The Atlantic

Dolly Parton: Photos From an Extraordinary Life and Career

2026-08-25T16:41:02-04:00

Paul Natkin / Getty

Dolly Parton performs at the Mill Run Theater in Niles, Illinois, on August 29, 1977.

Michael Ochs Archives / Getty

Dolly Parton and her collaborator Porter Wagoner perform onstage, circa 1967.

Ron Hill / The Oklahoman / USA Today Network / Reuters

Dolly Parton and the Wagon Masters pick and sing for a Civic Center Music Hall audience in Oklahoma City on October 8, 1968.

Gary Null / NBC / Getty

Dolly Parton sings for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show on December 14, 1977.

Tom Hill / WireImage

Dolly Parton greets her fans at an in-store appearance at Peaches Records on May 3, 1977, in Atlanta.

WENN / Reuters

Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, and Jane Fonda, in costume on the set of the 1980 movie 9 to 5.

20th Century Fox / ZUMA Press / Reuters

Sylvester Stallone and Dolly Parton appear on set in the 1984 movie Rhinestone.

Doug Pizac / AP

Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers rehearse a song for their appearance on the TV show Live … And In Person, in Los Angeles on September 27, 1983.

John Seakwood / Disney General Entertainment / Getty

Dolly Parton sits in on a performance at Dollywood in 1987.

Getty

Dolly Parton meets young schoolchildren at the Magna Science and Adventure Park on December 5, 2007, in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England. Parton chose the former steelworks town to be the first European location to participate in her “Imagination Library” literacy scheme. The charitable program, which she launched in her hometown of Sevierville, Tennessee, in 1996, encourages young children to discover the joys of reading, by sending every participating pre-school-age child a free book every month.

Bebeto Matthews / AP

From left: Patricia Resnick, Dolly Parton, Robert Greenblatt, Megan Hilty, Allison Janney, and Stephanie Block react during a press conference for the new musical 9 to 5 in New York, on July 15, 2008.

Rick Diamond / Getty

Keith Urban and Dolly Parton perform onstage at the 2010 We’re All for the Hall benefit concert at the Bridgestone Arena on October 5, 2010, in Nashville, Tennessee.

Christopher Polk / ACM2016 / Getty for DCP

Dolly Parton accepts the Tex Ritter Award for Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors onstage at the 51st Academy of Country Music Awards at MGM Grand Garden Arena on April 3, 2016, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Kevin Winter / Getty for The Recording Academy

Dolly Parton and Miley Cyrus perform together during the 61st Annual Grammy Awards at the Staples Center on February 10, 2019, in Los Angeles.

Jason Kempin / Getty

Dolly Parton attends the opening of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s new exhibit “Dolly Parton: Journey of a Seeker” on May 19, 2025, in Nashville, Tennessee.

Angelina Alcantar / News Sentinel / USA Today / Reuters

On March 13, 2026, Dolly Parton blows a kiss to fans during the DeWitt Tour on the opening day of Dollywood's 41st season in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.

David Crane / MediaNews Group / Los Angeles Daily News / Getty

Flowers adorn the star of Dolly Parton on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on August 25, 2026.

More American Families Are Refusing Vaccines

2026-08-25T12:59:39-04:00

As millions of children around the country start another school year, they’ll be confronting new classes, new teachers, and, inevitably, a new slate of germs. And this fall, they’ll be more vulnerable to infectious disease than children have been in decades.

Earlier this month, President Trump signed yet another executive order insisting that the United States shrink its schedule of recommended vaccines—federal guidance that currently guards Americans against 17 diseases with safe, effective shots. He also demanded that the U.S. split the MMR vaccine into three separate courses for measles, mumps, and rubella, without citing solid scientific evidence or acknowledging the infeasibility of such a system. (Scholars have already questioned whether the order has legal power.) Days later, the CDC released new data showing that, under Trump, the nationwide vaccine-exemption rate among kindergartners has reached a record high.

The new exemption rate of 4.2 percent is a relatively modest bump, up from the previous school year’s 3.6. The national numbers, though, paper over widening gaps among states. Roughly 98 to 99 percent of West Virginia kindergartners, for instance, are still getting routine shots. Meanwhile, in Idaho, the percentage of kindergartners who are up-to-date on vaccines that guard against diseases such as polio, chickenpox, and measles has tumbled to about 75 percent—well below the estimated thresholds for reliably staving off such outbreaks. These numbers reflect what Thomas Patterson, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Idaho chapter, has been seeing and hearing in the hospitals and clinics where he works: more families expressing skepticism, more families refusing or delaying shots, and more families opting out of his care after he reveals that he supports all of the vaccines that the AAP recommends. (The professional society has sued Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services over its attempts to pare down vaccine recommendations.) Idaho also bans employers, schools, and day cares from requiring medical interventions, including vaccines. Its vaccine-exemption rate is now 17.5 percent, the highest in the nation.

National polls show that the majority of Americans still think vaccines work well to prevent disease, and that at least two-thirds support requiring vaccines in schools. Those sentiments remain especially common in Democratic strongholds. Jennifer Shu, a pediatrician in Atlanta, told me that in the past year and a half, she and her colleagues have been flooded with calls from families who are worried that the vaccines they want for their children could soon be taken away. In response to a request for comment, Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson, told me in an email, “None of the Trump administration’s actions undermine access to or insurance coverage of any vaccine—they instead create an environment that fosters parents making informed decisions together with physicians and public health officials who are supposed to guide and support, not force, crucial vaccinations to ultimately ensure that American children do not suffer from serious vaccine preventable infections.” (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

At the same time, surveys show that national confidence in vaccine safety has eroded, especially among Republicans, who are also far less likely to support school requirements for shots. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the partisan split around vaccine attitudes has been widening. The second Trump administration has exacerbated those tensions, pediatricians around the country told me—and top health officials’ inaccurate portrayals of vaccine side effects seem to have emboldened more people to push back against standard medical advice. Elizabeth Hawse, a pediatrician in Lexington, Kentucky, told me that many of her patients have begun asking whether she’s aware of any new research to indicate that vaccines need to be newly restricted. Those questions tend to follow federal vaccine news: administration officials’ suggestions that the U.S. should mirror Denmark’s trimmer vaccine schedule, or Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s handpicked vaccine advisory committee’s elimination of the long-standing recommendation for universal hepatitis B vaccination at birth. Hawse’s answer is blunt: Nothing has changed.

Faced with doubts that tend to be informed more by politics than by scientific evidence, pediatricians have only so many tools. Sometimes, they can convince families with facts—reassuring them, for instance, that decades of studies have debunked the notion that vaccines cause autism, or correcting Trump’s recent statement that vaccines are the “size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body” (most vaccines are about a tenth of a teaspoon). Other parents respond more to common emotional ground: Hawse tells them that she gave these vaccines to her own children, the oldest of whom is 26. Caitlyn Neltner, another doctor at the same practice as Hawse, told me that she shows patients her own vaccination record from the 1990s. Families seem comforted by the shared experience, Hawse said—and by the fact that the pediatrician-recommended vaccine schedule has remained mostly unchanged for decades.

Some doctors told me that they’ve started spending far longer discussing vaccines with families, and that some conversations stretch across hours or multiple visits—heavy workloads that can sap the time and resources that small practices could otherwise offer to other patients. Benjamin Dowse, a pediatrician in southern Utah, where vaccination rates remain low, told me that, in a few cases, turning a “no” on vaccines into a “yes” has been possible only over the course of several years. Sometimes, the work seems unlikely to ever pay off. Patterson, in Idaho, has learned to pick his battles: Families who buy heavily into conspiracy theories or are adamant that vaccines have harmed their loved ones aren’t likely to be easily persuadable.

Several of the pediatricians I spoke with, especially those in larger cities, told me that they insist their patients follow the AAP-recommended vaccine schedule. But in rural areas, telling families to seek care elsewhere is not really an option, Dowse said. If he pressures people too much about vaccines and they leave his care entirely, they may end up without any pediatrician, which would put their kids at risk of all sorts of preventable health problems.

In places where vaccination rates are not high enough to prevent outbreaks, disease itself can make a powerful argument. Lately, the U.S. has been battling its worst measles resurgence in the past 35 years; just this morning, Pennsylvania announced two measles-associated deaths in unvaccinated residents. A few pediatricians told me that the arrival of the virus in their community has spurred an interest in vaccines, even from previously skeptical families. Lisa Costello, a pediatrician in West Virginia, told me that the grandparents in her community are some of the biggest advocates for vaccines: Many of them can still remember a time before routine polio immunization, when the disabling disease ran rampant, and never want to return to it. Even so, fear of disease isn’t always enough. Vaccination rates have ticked up only slightly in South Carolina, the epicenter of the largest recent measles outbreak—and exemption rates have risen too.

As federal guidance on vaccines softens, states’ ability to require shots is one of the most effective strategies to keep protections against diseases in place. West Virginia—where some counties lack any pediatricians at all and many families must drive long distances to seek care, including vaccines—has maintained some of the highest childhood-vaccination rates in the country for many years because it does not allow nonmedical exemptions. States that have followed West Virginia’s lead, including California, have seen vaccination rates increase as well. Meanwhile, some of the most obvious drops in protection have played out in states where vaccination laws have slackened. Prior to 2023, Mississippi forbade nonmedical exemptions, too, and its kindergarten-vaccination rate was the nation’s highest; more than 99 percent of children met school requirements. But since a federal judge eliminated that restriction, eight counties in the state have dropped below 95 percent, potentially putting them at risk for measles outbreaks.

Last July, citing concerns about falling vaccination rates, the AAP recommended the elimination of all nonmedical exemptions to school-immunization requirements. But in the current political environment, vaccine policies seem more likely to further degrade. In his recent executive order, Trump explicitly embraced liberal exemption policies, citing a need for “maximizing parental choice over childhood vaccines.” Politicians—most of them Republican—and anti-vaccine activist groups have continued to push for the elimination of vaccine requirements in several states as well. In March, before South Carolina’s recent measles outbreak had officially been declared over, state lawmakers killed a Democrat-sponsored bill that would have eliminated religious exemptions for the MMR vaccine for kids in public schools.

Kennedy has told Americans to consult their doctors about vaccination; he’s also urged them to distrust experts and do their own research. Many Americans are, in effect, now being asked to choose between the advice of their preferred politicians and their longtime health-care providers. Anita Henderson, a pediatrician in southern Mississippi, told me that she recently encountered a family who had vaccinated all of their older children but, on the mother’s insistence, were declining shots for their new baby. As they were leaving the appointment, Henderson said, the mother turned back “and made the comment, I’m so glad President Trump made that law changing the vaccine schedule. I’m glad he is bringing to light all the problems that we’re seeing with vaccines.”

By the time that baby is old enough to attend public school, Henderson expects that many more schoolchildren in her state will lack the vaccine safeguards they need. In Mississippi, she said, health department officials have logged more than 7,000 religious exemptions among kids 4 or younger. The more young children who join that poorly protected cohort, the more vulnerable everyone in the community will be the next time a dangerous virus arrives.

The Latest Empty Threat Against Iran

2026-08-25T11:46:32-04:00

No sooner had Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the latest tool for achieving what he said would be the “economic asphyxiation” of Iran than he revealed the reason he was reluctant to use it.

Secondary sanctions—penalties on countries, individuals, or entities that do business with Iran—are ready to go, Bessent announced to reporters in the Treasury’s ornate Cash Room yesterday. But he went out of his way not to name the chief offenders that help Tehran: China and Russia. So, Bessent was asked, why threaten rather than just do it, particularly after President Trump last week warned of economic warfare “on an unprecedented scale” if Iran doesn’t surrender to U.S. demands?

“Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?” Bessent responded, explaining that the administration is offering a bureaucratic grace period before the hammer falls. Secondary sanctions, he insisted, “are a very powerful tool.” Which is true. But the administration has repeatedly offered vivid explanations of what its powerful weapons can do, be they military or financial, and then declined to use them. Remember when Trump threatened to erase Iran as a civilization? The warnings may be intended to intimidate, but the lack of follow-through instead exposes just how narrow the administration’s options in Iran have become.

The possibilities for ending the war have been steadily closed off. The list of useful military targets is diminishing, and munitions stockpiles are perilously depleted, while the tools that were supposed to do what missiles could not—sanctions, blockades, financial pressure—have failed to produce the Iranian capitulation Washington promised. Iran has absorbed enormous damage, both military and economic, without surrendering its capacity to fight. And the countries that matter most to the financial-pressure campaign, including China and Russia, have shown little inclination to help Washington finish the job.

Soon after Trump took office last year, he announced that he was “restoring maximum pressure” on Iran, directing his administration to tighten sanctions and drive down Iranian oil exports. Eighteen months later, Bessent is promising what he describes as the “toughest sanctions in history.” Maximum pressure, it appears, has a sequel, much as Trump’s contention last June that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been obliterated was followed in February by a war to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

Trump, in a Truth Social post last week, hinted at what that sequel to maximum pressure would look like. “ANY country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences,” he wrote, before listing oil smuggling, financial swap lines, cash transfers, exchange houses, ship registries, and front companies that “all” need to stop “NOW.” It was the kind of warning designed to make the entire global financial system sit up straight. Then Bessent arrived at the Cash Room making equally stark threats, before pointing to a major reason why he shouldn’t follow through, assuming countries don’t voluntarily comply.

That leaves the administration in an uncomfortable position. The war has lasted far longer than Trump suggested it would, and its economic consequences are now a central issue in the midterm elections. Sanctions have inflicted economic pain on Iran for years without producing the result Washington wants. Yet China continues to buy Iranian oil, while Russia and other oil-producing countries stand to benefit from the drain of prolonged U.S. military action in Iran and from disruptions to energy exported from the Persian Gulf. “No one is above the reach of U.S. sanctions,” Bessent said when asked about China specifically.

But Beijing and Moscow might not comply with Bessent’s demands. The Russian embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington told me in a written statement that “sanctions and pressure tactics do no help in resolving issues” and called on all parties to “act rationally” and to avoid doing anything “that may further escalate tensions or deal a blow to global economic growth and financial stability.” The spokesperson added that China will watch the developments and “do what is necessary to protect our legitimate rights and interests.”

[Read: The forever negotiation]

The administration’s threats have yielded some results. The United Arab Emirates last week said it was stopping all trade and financial transactions with Tehran. Asked about the announcement by the UAE, Bessent suggested that the timing was no coincidence. He added that Trump was speaking with world leaders to deliver his ultimatum personally.

But although the U.S. can certainly make Iran’s relationships more expensive, it can’t wish them away. I tried to gauge how worried officials from around the world were about these threats of economic annihilation for the noncompliant. One Arab official told me they hoped “those countries”—this person, too, declined to name China or Russia—would “take this seriously.” A European official was less impressed. “We’ll see,” this person said, before quickly changing the subject to Trump’s trade wars with allies, which appears to command considerably more European attention.

Bessent may have been full of bravado. But his caution is also well-founded. Following through with the full slate of secondary sanctions against all offenders would indeed be devastating to the global economy. “These tools are so potent,” Jason Prince, a sanctions attorney at the Washington-based law firm Akin Gump who previously served as a lawyer at the Treasury Department, told me. Announcing secondary sanctions, even as a threat, is an economic gamble, Prince said, with “a chilling effect that has repercussions that reverberate well beyond Iran.”

Bessent also announced immediate sanctions on nearly 60 Iran-linked entities, people, and vessels, accusing them of having links to Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, cyber activities, and oil shipments. He added that the first major secondary sanctions against “a financial institution” are likely to come “by the end of this week.”

Prince said that the latter threat will be key for the administration’s credibility. “They have to take some sort of action, or the de-risking and the retreat by the real targets isn’t going to take place,” he told me. He said similar measures were taken against Russian banks after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But Sberbank, the titan of Russian banking, was first placed on a less severe sanctions list—a reflection, in part, of the impact that sanctioning the bank would have globally. (Tougher sanctions on the bank were eventually imposed as Russian attacks on Ukraine continued.)

The problem here, Prince added, is that secondary sanctions make the U.S. more vulnerable when its own economy is already under pressure, with the technology, manufacturing, and financial sectors likely to bear the brunt. Oil and gasoline prices have already risen, inflation remains a problem, and voters are unhappy with a conflict they were told would make their country safer. The American public’s approval of the war with Iran has fallen to its lowest level since the first days of the conflict, with just 31 percent supporting U.S. military action against Iran, while Trump’s ⁠popularity also sits at a record low, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. With the midterms approaching, Republicans have little reason to welcome another round of economic pain, let alone the possible U.S.-induced global financial crisis that Bessent talked about.

[Read: From ‘indispensable’ ally to target of annihilation]

Regional experts I spoke with see sanctions threats like this less as an escalation strategy than as the latest step in the administration’s continuing search for an exit from the war. The administration keeps reaching for a bigger threat because the last one failed to deliver a decisive victory, or even a face-saving off-ramp. Deadlines move. Threats get grace periods. “Maximum pressure” is followed by more maximum pressure. The question is no longer simply how Washington plans to force Iran to negotiate. It is how the U.S. gets out of a war in which its options seem only to shrink.

Leverage depends not just on possessing the power to punish, but on the willingness to use that power. If Washington repeatedly announces a deadline and then moves it, threatens a consequence and then delays, or unveils a weapon and immediately explains why it cannot be fully deployed, its adversaries don’t see geopolitical might—instead, they learn something about the limits of American power.

Bessent threatened a sanctions regime so severe that countries around the world would have to choose between doing business with Iran and having access to the U.S. dollar system. Bessent and Trump described the announcement as an “economic D-Day,” but that is not an apt comparison. The real D-Day, on June 6, 1944, was an actual invasion. It came without a public ultimatum or a warning to the enemy about what was coming. This operation, officially dubbed “Operation Economic Outcast,” has both put countries on notice while also delivering a message that the U.S. will go only so far.

“We believe that it is important to level-set, and give people a cure period,” Bessent told reporters. “But they should know that that will move very quickly and that we are serious,” he added. “If people do not want to meet our expectations, then we expect, and they should expect, that they will leave the dollar system.”

[Read: Iran unleashed]

Even here, the administration appears to be discovering that maximum pressure is easier to announce than to impose. After all, Iran has been under U.S. sanctions for decades. Those have undoubtedly done damage to the Iranian economy but have done nothing to push Iran closer to the negotiating table in search of a lasting peace with Washington. When Iran entered into the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal, the relief it received in return came from the lifting of U.S. secondary sanctions. Prince told me that secondary sanctions could reinstate that leverage. “There’s at least that historical precedent,” he said, “that the more secondary sanctions pressure that can be applied, the more leverage the U.S. government believes it has with respect to the Iranians.”

But Steve H. Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, told me the economic reality, to date, is that sanctions against Iran have had “a near-perfect record of failure.”

“Just look at the plethora of sanctions that have been placed on Iran since the Islamic Revolution of 1979—they have all failed to achieve their stated objectives,” Hanke, who served on President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, said. “The D-Day sanctions will meet the same fate.”

The military campaign has failed to produce the quick resolution Trump once promised. Now the economic campaign is in danger of following suit, while also adding to the domestic costs of war.

Portrait of the Artist as a Movie Star

2026-08-25T07:30:00-04:00

A few months ago, I traveled to a new city in a foreign country to talk about a book I’d written. At lunch one day, my host told me about a publishing acquaintance of hers who’d hosted the writer Rachel Cusk some years back, only to find herself seemingly replicated later, in cartoonish and (she felt) unflattering form, within one of the books in Cusk’s Outline trilogy. The woman was apparently devastated; although Cusk had withheld some details, the portrait, according to its presumptive subject, was specific and precise enough that anyone who knew her and read the book would immediately recognize the person being portrayed.

“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is indefensible,” Janet Malcolm wrote in her classic 1990 book, The Journalist and the Murderer, about a nonfiction writer who used ethically questionable means to get close to a subject. Does the same theory hold true for autofiction? The license that art allows is generous, which Cusk has learned to make use of. On the occasions when she’s written openly autobiographical works, she’s been pilloried, or even sued: Her 2001 book about motherhood, A Life’s Work, was lambasted in the British press for its frank portrait of maternal self-abnegation, and her 2009 book The Last Supper sparked a libel lawsuit from a man who took issue with her depiction of him. (The publisher settled the suit and printed a revised version of the book.)

But it was Cusk’s 2012 memoir about her divorce, Aftermath, and the excoriation she received for its exposure of supposed private family matters, that seemed to bring her to a breaking point. “Without wishing to sound melodramatic, it was creative death after Aftermath,” she told The Guardian two years after publication. “That was the end. I was heading into total silence—an interesting place to find yourself when you are quite developed as an artist.”

[Read: The uncoupling]

Instead of retreating, she turned that silence into its own ingenious form. Outline, published in 2014, is about a writer named Faye who’s traveling to Greece to teach creative writing, and its conceit is that Faye is an almost entirely passive vehicle for other people’s stories, which different characters spill out to her with unguarded enthusiasm. The book and two following installments, Transit and Kudos, were categorized as novels, which offered more protection than Cusk had previously been allowed. Still, Cusk made clear that what she was really interested in as a writer was truth—the resonance of pure reality. “I’m certain autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts,” she said in that same Guardian interview, which is an unusual thing to declare on a promotional tour for a work of ostensible fiction.

Life of M, Cusk’s newest book, takes autofiction’s familiar dance of authorial ambiguity and shakes it into something odd and unsettling. “A little while ago I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography,” it begins. M, as has been widely reported, is believed to be either based on or inspired by the actor Natalie Portman, who has praised Cusk’s writing and featured it in her book club. Both women live in Paris, where Life of M seems to be set. M is described as having first become famous as a child, and two of her roles—playing a ballerina and a performer who survives a school shooting—seem easily recognizable as Portman’s roles in Black Swan and Vox Lux. M, like Portman, is an avid reader, a mother, and a star of such renown that the world bends itself to accommodate her. When the narrator proposes writing about M to her, the actor initially likes the idea, asking wryly, “Would you just make it up?”

For most of the book, like M, we’re left to wonder what the answer to that question is. Cusk has long blown up form and genre in her attempts to capture the authenticity of female experience. Her pursuit is relentless and uncompromising; it’s also bound by a logic that only Cusk herself seems to really understand. (You cannot write an autobiography of another person, any more than you can write a fictionalized portrait of one of the most recognizable women alive and expect most people to understand what about it is or isn’t true.) Life of M is a strange book, written with cold formality. But in its final pages, it performs an astonishing rug pull that makes you wonder whether the book actually has been an autobiography all along, interested in exposing not M but the knotty and unpalatable process of Cusk’s art.

In the first pages of Life of M, the author meets M at a bookstore. We are told that M is “interested in books,” that she is small and her house is large, and that “her smile had a sweetness that almost seemed to reproach those who look at it for their dim and suspicious view of life.” The author finds it “hard not to feel ugly next to M”—the words ugly and ugliness appear almost 30 separate times over the book’s 180 or so pages—but seems drawn to the contours of their difference. M is portrayed as kind and thoughtful; the author comes across—intentionally, I am presuming—as surly and paranoid. “I had never learned how to make experience easier for myself,” she writes. “For M it was the reverse. Her difficulty lay in her distance from the random violence of insignificance.”

After this short introductory section, we do not hear directly from the author again until the end of the book, when she goes to meet M to discuss what she’s written. The chapters in the middle toggle between scenes describing M’s life and more elliptical sections written in the first-person plural, which seem to interrogate experiences shared by the author and M. “We live in the same city but millions of other people live here too,” the first of those first-person-plural installments begins. That city is beautiful yet unstable, full of sidewalk cafés and cultural venues and tourists, but also of “angry people, people who shout and rail in the streets.” Cusk, in these sections, has the wafty portentousness of a stoned philosopher. “Often we don’t know what to do, how to occupy ourselves,” she writes. “Then at other times, we’re very busy and the idea of creating ourselves seems less important. But suddenly we find it is there, the question: Who are we? Yet everyone else seems to know who we are.”

These interludes are, however, brief; the majority of the book comprises the descriptions of M engaged in the day-to-day business of her life: She reads Marcus Aurelius in a hotel room, she conducts research for a role by visiting an archive related to a historical figure, she meets a friend for coffee. Cusk begins many of these scenes with the same French-inflected sentence structure: “It is a hotel room in a foreign city.” “It is an office, square and high-ceilinged, with walls of paneled wood.” “It is the interior of a limousine. The air inside it is scentless and almost without temperature.”

The descriptions sometimes go on for several pages, as though Cusk is writing stage directions or action lines in a screenplay. But inevitably, we end up in M’s inner thoughts. She struggles to relate to a friend’s depression. Returning home after an acting job, she feels strangely like she needs to get into character as herself. At a dinner party one night, as a pie is cut up and served at the communal table, she senses “a great chasm of loneliness and terror yawn inside her, as though this knife were intended for her. She would be split open and made to come out.”

Some authorial projection here seems likely, given the precision with which Cusk describes M’s emotions, the “sensation of ground glass running in her veins instead of blood” when she has to meet with a man with whom she formerly had a relationship, who once “relished her fame” but now “sees it as a limitless series of opportunities for contempt.” But the descriptions of M sitting on a terrace above an olive grove, or meeting with her creative team, or participating in a book event sponsored by a fashion house feel distinctly real. They have the chilly detachment and careful texture of observation. They’re also laced with what feels like judgment: While reading on her terrace, M “lifts her eyes to the horizon with its primitive blue-grey shapes of islands washed in milky light, for the book is in French and does not entirely hold her attention.”

Several times, Cusk refers to M as having projects: She makes a point of befriending interesting people, for instance, or tries to mentor “younger female actors” to help them “avoid some of her own errors and misconceptions.” What is Cusk’s project? Toward the end of the book, the author returns, showing M “some of what only I was referring to as our project. She didn’t seem to like it very much. She said we needed to talk.” The author goes to see M in her big house, taking care to describe the scrolled mantelpiece of the fireplace, the polished herringbone parquet of the floor. M doesn’t like how she’s been portrayed. “It’s hurtful,” she says. “But it isn’t you,” the author explains. “It isn’t anyone.”

M points out that “she had never been to any of the places I described, nor done the things I had narrated.” The author struggles to communicate how none of that matters—that what she’s written isn’t a portrait of M but a rendering of the author’s own “private interior world” refracted through someone else. But all M can see are deficiencies—or, rather, the author’s projections of them—made real on the page. “You’ve made it seem like I lack humanity,” she says. “But you’re just playing a character,” the author replies. “The character was invented by me. So if that’s true, then it’s me it’s true of.”

[Read: In defense of fakeness]

Is Life of M about Portman, or Cusk, or neither, or both? Cusk’s “we” seems to seek out points of commonality between the two, despite their many differences: Both are well known, though to different degrees; both have seemingly difficult or tense relationships with their parents; both have had intimate relationships end under public scrutiny; both work in creative realms, although M insists that she is not a creator but “merely an element in the creations of others,” a statement that bears extra weight by the end of the book. And yet in its final pages, the author finds her power as a writer—the capricious and godlike influence of the storyteller—bludgeoned by M’s authority, her look of “mechanical power, a power that seemed to erase what it looked on.”

That final scene is freighted with tension. M is cold and angry; she feels betrayed. She forbids the author from using her name. More significant, everything we’ve read in the book thus far (the descriptions, the interiority, the endless self-scrutiny) is seemingly revealed to be false. M is just one more person left offended by the author’s excavation of her. The author, for her part, doesn’t seem to care about the truth of who M is—“I haven’t even googled you,” she says—so much as how she can manipulate the idea of M to make sense of her own life. During a year when the author had been preoccupied with her partner’s grave illness, she says, her focus on M “had enabled me to leave and go and live in someone else.”

To be a writer in this way is to be parasitic—to latch onto someone real and to try to draw out their life force to make art. It isn’t exactly defensible, but for Cusk to expose that practice is deeply fascinating, particularly in a book that some were always going to see as ethically fraught—and that many readers will be reading anyway in hopes of revelation and insight. Which is, Cusk might argue, the whole point of literature: that even, or especially, in its most uncomfortable form, it offers us moments of authentic humanity that thrum with recognition.

“I don’t really believe in character,” Cusk once told the author Sheila Heti. “I believe in moments of truth.” There is, Heti said in response, “a darkness in how far away we are from truth, how all the forces in life sort of conspire to keep one away from it.” But there’s also a darkness in seeking to uncover it, especially when the truth at hand isn’t your own. I can’t decide whether Cusk’s willingness to delineate and accept this paradox in Life of M is admirably resolute or absolutely merciless. Or both.

The Qataris Gave Trump an Airplane. He Crippled Their Country in Return.

2026-08-25T07:24:53-04:00

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Donald Trump really wanted the plane. The Qataris had flown the $400 million Boeing 747 to West Palm Beach just after he returned to the White House so he could run his hands over the soft leather chairs and inspect the sycamore- and wacapou-wood veneers. A sales brochure had described the en-suite master bathroom, with its mother-of-pearl inlays, as “almost a piece of art.”

The plane was a flying palace fit for a Persian Gulf monarch, or an American president who would like to live like one. But its operating costs—about $25,000 per flight hour—were steep even for the Qatari royal family. The government had been trying to sell it for five years.

The Qataris knew Trump would want the plane. They understood the man, and his taste. It sat in the same aesthetic register as the comparatively puny “Trump Force One,” the gold-heavy Boeing 757 that he had flown as a private citizen. They also knew that Trump didn’t like the aging, baby-blue 747s that had been carrying presidents since 1990. He’d ordered two new planes from Boeing in 2018, but they were years behind schedule. Trump wanted the 11-bathroom Qatari plane, repainted in a red-white-and-blue color scheme. And he wanted it in time for a flyover on America’s 250th birthday.

This was an absurd demand. Air Force One is meant to serve as an airborne military command post. The Qatari jet would have to be stripped to the studs and retrofitted with encrypted-communications equipment, as well as special material to shield it against the radiological blast of a nuclear weapon, and a variety of countermeasures to foil missiles and rockets. It had taken a Parisian design firm four years to complete the plane’s interiors. It could take American engineers at least that long to convert the jet into a flying fortress.

But these were details to be worked out later. Or not. The Qataris drew up the paperwork for a government-to-government sale. But they should have seen Trump’s next move coming.

