The Atlantic

DOJ’s First ‘Weaponization’ Report Is a Bust

2026-04-20T09:51:53-04:00

The day that Donald Trump swore his second oath of office, he signed an executive order demanding “accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people.” Within weeks, freshly confirmed Attorney General Pam Bondi had established a “Weaponization Working Group” aimed at rooting out supposed “abuses of the criminal justice process” under the Biden administration.

Despite this initial fanfare, the Weaponization Working Group has been largely quiet—until now. Last week, the group released its very first report, trumpeting its discovery of “shameful” abuses of prosecutorial power under Joe Biden against “pro-life Americans.” But the Weaponization Working Group has discovered very little “weaponization” at all. And whatever sins it does describe—both real and imagined—may serve as justification for perpetrating the very thing it decries. The weaponization report takes the form of a classic Trump two-step: First, claim that normal law-enforcement work, when directed against you or your friends, is illegitimate; then, use that supposed illegitimacy as justification for your own revenge. This is justice according only to the playground principle of “I’m rubber; you’re glue.”

This vengefulness will not be surprising to anybody who has been paying attention to the Department of Justice’s behavior under the second Trump administration. But the shoddiness of the report sets out the emptiness and hypocrisy of the project with particular clarity.

[Quinta Jurecic: Harmeet Dhillon is not wasting any time]

The report focuses on prosecutions of anti-abortion demonstrators convicted for preventing patients from entering abortion clinics. In the working group’s telling, the Biden administration “unfairly targeted” anti-abortion Christians under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which, much as its name suggests, prohibits blocking entry to facilities that provide reproductive health care. “No Department should conduct selective prosecution based on beliefs,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche—who stepped into the role after Trump fired Bondi earlier this month—said in a statement about the working group’s findings. CBS reported that the Justice Department had fired at least four prosecutors involved in pursuing those FACE Act cases.

Congress passed the FACE Act in 1994 following a wave of anti-abortion violence and blockades of clinics by anti-abortion demonstrators. The statute’s protections also extend to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers and—as a result of a political compromise in the Senate—to houses of religious worship, meaning that if protesters prevent worshippers from accessing a church, they, too, could hypothetically be prosecuted under the FACE Act. In 2022, as the Supreme Court prepared to issue its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and overturn Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion groups scaled up demonstrations at clinics, and the Biden administration increased FACE Act enforcement in response. After Dobbs, the Justice Department—still under Biden—also investigated vandalism of crisis pregnancy centers by pro-abortion-rights groups.

Still, many figures on the right pointed to FACE Act charges against anti-abortion activists as evidence of anti-Christian bias at the DOJ. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report decried those prosecutions as demonstrating “absurd double standards” that showed how the “DOJ has needlessly undermined its credibility with law-abiding people of faith.” Just days into his second presidency, Trump pardoned 23 anti-abortion activists prosecuted under Biden. And shortly after, Bondi included the Biden administration’s FACE Act prosecutions among the examples of “weaponization” requiring review.

The new report appears to be primarily a restatement of Project 2025’s preordained conclusions. The bulk of the 800-page document consists of anodyne emails among career attorneys—that is, people who serve across multiple administrations of both parties—which it spins into an unsubstantiated narrative of bias. For example, communications between DOJ lawyers and reproductive-rights groups—run-of-the-mill outreach by law enforcement—are framed as evidence that pro-abortion-rights advocates were directing the Justice Department’s work. That dynamic is repeated throughout the report: The working group finds dark intentions afoot because it refuses to ask whether the attorneys at issue might have had legitimate reasons to take the steps they did.

Consider the report’s point that the DOJ under Biden brought an unusually high number of FACE charges. This was because there were more charges to bring: Clinic blockades increased in advance of Dobbs, and prosecutors responded accordingly. The report also asks why more people weren’t charged in cases of vandalism at anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centers. That’s a reasonable question, but there turns out to be a reasonable explanation: Such cases are harder to investigate. As Attorney General Merrick Garland explained to the Senate in 2023, vandalism of crisis pregnancy centers tends to take place in the middle of the night, with no witnesses present. For this reason, the FBI under Biden began offering $25,000 rewards for information about the attacks—a development that the report does not mention at all. (Investigating blockades of abortion clinics, by contrast, is quite easy: Many of those instances are livestreamed and photographed by the participants and, by their nature, occur in public.) Regan Rush and Megan Marks, two former Justice Department attorneys, note in a rebuttal to the report that most of the episodes targeting crisis pregnancy centers are within the five-year statute of limitations, meaning the Trump administration could still investigate and prosecute the people responsible. Yet the DOJ has yet to bring any such cases.

The report also accuses the DOJ of pursuing harsher sentences for anti-abortion activists than for pro-abortion-rights activists. Again, this comparison doesn’t hold up. When prosecutors requested harsher sentences for anti-abortion defendants, this was in many cases because the defendants had engaged in aggressive, even violent, actions, such as crushing a nurse’s hand in a door and putting “vulnerable victims” at risk—factors that increase the severity of a sentence. In one case, a pregnant patient ended up climbing through a window to get inside the clinic after demonstrators grabbed her and shouted at her. The report, which repeatedly refers to the anti-abortion defendants as “peaceful,” doesn’t address this aspect of their behavior. The pro-abortion-rights defendants targeted empty buildings with no one around. Their actions were criminal, but no one was at risk of being hurt, so the DOJ’s normal process for calculating sentences produced a lesser penalty.

From the report’s framing, a reader might think that only the Biden administration—or perhaps other Democratic administrations—prosecuted FACE Act cases against anti-abortion defendants. But a careful look at the report’s footnotes and appendices undercuts this narrative. A number of the supposedly nefarious emails from members of the “Biden DOJ” were actually sent during the first Trump administration. One exhibit, which the report identifies as an example of the “Biden DOJ’s” disparate treatment of anti-abortion and pro-abortion-rights demonstrators, includes a list of five FACE Act prosecutions involving threats or attacks on abortion clinics brought from 2017 to 2020 by Trump’s own Justice Department. At the time, DOJ leaders appointed by Trump made statements emphasizing the importance of these cases.

The working group’s most egregious misrepresentation, though, is its handling of the provision of FACE that protects access to places of worship. The report complains that the Biden administration “did not pursue a single FACE Act case involving houses of worship.” As Rush and Marks point out, however, Biden’s DOJ prosecuted plenty of defendants who attacked religious centers, just under different statutes. Importantly, no administration had ever used FACE in such a way—in significant part because of concerns that this provision of the statute might be unconstitutional. (Much of Congress’s power to legislate derives from the Commerce Clause, which allows the legislature to regulate interstate commerce; business at a clinic implicates such commerce far more directly than attendance at a church.) According to CBS, an earlier draft of the FACE Act report noted this concern and cited a 2018 DOJ memo in which an attorney explained the issue. But this does not appear in the final report.

The conduct described in the report is not necessarily beyond disagreement or reproach. Under Biden, the DOJ took a novel approach in deciding to pursue charges against some anti-abortion protesters not only under FACE but also under a civil-rights statute, 18 USC 241, that elevated what otherwise would have been a misdemeanor into a felony charge. Whether that approach was justified could be legitimately debated, but the report treats it as egregiously abusive. Likewise, some attorneys sent emails that might, in retrospect, have been more circumspect—such as one that describes the anti-abortion Thomas More Society as “quite the racket.” But in normal times, that might merit a brief conversation with a supervisor about being less careless over email, not a firing. In this respect, the report recalls some of the DOJ inspector general’s findings from the first Trump administration, which excoriated FBI agents and attorneys assigned to the 2016 Russia investigation for their wording in internal chats but failed to dig up actual evidence of wrongdoing.

[Paul Rosenzweig: The destruction of the Department of Justice]

Blanche, in announcing the report, claimed that his goal was to “restore integrity to our prosecutorial system.” But the Justice Department’s actual response to the examples of supposed weaponization uncovered in the report has mostly been to take those same practices and turn them around to use against the administration’s enemies. The report claims that the Biden administration treated anti-abortion defendants more harshly than it treated pro-abortion-rights defendants; currently, the DOJ policy under Trump allows “abortion-related” FACE Act prosecutions to go forward only under “extraordinary conditions,” apparently setting a higher bar for pursuing anti-abortion demonstrators, though the law itself treats both sides equally. The report excoriates the DOJ for previously working with reproductive-choice groups; anti-abortion advocates have said that this DOJ gave them advance access to the report, and the CEO of the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life arrived at the DOJ for a meeting the day after the report’s publication. The report complains about the DOJ’s previous choice to charge FACE Act violations together with Section 241; currently, the Civil Rights Division is pursuing both FACE Act and Section 241 charges over an anti-ICE protest that disrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Civil Rights Division, herself recently argued an appeal defending the DOJ’s decision to bring a Section 241 charge against a pro-abortion-rights activist prosecuted for conspiring to vandalize crisis pregnancy centers.

If the DOJ were genuinely concerned about any of these issues, it would not be continuing them. Likewise, if it were genuinely concerned about protecting the freedom to worship, it would not pursue the St. Paul case under a use of the FACE Act that the DOJ itself has deemed constitutionally suspect and that is likely to get tossed out of court.

More reports from the Weaponization Working Group may be on their way. Trump appears to have fired Bondi in part because he felt that she had not done enough to harass his enemies. Perhaps conscious of this, Blanche has been more aggressive in speeding things up: On April 7, during his first press conference as acting attorney general, he promised journalists that they would start seeing results from the working group “very soon.” If the group’s forthcoming reports look anything like this one, they will be of interest less for what they uncover about the Biden administration’s past work and more for how they seek to distort it as justification for Trump’s own abuses.

The Most Tortured Relationship in America

2026-04-20T09:23:00-04:00

People like to say that American culture has a puritanical streak: one that entails, among other things, a certain haughty piousness, instilled by the killjoys who reached New England’s shores in the 17th century. Yet the Pew Research Center, in a pair of reports released last month, asked participants in various countries about a host of moral issues—and found few in the United States that were widely condemned. Spanking children? Doctor-assisted euthanasia? Clear majorities said they weren’t morally wrong. Gambling? Marijuana use? Compared with respondents in many nations, Americans were notably permissive. The poll also revealed clear political divides: Republicans were much more likely to oppose homosexuality and divorce, for instance, and Democrats were more likely to reject the death penalty and extreme wealth.

Only one behavior, in fact, received near-unanimous disapproval: infidelity. Ninety percent of Americans said that a married person having an affair is morally wrong, and their position didn’t differ dramatically based on political party, age, or gender. Compare that to Germany and France, where participants were roughly split down the middle.

The Pew poll is one of many suggesting that when it comes to monogamous commitment, Americans aren’t messing around. Well—technically they are: Studies indicate that a third to half of people in the U.S. have been sexually unfaithful, according to the evolutionary biologist Justin Garcia’s new book, The Intimate Animal. If you were to include “emotional infidelity” or kissing, which apparently some people don’t think is cheating, the numbers would rise. But that hasn’t stopped Americans from judging cheaters, even as attitudes toward other sexual behavior—premarital sex, casual sex, the use of contraception—have loosened.

[Read: The basic drive that humans might be losing]

No one wants to be deceived. Yet disdain for cheating seems to derive less from a simple desire for honesty and more from a commitment to the couple as an exclusive unit. Consensual nonmonogamy is widely stigmatized; one 2021 study found that of participants who weren’t personally interested in engaging in polyamory—meaning multiple romantic relationships—only 14 percent said that they respect people who do practice it. And of course, there are many ways to betray a partner that have nothing to do with sex—and that many people seem more willing to forgive. For a qualitative study, Jenny van Hooff, a sociologist at Manchester Metropolitan University, interviewed a woman whose partner had racked up a massive amount of debt without her knowledge; collectors came and stripped the house of her belongings, and she herself had to pay back what was owed. “But it’s so much better,” she told van Hooff, “than if he cheated on me.”

Monogamy, it seems, is one of the few moral rules that Americans feel they can grasp onto, in an age when many no longer look to religion or a unified culture for social norms. It serves many people well: Committing to one partner, growing together through change, and staying loyal even when it’s difficult can grant them profound purpose. Yet other sources of meaning and community exist, too—and other ethical obligations. The intensity of the American allegiance to monogamy might reveal something about national priorities: a sense of duty to ourselves, our partners, and our household—perhaps more than to anything or anyone outside of them.

Amy C. Moors, a psychologist at Chapman University, likes to play a game with her students. She tells them that in the United States, people who get married can receive a certain number of federal benefits. She names some examples: joint income-tax filing, medical decision-making authority, the ability to sponsor someone for immigration. Then she asks how many laws they reckon consider marital status in determining who’s eligible. No one has ever guessed more than 100.

The answer is more than 1,000. Some of these laws are enormously consequential: They could grant someone housing assistance, or custodial rights, or bereavement leave after a partner dies. Others are niche: One concerns who can inherit land on Lake Michigan’s Sleeping Dunes National Lakeshore, now that it has become a national park. But Moors’s point is that compared with other countries, the U.S. offers an especially robust package of spousal perks.

Americans are motivated to think of marriage, in other words, as the key to a stable and virtuous life. Fewer have actually been getting hitched, but that might be a testament to how seriously the institution is taken; people tend now to think of matrimony as something for which they need to prepare—save up money, get their career in order, find their soulmate. And monogamy is commonly associated with all kinds of positive traits: It receives what psychologists call a “halo effect.” In one study, when Moors and her colleagues described fictional characters as monogamously coupled, participants were more likely to see those characters not only as good partners but as good people—ones who recycle and tip generously and walk their dog regularly.

[Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance]

Van Hooff thinks that esteem is actually part of why infidelity is so despised: The more that you depend on monogamous partnership, the more terrified you are of losing it. She’s based in the United Kingdom, but she sees a lot of similarities between her country and the United States—both are societies, she told me, where many people get the bulk of their support from a partner or nuclear family, rather than from broader networks of, say, friends or congregants or extended kin. Americans especially, van Hooff said, tend to value self-improvement as a kind of ongoing project, and a relationship can be one way to feel they’re accomplishing what they’re meant to. Any threats to that source of security and identity can feel catastrophic. And the average couple today spends a great deal of time together—more than those in generations past, according to one analysis. When partners are so deeply enmeshed in each other’s lives, the idea that one might not always know what the other is doing, or what they desire, can be disturbing. The monogamous ideal sits on a pedestal so tall that it’s wobbling like a Jenga tower.

The irony, van Hooff believes, is that the same individualistic tendencies that might make cheating such a frightening prospect may also make it tempting. “We’re encouraged to maximize personal fulfillment, which means that the self-sacrifice involved in not having affairs,” she said, “is harder to sustain.”

Other factors, too, have paved the way for adultery. FDA approval of Viagra, in 1998, marked a rise in older men cheating. New technologies have made beginning and carrying out affairs easier, though they have also made it easier to get caught. (One woman van Hooff interviewed discovered her husband’s infidelity when he was out and a string of messages popped up on his iPad; by the time he came home, she was waiting with the evidence printed out.) And people are living longer now. Promising to be faithful forever is a more ambitious claim.

You might think that in 2026, a clear solution to the cheating problem exists: People should just be open about their interest in sleeping with or dating other people. “Ethical” or “consensual” nonmonogamy is a more visible option than it once was. But van Hooff’s interview subjects haven’t viewed this as a clean fix. Some of them, even when faithfulness feels hard, simply don’t want to open their relationship. Others are scared to cause friction by mentioning the possibility.

They’re not wrong to be scared. Psychologists have found that consensual nonmonogamy has a negative “halo effect”: In one study, characters described as nonmonogamous were judged less caring, less reasonable, and less likely to floss. Carrie Jenkins, a philosopher studying romance at the University of British Columbia, has written about nonmonogamy and practices it herself—and she regularly gets hate mail. That she would take interest in this subject might seem logical; thinking about the nature of love is literally her job. She never suggests that monogamy is inferior to other relationship structures, merely that it’s not the only one. Yet her work seems to make people powerfully, emotionally defensive.

Jenkins suspects that monogamy is simply so integral to American identity that any alternatives are “received as an attack” on the collective—rather like rooting against your home team. Although she’s British and lives and works in Canada, she has noticed that much of her hate mail refers to “American values.” One correspondent, inviting Jenkins to choke herself, added, “God bless America” and a quick ode to “Freedom” and “second Amendment rights.”

[Read: Why marriage survives]

Yet nonmonogamy, like infidelity, is quietly common at the same time that it’s publicly unpopular. In its 2024 Singles in America survey, conducted with the dating company Match, the Kinsey Institute found that nearly a third of participants had at some point been in a consensually nonmonogamous relationship—including polyamory, open relationships, or swinging (not casual dating). Moors—the Chapman University psychologist, who’s also a research fellow at Kinsey—likes to point out that this is similar to the share of Americans who have a pet cat, and greater than the share who are left-handed or speak a language other than English at home. And though consensual nonmonogamy has frequently been described in the press as an elite fad, research doesn’t back up that idea. One 2018 study found that participants in polyamorous relationships were more likely than those in monogamous ones to make less than $40,000 a year. In both 2016 and 2021, the Kinsey Institute found no association between polyamory and any religion, race, political affiliation, geographic location, or income category. “Polyamorists,” a press release states, “were as likely to be Republican or Democrat, poor or wealthy, white or Black, on the coasts or in the middle of the country.”

If nonmonogamy seems to come up largely in the context of Brooklyn moms or Portland kombucha brewers, that’s likely because these are the ones who feel at ease talking about it openly. Moors has spoken with many people who just carry on making private agreements with their partners, selectively telling people close to them. They’re not cheating, but they still have to live with secrecy—and maybe some shame: Ethical nonmonogamists themselves have been shown to rate monogamous subjects more favorably than nonmonogamous ones.

So an odd kind of paradox has arisen. Nonmonogamy has gained real attention; a growing number of people are practicing some form of it. Yet instead of becoming normalized, the practice has mainly triggered a whole lot of pushback. Over the 15 years that Jenkins has been studying polyamory, she told me, cultural attitudes have been “quite regressive.” Even in progressive circles, which might profess to be more welcoming to some groups on the margins, the argument is often that nonmonogamy is bad for feminism, that it’s essentially a way for men to justify cheating. (See recent debates about Lindy West and Lily Allen.) The idea that consensual nonmonogamy is generally harmful for women isn’t particularly well supported by research, but it might allow people who identify as open-minded to feel that their discomfort with nonmonogamy is rational, even just. Another message that Jenkins gets from strangers is the kind that professes concern over her best interest—warning her to be monogamous for her own good.

What a tortured relationship Americans have with monogamy. They can’t live with it; they can’t live without it. Pundits who panic about monogamy’s demise aren’t necessarily wrong. Only a minority of Americans live up to the nuclear-family model: two married parents with kids, all under one roof, their relationship not open or adulterous. Maybe people are so protective of monogamy because they can sense that it really is vulnerable. The problem is that they end up putting immense pressure on the custom to provide them with purpose and complete fulfillment. It’s perhaps no wonder that so many people cheat; they may want more from their relationship than it can ever really give them. The glass gripped too tightly will shatter.

None of this is to say that we should celebrate affairs. But I do believe that all of the self-appointed moral umpires could “take the temperature down,” as van Hooff put it. So many people are taught to tremble at the idea of infidelity. And it can be absolutely devastating, of course—not only for the partner who’s cheated on but also potentially for kids who pick up on what’s happening. But relationships survive infidelity all the time. Just like a million other mistakes, she said, it’s a “normal human failing.”

Van Hooff has found that cheating usually has less to do with unhappy relationships and more to do, frankly, with mortality. Extramarital affairs are less common among young adults than among people in their 50s and up, who might have been in the same job, seeing the same friends, carrying out the same routines for decades—but who don’t want to stop growing or to run out of time for new experiences. She has a lot of empathy for the adulterers she’s interviewed, who tend to feel horrible about their betrayal but exhilarated by the idea of trying on an alternate future—especially in a society that doesn’t always grant older people new opportunities, or make them feel seen at all.

[Read: The existential terror of monogamy]

As for ethically nonmonogamous partnerships, psychologists have found that they’re about equal to monogamous ones in terms of relationship satisfaction, commitment, and sexual satisfaction. “If you like monogamy, go and do that,” Moors summarized. “And if you like consensual nonmonogamy, go do that.”

I found the Pew results a little tragic—not because monogamy is a bad thing to go to bat for, but because we have limits on our moral energy and attention. What does it say that participants were collectively most critical of cheating, the consequences of which are usually limited to an individual or a family, and least critical of eating meat? I’m not a vegetarian, so I’m not judging from on high, but I was struck by the fact that 96 percent of respondents said the latter is morally acceptable.

So many people seem to be yearning for belonging and direction, and they’re searching for it in partnership, in the nuclear family, in the monogamous ideal that connects diverse Americans at one fragile point of unison. But that very priority might be distracting them from any broader sense of connection—from feeling, finally, like they’re part of something bigger.

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

Where Did ‘Let Them’ Come From?

2026-04-20T08:00:00-04:00

The year 2020 was a bad one for Cassie Phillips. Her husband had recently returned from an overseas deployment, and while he was away, she told me, she’d rarely heard from him. The pandemic began, and the family moved to Savannah, Georgia, where they didn’t know many people. Phillips felt isolated in her new home, and her marriage was falling apart.

Late at night, on her computer, she started writing out some lines—“If they want to go weeks without talking to you, LET THEM”; “If they want to follow the crowd, LET THEM”—to remind herself that she couldn’t control her husband’s behavior. The writing was an attempt to “get through the day knowing I didn’t have anybody but myself,” Phillips said; she was “learning not to give up on other people, but understanding I had to trust myself.”

The phrase Let them wasn’t entirely Phillips’s own invention—she was inspired, in part, by a video clip in which Tyler Perry’s character Madea says, “If somebody wants to walk out of your life, let them go.” In 2022, Phillips left her husband and got the words let them tattooed on her arm, with the L in print and the rest in cursive. She posted a picture of the tattoo on Facebook, along with the lines she had been writing—she calls them a series of mantras, but many people refer to them as a poem. That post went viral, for a poem at least; currently, it has nearly 50,000 shares.

Phillips saw people reposting the poem on Facebook and Instagram, and even screen-printing it on T-shirts. She thought that was cool, but it didn’t occur to her to try to make money from the “Let them” idea. At the time, she was working at a nursing home and as a bartender, taking care of her kids, and trying to hold it together psychologically. “I was in survival mode,” Phillips said.

[Read: This influencer says you can’t parent too gently]

In May of the following year, Phillips saw an Instagram video from the popular podcaster and self-help author Mel Robbins in which Robbins said, “I just heard about this thing called the ‘Let Them Theory.’ I freaking love this. If your friends are not inviting you out to brunch this weekend, let them.” Initially, Phillips, who assumed the post was referring to her work, was flattered; she sent Robbins a message thanking her for sharing her words.

“I didn’t really care about credit,” Phillips said. She didn’t know what Robbins had planned for the theory. “I didn’t really think it was going to be”—she searched for the right word—“kept.”

A few weeks after Robbins posted her Instagram video, she talked about “Let Them” on her podcast, which has more than 37 million monthly downloads. “I shared something called the ‘Let Them Theory’ in an Instagram post less than a week ago, and I just looked it up; there are over 14 million views of this thing,” she s aid. The reason the post resonated, she added, is that “every single one of us struggles with controlling behavior, or we struggle with controlling thoughts, and the ‘Let Them Theory’ is a way that you can check yourself so that your controlling nature or your controlling or obsessive thoughts don’t control you.” The YouTube video for that episode now has more than 3 million views.

In late 2024, Robbins released a book called The Let Them Theory, which became the best-selling book of 2025 and has sold more than 9 million copies. As her publisher put it, “I’ve been working at Hay House for 37 years, and we’ve had lots of big-selling books, but nothing as big as this.” Robbins released the book into a marketplace where nonfiction sales—never especially robust—were particularly abysmal, down nearly 10 percent from the previous year.

The Let Them Theory advises readers to stop trying to control others and instead take responsibility for themselves. I found parts of it genuinely helpful. Robbins includes one of the best explanations of motivational interviewing—a technique in which a person tries to help a loved one come up with their own reasons for changing their behavior—that I’ve read in my 12 years of covering psychology. And I appreciated her advice to not force a friendship. Still, reading the book, I found some tonally jarring clunkers. A chapter arguing that people should accept that life isn’t fair includes the line “It’s not fair that your country is torn apart by war.” At times, she assumes that her audience has the worst possible habits and intentions: In assuring the reader that they can “create anything you want in life,” Robbins adds that they are unlikely to do so if they keep up “this stupid and toxic habit of comparing yourself to other people. Stop it.” The book is definitely motivating, in the way that getting yelled at by your mother can be motivating.

Robbins writes that the theory came to her when, on the night of her son’s prom, her daughter Kendall urged her to stop micromanaging his choice of pre-dance restaurant. “Mom, if Oakley and his friends want to go to a taco bar for pre-prom, LET THEM,” she recounts Kendall saying. Robbins also acknowledges that many people and groups, including the Stoics and the Buddhists, have previously lauded the virtues of detachment. Indeed, between Seneca and Mel Robbins came “Let It Be,” I’m OK—You’re OK, and “Shake It Off.”

[Read: Why so many writers are athletes]

Of all the book’s citations—203 in total, according to a representative for Robbins—none of them credits Phillips’s work. Robbins has denied reading the poem or being inspired by it. Her representative told me, “neither Mel, the fact checkers, the researchers nor the publishers saw the poem.”

Phillips doubts Robbins’s origin story. Her “Let Them” lines had been widely shared online by the time Robbins was writing her book, and she thinks that Robbins, or her team, would likely have encountered them. In her poem, Phillips writes, “If they are showing you who they are and not what you perceived them to be, LET THEM.” In the book, Robbins writes, “Let Them show you who they are.” Phillips writes, “If they want to judge or misunderstand you, LET THEM.” Robbins writes, “Let Them judge. Let Them disapprove.” Robbins also writes that people were inspired by her podcast to get Let Them tattoos, but several of the tattoos pictured in the book look like Phillips’s, with similar lettering. Phillips said that Robbins never responded to her message or later attempts to contact her.

Phillips is especially incensed that in July 2024, Robbins filed a trademark for “Let Them,” in an application that’s still ongoing. She worried that a trademark would mean that she and others who wanted to speak or write about the theory would have to pay Robbins a licensing fee. She also seemed to find the move generally unsavory. “Don’t take a mindset and say, Well, now I’ve declared this is mine,” Phillips said.

I don’t know if Robbins sees it that way—her representative declined interview requests for this article. But when I read her book, I did wonder. In a passage about starting your own business, Robbins tells her readers to follow the example of a business owner who is already successful, and to not be afraid about whether you’ll seem like you “copied them.” “Let Them think you copied them,” she writes. “Because you did.”

Phillips, with her southern drawl and working-class background, is an ideal David to Robbins’s rich, polished Goliath. Many people—mostly fellow writers—have come to her defense, urging Robbins to credit her. Phillips has become a symbol of sorts for authors who will never earn out their advances, become best sellers, or otherwise be like Mel Robbins.

A writer named Andy Mort has posted a series of videos on YouTube dissecting the stated timeline of Robbins’s discovery of “Let Them,” attempting to poke holes in the idea that she learned about it on the night of her kid’s prom. The videos now have more than 100,000 views. (I’ve watched several of these and don’t find them dispositive either way.)

Sage Justice, a writer with a name oddly appropriate for this controversy, has written several posts on her Substack accusing Robbins of cribbing from Phillips. “Mel Robbins made a mint off of someone who had a smaller audience but was building momentum,” she told me. “If we don’t say something, it’s just going to keep happening. Then how do writers like us ever get ahead? How do we get that big break?” Justice mentioned that she is dealing with housing insecurity and financial difficulties, and that she would like a lucrative publishing deal.

