The Atlantic

The Atlantic Announces Joshua Partlow, Ariel Sabar, and Sebastian Smee as Staff Writers

2026-06-23T13:12:17-04:00

The Atlantic is announcing the hires of three new staff writers: Ariel Sabar, who has contributed to The Atlantic as a freelancer since 2015, and Joshua Partlow and Sebastian Smee, both joining from The Washington Post.

Joshua will cover extreme weather and natural disasters. Ariel will focus on in-depth narrative reporting. Sebastian will write widely about visual art and its influence on modern life and culture.

More details from our editors about all three journalists follow:

Ariel Sabar is joining as a staff writer. Ariel has been contributing to The Atlantic as a freelancer since 2015, and is responsible for such classics as “A Biblical Mystery at Oxford,” “The Billion-Dollar Ponzi Scheme that Hooked Warren Buffett and the U.S. Treasury,” and the truly amazing “The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife.” (If you’ve read that one, you’ve likely never forgotten it.) That last piece turned into his 2020 book, Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, which was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe award for best true-crime book of the year and the runner-up for the Investigative Reporters and Editors Book Award. His first book, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Family’s Past, in which Ariel reported from the ancient village in Iraqi Kurdistan where his father grew up, won the National Books Critics Circle Award in 2009. Ariel is a truly inexhaustible reporter with a gift for writing narratives that you can’t put down.

Joshua Partlow is joining as a staff writer, and will focus on extreme weather and natural disasters. Josh comes to us from The Washington Post, where he wrote most recently about environmental issues in the American West. He is a powerhouse reporter who has also been a foreign correspondent in Latin America and the Middle East. He served with distinction as the Post’s bureau chief in Mexico City, Kabul, and Rio de Janeiro, and was a stalwart in the paper’s Baghdad bureau, where he made a name for himself as a particularly brave and resourceful reporter. He has already made his mark at The Atlantic with his striking story on the fatal Lake Tahoe avalanche earlier this year.

Sebastian Smee is joining as a staff writer. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, Sebastian is the former art critic for both The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. He has written eloquently about visual art for many years, and is one of the most respected arts commentators and critics in the English-speaking world. Sebastian is a brilliant observer of the arts who approaches artists as well as individual works with deep humanity and sustained attention. He has dissected the rise of megadealers and reported the fascinating story of a Jackson Pollock theft. He is the go-to critic in times of controversy, weighing in in timely and acute ways on matters ranging from the deaccession effort at the Baltimore Museum of Art to the postponement of a Philip Guston show. Sebastian will write widely on visual art and its influence on modern life and culture more broadly.

Press Contacts:
Paul Jackson and Quinn O’Brien | press@theatlantic.com

The Screwworm Problem Will Get Worse Before It Can Get Better

2026-06-23T12:50:06-04:00

This time a year ago, experts were already predicting the return of flesh-eating screwworms to the United States: a matter of not if but when, Wayne Cockrell, a Texas rancher, lamented to me at the time. Screwworms had been eradicated from the U.S. to Panama and then were cordoned off through the continual release of almost 20 million sterilized screwworms every week over the narrow Isthmus of Panama. But screwworms, which grow into flies as adults, had jumped the cordon and infested a large swatch of Mexico by last year. This month, they indeed reached Texas.

The math of the crisis then and now is brutally simple: The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s screwworm program cannot produce enough sterile adults to get the parasites under control. A factory in Panama has already quintupled its weekly production to its physical max, just more than 100 million, but more, many more, flies are needed to re-eradicate the screwworm: 500 million.

Two new factories are under construction, but both were delayed, according to reporting in Politico, by the Trump administration’s aggressive reviews of government spending last year. The first, in Mexico, will be fully online only this fall and the second, a much larger one in Texas, in the fall of 2028. “To win this war, it’s all about the number of sterile flies,” Cockrell, who is also second vice president of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, reiterated to me recently.

In the meantime, the screwworms will keep percolating through the country, and ranchers will keep finding the grisly, telltale wounds in their livestock. The best that ranchers can do until more sterile flies arrive is “hold the line, weather the storm,” Jason Sawyer, the chief science officer of the East Foundation, an agricultural-research organization that manages six ranches in Texas, told me. Optimistically, he expects the re-eradication of screwworms in the U.S. to take three years. Realistically, he thinks it’ll take five years.

The parasites pose the biggest threat to cattle—which could push beef prices even higher—but they can also infect pets, wildlife, and even the unlucky human. After the first case of screwworms was discovered in the umbilical stump of a Texas calf on June 3, 15 more animal cases quickly came to light. The cases have been scattered over hundreds of square miles, a worrisome geographic spread that suggests that screwworms have dispersed in the U.S. beyond one isolated outbreak. Experts told me that they hope and expect the screwworm will not spread far outside Texas, but one case, in a dog, had already been found just over the state border in New Mexico.

Fernando Llano / AP

The wait for more sterile flies is all the more frustrating because the technology itself is so old. It has remained fundamentally unchanged since screwworms were originally eradicated in Texas, in the 1960s. Screwworms are reared in a factory and then blasted as pupae with radiation to render them impotent. When released en masse as flies, sterile males mate with wild females to produce nonviable eggs. Over the years, the screwworm program refined this technique but saw no reason for radical overhaul. Why mess with something that’s not broken?

In 2026, the outlook is quite different. The search is on for anything and everything that could possibly mitigate the long wait for more sterile flies. The USDA last week announced $105 million in funding for 40 projects that run the gamut, including new irradiation techniques and detection dogs and novel insecticides.

The USDA has even resurrected a male-only strain of genetically modified screwworms developed nearly a decade prior. Factory-reared males and females are currently released together, but only the sterile males are actually useful for eradication. (They mate many times, while female screwworms only mate once.) To that end, Maxwell Scott, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, began working on a male-only strain for the USDA back in 2010. The lab science went quickly, he told me, but getting approval for a field trial in Panama took three years. His team then created an even more efficient strain, which was never field-tested. The male-only project more or less went on pause, which frustrated Scott. “It was a lot of work to make these strains, and I thought they were good,” he said recently. “It wasn’t my decision.” He stopped working on screwworms.

Last year, with the screwworm’s return imminent, Scott heard that the USDA was interested in a newer version of the male-only strain again. The agency in March submitted paperwork to register a version of the more efficient strain—newly dubbed “NovoFly”—as a pesticide with the Environmental Protection Agency. (The USDA did not respond to my questions about when NovoFly would be ready for use.) Scientists are still waiting on approval for a field test in Panama, though. If the male-only strain is proven to work soon and deployed quickly, switching to it could ease the sterile-fly shortage. Scott also received a grant to continue working on a male-only strain as part of the USDA’s funding push.

Ironically, the basic technology behind these male-only strains is outdated now, Scott said. Since the strain’s original creation, CRISPR has revolutionized scientists’ ability to manipulate DNA in the lab. Scott is now interested in using CRISPR to create a “gene drive” that forces sterility to spread among wild screwworms. Theoretically, a single release of flies carrying a gene drive could even, over time, sterilize the entire screwworm population. At that point, screwworms could feasibly become eradicated from not just North and Central America but also South America, making the screwworm barrier at Panama entirely obsolete. But gene drives are controversial precisely because they may be uncontrollable once out in the wild; the technology in screwworms is not ready for even a field trial.

For now, Texas ranchers awaiting more sterile flies must rely on old-school strategies dating to the pre-eradication era: inspecting cattle, treating wounds with anti-screwworm drugs, and curbing the movement of infested animals. “When everybody in an area is doing that, you can keep the numbers low in the environment. But all it takes is one neighbor, as a source, that is not,” Cockrell says. And the work is labor intensive, because cattle herds can be spread out over hundreds or even thousands of acres, and ranches routinely employ fewer employees than they used to. “I’ve had people ask, ‘My parents told me about how they had to manage this in the ’60s,’” Sawyer recounted. “‘I don’t know if I have the capacity for that.’”

Even if ranches get a good handle on their own livestock, wildlife may serve as continual reservoirs of breeding screwworms. The role of wildlife in today’s outbreak is a real “wildcard,” Sawyer said. Deer populations in particular boomed following the eradication of screwworms. (It’s directly related: Screwworms used to kill 40 to 80 percent of fawns in Texas every year.) “Candidly, there’s not any great answers” for screwworm mitigation in wildlife, he told me. How much wild animals will contribute to the outbreak will become clearer only in a few years’ time—at which point the eradication effort will hopefully have enough flies to push the screwworms back to the Mexican border, and eventually even the Panamanian border.

Americans Are in Denial About Elder Care

2026-06-23T08:00:00-04:00

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As far as growing old goes, the Dutch have it pretty good. The Netherlands offers arguably the world’s most generous long-term-care insurance, covering professional nursing or home care for all residents who can demonstrate need. The country spends a whopping 4.1 percent of its GDP on formal elder-care services, 94 percent of which is publicly funded. (The United States, by comparison, spends 1.3 percent, 71 percent of it publicly funded.) “No other country spends more per capita on publicly financed formal care,” a 2023 working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded.

And yet, nearly half of elderly Dutch residents who need assistance with the basic functions of daily life—dressing, bathing, grocery shopping, paying bills—still partly or even entirely rely on informal care from family and friends. Herein lies a lesson for Americans: Chances are, your elder care will not be outsourced, at least not entirely.

It is no secret that in the United States, the accessibility and quality of long-term care leave a lot to be desired. But many Americans go through life carrying two big misconceptions about aging. One is that, in the postindustrial world, a ton of elder care is hired out to professionals. The other is that, with sufficient savings and adequate public services, it is possible to avoid relying on kin for help.

These notions are, quite simply, more myth than reality. The Boston University sociologist Deborah Carr told me that in classroom discussions on aging, she routinely hears her undergraduate students echo a “Grandpa Simpson” stereotype of American elder care: They assume that many older people spend their latter years in nursing homes, largely forgotten by their families. But “the proportion of older adults who actually live in a nursing home,” Carr said, “is very, very small.” And even when the elderly are in residential care, family members tend to be highly involved.

In my own conversations with family and friends, I find that many of them presume that relying on one’s grown children in old age is a thing of the past. But the truth is that, across the developed world, the majority of elder care is still done informally—usually by spouses or children, sometimes by other relatives or friends—and it is probably not possible for matters to be any other way.

More than 80 percent of Americans over 65 in need of care depend on kin; about two-thirds rely solely on informal care. And the share of American elder care done on an unpaid basis is, if anything, growing over time. For context, things don’t look all that different in our peer countries, including those that spend far more on elder care: In an analysis of 10 high-income nations with varying levels of public investment in long-term care, the Netherlands emerged as the only one in which less than half of the elderly population relied on kin. This suggests that if the United States were to suddenly and massively scale up its formal care services—a possibility that, in the current political climate, seems unlikely—Americans would still most likely rely on a significant amount of informal care.

Even when families can find and afford formal care, many older people are deeply resistant to the idea of moving into a nursing facility or having a stranger come into their home to help them, Emily Kenway, a social-policy doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh and the author of Who Cares: The Hidden Crisis of Caregiving, and How We Solve It, told me. Aging can be psychologically and emotionally difficult. Accepting that you need a home health aide means coming to terms with your own vulnerability, which is easier said than done, particularly for those who have been nondisabled their entire lives. And when you are struggling with a cognitive impairment, as many elderly people do, changing homes or having strangers care for you can be genuinely frightening. (In some cases, Kenway noted, racial biases can add to the discomfort—a difficult reality, but one that family members cannot simply hand-wave away, given that the majority of nursing and home-care workers are people of color.)

Of course, many spouses, daughters, sons, nieces, and nephews want to care for their aging loved ones. But considering recent demographic, economic, and social trends, the need to seriously reckon with the load-bearing role that kin play in elder care has become freshly urgent.

For one, a growing number of Americans don’t have children or spouses. This is partly why the proportion of older adults with daily care needs that will go unmet is expected to grow by more than 30 percent by 2050. At the same time, even people with spouses and children can’t assume that those family members will be willing or able to care for them, especially if they’re in the workforce. Many employers don’t make it easy to combine work and care.

Then there’s another complication: proximity, or the lack of it. For much of human history, people could rely on kin because family members lived close by. Nowadays, most Americans live within 30 miles of their nearest parent—which might seem quite close. But “every single mile matters if you are caring for parents who have a disability,” Hwajung Choi, an associate professor of internal medicine and of health management and policy at the University of Michigan, told me. Her research has shown that although older adults with disabilities rely heavily on care from their adult children, the amount of care they receive drops off steeply the farther away the child lives. Those living with their parent provide roughly twice as many hours of care as those living on the same block, who provide nearly three times the care that those living a couple of miles away do. Beyond five miles, adult children don’t provide much care at all, whether they live 10 miles away or 100.

[Read: How affluence pulls people away from their families]

Other troubling trends loom. American society seems to be going through a wide-scale retreat into isolation. People are spending less time with one another and opting out of community and religious institutions, where durable, supportive relationships have historically taken root. Meanwhile, AI seems poised to further wear down relational bonds at a time when the country desperately needs to be building them up. All of this points to a situation in which, over time, more and more Americans may find themselves heading toward precarity as they age—unless they start thinking creatively and pragmatically about how they want their future life to look.

Aging is unpredictable. When I asked Susan Fordham, who works in payroll for a school system in West Virginia, what a typical day of caring for her 84-year-old mother looks like, she struggled to answer the question. Her mother’s need for help arose last summer, when she had an operation that required a stint in a rehabilitation center and then several weeks of hands-on care. “She couldn’t fix her own lunch or drinks or even make it to the bathroom at certain points,” Fordham told me. By the time Fordham and I spoke, the sort of assistance her mother needed was less intensive but still crucial to her comfort. Her mom—who alternates between living with Fordham and Fordham’s sister—could pour her own coffee but couldn’t make it herself. So Fordham would prepare a pot before she headed into work. “Trying to lift a whole gallon of milk and hold on to it is more than she can do,” Fordham said. So every morning, Fordham put milk in a tiny pitcher that her mother could lift.

All the while, Fordham was prepared to drop everything in the event that something more serious might come up. The week we spoke, she had to call in sick to take her mother to urgent care—and then again for a follow-up later in the week.

Fordham’s experience is typical. Care needs can arise instantly—after a fall in the shower or an unexpected diagnosis—and can fluctuate wildly month to month, week to week, day to day. This volatility runs counter to the planned nature of most formal services. “You can set up paid care workers with certain shift patterns for a period of time, and then suddenly that need changes,” Kenway, the University of Edinburgh researcher, said. As people age, most will need someone well positioned to swoop in when problems first arise, and then to stick around to keep an eye on them even during spells when their care needs subside.

None of this is to say that there is no point in publicly funding formal care—only that such care is not enough. Formal care is “necessary but insufficient,” Kenway said: vital, but only one half of the “duet” required to meet elderly people’s needs. In fact, it’s perhaps best to think of formal and informal elder care as complements rather than as substitutes for each other. Even if an elderly person is receiving formal care at home or in a nursing home, someone has to coordinate those services, whether applying for programs and figuring out how to pay for them, scheduling appointments, or corresponding with government agencies, insurance providers, and care workers. “The family caregiver is like the boss of a team,” Kenway told me.

Fordham is the one who hired the home health aide who looked after her mother following her operation last summer. She paid for that service out of pocket because, although her mother has long-term-care insurance, the need for in-home assistance came up so quickly that she didn’t have time to explore what the policy covered. The local health-care system arranged for rehabilitation therapists to aid with her mother’s recovery—but it was Fordham with whom they communicated. “They quickly learned not to call Mom,” Fordham said. “I’d be on a call, and I’d have to go let them in because she can’t get to the door.”

Difficult as things are for Fordham’s mother, she is fortunate in one respect: She does have family to care for her. Many Americans, as they grow older, may not be able to say the same.

Parents and nonparents, the elderly and their aging family members—all have a tendency to avoid confronting their need for elder care. Jody Day, a psychotherapist and an author who has spent a good part of her career advocating for the needs of people aging without children, told me that parents she speaks with typically resist admitting that they are counting on their kids to care for them in old age. And many people, she added, begin to consider who might care for them only when they’ve been thrust into the position of caring for an elderly relative.

Such stalling is understandable. Planning for old age requires pondering death—our own, that of our loved ones—in a way that many people are not psychologically well equipped to do. Grown children may simply not comprehend the level of care they might need to provide for their parents. The elderly may resist acknowledging that they’re going to need help. Even younger, able-bodied people who imagine that, when they need it, they’ll be more easygoing about accepting help from paid caregivers may be deluding themselves. “People always assume they won’t be like that,” Kenway said, but “that does not seem to be what happens once you start aging.”

The problem with this kind of denial is that failure to think ahead can make life incredibly hard for both givers and receivers of care. This is true for everyone—but can be especially so for those without children or a partner.

One reason family members have historically taken on elder care is that they are driven by a strongly felt obligation, Sarah Patterson, a demographer and University of Michigan assistant professor who researches aging and caregiving, told me. Such cultural norms can be powerful, compelling people to care even for parents who have badly mistreated them. But this sense of duty isn’t as robust for other relationships. In a recent study exploring Americans’ beliefs about who ought to undertake the care of an older adult, a clear hierarchy emerged. Respondents assigned the greatest level of responsibility to partners, spouses, and “the family as a whole,” followed closely by adult children. The responsibility assigned to “lifelong friends” was much lower.

Essentially, modern elder care presents an enormous social and logistical quandary: Family members, who generally feel the greatest desire or sense of obligation to help, are not always well situated to do so. And the people well situated to do so, by virtue of their living in close proximity—that is, our neighbors—may barely know us, let alone feel responsible for our well-being. Combined, these facts add up to a sobering reality. As Carr, the Boston University sociologist, told me: Parent or not, married or not, “no one can assume anything” about who is going to care for them.

It strikes me as not at all coincidental that my quest to better understand the role that family members play in elder care led me to Kenway and Day, neither of whom have children. Both women are deeply familiar with the simultaneous strain and beauty of caring for aging relatives. Kenway wrote her book during and after the years she spent caring for her mother, who had cancer. Day lived with her mother-in-law during the final eight years of her life. The two also know that their own elder care will have to look different—and they are making preparations accordingly.

Now in her 60s, Day is in the early stages of building out what she refers to as “alterkin” (short for “alternative kinship circle”), which she describes as a “radical community-of-care model for people who are aging without children.” Membership in the circle requires people to do “inconvenient things for inconvenient people at inconvenient times” and to reject various elements of the frictionless culture of contemporary living, in which people cede tasks to technology and strangers rather than ask people they know for help. Her group, which meets monthly, has six core members, some partnered and others single. Some are middle-aged; others are nearing 80. All live in a rural Irish area, within fairly close proximity to one another.

On one hand, the sort of kin network that Day is attempting to build isn’t new. She has based her vision on a model long adopted by LGBTQ communities, which have historically had to rely on networks of “chosen family” after having been rejected by blood relations. “Many of them have had to really think about support systems for their lives outside their nuclear family,” Day said. On the other hand, she is clear-eyed about the fact that fostering such non-nuclear bonds is hardly a straightforward proposition.

The goal of Day’s group is, on its face, simple: to make a “shared commitment that we won’t let each other down,” she said. Its members spent several months formalizing their promises to one another, which are laid out in a document that they read at the beginning of their gatherings. The hope is that by repeating these vows aloud, they can internalize a spirit of shared obligation.

Both Day and Kenway told me that in some respects, they feel grateful: Their caregiving experience, along with the fact that they have no children, has forced them to confront the practical reality of what it means to age well before the challenges of doing so are upon them. Day said that people sometimes find her frankness about aging off-putting or overly bleak. But that’s not how it feels to her. At the moment, she doesn’t need much care from the community she is steadily building. She has a sense, though, that “there is some emotional and psychological scaffolding in my life that wasn’t there before,” she said. “That feels deeply reassuring.”

Certainly, American policy makers have avenues for better supporting informal elder care—whether by subsidizing care through cash payments or paid family leave (as some states do), streamlining access to public programs, or reforming zoning laws to make intergenerational or multifamily living broadly accessible. Massachusetts, for example, now allows homeowners to build accessory dwelling units—also known as “granny flats”—by right, which can help make it easier for older folks to live near family while maintaining some independence, Joshua McCabe, the director of social policy at Niskanen Center, told me.

But ultimately, it will fall to individuals to put the kin network they’ll eventually require in place—a task that may get only harder the more that people resort to tech-enabled life hacks in the present. A defining feature of modern existence is the ease with which able-bodied adults can survive without turning to family and friends, or encountering another human at all. But that style of living has a time limit. For most of us, truly preparing for old age will mean getting much more comfortable with asking for help and offering it to those around us, regardless of whether we’re bound by blood or law. It will require thinking strategically and long in advance about where we live—and whom we live near. It will mean resisting the temptations of digital convenience and instead opting for human interaction. More than anything, it will mean accepting that we still need one another in a world that makes it all too alluring to act like we don’t.

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A Fancy Name for Junk Food

2026-06-23T07:30:00-04:00

Once again, Americans are in a panic over what we eat. More than two-thirds of those surveyed now regard the industrially produced, ultra-processed foods, or UPFs, that dominate the U.S. food supply as addictive, according to a study published earlier this month in the American Journal of Public Health. That’s just the start of it. Most respondents said that UPFs are a major source of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. At least one-third blame these foods for causing cancer, ADHD, depression, and anxiety. And nearly half—corresponding to some 130 million American adults, if the survey’s findings can be extrapolated—believe that UPFs are simply “not what God intended for people to eat.”

For the past couple of years, concerns about the potential health effects of UPFs have been highlighted in the media, and at nearly every level of the public-health establishment. New restrictions on the sale of UPFs have been introduced or passed in blue- and red-state legislatures alike. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said repeatedly that UPFs are “poisoning” Americans. And the World Health Organization is planning to put out global guidance on the problem.

To some extent, this is nothing more than a rebranding of an old idea, that the foods being sold at convenience stores or fast-food restaurants are anything but good for us. These products, at least some of which are almost assuredly detrimental to our health, have gone by several different names. For those of us old enough to remember the 20th century, we didn’t use to call them “ultra-processed” foods, but simply “processed” foods or “junk” foods. Now an ultra- prefix has been added to the same fuzzy category. Ultra-processed in the world of nutrition circa 2026 is, first and foremost, just the latest synonym for unhealthy.

Any more specific meaning, though, has been elusive. The U.S. government, for all of its UPF-related rhetoric, hasn’t even resolved the most basic matter of semantics: “A definition for ultra-processed foods is really hard,” one FDA official said in April, to explain why the project of creating one had already taken many months and could still be far from done. So many of the foods we eat are processed in so many different ways. Where do we even begin?

To the staunchest anti-UPF crusaders, though, ultra-processing may also represent an outgrowth of a deeper problem. The nutritional epidemiologists and other scholars who have led this push in public health are out to challenge an entire system of beliefs, propagated by nutritionists for a century or more, about what makes a food unhealthy in the first place. When they swap in ultra-processed for junk, they are shifting the focus from the nutrient content of a processed food—whatever fats, salt, carbs, and sugary sweeteners it might contain—to how it’s made, where it’s made, and even why it’s made.

Going by this logic, even basic intuitions about what is good or bad to eat may be twisted into strange new shapes. Keebler’s Soft Batch cookies might be labeled harmful on account of their industrial ingredients—preservatives, emulsifiers, and hydrogenated oils—although your grandma’s home-baked snickerdoodles could be equally sugar-rich and considered benign. Store-bought whole-grain rye bread, with preservatives added to prolong its shelf life, could be viewed as toxic, but home-baked white bread is thought of as just a wholesome treat.

The war on UPFs, if its advocates are to be taken seriously, has many such confusing implications. At best, these complicate the conversation over how we should address the chronic-disease crisis on a national scale: What, exactly, should we eat and why? At worst, they suggest we’re stepping backwards and away from any hope of progress in the science of nutrition.

In the grand tradition of ideological revolutions, the turn against UPFs began with a manifesto—or rather two of them. The journalist Michael Pollan wrote the first. His 2008 best seller, In Defense of Food, blames the rise of margarine, low-fat cookies, and other healthy-seeming packaged foods on a scientific ideology called “nutritionism.” This refers dismissively to just about everything that nutrition researchers had been doing for the past century—that is, assuming that a food’s value is determined by the sum of its nutrients, and that eating healthy means optimizing for that value. Any truly healthy diet would reject this way of thinking, Pollan argues, and instead rely on how people have been eating for generations. Eat real food, the book implores, not “foodlike substances.”

That idea has now been taken up in earnest by the U.S. government as the touchstone of its dietary guidance. But Pollan’s argument would also feed into the second manifesto, which was the call for scientific revolution. Two years after In Defense of Food, the Brazilian epidemiologist Carlos Monteiro laid this out in an academic paper arguing that nutrition science on the whole, and its paradigm of healthy eating, had been a failure. (An editorial accompanying that paper notes Monteiro’s admiration for Pollan and references In Defense of Food.) People in Brazil had been getting fatter, in keeping with global trends, Monteiro observes, but they had not been purchasing more fats, oils, flour, or sugar, as might have been predicted by conventional theories of nutrition. Instead, he focuses on another dietary pattern: In Brazil, he writes, as elsewhere in the world, people tended to be heavier and more likely to have diabetes when their diets were less traditional and more reliant on packaged, frozen, and fast foods. He had already started using the term ultra-processed to describe the latter set of products; now he was declaring it the “big issue” in public health.

