voice.

The novel is again set in Appalachian Ohio, in a small town where an internet-famous neo-Nazi has just moved. Its characters have to struggle against not only the extremist herself, but also her quickly spreading influence, while still dealing with their preexisting troubles, which include isolation, addiction, and one mother’s seeming compulsion to hit her child. These are serious matters—and yet some of the clearest influences in Avalon, Rise are children’s books. In fact, Pete Seeger’s Abiyoyo, the tale of a boy and his father who save their village from a giant, seems to be the book’s guiding star.

Avalon, Rise is a sophisticated novel, intellectually complex and slyly funny at every turn. Like Abiyoyo, it is also a very direct story about facing evil with courage. Avalon, Rise makes the case on nearly every page that opposing the Big Bad is necessary. But that basic principle, the book suggests, does not make standing up to those who would destroy a community easy. Indeed, the ever-shifting balance between clarity and complication is central to the novel.

ffitch is able to maintain this balance largely because she seems to have little interest in demonstrating purity—either her own or that of her characters. Avalon, Rise doesn’t care if its characters do the precisely correct thing. As a result, it achieves the rare feat of having a distinct sense of right and wrong, without ever becoming preachy or heavy-handed. It becomes an exploration of how confusing and hard it is to be good.

Abiyoyo is set in a village united, as one of Avalon, Rise’s characters puts it, by annoyance and fear. The annoyance is at the dad and son, who are such inconsiderate neighbors that the town exiles them; the fear is of Abiyoyo, a perhaps-mythical man-eating giant. But when Abiyoyo actually shows up one morning, the ostracized father-son duo comes up with a clever strategy to defeat him, saving the town and redeeming themselves in the process. All of these plot points—and really, these characters—appear in ffitch’s novel.

In Avalon, Rise, the village is Avalon, Ohio, which seems to be loosely based on the real town of Athens. Its menacing giant is white nationalism, embodied by a true believer named Stasia—the “Volk Mother” or “OdinistMama” online—who moves to Avalon and begins recruiting in its community. But rather than having one parent and a child to defeat the villain, ffitch fills Avalon, Rise with a sprawling, endearing, enraging group of characters who are, if not outcasts, distinctly at the town’s margins.

There’s Avalon’s social worker, who holds herself a bit apart from the community she serves; there’s the wishy-washy librarian who, by trying to agree with everyone she talks with, ends up going back constantly on her word; there are the anti-fascist organizers with bad attitudes and too many piercings. Over the course of the novel, which has the conviction of a manifesto but the relaxed, raucous narrative quality of a good shaggy-dog story, ffitch gets all of these characters to come together to deal not only with Stasia but also with the residents of Avalon who are willing, and in some cases eager, to enable her.

[Read: A diagnosis for social conflict that gets lost along the way]

Stasia’s leading enabler, Woody, is, perhaps counterintuitively, also Avalon, Rise’s moral center. What I mean is that he’s the character who struggles the hardest. He is a printmaker and an addict (any reader who was disappointed, as I was, by Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead will get a more nuanced and less dramatic portrait of drug addiction in Appalachia here). His prized possession is a milk crate of children’s books—including, pointedly, Abiyoyo—that he refers to regularly as sources of artistic inspiration, comfort during withdrawal, entertainment for his 4- and 7-year-old nephews, and guidance for when he doesn’t know what to do.

Woody gets sucked into Stasia’s orbit after she commissions him to print flyers for her “European Heritage Rug Braiding” workshops. Stasia’s barn contains an old Vandercook, a 20th-century printing press that Woody reveres so much that he has “memorized its anatomy.” ffitch, who loves detailed terminology, luxuriates in Woody’s pleasure at just knowing “there was such thing as a half-pica lever, a sliding knee stick, a slug cutter, a cylinder eccentric,” let alone using them. Stasia allows him access to the press, and dangles the possibility of giving it to him. In Woody’s imagination, owning it would give him a real life as an artist, which, in turn, might help him stay clean. This desire, along with his addiction itself, makes him highly susceptible to Stasia’s manipulation, even as his mother and best friend lead very different efforts to organize against her.

Woody’s mother, Eloise, is Avalon’s people-pleasing librarian, a lifelong liberal activist who believes in civil discourse above all. On Stasia’s arrival, though, her commitment to this value is immediately shaken by the more forceful resistance proposed by the novel’s ragtag group of anti-fascists, which includes Woody’s childhood best friend, Leroi—a sweet, earnest mama’s boy who dreams of getting out of Avalon and becoming a vagabond. The novel’s goals include bringing its Lerois and its Eloises together, prodding them to collaborate despite their many disagreements.

[Read: A biting satire about the idealistic left]

But the novel’s deeper effort is to use political work—an “ordinary and necessary” part of life, ffitch has written—and the dissidence and quandaries it creates, to ask that each of its characters be brave in their own way. In every case, this means dealing with Stasia. For Woody, it also means reckoning with addiction, and for Eloise, recognizing that her desire to be an unjudgmental mother has led her to facilitating his drug abuse.

For Eloise’s older child, Emma, who has two young sons, it means admitting something even harder. ffitch is uncommonly good at writing, tenderly but without sentimentality, about people who both adore their children and make colossal errors in raising them. Emma, especially where her 7-year-old son, Martin, is concerned, falls into this category. Of their dynamic, ffitch writes, “Emma loved Martin helplessly. Yet, just as helplessly, she wanted to hit him”—and she does. It’s only toward the end of the book that Emma admits that hitting her son isn’t a maternal instinct but rather a sign that she, herself, needs significant help.

By braiding these stories, and many more, into the tale of Avalon defeating its giant, ffitch tells a layered, sophisticated story that expresses a clear, ethical point of view without hammering readers on the head. Not many novels for adults do this successfully, but in children’s literature, it is one of the standards for a great book. ffitch includes many in Avalon, Rise: Abiyoyo but also Frog and Toad, Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins, The Dead Bird. Each of these books demands that its characters face their situation with courage; each one takes something that seems simple—burying a bird, celebrating Hanukkah, all sorts of mundane tasks in Frog and Toad—and surrounds it with not just emotional complication but also mischief, humor, and delight.

So, too, with Avalon, Rise, as it demonstrates that white supremacists are unwelcome in town. What Avalon, Rise understands as well as the classics of children’s literature is that when you’re a small, fallible, confused person, everything is exciting but almost nothing is easy. What it understands as well as any great adult novel is how hard it is to get people to work together, no matter how high the stakes. In bringing these two clear yet complicated pieces of knowledge together, ffitch has written a remarkable book.

The Journalist and the Manipulator

2026-10-13T07:00:00-04:00

At one point or another, The New Yorker’s Janet Malcolm construed each profession or art form she wrote about as a mug’s game. She asserted that the “crowning paradox of psychoanalysis is the near-uselessness of its insights,” though she filled her work with Freudian tropes and paradigms. (She herself spent eight years in analysis.) The presumption of innocence underlying criminal trials had a “hollowness” that called the whole judicial system into question. Biography was a genre that Malcolm practiced and investigated, and she has now become a subject of it with the publication of Eve Sneider’s The Absent Woman. But all biography struck Malcolm as “transgressive,” an “impertinence”; its readers would be better off accepting that “if anything is our own business, it is our pathetic native self.” Which isn’t to say that readers should favor autobiography. The “original sin” of that undertaking is to wallow in “memories of conflict, resentment, blame, self-justification—and it is wrong, unfair, inexcusable to publish them.”

The quotations above come from five books produced over five decades, and this catalog of futility and ethical compromise does not even include Malcolm’s most famous animadversion, which she lobbed against her own craft and calling: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” These words open The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), Malcolm’s account of the lawsuit brought by Jeffrey MacDonald (the murderer, an Army captain convicted of killing his wife and children) against Joe McGinniss (the journalist working on a book about him), who’d maintained MacDonald’s cooperation by writing him letters that conveyed the clear impression that McGinniss believed in his innocence. The book McGinniss finally published, Fatal Vision, squarely affirmed MacDonald’s guilt.

This literary treachery seemed to agitate Malcolm more than the slaughter of MacDonald’s family. It was all of a piece with her certainty that nonfiction writers made reality and fact as pliable as they are for attorneys facing off in a courtroom. Journalistic accounts of trials all impose falsely coherent plotlines on actuality. According to Malcolm, nonfiction is always aspiring to the authoritative “completeness” and seeming inevitability of fiction. (Notice that the notorious first line of The Journalist and the Murderer, which lays down a universal law, has a cadence similar to the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice.) In The Silent Woman (1994), her study of the ever-multiplying biographical literature about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Malcolm took things further: “The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination.”

[David A. Graham: Janet Malcolm the magician]

Journalists were outraged by Malcolm’s account of MacDonald versus McGinniss not just because of what she included in the long New Yorker articles where The Journalist and the Murderer first took form, but also because of what she omitted: the fact that she herself was then embroiled in litigation launched by Jeffrey Masson, a flamboyant psychoanalyst whose professional adventures she had chronicled while massaging and repositioning interview quotations from him beyond accepted norms. She could produce tape recordings of most of the quotations in their raw form, but a handful of the more inflammatory ones were in written notes that she couldn’t locate; in the first of two trials, she was found guilty of libel.

Malcolm insisted that her adaptive techniques had once been “a commonplace of New Yorker nonfiction” composed by writers such as Joseph Mitchell, who brought his subjects to levels of articulateness they couldn’t reach by themselves. In an afterword to The Journalist and the Murderer, an appendage necessitated by the uproar over the New Yorker articles, she argued that “when a journalist undertakes to quote a subject he has interviewed on tape, he owes it to the subject, no less than to the reader, to translate his speech into prose.” This is at wild variance with all mainstream journalistic ethics. The written genre in which characters, for the reader’s convenience, speak better than they would in real life is, of course, the novel.

However much Malcolm acknowledged the queasiness she felt about her own participation in journalism, she barreled ahead. She could not have pulled off her mental acrobatics and compelling portraiture without a brilliant mind and a wickedly piercing style. During John Roberts’s Senate confirmation hearings in 2005, the “constant play of expression on his features put one in mind of nineteenth-century primers of acting in which emotions—pleasure, agreement, dismay, uncertainty, hope, fear—are illustrated on the face of a model.” The best of her observations merit something beyond Alexander Pope’s famous phrase: They’re not things oft thought but ne’er so well expressed; they’re things probably never before thought at all. Consider these remarks about having really good seats at Il Trovatore :

The inequality of audience experience is intrinsic to the performing arts and unique to them. Literature and painting and sculpture are mediums of equal opportunity. A rich reader’s experience of Anna Karenina is no more intense than a poor one’s. The hedge-fund owner and the secretary see exactly the same Raft of the Medusa. But only the hedge-fund owner gets to see the expression on Azucena’s face when she relives throwing the wrong baby into the fire.

Malcolm had an aphorist’s desire to turn anything she apprehended into an across-the-board truth. A steady snow of inclusivities—“every,” “all,” “we,” “always”—falls upon her pages:

Children are always feeling secretly ashamed or anxious.

All families of suicides are alike.

There is a law of human nature—let us call it the Confidant’s Law—that dictates that no secret is ever told to only one person; there is always at least one other person to whom we feel compelled to spill the beans.

One usually waits in vain for a single example to support these ostensibly omnipresent phenomena. And yet, Malcolm’s mordant power of tone makes a reader register and silently assent to a great deal of this ex cathedra stuff. Her style alone keeps her worthy of our attention. But the particular way she challenged assumptions of objectivity is what makes her a figure intriguing enough to merit her own biography. In her exposés of literary malpractice, she was unafraid to use some of the very manipulations she was decrying. The writs she issued to others were also blank checks made out to herself.

Sneider’s subtitle, The Genius of Janet Malcolm, makes one fear a book of fangirl gush, probably the last thing Malcolm herself would have wanted. One flinches further upon learning that Malcolm had invited Sneider to tea after she, then still a Yale undergraduate, curated an exhibition of Malcolm’s papers in the university’s Beinecke Library. But seven years after that tea, Sneider, now a contributor to The New York Review of Books, has produced a book that assembles the biographical facts about Malcolm with admirable brevity, if not always precision. As for her subject’s writing, Sneider more or less concurs with a widespread verdict: “Malcolm acolytes will tell you that she is everywhere and nowhere within her work.” If traditional literary biography seeks to illuminate the work through the life, this one mostly reverses direction. The Absent Woman is a play on the title of Malcolm’s Plath book, and a kind of challenge that Sneider issues to herself and to readers: Go find the person in the books she wrote.

Sneider’s voice is a lot breezier than Malcolm’s (whose isn’t?). The casual coarseness of her texting generation’s style (“pissing other people off,” “a little fucked up”) makes one imagine her blithely dropping crumbs on Malcolm’s carpet during that tea. Sneider does share a few basic techniques with her subject, such as taking the reader along on her research, making the work on the book part of the book itself. She also breaks into the first person (“I would be remiss not to mention”) when that seems useful.

Sneider tells us that Malcolm arrived in the United States, a Jewish Czech refugee, along with her parents in July 1939 (not a moment too soon), when she was almost 5 years old. Members of the Winn (originally Wiener) family assimilated with considerable speed and success, even as they remained closely tied to their fellow Czechs in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood; Jana, now Janet, continued to speak Czech with her parents. In 1951, she went off to the University of Michigan. The most surprisingly titled chapter in The Absent Woman is “The Humorist,” which covers Malcolm’s writing and editing for the school’s frolicsome undergraduate magazine, The Gargoyle. When Sneider mentions a later New Yorker colleague who said Malcolm “has not one drop of humor—not one,” she interprets the comment as “ironic,” but a reader of Malcolm’s work will find little to support such an interpretation. Cold wit abounds, but precious little warmth and laughter.

Before leaving Ann Arbor, Janet Winn married Donald Malcolm, her editorial predecessor at The Gargoyle. After graduation, the two moved to Washington, D.C., where both wrote for The New Republic, and a few years later to Manhattan, where each began a long association with The New Yorker. Now the mother of a young daughter, Malcolm wrote about shopping and interior design before becoming the magazine’s photography critic. Sneider observes that Malcolm’s “writing on photography could be read as a commentary on her own craft. She was fascinated by the medium’s quest for realism, by its murky relationship to truth-telling.” Donald died young, in 1975, by which time Janet had already begun an affair with Gardner Botsford, another New Yorker editor. She insisted to William Shawn, the magazine’s top editor, that Botsford continue to edit her stories even after she married him.

Sneider properly gives a great deal of attention to Malcolm’s style, characterizing it as “terrifyingly sharp,” “commanding,” and “cutting.” There is such a subzero severity to it that on the rare occasions when Malcolm uses an exclamation point, it’s as if someone else has plunked an emoji onto the page. One friend of hers noted that “the impersonality of how she writes is really the personality.” But Malcolm saw even the chilly projection of impersonality as just another self-interested construction. As she put it in The Silent Woman, “writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness. The pose of fair-mindedness, the charade of evenhandedness, the striking of an attitude of detachment can never be more than rhetorical ruses.”

Malcolm affected these postures herself, and on occasion she could be almost cruel in the pursuit of some small thematic end. In The Silent Woman, she describes a visit to the home of one source, an elderly man who decades earlier had spoken with Plath the night before she died. Her prolonged description of the house’s awful filth and hoardings is apparently justified by how it “stirred my imagination as a metaphor for the problem of writing”—namely, the need to rid one’s “vastly overfilled mind” of all but the essential points before starting. One has to ask whether this famous scourge of nonfiction’s distortions didn’t sometimes use metaphor only to crush reality beneath the gallop of her own hobbyhorses.

[From the April 2004 issue: Sylvia Plath, domesticated goddess]

If Malcolm, who died in 2021, had a “late style,” it was somewhat looser, less guarded. In her 70s, widowed and living by Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, she continued to make and exhibit collages in which text and photographic images sometimes combined in a process vaguely akin to the one she uses in Still Pictures (2023), a posthumously published memoir that allowed Malcolm to approach her own memories obliquely, through family photographs. Those physical objects seem as if they should offer factuality, or at least clues that unassisted memory cannot. But like letters and trial transcripts and so many tools of the trades that Malcolm scrutinized, the pictures sometimes let her down. Examining one snapshot of her very young self, taken several years before her first conscious memory, she writes, “No feeling of identification stirs as I look at her round face and thin arms and her incongruously assertive pose.”

The profile writing that she collected in Nobody’s Looking at You (2019)—which includes portrayals of the pianist Yuja Wang, the clothing designer Eileen Fisher, and the three sisters running Manhattan’s Argosy Book Store—tended toward the gentle and appreciative and even the self-mocking. (In the Fisher portrait, she hears herself “babbling about the ethical dilemmas of journalism.”) These articles don’t always go very deep; there’s no mystery to solve or fraud to expose. They come from a writer whose incandescent energy has subsided to a more ordinary professional level.

Sneider herself admits that Malcolm “threw a lot of spaghetti at the wall” when trying to justify her tampering with Jeffrey Masson’s interview quotes. Even admirers of Malcolm will concede this and likely wish that Sneider herself were more skeptical, less tolerant, than she appears to be of some of Malcolm’s peculiar behaviors and explanations. A year after the second trial, as Sneider summarizes it, “Malcolm’s two-year-old granddaughter Sophy pulled an inconspicuous red notebook off a bookshelf in her country home that, at long last, contained the handwritten notes she had been missing throughout the lawsuit. Three of the five quotes Masson took issue with were now more solidly on the record.” She seems to accept this story at face value, and perhaps it’s true. But if you had been involved in the fight of your life for what Sneider rightly describes as “twelve long, trying, tedious years,” wouldn’t you have at least run your hand along every bookshelf in your city apartment and country house to make sure that you hadn’t inadvertently put the crucial missing notes somewhere in your library? Without any expression of unease, Sneider informs us that Malcolm “opted not to part with the little red notebook” when she sent her papers to Yale; she instead supplied “photocopies of the relevant pages.”

Sneider correctly cites “control” as a core feature of Malcolm’s presentation, because at least the appearance of control (and its resultant authority) remains even when Malcolm is engaged in small fiddlings and concealments, or in her signature overstated generalizations. (Pronouncements that Sneider calls “bold” might better and more often be labeled “bald.”) Malcolm learned to discard one persona for another not only on the page but during her great legal crisis. Long after her courtroom troubles were over, she paid tribute to Sam Chwat, the acting-and-speech coach who helped her achieve a measure of vindication at the second Masson trial, in 1994, where she was cleared of libeling the psychoanalyst. She regretted how, at the first trial, well trained in the “accustomed New Yorker manner”—reticent and remote—she “came across as arrogant, truculent, and incompetent.” For the second trial, Chwat got her to address the jury, instead of Masson’s lawyer, when she was being questioned. He also orchestrated a makeover of her wardrobe, moving her from “skirts or trousers with jackets in black or subdued colors” into “pastel-colored dresses and suits, silk stockings and high heels, and an array of pretty scarves.”

The metamorphosis didn’t just succeed legally; it appealed to Malcolm in a visceral way. Chwat’s “gentle correction of my self-presentation at trial,” she wrote in a New York Review of Books essay, “took me to unexpected places of self-knowledge.” It convinced her that she could perform the tricks whose exposure continued to be her life’s work.

This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “The Journalist and the Manipulator.”

Voices From a Vanished World

2026-10-13T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Lesha Berezovskiy

I. 2,087 Questions

The Pale of Settlement is teeming with ghosts, and why shouldn’t it be? At the turn of the 20th century, some 5 million Jews lived in this region between the Baltic and Black Seas, and by 1945, almost all of them had been murdered. If they slouch now like scarecrows over the tilled black earth, or float between wooden shacks, or even peer over the shoulders of the babushkas selling neat piles of used clothes in front of the bus station in Rivne, this is to be expected. What I hadn’t quite anticipated was just how many questions they had left unanswered—2,087 to be exact. A long list of queries covering nearly every particular of how they lived their lives, from circumcision to shiva, sat on my lap as I stared out the window on a 10-hour car ride from Warsaw to Kyiv, through the heartland of what was once the Pale.

31. Is there a belief that if a pregnant woman steps on the spot where a mare has rolled around, she will carry her child for 12 months?

269. With what do people frighten a child so that he will go to sleep more quickly?

1,280. Is it a custom to drink red liquor if the bride turns out to be a virgin?

1,281. Is it a custom to eat hard cheese if she is a virgin? What does this signify?

1,714. Do people ask for forgiveness from a dead child?

I was on my way to visit the archives, once thought lost, of the early-20th-century Jewish writer Shloyme-Zanvl Rapoport, better known by his nom de plume, S. An‑sky. He was the author of this insanely granular questionnaire. I could have spent my car ride reading any number of other works by An‑sky, who, among his many eccentricities, had a touch of graphomania. His collected writing comprises 15 volumes. He left behind thousands of pages of diaries, essays, short stories, and plays, including his best-known work, The Dybbuk, a masterpiece of Yiddish theater. But I decided on the long list of questions because An‑sky saw them as the culmination of his life’s greatest endeavor: an ecstatic, obsessive attempt to wrap his arms around an entire people just as it was disappearing.

These 2,087 questions were the first part of his Jewish Ethnographic Program⁠—⁠and the only part that was published, in 1914, under the title Der mentsh, which simply means “The Person.” It was the beginning of a survey that he hoped would cover “every aspect” of Jewish life. “Death, life after death, demonology. Holidays, everyday life, abstract questions,” An‑sky wrote to a potential donor. “In short, we’ll have over 10,000 questions.” Looking out the window, I kept imagining a poor surveyor trudging through the mud of a shtetl with a clipboard, asking, Do you have a couple of months to spare?

Some of the questions are open-ended (897. How did people treat an old maid in the past, and how do they do so now?), but most are hilariously leading. Why would you ask, for example, whether children ever engaged in pranks like gluing their rabbi’s beard to the table when he fell asleep (484) if you didn’t already have intimate knowledge of such a beard gluing? In fact, An‑sky had done his research. The questionnaire was the fruit of an ambitious ethnographic expedition that he’d carried out from the summer of 1912 to the onset of World War I, two years later.

This sort of ethnography is now a mostly outdated social science, a relic of an imperial age in which certain peoples, such as the Inuit, were unthreatening and near-extinct enough to be placed behind glass in a museum. But An‑sky’s was a kind of self-ethnography, a work of salvage and redemption. He was born into the shtetl world in 1863 and grew up in the town of Vitebsk, in present-day Belarus (Marc Chagall’s hometown as well). Raised in poverty by a single mother who ran a tavern, An‑sky rebelled against tradition. In his late teens, he was expelled from a nearby shtetl for trying to persuade the young yeshiva boys he was tutoring to abandon their studies and become freethinkers. When he finally left the Pale, in his 20s, he intended never to look back. He began a peripatetic life as a revolutionary, working in salt mines in the Donbas region alongside Russian miners, living in Berlin and Paris and Bern, developing his writing and his political commitment to radical reform. This is what led him over time to ethnography, which was a way of elevating cultures that were being trampled by the Russian empire.

Only in his 40s did An‑sky realize that the insular but vibrant world of the Jews could be the subject of such ethnography as well. “There is no people that has talked about itself as much and knows itself as little as the Jews,” he wrote in his 1908 treatise “Jewish Folk Art.” He may also have been thinking about himself, and the “emptiness” he frequently described in his letters. In 1912, he secured funding for an expedition from a financier, Baron Vladimir Gintsburg, and set out with a photographer and a musicologist—a small team that would grow the following year—to explore the Pale. Slogging through mud “so deep you could die” (as the Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik put it), he gathered all he could, including songs—he brought along an Edison recording device that could capture sound on wax cylinders, making An‑sky the Alan Lomax of the shtetl.

The final tally of what the expedition managed to collect after two years—visiting more than 60 towns and villages—gives a sense of An‑sky’s intense ambition: some 1,800 folktales, 1,500 songs, 1,000 melodies, 100 historical documents, 500 manuscripts, 700 sacred objects, and 500 wax cylinders of music.

An‑sky didn’t intend for his collection to be a time capsule. He saw it as raw material that could help Jews build a secular national identity for themselves. But a time capsule is exactly what it became. Because in the years that immediately followed, the armies of Russia and Germany clashed in that mud, and each took its wrath out on the shtetl Jews, killing more than 100,000 of them; because Jews would leave the Pale after 1917 for cities such as Moscow, Berlin, and New York; because during World War II, the Nazis would bury what was left of this way of life in an archipelago of mass graves. What An‑sky ended up collecting became not the mortar for building a modern Jewish culture, but shards from a now-extinct civilization.

The archives of this expedition had essentially vanished for most of the 20th century, and were rediscovered only after the end of the Cold War—mostly in St. Petersburg institutions and Ukraine’s national library. Now the country is in the fourth year of what Ukrainians uniformly refer to as the “full-scale invasion” (“war” would imply mutual aggression). With Kyiv under bombardment, a good number of the An-sky materials are again endangered.

I was traveling there to see what remained. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, a century-old organization now based in New York City that works to preserve Yiddish culture, had come to an agreement with the Ukrainian government to digitize An‑sky’s papers. Jonathan Brent, a historian and the organization’s head, had invited me to tag along with him and his chief of staff on their trip to the country to make it official.

Lesha Berezovskiy for The Atlantic

The handwritten manuscript of a story by An-sky in the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine

There was a terrible feeling of continuity, heading into Ukraine right now for this purpose. An‑sky was desperate to save all that was strange and beautiful about his people; Ukrainians have been dying for four years by the tens of thousands for largely the same reason. They are fighting to preserve their autonomy, which includes the uniqueness of their national and cultural identity—a front line that An‑sky would recognize.

As he began his expedition at the end of June 1912, An‑sky wrote a letter to Gintsburg, his benefactor, in which he felt compelled to spill out his feelings: “I am very nervous, as if standing before the great unknown. How will this all turn out?” Would these villagers regard him as an interloper, or one of their own? “And yet, at the same time, I have a great feeling of joy in my soul, that the most treasured dream of my life is beginning to come to fruition.”

II. A Bird and a Cat

When I strode into the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, I assumed that the traces of An‑sky’s expedition were mine for the finding if I just asked nicely. I was wrong. What I discovered instead was the shabby attic fortress of the Judaica department and its head, Tetyana Batanova, who greeted me with pinched lips and a look of exasperation before I even opened my mouth.

I had originally thought the An‑sky archives would be housed in the main branch of the Vernadsky, which I’d ogled online before arriving in Kyiv. This giant modernist slab of a building, which opened in 1989, seems frozen in late-Communist style, with rows of card-catalog drawers and socialist realist murals depicting proletarians plowing fields. In fact, the An‑sky material, along with the rest of the Judaica collection, was located in a neoclassical relic, one of the original library buildings in the city’s center. This was a musty edifice whose interior was painted a faded sky-blue. A grandfather clock sat at the top of a grand stairway, chiming every hour, beneath portraits of the library’s elaborately bearded founders.

The Judaica department, tucked away on the top floor, was almost cozy by comparison. Houseplants crowded the windows. As I entered, along with the YIVO contingent, an air-raid siren went off. The Ukrainians in the room took out their phones, as though consulting a weather app. “There are 50 Shaheds, but not near us,” one of the librarians said, tucking her phone back into her pocket. Drones rather than missiles. The tour continued.

The reason for Batanova’s wariness of YIVO—and, by extension, me—seemed obvious. As the head of the Judaica department since 2019, she was protective of this material, which had barely survived the 20th century, and she did not seem all that excited to share it with outsiders who presumed they were its saviors. Brent saw his claim to An‑sky’s papers as part of his organization’s mission to preserve Jewish heritage. Batanova saw the same papers as integral to Ukrainian heritage. These were not easily reconcilable positions. But Batanova’s reaction was more than just defensiveness. I also picked up another, conflicting emotion as she led us through the dilapidated stacks: shame.

One look at the large water stains on the ceiling—the roof had been leaking for years, Batanova told us—made it clear that the situation for these thousands of precious books and manuscripts was not great. Century-old newspapers were stacked on top of one another, moldering on shelves that seemed about to topple over. Batanova pointed out where flimsy blue and red construction-paper folders that held the An‑sky material sat in the open. The building lacked any climate control. In the winter, the temperature inside dipped well below freezing, but that was better than the summer, Batanova said with a sigh. Humidity was the enemy of this yellowing paper. As we walked through, Brent muttered, “What a fucking shande.”

Wartime had not helped. In the fall of 2022, two cruise missiles slammed into the park across the street and a nearby intersection, killing several people and shaking the building. In early September, a missile struck within a few blocks of the archive’s many vulnerable windows. But limited resources had long been a problem. A researcher who worked there in the 1990s told me she’d been warned that she should bring her own toilet paper. I assumed she was describing a post-Soviet situation of economic hardship, but when I asked Batanova where the restroom was, she pulled a packet of Kleenex from her purse and handed it to me. As part of the deal with the Ukrainians, YIVO was going to pay the library—Brent wouldn’t tell me how much. In short, Batanova knew she needed help, but she didn’t want to need help.

Lesha Berezovskiy for The Atlantic

In the Judaica department of the Vernadsky, windows are covered with plastic sheeting to protect the material in case of missile attacks.

Yet it was a miracle that anything had survived at all. In an academic article, Batanova’s predecessor had described (with Slavic understatement) the “misadventures” of this archive. In 1929, when nearly 30 percent of Kyiv’s population was Jewish, an Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture was established with the goal of collecting every Yiddish periodical, book of poetry, newspaper, and manuscript it could get its hands on throughout the new Soviet empire. By 1934 it had more than 100 employees and housed a quarter of a million volumes—including the contents of five suitcases and boxes that An‑sky had left in his will to be preserved. Then, in 1936, as part of the Great Purge, Stalin shut the institute down and executed its founding director. Parts of the collection were carted away by the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB, or burned in the courtyard.

Not long afterward, the Nazis showed up. The occupiers looted what was left of the collection, which had been moved to the Vernadsky, stripping out valuable items to send to Berlin. After the war, the degradation continued. Stalin’s 1949 anti-cosmopolitan campaign targeted Jews and Jewish institutions, and led to the killing of most of the Soviet Union’s leading Yiddish cultural figures. Around this time, almost all of the Judaica collection was taken out of the library and hidden in the dank catacombs of the medieval Vydubetsk monastery, where it remained until 1968. From there, it was moved into a private basement, languishing until it was discovered in the 1990s and eventually transferred back to the Vernadsky.

Misadventures, indeed. After the YIVO folks left, I was alone with Batanova and her staff of four. Letting their guard down slightly, they began showing me An‑sky items. In one folder were some drafts of short stories in his handwriting, including “A goyisher kop,” a 1912 tale of a Jewish man who attempts to assimilate and pass as a Christian. An‑sky’s neat Cyrillic cursive slanted across long, thin strips of paper. The folders were full of such strips, pages that seem to have been sliced in half, apparently his preferred writing material. His signature was at the bottom of one page, with its idiosyncratic hyphen. (No one knows for certain where the hyphen came from; one of the many reasons An‑sky offered throughout his life was that it was originally a printer’s typo he’d found charming.)

Lesha Berezovskiy for The Atlantic

An-sky preferred to write drafts and notes on long, thin strips of paper.

What I really wanted to see were notes from the expedition, but every request seemed to meet Batanova’s resistance. When I mentioned this afterward to people familiar with the library, I was told that a Soviet attitude still prevailed in such institutions; the default was to withhold information. I started throwing more darts, asking for random folders. I saw some strips on which An‑sky had jotted down legends he had heard about the Baal Shem Tov, the mystical 18th-century founder of Hasidism. These were surely from the expedition. One folder revealed a long numbered list of signs that would indicate the Messiah had arrived—including that children would spontaneously clasp hands and start to dance.

I asked to see the wax cylinders and Batanova said no, they were too delicate. At this point I started to worry that coming all the way to Kyiv had been a mistake—if there were ghosts here, they were definitely in those cylinders. When I had spoken with Lyudmila Sholokhova, the musicologist who’d helped discover the abandoned recordings in the early 1990s, she described the first time she heard them as a moment of total awe. “I still remember the shock when actually hearing the voices and laughing and coughing. It was super exciting. People would introduce themselves, saying their name and how old they are, and then they would start to sing.”

But Batanova said that every time the original cylinders were played, they degraded. The best she could do was bring me one of the canisters in which they were packaged. I gazed into the darkness of the empty beer-can-size receptacle with EDISON written on the side in large letters, next to a photo of the inventor. This was what anticlimax looked like.

Lesha Berezovskiy for The Atlantic

Tetyana Batanova, the head of the Judaica department at the Vernadsky

What about some of the pinkassim that An‑sky had collected? These were local record books, some of which went back hundreds of years. The historians I’d talked with before I left for Ukraine told me they were probably the most precious items I could see at the library. Batanova brought out three from the town of Berdichev, part of the 109 in the collection. The pages were covered in calligraphic Hebrew script. One book was from a “Brotherly Love Society,” which a group of tailors established in the mid-19th century. It included bylaws and some fantastic illustrations, among them a drawing of a lion wrestling a snake.

The reading room was about to close for the day. As Batanova began gathering up the folders, a photograph slipped out of one of them. It was of An‑sky—a strange picture. He is standing in a street, squinting into the sun, wearing a black coat and vest. His salt-and-pepper goatee, thick swept-back hair, and dreamy look give him the appearance of a Jewish Don Quixote. But the strangest thing about the photo is that he is cradling a cat in his arms while a bird is sitting on his shoulder. Everyone, even these two enemies, looks copacetic and calm.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Judith Shulevitz on Ukraine’s “zombie history”]

III. A Severed Finger

Somehow this photo of An‑sky managed to make me forget my frustration, because it revealed something of his magic. He got people (and apparently animals) to relax in his presence. Those who traveled with him from shtetl to shtetl said he was often mistaken for a holy man. He was 48 when the expedition began but looked like he was in his 60s, which, as one of his biographers pointed out to me, was actually a benefit: Being preternaturally aged was a sign among rabbis of God’s grace.

An‑sky lived a vagabond existence from the time he was a teenager. “I have neither a wife, nor children, nor a house, nor even an apartment, nor belongings, nor even any settled habits,” he once admitted. On the expedition, he developed a method for quickly gaining trust. He would show up at synagogues and study houses to pray with the local men, disarming them. A crowd would usually gather around him after the service and then follow him to the local inn where the expedition members were staying. Abraham Rekhtman, who joined the group in its second year, recorded his memories nearly 50 years later, describing how, “over a glass of tea or, more often than not, a shot of liquor and a bagel for a snack, An‑sky would at last ask questions.” On his long strips of paper, he would jot down stories and sayings and local legends.

His most successful technique, however, was to bring out the phonograph. The shtetl folk may have heard of such machines, but most had not seen one before. An‑sky would demonstrate by recording a familiar song but coughing or laughing or making a mistake halfway through. He would then play the cylinder back and watch the mouths drop as they heard the recital, coughs and all. This was enough to break the ice, and men would then offer up wedding songs, lullabies, and wordless melodies called nigunim. I’ve now heard dozens of these digitized recordings, and they are eerie and sublime and a little sad. To take one example, Shloyme Kulish, a 24-year-old shopkeeper from Ludmir, was recorded singing on July 17, 1913. For 36 seconds, you can hear him lose himself in a song that sounds, as many of them do, halfway to a sob: Oh dey dey mama mey / Oh dey dey mama mey.

An‑sky was particularly interested in healers and exorcists, mostly older women, who seemed to hold a special power in every town and village. Rekhtman described them in his memoir as performing “magic with knives, socks and combs; they poured wax and poached eggs and knew hundreds of ways to cure a patient.” They also closely guarded the secrets of their spells, amulets, and remedies. An‑sky would often invent a tale of catastrophic bad luck, explaining that he had once been a rich man—and now look at him! He could pay to reverse the curse. The healer would usually pity him and oblige, for a fee. The incantation would then get written down and added to the collection.

Out of an intense desire to save all that he was seeing, An‑sky also started to gather artifacts, whether intricately embroidered kippahs or ritual objects such as the silver plaques used in synagogues to indicate east, the direction of prayer. The pinkassim I saw fell into this category. I also saw an album he’d made that included pages from illustrated Passover Haggadahs; some of these booklets dated back to the 16th century. No manner of ephemera was too small for him. Somewhat blasphemously, he even collected kvitlekh, the little notes left on the graves of famous Hasidic rabbis by people asking for intercession on their behalf. When young Jewish men were called up to serve in the czarist army, they sometimes tried to avoid the draft by cutting off a finger. But they usually saved these, because Jewish law demands that a body be buried intact. An‑sky met an old man in Proskurov who sold him his own finger, severed when he was a teenager. It was to be displayed in a planned ethnographic museum.

