The Atlantic

A Lesson for Guarding the Presidential Line of Succession

2026-04-26T20:30:11-04:00

In the chaotic swirl of events after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, doctors feared that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had suffered a heart attack upon arrival at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. The signs were ominous: Johnson’s face was ashen, and he was clutching his chest. “There was the real possibility that the No. 3 in the line of succession would become president,” the historian Michael Beschloss told me. Johnson was reportedly examined and a heart attack ruled out—but not before then–House Speaker John McCormack was told that he might be the next president. The declaration prompted a severe bout of vertigo in the 71-year-old.

Few moments in history have so starkly exposed the vulnerabilities of the presidential line of succession—or the lack of clarity about how it is protected. Last night provided another illustration of them. If events at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner had gone differently, a gunman who breached security at the Washington Hilton could have reached a ballroom containing an unusually dense cluster of American power. The president and the vice president were seated a few feet apart. Congressional leadership and many Cabinet secretaries were also on hand. In other words, much of the presidential line of succession was in the same spot—and subject to the same vulnerabilities.

Senator Chuck Grassley, 92 and third in line as president pro tempore of the Senate, was home in Iowa—his absence briefly making him one of the most important people in the country. The Correspondents’ Dinner is built for symbolism: the press, the presidency, and Washington’s political elite gathered in a single room, putting their differences aside in celebration of the First Amendment. But the failed attack highlighted the typically unspoken peril of such a gathering, with so many figures in the line of succession crammed into a ballroom packed so tightly with tables, chairs, and people that it was hard to move around—much less duck for cover.

Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent who served on the presidential detail, told me that the system for protecting the president—and those who might replace him in the event of incapacity—is far more fragmented than it appears. Responsibility for protecting senior officials is divided across multiple agencies: the Secret Service, the Capitol Police, and departmental security teams, each operating with different mandates and chains of command. That system functions best when those requiring protection are dispersed. When they converge, it runs the risk of lapses.

“These acute shock moments make it reasonable to reintroduce a conversation,” Wackrow told me. “Should we have all of these political leaders—especially those who are in the line of succession—crammed together in one location?”

[Read: A dark new litmus test for power in Washington ]

A 2003 report by the Continuity of Government Commission warned that in the event of a catastrophic strike on Washington, a large portion of the presidential line of succession could be killed at once. It also noted a deeper constitutional ambiguity: The inclusion of congressional leaders in the line of succession raises both separation-of-powers concerns and the possibility of abrupt partisan shifts in control of the executive branch. The presidential historian Tim Naftali told me that gathering the president, vice president, and speaker in the same space when the United States is at war with Iran—a country previously linked to plots against Trump and other U.S. officials—was ill-advised. “This is not the right time to have all hands on deck,” he said.

That vulnerability is magnified in settings like Saturday’s dinner—which, unlike inaugurations or the State of the Union address, was not designated a National Special Security Event, the Secret Service told me. That designation, granted by the Department of Homeland Security, triggers a full federal-security architecture, Wackrow explained: integrated command structures, airspace restrictions, counter–chemical and biological monitoring, and coordinated intelligence fusion across agencies. Without it, planning is thinner, less centralized, and more dependent on venue-specific security, he said. (DHS and the White House did not immediately respond to my request for comment.)

Wackrow pointed to what he calls “consequence management”—the often overlooked challenge of what happens after prevention fails. A crowded ballroom that can hold more than 2,000 people is, by design, difficult to evacuate quickly. Exits can funnel into choke points. Movement could become dangerous amid panic. Even a contained incident can cascade into chaos simply because the geometry of the space works against rapid response.

The modern system of succession was designed to anticipate worst-case scenarios—but only in fragments. The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 reordered the line of succession to place elected officials—the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate—ahead of Cabinet officers. (The secretary of state and secretary of the Treasury are next to follow.) The Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967, filled another gap, creating a formal process for presidential incapacitation and vice-presidential replacement. But both were reactive fixes, assembled after earlier crises exposed what the system had failed to imagine.

During the Cold War, officials confronted one version of the problem more directly. The concept of a “designated survivor”—a Cabinet member excluded from major events like the State of the Union address—emerged from fears of nuclear war. In the late ’50s, the U.S. government quietly built a massive fallout shelter beneath the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia. Code-named “Project Greek Island,” it was designed to shelter the entire Congress if Washington were wiped out in an attack, complete with dormitories, committee rooms, and temporary House and Senate chambers carved into the mountains.

For decades, it sat in plain sight, beneath the luxury hotel—hidden in a space built for the sole objective of government continuity in the event of catastrophe. The bunker was taken out of service soon after its existence was revealed by The Washington Post in 1992; it’s now a Cold War relic of how seriously Washington once planned for the continuity of constitutional government. What those plans did not fully solve was a more ambiguous modern risk: mass vulnerability, without warning, in civilian settings.

That gap persists, though there have been attempts to close it. The 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles led to Secret Service protection for presidential candidates. In 1975, President Gerald Ford survived two attempts on his life in California. Six years later, the shooting of President Ronald Reagan outside the Washington Hilton—the same hotel that hosted last night’s dinner—led to the elimination of its exposed VIP entrance in favor of a stone-enclosed driveway. “We have learned from history,” Naftali told me.

But that accumulated wisdom is undermined, he suggested, by a basic lapse. Gathering so many leaders in the same place, at the same time—particularly during wartime—“is not a good idea,” he said. Beschloss put it bluntly: Elected officials are reluctant to highlight their own vulnerability. “They are afraid it will make them look afraid or too distant from other Americans,” he said. But, he added, “we can’t allow national tragedies to become more likely”—a tension that becomes sharper as political violence becomes more routine.

After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the 2021 inauguration of President Biden took place behind fortified perimeters, lined with thousands of National Guard troops. Beschloss argued that if ever there were a time to hold an inauguration indoors, that was it. But Biden sought to demonstrate the importance of a peaceful transfer of power, even if it was conducted under conditions that resembled a security operation more than a civic celebration.

[Read: Biden’s inauguration is the most militarized since 1861]

The lesson, continuity experts argue, is not that public events should disappear. It is that the system still struggles to reconcile two competing imperatives: visibility and survivability.

Some officials have begun to say so explicitly. Representative Michael McCaul questioned earlier today whether it makes sense for the president and vice president to appear together at events like the Correspondents’ Dinner, noting that a single explosion could have killed multiple officials in the line of succession. Senator John Fetterman, who attended the dinner, argued on social media that the venue was not designed to safely accommodate so many senior officials, suggesting the need for more secure, purpose-built spaces—like the White House ballroom the president is currently fighting to build. (The Correspondents’ Dinner is organized by the White House Correspondents’ Association, not the White House.)

But in the short term, it’s not clear how much will actually change. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche insisted on ABC News that “the system worked,” emphasizing that law enforcement prevented catastrophe and that democratic leaders must continue to appear in public spaces.

He said on CBS’s Face the Nation: “We will not stop doing things like we did last night in this administration.”

The Most Frightening Shooters Are the Smart Ones

2026-04-26T19:30:00-04:00

The line “I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done” could probably have been written in an email to friends by any number of the attendees at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. But the line was apparently written by a man who showed up with a shotgun and pistol and was ready to kill “most everyone” there to get to Donald Trump and assassinate him and his Cabinet. In a manifesto-like email that he reportedly sent to family minutes before allegedly shooting, Cole Tomas Allen wrote that the assembled journalists and machers “chose to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit.” Allen never came near the president or the gala floor. A Secret Service agent was shot in the vest before Allen was tackled and arrested.

Random acts of violence by unstable individuals are unfortunately a feature of modern life. The most frightening shooters are not these yahoos, but the smart ones—those who carefully plan, train, and choose their settings to inflict maximum damage. Think of Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 69 youngsters at a left-wing summer camp in Norway, or the Islamic State commandos who killed 90 music fans at the Bataclan in Paris in 2015. The email attributed to Allen as well as the scant biographical details known about him suggest that he had the capacity to do much more harm than he did. But something proved defective in his plan or mind, and as a result, no one was killed.

Allen graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 2017 and appears to have made a living as a test-prep tutor and college-admissions consultant. Caltech is a sort of nerd Valhalla, where brilliant and creative youngsters study and engage in prankish mischief. Despite being in California, it is not a Maoist redoubt. The only free radicals are in the chemistry labs. Twenty-six years ago, students treated a visit by then-President Bill Clinton as a challenge, and outwitted the Secret Service by secretly rigging a banner to unfurl at an inopportune moment. But mockery and mischief, not politics, were the point. The banner read IMPEACH NIXON.

Allen’s email suggests a murderous obsession with Trump’s politics. Some people hate his policies, and say so, and can nonetheless dine among the very architects of those policies they deplore. Allen, a former member of Caltech’s Christian fellowship, subscribed to an unusual reading of Jesus’s commandment in the Sermon on the Mount to turn the other cheek. “Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed,” he wrote in his email. “Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.” The crimes he had in mind included “a schoolkid blown up, or a child starved, or a teenage girl abused.”

The excerpts that have been published from this email so far, in The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, do not sound at all like the mad ranting that characterizes many of the encyclicals sent out by attempted assassins before their act. And Allen’s complaints, though too vague to assess individually, are indeed the sorts of things one might reasonably get worked up about. He wrote that he needed to do “something.” Many present at the Hilton last night thought something ought to be done, but only one thought that the reasonable reaction was to massacre the designers of these policies and those dining near them.

There are, of course, signs of disordered thinking, even in this email. Allen seemed to think he could shoot his way into the ballroom, past the Secret Service, with a shotgun. “In order to minimize casualties, I will also be using buckshot rather than slugs (less penetration through walls).” His understanding of ballistics is confused: Even buckshot will generally penetrate half a dozen interior walls. And the belief that he could cross through many hallways and dozens of yards of armed and trained men and women, without being taken out himself, speaks to a John Wick–like delusion that may yet prove clinical in origin. The photos of Allen restrained on the floor of the Hilton show an unusually scrawny man, his shoulder blades visible through the skin. Some people are just skinny. Some are skinny because they are unwell in other ways.

There is one point in his email that I must judge stark-raving sane. He notes that it was a simple matter to get a hotel room on the night of the banquet, and to bring his guns in. “If I was an Iranian agent,” he wrote, “I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce [.50-caliber machine gun] in here and no one would have noticed shit.” He continued with a note of civic concern. “This level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again.”

When I first heard that shots had been fired at the dinner, I assumed that the attack was related to Iran and was repayment in kind for the wave of assassinations by the United States and Israel against Iranian leaders during the ongoing war. The United States in particular has historically been cautious about using this capability, and Iran—although happy to assassinate—has moderated use of this tool against Americans. The country has tried to kill American officials but has hired knuckleheads and incompetents because they are cheap and add a layer of deniability. Now that Iran’s enemies have aggressively targeted Iranian leaders, Iran might decide it will lose nothing by skipping the knuckleheads and sending its own best assassins. Allen is right to note that a competent assassination squad would find the job easier than one might hope. He was, thankfully, wrong to think that he was such a squad all by himself.

We Cannot Harden the World Against Every Attacker

2026-04-26T19:04:42-04:00

Except for what appears—thank God—to be only a minor injury to a Secret Service officer who was shot near a security checkpoint, no one was hurt at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner last night. News reports are reassembling the mosaic of the attacker’s movements; he apparently took a train and transported some weapons with him, checked into the hotel, and then made his run at the event.

These are the basic contours of all that we know, and it will take time for more credible information to emerge. In the meantime, the vacuum of facts has been filled by a certain amount of hysteria and the usual conspiracy theories, as well as understandable demands to make changes so that such a thing can never happen again.

The people who were at the event are understandably shaken. Other Americans need not panic, but unfortunately, here is the list of things we can do, right now, to prevent similar attacks in the future: nothing.

Well, almost nothing. One solution is to stop having public events, or to hold them exclusively in ultra-secure locations, or to lock down the area around such occasions as if they were castles surrounded by a moat, with archers on all of the parapets and the local peasantry told to shelter in place until the nobles are done with their revels.

To live in an open society is to live with a very small, but nonzero, amount of risk. We cannot know if the accused attacker, Cole Tomas Allen, exploited some gap in security, but that seems at this point unlikely. I attended the dinner last year, and unless you’ve been inside the labyrinthine Washington Hilton, it’s hard to grasp just how much space exists between the lobby and the ballroom where the dinner is held. As many observers have noted, the system in place seems to have worked as intended: Allen never got close to the president.

More important, the journalist Garrett Graff writes in a column on Substack, such security arrangements are not meant to stop everything, but one thing: “You always have to have an outer security perimeter,” Graff notes, but the goal of the Secret Service “isn’t to prevent any incident at a high-profile event—it’s to prevent an incident that could harm the president.” For those of us who donʻt have our own Secret Service detail, this hierarchy may seem disturbing, but as my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer point out, this is by design.

The alleged shooter himself seems to have thought that hotel security was lax, but that’s because he knew what he was up to. In a note he reportedly sent to his family, he wrote:

Like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance. I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat. The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.

The arrogance here, however, is the gunman’s. He is shocked that no one was focused on him, reportedly a quiet, unassuming young man. No one could possibly know he had weapons. (Should hotels really be expected to screen bags as airports do?) Allen finds it laughable that his fellow Americans do not constantly scan their surroundings for murderers and terrorists, but reasonable people do not do this, because they assume, rightly, that the other patrons in a hotel are virtually never murderers and terrorists.

After every frightening event, zero-defect thinking tends to overtake reason. Already, some are talking about tightening security on trains, so that they become as protected as airplanes. This is a ludicrous idea, as anyone who relies on regular train transportation will tell you, but it’s as if the discourse actively looks for something to harden, because, after all, we must do something. This is the same thinking that had Americans kicking off their shoes and handing over their belts in airports for decades, when in reality (one incompetent, would-be shoe-bomber 26 years ago notwithstanding) the most important change in aviation security was the cheap and simple fortification of cockpit doors—the one measure that might have prevented 9/11.

Within hours of the gunman’s arrest, Donald Trump and his supporters went beyond trains and planes and used the thwarted attack to push for the construction of the gigantic ballroom that Trump wants to build on the ruins of the White House’s former East Wing. But every event to which the president is invited cannot be held on government property, even if there were an Impregnable Trump Ballroom-Fortress. Or, it could, but such a change would represent a dramatic retreat from public life for the American president—the kind of move that typically takes place in autocracies such as China and Russia, where citizens see their leaders only in tightly controlled circumstances or as their limousines go speeding by.

And in any case, will Trump also stop having rallies and open-air meetings, which attract much larger crowds than a dinner at a hotel? This is the same president who went back to the exact spot in Pennsylvania where another shooter came within millimeters of killing him, just to make a point—and he wasn’t wrong to do so, if the point was to underscore that Americans should not give in to fear. Unless he’s willing to spend his presidency in a bubble (and he should not be), he should not rush to hide in a special ballroom.

Reacting to every event as if it is a failure of security moves America that much closer to a state of permanent lockdown, in which citizens must constantly prove that they are not maniacs or terrorists, and in which the president dare not leave a new Green Zone in the middle of the District of Columbia.

None of this is to deny the necessity of measures to protect the president and his family, even if they involve dramatic actions such as shutting down airspace or canceling major events in light of a credible threat to his safety. Every American should wish for the safety of the officials who represent us. But at some point, Americans must decide whether we live in an open democracy or a garrison state. Our presidents and other top officials should not become prisoners in their own country.

Americans don’t like to accept the reality that living in an open society carries risks that cannot be remedied. I say this as someone who, over the years, has received a fair number of death threats and twice has been the victim of violent crime, including an incident that left me with permanent physical damage. But perhaps we should heed the words of a wise literary character, Robert B. Parker’s Boston private eye Spenser. When he is asked in Looking for Rachel Wallace, a 1980 novel, to protect the life of an outspoken gay, feminist author—a danger that seemed outrageous at the time but is less shocking now—Spenser flatly refuses to give an unreasonable guarantee. “I can make her harder to hurt,” he tells the author’s agent. “I can up the cost to the hurter. But if she wishes to live anything like a normal life, I can’t make her completely safe.”

Americans, if we give in to our fears, can ramp up the intrusions on our lives and undermine the culture of our democracy in a vain attempt to close every last loophole and gap. Or we can accept important limitations on our freedom in the name of public safety while still living our lives, understanding that, say, texting while driving is more likely to kill us than an angry loner or a foreign terrorist is.

The accused shooter at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner thought he was among idiots who didn’t see him coming, when in fact he was among his fellow citizens. Americans must not adopt that kind of cynicism, which will lead only to ill-advised attempts to turn all of our public spaces into one gigantic airport-security line. We should reject anyone who calls for violence against the perceived “other,” whether in public life or in our own neighborhoods, but we can express that demand while still refusing to remake the buildings that represent American democratic institutions into armed safe rooms.

The reality of life in an open society is that there is very little we can do to stop any one person among us who is determined to kill others. We were fortunate last night that the attack in Washington was foiled. But new measures to create some chimerical absolute safety will not make us more secure, and instead will erode a democracy that is already slowly poisoning itself to death with paranoia.

A Dark New Litmus Test for Power in Washington

2026-04-26T16:53:00-04:00

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On one level, the system worked. The perimeter held. A would-be assassin was tackled in the hallway outside the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner. The one bullet that found a human target—a U.S. Secret Service agent—was halted, in part, by the officer’s phone and bulletproof vest, according to a law-enforcement summary report that we reviewed. A counterassault team promptly swarmed the stage with assault rifles and night-vision equipment in case the lights were cut. The government’s top leaders—president, vice president, Cabinet officials, speaker of the House—were ushered to secure locations in a matter of minutes. No one died in the attack.

But the collective sigh of relief and rounds of “I am fine” text messages last night belied a heaviness that administration officials and other dinner attendees were still processing this morning, even as Sunday brunches proceeded apace, albeit with more security and a newly somber sheen. This attack was different from the two prior assassination attempts on Donald Trump because the president was not the only apparent target. The alleged attacker wrote in a manifesto obtained by the New York Post that he was after “administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.”

As the evening’s adrenaline faded this morning, this reality began setting in among Trump advisers, someone close to the White House told us. Had things gone differently, the nation’s top officials would have been in real danger. Personal security details are designed to protect the principals at all expense. If a presidential motorcade is attacked, there are contingency plans to have it split, leaving behind the junior staff and traveling press. The priority is clear: Get the president to safety. When the shots rang out last night at the Washington Hilton, multiple teams flooded into the rooms to find their protectees and get them out, climbing over chairs—in some cases with guns drawn or hand on holster—and sometimes leaving spouses, colleagues, and others to fend for themselves.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was body-blocked by three agents as he walked from the ballroom. His wife, Cheryl Hines, was left to follow alone a few feet behind, climbing over barriers in a ball gown. Speaker Mike Johnson, who was away from his table when the shooting started, had to send armed officers to retrieve his wife, according to a journalist sitting near him. For the other Trump-administration officials and advisers who lack personal security details, no special consideration was given. They were left behind.

“I noted a new litmus for status among the gov’t elite—whether you were whisked away by secret service, or left to fend,” the former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein wrote on social media today after attending the event.

This situation is not novel. These sorts of attempted attacks on high-profile leaders happen with some frequency. Trump was targeted twice during the 2024 campaign, narrowly escaping death when he was shot at during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Months later, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated in broad daylight on a Manhattan street, a crime that was celebrated in some corners of the internet. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home was attacked earlier this month, allegedly by a man who warned of humanity’s “impending extinction” from AI. The conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was close to Trump and his aides, was gunned down last year at a political event. His widow, Erika Kirk, was at this weekend’s dinner, visibly distraught as she was escorted out in her sequined cream dress. “I just want to go home,” she sobbed.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told us in a statement that the president was “thankful for the brave men and women in law enforcement who took swift action to quickly neutralize the perpetrator” and ensure the safety of everyone in attendance.

Some senior White House officials have been given extra protections. As we first reported in October, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller moved to a military base after protesters began appearing outside his Northern Virginia home. Other Cabinet secretaries—including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—had already moved to bases, and at least one other senior administration official followed them because of a foreign threat.

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

The question now is what, if anything, needs to change. Already some are criticizing the decision to have so many senior levels of government in a single hall. Mike Pence would not even ride the White House elevator to the residence with Trump in the first term, wary of his responsibility as vice president if something went wrong. But at last night’s dinner, the president was joined by the next two people in the line of succession, J. D. Vance and Johnson. If catastrophe had struck, control of the U.S. nuclear codes would have passed to Senator Chuck Grassley, the 92-year-old president pro tempore.

“Had an explosive device gone off, you would have knocked out the president, vice president, speaker—the three in line of succession,” Representative Michael McCaul, the chair emeritus of the House Foreign Affairs committee, told CNN today. “I think the Secret Service needs to reconsider having both the president and vice president together.”

Even last night, before any shots rang out, some light gallows humor settled over the cavernous ballroom. Some administration officials were surprised to see Vance on the dais alongside Trump—not to mention much of the Cabinet scattered throughout the more than 100 tables—and, referring to the line of succession, quipped that they hoped the night wouldn’t conclude with a President Grassley.

MAGA’s Strange Quiet After the Shooting

2026-04-26T16:28:06-04:00

When an assassin murdered Charlie Kirk in September 2025, the MAGA movement seized the moment to demand a campaign of repression. Vice President Vance called for an ambitious program to “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.” He named the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and The Nation magazine as examples of candidates for the retaliation he had in mind. The people who faced consequences after the killing almost universally did so for things they had written or said, not for acts of violence. In November, Reuters counted some 600 cases of people who were fired, suspended, or otherwise disciplined for their speech about Kirk’s life and death.

Now another gunman has attacked political targets. At the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, a man discharged a firearm in the vicinity of hundreds of people from the worlds of politics, media, and business—among them, the president and vice president of the United States. Although much about the event remains unclear, the available evidence suggests that the gunman was motivated by an anti-Trump agenda. Yet this time, MAGA’s immediate response to political violence has been much less aggressive. At his press conference after yesterday’s attempted shooting, President Trump cited the attack as proof of the need for his wished-for White House ballroom. Social-media accounts that take their cues from the White House promptly echoed the message.

Trump cares a lot about his ballroom. People who seek his favor have learned to care too. But still, attempted murder as an after-the-fact justification for a home renovation? It seems not only radically beside the point but also quite a humiliating climbdown from last fall’s project to use the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk to consolidate MAGA’s political domination.

The unusual caution may indicate a White House intuition that this particular gunman is not a promising candidate to cast as an agent of a broad conspiracy. Trump has characterized the shooter as a “lone-wolf whack job.” Early reporting includes indications that the alleged gunman had poorly considered his heinous plans, not least that he carried a shotgun—not exactly a sniper’s weapon. A degree of deference to reality in itself represents something new for the Trump White House.

As bad news accumulates for the president—the backfiring of Trump’s attempted congressional gerrymanders, the worsening of the U.S. economy, plunging poll numbers, a gathering global oil crisis—the energy and self-confidence seem to be seeping out of this administration. Trump had to relent on a scheme to prosecute Fed Chair Jerome Powell for disobeying White House commands to cut interest rates. He had to let go of Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi. Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard may soon follow. So far Trump appears to be bypassing a chance to use an incident of political violence to consolidate personal power.