Here was the revolution in a single phrase. For half a century, at least, debates about our diet had focused on its nutrient content. That approach was inherently reductive, but it had the benefit of being scientific; it made testable claims about causes and effects. A Big Mac, for instance, contains more than a gram of sodium and almost 100 calories’ worth of saturated fat; nutrition science had hypotheses about the mechanisms by which those substances might lead, respectively, to hypertension and heart disease. A 12-ounce can of Coke delivers 39 grams of sucrose or high-fructose corn syrup—nearly 10 teaspoons—and nutrition researchers could study what those sugars do inside a human body, day in and day out, and speculate about the cumulative effects over a lifetime. That work had been going on for decades, and many of its central questions remain unresolved.

According to Monteiro’s theory, this nutrition research and the arguments that it has engendered are secondary concerns. The fight against ultra-processing does not fixate on the details of a food’s constituents, but on the means of its production. It’s not just what’s in the Big Mac or the Coke or the Cheez-It crackers that should concern us, but what the food industry has done to them: the sum total of unnatural ingredients and industrial processes that have been added to make these products cheap, convenient, and desirable.

[Read: The Big Tobacco playbook comes for your Oreos]

Monteiro and his colleagues can only guess at why a food becomes unhealthy when subjected to this transformation. Among their many hypotheses: Precisely engineered combinations of fat, sugar, salt, and refined carbohydrates might override our satiety signals; soft-textured food could lead to faster eating and more consumption overall; toxic chemicals may be leaching out from product packaging; and flavor enhancers, colorings, and other additives might disrupt the gut microbiome and reduce the body’s natural secretion of GLP-1.

In November, The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, published a three-part, 60-page series of papers—co-authored by Monteiro—that explores the science and policy of UPFs. The “key driver” of the global epidemics of obesity and diabetes, it says, is the rise of UPFs, which is itself a product of “the growing economic and political power of the UPF industry, and its restructuring of food systems for profitability above all else.” According to Monteiro and his many co-authors, every aspect of that system is to blame: the food manufacturers, for starters, but also the ingredient suppliers, the plastic producers, the packagers, the grocery stores, the advertising firms, the lobbyists, the industry groups, and even the “research partners” of industry, a category that would seem to include a significant portion of all of the nutritionists and food chemists in academia.

The mere science of “nutrition”—as it has been understood by its practitioners for many years, and implemented by authorities in public health—provides at most a bit of context for this bigger story.

Ultimately, though, the claim that “ultra-processing” is the big issue here—the proximate cause of the obesity and diabetes epidemics—is full of holes. First there is the obvious: What, exactly, constitutes an ultra-processed food? But also: Which aspects of a UPF (however it’s defined) are harmful to our health, and how? And finally: Will demonizing ultra-processing really bring us any closer to addressing the country’s soaring rates of chronic disease?

These are the kinds of questions that public-health authorities should be asking, and whether they can be answered with the existing evidence is at the center of the controversy. In 2010, Monteiro and his colleagues came up with Nova, a food-classification scheme that identifies UPFs as those food products that are industrially formulated to be “ready to eat or ready to heat with little or no preparation.” This working definition was then applied to observational research; the series in The Lancet compiled data from 92 such studies that had been carried out through 2024, and says they show that individuals who eat the most UPF-rich diets are 33 percent more likely to have abdominal obesity, and 21 percent more likely to be overweight or obese, than those who eat the least.

That sounds bad, but how meaningful is this kind of evidence? Even the epidemiologists who do this sort of research are unable to reach agreement on whether associations of this magnitude are even likely to reflect a genuine causal relationship. For comparison, the purported risks of eating UPF-rich diets are roughly one-hundredth the size of the lung-cancer risk that can be attributed to heavy smoking. The Purdue University nutritionist Richard Mattes, writing with half a dozen colleagues, notes that UPF consumption correlates with obesity to just about the same degree as people’s educational attainment, sleep duration, frequency of TV viewing, and many other factors.

[Read: What happens when you’ve been on Ozempic for 20 years?]

Far better research is necessary to clarify the evidence, but the kind of clinical trials that might be definitive aren’t likely ever to be done. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of individuals—ideally men, women, and children—would have to be randomized to eat diets that are either high or low in ultra-processed foods, they’d have to keep eating their assigned diet for many years, and they’d have to be monitored closely to establish which dietary pattern ended up producing better health. Even if such an expensive trial could be done (at a cost that might run well into nine figures), and even if it demonstrated that a low-UPF diet is superior, which would surprise no one, it wouldn’t tell us why: whether because of the industrial processing and food additives that went into the UPFs or because the UPFs were, like any of the foods we once described as “junk,” simply high in sugar, fat, processed starches, or salt.

So instead, the two sides of the UPF debate argue over a handful of published clinical trials, lasting from a day to a few months, that aim to demonstrate that the ultra-processing of food itself makes people eat too much. The most influential, by far, was a 2019 study led by Kevin Hall, then at the National Institutes of Health. Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of food studies at New York University and a co-author on two of the three recent Lancet articles on UPFs, called Hall’s research “the most important study ever done to explain weight gain.” But some researchers, such as the Harvard endocrinologist David Ludwig and nutritional epidemiologist Walter Willett, both of whom have co-authored papers with Nestle, have argued that the design of Hall’s research is fatally flawed, not least because the experimental diets were maintained for only two weeks each. Willett told me via email that the NIH study and other short-term studies of its kind are not just meaningless but “likely to give the wrong result (which is worse than no result at all).”

Hall, who is now a clinical scientist at AstraZeneca, noted in an email to The Atlantic that this type of research will be necessary if you want to measure energy intake with accuracy and precision. “With all of their limitations, our studies are among the longest and largest such studies that assess how changing aspects of participants’ food environments affects their energy intake,” he wrote.

Whether the results of such research will tell us anything about the cause of obesity remains to be seen. In the meantime, other nutritionists have tried to resolve the conflict between UPFs and traditional nutrition science by amending or rethinking Monteiro and his colleagues’ Nova scheme. In 2024, Susanne Bügel, a nutritionist at the the University of Copenhagen who has studied how plant-based dairy products might be better fortified with vitamins and minerals, proposed a research initiative that would develop a “next generation of the Nova classification” that might account better for each food’s nutrient content and quality. She organized a workshop to bring together critics and proponents of the system, food chemists and nutritionists and public-health researchers, in the hopes that a kind of multidisciplinary synergy would emerge—and with it, a means of establishing not only which foods are “ultra-processed” but also which UPFs might be harmful and which benign.

The project quickly exploded into controversy. Monteiro refused an invitation to participate in the workshop and demanded that it abandon any usage of the terms Nova and ultra-processed foods to avoid the implication that he or his group had actually endorsed the workshop or any new system that might emerge from it. He also took issue with the fact that funding for the project came from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, which is connected to the company that makes Ozempic and other obesity-related drugs. “Public health policy should be based on independent science, not shaped by entities with a financial stake in diet-related diseases,” he told the Financial Times. By that point, Monteiro’s allies had published an open letter calling for a boycott of the project and urging Bügel to “respect the scientific foundations upon which NOVA has been built.” (The Novo Nordisk Foundation has said that its grant decisions are made independently of the pharmaceutical company. Bügel told me that the project’s funders had not exerted any influence: “They don’t interfere; they don’t tell us what to do.”)

[Read: Avoiding ultra-processed foods is completely unrealistic]

In an academic article published in January, Monteiro and half a dozen co-authors make clear that any work dedicated to making food-industry products “healthy”—a category that would include Bügel’s research into plant-based milks—serves to legitimize “industry narratives,” and defeats the purpose of the UPF classification. Even the mere discussion of such products, they suggest, “risks normalizing ultraprocessing and delays effective interventions.” In short, traditional nutritionism is so fundamentally broken, and so compromised by its ties to industry, that it’s counterproductive to the public health on its own terms.

In spite of the rhetoric—and for all of the talk about a war on UPFs—nutritionism itself remains intact, which might not be a bad thing. The U.S. government’s website for this year’s update to the dietary guidelines, for instance, doesn’t actually use the word ultra-processed; it says instead that people should avoid “highly processed foods laden with refined carbohydrates, added sugars, excess sodium, unhealthy fats, and chemical additives.” Reductionist science, and the assessment of a food’s nutrient components in determining its value, still holds sway.

By the same token, Kennedy announced in February that HHS was backing a petition submitted by the former FDA chief David Kessler that would force the agency to reassess the safety of industrial ingredients in highly processed foods. Although that petition has been portrayed as an attack on UPFs, its scope is actually more narrow. The ingredients in question, which could in theory lose their FDA designation as “Generally Recognized as Safe,” are none other than sugar and other “refined carbohydrates.” Kessler told me in an email that he is not necessarily worried about the chemical additives in processed foods, so much as he is the carbs—“flour starches and sweeteners.” In Kessler’s world, the Keebler Soft Batch cookies may be just as harmful as Grandma’s snickerdoodles because both are sugar-rich, and both might be detrimental to those predisposed to obesity and diabetes. We have yet to do the research necessary to establish whether that is true.

Monteiro himself acknowledges the large overlap between UPFs and traditional concepts of sugar-rich junk food. The first article in his Lancet series notes that food products designated as ultra-processed by the Nova system are dominated by sweetened drinks, as well as “sweet snacks, desserts and confectionery.” The same paper notes that these beverages and foods constitute virtually all of the UPFs consumed in low-income countries and, with baked goods added, close to 75 percent of UPFs in high-income countries.

Given those numbers, couldn’t much of the global chronic-disease problem be resolved by communicating the message that, say, sugar and refined grains are harmful, rather than targeting an ill-defined new category that lumps in all of these treats with vitamin-fortified oat milk and whole-grain rye bread with preservatives?

I called Monteiro in Brazil to ask this basic question. He responded by turning the question around and pointing out that 90 percent of the added sugars in the American diet come from ultra-processed foods, along with a significant amount of our saturated fat and salt. “If you avoid ultra-processed foods,” he told me, “you improve your diet in terms of sugar, salt, and saturated fat.” The old advice to avoid specific nutrients could be dead-on, he said, and dietitians, nutritionists, and doctors should continue to dispense it. But that wasn’t enough: “It is not feasible for people to follow advice if you don’t change the food system, to liberate it from these corporations.”

To Monteiro, critics of his UPF hypothesis are conflating discussions about evidence with discussions about policy. “We cannot mix these two,” he said. “One is the evidence, the causality, the explanation for the pandemic of obesity. The other is what each country should do.” To worry about whether UPFs might be a useless or pseudoscientific category is to miss this point. Instead of trying to extrapolate the scientific evidence to policies in a “non-intelligent way” that only slows things down, he said, we should take some obvious steps to address the problem: Tax sugary beverages, subsidize farmers’ markets, and promote more fresh and minimally processed foods.

This all sounded very sensible. Maybe “ultra-processed foods” can be a way of focusing attention on the sorts of policies we need. But even then, wouldn’t the science of nutrition matter? The argument to tax sugary beverages, for instance, depends on evidence that these beverages are chronic toxins that cause obesity and diabetes, and are perhaps addictive as well, not just empty calories that we happen to consume to excess. And if we promote fresh, minimally processed foods, the question is, which ones? Red meat is a minimally processed food, and so are full-fat milk and cream. The current HHS secretary has insisted that red meat and animal fats are good for us, and he’s not alone in thinking so. Monteiro has more conventional views, and the evidence is ambiguous. So what exactly should we do?

The war on UPFs is based on the idea that traditional nutrition science will never land on useful answers to these questions. It sees the failures of the past—ill-fated admonitions from experts to cut back on fat, for example, and base our diets, as the FDA once recommended, on starches and grains—as signs of the inherent rot of nutrition science. But there’s another way to think about this history. Maybe the nutritionists had the right idea with their reductionist approach to the science, but they did a poor job with the research itself. Maybe a concerted effort to identify precisely what it is about the foods we eat that causes obesity and diabetes, done with far greater care and rigor, would at last produce the understanding that we’ve sought. If that’s the case, then an all-out fight to break the power of the multinational food companies, however righteous that may be, would entail enormous wasted effort—and it may not even work.

The Tech Companies That Just Need the Money

2026-06-23T07:15:00-04:00

This is the year of the giga-IPO. SpaceX, Elon Musk’s aerospace and artificial-intelligence company, raised a record $75 billion in capital when it went public earlier this month, instantly becoming one of the 10 most valuable companies in the world. The AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI, meanwhile, both recently filed to go public later this year, ensuring that in a matter of months, we will likely witness the three biggest IPOs in history.

These massive IPOs are outliers in other ways too. The number of businesses going public has been shrinking dramatically, from more than 500 or so a year in the 1990s to about 120 a year over the past decade. Although the number of new businesses in the United States has surged in recent years, the number of public companies is down by almost 40 percent from its 1990s peak.

So why are these buzzy companies in the hottest industry bucking this trend and going public? The answer is simple: because they need to raise staggering amounts of money to cover the enormous cost of competing in the AI race. This marks a fundamental change in the technology business.

[James Surowiecki: SpaceX is basically a huge meme stock]

Many tech giants of recent decades—think Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb—went public less to raise money than to give their early investors and employees a chance to cash out by selling stock. Although software and internet-based companies invested plenty in research and development, their capital expenditures were otherwise low. They built massive, and massively profitable, businesses without much in the way of up-front costs. (Even Amazon’s profits come mostly from its web-services business, not from retail.) At the same time, a boom in venture capital and private-investment funds allowed founders to raise money without subjecting themselves to the regulatory and reporting requirements of public companies.

But developing AI is ludicrously expensive. SpaceX’s AI business, for instance, is burning through $1 billion every month. OpenAI lost a reported $38.5 billion last year, according to financial statements uncovered by blogger Ed Zitron. These companies are consuming capital at a record pace to build out data centers—and, in SpaceX’s case, all of the other stuff that Elon Musk wants to make. Although SpaceX has had no shortage of private investors, the company just got masses of cash by capitalizing on record-high investor demand. And because these companies are not yet profitable and likely won’t be for a while, they are relying on the public’s hunger to get in on the AI boom to raise the tens of billions of dollars they need, and to allow some employees and early investors to cash out.

[Charlie Warzel: The myth of SpaceX]

Since 2003, companies have returned more money to shareholders than they have raised in the stock market. But that trend now appears to be reversing. Pretty much every Big Tech company is investing ungodly sums simply to be relevant in the age of AI. Even profitable companies are pouring much of their revenue back into their business—and they’re now starting to tap the stock market too. Alphabet, Google’s parent company and one of the most profitable companies in the world, recently announced that it would be selling new stock to the public to raise $85 billion, all of it earmarked for AI. In February, the tech giant Oracle said that it would be selling $20 billion in stock. And earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that Meta, too, is contemplating a big stock offering. JPMorgan Chase estimates that companies will sell $1.5 trillion in shares over the next two years.

Historically, this combination of a wave of IPOs and a rise in existing companies issuing more stock has not boded well for stocks in the long term. In many cases, a big surge in stock supply overwhelms demand—and raises questions about whether markets are properly reflecting value or inflating a bubble. As the economist and hedge-fund manager Owen Lamont has written, “When firms are selling, you should generally sell as well.” The volatility of SpaceX stock, which has tumbled for days, erasing nearly all of the gains enjoyed by the average investor, shows just how much uncertainty attends even the most hyped stock offerings in a risky industry.

The SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI IPOs and the stock sales by the Googles and Oracles of the world are happening because companies are trying to raise as much money as possible while the good times last. And that should make us wonder about how much longer they will.

*Illustration sources: Matteo Della Torre / NurPhoto / Getty; Spencer Platt / Getty; Samuel Boivin / NurPhoto / Getty.

America’s Big Mistake in Iran

2026-06-23T07:00:00-04:00

When the United States and Israel launched the war on Iran in February, their plan was simple: bomb Iran until either the Iranian public rose up and overthrew the government, or the existing government capitulated to American demands. It rapidly became apparent that neither was going to happen. The Iranian people didn’t revolt against their oppressors. The Iranian government hunkered down, closed the strait, and gambled that the U.S. would be unwilling to invade or strike at crucial infrastructure.

So it seems U.S. planners made an obvious, if common, mistake: They assumed that a war could be won via aerial bombing alone.

Starting right after World War I, military theorists in the United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom rallied around the idea that airpower lessened or eliminated the need for armies and navies. Their central thesis was that wars could be won almost exclusively with bombers and bombing campaigns.

In his 1921 book, Il dominio dell’aria (“The Command of the Air”), Italian General Giulio Douhet argued that whichever nation claimed air superiority first would be able to bomb their enemies’ cities to ash, forcing capitulation. Marshal Hugh Trenchard, the so-called father of the Royal Air Force who pioneered strategic-bombing theory during World War I, thought that airpower could break an enemy’s will to fight rather than merely provide tactical support for ground troops. And General Curtis LeMay, an American champion of strategic bombing, believed that overwhelming, concentrated force was the best way to win a war. He favored the use of incendiary weapons against urban centers and of immediate, devastating strikes instead of gradual escalation.

[Read: The price of defeat in Iran]

When these theories of total war through bombing were put to the test in World War II and beyond, however, they failed miserably. The German Blitz on London did not induce the British public to give in. Allied bombing of Germany did not break the Nazis’ will to fight; the German collapse at the end had much more to do with the (justified) fear of being captured by the Red Army, and the opportunity to surrender to the Americans.

In the case of Japan, the combination of the naval blockade and firebombing of cities left millions of Japanese people likely to die if the war went on into 1946. However, it was not until the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, plus the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, that Japan sought a nearly unconditional surrender.

Strategic bombing failed in Vietnam as well. In that war, the U.S. dropped approximately 7.6 million tons of bombs, compared with the roughly 2.7 million tons dropped by the U.S. military across the European and Pacific theaters in World War II. The “Christmas bombings” of 1972 were not enough to persuade North Vietnam to offer favorable terms; rather, the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 were a result of U.S. exhaustion with the war. They paved the way for North Vietnam to conquer the south in 1974–75.

The advent of “true” mass precision bombing in the 1990s led some analysts to conclude that the rules of war had changed, and that airpower alone was at last sufficient. But the supposed examples of victory through aerial bombing aren’t what they seem. The first Gulf War ended only after U.S. troops went into Kuwait in a 100-hour-long charge. In Serbia in 1999, Slobodan Milošević’s capitulation to a united NATO’s demands was based on fears of regime survival and the credible threat of ground invasion. The air campaign in Afghanistan succeeded because the U.S. had allies on the ground willing to fight for, take, and hold territory in the form of the Northern Alliance. In each case, there were troops on the ground, or a credible threat thereof.

A study by the RAND Corporation in 1996 on the capabilities and limitations of the psychological effects of U.S. air operations cautioned leaders that airpower alone was unlikely to coerce an enemy to offer favorable terms, unless there were other factors at play. Those external influences include the enemy’s belief that they would be defeated on the battlefield, that continued fighting would not improve their position, that damage from air attacks would likely be worse than concessions, and that there would be no hope of mounting a defense or effective counterattack.

The U.S. plan for attacking Iran was doomed from the start because it relied on airpower without the benefit of external factors that would have made an air campaign successful. There was no credible threat of mass ground invasion to overthrow the Iranian regime. It was either internal revolution or nothing.

The U.S. was also unwilling to inflict the sort of mass casualties and suffering that might have caused Iran to decide that capitulation was less damaging than continued resistance. The administration generally avoided targeting crucial infrastructure such as water and electrical plants and ground lines of communication (bridges and rail). And it was unwilling to resort to something drastic, such as setting off a nuclear electromagnetic-pulse weapon to permanently disable the majority of Iranian infrastructure.

[Karim Sadjadpour: Trump’s second gamble on Iran]

Unlike Serbia or Afghanistan, Iran had the ability to fight back and inflict significant pain on the United States. Iran fully grasped, from the beginning, that the outcome of the war would be determined by who could withstand the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The regime always had a plausible theory of victory and pursued it logically and consistently throughout the conflict.

Senior U.S. military leaders have spent decades studying warfare from every angle and must have understood the possibility of a prolonged regional conflict. In fact, General Dan Caine reportedly cautioned the Trump administration against attacking Iran.

But President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did not appreciate the need for caution. Hegseth gained his experience at the tactical level, as a junior officer in the field. He seems to believe that technological might and physical strength, rather than carefully thought-out strategy, win wars. An Army captain in the field might see dropping a 2,000-pound munition on a house as a self-contained solution to his troops taking fire; a flag officer understands the risk of it creating 100 more enemies next week.

The consequences of the botched war effort are nothing short of catastrophic. The U.S.’s munitions stockpiles are depleted, its military reputation is in tatters, its foreign relations are strained to the breaking, and Iranian leadership is in the best strategic position it has ever been in. It’s a hard way to relearn the old lesson that airpower alone doesn’t win wars.

Trump Can’t Spin His Way Out of His Two Latest Crises

2026-06-22T17:57:00-04:00

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President Trump spent the weekend trying to calm the waters in Washington and roil them in the Persian Gulf.

Let’s begin with the less serious of these two self-inflicted crises. This spring, Trump for some reason became fixated on the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, which had not previously been a topic of national discussion, but which he believes should vibrate with a deep Technicolor blue. The administration awarded no-bid contracts for both a color coating and a new water-purification system, with the latter going to a company tied to a Trump-campaign donor previously convicted of conspiracy to bribe. Surprising no one, both parts of the project have been a disaster. As my colleague Matt Viser has vividly reported, the pool is beset with algae, and the blue coating is coming off in big chunks.

Now Trump says water will likely have to be removed from the pool to do “necessary repairs”—in other words, $16.4 million in taxpayer money will go down the drain. (Credit where it’s due, though: This may become the first time Trump will have actually drained a swamp.) He also blamed vandals for the issues, though the White House has offered no evidence to suggest that’s true. Visitors who approached the pool this weekend were shooed away by National Guard members, and at least one who touched the pool’s broken liner was arrested; he denies doing any damage. Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington, promised to throw the book at vandals, which mostly seems like a good way for her to extend her record of failing to get D.C. grand juries to green-light tenuous prosecutions.

Meanwhile, Trump nearly upended peace negotiations between Vice President Vance and Iranian leaders in Switzerland. Over the weekend, Iran claimed it had once more blocked the Strait of Hormuz because of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, which appears to violate the fragile cease-fire in place. Whether the strait is actually closed is not entirely clear: The Trump administration says traffic is flowing, but third-party analysts say traffic has slowed, though not totally stopped, and remains well below prewar levels. Over the weekend, Trump told the Fox News reporter Trey Yingst that he had told Iranian officials, “You close it and you won’t have a country,” adding, “You won’t even make it back to your fucking country.” On Truth Social, he said that if Iran didn’t rein in Hezbollah, he would “hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”

Threatening to kill interlocutors in the middle of a peace negotiation is generally seen as uncouth, in addition to counterproductive. Today, Vance was left to tell the Iranians that, in essence, they should just write off his threats as bluster: “What we told the Iranians yesterday is that when you guys engage in what us Millennials might call trash talk, you can’t expect the president of the United States not to respond and not to correct the record.”

Like Trump’s repeated blaming of vandals for damaging the pool, Trump is talking, but no one’s really paying much attention. Iran seems to have already concluded that it doesn’t need to take Trump seriously, which is a mixed blessing: good because it meant the Iranians didn’t quit the negotiations, but bad for the prospects of the U.S. reaching a favorable deal.

The Iran war and the Reflecting Pool, though very different in scale and importance, share some illuminating parallels. In both cases, Trump embarked on a project while blaming the Obama administration, his persistent bugbear, for an alleged problem: Iranian aggression or an insufficiently azure pool. In both cases, he charged forward without a fleshed-out plan, preferring to fly by the seat of his pants, and ignored the experts who warned of exactly the problems that resulted—algal blooms, a blocked strait.

These are familiar patterns for Trump. What sets Iran and the Reflecting Pool apart from some previous cases is that he has been unable to deny reality. In the past, Trump has spun setbacks as victories, lying prodigiously to do so. In the case of his bogus claim of a stolen 2020 election, for example, he has relied on generalized public distrust of institutions, robust conservative media, and the arcana of election procedure to help create at least some doubt.

But no one can deny that the Reflecting Pool is, in fact, currently green. Nor can Trump spin the war in Iran—not when Americans spent weeks filling up their cars with gas that spiked well above $4 a gallon, and not when ships are visibly bottled up in the strait. These failures are plain in a way that exceeds even Trump’s capacity to get his supporters to believe him over their own eyes. A new CBS News/YouGov poll finds that just 39 percent of Republicans believe the U.S. got the better end of the peace agreement. Only 22 percent of Americans overall think so.

Now Trump’s only recourse is trying again, almost certainly with worse results. Vance is celebrating a tentative agreement to merely restore nuclear inspections—a safeguard present in Obama’s hated deal with Iran—even as the U.S. makes concessions such as allowing Iran to sell more oil. Trump badly wants the Reflecting Pool fixed by July 4, but it’s unclear if that is possible; if it is, doing so will almost certainly cost millions more in taxpayer money. The president chose two unnecessary battles and lost them both, and the American people will pay.

