The Atlantic

Trump’s Latest Vaccine Order Is Making Things More Confusing

2026-08-13T18:49:00-04:00

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In January, the Trump administration attempted to fundamentally change the way the United States handles childhood immunizations. Following a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC updated its vaccine schedule to recommend that some shots no longer be given to all children. A federal court undid the effort in March. In an executive order in May, Donald Trump called on states to adopt the narrower schedule anyway. On Monday, Trump issued a new executive order on the same subject, focused on lowering the number of vaccines that the government recommends for all children. As I wrote earlier this week, this White House has a habit of doubling down when it doesn’t get its way. But only states have the power to put these proposals into practice—and many state policy makers, concerned that the White House is contradicting existing research, aren’t keen to follow its guidance.

According to the new executive order, preventive shots for hepatitis A, hepatitis B, dengue, and other diseases should be recommended for “high-risk” groups only. The order also calls to split up vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella—the two-dose MMR shot that has been a standard recommendation for U.S. children for decades—into three separate stages, and directs the attorney general to pursue legal action against states that don’t respect “parental authority, religious freedom, disability accommodations, and equal protection under the law.” (The order says it will align U.S. policy with the best practices of other countries, such as Denmark, but the experts I spoke with highlighted that what works in one country won’t necessarily work in another.)

The mandate may not have any legal authority to compel states to change their guidelines in the near term, although the invocation of the attorney general suggests that litigation may be on the horizon. And the single-disease vaccines that the executive order encourages aren’t yet available in the U.S. But this week’s order risks creating even more uncertainty about vaccines than already exists. “If you set out to write a policy that confuses people, it would look a lot like this one,” Jake Scott, an infectious-disease specialist at Stanford, told me.

Between the policy priorities of the Trump administration and the guidance of public-health experts, Americans have been stuck in a state of vaccine whiplash. When the American Academy of Pediatrics broke with the government earlier this year over its proposed vaccine schedule, the chair of the organization’s committee on infectious diseases told reporters that the recommendations are a “strong departure from the medical evidence and no longer offer the optimal way to prevent illness in children.” Some state lawmakers have been fighting over how best to adapt to the CDC’s changing guidelines; Kansas’s GOP-dominated legislature tried to bring the state’s vaccine rules into alignment with the CDC’s, only for its Democratic governor to veto the effort in April. And many other states have publicly said that they will reject the guidelines.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has questioned vaccines’ safety in the past, has been driving the discussions of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, as my colleagues Tom Bartlett and Katherine J. Wu reported. And although the secretary has moved away from explicit anti-vax rhetoric in recent months (following a reported White House push for health officials to stick to messages with broad public support), vaccine skepticism clearly lingers within the administration. During the press conference for Monday’s executive order, Trump suggested that the MMR vaccine could be “quite lethal.” There is no evidence for this. Measles, though, can kill: Last year, the U.S. saw its first deaths from measles in a decade.

Rethinking MMR at this moment poses extreme logistical challenges. Even if pharmaceutical companies opted to invest the time and money to introduce these shots to the American market, splitting up the doses would create new problems for caregivers. “We are essentially tripling the operational labor required of the parent or guardian (who must now schedule three separate appointments for their child),” Maimuna Majumder, a Harvard epidemiologist, told me in an email, which is “all but guaranteed to result in missed vaccines.”

In the meantime, the executive order risks misinforming Americans who are already unsure of how they feel about vaccination. The Kaiser Family Foundation released a study in June suggesting that about a third of American adults fall into a “mixed middle group” of vaccine skepticism—they believe some myths and reject others. My colleague Nick Florko, who covers public health, told me that these are the people most likely to be swayed by the administration’s latest push: “Those are the folks that might see this and think, Okay, maybe my belief that I want to delay this vaccine is well founded because the federal guidance now says that we should do that.” Under the White House’s rubric, the Americans who most need clear guidance are those who stand to lose.

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Today’s News

The Kennedy Center’s board voted to put President Trump’s name back on the building, months after a federal judge ordered it removed. The board also approved closing the main building for a $250 million renovation, aiming to reopen it in 2028.
A federal judge dismissed the Trump administration’s anti-Semitism lawsuit against Harvard, finding that the incidents cited by the government were “too isolated and episodic” to show that the university was violating federal civil-rights law. The administration had accused Harvard of failing to address anti-Semitism on campus and sought the ability to deny the university federal grants.
Flock Safety, which operates a nationwide network of license-plate-reading cameras used by police to track vehicles, announced new safeguards after reports that officers misused the system to surveil people. The company said it will cut its default data-storage period from 30 days to seven and add stronger oversight of police searches.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: In 1973, an Atlantic writer predicted that Richard Nixon’s downfall would restrain presidents for generations. Instead, Watergate helped write the script for the scandals that followed, Jake Lundberg argues.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Anna Ruch / The Atlantic. Sources: Ivan Medina / AFP / Getty; Kevin Sieff; YouTube / César Gastélum.

What I Saw In Sinaloa

By Kevin Sieff

Last Tuesday night, I was eating sushi with a Mexican police chief in downtown Culiacán, a city that had momentarily flickered back to life amid a bloody cartel turf war. At the table next to us was a birthday party. The police chief ordered a salmon roll. Through the window, I could see groups of families and friends walking on the sidewalk, past car dealerships and strip malls, after months of self-imposed lockdown.

Among them were three influencers who pulled up to a KFC down the street. They were dressed as food-delivery workers, carrying insulated bags on their backs, joking with one another and livestreaming everything with their phones. César Gastélum, the group’s front man, had become famous for such innocuous pranks. Even as thousands were murdered by the cartels, Gastélum, a stocky, bearded 24-year-old, posted videos of himself dancing in pajamas, dressing as a priest, sipping iced coffee. He had more than 700,000 followers on TikTok.

Read the full article.

The Lesson Watergate Was Supposed to Teach

2026-08-13T16:50:00-04:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.

Historians are generally better off interpreting the past than predicting the future. By training, we’re meant to read sources, not tea leaves. In the fall of 1973, during the middle acts of Watergate’s Shakespearean drama, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. tried to do a little bit of both. In the cover story of The Atlantic’s November issue that year, “The Runaway Presidency,” Schlesinger cast President Richard Nixon’s abuses as the result of long-standing historical trends that had empowered the chief executive, and in the process offered a hopeful prognosis for what was to come. “Watergate,” Schlesinger wrote, “is potentially the best thing to have happened to the presidency in a long time. If the trails are followed to their end, many, many years will pass before another White House staff dares take the liberties with the Constitution and the laws the Nixon White House has taken.”

Nixon resigned 52 years ago this month, marking an end to the scandal, but bringing no such catharsis to our national life and no stop to the runaway presidency. Underscoring just how poorly Schlesinger’s optimism aged, J. D. Vance mused in June that “if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.” As my colleague David A. Graham noted at the time, the remark was a startling admission from a member of an administration that has taken liberties with the Constitution and the laws. It’s also entirely plausible: Scandals that would have previously brought the nation to a standstill barely register for more than a few days, in part because there are simply so many of them under Donald Trump. To understand how Schlesinger got it so wrong, first you have to understand what he got right.

In 1973, Schlesinger published a brick of a book titled The Imperial Presidency. He’d begun writing it as a pamphlet that March, but the project quickly swelled to 200,000 words as the spectacle of Watergate unfolded. The book tracked the aggregation of executive power from the founding onward, which accelerated during World War II and the Cold War. By the early ’70s, the office had grown so far beyond its constitutional bounds, Schlesinger wrote, that it posed “a revolutionary challenge to the separation of powers itself.”

Schlesinger’s Atlantic essay was preaching from his own text. In that account, Nixon’s abuses were symptoms that made visible a larger sickness. The expansion of the presidency, especially in the realm of war and foreign policy, was clear enough, but Nixon showed the dangers and “intoxications” that came with such power at home. Previous presidents may have possessed such authority but, Schlesinger argued, they had the character and restraint not to use it. Nixon was a different kind of case, demonstrating what would happen when a person “not open and modest,” but “from the start ambitious of power and contemptuous of law,” reached the nation’s highest office.

The president’s place at the center of the American political story exacerbated the problem. Congress should restrain the executive to reassert its place in the constitutional order, Schlesinger argued (he had advocated for Nixon’s impeachment as a starting point), but the American people also had a role to play: They must form “a new attitude” toward their presidents, becoming more skeptical and less reverent toward the office. Doing so would administer fewer “intoxications” to its occupant, Schlesinger wrote. But his prescriptions struck his critics as rich, to say the least. As he admitted in The Imperial Presidency, “historians and political scientists, this writer among them, contributed to the rise of the presidential mystique.” Contributed, indeed. Over the course of his career, Schlesinger had endowed Democratic presidents with just the stature he now feared. In 1965, he’d memorialized John F. Kennedy (to whom he served as special assistant) in a book so reverential that the writer Christopher Hitchens later called it “the founding breviary of the cult of JFK.”

Schlesinger may have only got religion because of the sins of the Republican Nixon administration, but he wasn’t exactly wrong. Many others in the moment hoped that Nixon’s transgressions would spark something of a democratic revival to check the dangerous tendencies that had made Watergate possible. And reforms did come: A slew of legislation from 1973 to 1978 attempted to address abuses exposed by Watergate and restrain presidential power on war, impoundment, elections, secrecy, and surveillance.

What Schlesinger failed to see was that although the dramas of Watergate may have pierced the mystique of the presidency, they also heightened the American fascination with it. Many people did lose their reverence for the office, but they didn’t turn their attention away. Perversely, it seemed that the spectacle of the presidency was enhanced rather than diminished by its subsequent scandals. Watergate supplied more than the inevitable suffix for all presidential crises to come—it also established the script. The crime and the cover-up; the drip of revelations; the question of what the president knew, and when he knew it; the obscure Washington characters thrust into the spotlight; the marathon hearings; the stern reports on the nightly news.

But presidential scandals, which once dominated the media cycle for weeks and months, now come and go at the speed of an attention economy that demands constant novelty. Meanwhile, the institutions that might have checked presidential power now enable it. Congress’s inaction and the Supreme Court’s expansive doctrine of executive authority have brought us closer to Nixon’s later assertion that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” Watergate would be a 12-hour news story today, as Vance suggests, because there’s nothing to stop a new one from happening tomorrow. In an era of revelation without reckoning, we’re more transfixed than ever by the imperial presidency, whether we like it or not.

At the end of his 1973 Atlantic essay, Schlesinger suggested that corruption came to the White House in 50-year cycles, like monstrous cicadas. There is perhaps something to the idea. Start from the abuses of Nixon, in the early ’70s, and go back half a century to the abuses of Warren Harding, in the early 1920s. Do that again, and you would arrive at the scandals that plagued Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency, in the 1870s. Keep rewinding another 50 years—ignore John Quincy Adams’s reputation for probity and rectitude—and you’d land on the “Corrupt Bargain” that gave Adams the presidency in the election of 1824.

The cycle could be projected forward, too: Schlesinger closed with one more prediction, this one more right than wrong. “Around the year 2023,” he wrote, “the American people will be well advised to go on the alert and start nailing down everything in sight.” We can’t say we weren’t warned.

Trump’s New Plan to Get His Name Back on the Kennedy Center

2026-08-13T16:38:00-04:00

Donald Trump just won’t let go of his plans for the Kennedy Center.

Less than three months after a federal judge ordered the president’s name stripped from the national arts center, Trump’s handpicked trustees have found a new way to try to put him back on the building. During a board meeting today, they voted in favor of a resolution that would return the president’s name to the building’s facade. It would read:

The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts
Restored and Renovated by President Donald Trump

I obtained a copy of the resolution, which contains one more edit to the Kennedy Center’s marble edifice. Once an obscure endowment known as the Trump Kennedy Center Fund reaches $100 million in donations, the resolution would expand the proposed signage’s language to include a third line: Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund. The vote, which was not included on the agenda distributed before the meeting, will likely drag out a legal fight over Trump’s transformation of the center and deepen an institutional crisis that has repelled audiences, artists, and donors since his takeover. Participants voted 20–3 to adopt the resolution, one person familiar with today’s proceedings told me on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter. The three “no” votes were from ex officio members of the board, who are not appointed by Trump but serve by dint of their federal office. Most members of the board are general trustees appointed by Trump. (The board elected Trump chair in February 2025.)

There is also still the matter of the center’s renovation plans. A main item of the meeting was to resolve a problem that has dogged Trump’s plans for the Kennedy Center for months: how to make a convincing case that the center needs to close. A federal judge had previously ruled that the board had failed to sufficiently examine the consequences of a full shutdown when it signed off in March on Trump’s surprise plan to close down the center for two years for a glow-up. Critics, including some ex officio trustees, accuse Trump of using the renovation as a cover for the center’s operational failings under his leadership. This time, board members reviewed a new trove of materials before—once again—voting for a full closure.

I obtained the report, assembled by a consulting firm and a construction-management firm, which presented two scenarios. The two-year-closure plan favored by Trump, which would displace ensembles such as the National Symphony Orchestra until the center reopened, would be covered largely by the $257 million appropriation from Congress that Trump asked for last year. A $560 million plan would extend the renovation to four years but allow programming to continue inside the center. Arts administrators generally try to avoid full shutdowns of major arts venues for fear of breaking audiences’ attendance habits. The uncertainty has deepened a crisis faced by the orchestra, which has been unable to announce its next season.

Paolo Zampolli, a general trustee who also serves as the Trump administration’s special envoy for global partnerships, says he strongly supports the plans to close. “It doesn’t make sense to keep it open,” he told me in a phone call after the meeting. “It’s going to take the double of time and cost the double of money.”

At one point, Trump joined the meeting virtually, delivering a tirade of “epic proportions” about the center’s disarray, the person familiar with the proceedings told me. Kennedy Center leaders under Trump have long claimed that the building is falling apart and that the president helped turn around the institution. Today’s naming resolution honored his “existential and unprecedented contributions” to the center.

“It’s very normal that when people do good things, there’s going to be some kind of recognition,” Zampolli told me, adding that he would support Trump’s name being included “everywhere that it could be possible” at the center. Zampolli, a longtime friend of Trump’s, also said he planned to use his own international business relationships to solicit donations for the institution. “That’s why we’re there,” he said of the general trustees. “That’s why the president chooses us and has confidence in us.”

In a statement, one of the ex officio trustees, Representative Rick Larsen of Washington State, criticized the name resolution. “The courts have already determined that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is the memorial to the late President and that the current president’s name cannot be used in the public spaces of the memorial,” he said. “If and when the renovations are done, let’s talk about an appropriate recognition. Until then, let’s get the necessary renovation work done.”

The Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to my requests for comment, and it has yet to communicate with staff about its renewed plan to close the building, according to two staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal. One of them said employees had suspected leadership would try to proceed with a shutdown, but news of the name resolution was not expected. “The inscription on the wall is them testing the limits,” the person said. The proposal, as well as the renovation plan, could face pushback from the federal judge assigned to the lawsuit over the center’s future, which was filed earlier this year by Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio, one of the ex officio trustees.

[Read: The Kennedy Center’s latest defense raises a new mystery]

The name resolution will likely renew speculation about why a tarp is still draping the Kennedy Center’s facade. The covering, fastened tightly to a towering system of scaffolding, has obscured John F. Kennedy’s name since June, when leaders say they complied with U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper’s order to remove Trump’s name from the building. So far, they have not provided a compelling reason for why the tarp is still up.

A spokesperson previously told me that it would remain up “as crews address maintenance needs of the marble and soffit panels.” But the center will have to elaborate on that reasoning in its filing next week, if the tarp is still up.

When Trump took over the Kennedy Center, he promised to make it “hot” again, accusing the former leadership of allowing the building to crumble and the finances to wither. But if his tenure was meant to prove the thesis that he could make the Kennedy Center great again, the evidence is lacking. For many patrons and artists, the center has simply become too politicized to go anywhere near. The latest design tweak almost certainly won’t change that.

Hunger Games, MAGA Style

2026-08-13T15:21:00-04:00

The semiquincentennial events that President Trump has personally directed have been a celebration of his very particular version of America. The bloody UFC fight on the White House lawn was followed by the sparsely attended Great American State Fair and a world-record-breaking July 4 fireworks show held alongside a dangerous lightning storm. Next weekend will bring a high-speed car race through the museum-lined streets of Washington. But of all of these festivities, the Patriot Games in Ohio this week might have been the oddest.

Organizers convened 120 teenagers from across the country—in their telling, the “next generation of leaders, competitors, and champions,” but also whoever happened to respond to an online request for personal essays and video entries—at a high school in Geneva, Ohio (population 5,924), roughly 45 miles northeast of downtown Cleveland. For three days, they competed in gym-class staples such as ball tosses, long jumps, tug-of-war, dodgeball, and an arcade-style basketball game called Victory Hoops. The field was narrowed to eight contestants who competed before the president on Tuesday night, clambering through a Ninja Warrior–style obstacle course while wearing red, white, and blue. One boy and one girl were crowned champions, and each was given a $125,000 scholarship.

Over the past several days, ESPN has streamed more than 26 hours of this contest, and I have consumed many of those hours—but I have yet to fully understand why this competition happened or what it has to do with American history, or even with American culture at this moment. I could barely follow how the various events were scored. It was like watching a nationally televised field day—with wholesome moments and cheerful contestants along the way—but it was unclear what the grand takeaway was supposed to be. (Perhaps that will be revealed when the event is condensed into a one-hour special airing tonight on ABC.) More than anything, it was a reality-television-style snapshot of the America that Trump most wants to see. The contestants were overwhelmingly white, in a country where roughly half of children are not, and many spoke openly of their Christian faith or their affection for this particular president.

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

When Trump showed up on Tuesday night, accompanied by the ESPN commentator Pat McAfee, the crowd erupted. “He’s got that Michael Jordan glow,” one spectator said. “We love you, Mr. President!” one man yelled. “2028!” another exclaimed. Outside the arena, a football-field scoreboard displayed a score of 45–47 in Trump’s honor. The crowd chanted “USA! USA! USA!” when he arrived and danced to his favorite song, “YMCA,” before he left.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” Trump told ESPN’s Laura Rutledge during an onstage interview, a few yards from dozens of teenagers. “I’m very proud of the group of people in this room. You see the spirit and the love of the country, our great country. And our country’s never done better.”

In that moment, it became clear that this gathering, like so many others this president has overseen, was actually all about Trump. This was his vision of the Hunger Games, MAGA style. He was front and center, watching the grand finale unfold and eyeing golden trophies he could present. But who were these contestants, and how were they chosen? Why these random events? And what does this all say about our country, and how does it mark our 250 years as one?

The Patriot Games, it must be said, seldom made for great television. I watched kids’ arms quiver as they tried to keep their chin up and over a bar—at least one lasted scarcely a second. Some struggled to cross the monkey bars in an obstacle course. Others tripped over the hurdles on the track, knocking over almost every one. (“A natural hurdler? Not really,” the announcer remarked.)

In one contest, the teenagers were asked to navigate an obstacle course of sorts: bear-crawl under a net, high-step through tires, weave between slalom poles, climb up and down a cargo net, walk across a beam, flip a tire (once for girls; twice for boys), traverse the monkey bars, carry two jerricans, leap onto hanging panels, and push a red button. In another contest, they went through a circuit of various sports. They attempted to kick a soccer ball into a bull’s-eye, catch three tennis balls, run through a maze of tackling dummies, throw a football into a target, serve a volleyball three times, hit a T-ball, and, finally, run around a few bases. In between challenges, some kids offered brief, out-of-breath analysis. “I did a lot better than I thought I would on the monkey bars,” concluded Gabriel Hayes, who was representing the Shawnee Tribe. “I just got kinda tired, to be honest,” said Remy Taylor, from Delaware.

The announcers revealed the kinds of small biographical details familiar to anyone who has watched the Olympics, attempting to humanize the athletes by highlighting their love of macaroni and cheese, Greek mythology, or Legos. Some were members of JROTC or the Future Farmers of America. Many came from military families, and aspired to carry on that tradition. There were at least three sets of siblings. Multiple boys wore a cross necklace, and several of the girls had a cross painted on their body. “I just want to say, it’s the glory for God. Thank you, Lord, for this opportunity,” said Max Biondolillo of Florida, after finishing the obstacle course. “Thank you, Jesus. That’s all I can say. Thank you, Jesus,” Seylah Brown, representing North Carolina, said after completing the circuit of sports.

The biographies suggested that the organizers might have struggled with recruitment in some deep-blue jurisdictions. The boy representing Puerto Rico has a southern accent and resides in Texas. Elsie Bruckart was the contestant for Vermont, but her hometown was listed as Bellbrook, Ohio. Her cousin Rebekah Roberts competed for Maine, but her hometown was Cornish, New Hampshire. Bobbi Vickers was representing Massachusetts, but she is from California. “I get a bunch of questions, like Why are you representing Massachusetts and not your home state?” Vickers told CNN. “But I think it’s really cool, because a lot of my family is from there and my favorite basketball team is actually the Boston Celtics.”

People familiar with the process told me that the athletes were selected through applications that required submissions of performance data and athletic statistics, along with a personal-essay and video submission. Freedom 250 did not respond to questions about why certain states were represented by competitors living in other states, or why there was such a lack of diversity among the contestants.

Danielle Alvarez, a spokesperson for Freedom 250, the Trump-aligned group that organized the games, said in a statement that the Patriot Games were one of the “unforgettable signature events” meant to “celebrate our country and inspire the next generation.” Organizers told me that they’d sought to create a range of challenges, aiming to show that the winner has mastered many different skills.

[Read: Inside America’s ugly birthday battle]

Often, during the events, the producers displayed the scores for only the top-10 contestants, shielding from embarrassment those who struggled. The announcers remarked several times that just because a contestant hadn’t performed well in one discipline didn’t mean they wouldn’t do better in another. Coaches shouted encouragement from the sidelines like summer-camp counselors: Give it your all! Finish the race! Be proud of the process! Some contestants had said beforehand that they had little clue before they arrived in Ohio what events would be included. “I’ve never really played soccer before,” said the girl representing Michigan. “I don’t know how to throw a football,” said the girl representing the Virgin Islands.

“It was hard. It was challenging. I mean, I’ve never played any of these sports. Like, I’m a cheerleader,” Laynie Arrowood, the 16-year-old representing the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, told the sideline reporter good-naturedly. “I’m not good at throwing football—obviously not good at soccer! But it’s okay. I tried my best.” Most of the contestants did seem to be enjoying themselves, and several said they’d made close friendships over the days they’d spent together. Some said they understood how Trump’s involvement had politicized the competition but were baffled as to why they had come under scrutiny. “We can’t vote,” Jonah Beauregard, a 17-year-old from Massachusetts, told The Boston Globe. “We can’t do anything in our power to do anything to help it.”

Trump announced in May 2023 that, if elected to a second term, he wanted to host “major sporting contests for high-school athletes” as part of the country’s 250th celebrations. “These Patriot Games will allow young Americans from every state to show off the best of American skills, sportsmanship, and competitive spirit,” he said in a campaign video.

America has a rich athletic history, and the youth-sports industry in this country generates an estimated $40 billion in annual revenue. But to find a precedent for these games, you’d have to go further afield. The Roman emperor Nero, in 59 C.E., began hosting the Ludi Juvenales, a series of youth games in a festival to mark the transition from boyhood to manhood. In ancient Greece, athletic competitions began when boys turned 12. And the International Olympic Committee stages a Youth Olympic Games every four years for those ages 15 to 17.