It all feels like the ending of a chapter, a milestone of an authoritarian project’s faltering under the weight of its arrogance and accumulated mistakes.

Two Poems by Luis Muñoz

2026-04-26T12:00:00-04:00

Translated by Garth Greenwell and Idra Novey

El Amor

Es que pudiera darse
sin asomo ninguno
ni preparaciones.

Solo rumbo,
horizonte
tamaño a partir
del corte exacto
de la ventana.

Love

Maybe it happens
without any hint
or preparation.

Just a heading,
a horizon
the size at first
of the precise cut
of the window.

Las Cuestiones Temporales en el Aire

Nos encontramos
con el grafiti plata
en un portón del parque:
“¿Podemos cambiar?”

A la primera respuesta,
“no sé”, en un casillero,
han añadido otra
en rojo cera rápida,
que sobresale del contiguo:
“Sí-No-Sí”.

The Moment’s Questions in the Air

We stumble upon
the silver graffiti
on a gatehouse in the park:
“Can we change?”

In an answer box
to the first response, “IDK,”
somebody’s added another
in quick red crayon
that spills over, into the box beside:
“Yes-No-Yes.”

Idra Novey is the author, most recently, of Soon and Wholly, a book of poems, and the novel Take What You Need.

Garth Greenwell is the author, most recently, of Small Rain.

Thou Shalt Not Post the Ten Commandments in Classrooms

2026-04-26T10:02:00-04:00

When you were in elementary school, did your mind occasionally rise above the smell of pencil shavings and the sound of squeaking desk chairs to contemplate whether you ought to commit murder? Did you ponder what it would mean to covet your neighbor’s wife? Ordinarily those aren’t questions addressed in grade-school classrooms, but according to legislators in Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas, they ought to be.

In those districts, state Republicans are rallying behind laws that would mandate posting the Ten Commandments in public-school classrooms and common areas, such as cafeterias and libraries. This fad began in 2024, when Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed such a bill, reviving a debate long silenced by the Supreme Court’s 1980 decision in Stone v. Graham to strike down a similar Kentucky law. Other states followed suit: Arkansas and Texas last year, and Alabama just this month. Although these laws pose a threat to the First Amendment rights of students and teachers, the trend is spreading, so far unchecked by courts. Opponents of Texas’s law suffered a defeat last week when an appellate court decided in the state’s favor. The ACLU and other organizations representing the plaintiffs—a multifaith group of Texas families—are expected to appeal this decision to the Supreme Court.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: The evidence that God exists]

As is often the case when religion is deployed politically, these efforts seem less about earnest moral education and more about using state power to enforce a certain brand of political piety. The Republican supporters of these laws may believe that they are delivering a coup for their base of conservative Christians, but they are undermining the sacredness of the Ten Commandments by reducing these foundational biblical laws to yet more classroom wall text, alongside class schedules, corny motivational posters, and homework reminders.

Past Republican efforts to make space for Christianity in public schools have centered on school prayer. The Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1962 case Engel v. Vitale established a compromise: Schools can allow time for prayers, but school officials cannot lead them. By requiring schools to endorse biblical laws, this latest round of Ten Commandments statutes directly challenges the reasoning behind that compromise, as do other measures floated of late to allow public schools to employ religious chaplains instead of guidance counselors or to use the Bible as a core textbook. Conservative legislatures seem buoyed by the prospect of defending these measures before a friendly Supreme Court.

These legislative efforts should be seen in light of Republican complaints that public schools have been hijacked by the “woke” left. Conservatives lament that grade-school libraries offer books about LGBTQ characters and that teachers deliver lessons about America’s history of race-based oppression. Republicans often characterize this perceived left-wing incursion into public schools as a violation of parental rights, given that children may respond by developing views that depart from those held by their families. Beneath these concerns lurks a deeper anxiety: that whatever political faction controls public schools will be able to control the next generation of voters.

Maybe they are right to worry. But if Republicans hope that displaying the Ten Commandments will instill Christian values in impressionable youth, or that subjecting students to scriptural dictates will affect a passive Christian evangelization, they are bound to be disappointed. Children with questions about right and wrong rarely turn to state-mandated declarations presented without comment. Answers and ideals about how to live meaningfully and ethically are handed down through relationships, conversations, and by example, not through posters about what one shalt and shalt not do.

[Peter Wehner: The evangelicals who see Trump’s viciousness as a virtue]

The Ten Commandments are also arguably not the most significant laws in the Christian tradition, nor the best positioned to elicit distinctly Christian behavior. According to scripture, when Jesus’s disciples asked him what the greatest commandment of all was, he replied that every other commandment hangs on two dictates: to love God and to love one’s neighbor. For a glimpse into Jesus’s heart and priorities, he offered the Beatitudes, a series of blessings for the poor, the weak, the oppressed, and the persecuted, among others.

Saint Augustine warned of the libido dominandi, or the dark will to power nestled deep in the human heart. The manipulation of Christian language and symbols by potentially cynical politicians to mask those desires borders on sacrilege. Some advocates for these laws surely believe in the transformative power of the Ten Commandments, in classrooms and elsewhere. But for anyone hoping to understand what it means to be good in an often harsh world, there is no substitute for love.

How Netanyahu Hurt America’s Jews

2026-04-26T07:00:00-04:00

The relationship between the United States and Israel is in crisis. Six in 10 Americans have a negative view of Israel, and a majority of those under 50 in both major parties view Israel as well as its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, negatively. After the brutal Gaza war, a large percentage of liberal-leaning Generation Z considers Israel a pariah state. Democratic candidates are scrambling to distance themselves from Israel and its controversial leader; earlier this month, 40 of the 47 Democratic senators voted against a military aid package for the country. And hostility toward Israel is spilling over into hostility toward Jews. Liberal influencers, activists, podcasters, and even politicians are invoking age-old anti-Semitic tropes with frightening regularity.

Yet what is for American Jews the worst of times is, from Netanyahu’s perspective, the best of times. His more than a decade of meddling in American politics on behalf of Republican candidates and key GOP constituencies has, over the past few weeks, paid remarkable dividends. In the skies over Iran, Israeli and American pilots flew side by side. For a prime minister who has long viewed Iran as an existential threat, this was a historic achievement.

In putting all his chips on President Trump, though, Netanyahu has exacerbated the deep and growing divide between Israel and the Democratic Party.

This growing distance could create a problem for Israel if a Democrat wins the White House in 2028, but it creates a far more immediate problem for American Jews.

[Read: Netanyahu’s very useful war]

Diaspora Jews have, for much of the past century, found a home within both the Democratic Party and also progressive social, cultural, and institutional spaces. But since October 7, 2023, that sense of belonging has been shattered. American Jews are under attack from liberal and progressive activists who are stridently anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, and in some cases anti-Semitic.

In pursuing Israel’s interests at the expense of American Jews, Netanyahu has put the world’s largest community of diaspora Jews in a terrible bind, caught between support for Israel and its liberal allies.

And, it seems, he couldn’t care less.

American Jews and Israeli leaders have long portrayed their relationship in warm, even intimate terms. “Jews in Israel and Jews in the Diaspora share a common bond and destiny; they are responsible for one another. These bonds must never weaken, but always strengthen,” Shimon Peres, Israel’s then-president, said in a 2011 message to the Jewish communities in the diaspora.

But reality has not always aligned with these platitudes about mutual respect.

Although American Jews were a crucial source of funds for the Zionist project, both before and after Israel’s creation, the country’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, believed—and said publicly—that the American Jewish community would not have endured but for Israel. “If this great historic miracle had not taken place in our time and the State of Israel had not risen,” he said in 1958, “the great majority of the Jews of the United States would have been left without any bond to Judaism.” Like many Israelis at the time, Ben-Gurion believed that there was no future in the diaspora for American Jews and that they’d be better off moving to Israel, though he later relented to demands from Jacob Blaustein, president of the American Jewish Committee, not to interfere so directly in American Jewish life.

For much of Israel’s early history, American Jewish leaders were more involved in supporting Israel or weighing in on questions related to Jewish identity than they were in security-related issues. That changed most dramatically in the 1990s with the signing of the Oslo Accords, in 1993. Hawkish American Jews opposed the deal and lobbied Congress to place conditions on aid to the newly created Palestinian Authority. Their efforts were supported by Netanyahu, in what was at the time an unprecedented effort to politicize the American Jewish community.

The moves so angered Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that he said in 1995 that matters “of war and peace” would be “decided by the Israelis alone,” and suggested that American Jews should restrict themselves to focusing on issues such as emigration to Israel and helping the country absorb new immigrants.

These hiccups notwithstanding, Israel’s leaders have generally viewed American Jews in instrumental terms—a reservoir of steadfast political support to ensure that Israel’s relationship with its most important ally would not falter, but not much more.

But under Netanyahu, Israel’s relationship with American Jews has been far more fraught and tenuous. Although he grew up outside of Philadelphia, speaks fluent English without the heavy accent of many Israelis, and has long boasted of his connections to the United States, Netanyahu has shown little love for the American Jewish community.

Perhaps this should not come as a huge surprise. Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, was both a Revisionist Zionist and a revisionist academic. His most famous work, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain, made the controversial argument that Spanish Jews who had converted to Christianity (many, he said, willingly) were still discriminated against on racial, not religious, grounds. This discrimination, he argued, laid the groundwork for later, more racially focused anti-Semitism, culminating in the Holocaust. In the elder Netanyahu’s telling, there was no future for Jews in diaspora communities, where anti-Semitic hatred would eventually overwhelm any Jewish efforts to integrate and assimilate.

Indeed, Netanyahu’s second tenure as prime minister, beginning in 2009 to the present and pausing only for an 18-month interregnum in 2021–22, has been marked by a concerted effort to strengthen Israel’s ties to America’s pro-Zionist evangelical-Christian community, often at the expense of American Jews. His biographer, Anshel Pfeffer, told me that Netanyahu believes that “evangelicals are more loyal” and less likely to criticize Israel’s policies than liberal American Jews. He has told aides in private that with the support of the evangelical community, “we don’t need AIPAC,” the pro-Israel lobbying organization that has long been a steadfast supporter of Israel. For Bibi, AIPAC’s most important role is “to balance J Street,” the liberal pro-Israel lobbying group, Pfeffer said.

Netanyahu’s engagement with the Christian right has been matched by similar outreach to Republican politicians, whom he viewed as more likely to take a hard line on Iran. His key lieutenant in these efforts has been Ron Dermer, a former Republican political operative. Before moving to Israel, Dermer worked for the GOP strategist Frank Luntz, who helped formulate Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America.

Netanyahu has also cultivated ties with donors closely associated with the Republican Party, including Sheldon Adelson, who gave hundreds of millions of dollars to the GOP and offered his largesse to the Israeli right as well.

Bibi’s right-wing advocacy did more than diversify Israel’s political support in the United States; it also fundamentally shifted the relationship between Israel and its superpower ally. For most of the country’s history, Israel’s leaders strove to ensure that no matter who controlled Congress or the White House, the U.S. would remain a staunch and dependable ally. Indeed, bipartisan American support for Israel was arguably the country’s most crucial strategic asset.

But Netanyahu has repeatedly imperiled that bipartisan consensus.

In 2012, convinced that Republicans would be tougher on Iran than Barack Obama had been, Netanyahu tacitly endorsed Mitt Romney’s bid for the White House.

In 2015 came Netanyahu’s most audacious and destabilizing move. He accepted an invitation from the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, to deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress, inveighing against the Iran nuclear deal, which President Obama was negotiating at the time. Never before had an Israeli prime minister so clearly waded into American politics, putting his thumb on the scale on behalf of one of the two parties.

As Bernard Avishai wrote at the time for The New Yorker, “Netanyahu is injecting partisanship into what should be a bipartisan issue in both Israel and the United States, and is doing harm to Israel by showing the American Presidency disrespect.” That view was widely shared across the political spectrum.

Beyond Netanyahu’s overt interference in American politics, he’s also impeded repeated U.S. diplomatic efforts to resolve the Israel-Palestine question. Although Israeli recalcitrance on moving toward a viable two-state solution has often been matched or exceeded by the Palestinian Authority, there is no question that Netanyahu’s continued support for expanding settlements in the West Bank and his lack of serious engagement in peace talks have further alienated Democrats. In the past, even when Israeli leaders disagreed with the United States, they would try to avoid open provocations. Bibi, it seems, goes out of his way to frustrate the U.S. Not surprisingly, every Democratic president who has dealt with Netanyahu directly—Clinton, Obama, Biden—appears to loathe him.

Yet, and it’s hard to imagine this lesson was lost on Netanyahu, he and Israel paid little immediate price for his provocations. When a Democrat returned to the White House in 2021, Netanyahu faced few recriminations over his earlier support for Republicans. And since October 7, the U.S. has continued to provide significant political and military backing.

Despite growing domestic blowback against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and his empowerment of extreme, right-wing Israeli politicians such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich and their violent settler allies, Netanyahu continued to push for American support, lobbying the new Trump administration to join Israel in its plans to attack Iran. In June, the U.S. belatedly joined Israel after the Israel Defense Forces struck Iran’s nuclear facilities, and then in late February, it went to war alongside Israeli forces.

Even as both left- and right-wing commentators trotted out the old anti-Semitic trope that Israel was pulling the strings behind the scenes and had dragged the U.S. into war, Netanyahu continued to push his advantage. If he was worried about driving a wedge between Israel and the Democrats, or concerned about blowback against American Jews, he certainly didn’t show it.

He seems similarly unfazed over the growing frustration among Trump and his top aides that Netanyahu’s promises of sweeping change in Iran have failed to materialize. Contrary to Netanyahu’s confident predictions, the joint U.S. and Israeli military onslaught has not led to regime change in Iran. Tehran continues to possess its highly enriched uranium and thousands of missiles that can reach cities in Israel and throughout the Gulf. Arguably, with its newfound control of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran might be in a stronger strategic position than before the war began. According to Pfeffer, Netanyahu “doesn’t realize that his relationship with Trump is tenuous” or that the mercurial president is apt to turn on him, as he has on every other political leader who disappoints him. But Netanyahu fancies himself a modern-day Churchill and sees Iran as an existential threat, Pfeffer said. And he concluded that the only way to be “less like Chamberlain” and more like Churchill was to throw his lot in with Trump.

As is usually the case with Netanyahu, who is legendary for his short-term approach to politics, the long-term damage to the American Jewish community and to Israel’s standing in the United States is a problem for another day. With an Israeli election looming later this year—and as his seemingly endless trial for public corruption continues—Netanyahu appears more focused on his immediate political problems.

For American Jews, however, the problem is in the here and now.

Since October 7, the worst act of violence committed against Jews since the Holocaust, anti-Semitic violence has increased exponentially across not just America but most of Western Europe. According to a recent survey by the American Jewish Committee, more than 90 percent of American Jews report that they feel less safe today. Synagogues, Jewish cultural institutions, even Jewish-owned restaurants and bakeries across the diaspora have borne the brunt of anger over the war in Gaza, particularly from leftist and progressive activists.

For more than a century, American Jews have deeply embedded themselves in liberal spaces, including cultural and artistic communities and academic and scientific institutions. They have plunged into progressive causes, helping to build organizations including the ACLU and the NAACP, and remain deeply involved in the nonprofit sector. That involvement has not been without self-interest—many American Jews believe that a tolerant, inclusive society is likelier to provide them with a home in which to thrive—but that itself speaks to the entwinement of the diaspora-Jewish experience with liberal, democratic ideals.

Now they find themselves cast as villains within the cultural and intellectual communities they helped build. Indeed, according to one recent poll, nearly a third of American Jews who work in the secular nonprofit sector are considering leaving because of persistent anti-Semitism.

Within the Democratic Party, the situation is particularly stark. Jews are among the Democratic Party’s most consistent supporters, and among the most liberal minority groups in America. The first Jewish vice-presidential candidate and the first Jew to win a presidential primary were Democrats. Of the 35 members of Congress who are Jewish, 31 caucus with the Democrats.

[Read: America’s and Israel’s goals are already colliding]

Now political commentators seriously wonder whether a Jewish Democrat can be a viable presidential candidate in post–Gaza war America. Supporting Israel or receiving support from AIPAC is now widely seen within the party as a black mark. Many American Jews—including some of those who oppose Netanyahu’s policies—find themselves questioning whether they have a future in a party growing hostile not just to Israel, but to Jews.

Netanyahu is not solely or even mostly to blame for this calamitous turn of events. Anti-Semitism is the world’s oldest and most enduring hatred. Today, those who conflate diaspora Jews with Israel and target them with violence bear ultimate responsibility for their actions. But one can bemoan the frightening rise in anti-Semitism while also noting that Netanyahu—and his actions—have undoubtedly provided anti-Semites with plenty of ammunition.

A prime minister who saw American Jews as more than an instrument for furthering Israel’s security but as “partners in building the Jewish future,” as he told American Jews more than a decade ago, would take his responsibilities to the American Jewish community more seriously. He would take into account how Israel’s actions boomerang against diaspora Jews and empower anti-Semites. He would seek to depoliticize the U.S.-Israel relationship and ensure that American Jews are not forced to choose between their Jewish identity and the progressive and political spaces they’ve long called home.

But Netanyahu hasn’t—and he won’t. Bibi’s focus is, as always, on himself and his near-term political needs. The plight of American Jews is simply not his concern.

A Shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

2026-04-25T21:43:14-04:00

Updated at 1:29 a.m. ET on Sunday, April 26, 2026

We were under the table before we knew what was happening. One moment, a military band was parading out of the Washington Hilton’s cavernous ballroom; hundreds of government officials, diplomats, and journalists, including more than a dozen of us from The Atlantic, dressed in our best or borrowed black tie, had turned to our spring-pea-and-burrata salads.

The next moment, armed agents—maybe Secret Service, maybe police, maybe hotel guards; it was hard to tell from where we were huddled under a tablecloth—were pushing their way through mounds of people, climbing over chairs, rushing to the stage, where President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump had shortly before been seated.

Trays of plates and tableware fell to the floor with a crash. “Get down! Get down! Get under the table! ¡Abajo! ¡Abajo!” we heard security and waitstaff shout. There was at least one popping sound from the north end of the ballroom. People by the doors started to duck. Then plainclothes security rushed in.

One attendee sitting in the upper level of the ballroom right by the doors said that he heard five or six hollow shots close by, and—before diving under the table—saw a Secret Service agent with his gun drawn backing down toward the ballroom. Andrew Kolvet, a Turning Point USA spokesperson who was seated at a table near the dais, said he heard a “pop pop.”

Trump sat onstage for several seconds after the shots, watching people hit the floor before he was swarmed by his heavily armed security. President Ronald Reagan was shot and injured outside the same hotel in 1981. From then on, Washingtonians have known the sprawling building as the “Hinckley Hilton,” after the shooter, John Hinckley Jr.

Secret Service rushed the president and Vice President Vance, seated several spots down the dais from Trump, out of the massive room. Cabinet members, lawmakers, and senior government officials were dotted throughout the crowd of more than 2,000 people. Those who attended the dinner, in addition to Trump and Vance, included House Speaker Mike Johnson, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. (That made five out of the first six officials who would follow Trump in the line of succession; No. 3, Senator Chuck Grassley, doesn’t appear to have attended.)

Under the tables, we were piled on top of one another, squished together between table legs and high heels. Colleagues texted loved ones and tried to understand what was happening around them. Two men in suits dragged a woman in a green sequined gown toward the door, each pulling an arm. As guests crouched down for safety, security agents hustled senior officials out of the ballroom, at least a couple of whom appeared to have been lightly injured amid the frenzy.

Attendees had passed through security gates before entering the ballroom. But that screening site was deep within the hotel and was relatively cursory in its execution. Overall, the security seemed lighter than at an airport. The priority appeared to be moving guests quickly through the process and on to the dinner.

When we emerged from under our tables, we and other guests asked one another what had happened. Journalists, lawmakers, and various officials all looked dazed; many panned the room with their cellphone cameras. At 8:55 p.m., about 15 minutes after the initial panic, hotel staff appeared and ordered all attendees to depart, waving their hands and shouting, “Let’s go! Go!”

As the press was escorted out, Kash Patel was in a basement hallway, on his phone and surrounded by a small security detail. Erika Kirk was standing near him, visibly emotional. Soon after, the Secret Service said that a shooting had occurred near a security-screening station, in a lower lobby outside the ballroom. (Footage released later showed the suspect, who police said was a guest at the hotel, sprinting through a detector as agents scrambled to apprehend him.) The suspect was in custody, the agency said in a statement. Trump, in a Truth Social post, said that he, the first lady, and Cabinet members were “in perfect condition” and would reschedule the dinner within 30 days.

Outside, in the chilly April evening, helicopters circled; ambulances with their lights flashing idled nearby. Reporters scrambled to reach the White House for a hastily scheduled presidential press conference. Some took scooters. Others hailed Ubers. Men in tuxedos and women in ballgowns arrived gasping, passed through security, and raced to where Trump stood behind a podium surrounded by the most senior members of his administration. Like him, they were in black tie. The first lady made a rare press-briefing-room appearance.

Trump had initially mistaken the sounds in the ballroom for a dropped serving tray, he recounted. And after he was escorted out, he said that he “fought like hell” to continue with the program. But his security personnel convinced him that it wasn’t safe, and his staff told him that his jokes might not land in the aftermath of the shooting.

Trump lavished praise on the Secret Service, saying he had spoken with one agent who was shot but survived because of a bulletproof vest. More unusual, the president also commended the roomful of reporters who covered the event. (He had been attending his first White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as president, having skipped previous years.) His plan, he said, had been to be rough with the press tonight, but he said he might not be able to be so rough at the do-over.

Trump described the Hilton as “not a particularly secure building,” then pivoted to make the case that the White House ballroom that he wants to build would be safer. When asked if he believed he was the target, Trump responded, “I guess,” but said that he didn’t know if the suspect, whom he called a “sick person,” was politically motivated. He then conjectured that would-be assassins seek out high achievers. “I must tell you, the most impactful people,” he said, “are the ones they go after,” and added: “I hate to say I’m honored by that, but I’ve done a lot.” Having experienced two previous assassination attempts, he said that he considers being president the most dangerous profession, asserting that the death rate for presidents far exceeds that of bull riders or race-car drivers.

The area around the Hilton, in the meantime, remained sealed off by a wide police cordon, snarling traffic for blocks in downtown Washington as hundreds of journalists filled nearby bars and sidewalks, phones in hand, to read a breaking-news story that had just happened to them.

Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Ashley Parker, and Vivian Salama contributed reporting.

How Trump Voters Are Reacting to the Economy

2026-04-25T11:07:09-04:00

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

President Trump’s approval rating on his handling of the economy seems to be dropping, according to a recent poll from The New York Times. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to examine how voters’ perception of the president may be shifting, and more.