An-sky managed to persuade people to part with their songs and community records and even fingers not just because he was charming or because he could pay well—though both were true. I imagine that people felt safe with him because they sensed that he was recovering pieces of himself. There aren’t too many firsthand accounts of An‑sky doing his collecting, but I like what this little tidbit from Shmuel Shrayer, a member of the expedition, reveals: “Our phonograph stood in the corner and recorded the Hasidic melodies with all the ‘bimbumim.’ Sometimes An‑sky would get into the groove and he would sing along like one of them.”

IV. Sem Sorok

On my second morning in Ukraine, I woke up to a video of a buzzing kamikaze drone careening into the side of a building in the center of Lviv, exploding in a bloom of flames and debris. The attack had taken place the previous day and nearly destroyed the city’s historic archive. The sirens I had heard while touring the Judaica collection were part of Russia’s biggest air assault on Ukraine since the start of the invasion, involving nearly 1,000 drones and 34 missiles. Lviv’s archive, which caught fire, holds some of the oldest documents relating to Ukrainian history, including three 12th-century manuscripts composed on birch bark.

I happened to have an appointment with Anatolii Khromov, the head of the Central State Historical Archives, who showed up with his tie loosened and nervously sucking on a cigarette. The Lviv attack had left him in shock, he said. We met on the outskirts of Kyiv, where the country’s main archives are kept, and he pointed to an enormous construction site nearby, where an underground bunker was being built to safeguard the collection. “We need to build faster,” he said.

Later, in the center of the medieval Kyiv neighborhood of Podil, I noticed a small tower of wooden panels protecting a statue from shrapnel. Peeking through the cracks, I saw the bronze face of the Ukrainian philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda. For Ukrainians, the stakes in this conflict are nothing less than their survival as an intact culture. Russia is not just a military aggressor; its invasion is premised on the idea that Ukraine doesn’t even exist.

Oksana Semenik, a young art historian, has made it her mission to “decolonize” Ukrainian art, using social media and podcasts to revive the works of forgotten Ukrainian artists, but also to reclaim cultural figures such as the painter Kazimir Malevich, who has long been considered Russian despite his Ukrainian roots. In Ukrainian House, an enormous concrete structure once known as the Lenin Museum that felt like the inside of a missile silo, she showed me around an exhibit of early-20th-century modernist paintings by Ukrainian women. Semenik seemed to apologize for the sparseness of the paintings and drawings. “We are lucky to have what we have,” she said. Most of these painters’ work was suppressed or destroyed during the Soviet period.

Her desperation to salvage Ukrainian culture is not that far off from An‑sky’s efforts to rescue his own. “With every old man who dies, with every small-town fire, with every exile, a piece of our past is lost, and the most beautiful expressions of traditional life, with its customs, traditions, and beliefs, disappear,” An‑sky wrote in the foreword to his questionnaire. When I mentioned this parallel to her, Semenik stopped walking and looked at me intensely. “When I was young, it shocked me whenever I thought about the Jews who once lived here,” she said. “The idea that a whole people could just disappear. Could a people just disappear?”

Despite a history of murderous anti-Semitism on the part of Ukrainian nationalists, the country’s current vision of national identity is a pluralistic one that includes Jews—such as Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s wartime president. Semenik told me about a new show she was curating for Ukrainian House about Chernobyl, with the goal of changing the perception that the city is defined only by the nuclear disaster that occurred there. It was also once a major spiritual center of Hasidism.

Seeing Ukrainian history through a Jewish lens means clashing with some patriotic narratives. On his expedition, An‑sky collected traumatic stories about 17th-century massacres carried out by the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky, which killed tens of thousands of Jews. Many shtetls preserved similar legends about a local couple about to be married who were murdered together by Khmelnytsky’s men, and whose common grave became a talisman. But for Ukrainians, Khmelnytsky is no villain. He led an uprising in 1648 that established the Cossack Hetmanate, the first independent Ukrainian state. A region of the country is named after him, and an enormous statue of him on a rearing horse stands in the center of Kyiv. My hotel was on Khmelnytsky Street.

When I returned to the Judaica reading room the next day, Batanova had warmed a bit. She even let me see the wax cylinders after I put my hands together in supplication. I went down to another, freezing room in the Vernadsky; signed a number of ledger books so that I could be granted admittance; and then saw dozens of smooth black tubes, kept in the kind of wooden crates in which you might store paint cans.

Lesha Berezovskiy for The Atlantic

Wax recording cylinders from An-sky’s 1912–14 expedition.

Lesha Berezovskiy for The Atlantic

Smoke from a Russian missile attack near the Vernadsky in September.

I asked Batanova whether her family and friends thought it was strange that, as an ethnic Ukrainian, she had devoted her life to Jewish culture, becoming a teacher of Yiddish and a keeper of this Judaica collection. Yes, she said, some members of her family did think it was pretty odd. An encounter with Yiddish as a student had changed her life. After years of trying to master German and failing, she took a Yiddish class. It was “like my language,” she said. “I understand the humor and the pain of this language. It’s in its structure. It’s in everything.” She smiled. She also felt a kinship between Yiddish and Ukrainian, two languages that she learned had both been dismissed by Russian imperial officials as zhargon, or “jargon”: disposable dialects.

Jewishness was part of Ukrainianness, she insisted. It shows up everywhere. In the 2000s, she traveled all over Ukraine to explore Jewish cemeteries, reading the lost histories of those towns on the tombstones. She also found artifacts with “Hebrew words or sayings incorporated in local Ukrainian.” Batanova told me about a dance that is popular at Ukrainian weddings, Sem Sorok, which sounds like traditional Jewish klezmer music—even though the people dancing in the middle of a circle holding a handkerchief between them have no idea about its origins. Sem Sorok means “7:40”; this was the name given to a commuter train that once arrived daily at that time in Odesa, bringing Jewish merchants home from all over the country. On YouTube, I found a video of a Ukrainian teenager with a blue mohawk breakdancing to the tune.

V. A Lullaby

On my third and last day in Kyiv, the archive began to satisfy my demands that it speak to me. This was not a foregone conclusion, even now that I had Batanova’s help; so much had gotten lost and scattered over time, and An‑sky’s expedition itself had been cut short by war. Rekhtman, the member of the group who later wrote a memoir, remembered all he had to leave behind when he fled rampaging Ukrainian militias in 1915. “I did not manage to take along with me the great collection of ethnographic pictures (approximately 1,500), as well as the few hundred journals containing notes on the expedition. Everything remained in my hometown Proskurov,” he wrote, and the material “vanished” during the anti-Jewish violence that convulsed Ukraine after World War I.

I was operating somewhat blindly in this huge archive, and my requests to see more and more items in the hope that An-sky’s expedition might come into view were met with some distress. “How long are you in Kyiv?” a few of the librarians asked me, anxiously. Soon I came across what appeared to be a dirty little saying jotted down in a notebook: “When I become drunk from the liquor, a pretty girl is essential” (this sounds funnier in Yiddish, because the words for “drunk,” shiker, and “essential,” iker, rhyme). Then I began opening folders that contained hundreds of pages of what appeared to be lyrics, which one of the expedition’s musicologists had neatly transcribed in small notebooks. Immediately, I encountered yearning. One song was attributed to a 24-year-old man named Dovid Keller:

Ach, there in the woods stands a tree,
The tree is bent and stooped
And there and there stands a lover
With two eyes filled with tears

Ach, there and there stands a vineyard
The vineyard has not yet been reaped
I wasted the years of my youth
Like a gambler with playing-cards

A gambler who plays, plays to win
Plays his cards with the goal of a win
I have lost the years of my youth
I will never win them again.

There were a number of lamentations like this: songs of longing, of lost love. And a few truly tragic and disturbing ballads, such as one that seemed like it could have been sung by Johnny Cash, about a boy who follows a girl he loves “one nice night on a summer’s day” and demands to know if she will marry him. Her parents forbid the match:

As soon as he heard this,
He got very upset
He took out a revolver
And shot her on the spot.

When he shot her like that
She fell like a stone
He then turned the gun around
And shot himself alone.

I also liked the lullabies, because I could picture a mother or father rocking a baby to them. This one, a lullaby within a lullaby, was attributed to a man named Hersh Perlokh Kaliker:

In the Holy Temple in a corner
The widow Bas Tzion sits alone
She rocks her only son, Yidel
And sings him a beautiful lullaby:

La la la Yidel’e, when you become a rich Yidel’e
You should remember this little song:
Raisins and almonds, that will be your trade,
Sleep, my dear Yidel’e, sleep. Sleep, dear Yidel’e, sleep.

Here was the treasure I was after, distinct voices from that lost, muddy world. (The translator Rose Waldman helped me reveal more of their color.) They should have been strange and unfamiliar, but they weren’t really. The emotions were so everyday, so known. I’m sure every culture that ever was had versions of songs carrying these sentiments—the desire to matter, to find love requited, to get a baby to fall asleep.

An‑sky didn’t focus on the universal, though. What felt exhilarating to him about his discoveries in each of these shtetls (“The happiness I feel from this work is limitless,” he wrote) were the inventive ways Jews confronted the human condition—all those ditties and amulets and dirty jokes. I looked through a collection of the photographs taken on the expedition, the originals of which are in St. Petersburg: a man transporting matzah on his back in a large wicker basket. A circle of schoolchildren during recess. A rabbi, with his long white beard, lying down for a nap. Taken by the photographer Solomon Yudovin, these images are incredible. But they don’t move me in the same way as the songs, because the photos are passive; they tell us what people wore, how they worked, and how deep that mud actually was. But folk culture is active—the record of how grief could transform into the stitch on a white burial shroud, how joy could turn into a rhyme belted out by children to accompany the skipping of stones across a lake.

When An‑sky was in his 20s, working in the mines of the Donbas, he began writing down the songs that miners invented to pass the time. Even though these men had been uprooted from their villages—“some kind of nomadic tribe, torn away from one shore but not having reached the other”—they were meeting their new reality by generating new culture, an act of adaptation. When he finally returned to the shtetls on his expedition, this was what he understood ethnography to be: capturing the product of this living process. Never given to understatement, An‑sky said that he was gathering nothing less than “another Torah, an Oral Torah,” one that was “on par with the Book, with the great Written Torah.” What Jews normally called “oral Torah” referred to the history of rabbinic interpretation and reinterpretation of the biblical laws, recorded in works such as the Talmud. An‑sky used the term to refer to something else entirely, created by “the people, themselves, especially the common folk.” This oral Torah “reflects the same beauty and purity of the Jewish soul, the gentleness and nobility of the Jewish heart, the height and depth of Jewish thought.”

What I’d finally seen at the Vernadsky were remnants of this Torah. Batanova, who wore white gloves as she carefully flipped each page, certainly would understand this. YIVO would as well, because this justified the great effort of digitizing it all. It suddenly seemed right that the transcription of a song sung more than 100 years ago and preserved in a little blue notebook should be the subject of such competing attentions. When I made my way down the linoleum hallways of the library for the last time, I had a strange, An‑sky-inspired urge: to go back and kiss the thin pages I’d just seen. Every Jew knows, after all, that when you come across a Torah, this is what you do.

Lesha Berezovskiy for The Atlantic

Notes from S. An-Sky’s archive, stored in the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine

VI. The Tightrope Walker

An‑sky wrote The Dybbuk while on the road, in trains and horse-drawn carts, pouring into it the same curiosities and artifacts that went into his 2,087 questions. I chose to read the play on my return trip to Warsaw, which included an eight-hour wait to cross the Ukrainian-Polish border. The alternative title of The Dybbuk is Between Two Worlds, and that is how I felt while idling in line with dozens of other cars. The eerie dialogue of the play only heightened the sense of being in-between. As the young bride, Leah, is about to be possessed by a dybbuk, a demon, she says to her old nurse, “They are here with us. A person is born to live a long life. But if he dies before his time, what happens to his unlived life, his joys and his sorrows, the ideas he did not have time to develop, the deeds he had no chance to do? What happens to the children who were to have been born to him? What are they? Where?”

The Dybbuk depicts the shtetl as a place saturated in magic, where the dead mingle with the living. A poor young student named Khonon is disturbed that Leah, the woman he loves and believes he is cosmically fated to marry, has been betrothed to another man. Khonon pursues all kinds of magic to stop the wedding. But, as he says, “they didn’t help—not the fasts, not the ablutions, not the mortifications of the flesh, not the kabbalistic spells!” He dies from the intensity of these efforts and returns as a spirit to possess Leah’s body. The last two acts of the play are an extended exorcism, a ritual that An‑sky must have observed.

The stories and customs gathered from the expedition are present in nearly every line of the play—one critic dismissed it as simply “an ethnographic museum.” I even found in it a story I’d seen on one of those thin strips in An‑sky’s own hand, one of the many legends he collected about the Baal Shem Tov. In it, the Hasidic sage joins a crowd to watch an acrobat do a tightrope act. His students wonder why the rabbi is paying attention to such silly entertainment, and he answers, “I came here to observe how a person crosses a deep abyss. And as I watched I thought: If a person were to put as much effort into developing his soul as he does into training his body, how many and what deep abysses would his soul be able to traverse on the slender thread of life.”

The Dybbuk is much more than a patchwork of archives, a way of preserving the oral Torah. It also expresses the horror of experiencing a world in collapse. When I watched the 1937 film version produced in Poland, I jumped at the moment the possessed Leah, about to be wed, shrieks in a voice that is not her own, “You are not my bridegroom!” This cry of dislocation could be An‑sky’s primal scream, addressed to modernity itself—to the waves of murder to come. “We are too late,” Reb Azriel, the exorcising rabbi, says as he rushes into the synagogue in the last moments of the play, to find Leah dead.

When the First World War broke out, in the summer of 1914, An‑sky got himself commissioned by a relief organization to embark on a new kind of expedition, working frantically to save Jews trapped in the crossfire between German and Russian forces. What he witnessed, and then recorded in a four-volume diary published with the title The Destruction of Galicia, was apocalyptic. Hundreds of thousands of hungry refugees, bodies strewn in the streets of abandoned shtetls, survivors of rape, synagogues burned to the ground—and in places where he had been just a year before, recording songs on his phonograph. In a photo from this time, he is dressed in a uniform with a fur hat on his head and a Red Cross armband over his coat. He looks ancient, and exhausted. An-sky also never stopped trying to save Jewish culture. In Lutsk, which I passed on my drive out of Ukraine, he encountered the frazzled remnants of the community, which had become a “ghost town,” he writes, and they handed him a trunk filled with objects from the synagogue, including a silver Torah crown from the 18th century and a gold-embroidered curtain for the ark. An‑sky managed to get them to St. Petersburg.

In the upheavals of 1917, he would lose track of these items from Lutsk and almost everything else he collected from his travels. He had to leave behind even his draft of The Dybbuk. The first phase of the Russian Revolution actually found An‑sky elected to the Russian Constituent Assembly as a Socialist Revolutionary, representing his hometown of Vitebsk. But when the Bolsheviks took power in the fall, he had to flee, first to Vilnius and then to Warsaw. He was already battling heart disease and diabetes, and in November 1920, just after a meeting of a new ethnographic society he was trying to form in the Polish city, he died of a heart attack. He was 57. He did not live to see the worst of it.

I can’t think of a better testament to An‑sky than his play, and I am struck by the self-awareness in that title, Between Two Worlds. He had himself traveled as deftly as a tightrope walker between two worlds—Jewish and secular, traditional and modern—but he also witnessed the passing of one world into another, and it made him determined to hold on to what he came to understand mattered most, and to avoid the abyss. I spent most of my short time in Kyiv frantically trying to put some flesh on those ghosts. As I waited for the border to open, it occurred to me that maybe this manic urgency was what brought me closest to An‑sky.

Will the Ukrainians fare better? I hope so. Struggling to keep fighting, dodging missiles, surviving, gets you only partway there. An‑sky recognized this. Writing in 1916, looking back on his travels through lands now decimated, he still held on to the truth of his expedition: “A nation lives not in suffering, but in the ecstasy of the realization of its ‘I,’ in joyful creation, in pride in its culture, in the poetry of its daily life. Only in that.”

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

Choose Your Overlord

2026-10-13T06:00:00-04:00

The Adriatic has been crossed by Odysseus and Caesar, by Venetian fleets and Napoleon’s navy, by countless men bent on dominating the world. It has seen its share of courage and folly. But one day in June 2025, off the island of Cres, it witnessed something genuinely new: a man worth $240 billion standing waist-deep in bubbles on the deck of a $500 million yacht, wearing a white bucket hat.

The man is Jeff Bezos, and the woman photographed in the string bikini next to him—hugging him, rubbing him with bubbles—is his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez. Bezos is shirtless, and it must be said: He is ripped. His hairless torso is so buff, his expression so amused, that he looks more like a louche cartoon character—a Club Med Ninja Turtle—than a 61-year-old corporate executive. In the foreground, an anonymous crew member, his face hidden from view and his thoughts forever unknown, mans a cannon blasting bubbles into the Croatian sky.

The foam party was a birthday celebration for Sánchez’s 19-year-old son, a prelude to the Bezos-Sánchez wedding five days later in Venice—with 200 VIP guests, hundreds of protesters, and an estimated cost of $50 million. The wedding consumed the internet for a week and was treated as a self-contained cultural event, a thing worth interrogating or gawking at on its own terms.

In fact it was the culmination of one of the weirder decades that any American billionaire has ever had. The whole republic, to be fair, has been pretty nuts, and Bezos has been both caught up in the insanity and an agent of its acceleration.

In 2013, Bezos, who founded Amazon and still owns roughly 8 percent of the company, purchased The Washington Post for $250 million. Two years later, Donald Trump accused him of using the paper as a tax shelter, to which Bezos jokingly responded that Trump should be launched into space. Trump then said at a rally, “If I become president, oh, do they have problems.” Trump became president, and the Pentagon steered a massive cloud-computing contract away from Amazon Web Services, while Trump repeatedly pressured the U.S. Postal Service to raise Amazon’s shipping rates.

In 2019, Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, announced their decision to divorce. A month later, Bezos accused the National Enquirer’s parent company of attempted extortion after he said it threatened to release intimate photos, including what its chief content officer described in an email as a “below the belt selfie—otherwise colloquially known as a ‘d*ck pick.’ ” (The company said it had “acted lawfully” but would conduct its own investigation.) This is how much of the world learned about Lauren Sánchez, which was awkward because her brother Michael, a court later determined, had spoken with the tabloid about his sister’s relationship and sold—for $200,000—information, text messages, and a number of Bezos’s “ ‘racy,’ ‘explicit’ photos.” Bezos suggested, without evidence, that the plot had been instigated by the Trump administration and the Saudi government in retaliation for the Post’s reporting on the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudis.

That’s already a lot, even by billionaire standards.

Bezos then stepped down as CEO of Amazon in 2021; went to space aboard a rocket built by Blue Origin, the aerospace company he’d quietly founded two decades earlier; and began devoting the majority of his time to the company. Over roughly the same period, he commissioned the world’s largest sailing yacht and worked on building a 10,000-year clock inside a mountain. By the time of his second wedding, Bezos had transformed physically and politically—killing a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris for president, attending Donald Trump’s second inauguration in a seat of honor, reorienting the paper’s Opinion section around “personal liberties and free markets,” cheerleading Amazon’s reported $40 million deal for a documentary and future docuseries about Melania Trump.

People change. And if Bezos were just another middle-aged guy using his money to become unrecognizable to his former self—God bless. Enjoy the Met Gala.

But we live in a society where trivializing the actions of our wealthiest citizens is both unbeatable fun and a form of recklessness. For most of the past decade, the changes in Bezos that attracted attention were the meme-able ones: his body, his partner, his yacht. This made the transformation that mattered harder to see. We’ve been gawking at Bezos becoming a different kind of billionaire while missing his attempt to become a different kind of historical figure. The man who once rewired how the planet buys and sells everything has been chasing an even grander project—creating the infrastructure for an off-world economy upon which human civilization might someday depend.

If this sounds implausible and potentially menacing, you will not be surprised to learn that the person standing between Bezos and his ambition is the implausible and menacing Elon Musk, who has spent the past two decades building a commanding lead in space while pursuing a different vision of where humanity should go once it gets there.

Together, in fierce competition, these two billionaires are in the early stages of a race to vertically integrate the galaxy—a process that involves rockets, moon landings, enormous satellite constellations, and space-based data centers running AI models fueled by computing power that no terrestrial supplier can match. Both say they hope to preserve human life from the specter of climate change and expand mankind’s understanding of the universe. Both would also like to dominate a market that, unlike every other market they’ve previously conquered, has no ceiling and few established rules.

Whether any of this is wise is a question the rest of us are not really being asked. For most of human history, the power to decide where a civilization went next belonged to governments, monarchs, or despots. It’s a measure of how much has changed that a retail executive from Seattle and a South African–born engineer are well positioned to exercise that power. Nobody voted for either of them. And they may be the only ones who can check the other’s power. Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security adviser, described this to me as “a very weird situation.” You’ve got two men with unfathomable power and an unshakable faith that they’re destined to shape the world. But neither of them is “actually Lex Luthor,” Sullivan said.

“ … Right?”

Perhaps not. But any answer requires a deeper understanding of the two men involved. Musk, typically, has overshared. Bezos has been more secretive. To reveal his character and intent, you first have to get past the foam.

In the 1990s, when reporters began tracing the origin story of the first king of e-commerce, they made their way to Miami, where Bezos grew up, and to Ursula Werner, his high-school girlfriend. They had listened to ABBA together and he’d made her adoring flyers for her birthday, and she told those reporters something about him that, for years, seemed like just another cute bit of color: “The reason he’s earning so much money,” Werner said, “is to get to outer space.”

Chris Carroll / Getty

Jeff Bezos in 1999

In his high-school-valedictorian speech, Bezos quoted Star Trek—“Space, the final frontier”—and asked his audience to imagine vast orbital colonies where humanity could relocate Earth’s most polluting industries, an idea cooked up by the Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill in the 1970s. “The earth is finite,” Bezos explained to a local reporter. “And if the world economy and population is to keep expanding, space is the only way to go.”

All of this nerd enthusiasm was out in the open until 2000, when Bezos created Blue Origin Enterprises. He based the company a short commute from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters and kept its existence a secret for three years, until Newsweek discovered it. This was not the only strange thing about Blue Origin.

For a while, the company’s sole employee was the science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson, best known for Snow Crash, a 1992 novel set in a near-future America where the government has collapsed and corporations run everything. In a blog post, Stephenson wrote that his title at Blue Origin was “Member, Technical Staff,” and that he “performed operations as prosaic as punching down Ethernet cable, operating a plate grinder, and passivating rocket parts.”

But that was just part of the job. “The bulk of my efforts,” Stephenson wrote, “were devoted to investigating possible alternatives to conventional rockets.”

Bezos wanted to know if almost a century of rocket science had gotten the basic question wrong—whether there was a smarter way to get to space than attaching a tube to massive amounts of fuel and setting it all on fire. Stephenson and the handful of other employees who were eventually hired ran software simulations that would either validate the conventional approach or, Bezos hoped, find its replacement. This is a pretty wild way to spend your money.

Three years of experiments proved that Wernher von Braun and Robert Goddard hadn’t missed anything. Only then did Bezos hire the former NASA engineer Rob Meyerson and buy 165,000 acres of Texas scrub brush where rocket prototypes might someday be launched without scrutiny.

Eventually Meyerson would be promoted to president—but of what, exactly? In the early years, Blue Origin had no customers or finished product, and little of what ordinarily makes a company a business. Bezos left the CEO job vacant and imposed no conventional timetable. It did have a tortoise mascot and a motto—“Gradatim ferociter” (“Step by step, ferociously”)—that reinforced its commitment to getting to space slowly, secretly, and stubbornly. Employees were focused on whiteboarding a tourism rocket, but Bezos told Meyerson not to worry about sales or pitching government agencies; he didn’t want to be held hostage by customers. It was “a science experiment for the first 15 years,” Tom Jones, Blue Origin’s vice president of human resources from 2016 to 2019, told me.

Contrast this with the hyper-logical way that Bezos had conceived Amazon. In an early interview, Bezos explained that the internet was growing at 2,300 percent a year; to capitalize on that growth, he needed a product category with more variety than any physical store could stock. There were more than 3 million active book titles worldwide. Therefore: books.

If Amazon was the company that Mr. Spock would create, Blue Origin was where Bezos got to lead with his heart and be Captain Kirk. He’d take days off from Amazon for field trips, packing Blue Origin employees onto his private plane and dropping in on companies with cultures or engineering accomplishments that he admired. Gradually, Bezos cleared all of his Wednesday afternoons and many of his Saturdays to work at the Blue Origin office. When Bezos wanted to learn about heat-transfer codes—software that models how heat moves through a rocket engine; the difference between an engine that survives its own combustion and one that doesn’t—Meyerson hired an employee to tutor him.

I asked Meyerson if managing Bezos’s enthusiasm ever got in the way of accelerating Blue Origin’s progress. “My job was to do both,” he said. “The time that he put into Blue was a gift to us, because the more he understood, the more he was willing to support what was needed for the long run.”

And yet, when it came to money, the accountant overruled the dreamer. Bezos was rich—Forbes’s 100th-wealthiest American—but not send-my-money-to-the-moon rich. He didn’t want “to spend the kind of money he’s spending today,” Meyerson said. Blue Origin would work through simulations, models, and small prototypes—staying within its means until Bezos was ready to scale up.

This would have been fine if Blue Origin were operating in a vacuum. But two years after Bezos founded his dream company, someone else started a company with a dream just as large. And he was not interested in moving slowly.

Impatience is part of Elon Musk’s mystique. So is an eagerness to break and remake things: the economics of car buying (Tesla), the operations of the federal government (DOGE), the last remaining norms of social media (X—now a platform for disturbing racial theories).

But Musk didn’t set out to revolutionize aerospace and become the world’s most successful rocket builder. Originally he just wanted to be a rocket buyer.

Dan Tuffs / Getty

Elon Musk in 2008 with an early model of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, designed to carry a crew or cargo into space atop a rocket

In 2001, Musk announced that he would send a robotic greenhouse into space, scoop up some Martian soil, and use it to grow a plant. This scientific publicity stunt may not go down as Musk’s best idea, but his attempt to buy refurbished intercontinental ballistic missiles for the Martian-soil gambit led him to Moscow, where, according to Ashlee Vance’s biography, Elon Musk, a Russian engineer spat on him (literally) and his PayPal millions. Flying back from a second unsuccessful trip, Musk opened a spreadsheet and realized that he could build a rocket for less than the $8 million the Russians wanted to charge him to buy one—and for less than anyone had ever built a rocket before. He founded SpaceX a month later.

It’s easy in hindsight, and with this year’s $1.8 trillion SpaceX IPO, to say that Musk had a better plan than Bezos to get to space. What’s inarguable is that Musk had a faster plan. He staffed up by cold-calling college aerospace students and handing them ludicrous deadlines—the first launch was scheduled for 15 months after the company was created. Speed gave SpaceX swagger, and that swagger gave its young employees faith. But the company’s most important virtue was thrift. Not as a means of preserving Musk’s wealth, but because lowering costs was the entire point of the business.

For decades, getting a person or a satellite into orbit was so expensive that only governments and the largest defense contractors could afford it. Musk believed that this had little to do with physics; unlike Bezos, he spent no time wondering whether there might be a fundamentally different way to get to space. Instead, he looked at launch costs the way a deregulator might have looked at long-distance telephone rates in the 1970s: not as a law of nature, but as the product of the people who had gotten there first and decided what to charge.

If SpaceX could create a reusable rocket capable of driving launch costs down far enough, it wouldn’t just swallow all the existing demand—it would transform space from a cartel into a free market. Satellite builders, scientists, start-ups, and, eventually, anyone with a payload and a business case could participate. Access to space would become as abundant as telephony. And then all sorts of innovation might happen.

Bezos had a similar vision, and both men believed that reusable rockets were the key to making space affordable. But while Blue Origin was moving step by step, SpaceX skipped every step it could. Employees were celebrated for outrageous hacks, such as figuring out that off-the-shelf car-wash valves worked just fine for rockets if you swapped their seals. All of that ingenuity led to Musk’s promise that SpaceX’s first rocket, Falcon 1, would carry a 1,400-pound payload into orbit for $6.9 million—75 percent less than any competitor.

He nearly went bankrupt doing it. The first three Falcon launches failed. By 2008, SpaceX and Tesla were burning cash. Musk was barely solvent enough to make one more launch attempt. On September 28, Falcon 1 reached orbit, making SpaceX the first privately funded company to launch a liquid-fueled rocket into space. The timing was exquisite. Three months later, as the global financial system teetered and Musk was days away from missing payroll, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to resupply the International Space Station. The company had gone from near death to indispensable in a single quarter.

A former senior NASA official who visited both companies in their early years described Blue Origin to me as an academic lab and SpaceX as a pirate ship. “SpaceX was scrappy,” the official said. “I went to the Blue factories in Kent, Washington, and they were these beautiful, massive buildings with the world’s best 3‑D printers. And I was like, Where are the people? Then you go to SpaceX in Hawthorne, and there’s these young people running around; everybody’s greasy.”

The differences were hardly lost on the people watching from Blue Origin. SpaceX had taken Amazon’s “get big fast” playbook and applied it to rockets⁠—staffing up, sprinting to deadlines, and treating its failures as content rather than embarrassment. The launch explosions and misfires it shared on social media didn’t make SpaceX look reckless; they made it look humble. At Blue Origin, the contrast was unmistakable: SpaceX seemed to be having more fun.

SpaceX soon proved that it could reuse rocket boosters—the bottom part where the flames shoot out. Its first reusable rocket, Falcon 9, launched and landed in 2015. By May 2016, SpaceX was on its way to becoming the UPS of low Earth orbit. Satellite customers could buy launches at published prices, and Falcon 9 was beginning to fly on something approaching a regular schedule. NASA was already relying on SpaceX to shuttle cargo to the International Space Station; the Air Force had certified Falcon 9 for national-security missions and had just awarded the company its first military-launch contract.

In West Texas, Blue Origin was completing the first takeoffs and landings of its New Shepard tourism rocket. Those missions were uncrewed and suborbital—which is to say, the rocket went to space the way a ball tossed upward in a backyard goes above the roofline: fleetingly. On Twitter, Musk pointed out how far ahead SpaceX was, beginning a series of exchanges in which two of the world’s richest men engaged in public rocket-measuring contests. Musk won most of these, which makes sense, because Musk was winning.

People who have worked closely with Bezos bring up two defining characteristics. The first is a comfort, bordering on delight, at being misunderstood. “I think he enjoys it,” a former Amazon senior executive told me. “You have no idea how stubborn he can be in defense of an idea only he believes. And of course a lot of times he’s right.” The second is that Bezos does not like multitasking. He’s told audiences that as a little kid in Montessori school, he was so resistant to leaving things undone that he had to be picked up in his chair and moved to the next activity. Bezos prefers to direct his focus, as intensely as possible, on one problem at a time. As long as he remained the CEO of Amazon, that problem was Amazon. For the first 15 years of Blue Origin’s existence, the company had to accommodate that reality.

Whether it was Musk’s taunts or the unignorable fact that SpaceX was racing ahead, Bezos finally changed course in 2016. During one of his regular Saturday meetings at Blue Origin, he asked a question that nobody in the room wanted to answer honestly: Why hadn’t Blue Origin directly bid on an Air Force contract for rocket-engine development that had just gone to SpaceX? The answer: Because you’ve always told us not to.

Bezos delivered a new mandate to Meyerson: “From now on, we go after everything that SpaceX bids on.”

When people in aerospace talk about SpaceX’s advantages, they nod to Musk’s maniacal expectations, his engineering instincts, and the particular quality of his attention. But Musk’s attention has at times been distributed across Tesla, X, the neurotechnology company Neuralink, the tunnel start-up the Boring Company, the federal government, and 14 children by four women.

Musk’s life is a browser with too many tabs. X is the tab that’s always open. It’s where he challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match, offered to give Taylor Swift a child and guard her cats “with my life,” and feuded with (partial list) Kanye West, the British government, the Australian government, the Brazilian supreme court, and a cave diver in Thailand he called a “pedo guy”—leading to a defamation lawsuit that Musk won after his legal team argued that the phrase was a generic insult. It’s also where he regularly posts memes and has promoted anti-Semitic content that makes him, justifiably, a pariah among people who believe society is plenty coarse enough without him. (SpaceX did not respond to interview requests for this story.)

The point is, Musk is no more focused than Bezos. The difference is that he’s never needed to be. This is because, in 2002, he had a three-minute conversation with Gwynne Shotwell. Shotwell is 62, and remarkable in several ways—a woman in a male-dominated field, a proud former high-school cheerleader with degrees in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics. But her unique gift is the ability to read her boss’s mind while ignoring his id. “I like his in-person self better than his Twitter self,” Shotwell said in a 2022 talk at Stanford.

Shotwell is self-aware and funny. Not aerospace funny—actually funny. She grew up in the “boonies” north of Chicago and was a sophomore in high school when her mother dropped her off at a Society of Women Engineers event. She decided to become a mechanical engineer that day in part because one of the presenters “had the best suit on, and she had great shoes, and her bag matched her shoes,” Shotwell told a podcast interviewer with delight.

Shotwell was in the middle of a career in traditional aerospace when she went to lunch with a former co-worker who had been poached by SpaceX. She was introduced to Musk on a tour of the office, and received a job offer to be vice president of business development that afternoon. For weeks she hesitated before pulling over on the Los Angeles freeway, calling Musk, and telling him that she was an “effing idiot” for not accepting sooner. He laughed and welcomed her to the team.

Since then, Shotwell and Musk have built one of the most drama-free partnerships in 21st-century business. He oversees engineering and technology while she takes care of everything else—sales, operations, manufacturing, workforce vibes. While Musk was supervising the 2008 do-or-die Falcon-rocket launch, Shotwell was at an industry conference in Glasgow, watching the livestream at 2 a.m. in her hotel room while writing the company’s bid to resupply the International Space Station. When the rocket reached orbit, she ran down the hallway to rouse her colleagues and broke into the hotel bar to drink warm champagne.

In 2015, having proved that SpaceX could reliably deliver payloads to space, Musk announced plans for a constellation of thousands of satellites, now known as Starlink. The pitch had a noble dimension—SpaceX would bring high-speed internet to parts of the world that fiber-optic cables had left behind. But this disguised its real purpose. SpaceX’s first act—flying rockets for hire—was not profitable enough. Getting in on boring old telecommunications would give the company a way to monetize its own launch capability. Starlink was created to be the thing that would pay for everything else.

The following year, Musk revealed the full scope of his plan: SpaceX would build a fully reusable two-stage rocket and spacecraft standing just over 400 feet tall and powered by 42 engines, with a capsule—the top part—capable of carrying 100 people to Mars (or 60 Starlink satellites into orbit). “The objective is to become a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanet species,” Musk said at the time. “The main reason I’m personally accumulating assets is to fund this.”

Previous spacecraft carried only what they needed for a mission. This would be like launching a Costco.

Scale is the great paradox of rocket science. A rocket twice as large as its predecessor isn’t just twice as hard to build; as the rocket grows, so do the forces trying to tear it apart. At the size Musk envisioned, the fully fueled vehicle would weigh more than 10 million pounds, more than one and a half times the weight of the Saturn V, which carried astronauts to the moon. Lifting it would require engines more powerful than anything SpaceX had built before, with roughly three times the pressure of the engines powering its Falcon rockets—conditions so extreme that SpaceX would need to invent new manufacturing techniques simply to build the combustion chamber. And Musk intended to reuse everything: Both the giant booster and the spacecraft above it would return to Earth and fly again.

The design would change repeatedly—first landing legs, then enormous mechanical arms—but the economic premise remained the same. If full and rapid reuse worked, Musk believed that the cost of reaching orbit could eventually fall below $100 a kilogram, which would make the things that had always died on a spreadsheet—lunar bases, enormous satellite constellations, perhaps even human flights to Mars—possible. The architecture was elegant in its circularity. Starship, as the giant rocket and spaceship would come to be known, would make Starlink, the satellite array, far cheaper to deploy. Starlink would then generate revenue to pay for a fleet of Starships. And Starships, eventually, would get humans to Mars. Engineering, commerce, and Musk’s interplanetary ambition, all stacked inside the same rocket.