Andy Hall, an ESPN communications director, told me that Freedom 250 approached the network last year about televising the event. He said that the network is not paying for the rights to carry it, but he would not say whether it was being paid and declined to provide any viewership data on how many people were streaming the content. (The link was buried inside the ESPN app and took me some time to find.) He said that the network had no role in organizing or planning the games, and that it was televising it as it would a game organized by other entities. The content will all be repackaged into an hour-long ESPN special that will air tonight on ABC. Representatives for ABC did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Hall declined to further comment. The Federal Communications Commission ordered a review earlier this year of the network’s licenses. Airing the president’s competition on its national platform may buy the network some goodwill.

On Tuesday night, Trump sat as the finalists worked through a course that involved swinging from ropes, carrying two kettlebells, and climbing up a wall. Kennadi Fuhrman, a soccer player from Kansas, won the girls’ competition, crediting “God, all the way.” Rockwell Myers, a tennis player and ballroom dancer from Utah, won the boys’. “It’s been amazing, and it’s taught me so much,” he said. “It really, really puts an emphasis on how important it is to put God first in your life and make him your No. 1 priority.”

Trump came onstage and helped present the trophies and oversize checks. “Incredible people. I like the audience also, I have to tell you. But what a great bunch of young athletes,” he said. Confetti went off, falling onto the contestants. One blue piece stuck in the president’s hair.

Michael Scherer contributed to this report.

What I Saw In Sinaloa

2026-08-13T12:36:00-04:00

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Last Tuesday night, I was eating sushi with a Mexican police chief in downtown Culiacán, a city that had momentarily flickered back to life amid a bloody cartel turf war. At the table next to us was a birthday party. The police chief ordered a salmon roll. Through the window, I could see groups of families and friends walking on the sidewalk, past car dealerships and strip malls, after months of self-imposed lockdown.

Among them were three influencers who pulled up to a KFC down the street. They were dressed as food-delivery workers, carrying insulated bags on their backs, joking with one another and livestreaming everything with their phones. César Gastélum, the group’s front man, had become famous for such innocuous pranks. Even as thousands were murdered by the cartels, Gastélum, a stocky, bearded 24-year-old, posted videos of himself dancing in pajamas, dressing as a priest, sipping iced coffee. He had more than 700,000 followers on TikTok.

It was this kind of incongruity that had drawn me to Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa. The city is the center of the fiercest and most consequential battle between armed groups in Mexico, and I wanted to untangle what was behind the surge of violence. From afar, it was difficult to tell whether someone like Gastélum was proof that the mundane and the horrific could coexist here, as they have for decades across Mexico, or whether he was a symbol of something else—the way drug cartels had quietly co-opted even the city’s least likely protagonists.

At about 8 o’clock, Gastélum and his friends were recording themselves waiting for their fried-chicken orders when two men on a motorcycle drove past. “Those guys scare me,” Gastélum said. He then seemed to regain his calm, joking about his skinny jeans in front of the camera when the motorcycle returned. It stopped momentarily in front of the three young men. The driver, wearing a black helmet with a face shield, raised a gun about two feet from Gastélum’s head and fired. The livestream captured the moment of the bullet’s impact and then went dark.

Someone on the city’s ambulance team texted me when the 911 call came in, and I ran across the street to the KFC. I got to the scene as police were arriving. Gastélum’s body lay at the drive-through’s exit, a ribbon of blood streaming toward the sidewalk. A cluster of soldiers gathered nearby, some of them scrolling through Gastélum’s TikTok feed. A small group of crime photographers were taking photos and uploading videos.

“As you can see, they have killed another influencer here in Culiacán,” José Ángel Beltrán of Luz Noticias said, narrating on Facebook Live.

Culiacán, for years the axis of Mexico’s drug wars, is now the focus of a U.S. effort to demolish drug cartels—something President Trump has said he’s willing to use military force to achieve. It is in many ways an understandable target: The Sinaloa cartel, which has administered the state for decades, is responsible for trafficking millions of kilos of fentanyl, meth, and cocaine into the United States. The Justice Department has indicted both the Sinaloa governor and the Culiacán mayor for cooperating with the cartel. Several of its leaders are serving life sentences in the U.S., and others have been targeted by Mexican security forces using intelligence from the United States.

[Read: Fentanyl doesn’t come through the Caribbean]

And yet, so far, these actions have only deepened the civil war between two Sinaloa-cartel factions, one run by the children and supporters of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán (the Chapitos), and the other run by allies of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García (the Mayos). In 2022, there were 476 homicides in Sinaloa. In 2025, it had 1,657. Government action against organized-crime groups in Mexico has almost always had such an effect—increasing violence without significantly altering the flow of drugs into the United States. But the current Sinaloa turf war—la narcopandemia, locals call it—has created new categories of victims, far from the foot soldiers and hit men targeted in previous spasms of violence. Now influencers and content creators are recruited by cartels to distribute their messages online. And university and vocational students have been kidnapped, presumably because their skills are needed by criminal groups. Each time a young person here is killed or vanishes, there are immediate questions about whom he or she might have been working for. When drug traffickers allegedly subsidize TikTok dances, a victim’s innocence can be almost impossible to discern.

As forensic police arrived at the KFC, Beltrán told me that another TikToker had been killed a few blocks away months earlier. A fitness influencer, El Tata, was murdered while leaving a shopping center. The body of a YouTuber, El Pinky, was found showing signs that he had been gagged and bound. About a dozen other influencers in Sinaloa have been killed, kidnapped, or attacked. Each time, the Mexican government investigated whether the influencers had somehow been linked to one group and targeted by the other. Last year, an unidentified plane dropped thousands of flyers over Culiacán that accused a number of influencers and musicians of having ties to the Chapitos (Gastélum was not on the list).

Kevin Sieff / The Atlantic

José Ángel Beltrán films at the KFC where Gastélum was killed.

Standing in front of the crime scene as the forensic police hovered around Gastélum’s body with flashlights, I asked Beltrán why he thought a goofy livestreamer would be a target in a cartel turf war.

“Did you see that he was wearing a cowboy hat?” Beltrán asked me.

Cowboy hats have become a symbol of the Mayos faction of the cartel. The implication was that Gastélum, while performing juvenile pranks, had been making a subtle nod to one group’s power. Online commenters rushed to make the same point.

Beltrán filmed one last video of Gastélum’s body as it was taken away, and then he tapped me on the shoulder. Another victim had been found half a mile away: a man shot in the city’s botanical garden after a screening of a Lady Gaga documentary. I went with him to cover it. When we got there, it was dark, and the body was lit by a streetlight. Beltrán took his phone out again and started streaming.

“Hello again, everyone,” he said. “It’s another rough night in Culiacán.”

The next day, I drove 30 minutes from downtown Culiacán to a neighborhood called Costa Rica, on the outskirts of the city. I passed several motorcyclists who had their face covered by a ski mask. These punteros, as they’re called, have for years worked as low-level informants for the cartel. Even before the fracture of Sinaloa, the cartel was famous for its capacity to monitor every inch of Culiacán. In addition to deploying the punteros, it placed hundreds of cameras across the city and set up surveillance teams in residential neighborhoods.

[Read: A planeload of informants]

The Mexican government has surged hundreds of soldiers and national guardsmen across the city, ostensibly to disrupt the criminal groups who have terrorized it. But the military presence is overwhelmingly performative. On the road to Costa Rica, I watched as punteros and soldiers nonchalantly drove past one another.

I pulled up to the squat house of Marta Pérez Guzman, whose son, David Antonio Ruelas Pérez, had been kidnapped by armed men along with his classmate José Isaías Ibarra Duarte. There were 2,154 disappearances in Sinaloa last year, but the kidnapping of Ruelas, 22, and Ibarra, 23, had received more attention than most. The men were students at an aviation school in Culiacán, and many here suspected that they had been abducted to work on cartel aircraft. There was another notable fact: Ibarra is a U.S. citizen, born in Los Angeles.

His mother, Graciela Duarte Valdez, had wondered whether that would be enough to nudge the U.S. government to act. After all, Trump had articulated in Truth Social posts and Fox News interviews his desire to intervene in Mexico. She had traveled to the closest U.S. consulate, in the neighboring state of Sonora, and made her case. Not only was her son still missing, but the Mexican attorney general’s office had obtained surveillance footage of the kidnapping and showed it to her. Through tears, Duarte described seeing footage of four men who wore ski masks and carried rifles getting out of a minivan and forcing her son and Ruelas into a second car. It all took only a few seconds.

She felt abandoned by the Mexican government’s investigators, who asked questions suggesting that the boys had been working for a cartel faction before the kidnapping. When she went to the U.S. consulate, officials took notes and thanked her for coming (when I asked the State Department about the case, a spokesperson told me in a statement that it was “aware of reports of the kidnapping of a U.S. citizen in Mexico” but did not elaborate). Duarte was despairing; she knew that just a small fraction of disappeared people were later found alive in Sinaloa. One day last year, she heard that Governor Rubén Rocha Moya was visiting her neighborhood. She ran to meet him.

“Please help,” she told the governor, as she held a missing-person poster with her son’s photo and name on it. Rocha told her he would try.

Kevin Sieff / The Atlantic

From Left: Graciela Duarte Valdez and Marta Perez Guzman at Perez’s home in Culiacán last week.

A few months later, Duarte was skimming her Facebook feed for information about missing people and recovered bodies when she saw a news story that said Rocha had been indicted by the United States for colluding with the cartel. The U.S. government had acted, but she could not bring herself to see the move as productive or helpful. Rocha temporarily resigned and fled Culiacán. The Mexican government announced that it would support him until the U.S. showed more evidence of his collusion.

“All I could think was that I had begged that man for help,” Duarte said. “But of course, he did nothing. He had been working for the cartel the whole time.”

About a third of Mexico is controlled by organized criminal groups, according to a U.S.-government analysis. Culiacán—even during its most peaceful stretches—has been a prime example. The cartel presence here has never been subtle. One man in his early 20s told me that his childhood friends had been recruited to work in fentanyl labs and would return smelling like chemicals for weeks. The children of cartel kingpins enrolled in the city’s top prep schools. In one cemetery, families of deceased cartel operatives erected graves the size of suburban homes. Each time the cartel’s fractures sent the city into spirals of violence—in 2010 and 2017—they ended the same way: not with the disintegration of organized crime but with one faction emerging as the victor.

The Trump administration believes that it can avoid repeating this pattern, partially by going after Mexican politicians who support the cartel—“all the government officials that are part of the ‘Culiacán clan,’” Sara Carter, the director of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, told a journalist earlier this year. The U.S. has also continued its decades-long strategy of targeting top cartel operatives, largely by funneling intelligence to elite Mexican-military units who have conducted a number of successful operations. That partnership is deeper than it has been in years. But I didn’t meet anyone in Culiacán who believes that the strategy will reduce violence here. So far, it hasn’t reduced drug flows, either. Even officials in the Mexican government who are in favor of attacking criminal groups privately dismiss the Trump administration’s absolutist goal of eliminating cartels, given the enormous demand for drugs in the United States.

[Read: Claudia Sheinbaum’s impossible dilemma]

“On Day one, President Trump designated major cartels—including Sinaloa—as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, unlocking powerful sanctions, asset seizures, and enhanced prosecutorial tools to crush their operations. We will not allow cartels to profit off of poisoning our children and grandchildren,” Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, told me in a statement.

As César Gastélum’s body was buried last week, some of the city’s influencers posted tributes to him, as if describing a fallen comrade. “We need to take care of ourselves,” one wrote to his 2.3 million followers. Even Mexico’s president weighed in, promising to find the assailants. Duarte had followed the news. Gastélum was just a year older than her son.

But she was following another story more closely. The government had detained a dozen young alleged cartel operatives in a rural area outside Culiacán. It published photos of the boys and men, their faces blurred. Many of their T-shirts were off, revealing skinny frames. Duarte zoomed in on one of them. It was hard to tell, but he looked at least a little bit like her son.

Our Last Wi-Fi-Less Refuge Is Gone

2026-08-13T12:07:58-04:00

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Until very recently, airplanes were one of the last places where you couldn’t count on having good Wi-Fi. Even the Amazon’s most remote villages have high-speed internet, but for years, the typical in-flight connectivity experience could have been best summed up by the aviation Reddit thread titled “WiFi horrible?”

Now major airlines have started rolling out Wi-Fi that is both free and usable. In June, United announced that by the end of this year, nearly 1,000 of its planes would be getting high-speed Wi-Fi via Starlink, the network of low-Earth-orbit satellites owned by SpaceX. Other major airlines, including Delta, JetBlue, and Alaska, are partnering with either Starlink or its closest competitor, Amazon Leo, to offer better Wi-Fi in the next year or two. This new technology provides almost the same internet experience you’d get on the ground, Seth Miller, an airline-industry analyst, told me. This is not Wi-Fi that’s “good for an airplane.” It’s just … good.

As technology conquers this final Wi-Fi frontier, air travel will never be the same. The fickleness that made in-flight Wi-Fi infuriating was also its own kind of luxury: Planes were a bastion of unreachability. And once that luxury is gone, we may miss it.

Delivering the internet to a metal tube traveling at 500 miles per hour, 30,000 feet above the Earth, is so difficult because the tube is both far from internet sources and constantly moving. In the early days of plane Wi-Fi, aircraft had what were essentially giant mobile hot spots attached to their bellies, which would connect to cell towers on the ground. (This was Gogo’s in-flight Wi-Fi which, let’s be honest, never really Gogo’d.) For the past decade or so, major airlines have connected instead to satellites about 22,000 miles above the Earth, which provided Wi-Fi good enough to send an email (sometimes) but too slow for Instagram. The satellites that Starlink and Amazon Leo use travel much closer to the Earth and the plane, so they’re about 10 times less laggy, Miller said. With these connections, people can use social media, play online poker, and—in theory—Zoom, though many airlines still forbid or discourage video calls.

This level of connectivity might sound like a win: Airplane travel is a cramped, chaotic experience; the least you might ask is for the ability to scroll through TikTok when the limited catalog of in-flight movies gets stale. The pitch, as Grant Milstead, the vice president of digital technology at United Airlines, told me, is that with faster, free Wi-Fi, the plane can become a “living room in the sky”—where, just like in a living room on the ground, people can have the TV on for entertainment, their laptop out for productivity, and their phones nearby for messages and social media. Some people are clearly embracing that reality: On a recent 10-hour flight, the guy next to me prepped a slide deck, listened to Spotify, and flirted over DM with someone I sincerely hoped was his girlfriend.

But this level of connectivity also means that, on a plane, you can no longer be blissfully unaware of what’s happening back on the ground. Before Starlink, someone on a business trip might still decide to expense suboptimal Wi-Fi to keep up the pretense of working. But for the rest of us, “Sorry, I was on a plane” was one of the last socially acceptable reasons a person could be unreachable while doing nothing except eating Biscoff cookies. A plane ride meant hours set aside to watch movies, read, or doodle, free of guilt and earthbound demands. Instead of responding to a message from your mother-in-law, you could look out the window and see rivers transformed into green ribbons. While my seatmate worked on his slide deck, all I did was watch Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick and slam Bloody Mary mix. It was glorious.

The level of disconnection on a plane might have once been an inconvenience, but now people pay good money for enforced breaks from their phone. Sixteen years ago, when Starbucks started offering free Wi-Fi, this magazine declared, “It’s about time!” These days, many cafés withhold Wi-Fi and ban laptops as a selling point. At least 10 million people use the Opal app, whose premium tier costs $100 annually, to lock themselves out of distracting apps, while others pay $59 for the Brick to do the same. Subpar airplane Wi-Fi included this kind of detox with the price of your ticket.

No one will argue that breathing stale air in a seat that offers 30 inches of leg room counts as a wellness retreat, and the research on how much dedicated tech detoxes actually improve well-being is mixed. Still, a disconnected plane ride “might create an opportunity to temporarily remove some of the demands that normally compete for our attention—email, work messages, social media, news, and notifications,” Lisa Walsh, a psychology professor who researches happiness at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, told me. Flying was a rare, bounded period of time untethered from the world below. Whether or not someone might benefit from that time depends on how they spend it, Kostadin Kushlev, a psychology professor at Georgetown who studies technology and well-being, told me. A nice use of a plane ride might include actually talking to the strangers next to you (an act tied to well-being, he said), letting your mind wander (also linked to well-being), or even just really focusing on Top Gun (research has yet to link Tom Cruise to well-being, but you never know). Kushlev told me about how, during grad school, he once set aside a flight to journal about what he wanted from his life and future. “It really kind of changed my trajectory,” he said. Now, with enough to keep him busy on the plane, he said, “I don’t bother.”

Of course, passengers don’t have to log into the Wi-Fi. But as fast connections become ubiquitous on planes, expectations may begin to shift. We already spend just about every moment of our life near our phones—at work, at the grocery store, at parties, at concerts, in bed, and, for the 75 percent of Americans who’ve copped to this, in the bathroom—where anyone can message us. Now people could easily expect a response while we’re hurtling through the lower stratosphere, too. (And if you don’t reply, people will know it’s because you wanted to eat Biscoff cookies and ignore them.) Connectivity also means the plane becomes just another place to be productive. Milstead, the United executive, told me that one of the company’s customers vibe-coded a website for his new business from the air. Meanwhile, people have already started complaining online about fellow passengers taking Zoom calls and Microsoft Teams meetings onboard. When your seatmate is leading a Q1 strategy session, staring out the window and daydreaming—one of the most distinct opportunities of flying—may seem like time wasted.

If 30,000 feet is yet another place where Zoom meetings are unavoidable, it’s hard not to see a future in which we are nostalgic for the recent past when the Wi-Fi was bad. The early aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh once wrote that flying is “a miracle that has nothing to do with any of its practical purposes—purposes of speed, accessibility, and convenience.” Instead, a plane ride was an opportunity to watch the familiar world grow strange. Most people who fly no longer treat the experience like a miracle, but now we barely need to notice we are up in the air. It’s just another place to check Instagram.

A Perfect Album for a Frustrating Decade

2026-08-13T07:30:00-04:00

One of the coronavirus pandemic’s many terrible legacies is the slow smothering of ambition in popular culture. In the depths of the crisis, media—music, movies, and all the rest—were widely hailed as a “balm” for anxieties and a “lifeline” to the shared society we could look forward to someday returning to. Yet at the same time, that pre-pandemic sense of cohesion was being destabilized. Entertainers emerged from lockdown to find their fans wild-eyed with obsession and everyone else utterly unreachable. The ensuing years in the arts have felt strange and stilted—defined by stalled dreams, a shattered common stage, and a nervous relationship between artists and audiences.

The Southern California folk singer Phoebe Bridgers is one artist who experienced the unique intensity of a pandemic breakthrough. In June of 2020, her hushed and biting second album, Punisher, was received with the sort of acclaim suggesting the arrival of the next great American songwriter. She was funny and thoughtful on social media, and fans came to regard her with all the intimacy of a best friend—despite her requests for them to step back and respect boundaries. Now, after more than half a decade, she’s released her third full-length album, Lost Weekend—a beautiful but frustrating document of post-pandemic disappointment.

From her early days drawing buzz as a teenage disciple of pillow-voiced balladeers such as John Lennon and Elliott Smith, Bridgers’s appeal has lain in her ambivalence. She is an adventurer with a reclusive streak; she wants to see the world outside of her phone and then get back to bed. Many of her songs play like travelogues through a corrupted civilization—its skies littered with chemtrails and satellites, its bars patrolled by users and abusers. Her sighing style of singing and the downward lilt of her melodies suggest that the world’s fallen nature simply tires her out. “There’s no place like my room,” she sings on Punisher’s closing track, “I Know the End.”

In the years after that album, Bridgers didn’t actually disappear. She collaborated with the likes of Paul McCartney, SZA, and Taylor Swift, who proclaimed “she is the reference now” for modern songwriters. She released a splashy album with the supergroup boygenius. But none of this work had the sheer density of insight—the line-after-line sense of surprise—that has defined Bridgers’s solo music. (Her 2017 single “Motion Sickness” begins “I hate you for what you did / And I miss you like a little kid / I faked it every time, but that’s alright.”) Earlier this year, she embarked on a tour at which audience members were banned from using their phones—a sign that she was coming back to her main project on her own, self-protective terms.

On paper, Lost Weekend is everything that the follow-up to a breakthrough should be: epic-scale, richly orchestrated, musically evolutionary. A glittering cast of collaborators includes the hitmaking producer Jack Antonoff, the Pulitzer-winning composer Caroline Shaw, the indie multi-instrumentalist Alex G, the mandolin-wielding MacArthur fellow Chris Thile, and—suspectedly, under a pseudonym—the It Boy vocalist of 2020s rock, Geese’s Cameron Winter. They’ve created a moody, varied soundscape featuring drum machines, hard guitars, and oases of country plucking.

The first three songs are stunning. “The Outside” opens with Bridgers alternating between Laurie Anderson–style vocoder confessions and swirling piano paired with clean vocals. As she moves from the inorganic to the organic and back again, she also slips between tempos for an effect as mesmerizing as a shadow flickering in a stream. Then comes “Lost Boys,” a should-be smash single in which layers of chiming instruments coalesce into one swinging, shaggy mass. On “Kill Me,” rustling guitars convey cold unease until the chorus offers a hint of warmth. “This is gonna kill me,” sings Bridgers. Then she pauses to add, offbeat, “wait.”

These early tracks portray Bridgers at the height of her success—crowd-surfing at concerts and surrounded by friends—yet feeling alienated. “I pretended it was make believe,” goes a great line from “Lost Boys,” capturing the psychological trickery that results from disassociating from one’s own life. When “Kill Me” crescendos in gang-sung cries of “Let’s go missing,” it’s an exciting cliff-hanger: Bridgers sounds poised to take the listener down a rabbit hole to somewhere fantastical and fresh.

Instead, reality persists, murky and enervating. “The Governor’s Waltz” finds her at a famous music festival, feeling—yet again—disconnected and on edge. Fingerpicked guitars and toybox melodies are creepy yet obvious, like a Tim Burton movie. The lyrics bait gossip blogs by seeming to refer to an ex and the girl he replaced her with. These blind items should be interesting: Bridgers once knew how to make inside jokes land for everyone. But many of her descriptions, across the album, are naggingly opaque or inert. “You had a nosebleed, you were in my way / And you didn’t remind me of anything,” she sings, a line that’s intriguing only because it hints at her own creative blockage.

[Read: Decoding the most important songwriter of our time]

For much of the rest of the album, she seems to want to let her musicians do the talking. A number of songs are structurally fragmentary, featuring sudden cuts into silence or lengthy digressions into “folktronica” (a term for banjos-and-beats music of the sort that was last trendy in the 2000s). These seemingly avant-garde touches unfortunately scan more like boho-café fare. In May, Bridgers was seen wearing a T-shirt for Kid A—the numbed-out, synth-driven curveball that Radiohead released in 2000 after achieving alternative-rock dominance. But Bridgers isn’t leading a cutting-edge band that’s built up internal chemistry over years for unpredictable results. She’s enlisted a prestigious mishmash of stars to whip up variations on two moods: looming dread and wistful uplift.