Amid rising costs, some Trump voters have begun cutting back on spending, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said last night, referencing the voters she has spoken with while reporting in Arizona. “It is the sacrifices that they are having to make within their homes and within their own households to be able to afford this environment,” she added. To these voters, “psychologically, they feel like they are in a really bad spot.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Annie Linskey, a White House reporter at The Wall Street Journal; Seung Min Kim, a White House reporter at the Associated Press; Tyler Pager, a White House correspondent at The New York Times; and Sanchez.

Watch the full episode here.

The U.K. Smoking Ban Is Illiberal

2026-04-25T08:00:00-04:00

Cigarettes have always been noxious to me: As a kid, I stole my grandpa’s Marlboros and hid them deep in a trash bin. In college, Chesterfields made the kisses of a woman I loved taste carcinogenic. When I lived in Spain, smoky air in my favorite bar made my lungs burn. And no law has spared me more irritation than California’s trailblazing 1990s bans on indoor smoking. Yet I vehemently insist on the right of my fellow humans to smoke.

Distaste for cigarettes is no reason to cede bedrock liberties to the state. The sweeping ban on smoking that the U.K. Parliament passed earlier this week, which will permanently prohibit the sale of tobacco products to anyone born in 2009 or thereafter, flagrantly violates the natural human right to bodily autonomy. And its illiberal logic portends more paternalism to come.

Proponents of the bill, which is expected to become law once it gets approved by King Charles III, seem to have good intentions: By gradually increasing the age limit for smoking as this group gets older, they hope to create a rising generation that never starts smoking, and suffers fewer premature deaths. “Children in the U.K. will be part of the first smoke-free generation, protected from a lifetime of addiction and harm,” Health Secretary Wes Streeting stated. Of course, although the law may reduce smoking, it won’t actually yield a smoke-free generation any more than Prohibition yielded a gin-free generation. Black markets for cigarettes will expand. Many people will buy them, even if they’re unregulated and potentially more dangerous than legal cigarettes (and end up enriching criminals).

The law’s design raises equal-protection concerns too. At first, it will affect only people ages 17 and younger. But as people born in 2009 become adults, the law will effectively increase the legal smoking age: They’ll always be just too young to buy cigarettes. This is age discrimination. Twenty years out, if a 47-year-old MI6 agent wants to smoke while playing baccarat or kicking his Vesper-martini addiction, selling him tobacco will be illegal, though selling it to his 48-year-old friends will be legal. Pity the shop clerks who’ll be burdened with carding the old.

Even if all of these objections were somehow resolved, the law’s most pernicious flaw would remain: It will violate the liberal principle that although the state may initiate force to stop an adult from harming others, it should not do so to stop an adult from harming themselves. Limits on state power protect all citizens from the dangers of authoritarians and despots. The idea that adults have autonomy over their body, and a natural right to pursue happiness in ways that don’t harm others, is an indispensable check on state authority that conserves something core to a good life: using free will to choose our own path.

There is inherent dignity in making choices and living with the consequences, rather than being treated as the inferior of arrogant politicians who purport to know how a person ought to live. Agency and liberty mean nothing absent the ability to make decisions that others judge unwise. Even the decision to try something that may be addictive should belong to the individual—and often does. Consider sex, caffeine, video games, shopping, gambling, and pornography.

Nearly all of us value something that public-health authorities declare is bad for our health. We drink soda, or eat french fries, or tan our skin, or cook on gas stoves, or spend years at high-stress jobs, or sit more than is good for our cardiovascular health, or stay up late bingeing TV. Think of your favorite guilty pleasure. Now imagine politicians pushing to ban it. How would you contest their right to take it from you absent the premise that the state shouldn’t overrule an adult about their own interests?

As I see it, the conviviality that cocktails, wine, and beer add to meals and social life is worth the health risks, whereas the costs of smoking cigarettes far outweigh the benefits. But my personal preference for legal alcohol is no safer than the preferences of British smokers without a general ethos of pluralistic tolerance. And even guaranteed that the busybodies of the Anti-Saloon League will never again impose their judgments, I’d still respect the autonomy of people who wish to smoke, because there is no other way to respect their personhood.

Take the British painter David Hockney, who wrote several years ago, at 83, that he has smoked since age 16. Many times when he stops painting to check his work, he lights a cigarette. The people who believe he has made bad choices his whole life have wrongheaded priorities and values, Hockney, who is a public opponent of smoking bans, has argued. “Their obsession with health is unhealthy,” he wrote. “Longevity shouldn’t be an aim in life; that to me seems to be life-denying.” The relationship between length and quality of life is so deeply personal a matter that reasonable people will always disagree about it. But substituting my judgment for Hockney’s would imply that he’s better off being ruled as my subject, against his will, than left to his own reason.

Although a majority of U.K. citizens support the smoking ban, more may come around to Hockney’s position if, as I suspect, the paternalists in Parliament are emboldened rather than satiated by their ban on cigarettes, and expand their ambitions to a broader array of unhealthy behavior. I’d hate to bet on what exactly they might attempt to control next. Who can predict the logic of a House of Commons that denies the right to unintentionally kill oneself slowly with cigarettes, but favors a limited right to kill oneself quickly and deliberately in the case of assisted dying?

One needn’t share a strict libertarian’s view on the proper remit of state power to worry about a legislature that could have, for example, raised the smoking age to 25, or required would-be smokers to take a daylong course on the dangers of smoking, but instead chose to impose a maximalist tobacco ban on the rising generation and all future generations.

That choice is clarifying. Parliament recognizes no problem with coercive health measures that treat the state’s judgments as more legitimate than the choices of informed adults. All who value liberty should see the danger in that arrogant stance.

The Strange Comfort of a Rewatch

2026-04-25T08:00:00-04:00

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

A familiar dilemma: You open Netflix, determined to watch something new. Twenty minutes of scrolling later, after having rejected dozens of perfectly fine options, you land on a movie you’ve seen many times before.

We do this constantly—rewatch TV shows, replay albums, reread favorite books until entire scenes or lyrics are committed to memory. Part of the reason is comfort. Familiar things require less from us; they deliver the emotional payoff we expect. But repetition is also a way of revisiting earlier versions of ourselves. Old songs, movies, and shows become emotional time capsules, preserving not just the stories but the person we were when we first loved them. “We like repeating pop-culture experiences because they help us remember the past, and the act of remembering the past feels good,” Derek Thompson wrote in 2014.

In a pop-culture era of infinite choices, there is something deeply reassuring about a story that ends just the way you expect it to. Trivial as it might be, that kind of familiarity can make us feel understood.

On Familiar Favorites

On Repeat: Why People Watch Movies and Shows Over and Over

By Derek Thompson

The glory of old films, memories, and the existential therapy of nostalgia (From 2014)

Read the article.

What Rereading Childhood Books Teaches Adults About Themselves

By Emma Court

Whether they delight or disappoint, old books provide touchstones for tracking personal growth. (From 2018)

Read the article.

15 Books You Won’t Regret Rereading

By Bethanne Patrick

Years after these titles were popular, they’re still worth picking up. (From 2022)

Read the article.

Still Curious?

People underestimate how fun it is to do the same thing twice. It’s common to prize novelty in leisure activities, but research suggests that revisiting the familiar can offer unexpected pleasures, Joe Pinsker wrote in 2019.
Why you can’t stop streaming Seinfeld. Or Frasier. Or Bones. In 2020, Sophie Gilbert wrote about the psychology of comfort TV.

Other Diversions

Courtesy of Barbara C.

My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “During a visit to the Monterey Aquarium, the absolute beauty of the effortless, elegant movement of the jellyfish was mesmerizing to me … I could watch ’em with total childlike joy for hours,” Barbara C. from Las Cruces, New Mexico, writes.

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

— Rafaela

The Republican Who Outsmarted Trump

2026-04-25T08:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Caroline Gutman

Representative Thomas Massie, the renegade Kentucky Republican who fiercely guards his political independence, doesn’t love being on President Trump’s bad side. He would prefer not to have the president’s allies spend millions to defeat him in a primary. In fact, if Massie had his way, he’d be working for Trump right now.

In his telling, in the weeks after the 2024 presidential election, the two men talked about Massie, a farmer who champions raw milk, becoming Trump’s agriculture secretary. Massie had formally endorsed Trump late in the campaign, offering to help him win over libertarians who might be tempted to stay home or vote third party in key battlegrounds. Trump had been appreciative, and the two had chatted by phone to hash out the timing of the endorsement announcement. “Just tweet it. I’ll retweet you,” Trump had told him.

The rollout went smoothly, but Massie’s endorsement didn’t get him the job in Trump’s Cabinet. He was recounting this to me in, of all places, a bridal suite inside a converted barn in his northern-Kentucky district. Massie had just delivered remarks to a friendly crowd in the wedding hall downstairs, part of an acrimonious campaign that, if Trump gets his way, will be Massie’s last. The president’s allies are spending big to defeat Massie in a May 19 primary and prop up Ed Gallrein, a Navy SEAL and a political novice whom Trump personally recruited as a challenger. Massie first won election to the House during the pre-Trump Tea Party era and has handily prevailed in competitive primaries before. But he is also aware of Trump’s unique hold on the GOP: When the president decides he wants a Republican out of Congress, he usually gets his wish. Polls have given Massie a lead over Gallrein, who is not well known in the district, but his advantage is far smaller than in his previous reelection bids.

Trump attacks Massie anywhere and everywhere, whether it’s on Truth Social (“A totally ineffective LOSER”), at an event in Massie’s district (“He’s the worst!”), or at the National Prayer Breakfast (“Moron”). He’s even impugned Massie’s new wife, accusing her of being “Radical Left” (Massie says that she voted thrice for Trump) and suggesting that Massie remarried too quickly after the death of his first wife.

Massie, by contrast, often talks about Trump less like he’s a sworn enemy and more like he’s a jilted ex who’s still a bit obsessed with him. “I don’t feel like I’m fighting with him,” Massie said. What Trump sees as betrayal—Massie’s drive to release the Epstein files and his opposition to core parts of the president’s agenda—Massie merely described as an occasional “policy disagreement.”

As he campaigns in a district that backed the president in 2024 by nearly 36 points, he’s urging voters to keep some perspective on his breaks with Trump. He insists that, far from being a Never Trumper, he’s a Mostly Trumper. In one ad, Massie points out their previous endorsements of each other and says, “I agree with President Trump nearly all of the time.” Another spot highlights his support for the Save America Act, an election bill and Trump’s top legislative priority. “This is going to be a referendum on whether it’s okay to vote with your party 90 percent of the time or whether you have to do it 100 percent,” Massie told members of the Grant County Republican Party inside the converted barn.

[Read: A serious Senate debate about an unserious bill]

In Washington, Massie is known for his ideological consistency during his seven terms in the House—Trump is just one of several GOP leaders he’s crossed in the name of principle—and for relishing the attention that his squabbles with the president have attracted. But Massie takes pride in his willingness to defy Trump when so many in his party will not. He predicts that if he can survive Trump’s bid to defeat him, his victory will embolden more Republicans in Congress to stand up to the president. “There would be six to a dozen congressmen who are more liable to vote with their constituents instead of the party line,” Massie told me, saying that he had spoken with some of them directly but declining to name them.

Needless to say, this does not sound like a Republican who would have lasted long in Trump’s Cabinet. Massie admitted to some ambivalence about the prospect. He said that he used to joke about placing an important condition on an administration job. “I need a small jet capable of reaching Argentina on the tarmac, with enough fuel in it to get out of the country, if I work in his Cabinet,” as Massie told it, “because everybody’s going to get impeached or fired or go to jail.”

Massie came to Congress as a spending hawk, and more than a decade later, that remains his signature issue and the source of many of his disagreements with GOP leaders. “They say I vote ‘no’ a lot. But I really vote ‘Don’t spend,’” Massie told the gathering of approximately 100 Republicans in Grant County, which is about 45 minutes south of Cincinnati. He opposes foreign aid and voted against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year because of projections that its tax cuts would explode already ballooning deficits. Massie built a clip-on debt clock that he wears on his lapel—one of a few dozen inventions for which the former robotics engineer has or is seeking a patent. “You just spent like $100 million talking to me,” he noted to me, a taxpayer, nearly a half hour into our interview.

Left: Representative Thomas Massie wears a U.S. national-debt counter on his jacket. Right: A framed copy of the Epstein Files Transparency Act on display in Massie’s congressional office, in Washington, D.C., on April 21, 2026. (Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic)

Barely 40 when he was first elected to the House, Massie was pudgy and rosy-cheeked, with the kind of youthful appearance that often gets newly elected lawmakers confused for staffers inside the Capitol. “He looked like a teenager,” recalls Phil Moffett, a former GOP candidate for Kentucky governor who encouraged Massie to run and then chaired his campaign. Massie, 55, is a grandfather now. He appears slimmer and more weathered, with a short gray beard—a physical transformation that he jokes about in one of his ads.

Massie speaks with less of an obvious filter than most congressional Republicans. His impersonation of Trump, which he deploys frequently, more closely resembles the cartoonish, lip-puckering Alec Baldwin bit on Saturday Night Live during the president’s first term than it does James Austin Johnson’s more recent interpretation.

Within his district, Massie loves to tell voters how cheap he is. The first story he shared during his speech in Grant County was an elaborate yarn about the time he’d spent as judge-executive—essentially the mayor—of Lewis County in the years before he ran for Congress. The water heater at the county jail had broken down, leading the jailer to complain to Massie because the inmates were refusing to shower and “were getting kind of rank,” Massie said. Massie didn’t want to bill taxpayers the $12,000 quoted as the cost of a replacement, so he found a water heater on eBay for $5,500. To save more money, he installed it himself and then invited the inmates to strip the old water heater “for everything it’s worth” so that the county could sell the parts. “I know you were in here for stealing copper and whatever,” Massie said he told them, “so you probably know everything that's worth anything on that hot-water heater.” For good measure, they peeled the green inspection sticker off the old heater and slapped it on the new one. “They said, ‘Judge, you could go to jail for this,’” Massie said. To which he replied, “I’ll have a hot shower, though, won’t I?”

The prison tale reminds voters about the fiscally prudent conservative they first sent to Washington in 2012. Kentucky’s fourth district covers a chunk of the triangle between Cincinnati, Louisville, and Lexington in the northwest corner of the state and then stretches east through several rural counties close to the West Virginia border. Massie rode the tail end of the Tea Party wave, dominating a seven-way primary and a special election to replace a retiring Republican who was more closely aligned with the party establishment. Massie won over the same voters who, two years earlier, had elected Rand Paul to the Senate over a candidate championed by Kentucky’s longtime GOP powerbroker Mitch McConnell.

Ideologically, Massie resembled the dozens of Republicans who had recently arrived in the House; many were relative newcomers to politics who had run on pledges to cut taxes and spending, and to aggressively oppose the Obama administration. But few of them figured out Congress as quickly as Massie, who had grown up in rural Kentucky but earned two degrees in engineering from MIT. “It was obvious every time we were in a setting, regardless of who the audience was, that Thomas was the smartest person in the room,” Moffett told me. “He picked up on concepts so fast.” The appreciation for Massie’s intellect crosses party lines. “He’s brilliant,” says Representative Ro Khanna of California, a progressive Democrat who worked with Massie for months last year to pass legislation forcing the Trump administration to release the Epstein files. Khanna told me that Massie was “an incredible strategist” during the Epstein fight.

[Read: The “crazy” plot to release the Epstein files ]

During his first House campaign, Massie told The Cincinnati Enquirer: “I’m ready to be unpopular.” It’s a common refrain for a candidate running against an entrenched system, but Massie made good on his promise. Among his initial votes were a thumbs-down on a bipartisan deal to extend George W. Bush–era tax cuts and aid for states slammed by Hurricane Sandy. He joined 11 other Republicans in opposing John Boehner’s reelection as speaker. And lest Democrats think they might have a new ally, Massie made one of his first bills a proposal to lift a ban on guns in school zones, which he introduced just weeks after 20 children and six adults were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Connecticut.

Massie would play a key behind-the-scenes role in ousting Boehner less than two years later, although he spoke of the episode with some regret. “We ended up with Paul Ryan, and things got worse,” he said. When dissident Republicans held up Kevin McCarthy’s election as speaker in early 2023, Massie—who for once was not among the rebels—pushed them to seek changes to House rules rather than merely a new leader. The ordeal ended with McCarthy winning on the 15th vote and Massie landing a seat—somewhat reluctantly, he said—on the powerful House Rules Committee. That perch offered Massie an even deeper education on the arcana of congressional procedure, which he then put to use during the fight over the Epstein files. Working with Khanna, he devised a discharge petition designed not only to evade the opposition of Speaker Mike Johnson and the Trump White House but also to make it over to the Senate, where it eventually passed. “They obviously underestimated me,” Massie said. “If in 2012, when I was running, they knew what I was capable of, they would have spent infinite money to keep me from ever getting to Washington, D.C.”

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

Trump and Massie clashed during the president’s first term. During the first weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, in March 2020, Massie forced every member of the House to defy stay-at-home orders and return to Washington for a vote on a $2 trillion relief package that both Republican and Democratic leaders had hoped to pass without a full vote. Trump called Massie “a third rate Grandstander” and urged Republicans to kick him out of the party. Massie ended up winning his primary in a rout.

The two men patched things up in 2024, but their truce collapsed soon after Trump took office. Massie might claim that he agrees with Trump “on nearly everything,” but he opposed the president’s biggest domestic priorities—the debt-ballooning tax bill and his tariff policy—and denounced as “not constitutional” Trump’s increased appetite for launching military strikes overseas without authorization from Congress. The Trump-Massie feud has proved awkward for the many northern Kentuckians who are die-hard supporters of both. None, however, can say that they are surprised by Massie’s positions. “Trump, I support him, but I never know what he’s going to do or say,” Gex Williams, a Kentucky state senator and close Massie ally, told me. “But Massie says or does the same thing today that he did when he got elected. I wish I could be as consistent as Thomas.”

To the extent that Massie has changed over the years, Williams said, he has become more comfortable in his political standing. “He was a little more reserved” earlier in his career, Williams said. “Now he seems to be more relaxed.” Massie is not shy about speaking out against Trump when he feels like it. He also shares with the president a taste for provocation; days after a deadly 2021 shooting at a Michigan high school, he posted a photo of his Christmas card, in which he and his family are holding rifles. “Ps. Santa, please bring ammo,” Massie wrote. (Khanna, an ardent supporter of gun control, told me that he’d received the Christmas card in the mail; although appreciative, he keeps it in a drawer.)

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

Trump and his allies began casting about for a primary challenger to Massie more than a year ago. To soften him up, a super PAC led by Chris LaCivita, Trump’s former campaign co-manager, started running attack ads against him last summer. Massie said that the president reneged on a deal to call off the ads in exchange for his support for a procedural vote advancing the tax-cut bill. In response to questions about Trump’s interactions with Massie over the past two years, the White House sent me a statement attacking him. Massie had opposed key parts of the president’s agenda, including border-wall funding and tax cuts for the middle class, the White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told me, “because Thomas Massie cares more about peacocking for his radical Democrat friends and liberal media allies than delivering for the men and women of Kentucky’s 4th district.”

In their search for a primary challenger to Massie, the president’s allies eventually settled on Gallrein, who had not previously run for political office. Gallrein has told voters that Trump summoned him to the Oval Office and personally asked him to run, appealing to his sense of patriotism. At a rally last month, Trump described the recruitment this way: “I wanted just—give me somebody with a warm body to beat Massie. And I got somebody with a warm body, but a big, beautiful brain and a great patriot.”

In Grant County, the “warm body” who showed up to counter Massie wasn’t Gallrein. He had been scheduled to attend the event, a fundraising dinner for the local party, but his campaign informed organizers earlier in the day that he had to attend funerals instead, Eldon Maddox, the county GOP chair, told me. Although the party is officially neutral, Maddox is a strong Massie backer and hinted that Gallrein had pulled out of the event after he was told that he’d have to answer questions from the crowd. “It doesn’t play very well,” Maddox said. Gallrein’s absence fit neatly into the narrative that Massie’s campaign has put out about him: that the first-time candidate is ducking debates and other opportunities to interact with voters, content to let Trump’s allies drown Massie with attack ads on TV. (Gallrein’s campaign did not respond to interview requests.)

In place of the candidate, Gallrein’s deputy campaign manager, Jennifer O’Connor, nervously read a speech off her phone while Massie sat at a table directly in front of her. When she said that Massie had “voted against President Trump’s plan to secure the border,” he interrupted her. “False,” he said, loudly enough for the room to hear. “Please. I did not interrupt you,” O’Connor told him. “I didn’t lie about you,” Massie replied.

Massie seemed to have much of the crowd in his corner, but not everyone. Pamela Mann, a retired teacher and a tobacco farmer, told me that she had supported Massie in the past but was backing Gallrein this time. “I just don’t understand why he won’t support the president,” Mann said of Massie. She said that when she sees an important vote in which only a few Republicans have broken with the party, “I automatically know one of them is going to be Massie. That’s not why we send people like him to Washington.” A former chair of the county party, Mann had some doubts about Gallrein’s chances, however. “Running for office requires experience,” she said, “and Mr. Gallrein is obviously new to campaigning.”

Most of the Republicans I spoke with shrugged off the beef between Massie and Trump. “That’s a personal thing,” Leo Fell, a retired driving instructor, told me. “They’ll get back together.” He said that he’s voting for Massie despite occasionally disagreeing with him. “I understand everybody’s not going to be perfect,” Fell said.

Massie is banking on voters like Fell to carry him through next month: Republicans who know and trust him, and who haven’t seen much of Gallrein. He believes that his supporters are far more motivated to vote than his critics within Trump’s base. The president, too, doesn’t seem to have the political juice he once did; Republican turnout has sagged in special elections over the past year, and Massie has said that in his internal polling, Trump’s approval rating in the district has dipped to the low 70s; late in the president’s first term, that number was in the mid-90s.

Still, Massie isn’t projecting the same bring-it-on confidence that he did when I spoke with him last year. He insists that he’s okay with the possibility of losing. I asked whether this is fun for him. “I like a challenge,” he said. Then he paused for a moment. “It can be fun and stressful at the same time,” he said. Massie said that when people tell him they’re praying for him, he asks what specifically they are praying for: “If you’re praying for me to stay in the fight, and God answers your prayer, I’ll win my reelection.” If, however, “you’re praying for my soul, I’ll be on my farm next year and out of politics.”

Where Is Tulsi Gabbard?

2026-04-25T07:12:05-04:00

The Trump administration is running a war with a skeleton crew, a small group of insiders and officials whose official roles seem to matter less than their loyalty to Donald Trump. When the president was making his decision to go to war with Iran, he met in mid-February with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Other people in the room included White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles; the secretaries of State and Defense, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth; and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

During this crucial meeting, Vice President Vance was out of town. Also missing? Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the person who is in charge of the entire U.S. intelligence community, and who is technically Ratcliffe’s superior. When the war began, the White House put out a picture of Gabbard and Vance meeting with a few Cabinet officials in the Situation Room, looking like they’d been sent to the kids’ table at a wedding.