People close to Trump—it’s still not clear who—suggested to the Qataris that instead of selling the plane, they could donate it to the United States. A gift. A freebie from “friends” who had already put hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s son-in-law’s private-equity firm and bought a debt-laden Manhattan hotel belonging to Steve Witkoff, his Middle East special envoy, for $623 million. That’s to say nothing of the $8 billion they’d spent to build the Americans an air base—the biggest U.S. military base in the Middle East—or their plans to spend $10 billion more to enhance and maintain it. What was another $400 million, for a plane that the president so dearly loved?

Even some Qatari leaders were surprised by the president’s gall. But they did what they’ve always done when an American official has asked them for something dubious—politically, ethically, or even legally. They said yes.

It’s not easy to buy good press, though the Qataris have tried. But it also takes real effort to generate the kind of bad press the plane brought to a country whose name many Americans probably can’t pronounce correctly (it’s kah-tar). The bipartisan outrage in Washington was incandescent. The plane was a flying emolument, an obvious constitutional violation. “Only a FOOL would not accept this gift on behalf of our Country,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. But what Trump couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see is that only a fool would view the plane as anything other than a massive bribe, especially given that Trump said publicly that he planned to have it transferred to his presidential library once he leaves office.

[Paul Rosenzweig: American corruption]

Even by the immoderate standards of the Persian Gulf, it’s quite a move to give a world leader a free airplane. But the Qataris had already given one to the president of Turkey, and they saw that bad press dissipates. And as the Qataris know, probably better than anyone, the price with Trump is always high.

To understand this strange deal—so absurdly corrupt that there is nothing analogous in the history of the American executive branch—it’s necessary to understand Qatar, the rare country with both the means and the disposition to even contemplate it. The Qataris don’t have allies. They have investments. Their investments in American relationships are undoubtedly their most important, and they’ve provided billions of dollars of diplomatic and military-support services to the U.S. But at the same time they’ve been providing money to America’s defense, they’ve also provided support to America’s enemies.

The Qataris play every side, and many of their partners resent them for it. Nonetheless, for decades their experience seemed to show that they really could just buy their national security, along with global influence and even a cosmopolitan culture. Trump must initially have seemed to them to be an ideal partner. And indeed, just four months after the delivery of his airplane, in September 2025, the president signed an executive order that ostensibly guaranteed American protection.

But recently, Qatar’s leaders haven’t gotten what they paid for. In February, the United States attacked Iran with practically no warning to the Qataris, despite the fact that they host a major U.S. military base. Then Iran attacked Qatar, badly damaging the country’s natural-gas facilities, the main source of its wealth. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the only route available to Qatar to export its natural gas, which must be liquefied for transport and is complex to deliver. The country’s neighbors can move oil over land and are planning to build new pipelines now that Iran controls the waterway. But Qatar is stuck, uniquely afflicted by the misadventures of the guy who took their airplane.

In Trump, the Qataris had met a man who could not be bought. He could be paid, and expected to be. But the security the Qataris hoped for turned out to be a protection racket. A man who doesn’t remember yesterday never asks Are we friends? He only wants to know, What have you done for me lately?

Qatar would never have had so much to lose had it not won the geological lottery. In 1971, engineers with Shell who were prospecting for oil 50 miles off the coast came upon a promising Triassic-period limestone formation about 200 feet below the ocean surface. To their surprise, it turned out to contain natural gas.

Subsequent mapping revealed that the gas field was not merely large. It was gargantuan—roughly twice the size of Delaware. So much natural gas was seeping out of the ground that previously unknown species of bacteria had evolved just to consume it. In this one continuous structure was 20 percent of the world’s known natural-gas reserves.

The deposit was a one-of-a-kind bounty. Thanks to their oil reserves, which were modest for the region, the Qataris were already rich. But the North Field, as the new gas deposit became known, made them unfathomably so. It took 25 years and a meaningful chunk of Qatar’s wealth for the country’s ruling Al Thani family to develop the field. Recently, annual liquefied-natural-gas revenue has been roughly $50 billion, which accounts for about a quarter of Qatar’s gross domestic product.

Younger Qataris wouldn’t recognize the country their grandparents inhabited in their youth. It was a poor and forgettable protuberance on the east coast of Saudi Arabia before large oil shipments began in the mid-20th century. Pearl diving accounted for much of its economy. Now the government pays for Qataris’ health care throughout their lives. It pays for their higher education, having imported universities from the U.S.: Georgetown, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, and other colleges have branches there, supported by Qatari largesse. Qataris pay no income tax, and foreign residents, who make up 90 percent of the country’s 3.3 million people, do just about all of the physical labor. You are unlikely to see a Qatari behind a cash register, driving a taxi, waiting on a table, or picking up a piece of litter. (Thanks to the foreign workers who perform the most menial tasks, you are also unlikely to see much, if any, litter on a Qatari street.) And now, with all the money in the world, the Qataris have extended their influence well beyond their borders.

The Qataris have been drawn to trophy real estate and major international events, such as Formula 1 races and the World Cup, which Qatar hosted in 2022 under a cloud of allegations (all denied) that they had bribed the selection committee. When it won its bid, Qatar didn’t even have stadiums in which to play the matches. The Qataris built them, of course, seven in all, along with new roads and public-transportation systems. Well, they didn’t. Migrant laborers did the work, and thousands of them died, according to human-rights organizations. Undeterred by scandal or by summer temperatures that often reach 120 degrees, last year Qatar announced its bid to host the Olympic Games in 2036.

In London, the Qataris’ state investment fund owns Harrod’s, the Shard (Western Europe’s tallest building), a portion of Heathrow Airport, and about a quarter of the district of Mayfair, also known as Little Doha, in the city’s center. In France, it has the Paris Saint-Germain Football Club, and in Washington, it holds a minority stake in the Wizards, the Capitals, and the Mystics. In New York, it’s got the Plaza and St. Regis hotels and a stake in the Empire State Building.

Qatar is also the world’s largest acquirer of fine art. The country’s collection of paintings and sculptures is estimated to be worth $40 billion, advisers who helped amass it told me. The works, which include some of the most expensive paintings ever sold at auction, are destined for museums that Qatar is still constructing.

But more than buildings, art, or global sporting events, Qatar invests in relationships, and one above all others. When Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani overthrew his father to become emir in 1995, he told the American ambassador that he wanted Qatar to be the United States’ most valuable ally in the Gulf. This was an audacious proposal from a 43-year-old ruler who imagined that his upstart emirate had anything to offer the world’s remaining superpower. But Hamad and the favorite of his three wives, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, had a shared vision for Qatar to become a modern nation, rooted in traditional Muslim culture, and they needed a protector. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States’ large military presence in Saudi Arabia became untenable. The Americans needed a new military base, so Hamad gave them one.

Al Udeid Air Base, located southwest of Doha, is now home to about 10,000 U.S. military personnel, as well as the Middle East headquarters of U.S. Central Command. Its runway, more than two miles long, can accommodate heavy cargo planes, aerial-refueling tankers, and fully loaded B-52 bombers.

The Qataris performed other services, too, becoming a diplomatic back channel for the United States to communicate with extremist groups, including the Taliban and branches of al-Qaeda. They hired retired U.S. military officers and diplomats whom they’d worked with as lobbyists and advisers. In 2022, after Qatar helped evacuate U.S. personnel from Afghanistan, President Biden called it a “good friend and reliable and capable partner.” To label this partnership an alliance would be overselling each side’s contributions, and Biden’s comments glossed over the times when Qatar was less than reliable. The relationship was mostly transactional from the start. But for two decades, it worked, by and large, for both sides.

President Trump unveils the 747 Boeing jetliner donated by the government of Qatar and painted red, white, and blue, on June 19. (Allison Robbert / The New York Times / Redux)

“I trust Qatar like I trust a rest-stop bathroom,” the inimitable Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, told Fox News not long after Trump’s airplane deal was announced. One of his Republican colleagues, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, likened the plane to a Trojan horse, citing security concerns.

Their worries weren’t solely based on the gift of the airplane. The Qataris spend lavishly on their friends, but they have also broadly defined who counts as one. For decades, Doha has provided support of one sort or another to some of the very groups that the United States has tried to eradicate.

In the mid-1990s, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the future architect of the September 11 attacks, worked in a Qatari government ministry while plotting terrorist attacks against the United States. He fled the country after a member of the ruling family, who Mohammad later said had paid for some of his jihadist activities, reportedly tipped him off to an FBI manhunt. One former U.S. official told me that when the CIA was searching for Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks, the Qataris obtained information about his communications and potential whereabouts but declined to share everything they knew about the origins of that information with the Americans.

Qatar has had diplomatic relations with Iran for more than 50 years. Its approach has been partly pragmatic—about a third of the massive natural-gas field that Qatar depends on lies in Iranian territory. But its steady engagement is unusual in the region and a major irritant to Qatar’s neighbors.

Hamad’s regime cultivated ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and anti-Israel clerics, including one who famously praised suicide bombers. In the mid-’90s, Qatar established and funded Al Jazeera, creating a media network putatively free from state censorship but that reliably railed against Israel. And in 2012, the emir became the first head of state to visit Gaza since Hamas had violently taken power five years earlier. He brought $400 million in reconstruction aid. That year, Hamas also moved its political headquarters from Damascus to Doha. The country’s strong embrace of a group designated as a terrorist organization in the U.S. sets it apart from other Muslim monarchies, just as its stance toward Iran does. During the Obama administration, U.S. officials publicly put the Qataris on notice for lax financial regulations that made their banking system a useful money-laundering network for extremists and terrorists.

The many U.S. intelligence officers, diplomats, and military veterans I spoke with consistently offered the same appraisal: It would be inaccurate to say that Qatar directly “supports terrorism,” but the country’s money and politics support an environment that helps terrorism and extremism flourish.

The Qataris justify their involvement with a wide range of regional players by saying that they are a small country, beset by chaos on each side, that cannot afford to make many enemies. They say that active outreach puts them in position to help solve conflicts within the region, and even outside it. Since the late ’90s, their diplomats have acted as mediators, negotiators, and go-betweens for violent political disputes, proxy battles, and full-on wars in Lebanon, Yemen, Darfur, and more. Qatar has been involved in talks between rival Palestinian factions, between Chad and Sudan, between the U.S. and, respectively, the Taliban, Venezuela, and Iran. Last year, Qatari officials told me, their teams were participating in a dozen separate negotiations at once.

“You can literally draw a small circle around Qatar, where an oasis of stability exists,” Majed Mohammed al-Ansari, an adviser to the prime minister and the chief spokesperson for the foreign-affairs ministry, told me not long ago. “And even that oasis keeps shrinking.” The alternative to trying to tamp down surrounding flare-ups, he said, is “basically watching your house burn down while drinking tea.”

Qatar has sometimes been called “the Switzerland of the Middle East,” but it isn’t. Neutrality is the cornerstone of Swiss foreign policy. (The country didn’t even join the United Nations until 2002.) Qatar funnels money to some of the parties whose conflicts it tries to resolve—sometimes it is paying both opposing parties in one way or another—and it takes political positions that neutral countries avoid.

Much of the country’s mediation and back-channeling has benefited the U.S., and some has come at its behest. Qatari officials are quick to point out that the American government asked them to host Hamas, so that Washington could open an indirect channel with its leaders. This is true, up to a point. Washington had concluded that Qatar was likely going to let Hamas move in anyway, after the group was expelled from Syria. “We did ask, but it was like pushing on an open door,” a former U.S. official who was serving at the time told me.

What skeptics in Washington call duplicity, Qatar calls a balancing act. Regardless of what you call it, building and maintaining relationships with dubious actors has turned out to be, in itself, a source of influence and leverage. It also, some Qataris admitted to me, helps keep the ruling family from becoming targets of terrorists.

Above all, the Qataris hedge their bets. They are morally flexible rather than rigidly ideological. True, some conservative Islamists in the government have embraced extremists and bridled at Qatar’s rush into modernity. But they have also failed to stop it. The country’s relationships are not passionate; they are tactical and serve the national strategy: to be safe, to have influence, and to remain very, very rich.

Trump must have seemed a gift to the Qataris when he was first elected in 2016. Here was an unashamedly acquisitive leader who showed plenty of ideological flexibility where there was a deal to be done. But the indications that he might care little about Qatar’s preexisting relationship with the U.S. came early and were hard to miss.

On May 23, 2017, the Qatar News Agency’s website and social-media feeds published comments attributed to Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who had succeeded his father as emir four years earlier, praising Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran’s regional proxy militia. Tamim reputedly cautioned other nations not to confront Iran, which he called an “Islamic power.”

There is persuasive evidence that the Qatari sites were hacked and the emir’s comments faked. But Qatar’s neighbors were incensed, and on June 5, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt simultaneously severed diplomatic ties with Qatar. They expelled Qatari citizens and closed land, air, and sea routes to the country, disrupting imports overnight. The tiny nation was blockaded.

At a dire moment like this, Qatar might have expected that its strategic investment in the United States would pay off. But Trump encouraged the blockade. Barely six months into his first term, he had just wrapped up a summit with Arab leaders in Riyadh, his first trip abroad as president, where he awkwardly swayed in a ceremonial sword dance and laid hands with the Saudi king on a strange glowing orb. Trump gave a major speech about combating terrorism. As the blockade took hold, he went on Twitter:

So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!

It’s doubtful that Trump understood the nuances of terrorist financing in the Middle East. But he had done business with the Saudis as a private citizen. A Saudi prince had bought Trump’s yacht in the early 1990s, when he was a real-estate developer deep in debt and in need of cash. And during the presidential campaign, Trump had registered eight companies that, based on their names, appeared set up for a potential hotel deal in Saudi Arabia.

Trump’s friends in Riyadh had just moved against the host of the United States’ biggest Middle Eastern military base. Despite American grievances about Qatar’s support for extremism, it’s very hard to imagine that another president would have green-lighted the blockade.

Qatar, of course, had resources available to weather the crisis. To guarantee that its residents would have enough milk and yogurt, for instance, the government flew in more than 3,000 dairy cows from Europe, Australia, and California aboard Qatar Airways. The government subsidized a new farm in the desert, and within two years Qatar was a dairy exporter.

By late 2019, Qatar and its neighbors were quietly talking, and tensions eased. The Trump administration, by then, was in a hurry to confront Iran and wanted a united front in the Gulf. The Americans urged the parties to reconcile. Qatar took effective measures to clean up its banking system, a long-sought U.S. objective. And in August 2018, an asset-management company in which Qatar was a major investor announced it had agreed to lease a Manhattan office building owned by Kushner Companies for more than $1 billion, saving the family business of Trump’s son-in-law from debt. The crisis in the Gulf officially ended in 2021, when Qatar and its neighbors reestablished diplomatic ties.

Trump had burned the Qataris with his support for the blockade, but he’d come back around. And the whole episode seemed to reaffirm the idea that with Trump in charge, the power of money was ascendant. Certainly, Qatar started acting more nakedly on that premise.

Since Trump was first elected, Qatar has paid nearly $250 million to at least 88 different lobbying and public-relations firms in the United States. Washington is steeped in influence peddling, but Qatar’s largesse is out of proportion for such a small country. It has hired several officials and advisers in Trump’s orbit—to do what, other than be a friend of Qatar, is not always clear. FBI Director Kash Patel and former Attorney General Pam Bondi received payments from Qatar before joining the current administration. (As AG, Bondi reportedly signed a memo saying the Qatari plane transfer was legal.) White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was a co-chair of a public-affairs firm that lobbied on behalf of the country.

Qatari cash sloshes across the political aisle. The country’s advisers have included staff members who worked for Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the foreign-relations committee, as well as the late Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump’s friend and frequent golfing buddy.

From 2021 through June 2025, Qatar’s agents officially reported 627 in-person meetings with U.S. political contacts, more than any other country. Many of them were with Graham, who lambasted Qatar for its support of Hamas “and other terrorist groups” after the October 7 attacks, but later called Qatar “our allies” after Qatar Airways announced it would purchase up to 210 Boeing Dreamliners assembled in Graham’s home state of South Carolina.

Qatar throws lavish parties in Washington and flies politicians, journalists, and social-media influencers to Qatar every year for the Doha Forum, covering their first-class airfare and five-star-hotel accommodations. In May 2025 at the Qatar Economic Forum, another marquee event where the country tries to showcase its influence and convening power, the news about Trump’s new airplane had just broken. The prime minister seemed annoyed during an onstage interview. “I don’t know why people are thinking about it as a bribery or consider it as Qatar wants to buy influence with this administration,” Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said, without evident irony. “We need to overcome this stereotype,” he added, that Qatar tries to buy influence in the U.S.

The next month, Iran attacked Qatar for the first time. More than a dozen short- and medium-range ballistic missiles targeted the American military base in a largely performative retaliation for U.S. air strikes on Iran, which Trump claimed, falsely, had “obliterated” its nuclear facilities.

Then, in September, Israel launched an air strike on Hamas’s political office in Doha, killing six people, including a Qatari security official. The country could now claim the unenviable distinction of having been attacked by Iran and Israel in the same year.

The Qataris got a little payback: Trump was furious because he had been angling for a Nobel Peace Prize for ending the war in Gaza, and cease-fire negotiations, facilitated by the Qataris, had been under way. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was screwing up his plans. Trump claimed not to have known that the strike on Qatar was coming and tried to get Qatari diplomats back to the negotiating table. He insisted that Netanyahu apologize to his Qatari counterpart. In front of photographers, Netanyahu called the prime minister from the Oval Office and read from a script partly written by Ali al-Thawadi, a Qatari fixer, who watched the scene from a chair near the Resolute Desk.

[Franklin Foer: Why the Gulf monarchs shower Trump with gifts]

For a time, it seemed like Qatar would get more still from the attack, and from its long and expensive cultivation of Trump and his allies. The same day as Netanyahu’s apology, Trump issued an executive order that any attack on the “territory, sovereignty, or critical infrastructure” of Qatar would be considered a threat to the peace and security of the United States. To go with that security guarantee, the Defense Department announced that Qatari fighter pilots would train at a U.S. air base in Idaho.

But like all of Trump’s guarantees, this one didn’t amount to much. After the U.S. and Israel again began attacking Iran on February 28, despite efforts by Qatar and other governments in the region to prevent the war, Iran struck the main natural-gas processing facility in Qatar. The energy minister said that the damage reduced export capacity by 17 percent, a hobbling blow to the economy.

The attack followed an Israeli strike on an Iranian natural-gas plant, and as with Israel’s earlier air strike on Doha, Trump claimed not to have known about it in advance. Officials in Doha were furious again, and this time they were frightened. Qatar’s entire relationship with Iran, which lay at the core of so many of its disputes with its Gulf cousins, was premised on pragmatic coexistence. Trump’s war was breaking that peace.

Between Iran’s missile attack and its closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the only transit point for Qatari gas, the country has had little choice but to shut down its liquefied-natural-gas production entirely since the war began. The lifeblood of the nation’s ambitions, plans, and influence is drying up. And Qatar’s global strategy, premised on so many contradictory bets, is crumbling. It’s hard to say these days who ranks higher on the list of threats to the emirate: Israel, which has long been Qatar’s main adversary; the United States, its most important strategic partner; or Iran, which controls the strait for the foreseeable future.

During a two-month period this summer, while the American president declared the war in Iran over, then back on again, Iran continued to strike Qatar. On America’s 250th birthday, the president’s new jet flew low over Washington, part of an all-day aviation spectacle that shook the walls and windows of houses in the capital, including mine. The retrofit had reportedly cost more than $1 billion, two and a half times the Qataris’ initial asking price. But the president seemed to think he’d gotten what the country had paid for. The jet was “the largest and the greatest in every aspect,” a “flying White House at a level of luxury no one has ever seen before.”

As the plane heads off to a hangar, to be retrofitted again for the security features it needs to protect the commander in chief, Qatar’s negotiators sit in Doha trying to find an off-ramp between the Americans and the Iranians. The middleman is stuck in the middle—right where they always put themselves.

Party in the (Downwardly Mobile) U.S.A.

2026-08-25T07:00:00-04:00

With every passing year, Miley Cyrus’s 2009 single “Party in the U.S.A.” comes to feel more like an artifact of an empire before its fall. When the Disney Channel star sang about hopping off the plane at LAX with a dream and a cardigan—on the way to turn her country-girl ambitions of fame into Hollywood reality—she projected an image of a nation that still believed in its own myths, trusted its power centers, and grooved together to the same songs. The guitars fizzed like a fresh can of Coke, and Cyrus advertised to the world’s strivers that making it in America is a breeze.

Released less than a year after the 2008 financial crash, “Party in the U.S.A.” was part of a crop of songs that have, in recent years, been labeled “recession pop.” It’s an affectionate term for happy, uncomplicated anthems—think Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” or the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling”—that once distracted from headlines about bailouts and foreclosures. The optimism of those songs now seems rarer in American life, but over the past few years, TikTok pundits and media commentators have theorized that a new wave of recession pop might come “back” to suit the economic weirdness of the mid-2020s.

[Read: Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture?]

I’ve never really bought that argument, for a few reasons. Perky pop largely faded from the charts in the mid-2010s not because of the national mood but because of changes in how people listen: Streaming eroded the top-down distribution channels, such as radio and network TV, that loved to broadcast sugary, universally appealing sing-alongs. More audience-segmented styles—country, hip-hop, confessional bedroom songwriters—now rule the charts. So-called pure pop has become a subculture, almost akin to indie rock.

And what’s been happening lately in that subculture is more interesting than a mere revival of carefree times. This summer has served up a slate of great party songs that are full of twisted nostalgia and tarnished glamour. Pop is dancing in the ruins of the American dream—or at least in the ruins of the traditional record business.

“Party in the U.S.A.” came to mind while I was listening to “Ain’t in LA,” a tasty new single by the rising star Adéla. She is a 22-year-old Slovakian musician who learned English by watching Hannah Montana, and the song is an obvious Cyrus homage. It revisits the trap-pop sound of Cyrus’s 2013 hit “We Can’t Stop” and features that song’s deep-voiced rapper, Theron Thomas. The breezy, yelled chorus seems designed to, as Cyrus put it in ’09, make the butterflies fly away. But the track has a naggingly wistful undercurrent—and its lyrics flip “Party in the U.S.A.” on its head.

The verses describe the yearnings of a young girl with Madonna and Destiny’s Child posters pinned to her wall. She wants to be a star—but watching American media taught her that “her dreams don’t live at home.” Then the chorus booms a corrective: “It’s all a lie / The baddest bitches ain’t in LA.” In the music video, Adéla balls out in stereotypical ways—twerking, joyriding, writhing on top of a pile of gold trophies—in her hometown of Bratislava, alongside kid dancers in Slovakian folk garb. She has a message for “girls in them unknown cities”: It’s hot to stay put.

Adéla would know. As a teenager, she traveled to Hollywood in hope of a big break on the 2023 reality show The Debut: Dream Academy. A co-production of Geffen Records and the Korean firm Hybe, the series recruited young women from around the world to audition to be part of a girl group subjected to the rigorous management style of K-pop. A trained ballerina with a fierce pout, Adéla performed strongly—but after she was criticized for not perfectly gelling with the other performers, she became one of the first girls cut from the running.

Dream Academy represented the response of the U.S.’s faltering star-making machine to international competition. Over the past decade or so, K-pop has become the premiere global source of the sort of polished dance-pop that homegrown stars such as Beyoncé and Backstreet Boys once specialized in. Dream Academy sought to repurpose the K-pop model for performers who sing mostly in English and come from all over. The resulting band, the sextet Katseye, has put out a string of hyperactive, utterly frivolous songs—full of L.A. references to $20 smoothies and trysts in Bel Air—that have performed decently on the U.S. charts. But the continuing viability of this carefully stage-managed project is an open question: Two Katseye members are on hiatus for health-related reasons.

Adéla, meanwhile, has embarked on a solo career that’s made her the connoisseur’s choice for girlish bangers. Although “Ain’t in LA” sounds clean and sleek, her earlier singles were a bit edgier, pairing dark electronica elements with lyrics about surviving the record industry’s manipulations. Her penchant for minor chords and meta-commentary recalls early Lady Gaga, but whereas that star subsumed her personal identity into operatic symbolism, Adéla’s music remains human-scale—bruised by rejection and panting with yearning. “Staring at a TV screen ’til I got bloody eyes / Just a little European girl, was plotting on my rise,” she squeals in “KGB,” sounding like someone whose childhood dreams have begun to smolder into a hunger for vengeance.

An even grimier sense of desperation powers the most astonishing pop song of the year: “BEAT UP CHANEL$,” by the 29-year-old singer-songwriter Slayyyter. On paper, it could be part of the Broadway tradition of “I want” songs— this one sung by a character who covets MTV-typical treasures such as money, drugs, and handbags. But Hamilton this isn’t: Amid a clanging guitar and bass, Slayyyter screeches those desires like a caged fox. The track cycles between wild accelerations and gliding comedowns, gaining tornadic intensity. When a cheerful melody pops up at the end of the song, the effect is as life-affirming as stepping onto the platform after a terrifying roller-coaster ride. “I want something for real,” goes the final refrain.

This gonzo song represents a culminating statement for an artist who’s been hustling for years. In the late 2010s, Slayyyter began to attract online attention for putting a deconstructed, sinister spin on Y2K pop. When I interviewed her in 2021, she told me about being a teen girl in suburban St. Louis who was radicalized by the media’s harsh treatment of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Chasing stardom in the early 2020s, she moved to L.A. and recorded two dance-pop albums, themed around the horrors of fame, that pleased fans but received little attention more broadly. She’s said that she went into the studio for her third studio album, this year’s WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, with the assumption that it would be her last.

She thus let herself indulge extreme impulses: scuzzy production inspired by obscure artists from her old iPod, feral lyrics delivered in what she’s called a “tweaker twang” tone of voice. Many tracks seem to be about her own failure as a celebrity—“I’M ACTUALLY KINDA FAMOUS” is a glorious parody of the D-list mindset—and the album’s music videos have shown her back in her native Missouri, partying in tattered jeans among trailer parks. But though the album documents a breakdown, it has turned out to be her breakthrough. Released in March, WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Dance Albums chart, drew her some big festival audiences, and earned her the fandom of Courtney Love. The buzz seems to still be growing: This month, Slayyyter scored her first-ever entry on the Hot 100.

The track to achieve that feat is a sister song to “BEAT UP CHANEL$,” titled “brand new chanel$.” It’s entirely different from its predecessor but nearly as good: a blurry reimagining of the crisp, uplifting pulse of circa-2010 electronic dance music and pop punk. As with “Ain’t in LA,” a surprising amount of vulnerability lies beneath the song’s spiky attitude. Slayyyter sounds heartbroken about a cheating ex whose new woman, she sighs, wants brand-new Chanels—a villainous desire in a cultural moment when destroyed seems better than new.

The urge to defy a mainstream that’s corrupted and fake has long been, of course, one of music history’s great drivers of progress. In trying to contextualize the sound that Slayyyter and her internet-pop peers in the share, Pitchfork just coined the fun term hyperclash. The name suggests a hybrid of the subgenres hyperpop (2010s laptoppers, many of them queer, subverting formulaic catchiness with video-game-inspired chaos) and electroclash (a late-’90s and early-2000s scene of ironic techno with punk influences). The writer Anna Gaca theorizes that hyperclash artists are drawn to hedonistic noise “as a protective adaptation amid the endless horrorscroll.”

But if a trend is unfolding, it also involves pop musicians reckoning with the death of pop itself. Just as fans have lately become obsessed with the concept of the “flop,” artists are treating the archetype of the world-conquering superstar as an unattainable myth from a not-so-distant past. Singers who once projected glitz are having a blast with the aesthetics of downward mobility.

[Read: How Lizzo became one of pop culture’s great flops]

The acclaimed but under-the-radar singer Tinashe, for example, is promoting an album called Popstar. Her latest single is a trippy house song, “Melatonin,” that accuses people of “sleeping on” her—ignoring her greatness—and whose video is set in what looks like a foreclosed mansion. (In another single, the slinkily paranoid “Crash Out,” she sings, “The American dream is outdated.”) An equally telling example: Kim Petras, a 33-year-old German who’s spent years making bright and bland pop with the notorious producer Dr. Luke, recently went independent and put out her most experimental—and best—album yet, Detour. Her persona used to be that of a Malibu socialite. Now, on the swooning “Jeep,” she fantasizes about driving around gas-station parking lots, drinking Four Loko, and doing “middle-American shit.”

None of these artists is rejecting the race for riches; we aren’t back in 2013, when Lorde mocked the “Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece” she heard about on the radio. Rather, the mood is one of thwarted materialism, of wanting but not getting. And no one should mistake much of this wave for a meaningful rebellion against the industry. Adéla works with Capitol Records; Slayyyter joined Columbia Records to put out WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA. At a time when even the biggest stars seem a little niche, major-label backing doesn’t quite mean what it once did—but clearly, music’s power brokers have judged that a scuffed-up, striving sound might appeal to the public right now.

It’s not difficult to see why. After a long pop-cultural swing away from Millennial do-goodery toward a redux of 1980s “greed is good” aesthetics, burnout with chasing the bag is finally setting in. Many influencers are starting to see their reach wane; luxury brands are facing flatlining sales. At the same time, anti-institutionalist sentiment—whether directed at political parties, Big Tech, or the entertainment business—is at a high. “Party in the U.S.A.” landed at a time when people still regarded Hollywood as a land of magic, not as a playground for sex traffickers.

The most popular songs of late reflects these trends as well. Ella Langley’s record-setting charts run with “Choosin’ Texas” speaks to a demand for music that’s indifferent to the cosmopolitan hustle. The stateside appeal of non-English-language stars also represents shifting ideals of what success looks and sounds like. Just as Adéla advises that the baddest bitches ain’t in L.A., Bad Bunny scoffs at the idea that Puerto Ricans need to head to the mainland United States to make their dreams come true.

In these conditions, it’s no wonder that pop, once the sound of the center, is finding glamour in marginality. Stars who might otherwise aspire to godhood are meeting listeners where they’ve always been: partying in their own backyard, with their own friends, and on their own terms—even while dreaming of something bigger.