People at Blue Origin first noticed the woman around 2018. She was seen at the Cedarbrook Lodge near the Seattle airport, a few minutes before Bezos arrived for drinks with executives. In West Texas, she began showing up as a contractor on the helicopter video team that documented New Shepard launches.

Lauren Sánchez Bezos is impossible not to notice because her lifelong goal, exuberantly pursued, is to be noticed. Sánchez Bezos grew up in New Mexico, learned she was dyslexic in community college, hustled her way into the University of Southern California, and for several years proceeded through the carnival of gigs (local news, Extra, So You Think You Can Dance) available to attractive and relentless people who want to be on television. She had a child with the former NFL tight end Tony Gonzalez before marrying Patrick Whitesell, the Hollywood agent and power broker, with whom she had two more children. In 2016, she got her helicopter pilot’s license and started an aerial-production company.

The first public encounter between Bezos and Lauren Sánchez was at a December 2016 Amazon Studios party for the grim kids-die-in-a-fire movie Manchester by the Sea. It must have been like meeting Jayne Mansfield at a shiva. Both were married at the time, and what happened next seems clear enough, even without the benefit of any photos from the National Enquirer. “Wonderful madness” is how Barry Diller, the media mogul and Bezos’s close friend, describes the relationship.

Understanding the force and fury of the response to the couple requires some unpacking, and it starts with the woman Bezos left. MacKenzie Scott studied creative writing at Princeton under Toni Morrison, did Amazon’s early bookkeeping out of Bezos’s garage, and has spent the years since their 2019 divorce giving away her share of the proceeds—more than $26 billion to more than 2,000 organizations—while largely erasing any evidence of her generosity. In August, she released a complicated third novel on Substack.

“I have great respect for and fondness for MacKenzie,” Diller told me. “You can see how she’s conducting her charitable work, which is remarkable—but it’s all quiet and private. And that’s MacKenzie.”

J. Countess / Getty

Bezos with his first wife, MacKenzie Scott, in 2005

Cindy Ord / MG24 / Getty

Bezos with Lauren Sánchez at the Met Gala in 2024

Lauren Sánchez Bezos enjoys being photographed at parties and events, and her picture is prominent on the website for the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10 billion investment in protecting “the best planet in this solar system,” where she’s vice chair. She’s written three children’s books—The Fly Who Flew to Space, The Fly Who Flew Under the Sea, and The Fly Who Flew to the North Pole—and if a brick wall were the only thing standing between her and the best-seller list, you wouldn’t want to be the wall.

“People assume she’s going to be Cruella, and she’s not,” a woman who’s been friends with Sánchez Bezos for a decade told me. “She’s smart and kind, and she has real accomplishments. But it’s confusing because snobby people look at her big, vulgar boobs, and she’s like, Yeah! Look at ’em! She likes being sexy. She just wants everyone to have a good time, and she doesn’t mind being the good time.”

Bezos and Sánchez Bezos make each other happy. This is not nothing, but the wonderful madness has had its costs. There was an alleged blackmail attempt to manage, a 25-year marriage to unwind, and a company that still depended on Bezos’s attention. The scandal “had a huge impact at Blue Origin,” Alexandra Abrams, the former head of employee communications, told me. (Abrams, who was fired in 2019, later went public with complaints about flight safety and criticized leadership, Bezos included, for what she described as a “toxic” culture; in response, the company said it had no tolerance for discrimination or harassment and stood by its safety record.) Abrams said that the news of Bezos’s relationship with Sánchez “started to break the goodwill of a lot of the senior employees at the company. They were shocked that Jeff would comport himself in that way.”

Only Bezos can say how much of his transformation has been driven or enabled by his new wife, and how much was always there, waiting for permission. And Bezos, who declined multiple requests for an interview, isn’t talking.

A few weeks after the Manchester by the Sea party, Trump’s NASA transition team invited Blue Origin to a meeting. With Bezos’s decree to start competing, Bretton Alexander, the director of business development and strategy, scrambled to prepare.

Mike Pence was passionate about space. Trump understood the MAGA value of rockets and astronauts. So, the transition team asked: What big idea could Blue Origin offer that would be ready by the electorally convenient date of 2020?

“I didn’t see the question coming,” Alexander told me. But he blurted out, “We’ve landed New Shepard in the desert five times in the last year. We can land something on the moon, because we have the engines and we have the technology.”

The last person to walk on the moon was the Apollo 17 commander, Gene Cernan, who let a crewmate climb the ladder before him so that he could utter the following: “We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.” That was in 1972.

There’s no single explanation for why America hasn’t returned, but there are several timely reasons to go back. The moon is the most convenient place in the cosmos: three days away, without the communication lags that make deep-space operations so complicated. It has water-ice deposits, which theoretically could sustain human life and be split into hydrogen and oxygen, also known as rocket fuel. And because the moon’s gravity is one-sixth of Earth’s, less fuel is required to launch from its surface and explore the rest of the solar system. For 4.5 billion years, celestial objects have used the moon as target practice, enriching the lunar soil with most every rare mineral the solar system has produced. Half its face is shielded from Earth’s electromagnetic noise, which makes it valuable for radio telescopes and, as national-security officials will warn in varying degrees of specificity, potentially useful to America’s adversaries. The Chinese have committed to landing astronauts on the moon by 2030.

For all of these reasons, Alexander’s pitch appealed to the transition team. That it nudged federal space policy toward the moon—elevating Bezos’s high-school dreams while usurping Musk, who hoped the Trump administration would back a Mars mission—was, for Blue Origin, the chef’s kiss. Alexander called Rob Meyerson right away. “I said, ‘Oh shit, I just created a program.’ ”

Greg Autry, who now leads international space policy at the State Department, was on the transition team. “We knew they didn’t really have this thing in their garage,” Autry told me. The company had announced New Glenn, its first orbital rocket, earlier that year, but the new rocket had not even carried a commercial payload, let alone human beings. But Blue Origin had “what appeared to be a simple and relatively quick way to get there, with a reusable system.” NASA, perhaps, was also beginning to realize that having a single dominant space-launch provider might in itself be a risk.

Animosity continued between Trump and Bezos, who remained publicly critical of the president’s immigration policies. The Pentagon awarded a cloud-computing contract worth up to $10 billion to Microsoft when Amazon Web Services was the undisputed market leader. Amazon sued—and asked for Trump to be deposed, arguing that the president’s dislike of Bezos had corrupted the bidding process. (The Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General found no direct evidence of White House interference but noted that it could not complete its assessment, because senior officials had asserted “presidential communications privilege.” The suit was thrown out in 2021 when a new contract was awarded to both Amazon and Microsoft.)

But meaningful friction appears to have stopped at Blue Origin’s door. A few months after Alexander’s meeting, Bezos flew to Washington to personally present his company’s proposal to the transition team. “That didn’t necessarily happen with the other companies,” Autry said. “You didn’t see their CEO or funder take the time to do that.” So began a drip of white papers and study contracts that, over several years, led to $592 million in government funding. Other than a 2019 meeting where Pence’s chief of staff told a Blue Origin executive that the company had a “Washington Post problem”—a detail later reported in The Washington Post—no one I spoke with could recall an instance when the Trump administration’s hostility toward Bezos translated into prejudice against Blue Origin.

There was plenty of turbulence at Blue Origin during this period, but it was self-inflicted, and well overdue.

At a Saturday leadership-team meeting in 2017, Bezos was presented with a memo outlining Blue Origin’s annual budget request. Senior leadership wanted more than $1 billion, double the current budget. All of which would come out of Bezos’s pocket.

When Bezos finished reading the memo, “he walks out, doesn’t say a word,” Tom Jones, Blue Origin’s former vice president of human resources, told me. “About 15 minutes later, he walks in and he says, ‘Why did I not know that you were going to be making a request this large until today?’ ” Jones described Bezos as calm, even affectionate; Bezos said that he loved the people in the room but that the request was “craziness,” and wildly disproportionate to their achievements. The company had convinced Washington to take its lunar ambitions seriously, but it had yet to put anything into orbit. “It’s probably one of the things that might have led to him thinking, like, Okay, I’ve got to make a change here.”

Bezos responded by bringing in Bob Smith, a veteran of the aerospace company Honeywell, as Blue Origin’s first CEO in September 2017. Smith told me he arrived at a company with no steady revenue stream and no supply chain: “Engineers would design a part, put the order out, and then it’d show up by mail back on their desk.” It was essentially “a prototype shop.”

Blue Origin might not have had a supply chain, but it did have a cosmology. Bezos “is God at Blue Origin,” Alexandra Abrams said. “Jeff’s big message was that it’s too late for climate-change efforts on Earth, and we need to be able to leave. We need to sustainably go into space and build resources, have a base on the moon, which would act as a gas station to the rest of the solar system. At the company, everyone felt like we were saving humanity.”

But God remained an intermittent presence. Bezos had tried to extract himself from Amazon for years—installing deputies, restructuring leadership. COVID wrecked that project; Amazon’s logistics network buckled in the spring of 2020, and Bezos had no choice but to dive back in. Meanwhile, Blue Origin was in the middle of a significant expansion. Bezos had authorized Smith to make thousands of new hires and build new factories, a transformation that required exactly the kind of consistent attention he couldn’t provide. Bezos had made himself indispensable by being the only person who knew exactly what he wanted. He had never found his Gwynne Shotwell—or perhaps he’d never believed the job could be done by someone who wasn’t him. In his absence, Blue Origin was growing fast and bidding on everything, but it was still chronically late.

New Glenn, Blue Origin’s version of the Falcon, still wasn’t flying by the time SpaceX began developing Starship. SpaceX announced its Starlink constellation in 2015, put prototypes into orbit in 2018, and began deploying at scale in 2019—at which time Amazon had not yet launched a single prototype for Project Kuiper, its we-can-do-satellites-too Starlink competitor. Bezos wasn’t chasing Musk so much as arriving at places Musk had already left.

The pattern held as SpaceX started flying astronauts to the International Space Station. Blue Origin’s answer, when it finally came, was personal.

On July 5, 2021, Bezos vacated the CEO seat at Amazon. Two weeks later, he flew to space on New Shepard, the tourism rocket his company had spent years building, alongside his brother, Mark; the aviation pioneer Wally Funk; and an 18-year-old whose father, a Dutch financier, had bought him a ticket. Bezos stepped out of the capsule in the West Texas heat wearing a cowboy hat and declared it the best day ever.

Joe Raedle / Getty

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket lifting off in 2021, with Bezos aboard

The Bezos who returned to Blue Origin was different. He seemed determined to run the company the way he had once run Amazon—present, demanding, involved in every significant decision.

Smith’s 2023 resignation took no one by surprise. He had grown Blue Origin from roughly 850 employees to more than 10,000, accumulated billions of dollars in customer orders, and built enormous manufacturing facilities in Huntsville, Alabama, and Cape Canaveral, Florida. But New Glenn continued not to launch. And when NASA, under the Biden administration, finally awarded the contract for its Human Landing System—the moon lander that Bretton Alexander had improvised into existence—it did not go to Blue Origin. SpaceX, proposing a lunar lander based on its Starship architecture, undercut Blue Origin’s $6 billion bid by more than half.

What followed was also personal—and a little embarrassing.

Blue Origin filed a protest, prompting Musk to tweet, “Can’t get it up (to orbit) lol,” and to offer Bezos some unsolicited management advice. “I think he needs to run BO full-time for it to be successful,” Musk told The Washington Post. “Frankly, I hope he does.” Bezos offered to cover $2 billion of the lunar-lander costs, then $3 billion. When NASA ignored Bezos, Blue Origin sued. Musk, again: “You cannot sue your way to the moon.” The courts agreed. The saga ended when NASA, nudged by Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell of Washington, awarded Blue Origin a $3.4 billion contract to build a competing lander.

Bezos decided that the next person to lead Blue Origin didn’t need to understand rockets or politics; they needed to understand him. Dave Limp had run Amazon’s consumer-devices business—Kindle, Echo, Alexa—for nearly 14 years. Limp had also overseen Project Kuiper, where he pushed to spread the risk among multiple launch providers rather than depend on Blue Origin alone. He even said Amazon would be “crazy” not to consider SpaceX, given its track record.

In his final interview before accepting the job, Limp asked a single question: Was Blue Origin a hobby or a business? Because if it was a hobby, he wasn’t interested. Bezos told him, “It’s obviously a business. It has to be a business or it’s not going to work.”

During the decade when Bezos was reorganizing his life around space, he walked away from a promise he’d made on the day he bought the Post : “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.”

The killing of the Harris endorsement, the subscriber cancellations, and the cascade of staff reductions—all of this has been well chronicled, because there’s no beat that journalists swarm quite like a competitor’s newsroom. But the core questions about Bezos and the Post remain: Why does he appear to have inverted his own promise? Was this an act of betrayal or of neglect? And, in the end, is there a difference?

When Bezos first showed up in Washington, the paper’s circulation was plummeting. One former Post executive described Bezos’s 2013 arrival to me as a kind of rapture. He was a forceful presence, respectful of the wall between the editorial and business sides, but relentless about improving the customer experience. Those first two years were “absolutely fucking magical,” the former executive told me. The Post went on a sustained run of profitability, and subscriptions surged throughout the first Trump administration.

But traffic and urgency declined in the Biden years, while COVID and Bezos’s other interests made him a phantom in Washington. He surfaced to participate in hiring Sally Buzbee to succeed Marty Baron as executive editor in 2021. In 2023, the Post lost $77 million. Bezos surfaced again, to replace the paper’s longtime publisher with Will Lewis, a British-tabloid veteran.

There were other candidates—a person close to the hiring process told me that one of them found their conversation with Bezos baffling. The Post’s owner couldn’t answer basic questions about the newspaper. Bezos seemed inattentive, and said that his priorities would not change: He was focused on Blue Origin and Lauren. Bezos appeared to think that his lack of involvement would be attractive; the next publisher would have free rein.

I was a columnist at the Post for a year, and had a few conversations with Lewis early in his tenure. He’d been a journalist before entering the wolf pack of Rupert Murdoch’s executive program, and among his talents was an unusual ability to throw back pints with reporters while keeping the secrets of powerful men. I found him to be a delightful, charismatic scoundrel.

Many colleagues were charmed by Lewis. But within a few months, his fury over the newsroom’s coverage of accusations that he’d helped conceal or destroy evidence while managing a scandal at Murdoch’s News International⁠—accusations he has denied—had soured the dynamic. Equally concerning was that Lewis barely demonstrated any interest in his job. The Post lost $100 million in his first year—and an astonishing 60 million monthly visitors from November 2020 to November 2024. But Bezos wasn’t paying much attention to Lewis or the newsroom; he regularly canceled meetings with top editors.

Bezos seemed more interested in the Opinion section. He never forbade the editorial board from writing what it wanted, and seldom voiced strong feelings about politicians or parties. But his interests and ideology were evolving, and as the owner, he hoped the editorial board would move in step. Bezos seemed to enjoy speaking with the section’s editor, David Shipley, about creating a forum for pragmatic ideas and policy solutions. Wonky centrist stuff.

That hands-off approach changed with the spiking of the Harris endorsement 11 days before the 2024 election—abruptly ending a half-century-long tradition and provoking 250,000 subscription cancellations. Those sympathetic to Bezos say that the last-minute timing wasn’t his fault. Lewis had told the editorial board that he would handle getting Bezos’s approval. But as the election drew closer, it clearly had not been handled—or was not handle-able. “The timing of their refusing to endorse was too close to the election,” Barry Diller told me. “If the Post had been his only job, he would have done that much earlier.”

Lewis, who stepped aside in February 2026, did not respond to requests for comment. He certainly deserves blame for some of the destruction. But the most consequential decisions were not his. It was not Lewis who withheld the endorsement. It was not Lewis who complained to Trump about the “terrible” businesspeople at the Post shortly after Trump’s reelection, according to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change. It was not Lewis who dined with the president on the very day he announced that the Opinion section would focus exclusively on “personal liberties and free markets” (a decision that prompted Shipley’s resignation).

Bezos has framed the changes at the Post as a matter of necessity and opportunity, writing in an op-ed that he wanted to reposition the paper for Middle America. Journalism isn’t a charity, and Bezos’s own politics have clearly shifted. He is, after all, the owner.

Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg / Getty

A rally outside The Washington Post’s headquarters in February after the company announced layoffs

But Bezos plainly appears to have made a Faustian bargain. Just as Blue Origin was getting its act together, a second Trump presidency dawned, with Bezos’s chief antagonist, Elon Musk, in a position of extraordinary influence. Musk had spent $288 million to help elect Trump and other Republicans. He was a senior adviser to the president. Amazon had fought the first Trump administration for more than a year over a cloud-computing contract. The administration had been lobbied hard by Oracle, Amazon’s cloud competitor, whose co-founder had reportedly given about $45 million to a nonprofit supporting Trump’s reelection. Oracle had also produced a docket of baseless conspiracies about Amazon that found its way to the president’s desk.

Marty Baron was the executive editor of the Post from 2013 to 2021, a gilded era that produced 11 Pulitzer Prizes and vital reporting on Edward Snowden, the Trump Access Hollywood tape, and the Robert Mueller investigation. “Everything I saw in my years there was that he truly believed what he was saying about democracy and the press,” Baron told me. “But I don’t think he thinks these other businesses could survive unless he finds a way to successfully navigate through the Trump era. And if the Post is the thing that has to pay the price, then, well, that’ll have to be the thing that pays the price.”

Donald Trump is not a simple transactional figure. He gets what he wants, but he also warps reality in the process. Countless executives have learned that successfully dealing with him requires both capitulation and an insistence that no capitulation has occurred. If Bezos and Trump did come to an arrangement, it would make Bezos a hypocrite twice: once for breaking his promise to Post readers, and once for pretending he hadn’t.

Jeff Bezos also tends to get what he wants—and unlike Trump, he’s willing to wait years for it. He’s comfortable with being misunderstood. Which is another way of saying that there’s more than one way to look at a Faustian bargain: not in terms of what must be sacrificed, but in terms of what might one day be gained.

“NG‑3, baby!” whooped a man in a Titusville, Florida, 7-Eleven in April, shortly before flashing me his admittedly glorious NASA-logo calf tattoo. People who live along Florida’s 72-mile Space Coast rarely end up there by accident. Some work in aerospace; the rest seem to wish they did. They buy condos and arrange their schedules for optimal viewing of the rockets rising from the Kennedy Space Center. As subcultures go, they’re somewhere between Deadheads and bird-watchers: obsessive, migratory, and willing to wait a very long time for the thing they came to see.

I was in town at the invitation of Blue Origin to witness the third launch of New Glenn—NG‑3. This would be the first time Blue Origin reused a booster from a previous launch, a crucial step. The nonreusable upper part of NG‑3 would be carrying a large telecom satellite for AST SpaceMobile.

Dave Limp was in from Washington State to watch the launch and schmooze the satellite guys. Limp is 60, and in his sensible jeans, glasses, and Blue Origin three-quarter zip, he looks like the most reasonable man in every room he enters. When he started the job, he’d wondered if a consumer-electronics guy was the right fit for a rocket company, but he’d come around to Bezos’s diagnosis—that Blue Origin needed more disciplined decision making, more manufacturing expertise, and more Bezos. “Jeff can be annoying at times, but he’s right a lot,” Limp told me. “And he was right on this.”

The standard that Limp is being held to has a name: Gwynne Shotwell. Limp is an admirer, and has arranged his duties accordingly. “My job is to have Jeff live in the future,” Limp said. “So if he has to hear about an HR issue or a financial issue or a schedule issue, I have not done my job.”

His other job is to get rockets up, fast. The Federal Communications Commission requires satellite operators such as AST to put a certain percentage of their constellations in space by specific dates, or they risk losing authorization for the satellites they failed to deploy. Amazon was supposed to deploy half of its 3,236 satellites by July 2026. The FCC granted a waiver in June after Amazon explained that it was producing satellites faster than any of its launch providers—including Blue Origin—could get them into space.

A year earlier, the New Shepard tourism rocket had carried a team of six women, including Lauren Sánchez and Katy Perry, into space. Now Limp put it on indefinite hiatus. All focus, he told me, was on the lunar lander and getting New Glenn rockets produced with assembly-line speed: “The ‘step by step’ component of our motto—let’s fast-walk it, you know?”

At 7:25 a.m. the next morning, NG‑3 lifted off from Blue Origin’s launchpad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. It did not blast off like the rockets of old. Accelerometers and gyroscopes fed its position to the guidance system as computers continuously adjusted thrust and steering, making millions of pounds of rocket seem almost to levitate. When the rocket disappeared, it left behind a long, knobby cloud—a strangely beautiful albino Cheeto. Six minutes later, the booster landed a few hundred miles away in the Atlantic Ocean on the drone ship Jacklyn, named for Bezos’s late mother. Everyone went nuts.

I didn’t find out for a few hours that the mission had been a dud. One of NG‑3’s engines had failed to produce enough thrust and dropped AST’s satellite in the wrong orbit, too low to be useful. AST had insurance, but the customer doesn’t care if you save money by reusing your booster; it cares that you get the job done. Blue Origin had not.

At 12:12 p.m., the day got a little worse: SpaceX announced that it had just landed its Falcon 9 booster for the 600th time.

A month later, a New Glenn rocket undergoing a static-fire test caused the largest explosion in the history of Cape Canaveral, badly damaging Blue Origin’s only operational launchpad and temporarily grounding the program.

Only two people have the means and ambition to vertically integrate the galaxy, and one of them has the upper hand. In 2025, SpaceX launched 83 percent of the mass sent into orbit—about 10 times more than its nearest competitor, the Chinese government. Starlink’s 11,000-plus satellites account for roughly two-thirds of all active spacecraft orbiting Earth.

Limp, at least, knows all of this. He acknowledged that SpaceX is “by far the leader.” But, he said, “there’s so much demand for space right now that if we get to the scale and the execution of SpaceX, the world will be a happy place. And that does not mean Gwynne and Elon have to fail.”

The exact size of that demand is debatable. SpaceX and Blue Origin, along with a handful of smaller competitors, provide launch services to other companies and the federal government, but most of the demand comes from their own or affiliated satellite fleets. In finance, this is called captive demand, and it’s generally regarded with suspicion. In commercial space, it’s called vertical integration, and it’s the whole point.

This is why the SpaceX prospectus reads like both a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission and a transcript of an investment banker’s weekend on mushrooms. “Our mission,” it states, “is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” It then arrives at a number for a total addressable market that includes the light of consciousness: $28.5 trillion. It must have been fun to sit in the room as that number got calculated.

Musk’s mesmeric power over investors is well-known. Tesla earned just $3.8 billion in 2025 and is somehow one of the world’s dozen most valuable companies. (Caterpillar, which makes backhoes, earned approximately $8.9 billion.) It’s best to read the prospectus not as a ledger but as the blueprint for a future empire: the East India Company of space.

The business is a ladder that starts with rocket-launch capability. The next rung up is satellite arrays. This is a much more profitable business—Starlink really does pay for most everything at SpaceX—but it depends on launch capability. The third rung requires a leap of engineering faith: data centers in space. The fourth is the reason to build them—control over an off-world computing economy capable of training and running AI models at a scale that’s hard to achieve on Earth. In January, SpaceX filed a proposal with the FCC to operate up to 1 million data-center satellites in orbit—describing the project, in the filing itself, as the “first step towards becoming a Kardashev II–level civilization.” A Kardashev Type II civilization is one capable of harnessing the entire energy output of its star.

Does this sound crazy? If so, technology’s biggest players are eager to break into the asylum. Space offers AI companies abundant solar energy available 24 hours a day, and freedom from the NIMBYism that makes earthbound data centers and power plants so contentious. “Should I make a rocket company?” OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, asked on a podcast in 2025. OpenAI subsequently tried, unsuccessfully, to take over Stoke Space, a reusable-rocket start-up founded by former Blue Origin employees. Alphabet’s Google and the satellite operator Planet intend to launch two prototype satellites in early 2027 to test whether AI chips can operate effectively in orbit.

Google and OpenAI do not have their own ladders. Musk does, and he’s already climbed the first two rungs; in August, he posted that SpaceX would put its first satellite data center in orbit by the end of next year. Bezos is in between—he has a ladder; it’s just shorter and shakier. The question is how much the gap matters as the race moves upward, into new areas of engineering and imagination where no one—not even SpaceX—has a lead.

In late 2027, Blue Origin plans to deploy TeraWave, a constellation of 5,408 new satellites custom designed to provide data centers and governments with internet up to 6,000 times faster than Amazon’s satellites. New Glenn is expected to place TeraWave into orbit.

John Couluris leads Blue Origin’s lunar-permanence team, charged with creating the infrastructure for colonization. “Maybe seven years ago, people wouldn’t have said, ‘Well, we could do data centers on the moon,’ ” Couluris told me. Now he considers it complicated but more and more plausible. The challenges are real—chips fail, cosmic radiation is weird, and maintenance is essentially impossible. But if launch costs continue to drop, they’ll offset the expense. Couluris said Blue Origin is already working on manufacturing solar cells directly from lunar soil. The chips would come from Earth; almost everything else could be made on-site.

The destination for all of this potential computing power has only recently become clear. In 2024, I heard rumors about Prometheus, a company whose plans were inscrutable even by the standards of AI start-ups. No one associated with Prometheus would confirm its existence. Given the history of Blue Origin, this should have been a tell.

What’s now known is that Prometheus is trying to build something quite different from the generative-AI models that spit out text or code. The most complicated things that humans create—jet engines, drug molecules, semiconductors—live at the intersection of invention and engineering, where physical forces interact in ways that are expensive to model and even more expensive to test. An engineer can sketch a thousand designs; each one still has to survive contact with physics. Prometheus is intended to compress that process—to create an artificial general engineer capable not merely of proposing designs, but, it seems, of simulating, testing, refining, and, eventually, helping manufacture them. The grandest possible outcome is a machine that makes machines.

There’s an echo here for Bezos. Neal Stephenson and Blue Origin’s other early employees spent years exploring engineering possibilities in slow motion while the competition raced ahead. An artificial general engineer could compress all of that painstaking discovery into rapid computation: a Neal Stephenson bot.

This could be useful to all humankind—and particularly useful to someone trying to build dexterous warehouse robots, cheaper rockets, and data centers on the moon. Whether any of this is possible, and on what timeline, is unknown. Large language models were jump-started by the availability (or theft) of trillions of words; there’s less training data on the physical world. The models also have to understand multiple kinds of physics at once, account for uncertainty, and produce results trustworthy enough to bet hardware and human lives on. Those problems are very expensive to solve. At least for most people.

In November 2025, Prometheus’s existence became public, along with the news that it had raised $6.2 billion, the largest chunk of which came from Bezos. He was also named co-CEO, his first operational role since Amazon. Prometheus has since hired 150 people, many from OpenAI and Google DeepMind. Dave told me that Bezos spends his days bouncing between Prometheus and Blue Origin. “But he multitasks very well. Well, he single-tasks in a multitask world very well.”

Musk already has his own AI company, xAI, which he merged with SpaceX. His chatbot, Grok, has mostly distinguished itself through creepiness and anti-Semitism, but Musk used $60 billion in stock from the IPO to buy Cursor, an AI-coding assistant that’s one of the fastest-growing software companies. That leaves tens of billions more to spend on the most precious commodity in tech: margin for error.

It’s not a coincidence that, a few weeks after the SpaceX IPO, Blue Origin said it had secured $10 billion in outside funding, the first non-Bezos money in the company’s 26-year history. Limp called it a sign of confidence. It was also an acknowledgment of reality: Blue Origin is going to need more money. It has less margin, and more errors.

Gary Hershorn / Getty

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket passes over Lower Manhattan in August.

SpaceX is winding down Falcon 9, the workhorse rocket that’s served as the West’s space-transportation system, in order to concentrate on Starship (as of this writing, the company was preparing for its 14th test flight—the first to attempt orbit). Other satellite companies have reported trouble buying Falcon launches beyond 2028. Starship will offer significantly more capacity—but SpaceX may use much of that capacity itself: Starlink and the orbital data centers it hopes to build are potentially far more lucrative than carrying other people’s satellites. In other words, the company that solved America’s launch shortage may now be creating another one.

This is not just a business problem. It also matters to a sovereign nation that has recently discovered that one of its citizens possesses powers normally reserved for states. All of humanity may learn what it means to have its future built atop someone else’s rocket.

In 2022, Ukraine asked Musk to extend Starlink coverage over Crimea so it could carry out military operations. Musk refused. General Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and National Security Adviser Sullivan spoke with him about the decision. “And there wasn’t much we could do about that, absent taking some very coercive measures,” Sullivan told me—measures no one wants to take.

Three years later, during an X fight with Trump, Musk threatened to immediately decommission SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, the only American vehicle capable of transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Without it, NASA would have had to pay Russia $80 million a seat on Soyuz capsules. A few hours later, Musk backed down. “We absolutely need diversification on this,” Sullivan said. “And what’s challenging is that the most likely pathway to diversification lies through another mercurial billionaire.”

That the republic finds itself needing Bezos’s extraordinary concentration of private power to mitigate Musk’s extraordinary concentration of private power is probably not what the Founders had in mind. I asked Senator Mark Kelly, a former astronaut, if he trusted either man completely. He replied, “Kind of a loaded question.”

Kelly has met Bezos. His history with Musk dates back to at least 2012, when he joined SpaceX’s human-spaceflight safety-advisory panel, consulting on the Dragon capsule that would eventually make SpaceX indispensable to NASA. After Kelly, who serves on the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, visited Ukraine in 2025, Musk called him a “traitor” on X. So it goes. But Kelly doesn’t begrudge SpaceX its dominance. “It’s not SpaceX’s fault, right?” Kelly said. “They got ahead. They do it well.” What he wants is for SpaceX to “continue to be a successful company because it is in our national-security interest that that’s the case. I also want to see Blue Origin be successful.”

The pragmatist’s position, shared by most of the national-security community, is that one company capable of getting you to space is better than none, and two is better than one. But even if Bezos is the less mercurial billionaire, Blue Origin is not yet a reliable substitute for SpaceX.

Andrew Harnik / Getty

At the start of Trump’s second term, Elon Musk served as a senior adviser to the president and wielded extraordinary influence.

So the government can’t use Blue Origin as leverage. It can threaten to withhold contracts from SpaceX, but, as Trump discovered, Musk will respond by threatening to decommission the only American vehicle capable of reaching the space station. It can nationalize the companies, which would require a political consensus that doesn’t exist and a legal argument that hasn’t been made. Kelly thinks campaign-finance reform would make it harder for the next Musk to buy his way into the center of government, or the next Bezos to buy his way back into its good graces. When I asked which is more likely to happen first—campaign-finance reform or data centers on the moon—Kelly laughed. “I hope it’s campaign-finance reform.”

The government is not negotiating from a position of strength, but Bezos and Musk have a shared vulnerability: Both say they would like to go to the moon—for their empires, for glory, and because their youthful love of space has never settled into something more rational. To put it in terms they and the president would all understand, the moon is leverage. If the people trying to bargain with Charles Foster Kane had known about Rosebud, they would have dangled a sled.

For all of the stated urgency of the 2016 Trump transition meeting, what’s really happening with America’s return to the moon is only just now coming into view. In February, Musk posted on X that SpaceX had shifted focus from Mars to building a “self-growing city on the Moon.” The SpaceX prospectus has a section called “Establish the lunar economy,” which includes a base supplied by a continuous flow of people and cargo, eventually capable of producing its own water, fuel, power, and manufactured goods. Moontown sounds great, but the engineering details are a kind of truth serum—revealing the distance between what Bezos and Musk say they want and where their priorities actually lie.

SpaceX’s Starship cannot get to the moon without stopping for gas. The plan it sold NASA works roughly like this: SpaceX launches a Starship to serve as a fuel depot; then it launches a succession of tanker Starships to fill the depot; then it launches the lunar lander, which gasses up at the depot and departs for the moon. NASA’s Office of Inspector General estimates that at least 15 Starship launches will be needed to deliver all the fuel. No spacecraft has ever transferred ultracold methane and oxygen between vehicles in orbit.

In August, SpaceX committed $100 billion to build what Musk called “the biggest launch site on Earth” in Louisiana. This, along with its other facilities, should allow it, eventually, to launch multiple rockets a day. But even if SpaceX can get refueler rockets to the depot before the other rockets run out of gas, Doug Loverro, NASA’s former associate administrator for human exploration and operations, told me he’s skeptical of all the other things Starship has to prove: that it can reach orbit, keep astronauts alive, transfer fuel repeatedly in space, fly to the moon, land, and—crucially, if you’re an astronaut—take off again. His point is not that any single step is impossible. It’s the sheer number of steps that have to work in sequence. “Hurdle No. 1 is let’s get Starship to orbit,” Loverro said. “Which still hasn’t happened yet.”

Blue Origin’s route to the moon is complicated too: New Glenn first sends a transporter into low Earth orbit to be refueled. The lander, Blue Moon, launches separately, takes on fuel, and heads toward the moon, while the transporter climbs to a higher orbit for another fill. Near the moon, the two dock for one final transfer. Only then do the astronauts arrive and move into Blue Moon, which they use to descend to the surface and return to their spacecraft.

It’s an elaborate chain of rendezvous and refuelings, but the jobs are divided among purpose-built vehicles: New Glenn launches, the transporter carries fuel across deep space, and Blue Moon lands. SpaceX assigns nearly all of those jobs to variants of the same enormous Starship.

Saul loeb / AFP / Getty

Jeff Bezos unveils Blue Moon, a lunar lander, in Washington, D.C., in 2019.

Also, as NASA’s Office of Inspector General has pointed out, Starship’s lander is 171 feet tall—roughly the equivalent of a 14-story building—and its astronauts descend in an elevator that begins 115 feet up. There’s no other way back into the vehicle if the elevator fails. Blue Moon is 52 feet, and its crew walks down a set of stairs that starts six feet off the ground.

If you’re curious why, 60 years after Apollo, getting to the moon seems harder, part of the answer is that NASA has 60 years of pent-up expectations. The original astronauts flew in tin cans atop disposable rockets. A sustained presence on the moon will require more mass and more propellant.

Most people I spoke with have reached the same conclusion: On this, Blue Origin is ahead. It has completed thermal-vacuum testing on Blue Moon, and, as of August, its structure, propulsion, and avionics were fully assembled; it’s already communicating with NASA’s satellites and deep-space network. Even with the launchpad explosion, Blue Origin still plans to deliver an uncrewed test mission to the moon by early next year. That first flight will be a chance to work out many of Blue Origin’s hardest lunar-specific tasks on a single trip.

The crux of the difference is that Blue Origin—the smaller, slower company in need of a win—seems to have built a product to fit the brief, while Musk has built a giant rocket designed for his satellite business and his personal goal of deep-space travel to Mars. Making Starship work for the moon is like adapting a cargo ship to win a yacht race.

None of this guarantees that Blue Origin gets to the moon first. “I’m the first to say never count Elon out,” Loverro told me. “He’s a clever guy.” It also doesn’t really solve the mercurial-billionaire problem as much as shift it. But Loverro had a suggestion so simple and clever that it made me laugh out loud.

The Apollo missions also sprang from private industry, but NASA divided the work among contractors—Boeing, North American Aviation, IBM, and more. Different companies, different roles, forced into collaboration by NASA. Why not make Starship the refueling station for Blue Moon? SpaceX would have to reconfigure some of its designs, but “it only takes one Starship to fill up a Blue lander. It may take 10 or 15 Starships to fill up a Starship lander. If they work together, they could both get there sooner.

“We’re individualistic in the United States,” Loverro continued. “Every man for themselves. But that’s not how we do great things. We do great things because we find the best of everything that we can bring to the table, and then we do it together. That’s what NASA’s job truly is—to organize that team. And they’re failing to do so.”

The person responsible for organizing that team is NASA’s administrator, Jared Isaacman, a self-made billionaire who twice flew to space on SpaceX’s Dragon capsule and performed the first private spacewalk. His relationship with Musk complicated his confirmation. On his first day in the job, Isaacman said that whichever lander was ready first would get the mission. He declined an interview request for this story.