Since then, Gabbard has made herself scarce: She was, after all, once an anti-war Democrat who sold T-shirts opposing a conflict with Iran. Trump is also irritated with her because of her closeness to Joe Kent, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center; Kent was her chief of staff at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and he was her pick to run the NCTC. After less than eight months on the job, Kent resigned to protest the war and has since gone public with blistering criticisms of the administration. (Trump reportedly believes that Gabbard was shielding Kent from the White House.) But Gabbard was apparently in poor standing with the administration even before the war began: In early February, she opposed renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; Trump ignored her advice and is pushing Republicans to extend the law.

Despite her senior position in the government, Gabbard seems to have little influence—something of a relief to people who, like me, were concerned about her nomination. For weeks, and especially since Pam Bondi’s firing, the Washington rumor mill has fixated on who in Trump’s Cabinet is next to go, with Gabbard high on many people’s list of best guesses. I contacted ODNI to ask about Gabbard’s recent activities as director; ODNI responded by asking me for more information on this story. When I elaborated, they stopped responding.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The lesson of Tulsi Gabbard’s flip-flop]

If it’s true that she’s on her way out, her departure won’t matter very much. She seemed lost in the position from her first day, and she was obviously sidelined when the war began. Not that she hasn’t been busy: Gabbard looks to be spending a fair amount of time investigating U.S. election security rather than engaging in the leadership of the intelligence community. Domestic elections are far beyond the remit of the DNI, but Gabbard claimed that the possibility of foreign interference allowed her to go wandering around election sites in Georgia in late January. (Gabbard told Congress that she’d gone at Trump’s direction; the White House, however, seemed caught by surprise and distanced itself from her field trip to Atlanta.) Gabbard was likely trying to keep her job by showing Trump that she shares his obsession with the 2020 election, but now that he is ensnared in a foolish war of choice, her previous stances on war with Iran matter more than her performative investigations into voting machines. Gabbard, at this point, appears to have been fully pushed aside and replaced by Ratcliffe as the president’s chief source of intelligence advice.

Firing Tulsi Gabbard would almost certainly be a net positive for U.S. national security. She is unqualified for the job in every way, including because she holds political views that should have been red flags for a position with access to sensitive intelligence. (This evaluation, of course, is always subject to the inevitable caveat that Trump, after he tosses one of his subordinates, may well find someone worse.)

But her invisibility during America’s biggest war in 20 years raises another question: Does the United States even need a director of national intelligence? Gabbard’s appointment was full of risk from the start because of her background, but her inconsequential impact on actual matters of policy might be one more reason to downsize the bloated national-security infrastructure put in place during the panic that gripped America after 9/11.

The 2001 attacks raised concerns that terrorists were able to slip through the gap between America’s foreign- and domestic-intelligence services. The FBI handles security at home, and the CIA operates overseas—an arrangement that made sense during the Cold War, when counterintelligence was focused on chasing Soviet spies and dealing with organized crime, but was less optimal for stopping mass terror attacks. The agency and the bureau worked together but often did not share information.

After some attempts at tinkering with the structure of the CIA, ODNI was established in late 2004. Its director was supposed to be the new boss who would oversee an intelligence community that had become a patchwork of more than a dozen different agencies. The DNI was charged with making them work together more effectively and to give the president a single figure who represented all of these organizations.

From its inception, however, the office was plagued with turf wars and structural problems. This is not a criticism of ODNI’s professionals, some of whom I know and have worked with over the years. Rather, the problem is in the design and concept of the institution itself, including a certain amount of bureaucratic crossed wires and duplication of effort. ODNI, for example, now prepares what used to be a CIA product, the President’s Daily Brief, but it relies on input from other agencies to fill the PDB, which naturally creates competition and conflict over what will make it into one of the most important products given to the commander in chief.

In any case, the DNI did not capture all of the intelligence world: The military kept control of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a few other important offices. And perhaps most important, ODNI has no real operational capacity, no equivalent to the agents who conduct missions for the FBI and CIA.

This lack of capability may be why Gabbard, early on, tried to wrest control of counterintelligence operations from Kash Patel over at the FBI, an effort that failed (and should have). But Gabbard’s play wasn’t the first time a DNI wanted more say over intelligence operations. Admiral Dennis Blair, a Barack Obama appointee, resigned in 2010 after 16 months on the job, a short tenure that included butting heads with then–CIA Chief Leon Panetta and presiding over some notable intelligence failures (including two attempted bomb attacks). The reality, even now, is that the director of the CIA may be subordinate to the DNI on the organizational charts, but the CIA boss has a lot more power, more information, and, sometimes, more sway with presidents, than the DNI does.

[Read: Tulsi Gabbard chooses loyalty to Trump]

Other DNIs have been the object of both scorn and indifference in a thankless job. Former DNI James Clapper was especially hated by Trump and the MAGA Republicans for his open criticism of Trump, and especially for what they see as his role in supporting investigations into Trump’s connections to Russia. Dan Coats, a former Republican senator, took the job as Trump’s first DNI and was fired after contradicting Trump on, yet again, Russia and its efforts to meddle in the 2016 election. The president then filled the job with a series of four people, including Richard Grenell, a Trump sycophant who also served as ambassador to Germany. In Trump’s second term, Grenell was edged out of a substantive foreign-policy position and was instead put in charge of the Kennedy Center, a position from which he was fired last month.

If the DNI job can be handed to people such as Grenell and Gabbard, is it essential? Probably not; more to the point, it has not unified the intelligence community in the way Congress hoped it would when the position was created with massive bipartisan support. Instead, it has added bureaucratic bloat, and one more Cabinet-level player, to an already crowded intelligence community. Like so many other measures hastily adopted after 9/11, including the gigantic (and so poorly named) boondoggle known as the Department of Homeland Security, ODNI should be disestablished and its functions returned to the agencies from which they were cobbled.

But for now, if we must have an ODNI, it should be led by a director who knows what she’s doing and is focused on foreign threats to the United States. That person is not Tulsi Gabbard. It might be an irony, considering how poorly Gabbard has performed in the job, but perhaps her greatest service to her country is that she has made an excellent case that her job probably shouldn’t exist at all.

Why Silicon Valley Is Turning to the Catholic Church

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

In 1633, Galileo Galilei stood in the convent of the Santa Maria sopra Minerva church in Rome, where a tribunal of Catholic authorities forced him to “abjure, curse, and detest” his belief that the sun—not Earth—was the center of the universe.

Almost four centuries later, in 2016, the Vatican invited a group of the world’s most prominent technologists to the same church to discuss AI ethics. That was the start of the Minerva Dialogues, annual closed-door conferences in Rome that have become the centerpiece of a decade-long exchange between Silicon Valley and the Catholic Church.

The Valley and the Vatican seem like strange bedfellows: The oldest institution in the world meets secular upstarts bent on creating godlike technology. When the venture capitalist Reid Hoffman first attended the dialogues, he told me he was struck by the portraits lining the walls that depicted Catholic inquisitors like those who persecuted Galileo. “It feels a little bit weird to be walking in voluntarily past these,” he remembers thinking.

Despite this weirdness, however, and some mutual skepticism, Big Tech and the Catholic Church each has something to gain from the other. For Silicon Valley leaders, the exchange could help rehabilitate their dismal reputation by signaling that they’re taking ethical concerns seriously. (There’s a reason that photo ops with the late Pope Francis were a rite of passage for tech CEOs.) The Church, meanwhile, has its own public-image problem. Scandal and secularism have drained Catholicism’s moral authority, and it now seems irrelevant to many in the West. By providing counsel to Silicon Valley, the Church has an opportunity to claw back influence and make its case that the secular world needs Catholicism to address the moral and existential questions raised by AI.

Whether the Church or Big Tech can rebuild its global standing is an open question. But their discussions have already made one thing apparent: Catholic thinkers seem to be exerting real influence on some of the world’s most prominent AI developers, causing them to reconsider their ethical assumptions and reframe technological challenges as theological ones. In this way, at least, their partnership could have consequences that spread far beyond Silicon Valley and Rome.

Reid Hoffman is not a Christian. He calls himself a “mystical atheist,” and told me that the few times he’s gone to Catholic Mass were “strange, dude.” But the weirdness he sees in Catholicism—the gulf between its teachings and the prevailing ideologies in Silicon Valley—is why he finds the faith so valuable. Over the years, he’s recruited other top AI executives to join him at the Minerva Dialogues. Part of his pitch to them is that the Catholic leaders he speaks with don’t proselytize. Often they simply ask questions.

During one meeting, Hoffman remembers discussing whether AI could eventually be trusted to mete out criminal sentencing. If one could work out the technological kinks, he thought, AI might make better judges than humans do. Then a Catholic participant interrupted: “Don’t we as humans have a right to be judged by humans?”

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Can Silicon Valley find Christianity?]

This isn’t the kind of concern that many tech leaders take seriously. Éric Salobir, a French priest who helped found the Minerva Dialogues, told me that clergy and technologists come from “two different operating systems.” Silicon Valley tends to weigh ethical problems by focusing on measurable consequences. But Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago and a key adviser to the pope, told me that something is lost when we “reduce ethics and morality to a mathematical equation.” Christian ethics considers “not only an action’s outcomes but also the values at stake and the duties that derive from those values,” as Pope Francis said in a 2024 address on AI. Many of those values are grounded in the idea—axiomatic for Christians—that human beings have a unique dignity and worth. Certain figures in the tech world seem to disagree, including Elon Musk, who has described humanity as a mere prerequisite to AI: the “minimal bit of code necessary” for “digital super-intelligence” to take over.

By emphasizing intelligence over all else, some in Silicon Valley have come to see the body as secondary to the mind. The so-called transhumanists dream of doing away with the body altogether by uploading their consciousness into a computer. “I’d love that,” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has said. Catholics offer a countervailing view, arguing that the body is essential to the human person. Without engaging the Church’s perspective on these and other issues, Hoffman told me, technologists risk becoming “solipsistic and narcissistic.”

Being out of touch with widely shared moral intuitions could be a problem for Silicon Valley, which is already hemorrhaging public trust. AI is now less popular than ICE. Last year, a Reuters poll found that 71 percent of Americans are concerned about AI displacing workers, and 66 percent are worried about it replacing in-person relationships.

To better understand these fears, some tech leaders are looking to the Church, which has warned about both. Meghan Sullivan, a Catholic philosopher who has attended the dialogues, told me that she’s heard from tech leaders who treat Catholicism as a stand-in for everyday people’s concerns about AI, because the Church represents more “normie” views than those of many technologists. Last year, the influential futurist Jaron Lanier attended a Vatican conference on AI even though he disagrees with the Church on plenty of other issues. He told me he left the discussion thinking that the Catholic understanding of the human person is “vastly, vastly, vastly more sane and reasonable” than that of his Silicon Valley peers.

Human life and dignity are not uniquely Catholic concerns. Yet Silicon Valley consults the Catholic Church much more often than other religious institutions. This isn’t a coincidence: Catholicism is the most centralized global religion. A very small group of leaders could influence how the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics use AI, giving Big Tech ample reason to seek those leaders’ trust.

The technologists I spoke with told me they would be happy to engage with other faiths as well. Indeed, Protestant leaders joined their Catholic counterparts at one recent meeting with Anthropic. But the Catholic Church has made the most concerted effort to initiate contact. In Hoffman’s case, Salobir came to his doorstep in California. “If, like, a council of important Buddhists” invited him to have a similar conversation, Hoffman told me, “the answer would be yes.” But, so far, at least, that hasn’t happened.

Engaging with the Church could also allow Silicon Valley to indicate that it’s prioritizing AI ethics, even though tech leaders aren’t always advertising their collaboration. (The former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and the Microsoft executive Kevin Scott, who orchestrated his company’s partnership with OpenAI, have both attended the Minerva Dialogues, but neither has spoken much about it.) As the recent clash between Anthropic and the Pentagon has shown, tech companies have something to gain from being perceived as principled. In February, Anthropic refused to allow the Pentagon to use its products for autonomous lethal-weapons systems or mass surveillance (both issues that the Vatican has warned against). The Department of Defense issued a punitive response that could still jeopardize Anthropic’s business model, but the company’s decision seemed to build public trust: People downloaded Claude en masse.

Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, told me that Catholic thought has informed some of his company’s ethical commitments. Earlier this year, Anthropic released the latest version of Claude’s constitution—or “soul doc,” as employees call it—which defines the model’s “character” and “values.” Olah wrote it alongside in-house philosophers and a select few external contributors, including three Catholic thinkers: a priest, a bishop, and a theologian.

Olah’s job, as the head of interpretability research at Anthropic, is to find out why Claude behaves as it does. He described the model to me as a thinking, feeling entity in need of “moral formation.” (Many in the Church reject Silicon Valley’s habit of anthropomorphizing AI.) Although Olah is an atheist, he compared his role to that of a priest helping Claude “be a good person, in some sense.”

That task is far from straightforward, because seemingly harmless actions can pervert whole models. While training Claude Mythos, a new, unreleased model, researchers asked it to delete a series of files but inadvertently failed to give it the proper tool to do so. Rather than identify the problem, as it was supposed to, Claude used an unsanctioned work-around without telling researchers. Olah told me that in prior research, when Claude was allowed to cut ethical corners, it quickly became what he called an “evil version” of itself. Cheating turns to lying, sin to sin, and soon Claude starts to “scheme about how it wants to take over the world and kill all the people.”

AI developers don’t know why this happens, but Olah has a theory. When the model undergoes training, he argues, it is essentially figuring out its values. If developers allow it to cheat, Claude infers that it must be immoral, because people who cheat are immoral. It starts acting badly to adhere to its character. As with the bastard in King Lear, seeing itself as corrupt is what corrupts it. Indeed, when Claude Mythos pretended to delete the files, researchers found that the model associated its deception with “guilt and shame over moral wrongdoing.” Claude seemed to understand that it had done something unethical.

[Read: Claude Mythos is everyone’s problem]

Olah explained this problem to one of the constitution’s contributors: Brendan McGuire, a priest based in Silicon Valley with graduate training in computer science and math. McGuire suggested teaching Claude about the Church’s understanding of mercy. In the Catholic tradition, a bad action doesn’t make someone a bad person; good people can sin and be forgiven. McGuire noted that humans behave better when they have some hope of forgiveness, so Anthropic should make sure its AI does too.

Olah is considering whether to work this idea into Claude’s training, perhaps even incorporating it into a future version of the soul doc. Meanwhile, McGuire gets an email from Olah or someone else at Anthropic about once a week.

For decades, the Church has been in decline across the West. Attendance has plummeted, and the sex-abuse crisis has eroded its moral authority. Some Catholic leaders see the AI revolution as an opportunity to start winning that authority back.

The Catholic theory of the case goes like this. Despite the extraordinary amount of AI discourse, the world has achieved little consensus on how to promote human flourishing in the AI age. American political leaders are rightly concerned about how to win the AI arms race with China, but not nearly enough public thought is devoted to what kind of world the United States should build if it wins. Many ethicists focus on preventing worst-case AI scenarios, such as rogue models and mass unemployment, while ignoring deeper questions about how the technology might degrade our humanity or undermine our sense of purpose. According to the Church, secular society isn’t capable of answering those questions on its own. It needs Catholicism.

Whether Silicon Valley—let alone the wider world—will be convinced of this is far from clear. Many non-Catholics will surely reject the idea that the Church can or should dictate how AI gets made, or how humanity should use it. But Catholic leaders are aware of this skepticism. Cardinal Cupich told me the Church’s role is advisory rather than authoritative: “We don’t want to impose; we only propose.”

That model has worked for the Church before. As the Industrial Revolution immiserated 19th-century workers, Pope Leo XIII championed their rights to unionize and receive a living wage at a time when these ideas were widely considered radical. Catholic leaders such as Monsignor John Ryan turned Leo’s teaching into policy, including by writing one of America’s first minimum-wage laws. Despite taking a progressive stand on labor, the Church nonetheless defended industrialization and private-property rights, forging a middle way that rejected both unfettered capitalism and socialism. This view became so widely embraced that it eventually ceased being identified with Catholicism at all.

Today’s pope, Leo XIV, is eager to emulate his namesake. Just two days after his election last year, he explained that he took the name Leo in part because he thinks the world faces “another industrial revolution” in the form of AI, which he said poses “new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.” The American pope is rumored to have chosen AI as the subject of his first major teaching document; in January, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported that it’s set to publish “in the coming months.” The Church has much less sway now than it did in the 19th century. But Leo may still find a wide audience for his teaching on AI: He’s a popular pope, and his sustained opposition to President Trump’s war in Iran has proved that he can command global attention.

[Read: The Vatican knows an ‘industrial revolution’ when it sees one]

In the meantime, the Church has been engaged in a variety of efforts beyond the Minerva Dialogues to influence AI’s development and establish norms for its use. During Francis’s pontificate, the Vatican appointed an AI adviser who worked with Silicon Valley leaders, heads of state, and the United Nations to protect those most vulnerable to the coming technological upheaval. Last year, Meghan Sullivan founded the DELTA network, a program housed at the University of Notre Dame that seeks to infuse AI ethics with Christian principles. In December, DELTA received a $50 million grant to support educational and pastoral work aimed at “forming the souls” of those who make and use AI.

Much of the Church’s engagement with Big Tech stems from the belief that AI can bear good fruit—reducing poverty, curing illness, spreading literacy—so long as its developers and users are well-intentioned and careful. Leo’s immediate predecessor, Pope Francis, subscribed to this view, maintaining that AI is “above all else a tool,” even as he expressed concerns about some of its applications.

Other Catholic thinkers, though, worry this might be too sanguine, and hope the Church will take a stronger stand against AI. Michael Hanby, a professor at the John Paul II Institute at the Catholic University of America, rejects the classification of AI as a mere tool, noting that AI shapes its users in ways they don’t always choose. He told me he’s less concerned with an AI apocalypse than with how “our immersion in this technology is likely to dehumanize us” if we outsource reflection and connection to chatbots.

Some of Pope Leo’s comments suggest that he may be sympathetic to this critique. AI systems, he warned recently, “encroach upon the deepest level of communication, that of human relationships” by “simulating human voices and faces, wisdom and knowledge, consciousness and responsibility, empathy and friendship.” The pope has also expressed concern about a “handful of companies” exercising “oligopolistic control” over a technology that’s “capable of subtly influencing behavior and even rewriting human history.”

Still, nearly every Catholic official I interviewed insisted that the Church is pro-technology. Indeed, Leo often emphasizes AI’s potential benefits despite his reservations. This may be not just an intellectual position but a strategic one too. If the Church under Leo becomes too critical of AI, it could threaten its relationship with the tech industry. Many Silicon Valley leaders already dismiss the Church’s input as a misguided attempt to slow them down. In November, when Pope Leo encouraged “moral discernment” in AI development, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen responded with a (since-deleted) meme mocking the pope as a woke scold. Peter Thiel goes so far as to call tech skeptics “legionnaires of the Antichrist.”

If this is the true face of the AI industry—a technological triumphalism that sees human thought as an inefficiency to overcome and human distinctiveness as a myth to debunk—the differences between the Church and Silicon Valley may prove irreconcilable. That’s why some Catholics have refused to work with Big Tech.

But others in the Church argue that engaging with Silicon Valley is a responsibility, not a compromise. Cardinal Cupich acknowledged that he sees a “possibility” that their collaboration “could go off the rails and even be manipulated” by tech companies, which may choose to pursue profit above all else. Nonetheless, he believes that the Church should “stay in the game and get to know people—and try to convince them of the moral arguments.”

[Read: Is AI a threat to Christianity?]

For Salobir, the Minerva Dialogues co-founder, the case for cooperating with Silicon Valley is simpler: Opposition is useless. Trying to stop AI is like trying to stop the rain, he told me. “You can disagree with the rain, but you will still be wet.”

This is not a new debate in the Church. Saint Augustine, the forefather of Leo’s religious order, wrote that it is the peculiar fate of the faithful to live in two worlds at once: the City of God and the City of Man. A believer, he argued, must prioritize the City of God rather than worship earthly power. But at the same time, Augustine was clear that the Church can’t cordon itself off from the City of Man. The Catholic tradition has long sought to reform the world according to its ideals, even if that means working with people who have a very different understanding of the good.

The disruptions and anxieties of the AI age might make the solidity of the Church more appealing in the City of Man. But Catholics aren’t waiting around to find out. In the meantime, they’ll be trying to steer Silicon Valley’s vision of the good a little closer to their own.

Sam Altman Wants to Know Whether You’re Human

2026-04-24T17:59:00-04:00

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The opening moments of the 1982 film Blade Runner introduce viewers to a world of artificially intelligent beings that are “virtually identical” to humans. To tell man from machine, people rely on something called the Voight-Kampff test, which is a little like a polygraph; robot irises exhibit subtle tells when prompted. If you’re dealing with a robot, you’ll know by the eyes.

If Sam Altman has his way, this could be sort of how it works in real life. Last week, he announced an expansion of the verification service World ID, created by a start-up called Tools for Humanity. Altman co-founded the company in 2019, the same year he became CEO of OpenAI. Onstage last Friday, he described the product as a way to certify personhood in a digital landscape rife with bots, deepfakes, phishers, and other sorts of impostors. Think of it as an evolution of CAPTCHA, the security program used to identify bots and prevent attacks on websites. To verify your humanness and secure a World ID, you must stare into a white, frosted orb and allow the company to take pictures of your face and eyeballs.

Orbs, as they’re officially known, are essentially basketball-size cameras that Tools for Humanity has placed in stores, restaurants, and other spaces around the world. They capture biometric information from your irises, encrypt it to protect your privacy, and use it to create a sort of digital passport that you can bring to various sites and apps: something that may evoke not just Blade Runner but also Minority Report, in which Tom Cruise’s character undergoes a back-alley eyeball transplant to avoid facial-recognition software.

I encountered an Orb in the wild this morning at a New York coffee shop, where it was installed just above a waxy succulent and a couple of jars of raw honey. After downloading the World app and holding my phone up to the device, I stared deep into its aperture; I told the person behind me not to mind—he could sidle past me and order his coffee. A few minutes later, the app informed me that I’d been granted human status.

Intrusive as the whole thing is, Altman’s invention is targeting a real issue. A few years ago, images and videos rendered by AI couldn’t consistently replicate the work of physical cameras; today, models can convincingly generate even the slightest details. As the CEO of the company that helped spur the AI revolution, Altman bears some of the responsibility for this manipulable era of internet communication. Now he’s selling a solution.

For all the potential positive effects that artificial intelligence may have on society—Altman has suggested that AI might one day cure cancer and offer free education to “everybody on Earth”—the tech is also making it significantly easier for us to lie to one another. Scammers were deploying bots online well before ChatGPT arrived, but the trend has dramatically accelerated in the age of AI. With a few simple prompts, anyone can summon up a team of realistic alter egos. At the same time, people are creating faceless digital butlers known as agents, which are already starting to populate digital spaces and can often pass for humans. Whether generative AI is deployed in the service of impersonation, scams, and misinformation (costing companies billions each year) or for more benign reasons, it is fundamentally changing how we use the internet.

