The Atlantic

The President Keeps Contradicting Himself on AI

2026-06-02T21:04:00-04:00

For months now, the White House has hinted that it may try to rein in the AI industry. Just two weeks ago, the nation’s top tech executives—including Sam Altman and Dario Amodei—were invited to attend a ceremony for the signing of a long-anticipated executive order on AI. But just hours before the ceremony, Donald Trump scrapped it. America is leading the world in the AI race, the president told reporters at the time, “and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that lead.”

Apparently, Trump has changed his mind again. Earlier today, the president signed an executive order that will create a process for top AI companies to voluntarily share certain upcoming models with the government for safety testing up to one month before wider release. OpenAI, Anthropic, and the like will also be asked to work with the government to shore up federal, state, and local cyberdefenses. The White House spokesperson Liz Huston told us that the policy reflects a “common-sense approach of collaborating with industry to balance innovation and security.”

The order itself is relatively toothless: Even before today, the major AI firms already had agreements in place that allowed the government to preemptively test their models for safety risks. The new rule “effectively formalizes what has already been happening between the US government and the leading AI companies,” Daniel Remler, an AI expert at the Center for a New American Security, told us.

But the executive order is meaningful in that the president is doing something—anything—about AI. At the start of his second term, Trump signaled to tech companies that he would stay out of the way. Last January, he rescinded a set of modest Joe Biden–era policies, calling the rules “dangerous” and a “barrier” to American AI leadership. Even the preamble of today’s executive order celebrates that Trump “unleashed tremendous technological growth” by “slashing the bureaucratic constraints that the prior administration placed on America’s AI developers.” Yet core components of those supposedly dangerous Biden-era AI regulations—voluntary agreements to share information about advanced AI models with federal agencies, for instance, as well as federal programs to leverage AI for cyberdefense—are strikingly similar to today’s new AI executive order. Dean Ball, a former AI adviser to the Trump administration, wrote that the policy “is considerably more intrusive” than Biden’s executive order.

Today’s order still could have been much more forceful. When the White House first started previewing the possibility of regulatory action in May, one administration official suggested that AI models would be reviewed “just like an FDA drug.” Even the leaked draft text of the version that Trump had originally planned to sign last month would have been more burdensome for tech companies. After David Sacks, the White House’s former AI czar, reportedly called the president to complain, Trump canceled the signing ceremony. Today, after the new order was announced, Sacks declared the watered-down provisions a “game changer” on X—despite the fact that the new government-review process is not so different from what he had originally opposed. This means that two former libertarian AI advisers to the White House—Ball and Sacks—disagree about whether this order is a good thing.

At the same time, joining Sacks in praising the rule is Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and a leading critic of AI on the right. “It’s not perfect,” he told us. “But directionally, it is pretty damn good.” As Bannon sees it, despite the fact the order is weaker than earlier versions, codifying rules is a step in the right direction.

The entire, chaotic saga—a wishy-washy White House, confused statements from populist and tech-elite Trump whisperers—is only the latest in a long string of strange, often contradictory AI-policy positions. Trump’s approach to AI has been inconsistent, if not incoherent, almost since the day he retook office. Consider that, for all the talk of cybersecurity, this administration has also gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the government agency that aims to protect the nation against hackers. CISA also happens to be one of the main federal agencies tasked with implementing today’s executive order.

Or take the White House’s relationship with Anthropic. On the one hand, Anthropic likely triggered the executive order in the first place. In April, the company announced Claude Mythos Preview, a new model with advanced hacking capabilities that has ignited concern over the growing power of AI companies. Ever since, the president has seemed to cozy up to Anthropic. Dario Amodei, the firm’s CEO, visited the White House that same month for conversations over the future of the government’s relationship with the company. “I like high-IQ people, and they definitely have high IQs,” Trump later told reporters of Anthropic’s leadership.

On the other hand, the Trump administration appears to be fighting in court to bar Anthropic from doing most national-security work. In February, the Pentagon designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk” after a high-profile contract dispute over the use of AI in warfare, essentially declaring it a national-security risk for the military to even touch Anthropic products. In late April, when Anthropic tried to grant Mythos access to more companies for cyberdefense—very in line with today’s executive order—the White House appears to have, inexplicably, blocked the move. (An Anthropic spokesperson pointed us to a post on X in which the company called today’s executive order “an important step in strengthening America’s leadership in AI.”)

Then there’s the administration’s attitudes toward China. Trump has repeatedly emphasized the need to deregulate the AI industry in order to stay ahead of China. Meanwhile, he has also permitted Nvidia to sell some of its most advanced AI chips to Chinese companies, lifting an export control the Biden administration put in place precisely to waylay Chinese AI development. (Anthropic, by the way, denied a Chinese think tank access to Mythos.) Trump has, in the name of beating China, pushed to remove regulatory constraints on data-center construction: “Build, baby, build,” he said last July. But once uproar emerged about data centers hiking up electricity bills, the White House announced a voluntary pledge for AI companies to take a number of measures that would prevent everyday people from paying for data-center electricity. Build, baby, but prudently.

Indeed, at least some of the vacillations seem to be driven by public opinion. Over the past several months, as AI models have improved, attitudes toward the technology have soured. Today’s order allows the administration to look as if it is undertaking more robust AI regulation—but it doesn’t actually require the industry to do very much, if anything. Trump is trying to score points with both the public and Silicon Valley. But in doing so, he’s not saying or doing anything substantive at all.

AI spending is consuming the U.S. economy, people are afraid of losing their jobs to AI, and communities across the nation are gathering to protest data centers. Political figures as divergent as Bannon and Bernie Sanders are expressing concern over AI and the concentration of power among the industry’s executives. This would seem to be a clarion call for the president of the United States, and a populist one at that. Instead, the White House spent weeks prevaricating on an executive order that rests on the voluntary cooperation of the AI industry. With Anthropic, OpenAI, and their competitors becoming major economic and geopolitical powers, the window for any one government to seriously regulate AI is rapidly closing. Hopefully, it is not already gone.

What Trump Wants From Bill Pulte

2026-06-02T19:20:00-04:00

President Trump’s critics would have you believe that William John Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is not qualified to serve as the director of national intelligence, the job that Trump gave him on an acting basis this morning. They correctly note that Pulte, the heir to a home-construction company, has no background in national security, and that this would seem to disqualify him from serving as the nation’s most senior intelligence official, on the grounds of not only common sense but also the law, which requires that the DNI have “extensive national security experience.”

But what if the naysayers are looking at things all wrong? The president has shown no sign that he wants a DNI who can coordinate the work of 18 intelligence agencies and harness the power of a multibillion-dollar global-espionage network to provide senior government leaders the best up-to-the-minute information about threats to U.S. national security. No, what Trump has made very clear is that he wants a DNI who will selectively declassify government documents that help fuel conspiracy theories, use the authorities of the state to enact political retribution against his enemies, and try to persuade Americans that Venezuela and maybe the Democratic Party are rigging elections by fiddling with voting machines.

From that perspective, Bill Pulte is even better suited for the job than the woman he’s replacing. In her 15-month tenure as the DNI, the former Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabard merely accused “deep-state” actors of launching a “yearslong coup” against Trump, which apparently continued while he was out of office and may still be happening. Pulte, meanwhile, made criminal referrals to the Justice Department, alleging mortgage fraud by some of Trump's most reviled political adversaries, including Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, Senator Adam Schiff, former New York Attorney General Letitia James, and former Representative Eric Swalwell.

Never mind that none of Pulte’s targets has gone to prison, and that some insist he is attempting to criminalize paperwork errors. Pulte has been a tireless fighter for the president, so committed to the MAGA cause that some administration colleagues nicknamed him “Little Trump.” He has, on occasion, even turned on those who he suspects aren’t serving the boss well, provoking their anger. “Why the fuck are you talking to the president about me? Fuck you,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly told Pulte at a dinner attended by administration officials and presidential advisers last year. “I’m gonna punch you in your fucking face.”

Pulte was a stronger minister of political vengeance as the self-appointed chair of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than Gabbard ever was as the nation’s top spy, and he had access only to mortgage records. Trump might be imagining what Pulte could do when he gets his hands on the most highly classified secrets in the government.

The reactions to Pulte’s appointment among current and former intelligence officials I talked with, in the United States and overseas, ranged from disbelief to resignation. Gabbard was widely regarded as an unserious leader and political loyalist. No one imagined that Trump would replace her with someone better qualified. But Pulte managed to defy even those low expectations.

When Marc Polymeropoulos read the news on X this morning, “I thought it was a joke,” the retired CIA officer told me. “And then my phone blew up” with messages from former colleagues, some of them outraged, some despondent. “We were nearly all worried about the possibility of a highly weaponized DNI. Some, myself included, also thought this was designed to get rid” of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Polymeropoulos said.

Democratic lawmakers were predictably appalled by Pulte’s selection. “The concern is not only that Mr. Pulte lacks the ‘extensive national security experience’ required by statute for the job,” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat and the vice chair of the Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. “It is that he appears to have been selected precisely because the White House believes he will provide the narrative it wants, not the intelligence we need.”

Even the Senate majority leader, John Thune, wasn’t enthused. He told reporters: “We don’t need a weaponized DNI; we need professionals there.” Should Trump nominate Pulte as the permanent occupant of the office, the Republican from South Dakota said, he will face “a lengthy road ahead of him.”

This all assumes, of course, that Trump intends to nominate Pulte. But he has given no indication that he will. Trump has a long history of putting officials in senior positions on an acting basis, effectively bypassing the Senate’s advice-and-consent role. Pulte can still pack a lot into a temporary stint. In just three months as the acting DNI in Trump’s first term, Ric Grenell managed to fire career officials, restructure the office, and declassify documents about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, a blitz that so alienated lawmakers, he would never have stood a chance at confirmation if Trump had nominated him. (Trump instead tapped John Ratcliffe, who also faced questions about his qualifications at the time, but is now the director of the CIA.)

Pulte doesn’t need the Senate’s blessing to carry out and broaden a campaign that Gabbard started, tendentiously releasing classified information, misrepresenting it in public, and rooting out the supposed deep state. And he’ll do it all on a part-time basis. Trump said Pulte will continue running the housing agency; acting as the DNI will be his side hustle.

Trump has mused to friends and advisers about disbanding the office, which has never really fulfilled the vision that Congress laid out for it two decades ago, after the 9/11 attacks. The DNI was supposed to ensure that intelligence agencies collaborated and never again failed to connect the dots about major threats to the nation. In practice, the office has added another layer to an already very large bureaucracy, which has managed through trial and error to figure out how to work collectively. Today, members of both parties think that the office needs reform, and that it is perhaps redundant.

Gabbard won the support of Senate Republicans, who were skeptical of her own slim credentials, by promising to reduce the headcount in her office. She did that, albeit in a highly politicized manner. Democrats were outraged, but they’re not exactly lining up to save the office or give it more authority. By appointing an unqualified acting director, Trump may succeed in diminishing the ODNI’s reputation so much that a future Democratic president would find it easier to abolish the office altogether. Pulte might make history twice, as the least qualified DNI—and the last.

One Reason Trump Might Have Chosen His New Intelligence Chief

2026-06-02T18:36:00-04:00

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There are two reasonable reactions to the news that Bill Pulte has been named acting director of national intelligence: “Who?” and “Him?” Pulte, the current head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, will replace Tulsi Gabbard, who announced her departure last month after an unhappy and unempowered spell as the DNI.

Pulte is taking the post on an interim basis, becoming the latest administration official to do multiple jobs. In some cases, such as Marco Rubio’s dual roles as secretary of state and national security adviser, obvious connections exist between the jobs. In others, such as Rubio’s stint as the national archivist, they do not. Pulte is in the latter camp. Knowing how long he might be in the job is impossible. Donald Trump has in the past shown little eagerness to fill roles. He prefers to have loyalists on hand, and he might struggle to find anyone qualified who is willing to serve. Besides, the Senate, which has already been slow to confirm some appointees, is currently gummed up on other business.

Three things about Pulte are important to know: First, he has no apparent intelligence experience. Second, he is being assigned to fill an important government-coordination position, but his brief track record shows that he has a tendency to clash with and infuriate colleagues rather than work with them. Third, the most notable thing that Pulte does bring to the role is a demonstrated history of using sensitive government data for political retribution.

The law that established the DNI states that “any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.” When Trump appointed Gabbard—a former Democratic member of Congress who endorsed him in 2024—she became by far the least-qualified person to ever hold the job. Pulte somehow has fewer qualifications; Gabbard was at least a member of Congress. (On the plus side, he’s never been accused of lying about conversations with foreign dictators or being a Russian asset, unlike her.)

Trump’s announcement of Pulte’s assignment conspicuously did not cite any relevant work, and The New York Times delicately notes that Pulte “has no known experience for a national security role.” Some intelligence work is necessarily secret, but given that Pulte is just 38 years old and has a well-documented work history, past clandestine work seems unlikely. Trump may see a bit of himself in Pulte: the young scion of a real-estate family (the Pultes are major home builders) who has boundless confidence in his own abilities. That approach has not been working well for Trump recently.

This shallow experience is particularly concerning given the reason the job exists. The DNI was created as part of post-9/11 reforms to the intelligence community. Inquiries including the work of the 9/11 Commission found that intelligence agencies not sharing information with one another had contributed to the failure to prevent the attacks. The DNI was designed to sit atop all of the agencies, including the CIA and the NSA, and ensure their coordination (although critics of the current structure have argued that it needs more power).

If the goal is for top officials to work together, Pulte is not a promising person to make that happen. One of the most notable incidents involving Pulte during this administration was when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent heard that Pulte was badmouthing him to Trump and tried to fight Pulte. “Why the fuck are you talking to the president about me? Fuck you,” Bessent said, according to Politico. Even cooler-headed intelligence officials may not be enthused about taking direction from a young, unqualified political appointee.

The one area in which Pulte has shown actual skill is the use of government information to launch retribution campaigns against Trump’s political enemies. Using agency data, Pulte launched mortgage-fraud investigations into Senator Adam Schiff of California and New York Attorney General Letitia James, both Democrats, and Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. (James was charged, but a judge threw out the case because she found that the acting U.S. attorney involved had not been lawfully appointed, and a grand jury declined to bring new charges. Cook accused Pulte of cherry-picking data; after Trump fired her, she sued, and the Supreme Court has not issued a final ruling, but lower courts ruled against Trump. Schiff denied wrongdoing and has not been charged; Cook remains on the board.) Reuters reported that two members of Pulte’s family have filed housing claims similar to the ones for which he investigated Cook.

Last year, the Government Accountability Office opened an investigation into whether Pulte had improperly used mortgage data. And top Fannie Mae officials were fired after they complained that a Pulte aide had improperly shared data from the federal housing lender with a competitor.

The efforts to investigate Schiff, James, and Cook are all troubling, and more so if federal data were used improperly. So far, these efforts seem to have mostly come up short, either for lack of evidence or for other procedural failures by the Trump administration. But as the DNI, Pulte would have much greater access to sensitive data, creating the opportunity for far greater abuses than anything alleged during his time at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and he could pursue Trump’s revenge against anyone involved in investigating his ties to Russia. It’s hard not to suspect that that’s the reason Trump has chosen someone otherwise so unqualified for the job.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told senators in a hearing today that “the war is over,” despite the fact that a peace deal has not been signed with Iran. He also said that the Trump administration has not offered Iran sanctions relief or access to frozen assets in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, adding that any easing of sanctions would have to be tied to limits on Iran’s nuclear program.
President Trump signed an executive order asking technology companies to voluntarily submit new AI models for government review before releasing them to the public, which marks a step toward regulating the technology.
The Trump administration will shelve its proposal for a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said. The fund, intended to compensate people who say that they were targets of political “weaponization” presumably under the previous administration, had drawn opposition from both parties and was temporarily blocked by a federal judge last week.

Evening Read

Photograph by Will Matsuda

The Ordinary Miracle of Existing

By Alan Lightman

On the northwestern shore of Africa, some 150 miles south of the Canary Islands, the coastline slightly bulges in a pimple known as Cape Bojador. For Europeans in the early 15th century, Cape Bojador marked the boundary between the known and the unknown. North of the cape was civilization and the cities of light. South were the mystical lands of Africa and the Mare Tenebrosum, the “Sea of Darkness.” Ancient notions, dating back to Ptolemy, claimed that Africa was surrounded by boiling seas filled with giant creatures, whirlpools, and perpetual darkness. No sailor had ventured south of Cape Bojador and returned.

The challenge was taken up by Prince Henry of Portugal. Between 1424 and 1434, he sent 14 ship expeditions to round the perilous cape. None succeeded. All turned back from fear or foul weather. Yet the unknown beckoned.

Read the full article.

AI Has Ruined the Job Market

2026-06-02T15:27:06-04:00

A few years ago, Ken Schumacher was working for a technology company. Part of his job involved assessing potential hires: hopping on a Zoom call, giving an applicant an engineering test (kind of like a crossword puzzle with code instead of words), and going on “mute for an hour” as the applicant struggled through it.

Except many of the candidates weren’t struggling. The firm’s exercises were getting posted on sites such as Glassdoor. “All these savvy 23-year-olds would, of course, practice the problem three times, come to me, and crush it,” Schumacher told me. “Now the bigger problem is everyone’s using AI to write their resume.” They’re also using AI-powered chatbots and teleprompters to help them get to the next round. It’s become “really, really hard for anyone to figure out who’s real and who’s fake,” Schumacher said. (This turned out to be its own market opportunity—he now runs a start-up using AI to detect AI cheating by job candidates.)

The problem might be particularly acute in software engineering. But the same dystopian phenomenon is contorting the whole labor market. AI has Tinderized hiring. Workers are applying to hundreds of positions and never hearing back; companies are receiving thousands of resumes and struggling to respond. More than that, AI has Amazoned hiring. It has scrubbed the uniqueness out of applications, flooded the market with same-same-seeming offerings, increased the number of frauds, and replaced personal discretion with brute algorithmic assessment.

People had once hoped that Silicon Valley might not only smooth out the logistics of getting a job but also make the process fairer. Unbiased tools would replace alma-mater networks. Digital portals would accept applications from anyone, anywhere. Workers would get free access to templates, practice exams, and advice. “Technology in general tends to improve the efficiency of job matching,” Mitchell Hoffman, a labor economist at UC Santa Barbara, told me. But AI in particular seems to destroy it. Employers and employees are locked in an “arms race, where it’s AI-on-AI crime,” Kathleen Creel, a philosopher and computer scientist at Northeastern University, told me.

In just a few years, tools such as ChatGPT and Claude have commoditized the production of cover letters and resumes. Large shares of job applicants are using generative chatbots to polish their language and summarize their accomplishments—raising the average quality of these personal documents, at the cost of “compressing” and “homogenizing” the information they convey, as one Columbia Business School paper put it. In Silicon Valley, the phenomenon is sometimes called “signal collapse.” CVs used to be filled with advertent and inadvertent signals for hiring managers to parse: degrees and certifications and languages spoken, as well as formatting errors and unusual digressions and over-honest admissions. Now everyone looks better and everyone looks the same and everyone parrots important key words and everyone uses punchy action verbs. Hiring managers are straining to “distinguish underlying expertise,” and to separate precious signal from cacophonous chatbot noise.

Because AI has reduced the time job seekers spend writing applications, people are submitting hundreds of them on ZipRecruiter, LinkedIn, and other sites—often for positions that are not quite a fit, often never to hear anything back. Applicants aren’t getting feedback on their strengths and weaknesses. They’re not getting intel on what they might need to do to get hired, or the skills they might need to obtain the job they want. Signal collapse is running in both directions.

[Read: The job market is hell]

To sift through all of those applications, companies are turning, again, to AI. A recent survey by Resume Builder found that four in five companies are using AI to scan resumes, two in five are using chatbots to communicate with candidates, and one in five is giving AI interviews. AI screening tools in particular are creating an “algorithmic monoculture” in hiring, a new study of 4 million job applications has found. More candidates are being rejected by every firm that they apply to; in general, hiring decisions are more uniform than they would be if HR managers were not using algorithmic screens. A decade or three ago, firms would “go through the resumes and pick out schools they knew, or fancy schools, or schools that had good programs” in relevant fields, Creel told me. “That’s bad in its own way, from an egalitarian point of view. But at least different people had different arbitrary screening criteria.”

Moreover, screening algorithms are discriminating against Black and Asian candidates, the paper found. “There’s this filtering happening, and we don’t understand it, because these systems are opaque and custom-built for different institutions, and we don’t know the functionality,” Sarah Bana, a co-author of the paper and a digital fellow at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, told me. Nevertheless, the algorithms’ tendency to advantage the advantaged and disadvantage the disadvantaged seems clear.

For candidates who make it past an AI screen, a test such as the one Ken Schumacher administered may await. Companies ask applicants to describe how they would respond to an unruly customer, or figure out an engineering fix to a software problem. In a lot of cases, this step involves AI writing the exam, proctoring the exam, and taking the exam. “I look at this stuff all day, every day, and even I have to pinch myself sometimes—the amount of fraud!” Schumacher said. “It’s just totally ridiculous.”

The result is that AI is slowing HR down instead of speeding it up, because companies have to spend more time scrutinizing applications and performing background checks. A number of large firms are making face-to-face interactions a bigger part of the hiring process again. Google is ensuring that candidates have “at least one round” of in-person interviews, to “make sure the fundamentals are there,” Sundar Pichai, its CEO, has said. Cisco is increasing “verification steps and enhanced background checks that may involve an in-person component.” Companies are also extending probationary periods and hiring people on contract, with the intention of turning them into full-time employees after managers can vet their work.

Finally, some firms are resorting to old-fashioned methods: referrals, alumni networks, local job boards, headhunters. Schumacher said that firms were “retreating to pedigree.” They aren’t doing this because “the Harvard engineers are the best in the world,” he said. “But it’s the safer play in an era where it’s really hard to tell who is legit and who is kind of full of crap.”