Jeff Guenther, a therapist and a social-media influencer known as Therapy Jeff, has also criticized Robbins on social media. He told me that he believes that “Let Them” is an oversimplified version of a real psychological strategy; he doesn’t like that Robbins, who is not a professional psychologist, “took a very specific therapy technique” and “made it fit on a tote bag.” He objects, for example, to Robbins’s advice for how to deal with political disagreements with family members. Guenther thinks that rather than simply letting loved ones hold potentially harmful beliefs, as Robbins has advocated, people with the opposing view should “speak the fuck up.”

As Guenther and I were winding down our conversation, he admitted, “There’s jealousy here.” Guenther has a book out, but it’s sold far fewer copies than The Let Them Theory. He appreciates that he’s “internet famous,” but Robbins is internet famous and “book famous”—and don’t all writers want to be book famous?

[Read: The wrong way to motivate your kid]

Beyond Guenther, many of Robbins’s detractors are likely motivated, at least in part, by envy. People tend to feel most envious of people who seem similar to them and who have achieved something impressive in an area that’s relevant to their own identity, Nicole Henniger, a professor at Tennessee Tech University who studies envy, told me. A bronze-medal-winning figure skater is more likely to envy a gold-medal-winning figure skater than they are a pole vaulter or a plumber. One explanation is that as our brain strains to tell us stories about our existence, we tend to look to comparable, successful people as proxies for other lives we could have lived. “I feel like I maybe should be able to do what they have done” is how Henniger explained the feeling. And of course, in a zero-sum contest, people who are similar to you but slightly ahead of you are your competition.

If I’m honest, professional jealousy is probably also part of why I spent a significant amount of time reporting a story about a self-help book, despite Everything That’s Going On. In a shrinking nonfiction-book market, one in which the victor has reaped an obscene amount of spoils, one person’s overwhelming success—especially if their core idea doesn’t seem very original—can be jealousy-inducing. No one would have made such a fuss over Robbins if she had sold fewer than 1,000 copies, as the majority of books do.

Jealousy isn’t the only reason that someone might take Phillips’s side. Many people have a tendency to root for underdogs out of a sense of justice, Nadav Goldschmied, a psychologist at the University of San Diego, told me. Despite what The Let Them Theory purports, people like to think that life is fair, and the possibility of a dark horse prevailing makes it seem more so, Goldschmied said. He has studied this phenomenon in situations such as Olympic matchups and the Israel-Palestine conflict. In the latter case, participants were shown a map, and he found that they tended to feel more sympathetic to whichever country was portrayed as smaller relative to other countries.

Part of the tension here can also be explained by the fact that influencers, podcasters, and other internet stars may not have the same commitment to attribution that journalists and academics do. An editor at a prominent publisher—who asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press—told me, “Some of this is people placing an academic understanding of knowledge onto podcasters, for whom intellectual credibility is not a source of anxiety.”

Beyond trying to block the trademark, there isn’t much Phillips or her supporters can do at this point. A two-word poem title isn’t copyrightable. Publishers sometimes even put out books with the same exact title as a previous book, the editor told me. “That doesn’t really matter unless the title is, like, Gone With the Wind,” he said. And self-help books tend to be at least a little derivative. Many authors—myself included—frequently dip from the same well of time-worn psychological tricks. A tomic Habits, a book about habit change, heavily cites The Power of Habit, an earlier book about habit change; my book about personality change builds on several other books about the same topic.

The editor also said that the key to selling nonfiction books isn’t necessarily a title or an idea, but a person’s fan base—something that Robbins had already well established with her podcast and a previous best seller, The 5 Second Rule. (Podcasts are a particularly important engine behind nonfiction-book sales; some book-publicity firms now have publicists devoted exclusively to pitching podcasts.)

[Read: What does ‘genius’ really mean?]

Taking a step back, one could argue that everyone in this drama is actually doing fine. Robbins certainly seems fine. Phillips has more than 20,000 followers on Instagram and is now working as a freelance writer. She isn’t sure she’d want to pursue a settlement with Robbins, if it came to that, because it might include a non-disparagement clause, and she’d want the freedom to discuss “Let Them” however she pleased.

The editor at the prominent publisher could also see the bright side of this saga: He said that at least it means “people still care about books.” In the age of AI-written novels, he said, “it’s kind of exciting that there are readers out there interested enough in policing the intellectual integrity of books that they bothered.”

Fervid discussion about books tends to be good for other books. If people want to argue over who truly created the “Let Them Theory,” maybe we should—well, you know.

What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat

2026-04-20T07:00:00-04:00

At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake.

Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells.

No matter how many times I watch that movie, and I watch it a lot, I have never once taken those words to mean I’m done for. There will now be consequences for my actions. Quite the opposite: They mean that Plainview has completed his journey, through the acquisition of wealth and power, to a realm outside the moral universe. He’s finished, in other words, pretending that the rules of human society apply to him.

In 2018, I was a guest at Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara, California. It’s an annual event in which the Amazon founder invites 80-plus guests—celebrities, artists, intellectuals, and anyone else he thinks is interesting—to spend three nights at a private resort. I had recently been approached by Amazon about moving my film-and-television business over from Disney, and although I had declined (or maybe because I had declined), Bezos’s team invited me to Campfire, perhaps keen to impress me with the power of his reach.

[From the March 2024 issue: The rise of techno-authoritarianism]

On a warm October Thursday, a fleet of private jets was dispatched to airports in Van Nuys and New York to shepherd guests to Santa Barbara in style. At that point I had only a vague sense of who else was coming—famous people, rich people, influential people, and me. A guest list, I was told, would be given to us once we arrived. Families were invited; an on-site nanny would be provided for each child.

So my wife and I got our two children from Austin to Los Angeles and took a 45-minute jet ride north, with a television mogul and a comedian on board. Bezos had bought out the entire Biltmore resort for the weekend, as well as the beach club across the street. He had brought in a security firm from Las Vegas to ensure our safety and privacy. Even the weather felt expensive, and when we were shown to our rooms, the designer gift bags we found were filled with luxury goods.

[Alexandra Petri: The 10 things the Bezoses are almost certainly grateful for each morning]

Each morning, we gathered in a lecture hall to hear presentations. If you’ve ever seen a TED Talk, you understand the format. The year I went, a sitting Supreme Court justice was interviewed, and a neurologist talked about technological advances in prosthetics. In the afternoons and evenings, we were encouraged to exchange ideas over drinks and four-course meals, with no set purpose—to network, in other words, with some of the most rarefied talent on Earth. The most common question I heard was “Why am I here?”

“Why am I here?” asked the 1980s hair-metal singer. “Why am I here?” asked the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, the famous anthropologist, the presidential historian. Only the movie stars and the billionaires didn’t ask: They had done this kind of thing before. It turns out there is a circuit of idea festivals. Many tech billionaires host one, and if you find yourself on the right list, you can spend much of the year traveling the world, eating Wagyu, and discussing how to make the world a better place with the most famous talk-show host in history.

That’s how the weekend started. Here’s how it ended: My wife broke her wrist slipping on wet grass, and both children and I came down with hand, foot, and mouth disease. This is not a joke. One of us went home with her arm in a sling; the other three developed itchy, painful red blisters all over our faces and extremities. If you’re looking for a sign from God as to whether hanging out with the richest man on Earth is right for you, pay attention when he sends you not one plague, but two. Suffice it to say we have never been back to Campfire, nor have we ever been invited.

At drinks on the second night, the head of a major talent agency asked me what I thought of the weekend. I said, “I’ve spent my whole career trying to figure out how the world works. I didn’t realize I could just come here and ask the people who ran it.” On some level I was kidding. The lead singer of an alt-country band didn’t run the world, nor did a noted author who would later be accused of impropriety. But finding myself at that resort by exclusive invitation, I now knew exactly what people meant when they talked about the elite.

Sitting in the lecture hall, pencils out, listening to a famous chef explain his humanitarian work, it was easy to feel like the solution to the world’s problems lay within our grasp. And yet, looking around at faces I had only ever seen in a magazine or on-screen, I had an unsettling revelation: This is the hubris of accomplishment. To be declared a genius at one thing is to begin to believe you are a genius at everything.

Here we were, 80 individuals with a combined net worth that was greater than a small city’s yet infinitesimal compared with the wealth and dominion of our host. How did he view this exercise—as a first step toward changing the world, or as a performative display of his reach and influence?

Bezos was everywhere that weekend—in a tight T-shirt, laughing too loudly, arms thrown around his teenage sons. He had recently become the world’s second centibillionaire, his net worth hovering somewhere around $112 billion, about half of what it is today. That number, previously unimaginable, had made him unique on a planet of 8 billion people, and you could feel it in the room. Even the richest and most famous among us were drawn to the energy of this impossible wealth.

[Martin Baron: Where Jeff Bezos went wrong with The Washington Post]

Though we didn’t know it at the time, Bezos’s first marriage would be over a few weeks later. My defining impression of his wife that weekend was sadness, even though Bezos made a big show of performing the role of family man. In hindsight, it is that performance that sticks with me. The Jeff Bezos of 2018 acted as if he still believed that people’s impression of him mattered, that his financial and social value could be affected by negative publicity. He still believed that his actions had consequences. He had not yet freed himself—the way Daniel Plainview freed himself—from the rules of men.

Eight years later, Bezos and two of the world’s other richest men—Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—have clearly left the world of consequences behind. They float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.

The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.

[Adam Serwer: How America chose not to hold the powerful to account]

This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Asked recently if there is any check on his power, President Trump—himself a billionaire, and by far the richest president in American history—said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not domestic or international law, not the will of the voters, not God or the centuries-old morality of civic and religious life.

Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be. It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The very powerful men who think introspection is dumb]

When Peter Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wasn’t talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don’t exist. When Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government as part of the inside joke he called DOGE, he did so with the air of a man who believed that nothing matters—poverty, chaos, human suffering. He was having fun. It didn’t even matter that the entire destructive exercise ultimately yielded no practical financial gains. For him, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: He could only win, because losing had lost its meaning.

Since the 2024 election, there has been a philosophical shift on the right, and especially among tech billionaires, to vilify the idea of empathy. Musk has called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” He sees it as a weapon wielded by liberal society to bludgeon otherwise rational people into operating against their own interests. Empathy is something done to you by others—a vulnerability they exploit, a back door through which they gain access to your resources and will. This rejection of empathy as a human value gives cover to people who don’t want to feel anything at all. If empathy is the problem, then lack of it isn’t a deficiency—it’s an advantage.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: The conservative attack on empathy]

I finally met Bezos on the last day of Campfire, at lunch, after my wife had broken her wrist. I went over to thank him for having us, and he asked how our Campfire experience had been. I told him that it was great, but that unfortunately my wife had broken her wrist that morning when she slipped on the wet grass while kicking a ball with our 6-year-old son.

The night before, we’d all stood by the pool at the beach club watching a cadre of synchronized swimmers execute a flawless water routine. I had spoken with a famous novelist, who said, “I just don’t understand why I’m here.” A famous rock star was about to start an acoustic set. The famous chef had made paella. Somewhere deep under my skin, a brutal pox was beginning to form.

The next morning, my wife fell, and I found myself in a black SUV with a team of private-security contractors, who whisked us to the back entrance of a Santa Barbara emergency room, where she was seen and treated right away. We made it back in time to watch the Supreme Court justice Zoom in from Washington, D.C.

How was your Campfire? Bezos asked me an hour later, and because I am an honest person, and because I have been a host myself, I decided he would want to know that there had been a problem, but that his team had reacted quickly and been extremely helpful. To be clear, I was in no way blaming him, nor was I shaking down the richest man on Earth. Instead, I was simply offering Bezos, also a husband and father, a brief human connection.

But when I told him what had happened, Bezos looked horrified. He did not say “I’m so sorry.” He did not say “Do you need anything?” Instead, he made a face, and in an instant, an aide came and whisked him away. When presented with the opportunity for empathy, even performative empathy, he chose escape.

A few hours later, on the private plane home, a famous movie producer offered my wife a blanket. My children’s faces were covered in spots. Under my fingernails, red welts were beginning to rise.

The world has always been run by rich men. The robber barons of the Gilded Age were known for their ruthlessness in the accumulation of wealth—hiring Pinkertons to shoot striking unionists. But they directly engaged with the world around them, using their wealth and power to muscle it into its most profitable form. And although today’s billionaires are clearly manipulating society to maximize their own profit, something else is also happening—a disassociation from the reality of cause and effect, from meaning and history. These men no longer feel the need to change the world in order to succeed, because their success is guaranteed, no matter what happens to the rest of us.

“I’m finished,” yells Daniel Plainview, perched happily on the polished floor of his own celestial kingdom. Though he has just committed a crime, he has never felt so free.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “Everything Is Free and Nothing Matters.”

Catch

2026-04-19T12:00:00-04:00

I never caught a ball.
Why would I?
Why do men need to be around balls?
(the rubber kind)
Are you more of a man if you throw a ball and less so if you catch one?
I do neither.
My father once tried to throw me a ball when I was a child
but
I just stood there.
No one has ever thrown a ball to me
since
or even considered it.
What would I do if I caught a ball?
I have nowhere to put it
I’d certainly never throw it back
Please
don’t ever throw me a ball.

Photos: Out Among the Cherry Blossoms

2026-04-19T07:00:00-04:00

Naoya Azuma / The Yomiuri Shimbun / Reuters

Weeping cherry blossoms are in full bloom at a sightseeing spot in Higashi-yoshino Village, Nara Prefecture, Japan, on April 11, 2026.

Mark Schiefelbein / AP

Cherry blossoms near peak bloom in front of the Washington Monument along the Tidal Basin, on March 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C.

Martin Meissner / AP

Thousands of people gather for the start of cherry-blossom season in the old town of Bonn, Germany, on April, 6, 2026.

He Yuankai, You Caibin, Wu Shuai / Zhejiang Daily Press Group / VCG / Getty

An aerial view of blooming cherry blossoms at a tea plantation in Ninghai County, Ningbo City, Zhejiang province, China, seen on April 11, 2026.

David Mareuil / Anadolu / Getty

People enjoy cherry-blossom season along the old moat of the Imperial Palace on April 5, 2026, in Tokyo, Japan.

Xu Congjun / Oriental Image / Reuters

Visitors admire cherry blossoms, fog, and light shows at Nantong Dream Island in Wujie Town, Tongzhou District, in China’s Jiangsu province on April 5, 2026.

Joe Klamar / AFP / Getty

Flowers of a blooming cherry tree, seen at Burggarten park behind the Hofburg imperial palace on a spring day in Vienna, Austria, on March 23, 2026

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Wearing a Chinese Hanfu dress, Jiahui Xu, who is from China, is photographed with cherry blossoms at the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., on March 26, 2026.

Julia Demaree Nikhinson / AP

People watch the sun rise among cherry-blossom trees along the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., on March 28, 2026.

Fuminori Ogane / The Yomiuri Shimbun / Reuters

A long-exposure photo shows swirling patterns made by floating cherry-blossom petals in the river’s current at the Japan-China Friendship Garden in Gifu Park, Gifu City, Japan, on April 7, 2026.

Kazuki Wakasugi / The Yomiuri Shimbun / Reuters

People enjoy cherry-blossom viewing beside a field of blooming nemophila at Uminonakamichi Seaside Park in Higashi Ward, Fukuoka City, Japan, on April 5, 2026.

Heather Diehl / Getty

A dog goes for a ride along the Tidal Basin beneath cherry-blossom trees on March 23, 2026, in Washington, D.C.

Ebrahim Noroozi / AP

People in costume enjoy blooming cherry blossoms during the Cherry Blossom Festival at the Gardens of the World in Berlin, Germany, on April 12, 2026.

Artur Widak / NurPhoto via Getty / NurPhoto

A group of visitors stands along the banks of the Nishiki River at dusk to photograph and view the historic Kintai Bridge, which is illuminated with blue floodlights and framed by glowing cherry blossoms, in Iwakuni, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan, on April 12, 2026.

Hidenori Nagai / The Yomiuri Shimbun / Reuters

People take photos of cherry trees in full bloom at Hirosaki Park in Hirosaki City, Japan, on April 16, 2026.

Tom Brenner / AP

A person poses for a quinceañera photo among the cherry-blossom trees along the tidal basin on the National Mall on March 26, 2026, in Washington, D.C.

Ahn Young-joon / AP

People take photos near the cherry blossoms at a park in Seoul, South Korea, on April 4, 2026.

Yang Suping / VCG / Getty

Night scenery of cherry blossoms at the Yuantouzhu, or Turtle Head Isle, scenic spot on March 28, 2026, in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, China.

Ina Fassbender / AFP / Getty

A woman poses beneath blooming cherry trees on Heerstrasse in Bonn, Germany, on April 8, 2026.

A 13,000-Mile Mission for One Beautiful Loaf

2026-04-19T07:00:00-04:00

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

Somewhere between a Red Lobster and a three-Michelin-star dining room lies the best free restaurant bread in America. For The Atlantic’s May cover story, our staff writer Caity Weaver set out to find it, surveying more than 500 people and traveling 13,000 miles along the way. Restaurants have long been judged before the meal even begins by the bread they serve; Caity wanted to know which one actually delivers. For today’s Daily, I spoke with her about how she’d chased down an answer, and what it takes to crown a basket of bread the “best” in the country.

Rafaela Jinich: You traveled across the country and did months of reporting to find the best free restaurant bread in America. How did the idea first come to you?

Caity Weaver: I have a fantasy—somewhere between a hope and a private religion—that when you die, you meet God, and he answers every question you have. The first question I put on my mental list as a kid was, Did I pick up more spare change than I dropped? (I’d like God to provide both numerical totals.) What is the best free restaurant bread in America? is a query in the same vein.

It popped into my head many years ago, when I was eating especially good free bread at a restaurant. It was possible, I realized, that I was currently enjoying the best free restaurant bread in America. But it was also possible, and statistically more likely, that I wasn’t. And it was even more likely that I would never taste that best bread, because it could be served anywhere, and the number of restaurants I will visit in my lifetime is vanishingly small. The idea that the only thing keeping me from enjoying the best free restaurant bread was ignorance of its location spiraled into a small obsession. I realized that I might be able to figure out its location before my death if I just asked enough people (with plans to double-check my findings with God eventually). I blurted the pitch out to The Atlantic’s editor in chief the first time I had lunch with him.

Rafaela: In your essay, you categorize people into three types based on how they answer your question about what they consider the best bread. Did that framework emerge early, or did you discover it as you reported?

Caity: I assumed that everyone would be able to name their favorite free restaurant bread instantly, as I was. I was stunned to discover that the majority of people had never given this superlative any thought at all. It became clear very early on that respondents were falling into one of three buckets: (1) people who provided an answer instantly, (2) people who kept no mental ranking of free bread they encountered, and (3) people who were so stressed out by the question that they refused to answer it.

Rafaela: How do you investigate something as subjective as “the best” bread?

Caity: I think that if a lot of people love something, it’s worth investigating. I believe in the wisdom of popularity. The first step was to see which bread was the most popular based on the hundreds of responses to my poll—weighted to correct for the likely overrepresentation of chain restaurants. (If two free breads received the same number of nominations, but one was served at a chain with 500 locations and one was served at a stand-alone restaurant, it seemed fair to say that the non-chain bread was more popular.) The second step was to try that bread for myself, to see if I liked it. I’m an only child, so I have total faith in the correctness of all my actions and opinions. I figured a lot of people couldn’t be wrong about what appeals to a lot of people—especially if the lot included me.

Rafaela: Did you walk into each restaurant with set criteria or let your impressions of the bread form in the moment?

Caity: I asked for bread as soon as I sat down, even before ordering (to make sure it was really free); I asked for at least one bread refill (to confirm that it was effectively unlimited); and I asked for bread to go (to probe the limits of “unlimited” and to evaluate it in day-old form). I took pages of notes and hundreds of pictures. I did research beforehand to try to understand what bakers are aiming for in terms of color, texture, and flavor—but ultimately, to me, the most important quality was how it tasted the moment it was served.

Rafaela: Without spoiling it, what made your final pick feel definitive to you?

Caity: It was wildly, disproportionately popular among respondents. And when I tried it, I discovered that I would have been delighted to eat it as my entire meal. This didn’t affect its ranking, but the day-old form of this bread also held up far better than every other bread I tried the next day.

Rafaela: What’s the first thing you notice now when you sit down at a restaurant? Has your answer changed after your bread mission?

Caity: I compare the free bread with the one my research has determined is the best; so far, the latter hasn’t been beaten. But there’s good news: I learned while reporting this story that lots of breads can be almost as good as the best free restaurant bread. If it’s warm, you’re 89 percent of the way there. Don’t get me wrong—the best free restaurant bread is exceptionally wonderful—but pretty good free bread ain’t bad either.

Rafaela: Now that you have found the best free bread in America, what food expedition is next? One commenter suggested french fries.

Caity: On it.

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The Week Ahead

How to Be a Dissident, a book by Gal Beckerman on how people across history have resisted conformity in an age of rising authoritarianism (out Tuesday)
Michael, a biopic about Michael Jackson (in theaters Friday)
Half Man, a drama series about the relationship between two “brothers” over decades (out Thursday on HBO Max)

Essay

Illustration by Emma Cheng, M.D.

The Paradox of Modern Medicine

By Meghan O’Rourke

In her first year of medical school, Diana Cejas discovered a lump in her neck. She went to the student medical center to have it evaluated and was told that it was likely benign. But the lump kept growing, and she returned to her doctors, who reassured her that it was just a large lymph node. One night, following a 36-hour shift in her residency, the lump hurt so much she couldn’t sleep. The next day, after she begged for help, a doctor finally ordered a CT scan. She looked up her results on the hospital computer system. There, on the screen, was a large mass in her neck. It turned out to be cancerous. Even as she had been learning how to correctly diagnose others, she had not been able to get an accurate diagnosis herself.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Photo Album

A drone view shows people gathering to celebrate across the Danube River from the Parliament building. (Reuters)

Explore photos of Hungarians celebrating in the streets of Budapest after Péter Magyar of the Tisza party defeated Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in a general election last Sunday.

Play our daily crossword.

Explore all of our newsletters.

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

The Problem With Hasan Piker’s Einstein Story

2026-04-19T07:00:00-04:00

Last week, Pod Save America, the popular podcast founded by former Obama-administration staffers, hosted the influencer and leftist provocateur Hasan Piker. A charismatic and pugnacious socialist streamer, Piker has become a flash point in a broader debate among Democrats over how far their party’s big tent ought to extend. Unsurprisingly, Piker’s hourlong interview generated controversy. Critics on the right and left highlighted his refusal to condemn Hamas. Others were upset that the influencer said he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time,” even as he reiterated his reticence to back a progressive politician such as Gavin Newsom over J. D. Vance.

But a very different part of the podcast caught my attention, because it illustrates the problem with the wrangling over Piker: It revolves around his contentious opinions about a narrow subject—Jews and Israel—while giving short shrift to his broader worldview and his tendency to be wrong on the facts. The issue is not whether to engage with figures like Piker; it’s how to do so in a way that’s genuinely informative.

[Read: The limits of the Democrats’ big tent]

The Pod Save America appearance offers a case in point. While discussing his personal opposition to Israel’s founding, Piker marshals an unexpected ally: Albert Einstein. “My assessment on Zionism as an ideology is not that different from Albert Einstein’s assessment of Zionism,” he tells the co-host Jon Favreau. The Jewish physicist, Piker said, “was actually asked to be the first president of Israel.” But Einstein, in Piker’s account, assailed the Israeli project from the start: He saw “the violence that the early Zionist brigades were engaging in” before “the IDF existed, before Israel existed,” and “wrote about what Zionism was turning into, and he warned that what he was seeing was exactly what the Nazis were doing.”

Most listeners probably took little notice of this historical riff. Favreau does not remark on it. But for me, it was a flashing-neon sign. I wrote my undergraduate thesis about Einstein’s relationship to Judaism and Zionism, poring over the relevant documents in three languages on two continents. And just about every bit of Piker’s potted portrayal is either misleading or false.

Far from an opponent of the Zionist endeavor, Einstein assisted it for decades. In 1921, he raised money across America for the Hebrew University alongside Chaim Weizmann, the head of the World Zionist Organization. In 1923, he delivered a guest lecture at the school’s campus in Jerusalem. Weizmann, meanwhile, was tapped to be the first president of Israel, in 1948; Einstein, who had not been in the running, congratulated him. “Long before the emergency of Hitler, I made the cause of Zionism mine because through it I saw a means of correcting a flagrant wrong,” Einstein wrote to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1947, in an attempt to persuade him to support the movement.

In 1951, the physicist hosted David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, at his home in Princeton, New Jersey. When Weizmann died the next year, Ben-Gurion offered his position to Einstein, who declined, writing that he was “deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel, and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it.” (The notoriously absent-minded professor explained, “I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions.”) Shortly before his death, Einstein told an interviewer that he had “great hopes for the future of the Jewish state.” He even planned to deliver a speech marking the seventh anniversary of Israel’s founding in 1955—but died days before he could deliver it. He bequeathed his valuable papers and the rights to his name and likeness to Hebrew University.

None of this is to say that Einstein was an uncritical booster of the Zionist project. On the contrary, he was a sharp public antagonist of the Israeli right. This ideological orientation was likely another reason Einstein turned down the ceremonial role of the country’s presidency, which is meant to be nonpartisan. He was also a deeply reluctant nationalist. Before Israel was founded, Einstein advocated for a shared state for Jews and Arabs, writing in 1946 that “what we can and should ask” is for “secured bi-national status in Palestine with free immigration.” But once Israel was established, Einstein strongly supported its continued existence, while insisting that its ultimate success depended on the pursuit of peace and fair treatment of the land’s Arab inhabitants. “International policies for the Middle East should be dominated by efforts to secure peace for Israel and its neighbors,” he wrote in the draft of his deathbed speech.

In other words, Einstein wasn’t an unapologetic Israel-right-or-wrong advocate or an ardent anti-Zionist, but something more interesting: a left-wing supporter of Jewish statehood who believed in Israel’s necessity but also in the fundamental rights of the region’s Palestinian citizens. This complex combination of commitments puts him in accord with many, if not most, Americans and American Jews today, according to survey data. In contemporary terms, one might call Einstein a liberal Zionist—the same category of people Piker has previously called “liberal Nazis.”

But listeners to Piker on Pod Save America will have learned none of this. The streamer’s cavalier characterization of the views of American Jews, living and dead, and his failure to genuinely reckon with what they think, help explain why some feel that Piker fosters anti-Jewish animus. But one need not reach a conclusion on the anti-Semitism question to arrive at the simpler determination that he speaks confidently about things that he does not know much about. And this phenomenon is not unique to Piker. It’s characteristic of the new-media landscape, which now includes smashmouth streamers and podcasters of all political persuasions who talk about everything but are experts in nothing, and whose incentives run toward incendiary virality rather than accuracy. Often, this means that these talkers leave listeners less informed than when they came in, as is the case here.

Such pitfalls should not stop journalists and activists from interviewing these influential actors; doing so is part of the job and essential for democratic dialogue. The question is not whether such people should be engaged, but how. Interviewers should educate themselves about an influencer’s past arguments and be prepared to dig into the details, as CNN’s Elle Reeve did when she exposed the far-right podcaster Candace Owens’s conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s killing. Tucker Carlson has broadcast elaborate Hitler apologetics and other anti-Semitic ideas; his interlocutors should be familiar with their refutations, and be able to raise them when confronting him.

Hosts could also bring on experts to complicate the simplistic narratives marketed by the streaming set: One imagines a medical researcher might have some thoughts about Piker’s recent claim that Cuba has come up with a treatment for Alzheimer’s that he alleges has been suppressed. Other interviewers might have someone else in the studio who is tasked with interrogating the claims of guests in real time. After all, even Joe Rogan has his producer serve as an on-air fact-checker; the people interviewing Rogan should too.

Other questions are worth posing to influencers such as Piker by those who are evaluating them as political partners. On Pod Save America, most of the run time was devoted to Piker holding forth about Jews and Zionism. This was less the fault of the show and more a response to the public discourse, which has obsessed over Piker’s every utterance on these subjects. But for the average voter considering the streamer as a potential ally, and wondering what the world would look like if he had more power, the tired anti-Semitism arguments obscure far more fundamental issues.