Isaacman may hold to his winner-take-all position. He may avoid angering two of America’s most powerful men and hope their engineering successes or failures make the decision for him. But the Solomonic solution has a certain appeal: Force Musk and Bezos to work together, and test their willingness to share a win.

One small step toward reminding them that the nation is still king.

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

Trump’s October Surprise

2026-10-12T17:08:00-04:00

It rained most of Sunday in Washington, as the remnants of Hurricane Isaias washed over the East Coast. Unable to golf, and stuck inside the White House, President Trump spent part of his morning on social media touting the size of his rallies and defending Christopher Columbus. He also declared that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to halt strikes against each other’s energy infrastructures. Except that he hadn’t first confirmed that with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—and Russia spent the hours that followed bombarding Ukraine with missiles and drones, hitting a Kharkiv power plant.

Trump’s inability to bring the Iran war to a close has left him incensed but also oddly paralyzed, two people close to him told us. One of them, an adviser, said that Trump “is used to snapping his fingers and having the whole world—Republicans, world leaders, the media—come to attention, and he is losing his mind that Iran won’t listen.” Iran has resumed menacing oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and the average price of diesel in the United States has crossed the $6-a-gallon mark, raising the cost of goods that travel the nation’s highways on trucks.

Republicans are panicked that those high energy prices could help Democrats take control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections, which are now only three weeks away. Trump has been searching for a scapegoat, and appears to have settled on Ukraine. Although blaming a European country that’s fighting for its existence for the rise in global oil prices might seem implausible, Trump seems to prefer that to accepting responsibility for his decision to attack Iran. His broadsides against Ukraine, moreover, are consistent with his decade-long deference to Vladimir Putin. With rare exceptions, Trump has aligned with Moscow over Kyiv throughout the four-and-a-half-year war. He wants Ukraine to end the fighting—and has pressured the country to agree to terms that Zelensky finds unacceptable.

A U.S. president siding with the Kremlin is quite an October surprise. But in just the past few days, Trump appears to have fully turned against Ukraine. He announced on Friday that he had reached an agreement with Putin to import Russian diesel fuel, undercutting the new sanctions bill against Moscow’s energy industry that Trump signed into law last month. Even if the roughly 2.25 million barrels headed to the U.S. only marginally ease fuel costs, the deal allows Trump to tout efforts to help Americans while also providing Russia with additional revenue. (Another few million barrels are set to ship next month.)

Despite the opposition of European allies and some Republicans on Capitol Hill, Trump has followed up by placing even more pressure on Ukraine. He called for Zelensky to be replaced. His aides have threatened to withhold arms sales unless Kyiv stops targeting Russian diesel plants. Some in Trump’s orbit have suggested that the U.S. go further, and stop sharing intelligence with Kyiv. That was the context in which Trump announced his fictional energy cease-fire. A senior Ukrainian military officer told us that Trump’s statements are “simply beyond comprehension.”

“Things are already incredibly difficult for us here,” the officer said, speaking, like others who talked with us, on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “But apparently, there’s always another level below rock bottom. Things can always get worse.”

Ukraine has expanded its strikes deep into Russian territory in recent months, targeting the larger nation’s oil refineries. Those attacks sparked an energy crisis in Russia and were cheered across Europe—but not in the White House. Russia imposed a ban on diesel exports in response, which added more pressure to global diesel markets already under strain from the war in Iran. Zelensky told Trump and his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner that he was willing to stop attacking Russian oil refineries if the Russians halted attacks on Ukrainian power plants, a White House official told us. But Trump doesn’t see the strikes as equivalent—and demanded that Ukraine first stop attacking Russian refineries, the official said. Zelensky refused.

“Zelensky is overplaying his hand and pissing the president off,” the White House official said. “The president is asking for one thing: stop hitting the refineries. Give him that.”

[Read: Trump’s latest appeal to Russia could outrage even his allies]

Trump’s next move against Ukraine came, as it so often does, after a phone call with Putin. Zelensky’s aides have expressed frustration that Putin has swayed Trump at crucial junctures in the conflict (once, even, while Zelensky was flying to Washington to meet with Trump in an effort to secure access to new U.S. weapons). This time, Trump spoke with Putin on Friday to wish him a belated birthday, even though some in the White House counseled against the call, the adviser told us, believing it would yield little. During the 90-minute conversation, Trump told Putin that he would lift the sanctions on Russian diesel exports. (Some in Kyiv believe that the deal was agreed to earlier, because a ship carrying Russian oil and gas is already approaching the U.S.)

That undermined sanctions applied in 2022 and undercut the tougher Russian-sanctions bill that Trump signed last month; the law was named in honor of one of its champions, the late Senator Lindsey Graham. A bipartisan group of lawmakers was infuriated by the move, and some Republicans denounced Trump for siding with Putin. Four GOP senators—Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of ⁠Maine, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and John Curtis of Utah—joined some of their Democratic colleagues to release a statement yesterday saying that lifting the sanctions “runs directly counter to that law” and that the U.S. should not provide “Putin with a financial lifeline while Russia continues to kill Ukrainian civilians.”

Zelensky, who was blindsided by the diesel deal, deemed it “not fair and not honest.” He had spent more than a year trying to repair his relationship with Trump, which hit its nadir in February 2025 during a shouting match in the Oval Office. Since then, Zelensky has taken to flattering the U.S. president, and he has tried to capitalize on Trump’s occasional annoyance that Putin will not end the war. Trump and Putin’s Alaska summit last year yielded little more than a photo of the two that hangs in the Palm Room at the White House. Even if Trump wouldn’t fully support Ukraine, officials in Kyiv had hoped he would not actively hurt their cause. That hope may be fading.

Recent talks between Kushner, Witkoff, and Putin have included the promise of massive business deals that Russia could strike with U.S. interests once the war concludes, according to reports. Ukrainian officials have long believed that Trump’s foreign policy focuses on opening up business deals—and the potential enrichment of the president’s family and friends—over the defense of democracy, human rights, or territorial sovereignty. Some officials in Kyiv believe that Russia’s economy, which has been remade to fuel Putin’s war machine, will not implode, despite the pressure of increased drone strikes and sanctions. A Ukrainian official close to the negotiating process told us that means “we need to change our strategy, stop fooling ourselves,” and find a way out of the war with Europe’s help. That, the official said, would likely require a new emphasis on negotiations.

During his call with Trump, Putin declined to commit to resuming peace talks, the Kremlin later told reporters. Yet Trump continues to view Zelensky as the primary impediment to peace—and the business deals it might bring—and he called for Ukraine to hold elections to select a new president. (Zelensky has said he will hold an election if Putin agrees to a 60-day cease-fire.) Trump also views Zelensky as an obstacle to his coveted, yet elusive, Nobel Peace Prize, for which he was passed over again last week. A senior European official told us that the U.S. has threatened to stop selling weapons to Ukraine via Europe if the strikes continue, and some close to Trump have suggested that the U.S. stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, as it briefly did after the 2025 Oval Office argument.

[From the November 2026 issue: The Baltic states prepare for war]

Ukraine was already bracing for a difficult winter. Moscow has escalated its attacks on Ukraine’s cities. It has grown its missile stockpiles and debuted a jet-powered drone that Ukrainian defenses have had difficulty stopping. Europe has tried to fill the gaps left by Trump’s indifference—and the U.S. being bogged down in Iran—but Zelensky’s aides believe that Putin will use the winter to pummel their cities before making another lunge at Kyiv in the spring. If, suddenly, Ukraine were left without U.S. intelligence or American-made weapons, Kyiv might be in its most vulnerable position since the first days of the war.

Trump’s admiration for Putin has been one of the most enduring geopolitical subplots of the past decade. He refused to publicly acknowledge Russia’s efforts to help elect him in 2016, infamously siding with Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies during the leaders’ summit in Helsinki during his first term. More recently, he has refrained from holding Putin to account for helping Iran, even after American intelligence agencies revealed that Moscow gave Tehran targeting information to strike U.S. military assets in the region. Some of Trump’s closest outside advisers have privately wondered what Putin has done to so thoroughly enthrall the president; Trump’s respect for the Russian leader appears undiminished despite the humiliating struggles Putin has faced during the Ukraine invasion.

Instead, Trump has taken steps to help Putin shed his status as an international pariah. Though Putin has been charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court, Trump welcomed him to Anchorage last summer. Trump’s move to undo the diesel sanctions could provide a boost to Russia’s faltering economy. And he has overruled the objections of some in his own party by inviting Putin to this winter’s G20 summit, which the United States is hosting at a Trump-owned golf course in Doral, just outside Miami.

If Putin accepts the invitation to that December meeting, it would be the first time he has attended a multilateral summit in a Western country since his invasion of Ukraine. Zelensky has said he’ll be there, and is hoping to meet with Putin to negotiate the end of the war. Trump has mentioned to advisers, one of them told us, that he’d like both sides to arrive to Doral ready to make a deal, so he can then preside over a peacemaking summit. Maybe then, Trump has suggested, he can finally win that Nobel.

Trump’s Message to Ukraine Is Now Crystal Clear

2026-10-12T12:36:37-04:00

In the past 72 hours, Donald Trump has dropped all pretense, torched a couple decades of American policy, and undermined 18 months of his own diplomacy. He lifted sanctions on the import of Russian diesel fuel, in violation of the letter and spirit of laws that he himself signed. He has threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, unless Ukraine agrees not to target Russian refineries, thus demanding that Kyiv give up its most effective weapon while asking nothing from Russia in exchange. He has not criticized Russian attacks on Ukrainian power plants or factories, even those owned by American companies. He has offered no condolences for the recent deaths of Ukrainian children in Russian bombing raids.

He has lied repeatedly. He declared that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to an “energy cease-fire,” an announcement that surprised the Ukrainians and that in any case the Russians immediately broke, hitting a power plant in Kharkiv only hours later. He accused Ukraine of blocking negotiations, when in reality the Ukrainians have repeatedly proposed cease-fires and Russia has never agreed to a cease-fire or any meaningful negotiation at all.

He has described Ukraine’s democratically elected president as an obstacle to negotiations and told him to leave office. But on Friday, before making these new decisions, he held yet another long, friendly telephone conversation with the Russian dictator, who really could end the war today. All Vladimir Putin has to do is tell his soldiers to stop fighting, and then the war is over. The Ukrainians cannot stop fighting because, if they do, their country will be conquered and they will suffer the fate of their occupied territories: leaders murdered, children kidnapped, repression and concentration camps for everyone else. If Trump knows this, then he does not care.

[David Frum: Trump is an easy mark for Putin]

The president has implied that the point of his new policy is to lower fuel prices for Americans. Perhaps he wants to convince voters that the cause of high prices is Ukraine and not his own war of choice in Iran. But this is not a sufficient explanation or justification for these dramatic actions. The amount of fuel that Russia could export is too small, the impact on pricing too slight, the narrative too late to shape electoral outcomes.

This looks, instead, like something very different: an abrupt, Hail Mary attempt to force Ukraine to surrender and to save the Russian economy, perhaps in order to finally complete the multiple business deals that the Russians are known to have discussed with American negotiators and others in Trump’s orbit. These include deals involving the Nord Stream gas pipelines, mineral mining in the Arctic, the Russian assets frozen in European banks, and more.

Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, American allies in Europe and elsewhere have tried to explain to the president the significance of the war and the threat that Russia poses to peace and prosperity in Europe, in the Middle East, in Africa. Now it looks as if they have failed, and Trump has followed his oldest instincts to side with Putin. What lessons will they draw?

The first and most obvious is: Don’t rely on the United States. America is now a capricious, unpredictable power, one whose long-standing foreign policies can be impulsively reversed, from one day to the next. The U.S. has been sanctioning Russia for many years, and now suddenly, at the whim of the president, it is not. Also: Dictators receive better treatment in Trump’s Washington than elected leaders. Canada is a far more reliable energy partner for the U.S. than Russia, and yet Trump has not sought to improve relations with the Canadian government. European security will be directly at risk in the case of a Ukrainian collapse or surrender, and yet Trump listens to Moscow, not Berlin or London.

Another lesson: This administration is for sale. A few days ago, The New York Times reported that, as part of peace negotiations between the U.S. and Russia, the property of Lukoil, a Russian company, may soon be acquired by a business consortium that includes Middle Eastern partners of Trump’s two lead negotiators in Ukraine, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, as well as Trump’s daughter Ivanka and Witkoff’s son. (An administration official confirmed to the Times that Kushner and Witkoff were involved in the Lukoil discussions, though there is no evidence that they will personally benefit.) The proposed deals on pipelines, minerals, and frozen assets are also still on the table. Even if none of them is ever completed, the mere fact that Trump’s negotiators discuss them gives the Russian regime reason to believe that it can continue the war with impunity.

[Read: Trump’s latest appeal to Russia could outrage even his allies]

However, democracies can cooperate without the American president. Ukraine will continue fighting, and will probably continue striking Russian refineries, thanks to its friends in Europe and beyond. French intelligence, German weaponry, and broad packages of aid from Scandinavia, Poland, and elsewhere will help. Everyone else should take note. For the past couple years, Europeans, Canadians, and the Pacific democracies have been building deeper commercial and security links with one another, as well as with India and Latin America. They’ve just been given another reason to make those links stronger.

The Trump-Russia relationship remains intense, important, and very weird. In the end, Trump always adopts Russia’s perspective, whoever the leader. Since his first trip to Moscow in 1987, when it was still the Soviet Union, he has loudly repeated Russian propaganda and reflected Russian views. Upon returning from that trip, he took out full-page advertisements in three newspapers, attacking American alliances in Europe and Asia. For nearly 40 years, he has been saying much the same thing. He has changed his mind about abortion and crypto, he has supported different political parties at different times, but his dislike of America’s democratic allies and his preference for Russia have remained remarkably consistent.

He continues to hold these views in defiance of the American military and American intelligence, as well as majorities in the country and in Congress. Immediately after his statement on diesel and his comments about Volodymyr Zelensky, a bipartisan cohort of U.S. representatives and senators attacked the deal and vowed to reverse it. Earlier today, U.S. Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich, America’s highest-ranking soldier in Europe and the top NATO commander—a job always held by an American—delivered a very different message to Russia. Speaking at a security conference in Warsaw, Grynkewich said that any attack on NATO, something many now genuinely fear, would be met with overwhelming force: “We will stop the attack and deny them the ability to achieve their objectives, whatever those might be. We will, ⁠in short, ensure any attack, against any ally, proves utterly futile.” He implied that there would be massive retaliation targeting “anything and everything that supports, sustains, and controls” an aggressive force.

This is the kind of language that, if it also came from the White House, might deter Russia from expanding its current campaign of sabotage and cyberattacks in Europe, from continuing to aid Iran, or from committing war crimes in Ukraine. But this president absolutely refuses to use it, and at this point, we have to assume he never will.

Make Big Brother Bad for Big Business

2026-10-12T10:30:00-04:00

Garrett Langley, the founder and CEO of Flock Safety, is an unlikely spokesperson for the dangers of the surveillance industry: His company says it has deployed more than 120,000 roadside cameras across 49 states. But in August, while defending his products and policies, he perhaps inadvertently showed why Americans should be alarmed by this technology.

Flock caught “a ton” of “bad cops” when it rolled out a tool to identify abuse of its data, Langley acknowledged on the All-In podcast. (While Flock will soon require the tool for all of its law-enforcement clients, just a fraction of clients were using it as of mid-August. Many bad cops likely went uncaught.) He argued that Flock will force safeguards on clients, though that may lose the company business, because he wants to “sleep at night.” His competitors, meanwhile, “run more reckless”—offering video and facial recognition with their license-plate readers, for example. If you take him at his word—and I’d argue that he overstates the strength of Flock’s safeguards––it’s clear that the way the industry works is worrying even one of its biggest boosters.

My own sleep has been troubled by the private surveillance industry for more than a decade. In 2014, three years before Flock was founded, I warned in The Atlantic that mass surveillance of all car trips was nearly upon us. I noted that private companies were deploying automatic license-plate readers, or ALPRs, at scale on America’s public roads, threatening a privacy we’ve always enjoyed, and that Congress should regulate the fast-growing surveillance industry. Today, if you drive in much of the continental United States, Flock may profit by selling others the means to reconstruct your movements.

Opposition to this form of surveillance is now a plurality position, according to an August YouGov survey, which found that more Americans oppose the technology’s use in their neighborhood than support it. Politicians in both major parties are criticizing ALPRs, whose name has become something of a misnomer: The cameras can capture detailed images of passing vehicles, not just of the license plate. And anti-Flock activists who track clients of the company list scores of past and potential clients that have canceled their contracts or deactivated cameras in recent months. “I’ve never really seen such a grassroots uprising against surveillance technology,” Jay Stanley, an ACLU senior policy analyst, told The Guardian. “On the left, there’s a historical memory of law enforcement spying on and interfering with advocates for social change … On the right, there’s a long tradition of ‘don’t tread on me’—keep the government out of my life, keep it from looking over my shoulder.”

Still, most of Flock’s network and its competitors’ cameras remain in place. And fans of the technology want to keep it that way; they argue that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy on roads, and that a network of cameras that logs every passing vehicle is a vital tool for catching criminals. Most surveillance boosters don’t deny that serious abuses have happened or wholly dismiss privacy concerns. Instead, they urge the use of safeguards and the passage of regulations to address them.

But this technology is already ubiquitous. States and localities should not permit its dangers to persist in the hope that one day, our often passive legislators will act. Instead, Americans should work to ban mass surveillance of public roads in every jurisdiction where they can secure support from elected officials until strong protections are in place. The pro-surveillance coalition has significant political influence, and some of its members employ accomplished lobbyists. The only way that it will hasten privacy safeguards is if doing so is the only way to sustain the surveillance business.

Before sketching out what specific legislative protections could look like, it’s helpful to notice that popular debates about ALPRs overstate their likely benefits and understate their dangers. The primary benefit––they help catch some criminals––will grow less effective over time as knowledge of the technology and how to evade it spreads. For example, license plates are already being cloned. And as the benefits decline, the cost that law-abiding citizens pay in lost privacy will persist. It may even increase. After all, the business model––pay us and we’ll help you catch criminals––creates a powerful incentive for surveillance companies to address falling effectiveness with new privacy intrusions. Flock may eschew facial recognition today, but no federal law prevents it from changing its mind tomorrow, or requires that it alert the public before introducing a new tool.

While evidence remains limited that ALPRs reduce crime in general or violent crime in particular, there is solid evidence that they reduce car theft: A working paper, published in August by the criminologists Scott M. Mourtgos and Ian T. Adams, found that ALPR networks are associated with an 11 percent decline in such thefts and an increase in arrest clearance (though they cautioned that clearances were already rising in the weeks before camera deployment). But if vehicle owners installed their own trackers, benefits could be had for all who opt in without imposing costs on everyone’s privacy.

Some dangers of roadside cameras are well understood. The Institute for Justice maintains a database of known and alleged police abuses of the technology, including stalking and wrongful stops. And although Flock’s rollout of Audit Assistance, the tool that helps catch abuse by cops, redounds to the company’s credit, it is no cure-all: It “detects abnormal activity and flags it for Administrator review,” a Flock spokesperson clarified to me by email, which “refers to review by an authorized administrator at the customer agency—not a Flock administrator.” This leaves open the possibility that abuse will remain undisciplined by some police departments.

A less widely understood danger is what might be called the foreign-adversary problem. China, Russia, and others have real incentives for gaining access to data collected by license-plate readers. Doing so could assist hostile actors in recruiting assets, blackmail, intimidation, and more. Breaching Flock would be the biggest prize––and the public is in no position to evaluate how competently the company or its competitors secure their data. If Edward Snowden could make off with the NSA’s most sensitive secrets, a systems administrator at Flock or a competitor could theoretically attempt a large-scale theft. The company (let alone the public) may not even know about it.

That worst-case scenario aside, a hostile foreign actor could do damage to U.S. interests merely via the access that normal Flock clients enjoy. Thousands of law-enforcement agencies use Flock. That means thousands of targets for incidents such as a phishing attack, well-placed bribe, or blackmailing a corrupt county sheriff.

What specific legal safeguards would justify the use of this technology? Figuring that out requires distinguishing between two different ways road cameras might operate. Say that a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder is reported stolen by its owner when he arrives home from work to find the car missing from his garage, and the Highland Park, Illinois, police department puts its license plate, NRVOUS, on a “hot list” of missing vehicles. In one approach, Chicago-area license-plate readers could (if the local regulatory scheme allowed it) scan all passing cars for “hot” plates, and instantly delete data on all vehicles that are not a match.

Alternatively––and this is the status quo––license-plate readers could store data from all scans, enabling people with access to the data to retrospectively reconstruct the movements of many thousands of innocents who have no connection whatsoever to any crime. (In this case, neither approach would result in the return of the vehicle in usable condition.)

Defenders of the way that Flock and other mass-surveillance technologies currently function favor constantly collecting and storing data on the movements of millions of people to ensure that a tiny cohort of criminals is surveilled. But that “collect and store it all” approach is not necessary for us to benefit from ALPRs. In Germany, multiple states deploy roadside cameras. Some German states use protocols that flag “hot” license plates while deleting all scans of plates that aren’t hits. That approach offers benefits without creating a spy apparatus that captures and stores data on nearly everyone.

If a collect-and-store-it-all approach endures, equally comprehensive safeguards are justified. First, companies should be permitted to retain data for no longer than a week, on encrypted, local servers; retaining data longer than permitted should be a crime. Authorization by a city council or county board of supervisors should precede installing cameras in any jurisdiction and constrain how that data are shared. And periodic reauthorization votes should be required.

Second, the federal government and all of its agencies should be banned from deploying ALRP technology on public roads or from accessing data collected there.

Third, state and local police should be required by statute to get a warrant to query ALPR data, whether or not federal courts consider these queries Fourth Amendment searches.

Fourth, permissible reasons to query the data should be limited––for example, to investigating felonies or missing or endangered persons, or responding to imminent threats of serious injury or death. And all queries should be made by a named person whose actions can be audited.

Fifth, every camera should be registered with the DMV in the state where it is located, display a physical license number on the device itself, and appear on a publicly accessible map that shows the location of all devices that capture data on public roads.

Sixth, individuals should have a right to know that their license plate was queried, by whom, and for what reason; to obtain records stored on their plate; and to compel deletion and payment of damages if the record was collected unlawfully or retained beyond statutory limits.

Seventh, as Mike Fox of the libertarian Cato Institute suggests, Congress should pass a law that authorizes victims of automated-surveillance errors to sue technology vendors for damages.

Until Congress acts, states and localities should impose restrictions or bans, as Knox County, Tennessee, and Oconee County, South Carolina, have done. (Scores of cities have already canceled or declined to renew contracts with Flock.)

In a City Journal article that argues against banning automated license-plate readers, the Manhattan Institute scholar Rafael Mangual writes, “Banning technologies in anticipation of harms that have yet to materialize is the wrong approach to policymaking. Where a technology presents genuine risks, policymakers can act to mitigate them.” But surely some potential harms, such as foreign adversaries accessing information that harms national security, or authoritarian officials exploiting networked ALPRs to threaten democracy, should be anticipated and averted rather than addressed after the fact.

What’s more, significant harms related to ALPRs have already materialized. Mass tracking by the federal government is reality rather than speculation: Last year, the Associated Press reported that “the U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious,” and that “suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over” and are “aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar.” And a 2015 investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that “100 ALPR cameras in Louisiana, California and Florida were connected unsecured to the internet, many with publicly accessible websites that anyone could use to manipulate the controls of the cameras or siphon off data.”

Details from a few entries in the Institute for Justice database of alleged police abuses help to convey their gravity: A Georgia police chief allegedly tracked an ex-girlfriend and her teenage daughter about 600 times. In Texas, a deputy reportedly used data from tens of thousands of Flock cameras to find a woman accused by her partner of having an abortion (the deputy later claimed that he made the search out of concern for the woman’s welfare). In Lenexa, Kansas, police reportedly tracked “a writer who wrote a column critical of them,” whom they also suspected of hanging anti-police posters on city property (which the writer has denied). In Toledo, Ohio, an innocent driver was attacked by a police dog, held at gunpoint, and jailed for hours after a Flock camera misread a digit on his license plate (the Toledo police said that they took “appropriate administrative action” after the incident, which included a “verbal reprimand” for the officer involved).

Getting a new privacy law through Congress is hard. Preventing its passage or watering down its provisions is easy. As a result, the intrusions on privacy just keep growing. But if people who favor and even profit from mass surveillance confronted state and local bans until adequate federal protections were in place, they would suddenly have a powerful reason to push for the speedy passage of new privacy rules. That change in incentives may be the best hope for Americans who see how quickly technology is changing and want to stand athwart the surveillance state, yelling Stop.

The Tragedy of AI Coding

2026-10-12T09:11:23-04:00

My family and I enjoy the occasional meal of delicious slow-cooked meat, but every time we visit a barbecue joint, we can’t remember whether we like the beans and slaw on offer. Some beans are sweet; others are spicy. Some slaw is vinegar based; others creamy. We should keep track of this somehow, we always say but then never bother. I should make an app, I used to joke. But that was a ridiculous idea.

Thanks to generative artificial intelligence, it became less ridiculous. By last summer, I had been making small programs with AI for some time. AI’s adeptness at programming was helping me, a busy person with a professional programming background but limited reason to program, work creatively with computing for the first time in ages. I wanted to see how far I could push AI as a solo programmer. The barbecue-sides-preference problem, I reasoned, would serve as a perfect test case: building a fully featured iPhone app—Beanslaw, I called it—with esoteric utility that nobody would have bothered commercializing.

Two days of occasional programming were sufficient to make a professional-grade version of Beanslaw—an act that would have taken weeks of full-time dedication not long ago. The app displayed smoked-meat joints on a searchable map. It implemented sophisticated intelligence to filter out Korean barbecue, Brazilian churrasco, and other (no less delectable!) cuisines that entail barbecue of a different, bean-and-slawless variety. A user can assign assessments of beans (such as vegetarian and soupy) and slaw (including chunky and mustard), and filter the map by desired side-dish traits. I even built an onboarding tutorial. I was ready to ship.

Photos courtesy of the author

Excited, I showed a friend. “Where are everyone else’s slaw and bean ratings?” he asked, tapping at his phone. He didn’t get the point of an app that amounted to a personal journal. Almost two decades of smartphone apps had trained him to understand software as a mechanism for collective intelligence. A program that only a few people would use is now alien. App has come to refer to a type of global, leveraged software business, not a computer program.

[Josh Tyrangiel: The secret to understanding AI]

Because AI is so good at writing software, in only an hour or so, I was able to add community ratings. Now Beanslaw does what my friend would expect it to—connect potentially billions of users. But doing so also turned an idiosyncratic app meant to satisfy me alone into a candidate (a hopeless one, at that) for the software attention economy.

I never released Beanslaw to the public. But during the year since, I have written, with AI’s aid, a dozen or more programs to solve anomalous problems, seeking to understand what AI programming—a practice some people call vibe coding—means for computing culture. AI-assisted coding could revive the old dream of ordinary people making software for themselves. But so far, in practice it amounts to a new trip down an old path that software development has been traversing for decades: one where a privileged few decide what computers are for, and the rest of us fall in line.

In the early 1960s, inspired by Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Atlantic essay “As We May Think,” a recent Swarthmore College philosophy graduate named Ted Nelson began conceptualizing a computer-publishing system for all global knowledge, accessible to anyone—work for which he coined the term hypertext. A decade later, in 1974, Nelson expanded his vision of computing’s populist power in a pamphlet manifesto called Computer Lib/Dream Machines.

At the time, computers were big, expensive machines used by corporations and government offices. Before the personal computer arrived in earnest, Nelson denounced the “appalling gap between public and computer insider.” He characterized the corporate and governmental actors with access to and expertise in computing as a “priesthood.” Nelson advocated for dismantling this priesthood and putting computing in the hands of ordinary people.

Nelson, along with other figures of the personal-computer revolution, saw his work as literally revolutionary: The Lib of Computer Lib referred to liberation, like “women’s lib,” and he and his allies understood their work as a part of the counterculture movement. Seymour Papert, who co-designed the programming language Logo, envisioned programming as a way for kids to control these machines rather than submit to them. Inspired by Papert, Alan Kay imagined the tablet-style Dynabook, a “personal computer for children of all ages.” And Steve Wozniak, who designed the first Apple (and co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Jobs), valued cheap, publicly shared software skills as a way to overthrow the corporate monopoly on computing.

For a time, that liberationist vision became reality. Early personal computers such as the Apple II and Commodore 64 booted up to a command prompt where users could immediately begin programming in BASIC, an intuitive language. Early advertisements pitched them explicitly as devices people could program themselves. Computer magazines of the era published code that readers typed into their machines by hand.

I learned Papert’s Logo as a first grader in the early 1980s, because my private school had invested in personal computers, labs to house them, and teachers to guide us. That head start gave me confidence with computer programming, which was presented as a normal activity akin to making art or reading. I picked up BASIC, assembly, Pascal, C, and other languages naturally. The machines couldn’t do much yet, and I could learn new things as they evolved—which was still slow enough that an ordinary person, even a child, could keep up.

Personal though they might have become, computers remained expensive and largely inaccessible. And the relatively well-off people who bought them were more likely to buy commercial software than to write their own. Within a few years, the graphical user interface popularized by Macintosh and Windows made the machines easier to use yet also more complicated. Business tools such as spreadsheets, word processors, and layout software made new kinds of computer-based creativity possible, but the results were far removed from the visions of Kay and Nelson. Computers, once envisioned as tools of self-actualization, became appliances.

In the 1980s and 1990s, ordinary people’s ability to construct their own software ebbed and flowed. Hypercard users made databases, cookbooks, and games on their Macs; gray-cubicle office workers used Visual Basic to build Windows programs to automate tasks, often for themselves alone. The World Wide Web let ordinary people publish websites for the whole world, rather than just themselves, their friends, or their office mates.

By the mid-2000s, the Web 2.0 economy had begun to roll back the web’s openness, shepherding people into using platforms such as Blogger, YouTube, and Facebook. The priesthood was back, and the wealthy tech giants served as its bishops.

AI programming does not challenge that power. It entrenches it. I encountered a characteristic, if humdrum, example of software authority during what I thought would be a straightforward vibe-coding task last winter. I had long been dissatisfied with the countdown-timer app on the Apple Watch, with its giant list of times and tiny stop button. I mostly time things in 30-second increments: hamstring stretches, grill sears, tea brews. So with AI’s help, I made a watch app I called Taptimer. I’d tap the screen repeatedly to add half minutes; the timer would run, and then it would buzz. Tapping anywhere on the screen would turn it off again. Sounds simple, right?

Except, Apple doesn’t let third-party programs issue the type of repeated-vibration notifications that its special “native” timer program uses. I had to settle on a single-buzz notification. It works—I use Taptimer every day—but the terms of what the software is allowed to do are set by the owners of the platforms that people must use to run it.

With reason, or at least excuse. Under the guises of usability, security, or control, the oligopolistic tech industry dictates what software can be and can do. The software industry began treating a program shared among friends like a product distributed to millions—in part because it cannot imagine why anyone would bother to make a program that didn’t aspire to wealth, power, or prestige. AI programming arrives during the most intensively exclusionary version of the computer priesthood. The software business has been pushing amateurs out of software creation for two decades, forcing us to use its own wares instead.

When I first started writing Mac programs, in the early 1990s, I could compile a program, put it on a disk, and give it to a friend. Apple’s documentation for how to do so came in printed volumes you could buy at a bookstore, and that didn’t change much across an entire decade. By the time I sat down to write Beanslaw, I needed a $99-a-year subscription to the Apple Developer Program, sufficient familiarity with Apple’s development tools to understand how to use ChatGPT’s code, and enough software-publishing experience to get the resulting software off of my computer and onto phones.

I had to know enough about making software that I could reason and negotiate with the AI about how to approach certain tasks. Some of this effort was not technical at all, such as building a whitelist of known barbecue joints (Rendezvous in Memphis, Pecan Lodge in Dallas) that the app would always display. Others required a deeper bureaucratic knowledge of software development as a practice, such as how to include restaurant images via a backend service provided by Yelp without accidentally spending thousands of dollars.

[Read: How long until AI hacks everything?]

The more I programmed with AI, the more I felt this tug-of-war between my own prior programming knowledge and the exciting, new coding capacities AI unlocked for me. On my own, I could have built the community ratings that my friend who tried Beanslaw had expected. But storing data in a scalable way across an internet service is complicated, and I wouldn’t have bothered for a program that was supposed to be for a handful of people. ChatGPT introduced me to an Apple programming feature called CloudKit, which made the process easy. Then AI made the implementation easy, too, by giving me the code.

In other cases, I had known what I wanted and how to do it, but I didn’t feel like investing time in the doing. AI made minor software excursions both reasonable and delightful. For example, the Ethernet switch in my home office kept dropping to a lower throughput. To monitor it, I made, with AI, a Mac program that performs an internet-speed test and displays the results in the menu bar. Or, when I had to rebuild my personal website before preorders for my latest book opened, I relied on 30 years of web-development experience to ask AI for the features I wanted (redirecting old URLs, presenting different content by geography) but that I couldn’t quite make time for amid the duties of my actual job and life.

To call this process vibe coding—as if one just types a prompt, waves their hands, and gets a complete and working computer program—amounts to a profound misconstrual of what’s going on.

Computer scientists sometimes talk about “high level” and “low level” programming. Low-level programming involves a lot of very small-scale, specific instructions; high-level programming abstracts that effort into simpler methods that are easier and more accessible. Low-level programming is sometimes considered more technical and therefore more righteous, but high-level coding is often understood to produce faster results. The latter value has prevailed, and over the years and decades, software development has moved to higher levels of abstraction because doing so streamlines output. Low-level work is used only when necessary—and often just to build tools or infrastructure to facilitate high-level programming.

Vibe coding continues this tendency. Coding has always involved a repeated process of giving a computer instructions for an intended outcome or experience, making the machine run them, and then revising the instructions based on the result. At first, those instructions were immensely basic: Move a number or perform a mathematical operation. Over time, the instructions became more complex and abstracted: Write a file to disk, draw a circle, plot a location on a map. Under the hood, computer programs often generate and run code at a lower level as a part of their work. AI programming does not disrupt that process at all. It extends the effort.

This makes the aesthetics of vibe coding entirely familiar to programmers. The moment-to-moment experience of coding feels the same, but you do so at a greater remove. Realizing this made me understand why programmer types might find generative AI so immediately compelling, and also why they might not grasp the objections of people in other walks of life who oppose it. Using AI to create prose or illustrations seems to erase the experience of the writer or artist and their participation in the act of creation. It clobbers the process in favor of the outcome. But for a programmer, the outcome and the process improve all at once. Nothing about AI programming feels like a compromise or cheat. It just feels like programming.

Or perhaps it’s programming at its best. I could feel myself becoming a more generous and open-minded programmer when I coded with AI. Feature requests or suggestions seemed not like slights or gripes, but like opportunities worth considering. Likewise, bugs stopped bothering me. A defect no longer represented something I did wrong; it was a problem I could hurl back at the machinery to solve. Even dead ends or bad ideas felt good, both because I enjoyed carrying them out and because the prototyping experience seemed familiar, but faster and more deliberate.

For example, over a few weeks this summer, I became obsessed with a little $30 computer with a round screen and a dial, similar to a Nest thermostat. I was convinced that the thing could host a clever video game. So I bought one and tried a bunch of ideas: circular Pong, round Breakout, marble rolling, safecracking, tetherball, mini golf, driving a car, navigating a spaceship, mowing a lawn. All of them were cute, but none felt interesting enough to play more than once. I stopped trying, at least for the moment. That feeling is familiar: I’ve started and abandoned hundreds of software projects in my amateur and professional programming career. But the vibe-coded failures felt less bad, because the coding had produced instructive results without devouring my life.

All of this still relied on my accidental, if long-in-the-tooth, membership into the computing priesthood. When I first started using ChatGPT to code, the process was almost dialectical. I’d ask AI for something, it would present some code, and I would implement that code in my project. The process involved a lot of step-by-step, back-and-forth discussion and action.

And yet, during my year of AI programming, I could feel my sense of control and competence recede as the technology evolved. By this spring, something had changed. So-called agentic execution in Claude Code had made it possible to give the AI access to a directory and have it create a whole program on its own, even a complex one. This method, which seems more automatic and thus more desirable, has spread, and OpenAI has added a version of it called Codex. AI has shifted from facilitating programming—as a process of iteratively making stuff with computers—to solving a problem on its own. No programmer required.