Is Mojtaba Khamenei Dead?

2026-08-25T07:00:00-04:00

Last Tuesday, Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei hosted a wake for his father and predecessor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Among the thousands who thronged Tehran’s biggest mosque were the country’s most prominent political figures and several of the elder Khamenei’s sons. One person was notably absent: Mojtaba, the event’s official host.

Almost six months since his anointment, Iran’s supreme leader has been entirely obscured from the public eye. Not a single contemporaneous picture, video, or audio recording of him has been released. Many of the country’s top political leaders admit that they haven’t seen him—among them Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister and a member of the National Security Council. IranWire, a London-based opposition outlet, reports that not a single cabinet member has met with Mojtaba since he became supreme leader.

Not even Mojtaba’s close friends and relatives have seen him. Fewer than five people have met with Mojtaba since his ascent to power, Mohammad Hossein Khoshvaght, a former official and a relative of Mojataba’s told me, “due to security precautions.”

The rationale is not implausible. Mojtaba would be a likely target for an Israeli or U.S. air strike, such as the one that killed his father. Direct communication from him could supply Iran’s enemies with clues to his whereabouts. He is also said to have sustained injuries in the February strike on his family that have made public speeches and appearances difficult.

[Graeme Wood: ‘The most dangerous man in the world’]

But the totality of Mojtaba’s invisibility and a recent decline in statements from his office have set Tehran abuzz with new rumors of his death. Some sources inside and close to the government speculated to me that Mojtaba recently died from the injuries that he had sustained in February. And irrespective of his actual status, the uncertainty might have major implications for Iran.

“I believe Mojtaba has either passed away or is brain-dead,” a staffer at a government institution in Tehran told me, citing the tailing off of even indirect communication from the leader to the outside world. At least two other government officials told me the same. One said that he believed Mojtaba died or became brain-dead earlier this month.

Two sources in the Iranian government recently told IranWire that word had spread among those at the “highest level of the regime” that Mojtaba was doing very poorly and could die at any moment. About two weeks ago, a public appeal went out on a domestic messaging service, asking Iranians to pray for Mojtaba’s health and sacrifice sheep to bless him, as is customary in Islam. Mojtaba’s life was “under threat,” and some “clerics” had warned that he might be killed, the appeal said.

Since he was appointed, Mojtaba has ruled by decrees disseminated by his office. Iran’s supreme leader is a religious authority in addition to being the head of state, and on July 27, Mojtaba’s office published a list of his answers to practical questions posed by the devout. One correspondent had requested guidance on eating with bleeding gums, because blood is haram—forbidden—in Islam. Any food contaminated with blood, including from one’s own gums, must be thrown out, Mojtaba ruled. If his office is to be believed, then the leader was well enough to ponder Islamic law and issue relevant rulings as recently as a month ago.

The office’s most recent statement came on August 9 and reported that Mojtaba had met with President Masoud Pezeshkian. It didn’t say when the meeting had taken place but noted that it was on the occasion of the president’s third year in office, which puts it on or after July 28. Pezeshkian confirmed to the Iranian media that he spent seven hours with Mojtaba discussing the war and the country’s beleaguered economy. (According to Khoshvaght, Pezeshkian was taken to that meeting “without knowing where it was,” which suggests that he was transported blindfolded, mafia-style.) Also on August 9, Mojtaba issued a slew of decrees, appointing several generals to top military positions and swapping out one of his representatives on the National Security Council. Since then, the office has been silent.

Khoshvaght assured me that Mojtaba is definitely alive. The rumors about the leader’s death are “part of a psychological war hoping to demoralize Iran’s officials and its people, for them to give up to the pressures and threats of America,” he said. He added that the rumors also aim to embolden Iranians opposed to the regime, giving them “courage to come to the streets so that the plans of the U.S. and Israel can be realized.” Abdolreza Davari, a former adviser to the interior ministry and a vocal supporter of Mojtaba’s, told me that the leader is “in full health” and will soon be revealed to the public. But the two weeks with no communication, the public appeal for sheep sacrifice, and the rumors emanating from government circles have led many Iranians to doubt such assurances.

Whether Mojtaba is dead or alive, his public absence creates problems for the Iranian regime. The supreme leader holds most of the constitutional power in the Islamic Republic and has in the past served as the final arbiter among the system’s warring factions and institutions. Mojtaba appears to be sitting these conflicts out, at a moment when their outcome could be particularly consequential.

[Robert Kagan: Iran unleashed]

The country’s 13-person National Security Council is effectively running the country as a collective. It is chaired by Pezeshkian, a reformist who favors an end to the war with America, and includes Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the powerful parliamentary speaker who led the talks with the United States. But it also includes General Ahmad Vahidi, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and other military leaders.

Back in June, 12 of the council’s 13 members voted in favor of the memorandum of understanding that Iran reached with the United States in Islamabad. Mojtaba sent a message endorsing the deal but also noting that he had initially opposed such an agreement “in principle.” Hard-line critics of diplomacy seized on this to claim that Ghalibaf had usurped power and forced the memorandum on the leader. A news outlet linked to a faction in the IRGC even issued a documentary called Ghalibaf’s Coup.

Mojtaba neither endorsed this view nor put it to rest. Rather, he has remained mum as various factions have purported to speak for him. Pezeshkian has told reporters that in his meeting with Mojtaba, the leader stressed that regime officials should “keep unity and cohesion” and avoid infighting.

But the infighting goes on. In June, a statement signed by 63 of the 88 members of the Assembly of Experts, a clerical body tasked with supervising the supreme leader, admonished regime officials that none of them was authorized to act against Mojtaba’s “definite opinion.” At the same time, the statement called on any Muslim “who could gain access” to kill Donald Trump—not quite the message of Iran’s negotiators, but rather more consonant with Mojtaba’s statements promising “blood revenge.”

The Iranian regime has existential choices to make as it decides between diplomacy and conflict. Iran’s constitution is clear about who has the authority to set the country’s course. But no one seems able to say for sure whether that person is alive or dead. And without a firm hand at the top, indecision can become a purgatory without a foreseeable end.

The Jews Who Voted for Hitler

2026-08-25T07:00:00-04:00

On the evening of February 5, 1930, the art and theater critic Paul Fechter took the podium before the League of Nationalist German Jews, in Berlin, to discuss purported Jewish control of the press and the arts in the country. “When Dr. Max Naumann invited me to give a lecture in your circle, I rather impulsively said yes,” Fechter began. “When he then told me the topic he wanted me to address, my immediate reaction was: Good grief ! One could not have found a better topic for making oneself thoroughly unpopular and for antagonizing everyone in the room.”

For too long, Fechter said, people had been too “shy, fearful, cautious” to speak openly about the Jews. Fechter, an editor at the conservative newspaper Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, was pulling no punches. The popular Jewish humorist Kurt Tucholsky, Fechter said, had insulted the German people with his recent book, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, an acid satire about the army, the police, the civil service, the national anthem, even Sekt, a popular sparkling wine.

“A large portion of the literary and art worlds are in Jewish hands,” Fechter continued. “The theaters, the major publishing houses, the major art dealers are all at least partially under Jewish control.” Jewish art dealers, Fechter said, filled their galleries with works by “Manet and Monet and Renoir and Gauguin and Picasso and Cezanne”—French Impressionists and Modernists, in other words, rather than traditional German painters. The Antigermanismus among Jews, Fechter declared, was “far more robust” than the Antisemitismus among right-wing German nationalists.

Naumann, the founder of the league, published the Fechter tirade in his monthly publication, The Nationalist German Jew, circulated to his group’s 7,000 members, mostly middle-class professionals in more than 20 chapters around the country. Naumann himself was a Berlin-based Jewish attorney who was decidedly antidemocratic, belligerently nationalistic, and unapologetically critical of other Jews.

He blamed Ostjuden—the “Eastern Jews” fleeing pogroms in Russia, Romania, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere—for flooding the country with unwanted immigrants. He felt pity but no solidarity. “It is the same pity we feel when there is talk of the Turks massacring Armenians or of lynch mobs targeting black people in America,” Naumann wrote—an abstract pity without emotional connection. In his league’s founding treatise, On Nationalist German Jews, published in 1920, Naumann had compared Zionists, those seeking a Jewish homeland in Palestine, to Nazis, whose political movement had just been founded. “Both groups, the fanatics of Zion and the knights of the swastika, are basically the same in that they have turned a question of ancestry into a question of nationality,” Naumann argued.

Naumann defended his German and Jewish identities in equal measure, a stance reflected in the term nationaldeutscher Jude—a blood-and-soil German Jew.

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

Naumann drifted right with the rest of German politics in the early 1930s, first abiding and then supporting the extremist, right-wing, rabidly anti-Semitic positions of Adolf Hitler. It is impossible to imagine a more tragically misplaced political calculation than Naumann’s embrace of national socialism. Though the Hitler Juden—or Nazi Jews, as Naumann’s adherents came to be known—represented less than 2 percent of Germany’s half-million Jews, they provide a cautionary tale of members of a minority within a minority who cast their lot with a political leader who openly despised them.

Naumann was born in 1875 into a middle-class family—bankers, landowners, cloth merchants—in an era of unprecedented opportunity for German Jews. They had recently gained the right to vote. They could run for office. They enjoyed equal protection under the law. Professions formerly restricted were now open—law, medicine, academia. Naumann studied jurisprudence at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, where he joined a fraternity and was given a Schmiss across his chin, the honorific dueling scar of a true Prussian. But prejudice persisted.

When Naumann was denied an officer’s title in the Prussian military because of his Jewish heritage, he enlisted in the 2nd Bavarian Infantry Regiment. Naumann advanced through the ranks, from lieutenant to first lieutenant and eventually to captain, serving with distinction during the First World War. He was awarded an Iron Cross First Class and an Iron Cross Second Class, among other decorations, for “outstandingly brave deeds performed in the face of the enemy that went far beyond the call of duty.”

But Jewish veterans of the Great War returned to find Jews collectively vilified for Germany’s defeat and surrender. The Reich Federation of Jewish Front-Line Soldiers countered with an information campaign highlighting their commitment and sacrifice—100,000 Jewish soldiers had served at the front; 35,000 had been decorated for bravery; 12,000 had given their lives for the fatherland. The Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, or Centralverein, sought to combat rising anti-Semitism through legal protections of Jewish identity and heritage. Meanwhile, the Zionist Federation of Germany urged German Jews to immigrate to Palestine for their own safety.

[From the World War I issue: Reinhold Niebuhr on Hitler, reduced to impotence]

Naumann found these responses wholly inadequate or misguided. He denounced the members of the Centralverein as ineffective “Dummköpfe,” or idiots, and the Zionists as traitors, foremost among them “the world-famous scholar Einstein,” who placed his Jewish identity over his German heritage. “The spiritual and even the material misery of the Jews in Germany would never have assumed such frightening proportions,” Naumann claimed in 1927, “if steps had been taken in time to prevent the Zionists, and especially the Zionist Ostjuden, from positioning themselves before Jews and non-Jews alike as the only rightful spokesmen of Judaism.”

Naumann believed that anti-Semitism needed to be “dismantled,” not legally challenged, the Centralverein’s preferred approach. During the war, Naumann had watched anti-Semitic sentiment evaporate in the heat of battle, where what mattered, he later recalled, were “actions,” not “words,” and where “a tough, resilient, determined willingness to put one’s head on the line” for comrades and the fatherland “transcended all class and racial difference.” This was the experience that shaped his approach to German politics.

He was joined by Alfred Peyser, the chair of the League of Nationalist German Jews, who was also an eminent physician and the municipal counselor of an upscale Berlin district. In a foundational 1922 essay defining the concept of a “nationalist German” Jew, Peyser warned fellow Jewish Germans against returning to “Ghettoknechtschaft”—enslavement to the ghetto—or trying to escape to “Zion,” urging them instead to embrace the “German fatherland.” “Yes, we love this land, its language, its people,” Peyser wrote. “We feel as one with it!”

Naumann and Peyser found a powerful ally in Samuel Breslauer, the editor of the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, a popular conservative newspaper. Breslauer traveled to New York City in the spring of 1927 with a delegation of German newspaper editors to meet with their American counterparts, including Adolph Ochs, the publisher of The New York Times. Breslauer advocated for fierce German nationalism and equally fervent Judaism. He defended this duality in an article titled “Me, an Antisemite.” “If over the course of three decades I have undergone a change,” Breslauer wrote, it had been a political drift to the right—but “certainly not” away from Judaism. Instead, he insisted, his Judaism had deepened and strengthened—“in the religious, not in the ethnic-national sense.”

Naumann had initially aligned his league with the German People’s Party, a center-right party led by the Nobel laureate Gustav Stresemann. But the political picture changed in September 1930, when the National Socialists surged nearly tenfold in national elections. Fascism was suddenly fashionable. Siegfried “Fred” Bon, the Jewish author of a three-volume philosophical treatise, Does 2 x 2 = 4?, sought to square Judaism and national socialism. In a January 1931 article for The Nationalist German Jew, Bon cataloged Jewish contributors to the country’s conservative movements, foremost among them Walther Rathenau, a foreign minister in the Weimar Republic and the first person, according to Bon, who’d sought to merge nationalism with socialism—“the very positions that today constitute the foundations of the National Socialist program.” Bon’s article appeared under the title “Can Jews Be National Socialists?”

Naumann, for his part, suggested that they could be, and he pointed to Italy as evidence. Jews had joined Benito Mussolini in the 1922 March on Rome. Guido Jung, a Jew, was Italy’s fascist minister of finance. Renzo Ravenna, a Jew, was the fascist mayor of Ferrara. When Girolamo Bassi, a Jewish lawyer in Venice, faced financial difficulties, a judge suggested that he join Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista. “So, two months later, my father became a cardcarrying Fascist,” Bassi’s son Roberto later recalled, “and having bought a fine black uniform went with the others to demonstrate support for Il Duce.”

[Timothy W. Ryback: The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler]

Naumann attributed the fascist receptiveness toward Jews in Italy not only to the absence of Zionists and Ostjuden in that country but also to Jews’ absence from “intellectual” professions. Naumann urged young German Jews to pursue careers in trades such as carpentry and masonry rather than professions such as law and medicine. “Of the approximately 200,000 Jews in Italy, at most 10% are doctors, lawyers, and journalists,” The Nationalist German Jew reported in a 1933 article titled “Why There Is No Hatred of the Jews in Italy.” (Although it’s true that there was less anti-Semitism in Italy than in Germany, the article’s premise would be proved grimly wrong when Italy passed a series of discriminatory racial laws starting in 1938 and deported Jews to Nazi extermination camps.)

In July 1932, Naumann caused a sensation when he appeared to urge German Jews to vote National Socialist in the upcoming Reichstag elections. In an article in Fechter’s newspaper, Naumann claimed that national socialism was the only viable future for the country—“that here, and only here, a path is being forged that can lead to a rebirth of Germanness and to the restoration of German prestige.”

Centralverein was outraged. An op-ed in the organization’s newspaper, Central-Verein-Zeitung, lambasted Naumann for inaccuracy and irresponsibility, and argued that to discount the threat posed by Nazi anti-Semitism was absurdly credulous. Whatever common values Naumann shared with Hitler—anti-communist, antirepublican, antidemocratic—hatred of Jews remained foundational to Nazi ideology. Central-Verein-Zeitung reminded Naumann of the Nazis’ “unbridled attacks” and “public incitement” against Jews, noting that “Herr Hitler has never, on any occasion, contradicted the speakers of his own party regarding their stance on the Jewish question.”

But Naumann continued to believe that the heated rhetoric against the Jews was political posturing that would cool once Hitler was in office, and once the inciting political effects of Jewish Communists, socialists, and Zionists had been neutralized. A trove of about 11 million digitized National Socialist records, analyzed by an international group of scholars from Harvard and elsewhere in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper published last April, includes 580 personal statements by Nazis, given in 1934, explaining their reasons for joining the party. Fully 26 percent of these Nazis cited their dislike of Jews as an “explicit causal reason” for joining the party, which suggests that anti-Semitism was considerably more than an incidental element of the party’s ideology. But Naumann was fixated on the other motivations for joining the party, which are reflected in the scholars’ analysis of these statements: 63 percent cited a hope for national renewal and the restoration of public order, while 53 percent expressed a desire for social belonging, 49 percent the need to combat communism, and 29 percent the belief that the party could lift them out of economic hardship. Naumann’s fatally naive view was that if these other concerns could be addressed, anti-Semitism would be diminished.

Following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, in January 1933, anti-Semitic violence spiked horrifically. Jews were assaulted on the street, at their places of business, in their homes. One young man was lashed bloody, then had pepper rubbed in his wounds to heighten the agony; he died of sepsis. An apartment on Berlin’s fashionable Friedrichstrasse was repurposed as a torture room, its walls spattered with blood.

The foreign press chronicled the atrocities prominently. On March 25, Hermann Göring, the powerful Nazi cabinet minister, summoned Naumann and other Jewish leaders to his office. Göring read from a stack of foreign-newspaper clippings with growing fury. “Unless you put a stop to these libelous accusations immediately,” Göring said, “I shall no longer be able to vouch for the safety of the German Jews!” Naumann had intended to use the meeting to protest the rising anti-Semitic violence; to that end, he confronted Göring with a list of attacks on Jews. But he left the meeting as a propagandist for the Third Reich. “While we readily acknowledge that there are excesses against German Jews,” Naumann declared in a public statement, “we are not interested in foreign interference in our internal affairs.”

To his fellow Jews of German heritage, Naumann counseled patience. “Today we are enduring without question days of rage,” he wrote in May. “It was inevitable that this anger—built up and heightened over fourteen years—would initially erupt in an explosive outburst.” But Naumann anticipated the day, “in the not too distant future,” when the country’s anti-Semitic fever would break and “Aryan and Jew” would once again “join hands” in common cause for the fatherland. “When this day of self-reflection finally arrives,” Naumann wrote, “that will be the beginning of the real answer to the German Jewish question.”

The preceding month, however, Hitler’s government had enacted the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which banned “non-Aryans” from government posts, as well as the Law on Admission to the Legal Profession, which prevented Jews—including Naumann—from practicing law. The Law Against Overcrowding in German Schools and Universities, passed at the same time, restricted the enrollment of Jewish students.

Amid these draconian measures, Hans Heinrich Peyser, the son of Alfred Peyser, ran into Naumann one day on the Berlin subway. Naumann was just returning from a meeting with leaders of the Nazi storm troopers. He spoke to Peyser of the Nazis’ “high ideals” and the need to try to understand things from their perspective. “I found this excessive self-absorption and inward-looking preoccupation, in light of what had already happened in Germany, to be absolutely grotesque,” Peyser wrote.

[From the April 1932 issue: Hitler and Hitlerism: Germany under the Nazis]

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, in New York, a wire service covering the global Jewish community, viewed Naumann and his adherents with similar dismay. “Although their professions have been taken away from them, and although they live in a state of rigid suspense and fear of the moment when they will be humiliated, beaten, or imprisoned, a large number of German Jews continue to remain faithful to the fatherland,” the agency reported on August 13. The report noted Naumann’s denunciation of Zionists as “traitors to their country.”

Stories circulated of “Naumann Jews” ending their meetings with Hitler salutes and the singing of “Horst Wessel Lied ,” the Nazi Party anthem. Though Naumann dismissed the alleged singing as “Jewish horror stories,” he defended the stiff-armed salutes and the presence of Nazi banners, saying that Jews needed to “overcome their fear of the swastika”: “After all, the Christian cross,” he wrote in April 1934, is also a symbol “in opposition to Judaism,” but “for a long time now no reasonable Jew has refused to accept the Iron Cross or other cross-shaped decoration.”

In August of that year, when Reich President Paul von Hindenburg died, Naumann urged Jews to approve a public referendum transferring Hindenburg’s powers to Hitler in his capacity as chancellor, effectively handing Hitler unchallenged dictatorial rule. (He did so despite acknowledging to his fellow Jews that the Nazi regime had “brought rigors to us.”) “We urge all Jews who feel themselves Germans to vote ‘Yes’ on Aug. 19,” Naumann declared.

Naumann reaffirmed his solidarity with Hitler’s government the following week, when he dispatched a telegram to the Nazi leader informing him that the League of Nationalist German Jews would not be attending a conference in Geneva for the establishment of the World Jewish Congress. Learning of this, Pariser Tageblatt, a newspaper for anti-Nazis in exile, responded: “Thank God!”

A Gestapo report on a meeting of 400 nationalist German Jews in Berlin on May 27, 1935, confirms that Naumann’s support for Hitler persisted. Naumann “emphasized in particular that the members considered themselves genuine Germans,” the report noted, and “had welcomed the transformation in Germany brought about by the Führer.” The meeting ended with a rousing chorus of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.”

For all Naumann’s efforts to win approval or recognition from Nazi leaders for his organization, or for his view on what Jews’ place in the Third Reich should be, he never received any.

On September 15, 1935, Hitler’s government introduced the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, collectively known as the Nuremberg Laws, stripping Naumann and half a million other Jewish Germans of their citizenship. By then, Naumann was divorced, and his daughter had broken irreparably with him over his pro-Nazi position.

On November 18, Naumann’s league was forcibly disbanded. Naumann himself was arrested by the Gestapo that same day and taken to Columbia-Haus, an SS detention and torture facility. A few weeks later, after attempting to commit suicide by slitting his wrists with the glass from his spectacles, Naumann was released. He died of cancer in May 1939, isolated and abandoned.

By that point, thousands of Jews had escaped abroad. Alfred Peyser was stripped of his medical license and briefly incarcerated before immigrating to Sweden in 1939, where he survived the war. Other Naumann Jews were not so fortunate. Siegfried “Fred” Bon was dispatched to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in September 1940; he was executed there in April 1944. Samuel Breslauer, who lost his editorial post and his property to the Nazis, also perished in Theresienstadt, along with his wife, Bertha.

Naumann’s remains were interred in a Protestant cemetery in the town of Stahnsdorf, southwest of Berlin, where his headstone still stands. It bears his name and military rank, along with his dates of birth and death, but no indication of faith or family. Persecuted and forgotten as a Jew, he was buried as he’d wished to be—as a German.

This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “The Jews Who Voted for Hitler.”

Darline Graham Is Not Her Brother

2026-08-25T06:00:00-04:00

It’s something that happens so often in politics that there’s a name for it: widow’s succession. Dozens of times over the past century, women have filled a seat previously occupied by their late husband, and some have gone on to serve a long career.

What has never happened in Congress before is what Darline Graham is doing: a sister’s succession.

Less than 48 hours after Senator Lindsey Graham died suddenly from heart issues last month, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster appointed Graham’s younger sister to complete the remaining six months of his term. Soon after that, Darline Graham announced that she would also run for a full six-year term, a bid that came at President Trump’s request. In the solidly red state, her biggest hurdle is likely to come in a primary runoff today. She is running in part on the legacy of her brother—but also in ways that bear no resemblance to the way he approached the job. Where he was chatty and seemed to love campaigning, she is reserved and describes the campaign as “brutal.” Where he was the ultimate Washington insider who served in Congress for more than 31 years, she is running as a populist outsider who previously worked with the disabled and visually impaired. And where he was one of his party’s most prominent and outspoken foreign-policy hawks until the day he died, she has conceded to having no experience and not much interest in such matters.

“I’m not that informed on national security,” she said during a debate last week, a blunder that has become a focal point in the final days of an abbreviated campaign. The president came to her defense, praising her for being honest. He has invested significant time and political capital in attempting to give her a late boost in a closer-than-expected primary race.

Her late brother comes up during almost every public event she holds—“I knew I could not sit on the sidelines. That’s not how Lindsey and I were raised,” she’s said—and campaign mailers tout that she is “Prepared to Carry on Lindsey’s Legacy.” She tells voters that “no one can ever fill his shoes” but that she will earn his seat. “I don’t just expect it to be handed to me,” she said earlier this month after casting her ballot in the special primary election.

[Read: An unsettling glimpse into the GOP’s future]

Her Republican primary opponent is Ralph Norman, a congressman since 2017 who earlier this summer lost his bid for governor. He has also referenced Lindsey Graham’s pull on the race. “Nobody’s entitled by birthright to this office,” Norman said before the debate last week. “You’ve got to earn it.” He tried to put the situation into college-football terms during an interview with the Associated Press, telling voters to imagine presenting the head coach at Clemson University with a top quarterback prospect who has just this qualification: They’re kin to Tom Brady. “Tell me how that analogy doesn’t work here,” Norman said. Although Graham has a famous last name and the president’s endorsement, Norman and his supporters believe that he can win today. Their message: Darline Graham is not Lindsey Graham. A PAC supporting Norman recently began running an ad that asks, “What if Darline Graham had any other last name?”

It’s the last name that has gotten her here—the reason she was appointed interim senator. But in the final stretch of the race, it is complicating her campaign, which has become the latest test of the power of Trump’s endorsement. Although the president has often played kingmaker in Republican primaries over the past decade, that influence has significantly weakened: 10 of his picks have failed to advance this year, many of them in the past few weeks. The congressional candidates Cory Mills and Catalina Lauf both lost in Florida last week. Two of his picks in races for governor—Megan Degenfelder in Wyoming and Mike Lindell in Minnesota—lost by double digits. If Graham loses, it will signal a limit to Trump’s ability to direct the MAGA base in one of the most MAGA states.

The relationship between Lindsey and Darline was long ago condensed into a few stock lines in their stump speeches: how they grew up in a one-room home that was attached to the bar and restaurant their parents ran. How their parents both died when Lindsey was in college, and how he took responsibility for helping raise his sister, who was nine years his junior. “Lindsey has been there for me throughout the years,” she said at the Iowa State Fair during his long-shot 2016 presidential campaign. “He has never let me down since then. He’s always been by my side.” Her remarks were earnest. And then he jumped to the stage with a joke: “Well, as Darline said, we grew up in a pool hall, a bar, and a liquor store. I’m eminently qualified to be president of the United States!”

A more textured version of their relationship emerges in a memoir he released during that campaign. He tells of how he arranged for her to have golf lessons, so that she could play one of his favorite sports. He took her to the movies (they both loved James Bond). He taught her to ride a bicycle when she was 5—then gifted her a turquoise one when she turned 9. In the early 1970s, he wrote, he heard his young sister use a racial slur. “She didn’t even think the term was offensive. She had heard it used so often,” he wrote. “I told her to not say it again, and a little while later, I went to my parents and asked them to make a change.” Graham says his mother offered a beer to a Black customer, who previously would have taken his beer home, and motioned to him to take a stool, slowly beginning to more actively integrate the barroom.

Graham also wrote of persuading his parents to take Darline to Disney World, a trip that became their first big family vacation. (Years later, in March 2026, the senator went viral for riding Space Mountain and carrying a bubble wand around during a government shutdown.) It was his and Darline’s first time on an airplane, and they stayed for five days at a Howard Johnson’s hotel with a pool. “Life was good. Then it wasn’t,” he wrote. The next year, his mother died. Shortly after, so did his father; it was Darline who found his unresponsive body, Graham wrote.

Lindsey Graham would go on to a career in the Air Force and then in Congress. His sister would earn a master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling from South Carolina State University, in Orangeburg, a historically Black school. She got her optician’s certification and in recent years led the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, which provides vocational, youth, and prevention services. She married her husband, Larry Nordone, in 2006, and they have two daughters. Darline kept her maiden name, she said recently on the campaign trail, as a way to feel connected to her parents.

The closest parallel that I could find to what Darline Graham is doing is this: When Representative Sonny Bono died during a family ski trip in 1998, his widow, Mary Bono, ran for his seat with the backing of Republican leaders. “It was crazy. It was a lot,” she told me. She got cotton mouth during her first debate but was so nervous that her shaky hand couldn’t bring the glass of water to her lips. “You’re told, It’d be great to be elected and fulfill the legacy of the loved one that was lost. But it’s really obvious on the campaign trail that only goes so far,” she said. “You have to establish who you are, what you care about, and show voters your own philosophies.” She won the race—and then, on the Judiciary Committee, she sat next to Lindsey Graham. “He had such a great and quick wit,” she said. Of Darline Graham, Bono told me: “I’m glad she’s running. But it will have to become her legacy and her work. It’s a hard job.”

Darline Graham has talked about the difficulty of campaigning while grieving, saying that she has not had time to fully process her brother’s death. She has said that sometimes, in the morning, she has time to reflect: “I think a lot about what I would say to him.” She remarked to a crowd at a barbecue joint in Florence, South Carolina, that she’d lost 10 pounds during the monthlong campaign following her brother’s death. “It’s been absolutely brutal. This past month has been brutal,” she said during a speech after making it to the runoff, one month after her brother’s death. “None of this has been comfortable for me. But like I said, I’m a fighter.” Her campaign and Senate office did not respond to my inquiries.

In South Carolina, an open Senate seat is rarer than a restaurant that doesn’t serve sweet tea. Strom Thurmond and Fritz Hollings had a combined tenure of more than 85 years, spanning most of the second half of the 20th century. Graham has occupied the seat since 2003. Longtime political operatives see Darline as quite different from her brother, although voters may be willing to overlook that if she can put forward a convincing case of her own. “Lindsey was the unique character in the public spotlight for decades. He was convivial. He was kind of a backslapper, wisecrack. Could deflect. Self-effacing,” Chip Felkel, a veteran Republican strategist in the state, told me. “I don’t see her personality that way, but I don’t think people care if she delivers for the state.”

The way Darline Graham is running her campaign reflects the ways she is trying to both align herself with her brother and differentiate herself from him. Her stump speech includes nods to the Second Amendment (“I believe gun control is how steady you hold your weapon”), a nod to voter-ID laws (“If you have to have an ID to check out a library book, you should have to have one to vote”), and transgender policies from her experience as a self-described volleyball mom (“I love watching my daughter play, and I know that boys have no place in girls sports, especially not in the locker room”). She has said that her No. 1 priority is “affordability” (a word that Trump has described as a hoax made up by Democrats). She wants to control health-care costs. She has also pointed to differences with her brother, saying that she would favor getting rid of the filibuster, something that he resisted, and that she would take a tougher line on immigration. Her brother supported creating a clearer pathway to citizenship. “I love Lindsey to death, but I’m a little bit stronger on immigration,” she said during a campaign event last week. “To me, it’s really clear; it’s a black-and-white issue: It’s legal versus illegal. If you’re here illegally, you should be deported. You’re breaking the law.”