For instance, Piker has repeatedly exhibited a soft spot for left-coded expansionist authoritarian regimes. When he was asked recently if “there is a country that has done socialism in a way that you’d like,” he did not cite the Nordic states favored by the likes of Senator Bernie Sanders. He said, “China is probably the closest,” while acknowledging “plenty of issues within the Chinese system” that he did not detail before launching into praise of the country’s high-speed rail. Piker has likened China’s subjugation of Tibet to the North’s crushing of the South in the American Civil War, and argued that the takeover helped civilize the territory. (He has also compared Taiwan to the Confederacy.) He once referred to China’s mass-detention facilities for Uyghur Muslims as “concentration camps,” only to quickly revise that to “reeducation camps” and claim that they “are all closed now.” (They are not, and the detentions also continue throughout the formal justice system.)

[Read: One by one, my friends were sent to the camps]

Piker’s apologias for left-wing autocrats are not restricted to contemporary ones. Last month, he told his viewers that “Mao Zedong is one of the great leaders of this world.” And at the Yale Political Union this month, he declared that “the fall of the U.S.S.R. was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century.” The tens of millions of victims of the Soviet Union went unmentioned.

Talking with Piker about a political coalition to save American democracy without discussing his affinity for China’s rulers is like teaming up with Carlson without interrogating his praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin—or with Donald Trump without examining his outlook toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And yet, only the debate over the latter tends to happen, such that Israel crowds out all other considerations, including extremely consequential beliefs that can end up going unchallenged. Favreau, the Pod Save America co-host, perceptively alludes to this very problem in his exchange with Piker. “Tucker Carlson’s a good example,” Favreau observes. “He’ll do, like, a very thoughtful critique of Israel and then suddenly, like, launch into a conspiracy.” The thing is, Carlson isn’t the only one whose Israel rhetoric attracts outsize attention that conveniently enables the rest of his ideology to evade scrutiny.

Many pundits and reporters are understandably unfamiliar with the oeuvre of some of the country’s biggest influencers. The content of these creators is spread out over incalculable hours of streaming video and is not easily searchable. But any productive conversation with or about these personalities requires an accurate understanding of their worldviews.

Perhaps liberal listeners align with Piker’s perspective on regimes such as China and the Soviet Union and consider his approach compatible with their fight against Trumpism. Perhaps they do not. But to make that call, they need to know what he actually believes. And that’s a conversation worth having.

California’s Blue Armageddon

2026-04-19T07:00:00-04:00

On a chilly Saturday late last month, I met Eric Swalwell at a Little League diamond near Capitol Hill, where the Bay Area congressman and his wife, Brittany, would be watching their 8-year-old son. Swalwell, who was running to succeed Gavin Newsom as the next governor of California, had been gradually rising above a Lilliputian cast of candidates and had acquired a strong scent of momentum in the race.

“Impeccable timing for you,” he’d texted me on my drive over. He attached a just-published Washington Post article reporting that FBI Director Kash Patel was seeking to release files relating to a decade-old investigation into Swalwell that had turned up no evidence of wrongdoing. If true, the Post story presented a publicity godsend to Swalwell’s campaign, further elevating his status as a nemesis of the vindictive president.

The family-guy tableau of the Little League game felt consistent with the wholesome image that the campaign had been straining to project of late, for reasons that would become clear soon enough. Our interview occurred on the same weekend that Swalwell released a video of him and Brittany holding hands on a boardwalk stroll, while she called him a “really great dad” and a “really good husband.”

As we sat together in the bleachers, Swalwell introduced me to Brittany, dropped the names of his better-known endorsers, and referred to Nancy Pelosi as his “work mom.” He also mentioned Adam Schiff, his former House colleague, whose trajectory into statewide office Swalwell had watched closely. Like Schiff, Swalwell had become a ubiquitous antagonist of Donald Trump—about as good of a credential as any for leading the de facto capital of Blue America.

“I am the only candidate whose name the president knows,” Swalwell told me.

[Read: Donald Trump’s gift to Adam Schiff]

A few weeks later, a lot more people know Eric Swalwell’s name, which has now been stained immeasurably. He is leaving Congress; his campaign is over, probably his political career too; and the California governor’s race is even messier than the colossal fiasco it had been before.

Swalwell’s collapse has been sudden and swift, if not surprising. Recurrent talk of bad behavior toward women had trailed him around Washington for years, and proliferated as he approached front-runner status. Late last week, the rumors detonated: Multiple women, one of them a former staffer, accused him of sexual misconduct, including sexual assault, unwanted advances, and explicit Snapchat messages. Swalwell admitted to “mistakes in judgment” but denied the allegations and vowed to “fight” them. In short order, he has been met with multiple investigations, and instant pariah status. (I reached out to him after the accusations came out but did not hear back.)

The fact that Swalwell was, until recently, the Democrats’ leading candidate for governor is itself illustrative of the race writ large. Or, as far as the people still running, writ small. The glaring lack of candidate talent, political skill, and personal appeal—let alone star power—has been the defining quality of the race. Bigger names, such as Kamala Harris and Senator Alex Padilla, opted not to run. Newsom is term-limited. Jerry Brown is 88. George Clooney lives in France.

Beyond the perverse pull of watching such ineptitude on display, the main allure of this campaign is that it could produce the ultimate man-bites-dog political result: the election of a Trump-aligned Republican governor in this bluest of states, concurrent with a national election that could produce the bluest of waves. Such a monumental upset would not occur because the two GOP candidates—Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and the British-bred commentator and strategist Steve Hilton—remind anyone of Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or any of the other larger-than-life Republicans in the party’s rich (if not recent) California tradition. Rather, a Republican win would represent an act of Democratic self-immolation, spectacular even by Team Donkey standards.

Here’s how the Democratic-lockout scenario could play out. California elections are winnowed through a so-called jungle primary, in which the top two finishers—regardless of party—advance to the general election in November. The current field has been crowded and stagnant for months, with eight major Democratic candidates (now seven). Until Swalwell dropped out, he, the billionaire investor Tom Steyer, and former Representative Katie Porter had each been polling in the low-to-mid teens. They were followed by a parade of single-digit laggards, including San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and former California Attorney General and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra. Hilton and Bianco, meanwhile, were polling in the mid-to-high teens through the first week of April. If no Democrat exceeds the others before the June 2 primary, the Republicans could finish first and second, guaranteeing a GOP victory in November.

A big part of the Democrats’ problem is that the party’s top tier, such as it is, consists of deeply flawed candidates, each encumbered with distinct personality impairments.

Steyer ran for president in 2020, burned through a ton of cash, went nowhere, and is now attempting to spend his way to Sacramento. He has already saturated the state’s airwaves with more than $130 million in ads, which may or may not be enough to buy him a modicum of personal appeal. His one viral moment of the campaign so far was not pretty: A local TV reporter asked him how he would grade Newsom’s two terms, and Steyer became flustered before muttering forth with the worst possible explanation: “I haven’t followed it closely enough to give him a grade.” The Steyer campaign declined to make him available for an interview.

Porter, an economic-populist gadfly in the fashion of Elizabeth Warren, became a social-media sensation during her years in the House. She wielded her signature whiteboard at congressional oversight committee hearings while making mush of CEOs and Trump-administration officials. Not all of her viral moments have been flattering, however. There was an infamous video last fall of Porter berating a news reporter while terminating a local television interview, and another from 2021 of her cursing out a staff member during a Zoom call (“get out of my fucking shot!”). Porter expressed regret over the videos, saying that she “could have been better in those moments.” A Porter spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests to interview the candidate.

Then there is—was—Swalwell, who at this point has graduated to his own special classification of toxicity. With his exit, the Democrats’ flailing field might be narrowed slightly, and perhaps improved by subtraction, but very much remains a bottleneck of B-listers.

At the end of March, I headed out to Los Angeles to better understand this predicament. My arrival coincided with a scheduled primary debate at the University of Southern California—which, naturally, would become a steaming debacle in its own right.

Not long after the debate was supposed to start, I found myself in a musty warehouse event space in Boyle Heights, just east of the Los Angeles River. Republican Chad Bianco’s campaign had decided to go ahead with a watch party, even though a slight wrench had been flung into the evening: The debate had been abruptly canceled the night before.

[Read: How Tom Steyer built the biggest political machine you’ve never heard of]

I’d attended many debate watch parties in my career, but never one with no debate to watch. Not only that, the candidate we were supposed to be watching was present at the party.

“It’s very disheartening, very disheartening,” Bianco told me as he mingled among roughly 60 guests. Bianco described the whiplash of his last 24 hours: After being canceled, the debate had been briefly resurrected, canceled again, and nearly resuscitated another time before finally being euthanized for good. He parked himself in a corner to talk with a few reporters. His wife, Denise, stood next to him.

“How are you supposed to do a watch party if there’s nothing to watch?” I asked Denise, as Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” blared in the background.

“We’re celebrating!” she exclaimed.

“What are we celebrating?” I asked. “What are we watching?”

“We are watching Chad,” she said.

Chad looks like the sheriff he is: short-cropped hair, studded belt buckle, six-pointed-star badge, and an excellent mustache, which I complimented him on. “I know Steve wasn’t looking tough enough, so he grew a beard,” he said, referring to Hilton, his Republican rival. “He dresses like me now too. It’s kind of weird.”

“Are you guys friends?” I asked.

“No, I will never be friends with him,” Bianco told me. “He’s unethical and dishonest.” Bianco did not elaborate.

The non-debate debate at least provided a tidy distillation of this muddled campaign. The hosts—the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future, KABC-TV Los Angeles, and Univision—had invited the five top-polling candidates and also a sixth, Mahan, even though he had been polling lower than many of the uninvited also-rans. This did not go over well among said uninvited also-rans. Villaraigosa and others pointed out that the Latino, Black, and Asian American candidates had all been excluded. Various activists, groups, and state lawmakers piled on. USC finally decided that the controversy was distracting “from the issues that matter to voters,” and the complainants declared victory. “We fought. We won! We stood up against an unfair candidate debate set-up,” Becerra wrote on X.

Another grievance about the debate was that Mike Murphy, the co-director of the Dornsife Center, is publicly supporting Mahan. Murphy told me that he is on leave from USC and had nothing to do with the event. The organizers, he explained, had faced a simple challenge: “How do you pare it down so it’s not a stupid circus?” Clumsily, in this case.

My basic approach to spending 72 hours in this stupid circus was to scramble around and visit with as many candidates and campaign-adjacent characters as I could. That included Murphy, a longtime Republican media strategist and raconteur, one of my all-time favorite campaign-adjacent characters. Murphy moved to Los Angeles in 2003, went full Never Trump, and has dabbled in screenwriting, podcasting, and TV punditry, as well as the odd Democratic campaign—i.e., Mahan’s. He invited me to a divey Chinese joint in the Palms neighborhood, Hu’s Szechwan, where he says he likes to keep office hours, like an old-school mayor in a back booth of a red-sauce Italian joint.

When I asked him to assess the candidates, Murphy wanted to make the point that they are all, figuratively, diminutive. But he was also aware that language sensitivities have heightened since, say, the 1980s, when pundits dismissed the Michael Dukakis–led field of Democratic presidential candidates as “the Seven Dwarfs.”

“I want to do a little-person joke without losing my career,” Murphy told me. “This thing is a Wizard of Oz wrap party,” he went on, not able to help himself.

He pivoted to safer rhetorical ground, noting that it’s near-impossible for candidates with little statewide name recognition to get traction in California, which is larger in size than Germany. “If you’re not famous or you don’t have a lot of money,” he said, “you’re a margin of error.”

Murphy believes that the Blue Armageddon result—both Republicans in the runoff—will not come to pass, a view that plenty of California politicos share. Their theory is that the Democrats idling in the margin-of-error lane will eventually start dropping out and rally around whoever the leading non-Republican is. But other than Swalwell, none of the remaining candidates has quit yet, and all of them make a similar argument: Voters are still not “tuned in” to the race, and those who are skew heavily to the undecided.

One candidate making that case is Murphy’s pick, Mahan, who in most polls sits in the low-to-mid-single digits. I met the boyish-looking, Harvard-educated mayor of San Jose at a café in downtown L.A. as he snacked his way through a plastic container of blueberries. Mahan, 43, entered the race late, at the end of January, after growing “incredibly frustrated with what the field was offering,” he told me. He has been trying to position himself as a results-oriented pragmatist who is not afraid to defy the party establishment, progressive groups, or Newsom himself.

Illustration by Lucy Naland. Source: Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu / Getty.

“What I’m suggesting—no, not suggesting—what I’m arguing with conviction is that we have to demand that our government do better,” Mahan said. He has become a chic choice for Silicon Valley types, good-government centrists, and the national media—California’s straight analogue to Pete Buttigieg. Like Mayor Pete, Mahan exudes high-minded, data-driven sophistication, with that special dash of “aw shucks” they teach at Harvard.

[Read: Katie Porter is tired too]

“A Democrat who talks about math,” Mahan told me. “Imagine that!”

Okay, let’s talk about math. As in, what happens if the weeks go by and Mahan does not see any significant addition or multiplication in his polling? Would he drop out then to help his party? Mahan maintains that he likes his chances. Democrats will eventually consolidate, he said. Around him.

“I plan to be the one,” he said.

Funnily enough, that’s what a lot of the math-challenged candidates say. This includes Villaraigosa, the former Los Angeles mayor, whom I met at his office in a Wilshire Boulevard tower, a clear view of the Hollywood sign out his picture window.

Villaraigosa is undeniably credentialed; in addition to running the nation’s second-largest city for two terms, he was speaker of the California Assembly in the 1990s. But he has not held any office since 2013. In the governor’s race—his second campaign for the job—he has consistently polled in the single digits and struggled to gain traction.

“Why do you want to do this?” I asked him.

Villaraigosa launched into his origin story (“Mark, this state’s given me more than I could have ever hoped for”), his litany of when-I-was-mayor selling points (“more housing, more schools, more community colleges”), and his explanation for why a 73-year-old politician with a heavily antiquated aura could become the next governor.

People are hungry, he said, for a leader who can bring this most diverse, dynamic, and populous state in the country together. California, after all, has only ever had one nonwhite governor—in the 19th century.

“I was everybody’s mayor,” said Villaraigosa, who seems especially fond of that trope of politicians claiming honorary status in certain identity groups (such as when the writer Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton “the first Black president”).

“Jewish Journal called me the first Jewish mayor,” Villaraigosa boasted.

As best I can tell, this referred to a 2017 Jewish Journal article in which Villaraigosa identified himself as being “the Jewish mayor,” in addition to “the Muslim mayor” and “the Korean mayor.”

“I get introduced in the African American communities a lot of times as the second Black mayor,” he also told me.

I started to ask Villaraigosa whether he could be considered an Asian or gay mayor of Los Angeles, but he shot me a look, so I dropped it.

“You know the point I’m making,” he said. “I was a uniter.”

Unfortunately for Villaraigora, few California voters seem to be uniting around the first Jewish and second Black mayor of Los Angeles.

From Villaraigosa’s lair, I headed to the patio of a fancy-pants hotel in Pasadena for the next stop of my tour de farce: a meeting with Steve Hilton before he had to head off to a fundraiser.

“I want to have a pee,” he announced after he walked in and introduced himself. Lots of traffic en route, very relatable. I was supportive.

Hilton returned a minute later, and seemed immediately amused by his circumstance: a Brit on a big adventure across the pond, a Republican somehow atop the governor’s race in California. “I’ve been leading or second in most of the polls,” Hilton told me. “There was one where I was fourth,” he added, giggling, “which is obviously a fake poll.”

On this day, Hilton was cheerfully annoyed by the canceled USC debate, which he blamed on the “inevitable whining” of what he called “the LPDs.”

“The low-polling Democrats were jumping up and down, ‘Racism, racism!’” said Hilton. “My line has been, they weren’t excluded because of race; they’re excluded because they weren’t doing better in the race.” He was clearly pleased with his cleverness.

Hilton is a different breed of American candidate. But he’s spent much of his life around politics, mostly in England. He is an Oxford-educated provocateur who was a top aide to conservative U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron. He moved to the United States in 2012; his wife, Rachel Whetstone, a British communications executive, has held top jobs at a Mount Rushmore of Silicon Valley firms (Google, Netflix, Facebook, Uber). Still, Hilton has never held or even run for office.

I wondered aloud whether there had ever been a governor of a U.S. state with a British accent. “I don’t think so,” Hilton replied, though he invoked Schwarzenegger, who very much had an Austrian accent. Hilton also noted, for the record, that both of his parents are from Hungary. Therefore, he sometimes jokes that since the last Republican governor in California was from Austria, electing Hilton would be like California’s version of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

“So, I say, ‘You’ve had the Austrian, now the Hungarian.’”

“That’s a great message!” I assured Hilton.

Hilton calls himself “a pragmatic kind of person” and insists that his “whole campaign is positive and practical.” His main theme is that California is an object lesson in how Democratic excess can ruin an otherwise glorious state. “You’ve had 16 years of one-party rule,” he said. “Are you happy with the way things are? The answer is going to be no.”

This could be a solid strategy, except for one thing: Donald Trump remains the dominant figure in American politics, including in California, where he is especially loathed by the general electorate. If Democrats can avoid the two-Republicans outcome and Hilton winds up facing a Democrat in November, his opponent will be relentless in trying to tie him to Trump. Hilton sometimes shifts into the language of the Fox News host he used to be, for example, promising to go “FULL DOGE” on California if given the chance. I kept asking him about the president and how MAGA Hilton considers himself to be. He kept ducking. “The whole Trump thing is just a ridiculous distraction from fixing California,” Hilton said. “I truly am not ideological.”

[Read: The front-runner]

Hilton’s dilemma is that if he is too dismissive of the president pre-June, California Republicans and right-leaning independents—which includes a considerable pro-Trump contingent—could prefer Bianco, a much more unabashedly MAGA figure, with notes of extremism. Bianco was once a member of the Oath Keepers, the far-right anti-government group whose ranks were heavily represented at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. (After his affiliation became public in 2021, Bianco said that he had left the group years before.) More recently—March—he took the bizarre step of seizing 650,000 ballots from the state’s 2025 election in Riverside County, saying that he was going to “physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes reported.” California’s attorney general called Bianco’s gambit “unprecedented in both scope and scale,” and the state’s Supreme Court eventually ordered Bianco to shut it down.

The real goal of Bianco’s “investigation” was likely to flutter his eyelashes at a certain connoisseur of bogus election fraud, the one sitting in the White House. But to no avail. Trump gave Hilton his “COMPLETE & TOTAL ENDORSEMENT” on Truth Social last week, calling him a “truly fine man.” Hilton dutifully went on X and said he was “deeply honored.”

He was, in all likelihood, deeply ambivalent.

Against his party’s interest, Trump had given Republican voters a reason to rally behind one candidate, and thus create an opening for a Democrat to advance to November. But although Hilton jumped into the lead in most polls taken afterward, Bianco remains close to the front of the pack. California Republicans held their convention last weekend, and neither candidate had enough support to earn the party’s endorsement.

Hilton still looked to be enjoying the stupid circus. If nothing else, he struck me as a rare sanguine Republican on a ballot anywhere in America this year.

In the days since Swalwell’s demise, no clear consensus has arisen about who will benefit and who will not. If there’s one area of agreement, it’s that the race remains an underwhelming hodgepodge of half-weights, has-beens, and, oh yes, a billionaire.

Steyer, largely on the strength of his limitless ad budget, seems to have inherited at least some of the emerging Swalwell momentum. He’s picked up a few endorsements (the California Teachers Association, for example), drawn some big crowds at campaign events this week, and, for what it’s worth, replaced Swalwell as the darling of the prediction markets. Trump even attacked “SLEAZEBAG Tom Steyer” on Wednesday, which in 2026 is probably the best attention that a Democrat, even a free-spending billionaire, can buy.

It does not seem obvious, however, that more publicity will make voters’ hearts grow fonder of a self-funded hedge-fund magnate whose last vanity campaign, for president, spent $345 million and won zero delegates. Meanwhile, at least one poll conducted after Swalwell’s exit showed a continued logjam at the top: Hilton at 17 percent, with Bianco and Steyer tied at 14 percent. Beyond that, the survey’s most significant development was probably Becerra climbing to 10 percent (tied with Porter).

The job of California governor has changed significantly during the Trump years, becoming more national than ever. Trump’s repeated incursions into the state—sending the National Guard into Los Angeles, denying federal funding, even endorsing calls for Newsom’s arrest—are likely to persist in some form. California voters will want their governor to be a “fighter-protector,” Swalwell had told me, in better days for him. “They’re asking, Who’s going to step in and fill the role?”

[Read: The week that changed everything for Gavin Newsom]

The last California governor’s race I wrote about was the 2010 campaign to succeed Schwarzenegger. I remember asking Jerry Brown, the eventual winner, how he would rate Schwarzenegger’s performance. Brown surprised me with his answer, crediting his predecessor with “making the job of governor bigger.” Reagan, Brown said, had also “added size” to the position. His point—I think—was that, in such a boundless and targeted state, the personality and perceived stature of the person in charge seemed to count for more than they would elsewhere. That’s only become more true in Trump’s second term.

On Friday, I asked Newsom himself what advice he would give the next governor in dealing with the president. “You know, it’s interpersonal with Trump, that’s how it starts,” Newsom told me in a Zoom interview. He said he would encourage his successor to fly to Washington, try to build some rapport; Newsom guessed that Trump would be receptive, in part to spite the departed governor.

“So you take advantage of that, the fresh air,” Newsom said, adding that it won’t last. “You’re dealing with an invasive species.” Inevitably, the president will try to bully the next governor if he senses he can. “His superpower, from my perspective, is exploiting weakness,” Newsom said.

I took a shot at getting Newsom to assess the race, and whether he believed any of the candidates was better suited than the rest to repelling the invasive species. But this he was reluctant to do. “I don’t want to get into the merits or demerits of people as individuals,” he said. “I think all of them are remarkably qualified in their own unique ways”—except for Hilton and Bianco (the latter of whom he called “the guy who tried to take all those ballots”). The governor referred to the wannabe Democrats as “an extraordinarily well-versed group” and also “just an interesting field.”

Newsom insisted that he’s not getting involved, or favoring anyone just yet. Nor does he seem to believe that the pileup of Democrats—and the prospect that it could result in a Republican governor—constitutes an emergency just yet.

I asked Newsom if he would endorse a Democrat before the primary.

“Only in a break-the-glass scenario,” he said, not elaborating on what that was, or whether it was getting close.

*Illustration sources: Anjali Sharif-Paul / MediaNews Group / The Sun / Getty; Jeff Gentner / Getty; Kevin Dietsch / Getty; Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times / Getty; Sarah Reingewirtz / MediaNews Group / Los Angeles Daily News / Getty.

Scars

2026-04-18T12:00:00-04:00

It was Nell’s turn to visit Coral, who was spending the holidays in the hospital, recovering from a breakdown. (“Better here than with my family,” Coral said. “At least here, people admit they’re not normal.”) It was her second hospitalization in three years. She had had one other breakdown—her worst, in fact—the summer following her high-school graduation. By then her mother was on her third marriage; her father, twice her mother’s age, was on his fifth. Both parents were dead now, and among Coral’s several siblings and half siblings were none with whom she was close and some with whom she had never gotten along. She had been married once, pitifully young, to a man whose whereabouts she’d lost track of decades ago. Even younger, unmarried, she had had a baby that she gave up for adoption. She had no other children, which she came to count as a major reason for the depression that often incapacitated her, though she had suffered from depression even as a child.

The few friends who knew that, contrary to what she’d told other people, Coral hadn’t left town for the holidays but had instead taken herself one dawn to the ER and from there agreed to be admitted to the psych ward, had made a schedule. During her first week, she wasn’t allowed any visitors at all, and now, week two, the rule was only one visitor at a time.

Nell had come on Christmas Day (“Whatever you do, don’t bring a gift,” Coral had warned. “I don’t think I could bear it”). On New Year’s Day she was there again. As usual, they hung out in the dayroom, rather than in Coral’s room, which she shared with a young woman who’d completely stopped speaking some time ago, but who, in striking contrast with the rest of the ward, had a mild, imperturbable way about her. Nell recognized her serene gaze and soft, sad smile from a multitude of Madonnas. According to Coral, there were two other patients on the ward who didn’t speak, and Nell, whose only idea of psychiatry was talk therapy, wondered how the doctors dealt with them.

Psychiatric inpatients usually wore street clothes—were, in fact, asked to do so—but not long after Nell and Coral had sat down, a woman in grippy socks and a loosely belted bathrobe walked in.

“They’re going to kill him,” the woman said.

“Kill who, Magda?” asked Coral.

“The president, who else?”

“Who’s going to kill the president?”

“The Democrats, who else? Just like they killed JFK.”

“You think the Democrats killed JFK?”

The surprise was all Magda’s. “You don’t?” She bared her teeth in a manner so savage that for a moment Nell was afraid she was going to bite Coral. Instead, she flounced from the room, pausing in the doorway to turn back and shout: “You disgust me.”

Coral sighed. “There’s been a lot of that on the ward.” As if there weren’t a lot of that everywhere. “And I’m supposed to get well here?”

Actually, she had been getting well, or at least better—enough to be going home the following week. Though she did not feel quite up to returning to work, she said. For most of her life, Coral had worked in the theater, a career that had brought her much success, but the demands that came with it had become less and less tolerable. She had made the decision to take a break—and immediately regretted it. She wasn’t used to such freedom. She wasn’t used to having time on her hands. So much time to think, so much time to fret. So much, in the troubled world, to fret about.

She decided to adopt a cat. She’d never had a cat before, but she liked cats, and she knew how entertaining and companionable they could be. She went to a rescue center and was astonished to be told that she couldn’t take home one of the kittens. A requirement for kitten adoption was that the person be in a position to care for it for life. Coral’s age disqualified her. Any cat she adopted had to be at least five years old.

“I thought of telling them the kitten was actually for my great-great-great-grandchild,” she said later. Instead, she swallowed her tears and walked out.

Nell had known Coral from the day they met in drama school. Back then, like Nell, Coral was studying acting. It was her mother, a film actress herself and an alumna of the school, who’d pushed Coral to follow in her footsteps. She had had to push, because Coral had always been doubtful about acting. Her adviser called it one of the worst cases of impostor syndrome—that plague of the gifted and accomplished—that he’d ever seen. She was nagged by the thought that it was only because of her mother that she’d been admitted to the highly competitive school in the first place. And although this was untrue, as her teachers were quick to attest, she could not be convinced that she was exceptionally talented.

Not like her mother, she said. Not like Nell.

Another fear was that her mother’s ambitions for her were an attempt to continue, vicariously, a career that had been cut off, like those of most female actors, when she found herself nearing 40 and no longer acceptable for starring roles. Yet another fear was that living up to her mother’s ambitions might mean that Coral would never be free of this woman, with whom she’d had a contentious relationship for as long as she could recall.

But Coral had grown to love the drama school. For all her anxiety and self-doubt, it was more of a home to her than any other she’d known, and she felt more kinship with the friends she made there than she had ever felt with her family. Instead of dropping out, she reapplied, this time to the department of dramaturgy.

When, about a month ago, Coral had been invited by a journal to contribute to a special issue devoted to the current political situation, she had jumped at the chance. A small project to focus on was just what she needed. She wanted to write about what she saw as a connection between the degradation of politics—the evil of disinformation, in particular—and advertising: its ubiquity, and society’s long habituation to marketers’ manipulative distortions and lies.

Articles should include ideas for how to think about the future, instructed the editor. But the more Carol thought about the future, the more she felt at sea. Just how were you supposed to live when the world appeared to be spinning on borrowed time?

Failure to deliver her piece filled Coral with humiliation, to which she had always been perilously sensitive. Add in migraines and escalating panic attacks, and she quickly unraveled. “Every day I woke up and wished that I hadn’t.”

She had gone so far as to compose a farewell, whose banality (as she saw it) now ironically served as a deterrent. “I’m not going ’til I can come up with something more original.”