[Rose Horowitch: The entry-level hiring process is breaking down]

Even with those techniques, hiring has simply gotten harder—so much so that the entire labor market might become a touch more sclerotic, and business dynamism might dim a bit. Companies are concerned that worker tenure will go down, as managers end up having to fire underqualified workers and ill-suited employees get frustrated and leave. Bana worries about businesses replicating their current workforces, and missing out on employees who might break them out of groupthink and expand their ambitions. Hoffman, the labor economist, raised the issue of AI reducing workers’ incentive to learn new skills and deepen their expertise.

What should a person looking for a job in this AI hellscape do? Nobody I spoke with was certain. But being yourself in a cover letter and dropping it off in person doesn’t seem like the worst idea.

The Ordinary Miracle of Existing

2026-06-02T12:56:56-04:00

On the northwestern shore of Africa, some 150 miles south of the Canary Islands, the coastline slightly bulges in a pimple known as Cape Bojador. For Europeans in the early 15th century, Cape Bojador marked the boundary between the known and the unknown. North of the cape was civilization and the cities of light. South were the mystical lands of Africa and the Mare Tenebrosum, the “Sea of Darkness.” Ancient notions, dating back to Ptolemy, claimed that Africa was surrounded by boiling seas filled with giant creatures, whirlpools, and perpetual darkness. No sailor had ventured south of Cape Bojador and returned.

The challenge was taken up by Prince Henry of Portugal. Between 1424 and 1434, he sent 14 ship expeditions to round the perilous cape. None succeeded. All turned back from fear or foul weather. Yet the unknown beckoned.

Undeterred, Henry dispatched the explorer Gils Eannes for a 15th attempt. This time, Henry’s man succeeded in rounding the cape, giving it a wide berth and steering far to the west. As he turned south, Eannes looked back over his shoulder and was astonished to realize that he had left the dreaded cape behind. On his next trip, the explorer landed in a bay many miles to the south. There, he saw footprints of humans, camels …

Prince Henry the Navigator was a pioneer in what historians have called the Age of Discovery. His triumph allowed improved mapmaking, new understanding of coastlines and ocean currents, and the opening of new trade routes. Most important, Prince Henry enlarged our perspective. He enlarged our concept of the world—not only of geography but also of our place in new lands and seas, our possibilities. Indeed, one can view all of human history (our art, our science, our exploration, our invention) as a gradual increase in perspective, of ourselves and of the world.

Perspective begins at a young age. Toddlers first begin using words such as me and mine around the age of 2, showing an awareness of themselves as separate from the outside world. Shortly thereafter, conscious exploration and discovery begins: Parents and caretakers at first, then the nursery, then the house, then the neighborhood. Little by little, we humans gain an understanding of what the world contains. We socialize, we read, we travel, we experience. But, in hindsight, our perspective remains highly limited. A significant minority of Americans—more than 20 percent—have never traveled abroad. More than half of us live in the same state where we were born.

[Read: The algorithm that makes preschoolers obsessed with YouTube]

Over the span of less than a century, discoveries in astronomy and biology have expanded our perspective almost beyond comprehension, if not as individuals, then at least as a human civilization. We have learned that our solar system sits on the outskirts of an enormous galaxy of a hundred billion stars called the Milky Way. And the size of our galaxy is practically inconceivable. It takes a light ray, which travels at a speed of 186,000 miles a second, 100,000 years to cross from one end of the Milky Way to the other. Other galaxies—many other galaxies—exist too. The mind reels from trying to imagine such expanse. Think of an ant in New York City contemplating a trip to San Francisco. Our houses, our roads and bridges, our cities are a speck in the cosmos, a dust mote, one grain of sand on a vast beach.

We have also enlarged our concept of time in the cosmos. We have learned that the universe began about 14 billion years ago. That’s about one hundred million human lifetimes ago. Just as our entire planet is a speck in the cosmos, our individual lives are fleeting moments in the grand unfolding of time. And, as the Buddhists always emphasize, everything is impermanent. Everything passes away. The ancient cities of Sumeria and Egypt are long gone, as are the temples of ancient Greece and Rome. Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec empire; Port Royal of Jamaica; the English coastal village of Dunwich. All gone. All that we see around us today will one day be gone. Against this backdrop of history, on Earth and in the cosmos, our individual lives are brief flickers in the chasms of time.

It is hard to imagine such a cavernous theater we find ourselves in. But it is even more difficult to fathom how unique each of us is, how improbable, how lucky to be alive at all. Advances in biology have shown that the instructions for creating each individual human being are encoded in a set of molecules called DNA. Far more possible arrangements of human DNA exist than there are atoms in the observable universe—each arrangement corresponding to a different human being. One of those many possible arrangements is each of us.

Or consider the process of conception, when a single egg unites with a single sperm. Each human female has about 300,000 eggs during the fertile period of her life. Each male ejaculation has about 300 million sperm. Thus each conception contains about a hundred thousand billion different possible combinations of DNA. In other words, there are a hundred thousand billion unique and different human beings that could result from each procreation event. Only one of those possible combinations led to each of you reading this article at this moment. Here’s a way to visualize that extremely tiny fraction. If you took a very long ruler that stretched from here to the planet Pluto, one inch of that distance would be you. The rest of the distance would be other possible human beings that could have been, but never were. Each of us has won a lottery with a hundred thousand billion different players.

Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous. Because we experience that miracle every day, we treat it as ordinary, even guaranteed, mostly unnoticed at all. We postpone joy, assuming there will always be more time. We don’t see the beauty in small moments. We simply go about the business of life, without taking a second to notice life itself. In making this comment, I am aware that in the time-driven, frantic pace of our world today, many people do not have the luxury of pausing to take stock of such moments.

There is a little more to the story. There will never be another you in the future of the universe. (Some apologies are due to Buddhists and Hindus, who believe in rebirth, but even the reborn individual is not the same.) From the distant past, billions of years ago, to the distant future, billions of years ahead, the universe will never see another one of you.

It is almost impossible to wrap our heads around such things. We could not have had this grand perspective as recently as a century ago. And we have found it not through Prince Henry’s ships but through our laboratories, our telescopes, and our minds. So the question is: What are we to make of the fantastically improbable fact of our existence, our moment of life? Or, as Mary Oliver asks in the last lines of her poem “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

[Read: ‘Attention is the beginning of devotion’]

I can speak only for myself. First of all, gratitude ought to replace entitlement. Gratitude not only for my great good fortune in a long chain of accidents, but gratitude to the individual human beings who have helped me along the way. Some years ago, I went to a Buddhist meditation retreat and learned about the concept of the “retinue,” a constellation of mentors that one imagines hovering nearby. Attempting to put this beautiful idea into practice, I collected the photographs of a couple dozen people who have guided me in my life—parents, high-school teachers, college teachers, music teachers, rabbis, colleagues. Some had already passed away. I made a poster of the images and hung it above my desk. Each day, I look up at the poster and give gratitude. It seems like a simple thing, but the gesture helps me position myself in the world, helps me slow down and take a moment to acknowledge my good fortune as the recipient of caring attention and the good fortune of simply being alive.

Two millennia ago, the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius understood the fragility of life when he wrote in his Meditations: “Whatever you do, whatever you project, so do and so project as one who may at this very moment depart out of this life.” With my one brief moment, I can try to make the world a slightly better place. Gratitude without action is empty. The mentors hovering above my desk all gave me something. Although I cannot return the favor to each of them individually, I can return it to the world. I can attempt to pass on the kindness and good faith and caring.

There is an irony here. As each of us dwindles in size by comparison to the cosmic stretches of space and of time, our individual lives, our improbable existence becomes more and more important. With the understanding of my great good fortune, I also feel a sense of responsibility. But to whom, or to what, am I responsible? Not the universe, which is without mind. And not the huge number of human beings who could have been but never were. I can hardly be responsible to people who do not exist. I believe it is a responsibility to myself—to not waste my precious life. In the immense hallways of time and of space, out of the fantastic number of potential lives and the infinite chain of accidents that led to this moment, I am here. I breathe. I see. I feel. I experience this grand spectacle of a cosmos I find myself in. That is not a thing to be wasted, or left unobserved.

Early in the 20th century, the Alsatian philosopher and polymath Albert Schweitzer introduced a concept he called Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben, which translates to “Reverence for Life.” According to Schweitzer’s autobiography, one day in 1915, while traveling on a river in Africa, the 40-year-old witnessed, all at once, the sun shimmering on the water, the background of tropical forest, and a herd of hippopotamuses basking on the banks of the river. Suddenly, he felt “the reverence for life.” Later, Schweitzer put it this way: “I am life that wills to live in the midst of other life that wills to live.”

Trump’s Strange Choice for Director of National Intelligence

2026-06-02T11:35:00-04:00

Bill Pulte does not have a habit of publicly saying admiring things about Vladimir Putin or Bashar al-Assad, so in that one respect his appointment as acting director of national intelligence represents an improvement over Tulsi Gabbard.

In every other respect, the appointment is baffling. Pulte has no intelligence background; no national-security expertise. He’s an ultra-partisan with a highly quarrelsome personality and great inherited wealth. Beyond that, there’s not much to say about his record of public or personal achievement.

[Shane Harris: Tulsi Gabbard takes the exit ramp]

Yet Pulte does have a disgraceful record of putting the prosecutorial powers of government at President Trump’s vindictive service. In his role as director of the Federal Housing Financing Agency, Pulte referred Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and New York Attorney General Letitia James for criminal prosecution for mistakes on mortgage documents so commonplace that they were also committed by Trump Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent.

To make sense of this otherwise bizarre appointment, consider the words of Friedrich Hayek, who said it best in his 1944 book about totalitarian systems, The Road to Serfdom, in the chapter “Why the Worst Get on Top”:

The totalitarian leader must collect around him a group which is prepared voluntarily to submit to that discipline they are to impose by force upon the rest of the people.

Advancement within a totalitarian group or party depends largely on a willingness to do immoral things.

To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, therefore, a man must be prepared to break every moral rule he has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him.

Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken support of the regime.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Show me the person, and I’ll show you the crime]

America under Donald Trump is not a totalitarian state. Free institutions are too strong here. Trump’s methods are too chaotic and lazy. Trump’s goals are more fundamentally larcenous and criminal than ideological and political. But Trump does aspire to cripple the rule of law—and the proper functioning of institutions—at every opportunity. In Bill Pulte, he has the perfect tool for any improper goal, an appointee who is plainly willing “to do immoral things.” Friedrich Hayek had Pulte’s number before either Pulte or Trump was even born.

The director of national intelligence exists to coordinate the government’s vast information-gathering capabilities so that the country is never again blindsided as it was on 9/11. It’s a job that demands judgment, wisdom, expertise, and integrity. To install Bill Pulte in this high position is to put every American at risk of abuses of power at home and dangers from abroad. Whether this latest Trump brain-burp is more outrageous or more absurd is hard to say. But maybe we don’t have to choose. It’s both.

Where Dogs Go On With Their Doggy Life

2026-06-02T09:30:00-04:00

Dogs follow the direction of a person’s gaze almost as well as another person can—better, in fact, when they are motivated to, because dogs are relentless. They track the movements of our eyeballs to see what we’re looking at so that they can look at it too, and they pester us to look just as attentively at them. When my late golden retriever had something to show me—a ball that had rolled under a fence, a man with an irregular gait—he didn’t always bark. Sometimes he stared first at the ball or man, then back at me, then at the ball or man again, until I retrieved the ball or moved away from the man. People speak with their eyes all the time, but every so often I’d be struck with wonder that a consciousness as radically different from mine could communicate so effectively. Then I’d love him even more, if such a thing were possible, and feel a little insecure. My dog was putting himself on my conversational level, as it were, or maybe the better way to say it is he was yanking me up to his level.

The first animals to be domesticated, dogs began the process about 20,000 years ago, and the more time they spent in our field of vision, the longer they could maintain eye contact. Evolutionary theory offers an explanation: Dogs that could follow the human gaze and predict human actions had more success as hunting or herding partners.

In a 1977 essay called “Why Look at Animals?” the art critic and novelist John Berger recounts an origin myth about the importance of seeing and being seen by creatures unlike us. To summarize a convoluted tale: A long time ago, before people had tamed animals, an animal looked at a person and the person looked at the animal, and the person saw that the animal was different and that they couldn’t understand each other. And yet the person recognized a fellow being with its own power, “comparable with human power but never coinciding with it,” and realized that to be seen by the animal was to become more fully oneself. We felt less lonely as a species. But then, Berger writes, industrial capitalism reduced animals to things—toys, future packages of meat, even “the new animal puppet: the urban pet.” We lost “a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange.”

Berger was right about the sense of wholeness that comes from seeing oneself in an animal’s eyes, and he was right to think that economic forces could undermine that connection, but he was wrong about pets. I wonder whether he had a dog. Or a cat. In 1997, Jacques Derrida held a seminar on the experience of seeing himself being seen by his cat as he stood naked before her. Published as a book during the aughts, the lecture became a key part of a revisionist philosophy of the human-animal interaction. Derrida undoes the solipsistic Cartesian formula for self-knowledge, “I think, therefore I am,” and substitutes a vision of the self as seen through the animal’s eyes. Derrida feels shame before the cat, he reports, but is not sure why. Perhaps he was “ashamed of being as naked as an animal,” he thinks. Soon he is asking, “Who am I, therefore?”

[Read: Dogs in books: an illustrated history]

Dogs must have provoked the same jittery, uncanny-valley feelings in early artists as Derrida’s cat did in him, because dogs appear more than any other domesticated animal in prehistoric and ancient art. Dog art goes back nearly 10,000 years, which is when early-Holocene people made giant paintings on rocks in Saudi Arabia showing people and dogs collaborating in a hunt. Some dogs in the pack seem to be looking up at a human. Thousands of years later, man and dog had grown so comfortable around each other that they didn’t need to trade glances. On an ancient-Greek vase from between 500 and 450 B.C.E., a man and his dog inspect an ithyphallic herm, a priapic statue with the head of the god Hermes; they both seem to express amused astonishment. The man is pulling the statue’s beard, as if testing whether it’s real. The dog has almost passed the figure but pauses and swivels his head back and up, doing a double take at the size of its organ.

Thomas W. Laqueur’s The Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History tells the story of the watchful dog. The book starts in the deep past and goes to the present, surveying much of the science and philosophy of the human-dog relationship. But Laqueur’s chief interest lies in the Western pictorial tradition, especially from the Renaissance into the 20th century. A cultural historian, Laqueur likes to come at big and familiar topics from unexpected angles: The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015) analyzes the respectful handling of corpses in order to understand what the dead do for the living. The book before that, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003), puzzles over the taboos that govern the most democratic form of sexual gratification.

Like mortal remains and masturbation, the canine gaze might seem a marginal topic, but it provides a way to appreciate dogs’ centrality in human experience. They are ubiquitous in art. Tens of thousands of them line the walls of museums and galleries. Dogs show up in dog portraiture, of course, and they have a natural place in scenes of hunting and public carousing. Once you start looking for them, you see them in all kinds of paintings—in portraits of princes and ladies, in Bible scenes, pooping on the street in a Rembrandt drawing, leading the way into modernity in an 1876 Gustave Caillebotte painting set in Paris, Le Pont de l’Europe. Mostly what dogs in art do is look, usually at people. They study other figures in a scene or peer out at the viewer. In the book’s frontispiece, Hundehode (“Head of a Dog”), a dog stares at us with disturbing intensity, the urgency of its expression highlighted by patches of electric turquoise around the eyes that clash violently with the reddish-brown of the snout. The painting, by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, is dated 1942, two years into the Nazi occupation of Norway.

Laqueur has a theory about the dog in art: It stands in for the artist. “Dogs like artists do seem to look more intently than the rest of us,” he writes. He tells a story about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was once surprised to hear the painter Paul Cézanne described by a fellow painter as a man who looked at things as a dog would—purely, straightforwardly, “without any nervousness, without any ulterior motive.” The writer W. G. Sebald turned Rilke’s anecdote into a dictum: “Like a dog / Cézanne says / That’s how a painter / Must see.”

Artists use dogs to do what both they and dogs are good at: telling us where to look. A dog steers us toward important information in Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s The Finding of Moses, from the early 1730s. The painting illustrates a scene from the Book of Exodus. Pharaoh’s daughter and her entourage hover excitedly over the infant Moses, who has been pulled out of a basket floating in the Nile; his mother had set him adrift rather than let him be drowned on Pharaoh’s order. The Egyptians are so focused on the baby that they don’t notice the Israelite girl striding toward them from the other side of the painting. We do, though, because their dog looks at her intently, its ears perked up. The young woman is Moses’s sister, Miriam, and she is gesturing toward a wet nurse outside the frame—actually, the wet nurse is Moses’s mother, though Miriam won’t tell the princess that. The dog sees what the Egyptians can’t or won’t because the young woman is a lowly slave.

Scottish National Gallery

The Finding of Moses (early 1730s), Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

The dog’s gaze in art doesn’t limit itself to indicating something concrete. It may also alert us to a larger force that we have been blind to. In the case of Munch’s dog, that force is Evil; in Tiepolo’s, it’s God. At this point in the story, Miriam’s role is to make sure that the future leader of the Hebrews ends up in the hands of the princess. But the sharpness of the animal’s gaze suggests another, higher meaning: Miriam is God’s messenger, heralding the imminent liberation of the slaves. Above all, the dog’s line of sight performs a crucial narrative function. It unites the two sides of the painting, and thereby two peoples and two opposing stories—the Egyptians have no idea how tightly their history is about to be tethered to the Hebrews’—into a single tale of redemption.

To see like a dog in a work of art is to have moral perceptions about human beings. A common theme is the dog guiding a blind man. Another is the dog watching out for the beggar. Francisco de Goya’s drawing Blind Beggar With Dog (circa 1824) combines both. In it, a humble beggar holds out his hat, bending in a manner that looks almost like bowing. Goya anchors this lowly man to the ground by means of a walking stick and a dog that lies next to him. Both man and dog seem more like shapes than individuals—the beggar is an undifferentiated bulk, the dog a lumpy mass under fur. The man’s eyes are closed, depriving us of access to his thoughts, and he seems about to sink back into the earth. But the dog’s eyes are open and piercing, providing a center of consciousness and a conscience. It is “looking straight out at us—seeing us for the blind man, demanding that we pay attention to his master,” Laqueur writes.

[From the May 2026 issue: Judith Shulevitz on masterpieces of the New Deal]

Above all, the pictorial dog shows compassion. In a fresco in Padua’s Scrovegni Chapel that is part of a cycle about the life of the Virgin Mary, the late-medieval painter Giotto endows a dog with a depth of mercy that perhaps prefigures Christ’s. Joachim, the Virgin’s father, has fled into the desert after a painful humiliation. (This episode is found in the First Gospel of James, a second-century apocryphal work.) There he comes upon two shepherds who tend his sheep. Rather than greet their master, the young men look away, eyeing each other as if put off by the anguish on his face. One of their dogs, however, rises up on its hind legs, looks full into Joachim’s eyes, and wags its tail. It is a poignant moment of cross-species recognition; the dog restores the dignity denied by the shepherds’ indifference. “Dogs humanize humans,” Laqueur notes dryly.

But aren’t sympathetic dogs in art just wish fulfillment? It would be easy to read them as products of a narcissistic longing for unconditional love. In our scientific age, we are not supposed to anthropomorphize animals—that is, mistake our culturally overdetermined notions about animals for real knowledge, empirically obtained. But dogs are not as “other” as other animals are, and our thoughts about them spring from a much closer acquaintance. Dogs attach to their human caregivers, just as babies do; they’ve been bred to. Moreover, if we mythologize the dog’s moral imagination, that doesn’t mean that its morality is imaginary. Actual dogs clearly do feel joy and sorrow, and exhibit concern for their humans.

Lucian Freud’s Girl With a White Dog (1951–52) can be taken as a melancholia painting in the tradition of Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving Melencolia I (1514). The main figure in such works is a mournful woman, typically accompanied by a dog. The conventional approach has been to interpret both of them iconographically. The woman represents a dark emotional state understood in medieval and Renaissance times as bound up in genius and madness, while dogs have long been seen as symbols for “spleen and black bile,” in Laqueur’s words. In his view, however, the dog is also just doing what dogs do; it is “keeping a dejected figure company.”

In Freud’s work, a woman sits on a couch and stares bleakly into the middle distance. She wears a loosely draped robe that exposes one untanned breast, and on her thigh lies the heavy head of a white bull terrier, which looks up at us with an inscrutable expression. The textured whiteness of its short-haired coat rhymes with her smooth white breast, pairing their bodies. They are profoundly at ease with each other. Dogs assuage loneliness by being there for us corporeally as well as sociably. Eyes locking with eyes is one step, and limbs sprawling side by side is another.

Tate

Girl With a White Dog (1951–52), Lucian Freud

How many other caring bodies cleave to us so unhesitatingly in our sorrow? And can we always be counted on to cleave back? Some of the greatest paintings in Laqueur’s book depict the misery of the solitary dog. Perhaps the most famous is Goya’s El Perro, in which a dog looks with imploring eyes into an ominous yellow mist. It is one in a series known as the Black Paintings, disturbing murals that the artist painted on his own walls from 1819 to 1823. As Laqueur reports, critics traditionally interpret paintings like these as figurative representations of our own existential isolation.

But I think they also show that dogs may share in that tragedy. I take one of Titian’s greatest paintings, The Death of Actaeon (1559–75), based on Ovid’s version of the Diana and Actaeon myth in his Metamorphoses, as a parable of our entangled fates. Wandering in the woods, the hunter Actaeon has come upon the goddess bathing naked with her nymphs. Furious, she has splashed water on him and turned him into a stag. Ovid heightens Actaeon’s anguish by having him retain his human mind in the animal’s body; he tries to cry out but has lost the power of speech. His own dogs, not recognizing him, tear him apart.

The Death of Actaeon, left unfinished at Titian’s death, depicts the mauling. It is a horror movie in paint, full of reds and streaking brushwork that convey the speed of the rushing hounds and made eerie by the specter of dogs turning on their master. Laqueur calls it “a primal scene of violence as if the evolutionary civilizing process were reversed.”