As Trump prepared to fly to Myrtle Beach on Friday night for a Graham rally, he suggested to reporters that although “she’s a terrific woman,” it’s difficult for voters to get excited about her. The president’s message to voters at the rally: “What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.” Once he arrived in South Carolina that night, the memory of Lindsey Graham hovered. The late senator was the reason Trump knew Darline and that so many in the state knew her, the president said. Twice, he announced: “I’m doing this to honor Lindsey.” He asked voters to do the same.

“For Lindsey,” he said, “I want it to happen.”

Jack Rodriquez-Vars contributed research to this report.

Trump Is Losing Touch With the Public

2026-08-24T18:31:00-04:00

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

One of the few issues that unites voters and politicians of both parties right now is data centers. Three-quarters of Americans would oppose a data center being built near where they live, according to a new poll released last week by Heatmap Pro and Embold Research. The two leading lights of the left, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, have sponsored a bill in Congress to create a temporary moratorium on new centers. They have an unlikely ally in archconservative Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, who said yesterday on ABC’s This Week that data-center companies “basically dug their own grave” and “got the backlash they deserve.”

Standing against this consensus is Donald Trump. The president remains a big booster of data centers. “Communities that don’t take a data center—they’re making a mistake,” he said Thursday during an interview with his on-again, off-again lackey Michael Cohen. “Data centers throw off tremendous amounts of jobs and money.”

This was no one-off. Trump had made several similar comments recently. “If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it, because the jobs are enormous and the money paid, the taxes paid, are just enormous,” Trump said last week—although he allowed that the sector could use “a little public-relations help.”

This puts Trump, the most successful demagogue in American political history, in the unusual position of misreading, and opposing, a populist groundswell. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump took many stands that were unpopular among establishment politicians. Some of these positions put him at odds not only with Democrats but also with most Republican elected officials. Trump broke with Republicans in claiming that he would protect social-welfare programs such as Medicare and Social Security, and he broke a bipartisan consensus by attacking free-trade agreements and promising protectionism. On these matters (as well as on his willingness to encourage and participate in gutter racism), Trump demonstrated that a big constituency existed for views that other politicians had deemed electoral liabilities.

Data centers’ political arc has been different. Initially, many officials seemed to back the centers, following exactly Trump’s logic: They offered jobs and tax benefits. But as public opinion turned—driven by a mix of backlash to AI in general, environmental concerns, worries about energy prices, and old-fashioned NIMBYism—politicians changed their view as well.

Why has Trump missed the shift? Presumably one reason is that he is surrounded by advisers and tech executives such as David Sacks and Larry Ellison, who are major boosters of and players in the industry. Tech companies invested heavily in Trump at the start of his second administration, lavishing him with gifts, including a gold-plated bauble and donations to projects such as his inauguration and his ballroom, and Trump has reciprocated by taking policy stances that benefit them. Trump may also be personally profiting from the AI boom; his financial disclosures show he’s become more of a tech investor.

Trump has always tended to adopt the latest thing he’s heard, no matter what it is. He has been willing to alienate corporate interests in the past—when he saw some political upside. But he is not hearing from voters who might alert him to how unpopular data centers are. Trump’s rallies and speeches once created a feedback loop in which he conveyed his message to voters and—crucially—they conveyed their thoughts to him. Now, as his energy sinks, his travel schedule gets lighter, and security makes events more challenging, Trump is getting out less.

Though his stump speeches dragged on for hours, Trump was carefully attuned to audience attention and what did and didn’t work. “You know, if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of, maybe thinking about leaving, I can sort of tell the audience, I just say, ‘We will build the wall!’ and they go nuts,” he told The New York Times in 2016. I think often about a speech Trump delivered in July 2022. It was billed as the launch of a new policy agenda, but as he read it, both Trump and his audience seemed bored. Then he ad-libbed a riff about trans athletes and the crowd came alive. Trump picked up on the shift and emphasized it; trans issues would become a central talking point for his 2024 campaign.

The president has always been susceptible to fake news and bad at filtering information, but rallies provided a gut check about his base, if not about the broader national reality. Now Trump isn’t even receiving that kind of information. One of his major conduits for information is Natalie Harp, a sycophantic aide who isn’t interested in exposing Trump to criticism. He could read public-opinion data, but as his own approval sinks, he has taken to saying (and may well believe) that polls are fake.

As his world shrinks, Trump’s populist touch has faded. Despite being elected twice on an antiwar platform, he’s launched attacks on Venezuela and Iran. As the Iran war has gotten bogged down, he’s been incapable of reading the public mood. He has dismissed voter frustration over rising fuel costs, saying “I don’t even think about” gas; he previously called affordability a “hoax.” In response to reports that American sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln were struggling with a long deployment, Trump said they hadn’t been deployed “nearly long enough.” And the collapse of trade talks with Canada on Friday threatens Republican prospects in border states including Michigan and Ohio.

Each of these cases represents a growing gap between Trump and his base, but none is as ironic as Trump’s stance on data centers. The AI facilities store terabytes of data, but the president can’t get access to the information about them that he needs.

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

The Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to move forward for now with plans to restrict mail-in voting, including directing the Postal Service to help determine which voters receive mail ballots. The ruling is preliminary and allows implementation to proceed while a lower court considers the legality of President Trump’s executive order.
Trump said that the United States will impose 50 percent tariffs on Canadian cars, trucks, auto parts, and steel beginning January 1, 2027. The announcement followed Canada’s decision to impose retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products after U.S.-Canada trade talks ended without an agreement over the weekend.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced an “economic D-Day” for Iran, stating that the U.S. will impose new sanctions on more than 60 entities, individuals, and vessels tied to Iran’s nuclear and missile programs; additional sanctions are planned in the coming weeks.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores how relationships can change your personality.

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From left: The comedians Anthony Atamanuik, Sarah Cooper, Alec Baldwin, and Brent Terhune Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Theo Wargo / Getty; Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty; @brentterhune / Instagram.

The Trump Comedians Are Tired

By Will Gottsegen

In 2017, as Donald Trump was getting used to the White House furniture, Alec Baldwin was feeling exultant. His impersonation of the new president on Saturday Night Live had made him momentarily inescapable and given the comedy show its highest ratings in years. To capitalize on the momentum, Baldwin co-authored a book-length satirical memoir written from Trump’s perspective. Baldwin’s autobiography—which also came out that year and was excerpted as a cover story for Vanity Fair—noted that his take on the president “seemed to delight nearly everyone in the People’s Republic of Manhattan.” When he accepted an Emmy for his performance in the fall, he addressed Trump directly: “At long last, Mr. President, here is your Emmy.”

It was disorienting, then, to hear Baldwin declare, when I spoke with him earlier this summer, that this sort of comedy has become stale, boring, and useless. “None of it’s funny. I don’t find it funny anymore,” he told me. “There’s nothing left to say about Trump.”

Read the full article.

Logging In Was Never Supposed to Be This Complicated

2026-08-24T17:06:00-04:00

One afternoon earlier this month, I pulled up to the rec center and realized that I had a problem. It was not the three boisterous tweens in the back seat who were clamoring to be set loose in the basketball gym. It was my parking app. I had somehow gotten logged out of Passport Parking, which has become the only way to pay for a spot in much of my town, and it was demanding a four-digit PIN to let me back in. My first guess drew a warning message in red letters: “Invalid PIN. PIN cannot contain 4 sequential numbers, 2 repeated digits, or the last 4 digits of your phone number.” I searched my trusty password manager, which was supposed to spare me these predicaments, but it came up empty. By that point, the kids had run ahead and piled themselves against the gym door, waiting for me to let them in.

Lately, the process of accessing apps and websites has grown dizzying. “I’m in password hell,” a colleague confided to me recently. “Every login attempt is playing the lottery.” The problem is not just the sheer number of digital accounts, all of which require their own password, ideally unique and unguessable (which usually also means un-memorizable). It’s the pileup of solutions to that problem: all of the different layers of software offering to remember your passwords, the six-digit codes sent to your phone, the authenticator apps, the passkeys.

Browsers and operating systems compete with third-party password managers to generate, store, and autofill your credentials. Most of my logins live in 1Password, but others are stored in Apple’s Passwords app (usually by accident), and still others were created via “single sign-on” features such as those offered by Google and Facebook. I vaguely recall certain apps—Facebook is one—prompting me many years ago to copy down a set of “login recovery codes” that would become extremely important should I ever get locked out of my account. Whatever device I stored them on was probably wiped and sold long ago.

Logins have always been a hassle. In the 1990s, forgetting your password sometimes meant mailing a po stcard to your service provider and waiting a week or two for it to mail you a new password. In the early 2010s, hackers learned to steal massive troves of logins and then reuse them on other services to steal people’s identities. Things spiraled from there; services started requiring unique, complex passwords with arbitrary requirements. These days, the user experience of logging in is “probably worse than ever,” Troy Hunt, a cybersecurity expert who runs the website Have I Been Pwned, told me. “There’s just no consistency.”

Password managers promised a way out, but they often don’t work as seamlessly as you might hope. I click to autofill my password somewhere, and a 1Password authorization appears, only for an iCloud Keychain authorization to pop up directly over it, preventing me from clicking on the 1Password one. When I manually enter a login I thought I remembered, my browser prompts me to remember it; only after I hit “Save” (pro tip: Do not do this) does the website inform me that the password was not recognized. Even when you log in successfully, there’s the tedious dance of waiting for a six-digit authorization code to appear on your phone or in your email, which defeats the concept of a single password for everything. And if you’re somewhere without cell service or you’re sharing a login with someone who isn’t around, you might just be out of luck.

All of these steps serve a purpose. At least in theory, each added layer helps prevent hacks and breaches. Erring on the side of safety is worth an amount of inconvenience. At the same time, extra steps can introduce security problems of their own. Last year, Hunt fell for a clever phishing scheme when he clicked a link to log in to his newsletter service. His password manager failed to autofill his information, which should have alerted him that something was wrong, he said. But like the rest of us, he was so used to things not working that he went ahead and manually entered his credentials on a site that turned out to be an impostor, designed to steal and exploit them.

None of these obstacles is insurmountable on its own. My problem with Apple’s native password manager fighting with 1Password, for instance, was eventually solved with a 10-minute foray into the bowels of my device settings. But together, they amount to a near-daily irritant. For the less tech-savvy, the situation can be overwhelming. My recent attempts to help my mother fix her password-storage system—which involved loose-leaf notepad sheets full of hand-scrawled credentials scattered around her house like Easter eggs—consumed the better part of a day. By the end, she had all of her credentials updated, validated, and stored in a password manager, just as the experts have been advising for years. But even then, her preferred browser, Google Chrome, showed no interest in surfacing the credentials we had stashed in Apple’s Keychain. And some websites short-circuited her attempts to log in by prompting her to set up a “passkey,” which she interpreted as meaning that her password had failed and she needed to scrap it and set up a new one.

Cybersecurity experts will tell you that passkeys—which typically entail logging in to apps or websites with a face or fingerprint scan instead of a password—are the future. When they work properly, they’re both painless and secure. “It may get to a point where we’re all using passkeys and we don’t even know we’re using passkeys,” Lorrie Cranor, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who researches privacy and cybersecurity, told me. “I just say ‘Log in’ and I smile at it, and it gets my passkey, and I’m logged in.”

But that future isn’t here yet, and in the present, passkeys have added a new layer of frustration. Part of the problem is that virtually no one seems to know what they are. “The fact that even I have trouble explaining them should be a clue,” Cranor said. Her past research on the rollout of two-factor authentication suggests that most people tend to resist new security features for as long as they can. Companies can nudge them, but for websites and apps trying to attract and retain users, pushing people to adopt an unfamiliar authentication technology risks scaring them away.

To further complicate matters, passkeys generally aren’t yet replacing passwords altogether, even on sites that use them. Because many passkeys live on your device, one that works on your phone might not work on your laptop, and one that works on your personal laptop might not work on your office device. So you still need a password that works across devices as a backup. It’s a lot, Dave Lewis, 1Password’s global-security adviser, acknowledged to me in an email. “The problem is cognitive overload,” he said. “All these tools are trying to help, but they don’t always work together intuitively.” Still, he disagreed that the situation has never been worse: “When the alternative was using the same password across dozens of accounts or putting it on a sticky note, the fact that people now have password managers, passkeys, biometrics, and multifactor authentication is a good thing.”

The mess might compound before it improves. Hacking attempts have been multiplying as crooks harness AI tools. Companies are adding even more security layers that make logging in harder, and they are pleading for people to make the switch to passkeys. On the bright side, maybe the seamless biometric future is actually within sight, and all of our login woes will soon be over. Then again, that’s what we were promised with password managers too.

Where Do America’s Colleges Go From Here?

2026-08-24T14:00:00-04:00

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On August 3, Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent a letter to states and higher-education leaders with instructions to, as McMahon put it, “describe to the American public your commitments to rigorous teaching, pathbreaking research, and national service—commitments that make our universities a bedrock institution of the American republic.”

A request like that would be simple enough if not for the history between the Trump administration and higher education—a relationship that can fairly be described as antagonistic. Case in point: last year’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which critics from across the political spectrum argued effectively asked colleges to compromise academic freedom in exchange for privileged, if vague, access to federal funds. There’s also the suite of federal investigations targeting diversity programs on college campuses.

Questioning colleges is normal. There are outstanding concerns about the experience, the education, and the enterprise of higher education: How much does it cost, and is that more than families can pay? Who gets in, and why? Are faculty members treated with dignity? What is college even for? So, although college leaders argue that a few of the concerns voiced in the document are legitimate, they also see within it the bane of Ilium.

[Read: A deal that would end universities’ independence]

On this week’s Radio Atlantic, I’m joined by Jack Stripling, the host of the College Matters podcast at The Chronicle of Higher Education, to consider higher education in the Trump era, and the purpose of college itself.

I also go back into the Atlantic archives to look at a debate between W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington over their theories of advancement for Black people, and how it should inform our thinking about colleges today.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jack Stripling: We keep talking about the politics, but when people are saying I don’t know if college is worth it, they’re usually saying I don’t know if it’s worth the money, not I don’t know if it’s worth risking meeting a liberal person.

Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris, and around the country millions of students are getting ready to head back to school, if they’re not already in class. So today, we need to think about education in uncertain times.

Now, I was always a big fan of the first day of school. In grade school, I’d pick out my clothes the night before, have them sitting and ready next to my bed. My bag was packed with everything I could possibly need, and some things I definitely didn’t. In college, every new year meant new books, new ideas, and new challenges.

But over the last several years, there has been a battle raging for the soul of higher education in America that’s divorced from those idyllic memories—a battle that has many asking what college is supposed to be and whom it is supposed to serve. Earlier this month, Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent a letter to colleges asking them to respond to a series of questions. Questions about their institutions, their programs, and how they contribute to the American project. The letter gives college leaders one more thing to consider in an era marked by funding woes, by fears of enrollment stagnation and decline, technological advancements, and political pressures.

How will it all play out? And what will school leaders be thinking about throughout the next year?

Jack Stripling is the host of the College Matters podcast at The Chronicle of Higher Education and my former colleague. And he joins me now to discuss.

Let’s get to questions.

Jack, welcome to the show.

Stripling: Adam Harris, so good to catch up with you.

Harris: Absolutely, man. I want to start with this letter that went out to college leaders recently from Education Secretary Linda McMahon that was effectively the administration’s call to action, right? To prod colleges to address what they see as a sort of outstanding concerns—affordability, viewpoint, diversity, right? That is to say, more acceptable, or more acceptance of conservative views on campus, job preparation, among other things. And it’s sort of been billed as a Compact 2.0, sort of building on the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education that was criticized in 2025.

In The Chronicle, you all referred to it as either an olive branch or a gloved fist.

So, like, which one is it? How are college presidents viewing this?

Stripling: Well, I think that the backstory is important here, Adam, which you know, which is that this is an administration that has essentially been at loggerheads with higher education since day one. The Trump presidency has largely defined its domestic agenda around attacking higher education for its perceived “wokeness.”

So this was no surprise that they were going to head in this direction to some extent. They have used, as you know, different types of leverage against all sorts of universities: withholding money, threatening all sorts of things. But the one thing they did do last fall was to release this compact for higher education, which was to say Sign on to these federal priorities and we will, in exchange, give you favorable treatment for federal funding. And this was a total flop. No one really signed on to this thing. There were lots of objections to it. And I think where it really hurt this administration was college presidents saying, This isn’t even merit-based, and you’re supposed to be the merit people. You’re now saying you’re going to give favoritism to people who agree with you politically.

So there was a disconnect between two value systems of the Trump administration. So they end up going back to the drawing board and, as you say, this August 3 letter comes from Secretary Linda McMahon that’s called “a national call to action.”

It’s a little softer. It’s more coalition-y, to make a phrase here. It’s based on feedback from influential higher-ed leaders, although some of them seem to be distancing themselves from their role in this.

Harris: Wait, how so?

Stripling: Well, so, one case in point being the Association of American Universities. So this is the group of high-powered research institutions in this country. It’s an invite-only group; it’s very elite to be a part of it. And they have apparently been working behind the scenes in conversations with the Education Department and with the White House about what they would or wouldn’t want to see in such a letter, but they’ve distanced themselves in saying, Hey, we actually didn’t get to take home drafts. We only had these conversations in person, and some of what we said showed up in there, some of it didn’t.

Other people, like the president of Wash U, Andrew Martin, who I think is considered somebody who’s kind of in the “Trump has a point” camp, has said, Hey, I didn’t I didn’t draft this thing, but it does look like some of the things I said are resonating with the Trump administration and ended up in there. But that tells you something about how prickly this is, Adam.

So people want to look like they’re playing ball with the Trump administration, but then they have to answer to other constituencies who are deeply skeptical of the motives behind this quote, unquote “agreement” or “value exercise.”

Harris: One of the things I noticed as you mentioned is that you had not only liberal groups, academics who might skew a little bit more to the left criticizing this original compact, but you also had conservative think tanks who would say things like At least the previous attempts to change higher education had some sort of legal backing, some sort of legal argument. It was a Title VI, it was a Title IX, it was a Title IV. Is this compact different than things that we had seen in previous administrations?

Stripling: Well, I probably should have said more about what was in it, Adam, right? So some of these things are sort of the greatest hits of the Trump administration. They want institutions to answer questions about, like, how are you gonna ensure merit-based admissions? Well, this is a very conservative-coded phrase, right? Because the suspicion is that they’re giving advantages to minority applicants, etc., even though the Supreme Court has said they can’t. So what are you doing on that front? What are you doing to ensure intellectual diversity in your departments? This is another conservative bailiwick, that certain soft sciences and other disciplines are now dominated by left-wing radicals who are here to indoctrinate your children. So they want you to speak to that.

These have flavors of things that came in the old compact. I think the distinction here, though, is that they are saying rather than Sign on to all of this, it’s phrased more in questions. Put something in a public statement that says what you’re doing on this front.

I talked to one former college president recently who said Is the Trump administration going to consider it a win if a bunch of us change our websites? And I think that remains to be seen. Would a symbolic victory of that kind be enough for the Trump administration?

Harris: And is there a concern that if they do put something on the website, the administration might try to poke holes in it?

Stripling: Absolutely, yes.

There are several people that I’ve talked to in recent days who talk about this as a Trojan horse. Because you can’t divorce this from history, Adam.

So I had one former president—I’m not going to name names here—but from a high-profile institution tell me, Well, Jack, you know, what if this came from Obama or Biden? Would people be freaking out about this? And then said, Now set aside all of the things that the Trump administration has done that appear to be or probably are patently unconstitutional and illegal. Set aside the fact that they had their fangs out for higher education from day one.

Well, you really can’t, right? You can’t set that aside. There’s history here, and so there’s a complete lack of trust. And the idea that we’re gonna put a public statement on our website saying we ostensibly sign on to a lot of the things you like—there’s great suspicion about how that information might be used against the institutions at some later date.

Harris: But we’ve seen some institutions comply, right, and already respond to the administration. So who has been responding and what are they saying in their responses to the call to action?

Stripling: The early responses are coming from pretty expected quarters. So Florida’s universities and state colleges, as well as the University of North Carolina system. These are both university systems that have a lot of political and ideological alignment with the Trump administration. They’re governed by boards that are led by Republicans or people with deep ties to the party. So it’s not really surprising to see them come out. They both praise the secretary’s questions. You know, we were waiting to be asked. Thank you so much. And they said We’re already doing a lot of the work that the Trump administration cares about.

So things like cracking down on disruptive protesters or banning DEI-related measures or emphasizing civics education. This is all pretty standard policy, particularly in red states now at public universities, so that’s not a big surprise. They were also asked about things that I think are arguably pretty nonpartisan, like dealing with grade inflation, maintaining academic rigor in the AI age. These are things that universities across the country, regardless of politics, I think, are concerned about and thinking about, so they weighed in on that.

I think what’s distinct in the responses to this letter from these two states, at least, though, is the highly nationalistic tone. They’re being pressed to talk about how they will serve American interest. And these states are very comfortable with that type of conversation, perhaps in a way that left-leaning faculty, frankly, might not be. Florida’s saying, Hey, we’re capping undergrads from foreign countries. That’s one of the things we’re doing. UNC says We emphasize research related to national defense. It’s probably a bit rah-rah for some in the faculty set. It reminds me a little bit of post-9/11 America, what we saw in higher education after that. But I think to sort of sum it up, Florida and North Carolina are saying You’re preaching to the choir here. In fact, you’re preaching to the choir directors. We were already on this. And so it’s not surprising to hear this from them.

Harris: But it’s almost like serving up a little bit of red meat with a little bit of substance.

Stripling: I think so, I think so. This has been compared to what people do in an accreditation process, for example. We know the rules; this is how we’re obeying them. And it’s, you know, it’s sort of a statement of alignment as much as anything.

Harris: Yeah. And so for these states, which are functionally sort of aligned ideologically, they’re saying that they are already concerned about these things. They’re already working on these things. And you mentioned that other institutions are concerned about these things. Are they also working on those things? Like, how much of this is the rest of higher education already doing?

Stripling: Well, I think that we’re having a national conversation around things like the SAT, for example. Some colleges went test optional, or even test blind. And even, you know, the liberal state of California is starting to grapple with this question. Did doing away with the SAT mean that we got students here who weren’t prepared for the level of work they were going to get at a University of California campus? So that conversation is happening in states red and blue, and it’s something the Trump administration emphasizes and cares deeply about.

It’s part of this larger merit conversation.

Harris: And of the things that are in the actual call to action, how much of it are colleges already doing? I thought that was a really interesting critique, was that these questions are things that we’ve already outlined; they’re things we’re already trying to address. So how much of it are the colleges actually already doing?

Stripling: Well, your mileage may vary on whether they’re doing enough to control cost, whether they’re doing enough to address ideological capture within their own departments.

Cost you can’t argue with; we now have from the highly selective institutions that are charging over $100,000 to other privates that are much lower but still very much out of reach for most American families. Very hard to argue with that.

Then you have recent reports from Yale and one commissioned by the chancellors at Vanderbilt and Wash U that have both said there’s some credence to this idea that politicization has become a problem in our academic departments. So those voices are coming from within. Clearly there has been some recognition within higher education that some of these critiques have some merit.

Harris: To that point though, one of the administration’s plans, goals, is to address the high cost of going to college. But how much control do institutions actually have over the cost of education?

Jack Stripling: Well, Adam, you’ll know from our days working together at The Chronicle, which were the best of my life, I should say—2017 was a great year for me.

Harris: Incredible. I enjoyed it so much.

Stripling: But in any case, you’ll remember it was the same story that we were hearing then, which was that a lot of the drivers of cost have to do with personnel; they have to do with structural issues within higher education; they have to do with students wanting more amenities—that was kind of an old sall. And I think you’re hearing a lot of the same things, but the fact is they can’t get away from the reality that people are losing confidence in higher education as an institution.

If you look at the latest polling on this, I think it’s, like, four in 10 Americans that say they have high confidence or a lot of confidence in higher education now. And even Democrats who have historically supported higher education more than Republicans are starting to lose their affection for the institution.

So I think there’s a recognition that it’s a real problem, and I really do think that the money is the big factor. We keep talking about the politics, but when people are saying I don’t know if college is worth it, they’re usually saying I don’t know if it’s worth the money, not I don’t know if it’s worth risking meeting a liberal person.

Harris: I do want to talk more about the purpose of higher education, but I wanted to ask first about the pressures for ideological change from the administration and state lawmakers. You’re in Florida, and that’s a good example of the changes in terms of curriculum, institutional culture. So are you noticing any effects?

Stripling: I think it kind of remains to be seen, Adam. I still—and again, this is really more gut than data—but I still do think cost is the major thing families are worried about.

I will say that, to your point, I do live in Florida and, you know, this is famously the place where woke goes to die, as Ron DeSantis said. And a lot of action has been taken on the ideological front that is also connected to this question of What is college for?

So if you think about the core curriculum, the courses that colleges are saying everybody should take, there’s usually some menu of sorts. A lot of institutions over time—there’s been a lot of bloat there. There’s been a lot of things that we might not consider essential that have come into the core curriculum. So some of these ostensibly sort of ideological attacks resonate to some degree with faculty who say, Actually we have gotten a little out of control in what’s in this core.

But what you’re pointing to, Adam, is the key distinction, which is, is higher education about vocation or does it have some sort of more aspirational mission? And this is an old problem. Are you there to learn about how to prepare for your first job, or is it about preparing you for a life of greater intellectual enrichment? And I think that that’s at the heart of a lot of the conversations we’re having, even if they are politically coded. What is college for? continues to be something that, you know, sort of divides people.

What’s interesting is that parents and even students will tell you, I really want to go to college and be able to get a good job. And I want to be able to leave here with a credential that matters and that is seen as authentic, even though I use ChatGPT for half my classes.

But students also say they want more. If you look at the studies around mental health that places like the Harvard Grad School of Education have done, they are desperate for something real. And so when they come to an institution that seems like it’s all about pleasing the next corporate overlord, they chafe. That’s why they’re booing at commencement ceremonies when people praise AI, right? So students actually do want something more than something to punch up their résumé.

Harris: So, Jack, we’re in August, whole school year ahead of us. What will you be keeping your eye on the most as this year develops?

Stripling: I go back to what I said before, which is this collective sense of Is the Trump administration done with us?

I think that that is something that I’m starting to hear people in higher education ask. Like, Was this Act 1, or is this letter in and of itself a form of surrender, a sort of concession? They’re looking for a symbolic win. Using the DOJ and these other arms of the government to try to exact concessions or revenge is very expensive. It’s very time consuming, and they’ve lost in court in some big ways. Now these cases are still unfolding, but that’s the reality.

What I will be paying attention to is this question of purpose, though. And I know this is going to sound weird, Adam, but have you read Stoner?

Harris: Yes, I have.

Stripling: Okay. So for folks who don’t know, this is a 1965 novel by John Williams. We just talked about it on my podcast, College Matters. We had sort of a reading club.

And it’s the story about this professor at Mizzou, who’s this farm boy who goes to the University of Missouri thinking that he’s going to major in some kind of agricultural sciences. He’s going to come back and work on the family farm, and life’s gonna be happy for him and his parents. What ends up happening instead is that he goes into this class and he’s exposed to his first Shakespearean sonnet, and it immediately changes his world. He can’t explain why, but the way he sees people, the way he sees worlds, the way he interacts with the universe changes in some profound way. And the frustration of the novel is that he can’t really explain it to anyone. It’s just something he feels.

And that’s the problem with this product that we call “higher education.” When it works as it should, it’s transformational. It changes you in profound ways. But it’s nearly impossible to explain how.

And that makes it really hard to charge $100,000 for. And so what higher education is going to have to do this year, like it has every other previous year I’ve been covering it, is explain that transformational experience in a way that resonates with every constituency, whether it’s the Trump administration, the student who doesn’t have enough money to go to college, the parents who are skeptical about the the job return, the people who care about AI and how that’s changing credentials. Somehow they’re going to have to make that case, and maybe reading Stoner is a good start. But that’s what I’m always thinking about.

Harris: Well, Jack, as always, it is fantastic to see you, to talk to you, and you’ve given us a lot to think about as we head into this new school year. It’s great to have you on.

Stripling: Thank you, Adam. Let’s do it again. I really appreciate it.

Harris: We’re back in the archives this week with a look at a question that has troubled some of the greatest minds throughout history. It’s a question that Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois tried to answer in The Atlantic between 1896 and 1903: Are colleges designed only to train people to work for their own improvement, or are they designed to train people to create a better society?

Booker T. Washington was the most powerful Black man of the late 19th and early 20th century in America. He was born on a tobacco plantation in 1856, and he was emancipated from slavery at the end of the Civil War. He was 9 years old then. Education changed his life.

Writing about his upbringing in the September 1896 issue of The Atlantic, Washington said: “After the close of the war, while working in the coal-mines of West Virginia for the support of my mother, I heard in some accidental way of the Hampton Institute.”

Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, near the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, had opened its doors in 1868. It had a simple mission: “to train selected Negro youth who should go out and teach and lead their people first by example.” The students from Hampton were expected to get land and homes, to work for their money with knowledge of why they were doing the work—or, as the institution’s founder put it, “to replace stupid drudgery with skilled hands.”

Washington would later write in the pages of The Atlantic in 1896 the education he received at Hampton changed him, it “caused me for the first time to realize what it meant to be a man instead of a piece of property.”

He was ready to proselytize, to spread the word on this industrial, practical education that wasn’t just a mirror of what was popular. It wasn’t just teaching French for the sake of saying that it did or the piano while expecting nothing but a future of poverty in return for its graduates. It was a functional education, which would help Black people less than a generation removed from slavery learn the skills they needed to advance.

In 1881, Washington went to the Deep South, to the Black Belt in Alabama, to establish a school in Tuskegee. The school opened with one teacher, 30 students, and not a lick of property to speak of save a shanty and a church. But Washington was a savvy dealer; he coaxed donations from wealthy people in both the North and the South by preaching a philosophy of self-reliance. The students worked to build buildings on campus while they received an industrial education. And by the time he was writing in The Atlantic in 1896, that little college in Tuskegee had grown to 800 students, taught by 79 faculty members, spread across 1,400 acres of land which housed 30 buildings.