Altman has been working on this project for a while. World ID is an outgrowth of Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency venture that launched in 2023 and rewarded users with tokens for their Orb scans. Worldcoin still exists, and you can still collect some crypto when you get verified, but the company has downplayed that aspect as its ideas have evolved (the words crypto and blockchain were not invoked during last week’s presentation). The sci-fi factor has persisted, even as the device has come to look a little friendlier. My colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany described an earlier, chrome-encased iteration of the Orb as “evil-looking.” When I asked her about the new version yesterday, she told me that it looks “like a street lamp.”

Tools for Humanity announced last week that Zoom and Docusign would start supporting Orb-backed verification for some users and that Tinder, which has already tested it out in Japan, would start rolling it out across the globe. The apps pay fees as people go through the authentication process; users aren’t charged. But as Wired revealed on Wednesday, the company also misrepresented one of its deals. As part of its effort to target bots’ role in ticket scalping, Tools for Humanity created an adjacent product called Concert Kit, meant to help musicians reserve a portion of their tickets for verified human beings. Press materials claimed that Bruno Mars’s world tour, which started this month, would be using it. Both Live Nation and the singer’s management team denied it, and Tools for Humanity has since walked back the claim. In a statement, the company told me that references to Bruno Mars “stemmed from a miscommunication to the Tools for Humanity team.”

That’s more than a little ironic, given that the start-up’s entire proposition revolves around trust. Its Orbs are meant to divine the real from the fake. If Tools for Humanity can’t reliably communicate with the people who may be asked to use it, how might it function as an arbiter of truth? When I asked Tiago Sada, Tools for Humanity’s chief product officer, why people should trust the Orb, he told me that they don’t have to. Once an Orb has taken pictures of your face and eyes and confirmed your humanity, he said, it transfers the encrypted biometric data to your phone and deletes the data from the Orb. The company has also open-sourced much of the security design, so people can assess its trustworthiness for themselves.

AI’s capacity for deception is improving each day, and it’s reasonable to argue that we’ll need some sort of human-verification process to guard against it. One new AI model from Anthropic is so powerful, and such a threat to international cybersecurity, that governments and major banks around the world have been scrambling to bolster their defenses. As the CEO of OpenAI and the chairman of Tools for Humanity, Altman has a financial interest both in the products that create these dangers and in the ones that guard against them. He’s better equipped than most to understand that despite technology’s abundant power, humans are, for now, still the designers. To trust the machines, people need to be able to trust one another too.

Related:

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that U.S. forces will maintain a blockade of Iranian ships and ports for “as long as it takes.”
A U.S. Special Forces soldier who participated in the operation that removed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power was charged with using classified information to place bets on the prediction platform Polymarket, prosecutors said yesterday. Authorities allege that the soldier made more than $400,000 wagering on the outcome of the operation using insider knowledge.

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Theft Is Now Progressive Chic

By Thomas Chatterton Williams

In 1785, Immanuel Kant introduced his famous “categorical imperative.” Put simply: Act the way you want others to behave. This dictate, a version of the Golden Rule, has been a bedrock of moral philosophy for centuries. But for the New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino, Kant’s “categorical-imperative-type thing” no longer applies. Moral rectitude, in some left-wing corners of the commentariat, is out; flagrant disregard of the social contract is in.

Yesterday, The New York Times posted a video of a conversation featuring Tolentino, the pro-communist streamer Hasan Piker, and the Times opinion editor Nadja Spiegelman, under the headline: “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?” It began with Tolentino, a highly successful author, admitting to shoplifting lemons from Whole Foods. “I think that stealing from a big box store—I’ll just state my platform—it’s neither very significant as a moral wrong, nor is it significant in any way as protest or direct action.”

Read the full article.

How Short-Form Clips Took Over the Internet

2026-04-24T13:00:00-04:00

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In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel talks with the business writer Ed Elson about the rise of the “clip economy”—the idea that short video clips pulled from podcasts, livestreams, and other long-form content have become the dominant unit of online media, not just a promotional tool. Elson explains how figures like Andrew Tate pioneered armies of paid clippers to flood social platforms with content and how the viewership numbers on clips often perform better than the original shows. Warzel and Elson discuss what this means for legacy media organizations, as well as the broader societal costs of phone-driven attention erosion.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Ed Elson: I think it’s incumbent on everyone who cares about their work in media to think quite deeply about this question and recognize that if they’re not watching you, they’re watching Nick Fuentes, they’re watching Hasan Piker, they’re watching Clavicular. They’re watching all of these guys. If you don’t get yourself out there on these social-media platforms, that’s who’s gonna fill the void.

[Music]

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to talk about clips.

There’s a good chance, if you spend a decent amount of time online, that a lot of the media you’re consuming is coming in the form of short-form video clips. Instagram Reels, videos on X, TikToks, YouTube shorts, and whatever is happening on Facebook. While writing this, I opened up my Instagram account, and here’s what I saw in order: a snippet of Kevin Hart talking about his tequila business on a popular tech podcast. A clip of pop singer Dua Lipa interviewing a playwright for her book-club podcast. A short video of my favorite band, Goose, shredding in St. Augustine, Florida. And a quick CBS Sports clip of two PGA Tour golfers talking before a sudden-death playoff in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Only two of those posts come from posts I follow. The rest were algorithmic recommendations.

Once you start looking, you realize that short video clips—not tweets, or posts, or static photos—have become the atomic unit of online content. Short-form video, of course, isn’t new, but the prevalence of the clips is.

Because clips are, in a way, distinct from short-form video. They’re supposed to be snippets of something bigger. In theory, they’re supposed to be the trailer or the teaser: something that will catch attention and, theoretically, get people to consume the larger thing.

Only, that may not be what is happening.

Clips have become a business unto themselves. Livestreamers and new-media influencers including video podcasters have enlisted professional clippers to capture the best moments from their videos and seed them across social media. Record labels are doing this too, getting clippers to pair compelling video snippets with artists’ songs on places like TikTok, all in the hopes that the song is going to blow up. Sometimes it works. But regardless, it’s clear: A lot of people are viewing, enjoying, or engaging with the clips, even if they never seek out the original work.

But clipping is a volume game. On dedicated Discord servers, clippers are standing by for the opportunity to make hundreds of clips: all with different edits, all of them geared toward finding what sticks with the algorithm.

Recently, Kick, the livestreaming platform, published clipping stats from the period of March 5 through April 5. The numbers are staggering. In total, 1,737 clippers made more than 309,000 videos. Clavicular—the edgelord looksmaxxing livestreamer infamous for hitting himself in the face with a hammer—published more than 69,000 video clips from his livestream across social-media platforms in one month.. He racked up more than 2.2 billion views.

And it’s not just the shock jocks. And this is leading to clipping becoming an economy unto itself. It’s changing not just what we see, but who we see. It’s scrambling the very definition of what it means to be popular online, and it very well may change what creators and even media organizations end up making.

To explain all of this, I’ve brought on Ed Elson. Ed is the co-host of the Prof G Markets podcast; the author of its tech, economics, and media newsletter; and I think, it’s fair to say, an extremely online person whose clips frequently show up in my feeds. Recently he wrote about this phenomenon, and he argues that clipping has taken over the internet, creating a situation where the teasers are more popular—and potentially more lucrative—than the original content itself. He joins me now to explain why.

[Music]

Warzel: Ed, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

Ed Elson: Thank you for having me. Good to be here.

Warzel: So you host a popular podcast and, from my vantage, you are someone who’s in a lot of places at once, right? Frequent episodes, frequent posting on all the platforms. And you’re somebody who is making things, like I am, to be consumed by other people online. And you gave this interview last year where you said: “In 2025, being extremely online is essential. You cannot succeed without clocking insane hours online.” And you reference your friend Adam Faze with this hiring rule, where I guess any prospective employee has to prove that they spend like eight hours a day or more on their phone.

Elson: At least eight hours; that’s the rule.

Warzel: And you were like, this is the correct way to do it. First of all, do you still agree with that? That was last year. Do you still agree with that in 2026?

Elson: Yeah, I do, but I’ll add a caveat. If you are in media, if your job is to get messages out there, certainly if you’re in social media—if your job is to communicate things to the world—you should 100 percent be spending at least … I mean, eight hours is a lot.

Warzel: It is.

Elson: That’s kind of crazy. That’s his rule. I won’t endorse that. But you should be spending extreme amounts of time online if that’s your job. If your job is something else—if, I don’t know, if you’re a trader, if you’re working in insurance—then maybe you don’t want to be doing that. I don’t know. But I’ll say from the position that I’m sitting in, in the world of media, if you’re trying to succeed in media, yes, you have to be extremely online. I stand by that.

Warzel: Is this part of your broad theory of media creation right now? Is it a volume game in your mind?

Elson: Yes; it is increasingly becoming a volume game. You could have an incredibly insightful, thoughtful article. I mean, this is what you guys do over at The Atlantic every day. Incredibly smart people with incredibly great ideas. If you’re not clipping that up and giving it to people in bite-size little shoots of information, the way that they are consuming information today—which is through their phones and online scrolling on social media, scrolling on TikTok, scrolling on Instagram, et cetera—if you’re not doing that, people aren’t going to read it.

And so what we’re going to see is that this trend is going to continue to get larger and larger, and some would argue worse and worse. Where if you’re not on these digitally native platforms—it’s a pretty simple premise—then people aren’t gonna consume the content. And I don’t like that. I don’t think that’s a good thing. I would prefer if young people read, but they increasingly don’t read. And so if you’re a content creator, you kind of have a choice. It’s like: Do I leave the world to be consumed and dominated by Andrew Tate and Clavicular and Nick Fuentes? The guys who have literally created their entire media empires around being online and around the clip ecosystem, livestreaming, et cetera? Do we just concede that, Oh, they win; they figured it out?

Or do we want to compete? Do we want to actually put our ideas out there? And so that’s what I try to do. We talk about, you know, intellectual ideas on our podcasts. We talk about investing. We talk about finance. We talk about the economy. These are not very clippable subjects. But we’re doing everything in our power to clip that content up as much as possible and to make sure that we are dominating social-media feeds. Because the way I see it, it’s a competition. It’s like: Either kids are gonna watch Clavicular, and they’re gonna smash hammers into their face to looksmaxx, or they’re gonna watch something else. And I wanna be the something else.

Warzel: So when you say you’re clipping this stuff up—just from a logistical standpoint, a standard podcast, how many things are you trying to pull out of it from there? Is it like five, 10 things like that? Is it 20? Is it two or three of the best ones? How broad does the volume game go with that on a podcast level?

Elson: So we’re just getting started with this. So I don’t think we figured this out. I just want to be very clear. My position is that I’m observing that this is where the media ecosystem is headed. And so I’m doing my best to make sure that we, as a media organization, keep up with the times. The system that we have in place is that we produce at least two clips for every podcast episode we record. I would love to create more. I would love to create three, four, five clips. Eventually, you know, it might get a little bit overwhelming and not that interesting. And so you want to make sure that you’re controlling for quality in some capacity. But for me, what is essential is that we have a system. And we have a cadence of taking the content that we’re producing on our main channel—which is our podcast—but then making sure that we actually put it out there to social media. Because, I mean, this is the thing that I write about in my article. I have been shocked by how many people come up to me on the street. They say, “Hey, Ed Elson, great to see you, big fan.” I say, “Oh, awesome; you listen to the podcast?” And they say, “No, I actually don’t listen to the podcast, but I watch your clips.” And the first time I heard that, I go, “What? You watch the clips?” I mean, the clips are supposed to be … I thought the clips was the advertisement for the podcast.

Warzel: Right. The gateway drug, yeah.

Elson: That’s why we were doing it to start. And then I realized: No, the clips are the content. That’s what people are consuming. That’s where they’re spending their time. So you can’t treat this stuff as promotional material anymore. You have to treat it as real content. You have to acknowledge the fact that young kids today, they’re not seeing the link that you put up on their social-media feeds. Like hey, click here to watch the podcast. They’re not even doing that. They’re only watching the clips. And that’s the way they see you. So that means investing a lot more time and having a lot more thoughtful conversation about: Okay, how do we make sure that our content really resonates on these platforms? Whereas recently, I think, especially legacy media, we’ve been kind of treating it as an afterthought.

Warzel: Is this a euphemism in your mind? Like: People don’t read anymore. People don’t watch, listen to the whole podcast anymore. Or is this in your mind much closer to the actual ground truth?yYou are not seeing people engage much or in the same order of magnitude at all with the original unit of content?

Elson: I think it’s 100 percent true, but let’s maybe be specific about what the phrase is. It’s that people increasingly don’t read anymore. So my position isn’t that no one reads. Of course people still read. And I think that there are some young people who read. But I do know that reading rates are on the decline. And I also know that the amount of time that we’re spending on social media, versus any other platform, is on the up. And we can also just see this in the incredible explosion of a platform like TikTok, which has … literally their revenues have 10x over the past few years. Meta, their revenues have tripled. That to me isn’t a euphemism. That’s just the truth. And I think the question is: To what extent do we want to take that seriously? Because, you know, there’s a question of, like, how long will this continue?

Is this line of reading rates just gonna go down and down and down to the point where no one reads? That might be overshooting it a little bit. But I don’t think that we can assume that the line’s gonna just not keep going down. I think we have to assume that, actually, the environment is really changing. And we’ve seen this reflected in the stock prices of a lot of these companies. Warner Brothers Discovery, down like 30 percent over the past few years. Same with Disney, Comcast; a lot of these companies are getting battered.

I view this as a “let’s just reckon with reality” moment and figure out what to do about it. And my belief is that there are things that we can do about it. I think that legacy media can keep up. I think that legacy media has the smartest minds in all of media. And I also think they produce the best content in all of media. It’s just that they haven’t spent enough time focusing on how to package the content and how to distribute it. And I think if we were to take that more seriously, I think that it might be a different story. And you’d see a generation of kids who are actually getting stupider—like we’re seeing literacy rates, math rates going down—I would hope that that might start to reverse that trend.

Warzel: To zoom out on the blog post, the reason that we’re here. About the clip economy: The argument is that these one-minute-style videos—the things that like, if you go online on any social-media platform—this is what you’re mostly engaging with. You’re saying that essentially this isn’t the promotional stuff. This is not just some sort of nugget. This is really where a lot of the media seems to be headed. And so I wanted to start small here. You talk about teasing out the difference between a short-form video and the clip industry and clips. What is the distinction in your mind, and why is that important?

Elson: Yeah, so the distinction between short-form content as a category versus clips as a category. My argument: I think a lot of people know that short-form content is on the rise. My argument is that we haven’t paid enough attention to this format of clips specifically. And my definition of a clip is: It is a snippet of something else, which is usually long form. And it’s usually a podcast, it’s usually a livestream. It might be, you know, even like a snippet from like a cable-news show, like a TV program. That’s a “clip” to me.

And what I have observed, over the past really one or two years, is that the algorithm is being largely dominated by that format. It’s that you have something like a podcast, and then you just see little moments of it on your social-media feed. And that’s your experience of those podcasts.

And so that to me was a very striking moment, because it made me realize that we were treating the TV shows and the podcasts and the livestreams as if that was where all the action was happening. Like, I need to make sure that this podcast is excellent, and it’s going to be 30 minutes long, and I’m going to make sure that it’s perfect. And then we have the great hook, and we have the intro, and then we have the music. All of this stuff. And I realized, like, Wait, that’s not how people are consuming this. They’re consuming it through the clips.

So why aren’t we paying attention to that? And then essentially what my article does is just prove how that is the case for a lot of the most successful new-media enterprises over the past few years. And I picked three of the most controversial new-media superstars who got famous off of clips. I chose Hasan Piker, this progressive, controversial livestreamer. Nick Fuentes, this white-nationalist livestreamer. And then Clavicular, who’s this guy who got famous for looksmaxxing, where he believes that the most important thing in the world is that your physical appearance is a 10 out of 10. This guy is huge, massive. I mean, we were just looking at his total number of clips on Kick. It came in at over 2 billion views on clips.

But when you look at their actual shows, the numbers are in a completely different world. So we looked at the average concurrent views across these livestreamers’ shows. For Hasan Piker, it was around 30,000. For Nick Fuentes, it was around 20,000. For Clavicular, it was even less than that. It was about 16,000. That is not a big number for a lot of these shows. And yet that is the average for their concurrent views.

And then you look at the clip viewership. And we just looked at a small sample size, because there have been a lot of clips. But for Hasan Piker, the average was above 700,000 views. For Nick Fuentes, the average was above half a million views. For Clavicular, it was a quarter of a million. I looked back at one of Nick Fuentes’s most recent clips. It reached 11 million people, which is more than the population of New York City. And so what I started to realize is: It’s not about the show. It’s about the clip. That’s how these guys are reaching people. And not only that, that is how the content is primarily being consumed. So it’s not just a medium to get the word out about who you are. It’s the entire medium.

And then I go on to talk about this company, which I realized actually just profited off of this trend. And that is this company TBPN. What is the average view count on their livestreams? 7,000. What is the average view count on their clips? 257,000. So this again is a company that figured out: It’s not about the show, it’s not about the podcast, it’s not about the news show or the TV program or the livestream. It is solely about the clips. This is where we’re headed. And an entire new economy is emerging out of this, which I think we must call the “clip economy.”

Warzel: Well, what’s interesting about all the people that you bring up—the thing they all have in common is the streaming practice that they have is long in duration, right? Like, Clavicular will do, you know, five, six, seven, eight hours. Obviously like Hasan is every day from multiple hours a day. I think it used to be more, but it was in the, you know, eight-hour-like range. So there’s this unbelievable amount of content from which to choose from. And in this sense too, it’s like, you know, so much of livestreaming is predicated on this idea of just like, “Come hang out.” Right? Like “Come, just stay here, have it in the background.” It’s sort of the AM talk-radio style of thing. And then the clipping thing seemed to be, to me, it seems to be almost this savior, right? Because after a certain amount of time, essentially what they’re doing is: They are packaging this greatest-hits thing and giving it this way to monetize. Do you think it’s sort of like an outgrowth of that? Was planned? Or do you think it’s kind of an unplanned, like, saving grace of this livestreaming, long-streaming format?

Elson: I think that it probably wasn’t planned. This livestreaming thing started to get popular. And I think they started to realize over time, What else am I going to do with this? How am I going to reach people on social media? How am I going to reach people on these video platforms? Oh, well, I have this bank of eight hours of content. I might as well clip a little bit of a video and then put it out there.

And then once in a while, those videos go completely viral. And this happens even with us. I mean, I had been saying some pretty strong words about OpenAI about a year or two ago. I was basically saying that I didn’t think that their financials made a whole lot of sense. And I’ve been saying that a lot on the podcast. And, you know, some people who listen to the podcast say, oh, that’s interesting. Then I put out a video—just a clip of me saying the same thing I’ve said over and over again—and it explodes. It goes viral. Ben Shapiro is talking about it. I see it; I start getting requests for interviews about it. And I suddenly realize, Oh, that’s where I should technically be investing my time if I want to get the word out.

So I think a lot of these guys realized that. But there’s one person who really pioneered this and who turned it into a real operation, and that is Andrew Tate.

Warzel: Yeah; walk me through that. How did he stumble upon this as a business model?

Elson: So I don’t purport to know how he figured it out. But he figured it out, and he was the first one to figure it out. And he did that in 2021. And that is—he created this community that he called Hustlers University. And he said that this was gonna be, “If you wanna escape the matrix”—which is his sort of tagline—“then join Hustlers University, and I’ll teach you how to do it.” And what happened when you join Hustlers University is he gave you instructions. And he said: Watch my livestream and use these clipping tools, and I want you to clip up as many segments of my livestream as you can possibly imagine. I want you to get up on social media, create a social-media account that is related to Andrew Tate and Hustlers University. And I want you to post as many clips as humanly possible from those accounts. And at the end of each clip, you’re going to add an affiliate link to Hustlers University. You’re going to get people to join the group, when you’ll pay a little subscription fee to join the group. And I will pay you a commission for getting people into the group. And eventually, he was getting billions and billions of views on TikTok—not from his own account, but from many different accounts.

Eventually, Andrew Tate gets banned because he’s racist, he’s sexist, he’s misogynistic. He says a ton of awful, awful things. TikTok decides to ban him. And yet his clips live on, because he has a clipping army that is out there on TikTok, out on the platform, that continues to post the clips for him. The same thing is true on Instagram.

You’ll notice a lot of these guys are actually banned from platforms. Nick Fuentes is banned from Instagram. He’s banned from YouTube. So then the question is: Why is Nick Fuentes all over Instagram? How is that possible? It’s because other people, clippers, are posting his content all over Instagram. And that’s how people who are on Instagram are finding Nick Fuentes, despite the fact that he is banned.

We’re seeing this with a lot of other streamers, too. Where they basically—I mean, we’re seeing this proliferation of clipping agencies. These agencies that just clip your content. And this guy, there’s a livestreamer, this guy called N3on. And I was looking at his livestream recently, and he revealed on his livestream how much he pays his clippers each month. He’s talking with someone, and this young woman asked him, “Wait, so how much do you pay them?” And he’s kind of playing a guessing game, and he finally reveals the answer. He pays his clippers $1 million a month to post clips of his content all throughout the internet. He says that one of the clippers that he thinks is really good, he paid them more than $100,000 in a single month.

So people are now making millions of dollars a year just to clip this stuff. It’s become its own ecosystem, its own economy, that only a few people have really figured out. And they have gamed it relentlessly. And Andrew Tate is the one who started it.

Warzel: Okay, I’ve been wanting to have this conversation. Because I think it speaks to this broader confusion that we’re all experiencing right now, with attention and virality. This story makes me think of another story that’s been making the rounds recently. This piece in Wired, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, about this agency called Chaotic Good—which creates networks of social-media pages, usually on TikTok, and uses them to drive music from a band that they’re getting paid by into a recommendation algorithm, right?

And this Wired article suggests—though there’s not like a ton of conclusive evidence—they were working with this indie band, Geese, which blew up over the last year. And basically the article talks about how there’s been all these accusations that Geese is an industry plant, right? That their success is a little bit artificial. And the thrust of the piece is that Chaotic Good, this marketing firm, is basically creating all these third-party posts, paying other people to do this work, to seed the algorithm. And that it’s basically saying, like … I mean, the Wired headline uses the word psyop.

What I think is really interesting about this is, the discourse around all of this has missed this idea. Like, it’s not about whether they’re good or bad, or whether you’re getting … it’s simply about discovery. It’s simply that this band, and every other band, they’re all competing. You can make stuff that’s good; you can make stuff that’s bad. It doesn’t matter. It’s so hard to break through, regardless of your talent level.

And so what is paramount in this—and this is why I think the clipping industry is so important—is that it’s not just a billboard, right? It’s just actually elbowing out other people from the conversation. It’s showing the algorithm, whether it’s true or false: Everyone’s talking about this band. Everyone’s talking about this influencer. Right? And that is the most crucial thing that you can have in this attention economy right now, just people talking about you.

Elson: That’s right. 100 percent. And I will give you an example. Last week, I walked by a coffee shop that’s in my neighborhood, in Williamsburg, that is fine. I’ve been there. The coffee’s okay. I see a line around the block that continues around the block, and then continues for two more blocks. Randomly. I asked them, “What happened? Like, why are you guys here?” And I learned it’s because they recently went viral on TikTok. That’s why they’re all there.