This might seem to realize vibe coding as automation, and perhaps even defrock the coding priesthood. I doubt it, largely because industrial power has swallowed so many prior attempts to democratize coding. But automation is also the wrong goal for amateur programming. The most productive, interesting, and fulfilling AI-programming experiences I have had are the collaborative ones.

Earlier this year, I became interested in the unexplored design space in software-based reading. So I started making prototypes: an e-reader that meted out a story as if over the 15 hours of a transpacific journey; a similar one that dispensed text about a road trip gone awry as the reader moved through physical space; an aleatory story that subtly changed what happened to its characters every time the reader opened it. In each of these cases, my aesthetic, technical, and writerly goals were iterative: I hatched some plan, ChatGPT helped me implement it, and then I judged the results and repeated the process.

Unfortunately, during the year that I spent programming seriously with AI, that paradigm of creativity has been superseded. When I try to partner with ChatGPT to code, the software now urges me to use its automation tools instead. ChatGPT has made certain kinds of direct file editing, which I found particularly useful for iterative work, hard or impossible. The industry at large now seems to assume that a programmer’s end goal is known in advance, and the work just involves moving toward it: Build a game for me, or make a website, or generate an app. A lot of news coverage of the phenomenon takes this efficiency as an improvement, assuming AI programming to be a way for the software industry to become more productive. But I found AI to be most liberating when I treated it like a partner offering a feedback loop between my intention and the machine’s implementation, rather than a silicon priest delivering answers or a minion carrying out my bidding.

Reflecting on my vibe-coding journey, I now realize that I began the effort insufficiently aware of what I should have known to be true: that software had already mostly been captured by the high-tech industry long before AI-coding tools arrived, and that those tools were doomed to worsen as much as improve the situation. I fell into the ever-enlarging chasm between the small-scale, personal-software fantasy and its scaled-up, big-business reality. Even the AI services I use to write software change so frequently that the methods I used last week to make something might change next week when Claude or ChatGPT updates. The whole structure feels erected on a sheet of ice.

[David Brooks: AI is already changing what it means to be human]

Rather than fight the friction, I’ve sought out a software equivalent of crampons that can bite into it—resilient enough to resist the slide into commercial software, but sufficiently functional to persist beyond curiosity. That charge is difficult but still possible, although I still feel as if I am clinging precariously to a frosty crag when pursuing it.

As part of this clamber, I found an inexpensive, programmable e-ink display that I could hang on a wall. I have a home weather station in my yard, and I liked the idea of building a pretty, inconspicuous display for the hyperlocal data it produces. I wrestled with the new version of ChatGPT, but for the moment collaboration was still possible if I pushed the AI to converse with me as a partner. Even in the more esoteric, open-source electronics platforms I was using for the project, an accidental priesthood has arisen thanks to 20 years of chaotic, incremental work by global homebrew volunteers. AI helped me make sense of it all so that I—so that we—could get started. And then, together, we built the layout, slurped up the data from my weather station, and iterated on the appearance of the weather-condition icons. I got the idea to display the temperature from my pool heater and then the soil moisture from my lawn sensors, silly things that would have felt indulgent if a computer hadn’t made them easy. Now the little screen hangs next to the alarm panel, updating itself every 15 minutes.

Photo courtesy of the author

When I pass by the thing on the way to the kitchen or the driveway, I feel a vibration of delight. The sensation isn’t quite pride, because I can hardly take sole credit for the accomplishment. But neither is it opportunism, as if I might package and resell weather-station displays as some kind of value-additive, hardware-accessory side hustle. Instead, I feel overcome by the modesty of the matter. A little black-and-white display is showing me the weather—one I made, if with AI help. How nice. For once, a computer doesn’t have to be connecting the world or saving it—or ruining it. Instead, it can simply hang humbly on a wall inside that world, doing something cute, and intentional, and perhaps even useful. The revolutionaries of computing’s counterculture, who mostly became its priests, once believed that would be enough.

The People Who Outsource Emotional Labor to AI

2026-10-12T08:00:00-04:00

One day not long ago, Franky, a 40-something woman who lives in the mid-Atlantic region, got an infuriating text message from her aunt. It was just the latest truth-stretching missive she had sent, and Franky’s impulse was to write back: “You’re a liar. You’ve always been a liar. All you do is lie.” Instead, she asked an AI program to write a response that was less “condescending and unnecessarily emotional.” AI-ese, Franky told me, helps make her responses more logical and neutral. Another message that she sent her aunt after running it through a chatbot read, “I respect you and I expect the same in return. I want to have a mature conversation.” The aunt appreciated it, Franky said—she called her and sounded calm.

Franky is among a number of people—we’ll never truly know how many, will we?—who secretly use AI programs such as ChatGPT and Claude when they interact with difficult family members. I interviewed several of them. Mostly, my interviewees use AI to communicate with individuals they don’t want an emotionally close relationship with—an ex they co-parent with, for example, or an in-law—but whom they nevertheless can’t escape. (Because they are describing tense personal relations, most of my interviewees requested not to be identified by their full name.)

People use AI to both interpret messages they receive and help them write their own to send. If they have to, say, call out rude behavior or express disagreement about whether the kids need a certain type of therapy, they type what they really want to say into one of these programs, ask the AI to nice it up a little, and paste the resulting verbiage into their text messages. Outsourcing correspondence to AI has enabled them to maintain harmony without spending too much time thinking about how to draft a perfect response. As Franky put it, using AI lets her have a relationship without allowing it to “live rent-free in my brain.” Franky said that in her family, it’s important for people “all to have, I don’t know, peace.” She and others have found that they can improve their relationships and at least increase the probability of peace by removing emotion from conversations. And that’s where AI truly excels.

[Read: There’s a name for the people who drain you]

Another woman I spoke with told me about how Claude had helped her revise a text to a family member who often misinterprets her words. This person, she said, sent her a message implying that he wanted her out of his life. Her impulse was to reply, “Congratulations. You got your wish,” but Claude softened that statement because it could “read as sarcasm/implication.” Then it asked, “Want it warmer, blunter, or shorter still?” Claude, she added, “leaves out the emotional part” and makes it more likely that the recipient will hear her and work toward a resolution.

People reach for Cyrano de Anthropic because during difficult text-based conversations, “it’s hard to know what to say,” Nedra Glover Tawwab, a therapist and the author, most recently, of The Balancing Act, told me. When we’re interacting in person, mechanisms in the brain help us interpret people’s body language and facial expressions, Matthew Fishleder, a therapist in Maryland, told me. But text and email strip messages of that context. “We’re left trying to decipher, What does this text from my mom mean?” he said. “And how in the world do I respond to something like this?”

In tense situations, people generally know what they’d like to express, Tawwab said, but then they might think, “I can’t say that.” AI can phrase the message in a slightly gentler way—and it can offer the sender “less of a responsibility” for how the recipient reacts. If your mom gets mad about your AI-assisted message, you can always mentally blame Dario Amodei.

The most common use case I encountered for deploying AI in this way was to correspond calmly with an ex-spouse, whom one may now resent with the fire of a thousand billable lawyer hours but whom one must treat cordially, lest one gets threatened with changes to the custody agreement. (As one Florida woman who uses AI for this purpose told me, sending an “F you” text to your ex might feel amazing, but you have to think about the “legal ramifications.”) A father in Arizona told ChatGPT to use a “five-star-hotel-clerk tone” with his ex, and it did—to the point that, reading over his shoulder, his child was shocked by how nice their parents were being to each other. A woman who asked to go by the initial S. told me that she uses AI to negotiate co-parenting decisions with her ex-partner. When AI helps her write “in a very neutral tone so that it’s not inflaming,” she said, “we help our kids to the best degree possible.” She told me that the tool has improved her relationship with her ex-partner, and that she even sometimes recommends the same strategy to her clients in her work as a therapist.

If their exes figure out that they’re using AI, many of the people I spoke with don’t really care. S. thinks her ex may be using it too, because sometimes she’ll notice that “that’s a tone I don’t hear very often from him,” she said. The Florida woman said that her ex has accused her of using AI “many times” but that she’s not especially concerned about impressing him. “It’s like, Oh, I know. I’m terrible in every way, including that I use AI,” she said. “Add it to the list. We get it.’”

The people I spoke with had a range of other reasons for using AI. Several of my interviewees are not native English speakers, and they feel that they are frequently misunderstood when they use their own words. “Even when I do try my absolute best, it just doesn’t work,” the Arizona father told me. One of the people he has used AI to communicate with is an abusive parent; given his childhood environment, he said, he doesn’t have much experience being spoken to amiably and calmly.

Others don’t have much experience with writing, period: A woman named Ashleigh told me that she uses ChatGPT to communicate with her baby’s father’s family because she’s “not a writer at all.” She said that she types in what she wants to say, then prompts the system to “take some of the emotion out and put more of the facts in it.” “It’s great for hard conversations,” she added, “that you know you’re gonna blow up on.” Finally, many of my interviewees like how much time AI saves them. They don’t want to spend their one wild and precious life drafting heartfelt texts to their weird cousin; they want to outsource all of that to Claude. As Franky put it to me, in one of the most relatable quotes I have ever gathered, “I just don’t have time in general to do anything.”

[Read: Forgive the bad texters]

Using a robot to talk with humans has downsides, of course, even if only philosophical ones. Relying on AI for communication can mean that we are “outsourcing our inner power to a machine,” Tawwab said. The people I spoke with are well aware of that. Even though she uses it herself, S. said that her therapy clients can become overly dependent on AI, to the point where they “aren’t thinking for themselves as much.” But as far as mortal sins go, this practice seems to fall somewhere around ordering from Amazon Prime or eating at McDonald’s—you may have misgivings, but the convenience truly can’t be beat.

Fishleder, the Maryland therapist, said that although AI can be helpful in a pinch, it won’t resolve the larger relationship dynamics at issue—and it’s further evidence of what he characterized as the “movement away from relying on one another as humans.” Still, when I asked him whether he also sometimes uses AI to write tricky messages, he said, “100 percent.” Sometimes you just need to send a firm but polite text about Thanksgiving plans. It’s not cheating; it’s muddling through.

Immigration Is a Poorly Oiled Machine

2026-10-12T07:30:00-04:00

What would the U.S. immigration system look like if it were a machine, made of wheels and gears, controlled by belts and joints? In Kelly Lytle Hernández’s new book, Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control, illustrations by the artist Mariah Tso help readers visualize such a contraption. Its parts are etched with important names and dates, Supreme Court cases, racist proclamations, and key concepts such as eugenics, no due process, and warrantless arrests. These sketches leave the impression that immigration control functions smoothly to exclude certain people—requiring only the occasional application of oil or glue.

I would depict this machine differently, as would many historians. Its parts would be misaligned and mismatched; it would leak and spew smoke, expand and contract at random, and periodically grind to a halt.

Yet Tso’s illustrations perfectly reflect the argument made by Lytle Hernández, a history professor at UCLA whose previous books have focused on the Border Patrol, mass incarceration, and Mexican anarchists. In Racist by Design, she contends that the United States since its founding has had a “whites-only immigration system.” That system has evolved, she says, but it remains “racist by design: It always has been and it still is.”

We shouldn’t take “whites-only” literally, Lytle Hernández cautions. Instead, she writes, the term is an “interpretive device” to help us understand “racialized power.” She borrows language from the book Let This Radicalize You, in which two organizers, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, argue for studying a machine to figure out “what blows could actually disable it.” Lytle Hernández wants Racist by Design to land as a blow propelled by the force of history, inspiring collective action that will “keep pushing” the machine “and make it tip.”

[Read: What Stephen Miller gets wrong about human nature]

It isn’t controversial to say that racism has often motivated American immigration policy. Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior aide and homeland-security adviser, is hardly the first nativist to set federal priorities. Yet Lytle Hernández’s contention that more than two centuries of immigration control boil down to a story of white supremacy is an overstatement, even if it’s an important provocation.

Lytle Hernández briefly acknowledges that “whiteness” isn’t always a simple category—that eugenicists have invented hierarchies among white people, and that racially neutral language, such as the word pauper, has been used to deport Irish people. But she doesn’t discuss how the meaning of whiteness changed over time; some white people were considered less white than others. She mentions other factors in debates over who can enter the country—sexuality, religion, public health, international diplomacy, ideology—but brushes them aside quickly so that they don’t muddy her point. These omissions and elisions make her argument vulnerable to challenges not only from historians who have studied other modes of discrimination, but also from political opponents eager to sabotage her cause.

Plenty of evidence supports Lytle Hernández’s larger case. The Naturalization Act of 1790 said that only “a free white person” could naturalize, after living in the United States for two years. The first federal immigration ban was the 1803 Immigration Act, whose main proponents were enslavers seeking to block the entry of Black Caribbeans fleeing the Haitian Revolution.

This pattern persisted for the next 150 years. In the mid-19th century, California state legislators levied a tax on foreign miners to keep nonwhite immigrants away from the gold mines. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which survived in different guises and iterations until 1943. And the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act established national-origins quotas that capped the total number of immigrants at 150,000 a year, while reserving 96 percent of those slots for European immigrants and 84 percent for those from northwestern Europe, according to Lytle Hernández. Senator David Reed, a Republican from Pennsylvania who co-authored the law, said, “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our nordic population being overrun by lower races.”

By 1940, Lytle Hernández writes, Europeans and Canadians, who at this point were all considered equally white, accounted for 94 percent of the foreign-born population living in the United States. Even after laws were liberalized and these numbers changed, members of both political parties tried to boost the proportion of white immigrants by prioritizing what the liberal Senator Ted Kennedy called the “old seed sources of our heritage.” This was all before the Trump administration made race-based immigration de facto American policy—most pointedly by deporting mainly nonwhite immigrants while welcoming white South Africans who claimed to be victims of a Black-led government.

The author shows how the intrinsic racism of these moves is not accidental or incidental, but by design. She adds fresh insights as well by tracking the gradual concentration of immigration enforcement in the hands of the federal government, and by showing how fights over naturalization were entwined with debates over the treatment of Black people and Native Americans. And she reframes the immigration story as focusing on not only the people we let into the country, but also those we keep out. This complicates Americans’ conception of themselves as a nation of immigrants; we are also a nation that has excluded them.

[Read: Republicans vs. the Fourteenth Amendment]

Lytle Hernández is too good a historian to skip over more permissive periods, even when they fail to serve her argument. She calls the passage of the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment the “single-largest mass naturalization action in U.S. history,” because these laws “created more than four million new African American citizens.” When white settlers in the western U.S. challenged the birthright citizenship of Chinese Americans, the Supreme Court, in its 1898 ruling United States v. Wong Kim Ark, “unambiguously affirmed” that almost all children born in the United States were citizens. (The children of Native Americans, diplomats, and occupying troops in a hypothetical invasion were exceptions.) Nobody has conclusively counted the number of Americans born to undocumented immigrants who became citizens because of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the Pew Research Center has calculated that it has exceeded 100,000 a year since at least 1990.

This past summer, in its Trump v. Barbara decision, the Supreme Court invalidated the president’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship and explicitly upheld the ruling in Wong Kim Ark. Trump’s solicitor general, D. John Sauer, argued that the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment intended to extend birthright citizenship only to freed slaves and their children. But a majority of the justices found that the language of the amendment was plain and applied to almost every person born in the United States, no matter their race or heritage. As alarming as it was that three justices sided with Trump, the decision, like earlier rulings from the top court, undermines Lytle Hernández’s idea of a whites-only immigration regime.

Often, the author downplays government action by the courts, Congress, or presidents that benefited nonwhite immigrants. As a result of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended national-origins quotas, the United States went from being 16 percent nonwhite to 40 percent nonwhite in 60 years. Lytle Hernández frames this accomplishment as the unintentional result of mistaken reassurances; President Lyndon B. Johnson, for one, announced that it was not “a revolutionary bill,” and would not change people’s daily lives. Insofar as it altered the nation’s ethnic makeup, restrictionists felt that it did change their lives—and ever since, they have considered it to be one of the worst pieces of legislation in American history.

The 1965 act contained strong, explicitly anti-racist language: “No person shall receive any preference or priority or be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of his race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence.” Lytle Hernández quotes this passage, but then immediately points out that the law left in place measures that disproportionately affected Mexican immigrants. This landmark of mid-century liberalism was another example of what the legal scholar Reva Siegel has called “preservation through transformation,” in which laws dismantling discriminatory status hierarchies could nevertheless perpetuate them. Yet the act was genuinely transformative, as were the ideas behind it. Earlier that year, Johnson had made immigration the focus of his State of the Union address. Too many people within our borders were “trapped in poverty and idleness and fear,” he said. “Let a just nation throw open to them the city of promise” by passing an immigration law that is “based on the work a man can do and not where he was born or how he spells his name.”

[Read: How the right could actually end birthright citizenship]

These ideas have animated our nation’s immigration debate as strongly as those of the restrictionists. If the 1965 law didn’t represent progress, certain conservative lawmakers and commentators would not have attempted to roll it back over the next 60 years. If there were no positive, non-racist vision of immigration law, there would have been no debate at all.

Two decades later, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act created a pathway to citizenship for close to 3 million immigrants (including more than 2 million from Mexico). Lytle Hernández says that the law, signed by President Ronald Reagan, came about because Chicana and Chicano activists “convinced” Congress to do it. In fact, support for the law came from a wide range of actors, including some conservative Latinos and Republican senators whom Lytle Hernández surely doesn’t count as immigrant-rights advocates, such as California’s Pete Wilson and South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond. The 1990 Immigration Act, passed under another Republican administration, expanded amnesty for the close relatives of immigrants whose status had been legalized in 1986, and as recently as 2007, President George W. Bush supported a comprehensive reform bill (which failed to pass).

Seen in this light, IRCA’s amnesty provision looks less like a temporary setback for white supremacy than an indicator of America’s shifting racial politics. As the alliances of the 1980s unraveled, the familiar partisan outlines came into view: a Republican Party committed to walls and deportation, and a Democratic Party that advocated for immigrant rights. But this realignment is not necessarily any more permanent than the last one.

Even Lytle Hernández’s greatest insight—the importance of federal control—cuts both ways. Washington lawyers and judges didn’t just restrict immigration rights, as she demonstrates; they also checked racist state laws, throwing sand in the gears of the whites-only machine. After Wilson left the Senate to become the governor of California, he championed Proposition 187, a law that sought to deny services and benefits to undocumented immigrants. A federal judge overturned it because national law preempted such state action. In 2012, two years after Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed S.B. 1070, which broadened state police powers to arrest undocumented immigrants, the Supreme Court struck most of the law down for the same reason.

Lytle Hernández should have given more weight to such moments not simply to tell a more balanced story, but also to help us understand why arguments for restriction failed or succeeded. She argues that racist immigration laws were beaten back by “nonwhite migrants and their advocates”—abolitionists, Chinese and Japanese individuals and organizations fighting anti-Asian policies, NAACP lawyers, and Chicano and Chicana activists and immigration attorneys. What her resisters share is that they attacked the machine from the outside. But for well over a century, insiders, including presidents and judges, have also tried to move the machine in a non-racist direction, while outsiders, including African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans, have sometimes supported restricting immigration.

Instead of exploring all these forces—liberal progress and conservative backlash, conviction and compromise, the realities of an imperfect union—Lytle Hernández has written a largely frictionless story in which racists have created immigration policies and anti-racists have achieved limited gains, sometimes by accident. There’s plenty of truth to that story, but toppling the machine will require a broad-based movement that wrestles more fully with the messiness of our country’s history.

By glossing over liberal victories and minimizing the efforts of reformers apart from a few, mostly doomed activists, Lytle Hernández makes a stronger case for defeatism than optimism. Historians like to say that the past is contingent, not predetermined. Much of Lytle Hernández’s previous work has demonstrated that proposition brilliantly. If immigration policy has been a machine, it has been a paradoxical one: rickety yet terrifying, subject to spasms of reform, deeply racist yet unable to settle forever who is “in” and who is “out.” This machine has been abused, patched up, and manipulated to serve nefarious goals. It has also been repaired, and bent toward justice. If today’s machine is toppled, history teaches us that whatever replaces it will inevitably be forged in the fires of democracy, messy and incomplete.

Some Revised Scenes From The Social Network

2026-10-12T07:00:00-04:00

The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s sequel to The Social Network, is now in theaters. I, for one, think that making a whole new movie is not the best way to tell the continuing story of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Why not do instead what Zuckerberg himself is doing—take the social network we have and just make it worse? Below, please find my script for the revised The Social Network. (Aaron Sorkin, you are welcome to use any of this if you want to make a third movie!)

Sean Parker, from Napster: A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what is?

Mark Zuckerberg: A million dollars—donated to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund?

Mark Zuckerberg’s ex Erica: You’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because of the pervert glasses.

The Winklevoss twins are rowing in a tank. We pan out to reveal that Mark Zuckerberg is right behind them, working out just as hard.

Mark Zuckerberg: Eduardo, I need the code you used for ranking chess players.

Eduardo Saverin, Facebook’s co-founder: Sure.

Mark Zuckerberg: We’re ranking women. And then we’re going to build a whole network around this. And then to keep people on that network we’ve built, we’ll create a black-box algorithm that pushes rage-inducing—sorry, borderline—content onto users’ feeds to drive engagement, even if it fuels the rise of conspiracy theories, misogyny, and violence.

Eduardo Saverin: Can we go back to the ranking-women part?

Mark Zuckerberg sits at his computer, reloading the screen again and again. Yup, the policies that formerly flagged dehumanizing speech about protected characteristics have been successfully removed in time for Trump’s second term! Also, Erica has not added him as a friend yet.

Erica: Dating you is like dating a StairMaster.

Mark Zuckerberg: Sounds excellent. An experience lots of people will want to have. Actually, that’s an idea. Why shouldn’t everyone you interact with be a robot? I am writing this down.

(Mark Zuckerberg scribbles on a window) Buy … Vine … then … destroy … it.

The Justin Timberlake character: A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what is?

Mark Zuckerberg: Floating leglessly in a joyless void.

The Justin Timberlake character: Um.

Mark Zuckerberg: Having a hole in you that nothing can fill, absolutely nothing, no amount of money, no amount of power, no amount of mixed martial arts, so that when the business that has made you billions of dollars but has cost other people their lives and sanity comes under any kind of scrutiny or attempts at regulation, you feel like you’re the victim.

Sean Parker: I was going to say “a billion dollars.”

Mark Zuckerberg: (staring dead-eyed into the camera) A billion dollars won’t fix anything.

What Hasan Piker Believes

2026-10-12T07:00:00-04:00

About a year and a half ago, Hasan Piker, the left-wing activist and streamer, was hailed as the Democratic Party’s Joe Rogan—an influencer who can reach young men. A wave of gushy profiles paid more attention to Piker’s physique than to his habit of making impolitic comments. The New York Times’ entry in the genre was titled “A Progressive Mind in a Body Made for the ‘Manosphere.’”

Piker has since been welcomed, with notable holdouts, into the Democratic Party coalition. He has appeared with multiple Democrats on the stump, and has boasted that several others privately seek his counsel. Vanity Fair named Piker one of the 50 most influential people in America. He sees his influence as extending even to candidates who have not aligned with him publicly, pledging to pressure James Talarico to side with the left should Talarico win his Senate race in Texas. (“We have to remind him that we are the force that backed him both early on, and we are the force that allowed him to win this seat of power, and if he wants to maintain it, he’s got to play ball.”)

The predominant Democratic Party view of Piker was perhaps expressed by the Pod Save America host Jon Lovett, who told him last month on the liberal podcast, “My view is: I am part of a pro-democracy coalition in the fight against fascism, and it includes everyone from former Republicans like Nicolle Wallace and Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell, it includes establishment politicians, it includes Neera Tanden, it includes Shannon Watts, it includes AOC and Bernie, and it includes voices on the left like you.”

Piker’s stratospheric ascent—he now earns seven figures from his Twitch stream—and grandiose ambitions have made him the target of recriminations from a handful of suspicious Democratic Party moderates, as well as a recurrent villain for Fox News, which has attempted to turn him into the party’s face. Those critics have tended to recirculate a handful of Piker’s most outrageous statements, some of which—saying America deserved 9/11, and calling Orthodox Jews “inbred”—he has retracted and apologized for. Piker has complained that the mainstream media cover him but rarely deign to speak with him. Seeing that as a reasonable grievance, when he invited me on his show, I invited him to instead do an interview with The Atlantic. He accepted, before postponing the interview and then ultimately canceling it.

[Elaine Godfrey: The Hasan Piker question]

As I prepared for the interview by researching his commentary, I realized that Piker is right to complain that the handful of frequently repeated controversial statements fail to accurately represent his worldview. In fact, it’s much worse than those quotes suggest.

The most important problem with inviting Piker to join the pro-democracy coalition is that, by any reasonable definition of the term, he does not believe in democracy.

Piker declared at a debate this year, “I say we put the power back in the hands of the many rather than the power in the hands of the few. If a dictatorship is inevitable, I’d rather have it be a dictatorship of the proletariat than one that is designed around the needs of the bourgeois class.” On his Twitch stream he has said: “I love Lenin. I love Fidel Castro. And I love Che Guevara. They are genuinely fucking heroes.”

When asked to cite an example of socialism that he admires, Piker replied, “China is probably the closest,” while conceding that “there are still plenty of failures within the Chinese system.” Although he cites China’s economic model, rather than its single-party Communist regime, as the source of his admiration, other countries have exhibited the same rapid industrialization without attracting Piker’s fawning praise.

He has dismissed Mao’s campaign of mass terror as mere mistakes. “Do I believe that it was intentional? No, I don’t believe that it was intentional.” In fact, as the Brookings scholar Kenneth Lieberthal, who has taught a course on China under communism at the University of Michigan, told me, “Mao never shied away from violence among Chinese civilians to achieve his goals, and he never expressed regret for any deaths that occurred as a result of his initiatives.”

Piker has extensively praised economic development in North Korea, a country that he has acknowledged engages in repression, while maintaining that “it’s certainly not as bad as the way that Western media presents it.” In one segment marveling at economic development in the Stalinist kingdom, where even the slightest acts of dissent are met with confinement and torture, he said, “It is fucking mind-boggling to me that a country so fucking poor and so distraught, a country that withstood a fucking genocide, could get to this level, dude. Like, how does this not make you mad as an American citizen? How does this not fucking piss you off, where you look at this shit and you’re like, if they can do it, why the fuck can’t we?” Piker concluded by saying that North Korea’s achievement “shows you that a better future is possible for all of us.”

Piker does acknowledge shortcomings in the Communist regimes he defends, but treats their millions of victims as the tragic cost of progress. This contrasts with his treatment of anti-communists, which is marked by unsparing contempt. He has proclaimed his hatred for NATO on the grounds that it opposed communism: “Of course I am anti-NATO. NATO is designed with the explicit intent of being an anti-Communist institution.”

In one especially revealing episode, he attacked a refugee from Vietnam. Piker’s stream typically includes snippets of videos that he and his audience watch together, interspersed with his own commentary. As the video showed the refugee saying “We have endured suffering under the Communist regime,” he threw back his head in disbelief and began to rant: “Okay, fuck you, dude. I mean seriously, fuck you, old lady. Shut the fuck up, you stupid fucking idiotic old lady with your stupid fucking gamer headest. Who has fucked you harder, America or fuckin’ Ho Chi Minh? Suck my dick, old lady. Goddamn, dude. Fuck this refugee.”

Alongside his pro-Marxist-Leninist principles, the second pillar of Piker’s worldview is anti-Zionism. This does not distinguish him from other progressives. What does distinguish him is his belief that American Jews who do not share his position deserve punishment.

“In a totally just world, regardless of your background, any kind of fucking Zionist tendency should be treated in the same way as being a fucking rabid neo-Nazi,” he has said. Piker attracted attention when he recently predicted, “If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action—not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”

The two statements in combination have dire implications for American Jews. A recent poll found that, while about two-thirds of American Jews oppose the current Israeli-government policy toward the West Bank and Gaza, more than 70 percent describe themselves as very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel. Piker’s argument that “any kind of fucking Zionist tendency”—which includes the many Zionists who strongly criticize Israeli policy—should be treated as akin to Nazism, and that American Jewish affinity with the Jewish state invites anti-Semitism, would justify subjecting Jewish Americans to ostracism and abuse.

Piker’s second and more recent comment drew predictable condemnation from several leading Democrats. Piker has depicted this response as puppetry orchestrated by the Israel lobby.

[James Kirchick: In defense of guilt by association]

“Aipac boss call was made,” he wrote on X. When Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress, said that Piker was not helping the Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to win his campaign in Michigan, Piker replied, “You should probably stop highlighting and ‘legitimizing’ reactionary framing and republican attacks against abdul from a ‘nominally liberal’ perspective but i guess your donors w financial ties to tel aviv don’t want you to stop.” The notion that any opposition to his ideas must be evidence of hidden control, exercised by wealthy Jews, is a classic anti-Semitic trope.

Some of these comments have largely been taken as confirmation that Piker is essentially a shock jock. His defenders see these rude remarks as the unavoidable cost of having a popular media personality to amplify the Democrats’ message. “Some segments of the Democratic coalition would find Piker to be edgy, or crass, or even despicable. But, if ‘Rogan of the left’ is to mean anything, it would surely mean a higher tolerance for controversy, even at the risk of alienating parts of the base,” a New Yorker profile concluded in March 2025.

But unlike Rogan, who is foremost an entertainer and who lacks grounding in any serious ideology, Piker sees his work as advancing a long-term political project.

He tends to analyze his work most openly when he gives interviews about his Twitch stream, rather than on the program itself. When he is speaking to his audience, he falls into a frat-boy patois laden with generous helpings of profanity. When he is speaking about his show, he employs more sophisticated language and concepts.

“I am, at the end of the day, someone who is engaging in—and this is a Marxist term that a lot of people get mad at, because they don’t understand that propaganda is supposed to be a neutral term in its inception—but this is agitative propaganda,” Piker told Vox last month. Agitative propaganda—or, as it is more commonly known, agitprop—is a term derived from the department of agitation and propaganda, which the Soviets created in the 1920s to instill communist thinking in workers and peasants. The method is not generally known for its faithful adherence to truth and accuracy.

Piker describes his role as the spearhead of a long-term persuasion campaign to build power through gradual means. “I want to, through a system of, at first, modest social democratic reforms, basically claw back autonomy for the everyday person and hopefully give them more of a voice in their workplace and in the political process as well, and slowly but surely, yield more egalitarian outcomes,” he told Ross Douthat a year ago.

Piker frequently derides liberalism as a failed ideology. In an interview this past spring with Trevor Noah, he explained that voters who think they’re liberal are actually suffering from false consciousness.

“They self-identify as liberals because they don’t really understand what that means. If you were to pick apart their worldview and offer them a little bit of political education, you might find that they’re actually not liberals at all. Maybe they’re socialists, maybe they’re Marxists, maybe they have a different ideological tendency than liberalism, which is basically just the monoculture that we’ve taken for granted,” he said.

He considers the Democratic Party essentially a hollow shell, its governing ideology a kind of mindless vestige to which its voters have no authentic attachment, one that he and his allies can easily replace. This strategy requires Piker and his allies to gain a foothold within the party in order to ultimately capture it. He actively campaigned for several left-wing Democrats, especially El-Sayed. “During the 10 days I spent in the Midwest ahead of the primary vote, Piker was everywhere,” my colleague Helen Lewis reported.

When El-Sayed’s Republican opponent began to tie him to some of Piker’s more infamous remarks, Piker responded pragmatically to contain the damage. He apologized for having said that America deserved 9/11, claiming that the remark was taken out of context. He dismissed comments about hating the United States: “It’s laughable to say guys like myself, guys like Abdul El-Sayed, we hate America.” (In fact, Piker has expressed this precise sentiment, or iterations of it, many, many times.)

El-Sayed responded by acting as though Piker were simply a media figure to whom he had given an interview, rather than his campaign wingman. He described Piker as “a streamer in California,” and said he would have “a conversation” with any media figure with whom he disagrees, as if campaigning with someone were just like talking on Fox News.

Piker has cooperated with this message. He has repeatedly referred to himself as “a Twitch streamer,” mocking his critics for being so small-minded as to pay any attention to his beliefs. Republicans “centering their midterm strategy around a twitch streamer no one knows was extra dumb,” he wrote on X. His go-to line in response to any important piece of news has been to mock Democrats for complaining about his influence. In response to a story about deaths in the Iran war, he posted, “will the democrats demand accountability and transparency on this issue, or will they continue crying about a twitch streamer?”

[Toluse Olorunnipa and Elaine Godfrey: What El-Sayed does next matters]

The notable thing about this rhetorical pivot is that it requires Piker to belittle himself as irrelevant and unworthy of attention. That depiction hardly comports with the seriousness with which he has previously described his influence, but it does show a level of message discipline and commitment to the cause. CNN reported last week that El-Sayed had recently spoken with Piker and “warned his rhetoric was costing El-Sayed votes, asking him to stop.”

Do not expect Piker’s reticence to continue after Election Day. There is little reason to trust his current self-presentation as a mere Twitch streamer who is too obscure to merit discussion. He sees himself as a representative voice of a movement that can take control of a major party, and then the country itself.

Describing the Democratic Party to Noah, Piker said: “That’s a weak party. That’s a party that you can seize. That’s a party that you can take advantage of.” Many earnest liberals see Piker as a handy megaphone who can convey their message to an elusive constituency. Piker, however, is not so much joining the team as sizing it up as prey.

Americans Aren’t Spending Their Retirement Savings

2026-10-12T07:00:00-04:00

When my father died, more than 20 years ago, he left my mother with a paid-off Philadelphia apartment, a modest pension, Social Security, and $1.6 million in retirement and brokerage accounts. My mother lived well, but frugally. She loved a Saturday at the boutiques but never got over waiting for a sale. She delighted in orchids but would buy them from only Trader Joe’s, where the blooms could be had for $10.99. “They last longer,” she’d argue. And once a year, she would ask me to go over her budget to make sure she was doing okay. “More than okay,” I’d tell her. My brothers and I encouraged her to spend—to take that trip, to redo that bedroom. But she limited herself to the pension and Social Security checks and the interest she was earning while refusing to touch the principal. When she passed away two years ago, she no longer had the $1.6 million my father left. She had $1.7 million.

My mother’s behavior turns out to be quite common. A landmark 2018 study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute found that the median individual with more than $500,000 in savings had, 20 years into retirement, spent just 12 percent of that sum. And a Corebridge/Greenwald Research survey of older adults with at least $100,000 showed that only 28 percent were comfortable watching their savings taper off to cover living expenses, ostensibly exactly what the money was saved for in the first place.

This is a problem—not just for retirees but for the country. Savers who forgo gratification for decades end up not enjoying the money they’ve worked so hard to set aside. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy suffers as all of that money sits under the proverbial mattress instead of being spent.

[Charley Locke: Retirement gets harder the longer you wait]

Why do retirees refuse to spend their retirement savings? One answer is fear. People worry that they’ll live too long, that inflation will rise, that a bear market will hit at the worst possible time. Another answer is habit. After decades of disciplined saving to reach a target number, flipping the switch to spending feels uncomfortable to many and just plain wrong to others. Seeing one’s number move in the opposite direction feels more like losing money than spending it.

The result is that retirement-account balances are treated like other precious items, which is to say they’re hoarded. Suzanne Shu, a marketing professor at Cornell, has studied when and how we consume things we consider special—bottles of better-than-average wine or boxes of pricey chocolate, gift certificates to favorite restaurants or spas—and found that we’re so afraid of using them too soon that we might never use them at all. The wine goes bad, the gift cards expire, and the chocolates develop that odd, whitish coating. And the retirement account goes unspent.

Since 1992, the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study has tracked a group of 20,000 people, all over 50, through time. (New subjects are periodically added as others die or stop responding.) Every two years, these individuals and couples are questioned on a huge variety of topics related to health and retirement, including work, family, caregiving, disability, cognitive changes, divorce and widowhood, and, yes, spending. Using this data set, the researchers have identified what they call a “retirement consumption gap.” Huge numbers of retirees are spending less—sometimes far less—than they could afford to spend for the rest of their life without fear of running out. For middle-income Americans, the gap is about 8 percent, or about $8,000 a year on average. That’s a car payment, a vacation, a whole lot of dinners with friends. Wealthier retirees, meanwhile, are spending as much as 53 percent less than they could afford. A gap remains even when plans to leave a legacy or reserve money for health care are counted as spending. Bucket lists everywhere are suffering.