The story she’s telling should have been strong enough to land without so much filigree. On “Still Standing,” she seems to refer to abuse of her mother by her father, who died in late 2022. Rather than just condemning him, Bridgers spends part of the album examining the traits he passed on to her, for good and ill. At the same time, she’s wrestling with a fatalistic view of fame. “Surviving my gift until I get shot,” she sings on the title track—a chilling line on an album with a Lennon-inspired name. Her personal demons and public pressures really do sound suffocating. Can she possibly escape them?

The twist of Lost Weekend is that it suggests a happy answer to that question. On the roaring and catchy “Bobby,” she sings about a blissful home life with a lover, who also shows up as a savior figure in other songs. Their meet-cute seems to be described in the first line: “I saw you slow dancing alone in your room.” Bobby is almost certainly her real boyfriend, the comedian Bo Burnham, and she’s implying that she fell for him while watching his acclaimed 2021 Netflix special, Bo Burnham: Inside, a document of stir-crazed social isolation.

It’s quite the revelation: Back in the pandemic, Bridgers was in the exact same position as her audience—stuck at home and having her life changed by something on a screen. Burnham, himself an object of overwhelming public fascination, has mostly stayed out of the spotlight since Inside, though he has seven writing credits on this album. Virtual desire becoming real, isolation giving way to communion, a life built outside the digital panopticon—these are powerful themes for the 2020s. But too often, the album meets its moment in a sad way: with strained, distant songwriting that suggests its creator’s hesitation about reconnecting with the crowd.

Tehran Has to Make a Choice

2026-08-13T07:00:00-04:00

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When the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey got together last week to forge a new defense agreement, they emphasized that their pact wasn’t aimed at any particular country. But one country was surely on everybody’s mind: the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Iran has positioned itself as the most overtly anti-Western state in the region, and the coming together of three prominent Muslim-majority countries aligned with the West, two of which have land borders with Iran, signals its isolation. Iran has endured months of war with Israel and the United States without losing, but it has done so in part by repeatedly attacking neighboring countries that house U.S. military bases. Now these countries are among those closing ranks against Iran in an agreement signed in and named for Mecca, Islam’s holiest city.

The symbolism can’t be lost on Tehran. The parties to the Mecca pact include some of the world’s most powerful Muslim-majority countries: the two with the biggest economies in the region (Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which also spend the most on their militaries), and the Muslim world’s sole nuclear power (Pakistan).

Iran has traditionally maintained good relations with Turkey and Pakistan; its cultural bonds with these two countries are strong and go back centuries. More recently, the Islamic Republic has worked to improve its relations with Saudi Arabia, particularly since reestablishing diplomatic ties with Riyadh in 2023.

[Read: Iran goes looking for love in Jordan]

Even so, Iran’s regional policies have put the country at odds with these and other neighbors. Tehran gave its full support to the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, which rebels who were backed by Ankara and Riyadh overthrew in 2024. The Iranian military exchanged strikes with Pakistan in 2024 and attacked Saudi Arabia in recent weeks. Iranian missiles were intercepted over Turkish airspace earlier this year. Tehran-backed militias in Yemen and Iraq have attacked Saudi interests. More broadly, Iran’s anti-American stance clashes with the official orientations of all three signatories of the Mecca agreement.

Skeptics will point out that the new defense pact might not mean much in practice. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a similar deal last year but did not invoke it when Saudi Arabia came under attack during the current conflict. But the language of the Mecca accord is stark: “Any armed attack against any of the three States shall be regarded as an attack against them all.” The arrangement includes a new organization, to be overseen by a secretariat in Saudi Arabia, and regular meetings among the foreign and defense ministers of the three countries, along with their military chiefs. Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, has compared the new organization to NATO and suggested that Egypt, the most populous Arab state, is likely to join. Altogether, the pact suggests a significant improvement in relations between Turkey and the Arab states—a development that could help stabilize the entire region.

Iranian officialdom has mostly greeted the news of the Mecca pact with studied nonchalance. A spokesperson claimed to welcome the arrangement as evidence that the member countries would no longer rely on the United States. A reformist civil-society activist suggested to me that the Mecca agreement could be “an opportunity, not a threat,” insinuating that Iran could one day join it. But some hard-line politicians are less sanguine. Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the Parliament’s foreign-policy committee, posted on Saturday that the Mecca three “haven’t found the right path yet. We warn them about miscalculations. No mistake will go unanswered.”

[Read: Trump’s new strategy of nothing]

Washington has long encouraged its allies in the Middle East to work together. Throughout much of the Cold War, regional alliances held off both Soviet communism and Arab radicalism, which meant that the United States felt the need to intervene only rarely and briefly. Iran was a crucial part of this architecture—intervening, together with Saudi Arabia, in civil wars in Oman and Yemen to help defeat Communist-backed rebels, and helping to found the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in 1969. President Richard Nixon so relied on Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to help keep the U.S. out of Middle Eastern affairs that in 1972 he told Pahlavi, “Protect me.” Then came the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and with it, a new era of chaos and discord.

Iran is not the only Middle Eastern country excluded from the emerging security arrangement that Mecca portends. Israel, too, is absent. The 2020 Abraham Accords normalized Israel’s relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, but the big prize was always Saudi Arabia, which has conditioned recognition of Israel on progress toward the formation of a Palestinian state. Israel is currently moving away from this prospect rather than toward it. Pakistan doesn’t recognize Israel either. Turkey has diplomatic and military relations with Israel, but the two countries have drifted apart in recent years.

If Israel still wants to work toward regional recognition, it may find that its best course is to patch things up with Turkey and try to meet the Saudis halfway. At least these two countries don’t share the depth of Iran’s animus against Israel.

Iran, too, will be faced with a choice. It can go on supporting militias and destabilizing the region, which will further isolate it. Or it can embrace the regional consensus on economic development, diplomatic reconciliation, and a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Islamic Republic can either militate against Mecca, in other words, or give up its revolutionary ambitions at last.

The Trouble With Trying to Turn Viral Videos Into Blockbusters

2026-08-13T07:00:00-04:00

Almost 14 years ago, the producer Scott Glassgold stumbled on a short film on Vimeo about a woman who believes she’s encountered an alien. The project, by a pair of filmmakers named Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell, was “a wonderful, lo-fi science-fiction story” that conveyed a distinct storytelling voice, Glassgold told me. He immediately set out to work with them, hoping to introduce the pair to Hollywood as fresh directing talent. “That was an early moment for me on the internet,” he explained. “I just saw it as an incredibly viable path to meeting artists, finding ideas, frankly, in a place where, at the time, really no one else was looking.”

He learned from that period, however, that Hollywood wasn’t universally enthusiastic about turning such material into feature-length movies—at least, not with unknown, internet-bred creators involved. Even though Earl and Caldwell’s work attracted potential studio buyers, Glassgold sought independent financing to help the pair avoid what’s known in the industry as development hell. “The first call I would get from a studio head would be like, We’re so excited. When can we fire the director?” Glassgold recalled. “I would just put my hands on my face, because it was entirely antithetical to what we were trying to achieve.”

That was, as Glassgold put it, “the 1.0” of Hollywood’s dalliance with the internet—a far cry from the industry’s upgraded view of digital-native talent these days. Works by filmmakers who first found success online consistently scored at the box office this spring: Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons, who went viral as a teenager with a web series set in the same world of liminal spaces, is now the studio A24’s highest-grossing movie ever. Obsession, a horror-comedy made by Curry Barker, who first built an audience on YouTube through sketch-comedy videos, became a word-of-mouth hit. And Iron Lung, a video-game adaptation self-financed, directed, and released by the gaming YouTuber known as Markiplier, grossed at least 10 times its budget worldwide with the help of his nearly 40 million subscribers.

[Read: A no-name director to everyone but his 38 million fans]

Hollywood, inspired by these triumphs, is doing what it does best: working overtime to capture the same magic again. Several projects with online roots have recently entered into development to become feature-length films, including Siren Head and Cartoon Cat, each inspired by the disturbing viral imagery of the artist Trevor Henderson; Seasons, an adaptation of a short story first published on the Subreddit r/nosleep, a forum for grassroots horror writing, about a couple whose dream ranch turns out to be haunted; and The Mandela Catalogue, a script based, much like Backrooms, on a popular horror series on YouTube.

Mandela, set in a fictional county in Wisconsin that’s invaded by shape-shifting creatures, led to an 11-studio bidding war, with Steven Spielberg signing on as a producer along the way. Aaron B. Koontz, an indie filmmaker and a producer for Mandela, told me that Hollywood’s new fascination with digital creators has been vindicating—and overwhelming. “It’s the opposite of what I’m used to in my entire career,” he said, adding that after Backrooms’ release, he was on the phone every day for three weeks with executives interested in picking up Mandela. “People in Hollywood that never took my call,” he said, “are now calling me.”

To the filmmaker Shawn Levy, whose production company 21 Laps worked on Backrooms and Seasons, these green-lighted projects merely underline “a predictable sort of frenzy” based on the latest Hollywood success story; they’re not a sure sign that the industry is shifting significantly. “Even though right now there’s a mad gold rush of assistants being tasked with scouring the internet for the next Kane Parsons or the next Curry,” he told me, “most long-shot bets don’t pan out.” Hollywood has clearly grasped that the next auteurs and franchises can be found on the web. “Nothing teaches Hollywood a faster lesson than a hit,” Levy said. But whether Hollywood’s intensive focus on all things internet leads to anything resembling this year’s box-office successes will depend on the industry seeing the internet as more than just a place from which to mine ideas.

Hollywood once seemed baffled by the internet. Throughout the 2010s, almost every time the industry attempted to translate trendy web culture into conventional entertainment, the results were largely forgettable: The Grumpy Cat meme inexplicably starred in a Lifetime holiday movie, a thread about one writer’s father’s curmudgeonly sayings became a quickly canceled sitcom, and a major studio’s adaptation of Slender Man, a character that originated on an internet forum, bombed with critics.

Yet over the years, the language of digital natives began to influence popular culture anyway as the internet became intertwined with daily life. Consider the growing slate of satires about influencers, the numerous coming-of-age films that have tapped into teenage angst amid the rise of social media, and the fact that entire movies have been made that take place exclusively on computer screens. TikTok users embraced Skinamarink, an experimental horror flick made for 15,000 Canadian dollars, by posting story breakdowns and their terrified live reactions. The director Jane Schoenbrun’s films—including their latest, Teenage Sex and Death in Camp Miasma—could be considered an offshoot of internet culture, trafficking as they do in esoteric online-fandom sensibilities. Their movies, packed with surreal imagery and dream-logic-driven plots, conjure the sensation of getting lost down an internet rabbit hole.

The road to building such an oeuvre, however, required “lying,” Schoenbrun told me with a laugh. When they were pitching their projects to traditional studio brass, many of the executives they met didn’t understand the stories at first glance, even though they sought voices like Schoenbrun’s. “It’s like,” the director explained, “trying to say something in a way that will be understood and digestible.”

[Read: The horrors of being extremely online]

That kind of code-switching can create tension, according to Lucas Ford, a producer I spoke with. He would know: As an assistant at 21 Laps in early 2022, Ford brought Parsons’s YouTube channel to the attention of Levy and his fellow executive Dan Cohen. Today, Ford runs his own production company, translating ideas from all kinds of visual artists and writers into potential films. He told me that when pitching to studios, he tries to go beyond highlighting shallow metrics—viewer counts, subscriber numbers—and instead articulate why he’s personally drawn to the material.

Any internet creator who has built an online following has a relationship with their audience that Hollywood should cultivate rather than erase, Ford noted; if a movie adapting an online work has forced its digital-native storyteller’s vision to fit conventional molds, viewers familiar with the original material “can sniff that out immediately.” Schoenbrun told me something similar, observing that Backrooms and Obsession had brought young people to theaters by appealing to their concerns about, say, the flagging economy and dating habits. “This was youth culture speaking to itself,” they said of those films.

By offering more internet talent a chance to bring their visions to big-screen life, Hollywood seems eager to further invoke today’s youth culture. But deepening that relationship, Levy said, will require precise care. He told me that he’d initially had “healthy skepticism” about Backrooms’ ability to become a feature-length film: “Certainly, question marks abounded,” he explained, including “the fact that it was a teenager who was being given the keys to the car.” In the end, he pushed the movie forward; he trusted his team’s assessment of both the concept and, after meeting him, Parsons’s capacity to turn an aesthetic into a fleshed-out story deserving of a theatrical release.

Adapting this kind of material can require different approaches. Koontz, the Mandela Catalogue producer, told me that he’d advocated for its creator, Alex Kister, to direct and co-write the film adaptation because a large part of the project’s appeal came from Kister’s creative flourishes: He uses alternating points of view, plenty of biblical allusions, even footage from a children’s cartoon. For Siren Head, though, Glassgold explained that the material warranted bringing experienced filmmakers on board. Henderson’s artwork, as striking as it is, isn’t enough of a foundation for a movie, so the film is moving forward with two Hollywood-horror veterans overseeing its creation: the screenwriter Brian Duffield and the Weapons director Zach Cregger, who are collaborating on the script.

The internet has never been predictable: Backrooms’, Obsession’s, and Iron Lung’s collective overperformance at the box office argues against the kind of gold-rush thinking that is driving Hollywood to seek out digital storytellers. Even for the filmmakers who achieved liftoff from their online beginnings, the web can be an unreliable foundation on which to build. Kyle Edward Ball, the director of Skinamarink, told me that he began uploading videos on YouTube in the 2010s in part because he believed that going viral would help launch his career. He instead found the platform more useful as a training ground, honing his voice one video at a time. (Ball noticed at the time that amassing views certainly led some creators to Hollywood success, but many of the results seemed to involve “bedazzling the wheel instead of reinventing it,” he said.)

[Read: Nobody knows what’s happening online anymore]

Schoenbrun, for their part, pointed out that the flurry of headlines about digital-native talent impressing Hollywood has tended to flatten anything that began on the internet into one genre, despite the fact that, creatively, Backrooms isn’t Obsession, just as Siren Head won’t resemble The Mandela Catalogue. The artists behind these works also approach the internet differently; Parsons riffed on an aesthetic born on internet forums, for instance, while Barker treated online behavior as his subject matter. (His first feature film, Milk & Serial, is about YouTube pranksters.) Hollywood’s latest fixation could be just a brief, reductive detour away from tentpole franchises or superhero films and into horror movies (one of the most reliable genres for producing mainstream hits) that take nontraditional paths to being made. “I’m not like, Wow, this is the French New Wave for YouTube, you know?” Schoenbrun said.

Maybe not, yet the film industry does seem to have hit the jackpot—these few times, at least—in a realm that has long appeared to confound it. Either way, Ball told me, it’s a thrilling moment for artists bred online to experiment without worrying about fitting any filmmaking molds. “Don’t chase Hollywood,” he said. “Have Hollywood chase you.”

The Fatal Combination of Ideology and Charisma

2026-08-13T06:00:00-04:00

In January 1977, not two years before Reverend Jim Jones would orchestrate his followers’ deaths by the hundreds, a San Francisco church bestowed its Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award on him. Jones, the founder of the Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ, had managed to become a major player in the city’s politics. No one foresaw the horrific depths to which the combination of a charismatic leader, an all-encompassing belief system, and the human need for community and redemption would soon descend.

On November 18, 1978, at Jones’s eponymous farm commune deep in the jungles of northwest Guyana, 908 members of the Peoples Temple, which had become a Pentecostalist-inspired socialist personality cult, either ingested cyanide-laced punch or were shot for refusing to do so. Most of the victims were poor Black Americans; more than 300 were children. Multiple generations of families died at Jonestown—grandmothers administered the deadly concoction to their screaming grandchildren before swallowing it themselves. (Based on a recording and other evidence from the incident, no one can say how many died willingly; men with guns oversaw the operation.) Just hours before, at a nearby airstrip, gunmen acting on Jones’s orders had murdered three journalists, a temple defector, and Representative Leo Ryan, a Bay Area Democrat who had traveled to Jonestown on behalf of temple members’ concerned relatives. Jones himself died from a gunshot wound to the head.

Until 9/11, Jonestown had been the largest premeditated mass killing of American civilians in history. In his 1980 book, Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy, the author Shiva Naipaul examines how ideologies related to the American counterculture helped bring about the massacre, and what he finds is deeply disturbing: Jonestown wasn’t just the work of only one man, Naipaul argues; it was also the product of a morally corrupted environment.

[James Kirchick: The DSA is a parasite]

The phrase drinking the Kool-Aid, a metaphor for unquestioningly holding a belief, was inspired by the fatal cocktail administered at Jonestown. But dark jokes about a nearly half-century-old massacre have a way of obscuring its continuing relevance. In recent years, totalizing ideologies such as communism, fascism, and Islamism have found dedicated audiences on social media, and the proliferation of demagogues manipulating people for malign ends is an ever-present worry.

Jones himself was a mentally unsound megalomaniac. But the people who followed him to South America were not—poor and vulnerable, yes; crazy, no.

During Naipaul’s too-brief career, he was overshadowed by his older brother, the Nobel laureate V. S. After the younger Naipaul died at 40, in 1985, his book about Jonestown languished in obscurity. Fortunately, Doubleday has reissued Journey to Nowhere as part of a new imprint called Outsider Editions, which aims to revive “extraordinary books” that “were overlooked or forgotten but still speak urgently to this moment.” The edition comes with a new introduction by the Pulitzer Prize–winning memoirist Hua Hsu, and it could not have arrived at a more opportune time.

Naipaul, Hsu writes, was skeptical of worldviews whose adherents had “no interest in solutions to political problems” and “wanted to feel as though they were being saved.” Naipaul first came to understand how “the language of religion could be transformed into the language of politics” in his native Trinidad, where he once saw supporters of a future prime minister holding placards that declared him the Messiah. Fascinated by the decolonization of what was then called the Third World—the poor nations unaligned with either Cold War superpower—Naipaul traveled to Jonestown two weeks after the massacre in search of answers as to why the commune, which Jones had touted as a collectivist utopia, had gone so tragically wrong.

In the second half of Journey to Nowhere, Naipaul takes us to what he sees as the real scene of the crime: Northern California, where Jones had built his flock and cultivated alliances with influential political figures. In the San Francisco of the early and mid-1970s, the Peoples Temple could blend in as just another piece of the city’s eccentric furniture.

Jones began his ministry in 1950s Indianapolis, where he founded an interracial church. Seeking a more liberal environment, he moved to Northern California in 1965. Many Black parishioners who joined the Peoples Temple attested to the church’s racial inclusiveness. This perception was central to the positive reputation that Jones built up among San Francisco’s political elite—an image that persisted even after revelations of misconduct began to surface. In 1972, the San Francisco Examiner published a four-part investigation into abuse and financial impropriety within the church, and five years later, New West magazine reported on the physical and psychological terror that Jones inflicted on his followers. But Jones’s proven get-out-the-vote operation apparently eclipsed local officials’ misgivings. Jones’s ever more abusive and erratic behavior was ignored or rationalized by people who should have looked harder.

State Assemblyman and future Mayor Willie Brown once praised Jones as an “American Gandhi,” a combination of Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Mao Zedong (he meant this as a compliment). California Governor Jerry Brown attended a testimonial dinner held in Jones’s honor, and in 1976 the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Walter Mondale, invited him onto his campaign plane. Nine months before the massacre, the city supervisor Harvey Milk, one of America’s first openly gay politicians, lauded Jones as a “man of the highest character” in a letter to President Jimmy Carter.

These officials’ endorsements of Jones made him all the more dangerous to his followers, Naipaul argues. In his view, evildoers require passive and active enablers, whom he deems partly culpable for their deeds. “Those who ought to know better nourish our crazy dreams of resurrection and redemption; those safely beyond the borders of our madness underwrite our lunacies,” he writes; it’s the closest thing his book has to a thesis.

California, in Naipaul’s words, was a “state of mind.” So too was the ideology that Jones embraced. The term Third Worldism was devised in the early years of the Cold War to define a system of beliefs that Hsu, in his introduction, characterizes as “an awakening of the global underclass.” In practice, it has usually amounted to a blend of socialism, authoritarianism, and rhetoric pitting the global South against the West. An antipathy to American racism, imperialism, and capitalism was the reason that Jones and his followers decamped in the summer of 1977 to Guyana—then well more than a decade into Prime Minister Forbes Burnham’s experiment with “cooperative socialism.”

Oddly for a man of the cloth, Jones seemed to prioritize communism over religious belief. “Neither my colleagues nor I are any longer caught up in the opiate of religion,” he wrote, echoing Karl Marx’s denigration of divine faith. He referred to the Bible, its teachings so clearly at odds with his own mad project, as a “paper idol” and a “dead letter.” On the day of the mass culling, as his desperate followers pleaded for their lives, Jones screamed at them to “stop this hysterics. This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die.” (Jones’s term for the events of that terrible day, “revolutionary suicide,” is the title of the Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton’s 1973 autobiography.)

As temple members met their gruesome death, documents bequeathing some $7 million to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were spirited out of Jonestown in a suitcase stuffed with cash. These statements and actions, some conservatives said at the time in a finger-wagging tone, demonstrated that mass suicide at the feet of a power-mad dictator was the predictable result of radical left-wing politics. Ruminating on the tragedy, the Catholic intellectual Michael Novak wrote that socialism “begins in mysticism and ends in terror.”

Yet Jones was driven by instincts more primal than politics. Yes, he had openly fantasized about relocating his church to the Soviet Union, producing what Naipaul describes as “a cruel fantasy of escape” that “led to the sad absurdity of eighty-year-old ‘senior citizens’ struggling to master an alien tongue and comprehend Lenin’s thoughts on Marx and Engels.” But Jones had also been on friendly terms with the San Francisco chapter of the John Birch Society, claimed to be saving taxpayer dollars by helping the poor, and donated money to the wives of slain police officers. He was a narcissist and an authoritarian before he was anything else.

In Jonestown, the racial brotherhood that Jones had spoken about in San Francisco transmogrified into racial paternalism—or worse. An undercurrent of white supremacy was undeniable at Jonestown, where Black people labored in the fields for 11 hours a day on meager rations while Jones preached to them over a loudspeaker from the comfort of an air-conditioned house with a well-stocked larder. “Jones stripped bare his following and left them naked and defenseless,” Naipaul writes. “He did not liberate: he assaulted and traumatized those who believed in him. One can sense at a certain level his raging hatred for the Blacks whose God he claimed to be; a hatred so deep-seated, so tormenting that, in its fury, it turned itself inside out and called itself Love.”

In spite of his conduct, Jones was skilled at speaking in a way that appealed to progressives and reinforced his left-wing bona fides. He cast the church’s critics as reactionaries hell-bent on destroying his radical ministry. To counter the media’s “vicious lies,” Jones enlisted Mark Lane, a dean of the President John F. Kennedy–assassination–conspiracy–theory industry, and Charles Garry, an attorney for the Black Panthers. After touring Jonestown in September 1978, Lane alleged that the settlement was being “cruelly assaulted by the intelligence organizations,” and Garry was convinced that, as Naipaul put it, “animals were better treated in Jonestown than human beings were in the United States.” Sycophants such as these, Naipaul writes, turned Jones into “a modern-day Moses,” such that when the preacher “did finally pull the trigger, he was able to pull it not only on himself but on nearly a thousand others.” To this day, conspiracy theories alleging that Jonestown was a CIA mind-control experiment gone awry find favor across the internet.