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Keir Starmer announced that he will resign as prime minister of the United Kingdom; he is expected to be succeeded by Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester.
The Trump administration temporarily eased decades-long oil sanctions against Iran, as the U.S. and Iran continue to hold peace talks in Switzerland.
A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from using Social Security data to flag noncitizens for expulsion from voter rolls, ruling that the administration had violated federal protections.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Adventure may have less to do with where you go than with your willingness to leave the familiar behind, Rafaela Jinich writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Pinnacle Rock, a volcanic spire on Bartolomé Island (Will Matsuda for The Atlantic)

Paradise Revisited

By Helen Lewis

My first encounter with a Galápagos tortoise came when the driver of my taxi from the airport attempted a risky overtaking maneuver into the path of an oncoming bus. On the island of Santa Cruz, which is bisected by a single highway, this is a favorite sport: The white Toyota HiLuxes that serve as taxis overtake tour buses, while tour buses overtake trucks. But this time, the driver quickly pulled back behind the slow-moving car ahead of us. “Tortoise,” she explained.

And there it was—a great dome, an overturned bathtub, trying to cross the road. What set of circumstances favored an animal that weighs up to 600 pounds, moves at four miles a day, and takes a quarter of a century to reach sexual maturity? The answer is: a remote island chain formed by volcanoes, with little fresh water and no predators, where life moved at a languid, lumbering pace—at least, until humans appeared.

Read the full article.

First the Kennedy Center, Now the Smithsonian

2026-06-22T16:39:00-04:00

Updated at 7:26 p.m. ET on June 22, 2026

When President Trump summoned Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, for lunch at the White House on August 28 of last year, Bunch’s advisers assumed that the end was near. Trump had spent months threatening the Smithsonian’s independence; just nine days earlier, he’d written on Truth Social that “the Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”

It stood to be a tough visit, and not only because Bunch, the first Black leader of the Smithsonian, takes the widely held position that slavery was, in fact, “bad.” Bunch is the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and, as such, is one of the country’s leading and most visible advocates for the commemoration and celebration of Black history. From the start of the second Trump administration, the entire Smithsonian had been a target of those on the MAGA right who are preoccupied with expunging what they understand to be “wokeness” from prominent institutions. In March 2025, Trump issued an executive order demanding the restoration of “truth and sanity” to American history and directing Vice President Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, to reverse the spread of “divisive ideology” in the museum system. Then, in May 2025, Trump attempted to fire the director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, igniting a two-week standoff. It did not seem to matter to him that the Smithsonian, though partially funded by the federal government, is meant to be independent.

Bunch’s staff assumed that he would come under sustained attack from the president. He was already contending with regents who wanted to fire him for the Smithsonian’s putative leftism. At one meeting, Representative Carlos Giménez, a Republican from Miami who holds one of the three seats on the board reserved for members of the House, accused Bunch of sympathizing with Fidel Castro and demanded his resignation, a call that resulted in a rare rebuke from the chancellor of the board, Chief Justice John Roberts.

It is Bunch’s long-standing position that the Smithsonian, which was founded in 1846, should not leave a visitor with negative feelings about the United States. The collection of museums largely represents a celebration of American ingenuity, art, and innovation. Bunch believes that the Smithsonian’s presentation of history should be comprehensive and complicated, as well as optimistic. His position would not have been considered particularly controversial before the rise of Trump; nor would Bunch have been considered anything but a mainstream historian. Like many historians, he argues that learning about negative aspects of American history does not undermine people’s ability to understand the good the country has done. “Every day, I have somebody talk to me about how important it is to have complexity and nuance,” he said at a meeting of the Organization of American Historians in April. “How they really understood something after they’ve gone through a Smithsonian exhibition that they had no idea of.” Bringing that complexity to life, he believes, is the mission of the institution, and he was ready to argue that point with Trump over a chicken-and-gravy lunch.

But the anticipated showdown never came. Over the course of two and a half hours, Bunch was subjected to a charm offensive. The president treated Bunch warmly; much of their conversation had to do with White House decor. At one point, Trump showed Bunch four chandelier samples for the Oval Office; one was clear, the others white, silver, and gold. Trump asked which one he preferred. Bunch, who wasn’t born yesterday, chose gold. Trump turned to an aide and said, “See? He agrees with me!” Trump then asked Bunch to name the most important building in Washington. Trump’s own answer was the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the White House’s next-door office complex. Bunch mentioned that the building is famously ugly, at which point Trump called in aides to show Bunch renderings of the structure, repainted white. (The account of this lunch is based on conversations with White House and Smithsonian officials as well as people in close contact with Smithsonian leadership.)

Bunch knew beforehand that one specific issue would be raised, either by Trump or his aides: the location of the space shuttle Discovery, which Texas’s Republican senators want to move from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum annex near Dulles International Airport to Houston. Senator John Cornyn had been lobbying for years to have the shuttle moved to Houston and, according to people familiar with his efforts, had more recently begun making the case to the White House that, among other things, the Smithsonian is too “woke” to display the retired space vehicle. But Bunch came prepared with a nonpolitical rebuttal: Millions of tourists have visited the Discovery at the Smithsonian facility, and only a fraction of that number would see it in Houston. At which point Trump became seized by the subject of Dulles’s appearance. Trump has criticized the modernist airport for being ugly and outdated. He told Bunch that Dulles should be “knocked down,” built again, and named after him. After a 10-minute digression about the airport’s shortcomings, Trump took Bunch on a tour of the Cabinet Room. He didn’t mention the space shuttle again. Nor did he mention the Smithsonian’s understanding of American history.

When the meeting was over, Bunch was relieved but flummoxed. The episode, he explained to an audience at UCLA in November, was “the most stressful lunch I’ve ever had in my life.”

Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Sources: Win McNamee / Getty; Amy Sparwasser / Getty.

“I kept waiting for the sword of Damocles to come take my head off,” Bunch recounted. “There was no logic to the conversation.”

Since that lunch, the 73-year-old Bunch has continued to defend the Smithsonian, but he appears to be inching closer to leaving. His family, fearful of what continued public antagonism means for his well-being, wants him to retire. He has begun to talk more openly about the strain that Trump’s interest has put on the Smithsonian. “For the Smithsonian, this is probably the most difficult time since the Civil War,” he said at the gathering of historians.

The conflict has largely disappeared from the news in recent months—a partial reflection, perhaps, of Bunch’s diplomatic finesse, as well as the general global and domestic chaos that is a feature of the Trump era. But as America approaches its 250th birthday, the Smithsonian is readying itself for the tensions over how it tells the story of the nation to resume, and potentially reach a climax.

A conviction in the necessity of curatorial independence has motivated Bunch throughout what has surely been among the most contentious periods a Smithsonian secretary has ever faced. “I tell people all the time, ‘I’m a nice guy, but poke me in the eye and I’ll fight you forever,’” he said at a public event in March. “So the key here is not to fight just to fight. The key is to make sure you’re just trying to protect an institution, to do the work we need to do.”

Al Drago / The Washington Post / Getty

He’s gotten the Smithsonian this far. What is uncertain is whether the institution is built to withstand an assault from a chief executive with designs on shaping history—or whether it needs a charismatic executive of its own to survive.

Bunch grew up in the 1950s and ’60s in Belleville, New Jersey, where he and his family were the only Black people. The biographies he was assigned in middle school looked like the town. So Bunch found histories of Black life in his grandfather’s old trunk, which ultimately led him to Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and W. E. B. Du Bois.

After studying for his Ph.D. in history and stints as a curator and professor, Bunch became a curator at the Smithsonian’s American-history museum in 1989. While assembling an exhibition on 19th-century America with a focus on the legacy of slavery, he traveled to plantations throughout the South, attempting to find one site that he might highlight as representative of the larger institution. He traversed Louisiana and Alabama and North Carolina, walking across land where exploited Black hands had harvested the sugarcane, cotton, and tobacco that would help build America’s wealth. Ultimately, he found himself at a rice plantation established in the 1730s at the edge of the Sampit River, in the Lowcountry of South Carolina.

There, Bunch encountered Princy Jenkins, a 90-something Black man who had been the plantation’s caretaker and had once lived in one of its slave cabins with his formerly enslaved grandmother. Jenkins told Bunch bluntly: “If you are a historian, then your job better be to help people remember not just what they want to remember, but what they need to remember.” The directive stayed with him. Bunch committed himself to ensuring that in his historical and curatorial work, he would not compromise on the truth, no matter how difficult it was to face.

In 2001, Bunch left Washington to become the president of the Chicago Historical Society (today the Chicago History Museum), a move that he understood made a return to the Smithsonian unlikely. Two years after Bunch moved, however, Congress finally passed legislation that advocates had been pushing for over nearly 100 years: It would create a national African American museum. The relentless efforts of Representative John Lewis had finally made the idea a reality. In December 2003, President George W. Bush signed into law the National Museum of African American History and Culture Act. Now someone needed to create it.

Bunch by then had become one of the most well-regarded historians and museum curators in the country. He was an obvious choice. When asked if he would be interested, he was flattered, but uncertain. There was “no staff, no site, no architect, no building, no collections, and no money,” he wrote in his memoir. It would take at least 10 years to open the museum’s doors. “It carried the weight and the burden of history,” he wrote.

But it was also an unprecedented chance to tell the story of his people, and in doing so, to tell the story of America. He didn’t want to see someone else potentially squander the opportunity. It might take years off his life, he thought. But if he did it right, it would be worthwhile.

As Bunch turned his attention to the new endeavor, he had to navigate tensions within the Black community about how to tell the story of Black American life. Some scholars and activists told him that the museum needed to “out-Holocaust” the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by focusing largely on “what they did to us.” But Bunch also heard from people who said that the new museum should focus on a more hopeful and inspiring message. He often recounts the story of meeting an elderly Black woman who thanked him for his work, hugged him, and whispered into his ear, “Whatever you do, don’t discuss slavery.”

Bunch took both viewpoints seriously, but he came to believe that slavery or no slavery was a false choice. He understood that slavery was painful for many Black Americans to confront. These were people’s ancestors: their great-grandparents, their grandparents, even their parents. (Ruth Bonner, the woman who would ring the bell to signal the opening of the museum, was the daughter of a man who had been born into slavery.) And yet he knew that the museum had a responsibility to present and contextualize the full history. “As a country, we cannot fully understand ourselves without embracing the nation’s interdependency with slavery,” Bunch wrote.

The museum would capture the reality of the violence, subjugation, and exploitation Black Americans experienced while also making clear that they were and are not singularly defined by that experience. “I wanted to build a museum,” Bunch has said, “where you’d cry as you pondered the pain of slavery or segregation—but I also wanted you to find joy, I wanted you to tap your toes to Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong.”

Bunch ensured that the museum would not be understood as a partisan endeavor. He built relationships with Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and when it opened in 2016—less than two months before Trump’s first electoral victory—tens of thousands of people attended the festivities. At the dedication, President Barack Obama spoke of how the museum demonstrates “that our glory derives not just from our most obvious triumphs, but how we’ve wrested triumph from tragedy.” President Bush praised Bunch for his persistence and determination to bring the museum to life. “It’s really important to understand this project would not and could not have happened without his drive, his energy, and his optimism,” Bush said. (Bunch doubts that he would be able to garner such public support from Republicans today; when he talks with Republican elected officials now, they tell him, “You’ve got to stand firm, but I can’t say anything.”)

Trump visited the museum exactly once, during Black History Month in 2017. The president was accompanied by incoming Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, Senator Tim Scott, and the conservative activist Alveda King, a niece of Martin Luther King Jr. and a vocal Trump supporter. Trump’s team told Bunch that the president did not want to see anything “difficult.” Bunch decided to show Trump the area of the museum that explores the slave trade.

In a section of the museum’s history gallery that explores the role the Dutch played, Bunch writes in his memoir, Trump turned to him and said, “You know, they love me in the Netherlands.”

“All I could say,” Bunch recounted in his memoir, “was let’s continue walking.”

Evan Vucci / AP

Bunch gave President Trump a tour of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2017.

After that initial trip, which Trump told Bunch he had enjoyed, the president took little interest in the Smithsonian during his first term, even when, in 2019, Bunch became secretary of the entire Smithsonian system, overseeing 21 museums, 21 libraries, the National Zoo, and several research and education centers. But in recent years, the MAGA movement has become fixated on combatting what Trump’s “truth and sanity” executive order describes as “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” The second Trump administration has taken a particularly antagonistic posture toward established institutions with deep ranks of expertise, which has made the Smithsonian a natural political target.

Still, although the Smithsonian receives nearly two-thirds of its funding from the federal government, the institution ostensibly preserves some measure of independence through its Board of Regents, keeping it insulated from political winds and top-down directives. The board has the power to hire the institution’s secretary—and to dismiss them.

Citizen members of the Board of Regents are themselves selected for six-year terms by other members of the board, and cannot serve more than two terms. All nominees must be approved by Congress and then signed off on by the president. (Unlike at the Kennedy Center, which Trump took over in the early weeks of his second term, the president does not directly appoint members of the board.) Four regents will have reached that two-term limit by the end of this year. Two more were renominated by the board for a second term but have yet to be approved by Congress.

The current and looming vacancies, and the need for congressional and presidential approval, raise the possibility that Trump could attempt to install new board members who are loyal to his agenda. (Trump’s March 2025 executive order said that the White House would work with officials “to seek the appointment of citizen members to the Smithsonian Board of Regents committed to advancing the policy of this order.”) In April, The New York Times reported that the regents had agreed on nominations for some of the replacements, but the House committee responsible for reviewing and vetting the nominees before they move to the full legislature for approval had yet to receive the names under consideration—intrigue that suggests some manner of strategy, although it’s far from clear whose. Minutes from board meetings earlier this year show that the regents have voted to give existing members additional duties because of the current and expected vacancies.

Throughout this presidential term, Bunch has remained loyal to Princy Jenkins’s admonition: showing the public not just what they want to remember, but what they need to remember. After the public release of the March 2025 executive order, Bunch sent an internal memo to Smithsonian staff. “We remain steadfast in our mission to bring history, science, education, research and the arts to all Americans,” he wrote. “We will continue to showcase world-class exhibits, collections and objects, rooted in expertise and accuracy.”

Bunch’s background as a historian and former museum curator make him unique among Smithsonian secretaries, which has helped inspire loyalty among the curatorial staff. “Having come up the ranks, he knows what it is to do the job,” Timothy Anne Burnside, a curator of music and performing arts at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, told me. During his tenure as the museum’s director, it was not uncommon for Bunch to pop into meetings to both encourage and challenge staffers, some told me. And today, he has high expectations for the quality and rigor of curators’ work across the system.

Shanita Brackett, the current acting director of NMAAHC, told me that she appreciates the example Bunch has set during this difficult period. “What he’s taught us over the last 14 months is not to be afraid, not to run,” Brackett said. “When you see it, you can embody it.”

But anxieties have spiked inside and outside the institution. Last year, a viral article suggested that NMAAHC had removed the famous Woolworth’s lunch counter from an exhibit and was returning a loaned Bible and Black-history book to a civil-rights leader. Observers clamored that the museum was acquiescing to Trump. But the story wasn’t true. The lunch counter and stools had never been removed. And the museum regularly cycles objects on and off public display for preservation reasons. (The Smithsonian said that it is also regular museum practice to return loaned items once the terms of the loan have expired.)

“Let me be really clear,” Bunch said in March at an event with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “There is not a thing that I’ve allowed to be changed at the Smithsonian. I don’t care what you hear. The artifacts that are there are still there. The interpretations are still there.”

Bunch has been cast by many of his admirers as something of a resistance figure—one of the only high-profile leaders standing up to Trump by single-handedly preventing the president from rewriting American history itself. “He is a rock star,” Burnside said. She recounted traveling with Bunch to various museum and history conferences over the years. “There is a mob of people around him. And they want selfies, and they want to shake his hand, and they want to say thank you.”

She went on: “I cannot think of anyone else who can walk through a hotel conference center and have a trail of people following him, sneaking pictures with their phones.” When I told her, half-jokingly, that she made Bunch sound like the Beyoncé of museums, she nodded enthusiastically. Bunch’s stardom has also translated into real financial benefits for the institutions he’s led. As the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, he raised $453 million, and as secretary of the Smithsonian, he has helped raise $2.5 billion in six years.

In February, I visited the National Museum of American History with the secretary. As we walked through the museum just when it was opening for the day, I was struck by how many people approached him. Visitors told him, “Keep standing strong,” as though the entire Smithsonian’s future was riding on him. A staff member retrieved a gift for the secretary from his office. “Thank you. Just—thank you,” the staff member said, almost bowing before Bunch as he handed him the small box.

Near the entrance, a security guard, who looked to be in his 70s and said he’d worked at various Smithsonian museums for decades, told me, “I’ll stay as long as he stays.”

Al Drago / The Washington Post / Getty

Bunch speaks ahead of the recent opening of the “American Aspirations” exhibit commemorating the 250th anniversary of the United States, at the Smithsonian Castle on the National Mall. He co-curated the exhibit.

Bunch has not been able to fend off every single effort by the administration. The Smithsonian closed its Office of Diversity following one executive order last year. In May 2025, Trump announced that he had fired the director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, despite having no legal authority to do so, calling her “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of D.E.I.” In response, the Smithsonian said that only Bunch could remove a director from her post. But a few days later, Sajet resigned, saying she wanted to put the museum first. In July, the National Museum of American History, on its own volition, removed a reference to Trump’s two impeachments from a display case about presidents who had come close to removal from office. The Smithsonian, at the time, asserted that the removal was temporary and part of a larger reimagining of the exhibition. The reference was restored just over a week after a public outcry.

In August, a few weeks before Trump’s meal with Bunch, the Trump administration demanded that the Smithsonian hand over a broad array of documents, including exhibit materials, wall texts, internal memos, and plans for forthcoming shows. In December, the White House sent a letter to Bunch saying that the effort “fell far short of what was requested.” The letter subsequently threatened to withhold funding if the requested documents were not turned over within 30 days. “Funds apportioned for the Smithsonian Institution are only available for use in a manner consistent with Executive Order 14253 ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,’ and the fulfillment of the requests set forth in our Aug. 12, 2025 letter,” the White House wrote. Bunch responded, in a letter obtained by The Washington Post, that the government shutdown had delayed the Smithsonian’s work on this matter and that he would be happy to meet and discuss the institution’s progress.

Bunch will admit that there are exhibits within Smithsonian museums that need updating and texts that should be revised. As we walked through the American-history museum, he pointed out places where he would like to amend some of the framings of, and materials in, different exhibits. But that is not unique to the Smithsonian; every museum reassesses its work based on new research and new scholarship. The Smithsonian, known for its deliberateness and even conservatism, is hardly the lefty hotbed depicted by the White House. Nor is Trump the first powerful figure to try to influence its displays. As America approached the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, the National Air and Space Museum created an exhibit that included the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb, on Hiroshima. When members of the public learned of the exhibit, they claimed that it focused too much on Japanese victimhood and the devastation of the bomb, and not enough on Japan’s role as an aggressor. Soon, members of Congress began expressing concern and, under pressure, the museum canceled the entire exhibit, then opened a new exhibit with a more laconic and innocuous framing; there was no interpretation and no graphic images.

Perhaps such experiences have made the institution more cautious in its approach over time. Simply existing as a national museum system is difficult for the institution, which has an interest in not acquiescing to the whims of any administration, but also in not doing anything that might make it a political flash point.

Scrutiny arrives no matter what. The Smithsonian is developing museums focused on women and Latinos in the United States. One fellow at the right-wing Heritage Foundation said the National Museum of the American Latino “will be another woke abomination” and that it “will go out of its way to become an incubator of grievances.” When a recent bill to establish a location for the Women’s History Museum came up in committee, a group of House Republicans passed an amendment barring the museum from including content about transgender women. The bill failed on the House floor; the museum, for now, is in limbo.

In 2020, Republican Senator Mike Lee said of the planned museums, “The last thing we need is to further divide our already divided nation with an array of segregated, ‘separate but equal’ museums for hyphenated identity groups.” Bunch rejects this argument. During his time at the National Museum of American History, he said, he realized that “no one building can tell the story of America. It’s just too complicated; it’s too big.”

The Smithsonian is a remarkable American institution. It is visited every year by about 15 million people, who travel from all over the world to see free exhibits spanning the skeleton of a tyrannosaurus rex, the command module that carried the first human beings to the moon, and the casket of Emmett Till, whose lynching was a catalyst for the civil-rights movement. There are other museums that cover some of the same terrain, but the Smithsonian is singular in both the collective proximity and the reach of its museums. The institution plays an enormous role in shaping the national understanding of science, culture, and history—which may be why the Trump administration is so eager to change it. If the White House can change the story of America, it can use a distorted, ideologically driven history to justify policies of exclusion and erasure.

Before the gathering of historians in April, Bunch made clear how high the stakes were. “If the Smithsonian becomes a state-sanctioned place—of state-sanctioned history, art, and culture—then you might as well close the Smithsonian.”

California, Seen Through the Lens of George Rose

2026-06-22T11:05:19-04:00

George Rose / Getty

Yosemite Valley, including Half Dome, Clouds Rest, Bridalveil Fall, and El Capitan, viewed from Tunnel View after a brief rainstorm cleared on March 27, 2025, in Yosemite National Park, California

George Rose / Getty

Heavy rains arrived in Santa Barbara County wine country, filling the creeks and streams and turning the hillsides a vivid green as viewed on January 20, 2023, near Santa Ynez, California. Following the notoriety from the Academy Award–winning film Sideways, this farming region north of Santa Barbara has become a popular wine-country stop for global and domestic tourists traveling between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

George Rose / Getty

A farmworker rides a horse through the neighborhood backstreets in Los Alamos, California, on January 30, 2016.

George Rose / Getty

The downtown high-rises are viewed at sunrise from the Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area in the Baldwin Hills Mountains on February 7, 2022, in Los Angeles.

George Rose / Getty

A group of surfers catches the same wave in this photo taken from the pier in Pismo Beach, California, on August 21, 2015.

George Rose / Getty

Pinot-noir vineyards in the famed Sta. Rita Hills AVA (American Viticultural Area) turn a vivid red, orange, and yellow, signaling the end of the grape harvest and approach of winter, as viewed on November 26, 2023, near Buellton, California.

George Rose / Getty

Discovery Bay, a waterfront community of 15,000 people built on a network of man-made dikes and surrounded by fresh water, is viewed from the air on May 22, 2023, over Discovery Bay, California.

George Rose / Getty

A woman photographs the Golden Gate Bridge and approaching bank of heavy fog on February 13, 2014, in San Francisco.

George Rose / Getty

Visitors to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park take in Galleta Meadows, a sculpture garden by the artist and welder Ricardo Breceda, on March 6, 2019, in Borrego Springs, California.

George Rose / Getty

Early-morning light shines on Emerald Bay in South Lake Tahoe, California, on October 26, 2022.

George Rose / Getty

Following record winter rains, colorful poppies and other wildflowers appeared in the Antelope Valley Poppy Preserve one hour north of Los Angeles, drawing visitors to a “super bloom” on March 31, 2019, near Lancaster, California.

George Rose / Getty

Trees stand along the Merced River, coated in white after a major storm dumped a foot of snow in Yosemite Valley on December 16, 2021, in Yosemite National Park.

George Rose / Getty

Elephant seals gather on the beach at the Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal Rookery on February 21, 2019, south of the Piedras Blancas Lighthouse and just north of San Simeon, California.

George Rose / Getty

Lake Oroville, California’s second-largest water reservoir, stood at a historically low level during a drought, seen on September 1, 2021, near Oroville, California.

George Rose / Getty

A large oak tree is silhouetted against the early-morning sky as the sun comes up on December 26, 2021, near Santa Ynez, California, in Santa Barbara County’s wine country.

George Rose / Getty

An In-N-Out Burger restaurant adjacent to a runway at Los Angeles International Airport has become a favorite Instagram spot to photograph jets as they land, seen on February 7, 2022, in Los Angeles.

George Rose / Getty

The Sierra Nevada Mountains, viewed from the scenic Alabama Hills at sunrise on April 6, 2017, near Lone Pine. Owens Valley is an arid valley in eastern California, to the east of the Sierra Nevadas and west of the White Mountains and Inyo Mountains on the west edge of the Great Basin.

George Rose / Getty

Smoke from a controlled burn produces a haze above the Merced River, seen in the hours before sunrise on October 28, 2021, in Yosemite National Park.

George Rose / Getty

More than 58,000 fiber-optic spheres cover a rolling hillside and gully in a “made for social media” Field of Light at Sensorio on June 1, 2019, near Paso Robles.

George Rose / Getty

A large grass-and-timber fire, the Lake Fire, dominates the horizon in Santa Barbara County’s Santa Ynez Valley, viewed from a nearby vineyard on July 6, 2024.

George Rose / Getty

Tourists flock to patches of aspens, cottonwoods, and maple trees that turn bright red, yellow, and gold along Bishop Creek Canyon and in the canyons of North Lake, Lake Sabrina, and South Lake, near Bishop, California, on October 9, 2021.

George Rose / Getty

A mixture of snow, rain, and sand moves across Death Valley on March 2, 2023, near Furnace Creek, California.

George Rose / Getty

A large statue of a Brontosaurus stands at the Cabazon Dinosaur roadside attraction off Interstate 10, seen on May 11, 2022.

George Rose / Getty

A farmer riding a tractor cleans out weeds in an old-vine zinfandel vineyard near Healdsburg, California, on March 22, 2022.

George Rose / Getty

Heavy surf created by a large storm in the Gulf of Alaska sent huge waves crashing along the coastal rocks and shoreline near the Piedras Blancas Lighthouse on February 4, 2016.