Washington’s reputation grew alongside the institution, not least because of what he was willing to set aside to achieve his goal.

His philosophy would have allowed—at least in the short term—the continuation of Black Americans’ second-class citizenship.

Black people, Washington argued in his Atlantic essay, were to find their dignity through their industrial labors and the financial gains it brought them. He wrote that “it is through the dairy farm, the truck garden, the trades, and commercial life, largely, that the negro is to find his way to the enjoyment of all his rights.”

Now, despite the critique that Washington’s school only taught Black people to do the same jobs that they did during slavery, even his critics were forced to admire his brilliance and thrift and ability to make a tangible difference in the lives of Black people in the Black Belt.

Perhaps most prominent among those critics was W. E. B. Du Bois, who argued that the training students received at Tuskegee was necessary but insufficient on its own. Sure, it might lead to the economic advancement for some of its students; it might make them self-sufficient, able to eat and clothe themselves. But Du Bois argued that there was more to life than food and clothing.

Du Bois thought a true college education—a liberal education of the kind taught at Fisk, Atlanta University, Wilberforce, Howard, and Lincoln, among others—was the foundation of advancement. In the September 1902 issue of The Atlantic, Du Bois argued that there needed to be teachers for would-be students. Those colleges like Fisk that were training Black people to go back and teach their kin were of the highest importance. Du Bois wrote: “In a single generation they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South; they wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of the black people of the land, and they made Tuskegee possible.”

The schools Du Bois praised developed not only workers but full men. They produced people capable of critical thought. The Bible says that man shall not live by bread alone; Du Bois had his own version. “We shall hardly induce black men to believe that if their bellies be full it matters little about their brains.”

The reality that both men acknowledged is that both forms of teaching—the one that begins with the theoretical and the other with the practical—are necessary to improve the situation for Black people in America, to unwind the damage done by generations of laws which banned Black education.

Washington thought enough of his critics to respond, which he did in the October 1903 issue of The Atlantic, where he wrote: “I cannot understand how any reasonable person can object to such education for a large part of a people who are in the poverty-stricken condition that is true of a large element of my race, especially when such hand training is combined, as it should be, with the best education of the head and heart.”

But the issue was that Washington’s idea of a practical education which would disregard social equality was weaponized: It was treated as the only way rather than a way.

As Du Bois noted in his 1902 essay, “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls.” Reading the classics gave him a sense of the ties that bind humanity; they welcomed him to the great brotherhood of mankind.

The question animating the debate between Washington and Du Bois is as relevant as ever: Is college meant to train people for the workforce of today or to produce graduates capable of building a better tomorrow? It’s a question that we should all be considering.

That’s all for today’s show.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli.

It was edited by Hadley Robinson.

It was engineered by Miguel Carrascal and has original music by Rob Smierciak.

Claudine Eibed 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 publication at theatlantic.com/listener.

Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.

The Atlantic announces Jessica Goldstein as SVP of events

2026-08-24T13:34:02-04:00

The Atlantic has hired Jessica Goldstein as senior vice president of events, who will work in partnership with managing director for events Evan Smith to lead and produce the magazine’s robust live programs nationwide. She begins with The Atlantic in early September.

Jessica has spent her career telling stories through reporting and creating live experiences that resonate far beyond the stage. She spent eight years creating and leading NPR’s live cultural programming, including creating the Tiny Desk Contest, NPR’s annual search for new musical talent, and the How I Built This Summit. She most recently led the Skoll Foundation’s global convenings strategy and directed the Skoll World Forum.

At The Atlantic, she will work with Evan to lead one of the most influential and long-running events practices in media. The Atlantic convenes dozens of annual in-person and virtual events that reach thousands of people every year, anchored by its flagship event, The Atlantic Festival, which returns to New York City September 17–19, after being held for nearly two decades in Washington, D.C. The Atlantic is also under way with a new 50-state tour, The Atlantic Across America, that has already held events in 10 states, addressing some of the most complex issues of our time.

Below is Evan Smith’s announcement to staff:

I’m excited to let you know that we’ve hired the amazing Jessica Goldstein as our new senior vice president of events. As the second-in-command on our growing team, she’ll oversee the operations, planning, and execution of our robust public programs, working closely with our sales, marketing, design, and CSG colleagues to grow The Atlantic’s audience and revenue; shine a great, big light on our brand; and—most crucially—bring our journalists and our journalism to stages from coast to coast through The Atlantic Festival, The Atlantic Across America, The Atlantic Summits, and so much more.

Jessica comes to us most recently from the Skoll Foundation, where she was managing director of convenings, leading the organization’s global events strategy and directing the Skoll World Forum, a weeklong gathering of heads of state, social entrepreneurs, and civil-society partners. But it’s her reputation at NPR that really precedes her—and makes her the ideal hire in this moment. As senior director and executive producer of Events & Experiential, she spent eight years creating and leading NPR’s live programming, including the Tiny Desk Contest and the How I Built This Summit. Previously she was a senior supervising producer for NPR Music, a senior producer on the science desk, and a producer of audio documentaries known as NPR Radio Expeditions. A native of New York, Jessica is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Jessica believes in the power of storytelling, of sharing ideas and sparking inspiration, which is precisely how we think about our work in the events space. There is no loftier task before us than getting people from divergent backgrounds—great minds who don’t think alike—in a room to listen and talk and continue the conversation after we’re gone. She will bring to bear her decades of experience, her imagination, her creativity, her calm, and her charisma as we expand the ambitious work of the Live team.

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

Scenes From the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games

2026-08-24T12:19:41-04:00

Lintao Zhang / Getty

A humanoid robot waves a flag during the opening ceremony of the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games at the National Speed Skating Oval in Beijing, China, on August 22, 2026.

Pedro Pardo / AFP / Getty

Robots parade on a track during the opening ceremony of the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on August 22, 2026.

Pedro Pardo / AFP / Getty

Robots play drums during an opening-ceremony performance on August 22, 2026.

Lintao Zhang / Getty

“Blitz,” a robot from the Chinese cellphone manufacturer Honor, takes an oath at the opening ceremony at the National Speed Skating Oval on August 22, 2026.

Qilai Shen / Bloomberg / Getty

Galbot G1 robots perform during a rehearsal ahead of the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on August 21, 2026.

VCG / Getty

Robots and artists perform during the opening ceremony on August 22, 2026.

Tingshu Wang / Reuters

A Tiangong robot takes part in a long-jump contest at the National Speed Skating Oval on August 23, 2026.

Lintao Zhang / Getty

“Blitz” is placed on a stretcher after a 100m preliminary run on August 22, 2026.

Tingshu Wang / Reuters

A robot takes part in a dexterous hand-block building contest in Beijing on August 23, 2026.

Pedro Pardo / AFP / Getty

A robot celebrates after scoring a goal during a football match on August 22, 2026.

Qilai Shen / Bloomberg / Getty

Booster T2 robots lie on the floor during an opening-ceremony rehearsal on August 21, 2026.

Lintao Zhang / Getty

A humanoid robot competes in the 1500m event during day two of the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games.

Florence Lo / Reuters

A robot falls beside a burning robot competitor after completing a 100m large-size group preliminary race on August 22, 2026.

Lintao Zhang / Getty

Staff members douse a burning robot with fire extinguishers at the National Speed Skating Oval on August 22, 2026.

Pedro Pardo / AFP / Getty

A robot returns a ball during a tennis match in Beijing on August 22, 2026.

Lintao Zhang / Getty

Robots fight in the lightweight combat event during day two of the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games.

Achmad Ibrahim / AP

A robot is carried off the field after a soccer game on August 22, 2026.

Lintao Zhang / Getty

Technicians guide robots during rehearsals on August 19, 2026.

Lintao Zhang / Getty

A robot competes in the 400m obstacle event on August 24, 2026.

Lintao Zhang / Getty

Robots compete in a table-tennis event on August 22, 2026.

Pedro Pardo / AFP / Getty

A robot competes in the tai chi event on day two of the World Humanoid Robot Games.

Tingshu Wang / Reuters

A robot falls during a 400m obstacle race.

Lintao Zhang / Getty

Staff members remove a malfunctioning robot during the 400m small group final on August 22, 2026.

Lintao Zhang / Getty

Humanoid robots compete in the 100m preliminary at the National Speed Skating Oval in Beijing on August 22, 2026.

A Reverse Ellis Island

2026-08-24T12:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Lisette Poole

Julio Borrell knew he was being deported, but after 47 hours on a bus rattling through Mexico, he still had no idea where the United States was sending him. Through the window, he saw the cities give way to sprawling banana plantations and coffee farms. The passengers were still wearing whatever clothes they’d had on when they were detained by ICE: shirts splattered with paint from their most recent job, pajama pants, landscaping-company uniforms, bathing suits. Borrell had lived in Miami for 46 years. Now he watched as the bus passed a sign for the Guatemala border and then pulled over on the side of the road.

“Where are we?” Borrell asked.

“Tapachula,” a Mexican immigration agent answered.

Borrell hadn’t heard of it. Neither had anyone else on the bus. The deportees weren’t from here. They weren’t even from Mexico. They were Cuban, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and Haitian—many of them elderly, some stripped of their green card after spending most of their life in the United States. The Trump administration, unable or unwilling to send them to their home country, had bused them 2,000 miles, from the U.S. border to a small city where they don’t have legal status. It’s a practice that started last year without any announcement and has quietly grown since then. “Why the hell did they bring us here?” Borrell, who migrated to Miami from Havana in 1980, asked me while I was in Tapachula this month.

By the time we met, Borrell, a tall, sinewy 72-year-old with a shock of gray hair, had been in Tapachula for about six months, trying to make enough money fixing tires to rent a studio apartment. He knew that a handful of other Cuban deportees had been flown even farther away, to African nations such as Eswatini and South Sudan. But it was Tapachula that had become a mass waiting area for those rebuffed by U.S. immigration policy, out of sight of lawyers and human-rights defenders. This is now where the largest concentration of deportees is dropped in Mexico, and where most migrants traveling through Latin America en route to the U.S. are halted. Donald Trump can claim that the border is “closed” because it has effectively been relocated to Tapachula. The city looks and feels the way towns in northern Mexico along the U.S. border once did—a dumping ground for those expelled from the United States and a gathering place for those snagged on their way north.

Mexican agents pull migrants out of commercial buses and cars on the freeway leaving the city, making sure the deportees don’t attempt to return to the United States. Another set of agents waits for the next busload of Cubans, Venezuelans, and Haitians to arrive so they can be processed. It’s what experts call externalization: the outsourcing of migration management to other countries.

Julio Borrell, originally from Cuba, in Tapachula, on July 30, 2026 (Lisette Poole for The Atlantic)

Borrell told me that he’d come to the United States when he was 26 as part of the Mariel boatlift, the mass exodus of Cubans who traveled on crowded boats to Miami in 1980. He had seven American children, 11 grandchildren, and a great-grandchild. He had run a mechanic shop and renewed his visa each time it neared expiration. He could feel his body breaking down after years of physical labor and had been looking forward to retirement and more time with his family in South Florida.

Then, last December, he went to his scheduled immigration check-in, as he had done dozens of times before. This time, he was detained by ICE agents. They sent Borrell to Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz for four months and then to Eloy Detention Center, in Arizona. From there, he was put on a bus for the U.S.-Mexico border and then another, bound for Tapachula. He walked on the side of the road for an hour before borrowing a cellphone to call his family back in Miami. “I’m in some place called Tapachula, Chiapas,” he told his daughter.

Borrell, like thousands of other non-Mexicans deported here, arrived without clear legal status and with nowhere to stay. Many deportees sleep on the street for their first few nights. Mexico denies that it is facilitating deportations from the United States to Tapachula, even though more than a dozen migrants described to me the cooperation between U.S. and Mexican immigration agents in their expulsions. According to data from the Mexican Institute for Migration, 12,977 non-Mexicans were deported to Mexico from January 2025 to March 2026, largely to southern Mexico. They joined the tens of thousands of other migrants from all over the world who have been stranded in Tapachula during their journey to the United States, after being blocked by Mexican immigration agents from moving farther north. The mix of nationalities here has prompted officials at the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration to begin informally referring to the city as TapaYork—a kind of reverse Ellis Island. There are roughly 350,000 permanent residents of Tapachula and approximately 60,000 migrants living here. Some have tried to flee Tapachula multiple times, only to be deported back over and over again after being caught by Mexican agents.

[Read: The rushed, blundering effort to send deportees to third countries]

U.S. officials have consistently said that their goal is “zero border crossings”—a more absolutist project than Trump articulated during his first term, when it was easier for migrants to advance beyond Tapachula. This month, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed that his department was accomplishing that goal. (Crossings are indeed way down, but they’re not at zero.) In meetings with their Mexican counterparts, U.S. officials continue to ask for more stringent immigration enforcement and accommodation for long-distance deportations, according to Mexican officials. The Mexicans, who fear unilateral U.S. military action, have generally complied. The Cubans, Venezuelans, and Haitians who are expelled here in buses that typically arrive a few times a week are evidence of Mexico’s acquiescence. In addition to the buses filled with foreigners, Tapachula’s tiny airport sometimes receives as many as five flights of Mexican deportees a day. (There have been more than 196 so far this year.) Most of the Mexicans arriving by plane head straight to the local bus station and return to their home state or to the border again. Some are minors and need to wait for their parents to pick them up.

At the Tapachula airport, deportees arrive on flights from the United States. (Lisette Poole for The Atlantic)

In his first weeks here, Borrell, disoriented, was walking to an ATM to see whether he could withdraw cash when he saw a face he recognized. It was a Cuban friend from Miami, who ran a tile business.

“What are you doing here, man?” Borrell asked.

His friend, who had moved to the U.S. from Cuba when he was 6 and held a green card, had also been deported by bus. Borrell told him what he has said many times since: “We’ve got to get out of here. I’m not going to die in Tapachula.”

From his small stand selling bread in downtown Tapachula, Mervil Wisdael, 43, sees the groups of deportees arrive a few times a week. “They’re lost,” he told me. “They’re just dragging their feet. They don’t even know where they are.”

Wisdael, from Port-au-Prince, is part of a different population of migrants here, one that intended to pass through on the way to the United States. Tapachula has historically been a way station for migrants traveling north, including those who navigated the jungle of Panama’s Darién Gap before continuing to Mexico. I spent a week in Tapachula in 2018, when a caravan of migrants amassed there on their way north, early in Trump’s first term. Migrants slept in the central plaza, in the bus station, in rented rooms and shelters. It quickly became a media spectacle. Trump claimed that the group leaving Tapachula, which included many young Central American families, was full of criminals. He demanded that Mexico intercept them. A few days later, I walked with the migrants to the edge of the town, where Mexican immigration authorities had blocked the road. Hundreds of people were detained. Taking a break, one officer said to me, “We’re doing what your president asked.”

Since then, the Mexican government has again and again bent to the will of the U.S. government on immigration enforcement. It signed off on the “Remain in Mexico” policy in 2019, which forced asylum seekers to wait for their immigration appointments from Mexico’s northern border rather than from within the United States. Under the Joe Biden–era CBP One program, it agreed to host asylum seekers even farther south, including in Tapachula. Then, during Trump’s second term, Mexico agreed to mass deportations to the city. Mexican officials told me that the main consideration for the Americans was Tapachula’s distance from the U.S. border and the way agents could create a choke hold on the only highway leaving the city. I came back to Tapachula to see how that series of capitulations had changed the city, a gritty commercial hub surrounded by miles of farmland, where near-daily afternoon storms briefly break the tropical heat.

Read: A planeload of informants

The refugee office in Tapachula often has a line outside as people seek residency in Mexico. (Lisette Poole for The Atlantic)

Wisdael had planned to make his way to the U.S. to reunite with his family and apply for asylum. But by the time he arrived in Tapachula, six years ago, Mexico was no longer allowing migrants to transit through the country without a humanitarian visa or refugee status, which could take months or years to get. He stayed until he got his papers, and then he waited longer to see whether it might get easier to cross the U.S. border. Many other Haitians stayed too. Roughly 10 percent of the city’s public-school students are now from Haiti. Each of its three semiprofessional basketball teams has Haitian players. The city’s market is peppered with stalls selling Haitian food. Employees of the municipal immigration office have taught themselves Creole.

Wisdael has been in Tapachula longer than most of his countrymen. He speaks fluent Spanish. He met a Guatemalan woman, Ericka Leonardo, while working on a construction crew there. She was walking down the street.

“You’re pretty,” he said.

“I’ve never dated a Black guy,” she said.

“Maybe you should try,” he said.

They’re now married and live together in Tapachula. She works at an arcade around the corner from his bread stall. They’ve become informal sources of information about Mexico’s archaic immigration system. Wisdael explains to newly arrived Haitians that they need to line up at Mexico’s refugee office every 15 days so that a bureaucrat can sign a document proving that they have not absconded from Tapachula. After 30 or 40 or 50 signatures—anywhere from one to two years—most Haitians will have refugee status in Mexico. “They don’t want to wait that long. No one wants to wait that long here,” he said.

Ericka Leonardo and her husband, Mervil Wisdael, at the arcade where Leonardo works, in Tapachula (Lisette Poole for The Atlantic)

But Wisdael knows that it’s not a good time to attempt to cross the U.S. border. Most people don’t even get that far. Haitians without Mexican papers are typically caught by Mexican immigration agents at a checkpoint just north of Tapachula. The city once felt like a stepping stone. Now it feels like a dead end.

Almost every immigrant community in Tapachula has its own Wisdael—someone who has been around long enough to explain the rules to the newly arrived. Aside from the Cubans and Venezuelans, there are thousands of Central Americans, along with smaller groups of Congolese, Senegalese, Bangladeshis, and Nepalese. There’s a Cameroonian bar and a Ghanaian restaurant within walking distance of the 19th-century colonial church in the city center. The man guarding the door at one of the migrant shelters is Ukrainian. Most people have learned just enough Spanish to ask at least two questions: How long have you been here? And when are you leaving?

Evening in Tapachula (Lisette Poole for The Atlantic)

Before I left Tapachula, I was curious to meet the city employees running the municipal migrant-assistance center. I followed directions to a mostly abandoned covered market at the edge of town. I was sure I was lost. Then an enthusiastic 28-year-old, Kevin Figueroa, leaped out of his office holding a laptop. He had a PowerPoint presentation on migration in Tapachula. Did I want to see it?

He flipped through the slides on the large numbers of migrant arrivals here and all of the ways the city had integrated them into municipal life. I knew that there had been protests over the past few years by locals upset about the way their city was changing. In 2022, Roberto Fuentes, the city council’s general secretary, told reporters that “the city is in a state of siege, a state of chaos.” At least once, Haitian street vendors like Wisdael have been physically removed from the city center by local police.

But Figueroa assured me that Tapachulans had become accustomed to the way their city had been transformed. The economy was growing. The food was better. I partially believed him. In some ways, the city did seem to have settled into its new demographics. But there were still frequent confrontations between migrants and municipal employees—triggered, for example, by migrants using public electricity outlets to charge their phones. This month, several migrants set their mattresses on fire in the city’s migrant-detention center, leading the military to intervene. Two Venezuelans were arrested. Mexico’s immigration agency said obliquely in a press release that the protest was in response to “the dissatisfaction of a group of foreign nationals regarding their immigration process.”

What seems to bother those trapped in Tapachula most is not the way they are treated in the city, but that they are here at all, in a no-man’s-land, far from any place they ever lived. It’s an approach the Trump administration plans to expand to more remote locations. Not long after I left Tapachula, the Liberian government announced that it would accept 1,200 non-Liberian deportees from the United States. Such an announcement would, until recently, have been a radical departure from decades of immigration policy. But there has been little outcry. The U.S. has kept the desperation of deportees and asylum seekers at a great distance. Some of the Cubans I spoke with in Tapachula told me that in the next week or two, they will begin marching north in their own migrant caravan. They know their chances of getting to the border are close to zero. But they think the effort might be enough to remind Americans that they are there, waiting at the southern tip of Mexico.

A Freedom 250 Event That Actually Worked

2026-08-24T11:14:00-04:00

An interest in the thrills of car racing is not what drove me to spend my Sunday afternoon at the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, the latest of the spectacles that Donald Trump has presided over during the United States’ big birthday celebrations all summer. I was there yesterday because I was worried about art. The event involved 25 cars zipping around a number of D.C.’s museums and historic buildings at worryingly high speeds—147 times. Preservationists and conservators had raised concerns ahead of the contest, leading me to imagine creaking sculptures and rattling ceramics, all because the president wanted a race around the National Mall. Seeing the National Gallery of Art’s huge black Alexander Calder sculpture outside, surrounded by wood boards as if the poor thing were hunkering down for war, didn’t help.

But it turns out that playing art patrol is rather difficult at an IndyCar race, especially when you find yourself crammed into a sweaty crowd as blurs of color whiz by. This proximity to the action means you are a participant in a much more visceral way than at many other sporting events: You can feel the vibrations in your toes. Somewhere among the vrooms, I realized that this was not like the other Freedom 250 productions I had attended, like the Great American State Fair with its drab triumphal arch and the Freedom Trucks with their selective history. Instead, in some moments, the Grand Prix was … fun?

The good vibes began when I spotted the driver Sting Ray Robb’s maintenance truck, decorated with the ridiculously wholesome image of seven puppies climbing on his race car. He immediately gained a fan in me, though he crashed early on. The course, with its many bumps, was tricky for drivers, and just more than half of them even finished. Kyle Kirkwood, another American, won.

Many might be tempted to slot the IndyCar race next to other Trumpian events that have disrupted life in the nation’s capital. More than that, the race could easily serve as another example of how little an administration that has pressured museums and diluted historic-preservation laws cares for the nation’s cultural heritage. These interpretations aren’t overblown.

Earlier this year, the Grand Prix unveiled (and later walked back) a disturbing T-shirt that featured a white-clad figure and read: One Nation One Race. In and around the city yesterday, the traffic was a pain for locals, the nearest airport had to stop flights for three hours, and the noise—including multiple deafening flyovers—was nothing short of a public nuisance. For those without tickets, access to the Mall was closed off. Madhan Subramanian, who lives by the course, told me he was “just a little annoyed by everything.” He thought it was a cool event, but “it was harder to get groceries and just do our normal thing.”

The worries about vibrations and damage to artifacts were legitimate, too. In the middle of the race, I put my hand on the boarded-up geometric I. M. Pei skylights outside the National Gallery and found them shaking like a cellphone on vibrate. (Not great!) A man yelled to me over the thunderous cars, “Are we okay?” I replied, in earnest, “I’m not sure.” (So far, there have been no reports of damaged art.)

Reckless is one word for what unfolded in the capital yesterday. But one person’s reckless is another’s exciting. And the Freedom 250 Grand Prix certainly had oomph to it. Trump did a lap of the track at the beginning of the race to the sound of mixed cheers and boos, and although I noticed Trump gear—Trump 2028 hats, for example—for sale outside the race perimeter, inside many fans had opted for checkers and race jerseys.

In other words, this didn’t feel like another Freedom 250 event that was more about Trump than about America. Race-car driving occupies its own indomitable universe of fandom, kitsch, design, and hype. Ultimately, a race is a race, and many in the crowd appeared to be there simply for the sport.

Keith Cole, a former amateur racer and F1 fan, was among them. A car race in downtown Washington seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime thing, so he came to D.C. with a friend despite some low-grade partisan energy they didn’t care for. “We don’t see a lot of people like us here,” Cole, who is Black, told me, noting some MAGA-hat sightings, too. “I understand how they want to use it to politicize it, but this is sports. You gotta, kind of, take it out of it.”

Most of the time, the National Mall is a reflective space flanked by quiet, regal buildings that command a certain respect. Yesterday, though, America’s “front yard” felt more like a backyard. IndyCar fans played cornhole and giant Connect Four on the grass, which was dotted with lemonade stands and picnic tables. In one moment, I was surrounded by beer-drinking racing fanatics; in the next, I was engulfed in the smell of gasoline and the sound of revving engines; minutes later, after a short stroll, I was standing in the National Gallery in front of a Georgia O’Keeffe.

Inside one of the galleries, I found Carol Madden—a native of Indianapolis, IndyCar’s namesake and the site of its premier event, the 500—seeking a break from the heat near some Renaissance-era earthenware. “The Indy 500 is Christmas for my family. We don’t come home for Christmas and Easter—we all come home for the race,” she told me. This was her 55th race, which she attended with her whole family, she said, getting teary-eyed.

Nearby, Diana Vinson, as much a race-car fan as a museum lover, was immersed in a photograph on the wall. She didn’t see her appreciation for the two things as entirely separate. Both art and racing are all about precision; they’re about tiny decisions—in brushstrokes or tire pressure—that add up. “You have to understand your mediums,” she told me.

The museum was making the most of any connection it could find with the event, which forced it to partially close for the race; the portion of it that remained open was accessible only to IndyCar ticket holders. (The National Gallery has been notably savvy about garnering attention of late, as evidenced by its viral videos of a Gen Z–whispering senior curator who called that Renaissance earthenware “bussin’.”) Outside, signs promised “iconic art (and air-conditioning).” Staff members had set up a tent where they sold T-shirts featuring a portrait of George Souders, who won the Indy 500 in 1927, from the museum’s collection.

Earlier, out on the Mall, I had spoken with Bill Sherman, a fan of “anything that makes noise and goes fast,” who told me he thinks people are drawn to car racing because they can see themselves in it. “I’ve driven these roads hundreds of times,” he said. “It’s one of the few sports that you can look at and say, I can go out and do that every day on the Beltway.”

Though that would certainly spice up your commute, you shouldn’t. Just like you shouldn’t send thousands of pounds of metal flying around historic sites. But watching cars hurtling past the National Archives, barreling toward the Air and Space Museum, with the U.S. Capitol looming in the distance, you might just convince yourself otherwise.

What a Bicentennial Baby Knows

2026-08-24T08:00:00-04:00

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Thirteen seconds after midnight on July 4, 1976, Karen Steele was born in Montclair, New Jersey, and was anointed the first “bicentennial baby.” Newspaper articles followed. President Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty, sent a note to the family. And then it kind of became a thing. Any baby born that year was treated like they had emerged playing the fife and drums. In Mobile, Alabama, new mothers received a commemorative blanket. In Covington, Louisiana, a hospital handed out (for $2.50) special “bicentennial baby” certificates on faux parchment, a “memento that can be framed and cherished as a family heirloom for endless generations.”

This was a year of jaw-dropping kitsch, an explosion of red, white, and blue everything—toilet paper, lollipops, even condoms (pleading: One Time for Old Glory). Branding newborns this way became part of the general patriotic fun. And although the tchotchkes surely ended up moldering in a red, white, and blue landfill somewhere, the label stuck. I know: I was one of those babies, born in August 1976.

Being a bicentennial baby was not anything I ever thought about all that much. In fact, it was really only when meeting another person born in 1976 that it came up at all. Oh, you’re a bicentennial baby too, one of us would say to the other, smiling dumbly. This was a secret handshake that opened zero doors. But unlike other indelible parts of my identity that felt small in their particularity—like being the child of immigrants or being nearsighted—having my birth hitched somehow to the history of the country, to its forward motion, felt big whenever I was reminded of it.

Beyond the horror of realizing that five of my current lifespans stacked up is all that separates me now from Benjamin Franklin, I’ve been thinking about this cohort of which I’m a part. Expounding on the significance of one’s own generation can lead rapidly to wild generalization, self-absorption, and some misplaced nostalgia. I know this. But I’m convinced that my fellow bicentennial babies and I have been through something unique. We’ve followed a distinct arc over the past 50 years: one of disillusionment. Better than most, we understand the disjunctions of our present because they happened at crucial inflection points alongside the timeline of our lives.

We were born during a period of palate-cleansing. The Vietnam War was over. President Richard Nixon had, in 1974, resigned after Watergate, a redemptive scandal that renewed people’s faith in self-government. Journalists—yes, journalists—were sex symbols. Robert Redford played Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men. And the peanut farmer Jimmy Carter, a man who campaigned teeth-first, would be elected president in the fall, having promised a new era of idealism.

[Read: Inside America’s ugly birthday battle]

I don’t remember any of this, of course, but babies like me were launched into an atmosphere of reawakened good vibes. When Time magazine commissioned the polling firm Yankelovich, Skelly & White to gauge the country’s temperature from June to September of 1976, the company found a 10 percent jump in positivity on its “state of the nation index” between those months, the most rapid increase it had seen since it began tracking the metric. The following years were also a time of crime and stagflation and the Iran hostage crisis, but at least by the indicators used by pollsters to determine collective mood, things continued to get generally sunnier into the ’80s. “The Zeitgeist has turned zesty,” Kurt Andersen wrote in a 1984 assessment of that year’s numbers. “The U.S. is at peace, and between rising employment and fading inflation, the economy is aglow. Americans are feeling more sanguine and comfortable about their country than they have felt in two decades. A rebirth of the American spirit, as Carter dearly hoped five summers ago? It sure feels like it.”

I remember this optimism and confidence. On November 9, 1989, I sat watching television with my grandfather—a Holocaust survivor who that day, and most days, had his shirt off and a captain’s hat on his head. The Berlin Wall was coming down. This happened when we bicentennial babies were 13 and highly impressionable. Look at them, my grandfather said, his voice breaking, as people pick-axed their way out of East Germany. I recall the total elation on their faces when they finally broke through, and then the bracing thought that they were trying to get to the side where I already lived.

The author in 1978 with his parents, sitting on his grandfather's Cadillac (Courtesy of Gal Beckerman)

For many young Americans in those years, a feeling of transcendence was possible. You had a sense that good fortune had placed you somewhere that everyone in the world wished they could be. At the same time, that wider world, with its crumbling empires and ethnic cleansing and genocides, seemed very far away. Even the Gulf War of the early ’90s appeared, to those of us safe at home, as a ghostly green video game playing on CNN, transmitted from somewhere hard to recognize as real.