Hearing this reminded Nell that, in high school, Coral had been voted both “Most Likely to Succeed” and “Class Comedian.”

There was a television in the dayroom, tuned at the moment to a news channel but with the sound and the closed-captioning off: a panel of two women and two men, hosted by a female anchor. As usual, each of the women was lavishly made up. Nell had long found this dissonant. Every hour the news aired stories of global disasters and atrocities, and apparently, in order to report them, a woman needed the works: 18 different products, according to an anchor’s how-to video that once, out of perverse curiosity, Nell had watched.

Coral laughed. “You counted?”

Nell had. “Four different shades of eye shadow. It’s like, they want you to hear about war crimes and at the same time admire the way their eyes pop.”

Even when a woman was reporting from some hellhole—“You can hear the explosions”; “People are fleeing”; “Many are trapped in the rubble”—her lipstick was impeccable. Was it a war, or a play about a war?

Agitation on the screen: a mime of shouting and angry gesticulating.

“I know it sounds pathetically nostalgic,” Coral said, “but what the world needs now is another hippie movement.”

Nell laughed.

“I’m serious.”

Which was why Nell had laughed.

“Anti-violence, antiauthoritarian, anti-materialist, pro–civil rights, pro–Mother Earth,” Coral recited. “They say you can judge an era by its soundtrack. So—all those songs about brotherhood, about workers’ rights and the common man, and everybody getting together to make a better world. Music plus activism plus love. You laugh, but I’d be a lot more optimistic about the future if Gen-whatever were to go back to that.”

Nell shrugged. Her brother had been a tie-dyed-in-the-wool hippie and a heroin addict who, not many years later, became more conservative than their parents ever were.

“Speaking of politics,” said Coral, “what’s it like out there? I’ve only been off the ward a couple of times, but always with a nurse, and only as far as the nearest Starbucks. I remember how strange it seemed to me, the day after the election. Somehow I’d expected it to be more like the day after 9/11. The looks on people’s faces, I mean. But I didn’t see anything like that.”

Everyone going about their business as if nothing extraordinary had happened, rather than something that would radically affect every aspect of their lives, for the rest of their lives: It had struck Nell too. It was still like that, she said.

“How’d you get that scar?” Magda was back. A different Magda. She was dressed now, in jeans and a cotton pullover, and her air was calm.

“Sorry,” Coral said to Nell. “That’s the thing about the mentally ill.” She spoke as if Magda were not standing right there. “No filter.”

“It was an accident,” Nell said.

Magda made a grave face. “My scars are all internal,” she said. “And that’s a big problem. My scars can’t be seen. So people don’t know.”

Whenever Nell looked back, she was amazed at her own naivete. She had never forgotten what turned out to be the last time she saw her manager, the excruciated look on that woman’s face: a mix of pain, pity, exasperation, and guilt. “I am so sorry, darling.”

Nell had refused to understand. She had never been a beauty. What she was was an actor: skilled, hardworking, and reliable. Supremely capable of playing any number of nonbeautiful characters.

“I look like a real person,” she said. “And real people have scars.”

“But don’t you see?” said her manager. “You can’t have a character appear with a scar and no explanation. It’s too distracting.”

“But if I were a man—”

“If you were a man, it would be different, yes. But even then. Unless the character is a villain, like an outlaw or a gangster, the writers will add some kind of backstory to account for a scar. And that would definitely be the case for any major role.”

The manager had first contacted her while Nell was still in school, after admiring her performance as Anna Christie in a student production. Since then, Nell had landed her first television role, as the mother of a missing child, in an episode of Hill Street Blues, and she was about to start rehearsals for a part in a made-for-TV movie about the Holocaust.

She had barely begun. How could she possibly be finished.

As part of her physical training, and to improve her movement technique, she had been taking dance classes, both modern and jazz. It could so easily have happened that she’d gone to modern that day instead of jazz. Or what if she’d been sick and unable to take class at all? What if the class had been canceled, as it had been only the week before, when the teacher got stuck on a stalled train? What if the class had not been overcrowded that day? If Nell had not been standing at the front of the room when they were doing fouetté turns? If the teacher had not made them do fouetté turns? If the woman next to her had not lost her balance and whipped into Nell, who, herself always a woozy turner, had not had time to even put out a hand?

The impact had concussed her. When she came round, her face was so wet that she thought someone must have thrown water on her.

It could have been her eye. Everyone—every health-care worker, every aesthetician, her friends and relations, and far too many people she barely knew—all said the same thing: She could have lost an eye. And it was true. The evil shard of mirror that had slit open her cheek had narrowly missed her right eye. Only Coral refrained from offering this as solace. Steeped in the art of drama, she knew all about missed chances and lost dreams (if only … what if …), how contingency determines the course of our lives and lies at the core of every tragedy, true or invented.

It was not Nell’s eye that had been cut out of her. It was her heart.

An accident: There were people Nell would know for years who’d never get more out of her than that.

She often found herself judging a person from the way they reacted to the scar—and not, as she really didn’t need her big brother to tell her, always fairly. It wasn’t Sean who had to hear the same stupid things over and over: The scar was cool. The scar was sexy. It gave her edge. It set her apart. “You don’t look like everyone else” (as if everyone else looked like everyone else). Almost as bad were those who said nothing but whose expressions betrayed mild revulsion or intense curiosity. Worse yet, those who couldn’t control their curiosity: You can tell me, I promise not to repeat it. Worst of all: those who began to avoid her, among them two people whom she’d long regarded as good friends and who ended up ghosting her.

“It’s a gut fear,” said Sean. “Bad luck is contagious.”

About a year after the accident, Nell received a letter from the woman who’d crashed into her and whom Nell hadn’t seen, or thought much about, since. Meanwhile, according to her letter, the woman had thought endlessly about Nell. She knew that Nell had quit acting, for which the woman said she felt responsible. She herself had wanted to be a professional dancer, but she had felt so guilty about what had happened that she could never bring herself to return to class.

Nell knew exactly what the woman was asking of her, and hated herself for not being able to give it.

Nell’s family had a rule: No matter what bad thing happened to you, you did not sit around feeling sorry for yourself. (Why me? was a wicked question, implying that misfortune was perfectly acceptable so long as it befell the next person.)

Nell’s mother had her own business, a child-care agency that she had started as a way to counter empty-nest syndrome. Once her wound had healed, Nell agreed to help out in the office. Simple tasks: answering the phone, scheduling appointments for job interviews, matching clients with sitters and nannies.

Every now and then, when someone called in sick, Nell was dispatched as a substitute. She discovered that, unless they were particularly fussy or unruly, babies and young children were a comfort to be around. And, as long as no other grown-up was present, she didn’t mind if a child asked her about the scar, or wanted to touch it, as a surprising number of them did. And one bold little girl gave it a kiss: to make it better.

After several months subbing, Nell decided to become one of her mother’s regular sitters. Later, at the invitation of one of the agency’s clients, she took a job with a company that produced entertainment for children’s parties. At first she worked as one of the performers, for which her acting and dancing skills served her brilliantly, and masks or heavy theatrical makeup took care of the potentially distracting scar. When she got older and was no longer so agile or energetic (“I feel like I’m just one backflip away from disaster”), she stopped performing but stayed with the company, taking on more and more responsibility, until, at the director’s retirement, she was ready to replace him.

Nell’s plastic surgeon had told her that in time, the scar would fade, but only very slowly. And no matter how much time passed, he said, it would never be gone completely. “And be happy when you start getting wrinkles,” he said. “The more wrinkled you are, the less noticeable the scar will be.”

And the less will I give a fuck, she responded silently.

As for her heart: It grew back, also very slowly. And she didn’t need to be told that no matter how much time passed, it would never grow back completely.

For a few years in their late 20s, Nell and Coral had shared a large Manhattan apartment, a classic six (perfectly affordable then) on Morningside Drive. Decades later, one evening over a bottle of rosé, they made a list of the men who’d passed through that apartment.

Looking down the names, Coral gave a low whistle. “That’s a lot. But it can’t be all of them. I don’t think I remember all of them, do you?” Nell did not. She did remember what her mother used to say, that a woman who couldn’t remember every man she’d been to bed with was, by definition, a whore.

“Just think,” Coral said. “A lot of these guys, if we ran into them today, we wouldn’t even recognize them.” And she added, wistfully, “Nor they us.” Forgetting, for the moment, her friend’s distinguishing mark.

But could that really have been them? So brazen, so free, so unafraid? Among the men had been no lack of strangers, encountered at some bar, or in the park, or on the nearby university campus, and brought home for a night, or just a couple of hours. Even some of them had expressed disapproval. (“I mean, I’d never hurt you, but another guy?”) Crime was on the rise in the city, with their neighborhood bearing much of the worst.

The woman who lived across the hall left a copy of Looking for Mr. Goodbar outside Nell and Coral’s door. They already knew the true story: the murder committed sometime during the night of New Year’s Day, the city’s first sensational crime of 1973—TEACHER FOUND NUDE AND SLAIN—which had happened only about two miles away. A single woman about their age, who taught at a school for deaf children and was a regular at the bar across the street, where she and her killer had hooked up. Found bludgeoned and stabbed 14 times.

The woman across the hall, Shoshana, who was separated from her husband and whose only child was grown, taught women’s studies at Hunter College. She sometimes forgot that she was now cooking for one and made too much, then invited Nell and Coral to join her for dinner.

About the novel, Shoshana said she was torn. On the one hand, it was gratifying to see a frank portrayal of female desire: A woman, no less than a man, could want to have sex solely for the thrill of it, for the sensual pleasure—nothing to do with romance, let alone marriage or procreation. Also, a woman could love children and want to devote herself to teaching them, yet not want to have any of her own.

On the other hand, Shoshana said, the story was clearly a cautionary tale. A promiscuous woman—a woman who gets off on picking up men, the rougher the better, in dive bars and inviting them into her bed—is playing with fire and thus complicit in what harm may come to her. (As the police captain heading the investigation opined of the actual victim: A death like hers should be expected.) How else to read the book except as a tragedy ending in punishment for a woman’s rebellious, deviant behavior.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Shoshana said. “I get how you cherish the freedom my generation never had, and I envy you. I even admire your guts. But I also worry.”

Under a thin veneer, she said, drawing her eyebrows into one thick, dark line, men were animals.

“They can seem perfectly safe, decent, even chivalrous. But never underestimate the power of misogyny and how easy it is to trigger male violence.”

Her own Ezra, a pussycat if there ever was one: “All it took was a couple of drinks in him and one negative word out of me …”

When Coral pointed out that the situation was different because, unlike the schoolteacher, she and Nell did not live alone, Shoshana’s jaw dropped. “Ever hear of Richard Speck?” He who, one summer night in 1966, broke into a Chicago town house and stabbed or strangled to death eight women, all student nurses. A ninth woman had survived by hiding under the bed in the room into which he’d herded the women. He must have lost count as he returned again and again to fetch his next victims, one of whom he also raped.

Coral said, “I have never understood how nine healthy young women were not able to fight off this one man. Just the thought of them together in that room, for hours, waiting their turn—”

“He had a gun as well as a knife,” said Shoshana, “and he used the knife to cut a bed sheet into strips to bind them.”

“And presumably he had only two hands. So while he was busy making strips, and busy tying up this or that woman—”

“Perhaps,” Shoshana gently roared, “rather than blame the victims, we should see this as a perfect example of a man’s power to paralyze women through fear. Not to mention how the patriarchy conditions women to be submissive to men.”

In his frenzy, thought Nell, he must have appeared not like a man at all but rather like some non-human being.

Each wondered: What had the women talked about during all those hours? Or did they remain silent.

“Women together never remain silent,” asserted Coral.

“My guess is that they prayed,” said Shoshana. “I see them praying.”

Nell saw them sobbing.

Reading Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Nell discovered that the character based on the victim has a scar, from spine surgery for scoliosis that she’d undergone when she was a girl, and about which she is morbidly self-conscious. Studying her naked back in a mirror makes her shudder.

Nell was at the hospital the morning Coral was discharged, ready to accompany her and help her resettle back home. A group of patients and staff had gathered to see her off. “Lose a screw,” they told her—their way of saying “Break a leg.”

Something she would miss about the psych ward, Coral said, panicky as she was about rejoining the outside world: “It’s the only place where the inmates aren’t running the asylum.”

They stopped at a coffee bar across the street from Coral’s building, where the cappuccinos they ordered were served by a barista who painstakingly drew a heart while pouring the milk foam into their cups.

“I know it’s supposed to be a heart,” Coral said. “But I always see a scrotum.”

“Everything is a Rorschach test,” Nell deadpanned.

Coral had left her apartment in considerable disorder before going to the ER. In the kitchen: the empty fridge and full sink of the majorly depressed. She and Nell spent the day lazily cleaning and ordering groceries, taking so many breaks along the way that, by the time they said goodbye, it was almost dark.

Coral’s apartment was not far from where she and Nell used to live, although it was in a newer and much nicer building. Like most of the city’s other neighborhoods, this one had been redeveloped over the decades. But their old building remained, and several of the tenants, who’d bought their units in the ’80s when the building went co-op, still lived there, among them Shoshana. And so it wasn’t really such a coincidence that on this day the two women ran into each other.

Crossing Broadway from opposite directions, they arrived on the traffic island at the same time. Even a good, hard look would not have revealed to Nell who this gnomelike person was, thickly wrapped against the cold and wheeling a rattly shopping cart. But Shoshana knew Nell at a glance.

“You’ve still got that scar. Though it doesn’t look as bad as it did back then.” (No filter.)

There was a bench on the traffic island. Easing herself down, Shoshana beckoned to Nell. “Sit, please.” A command.

She was in her 90s now, Nell calculated. And clearly frail but, as it turned out, still living on her own.

“I have a daughter,” Shoshana said. “Ava. But I don’t see much of her.” They had had a rift over something that had happened when Ava was a girl. “I don’t mind telling you,” she said. “I don’t care who knows anymore.” Ava had woken up one night to find her father sitting on her bed, his hands under her nightgown.

“She’d only just reached puberty,” Shoshana said. “I didn’t know what to say to her. Right around then, she’d had surgery to correct wandering eye, and she was on some post-op medication. I told her that sometimes the medication could cause a person to have weird dreams, or even hallucinations.” And Ava had seemed to accept that explanation, Shoshana said. “I spoke to Ezra, of course, and, believe me, I gave him hell. I swore that if he ever did anything like that again, I’d report him, and he’d lose us both forever.”

When Ava didn’t bring up the incident again, Shoshana thought that she must be okay, and, after a while, that she might even have forgotten it.

“But about 10 years ago”—and about three years after Ezra died—“she confronted me.” Which, it now came out, she had been wanting to do forever. Telling her that it was all in her head—denying the reality of the harm that had been done to her—she would never forgive her mother for that, Ava said.

“I tried to explain that I’d done what I thought was best, that all I’d wanted was to protect her, and to save our family. What—for that one sick act of Ezra’s, the whole family should be destroyed? I just wanted us to move on—and we had! And though she kept talking about the harm, the harm, I honestly couldn’t see that. She did great in school. She’s a physician, for God’s sake. She has a wonderful husband. No kids, because she never wanted any. So, of course, she has no way of comprehending what it meant to be a mother in the dilemma I was in.”

Among Shoshana’s friends were several whom she’d first met through the women’s-liberation movement, and some of whom had been in the same consciousness-raising group—a group that later evolved into a book club that read only women writers. At their next meeting, Shoshana told the other women everything. “I thought they would understand.” Instead, the women were outraged. “Not one of them took my side. Their empathy was all for Ava. And for me, disgust.

“When I tried to defend myself, things got really ugly,” Shoshana said. After a few more meetings, it was suggested that she drop out of the group. “Apparently, my presence made everyone too uncomfortable. So they canceled me!” She laughed hideously. “Bah, who cares. Big feminists, these ladies. Big cunts. They could get down on their knees and beg me to come back, and I’d just spit on them. Oh, the things you want to believe in. Friendship! Family! Sisterhood! But make no mistake. You’re all alone in this world.”

Nell could think of nothing to say—she barely knew what to think—and Shoshana, who may or may not have been waiting for her to comment, lapsed into silence as well. After a few minutes, it was as if, mesmerized by the traffic droning alongside them, north one way, south the other, they had forgotten each other. The holidays were over, but, as every year, some stores had not yet gotten around to taking down their Christmas lights, which shone brightly but no longer festively in the gloaming. It was rush hour, and the sidewalks were dense with people, who walked quickly because of the cold. Nell remembered that the forecast for tomorrow was a chance of snow—but why get excited? The magical, gladdening snowfalls of childhood—the city almost never saw those anymore.

First Shoshana and then Nell began to shiver, and still they sat mutely on. What could break the spell? Surely the words existed: precise, truthful, though not unkind. But, for the life of her, Nell could not find them.

The President and the Pope

2026-04-18T11:19:33-04:00

Editor’s Note: Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss growing opposition to President Trump’s attacks on Iran and what winning a war with unclear objectives could like.

Donald Trump attacked Pope Leo XIV earlier this week for his comments about the war in Iran. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss the president’s remarks, and what they may signal about Trump’s messaging on the conflict.

Pope Leo has become more vocal about his concerns over what’s happening in Iran, Michael Scherer, a staff writer at The Atlantic, explained last night. But in response to Trump’s backlash, Leo has “talked in even more aggressive terms … about how military leaders should not use religion to justify their actions,” Scherer said.

“Catholic voters are a real swing group in this country,” Scherer continued—and yet, “Trump has not backed down; he says he won’t apologize.” The president, Scherer argued, is not “operating from a position of strength.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; Jonathan Lemire, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a co-host of Morning Joe on MS NOW; and Scherer.

Watch the full episode here.

How to Revive the Art of Hanging Out

2026-04-18T09:00:00-04:00

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

As the weather gets nicer, many of us feel the allure of just hanging out. We want to sit outside with friends and have a drink, go on long morning walks and catch up, enjoy the breezy night air. But where to go, and with whom? Modern life has become filled with “establishments that are either too expensive for the average American or apparently designed to disincentivize lingering,” Allie Conti wrote in 2022. “Think carefully curated faux dive bars that serve $15 beer-and-shot specials, or parks like New York’s High Line that are built to be moved through in a linear fashion.”

Conti makes the case for finding a “third place”—a no-frills spot for conversation and meeting new people that doesn’t require spending a lot of money. If you find it but don’t have anyone to go with, don’t be afraid to step in alone. Conti did, and was thrilled to stumble upon the perfect hangout, almost like it had been waiting for her.

On Hanging Out

Do Yourself a Favor and Go Find a ‘Third Place’

By Allie Conti

We need physical spaces for serendipitous, productivity-free conversation. (From 2022)

Read the article.

What Adults Forget About Friendship

By Rhaina Cohen

Just catching up can feel stale. Playing and wasting time together like kids do is how you make memories. (From 2023)

Read the article.

The Six Forces That Fuel Friendship

By Julie Beck

I’ve spent more than three years interviewing friends for “The Friendship Files.” Here’s what I’ve learned. (From 2022)

Read the article.

Still Curious?

The anti-social century: Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality, Derek Thompson wrote last year.
Five books about going out that are worth staying in for: Read these books when the dance floor beckons but the bones refuse, Andrew Holter writes.

Other Diversions

Courtesy of Debi R.

I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Debi R. from Sorrento, Florida, sent this image of a sunset at Siesta Key, Florida. “While I was taking pictures of the sunset, a flock of pelicans happened to fly by, whirling about and enjoying the cooling evening. A trio of seagulls is on the sand, reminding me of sentinels.”

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

— Isabel

A Beguiling Film About the Downsides of Pop Stardom

2026-04-18T08:00:00-04:00

Mother Mary begins with a straightforward problem: The titular character, a pop star played by Anne Hathaway, is looking for a showstopper of a dress. But the complications quickly stack up. Mary needs it made over the weekend; she needs it to serve as the centerpiece of her career relaunch after a long and mysterious absence from the public eye; most crucially, she needs it designed by her former collaborator Sam Anselm (played by Michaela Coel), from whom she’s been estranged for years. When Mary storms into Sam’s office with her demand, Sam calmly replies that it’s impossible, unless the singer is somehow able to stop time. Mary raises her hand, snaps her fingers in the air, and pronounces it done.

If only it were so simple—but Mary, the viewer understands, is someone who has spent most of her adulthood defying the laws of reality. How else to define the life of a superstar, someone who bends everyone else’s needs around her own in order to satisfy the millions of fans awaiting her next move? David Lowery’s beguiling new film tackles the majesty and toxicity of that kind of fame, pitting a now-needy Mary against Sam, a former friend who has renounced the stress of being in Mary’s orbit. That interplay is juicy enough, but Lowery stirs something supernatural into the mix, creating a story that is both deeply sincere and quite surreal.

Mother Mary is also, coincidentally, the second film in two weeks starring Coel that stages a clash of wills between two very different creative types. But whereas Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers has a small-scale approach to its depicted rivalry, Lowery’s film feels comparatively epic. The Christophers could probably be turned into a play with some minor adjustments, but Mother Mary could only be a movie. The film is a definite oddity and a worthwhile viewing experience, as its initial hostility settles into a sweet, if scary, story.

That hostility is exemplified mostly by Sam, whose force fields are deployed to maximum when the film begins. It’s not clear why Mary and Sam stopped collaborating, but it is obvious that Sam views Mary with both fear and disdain. Mary, who is first introduced performing onstage (the film’s thumping, gothy pop songs are by Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX, and FKA Twigs), comes across as wounded in private, nursing some inexplicable psychic injury. Much of the drama of Mother Mary comes from watching the wall between the two lead characters slowly crumble.

[Read: The delightful pretentiousness of Irma Vep]

The two performances contrast jarringly. Hathaway is trembly, tearful, and seemingly on the precipice of a total breakdown; Coel is icy, sarcastic, and sharply ruthless whenever Mary makes a plea for help. Lowery draws out great tension from the frosty, often uncomfortable dynamic and the newly upside-down nature of their relationship: Mary has clearly never had to beg Sam. Sam’s resentment of Mary’s imperious fame, and of the thanklessness of being an artist working behind the scenes in service of that fame, is understandable.

Just as the audience’s understanding of what drove the two apart in the first place becomes clearer, the plot starts to swerve into paranormal territory. This twist is where Mother Mary may lose some viewers; that said, it’s what really sold me on the movie. The psychological duel between Hathaway and Coel is interesting to behold, but I admire Lowery’s boldness in finding a cinematic way to portray their battle as something mystical and uncanny.

A Ghost Story, one of Lowery’s best efforts in an unorthodox and varied career, has the same sort of grounded magical realism achieved by lo-fi but unforgettable special effects. In that movie, the lead character dies and becomes a ghost; he spends the rest of the film with a sheet over his head, silently watching lives go by in the house where he lived. Mother Mary takes a story that could be ripped from the gossip pages and transmutes it into a spooky campfire tale. It’s the furthest thing from the kind of mainstream-pop fame Mary seems to represent, but that dissonance is what makes Lowery’s storytelling so unique.

Is Hurry the Great Enemy of Spiritual Life?

2026-04-18T08:00:00-04:00

John Mark Comer can be a hard man to find. He’s one of the most famous pastors in America right now, an author whose books have together sold more than 1 million copies, but he’s not the most reachable guy. He has a professional website but no contact page. He rarely travels. And as I reported this story, I began to learn his habits: Sending him a text early in the day was a wash, for instance, because he doesn’t check his phone until after morning prayer time. Once, when I reached out by email, I got an out-of-office response that he had set before Christmas explaining that he was observing “rhythms of rest” and asking that I try him again after his return in mid-January. Incoming messages sent in the meantime would be deleted.

I had first seen Comer in October, at a service for Church of the City New York, held inside a historic chapel in Lower Manhattan. Lo-fi beats played over the speakers as hundreds of people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, milled around and looked for seats in the crammed pews. When Comer took the stage, dressed in a matching ochre shirt-jacket and pants, a silver stud in his left ear, the crowd cheered and whooped.

He pulled up a slide. It was not the usual Bible story or psalm, but an excerpt from Anne Helen Petersen’s 2019 BuzzFeed essay “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.” Burnout is “not a temporary affliction,” it read. “It’s the millennial condition.” The Gen Z one, too, Comer added. “It’s like we just churn out tired, exhausted souls like a widget factory,” he said. “I don’t know if you feel this at all yet in your body or in your bones. If you don’t, it’s because you’re still young and you haven’t been in the city very long. But you will. Trust me, you will.”

Then he clicked over to a passage from the Gospel of Matthew:

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

“Most of us, as modern Americans,” Comer said, with a hand over his heart, “we read that line and there’s just this, like, deep, soul-level, Yes, I ache for that.” The guy in front of me took a picture of the slide with his phone. I noticed that his screen was set to gray scale. So was the screen of the person sitting next to me.

[Read: The tension that defines modern life]

Signs of Comer’s influence had been popping up in my life all year. One friend had started observing a 24-hour, phone-free Sabbath. My roommates began fasting several times a month. Then, in quick succession, three different people recommended that I read The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, Comer’s 2019 best seller.

In that book, Comer advances the theory that the great enemy of spiritual life is hurry. By this he means not simply busyness: Hurry is a gnawing sense that there is always more to do; a life spent hurtling oneself through each day; a schedule that makes little room for God. Technology has only exacerbated the problem. Comer calls the modern world “a virtual conspiracy against the interior life,” and urges readers to reclaim their focus from the algorithm and shift it toward God.

The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, he told me, is “a book about discipleship to Jesus masquerading as a self-help book.” Many of its suggestions are similar to what you might find in articles about digital detoxes. To break a cellphone addiction, he offers detailed advice on how to “turn your smartphone into a dumbphone”: delete social media and web browsers, turn off notifications, and set your screen to gray scale, to curb the appeal of the remaining candy-colored apps. His prose, too, is rendered in a pithy, how-to style that one of his critics has dubbed “The Ruthless Elimination of Paragraphs.”

Because of this approach, Comer can seem more like a wellness personality, such as Andrew Huberman, than a pastor. Like Huberman, Comer offers a concrete regimen that’s attractive to people who feel unmoored in contemporary society. Comer’s skeptics, when remarking on his rapid ascent, point to these similarities and wonder if what he’s offering is simply baptized wellness, a pop spirituality tailored to the tastes and frustrations of affluent young people. But sitting among his followers, I wondered: Could Comer’s practices actually bring them closer to God?

I met Comer the next day at a coffee shop in the East Village. Our cashier, who looked about 24, recognized Comer and was visibly starstruck. “Your books are so amazing,” he said. “I pass them around to all my friends.” Our lattes, he insisted, were on the house. Comer told me that the same thing had happened yesterday in SoHo, then he shrugged. “Coffee shops are like bars for Christians.”

Comer is Protestant, nondenominational, and roughly in the evangelical sphere, but his work is mostly about how technology—what he calls “the machine”—is spiritually deforming people. “Any version of discipleship to Jesus that doesn’t seriously take into account that,” he said, pointing at my phone, “is going to be wildly deficient.” Christian spirituality has always adapted to its time, Comer said. In trying to adapt the faith for the 21st century, he looks to the life of Jesus, who took a Sabbath, fasted, and spent regular time in silence and solitude. To Comer, these weren’t the rhythms of Jesus’s life just because he happened to live in Galilee in 30 C.E. They are spiritual practices that Christians in any era ought to emulate.

[Read: How to break a phone addiction]

Comer’s most recent book, 2024’s Practicing the Way, is a sort of how-to guide for Christlike living. Inspired in part by the monastic Order of Saint Benedict, Comer encourages readers to incorporate nine of Jesus’s habits into their lives: scripture reading, service, keeping the Sabbath, solitude, prayer, fasting, community, witness, and generosity. He calls his work “spiritual archaeology”—reintroducing modern believers to ancient Christian practices. “Everything we need, for the most part, is there in church history,” he said. “We’ve just lost a lot of it.”