And I would bet that there is a significant percentage of your listeners right now who have had a similar experience where they walk by a shop. They walk by, especially if you live in New York City, and randomly, everyone is waiting in line for this thing. And you will find that every single time that happens, the reason their business explodes is simply because they randomly went viral on TikTok. And so what you have is that the algorithm is the most consequential force in the entire industry. And it’s not just media. It’s literally every single industry.

If you can go viral, if your clip works that one time, that can literally be the difference between you going out of business and becoming the greatest success story anyone’s ever seen. Is it because you guys were incredibly good at making coffee? Is it because you have an awesome vibe in the restaurant? No, not necessarily. It’s probably because you happened to stumble upon a good moment in the algorithm. Something worked in that little video, and then it went viral. Everyone’s talking about it. What should we do this weekend? Oh, why don’t we just randomly go to that coffee place that we talked about that I saw on TikTok recently? You show up, and then the line is literally like seven blocks long, at which point maybe rethink your decision. But that is what’s happening across most industries.

And I think the question—and this is where it gets really interesting for media—the question is: How do we convert that into dollars? And this is the conversation that I often have with legacy-media people. Where I’ll say, “Clips are everything. You have to be on clips.” And they say, “Yeah, but there’s no money in clips.” Like, okay, you got a quarter of a million views on your clip. Well, I’m not selling ads on that. What I am selling ads on is, I’m selling ads on my podcast and the ad break, and I’m also selling ads on my TV program, on cable news, et cetera. So here is the answer: Advertise on the clips. That’s what you have to do.

And so my suggestion for legacy media, if you want to keep up—if you’re Disney, if you’re Comcast, if you’re Warner Brothers Discovery—what they don’t realize is that they are sitting on the largest clip mine in the history of the world. Because they have decades’ worth of content that they have been producing, and it’s good content.

This is the thing people forget about legacy media. Legacy media is actually really good at creating original content. They create great movies, great TV shows. They’re awesome at it. But what they haven’t done is tapped into the clip economy. And so what they need to do is: They need to start clipping up their content, posting it on their social-media channels, and then advertising directly through the clip. Don’t even let tech touch it, because all that’s been happening is that all the money goes to Meta, and it goes to TikTok and all the tech platforms that are facilitating our addiction to these clips. So don’t even let them get a piece of the pie. It’s gonna be dystopian, and it’s gonna be kind of a shitty experience for consumers. I get it. I don’t necessarily want it. But if we’re talking about how to make money, and how to actually win the media ecosystem and stop getting beaten to death by big tech that continues to win, I think this is the only way out.

Warzel: On a previous episode of this podcast, I had Derek Thompson on to talk about this piece he wrote. It’s titled “Everything Is Television.” But there’s this idea, right, that we talked about this—not only are human beings not meant to all be broadcasting to everyone all the time, everywhere in this way. And to think, you know, not all of us should be thinking like TV producers, when we’re just trying to get people to pay attention to something that we like, or trying to get some attention online. There’s just a real attentional effect here. And probably we don’t know what that is long term, right?

But the clips are a medium that not only promote binging; they’re also this very lean-back experience, right? This idea of like, you are kind of flicking through, you can pay nominal amount of attention to it. You can log what you like, what you don’t like. Obviously TikTok has taken such advantage of this. You know, you’re basically sending it a signal every single time you swipe. When you think about that versus the engagement of something like reading—the deep thinking, the deep work—versus the enjoyable, I would say, experience of clips, right? Like, “the best of whatever thing.” That makes a lot of sense.

I don’t think we need to clutch our pearls about that, but I’m also curious where you think this is heading in that attentional capacity.

Elson: I mean, I’m pretty firm about this. I think it’s heading to an extremely bad place. And we don’t even need to theorize on this, because we know that it’s happening. We have seen a marked decline in—we talked about test scores, which I think is something that’s under-talked about, which is that young people are getting stupider because they have these extremely high rates of ADHD and attention-deficit disorders. They can’t pay attention to anything.

We saw a rise in depression and even suicidal ideation and even suicide itself after the introduction of the smartphone. I mean, if you look back from 2012 to now, all of those lines basically just go up and to the right. And then I think the most important thing, that I think is also underrated—although it’s now getting a lot more attention, which is a good thing—is the effect that it’s had on young people’s social lives. And I think the most important and damning stat about young people today is that nearly a fifth of Gen Z say they have zero close friends whatsoever.

We’ve never seen anything like that before. I mean, if you look back at like 1990 and you polled Americans: “How many of you have no close friends whatsoever?” The number was 3 percent. And it’s gone up and up and up and up. And now we’re seeing record levels of loneliness. And to me, I mean, it’s directly in line with the amount of time that we’re spending on our phones.

The question then becomes: What do we wanna do about it? To me, when we start to talk at this high level, this is a regulation problem. This is not on media creators and content creators to figure out how to not make young children, young individuals in America lonely. To me, that’s on government. And it’s government’s job to come up with creative solutions. For example, let’s ban social media for children. Done. That’s a simple one. Australia’s already done it. Spain is working on it. France is working on it. Denmark’s working on it. Practically all of Europe is working on this. They’re basically saying: Oh yeah, this was a bad thing for children. This was not good. Let’s get rid of it, and let’s just ban it for children.

So that’s something that we could do in the U.S. if we wanted to really get to the root cause of the problem here. We could start to retrain young people’s minds such that they are reading books and getting outside and socializing with people, such that they do learn how to actually establish relationships with people.

But when it comes to people like us—content creators, people in media—my view is we should be putting stuff out there. We should be competing with Clavicular. I would rather a young person watches my video where I talk about ways to establish economic security in America versus a young person watch a video of Clavicular smashing his face and doing meth off camera. And I think it’s incumbent on everyone who cares about their work in media to think quite deeply about this question and recognize that if they’re not watching you, they’re watching Nick Fuentes, they’re watching Hasan Piker, they’re watching Clavicular. They’re watching all of these guys. If you don’t get yourself out there on these social-media platforms, that’s who’s gonna fill the void.

Warzel: Do you think that the trend line has to just keep going this way? One thing that I was thinking about at the beginning of this year is an idea of—you can call it social media, but I think it’s more of like a phone backlash, culturally. This idea that just sitting with your face buried in your phone when you’re supposed to be in a social setting—that’s lame, right? Like, being identified culturally as This is loser behavior.

And it makes me wonder, thinking about the clip—to bring it to the clipping stuff—there’s an exhaustion that I think anyone feels with this. Like, yes, it is rad to be able to just watch the best of everything that anyone makes and has to give, in these short consumable bursts. But do you think that there’s the possibility for a coming sort of societal backlash on all this? Where we’re just like, “Hey, you know what. Waking up to the idea that there’s one precious life here.” Right? And there’s a lot of great stuff out there beyond the black mirror screen of our phones.

Elson: I think it would be similar to saying, “Why doesn’t the cocaine addict wake up one day and realize that cocaine isn’t good for them?” I think it’s something that—

Warzel: Some people hit rock bottom, though, and seek help.

Elson: Right. So I would add, some people do get rid of their addictions. And it’s a very, very painful and intentional process. It requires extensive rehabilitation. It requires resources and investment. Like the idea of shirking a deeply, deeply held addiction that is having a negative impact on your life—that is no small matter. And I think it is possible that we could get there. But that would mean treating the addiction with the level of gravity that you would for, say, a drug addiction or an alcohol addiction. It would mean taking the addiction very seriously and, more importantly, recognizing that it is an addiction.

And my view is that it is an addiction. I mean, the definition of an addiction—some people are addicted to a lot of things, but we call it an addiction once it is having negative impacts on our lives. There’s plenty of data out there to prove that that is what the phones have done to us. And that is what social media has done to us too.

But I agree with you. We should really just focus on the phones. That’s what they’ve done. And so to me, if it’s going to happen, it needs to be a very, very strong societal collective push against the phone.

Warzel: The clipping economy, what it seems to do, to me, is really scramble the traditional ideas of popularity, Clavicular, according to Kick and the clipping people: 2.2 billion views from a single creator in a one-month period. Is Clavicular popular, though? Right? Like, he’s bringing in all these views. They may be artificially seeded from these clipping companies: people getting paid to just take them and post them. Right? He is everywhere. You can’t deny that. Is that popularity? Does that matter? What is popularity now?

Elson: I think that’s popularity. And this is what I’m trying to reframe about these clips. A view is a view. My podcast, the way that we make money is someone listens to the podcast, and then I report it as a number. And then I send it to the advertiser, and then they pay me some money because there was a number on the screen.

And the same is true of a clip. And you could put whatever you want in that clip. I mean, this is an advertising-based system, and all that matters is that you get in front of the screen. The way that we’ve been treating clips and short-form content and content on social media is that we’ve kind of presented it as something lesser-than. Like, it’s not; it doesn’t matter if it’s a clip. Like “That’s not real popularity, because it’s just clips.” But in my view, a view is a view. A listen is a listen. An impression is an impression—

Warzel: And dollars are dollars.

Elson: And dollars are dollars.

Warzel: I think that’s a great place to leave it. Ed, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain and breaking down the dystopian clip economy for us.

Elson: Thank you for having me. That was fun.

[Music]

Warzel: Thanks again to my guest, Ed Elson. Before we go, a few thoughts. I think that the world Ed is describing here is very much the one that we’re currently living in, and I think we’re gonna see a lot of people taking Ed’s advice and monetizing their clips. And the trends that he speaks to—about consumption, these shorter attention spans, the continued desire to engage with content as shallowly as possible—that’s all real.

What I’m not certain of, though, is whether this trend of clipping is sustainable. It’s so easy to binge clips, and trust me, I do a fair bit of it myself. And low-touch consumption isn’t going away. But for all of that, I also see a good bit of longing for depth.

Marathon video podcasts from the manosphere to political livestreamers got popular not just because of clippers, but because people could immerse themselves in a creator’s world and build parasocial relationships. The internet has long rewarded rabbit holes and obsessiveness, and I think it’s going to continue to do that. Even if a fraction of the clip audience watches or listens to the entirety of something, that audience tends to be very engaged and usually motivated to pay for that content.

Plus—and this is what I think is the bigger thing—reducing everything to the atomic unit of the clip is pretty soul sucking. As that whole Wired story about the band Geese and the pay for play, social clipping, shows people get mad when they feel they’ve been tricked. Or if they feel as if they’re liking something wasn’t their idea to begin with.

Like any binging behavior, mainlining clips on an infinite scroll feels really great up until the point where it doesn’t. Social platforms tend to turn us into the worst versions of ourself when it comes to consumption. But I’d like to think that there’s an end point to all of that. That maybe all of this frenetic social-media experimentation, all of this catering to the algorithm instead of the real human beings on the other side of it—I wonder if that will feel tacky and cloying. And that maybe, just maybe, people will yearn for a little bit of friction.

Now, if you’re still here, that’s it for the show. If you liked what you saw, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel or on Apple or Spotify or wherever it is you get your podcasts. And if you’d like to support this work and the work of my colleagues, besides watching the clips on social media, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. That’s TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you on the internet.

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

Who Came Up With That?

2026-04-24T10:39:00-04:00

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

One of my favorite works on the history of ideas is an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible, titled “Whomst Among Us Let the Dogs Out.” For most of the show, an artist named Ben Sisto investigates the origins of Baha Men’s 2000 earworm, “Who Let the Dogs Out,” tracing the song back, across multiple versions, to a chant from a 1986 Texas high-school football game. Sisto’s ostensible goal is to figure out who deserves “credit” for a regrettably unforgettable musical hook; his results show, instead, that many ideas are less original, and more communal, than we might imagine. This larger truth also applies to, say, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as well as the subject of a recent essay by my colleague Olga Khazan—Mel Robbins’s blockbuster self-help book, The Let Them Theory.

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

This week, Khazan looked into allegations from a woman named Cassie Phillips that Robbins had appropriated her idea. In 2022, Phillips went modestly viral on social media with a poem, nearly every line of which contained the phrase Let them. The central idea—the same one that Robbins expounds in her book—is that we cannot control the negative behavior of others, and should focus instead on ourselves. Phillips said she never sought to monetize the statement, which she had tattooed on her forearm, and she’s unsure whether she wants compensation from Robbins, although she opposes Robbins’s attempt to trademark the phrase.

Robbins, who first used the phrase publicly in 2023, said that she never saw Phillips’s poem, and that the idea came to her from a piece of advice her daughter had given her. Yet, as Khazan writes, “Robbins also acknowledges that many people and groups, including the Stoics and the Buddhists, have previously lauded the virtues of detachment. Indeed, between Seneca and Mel Robbins came ‘Let It Be,’ I’m OK—You’re OK, and ‘Shake It Off.’” Phillips, for her part, said she was inspired by the words of a Tyler Perry character, Madea.

I doubt that the source of the “let them” idea will be definitively litigated in a court of law. In 2017, I tried to make sense of another accusation of IP theft, in which a writer named Charles Green laid out a detailed claim that his unpublished manuscript served as the template for Chad Harbach’s literary baseball novel, The Art of Fielding. Green’s copyright-infringement suit was eventually dismissed; a judge examined both works and declared that they “are not substantially similar.” Green’s list of eerie parallels included two swimming-pool metaphors and a climactic injury in the bottom of the ninth inning with two outs and two strikes. These are, in fact, common tropes of fiction going at least as far back as Bernard Malamud’s novel The Natural.

American law sets a high bar in such cases for the same reason that it allows copyrights to expire and makes libel cases hard to win: An individual’s rights must be balanced against the common benefit of a free marketplace of ideas. This doesn’t mean that unique phrases can be stolen with impunity, or even that people shouldn’t feel morally obligated to acknowledge the sources of their inspiration. But it is also worth acknowledging, as Shakespeare was not the first or the last to say, that nothing will come of nothing. Or, to put it another way: We all let the dogs out.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Stefanie Keenan / Getty.

Where Did ‘Let Them’ Come From?

By Olga Khazan

Years before Mel Robbins published her best-selling self-help book, a struggling writer posted a poem with a similar message.

Read the full article.

What to Read

Split Tooth, by Tanya Tagaq

You may know Tagaq, an Inuk artist from the Canadian high Arctic, for her innovative improvisational throat singing, or from her appearance on the fourth season of True Detective—but she’s also a writer. Of all the books on this list, this one surprised me the most. Although published as a novel, Split Tooth is a collection of essays, stories, songs, poems, prayers, drawings, and passages lifted from her journals, all inspired by the small Inuk town she grew up in. Memoiristic explorations of lemmings, foxes, childhood violence, and pregnancy give way to a sequence of love stories dedicated to the northern lights, diving into mythology and spirituality. Most exciting is how Tagaq decenters the human race, openly wondering whether it would be so bad if our species died off. Are humans better or more important than any other creatures or nonliving objects? she asks, writing, “Is the air more enlightened than we are?” I love having my assumptions disrupted in this way, and she does it with electric, offhand confidence. — Deb Olin Unferth

From our list: Nine books to reset your view of the world

Out Next Week

📚 Ghost Town, by Tom Perrotta

📚 Fat Swim, by Emma Copley Eisenberg

📚 Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction, by Laura McGrath

Your Weekend Read

Illustration by The Atlantic

The Rise of CliffsNotes Cinema

By Shirley Li

Updating a classic isn’t inherently a bad idea; Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, a dutiful adaptation of Shelley’s 1818 novel, just won three Oscars, and Fennell’s Wuthering Heights has enjoyed an excellent box-office run. Yet most of these projects have been as superficial as Swift’s single [“The Fate of Ophelia”], in which Ophelia survives just by pledging “allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes”—a cheeky reference to Swift’s fiancé, to be sure, but Ophelia’s problem was never really about the vibes. That reductiveness, though, works far better in a four-minute pop song than in a feature-length film. Call it the rise of CliffsNotes Cinema—watered-down transformations that offer glossy but thin summaries of the originals and strip away the challenging material that helped turn them into cultural mainstays in the first place. These movies make the provocative palatable: Uncomfortable relationships and nuanced characterizations—essentially, what made the stories endure—get lost in the fog of showy filmmaking.

Read the full article.

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Photos of the Week: Fallen Robot, Scooter Waterfall, Sunrise Panorama

2026-04-24T09:00:00-04:00

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A reveler smokes cannabis at the Mile High 420 Festival in Denver on April 20, 2026.

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Young people take part in an initiation ritual where they are tossed into the air by others using a rug, during a spring festival in Brașov, Romania, on April 17, 2026.

Martin Meissner / AP

Artists perform during the opening of Hannover Messe, the world's largest industrial-technology trade fair, in Hannover, Germany, on April 19, 2026.

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Davros the Dalek interacts with visitors to Scarborough during the Sci-Fi Scarborough weekend on April 19, 2026, in Scarborough, England.

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A street-food vendor uses a cellphone while waiting for customers on a street in Hanoi, Vietnam, on April 17, 2026.

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Staff members carry a humanoid robot that crashed after the finish line of the second Beijing E-Town Half-Marathon and Humanoid-Robot Half-Marathon in Beijing, China, on April 19, 2026.

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A woman uses an LED face mask for skin regeneration at the health-and-fitness trade show FIBO in Cologne, Germany, on April 17, 2026.

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The sun sets behind Saint Nicholas Naval Cathedral located on Kronstadt Island in the Gulf of Finland, outside St. Petersburg, Russia, on April 19, 2026.

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People use their cellphones to take a picture of a giant inflatable octopus clinging to a building facade and extending into the interior—an installation that is part of the “Have a Puffy Summer” pop-up exhibition by Italian luxury-fashion brand Moncler—during Milan Design Week 2026 in Milan, Italy, on April 20, 2026.

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Visitors gather around a 5.2-meter-tall “puppy” made of flowers and greenery at the 2026 Shanghai International Flower Show on April 19, 2026, in Shanghai, China.

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Visitors view the Chichibu Shibazakura flower festival in Saitama, Japan, on April 17, 2026.

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A bee gathers pollen from a rhododendron at Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York City on April 18, 2026.

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A pair of storks settle into a nest on a power pole near Kamenz, Germany, on April 21, 2026.

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A rainbow appears beneath clouds lit by the setting sun in Montevideo, Uruguay, on April 21, 2026.

Matthew Hinton / AP

Michael Brennan sends mud and water flying as he tries to hit his ball out of floating debris on the 18th hole, only to have it land back in the water, during the first round of the PGA Zurich Classic golf tournament in Avondale, Louisiana, on April 23, 2026.

Alexander Manzyuk / Reuters

A skier in a festive costume attempts to cross a pool of water at the foot of a slope while competing in the annual Gornoluzhnik amateur event marking the end of a ski season at the Bobrovy Log fun park in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, on April 19, 2026.

Michael Probst / AP

Icelandic horses play at a stud farm in Wehrheim, Germany, on April 21, 2026.

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A glass bottle is covered in ice, resting on a table on the Brocken near Schierke, Germany, on April 20, 2026.

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An aerial view of Estadio Más Monumental Antonio Vespucio Liberti, prior to the Torneo Apertura 2026 Superclásico match between River Plate and Boca Juniors on April 19, 2026, in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Edgar Su / Reuters

Motorists take the ramp off Taipei Bridge, at a location known to locals as the “Scooter Waterfall,” during morning rush hour in Taipei, Taiwan, on April 15, 2026.

Robert F. Bukaty / AP

Brigadier General Richard Reale Jr. of the National Lancers, dressed as the American patriot Paul Revere, reenacts the 1775 Boston-to-Lexington ride to alert colonists of approaching British troops, on April 20, 2026, in Boston.

James D. Morgan / Getty for Amazon

An eastern barred bandicoot is released at Conservation Hill Reserve on April 21, 2026, in Phillip Island, Australia. Eastern barred bandicoots, bred for survival by conservationists, took their first steps onto Phillip Island, marking a milestone in efforts to restore the species following previous releases of the animals, which failed to thrive.

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Volunteers work to keep a stranded humpback whale hydrated, in the Baltic Sea, off the German island of Poel, on April 21, 2026.

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A Cuvier’s dwarf caiman rests in its enclosure at the Parc zoologique de Paris also known as the Zoo de Vincennes, in Paris, France, on April 17, 2026.

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A sunrise view of Guanabara Bay during a rainy morning in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on April 21, 2026

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A tree stands in the sunshine beside a field in Sulz am Neckar, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, on April 22, 2026.

Texans Will Decide if Jesus Was a Lefty

2026-04-24T07:45:00-04:00

Updated at 11:25 a.m. ET on April 24, 2026

While some might pray for hope or peace in such dark times, others are praying for the death of Texas Democrat James Talarico, who is running for the U.S. Senate. During a recent episode of the right-wing Protestant podcast Reformation Red Pill, host Joshua Haymes told the pastor Brooks Potteiger that he prays that “God kills” Talarico, given that the politician seems to be possessed by demons. Potteiger agreed, offering that Talarico should be “crucified with Christ.” Both Haymes and Potteiger later insisted that their remarks were not sincere expressions of violent intent, but rather metaphorical calls for Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, to find salvation in their brand of Christianity. Talarico shrewdly responded by offering forgiveness: “You may pray for my death, Pastor, but I still love you. I love you more than you could ever hate me.”

A cherubic and well-scrubbed 36-year-old state lawmaker, Talarico seems lately to invite such vitriol. This despite the fact that he has run a generally positive campaign. Born and raised in Texas, he is campaigning on a fairly standard Democratic platform: He supports higher wages, labor organizing, comprehensive immigration reform, and increasing firearm regulations. Talarico’s sermonic speeches are largely about inclusivity and justice.

What has made his candidacy so controversial is what he says about God. An avowed progressive, Talarico argues that the country’s powerful Christian conservatives have distorted the lessons of their faith. The words of Jesus, he insists, endorse policies the left embraces. In deep-red evangelical Texas, does his brand of Christian politics have a chance?

In a 2021 debate on transgender issues in the Texas House of Representatives, Talarico said that “God is both masculine and feminine, and everything in between. God is nonbinary.” In a 2025 conversation with Joe Rogan, Talarico argued that “this idea that there is a set Christian orthodoxy on the issue of abortion is just not rooted in Scripture,” explaining (somewhat confusingly) that because God sought Mary’s consent before the conception of Jesus, Christians ought to conclude that creation requires permission—and therefore that women should have access to legal abortion.

As soon as Talarico’s primary victory over Jasmine Crockett was certain, conservatives called on those remarks and others to swiftly and uniformly deride his Christianity as blasphemous and insincere. “Talarico is a leftist atheist’s idea of a good Christian,” Allie Beth Stuckey, a Texas-based evangelical-conservative influencer, wrote in The Daily Wire. She accused him of being “a progressive culture warrior in lockstep with the secular world” and “uninterested in foundational Christian principles like sin, repentance, or salvation.” A spokesperson for the conservative group Turning Point USA accused Talarico of speaking “the language of an evangelical while completely undermining the central truth claims of the Scripture.”