You may not believe me when I tell you that I read Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man at 19, for fun, when I was a junior and living abroad in France. But I did, and then after college I went into the Peace Corps and lived in a village in Cameroon for two years. Although many of the people there thought that I was working for the CIA (I was not), I felt I was doing something uncomplicatedly wholesome, even a little patriotic.

We were 25 when 9/11 happened. I moved to New York City in October of that year, like a salmon swimming upstream—or like a salmon following a girl. Everywhere were posters of missing people. During my first days of couch surfing, New Yorkers were further terrorized by anthrax spores sent through the mail, addressed to political and media targets. That terrible fall was a hinge moment for all Americans but maybe especially for us young adults, who were also at a hinge moment in our lives, suddenly vulnerable and less innocent in new ways, feeling silly for having believed that history could have an end.

[Jerusalem Demsas: The end of Francis Fukuyama]

I haven’t mentioned the internet yet, but it also came around for us as adulthood hit. I got my first email address in college and accessed my inbox in the library basement at a computer lab that perpetually smelled like Doritos. It was all so new that you could forget to send a paper to a professor and then offer the excuse that the email probably just got lost. I spent a lot of time outside that library, chatting, with nothing in my hands besides a cigarette. I think I knew someone who had a beeper. We got flip phones in our 20s. We were in our early 30s when the first iPhone arrived and Facebook showed up. We were told that these were revolutionary tools. Maybe we believed this more than other people did, still being relatively young and feeling like we were being handed powerful megaphones in our prime—a chance to make change, to connect. Then the tools congealed into yet more products that would waste our hours and make us feel terrible about ourselves and our fellow citizens.

We made lives against the backdrop of distant wars, unceasing notifications popping up on our phones. The year we turned 40, Donald Trump was elected president. Four years later came COVID. Just as we were balancing more and more—perhaps children, a challenging job, ailing parents—the world seemed to conspire to keep our heads spinning. In these past few years, before we and the country hit our big milestones, we were assaulted by panicked warnings about the state of American democracy—and the future of the entire human race. What has AI been up to over the past few days? Creating new viruses and independently cyberhacking, it appears. We are less naive, though more exhausted. It has not been lost on us that the people warning that AI could lead to our extinction are the same people who invented it. This is a pattern we’re familiar with now: Technology gives us something with one hand while robbing us of something else with the other.

I’m leaving out a lot. We also had private joys and tragedies totally impervious to what America writ large was up to. But I can distinguish a progression toward an increased sense of emergency, toward alienation, toward a mournfulness that makes me read the newspaper through my fingers most days. I don’t think this is the birthday blues talking—or, if I’m honest, maybe not just the birthday blues. It’s also the metrics: about loneliness and economic stagnation and political polarization and the whole insane technological surround sound of our lives. My point is that bicentennial babies, regardless of their individual circumstances, have all been strapped into the first row of this ride.

Someone born on America’s centennial, in 1876, could well have argued that they had witnessed much more consequential change by their 50th birthday. They might have gushed about the expansion of railroads and telegraphs, about seeing the first airplanes, telephones, and radios, and then explained what it was like to face the reality that as many as 20 million people could be killed in a single war. I wouldn’t want to go head-to-head with them. Every generation has its story. But we bicentennial babies have lived through a major rupture. For all else that might be good in our lives—and I’m lucky to have a lot that’s good—this is not such an exuberant place to find ourselves at 50.

[Read: Trump’s 250th celebration is a fiasco]

Can we imagine anyone proudly calling the babies born this year—what? semiquincentennial sprouts? A mouthful, granted. But that’s not what makes it sound strange. Behind the “bicentennial babies” moniker was a kind of hope. We would be the Americans of the future. And we would be moving toward that future not with dread but with anticipation. Whatever one’s political affiliation, people do not have much enthusiasm these days when they picture where we’re headed.

When the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans just before this year’s semiquincentennial, 59 percent of respondents said that the country’s best years were behind it. Asked to imagine the United States 50 years from now, 44 percent were pessimistic and only 28 percent were optimistic. Perhaps most telling, 27 percent chose neither option; they just felt blah. Recently, Conan O’Brien, speaking on the podcast The Rest Is History, talked about the “undiluted joy” he remembers feeling as a preteen experiencing the bicentennial. Now: “It’s very hard for some people, maybe, to just say, I’m really excited about our 250th when our current state is so divided.”

I can’t conceive of myself being around for the tricentennial—and if I did suggest living to 100, my mother might faint from all the spitting she’d have to do to ward off the evil eye. But if I do make it there, I will have lived through a third of the country’s existence. I’ll have a lot more data to work with. Will 2026 appear in retrospect as another hinge, or simply as a snapshot of us—mouths open and eyes closed, as in an amusement-park photograph—mid–free fall? Will there be self-correction or a piling-on of bad decisions? Disintegration or newfound connection? No one can really tell. Though I do know what I would like on my 50th birthday and the country’s 250th: something for us to look forward to.

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The Trump Comedians Are Tired

2026-08-24T07:00:00-04:00

In 2017, as Donald Trump was getting used to the White House furniture, Alec Baldwin was feeling exultant. His impersonation of the new president on Saturday Night Live had made him momentarily inescapable and given the comedy show its highest ratings in years. To capitalize on the momentum, Baldwin co-authored a book-length satirical memoir written from Trump’s perspective. Baldwin’s autobiography—which also came out that year and was excerpted as a cover story for Vanity Fair—noted that his take on the president “seemed to delight nearly everyone in the People’s Republic of Manhattan.” When he accepted an Emmy for his performance in the fall, he addressed Trump directly: “At long last, Mr. President, here is your Emmy.”

It was disorienting, then, to hear Baldwin declare, when I spoke with him earlier this summer, that this sort of comedy has become stale, boring, and useless. “None of it’s funny. I don’t find it funny anymore,” he told me. “There’s nothing left to say about Trump.”

Clearly, something has changed—and not just for Baldwin, who effectively retired from the role back in 2020. The first Trump administration was a boon for comedians and for television. A cottage industry of new, politically inflected clip shows offered satirical commentary on the new president to a mostly liberal audience. Late-night comedy adopted Jon Stewart’s old playbook, trading quippy gags for more full-throated (and sometimes outright defiant) critiques of government. Ambiguity was out; everyone knew whose side these commentators were on, and other impersonators began vying for Baldwin’s crown. But the bubble collapsed right around the moment of Joe Biden’s ascension, and Trump’s return to power hasn’t inspired the same volume of riffs. Today, some of the comedians who rode the initial wave have come to feel a little like Baldwin does. They’re sick of the shtick—and they’re skeptical about the function of political comedy in a world that’s arguably beyond parody.

[Read: Why South Park did an about-face on mocking Trump]

Part of what once made Trump such a rich vein for comedic send-ups was that, at the start of his political career, he seemed straightforwardly ridiculous. Hadn’t this guy been shilling for Omaha Steaks with Gary Busey and Lil Jon? How would he spin the Oreo commercial he’d done with Peyton and Eli Manning, in which he’d challenged the brothers to a “lick race”? The jokes practically wrote themselves. Anthony Atamanuik, a Trump impersonator whose parody series, The President Show, ran for one season on Comedy Central in 2017, told me that at its best, the political comedy of that era also had a kind of diagnostic power: “I wanted my show to continue mostly because I saw each episode as an essay on an issue in American life, and the albatross I had was Trump.” His hope was that, for a liberal audience still reeling from the shock of his election, skewering the president could be a way to crystallize what had happened to the country.

That initial burst of left-leaning satire didn’t last. Studios gave the former Daily Show correspondents Michelle Wolf, Larry Wilmore, Hasan Minhaj, and Wyatt Cenac their own shows, only to cancel them before the end of the president’s first term. A 2020 New York Times Magazine story on this “boom and bust” suggested that some comedians—and some audiences—were tiring of the material even before it became clear that Trump would lose the election. Network late-night shows continued to treat the president as a punching bag, but the novelty had worn off.

Overexposure is one explanation for that decline. Another is that these liberal viewers started to expect something different from comedy as the reality of MAGA’s ascendance set in. More than over-the-top impersonators and Daily Show correspondents ridiculing the news, people seemed to be craving simple palliatives. By 2020, the most visible Trump satirist was the comedian Sarah Cooper, who filmed herself mouthing along to the president’s public statements while mimicking his facial expressions. Her work was almost post-comedic: Rather than writing her own material, she was giving people permission to laugh at the strangeness of his mannerisms. She eventually parlayed viral fame into a guest-hosting gig on Jimmy Kimmel Live and a Netflix special directed by Natasha Lyonne.

Trump’s return to office in 2025 could have been an opportunity for any of these comedians to stage comebacks, or for new shows to emerge. But although the president remains a target in liberal comedy circles, the market for this brand of humor has shrunk considerably. It remains most evident in today’s late-night lineup: The Daily Show, one of the progenitors of the form, remains on the air. (Its original host, Jon Stewart, returned in 2024.) Last Week Tonight With John Oliver—which once cautioned viewers against voting for Trump by reminding them of his family’s historical surname, Drumpf—is still going too, and in a recent episode covered Trump’s efforts to reshape the Department of Justice. Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers have consistently pursued Trump since his rise; even Jimmy Fallon, who was once reluctant to get political, will now occasionally take a shot.

Some new impersonators have risen to take Baldwin’s place: James Austin Johnson and Shane Gillis have both played the president with some success in recent years. But in this cohort, things aren’t quite the same as they were. Johnson’s impression hasn’t created the kind of splash that Baldwin’s once did; his version of Trump is reminiscent of the de rigueur presidential impressions of SNL seasons past. (That’s no judgment of comedic value—Johnson’s version is as accurate as it gets.) And last year, when CBS decided to end its long-running program The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, late-night TV lost one of its most prominent and consistent critics.

The administration’s attempts to chill dissenting speech elsewhere, although disturbing, don’t appear to have suppressed this sort of comedy’s prevalence in American culture. And in one case, such attempts had the opposite effect: In September, ABC suspended Kimmel’s show after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr demanded that it do so; a few days later, in response to a public outcry, the network reversed course. The fracas turned out to be good for ratings—Kimmel’s first show back was its most-watched in more than a decade.

[Read: Jimmy Kimmel ran right at his critics]

Still, the old guard doesn’t totally see the point. “All the majors that continue to just throttle him and carry on about him—move on to other people!” Baldwin told me. “It’s not gonna make any difference.” Atamanuik told me that by fixating on Trump, comedians risk missing the bigger issues, and that young people especially have “an anger at the entire system.” (The top-three late-night talk shows have been fighting for viewers in the coveted 18–49 age demographic for more than a decade.) “They know that Trump is just a product of something else,” he said. Meanwhile, Cooper said a few years ago that she has “no desire” to revisit her lip-syncs, and that “there’s nothing left to really do with it.”

Brent Terhune, another veteran of the short-form-video scene that flourished during the coronavirus pandemic, is less gloomy about the future of Trump-inflected comedy. This is partially because he’s not interested in taking on the president directly. Instead, he makes videos in the persona of a Trump fan. The character he’s played for nearly a decade, “Alpha Male,” is a sort of disgruntled MAGA vlogger—“a reaction and a reflection of people that are Trump die-hards,” Terhune told me. Part of what distinguishes the performance is that it’s at least somewhat empathetic; he said he’s always being told that Alpha Male reminds people of their brothers, dads, and uncles. His view is that because the Alpha Male character isn’t just about skewering Trump, it could potentially outlast his administration.

Terhune’s enthusiasm has certainly outlasted that of many of his peers, so maybe on-screen political comedy is just in need of new subjects. Although Atamanuik no longer consistently plays Trump, he has lately been impersonating Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—and Baldwin suggested that House Speaker Mike Johnson and former Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte could be deserving targets.

Or maybe you can make the same joke only so many times before you start wondering what it is you’re really doing. In 1962, when the impressionist Vaughn Meader released his landmark comedy album, The First Family, which poked fun at the Kennedys, the anthropologist Margaret Mead remarked that its very existence illuminated something about American society. “This making fun of people in authority is very healthy,” she told Life magazine. “It is the difference between democracy and tyranny.” The impressionists I spoke with might hesitate to agree with that assessment. But beyond the easy laugh of a presidential impersonation, humor can still be a potent force in defending a free society against tyranny—that is, if comedians are willing to keep finding new angles rather than repeat old gags.

The Gun Lobby’s Most Cynical Move Yet

2026-08-24T07:00:00-04:00

As a newspaper reporter, I covered my first school shooting in 2007 at Virginia Tech, where 32 students and faculty were murdered and 17 others were wounded. In one story, I recounted how Emily, a 19-year-old sophomore, was lying partially behind a desk on the floor of her French class while the shooter gunned down her teacher and nearly every student around her before shooting himself in the head. I can’t forget the image of Emily, shot twice herself, who pretended to be dead but surreptitiously grabbed a cellphone on the floor that another student had used to call 911 before he was shot. I listened many weeks later to a recording of the call. At first, she was too terrified to speak. All the police dispatcher could hear was the sound of her breath and the loud pop pop pop of gunfire all around her.

“I can’t talk,” she whispered, gasping for breath. “Please hurry.”

After the Virginia Tech massacre, I reported on many other school shootings, including Sandy Hook in 2012, when twenty 6- and 7-year-olds were shot to death in their first-grade classrooms and six staff members were killed. Attorney General Eric Holder, whom I covered at the time as The Washington Post’s Justice Department reporter, told me that walking through the bullet-riddled classrooms still caked with blood was the most difficult day of his professional life. He later cried openly when he saw the crime-scene photos of the children lying dead in their classrooms.

I wrote about so many school massacres that I lost count. After each one, I reached out to the National Rifle Association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (the gun industry’s trade association), and other organizations that the nation’s gun lobby comprises for their response. They rarely commented beyond a statement offering thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families. I twice attended the world’s largest firearms trade show, held annually in Las Vegas for tens of thousands of gun makers, sellers, and other professionals but closed to the general public. There, too, leaders of the NRA, other advocates, and representatives of the multibillion-dollar gun industry would not comment on school shootings, except to reiterate their support for armed guards in schools and a government registry of mentally ill people, and to resist calls to strengthen background checks and restrict access to semi-automatic rifles such as the AR-15.

[William H. Frist: The politics of gun safety are changing. I should know.]

But the gun lobby had another response to school shootings behind the scenes—one I didn’t know about at the time. A study by Stanford University researchers this year found that after fatal school shootings, pro-gun political-action committees dramatically increased their contributions to their preferred U.S. House candidates in the districts where the shootings occurred, when those races were competitive. These shifts in spending were not observed after other incidents of mass gun violence or after nonfatal school shootings—only when children were killed in schools. Over the many years that I reported on gun violence, the gun lobby’s enormous campaign spending was no secret. But the Stanford study reveals how these groups targeted their money, raising their aggressive tactics to a new level.

In the first study of its kind, the authors analyzed 25 years of data, linking campaign-finance records to every fatal K–12 school shooting from 2000 to 2024. They then compared campaign contributions between the districts that did and did not have a school shooting. After school shootings where children died, pro-gun contributions to candidates in competitive congressional districts increased on average by more than 30 percent. And when the shooting occurred within two months of an election, contributions surged by 2,820 percent. “The data shows that the gun lobby saves its political firepower for the moments when public grief is greatest and lawmakers are under the most pressure to act,” Eric A. Baldwin, one of the authors, told me.

In November 2021, for example, a 15-year-old killed four students and injured seven other people at Oxford High School, in Michigan. The pro-gun PACs contributed $50,650 during the 2021–22 election cycle in the district where the high school was located, a 434 percent increase from the previous cycle and a 591 percent increase from an average of the previous five cycles, according to the Stanford researchers. In December 2013, a 17-year-old senior was killed at Arapahoe High School, in a suburb of Denver. Before the shooting, the pro-gun PAC contribution had been $1,000. Afterward, it soared to $49,470.

Gun-safety PACs also increased their spending in competitive districts after school shootings. But the pro-gun groups were by far the dominant spenders until 2018, the year of the Parkland shooting, which left 17 students and faculty dead at a high school in Florida; at that point, gun-safety groups began to significantly increase their spending, sometimes equaling or even surpassing the spending of the pro-gun groups.

The Stanford researchers did not find that increased spending by either side after fatal school shootings measurably affected which party actually won a competitive House election. (The districts that the study looked at represent only a subset of the gun lobby’s overall election spending.) Nevertheless, the study shows how pro-gun PACs work to undermine anti-gun feelings in communities suffering from the trauma of children being killed in schools.

In poll after poll for more than a decade, the majority of Americans have favored stricter gun laws. Most Americans specifically want a ban on weapons such as AR-15s, and also favor stricter background checks. That sentiment is particularly acute after a school shooting, when “public demand for reform is especially high,” according to the Stanford researchers. But, they write, the pro-gun spending surge means that “instead of yielding to constituent pressure, candidates are fortified to resist it and are empowered to reframe their opposition to reform as principled rather than unresponsive.”

[Tyler Austin Harper: ‘How much blood is your fun worth?’]

Although the NRA’s power has been waning in recent years, it still spent $10 million in the 2024 election. Other pro-gun groups have emerged and are influencing national policy; together with the NRA, they spend about $14 million a year on lobbying. In response to lawsuits from a number of pro-gun entities, including Gun Owners of America, a federal judge in Texas recently found unconstitutional a 1934 federal law that placed strict requirements on anyone purchasing silencers, short-barreled rifles, and shotguns, among other firearms. The Justice Department did not immediately appeal the ruling.

In recent months, the Trump administration has announced new actions to make it easier for gun purchasers to avoid background checks when obtaining firearms. In April, then–Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and other Justice Department officials announced the rollback of gun regulations alongside leaders from the NRA, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the National Association for Guns Rights, and Gun Owners of America. And House Republicans proposed a bill to cut nearly $300 million from the budget of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the agency that enforces the nation’s gun laws.

The killing of America’s children and teenagers in their classrooms has become normalized. From a young age, our children and grandchildren are being taught vocabulary and math alongside lessons in how to hide when an “active shooter” storms their classrooms. The Stanford study is a compelling reminder of how far the gun lobby will go to block any efforts to protect our children.

What It Takes to Reclaim Your Attention Span

2026-08-24T06:00:00-04:00

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Of all the potential effects of using smartphones, the one that seems to inspire the most anxiety is what scrolling could be doing to people’s attention. On social media (ironically), many people express a desire to “heal” their attention spans from the damage they feel technology has done. They’re picking up on something real. In one 2025 study, researchers found that blocking the internet on people’s phones for two weeks led to improvements in sustained attention equivalent to reversing 10 years of cognitive decline. In this final episode of How to Touch Grass, host Julie Beck embarks on an experiment to see if she can heal her own attention span. Beck and co-host Natalie Brennan also hear from Jenny Odell, the author of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time, about how Odell’s antagonism for her phone actually helped her make peace with it, and how nature can teach us to pay deeper attention to the world around us.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Julie Beck: Are you happy with your relationship with your phone, or are you not happy with it?

Person 1: I wish I could reduce some of the Instagram Reel-ing, particularly at night, where I kind of go down the rabbit hole and it’s like, Oh my God, it’s midnight.

Beck: Oh, yeah. I’ve been there. It’s like lost time. You know like when the aliens come and they get you, and then they put you back down, and it’s just lost time.

Person 2: It has impacted my attention span. I get bored after half a paragraph of reading.

Beck: Do you have a sense in your mind of when you noticed that you feel like your attention span was getting worse?

Person 2: Probably been, like, since the start of COVID, probably in the last five years.

Person 3: The thing that kills me sometimes is how much I want to look stuff up in conversations. I still constantly have a few books that I’m trying to read through and trying to rebuild attention, or something like that.

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

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

Beck: This is How to Touch Grass.

[Birds chirping]

Brennan: Julie, attention is one of the biggest things we’ve heard people talk about when they are renegotiating their relationship to their phone.

Beck: Ironically, I feel like every time I go on social media these days, I see someone talking about how they’re trying to heal their attention span from technology that they’re currently using.

Brennan: (Laughs.) Yes.

Beck: And it’s always that word too, heal. It’s like we’re sick or we’re injured, and we must heal.

Brennan: Is it something that you’ve been worried about?

Beck: I do worry about my attention sometimes. Like every time I go to the gym lately, I forget to lock the locker that they have in the locker room. I put my stuff in there; I shut the door.

Brennan: And you don’t lock?

Beck: Then I guess I simply walk away.

Brennan: Huh!

Beck: And I don’t realize until I get back that—I mean, no one has taken my stuff, luckily, so it’s all good. Good Samaritans out there. But that has happened not once, not twice, more than twice. (Laughs.)

Brennan: I guess the way that the attention-span thing comes up for me the most is when I think about the number of hours that I spend on my phone.

Beck: You’re pouring your attention into that phone.

Brennan: Yeah, I see those as very interconnected. But I’ve also noticed that I very actively try not to think about it. I rush to swipe away the screen-time notification every Sunday. Obviously, that anxiety points to the fact that I want to have a different relationship with my phone, right?

Beck: What do you think has stopped you from actively trying to get that screen time down?

Brennan: I think it’s scary to sit with ourselves when we have grown really accustomed to all the stimuli.

Beck: Mmm. Love stimuli.

[Music]

Jenny Odell: We talk a lot about, you know, looking at your phone as a negative thing, and we talk about it in the negative, right? Like, I wanna do less of this thing. There’s this thing that I do a lot; I wanna do less of it. And there’s not as much talk about what I wanna do more of.

Beck: That’s Jenny Odell, the author of How to Do Nothing. When that book came out in 2019, and I remember at the time it was one of the first things I read that really raised a concern about what modern technology and social media were doing specifically to people’s attention. So now it’s seven years later, and I asked Jenny how her thinking has evolved and how she’s doing with her own screen-time habits.

Odell: I mean, I’m … [(Laughs.)] Look, I’m doing great.

Beck: That’s—I’m so happy to hear it. I can’t say the same. (Laughs.)

Odell: I’m okay with my relationship with my phone and screen time.

Beck: So can you walk me through a little bit?

Odell: Yeah. I would say, like, part of the attention economy is the selling of quick fixes when, you know, habits form over time. They’re like grooves, right? Like, they need to be sort of formed over time. And so …

Beck: Like, geologically.

Odell: Yes, exactly. And I think, you know, if you try to, say, go cold turkey, it can be frustrating when you don’t see immediate results.

Beck: Yeah.

Odell: Or even within a couple of months, right? And then in that meantime, there’s all this uphill struggle of, like, your friends are still doing it. You need to be on Instagram to see this and that, and there’s just muscle-memory things, things you’re used to. You get up in the morning; you look at your phone. These are just—that’s hard. Like, those things are really ingrained, especially, I think, if you’re younger. I’m good now. But I just wanna stress that it took some time, and in that time there’s a little bit of a leap of faith.

Beck: Yeah. I mean, I deleted TikTok off my phone for the third or fourth time, who’s counting? But like you were saying, the muscle memory of, like, the thumb going up and down, has just transferred to Instagram unfortunately. So we gotta work on that.

Odell: I would say there’s, honestly, you know, I’m almost 40. Actually standing, like, with your very heavy head, like on your neck; when you get older, you start to notice the problems from that, and it’s like that is another kind of physical limit. I can’t sit at a computer for that long without injuring myself.

And then I think I really had to think about my relationship to the news was a really big one that I hadn’t quite figured out. When you’re kind of scrolling, you're scrolling through it, you’re not really deeply engaging with any one particular issue.

Beck: Yeah.

Odell: You’re just seeing a list of bad things, and they’re bad in all different kinds of ways, and they’re terrible. Like, even just sitting with one of those things produces this paralysis. It’s like, in order to do something, you need an orientation toward the future and a situation in which you feel that you have some agency. There are certain things that I have started to do in the last couple years. One of them is volunteering at a native-plant-restoration project every week. I’ve also been going to a lot of repair fairs. Also kind of volunteering-type things that are in person.

Beck: Where you bring like a broken toaster or something—

Odell: Yeah..

Beck: —and learn how to fix it.

Odell: And learn how to fix it. Yeah. Totally. When I’m there, there is no desire to look at my phone. Like, it’s just so far from my mind, and it has this weird lasting effect throughout the week, actually, because I had this experience that was so direct, that was so meaningful.

Beck: And tell me what is the good thing about the repair café, about the, you know, weeding the native plants? Like, what is the good thing?

Odell: I think, you know, some of it is just recognition. I think we as humans, we want to be socially recognized, right? We want to feel seen. We wanna feel heard. We wanna feel welcomed. You know, it’s like Cheers or whatever.

Beck: (Laughs.)

Odell: Like, you wanna walk into a room and have people be like, Hey, it’s you. I know you. I’m happy to see you. This is just kind of like a really basic thing that we want. I kinda think that social media, especially early on, the evil genius of it was that it was hijacking that. And so I feel like these are in-person events. I feel incredibly recognized and acknowledged. And then it’s like, when you feel This is the real thing, it becomes very obvious what is not the real thing. That’s a big part of it. And I think you’re there. You have a shared project. You’re getting some traction with something, right? Instead of just sort of constantly being washed over with information and not really having anything to grasp onto.

Beck: For most people in this day and age, totally going without a smartphone just isn’t possible, or at least not practical. Like, the infrastructure of society, you know, they’ve got the QR-code menu at the restaurant, the stores are all accepting Apple Pay and Google Pay, and so many websites require you to receive a text and then put the code in to even get in there. So trying to resist getting sucked into your phone just feels like resisting the inevitable sometimes. Have you found a way to resolve this tension for yourself?

Odell: I live in the same society you’re describing, and I just used my phone to pay for lunch before this. But then I put it away.

Beck: Mmm.

Odell: I use the phrase standing apart as a way of kind of not leaving or believing in the fantasy of escape from something, and just sort of being like, I’m standing in a position from which I can see the thing.

Beck: You’re not running away from it or—

Odell: But I have critical distance. And I think about something like food. You know, you go to the grocery store and, I mean, depending on the grocery store you’re in, you kind of understand that 80 percent of the food in it is bad for you. We kinda know that, right? It has been that way long enough.

Beck: Doesn’t stop me from getting the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, but yes. I do know.

Odell: (Laughs.) But it’s just this understanding that that space is just not set up for me to thrive.

Beck: Mm.

Odell: And I think that it’s helpful to maybe transpose that to your phone. What is a phone? A phone is a communication device. What I want from this is communication. The apps, you know, social media in particular, are not designed for you to thrive. They are designed for the opposite. (Laughs.) These are actively bad for me, and I won’t feel good.

For me, it’s sort of a level of acceptance of, like, antagonism has been helpful. Where it’s like, I’m never going to have a peaceful relationship with that universe, and I’m just gonna kind of accept that and take what I need and leave.

Beck: You know, recently I hear so many people, both online and in real life, talking about “healing their attention spans” from the damage that they feel like technology has done. And I’m curious why, of all the things, you think people are worried about their attention specifically.

Odell: One would hope that what you pay attention to is what is important to you. That’s an ideal situation.

Beck: Not always the case.

Odell: Right, exactly. So if you’re not paying attention to things that are important to you, there’s something, I think, like, deeply unsettling about that on the level of identity because it’s like, Am I even who I am? Right? Am I who I want to be if I’m paying my attention to something that I don’t feel I ever chose?

Beck: Yeah.

Odell: I think it really deeply affects people on the level of, like, self-control and their sort of understanding of their identity.

Beck: Yeah. Well, it seems like the solution that many people have landed on for healing their attention span is just trying to be online less, however they can. So do you think that logging off is the answer, or no?

Odell: I think that the best approach, personally, is to just treat it as an experiment. Honestly, it makes it interesting, like I’m a curious person and I’m curious about myself and my own reaction to things. Kind of being like, Okay, I’m gonna try this. I’m gonna see what happens when I try this.

[Music]

Beck: Natalie, immediately after this interview, I really felt the itch to do what Jenny said—to try an experiment. And when I was thinking about how to do that, I remembered this study I had seen from 2025 where researchers blocked the internet on people’s smartphones for two weeks.

Brennan: Okay.

Beck: And just doing that, they found that the improvement to people’s sustained attention was equivalent to reversing 10 years of cognitive decline.

Brennan: After two weeks?

Beck: After two weeks.

Brennan: That discrepancy feels huge.

Beck: It’s huge. So I tried the experiment on myself for two weeks. Now, I didn’t perfectly replicate the conditions of the 2025 study, to be clear. They blocked mobile internet using an app called Freedom. I used, instead, this device called a Brick.

Brennan: Huge among my friends.

Beck: Oh, your friends are all into it.

Brennan: Yes.

Beck: Okay, so you know. So I used this device. I picked all the apps I was gonna block, and you have to physically touch your phone to the device to unlock it.

Brennan: Right.

Beck: I tried to, you know, keep all of the things that would allow me to communicate with other people, and so I blocked all games; I blocked all social media, email, Slack, internet browsers, and most internet-connected apps.

Brennan: Okay.

Beck: So I blocked all of that for 23 hours a day. I was allowed one hour of non-Bricked time if I needed or wanted it. And I could do whatever I wanted on a computer, same as in the study. It was only the phone that was restricted.

Brennan: And how were you going to test this?

Beck: So I got in touch with someone from that 2025 study, and they shared an attention pre-test with me and a self-report questionnaire. So I took those for a baseline.

Brennan: How long was the test?

Beck: It felt like 1,000 hours.

Brennan: Totally. (Laughs.)

Beck: I think he told me it’s actually, like, eight minutes. (Laughs.) I did both of those things before I started the experiment, and then I took them again at the end of the experiment. And I agreed to record a little audio diary along the way.

[Music]

Beck: Captain’s log, day one. My phone has been Bricked pretty much all day. I’ve definitely been kinda low energy. I don’t know if that’s, like, dopamine withdrawal. I’ve definitely been carrying my phone around with me everywhere even though there’s not really that much for me to look at.

Morning, it’s day two. My husband is out of town right now, so it is daunting to have two of my biggest sources of entertainment, my husband and my phone, unavailable to me at this time, but we persevere.

It is Saturday. It’s my first full weekend day. I ordered a big order of yarn, so I have a lot of knitting and crochet stuff to work on.