But, as he observes, the myth of Actaeon poses another question: What about the dogs? They deserve their lot no more than he does his, and surely understand it less. Ovid doesn’t tell us what happens when they realize that Actaeon is gone, but a second-century compilation of myths does. Laqueur quotes it: “When he was no more, they looked for their master with great howls and bays.” A dog is more than man’s friend. The social compact between the species is a two-way love story, rooted in millennia of mutual recognition. Woe unto us and our dogs should we ever stop seeing each other.

This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “What Dogs See.”

The Art of the Joyful Tearjerker

2026-06-02T09:00:00-04:00

Last fall, while leaving a critic’s screening of the film Hamnet, I was confronted just outside the door by the production company’s chirpy PR handler. “How was it?” she asked, as if the rivers of mascara streaming down my cheeks weren’t a clear enough signal. “Oh God,” I blurted out, before turning heel toward the bathroom. How to properly describe the garment-rending despair I’d felt in those 125 minutes?

I had known what I was in for. The Maggie O’Farrell novel on which the movie was based had left me in a similar state both times I’d read it. The allure of the literary tearjerker wasn’t new to me either. When I was about 12 and my older sister recalled sobbing in front of her college library over Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes, I raced to read it. (I was not deterred when my mother fretted about its “dead babies and dead dreams.”) I wanted the raw emotion, and the release, that my sister had reported. And I would seek it out again and again: in Thomas Hardy’s grim Jude the Obscure in my early 20s, in Hanya Yanagihara’s unrelenting A Little Life in my early 30s. Now that I’m in my early 40s, Hamnet—which chronicles the death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son—had found me, but it had moved me for more unexpected reasons. Mixed in with its heartbreak was an oddly complementary sensation of joy, and along with all the snot came a kind of neon ecstasy.

O’Farrell’s new novel, Land, provokes that same unlikely combination in ways that annihilate critiques of her work as “grief porn.” If the raison d’être of the tearjerker is to lure the reader into disorienting sorrow, O’Farrell’s fiction has a more complicated calling—her characters are endowed with a dignity that gives their despair power and meaning. She knows that anguish cannot properly infiltrate a reader who isn’t experiencing the full spectrum of emotions: disappointment, amazement, contentment, frustration, pride, and even unbridled bliss.

Irish literature is well known for its sad tales (in addition to McCourt and O’Farrell, see: William Trevor, Claire Keegan, Colm Tóibín). In Land, O’Farrell, who wrote two earlier novels at least partially set in Ireland, returns to her native roots, in effect telling parallel stories—one that minutely tracks a troubled family in the years following the Great Hunger of the mid-19th century, and one that reconstructs the entire course of Irish history from its earliest recorded days.

[Read: The long history of the Hamnet myth]

Land begins with Tomás and Liam, a father and son who are working for the Ordnance Survey, mapping the whole of famine-ravaged Ireland for the British occupying forces. Out on a remote western peninsula, they encounter a deep, mysterious spring in a copse of trees. Something mystical about it frightens Liam into a panic and turns the normally quiet Tomás so garrulous with gibberish that the local priest is called in to perform an exorcism. But the possession Tomás is shaking off isn’t Satan; it’s colonialism. He is no longer willing to sketch rivers and count dwellings for the redcoats. Instead, as an act of “honour and resistance,” he intends to draw “a map of how this land really is, of how it has always been, of what lies beneath whatever order or disorder others might impose upon it.” In due time, he moves the entire family—including Liam; his daughters, prickly Enda and agreeable Rose; and his hardworking and unflappable wife, Phina—from Dublin to a rundown cottage right near the spring.

Before revealing how this decision sets each of their lives on a surprising course, O’Farrell wants to draw her own map: the heritage of this single plot of land. In a brilliant stretch of 25 pages, she sketches out a millennium of history in the exact spot where Tomás has settled his family. She begins with Brith, a young Gaelic girl, who drinks from the spring and “feels it cutting a cool, confronting path through her middle”; for all her vim, she ends up in an early grave. From there, O’Farrell springboards through the ages, describing the construction of new dwellings and forts; the arrival of Christian religious figures and the departure of the tribe’s pagan “teller”; the varieties of magic or spirit thought to lurk in the spring. In brief snatches, we learn of men who desperately want children, of seaweed that accumulates on the shores, of seashells and bone hairpins left as sacrifices at the spring—the minutiae of daily life. But O’Farrell also gathers up the afflictions that have beset the Irish people as a whole: the failed crops, the Viking raids, the “bloating sickness” and piercing hunger, the colonizers’ cruel rent hikes and the degrading acts of foreign kings. These pages ought to be assigned reading for Irish schoolchildren, an introduction to all of the forces—natural, human, and divine—that have shaped the fate of their island.

Then suddenly, O’Farrell is back with Tomás and his family, finely detailing their new lives—sometimes painful and sometimes blissful—as people of the land. For Phina, a mother whom O’Farrell paints as slightly too good to be true, their home is a place of contentment and rewarding labor where she gives birth to their fourth child, Eugene, who never speaks but is still perfectly in tune with his siblings and the landscape. Tomás, determined to strike out on his own as a rogue mapmaker, struggles to keep his family fed while he tries to understand what exactly afflicted him at the copse spring. Liam, rattled by his father’s strange mutterings, clings to the dogma of the Catholic Church and spins out beyond his family’s reach. And Enda, feeling displaced by their move from Dublin, rambles through the countryside, alienated by her dissolving relationship with Liam. Tiny Rose can only cling to the habits of housekeeping and peacemaking, hoping to make sense of her splintering clan.

Over time, the losses mount: limbs, children, parents, homes, identities, dreams, certainties. Gone. Oh, the woe! As the family disintegrates, the reader begins to understand why we never learn their surname: They were never destined to cohere as a unit. The world is too fraught for that.

[Read: The limits of the year’s most heartbreaking film]

What O’Farrell specifically avoids is making misery their name. In Land, pain is not instrumental—neither a catalyst for growth nor a defining charactersitic—but rather a natural companion to merriment and satisfaction. It is a source of ambivalence rather than simple resolve or despair. Enda, for instance, plays the fiddle like a fiend; her gift is a tether that connects her with strangers and pulls her back from debilitating loneliness. Rose, abandoned by all that she holds dear, takes hold of a small grain of courage and hangs on for dear life. Liam, the most profoundly lost lamb in the flock, struggles with regret over his decision to join the priesthood but does not allow bitterness to envelop him completely. Even Tomás, deprived of his mapmaking—the only meaning he has found in life—takes comfort from the land itself, the trees that become his roof and the grass he transforms into his bed.

In Hamnet, great suffering provides fodder for a truly world-changing work of art. The staging of Hamlet at the novel’s end is a revelation. The death of Shakespeare’s son, who O’Farrell proposes inspired the play’s doomed prince, was more than just a family tragedy—it defined what tragedy can mean for the entire English-speaking world. The family suffering in Land does not fuel the production of a masterpiece—in fact, Tomás’s map is never completed—but the novel has something deeper in common with Hamnet. In Land, O’Farrell posits that the fate of one family, with all of its human-size joys and heartaches, cannot be extricated from history on a mass scale. She equates her characters to elements of the natural world by embracing the points of view of the long-dead girl Brith, the copse of trees, and even a passing skylark. The vibrant, nearly animate land is fastened tightly to the vagaries of human life. There is misery in this, but there’s also so much more. After all, the skylark is famous for the way it sings in flight—jubilantly.

The Strange Appeal of the Solitude Influencer

2026-06-02T08:00:00-04:00

Lana Isa has 195,000 followers on Instagram, for videos that mostly consist of her shuffling around her quiet, tidy apartment. She slides a premade pizza into the oven, pours herself a wineglass full of Diet Coke, and settles in on the couch. Or she plays a crackling fake fireplace on her TV screen, dims the lights, and watches the rain fall outside her window. Sometimes she takes walks, tries new cafés, goes shopping. No one else ever shows up in her videos, though she occasionally mentions FaceTiming her mother. A typical subtitle reads: “POV you’re single, have no friends, live alone and won’t be having kids so this is your Friday night.”

Isa, a 24-year-old in Toronto, is what you might call a solitude influencer: someone who gives followers a peek into mundane solo moments. Not all of these creators claim to have zero friends, but they generally take pride in the peaceful existence they’ve constructed. They use tags like #cozyathome, #introvertdiaries, and #alonenotlonely. One proclaims in her bio: “nyc with no friends and no complaints.” Another posts about being happily single in her mid-30s, living with her parents, and interacting only with them; taglines include “It’s ok to live a life others don’t understand” and “it’s only embarrassing if you’re embarrassed.”

These videos are popular enough that, much of the time I’ve mentioned them in conversation, people know exactly what I’m talking about. Some relay their bafflement. No friends at all? Not even a couple? Others, with a tone of knowing cynicism, declare the genre depressing but unsurprising: a dark corner of the internet, symbolic of rampant loneliness and the emptiness of modern life.

I can understand those reactions. Yet the clips keep pulling me in—keep pulling a lot of people in, judging by follower counts. They seem to serve, paradoxically, as watering holes for a community of commenters, who arrive in droves to chat about their anxieties, their beloved pets, their food preferences, their favorite novels. And they remind me of something I’ve learned while reporting on social connection over the years, speaking with sources who are at once busy and burned-out, lonely and restless, distrustful and hungry for kinship: Many people have a complicated relationship with aloneness, whether they have too much of it or not enough.

The solitude influencers are not the only people who say they walk through life almost entirely alone. A few years ago, I wrote about nocturnal ultra-introverts who go about their business at night, specifically because of the peace that comes when most others are asleep. They, too, were resolute in creating a life that suited them, and they, too, cherished the tranquility of their home and mind. Psychologists have told me that some people probably do need very little social interaction. It’s merely an individual difference.

[Read: The nocturnals]

The influencers, though, are different in one obvious way: They’re motivated to share their lifestyle online. On a call, Isa told me that influencing doesn’t get in the way of pure solitude; she has notifications turned off on all her social-media platforms, and she makes a point not to check them right after posting. The only people who text her, she said, are her mother and sister—and her phone provider, when her cellphone bill is due. Yet it’s hard to deny, scrolling through her videos, that she’s taking part in something inherently social.

Sometimes she chats away as she drives to town or whispers to her viewers from inside a store. One of her captions reads, “pretending like you guys are my friends and we’re on facetime 🤗.” And many of her commenters seem to think of themselves as just that—her friends. They cheer her on when she gets out of the apartment. They compliment her hair. They recommend books and makeup products. “Omg I loved this long video! It felt like we were all just hanging out together!” one wrote. “I’ve been a happy loner all my life and I watch vlogs while I eat meals for a little ‘company’ lol,” another confessed.

This was one of the more supportive corners of the internet I’ve seen. But it was also odd: strangers gathering, to celebrate being alone.

Isa’s work made more sense to me when I heard her origin story, which she shared with followers in a series of videos. Growing up, she says, her home life was chaotic. At school she was picked on for being poor, for having crooked teeth because her family couldn’t afford braces, for her shyness and frizzy hair. At an early job, she became close friends with one co-worker and developed a crush on another; she started dating the latter when she left. Then she realized that the two were seeing each other behind her back. So she learned: Other people will hurt you. Now she’s a kind of mentor for legions of people who also want “a little company”—at a safe remove. She shows them that you can take yourself to the hospital when no one is there to accompany you, or go to the movies when you want to “feel community” without really having it. “If you are on this journey of being alone,” she said in one video about spending Christmas solo, “I’m so excited to be a part of it with you and to show you how amazing it can be and how fulfilling it can be to make yourself happy and not rely on other people.”

Other people, it’s true, are complicated and messy and sometimes not worthy of trust. They can make life harder, or at least less simple. Solitude influencers tend to have two main types of commenters, I noticed. There are the ones on a “journey of being alone,” who appreciate Isa’s guidance and validation, or who just like seeing their lifestyle represented. But there are also the ones who pine for more solitude than they’re getting: who are tired of sloppy roommates or bickering friends or demanding families. Some of them appear to be devoted but exhausted wives and mothers. “I love my husband and the sweet life we’re doing together, but I would have wanted to spend time alone like you’re doing right now so I wasn’t still trying to figure out who I am at 42,” one commented. “I find your videos very relaxing,” another person shared. “No drama, no one with demands on your time and energy, freedom to do what you want, how you want, when you want.”

[Read: You’ve probably already met your next best friend]

This type of commenter seemed to watch in the same way as people who follow ultrarich influencers on vacation in Bali—with envy, or simply with vicarious pleasure. When I first encountered the solitude influencers, I’d been so busy, running from work to drinks to work to dinner, that I could see why people found their posts so soothing, even aspirational. I let myself imagine how I’d enjoy my own seclusion: I’d read all the unread books sitting on my shelves. I’d chip away at the films on my long to-watch list. I wouldn’t always have to be so on, so attuned to sensitive social dynamics—whom I was due to check in with, who was annoyed with whom, who had slighted me without even realizing it.

Most people, to some degree, are torn between different psychological needs. They might feel loneliness if they have too much solitude but experience what psychologists call “aloneliness” when they don’t have enough. They might crave connection but also resent it for asking so much of them. In the United States, as in many other places, a lot of people are spending ample time alone. They’re ordering in a ton of delivery; they’re streaming a ton of Netflix. But many are also stretched thin: working long hours, maintaining side hustles, caring for kids or aging parents without much help, living with parents because they can’t afford rent. There is a reason the solitude influencers’ homes are always so neat, the decor so bland, the music smooth and unremarkable. It’s a fantasy for overextended viewers, watching from the homes they don’t have time to clean, while they’re covered in baby food or tuning out the neighbor shouting through paper-thin walls.

[Read: The anti-social century]

Isa—the person, if not the persona—seems to embody all these contradictions. When I spoke with her earlier this month, she seemed more ambivalent about her lifestyle than I’d expected. As much as she values her peace, she would love to have a small group of close friends someday, she said. She imagines going out for drinks with them, giggling and chatting and slightly buzzed. “I’ve never really had that, so I can’t really tell you if that would be better than what I currently do,” she said. “But the concept of it sounds fun.”

In adulthood, though, new friends don’t just fall in your lap. You can’t know if someone’s worth trusting until you try putting your trust in them. To build the relationships she does want, she acknowledged, she’d have to make a concerted effort. She’d have to take a risk.

I knew that after we hung up, and after I finished writing this story, I was going to walk through the warm evening to my friend’s house for dinner and piña coladas. I’d been stressing about getting everything done, about not having a break in between, about going to bed late again. Now I felt almost guilty, and immensely grateful. I’ll probably never find the right balance of solitude and connection, I thought. But what I had, in that moment, felt close enough for me.

There Is Already a Word for the Deep Moral Failures of AI

2026-06-02T08:00:00-04:00

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For the past few years, I’ve been troubled by a word, and that word is sin. I keep reaching for it, because it seems to be the only term strong enough to describe the new forms of dehumanization that artificial intelligence has introduced—even though calling something a sin sounds embarrassing to me, like throwing salt over your shoulder or stowing a lucky penny in your pocket.

The problem is, I don’t know what else to call it when companies market digital girlfriends to the heartsick and young. Or when they hawk robot companions to the lonely and old. Or when a billionaire explains that he intends to sell intelligence—trained on humanity’s stolen intellectual property—back to us as a utility, like electricity or water. These developments are not just wrong. They feel to me like something deeper and darker. “I met the banker and it felt like sin,” Patterson Hood croons in the great Drive-By Truckers song “Sinkhole.” I’d substitute chatbot for banker.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, then, that the critics, living and dead, who capture my unease about the AI revolution—who discuss it with appropriate moral gravity—are or were Christians. They are or were people comfortable using words like sin. They include Catholic writers such as the social critic Ivan Illich and the philosophers Charles Taylor and Jennifer Frey, as well as the Orthodox Substacker Paul Kingsnorth, the Presbyterian theologian Carl Trueman, and Pope Leo, with his new AI-focused encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.

[Read: The Pope doubles down on the beautiful struggle]

The latter two figures in particular have struck a chord with me because they acknowledge that the crisis posed by technological modernity is primarily an anthropological one. “‘What is man?’ is the question of our time,” Trueman writes in his new book, The Desecration of Man. Pope Leo, in his encyclical, similarly frames life today as defined by the “paradox of material progress and anthropological regression.” Leo writes that people have more and more yet live less and less like human beings, a tension that AI is likely to exacerbate.

Many AI critics who write from a secular perspective, by contrast, tend to speak about artificial intelligence in utilitarian terms. Technology journalists, academic experts, and activists typically emphasize the AI industry’s prodigious environmental toll, its reliance on intellectual-property theft , its exacerbation of racialized algorithmic bias, its use in dangerous autonomous weapons systems, its role in warrantless surveillance, its exploitation of cheap foreign-labor markets, its upending of the domestic labor market at home, and the like.

These concerns are pressing—arguably the most pressing issues presented by AI—and spotlighting them is good and right. They are measurable harms that can be quantified, and that regulations and policy can be built around. The pope writes about many of these in his encyclical. But an overly pragmatic focus risks being morally and philosophically shallow, and leaving comparatively underexplored the more foundational questions that new large language models pose. After all, even if all of these concrete problems with AI were magically solved—if the environmental externalities were fixed, if better protections for workers were put in place, if artificial intelligence was not pressed into the service of war or surveillance or naked profit—we would still be left with a technology that radically unsettles many traditional conceptions of human dignity and meaning, and that threatens to outsource the most interesting aspects of our life and labor to machines.

This is what the most thoughtful Christian critics are able to see. Illich wrote in 1971, when the rise of the computer was the primary technological concern, that man “attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it.” He concluded, “We now must face the fact that man himself is at stake.”

Today, AI puts “man” even more at stake, as many of Silicon Valley’s leaders attempt to bring about a digital successor species, based on the belief that humanity’s evolutionary destiny is to usher in a higher form of intelligence. Defending humanity against its digital doppelgänger requires having a positive conception of what humanity is in the first place. As the pope writes in his encyclical, “Technological progress—valuable in itself—requires careful discernment of the anthropological vision that guides it and the ends it pursues.” He warns against a technoculture that displaces its burdens “on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species.” Christianity has a clear “anthropological vision,” asserting that the purpose of the human species is to exist in the image of its creator, to love God and one another, and to spread life on Earth and steward its creatures.

Many secular thinkers can struggle to articulate a clear definition of what humanity is. As Trueman writes, “Can the term ‘dehumanized’ even have a meaning if human nature itself is an abstraction, an empty cipher?” In his recent book Language Machines, the NYU professor and tech writer Leif Weatherby writes that contemporary critics tend to assert what he calls “remainder humanism,” whereby “the human here is defined by technology’s creep, but only negatively.” In other words, the definition of human is implicitly reduced to the narrowing set of behaviors, traits, and capacities that machines do not yet possess—which leaves secular humanists defending the shrinking ground that is left.

[Read: The coming humanist renaissance]

What Christian humanism offers, with its assertion that humans are made in the Imago Dei, is a choice other than Silicon Valley extremism or remainder humanism. If what makes humanity special is not our capabilities—automatable or not—but the notion that we spring from a transcendent source, then what the robots can or cannot do is in some sense irrelevant. ChatGPT was not made in the image of God, no matter how impressive its facsimile becomes. A secular humanism that cannot find a similarly deep line of reasoning is one that may not be adequate to defend human dignity in the AI era.

I am not arguing that one must be or become more religious to fully appreciate the challenge posed by the rise of AI—that would make me, a not especially observant Presbyterian, a hypocrite. But I do think that one must start from the premise that humans have some kind of universal nature or essence that must be safeguarded from technological encroachment. Otherwise, appreciating what large language models and their peddlers wish to take from us becomes too difficult. If secularists flinch at calling this taking—what Pope Leo calls Big Tech’s “dehumanizing ambition”—a sin, they’ll need to find another word for it.

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Democrats Must Learn to Talk Sports

2026-06-02T07:00:00-04:00

For the first time since 1999, the New York Knicks will appear in the NBA Finals. It’s a momentous occasion for a city and fan base starved for basketball success. President Trump, never missing an opportunity to insert himself into the discourse, has suggested that he’ll attend a game in Madison Square Garden. When asked about the president’s ambitions to attend a game, New York Governor Kathy Hochul challenged him to name the starting lineup of the “1993 championship team.”

But the Knicks didn’t win the championship in 1993. They did make the finals in 1994, but lost to the Houston Rockets. The most recent Knicks championship was, in fact, in 1973. Hochul’s press office has since said on X that Hochul slipped up on purpose: She “was baiting Trump into pretending that team won the finals. A classic 4D chess move.” The likelier explanation is that the Democratic governor, presented with the opportunity to score a couple of easy political points, had missed the layup.

That would certainly fit the pattern. Democratic politicians are decades into an authenticity problem. Fairly or not, voters—especially men—tend to perceive Democrats as unrelatable, scripted, and disconnected from the population they seek to govern. The solution seemingly favored by Democratic consultants is for anyone with presidential aspirations to appear on as many manosphere podcasts as possible or play footsie with edgy streamers. But appearing on this or that platform is not really what matters. Rather, the game is to get as much attention as possible, as frequently as possible, while seeming as relatable as possible. A cheat code exists to hit all three objectives: sports talk.

The contemporary sports-media landscape is designed to take ruthless advantage of the fact that nothing generates attention more reliably than controversy. Personalities such as Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless have made fortunes because they understand that sparking disagreement equals clicks and attention. Their debates may be contrived, inconsequential, and moronic. Their arguments may be made in bad faith. Yet they and other talking heads play on an endless loop on screens across the country. An entire genre of sports podcasts, meanwhile, seems to exist only to generate clips of the most outrageous opinions and post them to TikTok and YouTube.

As Democratic politicians scramble to seem in touch and ensure that their faces appear on our phones as much as possible, they are neglecting the free real estate offered by sports talk. A popular meme mocks men for being content to sit and name obscure athletes to one another for hours. It’s popular because it isn’t far from the truth. The politically disengaged male voters whom Democrats are so desperate to reach aren’t at bars arguing about Medicare funding. They are arguing about a roughing-the-passer penalty. Bettors on Polymarket give Stephen A. Smith higher odds of winning the 2028 Democratic presidential primary than Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, and Ruben Gallego. Nothing gets attention like sports takes.