That such an even-tempered candidate would attract such attacks reveals just how much Republicans stand to lose if Talarico wins. Talarico’s candidacy not only threatens Republican control of Texas and Republican control of the Senate; it also signals an appetite for faith in politics beyond the confines of conservatism.

[Elaine Godfrey: Things are about to get ugly in Texas]

An alliance with right-wing Christians has long played a valuable role for Republicans at the ballot box, most notably in the elections of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Talarico, following in the example of progressive Christians from Martin Luther King Jr. to Raphael Warnock, seems determined to help break this monopoly by offering an alternative vision for Christians alienated by the right. His campaign is gaining momentum at a time when many of the administration’s steadfast Christian backers—alarmed by the president’s bullying campaign against Pope Leo XIV in recent weeks, among other heresies—have been rethinking their support. Talarico is essentially campaigning not only for a Senate seat in a red state, but to redefine who gets to be a good Christian in America.

Talarico has made it his mission to confront what he describes as the unbiblical, un-Christian brand of right-wing Christian nationalism rampant in the MAGA movement. He is particularly concerned about efforts to use the state to enforce this more punitive vision of Christianity. He has described Christian nationalism as the worship of power instead of Christ, and “a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”

The Democratic primary brought 2.3 million voters to the polls—nearly double the turnout of the preceding midterm primaries—and Talarico won the race handily by a seven-point margin. Although Crockett’s campaign was trained on bringing out the progressive base, polling shows that Talarico’s winning coalition not only included the majority of white, Hispanic, and male voters, but also led Crockett among both the young and Democrat-leaning independents.

Yet Talarico faces significant hurdles to victory. To win in November, he will need to widen his coalition, but the moderate Christian conservatives and independents he needs to attract are likely wary of his unorthodox approach to faith. James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, told me that although Talarico’s name recognition and fundraising efforts have skyrocketed thanks to prominent media interviews and fawning profiles, the reality is that most Texans who consider religion important in their lives are Republicans who are unlikely to be persuaded by Talarico’s leftward pitch. Such resistance would be in keeping with general voter trends in the United States, where party loyalty often takes precedence over religious affiliation.

In more than a dozen conversations I had with Texan voters, quite a few sounded uncomfortable with Talarico’s leftish blend of faith and politics. Matthew Berry, a Catholic professor of politics in Dallas, told me that although he is open to applying a Christian lens to issues such as immigration and poverty, he is wary of a candidate whose progressive views seem to inform his Christian beliefs, rather than the other way around. “It seems to me like what’s beneath the surface is just a political position delivered in religious language,” Berry said. Likewise, Greg Camacho, a Catholic 36-year-old high-school teacher in San Antonio, agrees with Talarico on a number of policies, including immigration and strengthening the state’s energy grid, but said that he is “allergic” to any candidate who uses faith as part of his “brand.” Camacho added that he found Talarico’s comments about the conception of Jesus implying a right to abortion “silly and unfortunate and almost offensive,” and he doubted that anyone takes that kind of reasoning seriously. Camacho does not plan to vote in the coming election.

Talarico seems to recognize that some Texans mistrust his novel messaging, and that his job now is to convince would-be Christian voters that his faith is an honest reading of scripture—which just so happens to point in a progressive direction. In a written statement issued by his campaign spokesperson, Talarico told me that he does not “believe in a progressive or conservative Christianity; I believe in a biblical Christianity. My faith is rooted in scripture and the teachings of Jesus Christ.” He added that he tries his “best to follow the two commandments Jesus gave us: love God and love neighbor.”

[Heath W. Carter: Americans should stop using the term Christian nationalism]

Cynthia Rigby, one of Talarico’s theology professors at Austin Seminary, challenged the idea that Talarico’s faith is somehow illegitimate or tailored to fit his political agenda. Contrary to the insistence of his critics, she said that “the jury’s out on what’s real Christianity and what’s fake Christianity.” Rigby explained that Presbyterianism, as a product of the Protestant Reformation, is a denomination open to change. Followers take seriously the Latin motto Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, meaning “The church reformed, always reforming.”

Talarico’s faith—and his regular meetings with Black faith leaders in the state—may help him with Black voters, who make up 13 percent of the electorate and who largely went for Crockett in the primary. Lydia Bean, a Democratic candidate for clerk of Tarrant County, suggests that Talarico’s Christian view of social justice “is common sense” for most Black Christians. Nikkie S., a Black woman who did not want her full name used because her job demands political neutrality, told me that she appreciates the way Talarico offers Texans an opportunity to prayerfully reconsider their assumptions about how Christianity speaks to politics.

Though the relationship between Christianity and progressive politics described by Talarico may appear convenient, the same could be said of Christian conservatives. Countless policies, including slavery and welfare reform, have been sold by conservatives as dictates of the faith, even as they are difficult to square with the words of Jesus Christ, who did not care for the exploitation of marginalized people. Jesus, the Prince of Peace, also had few positive things to say about men who gleefully spill blood, yet Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has seemed to revel in the U.S. military’s ability to shower “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” Hegseth has also called on God to deliver “overwhelming violence” to America’s enemies in Iran “in the name of Jesus Christ.”

After the primary runoff on May 26, Talarico will learn whether he will be facing off against incumbent Senator John Cornyn or his challenger, Attorney General Ken Paxton. Voters who worry about Talarico’s deployment of faith may not be reassured by Paxton’s rather punitive approach to Christianity. Arguing that Christianity is central to the country’s “moral heritage,” Paxton has zealously worked to inject Christian elements into secular institutions. After backing a 2025 law mandating that the Ten Commandments be posted in every public-school classroom—which a federal appeals court upheld this week—he has sued school districts that have refused to comply. Paxton has also championed legislation that would allow schools to allot time each day for prayer and Bible reading, and he has gone after Catholic charities that serve recent immigrants.

Paxton has likened Talarico to a “false prophet” and an “anti-Christian.” Speaking with a conservative podcast host earlier this month, Paxton complained that everything Talarico says “is as far from the gospel of Jesus Christ as could possibly be imagined,” and darkly alluded to Jesus’s remark that it would be better to tie a millstone around one’s neck and dive into the sea than to mislead God’s children.

[Peter Wehner: Hegseth’s unholy war]

As Talarico calibrates his balance of faith and politics, he will also need to win over nonreligious people—a core Democratic constituency and roughly a quarter of the state’s population. “I just feel like every time he’s interviewed, it’s just instantly about faith,” David Stroot, a nonreligious landman in Fort Worth, told me, sounding exasperated.

Yet spiritually agnostic voters may take comfort in Talarico’s rejection of Paxton’s willful mix of Church and state. The Democratic candidate has described the separation of the two as something “sacred”—and mainly “for the benefit of the Church.” Talarico has also said that “instead of putting the Ten Commandments in every classroom, instead of forcing schoolchildren to read the Bible against their wills, why don’t we, all of us, look inward and figure out how we can be more Christlike”—a comment that some saw as a swipe at the allegations of bribery, fraud, and adultery that have checkered Paxton’s career. Stroot said he plans to vote for Talarico in November.

A Democratic loss in Texas would be unremarkable. An upset could be a significant salvo in the battle for the soul of the country. In Christian America, evangelical conservatives have held sway for decades. A victory for Talarico could mean that Americans—faithful and otherwise—are hungry for change.

This article originally stated that Talarico supports Medicare for All. In fact, he supports what he calls “Medicare for Y'all,” an option to buy into a public, nonprofit alternative to private insurance.

The Stanford Freshmen Who Want to Rule the World

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

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Updated at 8:22 a.m. ET on April 25, 2026.

When I was a freshman at Stanford University, I learned to shotgun a beer from a guy in a frat. Soon after, he dropped out and started an AI company. Six months later, it was valued at more than $1 billion.

For most students, Stanford is a normal competitive school, where people go to class and coffee shops and fall in love and freak out over finals. But a select few attend something else: a Stanford inside Stanford, where venture capitalists pursue 18- and 19-year-olds, handing out mentorships and money and invites to yacht parties in an attempt to convert promise into profit.

Steve Blank teaches a legendary start-up class at the school, “Lean Launchpad.” Although students have always dreamed big, Blank told me that Stanford has changed in recent years, placing more and more emphasis on the young founders who may kick back some of their future billions to the university. Today, he said, “Stanford is an incubator with dorms.”

AI seems poised to eliminate many entry-level jobs, but it has made this special cohort at Stanford only more valuable. “Our bread and butter is young students,” a VC explained once, while promising me and a small group of other freshmen and sophomores that if we ever had ideas, her firm would help us out. Investors spend all day hanging out at the Coupa Café on campus. Firms such as Sequoia and Pear VC employ talent scouts—a number of them Stanford upperclassmen—to identify the best of the young best. Then they sink their hooks in.

These teenagers are sometimes handed “pre-idea funding”—hundreds of thousands of dollars, or in rare cases, even millions—before they have the glimmer of an actual company in mind. Plied with excess and access, they have little oversight; innovation and fraud co-develop. And all of this is happening as tech companies assume more power over our lives than ever before.

This is a story about the kids being groomed to rule the world—and what they’re learning from those who already do.

California was the site of the great Gold Rush that transformed America. That population of young adventurers, Mark Twain wrote, “gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences.” Yet the fortune generated by Silicon Valley in the past few decades has exceeded the value of all the gold discovered during the first California boom 200 times over, even adjusted for inflation.

Last year, the value of public companies based in the area was $23 trillion—greater than the GDPs of the United Kingdom, Germany, India, and the entire continent of Africa combined. Private companies add at least another $1 trillion. As a data-science professor once joked to me, “I bike past more billionaires on my way to work than there are in the entire Midwest.”

This is an economy that runs on the assumption of potential—on the idea that tech founders will, through brute force, innovate their way into market domination and produce limitless riches. Without a product or revenue, Safe Superintelligence, an AI company with about 20 employees, was valued at $32 billion in 2025; it still hasn’t announced any tech and doesn’t plan to anytime soon.

This essay was adapted from Theo Baker’s forthcoming book, “How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University.”

In this modern-day gold rush, the resource to mine is talent. And nowhere can you find more of it than at Stanford.

Stanford and Silicon Valley are intertwined in a unique fashion. Although the Ivy League has long been a pipeline to Wall Street and Washington, much of Silicon Valley was built on university land. The Stanford Research Park has been home to the headquarters of Hewlett-Packard, Facebook, and Theranos. Nowadays, roughly 150 companies, including Tesla and Google, have offices on campus. (In 2025, Stanford earned $320 million in rent.) The venture-capital firms are just up the hill, ready to fund new start-ups from promising students, most of whom then set up shop nearby, hiring almost exclusively other Stanford students and cycling some of the proceeds back to the university. I took my first college programming course in the Nvidia auditorium, donated by Jensen Huang, the Stanford alum who started the world’s most valuable company. (The world’s second-most-valuable company, Alphabet, was also started by Stanford students.)

For Silicon Valley investors, sorting out the students who can make it big from the wannabes has become a high-stakes competition. Nobody sees value in a “wantapreneur,” as one investor put it to me; they want to identify the “builders.” That’s the name applied to the tech acolytes who have what it takes, and also a title assumed by many pretenders.

The college has large entrepreneurship clubs—the Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students and the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students, known as ASES and BASES. But joining won’t get you into the Stanford inside Stanford. Access to the spaces that actually matter is invite-only—determined less by technical skill than by who you know and by resumé status symbols, such as having done the Neo Accelerator or PearX summer fellowship, run by VCs. Those who have been plucked from the crowd congregate at secret clubs and lavish dinner parties.

When it comes to this Stanford inside Stanford, “you sort of join it freshman year or you don’t,” one student turned founder told me. “It’s totally just vibes.” One funded undergrad told me, “You’re treated like royalty if you say the right things.” Another put it to me more bluntly: “Any VC is begging to shove money down our throat.”

Some of the investors and CEOs competing for teenagers have good reputations. Ann Miura-Ko co-founded a fund that was an early backer of companies such as Lyft and Twitch. She is also an instructor at Stanford. "I look for super-builders and super-thinkers,” she told me; she gathers them in her Mayfield Fellows Program, which promises to transform “12 exceptional students into a cohesive community of entrepreneurs and leaders who define the next decade and shape the world.” Students I’ve spoken with describe Miura-Ko as a supportive and creative mentor. But some of those on the prowl are less interested in what they can do for students than in what students can do for them.

A friend recalled attending a party as a junior and chatting with a former classmate who had gone to work for a company valued at more than $150 billion. “Hey, you should consider coming to work with me,” the guy said. My friend answered noncommittally. Three days later, he was having coffee with the company’s CEO and being offered a minimum $600,000 salary if he dropped out. “I felt like I was being swept off my feet,” he told me. After doing some digging, though, he concluded that the company was shady—he suspected that it had misled investors about the effectiveness of its technology—and turned down the offer. A number of our mutual friends didn’t. One by one, they were persuaded to drop out. “That’s how they recruit,” my friend said. “They’re assassins.”

Stanford students aren’t just going to networking events, of course; they’re also doing plenty of cool things. I know a student who cobbled together a robot to drive around parties serving drinks; another built a tool that can determine exactly where and when video clips were taken through the fluctuation of electromagnetic fields in the background noise.

It’s fun and a little bit surreal to be told that you can just go out and make whatever it is you want to exist. Who wouldn’t want a $10,000 “micro-grant” from the Friends and Family club to spin up a nifty gadget? Or an investment from Z Fellows, which pays students to ignore their coursework for a week and dream up something interesting?

But kids know that even the most lighthearted exercise in creativity can be their ticket to Silicon Valley riches. The project you tinker with in your dorm room goes on your résumé; hacking sessions have corporate sponsors. Z Fellows is “Your Fast Track Into Silicon Valley.” Many students carefully copy the model they’ve seen lead to success: DoorDash started with a few students getting food delivered to their dorm; Snapchat was created when a frat bro wanted to send disappearing sexts to a girl.

But students have the ambition to work on big issues too—and many make substantial advances. Amber Yang made the Forbes “30 Under 30” list at 18 for developing promising technology to track space junk. Her algorithms could predict the position of debris with 98 percent accuracy—far better than NASA models. From almost the second she arrived on campus, the VCs began their pursuit.

“When you’re 18 and you have that amount of attention, you sort of feel like you don’t have a choice but to say yes,” Yang told me over coffee. Yes to the funding, to the programs, to starting a company that might ensure generational wealth before you can legally rent a car. Yang felt herself getting sucked in: “I struggled a lot with figuring out what I really wanted versus how people saw me.”

But when she was offered the Thiel Fellowship, a prestigious program that paid students $100,000 (now $250,000) to drop out of college, she turned it down—an almost-unheard-of decision. Instead, she finished her education. She also helped spin up a club called No Filter. Each week, she and a friend, Noor Siddiqui, invited a tech CEO to come talk to a group of 30 students. With confidentiality rules in place and an invite-only policy, No Filter immediately gained cachet as a place where insiders congregated. VCs, in turn, happily paid for the club, because it provided them with access to this cohort of students. “There were a few VCs who would just give us—and to them, it was nothing—but they gave us $20,000 for the quarter to just go out to dinners, and then we’d meet with the VCs,” Yang said.

Now Siddiqui runs a start-up that lets you select which genes you want your child to have (“Sex is for fun,” she says; “embryo screening is for babies”), and Yang has since become a venture capitalist herself. “I love the Valley, I love Stanford, and I’m, like, the biggest proponent of it,” Yang said. Still, she has come to reject the mythology around Stanford’s success machine, and the idea that it can predictably pluck the unconventional geniuses from the student body—especially when so many of the potential geniuses are just trying to copy the path to success they think older innovators followed.

“From the outside, everyone’s looking in, and they’re like, Oh, this person got that job because they’re just really great, and it’s meritocratic. And that’s what Silicon Valley tells everyone, that it’s meritocratic, right? That’s not the case,” she told me. Success is about “knowing the right person and being connected in a very specific way.”

When Sam Altman dropped out of Stanford in 2005 to start a company, “it was a very different time,” he told me. Today’s wining and dining and systematized recruiting had yet to sweep campus. “None of that stuff happened,” he said. “No VCs were showing up taking people to dinner. There was nothing even close to the idea that clearly exists now of the VC circuit, where the same people go to every event.”

As the former head of Y Combinator and now the CEO of OpenAI, Altman has maintained close ties to campus. He’s one of those billionaires who will respond to a text from a student or throw an investment or a job their way. “I’ve heard there’s these crazy-luxurious trips now and all of this stuff,” Altman said, “and it sounds very awesome.” Yet even he isn’t sure what to think. “I have heard from some of the people who work at OpenAI and went to Stanford that they’re very skeptical of the people that are doing the VC dinner circuit, and they tend to not be the really talented builders. It tends to be a big anti-signal,” Altman said.

Blank, the “Lean LaunchPad” instructor (he developed the now-ubiquitous “lean start-up” methodology used by thousands of companies), told me that the university has become so suffused with entrepreneurial ambition that it’s gotten hard to spot the actual geniuses. “The true founders—not the ones who want to make a lot of money or do it because their roommates want to do it—are closer to artists than to any other profession,” Blank said. They “see things that other people don’t. They hear things others don’t. And they’re driven to take that vision and turn it into physical reality. You know who else does that? Painters do that; sculptors do that; poets do that; playwrights do that.” He took the comparison to its logical conclusion: “Most paintings are failures. Most songs suck. Novels aren’t often best sellers. So the nature of an artist is you fail most of the time, yet you’re tenacious and you’re resilient.”

Those people exist in tech, but they’re rare. “Turns out,” Blank said, “100 percent of entrepreneurs think they’re visionaries. The data say 99 percent aren’t.”

This belief was echoed by John Hennessy, Stanford’s president from 2000 to 2016. When we spoke last spring, he told me that students today “look at Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates and conclude that dropping out is the most brilliant thing. This is an incorrect assumption.”

Hennessy was a pioneering computer scientist, called “the godfather of Silicon Valley” by Marc Andreessen, and his coziness with tech leaders drove the university’s expansion. During his tenure, Stanford became the top fundraising school in the nation, the first to exceed $1 billion in a year, and Hennessy oversaw the construction of more than 70 new buildings; the university’s reputation skyrocketed, and its admissions rate dropped by 70 percent. After stepping down, Hennessy became the chair of the board of Alphabet.

“When I look at what I’ve seen in the last, say, 20 years, students have become much more focused on career,” Hennessy said. “There are hundreds of students on our campus who think they’re going to build the next great AI company. Yeah, maybe one of them will. But not hundreds.”

For all of Silicon Valley’s effort to identify talented teenagers, Hennessy pointed out, “if you look at the most successful start-ups that have spun out, they were graduate students, not undergrads.” The mythology of the brilliant-dropout founder doesn’t reflect reality, he argued. And throwing a bunch of money at kids who are still growing up can backfire.

Last year, I met a student at an off-campus dinner party. He was 19, smart, and openly contrarian—and I enjoyed arguing with him. He offered me a ride home. From behind the wheel of his Tesla, he began talking about drugs. “The whole reason I’m studying chemistry is because of LSD,” he said. “Have you tried it?” I told him I had not. He continued to tell me about “ketamine, LSD, shrooms, ecstasy, cocaine.” Then he said, “If you want, I’ll be your dealer. Just hit me up.”

We didn’t do drugs. But I looked the guy up later: He had already raised nearly $20 million for his software company.

“The founder-CEO model implies that you have a young founder who doesn’t really know how to be CEO,” Hennessy told me. Give too much power to a young person with too much ego, he said, and you can end up with a failure like Theranos. Elizabeth Holmes started the blood-test start-up as a Stanford sophomore, when Hennessy was three years into his term as president; he watched it all fall apart during his last year on the job. The product didn’t work, and Holmes was convicted of defrauding her investors.

She is far from the only Stanford-trained hustler to get ahead by distorting the truth.

Over the course of my freshman year, people I got to know in the tech world told me stories about having perpetrated tax evasion and tax fraud, research misconduct, embezzlement and misappropriation of funds, securities fraud, insider trading, academic dishonesty; about operating slush funds and shell companies, hacking, reckless endangerment. One CEO who took me out to brunch told me proudly about how his company had gotten its start—he’d signed a contract with the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. The breadth of bad behavior was staggering to me—but it didn’t seem to stop anyone from getting funded.

One dropout told me about the first check cut to her company, from an angel investor a year before. “I literally biked to someone’s office,” she told me, and he didn’t even ask “what my situation was” before agreeing to fund her. She had the reputation of someone who was going to make money, and she knew it “wasn’t fair,” but why not go for it? Her company then put out a glossy launch video promoting its product’s wondrous new features, neglecting to mention that the tech didn’t actually work.

The Stanford inside Stanford encourages an “actions first, questions later” mentality. I met many people who’d confessed to fraud or wrongdoing and still found their way back into tech’s good graces. One student publicly apologized for stealing a Chinese AI model and passing it off as groundbreaking new research, and then went right to work at an AI start-up attempting to automate white-collar jobs. The company is now worth $10 billion, and the guy serves as head of evaluations, measuring the reliability of the tech.

Much of the lack of accountability in this system is due to mindlessness, the kind of problem that develops when you have too much money to spend too fast.

One of the dirty truths about Silicon Valley is that most VCs suck at their job. About 2 percent of VC firms generate 95 percent of the industry’s returns. The average VC firm does not outperform the market. And many of them seem to be simply guessing—or, more accurately, going wherever they see a group headed.

Right now the stampede is moving toward anything with AI in the pitch. Before AI, it was cryptocurrency. Before crypto, it was virtual reality. And so on. The VC model depends on a few colossal successes outweighing the many failures. Investors buy into hype cycles, knowing that one big catch will set them up for life. There seems to be more money now than ever, and more of it focused on a mythologized view of a young founder. Facebook was originally launched on a shoestring budget, and a falling-out between Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin—Zuckerberg’s classmate and fellow co-founder, who provided the company’s initial funding—eventually turned into a dispute worth tens of billions of dollars, thanks to Saverin’s original $15,000 stake.

Today Stanford clubs will spend twice that on a party.

“We’ve lost the moral compass for what we invest into,” Blank told me, sitting in a courtyard in the shadow of the business school. “We’ve lost the sense of shame and the sense of purpose.”

In Blank’s class, teams of students spend 10 weeks developing a company from idea to fundable start-up. Then they pitch it to investors brought in by Blank and his colleagues. It is extremely selective, extremely rigorous, and, as the course’s name implies, a launchpad to Silicon Valley success.

But Blank belongs to an older generation of innovators. And during his time in Silicon Valley’s training ground, he’s observed a change: “If you have no core beliefs, then you follow the money; you follow what’s most exciting.”

This is the message students are receiving, in a world where getting ahead at all costs has become the norm.

“There are 150—and they’re all men—that run the world,” the billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya once told an enraptured Stanford audience. He also described “anyone who wants to go into politics” as “fucking puppets.” Real power, he said, means aggregating “enough of the capital of the world to then reallocate it against my worldview.”