Comer is hardly the first such archaeologist. Each generation of evangelical Christianity has three main celebrities, Russell Moore, the editor at large of Christianity Today, told me: the politics guy, the church-growth guy, and the personal-spirituality guy. In the 1980s, these roles were played, respectively, by Pat Robertson, Rick Warren, and Dallas Willard. Right now, Comer is the personal-spirituality guy (yes, it’s always a guy). Willard encouraged evangelicals to adopt virtually the same practices, such as fasting and taking a Sabbath, in 1988’s The Spirit of the Disciplines, and a subset of evangelicals has practiced them ever since. But Comer is making his case at a very different moment.

[Russell Moore: The American evangelical Church is in crisis. There’s only one way out.]

“A lot of American evangelical leadership right now is algorithmic,” Moore said, meaning that many pastors ratchet up their sermon rhetoric to find an audience on social media—usually by decrying homosexuality and abortion. Comer has written that God’s vision of marriage is between a man and a woman, and he’s argued against the idea of abortion as “reproductive justice.” But he doesn’t really preach about those issues, so the traditional Christian political camps aren’t sure what to make of him. He’s too conservative for the progressive Christians, and the conservative ones assume that he’s a tote-bag-carrying NPR liberal.

Comer doesn’t avoid the algorithm entirely. He has more than a quarter million followers on Instagram, where he mostly posts clips about the nine practices and shares quotes from Christian writers in minimalist fonts on earth-toned slides. He likens such social-media outreach to a street preacher at an Old West saloon: You say your piece about Jesus, hope you change some minds, and get out as quickly as you can.

In December, I went to Comer’s house for tea. About two and a half years ago, his family moved from Portland, Oregon, to Topanga Canyon, a mountain community outside Los Angeles known as a hub of West Coast hippiedom—think Deadheads, crystals, and astral-projection workshops. The road to Comer’s home is shaded by scrub oak and barely wide enough to accommodate a single car. We sat in the living room beside the Christmas tree, where presents lay wrapped in butcher paper. Comer was on cooking duty that night, and his wife unloaded the groceries. Their teenage son and daughter milled around the living room as Comer and I spoke. He apologized for the commotion.

Comer grew up in the ’80s in Silicon Valley; his parents were “first-generation Christians,” as he put it. His father, Phil, was a rock musician in the ’60s and ’70s who encountered God for the first time during one of Billy Graham’s crusades, eventually becoming the worship pastor at Los Gatos Christian Church, one of the Bay Area’s earliest evangelical megachurches. Comer took after his dad, joining the ministry and then co-founding a church in the suburbs of Portland with his parents in 2003, when he was 23 years old. Comer was the cool preacher, a West Coast urbanite just like his congregants; he understood why people might be cynical about religion. (When we met, I apologized for saying “damn” in front of a pastor. He reminded me that I was with a pastor from California.)

His church added about 1,000 congregants a year for seven years straight and soon outgrew its original building, coming to command multiple locations around the city. Comer became the head of what was essentially a ministry franchise, he reflected later—“the Starbucks model of ‘local’ church”—where he was trying to give thousands of people the same experience, whether they were in downtown Portland or the suburbs.

By about 2014, Comer was preaching six services on Sundays and heading home at 10 p.m., long after his kids were asleep. He didn’t have time for himself or his family. The Bible calls Christians to be patient, to love. But Comer was becoming more hurried and less loving. He realized, as he would later write, that “you can be a success as a pastor and a failure as an apprentice of Jesus.” In Millennial terms, he was suffering from burnout, badly.

Comer took a break from preaching and started reorganizing his life. He tried to emulate Christ’s daily actions, gradually incorporating them into his lifestyle both then and after he returned to pastoring, now at just one of the church’s locations, known as Bridgetown Church, in downtown Portland. He began fasting, eventually working up to two days a week, and observing the Sabbath by turning off his devices on Saturdays and spending his time resting and worshipping. He still needed to use email and social media for work, but he took these apps off his phone and checked them on his computer only once a week. And because Jesus lived simply, Comer pared down his closet to three outfits for the Oregon winter and two for the summer.

He worked less, spent more time with his wife, built more Star Wars Lego sets with his kids. “Even better,” he’d later write about that period, he could “feel God again.” Comer was convinced that his entire church would benefit from these practices. So, over the next five years, Bridgetown adopted the disciplines as a congregation, creating the blueprint for the nine practices that Comer later would lay out in Practicing the Way.

Running a huge church was hard on him; for years, he had wanted to write and to work one-on-one with people instead of preaching. Comer stepped down from Bridgetown in 2021 and now leads a nonprofit, also called Practicing the Way, which offers a free course that more than 21,000 church groups have adopted. He’s on the teaching staff at a church in Los Angeles, but mostly, Comer serves as the pastor of his own small church, which follows the Practicing the Way disciplines: The 30-person congregation fasts together, takes the Sabbath together, and, on Sundays, meets for a service in his living room. He has “built a quiet life,” his friend and successor at Bridgetown, Pastor Tyler Staton, told me. “Some might accuse him of being a touch boring.”

Comer told me that his average reader is 27, with at least some college education, living in a city. I’m 27, with a college degree, living in New York. I wondered whether I could adhere to his disciplines, and if so, how they might affect my faith. So, for the past six months, I’ve tried to structure my life around Practicing the Way’s nine core habits.

I’d wake up early to spend an hour alone at the window next to my fire escape, reading scripture and praying; this was a major upgrade from checking my phone first thing in the morning. Once a week, I’d observe the Sabbath—put away my screens, do some form of worship, revel in the fact that I could do nothing for a day and God would keep the universe going. As part of the service practice, I volunteered at a soup kitchen once a month and started carrying food with me when I walked around the city, in case I passed people who looked hungry.

I did chafe against some of the disciplines. Navigating modern life with no phone for a day was a mess: Without Google Maps, I’d get lost; without texting, every meetup with friends felt like the high-stakes rendezvous at the end of An Affair to Remember. And although sometimes I’d have a moment or two of transcendence on my weekly fasting day, for the most part, I was just hungry.

I am surprised, though, by how much these practices have become central to my life—not because I think I will be smote if I don’t do them, but because it turns out I like them. (Except for fasting. That one is still a bummer.) The new constraints on my time and attention forced me to truly consider what was important or not, and to prioritize those things. I spent less time on the parts of my day that brought me little joy (my phone) and more time with friends. My life is less hurried. I’m happier.

But my happiness is not the point, according to Comer. The purpose of a spiritual discipline is “not personal fulfillment. It’s not personal expression. It’s not emotional wellness. It’s not to de-stress,” he said. The point is to have your character transformed by your attunement to God. Then it will be easier to follow Jesus’s two greatest commandments: love God and love others. Fasting and discipline, you can get from Andrew Huberman; self-care, from Goop. But, Comer told me, “wellness culture is not talking about the Sermon on the Mount.”

That sermon—in which Jesus says people must love their enemies, must turn the other cheek, and cannot serve God and money—asks a lot from believers. Dallas Willard, Comer’s forebear, argued that a person who expects to live up to Jesus’s commands on the spur of the moment, without structuring their life at least somewhat around Jesus’s, is like “a baseball player who expects to excel in the game without adequate exercise of his body.” The theory is that, to become more Christlike, you have to find more ways to literally live like Christ.

Comer’s critics worry that by focusing so much on Jesus’s daily regimen, he risks recasting the son of God as the original lifestyle guru. “The (real) point of the Gospels—identifying who Jesus is, putting faith in him, and worshiping him—is put in the background, while living like Jesus is put in the foreground,” Kevin DeYoung, a theologian and Presbyterian pastor, wrote in a review of Practicing the Way.

According to DeYoung, this isn’t just a small matter of emphasis. “How effective can an approach to spiritual formation be when it almost completely misses the point of Jesus’s life and ministry?” he wrote. DeYoung told me that when the apostle Paul writes to the early Ephesian church about how to combat evil in their lives, “he doesn’t tell them, ‘Here are a set of rhythms and come up with 10 rules for your life.’ ” He tells them about the power of God.

DeYoung and others also criticize Comer for conforming his ministry too much to the lives of young, well-to-do urbanites—repackaging Christian monasticism for the TikTok generation. Given how inconvenient Comer’s disciplines can be, his skeptics think they’re achievable for yuppies in ways they may not be for others who have fewer resources or more demands on their time. DeYoung and his wife have a big family, and although Comer’s routine may sound nice, he told me, “we’re trying to just get through our week.”

[Jonathan Haidt: End the phone-based childhood now]

Comer counters that many churches are facing what he calls a “crisis of discipleship” because they don’t give congregants enough instruction on how to actually live as Christians. But he says that he’s not doctrinaire about the practices; he doesn’t expect everyone to do all of them, all of the time: Jesus himself rebelled against the rigidity of the Pharisees by healing people and harvesting grain on the Sabbath. The night I saw Comer preach in New York City, he stressed that the question shouldn’t be Did I fast this week? or Did I observe the Sabbath? Comer wants his followers to ask themselves instead, Am I becoming more gentle? and Am I becoming more humble?

I Googled myself yesterday, so I still have a ways to go. But I had never asked myself those sorts of questions before. As a Christian moving in mostly secular circles, I’d felt that simply believing in God was a big enough feat. My faith had never shaped the way I lived each day. I am proof that you can say you love God and offer very little of your life to him. The practices became a way to call my own bluff.

I’m a member of the precise audience Comer is writing for—those who believe in the Gospels but haven’t made much time for a spiritual life; those who no longer feel at home in an evangelical community that has itself been warped by the imperatives of social media; those who (if we’re honest) can sometimes feel embarrassed to be seen as religious in a secular world. He told me that he is speaking to people who “want to figure out how to stay true to the Christian story in a very hostile cultural environment” but feel they need a road map. Even if the temptations of contemporary America look nothing like the ones the early Christian ascetics lived in the desert to avoid, that doesn’t necessarily mean the road map itself is out-of-date. And if, in promoting that road map, Comer can sometimes seem like many secular wellness influencers, maybe it’s a sign that they, too, are responding to a collective crisis of faith, and don’t yet know it.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “Can Turning Off Your Phone Bring You Closer to God?”

The Film That Explains Contemporary America

2026-04-18T07:00:00-04:00

The best thing I watched in the past year was an epically long movie about retired militants, but it wasn’t One Battle After Another, the Oscar winner for Best Picture. It was The Sorrow and the Pity, a four-hour documentary from 1969 about life in Nazi-occupied France. Reviewing the film in The Atlantic in 1972, David Denby called it “one of the greatest documentaries ever made,” and that remains true. What makes the film so effective is not how it looks at the Germans, a spectral presence, but how it chronicles the way that many ordinary citizens simply lived their lives as if nothing had changed.

The director Marcel Ophuls, who died last year at 97, explores collaboration and resistance through the lens of a small city, Clermont-Ferrand. It’s about an hour from Vichy, where the Nazis established a puppet government headed by the World War I hero Philippe Pétain. Pétain’s former protégé Charles de Gaulle fled to Britain, coordinated resistance to the Nazis, and returned to lead a free France. The idea that the French almost uniformly opposed Nazism, with only a few bad apples collaborating, is foundational to France’s postwar identity. The problem, as Ophuls, a Franco-German Jew, demonstrates, is that this is a myth.

Ophuls (who later became a U.S. citizen) interviews leaders of the Resistance, former guerrillas, an ex-Nazi soldier, an anti-Vichy politician who escaped prison in Clermont-Ferrand, and a French aristocrat who joined the Waffen-SS. Most revealingly, he speaks with ordinary residents who represented a big swath of French society: They didn’t actively collaborate, but by declining to resist and going along with the government, they enabled the occupation. I have seen many examples, in the past decade, of journalists and historians using historical encounters with fascism and authoritarianism to comment on the present moment in the United States. Often, these parallels are forced; the situation in the U.S. is a far cry from Nazi-occupied Europe. But Ophuls’s film is illuminating precisely because its lessons about complicity apply to evil and corruption of all kinds. Although there’s no substitute for watching the whole film, four hours is a lot, so I have distilled a few important takeaways.

[Timothy W. Ryback: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days]

Old hatreds: When a society begins to break, the fault lines aren’t new. That is true in the U.S., where xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia are rampant, and where those in power have brought bigotry from the margins back to the fore. The same was true in France. “Anti-Semitism and anglophobia are feelings that are never hard to stir up in France. Even if reactions to such things are dormant or stifled, all it takes is one event” to make them come alive, Pierre Mendès France, a politician who served as prime minister in the 1950s, says in the film. The Vichy regime, like MAGA politicians and media personalities, simply had to find the right propaganda to agitate the population and, if not win them over, at least drive them away from other groups that might threaten the government.

False neutrality: An authoritarian government doesn’t require support from a huge portion of the population, but it does require acquiescence. Many Vichy-era French tried to just live their life as though the crimes going on around them were not their concern. Denis Rake, a former undercover British agent, recalls that working-class French were eager to help him and to shelter him, even at personal risk. Those who were wealthier preferred to stay out of it. “The bourgeoisie, I must say, were very neutral. They didn’t help me much,” he says. “The bourgeoisie was scared. They had more to lose.” And an aging Resistance fighter scoffs at some fellow Frenchmen who protest that they would have fought back but hadn’t known how to join the Resistance: “Somehow an old fool like me knew how, and they didn’t.”

Corrupting the state: The Nazi occupation required co-opting institutions that had previously been neutral and turning them into tools for repressing dissent. “If the Germans had only had their own Gestapo, they couldn’t have caused half the harm they did,” the former Communist leader Jacques Duclos says. “If the French police had not helped seek out the Communists, not to mention all the other patriots, the Germans would have made a stab in the dark, but they could never have hit as hard as they hit the French Resistance.” When President Trump tries to use the National Guard, Marine troops, and agents from Customs and Border Protection or ICE to stifle protests and achieve political goals, he risks the same corruption of institutions created to protect the populace.

[Timothy W. Ryback: Hitler used a bogus crisis of ‘public order’ to make himself dictator]

Who goes fascist: Two of the most important forces driving the American far right are negative polarization—politics motivated by a hatred of the opposing side—and disaffection of young men. Some of the most riveting footage in the film comes from Ophuls’s interview with Christian de La Mazière, a wealthy Frenchman who served in the Waffen-SS and was willing to speak frankly about it. He attributes his decisions to his family’s anti-communism and royalism. “For people like us, there really wasn’t any choice,” he says. “We couldn’t choose the Communists, so we had to choose the other revolutionary party, which was fascism.” But he also acknowledges that, as for some on the MAGA right today, the transgressiveness of Nazism appealed to him and his friends: “It was a way of rebelling against our families. The first images we saw of Nuremberg were like a new religion to us. We were astounded.”

Coalition of the willing: Restoring democracy required opponents of fascism—nationalists, republicans, and Communists—to work together despite serious misgivings about one another’s views. Purity tests had to wait until the war was over. In one affecting moment, Ophuls asks Resistance Colonel Raymond Sarton du Jonchay, “Are you a republican?” Sarton du Jonchay sighs, smiles wistfully, and admits, “Not really.” “You’re more of a monarchist?” “Yes, that’s right,” he says. (Unlike de La Mazière, here is a royalist who held on to his beliefs without succumbing to fascism.) Another Resistance fighter attributes his involvement not to any high-flown principles but to anger at Germans getting the best food and imposing curfews.

My colleague David Frum once wrote about the Trump era, “When this is all over, nobody will admit to ever having supported it.” I thought about that a lot while watching The Sorrow and the Pity, which showed how true it was in France. But the documentary is ambiguous on what a society should do about that. One old guerrilla says that he knows that informers continue to live around him. He cannot forget the betrayals, but he also doesn’t seek revenge. Ophuls makes a case that remembering what happened is essential, but he leaves for viewers to decide whether it’s more important to effect justice or to simply coexist with those who see the error of their ways, even if they do not admit it.

Ukraine Has Finally Given Up on Trump

2026-04-18T06:00:00-04:00

For more than a year after Donald Trump returned to the White House, Ukraine held out hope—at least publicly—of winning him over. Trump, who revealed his affection for Russia’s Vladimir Putin again and again, largely halted American military aid to Kyiv. He insulted Ukrainian leaders regularly, personally berating President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in February 2025. Nevertheless, Ukraine diligently took part in Trump’s peace negotiations, which were tilted to reward Putin’s invasion and turned out to be fruitless. Zelensky agreed to mineral deals that supposedly promised to enrich Americans. He even lavishly praised Trump himself. Despite Ukrainian leaders’ growing doubts, they calculated that speaking sweetly of the American president would do no harm and just might gain his favor.

But now Kyiv appears to have given up on the United States. It is aggressively seeking new diplomatic and military partners—for instance, by sharing its hard-won expertise in drone warfare with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates and forging arms-production agreements with Germany. Ukraine has sent drones to attack oil-export facilities near St. Petersburg, deep inside enemy territory, in defiance of what Zelensky called “signals” from unspecified “partners” to avoid striking Russian energy infrastructure.

Using language that would until recently have been unthinkable, Zelensky has indicated that he no longer views the United States as a reliable ally and, even more astonishingly, that all of Europe needs to start moving on from the transatlantic relationship.

In an effort to keep energy prices from spiking further amid the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, the Trump administration eased sanctions on Russian oil producers and sellers. In an interview last week with Italian radio, Zelensky criticized that decision. “In my view, Russia played the Americans again—played the president of the United States,” he said. (The sanctions waiver expired earlier this week.) Lest anyone outside Italy miss his point, Zelensky amplified an English-language version of his comments on X.

[Read: Don’t mess with the housewives of Ukraine]

Not long afterward, Zelensky argued that, if the U.S. is truly planning to withdraw from NATO, as Trump has threatened, European democracies need a whole new security architecture. To defend itself from Russia without American assistance, Zelensky suggested, the European Union would need the capabilities of the nonmembers Norway, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Ukraine.

He was drawing a sharp contrast with European leaders who, in the past 15 months, have desperately pretended that the United States remains committed to its traditional allies. In the process, some leaders have debased themselves, as NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte did when he referred to Trump as “Daddy.” (Rutte, who is Dutch, subsequently described the comment as a “language problem.”) No one wanted to admit that Trump’s return had made the U.S. a threat to European security.

Sergey Bobok / AFP / Getty
A Ukrainian operator uses an unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a metal detector to search for mines in the Kharkiv region.

Ukraine’s new willingness to speak honestly results from a combination of factors. The United States has reduced what little weaponry it was selling to Ukraine to conserve supplies for its war against Iran. Although at various points Trump has discussed putting harsh sanctions on Russia—perhaps to appease pro-Ukraine sentiments within his own party—he has lately not bothered with such gestures. Most discouraging for Ukrainians, the Trump administration has frequently pressured them to cede their territory and fellow citizens in the Donbas to Putin as part of a peace deal.

Those developments have persuaded Zelensky and others to speak the truth about America’s tightening alignment with Putin and to warn other European countries about the danger they now face.

The change in Ukraine’s public posture comes as the country’s military situation has improved, at least relative to its struggles last year. Relying overwhelmingly on their homegrown drone industry and military structure, Ukrainian forces have regained the initiative in many areas. In recent months, they have reportedly caused more casualties than Russia can replace—and have taken back more territory than Russia has seized. Along the front lines, Ukraine has strengthened and extended its so-called drone wall, which restricts the movement of flesh-and-blood Russian forces. Earlier this week, Kyiv claimed to have seized a Russian position and captured a number of Russian soldiers while exposing no Ukrainians at all, only unmanned aerial and ground vehicles.

[Read: America is now a rogue superpower]

Meanwhile, Ukrainians have gained greater confidence in launching drone strikes on mid- and long-range targets far behind the front lines, as the attack near St. Petersburg showed. Finally, Ukraine continues to bottle up Russian naval power in the Black Sea. Vessels even in the most protected Russian naval bases are no longer safe from Ukrainian attack.

For the past 15 months, U.S. officials and many Western analysts have been fixated on Ukrainian weakness. Trump infamously insisted last year that Ukrainians had “no cards” to play. But their ability to adapt even without U.S. aid has been startling. Now a global leader in drone development and manufacturing, Ukraine is reportedly planning to produce up to 7 million military unmanned aerial vehicles in 2026.

Ukrainians would much rather have the United States on their side than on Russia’s. From 2022 to 2024, Washington provided more military aid than anyone else to Ukraine. Although much of this aid was delivered slowly, and in some cases with maddening limits attached, it was crucial in helping Ukraine survive the first few years of the war. But Ukrainians do not believe that losing American support will inevitably lead to their defeat. They see how they have sustained the war effort, using their own resources and with the help of European partners, even as the U.S. has moved away. Writing the United States off as a friend might once have been a sign of doom for Ukraine. It isn’t anymore.

The FBI Director Is MIA

2026-04-17T18:20:00-04:00

On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log on to an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”

Patel oversees an agency that employs roughly 38,000 people, including many who are trained to investigate and verify information that can be presented under oath in a court of law. News of his emotional outburst ricocheted through the bureau, prompting chatter among officials and, in some corners of the building, expressions of relief. The White House fielded calls from the bureau and from members of Congress asking who was now in charge of the FBI.

It turned out that the answer was still Patel. He had not been fired. The access problem, two people familiar with the matter said, appears to have been a technical error, and it was quickly resolved. “It was all ultimately bullshit,” one FBI official told me.

But Patel, according to multiple current officials, as well as former officials who have stayed close to him, is deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy. He has good reasons to think so—including some having to do with what witnesses described to me as bouts of excessive drinking. My colleague Ashley Parker and I reported earlier this month that Patel was among the officials expected to be fired after Attorney General Pam Bondi’s ouster, on April 2. “We’re all just waiting for the word” that Patel is officially out of the top job, an FBI official told me this week, and a former official told my colleague Jonathan Lemire that Patel was “rightly paranoid.” Senior members of the Trump administration are already discussing who might replace him, according to an administration official and two people close to the White House who were familiar with the conversations.

In response to a detailed list of 19 questions, the White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told me in a statement that under Donald Trump and Patel, “crime across the country has plummeted to the lowest level in more than 100 years and many high profile criminals have been put behind bars. Director Patel remains a critical player on the Administration’s law and order team.” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told me in a statement, “Patel has accomplished more in 14 months than the previous administration did in four years. Anonymously sourced hit pieces do not constitute journalism.”

The FBI responded with a statement, attributed to Patel: “Print it, all false, I’ll see you in court—bring your checkbook.”

[Read: Trump’s purge may be just beginning]

The IT-lockout episode is emblematic of Patel’s tumultuous tenure as director of the FBI: He is erratic, suspicious of others, and prone to jumping to conclusions before he has necessary evidence, according to the more than two dozen people I interviewed about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers. Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and private conversations, they described Patel’s tenure as a management failure and his personal behavior as a national-security vulnerability.

They said that the problems with his conduct go well beyond what has been previously known, and include both conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences. His behavior has often alarmed officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice, even as he won support from the White House for his eager participation in Trump’s effort to turn federal law enforcement against the president’s perceived political enemies.

Several officials told me that Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of White House and other administration staff. He is also known to drink to excess at the Poodle Room, in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends. Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

Some of Patel’s colleagues at the FBI worry that his personal behavior has become a threat to public safety. An FBI director is expected to be available and focused on his job—especially when the nation is at war with a state sponsor of terrorism. Current and former officials told me that they have long worried about what would happen in the event of a domestic terrorist attack while Patel is in office, and they said that their apprehension has increased significantly in the weeks since Trump launched his military campaign against Iran. “That’s what keeps me up at night,” one official said.

Patel arrived at the FBI in early 2025 as a deeply polarizing figure. He had risen from being a public defender in Miami to a congressional aide and, ultimately, a national-security official during the first Trump administration. During Patel’s confirmation hearing to be FBI director, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, expressed optimism that Trump’s nominee would implement much-needed reforms. “He’s the right change agent for the FBI,” the senator said, adding that the bureau was in need of “a big shake-up.”

Under questioning from skeptical Democrats, Patel vowed that “there will be no retributive actions” and that he was not aware of any plans to punish FBI staff who had been part of investigations into Trump. Democrats were not the only ones who were leery of Patel, who had a record of embracing far-fetched conspiracy theories—including the notion that the FBI and its informants had helped instigate the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to sabotage the MAGA movement. Several Republicans wavered on whether to back him. But a pressure campaign by the White House and its allies ultimately prevailed, and Patel was confirmed by a vote of 51 to 49.

Inside the FBI, which had been wounded by a number of scandals, many hoped that Patel could give the bureau a fresh start. But even many of those who had been enthusiastic about his arrival have since been disappointed. Officials said that Patel has been an irregular presence at FBI headquarters and in field offices, and that he has compounded the agency’s existing bureaucratic bottlenecks. Several current and former officials told me that Patel is often away or unreachable, delaying time-sensitive decisions needed to advance investigations. On several occasions, an official told me, Patel’s delays resulted in normally unflappable agents “losing their shit.”

[Read: ‘It’s a five-alarm fire’]

Patel has also earned a reputation for acting impulsively during high-stakes investigations. He announced triumphantly on social media, for instance, that the FBI had “detained a person of interest” in the Brown University shooting in December. That person was soon released while agents continued to hunt for the killer.

Still, Patel has his fans. The president has been pleased by Patel’s efforts to purge agents who worked on January 6 cases and other probes into Trump. The president has also indicated that he is relatively unbothered by grumblings about Patel from within the FBI, according to White House and other administration officials. That’s not surprising: Patel views many of the bureau’s veterans as anti-Trump “deep state” agents who have worked against him and his followers. But Patel has, on occasion, earned the president’s ire. Trump has complained that the FBI director has seemed unprepared for TV appearances and that some high-profile investigations that he directed Patel to pursue have not moved quickly enough. These include inquiries into former Biden-administration officials and other political opponents.

Patel’s spotty attendance at the office and the eagerness with which he’s embraced the perks and travel that come with the job have also been sources of concern at the White House. Some in the West Wing have followed the headlines about Patel’s use of the FBI jet for personal matters—as well as the whispers about his love of partying—and said that they fear that Trump would react badly were he to focus on those storylines.

DOJ’s ethics handbook states that “an employee is prohibited from habitually using alcohol or other intoxicants to excess.” The department’s inspector general has warned that off-duty alcohol consumption can not only impair employees’ judgment; it can also make them vulnerable to exploitation or coercion by foreign adversaries.

Patel’s drinking is no secret. While on official travel to Italy in February, he was filmed chugging beer with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team following their gold-medal victory. The incident prompted the president—who does not drink and whose brother died following a long struggle with alcoholism—to call the FBI director to convey his unhappiness, according to two officials familiar with the call. But officials told me that Patel’s alcohol use goes far beyond the occasional beer. FBI officials and others in the administration have privately questioned whether alcohol played a role in the instances in which he shared inaccurate information about active law-enforcement investigations, including following the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Many of the people who spoke with me said that they have been afraid to reveal their concerns about Patel publicly or through traditional whistleblower channels, because he has been aggressive in cracking down on anyone he deems insufficiently loyal. At Patel’s direction, FBI employees are polygraphed in an effort to identify leakers. One former official told me that bureau employees have been asked in these sessions for opinions about Patel’s perceived “enemies,” as well as whether they have ever said anything disparaging about the director or the president.

Patel has held on to his job in part because of his commitment to using the federal government to target political or personal adversaries of the president. In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters, Patel designated a list of government officials past and present that he alleged were corrupt or disloyal. In an interview that year on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Patel said that he planned to “come after” members of the media for their 2020-election coverage with criminal or civil charges. Patel has led a purge of people who he believes are anti-Trump “conspirators” or “enemies” within the FBI. This has included firing people, opening internal investigations, and pressuring agents to quit when they pushed back—or were perceived to have pushed back—against Patel’s demands or questioned their legality.

Some at the FBI are concerned that Patel’s behavior has left the country more vulnerable. One former senior intelligence official told me that there is a lack of experience at FBI headquarters and that the turnover rate is high in field offices, because of both voluntary departures and Patel-ordered purges. The result is an FBI workforce being asked to accomplish more with fewer resources, and with less direction from the top. “The instinctive level of muscle memory or discernment that is necessary to identify and counter a terror attack is missing,” the former official said. A current official described people inside the bureau feeling besieged and disillusioned—or even angry.