[Chris Murphy: My son’s hockey team and the crisis of American resentment ]

Trump seems to understand this. He takes controversial positions on sports and talks about them in words that sound sincere. The NFL’s kickoff rules, recently changed to reduce injuries during returns, are a particular passion of his. After attending the 2025 Super Bowl, the president posted on Truth Social: “The worst part of the Super Bowl, by far, was watching the Kickoff where, as the ball is sailing through the air, the entire field is frozen, stiff. College Football does not do it, and won’t! Whose idea was it to ruin the Game?”

How much Trump personally cares about sports other than golf is unclear, but he knows which buttons to press. He goes to UFC fights; he goes to the Super Bowl; he has pro athletes—most recently the Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart—speak at his rallies. Sports fans can relate, because this is how many of us would abuse our power if we were president.

Some other politicians are getting it. Ron DeSantis, who was widely mocked during the 2024 primaries for his robot-like demeanor, is happy to go on podcasts to discuss how the transfer portal and name, image, and likeness payments are ruining college football. DeSantis even remarked at a recent press conference that, although the University of Florida’s basketball team was the defending NCAA champion at the time, the fans weren’t happy, because the football team was bad. He understands his audience.

Zohran Mamdani, the rare Democrat who seems fluent in sports, has made a point of showing off his extensive knowledge of the English Premier League and has made his fandom of the Knicks and Mets apparent. After the Knicks swept the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA playoffs, Mamdani went on X to troll the Ohio Republican candidate for governor Vivek Ramaswamy.

Compare these examples with the way in which the 2024 Kamala Harris campaign tried to channel some of sports talk’s power after selecting Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a former high-school-football coach, as Harris’s running mate. “Coach Walz,” as Harris called him at the event announcing his candidacy, seemed more content to let people write about his sports identity than to demonstrate it. On October 27, the nation found out why. After Walz joined Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on a Twitch livestream to play Madden, the über-popular football video game, his campaign’s X account posted that “@AOC can run a mean pick 6.” A pick-six (when an interception is returned for a touchdown) is an outcome, not a play. The gaffe was probably the fault of a social-media staffer, not Walz himself. Even so, it went viral in sports group chats across the country.

But the more telling moment had actually come a week earlier, when Walz appeared on The Rich Eisen Show. During his 15-minute segment, Walz went out of his way to compliment the University of Michigan’s football fans, Lambeau Field in Wisconsin, and the coach of the Detroit Lions (also in Michigan). The appearance didn’t generate the kind of viral contempt that greeted the pick-six post. Indeed, the YouTube excerpt of Walz’s appearance on Eisen’s show has just 50,000 views. (By contrast, Trump’s appearance on the sports-and-entertainment podcast Bussin’ With the Boys, which was released just a few days earlier, has nearly 10 times as many.) And that’s exactly the problem: Walz avoided controversy by saying nice things about everyone, thus defeating the purpose of talking sports. In the realm of sports talk, kindness is unrelatable; it’s alien, even. What’s relatable is irrationally caring for your team and irrationally hating its rivals—not pandering by saying that you happen to like all of the teams in key Rust Belt swing states.

If Democrats want to defeat authoritarianism, they need to win the trust of people who are not necessarily politically engaged. To do that, they could do worse than to start expressing their own hot takes on sports. These shouldn’t repeat already-popular opinions as a way to seem relatable. The perfect take should be actually unpopular, counter to the consensus, and specific.

The Senate candidate James Talarico doesn’t need to run away from his meatless-taco order. Instead, he could prove that he’s a regular guy by calling into ESPN Austin to accuse the University of Texas quarterback Arch Manning of being a nepo baby who got millions of dollars just for his name. Or perhaps he could compare Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys’ imperious owner, to Trump: an egotistical old man destroying a once-proud institution.

Indeed, the sports world offers fertile terrain for class politics. Progressive Democrats have been trying, with limited success, to convince Americans that billionaires are their true enemy. Well, guess who loves to hate billionaires: aggrieved sports fans. Why not take a break from complaining that billionaires don’t pay their fair share of income taxes to focus instead on team owners’ obsession with avoiding the luxury tax by trading away their best players? Perhaps AOC could earn some support in Staten Island if she hammered Hal Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees, for letting Juan Soto go to the crosstown Mets to save on his tax bill.

[Dan Moore: Taxpayers are about to subsidize a lot more sports stadiums]

Josh Shapiro, of Pennsylvania, is one of the most popular Democratic governors in the country. Is it any coincidence that he drew headlines last year by complaining about the NFL’s attempts to ban the Philadelphia Eagles’ famed “tush push”? If he runs for president, he could go further still: Insinuate that the Eagles lost the 2023 Super Bowl due to sabotage by a groundskeeper with suspiciously close ties to the Kansas City Chiefs. He’s going to lose in Missouri regardless, so he might as well shore up those Pennsylvania votes while proving that he’s just as deranged as the rest of us sports fans.

The point isn’t the substance of the opinion—it’s the willingness to defend it. Sports takes are a simple way to show that you have the backbone to stand for something unpopular because you believe in it.

The counterargument to all of this is that politicians, especially dorky Democratic politicians, simply don’t have hot sports takes to offer, because they aren’t actually fans. But if you can’t relate to something that resonates so strongly with American people, then you need to reevaluate your role as a politician in an electoral democracy. Aspiring leaders who aren’t up on sports would do well to set aside some time to at least watch the highlights. They will find that sports opinions have a key advantage over policy arguments: If elected, politicians can never be held accountable for them.

How Much of Data-Center Activism Is Really AI Slop?

2026-06-02T07:00:00-04:00

Americans are wary of AI in general, and they are especially suspicious of the AI data centers that are popping up across the country like enormous mushrooms. A majority do not want a new data center built in their town. Across the country, community groups have organized to protest individual projects, and activists have successfully lobbied local and state politicians to place moratoriums on the facilities’ construction. But online, the movement has been mutated by some of the same forces it’s protesting. Defenders of the AI industry have claimed that the social-media conversation about the dangers of AI is inauthentic—that, in fact, it’s AI-generated—and to some extent, they’re right. There is a lot of anti-AI AI slop. Much of it is very strange.

[Read: Inside the dirty, dystopian world of AI data centers]

Last week, I perused dozens of local anti-data-center groups on Facebook, and in almost every one, I found people sharing AI-generated materials. Even in these groups, users posted screenshots of AI-generated summaries as backup for their arguments. In the comments under a post about data centers in Texas, a woman shared her concern about the fact that data centers use human stem cells. When someone called her a 🤡, she replied with a screenshot of a Google AI summary for the search Do data centers use stem cells. One Australian start-up is experimenting with the idea, but the AI summary made the practice sound widespread: “Yes, pioneering facilities are starting to utilize living human neurons grown from stem cells as biological processors,” it said. The same week, a town supervisor on Long Island had to debunk a rumor about a new data-center project after an inaccurate AI-generated search summary attracted so much attention that residents planned a protest (which they promoted with a flyer that itself appeared to be AI-generated).

A weirder, more disturbing type of AI-generated anti-AI content started proliferating on Facebook in March. The memes, which show broadly nostalgic images of the American countryside, are shared on state-themed pages with names such as “Life in Michigan” and “North Carolina Life.” In one repeating format, someone has mowed a spiky message into their grass or crops: “NOT WORTH GIVING UP AN INCH OF THIS TO A DATA CENTER,” for instance. (Sometimes they also mow a middle finger.) Another meme shows a boxy new industrial building—presumably a data center—right next door to a beautiful old farmhouse.

An accompanying caption will generally call out the unique qualities that make the state in question so worth fighting for: “quiet roads stretching beside cornfields and barns 🌽,” “Friday night football and county fairs 🎡,” “dark skies over peaceful countryside ✨.” Which state is that? Almost any of them. They’re all the same, but they’re all very special. AI data centers must not infringe on Indiana’s “quiet country roads, golden cornfields, old barns, peaceful sunsets, and the feeling of home that comes with them.” Nor should they be allowed to tarnish Kentucky’s “quiet country roads, golden fields, old barns, peaceful sunsets, and the feeling of home that comes with them.”

By far the most common template pairs an aerial image of pristine farmland with a copy-pasted story about a proud farmer making headlines after turning down a data-center developer’s offer of millions of dollars for his or her land. Although many commenters recognize that the stories are fake, many others offer apparently credulous responses: “Thank you”s and “God bless you”s and “#Respect.” One commenter gently fact-checked a post about an Alabama farmer, based on similar content that he’d come across in other places: “It was actually a Pennsylvania farmer that rejected the $15 million offer,” he wrote, “but there is supposedly a farmer in my home state of Kentucky that rejected a $33 million offer for his 650 acres.” (Actually, one farmer in Kentucky did reportedly turn down a huge offer from an unnamed company in March, but it was for $26 million, and the farmer was a woman.)

That many of these posts are AI-generated is not in question. They are not typically photorealistic. Some images include a deformed (or upside-down) state outline. Others name a state in the image that doesn’t match the one named in the caption. I found one in which the poster seemed to have forgotten to cut out some extra AI-generated text before sharing: “Here’s a Michigan version in the same style ,” it says at the top. I also saw a depiction of Pennsylvania with a New York flag flying over the landscape. And in a picture of Texas residents coming together to protest a new data center on the Gulf Coast, one activist holds a sign that says, nonsensically, PRESERVE BEFORE CLOUDS.

Who is making this stuff, and to what end? Maybe foreign actors are to blame. (Kevin O’Leary, the entrepreneur and Shark Tank star, has suggested that opposition to a 40,000-acre data-center project he is developing in Utah has been seeded by the Communist Party of China. The groups he has accused deny this.) When I showed some anti-AI slop posts to William Marcellino, a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation who has studied China-sponsored disinformation, he told me that both AI slop and state-by-state geographic-targeting campaigns are common in modern disinformation campaigns. But he didn’t see any particular reason to believe that these posts were part of one.

The deepfake expert and Meta adviser Henry Ajder told me last week that he thinks that blaming such material on geopolitical rivals is a “convenient explanation” for the AI industry “rather than the most likely” one. This was the first time Ajder had seen this kind of slop, but he guessed that people were creating and posting it to get attention on Facebook pages in order to make money. An anti-AI AI post is set up to get tons of engagement because people will comment and share approvingly when they’re fooled, and they’ll comment and share angrily when they’re not. Even the ironic fact of AI being used to rail against AI might be only another reason for sharing.

I sent direct messages to many of the slop-producing accounts—so many, in fact, that Facebook locked my account, and I had to submit a video selfie proving that I am a human being. Exactly one content producer responded to my queries, a poster who had put up fake images of Pennsylvania cornfields, rivers, and shoreline (Lake Erie, I guess?) with anti-data-center messages. “I actually live in Bangladesh,” the account runner told me. “But Pennsylvania has always been one of the U.S. states I’ve found most interesting online.”

Meta’s monetization program, which rewards views, comments, and other interactions, has long encouraged low-quality, lowest-common-denominator swill. The pages currently posting AI slop about AI also post AI slop about other geographically targeted mundanities, such as the humidity in Alabama and how confused Texas drivers get by roundabouts. (An analysis that was posted recently by a pseudonymous Substacker found that a lot of this U.S.-state-themed engagement bait comes from Bangladesh.) “I imagine the people that are posting this content are in most cases dispassionate to the issues they’re posting about,” Ajder said. “They just want to see the numbers going up each month on their payments on the platform.” The anti-AI slop creator who claimed that he has always had a thing for Pennsylvania also told me that he doesn’t really care about U.S. data centers and is interested simply in sharing “relatable” content. (He also said that he is supporting his family with his monetized social-media accounts, but he declined to share any proof of that income and did not provide a way for me to verify his identity when I requested it.)

Meta has said that it tries to label content that was produced using AI so that users will know when media is manipulated or totally made-up, but none of the posts I saw had labels, and few of the pages that hosted them made any reference to AI in their descriptions. When the pages were tied to “people,” the people seemed to be fake: One Texas-themed page was itself an administrator of the group “Born & Raised in Texas.” The other two listed admins for that group were a page called “I Love America” and a woman named Alice whose profile photo shows a Pakistani actor who was found dead last year. (A spokesperson for Meta told me that Facebook can’t label all AI-generated content.)

Whatever the source of anti-AI AI slop, thousands of people care enough about the issue it addresses to share and comment on the slop. They have legitimate concerns about the mysterious facilities straining their local utilities, taking over large open spaces, and likely providing very few long-term jobs to their community in exchange. In some cases, they may even understand that the images are fake and repost them anyway.

Before this year, “a lot of people probably didn’t really give a toss about AI,” Ajder said. (He’s British.) When it was just a new feature on our phones and computers, people could take AI or leave it. Now the same technology has an unavoidable and creepy physical presence in the form of huge, windowless buildings humming with machines—“alien monoliths that land in your pristine, bucolic countryside,” as Ajder put it.

Some of the people who are most put off by those buildings’ presence are getting taken in by AI output. That may be ironic, but it also shows how right they are to say that the world they’ve known and understood is disappearing.

How Raphael Made It All Look So Easy

2026-06-02T07:00:00-04:00

Plenty of faces keep you company in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Raphael: Sublime Poetry”—saints and sinners, popes and poets, ladies in posh frocks or nothing at all—but the most disarming is the first to greet you, that of a boy in a fun hat. With a long, straight nose; soft, bright eyes; and an uplifted chin, he carries the wary confidence of a teenage heartthrob. It isn’t just the face that makes you pause. So does the stripped-down assurance of its execution: A single strong line eloquently maps the contour of cheek, chin, and neck; a handful of deft arcs convey dark lashes above pale irises and a sweet double bow where the lips meet. A gentle swing of shoulder-length hair provides the only hint of motion.

The drawing, a presumed self-portrait, would have been made when Raphael was about 17, sometime around 1500. It gives a hint of his natural talent and also of something more—an attitude of mastery worn lightly, of elegance too dignified to call attention to itself. Raphael’s friend Baldassarre Castiglione later codified that manner as an ideal of refined behavior, for which he coined the term sprezzatura—the art of making it all look easy.

As with so many things, Raphael excelled at it. In his 37 years on the planet, he appeared to sail effortlessly through every domain he set his mind to—drawing, painting, architecture, client management, enterprise scaling. He had been lucky in his origins. His father was an artist and a poet at the ducal court of Urbino, home to Europe’s largest collection of books and to a culture of intellectual inquiry in which mathematics and perspective were pursued as both practical tools and a means of understanding the cosmos. Form and meaning, the visible and the eternal, were seen as mirrors of each other. (Castiglione set his sprezzatura-defining The Book of the Courtier in Urbino.)

Raphael’s mother died when he was 8, and his father three years later, around the time Raphael began his apprenticeship with the Umbrian painter Perugino, from whom he acquired a fine technical training and—to judge by that self-portrait and other works—a sense of his own powers. By age 17, he held the status of “master painter” in his own right. He could probably have made a good living churning out lovely, if slightly stiff, altarpieces. Instead, he took himself to Florence, where Leonardo was (as usual) generating ideas by the bucketload while failing to complete commissions, and Michelangelo was (as usual) making dramatic masterpieces while offending everyone around him.

Raphael was clearly a brilliant sponge. He adopted Leonardo’s soft gradients to produce skin and skies that seem to glow from within. Taking up portraiture, he moved swiftly from artful pastiches of the Mona Lisa to pictures so personable, they seem about to speak. (His doe-eyed Castiglione is a fur-draped embodiment of wisdom and gentle humor.) He adopted and expanded on Leonardo’s trick of organizing figures in pyramidal units: Where Perugino’s Madonnas sat facing the viewer like children frozen in front of a school photographer, Raphael’s started to twist and turn like real women with real children. In a large circular painting of the Virgin, Christ, and the infant Saint John, the players arrange themselves in a corkscrew of affectionate gestures and exchanged glances. (His gift for this subject is made more poignant by the exhibition’s inclusion of a ledger for memorial candles with entries marking the deaths of Raphael’s mother and newborn sister.)

Arriving in Rome at age 25, Raphael suddenly transformed from a popular maker of paintings for private devotion into the D. W. Griffith of wall decoration. His frescoes for the Vatican—which include such paragons as The School of Athens—serve as more than definitive lessons in how to compose compelling crowd scenes. They comprise what is probably the most intellectually ambitious fresco program of the Renaissance, a paean to human understanding encompassing theology and philosophy, poetry and justice, and realms in between.

His work for the Vatican eventually included portraits, a suite of tapestries so ambitious that they contributed to nearly bankrupting the papacy, thousands of square feet of frescoes, and the redesign of St. Peter’s Basilica itself. Having built up his workshop to cope with this papal acreage, he expanded into the other end of the market, working with the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi on mass-market prints that would carry Raphael’s designs and reputation across continents and centuries. In Lahore at the turn of the 17th century, Muhgal court artists copied the Marcantonio/Raphael Descent From the Cross. In Paris in the early 1860s, Édouard Manet cribbed figures from the Marcantonio/Raphael The Judgment of Paris for his game-changing Luncheon on the Grass.

Raphael the man breathed his last in 1520, but Raphael the brand kept on chugging. For centuries, the Italian Renaissance was celebrated as the cradle of all that made European civilization great—rational inquiry, individuality, capitalism, art that knitted the living world to higher-order ideals—and Raphael was feted as its most perfect avatar. He was entombed in the Pantheon, and his skeletal remains were venerated in the manner of saints’. Goethe spent some time with a skull purported to be Raphael’s and took note of its “handsome bone structure, in which a beautiful soul could comfortably meander.” In the catalog for “Sublime Poetry,” the exhibition’s curator, Carmen C. Bambach, writes: “That Raphael enjoyed three hundred years of uninterrupted fame, occupying his position as the premier artist of the West until the late nineteenth century, should prove sufficiently the timelessness of his art.”

But timelessness eventually went out of fashion. Apart from high schoolers cramming for AP Art History, Raphael takes up relatively little public brain space these days. To the degree that his geometric precision, balanced color, and idealized naturalism were the foundation of academic painting, he became associated with an unctuous, prettified stasis. When Manet borrowed those three poses from The Judgment of Paris, he wasn’t seeking the eternal sublime; he was sticking a pin in its balloon.

Some of this decline reflects the reputational fortunes of the Renaissance itself, its vaunted humanistic values lately critiqued for enabling forms of social exploitation, but some of it may be a side effect of sprezzatura. In 1528, Castiglione observed that “everyone knows, regarding rare and well-made things, how difficult it is to accomplish them, and so facility in such things excites the greatest wonder.” That was likely true in a preindustrial age. But we live in a world where well-made things are not rare (consider your phone), even if their fabrication defies comprehension (consider the chips in that phone, etched in vacuum chambers with lasers firing 50,000 times a second and mirrors polished to atomic tolerances). For people like us, the “greatest wonder” is more often occasioned by getting a look under the hood.

The triumph of “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” is to show us how the sprezzatura got made. It is at heart a drawings show, stretching from that early presumed self-portrait to a late two-sided sheet with a naked, crouching, eerily three-dimensional apostle on one side and sketches for the redesign of St. Peter’s on the verso. The paintings—which one might have expected to be at the center of things—serve as colorful punctuation points. The sublime poetry sits in them, but the action is in the drawings and the spaces between them.

Raphael was adored, in part, for transforming the depiction of the Virgin and Child from a rigid, hieratic trope into a personification of mother-child love. But how did he make that leap? How did he learn liveliness? The drawings from Raphael’s early years show remarkable grace and sophistication, but they are essentially careful and conventional figure studies. This changes when he encounters Leonardo’s habit of brainstorming all over the page. One Leonardo drawing in the exhibition features a mash-up of overlapping horses, riders, and text; another bears four kneeling Virgins, half a dozen tumbling infants, and a small perspective diagram. Near them at the Met are Raphael sheets filled with overlapping pen sketches of bald Virgins (probably drawn from a posable mannequin) and babies experimenting with different methods of escape from maternal arms. In oil paint, the sparkle of those babies would dim a bit with future-savior-of-the-world gravity, but in ink on paper, they remain gleefully restless and alive.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist in a Landscape (The Alba Madonna), circa 1509-11

École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts

Sketches of Infants; the Virgin and Child, circa 1507-8

Other drawings reveal the steps by which he moved from intimate idylls to the operatic choreography of his Vatican frescoes. In a study for the Entombment in the Baglioni Altarpiece, we can see him looking sideways to Michelangelo’s example, establishing the architecture of the scene with muscular naked men braced in heave-ho postures. (Later, they would be provided with clothing and the weight of the dead Christ.) Other figures—philosophers, saints, popes, and poets—who occupied his years in Rome began their pictorial lives in a similar state of nature.

Raphael emerges not just as a finished product, but as an event. Ideas are taken up and discarded; loose sketches are revised and combined into composition studies; studies are tweaked and translated into full-scale color drawings (“cartoons”) that would guide the makers of the final work. The larger and more elaborate the project, the more Raphael depended on assistants, and the more precise his specifications had to be. In oil painting, he could step in at any point to touch things up, but the colored plaster of fresco sets very quickly, and the weavers who made the tapestries were some 1,500 miles away, in Flanders. Thus we see him laboring over the exact positions of bent fingers, the fall of drapery above Christ’s toes.

By design, Raphael’s finished compositions function as autonomous machines. The world depicted is contained and self-sufficient. Nobody falls out of frame. The majority of Raphael’s drawings, in contrast, were made as waystations on the road to somewhere else—observational sketches of hands or heads for some future use, tools for thinking through a problem. Even the most complete and finished examples are waiting to be rescaled, or transferred to canvas, plaster, or copperplate. Wall labels in the exhibition call attention to the pinpricks in the main outlines—holes through which chalk or charcoal could be pushed (“pouncing”) to transfer the design from one surface to another. These were working drawings, created for a temporary and expedient purpose.