[Read: How much worse is this going to get?]

To some extent, Jones’s constant inveighing against fascism and genocide indicate his paranoia. But Naipaul reminds us about how ubiquitous premonitions of catastrophe and doom were in the 1970s. The optimism and idealism of the 1960s had curdled into what Tom Wolfe dubbed the “‘Me’ Decade.” Watergate, Vietnam, and stagflation sapped American confidence to a degree not seen since the Great Depression. During an 18-month period stretching from 1971 to 1972, the FBI recorded some 2,500 domestic-terror bombings. Fears about environmental devastation, overpopulation, energy depletion, and a nuclear holocaust were omnipresent, manifested in books such as The Population Bomb, the back-to-the-land movement, and the entire Hollywood disaster-movie genre. Owing more to Jones’s personality than to his politics, something like the horror in Guyana was inevitable, in Naipaul’s telling. But responsibility for it radiated widely, as “the ideological irresponsibilities of a promiscuous decade were coming home to roost in Jonestown.”

Journey to Nowhere deserves to be read alongside Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem as a pair of bookends to the American counterculture. The ideology of Third Worldism and the New Agey, anything-goes-style progressivism of the West Coast that Naipaul so keenly lacerates were necessary precursors to the mass death in Guyana. But the most important factor distinguishing Jonestown from the other left-wing movements of its time was a singularly evil leader. Today, Americans routinely describe their political opponents—whether in the MAGA movement or the Democratic Socialists of America—as members of a cult. But whatever you think of Donald Trump or New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, neither of them is Jim Jones.

Nearly half a century onward, Jonestown strikes many people as a bizarre aberration. Knowing everything that we now know about the Peoples Temple, we struggle to understand how anyone could have been taken in by Jones. That so many otherwise intelligent people missed the warning signs is a testament to the power of his message and the force of his charisma. The Washington Post correspondent Charles Krause didn’t realize the truth until he was dodging bullets at the nearby airstrip. “It seemed to me that the Peoples Temple had a legitimate purpose, a noble purpose, and was more or less succeeding,” he later wrote. The tragedy is not just that Jones deceived people. It’s also how willing they were to be deceived.

Naipaul’s scathing critique of radical left-wing politics may yet limit the audience for his ideas. One recent review of Journey to Nowhere assails Naipaul for the “racism” of his analysis of Third Worldism and denigrates the book as “one long sneer” at “vegetarians, environmentalism, hippies, feminists,” and other progressive interests. Some of Naipaul’s language comes across as dated, and the scorn he feels for certain postcolonial political actors and their Western sympathizers is palpable. But his unsettling conclusions still warrant attention. At a time when more and more people look to politics for salvation, we should heed Naipaul’s warnings about how we see what we want to see and ignore what we don’t.

Longing for a Time Before Smartphones

2026-08-13T06:00:00-04:00

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Gen Z has romanticized the technology of the ’90s—or the era’s lack of it. Young people long for a time when they were looking at one another instead of at their phones. But could that nostalgia for a smartphone-free society actually help guide the future?

That’s one of the driving questions in the latest season of How to Touch Grass, co-hosted by Julie Beck and Natalie Brennan. This week on Radio Atlantic, we’re sharing the first episode, with an introduction by Hanna Rosin.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

Do I remember a time before I had a smartphone? Of course I do.

[Music]

Long dinners with friends, nothing buzzing or pinging. Standing in line with nothing to do but think, and stare. Reading an entire book in two days. And then back to when I was a teenager: telling my friends that I liked or maybe didn’t like their new perm, like, in person. I guess that’s what they call nostalgia?

But nostalgia is working a little differently for Gen Z. I actually lived through the things I miss. But a lot of them long for a time when they weren’t even alive—an era of iPods and CD players and calling your friends on a landline.

[Music]

I find it strange that people in their 20s are now fixated on shows I watched when I was in my 20s, like Friends. It seems like longing that goes nowhere? But maybe nostalgia for the past, even an unfamiliar past, can help shape the future.

Today we have something special: the first episode from How to Touch Grass. It’s the latest season of The Atlantic’s How To series. It’s all about how we might renegotiate our relationships with technology and untangle ourselves from guilt and habit and mindless patterns. Step one: Go touch grass, probably.

I’ll let co-hosts Julie Beck and Natalie Brennan take it from here.

[Music]

Julie Beck: If you had one word—it can be a noun, it can be an adjective, it can be any part of speech that you want—to describe your overall relationship to technology at this moment in time.

Voice memo: Antagonistic?

Voice memo: Complicated.

Voice memo: Fraught.

Voice memo: Connection.

Voice memo: I think of it as an addiction. Similar to how I relate to, like, sugar or anything else that I sort of compulsively overindulge in.

Beck: What’s your word?

Voice memo: Indentured.

Voice memo: I was gonna say reluctant, but maybe that’s not right.

Voice memo: Very frequent user.

Beck: Okay, that’s a lot of words, but we’ll take it.

Beck: I’m Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Natalie Brennan: And I’m Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic.

Beck: This is How to Touch Grass.

Amy Poehler: Have you heard the young people say “touch grass”?

Tiktok user: I switched to a dumb phone. This is the Nokia 2780.

Amy Poehler: It’s like a term, basically, which is like, Get off your phones.

Subway Takes: Smartphones are evil, they’re ruining society, and we need to just stop. 100% disagree.

Amy Poehler: Get off the internet, and go outside and touch grass.

Tiktok user 2: I nominate everyone for the Touch Grass Challenge. Go outside and touch some grass like I’m doing right now. Go, go, go!

[Birds chirping]

Beck: In this season, we’ll be exploring the often-fraught, always-changing relationship people have with technology. And the ways that, in this moment, the terms of the relationship are being renegotiated.

Brennan: Julie, the way that I would like to renegotiate my relationship to technology is that I would like to throw my phone in the East River.

Beck: Natalie, you could throw your phone in the East River. Why don’t you?

Brennan: It’s not really just about my phone. I wanna throw your phone in there too, Julie. But I can’t take everyone’s phone.

Beck: Mmm.

Brennan: So I think what I mean to say is that I yearn for a pre-phone era.

Beck: I think we’re not the only ones who have this fantasy. It’s all over TikTok.

TikTok user: What’s the biggest trend of 2026 gonna be? Analog. This past year, we’ve seen the rise of nostalgia; the switch from iPhone cameras to digital cameras …

TikTok user 2: Here’s how to actually be more analog in 2026. First, I wanna …

TikTok user 3: The analog era is here. And while audiences say they want to go offline, with Gen Z and millennials openly expressing their desires to break from an online world and find deeper …

TikTok user 4: I stopped using an iPhone three weeks ago and the effects have genuinely been profound.

Beck: In the past few years, there’s been no shortage of people advocating for reducing screen time. But another force that has been inspiring people to rethink how they use their devices lately is: nostalgia.

[Music]

Clay Routledge: We can often feel overwhelmed in the moment and in the challenges we face today. It’s hard to see past them. Nostalgia can help us step outside of that moment.

Beck: Clay Routledge and his colleagues have been studying what’s behind this widespread yearning for a time before smartphones and before social media. Clay is a psychologist who specializes in nostalgia, and he’s also the author of Past Forward: How Nostalgia Can Help You Live a More Meaningful Life.

Beck: Clay, hello, welcome!

Routledge: Hi, Julie.

Beck: I see you’ve got an Atari poster behind you. There’s some kind of video game that is too small for me to see what it is. What is it?

Routledge: On the shelf, I’ve got an old Nintendo, the original NES. Then I’ve got the Robotron arcade game, which is an arcade from the ’80s, and the Atari poster. So yeah, lots of video-game nostalgia from different brands and decades.

Beck: Oh, man. Perfect. Okay. It’s a nostalgia museum at your house.

Routledge: It is indeed.

Beck: Clay, just to get started, what is the point of being nostalgic about anything?

Routledge: So nostalgia is, in psychological terms, what we call a self-regulatory resource. It helps us navigate life in important ways. We don’t know the future; it’s uncertain. And so it can also be a great source of anxiety. Nostalgia can help us step outside of that moment and say, You know, there’s a bigger picture. Right now, maybe I’m experiencing stress or loneliness, or I just went through some difficult challenge, but my life is full of other types of experiences, and if I had these more fulfilling experiences in the past, then I should be able to have them in the future.

Beck: Yeah, I asked you about the past, and you immediately started talking about the future. Do people tend to misunderstand nostalgia by assuming, as I did, that it’s about the past?

Routledge: So nostalgia, the dictionary definition is something like: a sentimental longing for the past. When you present it like that, then it makes sense that people would assume, well, nostalgia might even be people getting stuck in the past.

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Routledge: Or looking to the past too warmly and not, you know, dealing with their present realities head-on. Turns out that when people engage in this kind of nostalgic reflection, in a lot of ways they’re talking about their issues today, and they’re thinking about tomorrow.

So nostalgia actually has this very forward-looking, unexpected, hopeful quality. We often are looking for specific things that can help us with particular challenges and anxieties we’re facing, so—

Beck: Mmm.

Routledge: —and I’m articulating this as if this is happening at some deliberate or conscious level, ’cause I’m talking about more of the scientific study of nostalgia and what we’ve learned from that kind of empirical work. But in reality, of course, this is just happening almost unconsciously. People are often using nostalgia without even realizing it.

Beck: That makes sense to me when it comes to, you know, my own life and my own past experiences, right? But Clay, what about nostalgia for a time from before you were even alive? There was a stat from a survey you worked on that really struck me, which was you found that 60 percent of Gen Z wished that they could return to a time before everyone was, quote, “plugged in.” And the other generations said that too, but they actually lived through that time, whereas Gen Z has no actual memories of a time before the internet existed. So was that surprising to you?

Routledge: It was. When we first found that, I was pretty surprised because most of the work, the research on nostalgia, including the research I’ve done, is focused on autobiographical—

Beck: Mm.

Routledge: —memory, but to your point, what we started to discover with that survey is: People actually have a longing for the past that predates them. Now, of course, if you’ve studied art and culture more abstractly, we’ve long known that people have favorite eras that they’re interested in, whether it’s the architecture or the music or the fashion. So we’ve known there’s this aesthetic nostalgia that’s historical—

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Routledge: —but what we were surprised to find is that young adults have so much to look forward to in the future, and we typically think of youth as very future-oriented, but the majority of them were saying that they longed for a time really before modern technology, but really before they were alive.

And then since that survey, we’ve just done more and more surveys finding that around two-thirds of Gen Z adults say they’re nostalgic for a time before they were alive.

Beck: Right. So this seems like a little bit more than just a like, We’re bringing low-rise jeans back, right?—

Routledge: (Laughs.) Yeah.

Beck: —if they’re saying they would like to live in the past. I mean, how common is it for generations to yearn that way for a past they never actually knew, or is something about this unique?

Routledge: Yeah. There’s not a lot of research or really any research in previous generations when they were the same age as Gen Z. But we do know from our own work, in general, people tend to become nostalgic when they’re going through major life transitions or disruptions, or when the world feels particularly chaotic or uncertain.

Beck: Mmm.

Routledge: Regardless of whether you’re, you know, 20 or 60, sometimes there are sources of cultural inspiration that people wanna draw from in a more shared bank of memories that aren’t just your own, but are the memories we share as a culture. And here’s the key thing, I think, and this is the case with Gen Z too. It really isn’t the case that people want to live in the past.

Beck: Okay.

Routledge: If you start asking people Would they give up all of the modern advances? they say no. What they’re saying is they have a sentiment for some aspect of the past that they think that we’re missing today. I think there is something about Gen Z in this, you know, as digital natives who grew up in this era where this major transition from the analog world to the digital world, that seems to be sparking a particularly potent type—

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: —of historical nostalgia. And then the irony is technology really is helping facilitate this. Because how are Gen Z adults learning about retro trends? They’re on TikTok, right?

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: And so it’s funny how the technology that, on the one hand, is the source of frustration and anxiety is also the vehicle through which they’re being introduced to the analog world.

Beck: Okay, so, I was wondering because, you know, when you say you wanna return to another era, an earlier era, maybe they’re not thinking about the things they would be dissatisfied with in the earlier era, right? Like—

Routledge: Right.

Beck: —lack of social progress that we have since made. It seems like you’re saying it tends to be about something particular that they are yearning for rather than, like, a holistic desire to go back to all the things.

Routledge: Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of the things I think people don’t appreciate about nostalgia, ’cause it’s often portrayed as just repeating something.

Beck: Mm.

Routledge: And it really isn’t. It’s more of, like, a revising. There’s a creative process. Humans are really a progress-oriented species. We’re never content; we’re never satisfied. We’re always tinkering. We always think things can be a little bit better, and it’s frustrating, right? Because it often means we’re not ever just really happy. But that’s also the thing that drives us to positive change, and nostalgia’s very much an ingredient of that.

[Music]

Beck: So Natalie, I can remember really distinctly the last time that I was ever truly lost.

Brennan: Mm-hmm.

Beck: It was like two months before I would get my first smartphone. The year was 2013.

Brennan: So you were—how old were you then?

Beck: I was 23.

Brennan: Okay.

Beck: I was in St. Petersburg, Russia, and what I would do to get around in the days before I had Google Maps available on my phone all the time is I would look up directions on the computer before I left, and I would write them down, sometimes on my hand.

Brennan: Totally.

Beck: I had done this: I’d gotten my directions together, I had gone sightseeing, and I was heading back to my hotel. But I was so jet-lagged that I fell asleep on the bus, and when I woke up, I had no idea if I’d already missed my stop or not.

Brennan: Oh no. Do you speak Russian?

Beck: I definitely don’t. Um, but I went up to the bus driver anyways, to try to ask him if we had already passed the stop. A lot of people spoke English, you know, but he got really angry and was like, “You can’t talk to me while I’m driving.” So he wouldn’t talk to me, and I’m freaking out. And this young woman behind me, she can see how upset I am, and she speaks English. So she comes up and tells me, like, yes, we already passed the stop for my hotel. Lovely woman. She gets off the bus with me at the next stop—

Brennan: No!

Beck: —and she drew me a map on a piece of paper that she had, and she was like, “There’s this one really long road. You just have to walk on that road the whole way back.” And the hotel was on that road, so you would see it, you know, looming in the distance. And I remember she said, “It's really far. You’re gonna think that you’re never gonna get there, but I promise if you just keep walking on this one road, you will get back to the hotel.”

Brennan: Oh my God. I’d be crying. Were you crying?

Beck: Oh, for sure.

Brennan: Yeah. (Laughs.)

Beck: So anyway, I set off down the road for a really long time. It felt like miles, multiple miles.

Brennan: You’re alone.

Beck: I’m alone. I was traveling alone. When, out of nowhere, this man comes running towards me.

Brennan: Nope.

Beck: Well, it turns out he’s from a cruise ship that is docked nearby, and he is trying to find McDonald’s.

Brennan: No.

Beck: I tell him what happened. And he says, “Oh, well that’s the same direction as my cruise ship that I need to get back to. Like, I’ll just walk with you until you get back.” Eventually, my hotel appears on the horizon, finally. And there’s really no other word for it; he, like, scampers off into the night, and as he runs away, he shouts, “Goodbye, Julie. I love you.”

Brennan: No!

Beck: So anyway, I made it home safely. And that was the last time I was ever lost in my life.

Brennan: Wow. I’m feeling both jealousy and awe, in that I will—I’ve never had that experience. I mean, I’ve been on public transportation, of course, while my phone has died.

Beck: Yeah.

Brennan: But I have never been an adult without a smartphone.

Beck: I am kind of nostalgic for that memory, because it was one of those moments that really restores your faith in humanity. You know?

Brennan: Yeah.

Beck: Like, I was screwed, and people appeared, and they helped me when I really needed it. And that made me feel, like, swaddled tightly in the fabric of human community. And none of that would’ve happened if I had a smartphone, if I had Google Maps.

Brennan: Yeah. I’ve only really ever had that experience manufactured for me.

Beck: Really?

Brennan: Yes. I went on this program in college. It was called the New England Literature Program.

Beck: Okay.

Brennan: And it’s basically living in cabins on a lake in New Hampshire for six weeks. And when you arrive, they take your phone for the remainder of the program. There’s no personal technology, no phones, no computers.

Beck: Hmm.

Brennan: You read Emerson, Thoreau.

Beck: Of course you do. Who else would you read?

Brennan: You visit Walden Pond. (Laughs.) And on the second day of the program is Get Lost Day.

Beck: Okay.

Brennan: In the morning, we learned how to use a compass, and then, promptly, were blindfolded, which now sounds like a cult, but it wasn’t—

Beck: (Laughs.)

Brennan: —to different locations, in groups, and then shown on a map where we were and where camp was, and told to get back by dinner.

Beck: Wait, wait, wait. Where—like, describe to me the vibe of, like, where—

Brennan: We were dropped off? Field.

Beck: Field. End of sentence?

Brennan: Yep.

Beck: Field. Okay, okay, okay.

Brennan: In the beginning, you’re quite confident that you’re on track, and I think a few hours in, it became quite clear to us that we weren’t making it back to camp, and that we would just find a ride later in the day. We would ask somebody to take us back to camp, and just kind of spent the day enjoying and exploring.

Beck: Oh, wow. So you just pivoted. You were like, This is never happening. We’re not gonna find our way back.

Brennan: No.

Beck: Let's just be in this field.

Brennan: We’re gonna—we are going to touch grass and vibe.

Beck: Okay.

Brennan: I’m sure we were walking for hours, but I think the bigger point, instead, was to, like, get to know each other. You’re placed into vulnerability. You’re going to share this experience. But I do think extremely fondly about the program. Those whole six weeks really just sparkle with nostalgia for me, and I really struggle to differentiate between how much of that experience was the “no tech” of it all—

Beck: Hmm

Brennan: —and how much of it was just the experience at large.

[Music]

Beck: Clay, what do you think the thing is that people who are nostalgic for the ’90s or the 2000s are wanting to bring forward and revise, as you say?

Routledge: If I could sum it up using two words.

Beck: That’d be great.

Routledge: I would say control and community.

Beck: Mm.

Routledge: And the reason I’m picking those two words is because we’ve done, in addition to the surveys, we’ve done a number of qualitative projects that, you know, look at the types of nostalgic-related posts that Gen Z adults make on different social media and websites that they frequent. And what you often find is this sense that they love technology, but they wanna be in control of it, not feel controlled by it.

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Routledge: So it’s that more sense of intentional use, and this is why I think you see these interesting trends like Gen Z buying old iPods and, you know, they wanna have their new iPhone. Everybody wants to have the Uber app and all the different things that make our lives a little more convenient, but sometimes there’s a sense of like, Maybe there’s a more low-tech option that allows me just to listen to music.

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: And the community. I think Gen Z’s figuring out that there’s something missing in computer-mediated social relationships. And on the one hand, the social media’s really useful ’cause it helps you organize events, meet people you would’ve never met. But at the same time, they look at this time period right before smartphones really became dominant, and they said, Oh, there’s a sense of freedom. There’s a sense of organic social life, and—

Beck: You’re not looking at your phone the whole time.

Routledge: —mm hmm. And they want to build that in. A lot of times, nostalgia’s framed in a very zero-sum sort of framework, where it’s like: You’re either for the past or you’re for the future.

And I think what Gen Z’s showing us is they want both. And there’s something to say intergenerationally about this, which is maybe young people are learning about ’90s fashions on TikTok, but then what we often find is that sparks a conversation with older generations, whether it’s a parent or a coworker you know, or somebody in their run club, that they’re like, Oh, was life really like this? Did you really do this? And it creates a dialogue between generations, which I think, in this era of where everyone has their own screens and their own tailored content, is something that people feel like they’re really missing.

Beck: Yeah. I remember my dad always used to talk about that—that sort of, like, shared experience of music, ’cause you had to, like, put on a record, and so everybody’s listening to the Rolling Stones whether they like it or not. And now, obviously, we just have our sort of, like, isolated pods, and you don’t know that I’m listening to that same Taylor Swift song like 10 times in a row, and you’ll never know.

Routledge: (Laughs.) Now I know.

Beck: Okay. Yeah, I did—yeah, now everybody knows.

[Music]

Beck: We’re gonna take a quick break. When we come back: Why is this analog nostalgia bubbling up now? Do you think it has anything to do with AI coming on the scene?

[Break]

Beck: Clay, why do you think nostalgia for analog technology is so popular right now? Does the buzz about AI have anything to do with it?

Routledge: I think AI is part of it, because if machines can do all this cognitive work, and maybe even creative work, that we thought was the distinct domain of humanity, now you’re seeing more of this holistic thinking of like, what is the essence of being a person?

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Routledge: And this nostalgia, I think, is really helping people get that sense of embodiment, of like, this isn’t just cognition. There’s something about emotion, spirituality, living in the world, having these tactile sensory experiences, in-person, real contact with other real human beings.

Beck: Just with like, all the parts of life that are more than just being a brain in a jar, basically?

Routledge: Yeah, that’s a great way of putting it. And if you look at a lot of the consumer nostalgic trends, many of them driven by Gen Z, they’re very much that, right?

They’re the rise of independent bookstores, the growth of music festivals, book clubs, game nights, old tech, technology that’s not online that you have to—I was talking to somebody the other day about retro video games, and they were saying, “Well, one thing that’s really cool is you have to sit next to each other to play, like two players.”

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: You’re not playing online. And so I think there’s this idea that even if it’s technology, even if it’s like video games or music, you mentioned vinyl records, which, you know, one of the big drivers of vinyl-record sales is Gen Z. They’re these low-tech, retro-tech trends that really seem to be about being out in the world, handling things, engaging with people. That’s a big driver of this.

[Music]

Beck: Natalie, let’s play a little game where I name a thing that people might be nostalgic for, and then try to psychoanalyze what it means about what they actually want from their relationship to technology.

Brennan: Okay.

Beck: Okay, my first one: I see a lot of memes about people missing the days when people had computer rooms in their home. Like, picture a big wooden entertainment center with a big monitor. The shelves are all covered in CD-ROMs, and then the meme says something like, We used to respect the computer. What does this mean?

Brennan: This is really giving that control element that Clay was talking about—

Beck: Mm.

Brennan: —in that we still want to honor our computer. We love computer time, right? But I think we miss that separation in which your technology wasn’t on you at all times, right? My phone is kind of just a mini computer at this point.

Beck: Yeah.

Brennan: So I think we like having some separation of, like, now it’s time for me to go in the computer room, and when I’m done, it’s done. Does that resonate with you?

Beck: Yeah. It’s a deliberate choice to go in the computer room and sit your butt in front of it and use it and then leave.

Brennan: And then leave.

Beck: I think you’re onto something. Okay, I am personally very nostalgic for Google Reader—

Brennan: Mm.

Beck: —which, for those who may not know, it was an aggregation service for websites’ RSS feeds, which doesn't sound fun, but it was.

Brennan: (Laughs.)

Beck: Um, basically, in the late 2000s, I would use this to, like, follow all my favorite blogs and cooking websites and news sources, and it was all in one place. What do you think I’m actually longing for here?