And so is the wider economy. We can see this by looking at pensions, which retirees tend to spend because—unlike having a lump of money sitting in a bank account—they know that another payment is coming. According to a study by the National Institute on Retirement Security, in 2022, 26 million retirees received more than $680 billion in pension benefits. As they used it for rent, groceries, vacations, home repairs, and everything else on their lists, the money in turn generated $1.5 trillion in economic impact. The funds paying out those pensions contain just more than a quarter of the money held in America’s retirement accounts. If we apply the same math and assume that every dollar used translates into $2.28 in economic activity, then $52 trillion of potential consumption is sitting in the hands of the country’s retirees, much of it not being spent.

Americans hold about $20 trillion in IRAs (most of which is held by retirees) and another $15 trillion in 401(k)s and other defined contribution plans (35 to 45 percent of which is held by retirees). According to the economists David Blanchett and Michael Finke, retired couples spend only about 50 percent of withdrawals (including mandatory distributions) from investment accounts, compared with 80 percent of guaranteed-income payments such as pensions and Social Security. In that way, the retirement consumption gap is essentially a lagging byproduct of the corporate shift from pensions, which employers paid for, to 401(k)s, which employees mostly fund themselves, in the 1980s and ’90s. This transition was supercharged by the Pension Protection Act of 2006, which allowed employers to automatically enroll workers in a 401(k).

One way to close the retirement consumption gap, then, is for retirement savers to think about some of their assets as pensions and then, upon retirement, to convert them into a source of stable income—what I call a “forever paycheck.” In my new book, I recommend converting enough to cover both the needs and the discretionary wants that retirees aren’t willing to give up, generally about one-quarter to one-third of that nest egg.

[Faith Hill: The sneaky-saver generation]

A forever paycheck can be built with investments that spill off income—dividend-paying stocks, say, or a bond ladder. Or it can be bought with annuities, a category of insurance products through which a lump sum of money, deposited either all at once or over time, is used to provide a lifetime stream of income. Annuities trade away the potential upside of an investment account in favor of certainty that investments cannot provide; they have long been criticized for high fees and unnecessary complication. But these vehicles have become both more transparent and cheaper in recent years. The movement of big 401(k) providers, including Vanguard, Fidelity, and BlackRock, into the annuity market means that fees will likely go down even more in the future.

For most people, having somewhat less money but actually spending it leads to a better quality of life than having more money that they’re scared to touch. It might even lead to a better quantity of life. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper looked at the choices made by 600,000 retirees in Chile, where citizens can either annuitize their retirement payout, locking in a fixed payment for life, or opt for phased withdrawal that varies with the markets. Annuitization guarantees that the money will last as long as they do. Phased withdrawal offers upside, but retirees can also run out. The researchers found that those who chose the annuity had substantially lower mortality rates both five years and 10 years later. They also spent more money on health care and reported lower rates of disability.

Living paycheck to paycheck—a phrase that has been around since at least 1948, when it appeared in a Communist campaign pamphlet entitled “How to Make Your Vote Count”—has always had a negative connotation. It suggests surviving, not forging ahead. Treading financial water. That feeling is understandable during someone’s prime working and accumulation years. But when the time comes to reap the rewards of saving, living paycheck to paycheck turns out to be a pretty good idea.

The Only Thing the Houthis Have Done Successfully

2026-10-11T19:40:00-04:00

Yesterday in Riyadh, a missile fired by Yemen’s Houthis struck King Khalid International Airport, killed 13 people, and wounded hundreds more. Attacks in the previous week had killed four others. Because Saudi Arabia has been trying for years to shed its reputation for austerity and discomfort, a sterile, boring airport with overpriced pastries and harsh lighting is a national accomplishment. The strike turned that airport into chaos, its floors streaked with blood and lounges billowing with smoke. The Houthi military spokesman announced that the attacks would continue on a reciprocal basis—“airport for airport, siege for siege, and escalation for escalation”—until the Houthis achieve their stated goals: the “death” of America, Israel, and their allies, and an apocalyptic victory for Islam. Escalation, in other words, is assured. The Houthis hit the Riyadh airport again today.

Saudi Arabia’s ongoing self-transformation during the past decade has involved trading cosmic goals—the spread of Sunni Islam over the world—for more modest local ones, such as opening specialty coffee shops in Jeddah and hosting pro-wrestling contests in Riyadh. (The two most prominent international events in the coming weeks in Saudi Arabia are an investment conference and World Wrestling Entertainment’s “Crown Jewel.”) One can imagine the frustration that Saudis feel, just as they try to exit the game of global religious domination, to be pulled back in by a neighbor far more zealous than they ever were. The Houthis “are on a divine mission,” Nadwa Al-Dawsari, an independent Yemeni researcher, told me last year. That mission, she said, is to “keep the war going, at least until Jerusalem.” Negotiation, for them, consists of tactical delay, so they can resume the fight and fight harder. “Why would they want a deal when they can get everything?”

Earlier this week the Houthis’ leader, Abd al-Malik al-Houthi, delivered a typically long-winded denunciation of the Saudis. He devoted the bulk of it to condemning the Saudis for doing exactly what the Houthis have just done openly: targeting civilians. This decade-long conflict has indeed been characterized by a lengthy series of atrocities. Abd al-Malik listed alleged Saudi attacks against weddings, funerals, and homes—the total death toll far exceeding the missiles in Riyadh—and concluded that the Saudis were not Muslims at all but “Zionists” who follow “Satan.” He mentioned an attack on a market in Taiz, and said “there is absolutely no justification for targeting such a place,” because “it was a market, not a military camp.”

Riyadh’s airport is also a civilian target, but I suppose because the Houthis think they are fighting Satan, they are willing to excuse their own hypocrisy. (Here you can watch a group of travelers, dressed for pilgrimage to Mecca, blown off their feet.) What’s clear from the entire arc of the Houthis’ rise is that they are, as Al-Dawsari suggested, unwilling to negotiate, let alone go away or enter into what the Houthi leader describes as “an honourable peace with the Yemeni people,” “founded on good neighborly relations and mutual respect.” Sensible Saudi leaders would appease or join the Houthis, he said, but instead “they follow the Satanic approach.”

Iran must be happy. Recently, Donald Trump has taken to gloating about the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which now flows with oil traffic at near prewar rates. But the entire Iranian “Axis of Resistance”—the coordinate group including the Houthis, Iraqi Shiite militias, Hamas, and Hezbollah—was meant, as one American official put it to me, to be a keyboard on which many notes could be played, with rhythms able to keep the United States and its allies off the beat. Israel’s initial attacks against Iran in 2025 were an attempt to shoot the piano player. Iran has not only survived but also bragged that it has a surfeit of targets to select from. It is not a coincidence that just as Trump was congratulating himself for opening the strait last week, U.S. bombers had to scramble off the tarmac because of reported threats of an Iranian attack at RAF Fairford in England.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has a reputation for erratic decisions—sudden, apparently whim-driven plans to invest heavily in particular sectors, to pick fights with neighbors, or to oppress or kill this or that critic of his rule. This reputation is not entirely fair. He has been consistent, and indeed reasonable, in seeking, above all else, a path toward economic development uninterrupted by war or tumult. The main effect of this campaign by the Houthis is to disrupt that path. The Houthis are holding Saudi Arabia’s transition hostage by doing the only thing they have ever done successfully: fighting. It is not obvious that anyone has enough of a corresponding appetite for war to stop them.

Admiral McRaven: Public Execution Is Shameless and Ignoble

2026-10-11T14:07:00-04:00

A 62-grain, 5.56-mm round leaves the barrel of a standard-issue M4 rifle at approximately 2,900 feet per second. When it strikes a human being, the results are violent, traumatic, and unpredictable. If Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has his way, such images will soon be broadcast to the American people. The Pentagon has announced that the execution of Nidal Hasan, the Army officer convicted of killing 13 fellow service members in a 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, in Texas, will be livestreamed.

According to Amnesty International, 17 people were publicly executed in 2025. Eleven of these were in Iran and six in Afghanistan. Is this what we have become? Iran? Afghanistan? Are we so weak, so insecure, that we must convince the world that we are still powerful by making a public spectacle of an execution? Or maybe Secretary Hegseth and President Trump intend this as a spectacle for the American people: a show of just how much testosterone the two men have surging through their veins.

No one should shed a tear for Hasan. I certainly won’t. But if Hegseth thinks that this public display will somehow deter others from horrible acts of violence, he is mistaken. Terrorists seek attention above all. Publicizing Hasan’s death therefore could incite other extremists to do equally egregious acts. And it adds to the narrative, advanced by our enemies and ever more worrying to our allies, that the United States has lost its way.

When Osama bin Laden was killed, President Obama made a point of not releasing photographs of his body. “It’s not who we are,” he said. All of us who were involved in the operation agreed. Not sharing the pictures was a recognition that we are better than the inhuman beings who do unconscionable things, that there was a difference between a legitimate exercise of government authority and a public display of coercive power. Now, with this announcement, we are lowering ourselves to the ranks of brutal and failing regimes.

I teach a graduate class on national-security decision making. I give my students a framework for thinking about how to make difficult decisions. The first question they have to answer before they can get to the right decision is: Who are we as a nation? It is an acknowledgment that all correct decisions, those that will benefit us in the long run, will flow from an understanding of our American values.

Our values as a nation matter. It’s not naive to think that we should have a sense of propriety when carrying out the harsh business of justice; to believe in our national sense of honor; and to expect our leaders to behave with dignity, integrity, civility, and humility. These values build stronger, smarter, more humane societies. They engender good alliances. They drive trust in businesses and higher education and they inspire our men and women in uniform.

In almost 40 years of service, I came to realize that Americans share a common longing to be seen as the good guys. We were proud that our parents or grandparents fought against Nazism and fascism. As a nation, we stood tall against totalitarianism and communism. A younger generation sacrificed to keep America safe after 9/11. We made mistakes along the way; we always do. But despite these stumbles, inevitable in a complicated and violent world, I never once doubted that within our DNA was a sense of nobility that shaped the American character.

There is nothing noble about a public display of a government-sanctioned execution. With this decision, the Trump administration continues to undermine our national values. Our current leaders are shameless and ignoble. They have no sense of dignity or honor. They seem to believe that the performance of cruel power is what makes a nation great: the spectacle, the show, the crude theatrics of a tough guy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just ask the oppressed people of Iran and Afghanistan.

A Spot-On SNL Parody About Men Who Can’t Deal With Time’s Passage

2026-10-11T13:42:00-04:00

Even if you don’t know much country music, you likely know how much the genre loves the trope of the weepy father at his daughter’s wedding. In the best sketch of last night’s Saturday Night Live, the father of the bride was played by the host, Shane Gillis, but he wasn’t reflecting on life’s heavy milestones. Instead, he was thinking about “all the cool shit I can put in her room.”

As narrated by a Rascal Flatts–esque band (composed of Andrew Dismukes, James Austin Johnson, and Tommy Brennan), the dad imagined everything he was going to put in his new man cave: a Ms. Pac-Man machine and a pinball machine; a drum set that he swore he would finally learn to play; a life-size cutout of Shaquille O’Neal; a bottle of lotion and box of tissues (a bit stolen from the Paul Rudd film I Love You, Man); a House box set; a cotton-candy machine.

A child’s wedding is a joyous occasion, a new chapter for the family. But any beginning also reminds us that time’s arrow stubbornly points in only one direction. The sketch smartly underscored how many American men use consumer goods to distract themselves from anxieties about aging and the creeping sense that life may pass them by. Why deal with your uneasy feelings when you can finally afford the replica of a Star Wars stormtrooper you’ve wanted—nay, deserved—since you were a teenager? The hit of dopamine from a shopping spree is certainly more fun than wrestling with where your life currently stands.

The best SNL song sketches expand on a central idea as the parody progresses, commenting on the characters’ comedic dilemmas. They also need to nail the musical references (Tim McGraw, Alan Jackson, Zac Brown, and, yes, Rascal Flatts have all released songs on this theme, something that the southerners Dismukes and Johnson are likely aware of). In last night’s sketch, we learned that Gillis’s presumably long-suffering wife (Ashley Padilla) “hates my room / we’re drifting apart,” and that she’s becoming a bit too close with her Zumba instructor, Tad (Marcello Hernández), “who’s actually pretty cool”—an off-hand remark from a man too clueless to see what’s coming next. Whatever you think about him, last night’s host was well equipped for this exploration of male obliviousness.

[Read: What Shane Gillis proved on SNL]

In 2019, Gillis was set to join SNL before some of his old offensive jokes resurfaced and NBC rescinded the offer. Gillis apologized for the material, and SNL’s creator, Lorne Michaels, indicated that the casting decision was out of his hands. Michaels seems to have some lingering regrets about how it all went down; last night was Gillis’s third time hosting. But this overcorrection is arguably not doing Gillis many favors, as the episode often demonstrated his limitations as a comedian. He flubbed most of his lines—and cursed—in a sketch parodying Green Eggs and Ham, then apologized “about earlier” during the episode’s closing goodbyes.

Gillis tends to embody characters who aren’t actively hateful or toxic but just a little confused about society’s changing social mores and unsure about what they’re allowed to say. But Gillis, who lacks the dexterity of clear influences such as Louis C.K. and Dave Chappelle, can’t consistently pull off that tricky balance of thoughtfulness and provocation. During his opening monologue, in a bit about struggling to seem nonthreatening when he encounters a woman on an otherwise solitary hike, he lost the audience after saying, “I haven’t been to the gym in so long I didn’t know women just dress like whores now?” (I’ll spare you his description of women’s modern athleisure wear.) By that point, the crowd was so cold he couldn’t win it back with a clever closing riff about society’s polarization and the dangers of ambiguous haircuts: “You’re either gay or you’re Hitler, and isn’t that where we’re at as a country?”

Still, Gillis has become a successful touring comedian, mostly because he is very good at expressing the immaturity, simmering hostility, and general dunderheadedness of a certain strain of American manhood. His best sketches from last night made use of that meathead persona, as when he played a jerky police officer hosting the discussion show Cop Talk and the manager of an HVAC company that prided itself on having the most off-putting employees you would ever encounter.

But the wedding-song sketch stood out because it zeroed in on the stunted emotional life of Gillis’s character and then mocked it relentlessly. After his wife left him for Tad, he decided to build an even bigger room of one’s own (“Super Room Rocks!”), but when the impromptu construction project exposed him to black mold, he began “tripping balls.” The story eventually took an unexpectedly frisky turn before the episode’s kicker revealed this entire misadventure was a dream sequence that began after he forgot to help his daughter and wife pack up the moving van—a sly commentary on the character’s misplaced priorities.

It’s hard to say whether Gillis found success because he’s secretly very perceptive about the state of modern masculinity or because he’s unafraid to admit just how unperceptive he is about the modern world. Either way, last night’s song fulfilled the country-music imperative of “three chords and the truth”: a catchy ballad about how many men are emotionally stunted and unable to deal with aging and change, and will instead retreat into materialism and adolescent interests rather than reconcile with life’s relentless momentum.

I Thought I Was Good at Something

2026-10-11T12:00:00-04:00

and then I lose an hour to those billiard-trick-shot videos,
magnificent, their impossible spins, flawless timing,
the punctuated clunk of the corner pockets like God exhaling
just a little. I lose another hour watching and another.
Months evaporate this way. There’s the one where the cue ball
kisses every single solid in procession as if in a receiving line
before sinking the eight. There’s the simple shot, a spin
so hard, the cue circles back on itself only a few inches
away to sink a ball exactly behind it. If I eat I don’t remember
having done so. If I have lovers they haven’t called. If I have
a name I will need you to remind me. But then it’s today
and something snaps in me like a glowstick, bright
and temporary. My mother phones and starts talking about
identifying possum tracks in the snow. Isn’t it summer?
I think and venture out in the city. I get on the train, head
to whatever job I recall having had but still the world is here
too much and like an eclipse it’s bad for you to look at directly,
the naked tenderness of the men reading self-help books
on the train—all their failures and desires written
right there on the covers. I surface to the streets of this city
made crazy with commuters, how perfect we are, moving
toward what it is we chase. How one by one
we drop into the manholes on the corners with a clunk.

Yet Another Literary Prizewinner Seems to Be AI

2026-10-11T10:00:00-04:00

Because literary journals tend to have small circulations, few readers are likely to have come across “The Whistleblower,” a short story by the Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza. Published in 2021 in a journal called Transition, the story is a taut and closely observed political thriller in miniature. Its narrator, a sharp but inexperienced computer-science graduate in Harare, Zimbabwe, encounters an intelligence officer at the mall—a former teacher of his—who now wants something from him. At first, the graduate is nervous for what turns out to be the wrong reason: “I’d had a brief relationship with his niece Agatha and I wasn’t sure whether he knew about this or how he felt about it if he did.”

A more recent story with Kundizeza’s name on it, “The Blue Fighter,” will surely find its way to more readers. Last week, it was named the winner of the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing, which awards 10,000 British pounds (about $13,000) for a short story by an African writer. Some previous winners, including Namwali Serpell and NoViolet Bulawayo, are now among the world’s most celebrated authors.

Taste is subjective, but trust me, this story is bad—maudlin and full of tired tropes. Here, the Zimbabwean narrator is the son of a hapless father who squanders the family’s money trying to breed fish in tanks, to the mother’s chagrin. “‘We can’t afford this house anymore,’ she said one evening, placing the notice in front of him while he tested the seal on his newest creation,” the story reads. “Not with anger, but with the quiet resignation of someone who had known all along this moment would come.” At the end, the narrator compares the last remaining fish to his family: “Not broken, just learning how to live differently. Alone, sometimes. But still moving. Still here.”

That this narrator has all the personality of a chatbot is probably not coincidental. The AI detector Pangram flags almost the entire story as AI-generated; a notable exception is its epigraph, also about a father with a fish fixation, which is excerpted from what’s described as an unpublished poem by Vangile Gantsho. This isn’t the first prize-winning story to be flagged by Pangram. It comes after similar scandals over this year’s Commonwealth Prize and Prix Goncourt—two other renowned literature contests—in which Pangram flagged AI use among finalists.

In the case of the Commonwealth Prize, one of them eventually won; the Prix Goncourt pulled a writer from consideration after suspected AI use was compounded by plagiarism allegations over his earlier work. Any of these incidents might have been written off as a fluke. Together, they point to something of a crisis of trust—in both writers and technology—that threatens to undermine a global system of literary recognition.

[Read: The literary AI scandal that changes everything]

AI detection is fallible, which has raised concerns among some readers and writers about the prospect of false positives. But Pangram, which uses AI for its classification of text, is highly accurate: The company says its tool mistakenly labels human text as AI in about one in 24,000 cases; outside research also finds false positives to be extremely rare. When I ran all 25 of the previous Caine Prize-winning stories through Pangram, it labeled them as 100 percent human-written; the same is true of Kundizeza’s “The Whistleblower.”

I reached out to Kundizeza about Pangram’s assessment of “The Blue Fighter” through his agent, Adrienne Ingrum at the Serendipity Literary Agency. She wrote that Regina Brooks, the agency’s CEO, would send me “evidence that the author and we at Serendipity are completely confident that the story is Simba’s own work.” Neither Ingrum nor Brooks followed up before publication.

I also spoke at length with Ellah Wakatama, who chairs the Caine Prize’s board of trustees. Wakatama, a longtime book editor, told me that AI-generated fiction is not eligible for the prize. As soon as she learned of an inquiry I’d sent about the Pangram assessment of Kundizeza’s story, she and her colleagues initiated an investigation and contacted the author. Wakatama told me that she and a colleague will interview the prize judges, and that she’ll reread Kundizeza’s story and talk with him in detail about his methods. She added that a colleague has been in contact with Kundizeza’s agent about whether a verification process might include, say, reviewing previous drafts.

Yet Wakatama forcefully rejected the notion that an AI detector could, or should, be used to gauge AI involvement. “My stance, as the person who leads the prize, is that if there is such an accusation, I want proof that does not come from a machine.” She said she planned to approach Kundizeza with “compassion” and the presumption of honesty. Wakatama is also Zimbabwean. “As an African,” she said, “my first stance is, if I ask you, Are you telling the truth? and if you say yes, I am going to believe you—especially because the accusers are not coming from amongst our own people.”

Wakatama remarked on details in Kundizeza’s story that strike her as so typically Zimbabwean that a Zimbabwean must have written them: the shame of moving from a nice suburb to a less privileged township; how the mother’s initial forbearance with the father gives way to taking matters into her own hands. Wakatama also perceives multiple layers of meaning. She doesn’t think AI models are capable of that kind of cultural or literary nuance.

[Read: The Pangram backlash unfolding on college campuses]

But then, she acknowledged that she doesn’t use AI or AI detectors. “My first response when somebody asks me to use AI is that I think about water and energy,” she said—that is, AI companies’ excessive use of both. “That honestly overwhelms me, and I don’t want to.”

Wakatama isn’t involved in choosing the Caine Prize winner—a panel of judges reads all the submissions—but her approach to AI is common among organizations that award prizes or other honors to writers. Partly, this is a pragmatic response to the risk of false positives. “Our legal parameters don’t allow us to contest the honesty of our writers just because a tool says that,” Razmi Farook, the director-general of the Commonwealth Foundation, told me during the scandal over its prize.

But this wariness also reflects a general aversion, in literary and arts circles, to engaging with AI products, even if just to understand them better—including Pangram. The start-up’s product itself is based on AI, and it belongs to the Silicon Valley ecosystem; the company recently raised $50 million in funding, according to a person familiar with the deal.

The skepticism is easy to understand, but it might be shortsighted. Research suggests that the people most familiar with AI output excel at sniffing it out. I’ve covered AI for almost a decade, and have written fiction for even longer; in short, I’ve had plenty of exposure to both literature and chatbot output. I know from experience that, for example, AI models aren’t terrible at picking up on cultural details.

When I read “The Blue Fighter,” I was struck by the proliferation of language that is common in AI-produced writing: the not x, but y sentence constructions; the glut of metaphors; the platitudinous aphorisms. “Anger burns out eventually,” the narrator’s mother says at one point. “Hunger doesn’t.” The earlier story by Kundizeza lacked those stylistic qualities, its prose and dialogue far more plainspoken and natural-sounding: “So how are things with my niece, huh?” the intelligence officer asks at one point.

What I also noticed, more disturbingly, was the presence of stereotypes about African life common among outsiders: a blundering, unemployed father; a resilient matriarch who dispenses clichéd approximations of wisdom; an environment of deprivation. Research consistently shows that AI products reproduce cultural tropes, including those having to do with the African continent.

[Read: The most famous AI writing tic is also the most mysterious]

The novelist and critic Tope Folarin, a former Caine Prize winner who has written about how dominant white culture shapes global literature, told me after reading the story that it would be unfortunate if Kundizeza had relied on AI for any of it, because its plot is “deeply human” and “deserves human expression.” He also said, “There are a lot of writers from the global South who feel this extreme pressure to write to expectations so their work is legible to the West, and obviously chatbots have glommed onto that.” He called the incident a “tragedy.”

Wakatama, for her part, explained her suspicion of AI detection by referencing the long, fraught history of science being used to oppress people of color. To a skeptical reader, her invocation of race might sound like a preemptive excuse. But in our conversation, she came across as open-minded and intellectually honest. I considered her wariness of Silicon Valley well founded and reasonable—particularly because the writers implicated in three major literary scandals this year were all nonwhite and non-American.

Pangram’s internal research finds false positives to be rare or nonexistent across multiple races and languages, as well as for English-language learners writing in English. In a separate peer-reviewed study, researchers at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel found zero false positives for English-language writing by non-native English speakers. It’s also notable that Pangram didn’t detect AI in any previous Caine Prize–winning stories or in a pre-ChatGPT story of Kundizeza’s. Yet third-party research into Pangram’s effectiveness for writers across nationalities is limited.

Still, it seems that arts communities’ revulsion toward AI has fostered a self-defeating underinvestment in understanding how exactly it functions, and how those who are repelled by AI companies’ presence in cultural spheres might beat back its encroachment. If an AI-detection tool is known to work really well, couldn’t we at least use it alongside other methods? Barring that, couldn’t we build some expertise in detecting fakery the old-fashioned way—through human training and intuition?

“Language carries culture,” the Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o once wrote, “and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world.” Language, he added, is “thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world.” Ngũgĩ, following this line of reasoning, chose to return to his native language of Gĩkũyũ after having built a career writing in English. That is, he analyzed the situation, and then changed his approach.

Maybe the broader artistic community can learn from that. Toward the end of our conversation, Wakatama told me, “I am fervently praying that you’re wrong.” It would be easier if I were wrong; indeed, maybe I am. But if I’m right, it means that several of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes have been infected by language that represents not people’s actual values and cultures but a damaging mimicry of them by products of the most powerful companies and people in the world. This is the time to do something about it.

Do Human Beings Have Souls?

2026-10-11T09:00:00-04:00

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The majority of Americans believe that every human being has an immaterial soul, and they tend to base their sense of human dignity and equality on this belief. Yet the culture at large often operates under the assumption that physical reality is all there is. Which view is correct? In this episode of The Permanent Questions, self-described “spookiest” David Brooks talks with Shelly Kagan, a best-selling philosopher who insists souls do not exist—and that we don’t need them in order to embrace the wonder and mystery of human experience.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Brooks: I think the essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn was accurately capturing parts of America when, in her book God, Human, Animal, Machine, she wrote, “It is meaningless to speak of the soul in the 21st century. It has become a dead metaphor, one of those words that survive in language long after a culture has lost faith in the concept."

Yet here’s the funny thing: According to the Pew Research Center, 85 percent of Americans say that they have a soul. They really do believe they have a mystical, immaterial, spooky, ghostlike thing at the center of who they are. And I have a confession to make: I’m one of those people. Furthermore, this metaphorical and spiritual meaning of the word soul is pretty central to the way I see the world. Long before I ever believed in God, I was firmly convinced that each person you meet has some piece of themselves that has no size, weight, color, or shape, but gives them infinite value and dignity.

In today’s conversation, we’re gonna address the question: Do humans have souls? I’ve laid my cards on the table. I think they do. We’re gonna be joined by Shelly Kagan, and he does not think we do. Kagan is the Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. For over 40 years, stretching back to his days at the University of Illinois, Chicago, he has taught a course on death to undergrads, which, naturally enough, takes up the subject of the soul.

Shelly Kagan (from lecture): Last time, I distinguished between two ways in which thinking about the facts about the nature of death could influence our behavior. On the one hand, it could give us reasons to behave or respond differently, and on the other hand, it could merely cause us to behave differently.

The course has become globally famous because it’s on YouTube. Those lectures have been seen 33 million times in China alone. Part of his success is his intellect, but part derives from the fact that for a guy who doesn’t believe in enchantment, he’s a completely enchanting guy.

I’m pleased to welcome Shelly Kagan to this table.

Shelly Kagan, welcome to The Permanent Questions. We are honored to have you here. Now, there’s a chapter in your life I’m confused about. It concerns the time you go to Wesleyan in 1972. You grew up in Skokie, Illinois, right?

Shelly Kagan: That’s correct.

Brooks: And you go to Wesleyan, and you’re a religion major for some period of that time. But you also read John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, which suggests to me that you’re trending in the direction you’re trending, which we’ll talk about. But then in your senior year, you apply to rabbinic school. So in my mind, you’re trending toward a utilitarian, maybe non-believing form of life, and then you apply to become a rabbi. What’s up with that?

Kagan: I had planned to be a rabbi starting at some point in high school, and that was what I anticipated all through college. As you say, I applied to rabbinical school, a particular rabbinical school, in fall of my senior year. I got the rejection letter, spring of my senior year. So I graduated from college and was suddenly in the situation that most of my friends had been in for four years, asking myself, So what do I want to do with my life? I thought I had known what I wanted to do with my life. But I had already come into college knowing I was also interested in philosophy, which, as it happens, I’d gotten into through Judaica.

Brooks: I guess my question is: Did you believe in God, and you thought, Well, I’d like to serve God by being a rabbi?

Kagan: Well, I believed in the importance of Judaism, and I suppose any traditional Jew will say something like, “I believe in God.” But what it is to believe in God—as I imagine you know—from the Jewish point of view, that’s left much more up to you. Judaism doesn’t have a central set of religious dogmas. How you interpret this, as well as other central Jewish thoughts, like revelation—there are rival thinkers.

Judaism was important to me through college. Judaism stayed important to me after I got rejected from rabbinical school. After college, I asked myself, Should I reapply to rabbinical school? Should I get a secular Judaic degree? Or—and this was literally the very first time the question ever crossed my mind—Maybe I should become a philosopher. Since I thought I had known what I was going to do, the question had literally never occurred to me.

Brooks: When you thought about philosophy, did you think, I just wanna talk about big ideas, or is it, Like being a rabbi, I’m sort of ministering to people’s minds?

Kagan: I think it’s not a coincidence that of all the different topics in philosophy, the area I ended up specializing in is ethics and moral philosophy. I continue to think about questions about value, which were certainly the things that most drove me to wanting to be a rabbi as well.

Brooks: Now you teach this famous course on death, which has become internationally known. It’s unlike a lot of courses, where the professor offers: “Here’s this person’s view, here’s that person’s view, here’s this person’s view.” As I understand the course on death, and I’ve seen it on YouTube, you say, “Here’s my point of view. What do you think?” Could you summarize the argument of that course?

Kagan: As you say, in a number of classes, including several of my own classes, when I teach introductory ethics, I say, “Here’s four or five prominent views. Here are the arguments for; here’s the arguments against." I try to keep my cards pretty close to my chest. In the death class, as I began to put it together, I decided that wasn’t the way to go. I wasn’t going to pretend. I say on the very first day, “Here’s a bunch of things that lots of people believe about death, and I’m going to spend the semester arguing, trying to convince you that they’re not so.” I try to be fair—I hope I’m fair—to the views that I’m rejecting, but I don’t hide what my considered conclusions are.

So as I say, most people, at least lots of people, believe in a soul. By that term, using it as a piece of jargon, I mean that we have some immaterial, nonphysical part of us, maybe the essence of what we really are, and that thing can survive the death of our body. It’s good to believe in such a thing because mortality is bad. It would be good to live forever. If it’s not true, then death is something terrifying. Suicide never makes sense. There’s a variety of views like this. Death is very mysterious. What exactly is it? Something we can’t know, can’t really get our head around.

Over the course of the semester, I try to argue that there is no soul, that there’s nothing especially mysterious about death or dying, that immortality would not be desirable, that fear of death does not make sense, that there are circumstances in which suicide can be rational. I work through the various positions and try to lay out what strike me as the most promising arguments for the views before turning around and explaining why I think those arguments aren’t compelling.

Brooks: I want to get into the substance of this, but I’m just curious: These are undergrads; they’re 20 years old, 21, 19. Why are they interested in death? It’s so far away.

Kagan: When I first started teaching the class—that was before I came to Yale. I was at the University of Illinois Chicago. I taught the class a handful of times there, maybe four times in the nine years I was there, and almost nobody took it. But when I came to Yale, I thought, Well, it’s worth trying it again. Now, at the time, this is more than 30 years ago, because there was no preregistration, I had no idea how many people would show up. I thought, Maybe 50 people will show up. To be safe, I’ll run off 75 copies of the syllabus. Three hundred and twenty odd people showed up, and I realized I’ve hit a nerve here in ways that I really hadn’t anticipated. Of course, it’s a subject that everybody cares about. It’s a subject that everybody thinks about.

Interestingly enough, from the pedagogical perspective, as a philosophy professor, it’s a wonderful subject for an introductory class because it allows you to move from questions in metaphysics and epistemology and value theory and ethics and philosophy of mind and the like.

Brooks: Do they push back? Are they offended by what you’re saying? Do they embrace what you’re saying?

Kagan: I tell them that my goal in the class—although in some sense is to persuade them of a variety of claims, what’s most important to me is that they end up thinking through these issues. If they’ve genuinely given the matter thought and have come away disagreeing with me, that’s great. Philosophical questions are ones in which—this is a theme throughout all of my classes—reasonable people can disagree. So the class is really an invitation to think about some really important questions.

Brooks: We reasonably disagree whether people have souls. Even when I didn’t believe in God, which was most of my adult life, the way I would put it is that each of us has a piece of us that has no size, weight, color, or shape, but gives us infinite value and dignity. That accords with my sense of just looking around the world—that everybody I meet seems to have some sacred dignity. So if that’s my sense of where human dignity comes from …

Kagan: Let’s start with no size. What was it? No size, no shape?

Brooks: Color or shape.

Kagan: So let’s start with something totally trivial. You believe that seven times eight equals 56.

Does that thought have color? Does it have weight? Does it have shape? Well, presumably not. In philosopher jargon, that’s some sort of category mistake to think that things like that have to have color and shape, like this glass of water.

The very first thing we have to understand is that you can believe, as I do believe, that I’m just a material object and that you’re just a material object—the people watching this show are just material objects—and so we have size, color, shape. Not everything that’s true of us is helpfully described in those terms. What I think is that you’re a material object that is able to think. You’re able to think about simple mathematical facts, and depending on how far you got in your math education—

Brooks: You hit the limit of it right there.

Kagan: You’re able to think about more complicated facts. You’re able to make plans. You’re able to communicate with me. And the question is: Can we point to various properties like that and explain how a material object can have the ability to think, to be creative, to fall in love, and so forth?

There are aspects about us which give us a special kind of—you used the Kantian phrase— dignity. I’m happy to talk that way. I don’t think that’s a mistake. I don’t think that gives us reason to think that there’s something nonphysical about us. You would then have to ask the question: By virtue of what is it true that we count morally? And this is a contested philosophical question. If you want, I can rattle off three theories, but I’m not sure how much in the weeds you wanna get.

Brooks: Yeah, let’s go there.

Kagan: Let me start with one that I think is probably part of the story but won’t get you all the way to dignity—at least all the way to dignity in the sense I think you mean it.

As I say to my intro ethics students, if I were to bring in a cat, douse it with gasoline, and then set it on fire, and then it shrieks in agony, most of us would agree—maybe not everybody, but most of us would agree—that that would be wrong. It counts morally. It’s a stray cat, let’s pretend, so I’m not hurting its owner, right? I’m doing something wrong to the cat. The cat counts in its own right. By virtue of what?

A natural plausible thought is that it counts by virtue of the fact that it can feel pleasure and pain. I think that’s true about cats. One might think it isn’t true about animals. That’s up to you. But suppose it’s what most of us do think, that cats feel pleasure and pain. That makes them count in a certain way, and it would explain why it would be wrong for me to douse one in gasoline and set it on fire. In part, it would also explain why it would be wrong for me to douse you with gasoline and set you on fire.

So that’s one story. I don’t think that’s probably the whole story and maybe not the most important part of the story. You used the Kantian word dignity. Immanuel Kant, a great German philosopher, thought that our moral standing, which differentiates us from animals—Kantians have a hard time explaining why animals should count, too—but Kantians basically think it has something to do with our freedom, with our rationality, with our autonomy, with the ability to set ends for ourselves, to decide how we wanna act, and to reason about what goals and actions make sense.

I find that a very plausible and attractive idea. You’re an autonomous being. The etymology here is “auto,” self, “nomos,” law. You’re the kind of being that can give laws to yourself, decide for yourself how you wanna live. By virtue of your being an autonomous being, you count in a special way. Animals that merely feel pleasure and pain but don’t have that kind of freedom; they count, I think, in a lesser way.

So I think that you have that special moral status. We can use the word dignity to try to mark it. There’d be more wrong about setting you on fire than merely the fact that it would hurt. If I killed you painlessly, it would still be wrong, because as an autonomous being, you’ve set various goals for yourself. There are things you want to accomplish with your life.

It’s a controversial philosophical question, but I don’t see why bringing that in necessarily means you have to bring in a soul, if by a soul we mean something nonphysical, immaterial, distinct from our body. Just like we need to be able to tell a story about how a material object can believe seven times eight equals 56, we’ll need a story—it’ll be more complicated—about how a material being can come to set goals and reconsider them and reevaluate them and so forth.