We’re fortunate that people thought to preserve as many of these as they did, but something like 90 percent have been lost. To see these works in such volume is doubly rare because, unlike the paintings on loan from the Louvre or the National Gallery of Art, the drawings are rarely on display even in their home institutions. Drawings are notoriously light-sensitive, so they spend most of their life in dark storage. The specialness of what is on view communicated itself to visitors. People of all ages walked close to the walls, stopped often, and occasionally doubled back to make comparisons—a noticeable contrast with standard museum cruising from a four-foot distance.

The most imposing objects come toward the end of the exhibition (and of Raphael’s life): three tapestries from the Sistine Chapel series. They really are astonishingly large, and the colors in these examples (part of a set owned by King Philip II of Spain) remain remarkably vivid, but we are the wrong audience for their kind of grandeur. Enormous, brightly colored, storytelling pictures are almost inescapable in a contemporary world jammed with billboards, commercial signage of all sorts, wall-size video art. Looking at The Miraculous Draft of the Fishes, with its wonderful silent chorus of cranes, each at least three feet tall, I was moved to think about the difficulties of transportation and storage. Looking at a small preparatory study, however, I had the eerily immediate sense of a mind and hand at work—What if the miracle is pushed to the back, and the suffering women and children are down in front? What if the gesture of Christ is echoed by that of a toddler?—of ideas groping their way toward resolution; the how, not just the what, of (for want of a better word) genius. If the idea of Raphael inspires a “been there, studied that” indifference, the Met exhibition is a reminder that the experience of Raphael can be something else again.

All These Defeats Are Ruining Trump’s Birthday

2026-06-01T18:20:53-04:00

Why is the world conspiring to spoil America’s 250th birthday, and, more important, Donald Trump’s 80th? Like a Roman emperor, Trump has busied himself with self-aggrandizing public works, such as a massive triumphal arch, and is staging gladiatorial sports in his own honor, in the form of a UFC fight on the White House lawn on June 14. A string of recent setbacks reveals that Trump is no omnipotent emperor after all, but an American president who—more and more—is forced to fold.

On Monday, Axios and The New York Times reported that the administration was dropping its plans for the Department of Justice to create an “anti-weaponization” fund, after other Republicans recoiled at its terms and a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction preventing its operation. This fund was set up as a settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS (an agency he controls) over the leaking of his tax returns. Trump was suing for $10 billion in damages, but withdrew his lawsuit against himself in exchange for the creation of a slush fund of $1.776 billion (get it?) for those who felt victimized by “lawfare.” Participants in the January 6 riot, already pardoned by the president, were eagerly awaiting the chance to apply for reparations. (Though the Justice Department had helpfully clarified, “There are no partisan requirements to file a claim.”)

Trump’s apparent retreat marks the defeat not just of a harebrained scheme but of one of his signature policy innovations: the idea that federal law ought to be applied unequally, to punish his foes and dole out benefits to his friends.

Many of Trump’s other bold ideas have hit snags too. The unilateral tariffs that he imposed on the rest of the world were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in February; in May, the Court of International Trade also invalidated his stand-in measure of 10 percent tariffs. At the start of this year, Trump caught the foreign-interventionism bug and captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and then, emboldened by that success, launched a war alongside Israel on Iran. This has gone less spectacularly than the Venezuelan operation: Despite the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iran has refused to capitulate and has instead proved that, despite being militarily outmatched, it can inflict pain on the rest of the world by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Peace negotiations have dragged on for months, and the president is bored by it all. “I don’t care if they’re over, honestly. I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less,” he told CNBC today.

Perhaps these setbacks explain why the president has turned toward more immediate concerns—capital beautifications. But he has encountered disappointments there too. Congressional Republicans, who are working through a budget bill, announced that they would not allocate $1 billion to build Trump’s beloved White House ballroom project. On Friday, a judge ruled against the president’s attempts to unilaterally rechristen the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., as the “Trump Kennedy Center” and ordered his name and likeness removed from its marble facade. After a string of musical artists bowed out of performing at America’s 250th-anniversary celebration, Trump suggested that he be the headline act instead.

On foreign affairs, the president is experiencing the same reality check that many of his predecessors have: The U.S. military listens to the commander in chief, but the rest of the world may not. At home, the mighty executive branch must still operate under the constraints imposed by the other two branches.

Although the judiciary has been the primary bulwark against the president’s excesses, even a Republican-run Congress can, very occasionally, assert its enormous constitutional powers. Its unwillingness to bless a slush fund for the president’s allies, an ever-so-slight display of resistance, may also reflect a political reality: The Republicans are bracing for a terrible midterm election in November, as a result of Trump’s deep unpopularity and voter anger over the high costs of everyday life. Despite Republican gerrymandering efforts, Trump’s party will probably lose control over at least one chamber of Congress and, with that, its chance at passing major legislation for the next two years.

Despite Trump’s occasional insinuations that he might run for a third term, there will clearly be a normal succession battle. Perhaps that is why the president is so consumed by his legacy. Though Trump may still act as kingmaker, his power will wane as soon as his successor is picked.

Trump’s focus has been on unilateral executive power, not legislation. As a result, he has left little imprint on American policy that cannot be undone by a successor. In Rome, emperors ruled for life; they left their names on buildings and their faces on currency to ensure their immortality. In America, presidents are not meant to be so exalted. Trump is trying his hardest to defy this fundamental fact of governing a republic. But it’s harder and harder to believe he will succeed.

Why Did Donald Trump Get So Suddenly Shy?

2026-06-01T17:59:00-04:00

For once in his life, Donald Trump wishes he was getting less attention.

“Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one for the U.S.A. and those that are with us,” the president posted this morning at 1:02. “But don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively ‘chirping,’ at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever.”

The first part of the post is wrong. Weeks of stalled negotiations indicate that the Iranian regime is in no rush to reach an agreement—and this morning, Tehran said it was pulling out of talks and would completely block the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israeli attacks in Lebanon against Hezbollah, an Iranian ally. The United States, Iran, and Israel all launched strikes today.

Trump’s puffery and prevarication about the war are not new, but the second part of the post is more illuminating about his approach to governance. The president brings an odd combination of authoritarianism and hypersensitivity to the job. On the one hand, he wants to start, fight, and resolve wars without having to answer to Congress or the American people for it. On the other hand, he gets easily distracted and upset by their criticism.

The president’s agitation about pushback from Republicans is perplexing. As I wrote last week, recent primaries show that Trump’s iron grip on the GOP appears to be strengthening, even as the American public further sours on him. (One caveat is that Trump’s conquests of congressional Republican incumbents create a clique of legislators not beholden to him and possibly eager for payback.) Yet he seems very reactive to GOP commentary. Last weekend, he seemed to back off a rumored deal with Iran after attacks from hawkish allies including Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Now he’s fretting about public criticism again.

Members of Congress will always criticize a war that’s going poorly eventually, but Trump could have shored up support among loyal Republicans (and, to some extent, the public) had he sought congressional authorization or made a case for war to the American people. He declined because it was easier not to bother, but the vocal opposition to the war now is a reminder of how checks and balances can be a political benefit to a president, not just a restraint. The pushback hasn’t manifested in any kind of action—Republican leaders in Congress have so far abdicated their right to be involved—but Trump is nonetheless upset that lawmakers are exercising their right to free speech.

Trump wants them to pipe down and go away. “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!” he wrote in the same post. The past few days alone have offered ample reasons to doubt that. The Trump administration took over planning for the nation’s 250th birthday, installed poorly qualified commissars, and the result—as my colleague David Frum wrote yesterday—is a fiasco. The lineup for a splashy concert turned out to be a mix of has-beens and retreads, and even then many of them pulled out, leading Trump to say this weekend that he may pull the plug and just host a political rally instead.

Over the weekend, Trump also saw a blow to his planned Kennedy Center takeover. He promised that his overhaul of (and addition of his own name to) the arts institution would make it stronger. A few months later, as his plan failed, he announced his intention to shutter the center for two years. On Friday, a federal judge ruled that Trump had to remove his name and couldn’t close the center—though, as my colleague Janay Kingsberry reports, it’s not clear what is left to stay open, and Trump is threatening to walk away from it altogether.

Trump’s attempts to secure a $1.8 billion fund from the Treasury for payouts to his political pals, to redress supposed “weaponization” of the federal government, may be going even worse. To make that happen (and to avoid a judge blocking it), Trump aides hastily engineered a deal that sidelined government lawyers and took some advisers by surprise. Now it’s facing blowback from Congress and doubts from inside the White House, and two judges on Friday issued rulings calling the fund into question. Axios reported this afternoon that according to two senior administration officials, the White House intends to drop its plans for the fund entirely.

That brings us back to Iran, where few indications forecast success. The White House teased and then pulled back deals several times in the past few weeks. Trump held a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday that he promised would result in a “final determination” on Iran, but it ended without a resolution and seems to have been totally overtaken by events. In an interview with his own daughter-in-law Lara on Fox News over the weekend, Trump said that “we’ve actually left their military alone. People would be surprised to hear that.” They surely would, because Trump has repeatedly claimed to have destroyed most Iranian military capacity. Trump said in the same interview that if he didn’t get a good deal, he’d “finish the job” with military might.

Trump can’t get his talking points straight now. This afternoon, the president told CNBC’s Eamon Javers that he didn’t care whether talks were over, saying, “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less. If they’re over, they’re over. If they’re not, you know, I think they took too much time.” Not long after, he posted that “talks are continuing, at a rapid pace, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Today’s hostilities could be a sign of the larger conflict that Trump threatened, or just more evidence of how tenuous the supposed cease-fire in place is. Either way, the fact that so many big initiatives are heading in inauspicious directions explains why Trump doesn’t want people paying too much attention—and doesn’t offer a lot of reasons for anyone to relax and take his assurances that everything will work out fine.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blocked the promotions of at least seven Navy officers, including women and minority officers, a move that current and former defense officials say is highly unusual. His decision appears inconsistent with the military’s merit-based-promotion system.
Anthropic filed to go public, making it the first of the major AI start-ups to begin the IPO process. The company, which makes the Claude chatbot, could be valued at about $1 trillion when its shares begin trading.
Oil prices jumped more than 4 percent today as the United States and Israel renewed fighting with Iran, raising fears that the Strait of Hormuz could remain closed, further disrupting global energy supplies.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores why even the closest-knit families can leave important subjects unspoken.

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Evening Read

Martin Parr / Magnum

Fold Laundry With Me!

By Julie Beck

The nation’s welcome mats have been doing a lot less welcoming lately. Although Americans have been spending much more time at home in recent years—an hour and 39 minutes more a day in 2022 than in 2003—they aren’t inviting other people in. The percentage of people who hosted or attended a social event on an average day has fallen by 50 percent over the past couple of decades. Socializing of any kind declined over that same period, and isolation rose. These days, it seems, home is where people go to be alone.

Read the full article.

That’s Enough, Euphoria

2026-06-01T17:54:32-04:00

The following contains spoilers through the series finale of HBO’s Euphoria.

Euphoria’s troubled protagonist, Rue (played by Zendaya), spends much of the drama’s final season dodging one potentially violent death after another. As a drug mule turned strip-club employee turned arms dealer turned informant, she barely survives being buried up to her neck, getting dragged by a horse down a dirt path, and becoming target practice in multiple shoot-outs.

Yet when she does die, midway through the series finale, which aired last night, the scene unfolds quietly: Rue, recovering from a long day of double-crossing her employers and suffering a wound on her palm, overdoses on the fentanyl with which her painkillers have secretly been laced. The sequence stands out for its contemplative beauty. Rue, asleep, dreams of walking through her childhood home and seeing her mother, reaching for her before being embraced in return. Reality and fantasy blur. She smiles even as she gasps for air, then drifts off into endless slumber.

If only Euphoria had maintained that restraint across the rest of its bloated ending. Rue’s fate underlined how addiction can be a frustratingly misunderstood disease, but the show around her undercut that message again and again through its over-the-top storytelling. In its conclusion, Euphoria tried to provide both a serious look at the fentanyl epidemic and an extended homage to action-Western tropes about good and evil. The result was scattershot and murkily rendered, undermining the significance of its heroine’s tragic journey.

The episode’s frequent detours into lazy platitudes about faith didn’t help. Across Season 3, Rue, in turmoil, shows interest in the Bible. But after her death, the show’s characters allude to religion in ham-fisted ways. Lexi (Maude Apatow), Rue’s childhood friend, was largely indifferent toward Rue all season; in her last scene, however, Lexi delivers a monologue about how enlightening she has found the Bible in the months since Rue died, concluding that the holy book is about how, “no matter what, you have to just keep going.” Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), Rue’s merciless, drug-dealing, sex-trafficking former employer, who gave her the fentanyl-laced pills, insists out of nowhere that he wants to start a family, because it’s “biblical” to do so. When the white-supremacist drug dealers he has butted heads with have their property raided by the Drug Enforcement Administration, one of them raises his arms in a Christ-like pose as he surrenders—an image that’s both grossly misguided and thematically confusing, especially given Rue’s final voice-over praying for God to “bless us all.” These moments say little about the power of faith or why Rue was so drawn to Christianity. Instead, they come off as unconvincing attempts to rewrite the season’s crude indulgences as profound.

[Read: Euphoria is my favorite depression]

But that’s been the overarching problem with Euphoria this season: The show has touched on plenty of provocative topics—the unoriginality of modern Hollywood, the suffocating nature of capitalism, the online and offline trials of sex work—without saying anything substantive. That emptiness was more apparent than ever in the series finale. Ali (Colman Domingo), Rue’s levelheaded sponsor, becomes a last-minute superhero, avenging her by blowing Alamo to pieces using a sawed-off shotgun; though the always-excellent Domingo sells the character’s heel-turn, the scene overshadows the emotional devastation of Rue’s death. Absurdities such as a storyline about a minor character’s Brazilian butt lift received more screen time than Jules (Hunter Schafer), Rue’s ex-girlfriend and once the second-most-important character on Euphoria. She appears only in a brief, dialogue-less scene in which she paints a portrait of Rue. Schafer does her best to convey Jules’s grief, but the moment feels like too little, too late—and too haphazard, considering the episode’s relentless tonal whiplash.

In addition to the poetry of Rue’s death, the show did manage a handful of poignant, gorgeously shot moments that harkened back to the thoughtful elegance of its earlier seasons, including Ali’s speech about how tired he has become after losing so many loved ones to addiction. A sequence in which Lexi’s older sister, Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), haloed by the ring light she uses for her OnlyFans work and weeping alone in her mansion, looks like a figurine in a dollhouse is similarly meditative; she’s no longer the 50-foot woman towering over Los Angeles. But how are the characters reflecting on—not just responding to—the loss of a friend they watched struggle with addiction for years? What is the legacy of a young woman who escaped so much brutality only to be felled by a synthetic drug that she had no idea she was taking?

Euphoria doesn’t supply any answers—and, worse, it seems uninterested in searching for them. In its final moments, the show relied instead on the same moves it’s delivered all season: providing shock value over meaningful observation, turning previously nuanced characters into caricatures, and gesturing vaguely at the idea that everyone is addicted to something, be it opiates, sex, or success. “I’ve always been against utopian storytelling,” Euphoria’s creator, writer, and director, Sam Levinson, said in a behind-the-scenes featurette after the episode. This ending certainly wasn’t utopian. But in its misery, it did a disservice to any well-intentioned messages it attempted to convey, letting Rue down along the way.

Photos: Farming in Ukraine’s War Zone

2026-06-01T13:28:52-04:00

Ivan Antypenko / Suspilne Ukraine / Global Images Ukraine / Getty

Ukrainian farmer Oleksandr Hordiienko carries an anti-drone gun while holding “Chuyka,” a Ukrainian drone detector that helps spot Russian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), while his employees work on a tractor in a field in the Kherson region, Ukraine, on July 29, 2025.

Ivan Antypenko / Suspilne Ukraine / Global Images Ukraine / Getty

Anti-tank fortifications, also known as “dragon’s teeth,” stand in a sunflower field on July 24, 2025, seen in the Kherson region.

Ivan Samoilov / Frontliner / Getty

Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) inspectors of the National Police examine and remotely detonate the warhead of a downed Geran 2 attack drone, after clearing dry vegetation on a farmer’s field on September 22, 2025, in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. Police warn that civilians who attempt to recover explosive fragments risk death: “There have been fatal cases, including children,” said EOD specialist Oleksii Poliakov.

Evgeniy Maloletka / AP

A wheat field burns after Russian shelling a few kilometers from the Ukrainian-Russian border in the Kharkiv region on July 29, 2022.

Pierre Crom / Getty

Viktor, an agricultural worker, stops a combine harvester near the remains of a rocket on the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, on September 7, 2023.

Efrem Lukatsky / AP

Victor Tsvik, an owner of a private farm, shows a fragment of a Russian drone that fell in his field in the Kyiv region, Ukraine, on August 3, 2025.

Andriy Andriyenko / AP

Soldiers of Ukraine’s National Guard 15th Brigade launch a reconnaissance drone from a wheat field to determine Russian positions, as a farmer harvests in the background, near the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region, on July 29, 2024.

Sergei Supinsky / AFP / Getty

The shadow of a helicopter is seen on a field of sunflowers in the Kyiv region on July 14, 2022.

Viktoriia Yakymenko / Suspilne Ukraine / Global Images Ukraine / Getty

Surviving pigs are seen in front of a farm building hit by a Russian drone strike on October 3, 2025, in the Kharkiv region. A massive strike by Russian drones on the night of October 3 hit a farm in the Nova Vodolaha settlement, destroying farm buildings and killing most of its 15,000 pigs.

Wojciech Grzedzinski / Anadolu Agency / Getty

A view of a destroyed farm in Dovhenke village in the Kharkiv region, seen on June 22, 2023

Alex Babenko / AP

Sunflowers draped with fiber-optic cables left behind by passing drones are seen near Sloviansk, Donetsk region, Ukraine, on September 11, 2025.

Darya Nazarova / AFP / Getty

A worker leads a horse into a truck during the evacuation of horses from a stud farm to a safe place to protect them from possible air attacks, near Novomykolaivka, Zaporizhzhia region, on December 17, 2025.

Efrem Lukatsky / AP

A farmer works to harvest a field 10 kilometers from the front line, maneuvering around a crater left by a Russian rocket, in the xDnipropetrovsk region, Ukraine, on July 4, 2022.

Roman Pilipey / AFP / Getty

Ukrainian service members of the 59th brigade’s mobile-air-defense unit fire a Soviet-made ZU-23 anti-aircraft twin-barrel auto-cannon toward a Russian drone, during an air attack near Pavlohrad, Dnipropetrovsk region, on July 19, 2025.

Andrii Marienko / AP

Fragments of Russian missiles and weapons lie on a field as farm work continues in the background, near the front line in the Kharkiv region, on May 22, 2026.

Ivan Antypenko / Suspilne Ukraine / Global Images Ukraine / Getty

Ukrainian farmer Serhii Mykhaltsov shows Russian first-person-view drones that fell in a field thanks to electronic-warfare systems that Ukrainian farmers used on July 29, 2025, in the Kherson region.

Sergei Supinsky / AFP / Getty

De-miners with the humanitarian organization HALO Trust work to clear farm land of explosives near the village of Yevgenivka, in the Mykolaiv region, Ukraine on April 9, 2023.

Andrii Marienko / AP

A sapper removes potential explosive items from an agricultural field in Balakliia, Kharkiv region, on April 30, 2026.

Francisco Richart / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty

A Ukrainian reconnaissance drone flies above a field covered by discarded fiber-optic drone fibers on the Sumy front on January 28, 2026.

Efrem Lukatsky / AP

Mykola Kravchenko hangs laundry on a line attached to a fragment of a Russian rocket in the village of Maydanivka, Kyiv region, on May 30, 2024. The rocket fell on Kravchenko’s farm at the beginning of the war, in 2022.

Pierre Crom / Getty

De-mining teams from Ukraine’s State Emergency Service clear an agricultural field using a remote-controlled GCS-200 mine-clearing vehicle on September 27, 2024, in Svyatohirsk, Ukraine.

Latin America News Agency / Reuters

An unexploded bomb is removed from an agricultural field near Kupyansk, Ukraine, on August 11, 2025.

Dmytro Smolienko / Ukrinform / Future Publishing / Getty

Viktor Zinchenko takes care of a herd of 50 goats in Orikhiv, a city in the Zaporizhzhia region in southeastern Ukraine, close to the front line.

Pierre Crom / Getty

Ukrainian anti-drone units downed a Russian-launched Shahed UAV, which crashed in an agricultural field on August 10, 2025, in the Donetsk region.

Ukrinform / NurPhoto / Getty

A man walks among the ruins of a hangar granary that was destroyed by Russian shelling at one of the agricultural enterprises near Orikhiv in the Polohy district, Zaporizhzhia region, on July 8, 2025.

Wojciech Grzedzinski / Anadolu Agency / Getty

A destroyed Russian tank rusts in a field near Dovhenke village in the Kharkiv region on June 22, 2023.

Wojciech Grzedzinski / Anadolu Agency / Getty

Leonid Zolotariol walks beside a crater as he surveys his destroyed farm in Dovhenke village, Kharkiv region, on June 22, 2023.

Metin Aktas / Anadolu Agency / Getty

Part of a cluster-ammunition rocket sits embedded in a sunflower field after attacks in Izium, Kharkiv region, on September 24, 2022.

The White House Is the New Green Zone

2026-06-01T08:30:00-04:00

Across from the White House sits a museum called The People’s House: A White House Experience. Inside is a replica of the Oval Office, and interactive exhibits on what it’s like to attend a State Dinner or sit in on a Cabinet meeting. It’s about as close to the White House as you can get without actually being there, a wholesome reminder of how democracy is supposed to work.

But early last Saturday evening, two bullets shattered the glass between displays of Christmas ornaments and dining plates. A 21-year-old gunman had opened fire on Secret Service agents who then returned fire, killing him.