[Read: ‘The Trust Has Been Absolutely Destroyed’]

Days before the United States launched its war with Iran, Patel fired members of a counterintelligence squad that was devoted, in part, to Iran. The director said in testimony before Congress that the agents had been let go because their work investigating Trump’s handling of classified documents had placed them in violation of the bureau’s ethics rules. But multiple officials told me that they were concerned that the firings had been rushed and would leave the U.S. shorthanded at a crucial moment.

Patel has publicly proclaimed that the FBI needs to demonstrate that it is “fierce,” and officials I spoke with said that he is fixated on that image in private as well. He recently expressed frustration with the look of FBI merchandise, complaining that it isn’t intimidating enough. Officials have grown accustomed to such behavior, and they have learned to roll their eyes at it. But they said that the absurdity masks real concerns about what Patel’s leadership has meant for an institution that the country relies on for national security and the safety of its citizens. “Part of me is glad he’s wasting his time on bullshit, because it’s less dangerous for rule of law, for the American public,” one official told me, “but it also means we don’t have a real functioning FBI director.”

Jonathan Lemire, Isabel Ruehl, and Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed reporting.

The Donald J. Trump Guide to Classic Fairy Tales

2026-04-17T16:12:00-04:00

Donald Trump, as even some of his fiercest admirers will admit, is not always a paragon of personal virtue. Although the president’s aides sometimes treat him like he is a toddler, as the political scientist Daniel Drezner has observed, he’s not an especially well-behaved one. Trump often acts in ways that would result in detention or other punishment for an elementary-school student: bald-faced dishonesty, name-calling, unkindness, refusal to share, and an inability to use an inside voice. Put another way, Trump sometimes seems as though he missed out on all of the lessons that children are supposed to learn from fables and fairy tales. (Meanwhile, his administration is seeking to evict some lessons about tolerance from classrooms.) But perhaps that’s uncharitable: Trump isn’t ignoring those fables; he’s just taking different lessons away from them than the familiar ones. Here’s a set of classic stories and their morals, reinterpreted for MAGA political correctness.

“The Three Billy Goats Gruff”

Plot: Three brother goats must cross a bridge guarded by a malicious troll who wants to eat them. Walking in succession, they are able to trick the greedy troll into waiting for the third and largest brother, who throws the troll into the water, killing him. With the troll slain, the bridge is free for all to pass.

Moral: The goats could have saved time and made money by threatening to destroy the bridge and kill the troll, then proposing a joint venture with the troll to split the proceeds paid by those wishing to cross the bridge.

The Rainbow Fish

Plot: A fish is covered in beautiful iridescent scales. The scales make him very proud, but they also make him isolated in society, because other fish envy them and resent the Rainbow Fish for not sharing. After giving a single scale away, he makes his first friend. Soon, he has given away all of the scales except for one, and has created a tight-knit social group with the other fish.

Moral: Friendships are fundamentally transactional.

“Goldilocks and the Three Bears”

Plot: A family of three bears, upon preparing their breakfast, find it too hot to eat and decide to take a walk. When they return, they discover that a girl named Goldilocks has sampled their breakfast, sat in (and broken one of) their chairs, and is now sleeping in one of their beds. Goldilocks, startled by the bears’ arrival, jumps out the window and is never heard from again.

Moral: People with golden hair are entitled to whatever they want and must not face consequences for their actions, especially if those are official acts.

“The Pied Piper of Hamelin”

Plot: The burghers of a small German town beset with a rat infestation hire a man with a magical pipe to lure the rodents away, which he does, coaxing them to their death in a nearby river. But when he comes to collect his reward, the local authorities refuse to pay him. In retaliation, the piper uses his instrument to lure away the town’s children, who are never seen again.

Moral: Always pay vendors what they are owed. Charismatic European leaders are a threat to the future of your society.

“The Ant and the Grasshopper”

Plot: An industrious ant spends all summer gathering food for the cold months, while a lazy grasshopper dances and sings. Once winter hits, the grasshopper is cold and hungry, and goes begging for food from the ant, who refuses to share any of its bounty, upbraiding the grasshopper for failing to plan.

Moral: Ants are small and weak, and the grasshopper is entitled to destroy them and take the food he needs. He might also consider levying tariffs.

“Hansel and Gretel”

Plot: Two young children are abandoned in the wilderness by their parents, who cannot afford to feed them. They come to the house of a witch, who locks them up and plans to cook and eat them. But when the witch tries to put Hansel into the oven, Gretel pushes her in instead, burning her to death. The children, freed, take the witch’s treasure and return home with a means to live.
Moral: Unaccompanied minors are a violent danger and must be expelled.

“Rumpelstiltskin”

Plot: After a foolish miller falsely asserts that his daughter can spin straw into gold, the king imprisons her and says that he will marry her if the story is true and kill her if it is not. Weeping in her cell, she is visited by a magical imp who offers to turn straw into gold for her in return for her firstborn. The ruse works, and she marries the king and bears a child. The imp returns for the baby, and the queen is bereft. The imp agrees to give up his claim if she can guess his name, the wildly implausible “Rumpelstiltskin.” Although she cannot guess the name, she overhears him saying it to himself and is able to keep her child.

Moral: If you’re in the business of turning things into gold, trying to keep a low profile is counterproductive. Just plaster your name all over everything.

“Cinderella”

Plot: A girl is mistreated by her stepsisters, who call her Cinderella. One day, an invitation comes for all young women to come to a ball so that the prince can choose a wife. The wicked stepsisters force Cinderella to stay home working, but her fairy godmother provides a magical gown and carriage—with a warning that she must leave by midnight, when she will revert to her normal appearance. At the ball, the prince is smitten but cannot get her name before she dashes out just before midnight, leaving behind one glass slipper. The following day, he canvasses the kingdom until he finds the woman who fits the slipper and marries her. They live happily ever after.

Moral: This story’s message is perplexing, riddled with mysteries and contradictions. Why would it matter whether the shoe fits, and why would a wealthy prince want to stay married to the same person forever? And how big was the prince’s ballroom anyway?

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

The Strait of Hormuz has reopened to commercial traffic, according to Iran’s foreign minister. However, President Trump said on social media that the U.S. blockade on Iranian ships will remain until “OUR TRANSACTION WITH IRAN IS 100% COMPLETE.”
A 10-day cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah has taken effect, prompting thousands of displaced families to return to southern Lebanon. Israeli forces remain in Lebanon and have warned residents not to return, and Hezbollah has not clearly endorsed the truce.
Testifying before House lawmakers, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that a new study finding no link between Tylenol use in pregnancy and autism is “garbage” and should be retracted.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Lena Dunham’s new memoir is a fascinating primary source of Hollywood in the 2010s, Boris Kachka writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

Iran Had a Doomsday Weapon All Along

By Alan Eyre

President Trump has said that he went to war to stop Iran from ever having a nuclear bomb. Unfortunately, the war he launched led Iran to discover that it already had an extremely effective doomsday weapon—one that promised the economic equivalent of mutual assured destruction. The Strait of Hormuz has always been vulnerable; the United States has always known that Iran might try to close it if attacked. But neither Washington nor Tehran imagined how easy it would be for Iran to do so, how hard it would be for the U.S. to reopen it, or how widely and rapidly the economic effects of a closed strait would fan out.

Read the full article.

Iran Had a Doomsday Weapon All Along

2026-04-17T14:26:31-04:00

President Trump has said that he went to war to stop Iran from ever having a nuclear bomb. Unfortunately, the war he launched led Iran to discover that it already had an extremely effective doomsday weapon—one that promised the economic equivalent of mutual assured destruction. The Strait of Hormuz has always been vulnerable; the United States has always known that Iran might try to close it if attacked. But neither Washington nor Tehran imagined how easy it would be for Iran to do so, how hard it would be for the U.S. to reopen it, or how widely and rapidly the economic effects of a closed strait would fan out.

Fossil fuels are to modern industrial civilization what air is to the lungs: About 80 percent of the global economy is powered by oil, coal, and natural gas. Much of this comes from the states along the Persian Gulf: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain. About 25 percent of global seaborne oil trade and 20 percent of global liquified natural gas transits the Strait of Hormuz, between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

[Amos Hochstein: The Hormuz war will end]

Iran has two navies—one that is part of its national armed services and one belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—but it is not a maritime power. Its naval forces were quickly decimated once the American military operation began. General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at an April 8 briefing that the U.S. had sunk more than 90 percent of Iran’s regular fleet, leaving 150 ships at the bottom of the ocean along with half of the IRGC navy’s small attack boats.

Nonetheless, Iran closed the strait at the beginning of the American military campaign, and it wasn’t all that hard to do. Even without much naval capacity, Iran could threaten passing ships with mines, missiles, and cheap Shahed-136 drones. By attacking a few merchant ships and laying a few mines, it created an atmosphere of such pervasive insecurity that global marine-insurance markets, risk-averse by nature, either stopped providing coverage for transiting vessels or gave prohibitive rates.

So the strait turns out to be easy to close. It is also difficult to reopen—and, more important, to keep open. Even if the U.S. were to invest the time and resources needed for this task, the effort would likely yield far more body bags than Trump is willing to meet at Dover Air Force Base. Iran could well retaliate not just against U.S. forces, but also against vital energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf countries. Naval convoys would be needed, which would require an international coalition, something Trump has proved uniquely unqualified to assemble.

The bitter reality is that getting maritime traffic through the strait back to the prewar level (about 130 vessels daily), and keeping it there, is essential to the global economy—and this can almost certainly not be done without Iran’s cooperation. The U.S. blockade of Iranian ports promises to inflict significant economic pain on Iran, but it doesn’t change this reality.

So why is Iran so keen on keeping the strait closed? The answer lies in strategic deterrence—the ability to prevent attacks on its homeland. Because its conventional military is underwhelming, the Islamic Republic has historically focused on asymmetric capabilities. The first pillar of Iran’s strategic deterrence was long understood to be its extensive armory of short- and medium-range missiles; the second was its proxy network, and the third was its advanced nuclear program, which gave it the capability to surge to nuclear-weapon-state status.

But events set in motion by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel—or, more precisely, Israel’s counterattack, culminating in the June 2025 12-day war with Iran—toppled these pillars. After that, Iran found itself largely defenseless and facing the threat of subsequent Israeli attacks should it seek to rebuild its deterrent potential. Once Operation Epic Fury began at the end of February, the Iranian regime, fighting for its life, sought a riskier, yet potentially more powerful form of deterrence: control of the Strait of Hormuz. Yes, shutting down traffic also hurts Iran, but the regime is gambling that it can endure more short-term pain than Trump can, especially in an election year.

In addition to weaponizing the strait, Iran is also seeking to monetize it, to generate funds for postwar reconstruction. Iran has announced a toll on all friendly ships passing through, payable in either cryptocurrency or Chinese yuan. Unfriendly ships (such as those belonging to the U.S. or Israel) will not be allowed to transit. Iran has claimed that such tolling is the new normal and will continue after the war is over, international law be damned.

The Gulf countries find such an arrangement unacceptable. It not only decreases their profits, but also requires them to give money to an enemy that just attacked them. Even China, which has significant influence over Iran, could wind up opposing the toll, because it depends heavily on commodities that pass through the strait. As for Trump, who knows? At one point he said that the U.S. could jointly administer a toll system with Iran. What matters most to him is that traffic through the waterway resumes as soon as possible, so as to minimize economic pain ahead of the November midterms.

But even if the strait were to fully reopen, months would likely pass before the economic damage would lessen and shipping flows would resume. On April 14, the International Monetary Fund warned that the extent of the economic shock from the closed strait, including inflation and reduced growth, “will depend on the conflict’s duration and scale—and how quickly energy production and shipment normalize once hostilities end.” The stoppage of oil and gas shipments is bad in itself; it also affects the flow of goods such as nitrogen fertilizer (essential for growing crops), sulfur, and helium (essential for the semiconductor and medical sectors).

[Missy Ryan: Trump ditched hearts and minds in the Iran war]

The history of war, the scholar Norman Ricklefs has noted, “is also the history of unintended consequences.” This war’s supposed proximate cause was Iran’s nuclear program. Trump conjured improbable images of Iranian nukes raining down on American cities. Then, like something out of Jorge Luis Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths, the conflict sent us all lurching in a new, darker, and more ominous direction.

Tehran might well modulate its grip on the strait as part of the negotiations. Indeed, today Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced that the strait will be “completely open for commercial ships for the remainder of the ceasefire.” But Iran’s performance has fallen short of its pronouncements before. According to hard-line Iranian media, Iran is now routing traffic to a new transit lane through Iran’s territorial waters (formerly the route went through Omani waters). Using this passage will require coordination with the IRGC Navy.

Regardless of whether Iran allows maritime traffic to increase during negotiations, the reality is that Iran continues to “hold the key to the strait,” as the Iran expert Danny Citrinowicz, formerly of Israeli military intelligence, put it on X. Tehran may have relaxed its choke hold on this vital waterway, but the Islamic Republic, battered and seeking a way to stave off future aggression, is unlikely to release it for the foreseeable future.

One of These Trump Threats Is Not Like the Others

2026-04-17T13:59:46-04:00

Twelve hours after Donald Trump warned that a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”—after he’d previously threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages”—the president agreed to a temporary cease-fire. Since then, initial peace negotiations failed and Trump responded with a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz; a new round of talks may begin soon.

But what to do with his everyone in Iran is going to die comments last week? Because they were designed to pressure Iran to come to the table, and because the promised carnage did not materialize, many observers simply moved on, explaining away Trump’s threats as a ham-fisted negotiation tactic, some kind of 5-D chess, or another example of the president’s propensity to “TACO” (Trump Always Chickens Out).

Former military attorneys, human-rights lawyers, and genocide scholars told us that moving on from Trump’s remarks would be unwise. The president’s words, they believe, will have a lasting impact—not least because they appear to violate the rules governing warfare that the United States has supported since the aftermath of World War II. “There’s so much going on in the world, but this is the kind of issue that I really think deserves some sustained attention,” Rachel VanLandingham, who served as the chief of international law at U.S. Central Command from 2006 to 2010, told us.

Trump’s Truth Social post threatening to erase a “whole civilization,” scholars told us, was itself a violation of Article II, Section 4 of the United Nations Charter, which prohibits “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity” of other nations. The American law-of-war manual—a binding document for members of the U.S. military that clarifies treaty and legal obligations—also prohibits “threats of violence” against a civilian population, especially if the threats’ primary objective is to “spread terror.” Nearly identical language appears in Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, which was adopted in 1977.

The post was “basically an announcement that I’m about to commit war crimes at the very least—and possibly crimes against humanity and, in a worst-case scenario, genocide,” Leila Sadat, a professor of international criminal law at Washington University Law School, told us.

Perhaps as important, that post and others represented a sharp departure from how commanders in chief speak during wartime, when they ordinarily treat matters of life and death with solemnity. Trump is not the first American president to threaten mass bloodshed during war. Hours after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, President Harry Truman said that if Japan refuses to “accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.” President Richard Nixon, in recorded conversations with Henry Kissinger, said during the Vietnam War, “I’d finish off the goddamn place” and threatened to deploy “even the nuclear weapon if necessary.”

Still, those statements were made more than 50 years ago, and they don’t negate the point that the language presidents use in official communications matters. “Presidents have always taken great care to make it clear that the United States was at war with enemy governments, not enemy peoples,” Devin Pendas, a Boston College historian who studies genocide and war-crimes trials, told us. Nixon was speaking in private. And Truman’s threat came after he had decided to seek an end to six years of global war by using weapons more powerful than anything seen before. Trump’s threat, nearly six weeks into a war that he started, was of a different order and shouldn’t be dismissed as just a “Trump-being-Trump moment,” Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, told us. “That’s a no-go zone.”

One might argue that tone and word choice matter little compared with actions: the killing of civilians by the U.S. military in conflicts, including in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, prompted their own claims, and sometimes convictions, of war crimes. But what the commander in chief says matters. The Iran war stands apart because the president and the defense secretary are “saying things that seem to either authorize war crimes or seem to suggest that it would be okay if the U.S. did it, because no one’s going to stop us,” Daniel Maurer, a former Army judge advocate who is now a law professor at Ohio Northern University, told us. “That has never happened before.”

At least not since nearly 200 nations ratified or endorsed strict rules governing armed conflict, including the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Hague Conventions, the Nuremberg Principles, and the United Nations Charter. The U.S. was the principal supporter of that postwar order—and now its president’s words gnaw away at the order’s foundations.

“When he talks about the destruction of a civilization, is it just hyperbole?” Gabor Rona, a professor of international human rights at Cardozo School of Law, said to us. “Or are we really at risk of the U.S. committing the gravest mass of war crimes since the Second World War?”

This is hardly the first time Trump has demonstrated an eagerness to ignore the laws and norms of conflict. The 12-day war last June, when the U.S. joined Israel in attacking Iran’s nuclear and missile sites, was launched without the usual domestic or international legal sanction. Boat strikes in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific that have killed more than 175 people since September are intended to target suspected drug smugglers, according to the Pentagon, but some European officials have condemned the strikes for disregarding international law. The military operation that ousted the Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro in early January violated the UN Charter, several lawyers told us. (“I don’t need international law,” Trump told The New York Times shortly after.) Human-rights experts at the United Nations have denounced as illegal the U.S. fuel embargo on Cuba.

The launch of the war against Iran in late February may have violated terms of the UN Charter that prohibit military aggression against a sovereign state absent UN authorization or an imminent threat. The White House has claimed that Iran posed such a threat, but a U.S. intelligence assessment cast doubt on that assertion.

[Read: The Pentagon cut its civilian safeguards before the Iran war]

Within hours of the start of the war, the U.S. struck a school, killing more than 170 people, most of them children. A preliminary Pentagon investigation found that the strike may have been the result of errant targeting.

It is nearly impossible to assess whether the strike might constitute a war crime without knowing the chain of decision making, which would help determine whether the order was an honest mistake or the result of criminally reckless behavior, former military lawyers told us. Maurer, who has taught constitutional and criminal law at West Point, said that he has faith that U.S. service members would fulfill their legal obligations and, if necessary, refuse an unlawful order. “In the fog and friction of battle, mistakes get made; that happens—but I don’t see purposeful, deliberate actions that would constitute war crimes being a systemic concern,” he said. He worries, however, about the “dangerous signal” to troops from the top that the laws of war they were taught don’t matter. Over time, he told us, that could weaken service members’ “sense of duty.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has shown disdain for what he has called “stupid rules of engagement” and promised in a briefing on March 13 to give “no quarter” to the enemy. International law expressly prohibits declarations that “no quarter will be given.” This prohibition is also in the Department of Defense’s law-of-war manual.

Since the start of the war, Trump has repeatedly threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants. The Geneva Conventions and international law generally prohibit targeting civilian infrastructure, though there are exceptions. “If we have really strong intelligence indicating that an entire convoy of tanks is going to roll across a bridge at midnight tonight, we don’t necessarily have to wait until midnight, when the tanks are actually crossing it, to attack it,” Kevin Jon Heller, a professor of international law and security at the University of Copenhagen, told us. “We can probably attack it now.” But, he and others cautioned, such cases require meticulous fact assessments. “You’re not allowed to say, Oh, at some point in the future, this bridge might be used to ferry tanks or soldiers, so I’m going to blow it up now. That’s not how it works,” he said.

Three overarching principles of international humanitarian law must be factored in before a country can strike a primarily civilian object, such as a bridge or a power plant: the principle of distinction (you cannot deliberately target civilians or civilian objects), the principle of proportionality (you must weigh the military advantage to be gained against the harm to civilians, and that harm cannot be excessive), and the principle of precautions (you must take constant care to spare civilians from the ravages of war).

Those principles have come into play as Pentagon war planners have expanded possible target lists to include energy sites they describe as “dual use,” or used by both civilians and the military. The legality of launching a war is a separate issue from the legality of individual strikes—but the former informs the latter. If the Iran war violated international law from its inception, any further action can be thought of as “a force multiplier of the original sin,” David Scheffer, a senior fellow at Council on Foreign Relations, told us.

Hegseth has also dismantled the Pentagon office responsible for preventing civilian casualties. And he has fired and marginalized judge advocates general, the officials at the Pentagon who impose legal guardrails. Those actions could suggest to war-crimes investigators that U.S. officials failed to act responsibly and lawfully when selecting targets and executing strikes in the Iran war, scholars told us. Trump’s and Hegseth’s statements, meanwhile, have arguably created a record of mens rea—a reckless disregard for civilian life.

[Read: The Pentagon’s lawyers are now under review]

“There are questions in the law about whether criminal recklessness” rather than intent “is enough to charge someone with war crimes,” Beth Van Schaack, who was an adviser at the State Department on war-crimes issues during the Biden administration, told us. “But at a certain point, the recklessness absolutely becomes a violation of the laws of war.” The U.S. has frequently condemned Russian strikes on civilian infrastructure, including attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities, schools, and cultural sites. “We condemned them as war crimes,” Van Schaack said. “And now suddenly we’re committing the exact same conduct.” Iran, too, has attacked civilian infrastructure, including a major natural-gas facility in Qatar and oil-production equipment in Kuwait, prompting accusations of war crimes.

The tenor of top U.S. officials’ statements has left Steven Schooner, a former Army lawyer who previously taught judge advocates, feeling that “this administration isn’t really entitled to the benefit of the doubt on issues related to law of war,” he told us.

The White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told us in an email that the Iranian regime had “committed egregious human rights abuses against its own citizens for 47 years, murdered tens of thousands of protestors in January, and indiscriminately targeted civilians across the region in order to cause as much death as possible throughout this conflict.” (The Pentagon referred our request for comment to the White House.)

Finding evidence of potential war crimes is one thing; assigning accountability is another. Experts in the laws of armed conflict told us that it is extremely unlikely that an American president would be held legally responsible, especially given that the Supreme Court recently ruled that a former president has at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all official acts. Neither the U.S. nor Iran is party to the International Criminal Court, which adjudicates possible war crimes. (Since returning to office, Trump has imposed sanctions on at least 11 ICC officials.)

But hypothetical routes exist for members of the military, and possibly its leadership, to be charged through the military or the civilian justice system, or in foreign courts. Signatories of the Geneva Conventions (which include the U.S.) have “universal jurisdiction” over grave treaty breaches, giving nations the right to bring charges against other countries’ citizens regardless of where an alleged crime was committed. Some Israeli soldiers traveling abroad have been investigated for alleged war crimes in Gaza: Belgium arrested and interrogated two Israeli soldiers last summer for such alleged crimes; another Israeli soldier fled Brazil after a federal judge there ordered a similar Gaza-related probe. If U.S. service members were accused of war crimes by any other nation, “if I was their lawyer, I’d tell them they shouldn’t travel,” Oona Hathaway, an international-law professor at Yale Law School, told us. “They certainly shouldn’t travel to a country that has a universal-jurisdiction statute and that might potentially bring charges against them.”

[Read: Trump ditched hearts and minds in the Iran war]

Trump and Hegseth’s conduct of the war may ultimately be subject to the verdict of public opinion rather than to judicial review. What is more likely than legal accountability, Hathaway said, is that their crimes will be recorded in the history books for future generations to judge.

Breaking Free From Alex Jones

2026-04-17T13:00:00-04:00

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel speaks with Josh Owens, a videographer and the author of a memoir about his years working for Infowars, the media company of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Owens traces his journey from a film-school student who stumbled onto Jones’s radio show to an insider who spent four years filming, editing, and traveling for the organization. Owens describes how Jones’s conspiracy machine works, as well as how his own moral compass was scrambled by Jones’s manipulative management. The conversation explores radicalization, the conspiratorial media ecosystem Jones helped create, and how Owens was able to pull himself out.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Josh Owens: Jones was not sitting there telling us to lie about things. He was making us question our own minds. After years in that environment, you stop even believing the fire alarms that are going off in your brain saying, like, This is insane. This is crazy. This is wrong. And you think, Maybe there’s something else that I’m not seeing.

[Music]

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we talk about the twisted world of Alex Jones.

One day in the spring of 2017, outside of a courtroom in Austin, Texas, I got a tip about a potential source. I was in Texas writing a profile of Alex Jones: famous conspiracist and the founder of Infowars. I’d spent the last few weeks running around Austin, where Jones has lived his entire career. He started on public-access TV and, over time, he slowly worked his way into national headlines.

I’d met a number of former Infowars employees, but I was looking for an insider who could help me understand how Jones’s media empire worked. How Jones had gone from a fringe figure ranting about 9/11 being an inside job—and a person most of society ignored or mocked—to something much closer to the mainstream of the right wing.

He’d been preaching his anti-establishment, paranoid worldview for eons. But his business had evolved. He made a ton of money selling supplements with names like “Super Male Vitality Serum,” “Brain Force Plus,” and “Caveman.” And Jones’s profile began to rise around the 2016 presidential election. At that moment, Jones seemed like he was everywhere—Infowars’s Hillary for Prison T-shirts were fixtures at Trump rallies. Jones even managed to book an interview with then–presidential candidate Donald Trump himself. It seemed from the outside like Jones and his media empire could have a noticeable cultural impact on the 2016 election.

And so the question was: Had he ushered in this moment of brain-melting conspiracism and extremism? Or was he just good at profiting from it? This source, I was told, could help me find out.

I only got the bare outlines of his story, but: He’d been a key figure in the company, but had grown disillusioned. Had a change of heart. And then got out. I tried for weeks to reach him through a different source, but he wasn’t ready to talk yet. And then, almost a year later, he DM’d me out of the blue.

His name was Josh Owens. He was a 20-something video producer, and he’d won a contest to get hired to make videos for Jones and Infowars.

Over the course of a few hours, he told me his entire story. All of the things he’d done and seen working with Jones. His deep sense of regret for playing a part in spreading lies and hate. Things like Jones’s claims that the Sandy Hook shooting was a “false flag” operation. That the grieving families were playing the role of actors in an elaborate government plot.

Owens told me he wasn’t looking for any kind of absolution. He just wanted people to understand how the lies got made.

And so, the conversation stayed with me for months, in part because Owens appeared to have done something pretty remarkable in today’s landscape. Through the help of others, he seemed to have been genuinely de-radicalized.

Owens went public with his story in 2019, and we’ve stayed in touch since then. When Jones was sued in 2018 by the Sandy Hook families for defamation, Owens testified in the case.

And over the course of the last few years, Owens has been writing a memoir of his time at Infowars. It’s titled The Madness of Believing, and it’s full of staggering details about Jones, the erratic boss whose rantings off camera were as disturbing as the ones that got recorded. And for those trying to understand how the conspiracy machine that helps power fear and division in this country works, you’ll find it in this book.

But Owens’s story is also about his personal evolution. It tracks how he fell down the Alex Jones rabbit hole. But, more importantly, it documents how he managed to get out.

There are many important conversations out there—about radicalization and political extremism. But there are far fewer conversations though about de-radicalization. What that looks like and what, if anything, we can learn from people who’ve altered course.

And so I sat down with Owens to try to have that conversation.

[Music]

Warzel: Josh Owens, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

Owens: Thank you so much for having me.

Warzel: So, let’s start at the beginning. Tell me about the first time that you discovered Alex Jones.

Owens: Yeah, the first time was in 2008. It had absolutely nothing to do with politics. It had to do with movies. I was watching Dr. Strangelove with a friend, and there’s a scene where Sterling Hayden goes on this diatribe about water fluoridation.

Jack D. Ripper (from the movie Dr. Strangelove): Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we’ve ever had to face?

So my friend stopped the movie, and he asked me if I’d ever heard of Alex Jones. I had no idea who Alex Jones was. So he ran to the bathroom, came back with a tube of toothpaste, and he showed me the warning label on the toothpaste. It said, you know: “Don’t swallow more than a pea-sized amount. If you do, contact poison control.” And so he asked, he was like, “Well, why is it that if we swallow a pea-sized amount, it’s dangerous, but we don’t know how much we’re consuming in the water supply?” I didn’t know what fluoride was. I had no idea what he was talking about. The only thing I knew was that I liked Dr. Strangelove, and I’d seen it before. That was it.