Brooks: You said Kant believes humans have dignity. Do you? Would you say that humans have—I used the term “infinite dignity,” which is going up to 11?

Kagan: I will confess, dignity is not one of the words that typically I’ll find myself using. But I’m not troubled by using it. What is it that one means when one talks about a person having dignity? I’m perfectly comfortable talking that way, but it’s just a placeholder. Then we have to start talking about what are the sorts of things that come with being a creature with dignity. How it can be treated, how it should not be treated, what things it’s permissible to do to it, what things you have to do for it, what things you may not do to it.

To throw out more jargon, Kant was a deontologist. He thought that if you took these notions of morality being grounded in autonomy, generating a certain kind of dignity that demands respect, that this leads to a family of theories within moral philosophy called deontological views. According to deontologists, there are certain actions that it would be wrong to do to somebody even if the results would be better if you were to do them.

Against that, there are rival schools of thought that say, “No, if results really would be better, it becomes permissible." My own view is that Kant was right about morality being grounded in autonomy, freedom, rationality. He was wrong in believing that this leads to deontology as opposed to—to introduce another piece of jargon—a more consequence-oriented approach. But I’m happy to go with Kant about the foundations of ethics, because not everybody thinks autonomy is the core of ethics.

Brooks: I was gonna go there.

Kagan: Thomas Hobbes, another great philosopher. He’s British—1650, I think that’s when Leviathan gets published, something like that. Hobbes thought the ultimate basis of morality has to do with the fact that, roughly speaking, we can hurt each other, and we need help from one another. If we try to imagine a world with no moral requirements, we’ll all be at each other’s throats. You have some food, I’ll cut your throat, if I can. When you’re looking the other way, I’ll steal your food, but then when I’m falling asleep, somebody else will come along and steal my throat.

As Hobbes famously put it, in the absence of morality, we’d be in the state of nature. We’d be in the war of all against all. Now let’s see if I can get the quote right: “Life would be nasty, poor, brutish, solitary and short.” A friend of mine who teaches moral philosophy at Michigan said, “If life’s gonna be nasty, poor, solitary, and brutish, being short isn’t so bad." But Hobbes’s thought was, This is what morality is about, the social contract. Hobbes is a kind of contractarian, at least in the interpretation I accept.

Basically, we all strike a deal: I agree not to slit your throat in exchange for your agreeing not to slit my throat. Autonomy is not crucial there. What’s crucial there is our finitude, the fact that any one person can be killed by enough other people. Nobody’s Superman; nobody can do it by themselves. That’s a quite different story from the Kantian story about what ethics is all about. As it happens, I’m more sympathetic to the Kantian story.

Brooks: Now I’m gonna ask you a few questions that people like me always ask people like you. I’m sure you’ve heard them a zillion times, but I’m just curious what you would say. The first is: Why is rape worse than a punch in the nose? To me, a rape is worse than a punch in the nose because a person contains a soul, and rape is an insult to the soul in a way that the punch in the nose is not.

Kagan: I agree, rape seems like an especially horrific thought. To make it even easier: Why is rape a horrible thing to happen to you in a way that your backache is not? The backache could be a more intense pain, but it wouldn’t normally be nearly as psychologically overwhelming, because rape is a direct attack on your autonomy, on your ability to decide for yourself, in central ways, how you want your life to go. Your sexual decisions are among the most central decisions. Rape overrides that in an especially horrific way. Another thing that I think is similar in that way is torture. Torture is deliberately trying to break the person as opposed to merely trying to cause them pain. Certain truths that are central to organizing our worldview shouldn’t be beaten out of us.

I believe all of that, but I don’t see why one needs to bring in a soul. When I torture you, or if I were to rape you—there are probably other things of a similar sort—what I would be doing in the most fundamental way is undermining your ability to choose for yourself how your life wants to go. That’s where the autonomy comes in.

So the question just gets pushed off. To get ethics going in the way I want it to get going, we need a story about how you can have a creature that is able to set its own goals, to step back. Lots and lots of animals have pretty accurate beliefs about their environment. They make reasonable decisions about how to satisfy their desires in light of the immediate environment. What seems special about us—maybe not unique about us, but certainly special about us—is that we can step back from that. We can say, Yes, I want this. Does it make sense to want that? Yes, doing this would satisfy that desire. Does it make sense to satisfy it in that way or not? That’s where rationality comes in, and rationality and autonomy are tightly connected. So the question becomes: Do you need to believe in anything immaterial in order to believe in this kind of ability?

If we were having this conversation 100 years ago or even 50 years ago or maybe even 20 years ago and asked, “Could we really have machines that could reason?,” we’d say, “I don’t know. The jury’s out.” I don’t think the jury’s yet quite come back. But I think it becomes more and more credible to think a physical object is probably capable of reasoning.

Brooks: I’m going to try another reason why the concept of a soul appeals to me, aside from my experience of it. My view is that we’re not equal in our level of brain power, and we’re not equal in our level of muscle power. But we are all equal on the level of the soul. We all have the soul of infinite and equal dignity. To me, that’s the basis of human equality.

Kagan: I do think it’s an interesting question. If you’ve got a story about the ultimate basis of having moral standing—my own view is that animals count, but they don’t count as much as people do. I owe anybody who’s gonna be on my side a story about what is it that gives you standing that can come in varying degrees. As you say, it’s going then to be an interesting question: Will people differ in that regard? Because if they do, then they maybe will also have different strength rights, or something like that.

Suppose you accepted the Hobbesian story. Then it doesn’t matter that you’re stronger than me because I can get three other people and together we can beat you up. You still have to fall asleep. Hobbes, perfectly cognizant of this point, talked about—another piece of jargon—a kind of practical or rough equality. For all practical purposes, any one of us needs the moral contract and so will hold out. It doesn’t matter that you’re smarter than I am, or it doesn’t matter that you’re stronger than I am, or it doesn’t matter that you’re more creative than I am, or whatever it might be—or that I’m needier than you are. I’m not going to agree to avoid killing you and taking your food unless you agree to give me the same rights that you have.

Hobbesians have one kind answer. Kant thinks about it in terms of autonomy, and then one might wonder: Are we all equally autonomous? I suspect not.

Brooks: Not even close.

Kagan: No, not even close. Anybody who’s a deontologist and thinks that it’s ultimately based on autonomy needs to recognize that animals also have autonomy to varying degrees. So maybe they have weaker rights than we have.

So you’re going to bring in a soul. You believe in souls. So one question would be: By virtue of what is it true that souls are a plausible story about why we count morally? Second, even if you could tell me a story about that, do souls come in degrees? I take it as a part of the assumption that they don’t. Is that true?

St. Francis of Assisi famously preaches to the birds because he believes animals have souls. I haven’t read enough about him to know: Did he think that the birds had souls of a grade-A type? Or did they have grade-B souls? Once you start allowing souls, then maybe all humans have grade-A souls, but maybe you’ve got an A-minus soul, but St. Francis of Assisi had an A-plus soul. Tell me, do you think that souls come in only one-size-fits-all?

Brooks: Yes, absolutely.

Kagan: Based on what?

Brooks: Based on the idea that it would be horrific to think that I was superior to the homeless guy on the street. That would be a morally reprehensible belief. If that’s a morally reprehensible belief, then it must be we all have some level that’s equal, and I think it’s our spiritual natures.

Kagan: That’s not bad. Some people would say that’s an illegitimate argument, where you want it to be the case that we all count morally, so you’re going to believe whatever it is that you need metaphysically speaking in order to get that to fall out. I’m not hostile to that kind of argument.

Famously, Kant also argues this way. Kant thinks you can argue from moral conclusions to belief in a soul, belief in an afterlife, belief in a God, belief in reward and punishment. It’s loaded—How much does one need to assume in order to get the ethical? Hobbes, as I suggested a moment ago, thinks you don’t need to believe in the soul at all. There might be other ways that you could get that conclusion.

If you set yourself the goal of designing a moral system, one thing you need to take into account is: What are people like? And: Are people very good at sussing out micro differences in intelligence or degrees of autonomy or what have you? I think from the point of view of designing moral rules, were I God giving rules to all of mankind, I would think there’s gonna be limits to people’s abilities to understand very complicated rules—rules with too many exception clauses or too many subclauses, or rules that the left-handed people get to do this. There’ll be a kind of pressure to have the rules be similar for everybody. And that might give us equal rights without needing to bring in souls.

Brooks: Let me ask you the grandfather of all questions that people like me ask people like you, which is: How did consciousness arise in the brain?

Kagan: When people like you ask people like me, I say that’s not my area of philosophy. There’s a whole subarea of philosophy called philosophy of mind. One of the big debates in philosophy of mind is: How do you explain consciousness? Immediately, I’m gonna ask: What do you mean by consciousness? Because people, even philosophers, will use this term for different things.

Let me draw two broad categories of things. Sometimes what ordinary people mean by consciousness is having thoughts, beliefs, desires—putting these things together to make plans and so consequently having intentions. Your thermostat can turn the furnace on and off when it’s warm or cold, but it’s not conscious. It doesn’t have thoughts. It doesn’t have beliefs. If that’s what you mean by consciousness, the question becomes: Can we tell a story about how a physical object can have beliefs, have desires?

I think we’ve got the beginnings of a pretty good story, because we can already build machines that can represent environments. To take the trivial example, because it’s as complicated as I get, a chess-playing computer. When you’re playing that program on your computer, it represents the chessboard in a certain way. So it has what I’m perfectly content to say are beliefs about where your bishop is—and does it threaten or does it not threaten its king?—and so forth.

Brooks: That strikes me as a very weird definition of consciousness. We program certain algorithms into it, or in AI we’ve programmed the ability to predict the next words or whatever it is.

Kagan: No, I’m not sure that the ability to predict the next word counts as that. What I had in mind with the chess-playing computer was that, when it moves its queen to take my bishop, I find it perfectly natural to say something like, “It wanted to capture my bishops because it wants to protect its king from being checked.” Now I find that perfectly congenial, and all I wanted to say was if that’s what you mean by consciousness—having beliefs, having desires, being able to report what those beliefs and desires are, being able to make plans on the basis of them—we already can do that in some rudimentary ways, and we’re getting better and better at it.

You say, “That’s not what I mean by consciousness.” I say: “Fine. Here’s the second thing people mean by consciousness. This one is harder to describe, though I imagine everybody’s gonna be familiar with it.”

You punch me, and I feel pain. There’ll be various behaviors that I’ll engage in. But there’s something about the experience of pain that we have not yet captured, and maybe that’s what we mean by consciousness.

And it’s not limited to the ability to feel pleasure and pain. Right now on the desk, you’ve got a copy of my book. My eyes happen to be going to little red strip on it. So there’s something happening in my mind right now, the experience of red. I take it that when you look at the book—and hold it up so that people rush off to the bookstore to buy a copy of it—you and they will also have something going on inside the experience of red. So sometimes we, or philosophers, mean that inner aspect, by consciousness.

Then the question, and I think it’s a great question, is: How do we explain consciousness from a physical point of view? If physicalism is the view that all I am, all you are, is just a physical material object, how do you explain this ability to have this inner aspect of experience? Can a physical object have that? And if so, how do we explain the origins of that? Now the answer is: I don’t know.

I think that is the pressing question for physicalists to answer. There are physicalists, there are philosophers who have pet theories about this. I don’t myself. Although it’s not an area of expertise, I don’t find any of them especially attractive. But I don’t think bringing in the soul helps. Suppose you say—I mean, I’m not giving you a chance to say—but suppose you say, “Ah, this is why I believe in a soul; posit a soul, and now we can explain how it can happen.”

I say, “You haven’t explained anything. You’ve just said, ‘Imagine there’s a thing that somehow can generate consciousness. I don’t know how it can do it.’” You don’t have a theory, and I don’t have a theory. So that doesn’t give us any special reason to start positing souls.

Brooks: I would put it a little differently. I would say we have three pounds of meat in our brain, and we produce ecstasy. We produce “Ode to Joy.” I’m realizing that one of our distinctions is you’re a physicalist, I’m a spookiest. I think the world is spooky. So it doesn’t really surprise me that meat could produce consciousness. But for you, if you think meat is all there is, then the fact that you can’t explain the fundamental human experience, which is subjective experience, is kind of a problem for your worldview.

Kagan: Well, it is a problem in the sense that it’s an unsolved problem. First of all, I think the world is spooky and strange and weird too. Philosophers are basically people who never got over the thought that, Boy, the world’s a really weird place, and I don’t understand very much of it. Aristotle famously said, “Philosophy begins in wonder." And I just wanna say that it continues in complete bafflement.

Brooks: I can’t help pointing out that Descartes said that wonder is a surprise of the soul, so I’ll just add that.

Kagan: Again, I’m not unhappy using soul talk. When you start saying, “And by a soul, I mean to be stipulating something nonphysical,” then I say, “Why is that the best hypothesis as to all this cool stuff, all this weird ability to fall in love and to write poetry and to feel ecstasy?”

I think we can offer certain explanations for creativity from a physicalist point of view. I don’t think we can yet do it for consciousness. But does this trouble me? Well, I take some comfort in the thought that we’re just beginning to do brain science. To say we’re in the Middle Ages is too generous. We’re in the dawn of time in terms of brain science.

So the analogy I always give in my death class is: 100 years ago, 150 years ago, 300 years ago, 500 years ago, if you asked people how to explain life, the answer would’ve been: We haven’t a clue how you could explain life in physical terms. It must be that there’s something nonphysical going on there. And the answer was: Come back in 300 years, 500 years, 700 years. It turns out now we have an explanation. We don’t know all the details, but we know enough to know we can offer. My money—it’s nothing more than that—but I conjecture, come back in 300 years, 700 years, we’ll have a story as to how consciousness could emerge from three pounds of meat.

Brooks: You could answer any argument with that, though.

Kagan: Look, I’ll concede, I do concede. I make a point of emphasizing this. I don’t think we have a story yet. But the question is: To believe in a soul, you’ve gotta think it’s got the upper hand somewhere, and I would agree with that if you could give me even the outlines of a story. How is an immaterial thing going to experience an inner life?

Brooks: Let me read a sentence from your book, which I disagreed with.

Kagan: Great.

Brooks: You write, “Try introspecting for a moment. Turn your mind’s eye inward and ask, ‘Do you see a soul inside you?’ I don’t think you will. Like me, you may observe various sensations in your body. You may observe various thoughts and feelings, but you won’t observe a soul."

Now, I do. When I wake up in the morning, or I’m in the middle of my day, sometimes my soul is soaring, and sometimes my soul is degraded. The Psalmist famously says, “Why are you downcast, O my soul?"

The way I experience my soul mostly is in yearning. Yearning for self-transcendence. Yearning to expand outside myself. The stuff I pour into my soul, the different experiences, have different effects on it. Furthermore, what I’m describing is not uncommon.

Kagan: Of course.

Brooks: I actually looked up all these words in different cultures for soul. You know the one in Hebrew, it’s nephesh; Egyptian, ka; Chinese, hun; Arabic, nafs; Ghana, okra. All these different cultures all around the world independently have a central concept in all their cultures: Humans have souls. And it’s a spiritual, immaterial thing. Why are all these cultures wrong?

Kagan: They don’t all have the immaterial thing. They have a word that we can translate as soul. Then the question is: What does the word soul mean in English ,and are we translating it properly or not? Dualism—the view that there is this immaterial thing in addition to the body—is a philosophical conjecture that some people believe and other people don’t believe, and some religious traditions teach and other religious traditions don’t teach.

Even Christianity hasn’t always been dualist. The early Christians believed in part in bodily resurrection because there was no way to be around after your death without your body because they didn’t believe in souls. And then Plato comes along—

Brooks: But they would say the spirit infused every piece of them. It wasn’t separate.

Kagan: You gave a number of moving sentences a minute or two minutes ago, before I interrupted. I wish I had a transcript of those sentences. When you say, “My soul soars,” if I’d gone through, and any place you said soul, I just said, “I soar, I’m ecstatic, I’m moved, I’m down in the dumps,” I’m not sure what we would’ve lost.

Now, there’s a use of the word soul in English, as in lots of other cultures, where it’s a way of talking about the fact that when you listen to Mozart or I listen to Dylan, something is happening to me that is not happening to me, I will confess, when I listen to Lady Gaga. Something happens to me. I am moved by that. Fine, I believe in all of that, and I’m not remotely troubled in saying I want to reserve the word soul, or at least I want to use the word soul, in those contexts.

If we wanted to talk about our essence—the deepest, most central parts about our beliefs, our desires, our values, the memories that are most cherished—and you want to say “sacred,” I have no problems with that kind of language at all. I think soul is a useful word for characterizing those aspects, those elements, those components.

If we use the word personality for all of your beliefs, all of your memories, all of your goals, all of your desires, and then soul for that central subset that you would feel like you had died if you had to give those things up, I’m perfectly happy with that. The mistake is to think that if we are gonna talk that way, you must be positing something nonphysical.

Brooks: Let me describe to you what I think a soul is, because I think we probably have a little overlap.

So I have a hobby. Well, it’s my job. But I interview neuroscientists, because I’m just interested in what they’re doing. When I started doing this, 25 years ago, they were super interested in where things were happening in the brain. You’d go to conferences, and there’d be some BS corporate consultant, and he would say, “This shows the amygdala’s lighting up, and therefore, that shows blah, blah, blah,” and it was all nonsense. But now they don’t think that way. They talk about these vast neural coalitions that cross a lot of different regions.

There’s a neuroscientist, I wanna give him credit, Luiz Pessoa, who compares these networks, these vast, widely distributed networks. He calls them neuronal ensembles distributed across multiple brain regions, and he compares them to a murmuring of swallows. My intuition, though I don’t know, is that consciousness emerges from that murmuration. But I would say, also, the soul emerges from that. So it’s not without physical basis. We’re infused. But the soul emerges from the swirl. The soul is the swirl.

And emergent properties, as you know very well—you take a bunch of physical things, and out of their interaction, a new quality emerges. Some people have a low version of emergent that you can understand that high quality by looking at the physical low qualities. Other people have a strong version of emergence, which is you can’t understand the high quality. It takes on independent conditions that are its own thing, and then it has a downward pressure on everything underneath.

I take a strong emergent view. All of that swirl, all that energy state, creates this new thing. The quality of our soul then influences how we feel, how we act, how we do, what we want.

Kagan: So maybe you really are a physicalist as well. It’s just that you think that you want to save the word soul, and you want to think about soul as this thing that emerges at the global level, which is fine.

I’m perfectly happy to think about consciousness as something that emerges at the global level. You put enough neurons together the right way, and we’ll get either consciousness or something like that. Okay, great. I’m even happy—maybe, depending on how much you mean—in thinking that there’ll be things where the fundamental explanation needs to be done at the global level, not at the micro level.

But you don’t have to pretend that physicalism isn’t true. Or you shouldn’t persuade yourself, would be a better way to put it, that physicalism isn’t true to believe in this kind of emergent stuff at the global level.

Brooks: I’m trying to give some reasons why I think there’s a soul.

But there’s a set of experiences I’ve had that are not reasonable. I’ll tell you one story. I was in New York, like, 11 years ago. In New York City, a city I love, the ugliest spot on the face of the Earth—used to be … it’s still pretty ugly—is Penn Station, the train station. There’s only one possibly uglier spot, which is the subway station next to Penn Station.

So I’m there on whatever Eighth Avenue line, and I look around the car one morning, and I get the sensation that everybody in this car has souls. My sensation is these souls, in each case, are in movement. Some are going up and some are going down, degraded. Thomas Aquinas talks about all these movements. And then I thought, Well, I feel this.

That is not the only (what they call) “numinous” experience that I’ve had. In nature, with my kids, whatever. When I have those experiences, the arguments almost don’t matter.

Kagan: I’m glad you brought this up again because this allows me to do something I meant to do several minutes ago, when you quoted the sentence about peering inside and not seeing soul. This is a point I just learned from David Hume, another British philosopher. When he peers inside, he can sense experiences, pleasures, pains, thoughts, wishes, hopes, desires. He doesn’t experience any soul. Putting words into his mouth, that’s a philosophical conjecture as to how these things can occur.

So I just wanna say, yeah, you were in this moment, and I’ve had similar moments as well. You’re just taken by the magnificence of humanity, the fact that every one of us is a unique individual and has the things that we’re trying to do, and some of us are getting there, and some of us are not getting there, and some of us are on the wrong path, but hopefully we’ll make and others never will.

We can have all these thoughts. Having these thoughts is important. Again, I’m not any kind of foe of spiritual talk. If you find it most comfortable to express these thoughts in spiritual language, I won’t deny you them. It’s only when you start doing metaphysics—

Brooks: So we have a metaphysical difference. But I guess one of my questions is: What difference does it make? We have totally different viewpoints on this, but how do our different viewpoints affect our lives and how we should live our lives? It sounds like you’re saying it almost makes no difference. I’ve invented some word soul, which you think doesn’t exist. But do you think it affects lives when you shift from being a physicalist to a spookiest?

Kagan: It needn’t, in the same way that it needn’t when you go from being a spookiest to being a physicalist. I’m afraid I no longer remember, but I conjecture that when I was young, I believed in something nonphysical. And it was through doing philosophy I came to see that, as far as I could see, one could continue to espouse the things that were important to me about, call it, the spiritual side of life, without buying into a bunch of metaphysical baggage that I no longer find myself inclined to think was the most plausible metaphysics. Didn’t have to give it up.

Now for some people, giving up religion just is part and parcel of a transformation in which they give up not just the spiritual, but they give up the moral, and they give up the ethics. I’ve had any number of discussions with religious figures who basically look at me and say, “How can you have morality without God or a soul?” Hobbes has a story about how you could have it. And I think Kant has a story about how you could have it..

There’s no logical reason—if you want to believe in right and wrong and equality and human dignity—that you’ll have an easier time of it if you believe that there’s this nonmaterial object that maybe continues to exist after our biological organism decays. I don’t think that extra bit of metaphysics gets you anywhere closer to the ethics stuff and the value stuff and the spiritual stuff that you and I are in agreement is important.

Brooks: Well, Shelly Kagan, it’s such a pleasure to talk with you.

Kagan: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much.

Brooks: Thanks for joining my conversation with Shelly Kagan. As you could tell, we probably disagree pretty drastically on some of the biggest issues of life. But what I love about Shelly is that even though he doesn’t believe there’s a soul, he doesn’t believe there’s a purpose to the universe, he doesn’t believe there’s an afterlife, that has not made him a cold and technical and overly rational person.

He’s a deeply moral person. He’s a deeply warm person. I don’t know if Shelly would like me saying this, but you could even describe him as soulful.

This podcast is produced by The Atlantic and made possible by support from Yale University. New episodes of The Permanent Questions come out on Sundays. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

See you next week.

A Left-Wing Politics Based on Calling People Names

2026-10-11T08:00:00-04:00

Among the many areas of American life democratized by the internet, few have been more transformed than political commentary. Instead of being restricted to an old boys’ club of op-ed writers and Sunday-talk-show guests, punditry is now open to anyone with an internet connection. This shift has created abundant opportunities for once-neglected voices and broadened public discourse beyond a narrow establishment-media consensus. But lowering the barrier to entry has also had its downsides, mainly in the rise of political influencers. Like talk-radio hosts of yore, charismatic social-media commentators are skilled at forming a personal relationship with their listeners. Many of the most successful, however, pay next to zero attention to the details of policy or governance and gain followers mostly by calling the other side names. Consider the case of Jennifer Welch, author of the new book Not Today, Fascists.

A co-host of the left-wing podcast I’ve Had It, Welch commands millions of followers across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms. Multiple times a week, she delights her legions of fans by mocking Donald Trump, whom she calls “America’s dumbass dictator,” and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whom she derides as “Chuckles,” for his insufficiently ardent resistance to the “fascist” GOP. She has called Erika Kirk, the widow of the murdered conservative activist Charlie Kirk, an “absolute grifter,” and the MAGA movement an “anti-family, pro-pedophilia death cult.” Her response to Lindsey Graham’s death was to say, “He liked cock, as we all know.” (No, we don’t. No evidence that the bachelor senator was gay has ever surfaced.)

To people who do not already share her politics, Welch’s coarseness can be off-putting. But it clearly has a cathartic appeal for many disillusioned liberals. Ironically, a major component of Welch’s appeal is inspired by the man she so despises. “I disagree with everything he says, I think he’s a compulsive liar, et cetera,” Welch told National Public Radio last year, “but the way we talk is really the way Trump has been doing it the last 10 years.”

[Read: Megyn Kelly’s extreme makeover]

As a rule, when a book of political commentary has a big picture of the author on the front cover, readers should expect little substance and a lot of righteous certainty. Not Today, Fascists is no exception. But Welch’s rise as a progressive influencer, the growing popularity of her rhetorical style, and the leftward pressure she and her followers are putting on the Democratic Party exemplify a larger current: The American left has decided to mimic the right by cocooning itself in its own echo chamber.

“The Democratic base has abandoned traditional media,” Welch writes, “just like the Republican base did ten years ago, and they are desperate for something that goes against the status quo.” This “hunger for something different” among progressives, she observes, has been “so immense that a 51-year-old interior designer and her divorce lawyer started a podcast in Oklahoma a little over three years ago, and it’s now one of the top left-leaning podcasts in the country.”

During Trump’s first term, Welch, a successful interior decorator, starred in the Bravo reality-television series Sweet Home Oklahoma. Inspired by the voyeurism of the Real Housewives franchise, the show followed the exploits of Welch and her wealthy friends through the physical and mental landscape of Nichols Hills, her fashionable Oklahoma City neighborhood. Typical plotlines involved Welch’s design business, her husband’s recovery from drug addiction, and a character going on her first blind date in many years. After two seasons, the show was canceled in 2018.

Four years later, Welch started I’ve Had It with one of her former co-stars, Angie Sullivan, as a sidekick. According to The New York Times, the podcast initially consisted of “banter about petty grievances.” Gradually, the grievances became political and “grew to world-historical proportions.” Today, I’ve Had It is a go-to stop for Democratic presidential aspirants and other stars of the progressive firmament. Welch has appeared on The View, The New Yorker Radio Hour (interviewed by the magazine’s editor, David Remnick), and the livestream of fellow leftist shock-jock Hasan Piker, who refers to her as “one of the leaders of the radical wine-mom brigade.” Today, the Times reports, Welch “releases a podcast episode approximately once every seven hours.”

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

Welch has become the quintessential #resistance influencer—someone animated by righteous indignation over Donald Trump’s misogyny and other character defects. She is Howard Beale crossed with Martha Stewart. Reading her is like being subjected to MS NOW on full volume, but with F-bombs. Indeed, the progressive cable-news network, formerly known as MSNBC, isn’t left-wing enough for Welch, who writes that “I’ve moved left and weaned myself off corporate news in recent years.”

To the extent that Not Today, Fascists has a thesis, it’s that Republicans are an assemblage of fascists, pedophiles, and idiots—and that progressives must sink to their level in order to win. “The only way forward is to fight fair,” Welch writes, “which in this case means dirty as hell.” What Democrats need is a “fuck you politics,” she believes. Practically, this means using meaner, cruder language. “If any chickenshit pearl-clutchers gets their panties in a wad because we call Trump a fascist or a Nazi, step aside and let the grown-ups fight,” Welch writes. “Fuck the seniority system. Fuck compromise.”

Never in Not Today, Fascists does Welch express the slightest scintilla of a doubt about anything she believes. She cannot contemplate the possibility that others might disagree with her in good faith, without racist, venal, or otherwise malign motives. Like many partisans before her, she implies that voters’ failure to adopt her side’s preferred policies is because the other side has brainwashed them. “We have an uphill battle when it comes to the economy—not because the Democrats’ policies are weaker, but because the propaganda has been so successful,” she writes.

The argument that Republican voters foolishly vote against their own economic interests was most famously elucidated in Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, What’s the Matter With Kansas, the thesis of which is that the GOP wages the culture war to distract working-class white voters from its plundering of the economy. “Democratic politicians and candidates should be on TV every single day, beating the drum against corporate America’s exploitations, its billionaire CEOs, and the system that has enabled them to steal from America—and they should do so using clear, aggressive language,” Welch writes, as if such points haven’t been a staple of Democratic rhetoric for decades.

As an example of Democratic fecklessness, Welch points to the failure of the Biden administration to have Trump convicted for his role in the January 6 insurrection. She ridicules former Attorney General Merrick Garland for proceeding “as though he’d overdone it on the Xanax.” That Garland might have been at least partly justified in wanting to avoid the appearance of partisanship, a caution he demonstrated by first bringing cases against hundreds of rioters, is lost on Welch. The Biden administration’s attorney general “should have been vetted to make sure he or she understood the assignment,” which, apparently, was not conducting a fair and thorough investigation, but prosecuting Trump and his allies.

[David A. Graham: Donald Trump gets away with it]

This disregard for due process—for the idea that Garland’s long service in the American judicial system might have informed his prosecutorial restraint—is especially startling for someone flinging accusations of “fascism” onto anyone and anything she doesn’t like. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is “no different, in my eyes, from Hitler’s Gestapo,” she writes. A message from the State Department announcing a pause in the issuance of immigrant visas to citizens of 75 countries “isn’t language reminiscent of fascism—it’s obviously and explicitly fascist.”

Not Today, Fascists is a sloppy book. It’s riddled with malapropisms (Adolf Hitler sought to “coalesce momentum for World War II”), clichés (“it takes a village”), mixed metaphors (the establishment’s supposed belief that the rich are “the smartest people on God’s green Earth,” when in reality “they are not, uniformly, the brightest of bulbs”), and non sequiturs (“Note that to the MAGA cult, gay sex includes simply existing as a trans person.”) “Books are not known for coming together quickly,” Welch writes. This one certainly seems like it did.

But the bigger problem with the book is her uncritical recitation of left-wing talking points. Welch employs one of the most tiresome progressive rhetorical tics, referring frequently to the Trump administration as “the regime.” She calls the extensively documented scandal involving Somali immigrants running fake day-care centers in Minnesota “an utterly fraudulent accusation.” Welch repeats a laundry list of progressive shibboleths from the past decade: that Trump referred to the Nazis and white supremacists at Charlottesville as “very fine people,” that Trump labeled immigrants generally—not just participants in criminal activity—as “animals.”

She brings no more reflection or nuance to her discussion of the war in Gaza. “I will not go to great lengths to argue that a genocide is in place, because the reality is clear,” she writes. (In other words, she barely bothers to justify the grave claim she makes.) Welch admits that she “didn’t know much about” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until well into the current war. She begins the first of her two chapters about the conflict, entitled “Taxpayer-Funded Genocide,” with a memory of her visit to Dachau at the age of 16. The message seems to be that Jews have forgotten what the Nazis did to them and are callously inflicting the same horrors upon Palestinians.

Welch claims that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has made Jewish people less safe worldwide,” and favorably cites a writer who claims that Israel is “the world’s most powerful cause of antisemitism.” The implication that Jews everywhere are a natural target for opponents of Israeli policy rationalizes bigotry and absolves the actual anti-Semites of their crimes. At one point in Not Today, Fascists, Welch begins to rant about the evils of “Zionist American billionaires” and the “growing Zionist cooperation and Zionist power in the American government.” A commentator more steeped in the history of real-life fascism might be warier of tropes about Jews manipulating the levers of power.

Welch’s political consciousness was heavily shaped by her experience growing up in a proudly atheist household surrounded by conservative evangelical Christians. (Not Today, Fascists is dedicated “To all the blue dots in red states: You’re not crazy—they are.”) Her feelings about the American religious right—which overwhelmingly supports Israel—and her domestic political commitments more broadly seem to color her feelings about the Jewish state. “One striking fact” about the Trump era, she writes, is that “Netanyahu was delighted by Trump. I found it repulsive that he went to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring.” One can find Netanyahu’s obsequiousness toward Trump unseemly while simultaneously accepting that foreign leaders, just to do their job, must constantly flatter the most powerful man in the world. One can also abhor the actions of the Israeli government without writing off the entire country as an illegitimate enterprise.

By their nature, “heterodox” voices are an acquired taste. In the part of the political universe Welch inhabits, the battle lines are clear: Protect your friends and villainize your opponents, regardless of the details. Discussing the murder of the health-care executive Brian Thompson, she writes that his death “illuminated a harsh reality about American life: The unconscionable cruelty of the American healthcare system has driven some people so far into desperation and despair that they couldn’t find any empathy for the CEO.” That may be true for a radical fringe, but 82 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health-care coverage. In a paean to Tim Walz, Welch describes the Minnesota governor and failed vice-presidential candidate as “the hard-ass you could go to for counsel, who stood up for the underdog like the great American film heroes we grew up watching.” There are many things one can say about Tim Walz; that he is the latter-day incarnation of Paul Newman or Harrison Ford is not one of them.

There is a place for the Jennifer Welches of the world, just as there is a place for the Tucker Carlsons and Hasan Pikers and Sean Hannitys. Unabashed partisanship helps motivate some people to win elections. What makes sharply partisan media figures so useful to political movements, however, is precisely what renders them so uninteresting as thinkers. In an earlier era of political commentary, William F. Buckley Jr. earned cachet with his friendships across the political aisle; part of what made him interesting was his interest in other people and their ideas. A typical episode of Firing Line—his current-affairs debate show, which aired on public television for 33 years—would feature Buckley in spirited, respectful conversation with a guest such as Huey Newton, Allen Ginsberg, or John Kenneth Galbraith. Welch and her listeners, by contrast, have no interest in anyone outside their ideological bubble, other than as targets of invective.

[Read: The Hasan Piker question]

In encouraging her fellow progressives to follow MAGA into the gutter, Welch resembles that which she hates. At one point, she writes that “the feeling of being united against a common enemy, with total absolution from racism, sexism, or accountability, can be intoxicating.” But Welch and her followers too are in desperate need of an intervention.

Like her adversaries, Welch long ago gave up trying to convince those who don’t see things her way. “I don’t imagine a world where MAGA voters will wake up one morning and simply switch sides,” she writes. Democrats must therefore move left; on this, “there is no compromise” to be had. The Democratic Party is up for grabs, and Jennifer Welch may very well represent its future.

All the Things You’re Not Allowed to Say In Texas

2026-10-11T07:50:56-04:00

Updated at 1:11 p.m. ET on October 12, 2026

Sara Spurgeon, an English professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, has been teaching literature for 20 years. But preparing for the spring 2026 semester was the first time she was forced to submit her course materials through a portal to be evaluated by an artificial-intelligence program. It flags anything that might violate new rules laid out by the university chancellor, including a prohibition on the “advocacy/promotion of race or sex-based prejudice,” and a requirement—now Texas state law—that “only two sexes, male and female, are recognized.”

At Texas Tech, medical students no longer learn about racial disparities in medical care. Faculty at the university’s medical center in Lubbock were advised to “refrain from treating transgender patients, for any medical condition, if a medical student was present,” according to a lawsuit filed by the American Association of University Professors. (When asked for comment, a spokesperson said that the university’s “written guidance is publicly available and expressly protects instruction necessary for licensure and patient care.”) According to the same lawsuit, the censorship bot—officially known as the Course Content Review Process—ordered a Tech philosophy professor to remove Plato’s Republic from a syllabus because “it references Plato’s beliefs concerning gender roles and homosexuality.”

Professors in the Texas A&M system have had to strip their syllabi too. According to an ACLU lawsuit, last January, Aaron George, a professor at Tarleton State University, was told by administrators to remove A Gay Manifesto, a Stonewall-era LGBTQ-rights pamphlet, and White Flight, a history of urban segregation, from his American-political-history course. After a student complained that a different class the professor taught violated university policy, George was informed by administrators that it would be canceled if he did not make “necessary” (but unspecified) changes. He cut a reference in the course description to the significance of the Fourteenth Amendment for LGBTQ rights, and the class was allowed to proceed.

The University of Texas at Austin, the flagship school of the UT system, announced last month that it was eliminating majors in Africana studies, Mexican American and Latino studies, women’s and gender studies, and race and migration studies. More than 100 courses have been flagged for removal from the core curriculum, primarily ones relating to slavery, race, gender, sexuality, and the environment. Consolidating majors isn’t necessarily nefarious, nor is rethinking a core curriculum (a central group of courses from which students must take a certain number to graduate). But these changes are happening, Lauren Gutterman, an American studies professor at UT, told me, “entirely because of the political context.”