It was the latest reminder of how our democracy is actually working, how omnipresent political violence can feel, how inaccessible public buildings are becoming to the public. Three times in four weeks, gunfire has broken out as federal agents were protecting the president and vice president in the vicinity of the White House. Three months ago, a man was shot and killed after entering the Mar-a-Lago security perimeter with a shotgun and fuel can. Three months before that, two National Guard members were shot just blocks from the White House. The Secret Service, which says it has protections all around the building—some visible, some not—has a division that over the past year has been studying the rise in violent rhetoric and action to get at the question: What is driving the attacks—and can they be headed off in advance?

The Secret Service has investigated 40 percent more cases this year than it did during the comparable period in 2025, the agency told me. It’s had seven times more cases involving people with mental-health issues over that same time period. The surge is putting the Secret Service in what longtime agents say is an unprecedented threat environment.

“In the past, there have been some peak periods where we had maybe a really large uptick for a month or two,” Matthew Quinn, the deputy director of the Secret Service, told me. “But for us right now, it’s not a linear increase anymore. It’s really gone exponential.”

With the growing threat has come greater fortification—so much so that the White House complex can be thought of as the new Green Zone. The 18-acre site is laced with fencing, sensors, jammers, cameras, armed guards, bunkers, drone interceptors, and surface-to-air missiles—all of which speak to how we now protect, and isolate, our leaders. Tourists can no longer approach the 13-foot fence that rings the compound. Additional fencing went up in January around Lafayette Square, which remains under construction, and prevents access from the north. The perimeter to the south extends near Independence Avenue; the area around the Ellipse was closed last month. It’s impossible to enter from the east, through the barriers and construction where the East Wing once stood. And a battery of security vehicles, police on bikes, and Secret Service agents stand guard from the west.

[Read: A shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner]

Quinn was recently delivering a graduation speech, reflecting on some of the shifts he’s seen during his time at the Secret Service. Twenty years ago, he said, the questions he’d get were about how he stayed vigilant given that agents rarely had to draw their weapons. “Well,” he said, “we don’t have to explain it to anybody anymore.”

In 1801, Thomas Jefferson built the first fence around the White House, a wooden structure that was designed to keep animals away from the gardens. As for the people, they were largely able to roam freely on a property that had little security. “Early presidents would have had, more or less, their household staff doubling as their security force,” Matthew Costello, the chief education officer of the White House Historical Association, told me.

Franklin Pierce was the first president to have a full-time bodyguard. Abraham Lincoln posted guards outside, but inside they were dressed in civilian clothes and hid their firearms. In 1893, the grounds were closed to try to protect Grover Cleveland’s young daughter after tourists tried to cut off some of her hair. In the early 1900s, after the assassination of William McKinley, the Secret Service was tasked with presidential protection and two men were assigned to a full-time detail for Theodore Roosevelt. “The secret service men are a very small but very necessary thorn in the flesh,” Roosevelt wrote in 1906, reflecting the centuries-long struggle between presidential protection and public accessibility.

During World War I, the White House grounds were closed. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, security was enhanced once more: Bulletproof glass was added to the Oval Office windows and air-raid shelters were installed belowground. (Franklin D. Roosevelt rejected proposals from the Secret Service to line the property with 15-foot-high piles of sandbags and to repaint the White House in camouflage.) After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the section of Pennsylvania Avenue that goes by the White House was closed to vehicles. At the time, it seemed like a significant infringement on traditional American freedoms.

“Pennsylvania Avenue has been routinely open to traffic for the entire history of our Republic,” Bill Clinton said in his weekly radio address announcing the decision. “Through four Presidential assassinations and eight unsuccessful attempts on the lives of Presidents, it’s been open. Through a civil war, two world wars, and the Gulf war, it was open. But now it must be closed.”

After the September 11 attacks, the perimeter was widened again; vehicular traffic was shut down along E Street, on the south side. Airspace was more tightly restricted. To push the security perimeter any farther, the government would need to take over the Hay-Adams hotel or occupy the coffee shops (Peet’s, Starbucks, Swing’s) that sit on the blocks nearest the West Wing entrance and help fuel the staffers who enter it. Without the ability to go farther out, the security barriers must go higher up.

Former Secret Service agent Keith Wojcieszek told me that during his 16 years on the job, people routinely climbed over the 6-foot-6-inch perimeter fence. In one particularly embarrassing incident for the agency, a man not only jumped the fence but got to the front door of the White House and entered before being apprehended. Seven years ago, work began on a new fence—long requested by the Secret Service—of nearly double the height. But it is still not impenetrable: At least twice, toddlers have slipped through the fence, only to be retrieved by agents and returned to their parents.

Now, under protocols implemented this year, neither toddlers nor anyone else can get that close. Meanwhile, the park across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, Lafayette Square, is closed for renovations that the National Park Service told me it wants to complete before July 4. After the park reopens, the Secret Service wants to install a gating system to quickly secure the area if needed. The area in and around the park was for many years the scene of protests, demonstrators’ chants echoing within the halls of the White House. But not now. Among the protests was an anti-war vigil that had been continuously operating since 1981. It was partially dismantled earlier this year, after Donald Trump deemed it an eyesore.

In wartime Baghdad and Kabul, 30-foot-high blast walls shielded sensitive government sites. The White House still has a modicum of openness. But that’s possible only because of all the security protections that a visiting tourist can’t necessarily see.

Beyond the perimeter, plainclothes and uniformed officers roam the streets. Snipers patrol the roof. Drones hover nearby. K9 attack dogs are ready to pounce. The system operates in layers, with different agents monitoring different distances and threat levels. “It’s the Secret Service’s protective methodology,” the former agent Donald Mihalek, who retired in 2019 after 21 years, told me. “If you don’t catch it in the outer ring, you catch it in the inner ring. You want those overlapping rings of protection.”

The weaponry has been upgraded over time, to rifles that can easily cover the 290 yards from the White House to the fence line on the southern side. The White House snipers on the roof can see 1,000 yards in every direction. “It really is not just 360 degrees of a linear circle,” the retired Secret Service agent Jeffrey James, who served 22 years, told me. “It’s almost a sphere around them by the time you add the people on the ground, the assets above us.”

One of the trickiest parts for the Secret Service is trying to anticipate the lone wolf who might suddenly show up at an event, or approach the White House gates. Cole Tomas Allen was a 31-year-old mechanical engineer from Torrance, California, who traveled to Washington, wrote a manifesto, and bolted through security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Michael Marx was a 45-year-old from Midland, Texas, who allegedly shot at Secret Service agents as they approached him near the Washington Monument around the time that Vice President Vance’s motorcade was passing nearby. Nasire Best was a 21-year-old from Dundalk, Maryland, who had previously been arrested for claiming that he was Jesus Christ and trying to gain access to the White House; he was fatally shot last weekend after firing at a security checkpoint.

[Read: The era of normie extremism is here]

About a year ago, the Secret Service launched what it calls the Advanced Threat Interdiction Unit, which is designed to stop threats before someone shows up at an event or at the White House. “We don’t want to have a shootout on 15th Street,” Quinn told me. “If we know of a known-threat case and they’re on a record with us, we want to be able to intercept them, say, at Key Bridge or on 395 and not at the White House.” Quinn and others told me it's difficult to pinpoint any one cause for the rise in threats, but they named a few factors, including the proliferation of social media, a polarized political climate, and global unrest.

The president is not the only one who’s been targeted with violence. Governors, members of Congress, state legislators, and municipal judges have all been victims—or intended victims—of attacks. The U.S. Capitol Police, which protects members of Congress and their families and staff, investigated nearly 15,000 threats and actions in 2025, an increase of almost 60 percent over the previous year. Josh Shapiro’s family was asleep in the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion last year when the house was set ablaze by an arsonist, and Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman, who led the House Democratic caucus, was shot and killed in her home. At least a half dozen members of Trump’s Cabinet and White House staff have moved into military housing, spaces that help shield them from political violence, as well as protest.

One of the criticisms of the Green Zone in Iraq was that it created a false sense of tranquility. The Americans, protected by their security—not to mention the air-conditioned facilities, swimming pools, and buffet-style dining—were detached from the realities of war taking place on the other side of the gate. The zone was derisively nicknamed “the Bubble.”

The White House has long risked being its own kind of bubble. Harry Truman called it the “great white jail.” Joe Biden described it as a “gilded cage” and spent many of his weekends in Wilmington, Delaware. Barack Obama made a habit of reading 10 letters selected from the thousands sent to the White House each day. Trump uses his phone to reach those beyond his bubble, but his response to growing threats has been to try to further fortify the White House; at the same time, he’s cut back on travel, except to his golf clubs. Although his aides insist that he can maintain a connection with ordinary Americans, he has dismissed the economic hardships that many are facing as prices have risen since the start of the Iran war. Rather than talk about bringing down costs, he often focuses on his pet projects: the large cage going up on the White House lawn for a UFC fight that will be staged on his 80th birthday, for instance, or the ballroom he is determined to build.

[Read: Trump might already be a lame duck]

When in mid-May he invited a group of reporters to tour the construction site where the East Wing once stood, he spoke of the ballroom in militaristic terms. The roof, he said, will not only have a “barrier” and a “shield” so strong that “if a drone hits it, it bounces off,” but it will also contain a drone base of sorts. (He’s described it as a “drone empire,” a “drone gallery,” and a “drone port” that will house “unlimited drones” to protect all of Washington.) The side walls will contain “impenetrable steel” and the windows will be “four inches thick.” He bragged about the previously installed fencing surrounding the complex—made of titanium (“the strongest of all the metals”)—and said it goes deep into the ground and can’t be toppled by a tractor or a bulldozer.

His response in the immediate aftermath of the attempted assasination at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was to call for the ballroom construction to go ahead. The day after the shooting at the White House gates last weekend, his lawyers submitted a new filing in the lawsuit that has blocked him from continuing. “When completed, this highly knitted, integrated, and unified Project, which is a singular and vital National Security facility, will provide a ‘SAFE HAVEN’ from attackers such as the one last night, and on April 25th,” it read.

Inside the Cabinet Room on Wednesday, Trump was asked about the Saturday-night incident, when he was at the White House working as shots rang out nearby. Trump said he pushes such thoughts from his mind. “If I thought about it a lot, you know, I wouldn’t be a very good president. I wouldn’t be here, probably. I’d be up in some room with a locked door,” he said. Outside, the ceaseless roar of jackhammering and bulldozing went on as the ballroom, challenged by lawsuits and protected by that titanium fencing, took shape.

Hope, Change, Troll

2026-06-01T08:00:00-04:00

In the spring of 2006, when The Hills—a reality-TV show about the lives of privileged young adults living in Los Angeles—premiered on MTV, Spencer Pratt wasn’t part of the cast. Instead, he was sitting at home, watching with his mom and her best friend. His first impression? “The Hills was aggressively boring,” he writes in his aptly titled memoir, The Guy You Loved to Hate. “Like watching paint dry, except the paint was really pretty and had perfect lighting.”

Pratt, who was then in his early 20s, was no stranger to reality TV. He had previously appeared on The Princes of Malibu, a short-lived Fox show about Brody and Brandon Jenner—the handsome, wavy-haired sons of the Olympic athlete Caitlyn Jenner and the songwriter Linda Thompson. After watching The Hills, Pratt soon realized that the two shows shared an executive producer, Sean Travis. As Pratt tells it, he called Travis up, asking—or, more precisely, demanding—that he and Brody be cast on the next season. When they were rebuffed, the duo started showing up at the Hollywood nightclubs where the Hills cast was filming, over and over again. Pratt eventually got on the show when he started dating Heidi Montag, the party-loving roommate of Lauren Conrad, the central character whose unmistakable Californian drawl narrated the series. He immediately cemented himself as an agitator who was always willing to stir up drama by fighting with the other cast members and even with his own family, disrupting the show’s low-key vibe and turning it into addictive viewing.

Twenty years on, Pratt is once again a figure who can’t be ignored: an insurgent challenger to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s reelection bid. Pratt, a registered Republican, has positioned himself as an anti-establishment voice prepared to take a tough approach on homelessness, drug “zombies,” and crime, and he is currently polling a strong second in L.A.’s nonpartisan mayoral-primary election. His campaign, which was inspired by the experience of losing his Palisades home in the 2025 California wildfires, is infused with the same shamelessness and media savvy that made him a TV star. He’s new to politics, but he’s been playing this game for years.

In 2007, when Pratt first infiltrated The Hills as Montag’s love interest, he had a specific goal. “I want to be the most hated person in the world,” he said, according to Brody Jenner. By this point, reality-TV viewers had already become acquainted with villains such as Richard Hatch, who won the first season of Survivor by playing a devious, Machiavellian game, and Omarosa Manigault Newman, whose ruthless takedowns of other contestants on The Apprentice earned her an equal amount of fans and haters. But although The Hills wasn’t a game show, Pratt understood that the cast members were competing for airtime and column inches in a world where traditional “talent” was no longer a prerequisite for fame.

Pratt’s outrageous on-screen antics placed him at the center of many feuds. He often spoke aggressively with Montag’s family—especially her mother, Darlene, and her sister, Holly, who disapproved of their relationship. He severed ties with his own sister, Stephanie, whom he called a “crazy bitch” at a barbecue. (In February, she said that voting for him in the mayoral race would be a “vote for stupidity,” though she signaled her support in a recent Vanity Fair article.) Some of his most disturbing fights were with Montag, and fans accused him of being controlling, like when he pressured his now-wife to elope without her family present. (Pratt has since said that many of their fights, and instances when he exhibited controlling behavior, were faked “to make producers happy.”)

Yet his most intense beef was with Conrad, the show’s biggest star. When Pratt first started dating Montag, Conrad was a protective friend unimpressed with his antics, such as partying with other girls. But ahead of the show’s third season, their feud went nuclear when reports of a sex tape between Conrad and her former boyfriend Jason Wahler began to circulate online. Conrad, who has always denied the existence of a tape, blamed Pratt for leaking the story. (Pratt initially denied this, then admitted to it, then denied it again—then, eventually, admitted to it again.) The feud continued to play out for years after The Hills ended; in 2015, Pratt branded Conrad “a cold-hearted killer” who will “cut you in your sleep.”

[Read: The cruel social experiment of reality TV]

We now know that many storylines on The Hills were heavily embellished by producers or the stars themselves. Many scenes were reshot and, toward the end, some central plot points were totally invented. But by all accounts, the feud between Pratt and Conrad was real, and it’s where Pratt honed what he describes as his default conflict style: “If you want to throw missiles, I’m throwing a nuke.” Fans of The Hills might get déjà vu, watching the way he has conducted himself in the mayoral race. Pratt has relentlessly positioned Bass at the center of his doomsday-like vision of L.A. as a lawless and unsafe place. Not long after he kicked off his campaign, he gave her the nickname Karen “Basura,” the Spanish word for “trash,” and predicted that she’ll end up in jail.

Defeating an opponent, whether in politics or on reality TV, is largely about narrative control. It’s become common for reality stars and politicians alike to use many channels—social media, podcasts, press coverage—to influence how they’re perceived. In the pre-Instagram era, Pratt and Montag were known for constantly leaking stories to the tabloids, setting up paparazzi pictures, and surprising producers by showing up where they weren’t expected. The couple embraced new-media figures such as the notorious blogger Perez Hilton, who reported the story about Conrad’s alleged sex tape, and who was later a guest of honor at Pratt and Montag’s 2009 wedding. Since Pratt entered the mayoral race, his campaign has been disseminating bizarre spoof videos and AI-generated ads. He’s even running a “clipping campaign,” paying content creators to promote his videos.

Before the election of Donald Trump, reality stardom would have been a political hindrance—but no more. And Pratt’s experience might even have given him an edge, in ways beyond the obvious: On The Hills, he and his co-stars were likely encouraged by producers to distill their points into concise, easy-to-edit sound bites. Viewers could see hints of this at the May 6 mayoral debate, when Pratt was more inclined than his opponents to give simple “yes” or “no” answers to questions—a trait that was immediately amplified by Fox News. Reality stardom has also given Pratt something that most career politicians would kill for: name recognition. Even if a lot of people hated him on The Hills, they still may feel like they know him and therefore have an incentive to stop scrolling and listen to what he’s saying.

Pratt’s TV background also allows him to position himself as an outsider, even if that isn’t totally true. Certainly, he has no shortage of high-level connections. In May, the musician David Foster and his wife, Katharine McPhee Foster, held a fundraiser for Pratt, hosting wealthy donors, influencers, and Hollywood figures at their home. Foster has known Pratt ever since The Princes of Malibu. In fact, Pratt has said that it was Foster who encouraged him to be the “Simon Cowell of The Hills” way back when, as in someone who tells it like it is. At the time, this quality made him a villain. Now he has cast himself as the only candidate prepared to deliver hard truths on behalf of the silent majority.

Looking ahead to the June 2 primary, I wonder how much of Pratt’s rise is driven by a rose-tinted nostalgia among Angelenos for the era in which he became famous. As he promises to make L.A. “camera-ready” again, he may unconsciously remind people of the simpler time when The Hills started airing, before the first iPhone and the financial crash. In 2006, The Hills felt genuinely novel. Like its predecessor, Laguna Beach, it was shot and edited to look and feel like a scripted show, except the people and events were (supposedly) real. Young fans like me weren’t put off by the scenes that seemed obviously fake—in fact, part of the appeal was watching and making up your own mind about whether or not it was scripted.

There’s a symmetry between Pratt’s campaign and the broader moment, in which the media landscape looks more and more like reality TV. Every day, keeping up with the news means trying to decipher whether information is based in fact or not—and whether a politician, influencer, or public figure really believes what they’re saying, or is just trying to go viral. Does Pratt really want to be mayor of L.A.? Or is he using his campaign to reignite his fading stardom and promote his memoir? Is Pratt actually living in a trailer, as he has claimed, or is he staying in a luxury hotel? As on The Hills, audiences are once again being asked to decide what is real.

Not so long ago, Pratt seemed down-and-out and was selling crystals to make a living. Now he’s within the margin of error for taking an outright lead in the race. In his memoir, he reflects on how he found his footing on The Hills. “Once I see an opportunity, I’m like a shark in the water, a dog with a bone,” he writes. “I see what I want. I take it.” The key difference is how much the stakes have risen. Two decades ago, Pratt’s unnerving talent for getting as much attention as possible secured him a spot on a TV show. Today, the reward might be city hall.

How to Silence the Federal Workforce

2026-06-01T07:00:00-04:00

Early in Donald Trump’s second term in office, the White House declared itself “the most transparent administration in history.” The federal government has continued to insist on this slogan, even as it has barred journalists from the Pentagon, administered polygraph tests in an effort to ferret out leakers, and fired independent inspectors general tasked with hunting down corruption and mismanagement. Now the administration has announced yet another effort to stem the free flow of information—a plan that would push all federal workers to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

Last week, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management published a draft proposal for rolling out NDAs across the executive branch. The NDAs would ostensibly forbid federal workers from sharing “non-public, confidential, or proprietary information” outside the government, including with the press. Exactly what constitutes such information remains unclear, as does the proposal’s legal validity. The draft NDA itself acknowledges that the administration cannot go beyond the restrictions of existing law. And to the extent that the government seeks to add new constraints anyway, the proposed NDA would be a clear violation of First Amendment protections. Legal or not, though, the NDA will likely further intimidate federal workers, many of whom are already demoralized by the Trump administration’s efforts to torment the civil service and drive government employees to quit.

“As I see it, the goal of the NDA is to chill employees who would otherwise whistleblow on unlawful activity or mismanagement,” Nick Bednar, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who studies the civil service, told me. The proposal, in his view, is “an additional threat on top of dozens of other threats” to federal workers who have already suffered from mass layoffs and reductions in civil-service protections.

The proposal frames the draft NDA as a necessary response to recent “unauthorized disclosures” to the press, pointing to reporting by The New York Times and The Washington Post about the U.S. raid on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, which it claims could have endangered U.S. forces if published before Maduro’s capture. (The Times’ executive editor, Joe Kahn, has said that the paper did not receive operation details ahead of time.) It also cites the leak of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—a strange choice, given that this leak involved a branch of government not under the OPM’s control. If the proposed rule were adopted, agencies across the government would have the option of requiring their employees to sign the agreement as “a certification that the employee understands and agrees to comply with applicable nondisclosure requirements associated with Federal service.” But, the rule emphasizes, “the proposed NDA does not create new substantive restrictions on employee speech or disclosure rights.” Even on its own terms, then, the NDA is largely redundant.

[Conor Friedersdorf: What is Donald Trump hiding?]

Until now, the government has never implemented a blanket NDA like what Trump is proposing. This is, in part, because it has little reason to do so: The United States already has plenty of laws on the books governing what information can and can’t be disclosed. Federal employees who work with classified information already sign a binding agreement, known as SF-312, to never share sensitive material, and anyone who reveals such information can be subject to criminal prosecution. Outside the realm of national security, other laws prohibit federal workers from sharing material such as trade secrets and personal information contained in government databases. These restrictions are balanced by statutory whistleblower protections, which exist to safeguard government employees’ ability to reveal misconduct, including to the press and Congress, in an effort to bring before the public information about government abuse that might otherwise remain hidden.

Apparently, however, the right balance has not been struck. Trump has long leaned on NDAs as a tool to prevent unflattering information from becoming public. Prior to his presidency, he pushed NDAs on Trump Organization employees, Miss Universe contestants, business partners, family members, the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels, campaign employees and volunteers, and, according to the Associated Press, a manufacturer of red MAGA hats. During his first term, beset by leaks to the press, Trump demanded that senior White House staff be required to sign the agreements. In 2020, the Justice Department sued Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former aide to Melania Trump, seeking to seize the profits from Wolkoff’s book on the grounds that an NDA prohibited her from speaking publicly about her time with the first lady. (The Biden administration later dropped the case.)

This love affair with NDAs has continued into the second Trump administration—especially as, once again, the government struggles to prevent journalists from uncovering some of what is going on behind closed doors. Last year, CNN reported, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth began requiring that officials sign an NDA before accessing certain nonclassified information.