So, he said that Jones had had the answers for that. So that night I looked him up. There was a documentary I found called Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove. Which was this group of powerful men who got together once a year, and Jones infiltrated it with the writer Jon Ronson. And it was like this mashup of Blair Witch and Eyes Wide Shut, and it just sort of sucked me in. That was the beginning.

Warzel: What did engaging with Jones’s work do for you? Like, what was the experience of engaging in that worldview in this young version of yourself?

Owens: Yeah. Well first off, I mean, it was just exciting. It was terrifying, but also exciting. I was just coming out of high school. I just was directionless. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know who I was. I was a young kid. And my friends and I, sort of the way we communicated was through movies. Like, that was just sort of the medium. It was almost like a religion, honestly. It was like a language we used to communicate with one another. And Jones sort of created the world in those terms. He crafted this cinematic reality, but it wasn’t just cinematic. He literally used films to describe the world—not as like parables of the world, literally that they were pulling the curtain back. These directors were pulling the curtain back on reality. Sidney Lumet’s Network, John Carpenter’s They Live. You know, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, every Stanley Kubrick movie. And so it was, again, it was terrifying, but it, that language just sort of clicked in my head.

Warzel: What role does it all play for you in your life, for those years in between being a casual observer and going to work for them?

Owens: Yeah, well, that’s exactly how it started out. Just a casual listener of his show. I think that’s mostly how I consumed his program, was through the radio. I at the time was a janitor at a church. And so I had a lot of empty mental space to just have that guy in my ear.

And so it was years of that, off and on. I wasn’t constantly listening to him. I wouldn’t even say I got sucked into his world immediately. It was just like, Wow, this is fascinating. You tune in every now and then when you have time. The normalization process of the ideas were pretty slow to take hold, until I got physically in that world.

Warzel: The amount of time that he spent in your ears—was that essentially the reason why you wanted to go work for him?

Owens: Well, so yes. I think that was part of the reason. Another part of the reason, I think, was purpose. I grew up in an evangelical community. And, you know, that was what I was raised on. And at the exact time that I was introduced to Jones, I was stepping away from that world. Jones, in a lot of ways, sort of lines up to the televangelist way of doing things. It’s all about “everything is motivated by fear.” Everything is motivated by, there is this intense need to accomplish this thing in order to quite literally save the world. That’s the narrative that he spins.

So yeah, I mean, him being in my ear constantly was a big part of that. But also just the ideology, and the grandness of the ideology, was such an attractive concept. And I think that’s part of the reason that I decided to go there. Another part of the reason was I was trying a lot of stuff at the time. I interned a day at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta.

Warzel: Wow.

Owens: I was shooting a bunch of these commercial ideas. And at the same time, Jones offered me a job. I got offered a job at Tyler Perry Studios. And I thought, What a—

Warzel: —That’s a real sliding-doors situation.

Owens: I know; I know. I think about it often. Where would I be? But the thing that sort of made me choose that … I don’t think I’ve ever said that before, but the thing that made me choose that world was the purpose. Like maybe it could serve something bigger than myself. Maybe it could do something. Maybe, you know, I think at the time I was naively well-meaning.

Warzel: Now when people talk about Alex Jones, he’s so completely intertwined in the political, right-wing movement. I’m wondering for you, did it have any political valence at all? Because Jones was so different, in a way, back then—in terms of like being just totally on one side of the political spectrum, railing against one party only.

Owens: Yeah, it’s weird. Because in a lot of ways, he was different—and in a lot of ways those signs were there. You just had to know what to look at. You know, post 9-11, Jones was railing against the [George W.] Bush presidency. So it made this idea, like, Oh, maybe he’s going after these right-wing ideas. I think that’s why someone like Richard Linklater put him in his movies, because he was just like this weird guy in Austin who had a public-access show, and he wasn’t sitting around talking about literally how much he despises Muslims and immigrants. And like, just the narratives were different. I think the seeds were there, because I’ve gone back and listened to some of those shows, and I think there was always a piece of it.

My introduction to Jones wasn’t political, because I didn’t know the first thing about politics. I wasn’t interested in it beforehand. So, I mean, that wasn’t what interested me about Jones. But it came pretty quickly. You can’t listen to his show … I mean, it is, at the end of the day, a political show. That’s sort of like the subject matter. That’s the basis of the ideology. That’s what he’s talking about. He just weaves in all these other, like, grand conspiracies and movies and his own personality. And so, initially, no—it wasn’t politics. And when I’m trying to look back and understand how did I individually, because I try not to be prescriptive with this stuff, I try not to say like, “Well, I got pulled in that way.” So everyone does. I think there are a hundred different ways that people get pulled into Jones’s world. And I think it’s changed drastically, too. It’s much more incendiary. But the politics came, and I think they came pretty quickly.

But you know, the politics were there. But then, there’s Jones telling you to go through grocery stores and look at the ingredients list and, you know, aspartame in your drink. So it’s just like, it’s everything. But yeah, I mean, it’s under that umbrella.

Warzel: Tell me: How does Infowars work? Like, help us all understand the operation, the size, the scope, and just how it worked when you were there, especially early on.

Owens: Yeah; when I was there, I sort of entered in that liminal state where Jones was still broadcasting out of a studio that was essentially the size of a closet. Jones’s intro to the show made it seem like it was going to be this sort of nefarious, underground, hidden … you know, he was the tip of the spear in Austin, Texas. And in a lot of ways, it just looked like the places I was in film school. It was like this unkempt college media department. There was just junk everywhere. It was pretty messy. It was cave-like. It was dark. It was freezing cold. But at the time he had, I mean, I would say he had a significant staff. He had multiple writers. There were actually two buildings. But in the production building that I was in, there was his radio show, which is where he had producers for the show. Writers next to that studio.

Then there was a warehouse for all of his products in the middle. And then, on the other end, it was the production side. So Jones had just hired multiple reporters from the contest that I had entered. But the way that the operation ran was, Jones was at the top. And he basically told everyone what to do at all times.

And he was a micromanager, ultimate micromanager. And so, the show had to operate—his radio show—but everything else was pretty much up in the air. As to: What was his mood of the day? What did he want to talk about? What did he want to cover? What reports did he want to put out? And so, a lot of that was just waiting with bated breath in the early morning before he got there. And then he sort of set the tone for the day.

Warzel: And so, you describe him to me just now as a micromanager, but also, in the book, as just an extremely volatile and manipulative presence. Can you tell me how he worked as a boss in that way?

Owens: Yeah, yes. Well, so the volatility—or like his mercurial personality—is sort of, I think, the essence of how he operates. And how he, you know, keeps the people around him is that sometimes Jones could be kind of what you see on his show: this raging lunatic who is screaming about literal demons running the world. And then, in an instant, he is this complete other person; he is at times warm and jovial and fun to be around. But on my first day, I was sort of warned about that. I was told that that could turn on a dime, and sort of to always be watching out for it. Jones might try and rope you into a joke—but don’t play along, because you could be the reason that that turns.

Warzel: And it sounds like, in many cases … I’m reading this, and I’m like, This is just classically manipulative. Right? In a psychological perspective. I mean, there’s the “I don’t know whether this guy’s gonna break or not,” but also seemingly that intermittent-reward system of his presence. Right? Like showering people with praise for doing something. Handing out bonus checks, as you write in the book, for certain things. And then, conversely, excoriating people and screaming and punching things. And, you know, actually scaring people, physically, in this way creates this sense of this person—this leader of the organization—whose approval becomes absolutely paramount, right?

It seems like, from reading the book, that everyone there—yourself included—becomes almost monomaniacally obsessed with making sure that this guy is happy. Is that an accurate description of his management style?

Owens: Yeah; that’s the job. That is the job whether you’re in the office; that’s the job whether you’re in the field; that’s the job whether you’re, you know, shooting a video with him. About politics or whether it’s about the products that he’s selling. Like, no matter what, it’s about “How do we do what he wants?”

I can’t speak for everyone there. I can just speak for myself about this. But I was really trying to get his approval. So it wasn’t just “Let’s keep him happy,” but, like, “I want him to be happy with what I’m doing.” And I think that might be part of the reason why he sort of pulled me into his inner circle. Because he knew that I almost wanted it as much as he was sort of demanding it. And so, those people who were closest to him … I think he sort of senses that. And then he pulls those people in, because he can get what he needs out of them.

Warzel: So I’m curious about—in one sense, Jones is this pioneer, right? He was relatively early to understanding that you could take this radio show, you broadcast this thing over the internet. You create Infowars, the website, early. He got into streaming relatively early. What did you get as Jones’s relationship to technology and his theory of media? Was he super savvy with this stuff? Was he lucky? Was he just doing the most outrageous thing, and the internet rewarded him? Or did he seem to have a pretty explicit theory of technology and media?

Owens: I don’t think; no. I think what he knew fundamentally was that the loudest person gets the most attention. I don’t know if it goes beyond that. I’m not trying to take away from … I don’t know; I feel weird even saying “the pioneer.” He pioneered parts of it because, I don’t know if he just lucked out.

Beyond that, I don’t think there was any sense of, you know, “He had a deep understanding of technology.” He knew certain things; I just think he knew that the more incendiary he was, the more a certain subset of people would pay attention.

Warzel: Your book describes him, rather fascinatingly, as a chameleon, right? Changing his views pretty often. Also just, like, fixing to the nearest thing that’s gonna get him that attention, that’s gonna get him the thing.

I was struck, though, in the book, in all these different recountings that you have that shows Jones seemingly genuinely upset with the state of the world. Like using the civilizational-struggle language or the demon language, or things like that, when the cameras aren’t rolling. What’s your sense on where the performance and the actual person end and begin?

Owens: When people ask me that question—like, not what he believes, but “Does he believe the things that he says?”—my feeling on that has changed a little bit. I used to say, “Who cares?” Like, it doesn’t matter what he believes. He has been doing this for two decades plus. He broadcasts on his show six days a week, for hours a day. I don’t even think he could tell you what he believes, and what he doesn’t believe, with the things that he says. But his audience believes it. And so, ultimately, it doesn’t matter.

But I read this short book by Harry Frankfurt called On Bullshit. And the central idea is that liars intentionally skew the truth, and that bullshitters just don’t care what the truth is. And in a lot of ways, I think that’s Jones. Like, I just don’t think Jones has any value for truth. I think that it depends on the moment, and what can benefit him, as to what he says and what he claims to believe. I think that’s why it shifts so frequently.

But ultimately, I don’t think it really is about an ideology or anything. Or truth or not truth. I mean, Sandy Hook—that’s not bullshit. That’s something deeper and darker. That Jones, I feel like, just doesn’t care about how his rhetoric affects people.

I think you could probably hook Jones up to a lie-detector test, and he would pass it. I don’t think he cares what the truth is. So I think it frees him up, in some sense, to sort of say whatever he feels is of value to him in any given moment.

Warzel: Shortly after you get there, Jones gets fully into this … Infowars, I should say, gets fully into the supplements game. Gives him this injection of cash, right? And this ability to sort of grow the business, allow people to go out and do more outlandish things. Build bigger sets. Along this same period, Trump is coming up. And you write, kind of as you’re going through it, that you became—if not more ideologically radicalized—drawn at least into the machinery of it all.

And I want to quote you here. You write, “The echo chamber was relentless, pulling me back into a spiral of doubt, wondering if beneath the layers of exaggeration and fearmongering there might be something genuine at play.” Your compass is getting scrambled in this. And it is something that feels to me a little like, if not radicalization, it’s at least something akin to it. A cousin to it. It is this blurring of some of these boundaries, not being able to trust yourself. I thought that was a fascinating part of that. How do you think that happened to you?

Owens: Yeah. Well, I think it was that slow integration of the ideas over time. Also, getting the opportunity. I lived in Georgia. Jones was in Austin, and I somehow got this opportunity to go work for him. So I think I fooled myself in a lot of ways that like there was somehow providence or fate in that. I talked earlier about how Stanley Kubrick kind of drew me into that world, through that movie, or that was the doorway. And then I go to the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. Vivian Kubrick is at that event.

And we end up having dinner with her, and she’s talking about the same things that sort of pulled me into Jones’s world. Her father’s films. And I remember saying, “It’s incredible that you’re here.” And Jones sort of interjected, and he was like, “No, it’s not. Like, every decision we make in our life brings us to these moments.”

And in that moment, I believed him. So you have two things happening. You have the banality and the chaos of every day in that office, interchangeable, shifting with it every 30 minutes, every hour. And then you have these big moments of, like, Jones can craft the world into making it seem like everything has this purpose. I can tell you a story to sort of explain a version of this. So Jones started sending us to the border. And the first trip I went with the reporter Joe Biggs, who a lot of people might know or might not know. But he became a Proud Boy, and then he was sentenced to 17 years. And then Trump commuted his sentence after January 6.

We were sent on a trip to the border. And the first trip that I write about, there was a Judicial Watch report that said there were these ISIS bases in Juarez. So we got there; there was nothing to show. And we ended up having him dress as an ISIS terrorist and walk across the border. One side of that story is how that’s the dumbest thing ever. The second side is that we lied. We didn’t actually cross the border. We were having to fill this void of nothingness to produce these reports for Jones, and make things more cinematic. That’s why he sent us there. So that’s one story. But when we returned, Biggs crossed over, and he was trying to find this ISIS base. He found what he believed was a mosque. And then he, we, posted a report that said that he had discovered the ISIS base. And so that previous report that had happened, that report, I’m sitting there going like, We’re screaming into the void. This is absurd.

It’s to the point where it’s a joke. Like, What are we talking about? This isn’t based on anything. I saw nothing in the video that I was editing and uploading that proved that it was an ISIS space. I mean, there was no … what were we looking for? An ISIS flag? The next day, when we were leaving, the FBI contacted us. And they wanted to meet with us. And at the time I was certain, like, This has to be illegal. We didn’t know for sure that it was a lie, but there was no evidence to prove that what we were saying was true.

So I thought that we were sort of … the reckoning was coming, and it was well deserved. And so we met these FBI agents at the airport. They tell us that they’re using our video for information. Like, they don’t have jurisdiction. They can’t go over into Mexico. And they’re speaking to us as if we’re not idiots, but as if we’re journalists.

And it was a moment of ... What is going on? The FBI is talking to us as if they are gathering information from our videos. To me, this is clearly ridiculous. What am I to believe? Like, is there something actually going on here? Because all we had was a Judicial Watch report. There was no evidence to prove that there was an ISIS base or anything.

But Jones and his insistence is that, Yes, there is. You are the problem. Jones was not sitting there telling us to lie about things. He was making us question our own minds. And so, after years in that environment, you stop even believing what your mind is. You know, the fire alarms that are going off in your brain saying, like, This is insane. This is crazy. This is wrong. And you think, Maybe there’s something else that I’m not seeing. Like, Maybe I can’t trust myself. Maybe eventually there will be a piece of evidence that comes out that proves Jones was right about this thing the whole time.

Warzel: I want to reiterate, too, on this ISIS example—that’s an example that you sort of show throughout the book. Of Jones sending you guys on this, “go find a thing, a specific thing that I want.” You guys getting there, being like, “It doesn’t really exist. We have to figure out some way to get him something.” And you know that that incident itself is, like as you describe it, despicable, right?

Owens: Yeah.

Warzel: Like: dressing up as this ISIS person. You have a fake severed head and an Aladdin–style sword. There’s sort of a racist depiction to camera. Or like, accent. Something about Sharia law that he mentions as he crosses the border, to the camera. It’s obviously a skit—but it’s also, like, very bigoted. Very, you know … it’s gross. How much were you disgusted by what you were doing in the moment? Versus how much were you like, I can’t listen to that?

Owens: I don’t know if, in the moment, I was thinking much at all. In the moment it was, “We have to get this thing done. If we don’t, it’s going to be a problem. I have to go back to the hotel room. I have to stay up all night. I have to edit this report. I have to be up the next morning to appear on Jones’s show.” Like, it was just constant. “We have to fly back. There’s going to be another trip immediately.” Like, it was the day-to-day that I feel like I was focused on the most.

And that’s on me. Like, that’s not an excuse. That’s 100 percent, that’s on me. I was focused on the exact wrong things. But it wasn’t in the moment that I realized. I mean, yes—of course I know that lying is wrong. I know that those things were wrong. I wasn’t saying that, you know, we were somehow proving that ISIS was able to come over, and that it was going to manifest, and then we would see that thing that we were filming, that we knew was a lie.

But I think, in a sense, I don’t think I was thinking that much at all in the moment. I think I was in that funnel, that cloudy funnel of the chaos of everything. The atmosphere that Jones created. And, in the moment, at least, that’s what the focus was. It was “Get this thing done; do it the right way. If you don’t, Jones is gonna make you look like a fool.” The people you’re surrounded by, you’re isolated. It’s the only people you spend all the time around. Jones creates this reality in his world. So, I mean, if I’m being honest, I think that is, in the moment, what the focus was so much of the time.

Warzel: The reason why I’m pushing on this, I think, is because it’s helpful to understand for other people. This is less, you know, to try to make you answer for these things, which you make an attempt to answer for in this book. But it also does seem like when you’re writing this, that you are struck with this. And I don’t know if this is you thinking about it after the fact, because it seems like there’s so much going on inside of your mind in these moments.

In that ISIS example, you’re unpacking the box. The costume, right? And you get to the severed head, and you say, “If there’s a hell, I think we’re going there.” Right? Like, there’s an acknowledgement in the moment that this is messed-up stuff. It seems to me, at least from how you’re writing, that there was that, too. This notion that “This is not good.” Is that accurate?

Owens: Yeah; that’s definitely accurate. But I think that’s a small piece of a larger puzzle of what’s going on in our brains at the time. Or at least for me individually. Like, there was an understanding that there were things that we were doing that were wrong, 100 percent. And part of the reason I wrote the book was to acknowledge that. And yet I did nothing.

Like, I chose to focus on something else. I chose to turn it back inward and focus on what my days were, and what my problems were. To me, sort of the exploration of the book was to go back. ’Cause you know, I wrote the piece for The New York Times. I talked about some of these stories, and I felt to me like there was more to discover for me.

Why did I stay there for so long? Why did I do those things? Why was I presumably okay with it? And that, at least, was part of the reason of writing the book—to sort of explore those questions and try and understand it. And also try and take accountability for it. Because with that, I lead up to that ISIS story where we’re crossing the border in that Jones didn’t tell us to do that. Jones didn’t even know that was a lie. We had just been in so many circumstances before where the world was exploding—you know, our small world was exploding—because we weren’t finding these things that he wanted. That it then just became an expectation of the job. Did I know it was wrong in the moment? Yeah; of course I knew it was wrong in the moment. And yet I still continue to do it. And to me, that’s the ... I keep thinking while I was working on the book, to myself. Like, my dad would always tell me, “You’re making yourself look bad.” I’m like, “Well, that’s the point.”

I have to talk about things in those terms, because I am responsible for those things. Jones created a world where you second-guess yourself, and you were in this cloud of confusion. And he gaslit you and made you see things a certain way, or question whether you were seeing things a certain way. But I still did those things. And so, to me, that’s the whole point of the book. It’s an exploration of these things. It’s an atonement, taking accountability of those things. So yeah, I think in the moment, of course I knew those things were wrong. At the same time, my brain was … I was choosing to focus on everything but that.

Warzel: It reminds me of the cult behavior where you get into a place—and Infowars is a version of this—where you’re immediately asked to kind of alienate yourself from standard norms and practices of behavior. Or with people who are ostracized from polite society in some way. And you kind of give into that just a little bit. And then you find yourself in a position where—and you reference this a lot in the book—you’re like, Where else am I gonna get a job? Right? I’m unemployable now to most places.

And I think that that element feels, to me, to be such a crucial part of this. Right? Because it sort of keeps you from being able to say—not you in general, and this is not to absolve anything that anyone does—but just the notion that there is this other societal pressure that tends to happen in extremist groups. Where it’s like, “I don’t know where the exit ramp would be, even if I was able to conjure that.” Is that how it felt to you?

Owens: Yeah. And it wasn’t … I think it’s important to say that wasn’t an idea that I conjured on my own. That was something that Jones said on a regular basis. He said that we wouldn’t be able to exist in the world outside of him, because of being connected to him. He told us explicitly, “You’ll never be able to get another job.” We have to change the world, because we won’t be able to exist in it after this.

So in some sense, it was like he was rationalizing that way of operating. And accepting the danger. Because in that part of the book is where the chief of police comes to the office, and he says, “We stopped a man with a trunk full of guns coming to the office, to presumably kill Jones.”

And Jones almost took that as a tool to then use against us. By saying, “You understand how dangerous this is? You understand how real this is? People hate me so much because I’m telling the truth that they’re coming to kill me. So you think that you can walk out of this office and be safe?”

So it wasn’t just about a résumé. It was literally about existence. And I think I write in the book at that time, I came to the realization in that moment it wasn’t just a job. It was a trap. It wasn’t all, People are going to think I’m a bad person for working for Jones. Or People are going to think I’m a right-wing nutjob for working for Jones. Or a conspiracy theorist for working for Jones. On some level, it was this survival in our brains that was sort of inflicted on us by Jones, I think, as a form of control.

Warzel: The book is largely comprised of recounting a lot of these different trips. One of the last ones in the book is this trip to this Muslim community, Islamberg, in I believe upstate New York. There’s this moment after you go and are told, basically, “You gotta come back multiple times. We’re gonna keep harping on this, keep reporting on this community.” And you fly home, and there’s a scene you describe of seeing a small little girl in a hijab, looking out the window of the plane. And feeling this real sense of, I guess, a breaking point, or some kind of realization. Of the world that you guys might be helping to create, and the world that this girl is going to have to live in. It’s a pretty striking moment. Was that the breaking point for you, in some ways?

Owens: It wasn’t one moment—as much as I wish that there was one moment that just completely turned things around. It was many moments. Small moments. Big moments. Over time. That moment specifically was not that I didn’t realize that there could be a young girl in that community. It was that I wasn’t thinking about the individual at all. I was focused on everything but that.

And it was a moment where I started to slowly shift into focusing on people and individuals, not grand conspiracies. Not saving the world, but day-to-day life. How are the things that we’re saying and we’re doing affecting everyday people that have done nothing to deserve it or ask for it? Or they’re just living their lives—and we show up, and we expect them to be a story so that then we can feel better sleeping that night, so our boss isn’t upset. That is what that moment sort of shifted in me.

Warzel: What was another moment—maybe that isn’t even in the book—or something where the focus shifted to people?

Owens: So, Jones says everything is a false flag. Every incident that happens—a mass shooting, a tragedy—is a false flag, because then it becomes a tool that he can use to explain the world. They did this for a reason. Sandy Hook, as an example. The reason that that was a complete “fake” thing, that he said, was to push for gun control. Well, he said that about everything. It was ubiquitous. Sandy Hook happened in that exact moment of when I was offered the job, and when I took the job.

So, much of my focus during that time period was moving to a new place, starting this new thing. I wasn’t even really paying attention to what was going on in that world. I mean, Jones would say a hundred different things about Sandy Hook. The narrative shifted constantly.

Warzel: And just to be clear, for the listeners, Jones was found liable for defaming several of the Sandy Hook victims’ families, for those conspiracy theories about the shooting. And he was ordered to pay damages that total $1.4 billion. Did you clock it in the moment?

Owens: I don’t know if I clocked it at all, or if it was just the norm of what he said. What I remember from that time period is the Boston Marathon [attack]. That’s what I remember. And I remember him. I remember the reports. I remember him shooting reports with certain reporters that he had just hired, and him saying that that was a false flag. That’s the thing I remember. Sandy Hook wasn’t really on my radar, because I never edited a report about Sandy Hook. I never had anything that was part of my job that had to do with Sandy Hook. That got on my radar during the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton in a speech said about Jones: “How dark does someone’s heart have to be to spread the lies that he spread about Sandy Hook?” And you would think for anyone else, a presumptive candidate saying that about you, it would be devastating. And embarrassing, at the very least. Jones literally pranced around the office after that, calling himself Dark Heart. He wore it as a badge of honor. But after that, the media started reporting on the families and the things that they had gone through, directly because of Jones’s rhetoric.

And I thought at the time: If that wasn’t even on my radar—I listened to Jones’s show, I worked for Jones for years after that—if that wasn’t on my radar, the effects of that, how many other Sandy Hooks were there? How many other instances where Jones talked about something, claimed something was a false flag? Claimed a Muslim community was filled with terrorists when it was just random families? How many people that will never get their day in court?

Warzel: So since there wasn’t one straw, and it was this constellation, was there a last straw? Was there something in which it just became untenable for you?

Owens: Yeah, no. There wasn’t this big moment of “I have to get out of this world.” There was hundreds of little moments, dozens of big moments. That moment in Islamberg was a starting point of focusing on people. But in another sense, it was people who sort of helped me get out. I had my partner, Lacey, who I had moved to Austin with me to take the job. She was consistently challenging me to question my actions, to consider the things that I was doing and why I was doing it. And she wasn’t pushing me. She wasn’t screaming at me.

And again, I’m not trying to be prescriptive about this stuff. I’m not saying “If you’re with someone who believes these things, and is doing certain things, stick it out.” That’s not what I’m saying. But I’m saying that I had someone who cared enough about me to consistently challenge me and push me in another direction until I finally had the courage to leave.

But it took another person, my partner, pushing me in that direction. It also took relationships like with the writer Jon Ronson. I met him at the RNC. We started communicating. We met secretly at the inauguration, because I believed I had this whole big idea, of I was going to expose Jones’s world. And when I sat down with him, I didn’t have anything to expose, really, other than the lies that we were telling. Which a lot of people—they hear those and they go, “Yeah, of course, Jones is a liar.”

I mean, it seems obvious, at least from a listener standpoint, or the world standpoint of seeing his rhetoric. But I was just looking for someone that was slightly in that world that I could communicate with, that was a calming presence. That I could maybe unload some of the stuff that might understand it. And Ronson, in that meeting, I told him about Islamberg, I told him about the border stories. And he told me, because I had asked his advice on writing, I thought it would be nice to sort of have a little bit of a hermetic life after the chaos of that. And have some time to reflect. And writing was something that I thought was an option.

He said, “You’re going to write about anything; you should write about this.” And that’s when the purpose came. I thought, after all these things that I had contributed to, after all these things that I had done, maybe there’s an opportunity to talk about it. Maybe there’s an opportunity to finally tell the truth about those things. Instead of just going away, instead of just quitting that world, wiping my hands of it.

And so it was just those people in my life that sort of continued to open doorways, present opportunities to talk about things. But also just to be, you know, companions and create that space for conversation.

Warzel: Can you explain a little bit more how they pushed you? What were some of the things that helped push you in ways that helped, you know, create the fissures that became the cracks?

Owens: Yeah. So one instance is that Jones set up this rally outside of a Planned Parenthood. And when my partner and I moved to Austin, we were on diverging paths. I mean, it’s unbelievable that we stayed together, because I was getting pulled into Jones’s world, and she was teaching at a public art school. She was becoming friends with people in Austin, which was a progressive community, and she was getting pulled in this other direction. She was doing fundraisers for Planned Parenthood at the time, while I was in front of a Planned Parenthood with Jones, filming him protest it and scream as people pulled in to the parking lot.

She heard on the radio that Jones had been outside this Planned Parenthood. And when I got home, she asked if I had been a part of it. And I said, “Well, I didn’t plan it, but I had to be there to film Jones.” And she just asked me, “What the hell is wrong with you?” And I remember the argument that we got into that night, and she’s talking to me about how important it is for women to have access to these things, and how the rhetoric that Jones pushes about it eschews every individual that might need these things. And it was specifically moments like that, over and over and over again. Where I was being forced to sit in my house with my partner, who I loved and respected, and answer for the things that I was doing day to day.

Warzel: Have you spoken to any of the people who have been harmed by this? The Sandy Hook families or members of the Muslim community? The list of people who have been harmed by Jones is very long. Have you had conversations with those people? And if so, is there anything you can share about how that’s gone?