The Man Who Couldn’t Do It

2026-06-22T10:51:19-04:00

Updated at 11:54 a.m. ET on June 22, 2026

In the past decade, Britain has churned through leaders faster than the average fringe revolutionary sect. Earlier today, Keir Starmer became the sixth prime minister to announce his resignation since 2016. He managed just over 700 days in power.

Departures from Downing Street have become so frequent that Starmer’s announcement followed a well-established grammar: A lectern was dragged in front of the black door of Number 10, the doomed leader’s loyal staff gathered at the side of the road, and an irritating protester disrupted the speech by blasting music outside the gates. Two years ago, an activist named Steve Bray greeted a speech heralding the departure of Starmer’s predecessor, Rishi Sunak, with D:Ream’s song “Things Can Only Get Better.” Today he played Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” People often talk about how this is a country paralyzed by inaction, where nothing can get built and, as in the sketch show Little Britain, the computer always says no. Our failure to prevent moments of national importance—and personal devastation for the politicians involved—from being interrupted by one guy with a boom box and a very basic record collection is all the proof you need that this is true.

Starmer’s departure became inevitable late last week, when Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham won a special election in Makerfield that allowed him to return to Parliament—a precondition for becoming prime minister. Burnham had framed the election as a verdict on Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party and the country, and he won even more votes than pollsters expected. From the moment Burnham’s victory was declared—as he stood between a man dressed as a fox, and another wearing a trash can on his head, because British politicians are expected to endure ritual humiliation—he became the prime-minister-in-waiting. Over the weekend, as Starmer considered what one minister called “political realities,” there was a notable absence of any rear-guard action to defend him. In his resignation speech, he said that he had asked Labour members of Parliament whether they wanted him to lead them into the next election. They clearly did not, and he said he had accepted that answer “with good grace.” He has promised to leave the prime ministership before the fall, once Labour has chosen a new leader.

The speech was, by some distance, the best that Starmer has ever given. He had three main points. First, he reminded listeners that he had inherited a “politically, financially, and morally bankrupt” Labour Party—a reference to the election losses of his predecessor, the socialist Jeremy Corbyn, and the anti-Semitism that flourished under his leadership. Second, Starmer acknowledged that he had lost the backing of his own party. Finally, he set a timetable for the contest to replace him that allows other contenders to challenge Burnham, if they wish. (This seems unlikely.)

[Helen Lewis: Britain’s next leader has emerged]

Starmer’s voice began to wobble as he thanked his wife and children, reminding me of the moment when Theresa May fought off tears in her own resignation speech, as she expressed her pride in leading the “country I love.” In time, I suspect Starmer will be remembered as May is: as a decent person who proved wholly inadequate to the political demands of the job. Starmer also promised to help his successor with a smooth transition, something that made me glad, once again, to live in a country where such democratic norms still apply, rather than in one led by a politician who—just to pluck an example out of the air—refuses to accept defeat and goes on ranting for years about fraud and betrayal.

As it happens, Donald Trump deprived Starmer even of the ability to break the news of his own resignation, which the president announced last night on Truth Social. “He failed badly on two very important subjects- IMMIGRATION AND ENERGY (OPEN NORTH SEA OIL!). I wish him well!” As well as being shockingly graceless, the post was inaccurate: Labour has cut net migration by 50 percent since 2024, and significantly reduced the number of asylum seekers living in hotels while their claims are processed. Dealing with Trump’s tantrums is one part of the job that Starmer will not miss.

Since Burnham’s victory last week, I’ve been stewing on the exact cause of Keir Starmer’s downfall. One word springs to mind: Epstein. Starmer’s public persona was crafted in his earlier role as head of the Crown Prosecution Service, the public body responsible for criminal justice. He has always presented himself as a process lover, a consultation haver, and rule follower. So why did he appoint Peter Mandelson, a known associate of the pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, as his ambassador to Washington? After all, his own civil service questioned Mandelson’s elevation. The generally agreed explanation is that Mandelson was friends with Morgan McSweeney, the strategist behind Labour’s 2024 election victory, who later became Starmer’s chief of staff. In this telling, Starmer was simply following orders from his subordinate, McSweeney. Not the best look for a leader.

Last year, that decision backfired spectacularly upon the revelation that Mandelson had been far friendlier with Epstein than he had ever publicly admitted, and that their personal and financial relationship had continued after Epstein’s conviction for child sex offenses. McSweeney duly resigned over recommending him for the post. Afterward, the government seemed even more listless than before, vindicating the suggestion that Starmer had no real political beliefs or strategy of his own, and had outsourced all such matters to his Svengali.

But really, the Mandelson affair was just evidence of a bigger problem: Starmer was a curiously passive figure in his own government. He struggled to connect with voters or tell a coherent story about how he planned to change Britain. The manner of his election victory doomed him to failure: In 2024, he won 411 seats out of 650 by appealing to what McSweeney called “hero voters,” elderly social conservatives who lacked university degrees and in many cases voted for Brexit. None of these characteristics applies to Starmer, a former human-rights lawyer and principled Remainer, and his attempts to appeal to his supposed base always came across as inauthentic. Even worse, the demands of these hero voters were very different from the instincts of his own party, who did not want to cut welfare benefits or make life unpleasant for immigrants. In trying not to disappoint anyone, he alienated everyone.

Heading into the 2024 election, Starmer and his shadow chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, were mindful of Labour’s reputation as a tax-and-spend party that enjoyed giving away other people’s money. (In the latest dump of Mandelson-related files, one of Starmer’s most loyal ministers, Pat McFadden, expressed his exasperation with that tendency: “Every meeting I have is: ‘Who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others?’”) To neutralize this fear among voters, Reeves and Starmer promised not to raise the most high-profile taxes: income tax; national insurance, which pays for the health service; and the value-added tax, the British version of sales tax. But Labour still needed to find money, given Britain’s huge debt repayments, the big spike in working-age welfare claims after COVID, and demands for more defense spending after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

[Idrees Kahloon: British politicians still have shame]

Instead of imposing broad-based tax hikes to address the woeful state of public finances, Reeves nibbled away at the winter-fuel payments given to older people, raising little money but causing huge resentment; slapped an inheritance tax on family farms, leading to protests from those who were asset-rich but cash-poor; and increased the tax paid by employers, leading businesses to complain that hiring had become too expensive. Reeves also continued to freeze the income thresholds at which higher rates of tax are paid, dragging more Britons into the 40 and 45 percent brackets, even as inflation ate away at their spending power. The government endured enormous political pain without giving the sense that anything was changing for the better: Britain is as poor as Mississippi, its economy is growing more slowly than that of Poland, and, worst of all, the country seems unable to rouse itself to do anything about it.

You might have noticed that some of those problems are not of Starmer’s—or even Britain’s—making. Every developed country is wrestling with the consequences of supporting older people, who vote in large numbers, on the taxes paid by a labor force that makes up a shrinking portion of the population. Keir Starmer didn’t back Brexit. He didn’t cause COVID. He didn’t invade Ukraine or Iran, leading to energy-price increases and persistent overall inflation. But I can’t help seeing the original sin of his premiership as the failure to make difficult spending decisions, to explain their necessity to voters, and to convince his party to back them. This is a man who started out with a huge majority but had to abandon his proposed welfare cuts because of a triple-digit backbench rebellion. By the end, only 6 percent of Britons said they were “very clear” on what he stood for.

In all likelihood, Andy Burnham will face a coronation rather than a contest to succeed Starmer, and will serve out the remaining three years of this government rather than calling a snap general election. That deprives Labour members, and British voters, of a chance to argue about what direction the country should take. So far Burnham’s policy platform has been both expansive and vague: He campaigned to the left of Starmer, but has said he accepts the government’s economic rules and crackdown on illegal immigration. His time in office will therefore be defined by challenges from populist parties on both the right and the left. Better keep that lectern—and the boom box—handy.

What Happened to Tony Carruthers Is Horrifying

2026-06-22T09:42:00-04:00

Used needles clinked into the plastic medical-waste bin in the death chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Tony Carruthers was strapped to a gurney for his scheduled execution on May 21, but as his attorney Maria DeLiberato watched the medical team repeatedly try and fail to access her client’s veins, she knew something was going terribly wrong. The medics whispered and gestured to one another. One asked for bigger needles, then smaller ones. Another grunted softly while shoving needles into Carruthers’s arm. DeLiberato, who had entered the chamber when the process began at 10:22 a.m., noticed the wall clock said it was 10:54. Carruthers’s breathing was labored and much of the color had drained from his dark skin.

“How long do you let this go on?” she asked the prison warden. “Until they tell me they can’t,” he said.

DeLiberato left the chamber to call Carruthers’s other attorneys and tell them what was happening. When she returned minutes later, the execution was still dragging on. The worst was yet to come.

Carruthers, 57, who has always maintained his innocence, was convicted in 1996 for his role in the February 1994 kidnapping and murder of three people: Marcellos Anderson, a drug dealer and friend of Carruthers’s; Anderson’s mother, Delois; and Anderson’s friend, 17-year-old Frederick Tucker. All three were abducted from Delois’s home in Memphis and were discovered a week later, shot and buried together in a local graveyard; they had been bound with cloth, socks, and pantyhose. Prosecutors relied on the allegations of paid informants to charge Carruthers and two brothers, James and Jonathan Montgomery, with murder, alleging that they sought to rob Marcellos and assert dominance in the neighborhood. The prosecutors, seeking the death penalty, would also allege that the victims had been buried alive. Police recovered no forensic evidence linking Carruthers to the crimes.

Instead, prosecutors relied on the testimony of Alfredo Shaw, a convicted felon, to secure an indictment. Shaw claimed that in 1993, Carruthers and two other men had pressured him on two occasions to help carry out a murder-for-hire plot. But Shaw, a regular police informant, publicly recanted his claims before Carruthers’s trial began in 1996, saying that prosecutors had paid him to use police files to conjure up a credible tale for the grand jury.

Carruthers, whose appellate lawyers say has a schizoaffective disorder that leads to extreme paranoia, ended up representing himself at trial, having alienated no fewer than eight public-defense attorneys with his paranoid delusions. After Carruthers’s last attorney withdrew from the case, the presiding judge denied Carruthers additional representation. “This is the situation that you’ve created,” the judge said. “And you’re going to have to do the best you can.”

Prosecutors had lost a key witness: Shaw. And they failed to produce any DNA, fingerprint, or eyewitness evidence linking Carruthers to the crimes, according to the appellate lawyers. But Carruthers, who had no legal training, sabotaged his defense with a predictably appalling performance in court. He asked witnesses the same questions over and over, failed to object to misstatements of fact, and often spoke so softly that the jury could not hear him. More damning still, Carruthers did not call to the stand a medical examiner who had evidence that challenged the prosecution’s claim that the victims had been buried alive. Carruthers’s defense was so mangled that jurors wrote notes to the judge questioning his capacity to represent himself. “Judge Dailey,” one note read, “Mr. Carruthers has been scratching or pulling around his groin when facing the jury. We find this very offensive and distracting.”

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Donald Trump dreams of more executions]

The jury found him guilty, and sentenced him and James Montgomery to death. (Jonathan Montgomery killed himself while in jail.) Montgomery successfully appealed his verdict on the grounds that Carruthers’s courtroom behavior had deprived his co-defendant of his right to a fair trial. Montgomery then took a plea deal that massively reduced his sentence; he was released from prison in 2015. Carruthers has meanwhile languished on death row. His appellate lawyers, including DeLiberato, have pushed for the courts to consider DNA evidence recovered from the crime scene that could exonerate him.

Lethal injection has been the preferred method of execution in the United States for decades. With its veneer of medical professionalism, the procedure has long been billed as a more humane and consistent alternative to hanging, gassing, or electrocution. Conceived in 1976 by a couple of physicians in Oklahoma, lethal injection began as a three-drug protocol: a sedative, a paralytic, and a drug that stopped the heart. But even as the practice has evolved and streamlined in some places into two- and one-drug protocols, the drugs themselves have become harder for corrections departments to come by. A growing number of pharmaceutical companies and international distributors have expressly banned the use of their products for capital punishment, owing to ethical concerns.

Lethal-injection protocols vary by state, but they generally require execution squads to place two intravenous lines in a prisoner’s body—a primary line for introducing the drugs, and a secondary one if the primary line fails, whether because the first needle punctures through the vein and leaches chemicals into the surrounding tissue or because the IV line becomes blocked. Despite this precaution, execution teams frequently fail.

In 2022, Alabama botched three executions in a row. First came Joe Nathan James, whom the state apparently tried to fit with IV catheters inserted in each of his arms and hands, and a foot, resulting in broad smears of violet bruising and odd cuts in his arms. The state was evasive about what had happened, but an independent autopsy found that he had likely suffered a long and torturous death. Alabama then attempted to execute Alan Miller, piercing his veins for more than an hour without success, until the execution was finally called off. (The state then used nitrogen hypoxia to successfully asphyxiate him in 2024.) Undeterred, the state then attempted to execute Kenneth Smith, which involved medical staff once again fecklessly missing the veins in his arms only to stab him in the chest with a large surgical needle. Smith’s execution concluded in failure, too, and Alabama Governor Kay Ivey instituted a brief moratorium on executions to allow for an internal investigation into the state’s protocol, the results of which were never revealed to the public.

Tennessee has similarly struggled with lethal injection. In 2018, the state adopted the use of a three-drug lethal-injection cocktail including midazolam, a benzodiazepine intended to render prisoners unconscious before execution. But autopsies of prisoners killed with cocktails that included midazolam have revealed the presence of pulmonary edema—the sudden flooding of the lungs with fluid—which some argue is akin to waterboarding as opposed to mere sedation. Midazolam’s effectiveness as a sedative is also unclear. In 2014, the state of Oklahoma injected a drug cocktail including midazolam into a prisoner named Clayton Lockett, who woke up and began thrashing and crying out, then died of a heart attack after a 45-minute ordeal. Five Tennessee prisoners subsequently elected to die via electrocution instead.

In 2022, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee announced a moratorium on executions an hour before the scheduled killing of a prisoner named Oscar Smith. Lee’s office explained that in response to an inquiry from Smith’s attorney, prison authorities had learned that the drugs to be used in Smith’s execution had not been tested in accordance with the state’s protocol, specifically for the presence of endotoxins, a byproduct of bacterial contamination, which can trigger severe physiological distress. An independent investigation found that the state had consistently failed to test its drugs for potency and the presence of endotoxins, and had relied on an unnamed executioner with no medical training. Lee made staffing changes at the Department of Corrections, which then adopted a single-drug protocol using pentobarbital—the same method used by the federal government. Tennessee resumed lethal injections last year, first executing Oscar Smith in May, then Byron Black in August, and Harold Nichols in December. Tony Carruthers was up next.

As time passed in the death chamber with Carruthers, DeLiberato’s panic began to rise. A man then entered the room, introduced himself as Dr. Mark Walton Fowler, and began directing the execution staff to seek suitable veins in Carruthers’s feet.

The execution staff went on to puncture his feet without tapping a vein, and Carruthers was clearly in pain. Fowler then asked aloud if anyone in the room knew how to access the jugular. Jugular access? DeLiberato wondered. He’s going to bleed out on the table. But Fowler, who did not return requests for comment, apparently thought better of it. Instead, he said, they were going to set a central line, a more invasive procedure to access a vein in the neck, chest, or groin.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Tortured to death in Alabama]

Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist and intensive-care specialist at Emory University School of Medicine, told me that setting a central line is a delicate, dangerous process that can be safely carried out only in a sterile hospital setting. Zivot explained that locating the deep internal veins for a central line requires an ultrasound. A mistake could easily lead to air embolisms, collapsed lungs, or fatal bleeding.

DeLiberato objected to the procedure, arguing that Fowler was not qualified to perform it. She had learned that he had admitted in a 2025 deposition that he had not set a central line since 2013 and that he lacked hospital-admittance privileges, meaning he had not been approved by a hospital board to carry out complex procedures. Medical organizations typically prohibit members from participating in state-sanctioned executions because it contradicts the medical duty to “do no harm.” As a result, the physicians who tend to be involved may have inadequate training for the job.

“I am qualified,” Fowler insisted.

DeLiberato watched him inject Carruthers with lidocaine, a local anesthetic commonly used during dental procedures. Fowler then began poking Carruthers’s chest with a scalpel, asking if he could feel it.

Yes, Carruthers said. “It hurts. It hurts.” DeLiberato then watched Fowler push the blade of the scalpel all the way in. Carruthers groaned and grunted so loudly that journalists on the other side of the wall could hear him. Fowler had failed to reach the vein he was looking for, so he pulled the scalpel out and stabbed Carruthers again in another place. Blood was streaming down Carruthers’s chest, which Fowler mopped up as he worked.

Finally Fowler admitted defeat. “I can’t,” he said, according to DeLiberato. “I can’t set a central line.”

But the execution staff was not ready to give up on killing Carruthers. Instead, they tried again to find a vein in Carruthers’s arm, this time near his armpit. DeLiberato saw blood backfilling the tube, and she wasn’t sure whether they had actually established sufficient venous access. For several moments, she wondered whether the execution would actually go ahead, with Carruthers now pale, clammy, bleeding, and in pain. (In an NBC interview earlier this month, Fowler said that “every attempt was made to minimize the defendant’s discomfort in the case at hand.”)

Then the phone in the execution chamber rang, and the prison’s warden answered, listened, and then hung up. More than an hour after the grueling process had started, the warden announced that the execution had been called off. Having learned about the medical staff’s ineptitude from Department of Corrections officials, Governor Lee granted Carruthers a year’s reprieve.

When one of Carruthers’s attorneys reached out to notify his family in Memphis that the execution had been canceled, Carruthers’s sister Tonya at first believed that her brother had been spared by divine intervention. She told me she felt otherwise after hearing from a brother who had visited the typically upbeat Carruthers and found a hollow, shaken man—he had limped and struggled to use his arm and hand in a way that suggested that he might have suffered a stroke on the gurney.

Stories like this, which undermine claims about the humanity of state-sanctioned killing, have compromised public support for the death penalty. Juries around the country are mostly handing down fewer death sentences year over year. But as the practice loses public support and alienates trained medical professionals, the executions that do move forward are likely to be more brutal still—the preserve of vengeful politicians and feckless medics. America’s controversial practice of punishing mercilessness with mercilessness may one day come to an end, but there’s little question that the end will be bloody.

What Will Happen to Birthright Citizenship?

2026-06-22T09:30:00-04:00

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Who gets to be an American? It’s a simple question—one that was answered when Congress passed, and the states ratified, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” the amendment’s first sentence states. Thirty years later, in 1898, the Supreme Court cemented this principle in United States v. Wong Kim Ark.

But last January, on President Trump’s first day in office, he signed an executive order that would challenge the Court’s precedent—and, it has been argued, the purpose of the amendment. “The Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States,” the president’s order says. It would deny citizenship to babies born to parents who lack legal justification for being in the country—or born to those who are here only temporarily. The order was challenged in court within 24 hours.

Now the Supreme Court will decide whether the Constitution means what it says; it will decide whether “all persons born or naturalized in the United States”—save for those who are here under unique circumstances, such as children of foreign dignitaries—are citizens of the union. This week on Radio Atlantic, I’m joined by Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer to explore birthright citizenship and what it means to be an American.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Serwer: So you think about today’s discourse about birthright citizenship and these, you know, sometimes veiled, sometimes overt assertions that America is a white man’s country. You know, the people who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment did not believe that. They insisted that that was wrong, and they inscribed the equality of man into the Constitution in a much more sincere way than the original Founders.

Adam Harris: I’m Adam Harris. This is Radio Atlantic. And this is our first Monday episode of the show.

Today, we need to talk about birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court has before it a case that could redefine who gets to be an American. That’s not hyperbole.

Justice Neil Gorsuch: So you’re really at the end of the day, then this is a straight up constitutional ruling you want from this Court, win, lose, or draw.

Harris: The citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is brief—28 words: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and [of the State] wherein they reside.”

For more than 150 years since the amendment was ratified and adopted in July 1868, the clause has animated a basic idea: If you were born in the United States, then barring very rare circumstances, you are a United States citizen. On President Trump’s first day in office in January 2025, he signed an executive order called “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.”

The order would deny citizenship to babies whose parents did not have legal status in the U.S. or whose parents are only in the country temporarily. States sued immediately. “The 14th Amendment says what it means, and it means what it says—if you are born on American soil, you are an American. Period. Full stop. There is no legitimate legal debate on this question,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said at the time.

The Supreme Court, which only takes up about 1 percent of the thousands of petitions it receives each year, decided to hear the case anyway. They listened to oral arguments this April, and soon they’ll decide whether the law is constitutional. Will the justices go against the precedent the Court set a century ago? And what does it say that the justices are even considering a challenge to birthright citizenship in the first place? With me to discuss all of this is my colleague Adam Serwer, who writes about the courts and politics at The Atlantic. Let’s get to questions.

Harris: Adam, thanks so much for joining me.

Adam Serwer: Thanks so much for having me.

Harris: Can you set the scene for us? Where did this idea of birthright citizenship in America come from?

Serwer: So birthright citizenship is a centuries-old principle in Anglo-American law, which is obviously from where the American system is designed. But the specific aim of the Fourteenth Amendment was to make real the promise of the Declaration of Independence “that all men are created equal.” And you know, obviously, prior to the Civil War, Roger Taney and the Taney Court decide Dred Scott v. Sandford, where they say that Black people can never be citizens of the United States, but this was a long-standing argument. You know, there were people like John Calhoun who said, obviously, in the Declaration of Independence “all men” did not refer to Black men.

When I was in middle school, I had a teacher who explained to me that the “all men” in the Declaration of Independence meant all white men with property. And, you know, that is a very narrow interpretation, but in effect that’s how it worked in the beginning.

You know, the author of the Fourteenth Amendment, or one of the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, John Bingham, he said, you know, the purpose of this is to get rid of the horrid blasphemy that America is a white man’s country. So you think about today’s discourse about birthright citizenship and these, you know, sometimes veiled, sometimes overt assertions that America is a white man’s country. You know, the people who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment did not believe that. They insisted that that was wrong, and they inscribed the equality of man into the Constitution in a much more sincere way than the original Founders. But the purpose of birthright citizenship was to make America, as Frederick Douglass might have put it, right with itself. He used to say that all that is needed to fix America is for the country to get right with itself, to fulfill its own lofty ideals. And that was what the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to do.

Harris: So when you think about those lofty ideals, when you consider that we’ve sort of grown with this belief that America is a sort of melting pot, the idea of birthright citizenship is one of those things that really made it a melting pot, as opposed to just the ideal of a melting pot.

Serwer: Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, there were a few Republicans who were angry about, you know, the possibility of like—they would say things like, You’re gonna let Chinese men become American citizens? And they were like, Yeah. Yeah, you know, it’s the only way to do this. It’s the only way to make this not a white man’s country, is to say, You know, it doesn’t matter where you’re from. It doesn’t matter what the color of your skin is. It doesn’t matter what your ethnic background is. If you were born in America, you are an American. Except in these very narrow instances, you know: the child of a foreign diplomat, Native American nations, which were considered, you know, obviously separate from the United States at the time. Those are the only two exceptions.

And that interpretation was so widely shared that the Court that decided Plessy v. Ferguson, you know, the decision that legalized Jim Crow in the United States, they decided in Wong Kim Ark that the fact that, you know, someone was Chinese did not prevent them from being a citizen if they were born in the United States.

Harris: President Trump is the first sitting President in US History to attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court. And he did so for this case. In Trump versus Barbara, so why is the administration challenging birthright citizenship?

Serwer: I think this administration, as an ideological principle, thinks that this is a white man’s country, and as long as the birthright-citizenship clause exists, that principle cannot be fulfilled. And the reason is, you know, obviously, if all you need to be an American is to be born here, then that applies to everybody regardless of race. And this administration has been, you know, involved in what is essentially a gigantic demographic-engineering project with its quote-unquote “mass deportation” in an attempt to make the country whiter.

So, you know, I really think to some extent this is a project—I mean, we’re talking about birthright citizenship, which is really important, but I really do think this is a larger project of essentially nullifying all of the Civil War amendments.

I think the [Chief Justice John] Roberts Court—and I should be clear: I don’t know that they’re going to side with Donald Trump on birthright citizenship. There were some indications on oral arguments that they did not take that argument very seriously. You know, John Roberts said something, the attorney arguing in favor of, you know, Trump’s interpretation of the birthright-citizenship clause, he said something about, like, Times have changed.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer: “We’re in a new world now, as Justice Alito pointed out to, where 8 billion people are one plane right away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen.”

Serwer: And Robert said something along the lines of:

Roberts: “Well, it’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.”

Serwer: So that may be an indication that the Court is at least not going to buy this one. I think ideologically, you know, the conservative majority on the Court favors a very narrow interpretation of the Civil War amendments, and that is convenient for the Trump administration, which wants to engage in overt racial discrimination—overt racial and religious discrimination, I would argue.

[Music]

Harris: After the break, we talk about the arguments for changing the birthright-citizenship law and how it would actually work.

[Break]

Harris: So, Adam, the arguments against the Fourteenth Amendment hinge on an interpretation of the phrase “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” and the citizenship clause of the law. And opponents argue that this goes beyond mere physical presence and includes a required allegiance to the U.S. that would exclude children born to people who are here illegally, or who are here legally but temporarily, so people on temporary visas. So what do you make of that argument?