Good morning, it’s day five. Knitting right now. Joe and I went birding. The one thing that I am noticing mood-wise is that I do feel pretty calm, like maybe more calm than usual.

Brennan: Okay, Julie! First check-in. What off the bat did you think you were going to do more of with your time that you didn’t wind up doing?

Beck: Using the phone as a phone, as a communication device. Actually, like, calling my loved ones to catch up, you know, what the phone was invented for. Shout-out Alexander Graham Bell. But I think because I had blocked so much, and I was getting more used to just not having my phone on me and in my hand at all times, I was just thinking about my phone less overall, which was the goal. But I kinda come to think that as much as the distraction of the phone, like, has a cost, there’s also a cost to putting more distance there, because the phone is where the people are.

Brennan: It’s interesting how much our relationship to our phones is intertwined with our relationship to others.

Beck: Yeah.

Brennan: When we overuse our phones, that isn’t good for our relationships, and the way we use our phones is definitely influenced by other people.

[Music]

Odell: I think we don’t realize how much of our habits kind of live in other people. Like, think about it. When do you pick up your phone? It’s when the person you’re talking to picks up their phone, right? Like, the person picks up their phone; what are you gonna do? Sit there? Stare into space? That habit, like, lives between people.

Beck: It’s so true, because my friends will, you know, text me TikToks still even though I am trying to get off TikTok. And then if I’m like, Okay, I’ll just watch the, like, Lord of the Rings meme that they sent me, of course my phone prompts me like, Don’t you wanna download TikTok again? And so it is, like, sort of driven by, like, the relationship of wanting to see this meme. But I guess my bigger question is: Is logging off to pay attention to something else in the real world actually better, or is it just different?

Odell: I always think about, like, if you saw someone hiking and looking at their phone, you could be like, That’s so depressing. But then it’s like, what if they’re looking at iNaturalist?

Beck: Yeah.

Odell: And they’re, like, identifying a plant. There are good things on the phone; there are bad things on the phone. There are good things IRL; there are bad things IRL. One thing that you can say is that the sort of quality of attention that one often experiences on the phone with things like social media is pretty narrow versus things off the phone. There are so many different kinds of experience, so many different scales of time, so many different scales of space. I love seeing movies in a movie theater.

Beck: Oh, yeah. Me too.

Odell: I’m like a movie-theater junkie. I love to see horror movies in a theater.

Beck: Oh. Not me.

Odell: So there’s things like that, but then there’s things like looking at a very small bird in your neighborhood, or being at a table with a group of people and being part of a conversation. Like, these are all just so different. Even if you think about your body in those spaces; it’s so different. I think it’s good to have a variety of different contexts for your attention. I think that’s probably healthy.

[Music]

Beck: We’re gonna take a quick break but when we come back: how the way we think about our phones affects the ways we use them.

Odell: I think about it more as like: When I look at it as an object, it looks like a tool. And it did not look like a tool to me before. It looked like a black hole.

Beck: Like a portal to the underworld or something.

Brennan: Plus, did Julie fix her attention span? The results of her experiment, coming up.

[Break]

Beck: So day six, and wouldn’t you freaking know it, I did the exact same thing at the gym again. Sure enough, I forgot to lock it again. I’m legitimately concerned. Anyway, my attention is not fixed yet!

Good morning. It’s day seven of the experiment. My average screen time is down 74 percent from last week. I certainly haven’t been, like a perfect screen-abstinent person this week. I’ve watched plenty of TV. I have been able to, I think, focus a bit better.

I read 200 pages of my book yesterday.

I wonder how much of this could be achieved without such a draconian approach. I’ve been pretty surprised by how quickly I kind of, like, submitted. But yeah, just how quickly the cravings to check my phone all the time really receded.

Brennan: Julie, day seven was midway through your experiment. What started to shift for you by that point? Did the way you think about your phone start to change?

Beck: I think what you learn, or at least what I learned when you block access to almost everything on your phone, is that the phone is not just one thing. There’s a lot of different stuff in there. Like—

Brennan: Yeah.

Beck: —you know? I think in our frustration with our attention span sometimes, people, myself included, will demonize the phone as a device. Like, smartphones are evil. Smartphones are sucking our life force, and they’re making us stupid, and that kind of flattens the problem, I think. What kept coming up for me is there’s a lot of different things I turn to my phone for, and some of them are more problematic than others. Like, checking the weather is, uh, very helpful.

Brennan: You made a mistake in blocking that one (Laughs.)

Beck: I did. Like, I realized that actually the first day. But I suppose that is the point of the experiment, right? To figure out which parts of my phone are actually adding to my life and which are taking away from it.

[Music]

Beck: Jenny, have you heard of these devices that block certain apps on your phone? There’s the Freedom app, the Unplug, the Brick device.

Odell: Yeah.

Beck: What do you think of the recent popularity of these things?

Odell: Honestly, I’m all for it. I don’t use any—I’m not trying to brag. I don’t need them. I think they’re great. There’s one in particular that I think is called SocialFocus, and it lets you kind of change the appearance of websites. Like, you could go to YouTube and not see the auto suggestions, for example.

Beck: Mmm.

Odell: Or maybe not see comments. It kind of allows you to change what you see. And I think there was a Chrome extension that came out called News Feed Eradicator. And guess what happened? I stopped going to Facebook. And I didn’t decide to do that. It was because the News Feed is there to keep you on Facebook. So if you eradicate it, replace it with some sort of mindfulness quote, you go to the site; it’s inert. It can’t grab you in that way.

Beck: Hmm.

Odell: And so I just simply stopped going. It was a totally unremarkable thing. I didn’t even tell anyone, Oh, I’m quitting Facebook. I just stopped going to it. And I think that’s really powerful. So that’s why I’m a big fan of anything that can give someone sort of granular control over what the—it sort of reintroduced choice in areas where people have never experienced choice. Because that, in and of itself, will cause someone to reflect upon what it is that they want.

Beck: All of this reminds me of a study I’ve been thinking of a lot lately, that found using an app that was similar to the Brick for two weeks had such a big effect on people’s attention spans that it amounted to, like, reversing 10 years of cognitive decline—

Beck: Oh my God.

Beck: —which seems really huge.

Odell: Wow. That’s incredible. I’m surprised and not surprised. Actually, honestly, this reminds me of, like, ecological restoration because when you restore a site, some things come back quickly and some things don’t, right? Like, you restore a wetland, some species are gonna come back almost immediately. The nutrient cycling of the entire site might take 100 years. Maybe our attention is similar in that, or our behavior, let’s say, it takes a long time to totally overhaul something. But at the same time, I think you might be surprised at how quickly certain things change. Like, in times when I was a little bit more embroiled online and using my phone a lot, and then I would maybe go somewhere, put it away for a while or whatever, I found that after a couple of days, I would notice that my attention felt different.

Beck: Hmm.

Odell: And by attention felt different, I mean I would notice details or small differences in things. It’s almost like having a higher-resolution image or something.

Beck: Are there other seemingly small changes to your routine that you feel like might have that kind of big cognitive benefit?

Odell: You know, I think trying to replace habits with other habits—I meditate in the morning, only just for, like, 10 minutes. I kind of calm down to a level where then it’s not going to as easily occur to me to then pick up my phone, or at least I'll be a little bit more reflective about it.

Beck: Yeah. My thing so far, my recent thing has been taking up knitting and crochet, and this seems so small, but it’s like now while I’m watching TV, instead of looking at my phone, my hands are in hand jail, right? Doing knitting.

Odell: (Laughs.) Hand jail.

Beck: And it doesn’t seem so virtuous when I’m like, Now I’m only looking at one screen, but I feel like, you know, it’s an improvement.

Odell: I think that’s great.

Beck: Maybe I’ll get down to zero screens, TBD. But the other layer to that that I was just thinking about when it comes to phones and social media and stuff is, like, a lot of times where I’m going to learn how to do this new stitch or whatever is YouTube.

Odell: Mm-hmm.

Beck: So it’s not, you know, one is totally replacing the other, but there is sort of a relationship. Like now I am using that tool kind of for this other thing.

Odell: Yeah. Right, and I think that points to an important distinction, which is maybe a bit more nuanced than just, say, screen time as a statistic. You know, you were asking earlier about my changed relationship to my phone.

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Odell: I think about it more as like: When I look at it as an object, it looks like a tool. And it did not look like a tool to me before. It looked like a black hole.

Beck: Like a portal to the underworld or something.

Odell: Yeah. Or, frankly, I wasn’t even looking at it. I’m already picking it up. Like, I’m already in there. I’m already in that world. There wasn’t even a point where I perceived the phone as an object.

Beck: Yeah. You skipped right ahead.

Odell: Yeah. And now I feel like the things that I use it for: the Merlin app, it’s like Shazam for bird songs, I use that. I use iNaturalist. I use the Constellation app, voice memos for, you know, recording birds. That relationship, to me, feels really different because the intention and the purpose, I feel like I’m in control of that. I mean on my phone, the first home screen is all what I would call observational apps, so camera, voice memo, iNaturalist, Merlin.

Beck: Mm.

Odell: I’m kind of trying to remind myself of how I wanna use the phone. Like, I now associate my phone with those activities.

Beck: You write a lot about nature.

Odell: Yeah.

Beck: Being inspired by nature, how being in nature helps you, you know, pay attention. A common piece of advice for those who have been brain-rotted by the internet is to go touch grass. So are you also telling us to touch grass?

Odell: Yeah, pretty much. And, I mean, the weeds that I weed at my weekly project are grass, so—

Beck: And you’re touching them.

Odell: —actually, I’m saying Kill grass. No, I’m just kidding. (Laughs.) But the reason I think it became such a—that phrase caught on was because it’s just so obviously true. The obvious truth of it is, like, why it’s funny and annoying at the same time.

Beck: Yeah. What is it that you think the natural world has to teach us about attention?

Odell: Complexity, basically. Like, I think it's a master class in complexity. It is kind of an antidote to the idea of the easy answer, which I think—I really blame Instagram for the oversimplification of political issues. Like, personally, that is just my ax to grind. And the idea that you could sort of absolve yourself by reposting something is just—yeah. It’s upsetting to me. But I think that there’s no easy answers to anything. Like, if you are a birder and you like birds, well, guess what? You’re gonna have to learn about trees.

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Odell: And then gonna have to learn about, like, seasons, and then, I don’t know, there’s just—everything is so tied to everything else, and there are so many things that are sort of, like, neither good nor bad or sort of arguable. We need lessons in that right now. Like, we need lessons in the sort of, like, Let me pick a point in space to look at, and then let me look at the context around that. Okay, now let me look at the context around that. And now you’ve sort of widened this whole ecosystem. I think the opposite of that is what happens online.

Beck: So Jenny, if someone is just starting to rethink the relationship they have with their devices, what advice would you give them?

Odell: Try to take an outsider’s perspective on yourself. I’m a big journaler, so I’ve journaled since I was a kid. So that would work for me. I would look at my phone, I would look at some stuff on my phone, and then I would just write down, kinda what it was and then how I felt about it. And I would be, like, brutally honest.

Beck: Oh, man.

Odell: Just pretend like you’re a scientist. And just talk to a friend about it. You could write it down, like, whatever. But, you know, I think there needs to be that, like, every so often you step to the side and you go, Okay, what did I just do? Like, Why did I do that? How did that make me feel? You can be super brief about it. Just do it for a week. Just see what it tells you.

Beck: Yeah.

Odell: Before you try to make any changes, because the danger is that a person feels shame, they feel that it’s bad. They’re like, Okay, I need to change this, and then they try really hard to change it, and then it doesn’t go the way they wanted, and then they feel more shame. And now it’s just, like, a spiral.

Beck: Yeah. I think especially with attention for whatever reason, it does feel very shameful, this like, Oh, I can’t focus; I can’t pay attention. I can’t even, like, read a book without having the desire to pick up my phone.

Odell: Yeah. And people think it means that they’re a bad person, and it doesn’t. You just gotta be patient and try a bunch of different things and maybe it’ll be more interesting than you think.

[Music]

Beck: Guys, huge news. Huge news. I locked my gym locker today. Nature is healing. I am the virus. For once in my goddamn life, I locked my gym locker.

It is day 13. I was on the computer all day for work because computer is where the money comes from. You can still screen fatigue yourself. (Laughs.) The old-fashioned way.

Captain’s log, the final full day of the experiment. Over the past two weeks, I read one full novel, I started two other books, I finished an audiobook, I crocheted a hat, I watched all of the first season of The Traitors. It’s not like I, you know, found myself with a magical abundance of time. I think it’s more like I just paid more attention and spent more time doing the things that I already like to do.

That was time mostly well spent, so attention mostly well spent.

Brennan: Julie, when you set out to go on this experiment you got in touch with one of the researchers from the 2025 study, Kostadin Kushlev from Georgetown University, who agreed to go over the results of your post-experiment attention test with us. And before we call him up, are you nervous about your results, not so nervous about these results? Will it mean less to you if your attention span didn’t change on paper?

Beck: I mean, I guess I’m a little nervous. I mean, look, I am a nerd and I always wanna get an A+ on my projects. But I really do feel better, and if it’s just a placebo effect, well, a placebo effect is still an effect, right? Like, I’ll take it.

Brennan: Okay, I’m gonna dial Kosta up.

[Phone ringing]

Kostadin Kushlev: Hello.

Brennan: Hi, I’m Natalie. I’m Julie’s producer. I’m also gonna be sitting in on this call.

Kushlev: Hi, Natalie.

Beck: Hey, Kosta. It’s Julie. How are you?

Kushlev: Pretty good. How are you doing?

Beck: I’m doing OK! So, can we just dive right in?

Kushlev: Yes.

Beck: And tell me, before I started the experiment, how was my baseline attention span?

Kushlev: So your score was about three, 3.02.

Beck: Is that good? Good for a 35-year-old? Good, bad?

Kushlev: That’s pretty good. Essentially, you did about how our participants did. It’s a little closer to the level you might see in young adulthood or for somebody in their 60s. (Laughs.)

Beck: (Laughs.) Okay. Humbling. Humbling.

Kushlev: Yes. Yes. But, you know, but once we get to your post score—

Beck: Yes, let’s do it.

Kushlev: —things really change.

Beck: The big reveal.

Kushlev: Yes.

Beck: What changed?

Kushlev: So your post score was actually hugely better. So it was 3.8. And that is much bigger improvement than we saw on average in our study. So your improvement is about four to five times bigger than what the average participant in our study gained.

Brennan: Go Julie!

Beck: Write it down, Natalie. Write it down. (Laughs.)

Brennan: I’m taking notes.

Kushlev: Yeah. So you did really well on that.

Beck: Amazing, I think. Is 3.1 to 3.8 good? Have I reversed my cognitive decline? Or how would you characterize that?

Kushlev: You’re basically off the charts.

Beck: (Laughs.)

Kushlev: But it might take a while to reap the benefits of this improved attention.

Beck: Right. And it’ll probably go away if I just start scrolling Instagram again.

Kushlev: Right. Yeah.

Brennan: (Laughs.)

Kushlev: It’s certainly not a permanent increase. But I do like to point out that, you know, just taking a two-week break and not even a complete break from your phone, just sort of like reducing your use, can actually improve that ability to sustain attention. Our lives are just like so tied to these devices, so sometimes the question might be: Have we like essentially permanently damaged our, you know—

Beck: Yeah.

Kushlev: —brains? Like, have we changed our neurobiology and so forth? And so this seems to suggest that no, there is a way out. So it might be worth doing some of those digital-detox interventions.

[Music]

Beck: Thank you so much, Kosta. It was great chatting with you!

Kushlev: Alright, thank you, bye.

Brennan: Bye!

Brennan: Julie?

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Brennan: How do you feel about that?

Beck: Unbearably smug. No, no, no. I’m just kidding. No, I feel relieved, honestly. Like, even if the true effect size isn’t as big as it seemed, ’cause I am just one person; it’s not, you know, a full scientific study—

Brennan: Yeah.

Beck: —it still feels really good to know that it’s possible to improve so quickly.

Brennan: Right.

Beck: So it’s actually kind of wild that you can do something as simple as this and, like, bounce back so quickly.

Brennan: Are you going to keep using the Brick? Like, how are you feeling about—where’s your relationship at between you and your phone right now?

Beck: My relationship with my phone is cordial. We’re not—it’s not warm—

Brennan: (Laughs.)

Beck: —but it’s not cold. We’re cordial. We’re friendly acquaintances.

Brennan: That sounds like how people describe their exes.

Beck: Yeah. And, well, we haven’t broken up. It really is—it’s a situationship—

Brennan: Totally.

Beck: —that is ongoing forever. No, I’m definitely gonna continue using the Brick, and I have been still. Twenty-three hours a day? You know, maybe not.

Brennan: Yeah.

Beck: I have been Bricking my phone, at a minimum, before bed, so I can't doom scroll right before I sleep, and I can’t look at my emails or Instagram the second that I regain consciousness. So that does help.

[Music]

But I would say that throughout this, I kept thinking about my favorite poet, Mary Oliver, and one thing that she wrote was, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

Brennan: That’s beautiful.

Beck: So this season, I think what I’ve learned is: Your attention is your life. And I think on some level I knew that already, but after this experiment, I’ve really been feeling it.

Brennan: We started this season because we wanted to understand why so many people were feeling the pull to log off, right? We’ve explored a lot of the ways in which the internet can pull you into thoughtless patterns, whether it’s the way Instagram makes us feel bad about our bodies or the way that AI chatbots can send us into an anxious spiral. But it seems like what we are maybe actually looking for, right now, is ways to be more thoughtful.

Beck: Yeah, I wanted to feel more thoughtful about my life. I wanted to not to feel as much like I’m literally giving my life away to things that I don’t even care about. I wanted to stop nickel-and-diming the moments of my life away.

Brennan: Being intentional about where you give your attention.

[Music]

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

How To will be back with a new season soon.

Tallying

2026-08-23T12:00:00-04:00

I tally the dead. I tally today’s dead. I seek a tally of the dead or seek
yesterday’s dead. I try to count them, the dead. Reports tell me there are,
today, more dead. I announce the dead—the house is quiet. I try to
count. I seek numbers. I provide numbers. I wake trying. I cover
myself in numbers, trying to keep still.

I seek some stillness beyond the dead—I try to just manage. I tally the dead,
each pair of lungs, I wander through numbers, the daffodils nevertheless
fly up. I hide the numbers, paper over what I know. The warm house fills.
What are you doing, he says. I say prayers for, try to put faces to the dead

as if to anchor the dead—I condemn the dead, their utter defenselessness.
Again I try to spare no numbers, the ones who have died, not the ones
about to die, and when I wake they are there, counted and uncounted.
When life takes more away, I keep the dead inside me, the ones not
injured but gone, although many are injured. My counting—
what even matters? I don’t feel like going out. Soon I am counting.

At the gate of the house I feel the faint dusk resolve. I bless the dead,
I forget the dead from last year, I lose more dead, I tally what I can.
I count through the morning. Light drifts across the thick rug. I move
my hands as if I am counting the dead. As if I am altering the dead
in my hands as I count.

An American City, With Troops on Its Streets

2026-08-23T07:52:11-04:00

The sight of military troops patrolling in a peaceful American city would once have been strange, if not outright alarming. But since last August, when Donald Trump first deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C., residents have become accustomed to seeing men and women in camouflage military fatigues on duty throughout the city and its public-transit system. Sometimes, they trail federal officers from agencies such as the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service, dispatched by Trump to patrol the district in bulletproof vests. More often, the troops wander around unaccompanied, in small groups.

D.C. has now entered its second year with federal troops on its streets. President Trump initially ordered the Guard into the capital city, sent federal agents to work as beat cops, and briefly seized control of D.C.’s local police department following the attempted carjacking of a former member of Elon Musk’s DOGE team. The early days of the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force produced dramatic headlines. As the year dragged on, though, its activities faded from national news coverage, even as armed troops and federal agents continued to patrol. The Pentagon says it plans to keep the Guard in D.C. through January 2029—which will cost taxpayers more than $1 billion.

For all that money, the Guard’s purpose here is largely inscrutable. “They don’t bother nobody; they just go back and forth, and back and forth,” Aundrea’ Pulliam, a Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority employee at the Dupont Circle Metro stop, told us. (As we spoke, a few Guard members walked by, heading toward the escalators.) Occasionally, Pulliam said, she has seen Guards help a rider who’s “super drunk,” or check out an abandoned backpack. But most of the time, a station manager, Deidra Foster, told us, it seems like “they’re really bored.”

Whereas other American cities targeted by Trump with National Guard deployments found success in court, D.C.’s lack of statehood limits its ability to fight back. The presence of the task force represents a particularly Trump-era indignity for the city: both comic and menacing; abusive and ineffective; appalling to some and, as time goes on, exhaustingly commonplace. Antidemocratic though the federal takeover may be, D.C. residents have been forced to live with it.

Matt McClain for The Atlantic

A National Guard member yawns as he and others stand near the Korean War Veterans Memorial on Monday, August 3, 2026, in Washington, D.C.

At first, the 800 or so troops called up were locals: members of the D.C. National Guard, which, unlike other state and territorial Guard units, is under the president’s direct control. Then, governors from around the country, mostly Republicans, began volunteering their own troops. The total head count was about 2,000 before ballooning to 5,000 before the America 250 celebrations—enough that, in some neighborhoods, walking to the Metro or picking up groceries without encountering Guardsmen became nearly impossible.

The Trump administration has promoted the Guard’s presence as an overwhelming success. “Washington D.C. went from High Crime to NO CRIME — Thank you President Trump!” the president posted on Truth Social in early July. (This month, Trump claimed that crime in the city had dropped by 92 percent, citing a favorite number of his.) True, crime has largely fallen in the capital over the past year—but it was on the decline before Trump’s surge, and cities across the country without any comparable federal presence have seen similar positive trends. (Numbers reported by D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department suggest that violent crime in the district may, in fact, be slightly up.) A recent report by the moderate Niskanen Center found that deployment of the National Guard led to a roughly 25 percent decrease in petty property crime over the first six months, but had “no measurable effect on violent crime.” Another analysis, published by the left-leaning Center for American Progress, reported “strong evidence that the deployment of the National Guard did not result in a measurable decrease in violent crime rates.” In response, Trump threatened to sue the organization.

The National Guard may not have done much in part because there isn’t much for them to do. Troops have been sworn in as deputy U.S. marshals, which gives them some powers of law enforcement, but the terms of their appointment state that they cannot independently conduct searches or make arrests. (They can, however, detain suspected lawbreakers until either local or federal law enforcement arrives.) According to a recent analysis of court records by Reuters, troops have been mentioned in only 1.3 percent of criminal cases prosecuted in D.C. Superior Court over the past year—and in some of those cases, they were the victims. The media-relations page for the Guard’s D.C. presence includes stories about picking up trash and reuniting a lost boy with his parents on the National Mall.

Perhaps most notable, the Guard has begun carrying the overdose-prevention drug naloxone, commonly known by its brand name, Narcan. Early this month, the D.C. National Guard’s interim commanding general told reporters that Guardsmen had administered the drug 325 times. Sergeant Hare, a Guardsman outside the Woodley Park Metro station, who declined to give his first name, citing National Guard policies, told us that he had lost track of how many drug-related emergencies he’d helped with, but said it was “the main thing” he’d done during his deployment.

Andrew Leyden / Getty

Air National Guardsmen work clearing leaves and debris from McPherson Square on August 28, 2025, in Washington, D.C.

“Could this be handled without having the National Guard in D.C.? Probably,” Regina LaBelle, an addiction-policy professor at Georgetown University, told us. But “since they are here,” she said, “it’s really good that they are using naloxone where it’s needed.”

Whatever the troops are or aren’t doing, their presence is a reminder of Trump’s power to shape the world as he alone pleases. America’s Founders understood domestic deployment of the military as the tool of a tyrant, and put in place legal protections against it—protections that Trump has now set about eroding. The president treats America’s cities as though they’re populated by scofflaws to be subjugated rather than by citizens with a say in their own future, and deploying the Guard to D.C. is a way to make that vision into a reality.

“They’re an armed occupying force in our city,” Merawi Gerima, an organizer with the D.C. Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, told us. Gerima and other activists we spoke with emphasized that they understood the Guard’s deployment as only one aspect of the larger federal presence in D.C. As part of the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, federal agents have been reassigned from their normal responsibilities to act as beat cops, dispatched from agencies such as the FBI; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Customs and Border Protection; the Secret Service; the Park Police; the U.S. Marshals Service; the Diplomatic Security Service; and, oddly, the IRS.

Although Guard troops are the visual signature of Trump’s seizure of control over the city, they comprise the least energetic component of the task force. The federal-law-enforcement officers deployed across D.C. at Trump’s directive have been far busier, and more aggressive. Twice this past fall, agents with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division fired their weapons during traffic stops. Months later, a deputy U.S. marshal shot and killed a robbery suspect. After the administration lifted restrictions on car chases by Park Police, the agency launched a flurry of high-speed chases; multiple crashes and at least two deaths—of a bystander and a fleeing driver—soon followed. During the first six months of the surge, immigration enforcement and other federal agents roamed the city, detaining residents off the street.

Andrew Leyden / Getty

A National Guard unit patrols the National Mall on August 30, 2025, in Washington, D.C.

ICE has been less prominent since December, when a D.C. federal court enjoined the government from carrying out mass immigration arrests without a warrant. But Sandra Benavente, the advocacy manager at the immigrant-aid nonprofit Ayuda, told us that immigrant communities still feel the aftershocks of those arrests. “We’ve seen since last summer this climate of fear around all uniformed law enforcement,” she said—including the National Guard. Some of the group’s clients, including those relying on Ayuda for food or assistance with seeking legal status, have missed appointments because they are afraid of being stopped on their way downtown.

Although ICE activity remains limited in D.C., other federal agencies continue to police the city in unprecedented numbers, sometimes alongside officers with D.C.’s local Metropolitan Police Department. The “lockup list” in D.C. Superior Court, which records people detained overnight by law enforcement for arraignment the next business day, routinely hovers near 100—far greater than the pre-surge norm of 60 or so. “There’s a difference in the intensity of the policing,” Gerima said, particularly “in Black and brown neighborhoods.” (All three of the men shot at by task-force members, including the person who died, were Black.) The additional federal presence provides law enforcement with more resources, he said, “and what they’re using that to do is to grab anybody for anything, any semblance of a crime.” Minor violations of local laws that might previously have brought about nothing more than a ticket—such as drinking from an open container—are now resulting in arrests by federal agents.

Early in the National Guard’s D.C. deployment, especially after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered that troops begin carrying firearms, some residents worried about potential violence. So far, the troops deployed to the capital have not been responsible for any civilian deaths—the bare minimum of what one might hope for from a military deployment on U.S. soil. In fact, the only bloodshed related to the Guard involved troops as victims, when an Afghan man who had served with U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan shot two members of the West Virginia Guard near the White House, one of whom later died.

Apart from this burst of violence, the troops’ stay in the capital has thus far been largely peaceful, albeit the ominous sort of peace that results from uniformed men and women strolling around with guns. In one notable exception partially caught on video, three troops were physically aggressive in detaining a woman outside her home—pushing her to the ground and zip-tying her hands so tightly that, she later wrote in a claim against the Guard, the plastic cuffs “ruptured one or more ligaments in her wrist,” requiring surgery. The National Guard says that the woman, Anna King, had thrown “unknown liquid” at other Guard members. Prosecutors brought assault charges against King for the liquid incident and for allegedly harming a member of the Guard while being detained; she has pleaded not guilty.

Trump’s America is a land of perpetual indignation, where scandals that might once have ended a presidency have become commonplace. After a year of federal presence, D.C. is suspended somewhere between the routine and the outrageous. Still, activists we spoke with described continued energy to fight Trump’s overreach. Some organize protests; others quietly keep tabs on federal agents in their neighborhoods. The protest group Free D.C., which has grown prominent over the past year, encourages residents to voice their complaints by writing to governors who have sent their National Guard troops to the city.

“I feel like it’s just better for me to ignore them,” Jill Robinson, a health educator who has lived in the area for four decades, told us. Yet “I feel angry and annoyed.” Robinson was attending a Free D.C. event, one of nearly a dozen planned by the group in the days leading up to August 11, the first anniversary of the National Guard deployment. She had attended previous Free D.C. training sessions, including on how to stay safe if law enforcement becomes aggressive at a protest.

This event was meant to honor Nolberto Meza, the bystander who was struck and killed in Northwest D.C. during a Park Police chase of a suspected stolen car. (Meza had arrived in the U.S. from Venezuela, seeking asylum.) Amid torrents of summer rain, several dozen people had gathered on the bridge where Meza was hit, wearing ponchos, clutching umbrellas, and carrying signs with slogans such as END THE OCCUPATION. The attendees included more seasoned protesters like Robinson, but also newcomers such as Ella and Ant Peels, who’d moved to Washington in May from Annapolis, Maryland. They’d read about the deployment before their move, but seeing the Guardsmen out and about—“maybe three times every time we take a walk”—had made them uncomfortable. “It definitely gives an eerie feeling to living here,” Ella said. “It doesn’t make me feel safe.”

Matt McClain for The Atlantic

A demonstrator holds a sign referring to the National Guard deployment in Washington, D.C., as people gather for a Free DC event entitled “One Year of Occupation: 13,000 Arrests and Pirro’s Lies” outside the H. Carl Moultrie Courthouse on Monday, August 3, 2026, in Washington, D.C.

Those opposed to the increased federal presence have notched some wins. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office has been continually stymied in federal court by opposition from D.C. residents sitting on grand and petit juries. This spring, during D.C.’s Democratic primary, the mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis George won a decisive victory after advocating for a more adversarial approach to the president than that of the current mayor, Muriel Bowser. The D.C. city council passed emergency measures requiring the MPD to keep records of federal officers’ role in arrests and incidents involving the use of force.

But the city’s status as a federal enclave starkly restricts its ability to respond to Trump. Last month, all 13 members of the council signed letters calling on governors to withdraw troops from the city. A top Justice Department official dismissed the letters as “impotent theatrics.” (In response to a legal challenge filed by D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb, a federal judge ruled that both the D.C. and out-of-state Guard deployments were illegal, but that ruling has been paused while an appeals court considers the question.) The council can push MPD for transparency, but it has little power to constrain federal law enforcement, especially if those agents are patrolling separately from local police. These limitations underline the authoritarian tilt of the federal presence in D.C. The troops and federal agents are here without the city’s say, at the pleasure of one man only, and there is little the city can do about it.