Owens: So after I started talking about my experience publicly, I was contacted by one of the attorneys in the Connecticut trial, the Sandy Hook trial. And I was deposed, and I did everything I could in that deposition to help them in that process. During that time, I was contacted by a family member that endured the things that Jones … the rhetoric Jones had spread and everything after. I don’t want to say who; I don’t want to talk about it. They were incredibly kind to reach out and speak to me, and it meant the world. And it made it a lot easier for me to deal with some of the things I was struggling. They didn’t have to do it, and I really, really appreciate it. But I feel a little uncomfortable talking about it, because I don’t want that to be something that I use as somehow absolving myself, or using it in order to say anything. But I would just say—yes, I spoke to someone. Yes, they were incredibly kind to me. And yes, I am eternally grateful for it.

Warzel: Have there been conversations that have gone the other way? And come away with, Oh, I’m not going to get the forgiveness here?

Owens: Well, first off, I don’t think it’s my place to even ask for or seek forgiveness from anyone. I don’t believe I deserve that. So I never enter a conversation with anyone expecting forgiveness. I have had conversations with people who have been perplexed, knowing me after leaving that world, as to why I would ever be involved in it. And there were difficult conversations there. And I would say there are some people that are no longer in my life because of it.

But as far as talking to the people, say, in Islamberg, or people that we directly … you know, honestly, I have had enough involvement in their lives. Those people don’t owe me conversations. Those people don’t owe me time. And so, to me, it feels incredibly presumptuous and short-sighted for me to seek it. If anyone wants to have a conversation with me, I will listen, regardless of how they feel about my past. Because I’m sure I feel the same. I am not happy with myself then, and there is no absolution in my mind. That’s not the point of the book. I don’t ever see that in the future. But I’m not going to seek that out, because that just doesn’t feel like my place.

Warzel: So in 2019, you wrote the essay in The New York Times, which becomes sort of the genesis for the book. We had spoken previously in some of this reporting. So you coming out and sharing your experience about your time at Infowars is not new. But obviously the book and the work for the book coming out, and all of this, kicks the dust up again. I’m curious: Have you heard from current or former Infowars employees? Alex Jones? People like that, recently, around the book? Are they talking to you about any of this decision to be so public about the experience?

Owens: When I left that world, I severed a lot of those ties. And then when I first spoke out about things that you’re sort of forced to, like, Jones would never be okay with people still in that world communicating with me. I have heard from some people in that world who are no longer there. People that I knew when I worked there, that were employees then that also left, that have paid attention to the things that I’ve talked about. And from those individuals, it’s been nothing but positivity; nothing but encouragement.

From Jones himself—I haven’t heard from Jones since 2019. The first thing I did was a piece with Ronson for This American Life, where I told him a story, and then he went and researched it, about Jones’s past. Well, after the This American Life piece, Jones sent me this voice memo that was very manipulative. And it was him saying that if I had to do that for people to like me, that’s fine. That’s okay. But he likes me, he cares about me, but he refuses to become my villain. And the mainstream people that I might be talking to are much worse than him, and I need to keep that in mind. Then when, fact-checkers reached out to him for the New York Times piece, he sent me two text messages. The first text message was, “I’m going public,” which I guess was a threat. I don’t know what that meant. And the second message was, “I hope you have good legal representation.” Then the piece came out, and I’ve not heard from him since.

Warzel: When you have those conversations with previous employees who are no longer there and they are supportive of you, do you ever say to them, “Come on in; the water’s warm. The more the merrier”?

Owens: Yeah, over the past decade, I’ve had a few of those conversations with former employees. And a lot of the responses I’ve gotten is: “Life is too hard without talking about these things. So, you know, I’m not interested.” Or “Jones will spin it in a certain way,” or “Jones will come after me. And so it’s just not worth it.”

You know, honestly, that was my hope when I first did it. I thought, naively, that it would be a snowball effect. Because, if I’m being completely candid, I push back against the idea that this book is a tell-all. Because there are a lot of things that I’m not talking about in the book, because they’re not my stories to tell. They aren’t things that happened to me. And so it’s not my place to talk about them.

And my hope was that, initially with the New York Times piece, is that if I talked about things, other people might follow. And other people had stories that I felt were incredibly important. And that didn’t happen. And so that was unfortunate, because in a lot of ways I felt like if I opened that door it would, and it didn’t.

All I know is that one thing I hope that people can get out of my story is that it is possible for that shift to happen. Because I am not the person that I was when I began listening to Jones and when I worked for Jones. I’m just not. A lot of times I even talk about these stories, and I think, That person is an idiot. I don’t sympathize with that person at all. And it’s me. I did the things. I even think to myself, Why would you stay so long? Why would you do those things?

I don’t think there’s an answer; there’s only an acknowledgment that it happened. And a promise to change. What should people do? How can you help people get out of that world? I don’t know, but I have to believe that there’s some hope. Because I did.

Warzel: And that’s ultimately why you wrote the book. I mean, you mentioned before the process of airing it out of, you know, perhaps atoning for this publicly. Is that the big reason? This is just showing that, in your case, change is possible?

Owens: Yes; that is a big part of the reason. There’s also another reason. I want people to understand that those connections, and those relationships in a sense—I mean, in my experience—saved me, in so many ways. And in a world right now where, because of your podcast, I didn’t actually know this was a thing, but I didn’t know who Clavicular was. Or any of these things. There’s this manosphere world that is rejecting the idea of connection. Where, “What’s the return on investment? How do you monetize this? How does this benefit you?”

And I’m not saying that my story is the … well, in some sense, my story is the antithesis of that. Because it is about connection. It isn’t about return on investment. It isn’t about what you can do for you. And that was something that drove me, in the book, to write about the story. Like, yes: I want there to be hope. I want something good to come from my horrible experience. But I also want people to realize it’s important to surround yourself—at least if they’re in the situation I was in—with people who are smarter than you, people who are genuinely considerate of you. They care about you, and that if they push you, maybe that’s a good thing.

Maybe conversations are good. Maybe being challenged is good. I saw that in that world so often—like, anytime someone was pushed, they cut that person out of their life. That’s the isolation of the conspiracy world. That if people don’t agree with you, people don’t believe with you, you cut them out. And if I had done that, then I don’t know where I would be.

Warzel: That’s a great place to leave it, on that hopeful note. Josh, thank you very much for coming on Galaxy Brain and for writing about this experience for other people to learn from.

Owens: Thank you. I really appreciate you having me. Also, I have to say, you were one of those people that treated me like a person, after I left that world, with kindness. And it made the world of difference. I don’t think I would have published the New York Times piece if you hadn’t stepped in and helped in the way that you did and been a resource for me. So you are one of those people, after I left that world, that it changed everything for me and meant the world to me—that you treated me like a person and not like some idiot who used to work for Alex Jones. So thank you for that, and thank you so much for having me on your show. Was an honor.

[Music]

Warzel: That’s it for us here. Thank you again to my guest, Josh Owens. I want to note that, after our conversation with Owens, we reached out to Infowars for comment. No one from Infowars responded to our request. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe to The Atlantic’s YouTube channel, or on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my fellow journalists, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. That’s TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you on the internet.

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

The First Draft of Cultural History

2026-04-17T12:00:00-04:00

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

Newspapers publish the rough draft of history, as the saying goes. And what’s the rough draft of the news? I would argue that it’s gossip, as filtered by good reporters. Which means that gossip is the very rough first version of what ends up in the history books. I first thought of this syllogism while reading primary sources for my book of cultural history, and it came to mind recently as I dove into Lena Dunham’s highly entertaining new memoir, Famesick. “God bless a memoir that drops names—the more bold-faced and braggadocious the better,” my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote this week in an essay about the book. Gilbert also laments that Dunham’s second memoir fails at what her groundbreaking HBO series, Girls, managed to do: “make broader meaning out of her experiences.” It’s true that the book cannot compete with the show’s ability to explain members of a generation to themselves. And yet, as primary-source material about the making of Millennial art, Famesick is hard to beat.

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

“For everything that was written about Girls across its six seasons—and it was a lot,” Gilbert writes, “nothing has offered the access and insight that Dunham provides in Famesick.” The opening chapters describe Dunham’s arty, privileged Manhattan upbringing; her struggles to master the challenges—technical, physical, and emotional—of filmmaking in her early 20s; and her first encounters with the transactional creatures that operate Hollywood and the trolls that drive social media. Her material is tightly packed but lightly delivered, her writing funny and vulnerable. But as a memoir, her account is also by definition self-involved—the product of a single perspective. As Dunham’s alter ego, Hannah Horvath, says so memorably in the Girls pilot, she is, if not the voice of her generation, then maybe “a voice of a generation.”

Hannah’s statement of purpose gets at both the promise and the limitation of memoirs by public figures. In the hands of a skilled and thoughtful writer (or, in some cases, a ghostwriter), these books can be powerful distillations of what it felt like to live and work in a specific moment. Famesick reveals a great deal about how Hollywood worked in the 2010s, how America’s economic and social networks functioned, and how some Millennials responded to a set of opportunities and dangers specific to them. Dunham’s gossip about colleagues, friends, and enemies adds up to a generational portrait, a feast for cultural historians to come.

The book’s major limitation, meanwhile, is a common one. This is only “a voice”: one person’s account, colored by score-settling, self-justifications, and blind spots. Yet sometimes these qualities can be exactly what make a book compelling. The fun of reading a memoir by Cher or Barbra Streisand or (to cite one of my own primary sources) Sammy Davis Jr. comes from feeling enmeshed in a gossip session with an unreliable but charismatic narrator. You hang on every word in part because you don’t always believe them; if you’re a journalist or a critic, you consult other sources. Reality as we know it is made up of subjective experiences, none of which would feel complete on its own. Gilbert writes, “I’m not quite sure what the meaning of Famesick is, beyond getting certain things on the historical record.” Sometimes, that’s enough—especially if you can’t stop reading it.

Illustration by Lucy Naland. Source: Theo Wargo / Getty.

What Does Lena Dunham Want to Tell Us?

By Sophie Gilbert

Her new memoir captures the cost of being an impossibly popular target.

Read the full article.

What to Read

Party of Two, by Jasmine Guillory

Picking a favorite book by Guillory is like picking a favorite cookie. They’re all sweetly satisfying; it just depends on what flavor you’re in the mood for. Perhaps you’re interested in a fake-dating ruse that turns into real love. Maybe you want two rivals to realize how thin the line is between hate and love. In Party of Two—the fifth novel in a series featuring the same group of friends—the protagonist, Olivia, has to navigate the spotlight that comes with dating a senator without dulling her own ambitions. What makes Guillory’s characters shine is their passion: for their work (some, including Olivia, are lawyers, as the author herself once was), for improving their communities, and for the simpler pleasures in life, which here mostly take the form of good food. Olivia and Max meet at a hotel bar, where she’s enjoying an ice-cold martini with her Caesar salad and fries. They strike up a conversation about dessert. Later, he sends a cake to ask her on a date. The whole book offers a feast for both the heart and the stomach. — Karen Ostergren

From our list: Eight romance novels for romance skeptics

Out Next Week

📚 The Rolling Stones: The Biography, by Bob Spitz

📚 Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir, by Jayne Anne Phillips

📚 A Room in Bombay, by Manil Suri

Your Weekend Read

Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post / Getty

What I Saw Inside the Kennedy Center

By Josef Palermo

On the day I was laid off from the Kennedy Center, I felt a little like Dolley Madison saving the Stuart portrait of Washington before the British sacked the capital. I was the staffer in charge of the artworks in the building. A crucial difference is that my institution, unlike the White House in 1814, had been on fire for months.

Read the full article.

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

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

Explore all of our newsletters.

The Real Crisis of The Pitt

2026-04-17T09:20:00-04:00

This article contains spoilers through the Season 2 finale of The Pitt.

The first season of The Pitt presented an emergency room brought to the absolute limits of its capabilities, unfolding as 15 hours of real-time drama at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center that culminated in a deluge of patients after a mass shooting. It was exceptional stuff, a throwback to classic medical TV dramas with just enough of a modern, high-octane twist, and was ladened with awards. But it also set the second season up with a sophomore-slump dilemma—how do you top that?

The answer: You don’t try. The Pitt’s excellent Season 2 didn’t attempt to match or outdo the crisis of last year’s PittFest calamity. Instead, it managed to wring equally compelling drama out of all of its characters just having a really, really crappy day.

[Read: The Pitt has revolutionized the medical drama]

For the show’s tightly wound protagonist, Dr. “Robby” Robinavitch (played by Noah Wyle), that manifested as a series of small work dramas—difficult patients, spats with co-workers, and a personality clash with his replacement—as he prepared to ride his motorcycle across the country in a reckless bit of vacationing. The season saw him growing ever more irritable and brittle, leading up to last night’s finale, in which his closest friends finally confronted him about his darker hints at not wanting to return.

Of course, other surprises still abounded over the season’s 15 episodes, each covering an hour of the July 4 day shift at the ER. The hospital’s computer system was threatened by hackers, forcing it to shut down and everyone to turn to pen-and-paper recordkeeping, complete with triplicate forms and eager messengers ferrying orders around. A local waterslide collapsed, resulting in some patients with gnarly, potentially limb-threatening injuries. But things never quite built to the all-hands-on-deck chaos of the show’s first season. Instead, the biggest crisis was internal, most acutely focused on Dr. Robby but featuring almost every member of the ensemble entangled in some sort of existential malaise.

The approach suggests to me that the show’s creative leaders—R. Scott Gemmill, John Wells, and Wyle himself among them—have learned lessons from the last medical drama they all worked on together, the juggernaut ER. That show ran for 15 seasons on NBC, with Wyle playing Dr. John Carter in 13 of them, but after early wild success (both ratings-wise and critically), it often struggled to outdo itself, insisting on bigger and bigger “event” episodes to capture viewers’ attention. In the first season of ER, a blizzard was a blockbuster event; later years featured exploding helicopters, toxic chemical spills, even a vengeful patient stealing an Army tank. The one-upmanship was unsustainable, cutting into the human drama that made the show actually worthwhile.

So The Pitt made human drama the main event, structuring the season around Dr. Robby’s last day in the emergency department before a three-month sabbatical—a much-needed break for someone who had already been depicted as struggling with the strain of his job after the nightmares of COVID. As patients filed through and he was confronted with typically wrenching ER cases, Robby appeared to sink into a deepening daze, eager to escape while alluding to the possibility that maybe he just wouldn’t come back. Toward the end of the season, every time he seemed close to leaving, some plot development would keep him for another hour past the end of his shift. I started to wonder if he would ever escape. (After all, the audience barely sees outside the walls of the Pitt.)

[Read: The Pitt is a brilliant portrait of American failure]

But although Robby’s plight was understandable, the radiating negativity of his unresolved PTSD was presented pretty starkly. Robby was quick to snap at his subordinates, lost patience with medical students and patients alike, and was generally a walking thundercloud. It was impressively unsympathetic work from Wyle, and while the long season did make some of Robby’s grim asides feel repetitive, the final episode provided necessary catharsis, as he admitted to his friend Dr. Abbot (Shawn Hatosy) that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to be alive anymore.

That was obvious to the audience, and was even dawning on some of the show’s characters, particularly the flinty charge nurse, Dana (Katherine LaNasa), but the confession still had real dramatic heft. In Season 1, Robby suffered a total breakdown at one point, collapsing in tears in the middle of a trauma event, but here, this quieter, vaguer confession felt just as devastating. Some fans had predicted a more definitive twist for the final episode: Perhaps Robby would be put on a psychiatric hold, or would just ride off into the sunset on his motorcycle with a wild glint in his eyes. But the episode ended on a more ambiguous note, with Robby cuddling an abandoned baby Jane Doe in the peds room, saying she had “so many wonderful things to see and so many people to love” ahead of her. I’ve no doubt that Wyle will return next season, but I’m intrigued to see in what state—and that’s enough of a cliff-hanger for me with a show this dramatically consistent.

Although Robby is the focus of The Pitt, the wider ensemble is what makes the show really sing, and this year all of the characters had similar internal predicaments to tackle. Dr. Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) was battling an unexplained estrangement from her mother on top of the career crisis that many a medical resident faces as they pick a specialty. Younger residents like Dr. King (Taylor Dearden) and Dr. Santos (Isa Briones) saw their sanity ebb over their shift as administrative nonsense piled atop personal drama. The 21-year-old prodigy Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez) seemed ready to quit outright in the season finale, saying, “The more time I spend here, the more I realize the importance of my mental health”—a thought that seems to be pushing her toward exploring a career in emergency psychiatry.

In every case, the show mined some real pathos for its actors—though I’d love to see characters like King and Santos get even more to do as they rise in seniority. Yet their problems were relatable, the interpersonal spats dramatic but recognizable; if it ever felt like something disastrous was brewing, that was because Robby’s absence as a leader was more keenly felt as the season went on. The day ended with some of the staff hitting a bar to scream into karaoke microphones; pretty much everyone watching at home has wanted to do that after a cruddy day at the office. The Pitt just supersized that feeling without overblowing it. Whether or not the third season swerves back to something larger-scale, the show has proved that it doesn’t have to summon the apocalypse to its hospital doors every year to justify its continued success.

Photos of the Week: Glacier Performance, Gorilla Birthday, Moon Return

2026-04-17T09:00:00-04:00

Mehmet Emin Mengüarslan / Anadolu / Getty

Fiery streaks of handmade rockets light up the night sky over the village of Vrontados on the island of Chios, Greece, as two rival congregations engage in their traditional “rocket war” to celebrate Easter on April 12, 2026. Thousands of fireworks were launched between Saint Markos and Panagia Erithiani churches, turning the solemn resurrection night into a spectacle of light and sound.

Wason Wanichakorn / AP

People participate in the Songkran water festival to celebrate the Thai New Year in Prachin Buri province, Thailand, on April 13, 2026.

Guglielmo Mangiapane / Reuters

Pope Leo XIV releases a dove next to Archbishop of Bamenda Andrew Fuanya Nkea and other officials after a meeting for peace with the community of Bamenda in Saint Joseph’s Cathedral in Bamenda, Cameroon, on April 16, 2026.

Matias Basualdo / ZUMA Press Wire / Reuters

A gosling rests among flowers along the banks of the Main River on April 15, 2026, in Frankfurt, Germany.

Yves Herman / Reuters

Wild bluebells, which bloom around mid-April, turn the forest floor blue in the Hallerbos, also known as the “Blue Forest,” in Halle, Belgium, on April 14, 2026.

Charlie Riedel / AP

Lightning flashes as a thunderstorm passes in the distance on April 13, 2026, in Lenexa, Kansas.

Matt Winkelmeyer / Getty for Coachella

Mariqueen Maandig and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Noize perform at the Sahara Tent during the 2026 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, on April 11, 2026.

Avishek Das / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty

Hindu devotees have their bodies painted as part of traditional practices during the annual Gajan Festival in West Bengal, India, on April 12, 2026.

Sazzad Hossain / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty

A giant rooster statue is paraded during celebrations of the Bengali New Year, known as Pohela Boishakh, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on April 14, 2026.

Ina Fassbender / AFP / Getty

A bodybuilder performs at the FIBO trade show for health, fitness, and wellness in Cologne, Germany, on April 16, 2026.

Markus Schreiber / AP

Fatou, the oldest gorilla in Berlin’s zoo—and believed to be the world’s oldest gorilla—celebrates her 69th birthday on April 13, 2026.

Ramil Sitdikov / Reuters

Natalia Malinovskaya, a self-described witch, holds a crystal ball during an interview with Reuters at her apartment in Moscow on February 17, 2026.

Martin Bernetti / AFP / Getty

An airplane passes in front of the sun during sunrise in Panama City on April 15, 2026.

Valentyn Ogirenko / Reuters

A Russian Geran 2 attack drone flies past apartment buildings in Kyiv, Ukraine, during Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine, on April 16, 2026.

Serhii Okunev / AFP / Getty

A firefighter works to extinguish a blaze at a recycling-materials site following a Russian strike in Kyiv on April 16, 2026. Russian strikes killed at least 12 people in Ukraine, local authorities said on April 16, after Moscow pummeled its neighbor in overnight attacks.

McKlein Photography / LAT Images / Getty

Sami Pajari competes in his Toyota GR Yaris Rally1 during Croatia Rally, Round 4 of the 2026 FIA World Rally Championship in Zagreb, Croatia, on April 11, 2026.

Sheng Jiapeng / China News Service / VCG / Getty

A humanoid robot takes part in a test for the upcoming 2026 Beijing E-Town Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon on April 12, 2026, in Beijing.

Bill Ingalls / NASA

Christina Koch, a NASA astronaut and Artemis II mission specialist, hugs the Orion spacecraft in the well deck of USS John P. Murtha on April 11, 2026, in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. Koch, along with the astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Jeremy Hansen, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on April 10 at 5:07 p.m. PT, after their trip around the moon.

Kevin Frayer / Getty

Workers stand on the roof of the Phoenix Center building as they clean the windows on April 12, 2026, in Beijing.

Gerald Herbert / AP

An alligator rests on a log in a pond along the batture of the Mississippi River in Harahan, Louisiana, on April 15, 2026.

Robert F. Bukaty / AP

A female eastern bluebird brings material to her nest on April 14, 2026, in Freeport, Maine.

Jenny Kane / AP

People walk through the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm in Woodburn, Oregon, on April 11, 2026.

Nick Lachance / Toronto Star / Getty

Shalini Maria teases her husband, Alvin Presley, with a tulip while singing “Kiss From a Rose” by Seal in Christie Pits Park in Toronto, Ontario, on April 13, 2026. Maria had just returned from a trip to New York City, and Presley met her at the airport with flowers, one of their traditions.

Hidenori Nagai / The Yomiuri Shimbun / Reuters

Cherry blossoms are in full bloom at Hirosaki Park in Hirosaki City, Aomori Prefecture, Japan, on April 16, 2026. Many of the approximately 2,600 trees are lit up at night.

Odd Andersen / AFP / Getty

A fox pays a visit to the chancellery as journalists wait for the arrival of head of the African Union Commission, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, in Berlin on April 14, 2026.

Joseph Eid / AFP / Getty

A boy walks with a flock of sheep along the shore in the Lebanese village of Kfar Aabida, north of Beirut, on April 11, 2026.

GreenPeace / Reuters

The Swiss musician To Athena, accompanied by a small group of musicians, performs outside a cave in Morteratsch Glacier to draw attention to climate-change issues, in Pontresina, Switzerland, on March 25, 2026. (Handout photo released by Reuters on April 10.)

Amit Machamasi / NurPhoto / Getty

Newari women pull Lord Bhairav’s chariot in Bhaktapur, Nepal, on April 16, 2026, during a Hindu festival. Biska Jatra, celebrated to welcome the New Year, spans eight nights and nine days, bringing communities together in a shared spirit of devotion and celebration.

The Scapegoat Scam

2026-04-17T07:00:00-04:00

Sign up for our newsletter about national security here.

The Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, who lost his election in a landslide on Sunday after 16 years in power, presented himself as a defender of Western civilization. But at best, his lofty rhetoric was a code for bigotry and a justification for the persecution of minorities; at worst, it was a scam to fleece Hungarians by persuading them to blame everyone but those responsible for their problems. Maybe both.

Eventually Hungarians decided that a major source of their problems was Orbán himself. Maybe someday Americans will come to a similar realization about Orbán’s great admirer, Donald Trump, who praised the former Hungarian leader before the election as a “fantastic man” who had done a “fantastic job.”

Orbánism was, more or less, a model for what Trump and the Republican Party are trying to do in the United States. The Trump administration was so desperate to prevent Orbán’s defeat that it sent J. D. Vance to ask Hungarians to “stand for Western civilization” and “freedom, for truth and for the God of our fathers.” Few vice presidents have more consistently debased the office, to the point that most people hardly noticed that Vance had praised as godly a man who publicly condemned “race mixing.”

Hungarians didn’t listen to Vance’s pleas. They swept the opposition leader Péter Magyar into office with a large enough majority to undo the changes to the system that Orbán had instituted to keep himself in power. Those changes forced an otherwise ideologically divided opposition to coalesce behind the center-right Magyar, a former member of Orbán’s party, because he was committed to restoring Hungarian democracy.

After 16 years of Orbán, freedom and truth, not to mention material prosperity, are relatively scarce. Hungarian media were consolidated by regime-friendly billionaires, the independence of universities was curtailed, and the distribution of state benefits was predicated on loyalty to Orbán’s party, Fidesz—making people reluctant to criticize the government. All this meant that more direct tactics of state control, such as violence, were unnecessary.

Orbán rode to power on resentment over the economic stagnation that developed under center-left governments. But he leaves office with Hungarians facing falling wages and higher inflation than similar countries are experiencing. Orbán’s sectarianism and intolerance have sparked neither a religious revival nor a fertility bump; Hungary’s population is shrinking and has become more irreligious, even as Orbán has demonized LGBTQ people, “Muslim invaders,” and Jews. Orbánism, in short, did not make Hungarians more rich, Christian, or free—unless you happened to be one of Orbán’s buddies, in which case you may have gotten rich. As most Hungarians felt their economic circumstances worsen, Orbán provided them with relatively powerless targets to hate.

That was effective, but it didn’t last forever. The massive turnout for a banned Pride parade last June, despite Orbán’s threat of “legal consequences” for any attendees, was seen as a sign that Orbán had lost his iron grip.

That Orbán’s carefully constructed system for keeping himself in power was ultimately overwhelmed by discontent over economic stagnation offers a warning for his successors. The European Union had held up funds for Hungary in response to Orbán’s corruption—a central issue in the campaign. Those funds may now be released, and this should help the Hungarian economy. Still, further stagnation could revive the authoritarian right, and, as my colleague Anne Applebaum points out, much of the media and the private-sector economy in Hungary remain in the hands of Orbán allies.

Although Orbán has been defeated, America is following the path he blazed. Many American conservatives, surprised lately to find themselves on the defense regarding culture-war issues such as marriage equality—wars that, just a few short years ago, they seemed to be winning—openly admired the Orbán model, even inviting him to the Conservative Political Action Conference to inveigh against “wokeness.” The Trump administration’s public communication is almost entirely scapegoating—blaming immigrants for low wages, housing scarcity, and crime, while appealing to high-minded sentiments about “Western civilization.” The rhetoric of administration figures such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the adviser Stephen Miller is only slightly paraphrased from the 19th century, language used to justify colonialism and imperialism by framing Europeans as heirs to the great civilizations of antiquity and their enemies as worthless “savages.”

The Trump administration has ignored Congress in its distribution of funds, it has made corporate mergers and government contracts contingent on Trump’s approval, and it has used state power to threaten the free speech and independence of media outlets, universities, and political opponents. Trump has sought to compromise the independence of both the federal judiciary and the Federal Reserve. Although Trump has not entirely nullified Congress’s appropriations power, he has done enough to signal to powerful actors that they need to genuflect before him to protect their interests. Trump has done his best to centralize power over elections Orbán-style, but he has been largely thwarted by America’s federal system.

Demonizing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ people has helped the GOP win elections but, as in Hungary, economic prosperity has not been widely shared. The Trump administration’s economic policy has been to redistribute income upward, cutting taxes on the rich while slashing health care for everyone else, even as costs rise because of the president’s tariffs and his catastrophic war with Iran.

Traditional American conservatism once held that this kind of centralization was a sure path to tyranny, the very reason to keep government small, so as to prevent it from dominating political, economic, and cultural life. That view was informed by genuine insight, even if one is skeptical that anyone since Barry Goldwater has actually believed it. Whatever earnest commitment to small government that once animated the GOP has not survived its encounter with Trump. Opposition to equal rights, to higher taxes on the wealthy, and to a more generous social safety net is all that is left.

Trumpism will not deliver broad prosperity any more than Orbánism did, and keeping Americans strung along will require new enemies and panics to focus their frustrations elsewhere. It took Hungarians the better part of 20 years to reclaim their freedom. How long will it take Americans?