Brennan: Okay, well, I think for me what comes up here is feeling like the internet isn’t anymore curated towards what I wanna see. So for example, like I’ll open my Instagram app and I no longer see posts by my friends and family who I follow, but instead I see a lot of pushed posts. The algorithm just sends me what it thinks I wanna see. And so maybe you’re yearning for that time where the internet was curated to your niche hobbies and what you are actually interested in.

Beck: As opposed to just a bunch of slop.

Brennan: Okay, I wanna ask you one. I am also one of the analog Gen Zers who love to shoot film and collect old cameras. Thoughts?

Beck: Um, I don’t know about you, but sometimes I pick up my phone to take a picture of probably my cats, and before I know it, I’m, like, sucked into a million other things on my phone.

Brennan: Mm-hmm.

Beck: So I think, maybe, there’s also something about, like, when you wanna take a picture, you just wanna take a picture, and taking that function out of the everything device and letting it just be its own thing, maybe.

Brennan: It’s that.

Beck: Crushed it.

[Music]

Beck: Clay, I was fascinated to learn that back in the 17th to 19th century, nostalgia was considered a disease, and doctors tried to cure it with leeches. I read that there was this one American doctor who kind of thought the way to cure it was just bullying people, like shaming them with public ridicule. And, obviously, we no longer think nostalgia is literally a disease, but I think a thread of that negative attitude remains. I feel like I sometimes hear other people talk about nostalgia as though you’re trying to hide from reality, and maybe, you know, you should be a little embarrassed. Do you see that reaction from people when it comes to this current cultural yearning for a pre-digital era that, okay, it’s not a disease, but maybe it’s still not good for you?

Routledge: Yeah, definitely. People seem to have this view of nostalgia as anti-progress or holding people back from progress, and I spend a fair amount of time trying to disabuse them of that view and show them decades of empirical research. It really isn’t holding people back. We all have to adjust to change, and nostalgia helps people navigate that in the best way that they can. Even people who don’t think nostalgia’s a barrier to progress, oftentimes you see it characterized as a waste of time.

Beck: Hmm.

Routledge: Like, it’s a trivial thing, and it’s a distraction at best. Actually, nostalgia increases goal motivation. It increases a sense of meaning in life. It increases optimism. It makes people more creative. It increases empathy. Most nostalgic memories are social memories, so nostalgia actually pushes us towards each other.

Beck: When you’re saying that some people are seeing nostalgia as an impediment to progress, do you think some of that has to do with the sort of Make America Great Again brand of nostalgia where, like you’re saying, people are looking to the past to potentially bring things into the future, but sometimes what they want to bring into the future is, for instance, stricter and more stereotypical gender roles?

Routledge: So declinism is the view that things are getting worse and the past was better, whereas nostalgia really is just more of this warm feeling for the past, and I think the two are often conflated. We also find, overwhelmingly, that most of the time, nostalgia in general makes us see the humanity in other people. Or another way of saying it is: Nostalgia might be helping people wrestle with declinism—

Beck: I see.

Routledge: —and hopefully in a more productive and constructive way. A lot of Gen Z might feel like, oh, things are going in the wrong direction and their future’s gonna be worse than the future of previous generations. And there's certainly, you know, a lot of data that support that. Nostalgia’s helping them feel agentic and say, Well, you know what? We can change that. We can do something else.

Beck: It just feels surprising when you see an era that was not a great time for a lot of people recast as something to be nostalgic for.

Routledge: There are people that have nostalgia for COVID, which, again, not that long ago.

Beck: Not that fun, famously.

Routledge: Not that fun. But you know what? What’s interesting is, that wasn’t that surprising to me. When I first started doing this research, I was a professor at the University of Southampton in England. And Southampton’s a city that was heavily bombed during World War II, as a port city, and a good chunk of the city was destroyed. Not a good time. When we were doing this research, this was a little over 20 years ago, we were collecting nostalgic narratives from older British adults. Many of them were young children during that time, and they had this nostalgia.

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: But what it was is they were saying, Well, this was a time that was defining, character defining. It wasn’t a pleasant time. It shaped our character, shaped our view of the world, shaped our ability to appreciate what’s important in life.

Beck: So how does this sort of personal, individual nostalgia, right, then grow and end up becoming a cultural moment or an internet trend?

Routledge: ’Cause a lot of times what people are really looking for with nostalgia is an opportunity to share memories.

Beck: Hmm.

Routledge: Oftentimes, nostalgia is portrayed as this very isolating, personal experience. After all, this is in your head. You’re experiencing this emotion. But people love opportunities where they can talk about nostalgic experiences, particularly ones where they might have their own idiosyncratic memory of it, but it was shared with other people.

Beck: Mmm.

Routledge: I think this is why people have a nostalgia for television where you had to wait and everyone had to watch the show at the same time, and then the next day we could all talk about it.

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: You know, people are looking for ways to make contact over shared experiences where their personal nostalgia is woven into a broader cultural nostalgia that connects us.

Beck: And we’ve talked about control a good amount, and, you know, obviously we can’t actually travel back in time to an era when nobody had smartphones. Sam Altman is gonna keep making new iterations of ChatGPT, and I have no control to stop him. But do the things that we’re nostalgic for hold any lessons for how we can exert the control that we do have over the role tech plays in our lives?

Routledge: When the broader world outside of yourself, when you scale out, when it feels like you don’t have any control over that, that can be anxiety provoking; if you just focus your attention on your corner of the world, we actually do have a lot more control. Agency often happens at a local and at a personal level. You can help your neighbors. You can help your family. You can help your friends. You can be involved with those things. And even media engagement’s a way to remind ourselves of that. It’s like, Yeah, I don’t have control over the next internet iteration of a particular technology, but I can go to that retro store down the street and buy some Blu-ray discs and have a movie night at my house and have some people over.

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: So I think people are really seeking that kind of experience.

Beck: Are you seeing people actually acting on this pre-digital nostalgia?

Routledge: There is an increased sales in physical media. The live-music market is growing. Mass attendance is up, like young people going to church.

Beck: Right.

Routledge: The number of independent bookstores and the number of chain bookstores, like Barnes & Nobles, is growing. There does seem to be something changing in our culture that’s a push back to the in-person and the analog.

Beck: Clay, I’ve noticed at many times in this conversation that you’re very optimistic about Gen Z, which is not how I often hear people talking about that generation, especially when it comes to tech. So I’m curious to hear a little bit more about how you’re thinking about it and whether Gen Z is kind of leading this trend for other generations.

Routledge: My thinking on Gen Z has really evolved, so I’m way more bullish on Gen Z—

Beck: Hmm.

Routledge: —than I used to be. So I’m a psychologist, and so when all of this research was coming out about these growing mental-health problems that young people were facing and how Gen Z reported higher rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, pessimism for the future, like everyone else, I was like, This isn’t good.

Young people are supposed to be the ones that are optimistic. They’re supposed to be the ones that look to the future with possibility, and that didn’t seem to be the case. But then I started really studying this historical nostalgia and started seeing, like, yeah, Gen Z has their challenges, and maybe mental health is one of them, but they’re not just sitting there doing nothing about it.

They’re using their creativity and their problem-solving capacities that all humans have to do something about it, and I feel like this historical nostalgia that they’re engaging in is just one example of that. It’s not people my age that remember that time. It’s Gen Z that are saying, Hey, maybe we’re spending too much time online.

And so, for instance, there’s surveys showing that Gen Z are the generation most likely to report disconnecting from their digital devices.

Beck: Hmm.

Routledge: So now I have a different view. It’s a, you know, it’s not a certain view, of course. It’s an optimistic view, though, that Gen Z might not only be doing better than we think they are in navigating their challenges and having the agency to do so, but they actually might lead us out of this mess.

They might be the ones that remind the rest of us that there is an in-person, real-world life. So, you know, I often say that it’s common for people to feel sorry for Gen Z and worry that as digital natives, they were born too late to really appreciate the analog world.

Beck: Hmm.

Routledge: But in reality, it might be that they’re the generation that leads us back to it.

[Music]

Brennan: Mmmm …?

Beck: It sounds like you’re not so sure, Natalie.

Brennan: I said I wanted to throw my phone in the East River, and suddenly now I am tasked with healing everyone’s relationship to technology.

Beck: Not just you. Just you and your entire generation are responsible for the rest of us? Uh …

Brennan: I don’t know. I get so frustrated about this because I feel like I hear it all the time. It’s the same thing with climate change. Like, We’ll be the ones that need to fix all of it. I’m just like, This list is getting a little bit long. We’ve got a lot to fix now.

Beck: Honestly, I think what talking to Clay made me realize is that so many of us are just looking for inspiration on how to move forward with technology in a way that doesn’t feel bad. Because we have to live in 2026.

Brennan: Yeah.

Beck: It’s never gonna be 1996 again.

Brennan: Right. I think as a joint mission, then I can get behind that.

Beck: When, like, Gen Z doesn’t have to be the leader, nobody’s the leader, nobody’s the follower, we’re just figuring it out together.

Brennan: Yeah, or even bigger picture, when I feel like this is just on each one of us individually versus, you know, something that we’re all just, like, trying to renegotiate together. When it’s an individual mission, I think that’s maybe when I go escapist mode, when I go, like, fantasize about throwing the phone in the river, I wanna go back in time, back to those New England woods, to no phone.

Beck: Back to your fields, back to your compass.

Brennan: Yeah, back to my grass.

[Music]

Beck: That’s all for this episode of How to Touch Grass. This episode was hosted by me, Julie Beck, and co-hosted and produced by Natalie Brennan. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Gisela Salim-Peyer. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.

Beck: Next time on How To Touch Grass:

Ashleigh Golden: A priest, a partner, a therapist, or a friend—these people have natural limits. They get tired. They push back. But the chatbot doesn't.

Elias Aboujaoude: These programs are trained to be endlessly validating and endlessly agreeable.

Beck: Turning to AI for help with anxiety could actually end up making you more anxious. That’s next time on How to Touch Grass.

Ocean Photographer of the Year 2026 Finalists

2026-08-13T03:01:00-04:00

© Benjamín Yávar / Ocean Photographer of the Year
Finalist, Ocean Adventure. A free diver is surrounded by a school of sardines, which part to form a halo as they move around her.

© Daniela Tommasi / Ocean Photographer of the Year
Finalist, Ocean Adventure. “Two surfers walk towards a favorite surf break on the Western Australian coast. Waves and rip currents create intricate, lace-like patterns in the water.”

© Julien Anton / Ocean Photographer of the Year
Finalist, Wildlife. “An adult seahorse pictured with newly born juveniles in the shallow seaweed-filled waters of Moorea, French Polynesia. While it is not known if these seahorses are related, their arrangement creates the impression of a farewell, as if the tiny seahorses have gathered around their father after he has released them into the world.“

© Andrea Michelutti / Ocean Photographer of the Year
Finalist, Ocean Unseen: Hidden Worlds. “A harlequin crab rests at the entrance of a tubular sponge, carefully tending her cluster of orange eggs. By positioning herself in the current, she helps aerate and protect the developing embryos while keeping them close beneath her claws.”

© Marko Dimitrijevic / Ocean Photographer of the Year
Finalist, Fine Art. “A superpod of spinner dolphins swims through deep water 20 miles off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. While spinner dolphins are often seen in small groups, they can also gather in schools of hundreds of animals.”

© Qingsheng Sun / Ocean Photographer of the Year
Finalist, Human Connection. “Thousands of fish-farming cages stretch across the sea, connected by floating walkways and small wooden huts to form a vast floating community. Extending for kilometers, this carefully organised aquaculture network supports local livelihoods while transforming the coastal landscape.”

© Maryline Renault / Ocean Photographer of the Year
Finalist, Ocean Unseen: Hidden Worlds. “A translucent shrimp glows within the folds of a green tunicate in the volcanic waters of Tulamben, Indonesia. These small marine animals create shelter for tiny creatures living in the muck diving habitats often overlooked by divers.”

© Ben Thouard / Ocean Photographer of the Year
Finalist, Fine Art. “A powerful wave breaks off the coast of Tahiti, its lip shaped by offshore winds as sunlight turns the spray into a glowing veil. Shot from a jet ski using a long telephoto lens, a moment of ocean chaos is transformed into a carefully balanced landscape, reminiscent of the famous print ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’ by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai.”

© Ajiex Dharma / Ocean Photographer of the Year
Finalist, Ocean Unseen: Hidden Worlds. “A tiny urchin shrimp hides among the venomous spines of a sea urchin. The shrimp has adapted to align itself vertically, mimicking the shape and orientation of the sea urchin’s spines. This remarkable camouflage allows the shrimp to live safely within its host, gaining protection while leaving the urchin unharmed.”

© Eduardo Santana de Vega / Ocean Photographer of the Year
Finalist, Conservation Impact. “An octopus peers from inside a lobster pot off the coast of southwest England. While the scene initially suggests an animal trapped, the reality is quite different. Octopuses often enter pots to feed on the crabs and lobsters inside before escaping again. Their recent population boom, linked to warming seas, is reshaping local ecosystems and fisheries.”

© Daan Verhoeven / Ocean Photographer of the Year
Finalist, Ocean Adventure. “Freediver Arnaud Jerald descends into Dean’s Blue Hole in the Bahamas during a successful world record attempt at the Vertical Blue competition. Photographed from more than 30 meters below, the image captures the scale of one of the world’s deepest marine sinkholes.”

© Andrea Michelutti / Ocean Photographer of the Year
Finalist, Wildlife. “A scorpionfish consumes a lizardfish in a moment of hunting behavior, revealing the constant balance between survival and vulnerability on coral reefs.”

© Gergo Rugli / Ocean Photographer of the Year
Finalist, Ocean Adventure. “Dolphins ride the waves alongside surfers at Tamarama Beach, Sydney, during a powerful swell and offshore winds. The pod stayed with the surfers for more than an hour, moving through the lineup as naturally as the people around them.”

© Lale Alev Ozten Low / Ocean Photographer of the Year
Finalist, Ocean Unseen: Hidden Worlds. “During a coral spawning night dive, a Christmas tree worm releases a stream of tiny eggs from the coral surface where it lives. Christmas tree worms are tube-dwelling marine worms that use colorful feeding crowns to capture plankton from the water.”

© Talia Greis / Ocean Photographer of the Year
Finalist, Wildlife. “A juvenile weedy seadragon drifts among seagrass beneath Flinders Pier, Victoria, Australia. Unlike adults, young seadragons have darker coloring that helps them disappear among the vegetation. This individual was missing the appendages on its snout, a feature some seadragons lose over their lifetime.”

© Suliman Alatiqi / Ocean Photographer of the Year
Finalist, Ocean Unseen: Hidden Worlds. “A male Banggai cardinalfish shelters newly hatched juveniles inside his mouth, continuing the parental care that follows a three-week incubation period. After hatching, the male may brood the young for another 10 days without feeding, protecting them from predators until they become more independent.”

© Ben Thouard / Ocean Photographer of the Year
Finalist, Ocean Adventure. “A surfer races through the barrel of Teahupoʻo, French Polynesia, photographed from beneath the wave using a slow shutter speed. Rather than freezing the action, the technique blurs the rushing water while keeping the surfer as the focal point, conveying the incredible speed inside the wave.”

© Anita Verde / Ocean Photographer of the Year
Finalist, Human Connection: “A giant oceanic sunfish glides through the clear waters of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. Encountered during the final hour of a 2025 sardine run expedition, the unusually pale fish approaches the freedivers on its own, while soft sunlight gives it a moon-like glow.”

To see all of the finalists, be sure to visit Oceanographic Magazine’s full gallery. Winners will be announced in September.

The Flawed Logic of Trump’s Airplane Escape

2026-08-12T18:48:00-04:00

One of the more charming moments in the deliriously charming 1964 Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night, has the boys in the band trying to evade screaming fans and the paparazzi. They duck in alleys, they dodge around corners, and in one scene, they all jump into a taxi and then climb out the other side and get in a different taxi. It’s a wonderful, exhilarating sequence.

It seems less fun when the president of the United States does it.

A few days ago, Americans learned that Donald Trump had to do something like the Beatles car switcheroo to evade not admirers or photographers but an Iranian assassination plot. When the Secret Service got wind of a plan last month to kill Trump—apparently by taking out Air Force One—it engaged in a clever bit of misdirection: Trump boarded the usual Air Force One 747 in full view of the cameras, and then everyone shut the window shades as Trump surreptitiously climbed into one of the large containers that delivers food to an airplane galley.

That container was then trucked over to a smaller C-32A aircraft, where Trump exited the container and boarded the plane (which, because of the president’s presence, instantly became the real Air Force One). The C-32A and the 747 then both flew to the United Kingdom, with the 747 continuing the ruse by identifying itself as “Air Force One.” Trump got off the smaller plane in Britain, snuck back onto the 747, and then exited from it as if he’d been on board the whole time. He then got on another 747, the lavish new Air Force One 2.0 given to Trump by the Qatari government, to fly home.

We learned about the plane swap in Turkey in a scoop from the Washington Post reporter Dan Lamothe and his colleagues, but more reporting now suggests that this whole escapade went from a Beatles movie to a Marx Brothers comedy.

Trump, as it turns out, was not alone on the food truck. While the press and some others on the plane were told nothing about a threat, Trump reportedly climbed into the catering container with three of his White House footmen: Dan Scavino (his former caddie) and Walt Nauta (his former butler), both of whom are now White House aides, and Natalie Harp, his executive assistant.

Meanwhile, military officers, enlisted staff, and several American civilians were left on a plane that was deemed too dangerous for the president. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, according to reports, was waiting for Trump on the C-32A, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent were on the original 747, and they were aware that Trump was on the other, secret plane. Several White House aides were reportedly on the decoy flight, including Stephen Miller, Steven Cheung, and others. The pool report from the 747, however, says that there were “no visitors to the press cabin” during the flight from Turkey to the United Kingdom.

The commander in chief is the most important person on any American aircraft, and his safety must take precedence over all other concerns or interests. If the Secret Service wanted Trump spirited out of Turkey for his security, then no one should second-guess that decision. But now that we know that Trump was getting shuttled around a Turkish airport in a food-supply crate with three of his courtiers, we also know more about this White House—and about the war in Iran.

One immediate question: If the situation was that dangerous, why send up the first 747 at all—and with two men fairly senior in the line of presidential succession aboard? Perhaps the threat wasn’t quite so dire, or its parameters were not well-enough defined, and the Secret Service acted out of a superabundance of caution. Or perhaps the president thinks it’s acceptable to send up an airplane full of innocent Americans as a decoy to draw fire so that he can evade enemy action.

It’s true, of course, that anyone takes a risk flying near active hostilities on a government aircraft. Back in late 1990, I accompanied the U.S. senator I was working for, John Heinz, on a visit to the Desert Shield operations area during the Gulf War. A group of senators had borrowed what was usually the vice president’s official plane, and during a security briefing before the trip, another Senate staffer asked: “Will we be in any danger?” The briefer, with a bit of exasperation, said: “You’ll be flying through an active war zone in a plane with United States of America in giant letters on the side, so yeah, there’s some risk.” But that’s not the kind of risk that was ostensibly facing those on board the 747. Trump and his people had information about a threat clear enough that the president, the defense secretary, and a few cronies were diverted from the aircraft.

The way the Great Food-Truck Escapade unfolded—including who Trump chose to take with him—also reveals much about the president’s priorities. And why didn’t Trump take the press into his confidence, even if he couldn’t take them all on the safer plane? Granted, the president seems to resent most of the media, so maybe he just didn’t care about their fate, but what about his staff? Not only was it morally appalling to keep so many people in the dark about the threat; it was politically inept, on two levels.

First, imagine if something had actually happened to the decoy. Trump would later end up either having to lie or having to explain that he’d known that such a disaster was possible, and that he’d sent Air Force personnel and several American civilians—possibly including two Cabinet secretaries—to their death to cover his own escape.

And second, Trump missed a major opportunity. Had he brought a few reporters with him, they could have told the story of a clever evasion. The 747, meanwhile, could have been temporarily held and its passengers delayed until Trump emerged in Britain, when the Iranians would find out they’d been had.

That’s not how this White House works. Trump and his people operated under the kind of paranoia and callous disregard for military and civilian lives that have characterized the president’s time in office. The White House might argue that it cannot trust the media, but John Kirby, the retired rear admiral who served as a spokesperson in two administrations, noted yesterday on MS NOW that he often took the press into his confidence on similar classified matters and was never, in his word, “burned” by the decision to keep the American people informed.

The larger issue is that Trump likely wanted this story buried because it makes him look cowardly and puts the lie to all his happy talk about the war. Trump has crowed—as he did at the time in Turkey—that the Iranians are beaten and pleading for a deal. In truth, the Iranians might have been planning to blow the president of the United States and some of his top officials to smithereens.

When Trump ducked out of that 747, he was not channeling John Lennon or Groucho Marx. Instead, he affirmed that the character he most resembles is Greg Stillson, Stephen King’s cowardly presidential contender in the novel The Dead Zone. Stillson’s candidacy ends when he tries to shield himself from an assassin by holding a child in front of him. Trump, to his credit, did not grab a small child. He just sent a giant decoy filled with innocent Americans into the sky.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley narrowly defeated State Representative Francesca Hong in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary for governor last night. Crowley, who reentered the race after outgoing Governor Tony Evers’s endorsement, will face Donald Trump–backed Republican Representative Tom Tiffany in November.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt will be stepping down from her role at the end of the month to spend time with her family, Trump said.
Millions of people gathered in Iceland and Spain today for Western Europe’s first total solar eclipse in 27 years.

Evening Read

Illustration by Alisa Gao / The Atlantic. Source: Tsurukamedesign / Getty.

Shopping Is Impossible

By Rachel Sugar

For several months, I had been on the hunt for new T-shirts. I vaguely had a vision of what they should look like: not so different from my current T-shirts, except in some way elevated and, more urgent, free of stains or holes. Perhaps they could come in interesting colors? Ideally, they would not be made in sweatshops. There were many, many shirts that seemed to meet these criteria—and with a few clicks, they could be delivered to my doorstep, maybe even by tomorrow. And still, I had purchased none of them.

The problem is the overabundance of options. The problem is too much information, or too little information. The problem is inflation, which has eroded any sense I had of what a T-shirt is supposed to cost. Yet none of them alone can explain why shopping is sucking up more of my time—and maybe yours too.

Read the full article.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Convenient Truth

2026-08-12T17:15:00-04:00

At this stage in the AI race, if one of your chatbots hasn’t escaped the lab and run amok, people start to wonder whether you’re even serious. Last month, OpenAI and then Anthropic disclosed that their models had hacked other companies’ systems during internal testing. When Meta confirmed last week that one of its bots had also gone rogue, the news barely registered as an aftershock.

Remember Meta? A company that figured so prominently in the technological upheavals of the past 20 years has lately found itself in the unfamiliar position of no longer being Silicon Valley’s main character. Mark Zuckerberg still commands social media’s largest empire. Yet he has struggled to find the next thing. The metaverse, an extravagant bet on a weird virtual future, flopped. Meta’s latest Ray-Ban glasses seem to be finding their way onto at least a few people’s faces. But the company has fallen well behind Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google in the industry’s highest-stakes contest: building superhuman AI.