Supposedly, the new NDA would be voluntary, but the proposal states that workers could be fired and barred from future government employment if they refused to sign. And for those who do sign, the draft NDA warns that breaking the agreement could result in discipline, firing, and ominously unspecified “civil or criminal penalties”—although there is no broad criminal prohibition against sharing unclassified information. The only statute that the Office of Personnel Management cites has to do with destruction or theft of government material, not leaks of it. “That provision has no obvious relevance or application to an NDA seeking to restrict unauthorized dissemination of unclassified information,” Bradley P. Moss, an attorney who specializes in national-security law and federal employment law, explained to me in an email. Perhaps the OPM was simply sloppy in throwing the draft together. Or perhaps the idea was just to sound threatening and make a bet that few federal workers would want to risk being prosecuted.

[Orly Lobel: Trump’s extreme NDAs]

Moss, who described the draft NDA as “ridiculous on its face,” found one aspect particularly troubling: The agreement purports to bind government workers from sharing information not just during their employment, but even after they leave federal service. This is “unequivocally unlawful,” Moss said. Under well-established law, the First Amendment limits the government’s ability to block former employees from sharing unclassified information. (This is the argument that Wolkoff was making before her case was dismissed.) As an employer, the government retains some power to tell its workers what they can and can’t say, but it cannot force people to sign away their rights to free speech even after they leave public service just because that speech might be annoying or inconvenient. If the OPM goes forward with the draft NDA as currently written, the administration would almost certainly face a wave of court challenges under the First Amendment.

Then again, Trump is no stranger to NDAs that don’t hold up in court. According to The New York Times, White House lawyers explained to Trump during his first term that the NDAs he wanted aides to sign would be impossible to enforce. Years later, in 2021, a federal judge in New York ruled that the NDAs signed by Trump-campaign workers in 2016 were so broad as to be legally void. The effect, the judge wrote, was to “chill the speech” of campaign employees “about matters of public interest.” Over the next year, two additional private arbitrators found the campaign’s NDAs to be unlawfully broad. The Trump family’s effort to invoke an NDA to block publication of a memoir by Mary Trump, the president’s niece, likewise failed. Speaking with The Washington Post, Mary Trump characterized her uncle’s legal strategy as wielding “his power, his position and his money and his apparently endless supply of lawyers to run out the clock” and “outspend people who can’t afford it.” In that sense, even if those previous NDAs were legally worthless, they achieved their true purpose of extracting pain. Now Trump’s administration is applying that same logic to silence public servants.

The NDA proposal is only in its beginning stages. Under the typical process for adopting regulations, the OPM will allow members of the public to submit their thoughts on the plan. Perhaps the administration will soften the language of the draft NDA as the process goes on in order to avoid the risk of litigation. Either way, the message from Trump to federal workers is clear: Shut up, or else.

The Spanish Exception

2026-06-01T07:00:00-04:00

Updated at 10:55 a.m. ET on June 1, 2026

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As recently as five years ago, Spain was no one’s idea of an economic success story. Southern European countries have long been notorious for lagging behind their neighbors to the north. Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain were referred to by the intentionally unflattering nickname “PIGS” after they had to be bailed out following the 2008 financial crisis. “Greece, but also Spain and Portugal have to understand that hard work—meaning ironfisted money-saving—comes before the siesta,” the German tabloid Bild wrote in 2010.

And yet, since the coronavirus pandemic, Europe’s major economies—including the United Kingdom, Germany, and France—have slumped, while Spain’s has boomed. Over the past three years, Spain has accounted for one out of every three jobs created across the European Union. Disposable income has risen three times as fast as in France and eight times as fast as in Germany. Unemployment, poverty, and inequality have fallen to their lowest levels in nearly two decades. In 2024, The Economist ranked Spain as the No. 1 economy in the world. That success has helped the country’s main center-left party, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, remain in power for eight years, even as incumbents across the continent have lost ground to right-wing populists.

I recently spent some time in Madrid, Spain’s capital, trying to figure out how exactly the country had pulled off such an unlikely turnaround. What I learned surprised me. Since the pandemic, Spain’s economic agenda has embraced the kinds of overtly progressive policies that left-of-center parties around the world have tried to distance themselves from. It has welcomed record numbers of immigrants while hiking the minimum wage, implementing energy-price controls, and even providing a type of guaranteed income.

That program helped deliver material prosperity while neutralizing the political far right. But after spending years boosting economic demand, the country faces a devastating housing shortage. Abundance in one domain can create scarcity elsewhere. By fostering prosperity, Spain’s leaders avoided the fate of other incumbents in Western democracies. If they can’t address their housing crisis, though, that success is unlikely to last.

Following the 2008 financial crisis, several of Spain’s major industries collapsed, the unemployment rate soared to 27 percent, and the banking system entered such a vicious cycle that not even the Spanish government could afford to rescue it (hence, the EU bailout). More than a decade later, incomes and employment still hadn’t recovered to pre-crisis levels. “I left; my friends left; everyone was leaving,” Jorge Galindo, who grew up in Valencia and graduated college in 2008, told me. “For a long time, it seemed like Spain’s economic nightmare was never going to end.”

Spain’s anemic recovery radicalized its politics. Protests erupted across the country, support surged for parties on the far left and right, and regional separatists began claiming independence. In the 2019 national elections, Vox, a far-right, anti-immigrant party, went from holding zero seats in Parliament to becoming its third-largest party, with 15 percent of the vote. The country’s politics appeared to be at a breaking point. “It’s important to contextualize just how terrifying this was for many Spaniards,” Omar G. Encarnación, a political scientist at Bard College who studies Spanish politics, told me. “The far-right dictatorship of Francisco Franco had only ended in 1975. It was still in living memory for many people. And it felt like maybe the country was headed in that direction again.”

Then, just months later, COVID hit. Suddenly, the government was faced with the prospect of a new economic crisis before it had recovered from the last one.

To better understand what this moment was like, I talked with Diego Rubio, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s chief of staff. We met at Moncloa, an ivy-covered complex of red-brick buildings that includes Spain’s version of the White House. Rubio had graduated from college during the financial crisis and left Spain to continue his education abroad, returning in 2017 to take a prestigious academic position. When Sánchez asked him to join the team leading the government’s pandemic response, he had only one thing in mind. “The most important priority was making sure we avoided a repeat of 2008,” Rubio told me. “There was no way we could let the country go through something like that again.”

Like most of Europe, Spain kept most workers on payroll by paying their wages and helped businesses stay afloat by extending generous loans. But as the world began to reopen in the spring of 2021, Rubio and his colleagues had another problem: too much demand. Tourists were beginning to travel again, consumers were starting to spend their pandemic savings, and public investment was beginning to flow to major infrastructure and energy projects. Spain, with one of the fastest-aging populations in all of Europe, didn’t have enough workers to keep up. If that shortage persisted, the country’s entire welfare state would be in jeopardy.

[Derek Thompson: The great depopulation]

The obvious solution was to allow a lot of immigration, and fast. “We really didn’t have another option,” Rubio said. But with the far right ascendant, simply flinging open the country’s borders would be too great a political risk. Rubio and his colleagues needed to figure out a way to bring in as many workers as possible while minimizing the chance of a populist backlash. This meant, first, visibly cracking down on the most controversial form of immigration in Spain: African migrants crossing the Mediterranean by boat and entering the country illegally. This represented a tiny share of overall migration, but it was the form most opposed by the Spanish public and, as a result, the one most frequently used by Vox to gin up anti-immigrant sentiment.

At the same time, the Spanish government dramatically increased the least-controversial form of immigration: Latin American migrants entering the country legally to work. Spanish society has always had a relatively high tolerance for Latin American immigrants, who speak the local language and share certain cultural affinities. The government provided fast-track work authorization for immigrants in sectors with labor shortages, streamlined the process for employers to apply for foreign work visas, and made it easier for immigrants to settle in so-called Empty Spain, where the working-age population has dried up.

From 2021 to 2023, more than 3 million migrants entered Spain, the largest three-year surge in the country’s history. Relative to Spain’s population of 48 million, that is more than three times the size of the immigration surge to the U.S. over that same period.

Whether Spain’s approach should be categorized as progressive, because the country welcomed huge numbers of foreigners, or conservative, because it prioritized those foreigners deemed most likely to easily assimilate, is difficult to say. What is clear is that the plan succeeded beyond the administration’s expectations.

Brais Lorenzo

Wind turbines in the village of Abeledo, in Muras, Spain, 2024

The new arrivals injected life into the Spanish economy. By filling labor shortages, they allowed existing businesses to expand to serve more customers, which, in turn, created the need for even more workers. The migrants were also, of course, consumers, who bought goods and services. Many also started their own businesses. Rather than harming native-born workers, the immigration surge seems to have helped them. The unemployment rate for native-born Spaniards has plummeted while incomes have risen by double digits; the poorest workers experienced the largest increase. A report from the Bank of Spain estimates that a quarter of the rise in the country’s per capita GDP from 2022 to 2024 could be attributed to immigrants. “I’ve been writing about Spain for 50 years at this point, and I’ve never seen its economy perform quite like this,” William Chislett, a senior fellow at the Elcano Royal Institute, in Madrid, told me. “And there’s little doubt in my mind that immigration is the most important factor.”

Alongside the immigration push, Spain’s leaders also pursued a suite of left-wing economic policies. They raised the country’s minimum wage by about 30 percent, implemented new worker protections that slashed the use of temporary contracts, created the country’s first-ever “minimum basic income” scheme for poor families, worth up to about $1,900 a month, and invested tens of billions of dollars in green energy. When Europe was hit by an energy crisis after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Spanish government instituted a cap on the price of natural gas to keep costs low.

Carlos Cuerpo, now Spain’s deputy prime minister, helped spearhead the country’s post-pandemic economic strategy. He does not come across as a left-wing populist. He’s an economist by training who has spent much of his life as a career bureaucrat. He speaks carefully and precisely, backing every argument he makes with references to at least two academic papers and three data points.

For Cuerpo, Spain’s economic approach was rooted in economic and political realism. One lesson from 2008, he argues, was that boosting the incomes of those at the bottom is the only sustainable way to grow an economy. When the rich get extra money, they tend to save it, which simply pushes up asset prices; when the poor get extra money, they spend it, which creates all sorts of real economic activity. “You have to give people some economic security, some stability, in order for them to go out and consume and create these positive feedback loops,” Cuerpo told me.

[Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker: The economic experiment that upended reality]

A second lesson from 2008 was that inequality is a corrosive force that generates class resentment and populist anger. The austerity policies that Spain undertook during that crisis—such as freezing the minimum wage and cutting social spending—had produced an immensely unequal recovery and become the target of populist movements. “We have to understand the underlying sentiment of the voters, which is a sentiment of economic insecurity,” Cuerpo said. “If not addressed quickly and properly, that might lead to dissatisfaction with institutions and attraction to populistic options.”

One school of thought holds that high levels of immigration and a robust social safety net are incompatible; natives don’t want to share their nation’s generosity with foreigners. Spain’s leaders flipped that idea on its head. The best way to ensure social support for immigration, they reasoned, was to make sure that existing residents feel materially secure. “The far-right wins when it weaponizes people’s economic security by identifying a clear enemy,” Pablo Bustinduy, Spain’s minister of social rights and consumer affairs and a co-founder of the far-left party Podemos, told me. “The best chance we have to counter this phenomenon is not by abandoning our principles. It’s by putting forward a model that guarantees better living conditions.”

Heading into the 2023 election, most commentators predicted that the Sánchez government would succumb to the anti-incumbent fervor sweeping Europe and that Vox would enter government for the first time. Instead, Sánchez’s party actually gained support while Vox lost more than a third of its seats in Parliament. Spain’s approach appeared to be vindicated.

But this success story has a wrinkle. There is one key area where the government has failed to deliver. And it is currently threatening to reverse Spain’s progress at keeping the far right out of power.

In 2022, after nearly 15 years abroad, Jorge Galindo finally returned to his home country. The economy was booming. Galindo landed a well-paying gig at a new policy think tank in Madrid. “For the first time, I felt optimistic about my economic prospects in Spain,” he told me.

But when Galindo began looking for a place to live, he discovered something disquieting. Although he was making a higher salary than in any of his previous jobs, he was struggling to find a home that he could afford to buy. “I was really confused at first,” Galindo, who now directs the Esade Center for Economic Policy, told me. “Spain has always been known for having one of the cheaper housing markets in Europe. But suddenly prices in Madrid and Barcelona were starting to look like Paris or Berlin.”

Figuring out how this had happened became an obsession for Galindo. The Spanish housing crisis became the focus of his research, culminating in a 2025 book, Tres Millones de Viviendas (Three Million Homes). During a conversation at a café outside the Reina Sofia Museum, in Madrid, he gave me an oral history of the housing market in Spain.

As recently as the early 2000s, Spain built more houses annually than Germany, France, and Italy combined. But after the real-estate bubble burst in 2008, Spain’s home-building industry collapsed. In an effort to prevent another speculative frenzy, cities and towns across the country imposed new restrictions on what could be built, and the national government passed regulations making it harder to finance new construction.

At the time, these laws didn’t make much difference. For much of the 2010s, Spain’s problem was that it had too many homes and not enough people who could buy them. That situation reversed after COVID. The post-pandemic surge of immigrants, combined with a rebound in tourism, higher incomes, and the rise of remote work, created huge demand for housing. But the country was now building homes at just over a tenth of the rate it was building them prior to 2008. With too much demand chasing too little supply, average home prices increased by more than 50 percent from December 2020 to December 2025, more than twice as much as wages increased over the same period. “If we were building even half the number of homes we were building 20 years ago, then we’d have more than enough for everyone,” Galindo said. “The problem is we’ve made it almost impossible to build anything here.”

Ben Roberts

Housing in Madrid, Spain

Across just about every public opinion poll, housing has become the top issue for Spanish voters. “Look, the government has done a lot of things right,” Antonio Roldán, an economist at IE University, in Madrid, told me. “But raising wages and handing out checks can’t solve a housing shortage. And the housing shortage is the thing preventing people from reaching the middle class.”

[Rogé Karma: The whole country is starting to look like California]

When I spoke with members of the Spanish government, all of them acknowledged the severity of this problem and insisted that they were doing everything in their power to address it. They pointed to, among other things, a national rent-control scheme, regulations to prevent homes from being turned into Airbnbs, and investments in public housing. These measures, however, have hardly made a dent in the problem. Several recent papers suggest that the rent-control scheme might even be making the housing shortage worse in some places by causing landlords to take units off the rental market and dissuading developers from building.

This failure has provided a new opening for the far right. After its poor performance in 2023, Vox pivoted its message away from immigrants taking jobs and toward immigrants taking homes. Its leaders began blaming the country’s housing crisis on foreigners and the party adopted the slogan “Fronteras seguras son pisos asequibles,” or “Secure borders mean affordable housing.” Gradually, Vox began rising in the polls, aided by the Sánchez administration’s corruption scandals. In 2025, after the government proposed granting amnesty to about half a million immigrants living illegally in Spain—a proposal that initially had wide support—Vox pounced, arguing that this would overwhelm Spain’s already limited supply of affordable housing. The party proposed banning landlords from renting apartments to undocumented immigrants as well as a “Spanish first” policy that would give native-born citizens and longtime residents priority over recent immigrants for public housing. (Vox party representatives did not respond to my interview requests.)

The strategy of tying the housing crisis to immigration paid off. Immigration has surged from a relatively low concern among voters to one of their highest priorities. In two recent regional elections, Sánchez’s socialist party lost a fifth or more of its seats while Vox doubled its share. “What Vox has successfully done is link the issue of housing to the issue of immigration in the minds of many voters,” Carmen González Enríquez, a senior fellow at the Elcano Royal Institute who specializes in immigration and public opinion, told me.

Despite its recent gains, Vox still holds less than 10 percent of the seats in Spain’s version of the House of Representatives, considerably less than far-right parties in France, Germany, and Italy. And Sánchez, who has already announced his intention to run for a third term in 2027, has recently seen a bump in his popularity after several high-profile public standoffs with Donald Trump, who is incredibly unpopular in Spain. But the 2027 election is still a ways away, and in the meantime, Spain’s housing crisis isn’t likely to suddenly fix itself. “The lesson for me is that scarcity is the ultimate gift to the far right,” Galindo said. “When there isn’t enough housing or public transit or health-care services for everyone, it’s so much easier to point a finger at immigrants than to address the actual causes of that shortage.”

Spain’s success over the past five years has undermined many long-standing political-economic truisms. Raising worker pay doesn’t necessarily come at the cost of economic growth; in fact, it can boost it. Immigration and a generous welfare state are not inherently incompatible (although very few countries have the advantage of a huge supply of foreigners who already speak the local language). At the same time, the downsides of the Spanish boom show just how precarious these sorts of gains can be. The political euphoria that arises from economic growth can quickly curdle into anger if the growth prices the middle class out of life’s necessities. And that anger threatens to empower political parties that would reverse the progress that created the growth in the first place.

This article originally incorrectly stated that Spanish officials in the ministry of inclusion, social security, and migration had recruited migrants with technical or vocational skills at the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, Spain and the U.S. entered an agreement in 2023 for Spain to take in migrants from processing centers based in Latin America.

The Plight of the Radical’s Children

2026-06-01T07:00:00-04:00

The Russian Revolution aimed to dissolve the family. Neither true equality nor true freedom could be achieved, the Bolsheviks argued, until class bonds trumped all other loyalties—that is, until people no longer felt greater responsibility toward their family than they did toward strangers. “The worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine,” Alexandra Kollontai, the Soviet Union’s first people’s commissar for social welfare, wrote. “There are only our children, the children of Russia’s communist workers.” The early government “tried its best to separate the children from the family,” as Leon Trotsky later wrote, “in order thus to protect them from the traditions of a stagnant mode of life.”

This radical attempt to dilute and deny family attachments is the specter haunting The Hill, a remarkable debut novel by Harriet Clark. The author is the daughter of Judy Clark, a onetime member of the American Marxist militant group known as the Weather Underground. Judy, a single mother, left 11-month-old Harriet at home when she drove the getaway car in a 1981 robbery of an armored truck that left a Brink’s guard and two police officers dead. “Revolutionary violence is necessary, and it is a liberating force,” Judy told the jury at her trial. The judge gave her the harshest available sentence: a minimum of 75 years. Harriet grew up first in a commune on Manhattan’s West Side and then, starting at age 5, in the home of her grandparents, Ruth and Joe, both disillusioned American Communists. (They had raised Judy partly in 1950s Moscow, where Joe had written for the Daily Worker.) Harriet got to be with her mother only during visiting hours, mostly at the maximum-security women’s prison in Bedford Hills, New York.

With The Hill, Clark has transformed her unusual childhood into a beautiful, unrepeatable bildungsroman. One of her essential maneuvers is to treat politics—and in particular the millenarian views that once animated and then fractured her family—as an exhausted subject, an aspect of character rather than a topic in itself. As Suzanna, the protagonist, tells us in narrating her childhood: “Though previously in the family attempts had been made to act on the world, great efforts to change it, what had been communicated to me was that the world was none of my business.” Young Suzanna, like The Hill itself, is a green shoot rising from the crater of a fiery political experiment—and giving new meaning to it. “If you figure out a way to be happy,” Suzanna’s mother writes to her, “it changes everything. Not just everything to come but everything that came before.” In this seemingly vanilla request to pursue happiness lies a profound theme: the inevitable decay of a pure and uncompromising ideology when confronted with the pure and humanizing presence of children.

We meet Suzanna at age 8 on her way into Hillcrest prison, where her mother (unnamed in the novel) is serving a life sentence for participating in a botched bank robbery, an attempted expropriation “for the purpose of revolutionary struggle.” Suzanna is chaperoned by her grandfather. (Like Clark’s grandfather, he is named Joe and once wrote for the Daily Worker.) Winded by life and by the large hill on which the prison perches, he helps his granddaughter through the security checkpoint, turning out her pockets and removing her jacket “with the tender distance of a tailor.” He brings Suzanna here every week, but he and his jailed daughter do not speak.

[Read: The holiday traditions of a nation long dead]

They return in the evenings to Suzanna’s grandmother, Sylvie, who refuses even to acknowledge where they’ve been all day. Disappointed with the actual communism of “Stalin’s starving land,” Sylvie nonetheless retains much of its ruthlessness and idealism. Specifically, she tries to inculcate in Suzanna the old disdain for unchosen, inherited attachments—“to free me of my mother,” as Suzanna puts it. When Joe dies, Sylvie bars their daughter from the funeral, and she tells Suzanna, “I’m never taking you to any prison.” This interrupts Suzanna’s weekly visits, a sacred pilgrimage to which the child (already exhibiting some of the familial willfulness) has committed herself “forever and ever.” Sylvie and Suzanna lock into a stalemate on the subject until Sylvie finally permits a nun named Sister Claudine to shuttle the girl between Manhattan and Hillcrest.

Sister Claudine is Sylvie’s foil. Her great calling, Suzanna knows, is to reunite families: “What God hath joined together let no man,” or prison, “tear asunder.” Sister relentlessly campaigns to bring the grandmother to Hillcrest, and she channels a sense of certainty, shared by the reader, that Sylvie must of course one day visit her own daughter. Sylvie remains comically unmoved. “No one leaves their family more fully than a nun does, believe me,” she snipes. “She chose her attachments just like anyone.” What Sister did not seem to know, Suzanna tells us, “was that my grandmother was punishing my mother.” Part of what makes Sylvie such a fascinating and poignant figure is the sense that she is punishing herself too; she recognizes that her daughter’s crime was not a rejection of her own ideals but in many ways an overzealous enactment of them. Sylvie is hardly the only erstwhile Communist with an estranged family. “To say that my grandmother’s friends had done a poor job keeping their children around is an understatement,” Suzanna remarks.

Even in her dying days, Sylvie refuses to open a last letter from her daughter. “I know what I need to know,” she says. One tragedy of her refusal to resume the relationship is that her daughter is no longer the militant she once was. Years in prison, and Suzanna’s presence whenever we meet the mother, cast her as somewhat childlike. She places great value on simple, sensuous experiences: thrilling when she gets to touch Suzanna or watch her sleep, infatuated with the service puppies she raises, playfully banging the pans and ice trays in the prison trailer where she and Suzanna spend a weekend. “Come open a door with me,” she says to Suzanna in the trailer—just one of a million prosaic things they’ve never done together. By now, she accepts without complaint the countless absurdities and humiliations of prison life. When she finally tells Suzanna about the robbery, there is no mention of class injustice, righteous expropriation, or disproportionate sentencing—only a lyrical memory representing her regret about the guard who died.