Serwer: It is an ahistoric argument that exists largely because of the Trump administration’s desire to nullify the birthright-citizenship clause. The birthright-citizenship clause has never been interpreted this way. Again, the Plessy Court did not interpret it this way. This is a long-standing principle of Anglo-American law. You know, if they were—during the debates over the Fourteenth Amendment, they were literally talking about, you know, Does this really mean anybody except for the very narrow exceptions?, “and the jurisdiction thereof” is, you know, when we’re talking about Native American nations or foreign diplomats or children of foreign diplomats, that’s what that narrow exception applies to. It would have made no sense to apply it to quote-unquote “undocumented” immigrants, because that concept did not exist at the time in the same way it does now.

You know, the concept of an illegal immigrant is a relatively recent one in American law, and it really starts, you know, in the 19th century with the Chinese Exclusion Act and, you know, these racist restrictions on immigration to the United States. And that’s not unconnected to the Trump administration, because one of Trump’s most prominent advisers and the architect of his immigration purge is Stephen Miller. And Miller is someone who believes that the 1965 act that repealed those racist restrictions on immigration was the thing that ruined the country.

So it’s really sort of extraordinarily, like, out in the open here as to, you know, what the purpose of what they’re trying to do is. You know, their view is that America is based on a very specific ethno-religious tradition, and so the diversity of the country is destroying the America that they understand to be real America. And you know, this is part of their plan to reverse that.

Harris: You know, I think a lot about one of The Atlantic contributors, early Atlantic contributors, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who says that the law stands to say, yesterday we agreed so and so. What say ye with this law today? And the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were examples of the American social contract being rewritten, of our laws sort of reflecting better the moral agreement that we had at the time. Is there an argument to be made that our nation has evolved so much since the Civil War era, since Reconstruction, that the makeup of our nation has evolved so much that that social contract once more needs updating?

Serwer: I mean, look, you can make that argument. I mean, obviously, you know, Eric Foner, the eminent Civil War historian, Reconstruction historian, refers to you know, the Reconstruction era as the second founding, and I think that’s an apt description for it. But we’re talking about constitutional amendments here.

The solution to fix the problems that you see with our collective social contract is to amend the Constitution. There’s a process for that. You can propose an amendment for whatever you think is wrong with the Constitution as it currently exists, and then if it gets ratified and added to the Constitution, then you’ve solved your problem. But instead, what the Trump administration is doing is demanding that the Supreme Court rewrite and nullify the Reconstruction amendments by fiat, you know, by arbitrary, one-sided decision, essentially amending the Constitution without having to actually amend it. And that, I think, is not defensible or justifiable.

Harris: One question that I’ve had, kind of growing out of the arguments—the oral arguments and even before—was something that had been written in The Atlantic. It was basically What would this even look like? Say that they try to modify the contract without a constitutional amendment—they have the executive order. What would it even look like to implement something like this?

Serwer: I think one of the things that people do not appreciate about this is how much absolute chaos this would be, because people think, Oh, this’ll just hurt undocumented immigrants. No. After this, every baby born in the United States has to prove that it’s a citizen of the United States. It’s total chaos. You have to show your papers. Your parents have to show your papers at birth. It would be a genuinely insane thing that would create all kinds of bureaucratic problems, headaches. You know, what happens if something goes wrong and someone’s citizenship isn’t proven and then, you know, they’re stateless, even though their parents are American citizens? It’s a bad idea from a policy-logistical point of view, in addition to being a thoroughly amoral thing.

And even though, you know, birthright citizenship is actually the rule in the Western Hemisphere, you know, I understand that Donald Trump is constantly insisting that we’re the only country who has it, but that’s not true.

Harris: You mentioned “stateless,” and I think people can hear that word and not sort of pin down exactly what it means to be stateless, like the position that a stateless person is actually put into. So can you just sort of explain a little bit what it would mean to be a stateless person?

Serwer: I mean, if you’re a stateless person, there’s absolutely—I mean you basically have no rights, right? You have no rights, except that which, you know, the people in whose custody you are see fit to give you, because there’s no government that gives you a guarantee of certain particular rights. So I mean, I think, you know, mass statelessness is something— you know, I don’t wanna be too categorical about this, but the immediate example I think of is Jews in displaced-person camps after World War II because no European country wants to take them. It creates a huge problem. It creates a class of people who can be abused and mistreated, you know, with no recourse, and that’s a monstrous thing.

Harris: If the Court decides to side with the president, what does that say about where we are as a multiracial democracy 250 years on from the Founding?

Serwer: Well, what I would say is that you could really argue that America has not been a multiracial democracy for very long. Not until 1965 did everybody in America have the right to vote regardless of race or gender. You know, obviously, in the early 20th century, women get the right to vote, but that vote is still prescribed by Jim Crow and by the wholesale denial of Black men and Black women of the right to vote in the South. So it’s really only 1965 when America becomes a true multiracial democracy, on paper at least. And since then, you know, in the past 20 years, we’ve seen those protections being dismantled.

And I think destroying birthright citizenship is, you know, a massive piece of that project of turning back the clock in America, so that you can define America in religious and ethnic terms rather than in the sort of universalist ideals that during the Cold War were espoused by both parties. I mean, if you go back and you look at Ronald Reagan’s speeches, he’s saying things like:

President Ronald Reagan: You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.

Serwer: But once upon a time, that was just the established bipartisan consensus. And so the shattering of that consensus, I think, has tremendous implications, not just for the freedoms of people who are not considered fully American, but I think pretty much everybody, because you know, those kinds of rules force everybody else to prove their citizenship and therefore that they are entitled to the rights due to them under the Constitution as well.

Harris: Adam, thank you so much for joining me, and we’ll be watching in the days ahead.

Serwer: Thank you so much for having me.

Harris: That’s all for today’s show. Thank you again to our guest, Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer. This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli and engineered by Miguel Carrascal. Our music is by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

If you like what you saw here, new episodes of Radio Atlantic drop every Monday and Thursday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, on Apple or Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Again, that’s TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.

Radio Atlantic Expands: Launches Second Weekly Video Episode With Adam Harris

2026-06-22T08:39:04-04:00

Today The Atlantic’s flagship podcast, Radio Atlantic, is launching a new Monday-morning video episode hosted by Adam Harris, who joins Hanna Rosin as co-host of the show. Adam will anchor every Monday, focusing on stories that set the agenda for the week ahead; Hanna hosts the show on Thursdays. The first episode, out today, features Adam in conversation with the Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer, discussing the birthright-citizenship case soon to be decided by the Supreme Court.

Since it relaunched in May 2023 with Rosin as its host, Radio Atlantic has played a central role in bringing The Atlantic’s journalism to audio, with weekly episodes featuring original reporting and investigations; long-form interviews with journalists, authors, and newsmakers on the topics of the day; and exclusive conversations that go inside The Atlantic’s biggest stories.

Radio Atlantic on Mondays will focus on the major stories listeners need to know about that week, and Adam will interview a variety of guests––including Atlantic writers and editors and outside experts. By bringing its flagship podcast to YouTube, The Atlantic is also creating opportunities for audiences to experience Atlantic journalism across a wider range of formats.

The expansion of Radio Atlantic is part of a surge of audio and video at The Atlantic, which has doubled its number of weekly shows, podcast staff, and audio revenue in the past year. This is The Atlantic’s fourth video podcast effort since 2025, following last year’s launches of The David Frum Show and Galaxy Brain with Charlie Warzel; this fall, The Atlantic will introduce a weekly video podcast hosted by David Brooks.

Adam was an Atlantic staff writer for six years, covering education, and is the author of The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal—And How to Set Them Right. He has guest hosted a number of recent episodes of Radio Atlantic, including “Trump Is Wishcasting Victory in Iran,” where he spoke with Nancy Youssef and Tom Nichols; and “Colleges Are at a Breaking Point,” speaking with Ian Bogost on how the AI job market has made tuition look like a dubious investment.

The Atlantic is also announcing a number of new senior hires to the podcast team, who have spent their careers shaping audio and video journalism. Mike Pesoli is a video podcast producer for Radio Atlantic; he joins from the Associated Press, where he produced and edited video coverage of politics and national defense. Hadley Robinson has joined as a senior supervising producer; she was most recently editorial director of audience at Politico and previously developed podcasts at The Washington Post. Christopher Beha has been hired as a senior editor for video podcasts; he is an author and was the editor of Harper’s magazine from 2019 to 2023. Rebecca Davis, senior producer for video podcasts, has spent her career as a producer and director at The New York Daily News, NBC News, and later on Vox’s Netflix show, Explained.

They join Kevin Townsend, who was recently promoted to senior supervising producer; Kevin joined The Atlantic in 2017 and has been an essential member of the Radio Atlantic team across the years. Rosie Hughes was also recently promoted to producer at The Atlantic; Rosie joined as the associate producer of Good on Paper and has recently worked with the Radio Atlantic team.

Press Contacts: Anna Bross and Paul Jackson, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com

The Hot New Place for Singles

2026-06-22T08:00:00-04:00

Last month in Los Angeles, John Fulton reported the following: Cafe Stella has not only reopened—it also might get a pool. Maru needs baristas for its Los Feliz location. The Salkin House, gorgeously restored, has found a buyer. Oh, and a 38-year-old guy who dislikes Los Angeles Police Department helicopters is single and open to dating.

Fulton is the publisher of a year-old Substack newsletter called The Eastside Rag, which focuses on the goings-on in a collection of L.A. neighborhoods, including the trendy Silver Lake, the upscale Los Feliz, and the quickly gentrifying Atwater Village and Highland Park. He returns to certain scenes, themes, and characters again and again—celebrity sightings at Canyon Coffee (Echo Park), the sex appeal of the delivery guys at the east-side restaurant Bub and Grandma’s (Glassell Park), sales at the hipster apparel store Mohawk. What he wasn’t expecting, when he began his project, was that he would also become a relationship matchmaker—and that his newsletters featuring personals would become subscriber catnip (his readers now number in the thousands).

But when you think about it, the development—call it “hyperlocal dating”—is sort of obvious. It seems that every few weeks, someone predicts the death of dating apps. The apps won’t disappear anytime soon, though they may get worse, what with their growing reliance on AI, which threatens to further alienate users from anything resembling authentic human experience. More and more people may be trying to swear off machine-made love matches, but when they do, the question becomes: How in the world to meet someone?

[Read: The doomed dream of an AI matchmaker]

Just do it IRL, people might say, but that can be harder than it sounds. With far more people staying home than in previous generations, those seeking romance face tough odds if they’re hoping to simply walk out the door and stumble into a meet-cute. Singles mixers and speed-dating events have been around for decades, but at best they feel contrived, and at worst they stink of desperation. (One mixer I went to with friends was so cringe-inducing that five minutes into the event, we parked ourselves at a far-off table and made it a girls’ day out.) Professional matchmakers are expensive—and unreliable. They offer no guarantee of success, and working with one can be demoralizing, especially when money doesn’t translate into excellent matches, or any matches at all.

In this environment, newsletter-based personals have a lot going for them. As you might imagine, readers of The Eastside Rag are likely to have a good deal in common with one another. They probably live on L.A.’s east side and have access to a fair amount of disposable income. In many cases, newsletter readers may also be somewhat like-minded. Consider the subscribers of the Substack run by the multi-hyphenate artist Miranda July, who earlier this year announced that she would begin featuring a profile of a date-seeking reader roughly once a month: Her audience tends to be made up of feminist, creative types. Ava Huang, the proprietor of Bookbear Express, attracts subscribers drawn to her commentary on books, technology, human behavior, and love. Last year, she began running her own (paid) matchmaking service—because, she wrote, she realized that “my writing might be a way not only for me to meet people, but for other people to meet each other.”

Of course, there are downsides to dating in a circumscribed community; you might miss out on encountering interesting, exciting people who are very unlike you. But the appeal of these new personals is pretty clear, Camille Sojit Pejcha, the Brooklyn-based writer of Pleasure-Seeking, which explores sexuality and desire, told me. Because newsletters typically draw readers with similar tastes and worldviews, prospective daters may start from a stronger baseline of compatibility than singles who meet at a random mixer. (Pleasure-Seeking doesn’t yet have a personals element, but Sojit Pejcha said she is thinking about it.)

Newsletter “dating,” such as it is, tends to feel both more grassroots and more curated than the newspaper-based personal ads of yore. People’s profiles are chosen by someone whom readers view as a vetted, trusted individual. They also read less like advertisements and more like a careful introduction. “I mean, people want to be introduced by their mutual friends,” Sojit Pejcha said—so why not be introduced by “your mutual parasocial crush?”

[Annie Joy Williams: Canceled by Hinge]

July calls her dating venture “Beguiled”: Romance seekers who want to be featured fill out a “looong” questionnaire, which asks for biographical details (gender identification, kid status, pet status) and their comments on, say, why they’re single, their morning rituals, and what an ex or a friend might have to say about them. Interested readers can then fill out the same questionnaire, which gets sent directly, privately, to the profile-ee.

The artist and TV creator Lisa Hanawalt, who was spotlighted in July’s inaugural “Beguiled” column, told me that July chose her after she “made a little joke” in the newsletter’s comments section: “I’d love to date a guy who subscribes to Miranda July.” Hanawalt had been fatigued by dating apps and figured she might as well try a different approach. “I think it feels more intimate,” she said, “like one step away from asking friends to hook you up with someone.”

In March, buoyed by the success of his personal ads, Fulton, the Eastside Rag writer, decided to take things one step further and host a singles event at Los Candiles Night Club in Glassell Park. I went to check it out, and I can report that the gathering was well attended: At its peak, more than 300 people filled the room. “People were talking to each other; people were going up to strangers and striking up a conversation,” he told me. “It felt so, sort of, magical and rare.” It’s unusual these days, he said, for people to approach a stranger out in public, with no entrée. “I think this party gave everyone an excuse to talk to whoever they wanted to and not feel weird about it.” He’s planning more events, he said, after getting “tons of requests” from his readers.

As for Hanawalt, she’s dating someone exclusively now. She didn’t meet him through “Beguiled,” but he did offer to fill out July’s questionnaire, a gesture that she found super romantic. “He answered every question,” Hanawalt said. “He texted an ex; he texted a friend.” In response to one prompt—“Photo of the inside of your fridge?”—he produced “a picture of his fridge where he drew little guys inside the fridge.”

In their way, newsletter personals have the potential to delight and influence all sorts of readers, even those not participating in the experiment directly. For one, they provide entertainment (“I own four mullet wigs. So I hope you don’t hate 80s rock,” an ad in The Eastside Rag read) and useful conversation starters (I love July’s “How important is cuddling to you?”). But they also offer heartening evidence, to anyone eavesdropping, that people are out there, not too far away, looking for someone who might be—to quote Mister Rogers, that great philosopher of love and community—just like you.

The Election System Wasn’t Built for This

2026-06-22T07:00:00-04:00

Not so long ago, the Republicans who ran elections in one of the nation’s most important battlegrounds—Maricopa County, Arizona—largely got along. There were egos and quibbles, sure. But in the face of unyielding attacks on elections led by President Trump, the recorder and board of supervisors—which together split election duties—resolved conflicts without blowing up a delicate system built on trust and cooperation.

Today’s recorder and board, a mostly new cast chosen by voters in 2024, are different. They’re locked in an all-out war over the machinery, money, and operations that make the democratic process possible. Both sides agree that the standoff threatens their ability to carry out November’s midterm elections free of complications for the county’s 2.6 million voters, more than half the state’s total. The recorder’s side describes the situation in dire terms, writing to a judge that “the legal validity of the election results themselves” is at risk. The recorder’s critics fear that the fight could be used as pretext to cancel results MAGA doesn’t like in elections that could tip the balance in Congress.

Before this battle for control fully exploded in recent weeks—with the recorder insisting the Republican-dominated board pay six-figure contempt-of-court fines and election staff facing possible prosecution for setting up ballot drop boxes—he floated an idea through his attorney. Recorder Justin Heap, a Trump ally who was elected two years ago on a pledge to “end the laughingstock elections,” suggested that the two sides mediate their dispute using Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer and election activist who worked closely with Trump to try to reverse his 2020 defeat. “Ms. Mitchell would be ideal,” the attorney wrote, according to records I obtained, which cited “her expertise.”

The suggestion that Mitchell be brought in to broker the conflict astonished county staff still haunted by a 2020 cycle that drew protests at the tabulation center, pressure from Trump and his allies to overturn his loss, years of death threats, and ceaseless trolling from critics. In February, Mitchell told me that “Maricopa County is a complete disaster” and that federal investigators should turn their attention to the desert swing county. The recorder’s proposal to bring her in as a mediator of the dispute went nowhere. But the very idea that a lawyer who plotted to overturn the 2020 election could be a neutral arbiter signaled how differently Heap and the Board of Supervisors see the situation, people involved in the private deliberations told me.

[Read: Arizona is now at the center of election investigations]

Trump has spent his second term trying to “nationalize” elections that are, by constitutional design, run by state and local governments. He’s sought to advance his voter-ID legislation, and pressed the Justice Department to probe his loss six years ago. None of those efforts have yielded very much. But far from Washington, his allies have gained influence inside the local offices that do the hard work of actually administering the vote.

That includes the Maricopa recorder’s office, which over the past year has had striking success in court. Heap last year brought on an Arizona attorney who works for the America First Legal Foundation—co-founded by Stephen Miller, the powerful Trump adviser who supports stricter voter-registration verification and voter-roll purges—to represent him in his fights. The group’s involvement has alarmed the Republican county attorney, whose lawyer argues that the group is usurping her authority and using its representation of the recorder as a “launching pad for an unprecedented power grab.”

American election systems weren’t built for this. The brawl in Maricopa County has exposed the vulnerabilities of election structures that divided functions and duties between different offices, requiring cooperation in the service of democracy. Though the split-authority model worked well for decades, it is fraying under the weight of today’s hyper-partisan and conspiratorial environment.

“This is a new front in what appears to be a long-term play by America First to change how elections are run,” one person involved in the dispute on the board’s side told me. “They want them to be run by not just the Republican Party—but the MAGA movement.”

To his critics, Heap represents a dire threat to free and fair elections. To his supporters, he is a gutsy conservative who is unafraid to challenge the status quo. For an Arizona judge—whose opinions mattered most until Thursday, when an appellate court weighed in—Heap simply made a persuasive case that he is entitled to more power over elections than his office previously enjoyed. Heap’s office did not make him available for an interview.

An attorney and one-term state lawmaker, Heap was bolstered in his 2024 campaign for recorder by support from Charlie Kirk’s Arizona-based Turning Point USA’s political wing and the failed Senate and gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. In the primary, he faced a Republican incumbent, Stephen Richer, who had been outspoken in his opposition to Trump-inspired election denial and in his support for the integrity of the voting system. Heap won convincingly. Trump allies welcomed Heap’s ascent to an office that holds sway over election procedures in a county that generally dictates on which side of the red-blue divide Arizona will fall. “I’m confident that Maricopa County is about to get a huge upgrade in its election administration,” Harmeet Dhillon, now a senior Justice Department official, wrote on X after Heap won his race. But the board of supervisors continued to be controlled by Republicans who are more in the mold of Richer—conservative, yes, but unwilling to go along with wild theories that the voting system is rigged.

[Read: The election deniers are winning]

In Arizona, the legislature assigns election responsibilities such as voter registration and early voting to county recorders. Other responsibilities, such as Election Day operations and tabulation, fall under the county boards of supervisors. In Maricopa County, the board’s elections department carries out many of those duties.

After taking office in January 2025, Heap terminated a power-sharing agreement that Richer had made with the previous board in the final months of their tenures—after his primary loss and before the November general election. That agreement transferred the recorder’s IT department—including personnel and about $4.5 million in funding—to the board’s control. Though the idea had been percolating well before Heap’s election, he argued it was punitive and disrupted his ability to carry out his duties. County supervisors sought to negotiate new terms, and Rachel Mitchell, the Republican county attorney, authorized two outside lawyers, including a former state Supreme Court justice, to help Heap negotiate a new agreement. Instead, Heap brought on America First Legal and, last summer, sued the board, which has a 4–1 Republican majority. Heap alleged that the board had illegally taken over IT staff, servers, databases, equipment, and key election functions, including maintaining ballot drop boxes during early voting.

On April 16, following a contentious trial, Heap largely won his case. The judge ruled that the board “acted unlawfully and exceeded its statutory authority by seizing the Recorder’s personnel, systems and equipment and refusing to return them to the Recorder’s control.” He concluded that the board must give those things back or fund a new system for Heap. The judge also found that certain election duties that the board had considered its own fell to the recorder instead.

The ruling complicated an already messy situation. With the recorder and board preparing for the start of early voting, which begins this week for a July 21 primary, the board and election staff said it was impossible on such a short time frame to untangle their complex procedures, implement new protocols, and train staff to fully comply with the judge’s order. An attorney who represents most of the board has warned that the recorder’s “burgeoning cyclone of chaos also threatens to envelop the voters.” The judge refused to pause, but on Thursday, the board won an appeal to stop the changes. In intervening, the appellate court said that the fight was “no mere backroom dispute over accounting principles or organizational charts. It is, by everyone’s assessment, a live conflict hurtling toward real-world consequences in elections about to begin.”

Arizona this fall has a competitive governor’s race, and two House contests that could help determine who controls the chamber. But the dispute over who gets to run the election shows no signs of clearing up anytime soon. In fact, it has only escalated. Heap’s America First lawyer recently threatened possible criminal prosecution of the supervisors and their election staff unless they fully comply with the judge’s order, which has been stayed. Heap has also asked that the board be punished with $100,000 daily fines (which taxpayers would pay, a county official told me). The board argues that a redistribution of election duties risks delays and confusion and envisions a nightmare scenario in which tabulation is conducted by two separate offices. The conflict has already chilled participation among poll workers who are declining to work the election because “they fear the Recorder’s threats of retribution,” the attorney who represents most of the board has said.

During a recent hearing, a judge ordered the two sides to try to work things out. “I know it would be a miracle,” the judge said. Heap on Friday asked the state supreme court to review the appeal court’s decision, and has said he is “fully committed to conducting a secure, orderly, and lawful election while this litigation continues.”

Even in the best of circumstances, pulling off elections is difficult. This one features a president with sagging poll numbers whose administration is determined to prove the 2020 vote was stolen, rising pressure on slow-moving courts to act as arbiters of democratic legitimacy, and a battle for control of Congress with implications for Trump’s agenda. Mix in local fights for control like the one in Maricopa, and it’s little wonder that election officials I speak with are fearful of a disaster.

Democrats’ Great Alaskan Hope

2026-06-22T07:00:00-04:00

The Democrat Mary Peltola has led in every public poll since she declared for the U.S. Senate election this year in Alaska, a state that Donald Trump won by double digits in 2024. A former U.S representative, Peltola is a culturally moderate mother of seven whose top issue is fish. Unlike the candidates dominating national headlines, she’s neither a social-media sensation nor a charismatic progressive. Most people outside Alaska have never heard of her. That’s a problem from a fundraising perspective—but an asset from an electoral one. If Peltola is a little boring, that’s exactly why she’s the Democrat most likely to flip a red-state Senate seat this year.

Peltola does not resemble a stereotypical Democratic politician. Both her biography and her political positions suggest someone attuned to the importance of environmental preservation—and to the simultaneous economic value of resource extraction. She has worked as a commercial fisher and a spokesperson for a gold-mining company, a job she quit after the company spilled toxic waste into local waters. Peltola, who is Yup’ik on her mother’s side, then became a tribal lobbyist and worked at a tribal fishing commission. Fishing is a huge part of her political brand. Her campaign slogan in every federal race she has run in has been “Fish, family, freedom,” and one of her top policy goals is to enact stricter regulations, favored by small-scale fishers, on the use of dragnets by industrial fishing companies. At a time when even local races can easily get subsumed by national politics, this approach has helped Peltola come across as singularly focused on Alaska-specific issues—as she puts it, “Alaska first.”

[Elaine Godfrey: The Democratic base is ready to go]

In 2022, Peltola won two statewide elections: first in a special election to become Alaska’s at-large House representative, and then again by a larger margin that November, even as Republicans gained seats in the House. In 2024, when Kamala Harris lost Alaska by 13 points, Peltola lost her seat by fewer than three points.

During her two years in office, she followed a middle lane on mining and drilling. She pushed for the Biden administration to approve the Willow oil-drilling project in 2023, and when the same administration canceled oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, she became the only Democratic sponsor of a bill to overturn the decision. But she opposed a Republican move to use the bill to remove environmental protections from part of the Bering Sea. She also urged the EPA to block a locally unpopular copper-mine-development project.

This middle lane has not satisfied everyone. After she signed an amicus brief endorsing a local gold-mine development, a tribal group opposed to the mine declared, “We elected Representative Peltola to represent us, and by signing this amicus brief, she is going against us.” The League of Conservation Voters, a powerful environmentalist group, maintains a list of her 14 “anti-environment votes” during her two years in Congress.

Peltola, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has taken moderate positions on other cultural issues. She has said she owns 176 long guns, and in her 2024 run, she became the first Democrat in four years to secure an NRA endorsement. (No Democrat has gotten one since.) And she was one of six Democrats to vote to condemn Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

Her independent image has, however, won the admiration of Alaska Republicans. When Don Young, the longtime Republican Alaska congressman, died in 2022, some of his staffers endorsed Peltola to replace him over former Governor Sarah Palin. So did Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. (Peltola returned the favor, supporting Murkowski in that year’s Senate race.) John-Henry Heckendorn, an Alaska political consultant who helped recruit Peltola for federal office, told me that those are “the kind of odd-couple endorsements that really catch people’s attention.” When Palin lost the congressional race, even she couldn’t help being charmed by the experience, texting Peltola in the days after the election that she was “a real Alaskan chick. Beautiful and smart and tough.”