[Adam Kirsch: Texas sends Plato back to his cave]

The changes to Texas public-university systems are being presented as a necessary corrective to left-wing orthodoxy on campus. Over the past decade, many Americans have come to believe that academia is too ideological and too intolerant of conservative views and arguments. Censoriousness is not an exclusively left-wing phenomenon, but it is real. And some conservative speakers on college campuses met with protests that, while themselves a form of speech, occasionally deteriorated into violence.

“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,” President Trump declared in 2019. “One of their political weapons is ‘Cancel Culture’—driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and our values.”

Perhaps it’s less alien than Trump supposed. In the name of fighting propaganda and indoctrination, Texan politicians have established strict state controls on what can be taught, researched, and even discussed in the classroom. However bad left-wing censoriousness is or was, the Republican response in Texas has been to ensure that what is taught in the state’s universities is itself propaganda and indoctrination. Ellen Schrecker, a historian of McCarthyism at Yeshiva University, told me that this campaign goes beyond even the repression of the McCarthy era, when censorship led to firings and purges but the government did not interfere directly with what students were taught. After all, American politicians understood that there was a Cold War to win, and that it could not be won if the universities themselves were destroyed. By outlawing or banning forms of speech and inquiry, and by eliminating faculty independence, today’s Republicans are doing much more damage.

Texas passed the first of its education gag laws in 2021 to limit the teaching of “critical race theory” in K–12 classrooms. Texas also tried to ban books dealing with racism or LGBTQ themes from public and school libraries; lawmakers characterized the latter as “pornography.” In 2023, the legislature banned “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in higher education, leading to the closure of DEI offices at state-funded institutions. Last year, Texas passed Senate Bill 37 to sharply curtail shared governance—the process by which faculty, administrators, and boards collaborate in running universities; this left political appointees and administrators with unchecked power over hiring and curricula. Governor Greg Abbott had bragged about signing a free-speech law in 2019. Following pro-Palestinian protests on Texas campuses in 2023, he signed a new law banning “expressive activities” from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m., and allowing schools to forbid student protests in some public areas.

The seven Texas public-university systems serve more than 700,000 students—several times the enrollment of all Ivy League institutions combined. There are many ways to destroy a university. Texas Tech, Texas A&M, and the University of Texas have each taken a different approach to enforcing the new state laws, with varying degrees of heavy-handedness. But the result will be the same: substandard education, substandard research, and graduates who are less prepared for their future as workers, thinkers, and citizens, and more prepared to obey without question.

Texas Tech’s approach to censorship is notable for being both onerous and clumsy, in part because it relies so heavily on artificial intelligence.

Curriculum review traditionally involved faculty, administrators, department chairs, and deans who offered expert input without subjecting teaching decisions to the whims of trustees or politicians who might have political or economic interests in avoiding certain subjects. The process still involves layers of review from administrators and university leaders, but the faculty’s role has been replaced in part by the censorship bot, which scans course materials considered potentially controversial. Asked about the role of AI, a spokesperson for the university said that “the Course Content Review process will continue to be faculty-led, just as it was designed to be from the beginning.”

Texas Tech’s new chancellor, Brandon Creighton, is a former Texas legislator and the author of Senate Bill 37, the law that limited shared governance. Creighton said he intended for the bill to “eliminate woke indoctrination in core courses” and give “Texans the power to report biased or inappropriate instruction.” The original text contained explicit “identity politics” restrictions that were stripped from the final version, possibly because they might not have passed legal muster. The policy he has implemented at Texas Tech, however, resembles the original version. Creighton has said he believes that it will be a “national model.”

Creighton issued two memos outlining the restrictions, including one threatening faculty members that a failure to report any course content “implicated” by the policy would result in “disciplinary action.” Another announced a phaseout of all degree programs related to what the memo referred to as SOGI (“Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity”). It also formalizes a ban on “instruction that advocates for concepts of inherent racial or sexual superiority, inherent bias, or collective guilt.” In the future, the memo states, no degree “will be permitted to center on SOGI topics.”

Such a ban on entire fields of study, inquiry, and discourse, Creighton said—preposterously—would foster “diversity of viewpoint.”

For many years, Sara Spurgeon has taught a literature class focused on social justice and the environment. She has often assigned Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir Between the World and Me, but this time, the book was flagged by the bot as promoting “the belief that meritocracy is a construct of oppression designed to exploit Black bodies,” and it therefore “directly violates the system’s Prohibition of Prejudiced Advocacy.” (The word meritocracy does not appear in the book.) Creighton has insisted that “studying Black history, discussing the realities of racism, and treating every student with respect are not prohibited.” Spurgeon told me that works by science fiction and fantasy authors were also flagged.

In other professors’ syllabi, the bot flagged the Pulitzer Prize–winning play Angels in America by Tony Kushner, essays by the Mexican American MacArthur genius grant recipient Sandra Cisneros, and materials related to a class about the Holocaust (that professor was told to drop material regarding Nazi persecution of LGBTQ people).

Putting aside the ideological slant of the new rules, the bot, like many large language models, seems to “hallucinate,” or make mistakes. The AAUP lawsuit lists texts banned for their “sex-based ecofeminist framework” and “gendered ecofeminist frameworks.” These phrases might sound persuasively like academese, but the academics behind the lawsuit had never heard of them; these concepts “do not exist,” the complaint says. Matthew Pehl, a history professor at Tech, told me that he knew several people who’d received reports from the system that were “plainly written by an AI that had hallucinated content or confused content from one class to another.”

Alan Barenberg, a history professor who specializes in the Soviet Union, was told to remove readings by the Princeton historian Joan Scott and the French philosopher Michel Foucault from his Ph.D.-level historiography class, after they were flagged by the AI—whose assessments he described to me as “completely inaccurate.” It also seemed to have mixed his course up with a different one. The texts were part of a unit of the class related to how treatment of gender in historical research has changed over time. “These things have been taught in classes for a long time,” Barenberg told me. The material is controversial, he said, only “in the eyes of a few people who aren’t even actually on campus.”

“The fact that the system AI doesn’t work, that it makes inaccurate pronouncements—that’s a feature, not a bug. They don’t care if it’s accurate or not. They just want to be able to say, Look, we’re making sure that your children are not being exposed to these horrible ideas from these radical professors,” Barenberg said. “A key part of how authoritarian systems often work is that, through the vagueness and sending up signals and vibes, they’re essentially saying, You know what not to do, but being deliberately vague about it.”

Although the AI is now reviewing only some courses, the university could extend the process to more. For now, professors are the ones responsible for volunteering whether their own materials may be considered controversial. Many, unsure of what might trigger the bot, told me that they had private conversations with administrators who told them to simply self-censor and remove materials from their courses in advance, so as not to draw the wrath of leadership or lawmakers.

Pehl, the history professor, told me that he did just that, and decided not to use the book Scraping By, about labor in Revolutionary-era Baltimore, because he had been planning on teaching it early in the year, which didn’t allow time for it to be reviewed first. The book differentiates between the experiences of workers based on whether they were enslaved or free, men or women.

William Wenthe, a poetry professor, didn’t mark his course as potentially controversial, though he told me that he was worried: He teaches T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which includes a male character from Greek mythology who becomes a woman. Could a Texan politician object to that? Censorship infantilizes students, he said: “They’re old enough to vote. They’re all old enough to fight and die for this country. And you’re treating them like babies.”

Texas Tech’s censorship policy does not just affect the humanities. According to the AAUP lawsuit, medical students at the campus in El Paso are no longer permitted to learn about racial disparities in medical care or how to treat underserved populations—both major challenges in the overwhelmingly Hispanic Texas border region. At the Lubbock campus, a professor of health sciences at the medical school was told that he could not teach about transgender or intersex patients.

Some professors are leaving. Breanna Harris told me she quit her job as a biology professor at the Lubbock campus in part because she says administrators informed her that she could not use the American Medical Association’s definitions of sex and gender, which, by distinguishing between the two, run afoul of Texas law. Harris’s course materials, she said, ask questions such as “How do organisms become ‘male’ or ‘female’?” and “What does that process look like biologically during development?”

Lisa Limeri, a biology professor at Texas Tech who had just been awarded tenure this year, resigned for the same reason. “We are not allowed to teach topics that are relevant to things like the MCAT and being practicing medical professionals,” she told me. “We are not allowed to teach them scientifically, accurately.”

A spokesperson for the university pushed back on the claim that medical students were not being taught what they would need to do their jobs: “We have tremendous confidence in our faculty and their commitment to preparing students to provide excellent care. It is important to distinguish between what our policy actually requires and restrictions that are not found anywhere in our written guidance.”

According to an internal survey, more than half of Tech’s faculty are looking for work elsewhere. In a private meeting with faculty, a recording of which was shared with me, a provost acknowledged that “on average, we have 20 percent to 25 percent fewer people applying for jobs here.” When professors challenged him on why he was not fighting against censorship, the provost said he couldn’t stop it: “It’s going to happen. And so you can try to help slow or mitigate it,” he said. “Or you can bring in people who will help it happen faster. That’s the option at the moment.”

Texas Tech is an R1 research university, which means that it receives a large amount of federal funding to produce significant amounts of research. But the censorship policy leaves entire fields of scientific inquiry banned, even for Ph.D. students.

“America has risen to global prominence in science and scientific research because of the strength of our system,” Limeri said. “If these kinds of censorship policies were implemented everywhere, we would have a generation of students who are not learning to think critically, are not learning to think for themselves, and are not learning full and accurate scientific information.” Administrators told faculty in that private meeting not to discuss the censorship policy with students, because it might generate “a lot of fear and a lot of anger and anxiety.”

The Texas A&M system, which serves about 175,000 students, doesn’t have an AI censor. But it does have both a strict, arbitrary, and confusing censorship policy and elected leaders joining online mobs against professors.

Melissa McCoul, a senior lecturer in the English department at Texas A&M’s College Station campus, has taught her course on children’s literature 11 times since arriving at the university in 2017. And she would have continued to do so, if Governor Abbott hadn’t demanded she be fired.

In July 2025, Brian Harrison, a Republican state representative, reposted a slide from McCoul’s class that had been highlighted by another X user. The slide argued that queerness can be discussed in “age-appropriate” terms and that homosexuality was not an “x-rated” concept. Harrison declared that “Texans are being taxed out of their homes to fund liberal indoctrination.” McCoul immediately found herself at the mercy of a social-media mob.

A little more than two weeks later, a student interrupted McCoul’s class to say that her teachings were “against the law.” After a brief exchange, McCoul asked the student to leave. In September (by which time McCoul was teaching a different class), Harrison posted a video of the summer confrontation and described the student as “OBJECTING TO TRANSGENDER INDOCTRINATION.” Harrison also posted a letter he had sent to Abbott reminding him that “during your State of the State Address, you stated that ‘any educator who tells students that boys can be girls should be fired on the spot.’”

Mark Welsh, then the president of A&M, replied to Harrison’s post with a statement that the class had been canceled and that “key leaders” had been removed for allowing McCoul to teach “course content that was not consistent with the course’s published description.” Abbott joined the mob, replying, “Good. Now, fire the professor who acted contrary to Texas law.” Promptly, the university did.

McCoul claims that the course never deviated from the catalog description and has sued the university for ignoring its own due-process procedures; the lawsuit is ongoing. According to her complaint, two faculty panels reviewing the incident found no good cause for her firing. Welsh has since resigned.

In a motion to dismiss McCoul’s suit, filed in April, A&M states that McCoul was an untenured senior lecturer and that “Texas A&M University is entitled to state sovereign immunity as an ‘arm of the state.’” The motion also argues that “the termination was lawful and was certainly no violation of the lecturer’s academic freedom or the First Amendment.” The university alleges that McCoul “used the class as an opportunity to indoctrinate her students into transgender and LGBTQ ideology,” and that “by kicking out a student” who expressed a contrary opinion and “threatening” to kick out others, McCoul “interfered with those students’ academic freedom.” The filing also makes sure to point out that “she began the class by introducing herself as an autistic lesbian.”

In December, A&M adopted a policy stating that “no system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.” The next month, the women’s and gender studies programs were eliminated.

The policy defines gender ideology as the idea “that self-assessed gender identity should replace the biological category of sex,” whereas race ideology “attempts to shame a particular race or ethnicity, accuse them of being oppressors in a racial hierarchy or conspiracy, ascribe to them less value as contributors to society and public discourse because of their race or ethnicity, or assign them intrinsic guilt based on the actions of their presumed ancestors.” If a professor acknowledges the existence of trans people, they could be violating the first policy; if they describe race-based chattel slavery in the antebellum United States, they could be violating the second. Their livelihood might depend on how much time the governor of Texas is spending on social media that day.

Leonard Bright, a tenured professor at A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service, is one of several other professors suing the university for its censorship policy. This year, his graduate-level course on ethics and public policy was canceled. His lawsuit says that he informed the administration that “at no point does the course require students to adopt, affirm, or reject particular beliefs regarding these topics. Students are evaluated solely on analytical rigor, use of evidence, and professional engagement.” Still, he told me, the university wouldn’t approve the class unless he provided “a detailed day-by-day description of when sexual orientation is going to come up.” And he couldn’t do that, because “this is a discussion course.”

The policy raises other uncomfortable questions for Prairie View A&M, a historically Black college in the A&M system that was first established by the Reconstruction-era legislature as a segregated institution. There’s no way to even explain its existence without touching on matters that could be caricatured as “race ideology.”

The difference between “advocating” and “teaching” is not clearly defined, but the way the censorship policy is being implemented makes the situation pretty clear: If you’re using material that state lawmakers agree with, that’s teaching; if you’re talking about something they object to, that’s advocacy, and you have to stop. As detailed in a complaint against Texas A&M filed by the ACLU, an English professor, Vanita Reddy, was told that the censorship policy “will not be applied to heteronormative orientation and identity,” but exclusively to “LGBTQ gender identity or sexual orientation.”

George, the history professor who was told to remove several texts perceived as liberal, was allowed to teach the conservative anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly’s “What’s Wrong With Equal Rights for Women?”

Professors at UT Austin aren’t seeing their classes summarily canceled or scrubbed for forbidden terms by a censorship AI. They haven’t been told to list the dates that gender might come up. The governor hasn’t demanded the heads of any of its professors. “Gender and race ideology” have not been banned. While Texas Tech and Texas A&M received an “F” from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free-speech watchdog, UT Austin earned a “D–”.

What UT has done is issue a statement on “academic integrity” urging professors to “fairly present differing views and scholarly evidence on reasonably disputed matters and unsettled issues” and “to eschew topics and controversies that are not germane to the course.”

No one is really sure what that means—and that may be the point. “Nobody yet has been disciplined under this policy,” Julie Minich, an English professor who focuses on Latino literature, told me. “But also, nobody wants to be the first one to be disciplined under the policy.” The university did not respond to repeated requests by phone and email to speak about this story or to a list of questions.

[Adam Serwer: Speak at your own risk]

Peter Onyisi, a physics professor, has for years used the greenhouse effect as an example of a real-world, practical effect of quantum mechanics to students. Although he does not plan to stop, he worries that administrators could argue that climate change is not “germane” to his course. But that’s not how teaching works, Onyisi pointed out: “You can’t really say, Oh, physics is in a nice little box, and it doesn’t talk to anything else.” Academic freedom is under assault in the UT system, he said, just in more “subtle” ways than elsewhere.

Jim Davis, the president of UT, has justified the cuts to the core curriculum by arguing that too many courses were “narrow.” One of Davis’s favorite examples is a class on the history of college football, although, as one professor pointed out to me, the origins of the sport offer a fascinating view into the post–Civil War economy and culture of the South, not to mention a billion-dollar industry that is a big deal at, well, UT. That’s the thing about academic inquiry: Many seemingly “narrow” questions open up much bigger ones.

Davis’s example, however, may be misleading. Given that most of the courses being targeted involve the study of gender or race, “narrow” seems to refer mainly to the study of people, subjects, or works that some conservatives consider unimportant.

These sweeping changes couldn’t have happened “if shared governance was still in existence,” Lauren Gutterman, the American-studies professor, told me. “S.B. 37 has changed things dramatically in just a very short period of time.”

A university task force has proposed that the new core include a “Great Questions of Human Life” requirement based on texts from preapproved “great thinkers.” A preliminary list of 50 names was sent out to faculty. The list includes three Black writers (W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Toni Morrison), six women (in addition to Morrison: Mary Shelley, Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Ann Evans, Jane Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft), and no Hispanic or Latin American authors. The only Asian author on the list is Confucius. (UT has said it “intends” to expand the list). A “Masterworks of Literature” requirement would pull most of its readings from the same list, and divide them into the categories “American,” “British,” and “World.” The proposed “Principles of American Politics” requirement warns that the courses should “focus on issues that involve the whole country, not just one region or group.” And under its “Western Civilization” requirement, the task force observes that “Western Civilization has interacted in complex ways with other civilizations”—middle-school writing that raises the question of what counts as Western civilization, a term that the report acknowledges it cannot define.

“They’re saying that they need to be broad classes that satisfy the core requirements, not narrow classes,” Minich told me. But the effect is the opposite. “Rather than having a core curriculum that reflects the diversity of the campus in the public flagship of the second-most diverse state in the country, they’re moving toward a curriculum that is much more heavily focused on the European intellectual tradition. And they are calling that ‘breadth’ and saying that courses that fall outside that intellectual tradition are ‘narrow.’”

Classes that get stripped of their core designation may end up scrapped altogether, because students have limited time. Declining enrollment in non-core classes can then be an excuse to dispose of them entirely.

“At the time I came here, UT was the No. 1 place to do what I do—studying Latino literature. We have this long, rich history of Latino studies,” Minich said. “I see this as a first step toward eliminating an area of study that has been historically extremely important at this university.”

In July, Iván Chaar López, an expert in the history of the U.S. southern border, was denied tenure, as Inside Higher Ed reported, despite the College of Liberal Arts tenure committee voting overwhelmingly in his favor. Chaar López told me that, in a meeting with administrators that February, he was told that the president’s tenure committee “had a negative view” of his work. He is challenging the decision, and is one of several faculty members or administrators who believe that they were fired, laid off, or denied tenure because their politics were seen as left-wing or because their expertise is among the subjects the administration has turned against.

“It is almost as if we are meant to teach whatever fits into a political pamphlet. But that’s not what free inquiry and free speech and academic freedom are about,” Chaar López told me. Students are getting “an education that is all about obeying.”

Angela Valenzuela, a professor in the department of educational leadership and policy, said that you should not be able to “graduate from UT Austin and not know anything about anything south of the Rio Grande River and call yourself an educated person.” She added, “This is not an argument about whether or not ‘Western civilization’ should be taught. It’s an argument of whether that’s what should be exclusively taught.”

UT’s quiet restructuring of the university may prove to be more effective and sustainable than the tactics at Texas Tech and Texas A&M; UT’s censorship attempts, notably, have yet to face a legal challenge. Nonetheless, professors fear that the changes will leave students without the cognitive tools or contextual information to question matters that some conservatives would prefer not be questioned.

Meanwhile, resources have been directed instead toward UT Austin’s new School of Civic Leadership, which claims to promote “freedom of thought and speech.”

Jen Shelton, an English professor at Texas Tech, told me that her daughter had gone to college in Minnesota. “When she had her first class,” Shelton said, “she called me to say, ‘You won’t believe all the things people are allowed to say up here.’”

Some conservative activists have gone beyond attacking teachers. Brian Harrison, who led the campaign against the A&M professor, railed in September against the existence of an archive of LGBTQ-history primary-source documents at the University of North Texas. The webpage describing the archive was taken down; one begins to wonder whether the state will demand the destruction of the documents themselves next.

In a 2026 AAUP survey, 70 percent of Texas faculty would not recommend taking a faculty position in the state, and about 30 percent said they had experienced censorship of courses by administrators. Texas “is on the leading edge” in the field of censorship in higher education, Jonathan Friedman, who directs PEN America’s work on free expression in the United States, told me. But Texas is hardly alone. According to PEN, Alabama, Florida, Indiana, and Utah have all adopted laws that seek to limit what professors are allowed to teach and what students are allowed to study. “Notions like academic freedom and free speech on campus are all just going out the window,” Friedman said. More Republican-leaning states will likely follow.

Over the past decade, some conservatives have invoked principles of academic freedom and free speech in order to subvert both. These conservatives mocked “snowflakes” and “trigger warnings,” and then passed legislation making it illegal to hurt white students’ feelings by discussing historical or contemporary events. They invoked academic freedom and then began erasing fields of study they found politically inconvenient. They railed against “indoctrination,” and then argued that the state is entitled to control everything said in the classroom.

[Kevin Carey: The logical end point of Trump’s higher-education agenda]

One might argue that progressive influence on campus had gone too far and states needed to reestablish free-speech norms eroded during the zenith of the first anti-Trump backlash. Conservative ideas do have an important place in higher education—a well-rounded education is impossible otherwise. But there is a distinction between left-wing censoriousness and actual state censorship. Todd Wolfson, the president of AAUP, told me that he would be “the first to admit” that he witnessed people and ideas being “shut down from discussion” on campus. But, he said, “there’s no comparison in the ability and attempt to dictate ideas. Just none. One was informal, and the other is now formal and legal.” He continued, “I think it’s a fantasy to say that what happened then has any relationship to the extremism that we’re seeing right now.”

The right-wing assault on higher education may be rooted in college-educated voters’ shift to the left. If one blames that shift on left-wing professors, then purging them from academia could change the way educated people vote. But educational polarization is a global phenomenon, and evidence shows that college does not alter students’ political beliefs as much as people assume. Attacking universities is more likely to simply degrade the quality of education than it is to help Republicans at the polls. Besides, in Texas, many students arrive as conservatives and stay that way. Many students have protested the new censorship policies, while others have enforced them, as demonstrated by the undergraduates turning their professors in for violations.

University leaders have occasionally attempted to disguise their campaigns as an effort to better prepare Texas students for the workforce. Texas Tech Chancellor Brandon Creighton said that there was “quite a bit of garbage in curriculum all over university campuses all across America,” and that Tech would “remain the tip of the spear on producing the highest degree of value.” But the value of even the hardest STEM degree will be degraded if courses in those fields are censored for being politically inconvenient. And regardless, the quality of an education is not determined by the wealth you subsequently accumulate.

So what can be done? Legal precedent seems to be on the side of people challenging the censorship policies, at least at Tech and A&M. The Supreme Court has held that academic freedom is a “special concern” that is “of transcendent value to all of us.” Florida, during litigation over the Stop WOKE Act, a similar ban on “divisive concepts,” tried to argue that the First Amendment didn’t apply to professors at state schools, because they were government employees. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that argument, concluding that “if the history of that Amendment tells us anything, it is that the government cannot forbid what it perceives as heresy.” The current right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, however, has shown itself willing to ignore the plain text of the Constitution where the latest culture-war fixation is concerned.

“You have to go back to the loyalty oath cases of the Cold War period to see relatively analogous situations where the government was trying to silence academics with viewpoints that they didn’t like,” Emerson Sykes, an attorney with the ACLU, told me. “But even in those cases, we did not see the sort of brazen attempt to ban particular ideas or ideologies and scrub them from the public record or from public education.”

Sykes cautioned me that although academic freedom interacts with the First Amendment, they are not synonymous. The Eleventh Circuit ruling found that state governments can “make ordinary curriculum decisions (like which majors or courses to offer), or otherwise ensure competent academic instruction.” For that reason, UT Austin’s structural changes are likely more resistant to legal challenge. Those who wish to oppose them may have to find other means, such as labor organizing or politics. That will be a monumental task—especially as universities are relying more and more on tenuously employed adjunct professors.

In the meantime, the Trump administration has been meddling in higher education at the federal level—using grants to pressure universities into changing whom they admit and what they teach and research, and going after foreign students for their politics. The degradation of free speech doesn’t stop in Texas. And it won’t stay on campus either.

This article originally misstated the date when the professor Sara Spurgeon first had to submit her course materials through a portal for review.

Six of the Best First Lines in Modern Literature

2026-10-11T07:00:00-04:00

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

A novel’s first line is saddled with an extraordinary responsibility: to not only establish a story’s start but also to impart with indelible effect the writer’s voice. Asking someone to identify the best first line of all time tends to make people skittish, so I asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors instead: What is one of the best first lines in modern literature?

“Sth, I know that woman.”

Toni Morrison’s fiction contains a rich seam of great first lines. This one, from Jazz, is my favorite, for its immediacy and its intimacy. From the start, the narrator and her words have an arresting physicality, and the reader is put in the position of question asker and gossip hound, wondering whether the speaker is exasperated or disgusted (or if she relishes that disgust).

In Morrison’s own telling, the line emerged out of frustration. She wanted her novel to express the spirit of metropolitan Black life in the 1920s and for her prose to embody the essence of jazz, with its genius for spontaneous invention. But her original opener felt too predictable. Irritated, she flung her pencil aside and sucked her teeth. When she set that exclamation down on paper—sth, evoking an intake of breath—she found the voice of her story. Following that voice, Morrison achieved the unity between sound and meaning that she was after: music, made manifest in prose.

— Sophia Nguyen, staff writer

***

“Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez (translated by Gregory Rabassa), is riddled with richly detailed and narratively complex sentences. This first one seems to encompass the whole life of one character while leaving part of that story untold. The line pairs the incredible with the mundane, setting the stage for a novel that popularized magical realism and inspired a generation of international writers by blending an imagined Latin American past with actual historical events.

Think of a murder board, that trope from crime television with the red string and pushpins connecting things together. Now imagine that an endless string connects everything, everywhere, real and fictional, possible and hopeless, backward and forward in time. And then visualize bunching that endless string together in your hand, connecting it all together at once. That is the sensation this first line delivers anew, every time I read it.

— Ian Bogost, staff writer

***

“The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.”

The diction Stella Gibbons deploys at the start of her satirical 1932 novel, Cold Comfort Farm, is so precise that you could almost be forgiven for reading the sentence straight, although to do so would be to miss out on its humor: She is presenting a simulacrum of the genteel English novel but turning the values that sort of novel advances on their head. (To that end, Gibbons also includes a foreword in which she appeals for feedback from a pretentious fictional author called Anthony Pookworthy.) Flora’s education is presented as enviable but in fact sounds dreadful, in addition to ineffective at preparing her for anything but an ornamental life. And although the book revolves around her efforts to impart her impeccable social graces to a pack of depressive, half-feral relatives, it also makes relentless fun of her and her tactics, starting with her reluctant attraction to the sort of upper-crust chap who would name his personal airplane Speed Cop II.

— Talya Zax, senior editor

***

“For a long time I used to go to bed early.”

The first words of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time call us to attention like an orchestra tuning before a symphony—and from this simple confession, the elaborate, mannered world of Paris in the late Second Empire soon springs to life. In this seven-volume novel, Marcel, the narrator and the author’s surrogate, learns to navigate, and then transcend, social circles of ever greater wealth and status.

One of Proust’s possible titles for his masterpiece was The Intermittencies of the Heart, and his epic novel takes place on a startlingly intimate scale. The airy ordinariness of the opening sentence introduces a mind seized by obsessive self-scrutiny and exquisite perceptions of art, music, memory, love, and grief. The painstaking details of Marcel’s inner life make this million-plus-word book still feel like the radical experiment it was in 1913, when the first volume was published. No one bares the soul like Proust, and for a long time, his anatomy of sexual jealousy, infatuation, and heartbreak has kept me up quite late.

— Walt Hunter, contributing editor

***

“The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at 8 p.m.”

This line, from the first story in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize–winning short-story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, is astonishing in its ability to do so much narrative work in only 26 words. Immediately, as a reader, you are left wondering about the notice, who sent it, and why the electricity is getting cut off. You feel compelled to keep reading, to answer these questions, and to encounter new ones. Once you reach the end of the story—which is packed with a remarkable number of emotional turns in just 21 pages—the meaning of “temporary matter” takes on a new and devastating shape. Lahiri is singular in her ability to write characters enmeshed in melancholy, folded into a propulsive narrative. An incredible story in an incredible book.

— Clint Smith, staff writer

***

“Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty-seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything else was a do-over.”

Who, after reading this sentence, can resist wanting to know more about Cyrus’s plight? This opening line from Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar’s 2024 debut novel, is funny and dense with mystery and surprise (where has God been for 27 years? Is God really speaking, or is “God” just a neurochemical epiphenomenon of those drugs?), and it ends on a powerful note of regret—regret being a winning quality in a first sentence. To begin this story about an Iranian American man’s experiences with addiction, faith, blasphemy, family, and martyrdom, Akbar stretches out a long sentence introducing a character who has steered his life into a dark place, landing with the down-stress on the colloquial do-over, the perfect note of anticlimax. Akbar, a poet, has an ear for rhythm, and his irresistible narrative voice hooks you from its first wry and delightful clauses, carrying you through to the many plot revelations ahead.

— Scott Stossel, national editor

The Week Ahead

You Can See Everything, a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes in the weeks before she went to prison and the three years that followed (out Friday in limited theaters)
Crystal Lake, a Friday the 13th prequel series about Pamela Voorhees before she becomes a killer (streaming Thursday on Peacock)
You Let Me In, a novel by Lucy Clarke about a writer who suspects that someone is watching her in her own home (out Thursday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: ZEPHYR / Science Photo Library / Getty.

A Striking Decline in Openness to IVF

By Faith Hill

Less than 50 years ago, the first child conceived by in vitro fertilization was delivered in Oldham, England. Louise Brown was heralded as a medical marvel—not only for her parents, who had struggled to conceive for a decade, but also for the world. “At 11:47 pm, on July 25th 1978,” the British paper The Observer declared, “hope was born.”

Thirteen million “test-tube babies” later, Brown is still too young to qualify for social-security benefits, and IVF has gone from science fiction to a household acronym. It accounts for almost one in 36 births in the United States, according to some estimates. In the meantime, another fertility treatment has become much more common: From 2014 to 2024, the number of egg-freezing procedures per year went from 6,000 to 39,000, a sixfold increase. By most obvious standards, the assisted-reproduction industry is thriving. It has allowed countless single people, same-sex partners, and couples dealing with infertility to become parents. It also happens to be worth tens of billions of dollars.

Read the full article.

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At festivals and competitions in Spain, teams form spectacular human towers known as castells, a Catalan tradition dating to the late 18th century.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Trump Is an Easy Mark for Putin

2026-10-10T14:14:00-04:00

Late last night, President Trump announced a “massive” deal to buy diesel fuel from Russia. For the American truckers and farmers Trump claims to be serving, the deal means little or nothing. Trump may not know or may not care that his latest gambit will not reduce diesel prices. His poll numbers are plunging to Herbert Hoover levels. He needs a last-minute electioneering gimmick.

But while the deal will not benefit American consumers, it has immense consequences for others. For Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the deal is a potential lifesaver. For war-ravaged Ukraine, it is the most outrageous and heartless Trump betrayal to date. For Trump’s entourage, the deal promises corruption opportunities on a multibillion-dollar scale. And for people trying to understand the Trump presidency, the deal is further proof of the accusation that Nancy Pelosi flung in Trump’s face in 2019: “With you, all roads lead to Putin.”

The United States is a diesel superpower. It is one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of diesel fuel. U.S. refineries produce about 5.2 million barrels of diesel a day. Americans consume about 3.7 million barrels a day. The surplus is sold abroad: In recent months exports have run above 1.5 million barrels a day.

The United States imports some diesel fuel from Canada, about 154,000 barrels a day, owing to the peculiarities of pipeline and shipping networks: It’s cheaper to supply New England from the Canadian refinery in New Brunswick than from U.S. refineries along the Gulf Coast. By comparison, Trump’s Russia deal is for 2.25 million barrels: the equivalent of about 16 hours’ worth of U.S. consumption, 10 hours’ worth of U.S. production, or 14 days’ worth of Canadian imports.

Unfortunately for U.S. diesel consumers, the price of diesel fuel is set by global markets, not North American ones. Trump’s Iran war has disrupted fuel supplies from the Middle East, including diesel supplies. Before the war, Europe imported more than half a million barrels of diesel a day from the Persian Gulf. The world’s second-biggest diesel exporter used to be Russia, which shipped about 817,000 barrels a day in 2025. When the Iran war raised energy prices, Russia was positioned to profit.

[David Frum: Why Trump didn’t predict the gas-price spike]

The United States in the past tried to help Ukraine by sanctioning Russian energy exports. Trump sometimes pretended to support this policy. In September 2025, for example, Trump proclaimed a tariff on India, ostensibly to punish India for buying Russian oil—but then lifted it in February.

So the Ukrainians took matters into their own hands. As Russia has intensified its horrific drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian civilians, Ukraine has struck back with a devastating campaign against Russian energy infrastructure, including diesel. By late summer 2026, the Ukrainians estimated that they had shut down 43 percent of Russian refinery capacity. According to Ukrainian reports, Russian production of oil of all kinds plunged from 5.6 million barrels a day before the Iran war to 4.1 million barrels by late summer 2026. Russia imposed a ban on diesel exports in July. That ban has been extended into October.

Friends of Ukraine hailed the attacks on Russian energy infrastructure as a war-changing success. Trump saw a threat to Republican hopes in the midterms. Curbs on Russian fuel exports helped push the price of diesel fuel in the U.S. above $5 a gallon in July, then higher than $6 a gallon in September.

Since Trump’s return to power in 2025, the Putin regime has dangled lucrative deals in front of the president’s entourage.

The Wall Street Journal reported in November 2025 about secret conversations in Miami the previous month between the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, and Trump’s negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner:

“For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity, according to Western security officials. By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.”

The report noted that Dmitriev “found receptive partners in Witkoff—Trump’s longtime golfing partner—and Kushner, whose investment fund, Affinity Partners, drew billion-dollar investments from the Arab monarchies whose conflict with Israel he had helped mediate.” The New York Times reported last week about an even more brazen Russian offering: a multibillion-dollar oil deal for assets owned by Russia’s Lukoil, which would directly benefit a Trump donor and two Middle Eastern groups that have done business with Kushner or Witkoff’s family. (A spokesman for Steve Witkoff said of the Times story that Witkoff “has no conflict of interest and no financial stake in this matter.” Of the Wall Street Journal story, a source described as “familiar with Witkoff’s thinking” said “the envoy is confident that any settlement with Russia would benefit America broadly, not just a handful of investors.”)

But all these apparently enticing Russian schemes come with a catch: Russian energy assets are not worth much if those assets are regularly wrecked by Ukrainian drones. This makes plain the implicit quid pro quo in these lucrative deals offered to Trump’s family and friends: If you compel Ukraine to surrender, we will enrich you beyond reckoning.

Putin is attempting to leverage Russia’s most strategic asset in his war on Ukraine: Trump’s weakness for corruption. The 2.25 million barrels of diesel Putin offered Trump will have zero net impact on world energy markets or the world price of diesel. But accepting those barrels will collapse the U.S.-led sanctions regime on Russia—and align Trump with Putin against the Ukrainian air attacks on Russian energy production.

Trump stopped providing aid to Ukraine long ago. But the U.S. still provides Ukraine with crucial intelligence information. If Putin can entice Trump to cut Ukraine off from U.S. intelligence, he can do real damage to Ukraine’s capabilities. Russian diesel fuel is the cheese in that mousetrap. Trump’s negotiators are sniffing at the bait: The Kyiv Post reported today that Witkoff and Kushner are already threatening to stop information-sharing if Ukraine continues to strike Russian energy assets. And meanwhile, FBI Director Kash Patel is reportedly planning his own trip to Russia—one that members of Congress are urging him to cancel, as my colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick recently reported.

There is much about Putin’s offer of diesel that remains doubtful. Does Trump have the legal authority to buy previously sanctioned Russian oil? Does Russia even possess the diesel to sell? But one thing at least remains as clear as ever: With Trump, all roads lead to Putin.

A Referendum on the President’s Policies

2026-10-10T11:38:25-04:00

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.

With less than a month until the midterm elections, Democrats and Republicans alike are trying to identify the key battleground states and districts in which to concentrate their efforts. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss what these races may mean for both parties.

“What we’re seeing right now is a referendum on the president’s policies over the past two years,” Adam Harris, a host of Radio Atlantic, said last night. “You have the war in Iran that [President Trump] can’t tether to Joe Biden,” and so now more voters are linking “the president’s policies specifically, from the war on down,” to issues such as increases in prices.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Carrie Dann, the managing editor of The Cook Political Report; Harris; Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News; and Annie Linskey, a White House reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

Watch the full episode here.