The legal restraints on D.C. are unique, but the city is not going through this experience entirely alone. To the southwest, Memphis has a similar federal presence, alongside a deployment of hundreds of Tennessee National Guard troops sent by the state’s Republican governor. Trump announced the Memphis Safe Task Force a month after the D.C. task force began its surge, touting Memphis as a “replica of our extraordinarily successful efforts” in D.C. Now both the Guard and a contingent of federal agents have patrolled Memphis for almost a year. In four separate incidents, city residents died after being shot by members of the task force: Two National Guard troops were responsible for one shooting; the agents in the other three incidents were with the DEA and ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division. (In one incident, it remains unclear whether the person died of the gunshot wound or a self-inflicted stabbing.) Memphis, a red-state “blue dot” whose autonomy has been continually rolled back by Republican state legislators, mirrors D.C.’s vulnerability.

In both Memphis and D.C., people harmed by the task force have limited options for legal redress. Although federal civil-rights law allows lawsuits against state and local officials for violations of constitutional rights, options for suing federal officers are far more limited. In one case, the ACLU is pushing for accountability after MPD, called in by an Ohio National Guard sergeant, handcuffed and detained a D.C. resident who had been protesting the Guard by trailing troops while blasting “The Imperial March,” from Star Wars, on his phone. D.C. settled, but litigation continues against the sergeant, who argues that he was acting in a federal role.

The activists we spoke with said they see their push to rid D.C. of this military presence as part of a larger effort to oppose authoritarian overreach. The “Imperial March” case makes the metaphor for them. It is absurd—a Star Wars joke that ended with someone in handcuffs—but also unnerving. In a city, or country, with fewer and fewer checks on presidential authority, a small act of dissent can provoke a big abuse of power.

Iran Unleashed

2026-08-23T07:00:00-04:00

For years, Iran confronted a balance of power in the Middle East that tilted against it. The region was dominated by a hostile American superpower, a nuclear-armed and militarily superior Israel, and significant local actors—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates—that were strategically and economically aligned with the United States.

Today finds Iran in entirely new circumstances. It has gone head-to-head with the superpower and Israel, withstood a pounding from their most advanced weapons, and more than survived. As a result, Iran has, with American help, completely reconfigured the power structure of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. The dominant power in the region going forward will be Iran, not the U.S. or Israel. Neighboring countries are already making their adjustments to this new reality. More distant powers will too. For years, the world has been dealing with an Iran constrained. It will now discover what Iran unleashed looks like.

Iran doesn’t need a deal with the United States. The common assumption that a weak and impoverished Iran would eventually have to make some accommodation to American power, open the Strait of Hormuz, and set about tending to its badly damaged economy has proved mistaken. The Islamic Republic has rarely appeared weaker or more vulnerable than it has over the past two years. Last February, President Trump renewed his “maximum pressure” campaign of international sanctions, which severely damaged Iran’s already-weak economy and cut billions of dollars in state revenues. Israel and the United States then launched the 12-day war that June to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities. The war significantly damaged Iran’s program and revealed just how vulnerable the country was to Israeli and American strikes. Then, in February, the United States and Israel launched the most recent war with the killing of the regime’s supreme leader and the great majority of its senior officials, followed by more than five weeks of unremitting attacks on Iranian military capabilities.

[Tom Nichols: Donald Trump effectively just told Iran to get a nuclear weapon]

Yet through all of this, the regime has survived and made no concessions. On the contrary, Iran exposed America’s Achilles’ heel: the vulnerability of Iran’s neighbors. A major turning point came in mid-March, when Israel attacked Iran’s South Pars gas field, and Iran retaliated against Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex, the world’s largest liquefied-natural-gas facility. The attack showed that although Iran obviously could not defeat the United States in an air war, Iranian missiles and drones could inflict enough damage on the oil-and-gas infrastructure of the Gulf to plunge the world into a prolonged economic crisis. The Gulf States understood this immediately, and so did Trump. He halted attacks on Iranian energy targets, ordered a reluctant Israel to do the same, and soon brought the larger campaign to a stop without extracting a single Iranian concession. Ever since, and despite many threats, Trump has not once ordered another strike against Iranian energy infrastructure.

This alone was enough to alter the balance of leverage between Iran and the United States. From April through last month, Trump repeatedly threatened to launch another massive attack against Iran. Each time, Iran threatened retaliation, Gulf States warned of the consequences, and Trump backed off. By his third or fourth bluff, Tehran had reason to conclude that the United States was no longer prepared to follow Iran up the ladder of escalation. Trump made this clear when he noted in mid-June that continuing the war would lead to “economic catastrophe,” possibly even a “depression,” and that he did not want to become President Herbert Hoover. Ever since, Trump has been trying, with notable desperation, to end the conflict.

The memorandum of understanding that the U.S. and Iran adopted in June reflected this reality. Although phrased to save face for the United States as much as possible, the MOU was a clear Iranian victory. It declared that the Islamic Republic of Iran, and no other nation, would “make arrangements” for the “safe passage of commercial vessels” through the Strait of Hormuz. In dialogue with Oman, without intermediaries or other participants, Iran would determine the strait’s administration “in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states.”

The MOU did not call for a return to the prewar status quo. Neither did it provide the United States any say over future administration of the strait. Rather, it designated Iran as the only actor other than the weak Oman, and it even allowed Iran to charge nations for safe passage after 60 days. The MOU thus codified the defeat that the United States had suffered back in March, when Trump apparently realized that he either could not or would not risk further attacks on energy facilities in the region.

In retrospect, Iran’s leaders do not seem to have believed that they needed the MOU. Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei reportedly had to be persuaded by President Masoud Pezeshkian to sign it. Tehran’s relative indifference was understandable: The American concessions reflected such desperation to end the war that the Iranians could well have expected that the U.S. would eventually retreat, with or without a deal.

Iranian leaders certainly did not hesitate to blow up the cease-fire almost immediately when the U.S. Navy began shepherding tankers through the Omani side of the strait. Trump may or may not have understood the full extent of the concessions his negotiators had made regarding control of the strait, but from the Iranian point of view, the Omani route was an attempt to recapture what the U.S. had given away. For a while, the United States and Iran engaged in tit-for-tat strikes, culminating in intense American attacks in mid-July. When these had no effect, Trump warned on July 15 that the United States was “going to knock out all their power plants” and “all their bridges” unless Iran negotiated. Yet again, no attack followed.

Then the world, and the Iranians, learned one of the main reasons: Revelations that American stocks of crucial munitions were dangerously low, and that no less than the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff himself was looking for an “off-ramp,” sent a clear signal about the future course of American strategy. A major assault on Iran would threaten American interests elsewhere by weakening the United States in the possible event of a Chinese move on Taiwan or a Russian onslaught against a NATO member.

Missile shortages would also increase the hazards involved in a massive attack on Iranian infrastructure. The U.S. would be forced to send more manned aircraft within range of Iranian air defenses, and it would have relatively few interceptors on hand to protect the Gulf States and its own regional bases. The risk of American casualties would be high, as would the danger to the region’s energy infrastructure. And nothing would guarantee that such an assault would be any more effective than the five-plus weeks of bombings were earlier this year.

American actions have made plain that Washington fears escalation more than Iran does—not just for now, but for the future. This places limits on what the United States can do even at low levels of conflict. Because any military action against Iran risks stepping onto an escalation ladder that the U.S. does not want to ascend, even tit-for-tat strikes seem no longer to be part of American strategy. The president has reportedly told his advisers that he does not want to order more strikes. The Iranians have struck at several UAE ships this month and even fired ballistic missiles at the country, but the United States has not responded since July—a fact undoubtedly noted by the UAE and Iran’s other neighbors.

[Vivian Salama: From ‘indispensable’ ally to target of annihilation]

Given the evident American reluctance to fight another major campaign, Iran has reason to wonder what it can get from a deal that it will not get anyway without one. Senior Iranian officials are now calling for the withdrawal of American forces, the lifting of the American naval blockade and all sanctions, the freeing of Iran’s frozen assets, and the payment of war reparations. The conventional wisdom is that Iran’s leaders know that these demands are nonstarters for Washington and that they are therefore either rubbing Trump’s nose in defeat, angling for a better deal, or overplaying their hand. Many observers still assume that control of the strait is a bargaining chip to squeeze more concessions out of the United States or get Trump back to the MOU. But we are well past all that. A victor does not have to go back to the bargaining table except to set the terms of surrender.

Iran has now laid out those terms. They may appear maximalist and excessive, but Tehran must hardly believe that it has reason to ask for less. Iran has made clear for months that control of the strait is not negotiable. The notion, constantly floated by the Trump administration and the media, that the Iranians can’t make up their minds and that they keep shifting their positions is nonsense. As far back as April, Mojtaba declared that Iran would implement “new legal frameworks and management” of the strait and that “foreigners who come from thousands of kilometers away” had no place in the Gulf, “except at the bottom of its waters.” On a day commemorating Iran’s defeat of Portugal in the strait in 1622, he declared that “by the will and power of God, the bright future of the Persian Gulf region will be a future without America.”

The idea that, having survived both military strikes and sanctions, Iran will now succumb to sanctions alone is deluded. Mojtaba has overhauled Iran’s national-security leadership and installed veterans of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in top positions. Former IRGC Commander Mohsen Rezaei now heads the Supreme National Security Council, and other hard-line security officials have been elevated. The regime emerging from the war is being reorganized by men who believe that Iran survived an American-Israeli attempt to destroy it and that defiance, not compromise, produced victory.

But this is not just triumphalism. For Iran, control of the strait is neither a luxury nor a bargaining chip. Given the likelihood that, at some future point, Israel or the United States will attack again, deal or no deal, the strait provides Iran’s strongest and surest deterrent. It is also the key to unlocking many of the shackles that a U.S.-dominated world order placed on Iran over the course of decades, and to undoing a regional and global economic system designed to exclude and impoverish it. Some so-called moderates within the Iranian establishment may well regard the strait as a bargaining chip, but they are not winning the argument, for reasons that are not hard to understand. An IRGC spokesperson stated the regime’s perspective plainly: “For us, the Strait of Hormuz is not merely an economic waterway, but rather a key component of our geopolitical and strategic power.”

Iran has been establishing the mechanisms of control for months and instructing shipowners and nations as to how the system will operate. It created the Persian Gulf Strait Authority and demanded that shipping companies register with it, obtain permits, follow Iran-designated routes, and pay for Iran-provided insurance and security.

Neither is Iran claiming merely the right to collect money. It is also claiming the right to decide who may pass. It has proposed excluding vessels associated with governments it deems hostile, such as the U.S. and Israel, and it has demanded compensation from nations that participated in attacks against it. Iran is establishing the principle that passage through the strait will henceforth be a privilege that Tehran can grant, condition, delay, or deny. Other nations have already begun acquiescing to the new arrangement. India, Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, China, and others have sought to come to terms.

Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz is a more useful instrument of power than a nuclear weapon would be. A nuclear weapon might deter an attack, but control of the strait gives Iran leverage every day, over dozens of countries. With it, Iran can reward friends, punish enemies, extract revenue, force the loosening of sanctions, and make governments think twice before opposing Iranian policies. It can do all of this without firing a shot, and while preserving the ability to threaten violence when necessary.

The sanctions strategy that for decades served to isolate Iran rested on international cooperation. Nations that depend on access to the strait—Japan and South Korea, for example—will have to choose between access to a reliable energy supply and participation in American-backed sanctions. Will they choose solidarity with Washington—this Washington—over their economic interests? In the new order that Iran is creating, a global sanctions regime is likely to be unsustainable.

Iran will probably sustain its control over energy flows for at least a couple of years. The most optimistic projections suggest that establishing alternative pipelines and export routes that circumvent the Strait of Hormuz will take this long. But one wonders whether these will even come to fruition. New pipelines, ports, and energy facilities will be just as vulnerable to Iranian missiles and drones as the old ones were. Will Iran simply stand by while neighboring states construct the means to escape its control? The small states that must build and protect such routes are going to be wary of incurring Iran’s wrath, and American protection has proved inadequate. Iran is already trying to draw Iraq away from developing alternative oil-export corridors, in part by offering safe passage for Iraqi tankers on Iranian terms.

The regional adjustment has begun. Gulf rulers who once counted on an American security guarantee must now make their peace with the power that proved capable of defeating their protector. Saudi Arabia’s rejection of the U.S.- and Israel-backed Abraham Accords in favor of a strategic compact with Pakistan and Turkey hints at the shape of the future. The Abraham Accords represented the consolidation of Israeli power and influence in the region and the further containment of Iran. The Mecca pact is something else entirely. Neither Pakistan nor Turkey regards Iran as a major threat; Pakistan, like Iran, has close relations with China; Israel regards Turkey as a regional threat second only to Iran. Instead of an American-Israeli order, this will be an alignment less implacably hostile to Iran, less friendly to Israel, and more independent of the United States. The signatories also have nuclear weapons in common: Pakistan has them, and the Turks and Saudis want them.

[Arash Azizi: Tehran has to make a choice]

Meanwhile, Iran will be free to resume its own nuclear-weapons program without fear of another major attack. This fact in itself will transform the regional balance. Last year, Israel and the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities for 12 days without facing serious Iranian retaliation. Now Iran has been emboldened to use its control of the strait, and threats against neighboring states and their energy infrastructure, to deter any such strikes for the foreseeable future. American missile and interceptor stocks will take a long time to replenish, and may well be needed in other parts of the world in years to come; Iran will all the while be rearming with Russian and Chinese help, potentially leaving the U.S. in a worse position a year from now than it is in today.

The effects will extend far beyond the Middle East. American allies in Asia and Europe can see that a relatively brief war against a second-rank power has consumed much of America’s supply of the weapons needed for missile defense. They can see that the United States began a war it could not finish, exposed its partners to retaliation, and then stopped when the costs became too great. Beijing’s conclusions about Taiwan, and Moscow’s conclusions about Europe, may be impossible to know. But America’s allies will inevitably be asking whether Washington has the weapons, stamina, and political will to sustain another major conflict. In fact, they already are.

That the Iranian regime could fall is, of course, possible. It is corrupt, repressive, economically incompetent, and widely hated by its people. But it had all of these weaknesses before the war. What it did not have was control of the world’s most important energy choke point, the prospect of growing revenues and influence, the demonstrated ability to deter the United States, and the prestige of an impossible victory.

A regime that survived what much of the world believed would destroy it, and then forced the world’s dominant power to retreat, will likely emerge strengthened, at least for a time. Such success tends to breed confidence, and perhaps overconfidence. But it is not likely to make Iran’s leaders less ambitious or less committed to the faith that saw them through this miraculous triumph. Recently, senior Iranian officials began talking publicly about adopting a “fully offensive” posture, and reports have emerged of Iranian plans to expand its targets to include European countries hosting American bases. To see stories in The New York Times asking, “Who will blink first?” is amusing, given that the Iranians until now have never once blinked, while the Trump administration has done nothing but blink. Iran may even start fighting again to force the U.S. to lift the naval blockade. Given the American administration’s proven fear of escalation, the hope is not unreasonable. The world has spent decades worrying about what Iran might do if it acquired a nuclear weapon. It should now worry about something even more consequential: an Iran that has defeated the United States, no longer fears American attack, and controls access to the Persian Gulf. Nuclear weapons alone could never have given Iran this kind of power. The failed U.S. and Israeli war with Iran has.

The Hatred That Broke American Politics

2026-08-23T07:00:00-04:00

“If you want to defend the South and Western civilization from the Jew and his dark-skinned allies, be at Charlottesville on 12 August.” Nine years ago, that message spread across the internet. The call was answered by several hundred white supremacists, who marched through the University of Virginia. The rage-filled men carried torches, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” They swarmed around the historic rotunda, arriving at a statue of the school’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. There they met a tiny band of student counterprotesters who responded with their own chant: “Black lives matter.” That evening turned violent, the first act in a deadly weekend. Most Americans remember the torches, the rage, the death. But those clashing chants also revealed a gap between the targets of hatred and the words available to name it.

Race is the wound America sees. Anti-Semitism is the one it doesn’t. Jews have frequently been imagined as a colorless minority whose great persecution took place elsewhere, or as a group whose Christian-adjacent faith flourished with the religious freedom they found in the United States. But their in-betweenness has always been part of the danger: Jews have never fit neatly into America’s frameworks of identity, and that failure to fit has marked them as suspect, out of place, or impossible to categorize. Depending on the audience, Jews are dismissed as beneficiaries of white privilege or treated as not quite white at all—too assimilated and not assimilated enough, too powerful and too marginal. That ambiguity has placed them, again and again, at the center of America’s battles over free speech and equal protection. When hatred does not fit existing categories, we tend either to ignore it or to overcorrect—both responses that distort the boundaries of free expression.

Our failure to reckon with the anti-Semitism of Charlottesville—on the right and the left—was not merely a missed opportunity. It helped create the opening into which illiberalism has since rushed.

[David Frum: Anti-Semitism is becoming mainstream]

August 2017 marked a turning point, not just for racial populism but for American democracy. That crisis seeded a surge in anti-Semitism. It also helped produce a government campaign against such bigotry that has become a tool for undermining freedom, championed by the Trump administration only when it serves the White House’s purposes. Meanwhile, the progressive left has struggled to sustain its critique of Israel’s war with Palestine—and of American responsibility for a moral catastrophe—without letting that critique curdle into conspiracism.

Americans appear to face an impossible choice between protecting free speech and safeguarding equal rights. But that is a false dichotomy. Honoring both will, however, require de-exceptionalizing anti-Semitism. And that, in turn, necessitates returning to Charlottesville, and reckoning with how both the left and the right failed in its aftermath.

Over the course of 2017, three separate racist rallies took place in Charlottesville. In May, the alt-right provocateur Richard Spencer led a small rally in downtown Charlottesville to protest a city-council decision to remove two century-old Confederate monuments. A University of Virginia alum with a passion for Wagnerian opera, Spencer dressed old hatred in new clothes. He spoke grandly of restoring white supremacy, and of defeating liberal conspiracies to change America beyond recognition. President Trump’s election gave him cause for hope that Black Lives Matter and antifa would be crushed. “We will not be replaced from this world,” Spencer screamed as plumes of green and gray smoke from flares rose into the sky. “Whites have a future! We have a future of power!”

Two months later, the Ku Klux Klan paraded through town. Although they had come to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, they held banners denouncing Jewish communism and the satanic Talmud. They were met with a massive, raucous counterprotest, inspired in part by a newly formed Black Lives Matter chapter in town, staged by citizens determined to oppose the hatred.

This article was adapted from James Loeffler’s forthcoming book, Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern America

August brought round three: Spencer returned to town, accompanied by a who’s who of the far right, answering the call to join what they labeled the “Battle of Charlottesville.”

Officially, Unite the Right was a free-speech march in defense of the monument. But several organizers had ties to violent extremist groups and online they made their intentions clear. “Next stop: Charlottesville, VA. Final stop: Auschwitz,” wrote Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer. The planners fantasized about mowing down protesters with cars, and repeating the Holocaust—even as they denied it happened. They wrapped retrograde hatred in constitutional pretense. Free speech became both shield and sword.

The weekend brought mayhem: dozens of injuries, the murder of Heather Heyer, the death of two state troopers. Yet it also exposed the entanglement of race and religion in the racist imagination, which conceived of Jews as invisible power brokers, racial chameleons, white impostors, and anti-Christian infidels.

Charlottesville shocked the country. Yet in its aftermath, America had no vocabulary for describing anti-Semitism in relation to other hatreds—let alone for responding to it. Then–UVA President Teresa Sullivan denounced the violence and “racist, anti-immigrant, homophobic and misogynistic chants,” but made no mention of Jews. The great majority of other statements issued by Virginia-college presidents repeated the same failure. The local school superintendent discarded her back-to-school speech and instead spoke of the need to name “the hate that had visited our city,” which had targeted “our Latino, Muslim, bisexual, transgender, Christian, and Black students.” Jews, again, went unmentioned.

These educators were not anti-Semites. They were well-meaning liberals for whom other forms of hatred eclipsed anti-Semitism; anti-Black racism, for one, loomed larger. But anti-Semitism was hardly new to Charlottesville. The poet Karl Shapiro wrote of his time at UVA in the 1930s: “To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew is the curriculum.” The dean once tracked applicants in three categories: “Virginians, non-Virginians, and Hebrews.”

And that was not true of just Virginia. Americans have long been accustomed to seeing Jews as a model minority whose success proved their belonging, and to dismissing anti-Jewish hatred as something that happened elsewhere. Without having reckoned with their nation’s own long history of anti-Semitism, Americans met it in 2017 with confusion and silence.

The centrist liberal response constituted a form of occlusion. White supremacy was understood strictly in racial terms, and anti-Semitism was blocked from view. The chants in Charlottesville fixated on Jews. The response did not.

What liberals failed to see, the populist right first denied, then exploited. Trump could not condemn the marchers without asserting there were “very fine people on both sides.” For two years, his administration shrugged off any serious response.

Then the strategy shifted. Trump seized on anti-Semitism—but only anti-Semitism from the left. A 2019 executive order focused on college campuses, targeting anti-Zionist expression while lifting anti-Semitism out of the broader landscape of hatred for special treatment. This marked the first moment in which Trump threatened to defund American universities without even a proper investigation. Anti-Semitism became a cudgel for the administration to wield against political enemies and liberal institutions, not a hatred to be fought on equal, consistent terms.

The same pattern played out in Virginia. Glenn Youngkin tried to ignore Charlottesville entirely while running for governor in 2021. On his first day in office, he issued several executive orders. One of them banned “inherently divisive concepts” such as critical race theory from classrooms in the name of free speech. Another announced a commission on anti-Semitism whose final report reduced Charlottesville to two paragraphs out of 13,000 words.

Many Republican politicians chose to attack civil-rights protections for most minorities while selectively championing them in the Jewish case. Genuine anti-Semitism was met with a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel, violating other rights in the process. UVA faced a wholesale attack as part of the wave of disproportionate punishments inflicted on institutions of higher education in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. But the institution’s vulnerability had deeper roots. The progressive left had its own failure to reckon with—one that played out on campus and left universities unable to articulate a coherent defense when the attacks came.

The progressive left failed by exclusion. After the weekend of terror in 2017, UVA’s Jewish Leadership Council worked with the Minority Rights Coalition on repair and renewal. Yet when they applied to join as a member organization, they were rejected on account of their pro-Israel affiliate group. Remove that Zionist organization, they were told, and they could join. After objections that Jews had been prime victims, a compromise was floated: Jewish students could join as an honorary minority group without voting rights. Jewish student leaders, among them a young woman who had fled fearing her life on August 11, denounced the moral myopia.

As this conflict escalated in spring 2018, pro-Palestinian protesters stormed a Hillel event featuring Israeli Druze and Jewish reserve soldiers. Shouting slogans through a megaphone, they denounced Zionists as fascists and refused “dialogue with racists.” Their heckler’s veto muddled their critique of Israeli military propaganda. Jewish students claimed the rhetoric threatened them; protesters said the soldiers’ presence did the same to Palestinian students.

Everyone claimed the mantle of free speech while denouncing the other side as perpetrators of hate speech. The progressive left, for all of its commitment to confronting hatred, rarely turned that lens inward. The question of where anti-Zionism ended and anti-Semitism began was dismissed, not deliberated.

That moment was a rehearsal for every debate we’ve lived through since. How do you balance free speech and equal rights when competing groups on campus have political and personal ties to a live conflict? Where does legitimate critique end and hatred begin? All of it was there, seven years ago, before October 7, before the campus protests of 2024. When war erupted again, Americans were unprepared. Each side had made its cause exceptional—anti-Semitism a unique hatred, Zionism a unique evil—and that rhetorical brinksmanship left no room for the harder work of ensuring uniform equality and pluralism for all. From silence to chaos, we found ourselves without a coherent language to combat hatred.

The past several years have illustrated an old Yiddish saying: Lekh mikh nisht, un lakh mikh nisht. Literally: “Don’t beat me, and don’t lick me.” But in effect: Don’t demonize us, but don’t fetishize us, either. Since Charlottesville, Jews have been both demonized and tokenized across the political spectrum. Building a way forward requires de-exceptionalizing anti-Semitism—not erasing its distinct features, but treating it as one hatred among others, deserving the same protections, no more and no less.

[Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right]

This wisdom extends beyond Jews. Every group deserves protection from hatred without becoming a political football. Every group deserves to be seen clearly—neither as villain nor as mascot. That includes Palestinian Americans, who have watched their own dehumanization dismissed while anti-Semitism is used against their speech.

This is why we need a new model—one that treats no group’s claim to protection as special, one that recognizes free speech and equal protection as complementary values enabling all citizens to participate fully in democratic life. Building that model will require Jewish communal leaders to resist the politicization of Jewish fear—and progressive coalitions to make room for Jewish particularity without imposing a litmus test on Jews alone.

What would this look like in practice? Rejecting the warping of anti-Semitism for partisan ends. Acknowledging anti-Semitism from all directions rather than only the versions that serve our politics. Building democratic coalitions across differences rather than demanding ideological purity as the price of admission.

Nine years after Charlottesville, we have seen the stumbles and overcorrections, the cynicism and despair. What we haven’t done is imagine a better future in which fighting anti-Semitism strengthens civil rights for all.

That work begins with honesty about how we got here. The bigots who marched in Charlottesville were real. So is our capacity to build something better. In 2017, two chants collided in the dark. We can still answer them together.

This article was adapted from James Loeffler’s forthcoming book, Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern America.

How to Lose a Trade War

2026-08-22T11:25:00-04:00

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U.S.-Canada trade talks collapsed last night. Punitive Trump tariffs will now go into effect. Canada will reciprocate with retaliatory tariffs of its own.

The story may not be over. Donald Trump is notorious for issuing threats, then reversing them. Wars are on, off, on again, off again, then on a third time—but only as a “little detour.” This is not an administration that thinks even one move ahead. But without a supersized Trump TACO, the U.S.-Canada impasse likely won’t resolve soon.

The Trump administration has one big idea about Canada: The U.S. is larger, stronger, and richer than Canada, so Canada must sooner or later surrender to Trump’s demands. That one big idea is wrong.

Yes, Trump can hurt Canada more than Canada can hurt Trump. That part of Trump’s thinking is true. But wars are not decided only by the question Who can inflict more pain? Wars are also decided by the question Who can endure more pain? Trump’s failure to accept this truth is why he lost the Iran war—and why he is losing his trade wars.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has much more political permission to accept pain from a U.S.-Canadian trade war than Trump does.

To read current Canadian polling is to see a country united under its political leadership—and energized by its dislike and distrust of Trump’s United States. A majority of Canadians view Trump’s America as a more immediate threat to their security than Russia or China. Two-thirds favor the government taking a hard line in trade talks; fewer than one-quarter regard the United States as trustworthy. Meanwhile, Carney is backed by the Canadian public, polling at about 60 percent approval, a remarkable figure in a multiparty political system.

The Canadian economy has definitely suffered because of Trump’s hostility. Exports were down last year, and growth slowed. But this year, Canada got an unexpected bailout: Trump’s Iran war and inflation have boosted prices for Canadian oil, gas, minerals, and food products. Canadian incomes are rising again. Meanwhile, Canada’s low levels of public debt have kept inflation low. Whereas the U.S. government must pay 5.3 percent to borrow money for 30 years, Canada pays 4.2 percent.

By contrast, Trump is facing an omnishamble. “Trump’s Economic Challenge: $40tn Debt, 6.7% Mortgages and $5 Diesel.” That’s a headline in today’s Financial Times. The paper could have added one more: 33 percent job approval, and falling fast.

Trump’s tariffs are costing the typical American household $1,100 a year in both direct collections and indirectly in higher prices, according to the Yale Budget Lab. Although teasing out Canada-specific costs is tricky, one indicator is the price of aluminum. In 2024, about one-fourth of the aluminum consumed by Americans came from Canada, the U.S.’s single largest source of imported aluminum. Result: Whereas European and Japanese consumers now pay about $3,000 a ton for aluminum, Americans pay almost $5,000, driving up the cost of everything from a can of beer to the construction of a new hospital.

Although Canada’s economy is much smaller than the U.S.’s, Canada’s government has a more rational and intelligent leadership—and can therefore target its retaliation in ways that better serve national ends. U.S. alcohol exports to Canada have collapsed by 80 percent as Canadian provincial liquor stores ban U.S. wine and spirits. Canada’s booze boycott hurts more than one might expect given the comparatively small size of the Canadian market. Alcohol exporters to Canada prepare special labels for their products to meet Canadian legal requirements. More than 1 million bottles of wine intended for Canadian markets now slumber in U.S. warehouses, unsellable anywhere else without costly repackaging.

More than 30 percent of Ohio’s exports go to Canada, and almost 40 percent of Michigan’s. Both states will this year elect a U.S. senator and fill open governor’s seats. Not only is Trump putting at risk his party’s position in purple Michigan, but suddenly the races in beet-red Ohio look in jeopardy too. These states may turn control of the Senate—and Trump’s chances of facing meaningful accountability next year for his law-breaking and corruption.

Trump’s theory of his trade war, like his theory of his Iran war, is that the bigger bully always wins. Size counts for a lot, but not for everything.

As Trump has declared over and over again, his ultimate goal in this trade war is to add Canada as a 51st state. Why? To make the United States look bigger on the map. For that goal, which excites ultra-MAGA crackpots, Trump is hazarding not only America’s most important trading relationships but very possibly every other political equity he holds, including avoiding investigations and accountability by a Democratic House and Senate after January 2027.

Against Canada, Trump is fighting a trade war that very few Americans support, under leadership that most Americans reject, to achieve results that virtually all Americans would dismiss as pointless if not crazy.

Against Trump, Canadians are fighting a trade war that the great majority support, under leadership that commands broad assent, to defend their independence and self-respect. That’s a war that even the weaker side can win, especially if it needs to hold on only a few months longer to survive.