The caricature of a bipartisan centrist is someone who avoids controversy and bold ideas, standing helplessly athwart the people’s will for change. Peltola is not that. This cycle, her two campaign pillars are affordability and “fixing the rigged system.” In the latter category, she’s proposing term limits, a ban on members of Congress trading stocks, and a crackdown on waste and foreign influence. On the affordability side, she offers some ideas generally beloved by centrist intellectuals (permitting reform, a larger child tax credit, “right to repair” laws) alongside other, more economically irresponsible proposals that they’d dismiss as “slopulism,” such as eliminating taxes on Social Security and the first $92,000 of income. This combination—economic populism and cultural moderation—comes across to many voters as sensible. It also distinguishes Peltola from most would-be Democratic populists, who are reluctant to give an inch on progressive social-policy commitments.

All of these traits—her bipartisanship, her cultural moderation, her focus on local issues—come at a cost: Peltola gets less attention and fewer donations than other similarly situated Democratic Senate candidates. By Alaska standards, the nearly $9 million Peltola raised from January to March is a huge haul. But it’s minimal compared with the $40 million war chest that Texas’s James Talarico has built up, or with the more than $16 million that Maine’s Graham Platner has raised. Even Alexander Vindman, the star witness in Trump’s 2019 impeachment trial, has significantly outraised Peltola in small donations for his much unlikelier Senate candidacy in Florida.

Donors are different from the average voter, Raymond La Raja, a political scientist and co-author of a book about small-dollar donors, told me. “First and foremost, they’re partisans,” he said. Their ideal candidate is a doctrinaire progressive in a high-profile race who seems to “have a chance of beating Darth Vader.” Dan Sullivan, the incumbent Republican whom Peltola is challenging, has one of the lowest in-state approval ratings of any senator, but he’s basically unknown outside Alaska. And Peltola is anything but doctrinaire. “You don’t see people who are more moderate, or people who tend to just focus on policy, getting a lot of small donations,” La Raja said.

[Mark Leibovich: Democrats could use a cold shower before the midterms]

But Peltola’s relative fundraising disadvantage is really a symptom of her success at being the type of candidate who appeals to Alaska voters more than to national Democrats. She looks poised to pull off the upset. Public polls released in the past few months show her leading Sullivan by five to seven percentage points. Bettors on Kalshi and Polymarket believe that she has a higher than 60 percent chance of winning, better odds than Talarico in Texas, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Joshua Turek in Iowa, and Vindman in Florida.

Alaska has some quirks that make a candidate like Peltola especially viable. Since 2022, the state has had open, nonpartisan primaries. The top four candidates advance to the general, which features ranked-choice voting. This design benefits a candidate with cross-partisan support. Because there is no partisan primary, Peltola doesn’t have to worry about being outflanked by a more left-wing candidate who appeals to the Democratic base. And the ranked-choice system is designed to benefit candidates who are acceptable to a majority of the electorate. In the 2022 general election that sent Peltola to Congress, the two Republican candidates combined for 59 percent of the first-choice vote, but so many voters ranked Peltola second that she still prevailed.

Still, Peltola’s past overperformance and current lead in the polls suggest that the big mystery of how to win over Trump voters is not such a mystery at all. Peltola is succeeding by catering to the deeply held views of the citizens of her state—not just the ones in her party.

Paradise Revisited

2026-06-22T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs and videos by Will Matsuda

My first encounter with a Galápagos tortoise came when the driver of my taxi from the airport attempted a risky overtaking maneuver into the path of an oncoming bus. On the island of Santa Cruz, which is bisected by a single highway, this is a favorite sport: The white Toyota HiLuxes that serve as taxis overtake tour buses, while tour buses overtake trucks. But this time, the driver quickly pulled back behind the slow-moving car ahead of us. “Tortoise,” she explained.

And there it was—a great dome, an overturned bathtub, trying to cross the road. What set of circumstances favored an animal that weighs up to 600 pounds, moves at four miles a day, and takes a quarter of a century to reach sexual maturity? The answer is: a remote island chain formed by volcanoes, with little fresh water and no predators, where life moved at a languid, lumbering pace—at least, until humans appeared. The tortoise’s reaction to the traffic was typical of its kind. It retracted its head into its shell and fervently wished for the bus to go away.

The Galápagos Islands owe their place on rich travelers’ bucket lists to the vision of them as an unfallen Eden, touted as “the laboratory of evolution” that inspired Charles Darwin to write On the Origin of Species. When he visited, humans’ presence here was limited to whalers, buccaneers, and political prisoners. Today, more than 300,000 people visit the archipelago each year. Every tourist desperate to see an untouched paradise is part of a constant influx that risks despoiling the very thing they came to see.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

Pinnacle Rock, a volcanic spire on Bartolomé Island

On his arrival, in 1835, Darwin marveled at the lack of fear shown by all the animals, thanks to their limited exposure to humans. “Met an immense Turpin: took little notice of me,” he wrote in his field notebook about encountering a tortoise on September 21. Perhaps the poor turpin should have been more wary: By October 12, Darwin was recording that he had been “eating Tortoise meat / By the way delicious in Soup.” Soon he was trying to ride them. “I frequently got on their backs,” he wrote in the published version of his diaries, “and then giving a few raps on the hinder part of their shells, they would rise up and walk away;—but I found it very difficult to keep my balance.”

On these parched islands, the tortoises were prized for their ability to slurp moisture from prickly pear cacti, and to drink enough at the rare springs to sustain them for months on end. Thirst-racked sailors would catch and kill them purely for the contents of their bladders. “In one I saw killed, the fluid was quite limpid, and had only a very slightly bitter taste,” wrote Darwin, having sportingly chugged some tortoise urine for science.

Today, none of this is allowed. El Chato Ranch, which I visited in the pouring rain, permits selfies with its resident tortoises but absolutely no touching, eating, or disemboweling. Most of the Galápagos have been designated by Ecuador as a national park, with a $200 entrance fee—up from $100 just two years ago—and a strict injunction to stay six feet away from the animals. The archipelago is also home to the flightless cormorant, whose former wings are now stumpy nubs; a species of batfish that looks like it is wearing bright-red lipstick; and the marine iguana, which ejects excess salt from its body by sneezing. (Catch a big group at the right moment and they can go off like the cannons in the 1812 Overture.) These animals all exist in the Galápagos and nowhere else.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

A giant tortoise lumbers across Santa Cruz Island. Visitors are no longer allowed to eat them.

The usual story of Darwin’s visit is that he cataloged the small differences that had emerged in animals across the islands—discrepancies in the beaks of the finches being a prime example—as each species responded to the unique conditions. In a flash of insight, he understood the mechanism of evolution: survival of the fittest. The truth is more complicated, and more interesting. His ship, the H.M.S. Beagle, spent only five weeks here, and Darwin landed on just four of the 13 major islands. At first, he did not recognize the importance of the variation among the islands, and did not label many of his bird specimens with their precise origins. The greatest study of what we now call “Darwin’s finches” was done by a British couple, Peter and Rosemary Grant, who visited the same uninhabited island, Daphne Major, every year from 1973 to 2013.

Darwin also didn’t notice the numerous subspecies of giant tortoise until the vice governor called attention to their variety and declared “that he could with certainty tell from which island any one was brought,” the naturalist wrote in his field notebook. Tortoises on Hood and Charles Islands, for instance, had evolved shells that were curved upward at the front like a saddle, allowing their necks to reach higher vegetation. Oh, and Darwin didn’t even coin the phrase survival of the fittest. That came from one of the early reviewers of Origin, Herbert Spencer. Darwin liked it so much that he incorporated it into later editions.

The mythology of blinding-inspiration-in-paradise is so appealing that it has outcompeted the truth. The actual story—the one that drove me here—is that Darwin was above all an empiricist. He took nothing on trust. He wanted to see things for himself, measure them, catalog them, and perhaps even eat them, and he was willing to endure any combination of boredom, nausea, and danger to do so. He was an omnivore, as interested in geology as biology when he toured South America, and his most famous theory drew on economics as well. He had an ego, definitely, but he was also open-minded and curious; he wanted to understand nature, not just plunder it like so many colonial explorers. (In later life, he supported animal charities and called for vivisection to be regulated.) He was willing to push back against editors, too, such as the one who suggested that he should reframe Origin to focus only on pigeons, because “everybody is interested in pigeons.”

All of that should make him any writer’s hero.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

A bust of Darwin at the Charles Darwin Research Station, near Puerto Ayora

The British first named the individual islands in the 1600s—Charles Island after King Charles II, James Island (where Darwin spent most of his time) after the King’s brother, and so on—although most guidebooks now use the official Spanish names. Today Ecuador treats the Galápagos as precious jewels for both noble and commercial reasons. To enter, you need to complete a biosecurity declaration, promising not to introduce any plants or animals that could rampage through this delicate ecosystem. There are no international flights into the archipelago. For me, the two-hour flight to the territory’s main airport, on Baltra Island, came at the end of a tiring slog from London to Miami, and then on to Quito, the high-altitude Ecuadoran capital, where the thin air gave me a headache the instant I stepped off the plane.

I consoled myself on the long journey by reading accounts of Darwin’s five years on the Beagle, which were marked by seasickness so intense that he traveled overland by horse whenever he could, catching up with the ship farther along its journey. “I hate every wave of the ocean, with a fervor, which you, who have only seen the green waters of the shore, can never understand,” he wrote to his cousin William. His captain, Robert FitzRoy, recorded that Darwin was “a martyr to confinement and sea-sickness when under way.”

One of the great mysteries of Darwin’s life is how he made such a success of his five years at sea, which came between a directionless youth and an adulthood blighted by anxiety and illness. When he left England, at age 22, he was a dilettante who had washed out of medical school and was wavering about becoming a parson. His main interaction with birds and mammals was shooting them. He returned from his sea voyage a more serious and ambitious man, but one plagued for the rest of his life by vomiting, palpitations, “extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence,” and vague, shifting symptoms of mental distress. He installed a lavatory behind a screen in his study at Down House, in Kent, so that he could void himself from either end as necessary and quickly return to work.

During his half decade on the Beagle, though, Darwin worked steadily, sending crates of specimens home on passing ships, and he endured the loneliness and ennui of the voyage with remarkable fortitude. Time at sea was notoriously hard on sailors’ mental health; the Beagle’s previous captain, Pringle Stokes, had killed himself during the bleak southern winter. (The weather was so dreary, he wrote in June 1828, that “the soul of man dies in him.” A month later, he put a gun to his head in his cabin.) FitzRoy took over as captain soon after, and decided that on his second Beagle voyage, he would take a gentleman companion to jolly him along. He and Darwin ate meals together and talked about current affairs, tiptoeing around their different political backgrounds (FitzRoy was a Tory; Darwin was from a Whig family) and intensity of religious belief (FitzRoy was a creationist; Darwin, even then, was a doubter). He gave Darwin the affectionate nickname Philos, for “natural philosopher.”

In addition to seasickness, Darwin had to brave an equatorial climate far removed from the English Midlands, where he (and I) grew up. The midday sun is directly overhead, and on the youngest islands, which have little soil and therefore little vegetation, there is no shade to hide in. “Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance,” he wrote on landing at Chatham Island (now San Cristóbal, the seat of government). “The dry and parched surface, being heated by the noonday sun, gave to the air a close and sultry feeling, like that from a stove: we fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.” And this was in September, the cooler of the two seasons! I had come during the first half of the year, the hotter rainy season, when the seas are warm, the air temperature is about 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity wilts you like spinach.

On the first full day, crossing a scorching beach on the way back from seeing the marine iguanas at Tortuga Bay, I began to suffer from some sort of humidity-induced delirium, despite unfurling a legionnaire’s hat over my neck and shoulders. I distinctly remember thinking at one point that I had to “lock in,” the kind of extreme-sports jargon that my fully operational mind would disdain. After I had arrived safely at the hotel and rehydrated aggressively, I was amazed once again that Britons managed to explore and conquer so much of the globe, despite our manifest maladaptation to anything other than mild drizzle. That we did so before the advent of wicking fabrics, bug spray, and SPF 50 is even more implausible; I felt as ill-prepared for the climate as Captain Scott did when he relied on ponies rather than sled dogs in Antarctica, or the equally doomed Burke and Wills expedition, which took 20 tons of equipment, including a Chinese gong, into the Australian outback.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

Marine iguanas in Puerto Ayora. Darwin called this species, found only in the Galápagos, “imps of darkness.”

Unfortunately, what drove some of those early explorers was an unfounded (and occasionally fatal) sense of racial superiority: Europeans knew best. On FitzRoy’s previous Beagle voyage, in 1830, a whisper of this attitude crept into the ship’s scientific mission to map the South American coastline. At the southernmost tip of the continent, Tierra del Fuego, FitzRoy effectively kidnapped four Indigenous people as revenge for the theft of one of his boats. He gave them allegedly English names—York Minster, Jemmy Button, Fuegia Basket, and Boat Memory—and took them back to England. (The birth names of the first three were Elleparu, Orundellico, and Yokcushlu; Boat Memory’s name has been lost.) The idea was that they would be “civilized” and returned, accompanied by a missionary, to convert their benighted fellow Fuegians to Christianity.

In fact, the missionary bailed after experiencing a few days of harsh Fuegian life, and the Fuegians quickly reverted to their ancestral ways. “Captain Fitz Roy could never ascertain that the Fuegians have any distinct belief in a future life,” Darwin observed in his diaries. To the average Victorian gentleman, this was proof enough that they were “savages.” I wonder, though, if the assertion gnawed at Darwin, given that his research was already drawing him away from religious faith. “Science has nothing to do with Christ; except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence,” he would write to a friend toward the end of his life, adding: “As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.”

While on the Beagle, Darwin had to wait months to reach a suitable port to receive the latest packet of letters from home. Nearly 200 years later, I FaceTimed my husband from the deck of an expedition boat, which had excellent Wi-Fi. Most of the archipelago has Starlink coverage.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

Blue-footed boobies on Bartolomé Island

Some of the wildness that Darwin encountered still survives. The walls of my hotel room, up in the misty highlands of Santa Cruz, were flecked with geckos, which dart behind the picture frames if you get too close. Darwin was disappointed that “the insects, for a tropical region, are of very small size and dull colours.” Everything is relative, though, and to me this was a paradise of bugs, evoking fond childhood memories of crickets in the grass, ladybugs on leaves, and wasps on Coke cans. (Now I can go for days in England without seeing anything more exciting than a bluebottle; terrestrial insect populations in North America and Europe have been declining by 1 or 2 percent a year for a while.) Arriving in the Galápagos was like stepping back in time: A huge antennaed something lay outside my hotel-room door on my first morning, its black-and-red carapace glistening in the dawn. What appeared to be gothic bumblebees flew past my face—Xylocopa darwini, female carpenter bees, fat and inky black. (The males are gold.) Monarch butterflies, with their stained-glass wings, danced in the sun; a smaller, violet butterfly, the Galápagos blue, is endemic to the islands.

Today, even after decades of human intrusion, the abundance of the Galápagos is still what sets them apart, thanks to recent decades of human conservation. The embarrassment of frigate birds, with their red, puffed-up throat sacs. The great flocks of blue-footed boobies, dancing for their mates on Tiffany-tinted toes. The lines of flamingos, their feathers a shocking Millennial pink. The frequent sight of a lava lizard doing push-ups, their way of communicating. The pod of dolphins that swam up to the expedition boat for a spot of bow-riding, using its slipstream to slough away the remora fish that cling to their backs. A furious thrashing in the water that revealed itself as a school of rays—mating, or fighting, or possibly both.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

A pod of dolphins

Tragically for Darwin, he lived before the invention of the modern snorkel, and so never saw the magnificent world under the islands’ waves. As soon as I dipped my mask underwater off Pinnacle Rock, a volcanic spire not far from where he made landfall, I found myself in an alternate world of pearlescent parrotfish, baby sharks, and vivid blue starfish. The Australian electrician traveling with our party noticed an octopus, and it took a while for my eyes to make out a brown fluidity of fingers, slurping its way along the seabed.

I surfaced to the sound of retching—What the hell?—only to discover that baby sea lions can nurse with a disgusting noise. Then Isadora, our guide, started barking: arf, arf, arf. She was trying to lure a penguin off a rock, she explained, so that we could see it swim underwater. We were rewarded when a black-and-white bullet sped past. (Penguins on land might be comical, but an underwater penguin is no joke at all.) The final surprise came as I swam to the boat ladder and then checked beneath me. Have you ever screamed through a snorkel? Try spotting a full-grown reef shark a few feet below you; that’ll do it. Its sheer bulk and rigidity astonished me, as if I were watching a refrigerator glide through the water.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

A Galápagos land iguana (left) and frigate birds (right) on North Seymour Island

On the four inhabited islands, too, animals abound. In London, the main hazard of being absorbed by your phone is veering into the path of a cyclist. Down at the dock in Puerto Ayora, the town on Santa Cruz, it’s stepping on a drowsy sea lion. Walk almost anywhere and you’ll see a land iguana, perhaps two feet long, colored in burnt sienna, gray, and black. The iguanas molt in patches to accommodate their growth and so are covered with loose, peeling skin. Never mind the thrill of riding a tortoise; exfoliating a lizard would provide the ultimate ASMR.

Their distant cousins, the marine iguanas, are so black that they seem to suck the brightness out of the air: Darwin referred to them as “imps of darkness.” (He carried a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost with him on the Beagle, and you can often feel the effect of its dazzling imagery on his prose.) The iguanas congregate in big crowds, piled on top of one another. At Tortuga Bay, on Santa Cruz’s south coast, I nearly stumbled over a veritable cuddle puddle of them, with one large specimen in the middle, its arm proprietarily draped over another, as if they were on a third date at the movies.

“Come over here,” I yelled to Will, the hip American photographer who’d accompanied me. “I’ve found an iguana polycule.”

He sighed with satisfaction. “It’s like I never left Brooklyn.”

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

Marine iguanas at Tortuga Bay, on Santa Cruz Island

The crew of the Beagle treated the iguanas with no more respect than the tortoises. Intrigued by the idea of a lizard that could swim, Darwin caught one—“They do not seem to have any notion of biting,” he wrote—and placed it in the water. Despite being gracefully at ease there, the iguana immediately returned to shore. “Perhaps this singular piece of apparent stupidity may be accounted for by the circumstance, that this reptile has no enemy whatever on shore, whereas at sea it must often fall a prey to the numerous sharks,” he observed. (In other words, they felt predation pressure.) Others in Darwin’s party did crueler experiments on these intriguing creatures. “A seaman on board sank one, with a heavy weight attached to it, thinking thus to kill it directly; but when an hour afterwards he drew up the line, the lizard was quite active.”

The birds did not escape this casual sadism either. Darwin noted their “extreme tameness,” adding that “a gun is here almost superfluous; for with the muzzle I pushed a hawk off the branch of a tree.” The doves used to be even tamer before the arrival of the buccaneers and the whalers, Darwin remarked, because the “sailors, wandering through the woods in search of tortoises, always take delight in knocking down the little birds.”

To me, these passages are some of the strangest in the Beagle diaries. Darwin lived in a world where, whatever you did, more animals would be along in a minute. When Darwin made camp on what is now Santiago, the land iguanas were so plentiful that he struggled to avoid their nests in the sand. “I cannot give a more forcible proof of their numbers, than by stating, that when we were left at James Island, we could not for some time find a spot free from their burrows, on which to pitch our tent,” he wrote. Three years later, though, a visiting French naval officer was the last person to record any land iguanas on James at all. Feral pigs, descendants of domestic animals introduced by settlers, soon wiped them all out. (A population of iguanas was reintroduced in 2019 from North Seymour Island, and is now thriving.)

All the human eating didn’t help. At Cambridge University, Darwin had belonged to the Glutton Club, which aimed to consume meat “before unknown to the human palate.” In northern Patagonia, he listened to the gauchos tell stories of a rare flightless bird, the petise—a type of rhea with feathered upper legs—which he became desperate to add to his specimen collection. At Port Desire, farther south, one of his shipmates shot and killed what he assumed to be a young ostrich, and served it for dinner. “It was cooked and eaten before my memory returned,” Darwin wrote. Oh no! The bird was the elusive petise. He did save the skin and a few of the bones, and still managed to get the bird named after him: Rhea darwinii.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

Giant tortoises on the parched islands slurp moisture from prickly pear cacti.

Today, Darwin is known as the great heretic, the man whose work shocked the Victorian establishment and undermined the Church. But the exact heresy he committed is not well understood. He was not the first person to suggest that species evolve—in fact, his own grandfather Erasmus had suggested that all warm-blooded animals might have arisen from “one living filament” in his 1794 book, Zoonomia. Darwin was also not the first person to notice that the boundaries between species were more fluid than the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus had acknowledged. (The Comte de Buffon, a French biologist, had done so at the time.) And he was far from the first Victorian intellectual to question the spurious biblical chronology suggesting that the Earth was created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C.E. He didn’t even come up with the idea of selection pressures, per se—he got that from an economist, Thomas Malthus, who suggested that human populations tended to outgrow their available food sources and suffer famines as a result.

No, what offended some of Darwin’s early readers was that his vision of the universe counted humans as just another animal, rather than God’s special creation. Accepting evolution meant having “an ape for a grandfather,” as one observer put it. From the start, Darwin understood the political and religious implications of this, and he knew that advancing the notion publicly would make him a controversial figure. His own wife, Emma, was a devout Christian; some of his friends and colleagues were too.

After returning from the Galápagos, he spent more than two decades noodling in his “transmutation notebooks” without having the courage to expose his ideas, and his evidence, to universal scrutiny. In 1844, he wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker: “At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.” It is like confessing a murder. Another decade-plus passed before he was driven into print by the unwelcome discovery that another scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, had independently arrived at the same conclusion.

The publication of Origin, in 1859, gave everyone in Victorian polite society the opportunity to have an argument that had been brewing for many years. Soon after its release, Darwin’s critics and defenders clashed in a public debate that pitted the fierce Darwinian Thomas Henry Huxley against the bishop of Oxford and the former Captain FitzRoy, who preferred to believe that the fossils they had seen together in Patagonia had been deposited there by the biblical flood. (Darwin was too anxious and flatulent to attend himself.)

History has recorded this as a victory for the Darwinians, and the framing stuck—evolution was an uncomfortable truth promoted by working scientists and opposed by churchmen and aristocrats. Darwinism was a populist revolt, and for progressives, it also had a racial dimension. If all of humanity were descended from a common ancestor, that challenged the hierarchy of races, in which “Negros” and “savages” were deemed to be lower, less advanced species than Europeans. (Origin came out six years before America abolished slavery.)

To many of his contemporaries, Darwinism came to stand for a cold, bleak vision of the universe, what Tennyson had described as “nature, red in tooth and claw” back in the 1850s. Did everything happen for a reason, as Christian tradition had comfortingly taught, or was life a cutthroat struggle for survival? Echoes of the Malthus text that Darwin drew on had also made it into Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, in which the miser Scrooge has no sympathy for anyone who will not go to a workhouse. “If they would rather die,” he tells two men collecting for the poor, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

For Darwin, so much time spent contemplating the natural world subtly changed his attitude toward it. In later life, he was no longer the young man who boasted that killing his first snipe had left him so excited “that I had much difficulty in reloading my gun from the trembling of my hands.” On returning to England, he was captivated by Jenny, an orangutan housed at the London Zoo that played with straw like a “silly listless child.” In 1871, his Descent of Man went further in positioning us as part of nature, rather than set above it. Even though humans had a “god-like intellect,” he wrote, “Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”

Today, the idea that animals are just like us is more apt to be considered mind-expanding than horrifying—and sometimes amusingly delightful, too. On a day trip to North Seymour, an uninhabited island next to Baltra, I watched male frigate birds puffing out their throat sacs to attract a mate. When several of them gather together in a treetop, the Galápagosians call it a “bachelor’s bar.” Asked about the parenting habits of the birds, our guide informed the woman next to me that, no, the male does not help raise the chicks, because “he is off to another lady.” In situations like this, someone will always mutter “typical” from the back.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

A male frigate bird on North Seymour Island puffs out its throat to attract a mate.

Disemboweled tortoises, stoned birds, drowned iguanas—there’s a strange irony about Darwin becoming the world’s best-known naturalist. His Beagle diaries, which amount to an animal-murder manual, have inspired subsequent generations to keep as many animals alive as they can. Then again, that is the power of seeing ourselves as part of the great chain of creation—and seeing that chain as easily disrupted rather than divinely ordained.

Just outside Puerto Ayora lies the Charles Darwin Research Station, which supports the many scientists who make a pilgrimage to these islands. Its executive director is Rakan Zahawi, a restoration ecologist who grew up on another island chain, Hawaii, and accessorizes his khaki field uniform with armfuls of silver and beaded bracelets. His special enthusiasm is scalesia, a group of shrubs descended from the same family as sunflowers. Here in the Galápagos, without competition from trees, the plants grow up to 60 feet tall. Although Darwin did not know it, the genus’s 15 species are—like the finches—examples of adaptive radiation: One common ancestor produced many variants, reflecting their specific circumstances.