The Hill’s structure deliberately adheres to a conventional coming-of-age template, following Suzanna from ages 8 to 18 as she constructs a family out of these women and a few of her grandmother’s friends. Suzanna describes her childhood vow to visit Hillcrest every week as “choosing the life I had, which strikes me still as wise a choice as any.” Over the next decade, Suzanna takes what life throws at her, coming to terms with death—her grandfather’s, her grandparents’ friends, then Sylvie’s—much more readily than she grasps her own potential for a flourishing future. Her challenge as high school ends is not to accept things as they are but to embrace how they could be. By summoning the courage to apply to college, though attending would force her to break her vow, she could start building a life unconfined by the rituals of her peculiar childhood. Even her mother, touchingly, nudges Suzanna from the nest, refusing for her daughter’s sake to cling to their weekly routine. “Go adventure. I’ll be here. I’m the one person who can say that and mean it: I’m always here.”

[Read: How long can you live your ideals?]

Suzanna is a worthy hero, a wry and candid observer who claims to “know nothing” but who, like Henry James’s Maisie, might know more about the grown-ups than they know about themselves. Most profoundly, she knows something about the tolerant forbearance necessary to sustain even families more conventional than her own, and something about the maternal bond that Sylvie stubbornly disavows. For all of Sylvie’s big talk about unshackling oneself from inherited obligation, her life in many ways refutes her argument. She has sustained a decades-long marriage and sacrificed her retirement to raise her granddaughter, and she is anything but indifferent to the daughter she refuses to see. In her final bedridden weeks, Sylvie watches Court TV. She grows frustrated with the juries that take longer than she does to reach a verdict: “Another old lady dies while these idiots enact their Dostoevsky fantasies.” But the trial on TV is surely not the trial foremost in Sylvie’s mind, and she reveals despite herself that her judgment of her daughter is not as settled or as harsh as she likes to suggest.

“Revolutions do not devour their children,” Yuri Slezkine writes in his immersive history The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. Instead, revolutions “are devoured by the children of the revolutionaries.” Slezkine, a history professor at UC Berkeley, pins the demise of Soviet Communism on the Bolsheviks’ failure to re-create themselves. Their attempts to destroy the bourgeois family were, like the efforts of Suzanna’s mother and grandmother, ambivalent and half-hearted. It turned out that the Bolsheviks loved their kids. And instead of producing merciless class warriors, they raised children who loved their parents. They never eradicated what Slezkine refers to as the “hen-and-rooster problems” of familial love and self-preferencing, and, in a rather obvious unforced error, they had “their children read Tolstoy instead of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin.”

The second and subsequent generations of the Soviet elite grew up on the great literature of Europe—Shakespeare, Balzac, Goethe, Dickens—most of which, as Slezkine points out, shared an anti-totalitarian humanism, “embracing the folly and pathos of human existence.” The revolutionary parents “started out as sectarians and ended up as priestly rulers or sacred scapegoats; the children started out as romantics and ended up as professionals and intellectuals.” Among the American radicals they inspired, at least one of the children has circled back to the work of literature and become a wise, artful, and humane new novelist.

Use It or Lose It

2026-06-01T07:00:00-04:00

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Even in an age of unintended metaphors, few can compare to the scene that unfolded one winter morning five years ago on a street corner in downtown Washington, D.C.

A group of men gathered in front of the seven-story building at Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street Northwest, just a short walk from the Capitol, and prepared for an act of careful destruction. Their task was to do away with the colossal facade overhead. Slab by slab, they removed the Tennessee pink marble. The 45 words of the First Amendment had been there for years, giant letters carved in stone. Now that message was gone.

Although the symbolism was impossible to ignore, the backstory bordered on mundane: The Newseum, a museum devoted to the history of journalism, had run out of money and closed. So down went the tribute to the First Amendment, sent in pieces to Philadelphia. The marble was reconfigured by the National Constitution Center, which is all well and good for those who want to pay $24.95 to bask in freedom’s most glorious words. But those words are no longer displayed on Pennsylvania Avenue, where anyone traversing the street that connects Congress to the White House would once have seen them.

The facade was only ever a blip on the radar screen—installed in 2007, dismantled in 2021. And if you’re looking for razed history, there’s plenty more at that exact intersection. A century before the First Amendment (briefly) towered over passersby, two rival hotels stood at the corner of Pennsylvania and Sixth. One had a tavern that held the distinction of being the first public place in Washington where “The Star-Spangled Banner” was sung, in 1814. The other, the National Hotel, was where John Wilkes Booth slept the night before he assassinated Abraham Lincoln, in 1865.

miralex / Getty

From 2007 to 2021, the facade of the Newseum reminded passersby in downtown Washington of their First Amendment freedoms.

My point is: America is in a constant state of change. Anything that persists for a time does so only through a combination of fortune and choice. Our core freedoms may be enshrined in our founding documents, but they are guaranteed to us only in principle. Advancing the cause of freedom in practice is another matter.

Americans must try to better understand what freedom demands of them. One requirement of self-governance is the relentless pursuit of truth, which necessarily involves questioning people in positions of power in order to prevent tyranny. Yet misconceptions about what free speech and free press actually mean are everywhere. Too many people assume that freedom of speech means freedom from consequences—whether reputational, social, or professional—for what they say. (It does not.) Others conflate the role of privately run companies with that of the government, arguing, for example, that a social-media company’s moderation decisions amount to state censorship. (They do not, and in fact the individuals who run social platforms have their own First Amendment rights as publishers—even if they don’t like to concede that they themselves are publishers.)

Far too many people behave as though freedom of the press refers only to freedom for professional journalists. But journalists are not in some special category. The right to free press is, like free speech, a basic freedom that applies to all Americans who choose to exercise it. The First Amendment tells the government that it cannot encroach on any American’s right to speak and publish. Freedom of the press is not about the press; it’s about the freedom.

So when you encounter an American cheering on the notion that the “fake-news media” should be jailed, or punished, or destroyed, what you’re actually seeing is someone cheering for the government to trample on their own First Amendment rights. And if you’re the one excoriating “the media” for their failings, consider not just complaining but competing: Exercise your own right to free press. The barriers to distributing information have never been lower. What once required an expensive printing press can now be done with a smartphone—paper, a pen, and a copy machine still work in a pinch too.

It is no coincidence that President Trump has conditioned his followers to attack their fellow citizens as enemies of America for questioning him. He makes himself available to the public far more readily than other modern presidents have, a quality that offers a simulacrum of transparency—until you observe how he interacts with people who dare speak words that upset him. He kicked the Associated Press out of the White House for not calling the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” His administration replaced the Pentagon press corps with MAGA lapdogs, influencers, and a disgraced former congressman turned podcaster. All the while, Trump routinely lashes out at citizens for posing basic questions that the American people deserve answers to. When one woman asked him when the Iran war would end, he called her a “disgrace.” When another woman asked him why he’s focused on beautifying the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial during wartime, especially as gas prices soar, he snapped that it was a “stupid question.” When a woman asked the president about his administration’s handling of Afghan refugees, he interrupted her, saying, “Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?” To yet another woman, who’d asked him about Jeffrey Epstein, the president responded, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.” He has told other Americans that they are “horrible,” “obnoxious,” “terrible,” “stupid and nasty,” simply for asking him serious questions on behalf of the public.

Trump, gifted showman that he is, understands that insulting citizens on camera is a tactic that serves his interests. It distracts people from the fact that he hasn’t answered the question. And it is chum for his propagandists, who eat up this debasement of American freedom and share clips with breathless commentary such as “Trump absolutely bodies a CNN reporter” and “annoying anti-MAGA brat gets HUMILIATED LIVE.” Trump has effectively cast journalists as a separate special-interest group—apart from ordinary American citizens. But this is a lie.

The tech barons who run the platforms where these indecent clips proliferate are pliant cogs in Trump’s machine. So it’s not entirely surprising how many of them share his disdain for Americans who happen to work as journalists. Nevertheless, it is alarming that Silicon Valley is now emulating the president and establishing its own “editorial” teams that please and flatter tech leaders, who in turn refuse to subject themselves to serious questioning.

Power doesn’t like to be checked. Peter Thiel has declared anyone who criticizes his vision of AI “the anti-Christ.” The venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz—co-founded by Marc Andreessen, a man who infamously blocks every journalist he can find on social media—has an “editor in chief” for one of its funds and an in-house media team designed to bypass independent outlets. Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into a right-wing propaganda network. Anthropic has an “editorial team.” So does Apple. Meta has an “editorial” leader, whom it hired away from The New York Times. At OpenAI, which also has an “editorial lead,” Sam Altman claims that TBPN, the podcast he recently acquired, will be fully editorially independent. (As of this writing, Altman has refused to speak with any journalist at The Atlantic for years despite our many, many, many requests. We will keep asking.) Like Trump, the tech industry’s most powerful and illiberal figures want to replace those who seek truth in the public interest with sycophants who cheer on their consolidation of power and self-enrichment. They believe that the American people won’t notice, or don’t care, and in plenty of cases they are right.

[From the March 2024 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on the rise of techno-authoritarianism]

I should note that every last one of these people is exercising their own First Amendment rights. If someone wants to do “editorial” work for a tech company that involves publishing only stories advancing the mission of the company and the worldview of its owner, that’s their right. Corporate public relations and marketing are, like any other form of publishing, protected under the First Amendment from government interference, as they should be, even if they aren’t guided by the same values and standards as journalism.

I should also note that working journalists bear an awesome responsibility. Anyone who is charged with seeking the truth and reporting it, and is lucky enough to spend their days asking questions of powerful people, should remember that journalism is first and foremost a public service, and that it is a privilege to serve. Journalists are not above reproach. Americans have a civic obligation to demand the highest standards from anyone who promises to represent their interests—regardless of whether that person is an elected official or simply a fellow citizen. Journalists should receive good-faith criticism with humility and appreciation.

Although every American is entitled to exercise the right to free press, no one is entitled to be trusted or believed—that, you have to earn. The nosedive in trust in journalism is multifactorial, and journalists themselves are not without blame. All journalists make mistakes. And those mistakes are never acceptable. But pay close attention to the difference between how a reputable news organization acknowledges its mistakes—namely, by transparently correcting them—and how Trump or Musk reacts to being called out for getting something wrong.

In the United States, we like to tell ourselves that freedom is as natural as sunshine and as American as bubble gum. But American freedom has always been simultaneously conditional and aspirational—available to some and not to others, and at times diminished for all.

The cause of freedom has advanced only because of those who have been willing to stand up against government overreach. On September 25, 1690, in Boston, Benjamin Harris published colonial America’s first newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick. Harris was a refugee from England, where he’d faced harsh government censorship in his failed attempts to establish a free press. The first issue of Publick Occurrences contained a few items of local news and, notably, one salacious sentence speculating that King Louis XIV of France was sleeping with his son’s wife. Colonial authorities shut down the newspaper immediately—citing the fact that Harris, along with the printer, Richard Pierce, had disseminated information without first seeking government approval. They ordered Harris not to publish another edition and destroyed all remaining copies of the paper. (A single copy is known to have survived, and it is now in London, of all places.) Harris and Pierce had no constitutional protection of their right to free press; the government believed that it had total discretion over what information was allowed to reach the public. Publick Occurrences existed for exactly one issue. The next newspaper would not be printed in the colonies for 14 long years.

The paper often credited with being the first true daily in America, The Pennsylvania Evening Post, was founded generations later, in the months leading up to the American Revolution. (The Post was the first to publish the text of the Declaration of Independence, on July 6, 1776.) And although the Bill of Rights came soon after, ever since the First Amendment was ratified, Americans have had to continually, sometimes aggressively, insist on their right to free expression in the face of political pressure.

[From the May 2025 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on how capitulation is contagious]

Alexander Manly did so when he continued to publish his newspaper, The Daily Record, in Wilmington, North Carolina, after racist backlash to an anti-lynching editorial. A former congressman led a mob in burning the Record ’s office to the ground in 1898. Manly was just one target in the wave of post-Reconstruction violence that erased hard-won freedoms. Ida Tarbell and Ida B. Wells pushed for freedom through their relentless reporting, exposing the predatory practices of the oil baron John D. Rockefeller and the horrors of white mobs lynching Black Americans across the South. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. defended free expression when he argued for a competitive marketplace of ideas. Lenny Bruce did it from the stage in a comedy club. And Fannie Lou Hamer did it when she refused to be silenced by presidential intimidation and described the brutality she’d faced for simply trying to vote.

Every human deserves the five basic freedoms protected by the First Amendment: religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. But freedom is not promised to any of us, not really. American freedom is a continual achievement that is secured by those willing to defend and perpetuate it. And it is a choice we must make, again and again and again, knowing that the forces aligned against the pursuit of truth are inherently working against the cause of liberty too.

This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “Use It or Lose It.”

D.C. Progressives’ Great Socialist Hope

2026-06-01T06:00:00-04:00

These days, the best thing about being mayor of Washington, D.C., is the nice title. The overwhelmingly Democratic city is in an economic contraction, triggered by the Trump administration’s purges of the federal workforce, and is facing a deep budget deficit of $1.1 billion. The metro area lost 1.7 percent of its jobs last year, the worst showing in the country. Meanwhile, a hostile president and Republican-led Congress are able—and eager—to overrule laws, yank away funds, and deploy troops in the city at whim. Perhaps that is why Muriel Bowser, who has held the job since 2015, announced in November that she would not run again. The bitter contest to succeed her has so far replicated the central ideological struggle within the Democratic Party—between a defiantly left-wing politics and the sedate institutionalism it disdains. The Democratic staffer class who will power the party in the coming years will make up a disproportionate share of the June 16 primary’s voters.

The front-runner is Janeese Lewis George, a democratic socialist on the D.C. city council. She is promising greater resistance to Donald Trump, especially his deployment of ICE agents and National Guard members in the city. She is also proposing state-sponsored plenitude. “I follow the socialist tradition shaped by Dr. King, who said there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country,” Lewis George told me. “And that’s why there’s nothing radical about fighting for universal child care or housing that puts people over profit.” Both her rhetoric and her proposals show a deep skepticism that the private sector can sufficiently provide essential goods and services.

Just behind her in a recent poll is Kenyan McDuffie, a mild-mannered lawyer who served, without much fanfare, on the city council from 2012 until January. “I’m not overcommitting on what we can deliver,” he told me. “What we have to do is be honest with Washingtonians, that D.C. has both a revenue problem and a spending problem.” That McDuffie is close—despite his low-key affect and late entry in the race—speaks more to apprehension about Lewis George than to the persuasiveness of his campaign. Another motivation for McDuffie supporters is the fear that, if Lewis George is elected, Trump would intensify his retaliation, which has already harmed the economy and left thousands of National Guard members idling on its streets at a cost to U.S. taxpayers of more than $1.6 million a day.

[Michael Powell: Where Mamdani has refused to moderate]

Polling conducted by City Cast DC shows that Lewis George is the preferred candidate of affluent, college-educated, Gen Z and Millennial white voters who have newly moved into the city, but that McDuffie leads among longer-term residents, Black voters, and older white people. Victory for Lewis George would be the latest in a string of triumphs for proudly socialist politicians, including, most notably, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Others predict that her victory would only accelerate the city’s decline. “The District is functionally in a localized recession right now,” Adam Fofana of the DMV New Liberals, a local centrist group that has endorsed McDuffie, told me. “That’s a very real constraint on the resources available, either from the federal government or within the District.”

Lewis George has made two eye-catching promises in her campaign. First: to provide universal child care that caps family expenses at 7 percent of household income. The costs of doing so would be considerable. Even at current child-care prices of about $27,000 a year, meeting the commitment would likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually. But Lewis George has also committed to increasing the wages of child-care workers to the same scale as those of unionized teachers, which would considerably raise the total cost. When I asked her how the city could afford those schemes while already facing a serious deficit, she said, “I’m not naive about the fact that we are going to be facing some financial hard times.” She said that D.C. can raise revenue through a new tax on lobbying and consulting firms owned by people who live outside the city. Advocates say this could raise up to $500 million per year—assuming the untested tax does not prompt businesses to relocate to Maryland and Virginia.

Her second pledge is to build 72,000 homes in five years. While Lewis George is pledging to liberalize zoning laws and reduce permitting times—a nod to the yes-in-my-backyard urbanism that has gained force among wonky D.C. Democrats—her pledge would be extraordinarily difficult for private developers to deliver amid the deep recession that the D.C. housing market is in. House prices peaked in May 2021. Since then, they have fallen 26 percent in inflation-adjusted terms, making investments in new-home construction less likely to pay off.

“A couple of years from now, we’re looking at almost no housing production going forward,” Emilia Calma, the director of housing studies at the D.C. Policy Center, told me. Calma attributed the problem to high interest rates, high rates of rent nonpayment, and an extremely slow eviction process. D.C. has also just come off an incredible construction boom: From 2019 to 2026, the District added 45,000 new homes. As a result, real rental prices dropped by nearly 11 percent (even as rents rose across the country). Already discouraged developers will not exactly be lured back by the new tenant protections and expanded rent-stabilization laws that Lewis George is proposing.

Instead, the most important developer would be the local government. “The private market cannot do it alone, so as mayor, D.C. is also going to step up and build mixed-income housing,” Lewis George told me. In place of ordinary development would be “Dignified Homes DC”—government-owned “mixed-income housing with stable rents” to “prioritize residents over profit.” Policy experts would call it public housing or social housing. Lewis George’s faction of the new urban left does not oppose home construction; rather, it aims to achieve it on the government’s terms.

On this issue and others, McDuffie has pitched himself as the moderate alternative. “There is no way anybody is going to build 72,000 units of housing in Washington, D.C., particularly when her goal is to build social housing, which is an experiment and is untested,” he said. (He has instead pitched building 12,000 new homes. He has also promised to preserve 20,000 below-market-rate units whose rent restrictions are scheduled to expire soon.) He would like to reinstate wage subsidies for child-care workers but not commit to universal child care.

Perhaps most decisively for the race, he has pitched himself as tougher on crime than Lewis George, who, ahead of her first council election, in 2020, called for defunding the police. In a questionnaire that she filled out for the Democratic Socialists of America that year, she agreed to support “efforts to demilitarize and disarm our police departments.” But in the same year, McDuffie also said, “We need to redirect funding away from the police department to other government agencies.” Both are now eschewing those past statements and campaigning on hiring more police officers. And both candidates, when I asked them about whether they had flip-flopped on the issue, pivoted to talking about their past work as prosecutors.

Still, there are clear differences: Lewis George was the sole vote against a strict emergency crime bill in 2023, passed amid a homicide spike. Unlike McDuffie, she opposes a nighttime curfew on teenagers—imposed after several episodes of violent “teen takeovers” of public spaces that have resulted in brawls, robberies, and gunfights. And when I asked Lewis George whether she would commit to not defunding, demilitarizing, or disarming the police as mayor, she answered: “That’s a nuanced question.” By that, she meant she wanted other agencies to deal with mental-health crises and traffic enforcement, “so that officers actually get to do the job we need them to do.” This stance is arguably responsive to her core constituency of white liberals, who are much more supportive of such efforts than Black voters are.

[Charles Fain Lehman: Trump is right that D.C. has a serious crime problem]

This will be the first mayoral election in D.C. that gets decided through ranked-choice voting. That system might be empowering to McDuffie, who, polling suggests, narrowly trails Lewis George overall but is the second choice for more voters. The ranked-choice system has also tempted outside candidates to try their lot. “The principal opponents I have in this race are career legislators,” Rini Sampath, a young government contractor who entered this race in a fit of frustration over city management, told me. “My fear is that either of these guys—regardless of what their promises are—are going to get in office and not have the chops to execute.” Sampath’s campaign promise is to not make any grand promises and to instead fix basic city management. Gary Goodweather, a longtime real-estate developer polling at about 7 percent, lobs a similar critique at the front-runners, who, he says, do not know how to build. “They’ve never done it. I spent my career doing it,” he told me. Whereas Sampath is minimalist about her pledges, Goodweather is maximalist. Among other proposals, he wants to make transit use free for D.C. residents, set up a small modular nuclear reactor, and “convert office buildings into indoor vertical farms.”

The schism of D.C. Democrats between socialists and institutionalists is a familiar battle across the country—between those who believe that the government can solve most social problems and those who favor cautious approaches. Lewis George’s performance will gauge the activist left’s strength within national Democratic policy circles. But the prize for the winner is perhaps the least appealing of all those contests. Whoever prevails in the mayoral primary will likely inherit a city stuck in a Trump-induced contraction with budgets that Congress can unilaterally overwrite and a police force that the president can federalize. Trump enjoys squeezing those who are subject to his discretion—trading partners, military allies, universities, domestic businesses, and, in his most immediate vicinity, the District of Columbia. Lewis George and McDuffie are staging a contest for the future of the Democratic Party. Trump will do his utmost to remind them of their painful and powerless present.

Memories of Green

2026-05-31T12:00:00-04:00

I was as vapour in the blue airs of summer and knew no bounds.
— Simone de Beauvoir

Come outside, he told us, as we looked up from our play.
We set down all our G.I. Joes and the assorted dolls
to see the fruits of labor that he’d planted back in May.
Children listen dutifully when Granddaddy calls.

We passed the porch and fence where wild honeysuckles grew
and never got too close, as you’d be worse with just a lick,
to grandma’s elephant ears, pillows for drops of morning dew—
we heard that just a few could cure a cold when you were sick.

I saw lambent light within his eye. We stepped upon the grass:
Just past the pack of chickweed that my sister said were greens,
(it’s funny how those memories are gilded in their cast),
Granddaddy saw his life and told us what it really means.

His hands held the cucumbers: There were two that he would pick.
We leaned in close to get a look: so long and green and thick.