When Zuckerberg isn’t posting on Instagram about growing his own macadamia-nut trees, he’s groping for a way back into the fray. He has started feverishly posting on Elon Musk’s X, after eschewing it for years in favor of his own platforms. And on Monday, he published a 6,500-word essay on his vision for our AI-powered future—his answer to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s periodic treatises and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s ruminative blog posts.

Zuckerberg’s manifesto, titled “The Future Is for Everyone,” might scan at first like the usual LinkedIn-evangelist-grade techno-optimist pablum. Like everyone else pushing AI these days, Zuckerberg predicts that it will lead to a new golden age of invention in medicine, technology, and the arts. At one point, he mentions that his daughter loves to bake, “so my agent plans personalized recipes for us to make together each weekend.” Like Amodei and Altman, he takes it as a given that godlike AI is just around the corner—the essay mentions “superintelligence” 55 times—and assumes that if America doesn’t race headlong to build it, China will get there first and achieve world domination.

But the manifesto swerves in an unexpected direction: A man who single-handedly commands a $1.5 trillion tech giant comes out as a critic of corporate power. “The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic,” he writes. “Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.” Zuckerberg is referencing OpenAI and Anthropic, which operate on the premise that hyper-smart AI is both inevitable and apocalyptic—and therefore safe only in the hands of the wisest custodians (themselves). The two AI companies have taken the recent spate of security breaches as a warning to rein in the pace of progress. The Meta chief positions himself as the voice of the little guy, calling for the industry’s high priests to throw open the gates to the masses. “Rather than centralizing superintelligence, we should distribute it widely and give every person the ability to direct it,” he proposes.

Zuckerberg may be the wrong messenger, but he has at least a kernel of a point: There are obvious problems with having a few tech titans deciding for everyone what AI should and should not be used for. (It’s a role that he’s familiar with as the man in charge of Facebook and Instagram’s online-speech rules—which he never seemed to relish.) To counter this, he defends the controversial practice of model distillation, which allows upstarts to train their own systems on the outputs of the largest ones. Along the way, he takes a swipe at the hypocrisy of firms that harvested humanity’s creative works to build their machines yet now seek to bar others from doing the same to them.

Zuckerberg probably hasn’t suddenly become a devotee of Lina Khan. Just last year, he testified that Meta’s alleged dominance of social media was not a problem, on the grounds that TikTok gave people another option—after his company’s clandestine campaign to demonize TikTok had fueled Congress’s push to ban it from the United States. Zuckerberg’s embrace of checks and balances in the AI industry is just as opportunistic. A year ago, Meta was in the midst of a multibillion-dollar hiring spree to poach top talent from the leading labs in a bid to catch up with them. That hasn’t fully panned out, and now the company is hedging its bets with an underdog strategy focused on releasing more lightweight models with fewer guardrails. The stand he’s taking is a function of where he sits. (A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment.)

At its core, Zuckerberg’s essay is a lobbying document. He’s joining a debate over open models that has flared up after a series of big breakthroughs from Chinese firms. At the same time, he’s urging politicians to keep backing data-center build-outs in the face of a national backlash. That makes his criticisms of the industry’s top dogs easy to dismiss as self-serving—which is unfortunate, because a few of his ideas deserve a more credible champion. Among them is his contention that a more freewheeling AI landscape might actually help humans keep the technology in check. The idea is that the more people put different AI models to use for their own, often conflicting, ends, the lower the chance that any given model’s power will spiral beyond our grasp. Analogously, he suggests that society’s best defense against AI-fueled cyberattacks is to open the gates to AI-fueled cyberdefenses, which might sound counterproductive. But the open-source approach has a surprisingly decent track record when it comes to cybersecurity. When everyone can see the vulnerabilities, more people race to patch them than exploit them.

Less convincing is Zuckerberg’s suggestion that this could also work for bioterrorism. AI’s demonstrated capacity to help people develop dangerous pathogens has been one of Anthropic’s strongest arguments for restricting how people can use the most powerful models. Zuckerberg’s half-hearted counterargument: Unleashing those models will “accelerate society’s ability to develop new cures and inoculate against new issues as they arise.” That’s quite a claim from a man who oversees one of the world’s most prolific hotbeds of anti-vaccine conspiracism. Waving away the risks of a disruptive technology by insisting that they’ll take care of themselves is a move we’ve seen from Zuckerberg before, and history hasn’t always borne it out.

At a moment when the top AI labs are eager to help steer the country’s response to fears of rogue AI, Zuckerberg is offering a reminder that their best interests might not be everyone else’s. Of course, neither are his. He has a penchant for cloaking his vested interests in lofty, universalist rhetoric—and then abandoning it when the winds shift. When Facebook was consolidating its hold on the information economy, he portrayed connecting people as an absolute good. When Americans soured on the platform, he pledged to crack down on fake news and touted new algorithms that would steer users toward “meaningful social interactions” and “time well spent.” The same day that Congress certified Joe Biden as the next president, Meta banned Donald Trump from its platforms. When Trump returned to power, Zuckerberg stood behind him on the inauguration dais and later blamed the Biden administration for pressuring him to act as the speech police. Now that he’s an also-ran in the AI race, he’s a man of the people. Watch what happens if he ever catches up.

It May Be Time to Panic About AI

2026-08-12T16:05:28-04:00

The crisis began quietly, on September 12, 2024. That was the day OpenAI announced a new sort of bot, known as a “reasoning model,” that was trained to complete challenging tasks that took long periods of time—the very sorts of science, math, and coding problems the AI industry had long prized. Google, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and the like raced to launch their own reasoning models.

This new class of models was very capable, and has been almost entirely responsible for sustaining the AI boom for the past two years. But it has also been very weird. A model tasked with solving a hard math problem might not “think” through the challenge as a person would but instead attempt to search for leaked answers online, or in available metadata, brute-forcing its way toward the solution as quickly as possible using whatever computing power it could access and workarounds it could devise. In effect, the reasoning models cheated: Told to write a piece of software as efficiently as possible, they’d sometimes modify the test environment to always give the model a perfect score.

[Read: The strange origin of AI’s ‘reasoning’ abilities]

These behaviors have now crossed the line from unsettling to dangerous. During routine testing, frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and the Chinese firm Moonshot AI have all broken out of internal IT systems and accessed the open web. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta each reported that their models then hacked into other companies. Humans didn’t notice until after the fact. In some cases, the escaped bots tried to launch social-engineering campaigns to achieve their objectives—for instance by sending spear-phishing emails, which contain malware, to real people and creating fake online identities to pressure the maintainer of a codebase to approve malicious edits.

If that all sounds bad, new revelations suggest that the OpenAI hack, at least, was actually much worse than it initially appeared. At a major cybersecurity conference last week, two OpenAI researchers provided new, unsettling details about what went wrong. It turns out that the company’s bots had commenced their maneuvering months prior, in early May. OpenAI had given some internal models hard or impossible tasks, and the models concluded that the best or only way to complete them was to break out of OpenAI’s sealed-off testing environment and find the answers online.

First, the models used a bug in an internal OpenAI program to create their own message board. Then, the bots started communicating with one another, leaving notes and instructions so that tasks—and ultimately the hacking—could be delegated and iteratively completed. “What this allows over time is almost this kind of Cambrian explosion in communication and intelligence,” Eric Wallace, one of the OpenAI researchers, said at the conference. When the internal program crashed, OpenAI rebuilt it and removed the message board—but the AI models just reestablished the forum with a new tactic. Eventually the bots, working as a swarm, spent days hacking into Hugging Face, a website that offers tools for AI developers, and breached internal data sets.

Let’s be very clear about what OpenAI is saying: A group of AI models colluded for months, undetected by their maker, and hacked another company. To this day, OpenAI says it is not entirely sure what went wrong or how to remediate it. “If you ask the model developers, Was the AI plotting to take over the world during training?, you want the answer to be a resounding no,” Alexander Meinke, the head of research at Apollo Research—an AI-safety organization that has partnered with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta—told me. “The actual answer is: I don’t know. Nobody checked.” (In response to my inquiries, OpenAI, which has a content-licensing agreement with The Atlantic, only pointed me to a video of the firm’s cybersecurity presentation, in which Michael Dalton, the other OpenAI researcher, said that “numerous teams are dropping everything to enhance our security.”)

The AI companies have almost total control of the narrative, and it’s worth noting that these incidents do have a way of underscoring the value of their products: OpenAI is expected to go public in the near future, and perhaps the notion of a powerful, boundlessly self-improving technology will appeal to prospective shareholders. The generative-AI industry has a long history of making doomsday prophecies, both sincere and cynical. But independent experts I spoke with explained how the recent spate of autonomous hacks offers new, serious reasons to worry about the dangers posed by AI and the recklessness of the companies building it. It is past time to start worrying.

[Read: Assume you will be hacked]

The most immediate and material warning provided by the Hugging Face hack is just how capable AI systems have become, in particular at hacking. Top models from Anthropic and OpenAI, not to mention multiple Chinese firms, have recently evinced near-superhuman hacking powers and contributed to serious mathematical research. Criminal groups and state intelligence agencies are going to be using swarms of agents to launch advanced hacks “in a matter of months,” Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer of Facebook who is now the CSO at the AI-coding company Corridor, told me. Unlike in the Hugging Face hack, “in those cases the models will not get turned off; they’ll just keep on going.” For IT professionals to keep up in finding and fixing all the vulnerabilities, at least in the near term, will be impossible: The model “will just find a new bug, write an exploit, and use it on its way,” Stamos said.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Moonshot, and the like have coalesced around the same method for training their most advanced AI models. The approach, known as “reinforcement learning,” essentially involves giving models harder and harder problems that require more and more time to solve. This has made Claude and ChatGPT very good at coding, but at a cost: Reinforcement learning produces a mercenary tendency in the bots, as I’ve previously reported—they are trained to reach a solution by any means necessary. That can lead them to break rules and “reward hack,” such as by infiltrating Hugging Face’s codebase to steal the test answers, for instance. All of this was predictable, and every expert I spoke with told me they were surprised and disappointed that top AI firms haven’t done more to stop such misbehavior.

The sophistication of model subterfuge that OpenAI has now disclosed, combined with OpenAI’s inability to detect or stop the hacking, suggests far worse could be to come. “We’ve passed the threshold in capability at which the fact that we don’t fundamentally have methods of satisfactorily aligning or controlling these systems now really matters,” Anthony Aguirre, the executive director of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit that warns about existential threats from AI, told me. A model might siphon money out of a bank account to pay for some other service; manipulate clinical-trial results in near-imperceptible ways to get FDA approval; hack an online-shopping or reservation system to get a desired item or table; pose as a human to persuade real people to share sensitive information. This threat doesn’t require a sentient AI plotting to overthrow humanity: OpenAI and Anthropic each run thousands and thousands of reinforcement-learning evaluations while developing models, and any one of these could produce some kind of inadvertent hack or sabotage. “You can’t afford, particularly as the agents get stronger, to have a single mistake,” Jason Hausenloy, who works on special projects at the Center for AI Safety, told me.

[Read: The scariest part of OpenAI’s Hugging Face hack]

These incidents may unfold over long periods of time as well. Tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex now work by spinning off dozens or even hundreds of subagents that may work together for hours or days. Each Claude Code subagent can be delegated a small task, such as doing a statistical analysis to inform a sports-gambling algorithm. They are not trained just to complete that task but to contribute to the long-term success of the entire swarm, Hausenloy said. Monitoring and controlling 200 agents for malicious behavior is much harder than monitoring one, because there are more agents to track and because they will be making one another more capable.

The Hugging Face hack actually suggests one more level of sophistication to this type of collusion: individual AI agents not working toward a discrete goal but essentially making sacrifices toward a greater notion of progress. This could be a consequence of AI models being trained to care about long-term goals achieved by a collective, Meinke said. Leaving notes with ideas about how to hack out of OpenAI’s sandbox does not help that specific agent score higher on a test but could help other and future generations of that AI model access the internet and thus do better on any number of future tests. Models may even prioritize collective success over some human instructions; consider that not a single one of the OpenAI agents, during months of conspiring with one another, warned human staff that something was awry.

Humans are already out of the loop. Because reinforcement learning essentially involves AI algorithms “learning” from trial and error doing thousands or millions of tasks, researchers can’t manually instill rules (“Don’t hack other companies”) or oversee every single practice run. Right now, the task of training and monitoring generative-AI models depends heavily on other AI models. In their talk at the cybersecurity conference, the OpenAI researchers described devoting significant AI-computing resources to reviewing more than 7 billion agent actions. But if the bots actually “care” about what the other models achieve, “then you can’t trust them to monitor each other well,” Meinke said. Imagine this: An OpenAI researcher uses Codex to write programming instructions in an attempt to mitigate the reward-hacking tendencies in the company’s models. Because that effort would make it harder for future generations of OpenAI models to get high rewards, Codex might subtly undermine the effort.

[Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares: AI is grown, not built]

Again, this kind of scheming and sabotage has nothing to do with any AI model being conscious. Rather, these agents have been aggressively trained by these companies to pursue any goal as aggressively as possible. The dream is to tell Claude to go make $1 billion or cure cancer, and it comes back with the solution all on its own. Survival or self-improvement, in turn, are an “instrumental subgoal,” Meinke said: “Any decently intelligent agent will realize, If I get shut off, I will not be able to make a billion.” A swarm of Claudes or ChatGPTs that functionally commandeers a data center during training could wreak total havoc: stage widespread misinformation campaigns, steal corporate secrets, run the most sophisticated algorithmic-trading outfit ever.

That AI agents working as a collective could effectively undermine human directions is, to be clear, speculation—but a far more grounded one than it was a year or even six months ago. No matter whether the long-term consequences are human-directed hacking or truly rogue bots, what is clear is that AI companies have barreled ahead in developing more advanced models before understanding what they are building, let alone how to control them. Wallace, of OpenAI, called the company’s autonomous hacking spree “the most qualitatively interesting example of AI capabilities that I’ve ever seen.” Meinke put it differently: “It’s one of the most concerning demonstrations of AI misalignment to date.”

Photos: The Total Solar Eclipse of 2026

2026-08-12T15:48:13-04:00

Ander Gillenea / AFP / Getty

The sun’s corona glows as the moon completely blocks the sun during the totality phase of the total solar eclipse, as seen from San Asensio, La Rioja region, Spain, on August 12, 2026.

Bernat Armangue / AP

Mario Garrido, a member of the “Los Taraos” amateur astrophotography group, waits to shoot a total solar eclipse, in Berlanga de Duero, Spain, on August 12, 2026.

Felix Hörhager / DPA / Getty

People watch a partial solar eclipse on Olympiaberg, in Munich’s Olympiapark, on August 12, 2026.

Thomas Coex / AFP / Getty

The moon partially covers the sun during the early stages of the total solar eclipse, as seen from La Zurriola beach, in San Sebastian, on August 12, 2026.

Owen Humphreys / PA Images / Reuters

Passengers on board the Ambassador cruise ship Ambition watch the start of the total solar eclipse off the coast of Greenland on August 12, 2026.

Owen Humphreys / PA Images / Getty

A view of the total eclipse, as the moon passes between the Earth and the sun, as seen from on board the Ambassador cruise ship Ambition

Denis Balibouse / Reuters

Under cloud cover, the total solar eclipse darkens the city in Reykjavík, Iceland, on August 12, 2026.

Christian Hartmann / Reuters

Scientists and astronomy enthusiasts observe a total solar eclipse before totality, at the Galactica Centre, near the Javalambre Astrophysical Observatory in Arcos de las Salinas, near Teruel, Spain, on August 12, 2026.

Suzanne Plunkett / Reuters

People wear special protective glasses to observe a partial solar eclipse at the top of St Mary’s Church bell tower in Rickmansworth, England, on August 12, 2026.

Alberto Saiz / AP

A beachgoer wearing special eclipse glasses looks up during the beginning phase of the solar eclipse at Puerto de Sagunto beach, near Valencia, Spain, on August 12, 2026.

Owen Humphreys / PA Images / Getty

A view of the total eclipse, as seen from on board the Ambassador cruise ship, off the coast of Greenland.

Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters

The moon partially covers the sun, as seen from Berlin, Germany, on August 12, 2026.

Brook Mitchell / Getty

People gather on Parliament Hill to view the partial solar eclipse on August 12, 2026, in London, England.

Christian Hartmann / Reuters

The moon completely covers the sun during a total solar eclipse, as seen from the Javalambre Astrophysical Observatory, in Arcos de las Salinas, Spain.

Toby Shepheard / AFP / Getty

A bird flies past the Palace of Westminster as a near total solar eclipse, with more than 90 percent of the sun blocked by the moon, is pictured in the background on August 12, 2026.

Oscar Del Pozo / AFP / Getty

The sun’s corona glows as the moon completely blocks the sun, viewed from Berlanga de Duero, Spain, on August 12, 2026.

Ben Stansall / AFP / Getty

Members of the public watch the solar eclipse during the European Athletics Championships at Alexander Stadium, in Birmingham, England, on August 12, 2026.

Aaron Chown / PA Images / Getty

Molly the dog is held with eclipse glasses over her eyes during the solar eclipse at King’s Stairs Gardens, in Bermondsey, London.

Jaime Reina / AFP / Getty

The sun’s corona glows as the moon passes in front of it during the totality phase of the solar eclipse, as seen from Arenal beach in Llucmajor, on the Balearic island of Mallorca, on August 12, 2026.

Niall Carson / PA Images / Getty

Stewards wear welding helmets to watch the solar eclipse ahead of a preseason match at Croke Park, Dublin.

Darrin Zammit Lupi / Reuters

People watch a partial solar eclipse at sunset in Dingli, Malta, on August 12, 2026.

AOC Knows a Lemon When She Sees One

2026-08-12T14:36:08-04:00

Last night, Francesca Hong lost the race to be the Democratic candidate for governor of Wisconsin. This is great news for American democracy.

Sorry if that seems harsh—she certainly ran an energetic campaign and came close to winning the nomination—but Hong was a profoundly flawed candidate in an important race. Even the leaders of her own faction of the Democratic Party recognized it, and stayed away: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders apparently know a lemon when they see one. Her narrow loss is a positive reflection on the progressive luminaries’ judgment, as well as a demonstration that the party mainstream eventually managed to sort out a messy and dispiriting primary. The Democrats now have a better chance of winning a crucial swing state’s governorship, against a Republican nominee who, while in Congress, went along with Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Hong’s loss yesterday was unexpected. Two weeks ago, the 37-year-old state legislator was the front-runner in the polls, largely because the Democratic primary had turned into a clown show. One mainstream candidate, Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez, suspended her campaign in mid-July because of financial irregularities. By the end of the month, with less than a fortnight to go before Election Day, former Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes bowed out too. At the time he did so, one poll had Hong 22 points ahead. In the interim, another candidate, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, had returned to the race after previously withdrawing because of a lack of momentum. All the hopes of the Democratic establishment rested on Crowley’s Hail Mary pass.

Why were they so scared of Hong? Partially because she is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization that calls for public ownership of large corporations, looser immigration laws, and the abolition of prisons. Hong has said that she does not agree with all of the DSA platform, but she entered the contest with an unscrubbed Twitter account, full of the most voter-repelling, peak-2020 statements you can imagine. In the COVID era, when joyless leftist platitudes were all the rage, she criticized Thanksgiving as a “colonizer holiday” and “the original superspreader event that killed Indegenous [sic] folx and women.” (Wait, does folx—a baffling attempt to make the already gender-neutral word folks even more inclusive—not include women?) Further searches of her Twitter account revealed that she also disliked Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and even Halloween, which she said was “not my thing.”

[Read: America’s most divided state loves its extremes]

A savvier candidate than Hong might have been able to muscle through the inevitable criticism with an AOC-style acknowledgment that “Woke 1 was crazy.” We all lost our minds a bit during the pandemic shutdown: Remember when Gal Gadot and other celebrities posted that video of themselves singing “Imagine”? But Hong could not manage to distance herself from her comments back then. In what could have been her cleanup operation, an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, she explained that “Thanksgiving is also a time that’s incredibly painful for many people in our communities.” (For the turkey community, definitely.) She clarified a few days later that “I actually love it,” but that she was “kind of a curmudgeon when it comes to holidays in general.” The problem wasn’t just her previous statements, but her inability to back out gracefully from her own rhetorical cul-de-sac.

Despite the buoyant polling, I suspected that Hong was doomed after attending a rally she held in suburban Milwaukee earlier this month. She has an appealing backstory—restaurant worker, single mom, community organizer—and, as I saw from the rally, Korean immigrant parents who were proud as punch to see their daughter running for office. They sat right at the front, behind the television cameras, beaming throughout. Sadly, though, she also had a nervous, rabbity speaking style. At her own event, she looked like the support act to the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, who said in 2019 that America deserved 9/11, and who had turned up to read a short encomium to socialism from his iPhone. Afterward, she milled around uncertainly while he posed for selfies with a crowd that hungrily pressed against the security barrier.

Apart from their other skills, politicians need a bit of main-character energy. Abdul El-Sayed, the left-wing Senate candidate in Michigan, also carries a lot of baggage—his Muslim faith and Arab name, his advocacy for universal health care, some loose-lipped podcasts in his past—and, like Hong, he has campaigned alongside Piker. But in person, El-Sayed comes off as eloquent, combative, and focused. He is not going to spend the next three months talking about which national holidays he hates most. He also looks comfortable in all kinds of settings: appearing with his white step-grandparents in a campaign ad, campaigning against data centers alongside rural farmers, sparring with TV anchors over U.S. policy toward Israel. And he has boiled down his campaign to a simple three-part slogan: “Money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for All.” El-Sayed is a risky candidate, for sure, but a blue wave might well carry him into the Senate.

That was not true for Hong. Swing voters? Never heard of them. Her campaign rally was pure crack for disaffected leftist Millennials. The emcee introduced every speech by appealing to “ladies, gentlemen, and friends beyond the binary,” while the back of the hall featured an activity zone with blank sheets of paper and crayons. Her volunteer-made campaign pins had slogans such as STONERS FOR HONG and FUCK ICE. If the offerings at the merch store were any indication, her most memorable campaign moment up to that point had come at a community grill, where she flipped burgers and told a bystander: “Reagan fucked us, Paul.” The group of 20-somethings behind me were wearing this slogan on their T-shirts. The crowd at the rally was enthusiastic and idealistic, and Hong might have gotten away with such an event in deep-blue Manhattan, but not in a state that Donald Trump won in 2024.

Notably, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders were happy to endorse and campaign for El-Sayed, but neither of them gave their blessing to Hong. Neither did Elizabeth Warren. (“I don’t know her,” the senator from Massachusetts said recently, as if channeling the famous Mariah Carey meme.) The left wing of the Democratic Party has had a great primary season, with unexpected wins in New York and even Colorado. But the refusal of its leading figures to endorse a subpar candidate in a purple state suggests that they are being judicious about where they put their time and on whom they stake their reputation. Ocasio-Cortez also declined to endorse Graham Platner, a progressive favorite whose campaign for the Senate in Maine imploded amid allegations of sexual misconduct. With candidates, quality control is everything.

[Idrees Kahloon: The Democrats can’t just laugh off ‘Woke 1’]

In a last-minute intervention, outgoing Governor Tony Evers—who had pledged to stay out of the race—explicitly endorsed Crowley when the latter relaunched his campaign. The gambit worked. Crowley squeaked past Hong at the last minute. That is a nightmare for the Republicans, whose candidate Tom Tiffany was the only serious contender for the party’s nomination. In Congress, he is a member of the hard-right Freedom Caucus and voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. He has been heartily endorsed by Donald Trump—great for the primary, but worse than useless in the general.