Now, though, the scalesia forests are under threat from the invasive Asian blackberry, Rubus niveus, which was introduced to the islands in the 1960s. The thick vegetation created by the interloper “comes up to the height of this table or even more,” Zahawi told me, gesturing a few feet off the floor, “and blocks out sunlight at the ground level.” The scalesia seeds germinate but cannot grow. The institute’s scientists have studied the blackberry for decades, trying to devise a way to repel it. “The simplest intervention is you take a machete out,” Zahawi said.

But that is hard to scale up across thousands of square miles, in remote conditions, so the institute is looking at a technique called “biocontrol”—disrupting the life cycle of an invasive species with another organism, countering its competitive advantage. For the blackberry, that might be a fungus. A similar problem is presented by Philornis downsi, another invasive species, “which we call the avian vampire fly,” Zahawi explained, “because part of its life cycle requires a blood meal to complete.” That blood often comes from baby birds; too many parasites can kill every fledgling in the nest. The foundation has collaborated with more than two dozen institutions over more than a decade to crack this puzzle, and one possible solution is to introduce a parasitic wasp to eat the parasitic fly. (Perhaps they’ll die.) What Darwin might make of this effort—deliberately trying to restore the flora and fauna of the Beagle era—I couldn’t begin to imagine. But I had a sense that he would welcome the humility: Biocontrol is treated with caution because scientists recognize the dangers of further disrupting the ecosystem, as the early settlers of the Galápagos did with their pigs, dogs, and cats.

The research institute is also the final resting place of Lonesome George, the giant tortoise that has become an icon for conservation efforts—an endling, the last of the Pinta Island subspecies Chelonoidis abingdonii. He was rescued in 1971, and scientists kept hoping to discover a mate—or even a friend—for him. But after a few years, it became obvious that George had been condemned to perpetual bachelorhood by the feral goats introduced to Pinta by fishermen in the 1950s. When George died, his 40-inch shell—curved upward at the front—and leathery skin were sent to a taxidermist, before being returned to a display case in the forest, preserved “in a temperature-controlled box, like Lenin,” as a friend once described it to me. The tortoise’s bones are stored in the institute’s indoor collection.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

The bones of Lonesome George, a giant tortoise that died in 2012, at more than 100 years old

The guide to this scientific charnel house was Andrea Carvajal Román, an enthusiastic entomologist who, in observance of the no-shoes rule in the storage facility, was wearing a pair of slippers with the slogan I LOVE BOOBIES. The insect collection alone numbers more than 75,000 specimens. Upstairs, in the bird-and-reptile section, Carvajal Román pulled out drawer after drawer of wonders: five dead penguins, lined up like a serial killer’s victims; a plethora of blue-footed boobies, to illustrate that their aquamarine pigment does not survive taxidermy. And, yes, a white drawer labeled SOLITARIO GEORGE. I asked to hold his vertebrae and leg bones, which weighed as much as a medium-size dog; earlier, I had seen the inside of a tortoise shell and marveled at how the pelvis and ribs were fused to the carapace. (I had imagined a big, wrinkly sock floating freely inside the shell.)

[From the June 2012 issue: X. J. Kennedy’s poem “Lonesome George”]

After four decades in captivity, George died in 2012, at more than 100 years old. If Darwin had landed on Pinta, he might have eaten George’s uncle or aunt.

As we waited to board our return flight at the Baltra airstrip, the guy in front of me stopped to photograph one last land iguana, which was coolly surveying the runway. Haven’t you seen enough wildlife by now? I briefly wondered, before catching myself. Of course not. How could you ever see enough of this?

After Darwin returned to England, in 1836, he took the next mail coach home and never left the country again. But he never stopped looking, paying attention, collecting. Back in Kent, he spent eight years dissecting barnacles, one of the least-prepossessing animals in the world, after becoming obsessed with a particular parasitic species he’d found off the coast of Chile. (He nicknamed it “Mr. Arthrobalanus.”)

Darwin was never happier than when he was engaged in direct observation, writing to a friend that, after years spent recording his geological findings, “it is delightful to use one’s eyes and fingers again.” But there was another reason to lavish so much care on barnacles—and on the pigeons that he bred in a loft at his home. He knew that a theory was nothing without evidence, and that gathering examples of natural (and, in the case of the pigeons, artificial) selection was crucial. He wanted his idea of “modification” to be bulletproof. He reclassified the world’s barnacles from scratch, exploring their differences, and he proved to his own satisfaction that domestic pigeons were all descended from rock doves.

One of Darwin’s many admirable qualities is that all of this came at a cost, not just to his health, but to the operation of his mind—as he was poignantly aware. By the end of his life, he had lost his taste for poetry, even Shakespeare, and listening to music just made him think about work again. His brain had become, he noted in his autobiography, “a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.”

To me, this is Darwin’s great lesson as a writer: You are what you pay attention to. If he could live his life again, he wrote, “I would have made a rule to read some poetry & listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied could thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, & may possibly be injurious to the intellect, & more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” In other words, he wished he was still the young man who’d taken a pocket edition of Paradise Lost on the Beagle—just as I sometimes wish I were a little kid, enthralled by a ladybug crawling over my finger.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

Sunset at the Charles Darwin Research Station

Travel Notes

Semilla Verde, Santa Cruz

The spendiest hotel on Santa Cruz is Finch Bay, a four-star dazzler with a spa and direct beach access. For a third of the price, however, you can stay at Semilla Verde, up in the highlands, which has giant tortoises roaming freely on the grounds. The staff cooks a communal meal each night, timed for whenever you return from your daily boat trip, allowing you to trade stories of your best sightings with other guests. My top-floor room had views on three sides, across the treetops and down to the sea, making it a spectacular aerie from which to observe the regular thunderstorms that mark the rainy season. I spent a few happy moments before breakfast on my final day—smothered in bug spray, sweating like a Trump nominee at a Senate confirmation hearing—just hanging out with a tortoise down at the pond.

Via a Baltra Km 12, 200350 Puerto Ayora, Ecuador

Darwin’s Arch (RIP)

Charles Darwin got his name on a lot of stuff—not just animals, but places: the city of Darwin, Australia; Darwin Channel, Mount Darwin, and Darwin Sound in Patagonia; and Port Darwin in the Falkland Islands, among many others. In the Galápagos, the naturalist lent his name to Darwin’s Arch, a much-photographed rock formation just off Darwin Island, one of the most remote spots in the archipelago, 100 miles northwest of the main cluster of landmasses. The arch collapsed from natural erosion in 2021 and is now two pillars, but it remains one of the liveliest diving spots in the Galápagos. The spot is reachable only by live-aboard cruises.

Darwin (formerly Culpepper) Island, Galápagos Islands, Ecuador

A Murderous History on Floreana

Back in 1931, The Atlantic published three articles by a Nietzsche-obsessed German nudist, Dr. Friedrich Ritter, who had decided to live off the grid on the uninhabited Floreana Island with his former patient Dore Strauch. “From all I could learn, the conditions of soil and climate were such that we could raise enough food for two people—and little more,” he wrote. “That was just what we wanted; only enough for two meant no neighbors.” Unfortunately, their idyll was disturbed, first by another European couple, Heinz and Margret Wittmer, and then by a self-styled baroness and two male companions. None of these people got along. One day, the baroness and half the harem vanished, never to be seen again. Eight months later, Ritter died from apparent poisoning. Had murder come to paradise? No one knows for sure. The Wittmers survived, though, and their descendants run a guesthouse on Floreana, which has a grisly 3.8 rating on Tripadvisor.

Wittmer Lodge, Playa Negra, 200101, Puerto Velazco Ibarra, Ecuador

The Finches’ Paradise

The island of Daphne Major is what’s known as a “tuff crater,” a collapsed cone of volcanic ash. There are no trees and (usually) no people. Any boat tour heading north out of Santa Cruz will pass it, but access is almost entirely restricted to scientists. In 1973, a British couple arrived for what was supposed to be a two-year study of the island’s finches, but Peter and Rosemary Grant—now both nearly 90 and professors emeriti at Princeton—ended up collecting data for decades. They watched as changing weather conditions favored birds with different types of beaks. Darwin thought in eons, but the Grants discovered that sometimes natural selection could happen very quickly indeed. A 1994 book about them, Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch, won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

Daphne Major, Galápagos Islands, Ecuador

Drinking Canelazo

After 17 hours of travel from London, I arrived at the airport hotel in the Ecuadoran capital of Quito giddy with fatigue, along with a thumping headache. Assuming that the problem was dehydration, I poured myself a glass of canelazo, a free drink on offer in the hotel lobby. It was delicious, a warm blend of cinnamon and citrus, with soothing caramel tones provided by panela, unrefined cane sugar. What a delicious fruit cup, I thought, helping myself to a second glass. I woke at 1 a.m. with the sensation of a railway spike being driven through my eyeball. What makes canelazo so warming is aguardiente, a strong clear liquor also made from cane sugar. Lesson learned: Never trust a fruit cup. It was delicious, though.

Wyndham Quito Airport, Parroquia Tababela SN Via A Yaruqui, 170183 Quito, Ecuador

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

Imperfect Ghazal on Weightless Living

2026-06-21T12:00:00-04:00

for my father

My father’s hands flapped in a spiral of smoke—a weak light.
What did I dream then, a child drenched in image? Sleek light,

falling honeyed rivers, purpled fruit. What did I need
to imagine my body, calm in migration? I wanted to seek light.

Dawn sank into my hands like rain. I wanted to evaporate
& ask God to reveal my face. I wanted to speak light

& watch the earth settle into being. Each splash of wilderness
unraveled into clean, solid lines. From there I would leak light.

From there I would take flight, my body sloped & pliant
in this arena of disorder. But in the dark beak of night

that light still shivered. The world with its oblique
tilt. Every day I arrived & arrive. My physique light,

my mouth blazing verse. With prayer I swill inward
those weeks I lie rooted. Flood my cheek, light

traveling into all skin: I am learning to find pleasure
in uncertainty. Teach me your technique, light.

Wait for it to come to you, I heard once in a car. O radiant
risk, I am ready. Give me your mystique, light.

Untouched by flame, my father now shakes his hair
that suddenly grows to its full, shiny length—an antique light.

Photos: A Bear-Emergency-Response Drill in Japan

2026-06-21T10:00:00-04:00

Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters

A man in a bear costume takes part in an emergency-response drill simulating a bear intrusion in Yaita, Tochigi Prefecture, Japan, June 17, 2026.

Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters

Hunters look at a map and diagram while taking part in a bear-emergency-response drill in Yaita on June 17, 2026.

Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters

A man wearing a bear costume takes part in a bear-emergency-response drill in Yaita.

Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters

A participant deploys bear spray during the drill.

Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters

The simulated bear looks up toward hunters inside a school building.

Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters

A hunter prepares to take a simulated shot at the fake bear.

Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters

The simulated bear is down.

Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters

Hunters and a police officer practice their approach while poking the simulated bear.

Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters

A man wearing a bear costume lies on the ground, playing dead after a simulated hunt during a bear-emergency-response drill in Yaita, Japan, on June 17, 2026.

I’d Rather Risk Cancer Than See AI Move This Fast

2026-06-21T08:00:00-04:00

On a fall afternoon 15 years ago, I met an idealistic researcher outside a Stanford coffee shop to discuss our shared dream: using AI to detect cancer. He had wiry hair, a penchant for talking with his hands, and a reputation for brilliance. He worked at a research lab that developed early screens for cancer; I, at 20, had just learned that I carried a mutation that conferred a very high risk of breast, ovarian, and other cancers. Over the following years, he offered guidance on how to enter his field, prepared me to apply for the scholarship that would fund my Ph.D., and warned me away from cancer-screening companies that made exaggerated claims.

But from there our paths diverged. I became an AI professor. He co-founded Anthropic. My mentor was Dario Amodei, the man who leads one of the most powerful AI companies in the world. In a utopian 2024 essay titled “Machines of Loving Grace,” he predicted that superhuman AI—smarter than Nobel Prize winners, freely using computers, and collaborating with millions of copies of itself—could soon compress a century of scientific progress into a single decade, and potentially reduce cancer mortality by 95 percent.

Which should sound pretty good to me. At 35, my cancer risks are catching up with me. A few weeks ago, surgeons removed my ovaries, instantly inducing menopause and destroying my ability to naturally bear children. By 40, the risk of breast cancer for carriers of my mutation rises to one in four, double the lifetime risk for the average woman. My mother, who also carries the mutation, was diagnosed with breast cancer at 45. Now would be a fabulous time in my life for a superintelligent AI to cure cancer.

Why, then, do I find myself rooting for delays in the creation of this AI—hoping, in my heart of hearts, that GPT-6 will be a disappointment?

Part of the answer is that, despite the extraordinary speed of AI development, I do not believe that AI is likely to cure cancer anytime soon—certainly not enough to bet my life on it. This skepticism is shared by most of the AI experts in a survey I recently advised, who generally expect slower progress than the leaders of AI labs. AI systems are strongest in settings such as chess, where they can generate infinite data (by playing over and over again), experiment freely, and observe exactly what happens. Many important settings, including math and coding, share these properties, and AI has yielded remarkable progress there. But cancer is different. Cancer data are finite and come from biological experiments and clinical trials that cannot run at silicon speeds. Experimenting freely on cancer patients would be unethical. And cancer data only imperfectly illuminate the complex processes by which our own cells betray us. There are, in short, many barriers to curing cancer beyond a lack of intelligence.

The intelligence our existing AI systems provide is also already formidable and underused. We have yet to take full advantage of systems such as the Nobel Prize–winning AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures with stunning accuracy but has not yet yielded revolutions in drug development; or the AI algorithms that match or beat radiologists at many types of image analysis; or the chatbots that now aid scientists with research. My Ph.D. students used to write code to analyze medical data; now they express their ideas in plain English and let AI do the rest. They operate essentially as professors, constrained only by their own imagination. My student recently came to me giddy with excitement over an AI-aided medical discovery.

So as daunting as a cure for cancer remains, I am certain that AI will contribute to it. And if curing cancer were the only result of building ever more powerful AI systems, I would cheer for their arrival. But the problem is that their impacts are much broader, and we are moving too quickly to ensure that these impacts are positive.

The recent chaotic release of Anthropic’s latest model, Fable 5, illustrates how unprepared we are to handle the broader repercussions of these models. Anthropic, fearing that the model might be misused to develop bioweapons, initially kneecapped its ability to answer most basic biological questions, which the company said was a temporary measure. This made the model, ironically, far less useful for cancer research than its less powerful predecessors. A couple of days later, the U.S. government issued a national-security directive prohibiting foreign nationals from using the model, likely due to concerns that it could be used for cyberattacks. In response, Anthropic shut the model down entirely. Reasonable people disagree about how risky this model is and whether Anthropic or the government is overreacting. But clearly, our institutions aren’t remotely ready to respond to these rapid deployments. (Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment about Fable 5’s rollout, nor to other questions.)

Many developers of these models, including Dario Amodei, agree that AI is progressing more quickly than society is adapting. The solution they propose is for society to speed up, not for AI to slow down, which they view as unrealistic; the very title of Amodei’s latest essay, “Policy on the AI Exponential,” frames AI progress as an iron arc to which society must bend. But speeding ahead will inevitably mean more of the type of chaos that surrounded Fable 5’s release. More fundamentally, it will shorten our time to respond to the many societal challenges that powerful AI may raise, including mass unemployment, skyrocketing inequality, repressive surveillance, and autonomous warfare. Each of these—and many others that match their scope—is an enormous problem, no less obviously important than curing cancer, for which we lack good solutions. It is not at all clear that crafting an international response to all of these issues at breakneck speed is easier than slowing AI down.

I myself am ferociously impatient; since the day I learned I carried my mutation, I have lived with the constant awareness that life is finite. But I will wait a little longer for a cure—even if it means losing my fertility and living under the shadow of risk—if it lets us approach this new world more carefully, and ensure that, in curing cancer, we do not lose the things that make cancer worth curing.

Of all the things we stand to lose, I worry perhaps most about how we will find meaning if we obviate our own minds. Amodei struggles repeatedly with this question in his essays, calling it “more difficult than the others.” I admire his attempt to confront the question but find his answer unconvincing. “I spend plenty of time playing video games, swimming, walking around outside, and talking to friends,” he writes in “Machines of Loving Grace.” But I doubt that he would want to spend the rest of his life doing only those activities—certainly I would not. He suggests that humans will still find meaning in deep intellectual pursuits, such as doing research, even if AI can do them much better. For my own part, I would neither spend months struggling with a research problem I knew AI could solve instantly nor find as much pleasure in the answers it provided. I do not want to be merely a spectator to the universe, whatever wonders AI may reveal.

Or take this essay. I will be heartbroken when a chatbot can extract my innermost feelings and, having gorged itself on the words of a million artists, regurgitate Fitzgerald-worthy prose I cannot match. For me, writing is a process bound up in self-discovery and human connection. My sister suggested the idea for this essay; my wife, seeing me suddenly and deeply sad as I reflected on it, touched my cheek, offering a comfort that no AI therapist could. Afterwards, I wrote late into the night at the handmade dining-room table I inherited from my grandparents. I thought of how my family would gather for long dinners around this table—the adults loosened with wine, the children excited to be part of it all, everyone laughing and talking over one another and debating physics and philosophy—trying, in our slow, suboptimal, human way, to figure things out.

J. D. Vance’s AI Doctrine

2026-06-21T07:00:00-04:00

In early 2025, J. D. Vance paid a visit to Les Invalides, in Paris, where he was invited to clutch the sword of the Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of the American Revolution. In a speech the next day, Vance drew a parallel between that sword and artificial intelligence, calling them both “weapons that are dangerous in the wrong hands but are incredible tools for liberty and prosperity in the right hands.”

Whether the rollout of AI in the U.S. ends up in the right hands will depend to some degree on the vice president himself. Since President Trump returned to office, Vance has taken a prominent role in articulating how the administration should approach the AI revolution. Many Republicans, including Trump, broadly favor a hands-off approach. Vance, in a series of speeches and interviews, has offered a more substantive framework for the interplay among government, AI companies, and workers—with the occasional political barb thrown in.

He, too, has called for avoiding regulations that slow innovation. But he also believes that some forms of power are too important to leave to Big Tech to self-regulate. And he has sought to tackle one question on the minds of many Americans: What will happen to workers?

Vance’s approach reflects the tension between the two main forces that fueled his political rise. Before he ran for Senate, Vance worked in venture capital, and his ascent was backed by Silicon Valley figures such as Peter Thiel and David Sacks—many of the same people who are now in the aggressively anti-regulation, pro-market camp of the GOP. Yet Vance also built his political reputation on his self-described hillbilly upbringing and on giving voice to the frustrations of working-class voters—who feel forgotten by Washington, view both government and big companies with suspicion, and fear that AI is coming for their jobs.

Now Vance is attempting to build a distinctly MAGA vision of AI that rewards innovation and is global in ambition, protective of American workers, skeptical of regulation, and wary of concentrated corporate power. Depending on what you think about AI (and about Vance), that could be viewed as a reasonable middle ground designed to keep some guardrails on AI’s development and to help protect American livelihoods—or viewed as the tap dance of a politician aiming to appease everyone and potentially satisfying no one.

Either way, Vance is in no doubt about the stakes. The day after touching Lafayette’s sword, he told the audience of executives and policy makers gathered for the Artificial Intelligence Summit: “If we choose the wrong approach on other things that could be conceived of as dangerous—things like AI—and choose to hold ourselves back, it will alter not only our GDP or the stock market but the very future of the project that Lafayette and the American founders set off to create.”

Vance often compares workers’ fears about the impact of AI to concerns that followed the introduction of ATMs in the 1970s, when many people predicted that bank tellers would become obsolete. “What actually happens is we have more bank tellers today than we did when the ATM was created, but they’re doing slightly different work,” Vance told the Interesting Times podcast in May 2025. “More productive. They have pretty good wages relative to other folks in the economy. I tend to think that is how this innovation happens.”

[Read: What happens if Trump seizes AI companies]

I asked the economist James Bessen, who has written extensively about the impact of ATMs, whether that was an apt analogy. “It’s not even the right account of what happened with bank tellers,” he told me. When ATMs were first introduced, the number of tellers in any given bank branch likely fell. That dynamic also made it cheaper to open new branches, which banks raced to do after deregulatory measures in the 1990s allowed them to expand their footprint. More branches meant more tellers, though they were performing different roles. That picture changed again after 2010, as online banking spread. This time, the new technology led to a dramatic reduction in the number of teller jobs.

A more fitting comparison, Bessen told me, is the 19th-century automation of the textiles industry. Automation made cloth cheaper, demand surged, and employment and productivity both grew. But by the mid-20th century, those gains had already been reaped, and as productivity continued to grow and demand plateaued, jobs disappeared. The lesson is that technological progress doesn’t guarantee permanent job creation, as Vance suggests. What is clear, Bessen added, is that people across the workforce will need to acquire new skills if they want to keep working.

Vance disagrees. “I don’t buy the premise,” he told me in an interview last week. “I have not yet seen the evidence that you’re going to see widespread job destruction because of AI.”

Yet Vance said he worries that the benefits of AI will fall disproportionately on the wealthy, as has happened in previous industrial revolutions. “You certainly saw a massive concentration of wealth and income upwards,” he said. “I do worry about that. I think it’s a serious concern, and I think it’s something, certainly, policy makers should not sit idly by and let happen.”

Vance acknowledges that he is an optimist. And he has a venture capitalist’s focus on productivity. Americans, he says, should be less concerned about AI replacing workers and more worried about falling behind in developing technologies that make workers more productive. “If the robots were coming to take all of our jobs, you would see labor productivity skyrocketing in this country—but you actually see labor productivity flatlining,” he said at the Winning the AI Race Summit last July.

The bigger problem, he believes, is the tendency by some companies to prioritize foreign talent. Vance has criticized Microsoft and other tech firms for laying off workers while simultaneously applying for H-1B worker visas to hire foreign labor. Corporate claims of a domestic talent shortage are a “bullshit story,” he has said. “When we try to grow our economy, frankly, through importing cheap labor, that, I think, is a dead end,” he said at the summit. Microsoft declined to comment.

Will Rinehart, a tech-policy expert at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, told me that he has discussed with the vice president’s staff ways to promote labor development for an AI world. “What’s interesting about Vance is that he does cut his own line, where, in part, he is with the administration on no excessive regulation of AI, but at the same time, he sees this as an opportunity for pro-worker development and pro-worker growth,” Rinehart said.

How that might translate into policy, however, isn’t clear—and on this, the United States isn’t alone. “It’s not surprising to me that they don’t have a plan for that,” Nathaniel Persily, a co-director of the Stanford Law School AI Initiative, told me. “Frankly, no country in the world right now seems to have a thought-out plan for how to deal with AI-related labor-force impacts.”

The Republican Party itself is split over what to do about AI, a fight reflected in a meeting at Vance’s office last year. Seated across from each other were two influential figures in Trump’s orbit: David Sacks, who stepped down in March as the administration’s AI czar (but continues to advise the White House), and the conservative attorney Mike Davis, who was trying to stop Sacks from inserting language into legislation that would have limited congressional oversight over the technology and eliminated state jurisdiction.

Vance, who is close to both men, tried to talk through their differences. The exchange grew heated at times, and Vance urged Sacks and Davis to find common ground, according to officials familiar with the exchange.

Weeks later, in December, Trump signed an executive order that sought to curb states’ ability to pass their own AI regulation, and directed the administration to work with Congress on a national framework for governance. Republican governors from 17 states responded by calling on Congress to strip any language that banned state-level AI regulations from a congressional budget reconciliation. California and other Democratic-run states have pushed their own AI rules.

Months later, those tensions still simmer. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has argued that the White House can’t legally strip states of their right to protect citizens using an executive order alone, and has pushed ahead with proposals for Florida to put its own safeguards around AI. Earlier this month, Florida became the first state to sue OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, claiming that ChatGPT puts corporate profits ahead of safety and is unsafe for minors. Kate Waters, a spokesperson for OpenAI, told me in a statement that the company is working to enhance AI safety. “We know there is more work to do,” she said. “We are committed to getting this right.”

In February, Fox News’s Martha MacCallum asked Vance in an interview whether AI policies should be left to the states or be federalized. He said the country needed “one standard” because the tech companies are, in his words, “so complicated.”

“What’s happening in California affects what happens in Ohio, and vice versa. I think that, eventually, you’re going to have some standard applied, whether it’s a federal standard or whether it’s one state standard dominating,” he added. “Frankly, the worst possible outcome would be to have far-left California dominate the entire AI regulatory map. That is, unfortunately, what the Californians would like to happen.”

Vance doesn’t want to see the Europeans take the lead, either. In his Paris speech, he argued that perhaps the greatest threat to AI was that governments would burden it with rules before the benefits could be realized.

Vance argued that overly restrictive rules—in other words, what he sees happening in Europe—strengthen the position of established firms, making it harder for new companies to compete. In Paris, Vance also described how he viewed the technology itself. He talked about AI in the way that previous generations talked about oil, steel, and nuclear reactors—as a source of national power that could determine which countries build stronger economies, field more capable militaries, and exert greater influence in the decades ahead. “AI, we believe, is going to make us more productive, more prosperous, and more free,” he said.

[Read: The conversions of J. D. Vance]

Given those stakes, Vance has repeatedly warned against allowing a small number of companies to control the industry. That view sets him apart from many traditional Republicans, who have long been skeptical of antitrust enforcement. Vance sees danger not only in government overregulation but in a handful of dominant firms gaining too much power. The new industrial revolution will be thwarted, he said, “if we allow AI to become dominated by massive players looking to use the tech to censor or control users’ thoughts.”

His interest in corporate restraint goes only so far. The construction of AI data centers is controversial in both parties. Supporters argue that the sprawling facilities are essential to winning the global AI race; detractors warn that they strain power grids, consume enormous amounts of energy and water, and hand even more influence to Big Tech. Vance has mostly sided with the builders.

For all of Vance’s skepticism of regulation, he makes exceptions where national security, human judgment, or democracy are on the line. Addressing the graduating class at the U.S. Air Force Academy in May, Vance warned that artificial intelligence was transforming warfare faster than military institutions have historically adapted to new technologies. He cautioned them to “use technology to make you better, but never submit to it.”

In making his case, Vance invoked Pope Leo XIV, whose recent writings on AI have called for stricter ethical constraints on autonomous weapons and warned that some military systems are already moving beyond meaningful human control. Vance has publicly disagreed with the pontiff on other matters, but he embraced those concerns.

AI is rapidly becoming embedded in national-security systems. OpenAI and other major tech firms have scaled up their partnerships with the Department of Defense. Anthropic, which has been put on a national-security blacklist, is an exception. (Trump last week said that talks with Anthropic to resolve the issue were “going fine.”) The company’s relationship with the federal government fractured earlier this year following a fierce dispute over military guardrails, including whether AI systems should be allowed to make autonomous decisions.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has argued that the Pentagon’s AI initiatives should operate “without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications” and that the military is “building war ready weapons and systems, not chatbots for an Ivy League faculty lounge.” He issued a directive requiring a handful of AI defense contractors to permit the military to use their technologies for all “lawful operational use,” without exceptions.

Vance, who, like Hegseth, is a military veteran, has focused on a different concern: ensuring that even as machines become more capable, human beings retain responsibility for choices that carry moral weight. “Decisions over life and death must be made by humans and not machines,” he said at the Air Force Academy.

The dilemma facing policy makers now is whether the lines that Vance favors will hold—or whether the AI revolution will overwhelm those seeking to guide its development. On that, Les Invalides and Lafayette may provide different history lessons than the ones Vance cited in Paris.

On July 14, 1789, Parisian insurgents seized weaponry from Les Invalides that they used to storm the Bastille later the same day. In the resulting chaos, Lafayette, as head of the French National Guard, sought to steer a middle path between the monarchy and the insurrectionists. He failed, and was eventually forced to flee France.

The Warrior-Witches of Ukraine’s Resistance

2026-06-21T07:00:00-04:00

For several months last year, a Ukrainian housewife, 35 and lonely in a marriage that had gone cold, traded WhatsApp messages with a Chechen commander, Achmad, stationed somewhere in Ukraine’s occupied south. They wrote about their days, their disappointments, what they hoped to do when the war ended. She asked about the front. He told her.

“Send me a picture,” she said. “I want to see your life.”

One afternoon, he obliged—a photograph taken inside the barracks, of himself and another soldier grinning for the camera. Behind them, pinned to the wall, was a map of the compound showing the unit’s position.

The housewife did not exist. “She” was a middle-aged officer named Serhiy working for Ukraine’s military-intelligence directorate, part of a concerted effort to draw secrets from the men sent to occupy his country.

“Serhiy was great at flirting,” his commander told me. “Guys in our team started asking him for dating advice.” Shortly after Achmad sent that photograph, the coordinates it revealed were struck by a Ukrainian drone.

[Anne Applebaum: Ukraine is not losing. Russia is not winning.]

Ukraine’s resistance is alive and more lethal than ever. But it has changed dramatically since its early days. A man I will call Dmytro (he requested anonymity for reasons of safety) has served with a resistance team inside occupied Kherson from the first days of the full-scale invasion. “We took insane risks then,” he told me. “Nobody thought the Russians would be here long.” Partisan cells sprang up organically—people who knew one another, sometimes ex-military, improvising as they went. Symbolic acts of resistance happened daily. Ukrainians flew their flag and blared patriotic songs in public. The image of a grandmother pressing sunflower seeds into a Russian paratrooper’s hand—“so that sunflowers grow here when you die”—traveled around the world.

As it became clear the Russians intended to stay, such open defiance faded. Today, expressing support for Ukraine in Russian-occupied areas is likely to earn a trip to “the basement,” a euphemism for Russian torture chambers. Dmytro described Russia’s repression as a kind of machine: “It takes time to get spinning, then it has its own momentum.” High-resolution surveillance cameras now blanket city centers, and interrogations are a feature of daily life. Resistance leaders from Mariupol estimate that nearly half of the adult population there has been polygraphed by the Russian security service.

Even peaceful acts can meet with extreme repression. In 2022 and 2023, occupation forces in Mariupol effectively banned the colors blue and yellow. Residents describe receiving aid packages, including school supplies, with yellow and blue markers ripped out of their boxes. Today, Russia’s camera net is sophisticated enough to track individuals block by block, masked or not. Petro Andriushchenko escaped from Mariupol and now coordinates a cell still operating there. “Pro-Ukrainian graffiti can get you killed,” he told me. “Even disguised, your movements can be traced backwards to find where you live.”

The kind of symbolic resistance once waged by the general public has now given way to intelligence work, carried out by serious operatives. Managed by handlers in unoccupied Ukraine, these agents help identify targets, verify coordinates, and pass them to the Ukrainian military. The location of Achmad’s barracks, although traced through online subterfuge, was almost certainly confirmed by an agent on the ground. The result is a movement that has grown both quieter and deadlier. It now feeds the “middle-strike” campaign—a sustained drone offensive against targets deep inside the occupied territories, including air defenses, logistics hubs, command posts, and personnel. A crucial link in that kill chain is information from loyal Ukrainians behind enemy lines.

The partisans I spoke with included coordinators directing operations from free Ukraine, operatives working inside occupied territory, and volunteers scattered across Ukraine and abroad. Many have family members still living under Russian occupation and must closely guard their resistance activities. Inside the occupied territories, most agents work alone, their only connection via encrypted communication with their handlers. One operative, code-named Sestra, has no idea how far the network around her extends, except that it kills Russians almost every day. “What you do not know,” she explained to me, “you cannot betray under interrogation.”

The Russian military is a meat grinder. Commanders send infantry forward in waves that Ukrainian officers refer to as “human radar”: The piles of bodies reveal Ukrainian strong points. As crude as Russia’s infantry operations may be, its electronic countermeasures are very sophisticated and continually reshape how the resistance communicates and survives.

Until June 2022, Ukraine’s mobile carriers Kyivstar and Vodafone kept operating in the occupied zones, because the Russians had not yet stood up their own infrastructure. Then the Ukrainian networks went dark, and the resistance had to improvise. Early fixes were crude: VPNs, Wi-Fi nodes. Methods have since been refined, and the details are closely guarded. What is clear is that any phone purchased inside the occupied territories is useless for resistance work. Devices sold there come preloaded with monitoring software developed by Russian intelligence. That app is called Druge—Друг—which means “friend” in Russian.

Druge monitors communications, photographs, and location data, relaying all of it back to Russian intelligence. One woman who had recently escaped from an occupied zone told me that her mother, who still lived there, tried to delete Druge. The icon disappeared, but the app kept running in the background. At checkpoints, Russian soldiers examine every phone. Not having Druge installed is a red flag to them; having an encrypted app, such as Signal, guarantees a phone’s owner a trip to the basement.

Phones smuggled in from free Ukraine are the linchpin of resistance communications. For a time, one reliable route ran through Deutsche Post: parcels mailed from Germany, routed through Russia, delivered to innocuous addresses in occupied territory—a government office, a shop—and wrapped so that any tampering would be evident. That route is now closed. Others remain, though the specifics are closely held. In emergencies, a phone can be delivered by drone, which demands real-time coordination and carries its own risks. These “clean” devices do not have Russian spyware installed, and they lack SIM cards that would connect to the local mobile network. Because cell towers can detect when a new phone enters their coverage area, resistance members compose encrypted messages on a clean phone then send them via internet, using the hotspot of a second device already recognized by the network.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Ukraine has finally given up on Trump]

Few resistance agents have professional training. Most learn on the job. Partisans pass around hard-copy tradecraft manuals to avoid using vulnerable digital channels. Within Kherson’s partisan brigade, one of the most sought-after is a Soviet-era handbook describing CIA catfishing tactics in Africa during the Cold War. No online version exists, but a well-worn original circulates among the resistance.

“Your CIA was good at this,” Dmytro said. “You bastards knew how to use sex.”

Several Ukrainian print shops have developed methods for hiding instruction manuals inside best-selling books. A guard at a Russian checkpoint, thumbing through an artificially tattered paperback, will likely have no idea that some of the pages explain how to kill him.

Inside the occupied territories, women form the backbone of the resistance. Many hold positions in Russia’s civil administration—at clinics, schools, and government offices—and report to Ukrainian intelligence. They exploit the occupiers’ assumptions: Russian soldiers often fail to imagine that women can be combatants. Few suspect that a grandmother passing their barracks every morning, shopping bags in hand, is the first link in a kill chain.

Some women volunteer with Russia-based charities supplying aid to military units. Every interaction is a collection opportunity. In late May, a government-linked Russian aid organization circulated a warning about this over Telegram: It had identified individuals, the agency noted, “who offer to deliver humanitarian aid to the Special Military Operation zone” as “a tactic employed by hostile forces to gather intelligence regarding the deployment of Russian troops.”

The most valuable sources are the occupiers themselves. In free Ukraine, agents build online relationships with occupation soldiers. Most of the operatives are women—though some men, such as Serhiy, have a gift for it. Native Russian soldiers tend to be difficult marks; they are transactional, Serhiy’s commander told me. “They always ask in the first five minutes: ‘Are we going to fuck or not?’” Chechens, by contrast, are “much more likely to seek a real relationship” and are easier to manipulate.

Since its creation in the early 1990s, the National Academy of the Security Service of Ukraine has trained operatives to cultivate intelligence assets. There are rumors of a new course that requires students to develop online connections with real occupation soldiers. An instructor at the academy, who requested anonymity for security reasons, would not confirm the course’s existence but insisted that “every intelligence agency does this—even yours.” When pressed about a specific aspect of the rumor, that the highest grades go to students who deliver target coordinates by the end of the course, he smiled. “That would indeed earn high marks.”

Most instruction for resistance agents, however, remains unofficial. Olena Biletska runs the Ukrainian Women’s Guard, a volunteer organization launched after Russia’s initial assault in 2014 to train women to survive under attack or occupation. By 2022, training had been delivered to more than 60,000 participants, some of whom remained in occupied territory. Most courses cover basic self-defense and survival, but others apply to resistance work. Pipelines smuggle training materials behind enemy lines. One course focuses on defeating polygraphs; others cover urban surveillance and intelligence-gathering.

Outside Ukraine, a diaspora helps vet target coordinates obtained through these resistance networks. Refugees from the occupied territories, who have detailed local knowledge, provide insight for the middle-strike drone campaign. A woman I will call Roksana, who asked for her name to be withheld to protect her network inside Ukraine, served in a clinic near Kherson on the occupied south bank of the Dnipro River. She barely escaped with her life after refusing to work for the Russian military. Now, living abroad, she helps verify targets for Ukrainian military intelligence. “I know my village—every street, every farm, every warehouse,” she told me.

For Roksana and some of the other women operatives I spoke with, the determination to destroy the Russian occupation was forged in dark experience. “Almost every day, for the first few weeks after the invasion, we would hear about another body in the street,” Roksana said. “If it was a woman, they were often abused.” The doctor Tetyana Kostyantynivna runs the women’s center at one of Kyiv’s largest hospitals. In 2022 and 2023, her facility treated a steady stream of sexual-assault survivors from the occupied territories, ranging in age from 4 to 75. “Over the past four years,” she told me, “we have become a world leader in new methods for gynecological reconstructive surgery.”

During her own escape, Roksana passed through 33 Russian checkpoints, several of which were surrounded by dead bodies. Some of those corpses were of women and showed what she understood to be clear signs of sexual violence. At one checkpoint, a Russian soldier fired into the back of Roksana’s car while it sat parked, hitting a passenger in the legs. The soldiers did it for sport. But Roksana’s group made it through, and today, she has no reservations about guiding drone strikes against her own village, if doing so helps drive the Russians out. “We can rebuild warehouses,” she said, “but the Russians can’t rebuild Russians.”

[Read: Something is wrong with Russia’s children]

Women are crucial to the Ukrainian resistance. “They can go places, do things, that men cannot,” Andriushchenko, who runs agents inside Mariupol, told me. “Also, they are ruthless.” Several resistance leaders call their female agents vidma, a term that appears often in Ukrainian folklore. Its closest translation is “witch,” but it has a very different connotation here. The word derives from vidate, which means “to know.” Lesia Orobets, a former member of the Ukrainian Parliament, explained: “Vidmas were wise. They understood the secrets of the surrounding environment. Here in Ukraine, our vidmas were respected for their knowledge, not burned for it.”

These warrior-witches have become Ukraine’s most feared intelligence assets, moving through occupied territory like shadows. Orobets travels abroad often, where she is sometimes asked, “What happens if Ukraine runs out of men?”

“Be careful what you wish for,” she says. “If Ukraine’s women are in charge, there won’t be a Russian left alive.”

In the early months of the occupation, children played a role in the resistance. They slipped through checkpoints easily, took instantly to encrypted apps, and were extraordinarily brave. But the risks they took were no less grave than those faced by adults. An errant social-media post—or simply “liking” content supportive of Ukraine—was enough to get a child hauled in for interrogation. Those sessions could involve unspeakable violence, especially for girls. I interviewed one who was only 11 when her village near Kherson had been occupied. Implicated in “resistance” activities, she was dragged from her home. As we began our conversation, she apologized for her stutter. “I did not used to have this problem,” she told me, “until the Russians took me to the basement.”

The resistance says that it now enforces an absolute ban on children taking part. Dmytro, from the Kherson brigade, explained that “it’s not just about the risk to the kids. It’s about the risk to the whole unit.” The death of a child at Russian hands can devastate morale. Andriushchenko described the case of two teenage boys from Melitopol who had been interrogated by Russia’s security service. Their bodies were never returned, almost certainly because of how badly the boys had been tortured. “Their deaths hit us hard,” he said. “What they did to them.”

In practice, the ban on children helping the resistance has its limits. In one occupied city, teenagers have learned to move around the Russian camera network. For a while, they spray-painted Ukrainian colors on the sides of abandoned buildings. Now, given the risks of carrying blue or yellow paint, they chalk or scratch the Ukrainian letter Ї, which does not exist in the Russian alphabet, wherever they can get away with it. Even this, resistance leaders discourage. Sestra, the agent operating inside Mariupol, describes how “a single piece of graffiti can mean torture, a cellar, or deportation to Russia for the child, and arrest or the stripping of parental rights for the family.”

“It’s not worth it,” Andriushchenko said. “We need intel, not art. When they turn 18, they’ll get their turn.”

If resistance fighters are the first link in the kill chain, drone operators are the last. Iegor Kravchenko, whose call sign is “Ram,” commands a company in Ukraine’s 426th Unmanned Systems Regiment. Every night, his unit launches attack drones into the occupied territories. “A significant percentage of those missions,” he told me, “rely on intel provided by the resistance.”

Today, the middle-strike drone campaign is the main engine of partisan activity. It has become extraordinarily efficient. For a high-priority target—an air-defense system, a command post, a munitions dump—anywhere from 15 minutes to a few hours can elapse between the transmission of coordinates and the strike. There have been moments when an operative was still chatting online with a soldier as a drone hit his position. “Our goal,” Orobets said, “is to make sure Russian soldiers never reach the front line.”

[Read: Building tanks while the Ukrainians master drones]

I asked the partisans why they would talk with me at all, sharing intimate details of the war’s most dangerous operations. In part, they are sending a message to the occupier: You are hated here. Sestra put a finer point on this: “I want every Russian soldier who has set foot on our land to carry that paranoia with him—suffocating, relentless, every second of every day. I want him to look at the grandmother at the market, at the bus driver, at the doctor in the clinic, at the ordinary passerby on the street—and to see in each of them his own potential destruction.”

The Ukrainian operatives also want Americans to know that Ukraine is fighting for every inch of its land. Asked whether Ukraine would tolerate a peace deal ceding occupied territory, Biletska answered, “Have you seen Bucha? Kherson? Mariupol? That’s not peace.”

As for Achmad, the Chechen commander who revealed the location of his own barracks, Andriushchenko was blunt: “He’s gone dark online, but we suspect he still doesn’t realize he was flirting with a middle-aged chuvak,” meaning a dude.

I asked whether he worried about exposing Achmad as a source. “No. I hope his unit learns what he did,” Andriushchenko said. “And then I hope they cut off his balls.”

What Comes Next for Iran

2026-06-20T11:31:25-04:00

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

Last night on Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the signing of an agreement between the United States and Iran, and what Donald Trump’s deal with the regime may mean for other countries.

“The international community is looking at what happened not only in Iran but in Ukraine, and seeing that this idea of large powers coming in and definitively defeating other weaker nations is not necessarily the case anymore,” Nancy Youssef, a staff writer at The Atlantic argued last night.

What this may mean going forward is that militaries across the world, including the U.S., will look at their technological, drone, and AI capabilities to “figure out what advances they need to make given this rapid moving and changing battlefield dynamic,” she said.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Jonathan Karl, a chief Washington correspondent at ABC News; Karim Sadjadpour, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; David Sanger, a White House and national-security correspondent at The New York Times; and Youssef.

Watch the full episode here.

Why Adventure Matters

2026-06-20T10:46:00-04:00

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

The word adventure tends to conjure images of people climbing mountains, kayaking through rapids, or traveling to remote corners of the world. It sounds expensive, athletic, and slightly exhausting.

But adventure is really just the experience of stepping into something uncertain—doing something for which you don’t already know the outcome. And that can happen almost anywhere. Maybe you can sign up for a new class, introduce yourself to a stranger, or simply say yes to an opportunity that scares you. What these experiences have in common is not danger. It’s unpredictability.

Adventure runs against the logic of modern life. We spend much of our time trying to reduce uncertainty—to make things more predictable, efficient, and manageable. Adventure asks us to do the opposite. It tests our willingness to leave the familiar behind.

On Adventure

Why You Might Need an Adventure

By Arthur C. Brooks

In a rut? Try shaking things up. (From 2024)

Read the article.

Seven Death-Defying Books for the Adventurous Reader

By Eva Holland

These titles will spirit you to some of the planet’s wildest landscapes, without making you leave your armchair.

Read the article.

How to Turn Anxiety Into Adventure

By Arthur C. Brooks

The secret is to turn your feeling of dread into the excitement of opportunity. (From 2025)

Read the article.

Still Curious?

The benefits of getting comfortable with uncertainty: “Wanting and not wanting the same thing at the same time is a baseline condition of human consciousness,” Julie Beck wrote in 2015.
The worst advice parents can give first-year students: Today’s college students will have ample time to figure out their careers, Ezekiel J. Emanuel wrote in 2024. Before that, encourage them to take risks.

Other Diversions

Courtesy of Michele R.

My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “The stunning beauty of Red Rock Canyon, just a 15-minute drive or so from my home. It takes my breath away each and every time I see it—whether from my car or when I wake my laptop!” Michele R., from Las Vegas, Nevada, writes.

— Rafaela

Are GLP-1s Performance-Enhancing Drugs?

2026-06-20T09:00:00-04:00

Before Serena Williams picked up her racket at London’s Andy Murray Arena last week, two questions hung over her return to tennis.

First: How would she do? She answered that, in her first competition in nearly four years, by winning. The 44-year-old and her doubles partner, the 19-year-old Victoria Mboko, ended up besting the third seed in their opening match of the Queen’s Club tournament. Their victory was sealed by a 116-mile-an-hour serve from Williams that her opponents couldn’t return.

The second will take longer to answer: Did a GLP-1 weight-loss drug enhance her performance?

Williams is a paid spokesperson for Ro, a telehealth company that specializes in such medications. In ads, she says that she lost 34 pounds with the help of GLP-1s. It’s unclear whether Williams is still on her drug of choice, tirzepatide (her publicist declined to comment), which has helped her lose stubborn baby weight and manage her cholesterol. Although there’s no indication that she took it to gain a competitive advantage, Williams has also said that the medication improved her training and her game. The drug “helped me enhance everything that I was already doing—eating healthy and working out, whether it was as a professional athlete at the top level of tennis or just going to the gym every day,” she told People magazine in August.

With her comeback, Williams is the first active elite athlete to publicize her use of GLP-1s. But the world of sports is full of whispers that she is not the only one. The more athletes who follow Williams’s lead, the more urgent the question of whether GLP-1s should be treated as performance-enhancing drugs will become.

The World Anti-Doping Agency, which sets rules adopted by most international sporting leagues, has said that it is keeping a close eye on whether GLP-1s are being abused; for now, athletes are free to take them. (A Ro spokesperson told me that “any patient who receives a GLP-1 prescription through Ro has been determined to be clinically eligible for that treatment by a licensed medical provider.”) But experts are divided over whether GLP-1s have the potential to improve athleticism. “I can’t see that there would be much of an advantage at all to using these substances in an athlete,” Thomas Hudzik, a pharmaceutical consultant who has served on the advisory group that recommends what drugs WADA should ban, told me. Meanwhile, Lars Engebretsen, the head of WADA’s health, medical, and research committee, told the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation that he believes the drugs should be banned, but mostly because they could exacerbate eating disorders.

Opinions diverge because no studies have yet tested these drugs in elite athletes. Williams’s return to tennis—which will continue with a doubles appearance alongside her sister Venus at Wimbledon—is one of the first opportunities, as far as we know, to see how an elite athlete performs after taking a GLP-1. So far, the results have been uneven: She won with Mboko at the Queen’s Club, but lost her first doubles match at the Berlin Open this week. Doubles also demands less of athletes than a singles match does, so Williams’s full abilities have not yet been tested in competition. (Tennis fans are eager to know if Williams will get a wild-card singles spot at Wimbledon too.) “The jury is out in terms of endurance, stamina,” Rick Macci, who trained Williams during her childhood, told me.

[Read: America has a new GLP-1 playbook]

Being trim can be an advantage in some sports. A lighter frame can reduce the amount of effort needed for, say, climbing, running, or gymnastics. And weight is built into the structure of other sports. Wrestlers, for example, must weigh in to qualify for their matches. The popular strategy is to get just under the maximum weight for a given class—a process that GLP-1s might make easier. “It makes perfect sense in weight-category sports,” John Hawley, the director of Australian Catholic University’s Centre for Human Metabolism and Performance, told me via email.

But whether GLP-1s will deliver meaningful weight loss for athletes already in tip-top shape is an open question. No major trials have tested GLP-1s in healthy people with a normal or low BMI, so it’s unclear how much weight such people might lose on the drug. That could mean that among elite athletes, the drugs might have significant effects for only a small group, including Williams, who are seeking to get back into shape. Several clinical trials have also shown that GLP-1s can reduce an inflammation marker in the blood—but it’s still unclear how much of that improvement is the result of weight loss or an independent effect of the drugs.

Besides, being light isn’t necessarily an upside if it means a reduction in strength. Roughly 25 to 35 percent of the weight that GLP-1 patients lose is lean mass, according to a meta-analysis published in March. Athletes using GLP-1s will need to closely watch their diet and training to make sure they maintain muscle (perhaps while dealing with the vomiting, nausea, and diarrhea often associated with GLP-1s). Plus, GLP-1s are believed to dampen dopamine signaling, which “might actually put the lid on initiative and drive and competitiveness,” Ziyad Al-Aly, a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis who has studied GLP-1s, told me. Lack of research is a problem here too, Al-Aly emphasized: The best evidence of this hypothetical effect is a preprint study that found that mice sought out their exercise wheel less after being injected with semaglutide.

[Read: Ozempic is a brain drug]

Some studies on the effects of GLP-1s in certain sports are now under way. WADA, for example, is funding a trial to test how semaglutide changes runners’ body composition and performance. But pharmaceutical companies are actively testing new types of weight-loss medications that may have different effects on muscle, as well as combinations of GLP-1s with other drugs meant to preserve strength. Some of those drugs, such as a class that overrides the body’s natural limit on muscle growth, are already banned by WADA. Every new weight-loss medication will complicate any tenuous understanding of how these drugs affect athletic performance.

Determining whether a drug should be banned is not solely a scientific endeavor: WADA bases its decisions in part on whether the use of a drug violates “the spirit of sport,” which it defines as “the ethical pursuit of human excellence through the dedicated perfection of each Athlete’s natural talents.” Athletes earn our admiration because they work hard to perfect skills that most of us could never imagine having. We marvel at baseball sluggers because hitting a small ball traveling 90 miles an hour requires hard work; regularly hitting it 400 feet is that much harder. When a hitter takes an anabolic steroid, the wonder is largely lost.

Williams became a tennis icon in part because of her relentless desire to compete. Even as a child, “she would run so hard to try to get to the ball, she’d fall,” Macci said. When she competed in the Australian Open while pregnant in 2017, she defeated every opponent who faced her, without dropping a set. Being 44, having two kids, and struggling with extra weight didn’t stop her from returning to professional tennis. Yes, she was probably lighter and quicker because she took a GLP-1. But a good comeback embodies the spirit of sport, too.