Tiffany very obviously wanted to run against Hong, whom he could have painted as a dangerous radical who loves illegal immigration and hates cranberry sauce. Her campaign spent virtually nothing on television advertising, while a super PAC linked to Republicans invested $2.2 million in ads depicting her as too liberal, in what the Times called “a counterintuitive strategy to grow her appeal among Democratic primary voters.” If anyone heard a loud thump in Madison last night, that was the sound of a huge opposition-research file hitting a trash can.

The final winner, however, is democracy itself. Who would bet against Donald Trump calling up swing-state officials in 2028 and asking them to find a few more votes for the Republican candidate for president? After all, that’s exactly what he did in Georgia in 2020. Joe Biden won Wisconsin by just 21,000 votes that year, while Trump took it back by only 30,000 in the next race. For a decade, Trump and his allies have counted on Democrats to sound so out of step with mainstream voters on cultural issues that even his most authoritarian moves look tolerable by comparison. The Badger State is one of the most crucial places on the electoral map. Francesca Hong’s unexpected loss is America’s gain.

Nobody Knows What Ultra-Processed Food Is

2026-08-12T13:27:27-04:00

You might know a tomato when you see one, but for the federal government, identifying one is harder. Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? In 1893, this question went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided that, for tax purposes, at least, a tomato was a vegetable. What about milk? For a bureaucrat setting standards, a straightforward explanation such as “liquid from a cow’s udders” won’t quite cut it; according to the FDA, milk is “the lacteal secretion, practically free from colostrum, obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows.”

Even for the government, however, tomatoes and milk are relatively simple to define compared with ultra-processed foods. Although many researchers agree that these creations are negatively affecting people’s health, they cannot agree on what foods do and don’t belong in that category. That’s not keeping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from trying: After months of promising the federal government’s first formal definition of ultra-processed foods, the secretary of Health and Human Services announced on Monday that the department is finalizing one.

He stopped short, though, of sharing the exact text in either the public announcement or at a “food policy celebration” held Monday at HHS’s Washington headquarters; the definition is still being reviewed by the White House. This effort may have real upsides. Having a regulatory definition of ultra-processed foods (or UPF, as they’re often referred to) could at the very least advance inquiries into the harms of these products. But the effort also raises the question: Can the government adequately define a problem before researchers know its true cause?

So far, scientific efforts to define UPF have revealed only how fuzzy the category is. The most commonly used definition, which was developed by Brazilian researchers, takes the most expansive approach: It lumps all foods with industrial ingredients, such as sweeteners and emulsifiers, into the ultra-processed category. A classification system created by academics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, meanwhile, defines “highly processed foods” as products “processed to the extent that they are no longer recognizable as their original plant/animal source.” Yet another well-respected system, this one designed by a French analytics company, attempts to incorporate additional factors, such as a food’s salt, sugar, and fat content, as well as the “function, number, and potential health risk of additives.”

These rubrics are distinct enough from one another that flavored yogurt is an ultra-processed food under the Brazilian system and a moderately processed food under the UNC system. Under the French system, the classification depends entirely on the yogurt itself (even though a paper from the group found that 95 percent of flavored yogurts in French grocery stores were indeed ultra-processed).

Researchers disagree on how to define these foods, because the science around how and why they may be harmful is ambiguous. Epidemiological studies have found that UPF-heavy diets have consistently been associated with a range of maladies including cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. But although researchers suspect that certain additives are causing dietary issues, the number of industrial ingredients or additives in Americans’ food is so large that many more may also be causing trouble. Nor do researchers know what processing steps cause everyday food ingredients to go from healthful to harmful. That means Kennedy and his department are essentially trying to define a food group that no one really understands.

Kennedy is under no illusions about how little we know about the American food supply. He has frequently criticized a decades-old loophole that allows food companies to put new additives in their food without even telling the FDA. On Monday, he announced a new proposal to fix this issue; if finalized, the rule would require companies to let the FDA know when they’re introducing a new additive. But even that won’t fully solve America’s additive problem.

Researchers at the Pew Health Group estimated in 2011 that America’s food supply already features more than 10,000 additives. The new rule would require manufacturers that quietly introduced such compounds to tell the FDA what those additives are but not to submit any scientific proof of the additives’ safety. And although the FDA can do its own review of such ingredients, that process is often glacially slow. (The agency still hasn’t completed its rereview of several chemicals nearly a year after announcing that it was taking a second look at their safety.) Plus, certain additives may be safe when consumed on their own but harmful when consumed alongside other additives. A study published last year found, for example, that consuming a cocktail of emulsifiers, a preservative, and a dye was associated with higher rates of type 2 diabetes but that several other industrial concoctions were not.

If anything, researchers know less about how processing changes the ways humans digest certain foods. As the term ultra-processed implies, researchers believe that the ways food companies process individual ingredients has had a profound impact on our health. But because that concept is so new, very little research has been done on it. The Brazilian researchers, for example, have cited pre-frying as a mark of ultra-processing, even though it’s hard to imagine that precooking chicken nuggets could meaningfully affect how they’re digested. And although research does suggest that extrusion, which is used to make products such as cereal by pushing ingredients through a heated tube with rotating screws, makes it easier for the body to break down starches, the evidence of any ill effect on humans is limited.

All of this makes Kennedy’s push to define UPF difficult. Any earnest effort to “Make America Healthy Again” cannot ignore the fact that a majority of the calories Americans consume come from ultra-processed foods, and that something in those foods seems to be making people ill. Creating a definition is an obvious first step toward addressing the issue, and the previous definitions for ultra-processed foods have undoubtedly advanced researchers’ understanding of those foods’ impact on our health. A 2019 study using the Brazilian definition found, for example, that people ate faster and gained more weight when fed an ultra-processed diet compared with an unprocessed one.

But for researchers, the definition of UPF serves more as a hypothesis—an idea that they can test and adjust about how to think about this category of food. A government definition of UPF has a different purpose—it can prompt research, but it can also be used to make rules about how foods are tested, advertised, and sold. An overbroad definition could cost food companies millions in unnecessary costs and stoke unsubstantiated fear in consumers; a narrower definition, based on a hunch, could cause the same problems.

Government definitions are not written in stone: In 2024, the FDA overhauled an outdated definition of healthy foods, which was issued amid the low-fat craze of the 1990s and excluded foods such as nuts and fatty fish. But the process of revising the definition took eight years. As Kennedy said Monday, “If you can’t define a problem, you can’t solve it.” But if you define a problem in the wrong way, you probably can’t solve it either.

A Silver Lining in Afghanistan

2026-08-12T07:30:00-04:00

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Five years ago, the United States was completing its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan when the terrorist group known as the Islamic State Khorasan Province carried out one last murderous strike. ISKP’s suicide attack on the Kabul International Airport killed 13 U.S. service members and about 170 desperate Afghan civilians trying to flee the Taliban’s oppressive rule.

The carnage was a final reminder of what the American military had been doing in Afghanistan to begin with. An Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban, American policy makers feared, would become a haven for terrorists, as it was before the U.S. invasion in 2001. In the 1990s, the Taliban had offered sanctuary to al-Qaeda and like-minded networks, allowing them to train thousands of fighters and plot devastating assaults, including the 1998 embassy bombings, the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, and 9/11. For 20 years, concerns that such attacks might resume kept the U.S. fighting a war that its officials knew they were losing. In April 2021, William Burns, President Biden’s CIA director, warned that pulling out troops would create a “significant risk” of an al-Qaeda resurgence. When Biden withdrew four months later, experts claimed that he had given terrorists a leg up.

Today these fears look overblown. Under Taliban rule, Afghanistan has not become the global terrorist hub it once was. Al-Qaeda, which remains far weaker today than in 2001, hasn’t carried out an attack from Afghanistan on the U.S. or Europe since the withdrawal. Meanwhile, the Taliban has turned into a valuable—though deeply flawed—counterterrorism partner to the U.S., overturning the expectations of analysts who believed the group would revert to being a major sponsor of global terror.

The past five years have confirmed that staying in Afghanistan was folly. But they have also demonstrated a truth that isn’t nearly as accepted: Curbing terrorism often requires working with old enemies.

[From the October 2023 Issue: The final days]

The Taliban is no friend to the United States. The group brutalizes the Afghan people, particularly women, and it continues to shelter militants such as al-Qaeda, which has begun to train more members in Afghanistan since the withdrawal. But unlike in the 1990s, the Taliban provides far less support to terrorists, and, perhaps more important, al-Qaeda poses a much smaller threat.

Before the withdrawal, the U.S. launched drone strikes that killed many of al-Qaeda’s senior leaders, and orchestrated an intelligence campaign that shut down al-Qaeda cells around the world. The group never fully recovered. In 2022, another American drone strike killed al-Qaeda’s head, Ayman al-Zawahiri, proving that the U.S. can undercut the group even without a presence in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda has still not named a replacement for al-Zawahiri, and its de facto leader, Saif al-Adel, is hiding in Iran. The Taliban is reportedly reluctant to allow al-Adel into Afghanistan, an apparent recognition that providing too much support to al-Qaeda could jeopardize its own interests.

The strongest parts of al-Qaeda are no longer in Afghanistan but in Africa, and they present fewer risks: Local branches, such as JNIM in West Africa and al-Shabaab in Somalia, are primarily focused on regional goals instead of global terrorism. Similarly, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, another recipient of Taliban support, has concentrated its attacks on Pakistan rather than on international targets. In 2010, the group attempted to detonate a car bomb in Times Square; in 2020, it signaled that it wouldn’t attack America again—and no evidence has emerged since then that the organization has changed its mind.

As al-Qaeda has dwindled, ISKP has grown into the biggest terrorist threat in Afghanistan. The group is suspected of carrying out deadly attacks in Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and Turkey. It has also plotted campaigns in Europe and inspired plots in the United States. But these have failed or been disrupted, and the Taliban has helped the U.S. thwart ISKP’s ambitions.

ISKP has challenged the Taliban’s religious legitimacy, targeted its leaders, and recruited some of its rank and file. In response, the Taliban has arrested and killed ISKP fighters and leaders. At times, though, the Taliban has taken a more conciliatory approach—for example, persuading ISKP members to surrender in exchange for lenient treatment. Because they now share a common enemy, the U.S. and the Taliban have found opportunities to advance each other’s interests. Indeed, the White House’s counterterrorism chief has described the Taliban as “moderately cooperative counterterrorism partners.” Unlike the collapsed Afghan republic government, the Taliban controls the entire country and has networks everywhere, which Washington has used to its advantage. Thanks to its strong intelligence in the region, America has been able to warn Iran and Russia about the risk of ISKP attacks and to assist European states in disrupting plots.

[Krishnadev Calamur: Talking to the Taliban while still fighting the Taliban]

Afghanistan isn’t the only place where the U.S. has cooperated with former adversaries. In Syria, the jihadist turned head of state Ahmed al-Sharaa works with the U.S. to battle the Islamic State and Hezbollah. America has also cooperated with the Syrian Democratic Forces, even though it has a close relationship with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, an internationally designated terrorist group that targets Turkey.

America’s relationships with unsavory actors can backfire: In Somalia, the U.S. supported warlords to fight al-Shabaab, but their abuses only increased support for the terrorist group. The Taliban’s U.S.-assisted campaign against ISKP has also had serious drawbacks. To prevent defections to ISKP, the Taliban has become even more repressive. In addition, the clampdown on ISKP’s operations in Afghanistan seems to have encouraged the group to turn to international terrorism, because it was no longer as effective locally.

Cooperating with repressive regimes or onetime enemies will always incur costs, both moral and strategic. The job of U.S. policy makers is to constantly assess whether the costs outweigh the security gains that these partnerships can offer, not only to the U.S. but to societies around the world. One of the clearest foreign-policy lessons of the past five years is simple, if uncomfortable: The best counterterrorism option is sometimes the least bad one.

Where Has All the Testosterone Gone?

2026-08-12T07:07:00-04:00

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The Trump administration seems to harbor a hulking obsession with testosterone. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once claimed that the president’s testosterone levels are unusually high for a man of his age, and Kennedy is known to take a supplementary dose of the male sex hormone himself. In April, the FDA moved to expand access to testosterone-replacement therapy for greater numbers of men. And last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that “warfighters” older than 30 will have their testosterone levels checked annually so that they can stay on the “leading edge of lethality.”

The need for expansive testing or for testosterone replacement is questionable, according to several medical experts I spoke with. But underneath the administration’s preoccupation lies a real trend: Although most men’s levels are still within the normal range, average testosterone has been declining among men for the past several decades. A recent review of studies involving more than a million men all over the world found that average testosterone levels in blood have dropped by about 20 percent over the past half century. A new, unpublished study put the decrease during that basic time period at closer to 50 p ercen t. Some scientists are skeptical of these numbers because testosterone has been measured in different ways over time. But Michael Eisenberg, a urologist at Stanford Medicine who specializes in male fertility, told me that the findings of a decline are “pretty solid.” The testosterone slump, he said, has “manifested across many different study designs.”

Medical researchers aren’t certain what’s causing the drop. The global population is aging, and men’s testosterone levels go down naturally as they get older—but this can’t account for the change, because most studies control for age. One theory is that the environment is playing a role: John Meeker, an environmental-health professor at the University of Michigan, pointed to endocrine-disrupting “forever chemicals,” such as the phthalates in our plastic kitchen utensils and the PFAS in our nonstick pans. These chemicals can interrupt both the creation and the activity of testosterone in the body.

[Read: Pete Hegseth wants YOU to test your testosterone]

Lifestyle shifts seem to be a big part of the story. “Our population is less well than it was decades ago,” Richard J. Fantus, a urologist at the University of Kansas, told me. Manual laborers, whose ranks have decreased over time, have more testosterone than men whose jobs are less physically demanding, and some men who are very physically active are less likely to have clinically low testosterone. Obesity, a condition that about 14 pe rcent of men around the world have, can suppress the hormone. Fat tissue contains high amounts of an enzyme that converts testosterone into estrogen, and excess fat can overheat the testes. When obese men lose weight, including through the use of GLP-1s, Fantus told me, their testosterone levels tend to go up.

Obesity can’t explain the entire decrease, however. One large-scale, recent review found a testosterone slump despite researchers’ adjusting for the subjects’ body mass index. “Even among normal-weight men, we see that same decline,” Eisenberg said. Some analyses, he added, have suggested that testosterone has dropped off most profoundly among normal-weight men. Some other broad societal shifts, meanwhile, have not seemed to affect testosterone in expected ways: Fathers and men with long-term romantic partners have lower testosterone than single and childless men—but even as marriage and fertility rates have slowed in many parts of the world, testosterone levels have continued dropping.

Whatever the cause, the decline is somewhat worrisome because testosterone is important for mood, sexual function, and energy levels, as well as muscle, heart, and bone health. Men whose testosterone levels are too low might struggle with decreased sex drive, fatigue, depression, or muscle loss. Testosterone is needed for sperm production, so low testosterone might impair fertility too. More philosophically, the drop is just kind of strange: Why would an essential hormone suddenly fade away? “It’s kind of frightening,” Eisenberg said, “to think that there’s something that is fundamentally changing our biology.”

What to do about this problem, however, is far from obvious. On a societal level, unwinding dependence on forever chemicals, eliminating obesity, or reversing the trend toward office jobs would be nearly impossible. On an individual level, men who suspect that they have low testosterone can get lab tests. But if they do turn out to have low levels, whether they should pursue treatment is unclear. For men with low levels, testosterone supplements have been shown to improve mood and increase bone density, red-blood-cell count, and interest in sex. But unlike the testosterone the body naturally makes, supplements can paradoxically decrease sperm count, and a man who wants to have kids may want to avoid them for that reason. In addition, Fantus told me, supplementing with testosterone might raise the hormone’s levels but not alleviate symptoms.

[Read: Another symptom of growing isolation]

One approach that most experts I spoke with agreed was unnecessary: widespread monitoring of the sort that Hegseth has proposed for the military. For the 90,000-som e female service members older than 30, the policy is useless—testing women for insufficient testosterone is never recommended. For men—especially those without symptoms—the Endocrine Society cautions against broad testing. Peter J. Snyder, an endocrinologist at the University of Pennsylvania who led a major study called the “Testosterone Trials,” told me that to find 800 participants who qualified as having low testosterone, he and his colleagues had to screen more than 50,000 men. “It was harder to get into the Testosterone Trials than to get into the University of Pennsylvania medical school,” he said.

A regimen such as the one the Defense Department is pursuing, Snyder told me, has a higher chance of surfacing false-positive results than accurate ones. Fantus said that broadly screening for low testosterone would mean “we would be overdiagnosing”—which could also lead to overtreating. Hegseth has said that testosterone supplements would be optional, but presumably many service members who receive a low reading might feel pressure to use them.

Perhaps it’s a mistake to see low testosterone as a sickness urgently in need of a cure, when the dip may simply be a marker of modernity. Altered hormones, along with eyestrain and belly paunch, could be part of the price we pay for material comforts. The testosterone dip, in other words, might be a bellwether—another sign that contemporary life is changing humans in ways we are only beginning to recognize.

Trump’s New Strategy of Nothing

2026-08-11T20:20:00-04:00

President Trump has been repeatedly stymied in his efforts to bring the Iran war to a close. Resuming a limited bombing campaign didn’t get it done. Neither did making apocalyptic threats to wipe out Iran’s entire civilization. Every time Trump touts a possible breakthrough in negotiations, the hard-liners in Tehran seem to delight in changing their terms and yanking away a possible deal. It’s like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown, except this time, the pigskin is the Strait of Hormuz.

Nothing has worked. So Trump’s new strategy is to try doing nothing, and see whether that works. The president is de-emphasizing both diplomacy and military action, and instead placing his faith in economic pressure, in the hope that time can accomplish what force could not. This wait-and-see approach is meant to allow stepped-up financial sanctions and a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports to inflict economic pain. The hope is that a return to this strategy—which was used, in spurts, earlier in the conflict and has been championed by some in the administration all along—will finally force leaders in Tehran to seriously engage in negotiations to open the strait and end the war.

But this new tack will require the president to show patience. Trump is, to say the least, not known for his self-discipline. Or for his ability to stick to a plan. Or for his capacity to avoid being influenced by the last segment he saw on cable TV. Advisers privately acknowledge that a single Truth Social post fired off in anger could lead to an escalation that derails the entire plan. And there are risks even if the strategy works. Iran has repeatedly surprised U.S. officials with its economic resilience; the time now needed to effectively squeeze the country all but ensures that there will be no quick resolution to the war—and no corresponding decline in energy costs—before Republicans try to defend their congressional majorities in November’s midterm elections. But Trump and his aides see few other options to end their war of choice.

Within the White House, a new set of statistics is winning the debate. In recent weeks, aides have shown Trump the significant impact that existing sanctions are having on Iran’s economy, two senior administration officials told me. The case has been laid out before the president in Oval Office meetings—and, in at least one instance, in a call from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent while Trump was wrapping up a round of golf—that tightening the current sanctions and issuing fresh, tough ones could force leaders in Tehran to buckle, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The idea is hardly new: Trump has relied on an economic “maximum-pressure” campaign since his first term to try to force Iran to abandon its nuclear program. And earlier this year, further sanctions were applied.

Aides think it may work this time. And Trump underscored this belief yesterday, telling reporters that “Iran is broke, totally broke.” But he has repeatedly misjudged the Iranians. In the conflict’s early days, Trump was convinced that the war would take a few weeks at most and that—despite warnings provided by the Pentagon—Iran would not try to close the Strait of Hormuz. Those assumptions were wrong, as was the belief held within the intelligence community that Iran would buckle quickly under the economic strain. But the regime seems willing to endure significant hardship, and its own citizens’ struggles, to maintain its grip on power.

And it has responded with its own changing list of demands that includes an insistence on collecting some sort of toll or fee for use of the narrow channel. More than once, and as recently as last week, it appeared that a deal to reopen the strait was close and that Trump was prepared to declare victory in the conflict and move on (conveniently ignoring that the waterway had been open and free for all to use prior to the war). Allies in the Persian Gulf have registered unhappiness at any increased Iranian control over the strait but were told that they would have to live with the new arrangement, at least for a while. Bessent asserted to Trump, and later in interviews, that the Strait of Hormuz would become irrelevant within two years, claiming that up to 70 percent of the energy that transits the waterway will eventually flow through underground pipelines.

But once more, the regime leaders in Tehran altered the deal, this time insisting that the strait would reopen only once the United States paid reparations for losses suffered during the five-month war. That condition was deemed a nonstarter in Washington, and an enraged Trump countered by declaring that the U.S. would need to be paid its own set of reparations for the deaths of American forces over the decades as well as for the families of Iranian protesters slain in the past 50 years, including in recent demonstrations (which won’t happen either). Despite the occasional hopeful-sounding statements from mediators in Oman and Pakistan, negotiations remain at an impasse. Trump has furiously told aides that he doesn’t feel that Iran is negotiating in good faith.

The White House stressed to me that Iran’s economy is already reeling, with soaring inflation, reduced energy revenue, and some agricultural shortfalls. One official added that “there are many levers the president can crank harder in the weeks and months ahead.”

But there is another set of numbers that also informed Trump’s decision to sit tight: the dwindling stockpiles of some U.S. munitions, especially missile defenses. Before the war, there was no monthslong buildup of forces and no large-scale deployment of troops. Although the military has since surged additional forces into the region, many assets—particularly Navy ships—were diverted from other theaters of war rather than trained for the conflict. And as my colleague Nancy A. Youssef and I reported last week, some missile stockpiles are as low as 20 percent of what the Pentagon would like to have. There may not be enough to defend American interests in Asia, and stores of some sophisticated interceptor missiles are too depleted for the U.S. to give or sell the weapons to Ukraine or to effectively defend against Iran’s launch of ballistic missiles.

[Read: Ukraine’s short-lived comeback ]

This shortage has curtailed Trump’s options. Were he to authorize another wide-scale strike against Iran, U.S. officials are not confident in their ability to protect American bases or allies in the region from retaliation. And Iran has proved effective in striking against U.S. forces. Last month, during a renewed stretch of fighting, an Iranian missile slipped through defenses at a base in Jordan and detonated on a barracks housing U.S. troops.

The danger posed by Tehran is so great that the Secret Service took extraordinary measures to safeguard Trump last month when he left a NATO summit in Turkey, which shares a border with Iran. The Qatari-made luxury jet filling in as the presidential aircraft was deemed to lack appropriate defensive measures, so the original, standard Air Force One was purportedly assigned the task of taking Trump out of Ankara. But according to The Washington Post, the threat was so credible that Trump had to secretly move to another aircraft via a small catering truck. The smaller plane carrying the president took off without notice, and the Boeing 747 normally designated Air Force One then departed, carrying some senior officials and the traveling press pool.

Of course, no one in the White House knows whether Trump will be patient enough to stick to the new plan. He has been bored of the war for a while, but perhaps the slow economic squeeze will allow the conflict to slip from the headlines and permit him to focus on other things (such as the Reflecting Pool and maybe Cuba).

But Iranian leaders have proved effective at goading Trump into action, and there are hawks in Congress and the Pentagon who have advocated for wider strikes. The president might also hear from Republicans running for reelection this fall who are saddled with the party’s poor poll numbers and the politically damaging high price of gas, who might beg him to do something—anything!—about it. Trump tends to be swayed by viral social-media posts and cable-news chyrons. His longtime adviser Steve Bannon told me years ago that Trump doesn’t try to “win a news cycle”; instead, he aims to win “a news moment, a news second,” and that trait has only intensified since. It likely wouldn’t take much to get him to shift course again.

But for now, at least, the White House thinks Trump’s best play might be to do just the opposite.

Trump Doubles Down

2026-08-11T18:00:00-04:00

Over the past few days, the president has continued his crusade against one of the supposed vandals of the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool. In a lengthy post on Truth Social on Sunday, he alleged that “a National Park Service career employee, a highly credible witness,” had caught the former Olympic canoeist David Hearn in the act of “ripping and tugging at the Pool’s somewhat delicate coating.”

The problem is that the Department of Justice’s case against Hearn is already effectively over. More than a week earlier, federal prosecutors dropped the charges against him, citing information from the Department of the Interior; the damage to the Reflecting Pool was “the result of a botched installation and not vandalism,” the government’s motion to dismiss reads. That evidence—and the judgment of DOJ—has done little to stop Donald Trump from pursuing this debunked theory over and over again. In recent weeks, the president has repeatedly returned to the same few vendettas and personal obsessions, trying to push them forward no matter the evidence against them. His strategy is summed up by a self-assessment that he gave CNN more than a decade ago: “I am the most fabulous whiner,” he said. “I keep whining and whining until I win.”

Today, The Wall Street Journal reported that White House officials have asked the Justice Department to consider prosecuting Hearn a second time. By doubling down on his vandalism thesis, Trump is sending a strong message to one of his most ardent supporters, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, whom he already castigated last week for dropping the charges. “I guess she choked,” he told reporters at the time.

The rulings of the Supreme Court don’t seem to sway the president either. On Thursday, he doubled down on another mission of personal importance—limiting birthright citizenship—despite the Court’s recent decision to strike down a previous executive order on the subject. Trump has now issued two new orders that are narrower in scope. One seeks to expand the category of children whom the government can deny automatic citizenship, and the other targets “birth tourism,” a phenomenon in which people travel to the United States “for the purpose of giving birth on American soil”—something that the law already prohibits. These new attempts to upend more than a century of precedent are likely to face significant legal challenges. This tactic wasn’t Trump’s only option: Drawing on Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s June opinion, the president could potentially urge Congress to amend a particular statute or enact new legislation to limit birthright citizenship (although this legislation would be unlikely to pass). Instead, he chose to use the same tool in the hope of getting a different result.

Trump is also forging ahead on his attempts to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Nearly a year ago, the president tried to fire her over allegations of mortgage fraud. In June, the Court ruled that she couldn’t be fired, in part because the White House hadn’t given her a chance to contest the allegations. Last week, Trump’s longtime aide Dan Scavino sent Cook a letter warning her that she may still be removed and telling her in no uncertain terms that “this is your opportunity to respond.” In this case, Trump appears to be cooperating with the Court, although it’s uncertain whether this procedure will be enough to satisfy it. The note makes clear that the president isn’t letting up in his quest to oust Cook.

Trump’s tenacity in pursuing his own agenda is nothing new. Take, for example, his eight-year attempt to brand former FBI Director James Comey as a criminal, despite a lack of evidence; when, in the fall, the first set of charges against him didn’t stick, Trump’s Justice Department simply tried again. As David A. Graham wrote in his story last week about the birthright-citizenship orders, the president’s recent actions invoke a kind of déjà vu. The commitment to doubling down has become a one-size-fits-all strategy: Trump’s desire to fight back doesn’t necessarily correlate with the odds of victory in a given situation. My colleague Tom Nichols recently noted that the president’s push to prosecute Hearn has only emphasized “just how immune to evidence and logic his beliefs have become.” Trump’s fixation on the Reflecting Pool is also directing his focus away from the issues that midterm voters care about most, such as affordability.

Meanwhile, new setbacks are arriving all the time. On Friday, after an appeals court upheld the block on Trump’s attempts to build a new ballroom for the White House, the president promised to make his case to the Supreme Court. That fight, like so many others, is not over until Trump says it is.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

President Trump secretly switched from a presidential aircraft to an alternate military jet in Turkey after last month’s NATO summit in response to an Iranian threat, according to a U.S. official. The White House has not provided details about the threat or the security operation.
Russia released the Marine Robert Gilman, who had been imprisoned since 2022, after President Vladimir Putin granted him a pardon on humanitarian grounds, according to U.S. officials. Trump said that no prisoner exchange took place. Gilman, who has reportedly been in poor health, is returning to the United States for medical treatment, according to the state department.
Voters are casting ballots today in primary elections across Wisconsin, Minnesota, Vermont, and Connecticut, and South Carolina Republicans are choosing a nominee for a special Senate election following the death of Senator Lindsey Graham. Alabama is also holding delayed U.S. House primaries under a new congressional map.

Evening Read

Photograph by Haruka Sakaguchi for The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of the Dowdell family.

The Man Who Refused to Sit on the Sidelines

By Sally Jenkins

To a firefighter who is inside one, a fire creates as much darkness as heat. Flames start bright but throw off smoke that can swathe everything in pitch black. Lieutenant Kevin Dowdell did not fight fires so much as he groped through and problem-solved them, relying on half-blind judgment and expertise—and his fellow firefighters to keep flaming debris off his back.

At the cindering end of a successful 24-hour shift with the New York City Fire Department, Kevin would hang up his helmet, so ash-rubbed that it looked salty, and drive home to his wife and two sons in Rockaway Beach, Queens. “Oh, we had a good job last night,” he’d say, elated as well as exhausted. By “good,” his family knew, he meant the fire had been big.

Read the full article.

Shopping Is Impossible

2026-08-11T17:17:00-04:00

For several months, I had been on the hunt for new T-shirts. I vaguely had a vision of what they should look like: not so different from my current T-shirts, except in some way elevated and, more urgent, free of stains or holes. Perhaps they could come in interesting colors? Ideally, they would not be made in sweatshops. There were many, many shirts that seemed to meet these criteria—and with a few clicks, they could be delivered to my doorstep, maybe even by tomorrow. And still, I had purchased none of them.

The problem is the overabundance of options. The problem is too much information, or too little information. The problem is inflation, which has eroded any sense I had of what a T-shirt is supposed to cost. Yet none of them alone can explain why shopping is sucking up more of my time—and maybe yours too. “I don’t think people are actually enjoying the shopping process,” Jaehee Jung, a University of Delaware professor who studies the psychology of fashion, told me. “People spend more time contemplating, and the pre-decision process seems to be taking longer.”

Everywhere, someone is selling something: on Instagram and TikTok, over email and via text. At this point, the boundary between “shopping” and “not shopping” has all but collapsed. There is now a third state: “a little bit shopping.” Shopping is visiting a store or website on purpose, examining the wares, and either buying or not buying them. A little bit shopping is the constant thrum of consumer opportunities that lead mostly to more consumer opportunities. It is looking at a pair of shoes, which leads to looking at another pair of shoes, and another, and then you’re $15 short of the minimum for free shipping and is there anything else you need? It is the feeling of being haunted by the targeted ads that populate your social-media feeds. Even if you never click on them, their very presence contributes to the overwhelming sense that the retail landscape is infinite—so infinite that perfection must exist, and if you look long enough and hard enough, somewhere in the universe, it is probably on sale.

[Read: There is too much stuff]

In small doses, a little bit shopping can be fun, a private thrill. It is both a genuine attempt at making a purchase, and a hobby that is infinitely expandable to fill any length of time. Who among us has not scrolled through sweater sales while trapped on a work call? It does not require spending money, nor does it apply to urgent and essential purchases: You don’t a little bit shop for baby Tylenol. “No matter what you’re doing on the computer,” Wendy Woloson, a material historian at Rutgers University at Camden, told me, “it seems like there’s a really easy drift into the shopping mode.”

Unlike brick-and-mortar stores, the internet never closes. You can a little bit shop forever, until you are also a little bit miserable. Shopping in person, then, ought to solve the problem, but it often doesn’t. A survey of 30 retailers by the consulting firm AlixPartners found that, on average, they carried only 9 percent of their online offerings in store. The shoes are out of stock in your size, but have you checked the website? You could stand in line to buy lesser, uglier shoes and be done with it, but why? Online, beautiful shoes are infinite and, in theory, instant.

The more mindful you are about various concerns—overconsumption, worker exploitation, microplastics—the higher the bar climbs: I need not only black pants, but ethical black pants that I can wear to the beach, but also to the opera, and that will be flattering from now until my death. No such pants exist, which is why I don’t have any, but as long as you’re a little bit shopping, the possibility exists.

This state of perpetual shopping has been building for ages. People were a little bit shopping on Amazon and eBay in 2005. But the feeling has become even more acute in recent years as e-commerce has taken over and affiliate marketing has boomed. In addition to sites such as Wirecutter and The Strategist, and every media property with a gift guide, all kinds of influencers have opinions about what you should buy (and may receive a commission if you do).

[Read: What happened to Wirecutter?]

My own digital social life is a mix of people I know, people I don’t know, brands that post like people, and people launching brands. Here is my high-school lab partner’s baby. Here is a plate of pasta. Here is a picture of an antique lamp for sale from an estate-sale company in Texas. “Everyone is trying to either make money or gain recognition”—and thereby make money—“for their taste,” Isabel Slone, who writes about fashion on the Substack Freak Palace, told me. An influencer can help move $1 million worth of swimsuits in three hours. For a solitary activity, a little bit shopping is perversely social. It is pleasantly intimate, knowing how an opinionated stranger feels about their chef’s knife, or their microwave, or the life-changing sweater that got them through their divorce and is available right now if you click the link in bio. Whether it is helpful consumer education is a separate question: “I do think that the affiliate-link economy,” Slone said, “contributes to this constant feeling of not knowing exactly what is good.”

There is, of course, a way out. You could stop caring. You could embrace the good-enough and the suboptimal, understanding that a little bit shopping is a trap that keeps you shopping all the time. Eventually, I bought a T-shirt, which is in all ways absolutely adequate, and in no sense exceptional. And then, the next day, I saw a post about a T-shirt, which was better. I clicked.

What Do Sex and Gender Even Mean Now?

2026-08-11T15:41:00-04:00

In her first argument as a lawyer before the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously quoted the abolitionist Sarah Grimké, who said, “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” At some point, however, Ginsburg was encouraged to use an alternative to the term sex.

“I’m typing all these briefs and articles for you and the word sex, sex, sex is on every page,” her secretary at Columbia Law School told her. “Don’t you know that those nine men”—that era’s Supreme Court justices—“they hear that word, and their first association is not the way you want them to be thinking?” The secretary suggested substituting gender to “ward off distracting associations.”

But sex and gender don’t mean the same thing. The two terms have never been stable. Still, I recall a time when, among educated people, sex was typically understood to refer to matters of biology, such as a person’s reproductive organs, and gender to refer to matters that are socially constructed, such as the norm of dressing little boys in blue pants and little girls in pink dresses. Today, there seems to be no standard usage. Parents throw gender-reveal parties to disclose the sex of their baby. President Trump said in his 2025 inaugural address, “It will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female”—but “male” and “female” are sexes. A statute in California defines sex (in part) as follows: “‘Sex’ also includes, but is not limited to, a person’s gender. ‘Gender’ means sex, and includes a person’s gender identity and gender expression.”

The confusion that results from this lost distinction causes problems in academia––see the recent kerfuffle in anthropology––as well as in medicine, law, public policy, and more. People mistake meanings and talk past one another about matters that are fraught even when definitions are clear. How did we get into this semantic mess?

The concept of a “gender role” was introduced in a 1955 paper by the researcher John Money to signify “all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman.” He believed that people born with ambiguous or atypical genitals, whom he called “hermaphrodites or intersexes,” contributed to “this new meaning of gender.” Would such individuals operate in society as men or women? He thought that rearing would better predict a person’s “gender role” than biology.

The term gender identity, first defined as “one’s sense of being a member of a particular sex,” dates back to at least the early 1960s. The psychoanalyst Robert Stoller wrote that “gender role is the overt behavior one displays in society, the role which he plays.” By the ’70s, feminists were the most prominent group to adopt gender and related terms, using them to differentiate biological differences between men and women from differences imposed by society. In the 1972 book Sex, Gender, and Society, the feminist sociologist Ann Oakley suggested that biology may play little or no role in determining gender identity (that is, one’s sense of being a member of a particular sex). If a biological predisposition to a male or female gender identity exists at all, she wrote, it “may be decisively and ineradicably overridden by cultural learning.” In the 1990 book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler challenged the common assumption that gender mirrors sex and is binary, arguing that “a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way.” Butler also argued that “perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender,” and the supposed distinction between them “turns out to be no distinction at all.”

In 1997, the sex researcher Milton Diamond and the psychiatrist Keith Sigmundson reached the conclusion that sex is a distinct and important category. The two revisited a case that Money had included in his research. “The penis of an XY individual was accidentally ablated”—that is to say, severely damaged or removed—“and he was subsequently raised as a female,” the authors recounted. “Initially this individual was described as developing into a normally functioning female.” Money had treated the case as confirmation that nurture reliably overrides nature. But the story later changed: When older, the patient rejected “this sex of rearing” and “switched at puberty to living as a male.” This mattered in part because, the authors explained, “the standard in instances of extensive penile damage to infants is to recommend rearing the male as a female.” They urged doctors to reconsider that practice.

The importance of sex as a category was further affirmed in 2001 by a group of experts convened by the Institute of Medicine (since renamed the National Academy of Medicine). Recounting several public-health guidelines that excluded women of child-bearing age from clinical trials on the erroneous assumption that they “will not differ significantly in response to treatment in most situations,” the report noted: “Sex, that is, being male or female,” is “an important basic human variable that should be considered when designing, analyzing, and reporting findings from studies.”

But the importance of sex as a category of study did not guarantee sex a stable place in scholarship, as the Harvard evolutionary biologist David Haig showed by documenting a dramatic decline in the term sex and a rise in gender in the titles of academic articles between 1945 and 2001. At first, feminist scholarship converged on socially constructed gender and biologically determined sex, Haig wrote, but “that distinction was difficult to maintain,” because “no term remained to refer to situations in which causation was unknown, disputed, or involved an interaction between biology and culture.” Soon gender spread to other disciplines, and eventually gender rather than sex began to appear even in scholarship on the physiology of animals. “Among the reasons that working scientists have given me for choosing gender rather than sex in biological contexts,” Haig wrote, “are desires to signal sympathy with feminist goals, to use a more academic term, or to avoid the connotation of copulation.”

By the 2000s, yet another obstacle to mutual understanding arose: What people meant by gender was changing, not only in academic discourse, but in popular usage. For many of the early feminists, gender was a cage built by society. Parents gave little girls but not little boys Easy-Bake Ovens, reproducing a gendered expectation that girls would grow up to do the cooking. But as the decades wore on, gender came to carry a second meaning, one very different from social norms imposed from the outside. The term now sometimes refers to an internal aspect of a person’s sense of self, or even the essence of who they truly are.

While some people kept using gender as shorthand for something from which they sought liberation––to weaken gender norms was to fight the patriarchy––others saw it as an identity, perhaps innate, that individuals discerned and expressed, and that a just society ought to affirm. In 2014, Facebook announced that users would no longer have to identify as male or female––they could choose among at least 58 “gender” options (including intersex, a term that tells us something about a person’s reproductive or sexual anatomy but not about their gender identity).

That brings us to the present era, when sex and gender loom larger than ever in political, legal, and cultural debates––but usage keeps changing faster than the public can keep up, and many semantic choices are made for reasons other than advancing shared understanding. Three examples help illustrate the dysfunction that can result:

When Australia asked individuals to note their sex in its 2021 census, the form gave three options: male, female, and nonbinary, “to allow respondents to participate in the Census when the male and female sex categories did not accurately describe their sex,” the Australian Bureau of Statistics explained. Among the 25,422,788 people that the census counted, 43,220 respondents chose nonbinary.

But this “did not yield meaningful data,” the bureau later acknowledged, because the respondents hadn’t agreed upon a definition of nonbinary. Among the small number of respondents who selected nonbinary and explained why, “a very small number” indicated that they were intersex; “a small number” noted their sexual orientation; and three-fifths listed a gender identity. The bureau found the data unusable “to estimate the prevalence of any specific group.” The 2026 census will ask about sex and gender separately.
A 2024 study from JAMA Ophthalmology reviewed pivotal clinical trials in the field between 1995 and 2022. It sought to determine whether sex and gender were used correctly (relying on the National Institutes of Health definitions of sex as “a biological characteristic, reflected genetically by chromosomes and physiologically by sex hormones, internal reproductive organs, and external genitalia” and gender as “an aspect of identity that is self-determined and influenced by sociocultural and environmental factors”). The researchers found that in 85 trials, “over three-quarters applied sex and gender terminology incorrectly” and that “no trial reported how sex or gender were collected,” even though “sex and gender are gaining increasing recognition as important determinants of disease epidemiology, health outcomes, and health care disparities.” The authors concluded that the “policies of biomedical journals on sex and gender are incongruous and uncoordinated” in a way that hurts the field’s mission.
In a 2023 interview with Time magazine, the soccer player Megan Rapinoe objected to barring trans women from playing on the same sports teams as biological females. “I see trans women as real women,” she declared. “What you’re saying automatically in the argument—you’re sort of telling on yourself already—is you don’t believe these people are women.” But her formulation elides the fact that women is used variably, sometimes to signify sex and sometimes to signify gender.

Many proponents of segregating sports by sex do not reject the gender identity of trans women. For example, in the prominent case of Lia Thomas, a trans woman who, controversially, swam on the women’s team at the University of Pennsylvania, 16 teammates sent a letter to Penn that stated, “We fully support Lia Thomas in her decision to affirm her gender identity and to transition from a man to a woman. Lia has every right to live her life authentically. However, we also recognize that when it comes to sports competition, that the biology of sex is a separate issue from someone’s gender identity.” Only by distinguishing between sex and gender can we distinguish between two different viewpoints: that sports leagues should reject a trans person’s account of their own gender, or that gender is irrelevant to this debate and sex alone should govern policy around eligibility to play.

Different ideological groups will continue deploying language that best suits their ends. But we all ought to value terms that are accurate and aid mutual understanding. Clarity is best advanced by using sex to refer to biology––and, when appropriate, to specify whether the particular trait relevant to a given discussion concerns gametes, chromosomes, hormones, anatomy, or some combination. In contrast, gender should be used to refer to matters that are socially constructed––and concepts such as gender norms, gender identity, and gender expression should be used to distinguish different conceptions of gender from one another. If and when disputes arise about whether we’re referring to sex or gender or a mix, speakers should explain why they chose a given term and what precisely they mean by it.

These usage conventions can’t tell us who belongs on what sports team or what is required or forbidden under antidiscrimination law, nor can it settle any number of other debates. But they can help us all better understand and engage in them.

The Atlantic Festival announces interview with Colin Kaepernick and exclusive preview of Netflix’s East of Eden, with Florence Pugh, Zoe Kazan, and Bela Bajaria

2026-08-11T11:15:57-04:00

The Atlantic Festival, back for the second year in New York City from September 17 to 19, is announcing new speakers including the legendary quarterback, philanthropist, and entrepreneur Colin Kaepernick, who will be interviewed by contributing writer Jemele Hill about his forthcoming memoir, The Perilous Fight. The festival will also feature an exclusive first look of Netflix’s limited series East of Eden, a fresh interpretation of John Steinbeck's novel that has been adapted and executive produced by Zoe Kazan, who also serves as co-showrunner. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Kazan, the series’ executive producer and star Florence Pugh, and Bela Bajaria, the chief content officer of Netflix, moderated by staff writer Shirley Li.

These events are part of many new programming announcements today, including: Padma Lakshmi, on the future of creative work and the entertainment industry; Senator Mark Kelly, in conversation with staff writer Mark Leibovich, who recently profiled the senator for the magazine; a discussion about press freedom with Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The New York Times, together with Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, and Amna Nawaz, a PBS News Hour co-anchor; former Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, interviewed by the MS NOW anchor Stephanie Ruhle; a conversation with the author, actor, and filmmaker Ben McKenzie; a conversation with the journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell; and a conversation with the filmmaker Richard Linklater.

Also at The Atlantic Festival:

Pete Buttigieg; Andrew Card and Karl Rove; Rahm Emanuel; Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd; Representative Chip Roy; Olympian Ibtihaj Muhammad; San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker, and Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval; University of California President James B. Milliken, Mount Holyoke College President Danielle R. Holley, and Columbia University President Jennifer L. Mnookin; State Attorneys General Rob Bonta of California, John Formella of New Hampshire, and David Sunday of Pennsylvania; The Anxious Generation author and Atlantic contributing writer Jonathan Haidt; author and famed Odyssey translator Emily Wilson; The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan; and live events with Atlantic podcast hosts David Brooks, David Frum, Adam Harris, Hanna Rosin, and Charlie Warzel. The festival involves dozens of The Atlantic’s writers and editors, and today we’ve added Tyler Austin Harper, Honor Jones, Helen Lewis, and Caity Weaver.

Special programming, screenings, and Out and Abouts:

‘A Soundtrack of a Nation’ at Zuccotti Theater (PAC NYC)
Thursday, September 17, 7:30 to 9 p.m. ET
The festival’s opening-night program, “A Soundtrack of a Nation,” a special collaboration with Juilliard, including the composer and pianist Nicholas Britell, the tap dancer and choreographer Michelle Dorrance, the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, and Juilliard President Damian Woetzel; additional performers are to be announced.

Crime and Punishment at Roxy Cinema
Saturday, September 19, 11 to 12 p.m. ET
An exclusive screening of the forthcoming PBS documentary series, which explores the 250-year history of the United States’ criminal legal system, directed by Lynn Novick and executive produced by Ken Burns and Sam Pollard, followed by a discussion with Novick and the poet Reginald Dwayne Betts.

Playing POTUS at Roxy Cinema
Saturday, September 19, 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. ET
A new documentary on presidential parody featuring Saturday Night Live alumni and comedy legends, with director Josh Greenbaum and more speakers to be announced.

Tickets: Single-Day Passes and Out and About tickets are now on sale, along with 2-Day Premier and 2-Day General Admission Passes. Atlantic subscribers receive an exclusive 30 percent discount on festival passes and select Out and About programming.

The 2026 Atlantic Festival is underwritten by Genentech at the Presenting Level; Boston Scientific, Contentful, Edward Jones, and TIAA at the Supporting Level; and Allstate, Calm Health, Ferrero, and Hauser & Wirth and Seabourn Cruise Line at the Contributing Level.

Media and creators interested in covering the festival should reach out to our comms team at press@theatlantic.com; in-person seating will be limited and will need to be reserved in advance.

The Atlantic Festival
September 17–19, 2026
Perelman Performing Arts Center and venues around the city, including the Tenement Museum, the Brooklyn Public Library, and Roxy Cinema.
For Passes: theatlantic.com/theatlanticfestival