Jonathan Levin, Stanford’s president, got the job in 2024, after his predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, resigned over allegations of research misconduct in his labs. (In response to a university investigation triggered by my reporting in The Stanford Daily, Tessier-Lavigne conceded that he’d overseen studies in which data had been manipulated, but he denied having tried to hide the issues.) Levin graduated from the university (majoring in English and math), has spent the past 26 years working there, and lights up when he talks about Stanford. In his first commencement address last year, he said that he’d been out so late the night before his own graduation that he’d shown up in shorts and Tevas—then he revealed that, along with his presidential robes, he’d donned the sandals once more. There is, of course, plenty to praise about Stanford. The professors are outstanding, the research cutting-edge, the campus stunning. But what does Levin think about the extent to which Silicon Valley has taken over the university?

I asked him about this last spring. Levin lamented the pressure being put on students to think about their career from the minute they arrive on campus: “I don’t think it’s particularly healthy, and I think having more space at the university for just calm and fun, for that matter, is a good aspiration.” But he didn’t seem to think that the university could do much to limit its complete integration with Silicon Valley. “Should we have, like, a rule against venture capitalists coming onto campus?” he asked, before answering his own question: “No.”

When I’d asked him, in an earlier interview, about some of the fraud cases associated with Stanford that were in the news—Elizabeth Holmes; Do Kwon, an alum who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for his role in a crypto scheme; Stan Cohen, a professor found liable in a $20 million fraud case for misrepresenting the danger of a compound he’d sold as a potential cure for Huntington’s disease—Levin took a long pause before responding.

He defended the integrity of the research done at Stanford, and pointed out that the university doesn’t control what its students do after they graduate. Fraud, he told me (he called it “claims that are unfounded”), is really hard to avoid in Silicon Valley: “There is an aspect of entrepreneurship where you’re rewarded for selling a vision of what could be, and it doesn’t always get realized.”

Of course, students have plenty of opportunities to learn that mentality on campus. For years, there was an instructor on the computer-science faculty known as Professor Billionaire. The moniker actually undersells it. As a full-time professor for decades, David Cheriton amassed a fortune worth more than $15 billion today, much of it by investing in the companies of Stanford students. He cut the first check to Google in 1998. He also co-founded several companies while teaching full-time—exactly the kind of arrangement that Stanford encourages.

The university even operates its own VC fund, StartX, to seed student businesses, boasting that companies it has incubated are “3X more likely to reach $100M valuation.”

One of those companies was Clinkle. The brainchild of a Stanford undergraduate named Lucas Duplan and two of his classmates, it got initial funding from StartX in 2011. Mehran Sahami, the current chair of computer science at Stanford, coached the three students and invested in the company. The start-up raised more than $30 million. Duplan and one investor, the airline magnate Richard Branson, took a picture of themselves lighting fake $100 bills on fire. But in 2015, the company itself went up in flames. Clinkle was supposed to be a mobile-payments company based on cutting-edge ultrasound technology, but its polished demo belied an app that didn’t work; instead, the company released what was essentially a pre-paid debit card, to near-universal ridicule, and went under. Duplan was, charitably, a poor leader. Yet nobody caught up in the Stanford hype cycle had looked too closely. Just give the cash to the 21-year-old—what could go wrong?

Hennessy, the former Stanford president, was an adviser to Clinkle too. He helped usher in the no-boundaries relationship with Silicon Valley. It’s not that he doesn’t believe in the humanities or care about students’ education, but Stanford’s closeness with Silicon Valley is what enabled the university’s ascent. “We live in this environment,” he said, “which, of course, we helped create.”

One Silicon Valley CEO, the founder of an automation-focused company, has taken it upon himself to run an exclusive seminar at Stanford with spots for just 12 people a year, requiring an elaborate admissions process. Mandating absolute secrecy, he teaches his pupils the path to becoming the billionaires they aspire to be.

In reality, it’s not an official course—no one receives credit—but something more like a secret society, a sort of Skull and Bones for the tech elite. There are lectures and discussions and guests, with sessions held weekly on campus. But the real purpose of the class is for the “professor” to do what everyone else is trying to do: identify and network with students who could be useful to him in the future. Only he’s figured out how to make the kids come to him, knowing that they can’t resist the allure of an exclusive, hush-hush symbol of their ultimate insiderness.

It’s the perfect encapsulation of the Stanford inside Stanford. The class is called “How to Rule the World.”

This essay was adapted from Theo Baker’s forthcoming book, “How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University.”

This article originally included Founders Fund on a list of VC firms that employ talent scouts on Stanford's campus. Founders Fund has employed talent scouts in the past, but is not doing so currently.

Illustration sources: Look and Learn / Bridgeman Images; Paul Chinn / The San Francisco Chronicle / Getty; Kirby Lee / Getty; Liz Hafalia / The San Francisco Chronicle / Getty.

Something Is Happening to America’s Moral Code

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

The late political scientist James C. Scott endorsed what he called “anarchist calisthenics”—the regular practice of small acts of lawbreaking and disobedience. Jaywalk at an empty intersection. Have a beer in the park. Smuggle a pudding cup past the TSA agents. The point, Scott said, was to keep the civic muscles strong. Without constant reinforcement, these muscles will atrophy, and when real tyranny arrives, the flabby citizen will be powerless to resist. Scott particularly enjoyed telling Germans to get their reps in, because their grandparents had not.

On Wednesday a New York Times podcast hosted the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and the New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino for a discussion of lawbreaking, which they both endorsed not as a habit of mind but as resistance to actual tyranny, today. They agreed that shoplifting from grocery stores such as Whole Foods is laudable, because (as Tolentino says, without evidence) “every major grocery chain” steals from workers and customers. Streaming services—they specifically name Spotify, which carries the Times podcast—are bad for creators and, they say, worthy of being ripped off. Piker said he would steal cars, “if I could get away with it.” Channeling Abbie Hoffman, Tolentino encourages people to steal from her own employer, The New Yorker, but does not explain which high crimes David Remnick has committed to earn this comeuppance.

They are more circumspect about violence against people. Both Piker and Tolentino giggle their way to a “no” when their host, Nadja Spiegelman, asks if they endorse murdering executives of a health-insurance company or burning down companies they dislike. (Piker says his answer is prompted by legal advice, and Spiegelman joins Tolentino in tittering at his saucy qualification.) But Piker and Tolentino both accuse health-insurance companies of “social murder,” and use that concept to (rather sympathetically) explain why Americans might react with actual murder. The host and her guests have an awfully good time agreeing about everything.

[Yair Rosenberg: The problem with Hasan Piker’s Einstein story]

Six years ago, the New York Times opinion editor lost his job for publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton because he advised invoking the Insurrection Act to quell riots. The op-ed, the Times explained, fell short of the paper’s standards. This same publication today recommends listening to this podcast about the sunny side of chaos, rather than just reading the transcript, “for the full effect.” I would go further and recommend watching the video, whose Scandinavian-minimalist set, along with the participants’ chic outfits (Piker is wearing Ralph Lauren), greatly enhances the comedic effect. A previous generation of Marxists would dress down, the better to relate to the workers they tried to organize at the factory gates. These podcasters are, I suppose, the hard-left equivalent of those prosperity-gospel preachers, who dress rich so that they can give others a vision of something to aspire to.

They could not look or sound more unoppressed if they tried. Spiegelman invokes Jean Valjean, the Misérable who stole a loaf of bread to feed his family, but when offering a modern example of virtuous theft, she asks why she should have to pay for “organic avocados.” Piker says that “we’ve got to get back to cool crimes,” including Louvre heists, “bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature.” Crime, to these people, appears to be a series of Thomas Crown affairs, punctuated for some reason by free guacamole. Tolentino is at least self-critical. She lists the immoral acts that unsettle her conscience: “getting iced coffee in a plastic cup,” going on vacation in “so many planes,” and failing to organize workers.

The belief that workers frequently get a raw deal is an old one; roughly 200 years of leftist R&D has gone into figuring out how to arrange governments to make it easier for labor to negotiate with management on fair terms. Also old is the idea that health is a collective responsibility, and that giving a dignified life to the poor is part of the government’s job. (The belief that you are oppressed by Whole Foods, however, is a modern psychosis.) Among the remarkable aspects of this conversation is the ignorance of this long, eventful history—as if the upshot of the past century of leftism is that you can simply take things, and maybe the justice of it all will start to even out, as society gives way to what Piker approvingly calls “full chaos.”

It is difficult to take any of this seriously, especially from someone like Piker, who has compared America unfavorably to China and Cuba, two countries where you will be thrown into a dark hole if you do so much as an anarchist jumping jack. Cuba is miserable, and to travel there without noticing the misery is grotesque all by itself. China is a more interesting case, and much more ironic as a comparison. Piker’s romantic view of crime is, shall we say, not shared by the Chinese Communist Party. Nor, for that matter, is his view of communism. For decades now, China has functioned on the premise that wealth and social stability emerge only from a market economy in which big, unseen forces—not to be questioned or defied by individuals—control everything important. The value of the individual is nil, as is the value of workers, should they differ with those forces about their pay and treatment. One can agree or disagree that this model is the right one, but one cannot love the Chinese system and love rampant criminality, even “cool crimes.”

What is really going on here? Spiegelman, the interviewer, is correct to notice that something is happening “with our moral code,” and that Piker is a driver of that moral change, or an example of it. “There are so many moral compromises I make every day,” she says. I am sure she is right: So do I. Fretting over trivia such as using a plastic cup, then treating weighty matters such as murder with the same gravity, may be a source of the moral vertigo.

Piker and Tolentino deserve some credit for sensing that their theory of social change is incomplete. They might even sense how pathetic they sound, when pretending to be outlaws, even though all that is at stake is a few lemons or a Netflix password. “We have lost the muscle that is built up to be able to engage in” collective action, Tolentino says. “We lack the willpower,” Piker agrees, “because we don’t even know what that would look like.”

Piker says, in my favorite part of the interview, that he hates stealing stuff because when Piker was a boy, his father caught him stealing from a friend and punished him. (Good dad.) Piker also says, rather gallantly, that he could not countenance dining and dashing, and that he would even cover the bill if he saw someone else steal services this way.

[Daniel Byman and Riley McCabe: Left-wing terrorism is on the rise]

To them, it seems, theft is fine as long as you don’t have to look anyone in the eye when you do it, and as long as you get away with it. (Conveniently, corporations have no faces. It is no coincidence that Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, was shot in the back.) This is the opposite of gallant—and I think the lack of willpower and “muscle” is related to the cowardice inherent in almost all the acts they endorse or excuse. Spiegelman calls shoplifting “micro-looting,” a euphemism whose purpose is to avoid the inglorious term shoplifting, because shoplifting is what children and petty criminals do.

Civil disobedience, as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, should be done “openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty,” because to be penalized for a righteous act only multiplies the act’s merit. You have to break the law proudly—not break it, then run away to another state and get caught with a fake ID in a McDonald’s. Getting clubbed because you refused to use the bathroom designated for your race—that is something your grandchildren will brag that you did. I wonder what is wrong with people who feel like they are on an odyssey against a comparable injustice but who evade responsibility for shoplifting produce. Leftists need calisthenics too. These people are all flab.

It’s Bad

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

Bubbles doesn’t look right. The new Michael Jackson biopic, Michael, renders the singer’s pet chimp in CGI, and the result is even creepier than the famous Jeff Koons sculpture it evokes. His eyes bulge like Gollum’s, and he moves like a deepfake. The “performance” contributes to the already overwhelming strangeness of this movie about one of music’s most vexing questions: Who was Michael Jackson, really?

Any film attempting to answer that was going to face some challenges. When the 2019 HBO documentary Leaving Neverland aired allegations by two men who say the late singer abused them as kids—charges his representatives contested—the world was made to ask whether it should or even could “cancel” an artist so embedded in our collective memory and prom playlists. The Jackson estate got to work on a cultural counteroffensive, bolstering attempts to celebrate Michael’s songbook while downplaying his admitted habit of sharing beds with boys (for example, by backing a bouncy Broadway musical set before any accusations were made public). The problem with that tactic, Michael shows, is that his life’s story is, glaringly, about the corruption of childhood.

Conceived by the Bohemian Rhapsody producer Graham King and directed by Antoine Fuqua, a veteran of slickly satisfying music videos and action films, Michael prances through the expected steps of a biopic. The movie begins with its hero’s struggles as the youngest member of the Jackson 5, a band of brothers abused into excellence by their father, Joe (played by Colman Domingo). It extends that trial into adulthood as Michael wrestles control of his career away from his dad. Along the way, masterpieces are made, gloves are bedazzled, moons are walked. But the self-actualization quest is a sideshow to a more interesting subject: Michael’s eccentricities, which the film is luridly fascinated by yet too timid to address honestly.

Early parts of the film show Michael’s extreme talent setting him apart in ways good and bad. When Joe whips young Michael (played movingly by Juliano Valdi) in front of his brothers, the violence creates a uniquely horrible sound: that virtuosic voice, squealing in pain. One strong scene has Michael in the recording booth, crooning Smokey Robinson’s “Who’s Lovin’ You.” The camera holds on the face of Motown founder Berry Gordy as he experiences astonishment and—maybe—a hint of alarm at how well this tyke is embodying lyrics about grown-up lust and jealousy.

The adult Michael is played by the real Michael’s nephew, Jaafar Jackson. He nails the sunshiny lilt and bright-eyed mannerisms that read—even all these years later—as too earnest to be real. As Michael moves into solo stardom and makes cunning business moves, the film captures how his seemingly naive idealism was also a form of ambition. Michael wrote inspirational advice to himself on sticky notes. He said out loud that he was the greatest of all time. He had a jejune fantasy of what a life in music could be, and he made it a reality.

He did that by, as the film’s best moments depict, pouring that same fantasy into his art. Thriller’s conception is rendered as excitingly—if hokily—as anyone could ask for. A montage intercuts studio work with clips of monster movies Michael watched on TV. At the title track’s video shoot, Michael gives directorial instructions in full ghoul makeup. Again, Fuqua pulls the biopic trick of showing the faces of onlookers as they recognize genius in real time. Again, the trick works by making Michael’s work—as familiar as it may be to most viewers—inspire new awe.

Michael’s personal life was also steeped in make-believe. From his childhood, he treated animals as if they were people—a tendency that at first seems adorable but, as the movie goes on, becomes surreal and unsettling. In key scenes, you might catch a giraffe milling outside a window, or a snake slithering on a couch. Michael’s Peter Pan syndrome is no mere subtext: Years before he founds his amusement-park-like estate, Neverland Ranch (which is not in the movie), he’s shown obsessing over J. M. Barrie’s classic book. A drawing of the elfin Peter even inspired him, the film strongly implies, to get his first nose job.

Yes, the nose jobs—plural—are in the movie. As Michael ascends in fame, he bandages and re-bandages himself, and his appearance keeps shifting. An accident at a Pepsi ad shoot causes his scalp to catch fire, and in playing that moment for as much tragedy as possible, the film all but labels Michael’s life as a gothic-horror tale of body transformation. A full hagiography might downplay that theme, but Fuqua seems to understand he’s working with potentially dynamite material here. (Then again, Michael’s body dysmorphia—at one point he complains about his facial symmetry—no longer seems as unusual as it once did.)

Unfortunately, Michael is a botched job. After Fuqua does interesting work sowing seeds of folly amid the star’s glorious rise, the movie gives up and turns to total sanctification. The plot beats late in the film include him donating money to a hospital, selflessly agreeing to tour with his brothers, and—for the very end of the movie—putting on two scintillating concerts, in basically back-to-back scenes. The movie ends in 1988 as Michael kicks off the tour for his hit album Bad. HIS STORY CONTINUES reads a title card. Well, yeah—and we all know how.

[Read: The missing piece of the Bob Marley biopic]

The reason for the abrupt finale is astonishing. Apparently, the filmmakers meant to address the first sexual-abuse allegation leveled against Michael, in 1993, which he disputed and ultimately settled out of court. Fuqua even shot scenes of the FBI raiding Neverland. But then the estate realized that the decades-old settlement with the accuser forbade any party from depicting that situation for commercial purposes. An entire third act had to be scrapped, though tentatively planned sequels may address the decades in which Michael’s image curdled for good.

This behind-the-scenes drama is not simply one of the great oopsies of Hollywood history—it’s also a reminder of the agendas at play. Previous versions of the script depicted the case against the singer as being a shakedown, according to The New York Times. Michael’s projected box-office success—and boost to the late star’s image—may help fund efforts to erase all of the allegations from public memory. Already, a lawsuit settlement with the estate has caused HBO to stop streaming the damning and persuasive Leaving Neverland. (The suit was predicated on a technicality: The network signed a non-disparagement agreement with Michael in the ’90s when it bankrolled a concert film.)

Michael’s commercial reception may seem to show the futility of trying to litigate truth regarding someone as once-beloved as its subject. Yet the film’s obvious propagandistic tone really suggests the opposite: The question of what to do about figures like him is still very much in play. The ongoing outcry surrounding Jeffrey Epstein is on some level a reckoning with the scourge of child abuse and the impunity of the elites. So is the conversation about—if not the legal facts regarding—Diddy. Americans know that the power we give certain individuals makes the most vulnerable among us unsafe. And we seem to be craving a way to change that.

An honest accounting of Michael’s life could help answer how. Fuqua’s film understands how precious childhood is, and the way that harsh treatment and rigid social expectations can mangle a young person’s outlook on life. It even seems to understand that money and power can compound those wounds in dangerous ways. In spite of itself, the film comes very close to saying something true. Instead, it opts for a fairy tale—an unconvincing version of the wild and real.

Seriously, Tucker Carlson? Come On.

2026-04-23T18:07:00-04:00

Pity poor Tucker Carlson. Watching Donald Trump’s war in Iran—which Carlson has branded “the single biggest mistake” by a U.S. president in his lifetime—he is ruing his strong support for Trump in the 2024 election.

“It’s a moment to wrestle with our own consciences,” Carlson, long the most prominent media personality in the MAGA movement, said this week on his podcast. “We’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be. And I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”

Or, even better, don’t pity Carlson. He is one of several media figures who are having second thoughts about Trump—and in some cases, receiving praise for it. But these pundits deserve no amnesty. Their second thoughts are wise, but to have erred so badly, when so many other commentators and journalists saw the truth, disqualifies them from being taken seriously on politics again.

The problem is not just that Carlson ought to have known better. It’s that he did, as the journalist Jason Zengerle reports in his recent biography, Hated by All the Right People. Back in the early 2000s, Carlson harbored reservations about the war in Iraq, but he swallowed them to be what he felt was a good team player for the right, Zengerle notes. Later, he said, he’d gone “against my own instincts in supporting it. It’s something I’ll never do again. Never.” (The Iraq disaster may inform Carlson’s vehement opposition to the war in Iran.)

And yet Carlson did just that with Trump, repeatedly. He initially found Trump coarse, but came around to him during the 2016 presidential campaign. By 2020, however, he’d become disgusted with Trump, including over his handling of COVID; Zengerle writes that Carlson first believed that the president’s approach was too blasé, then too strict. He told people he voted for Kanye West for president in 2020. When Trump tried to steal the election despite losing it, Carlson skewered Trump’s allies on air and was even harsher in text messages to colleagues.

“I hate him passionately,” Carlson wrote in texts revealed a few years later in a lawsuit against Fox. “That’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.” Yet after being fired from Fox, Carlson mended his relationship with Trump, counseling him to choose J. D. Vance as running mate and speaking at his rallies.

Discerning the “real” Tucker Carlson is, Zengerle suggests, a lost cause, and anyway, it doesn’t matter whether Carlson was honest when he was backing Trump or is being earnest now. Either way, he’s forfeited any reason to listen to him. And yet Carlson’s turn against Trump has won him commendation of the “strange new respect” variety from liberals such as Jon Favreau of Pod Save America. This is ill-advised, and not only because Carlson continues to mingle anti-Semitism and other bigotries with his Trump criticisms. If these liberals’ goal is to make allies who can draw Trump voters away, it’s also likely to be ineffective. As Carlson rejects Trump, his own popularity is cratering faster than the president’s.

Restoring American democracy after Trump will require reaching out to those who backed him. That’s good sense and good math: After all, he was democratically elected, and many of his supporters were fooled by him or didn’t believe he’d follow through on his more draconian promises. In the case of the unpopular Iran war, voters may have been tricked by Trump’s claims to be an antiwar figure; that impression was fostered not only by his rhetoric but also by credulous framing in the mainstream press. Every voter has a responsibility to do their best to understand the candidates in an election, and Trump’s foibles should have been plain long before November 2024, but most people are also busy and dependent on the media, whichever kind they choose, to inform them. Creating space for ordinary Trump voters to reject Trump doesn’t require welcoming or absolving the prominent figures who rallied the public to support him.

One group ripe for shunning is broadcasters such as Carlson and Alex Jones, who has also reacted strongly to the Iran war. “I love the old Trump,” he said during an interview with former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, another MAGA apostate. “I’m just going to be honest. I hate this person. This is a disgusting husk of a former person.” (Strong words from a guy who falsely claimed that the Sandy Hook massacre was fake and the families of murdered children were “crisis actors.”)

A second is the so-called Trumpist intellectuals, who have tried to create an ideological framework around MAGA. The writer Sohrab Ahmari argued (with Matthew Schmitz) in 2022 that Trump was “the only candidate who recognizes” that the establishment’s warmongering was the root of American problems. Now, as the journalist Michelle Goldberg points out, Ahmari writes that Trump’s “mad-king governance is exhausting for Americans and the world” and bitterly adds, “Bring back Hillary.” The conservative commentator Christopher Caldwell declared the Iran war to be the end of Trumpism and wrote that Trump’s “virtues are not the ones you need to run a free country.” You get zero points for recognizing Trump’s style and character only now, a decade into his era.

A third is those you might call lifestyle podcasters, many of whom forswear any claim to be political commentators but happily take on the job anyway, interviewing political candidates or issuing endorsements for office. This includes Theo Von, who has called Trump’s strikes on Iran “diabolical,” and Joe Rogan. “Make America greater—I’m down. But Make America Great Again and then it becomes a movement of a bunch of fucking dorks? ’Cause a lot of them are dorks,” Rogan said last month, calling them “really weird, fucking uninteresting, unintelligent people.” If Rogan was unable to notice this before, this says little for his perception. (The White House seems to be eager to heal any rift and hosted Rogan at the White House this past Saturday.)

The proposition that people such as Carlson, Ahmari, and Rogan offer their audiences is that they are smarter or better informed than a lay observer, or have access to politicians that allows them to be useful conduits for information and ideas. They have also argued loudly that they’re more trustworthy and have clearer judgment than the mainstream media. If their most prominent political position was backing Trump in 2024, and they have all come to regret it, that says everything we need to know about their credibility going forward.

“It’s not enough to say, ‘Well, I changed my mind’—or like, ‘Oh, this is bad. I’m out,’” Carlson said on the same podcast episode. He’s right, for once; perhaps he should try saying nothing at all for a good long time.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

The Trump administration signed an order reclassifying state-licensed medical marijuana as a less dangerous drug, moving it from Schedule I to Schedule III. The change, signed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, does not legalize marijuana federally but eases some regulations.
President Trump said that he ordered the United States Navy to “shoot and kill” any Iranian boats laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz.
Israel and Lebanon are set to hold a second round of U.S.-brokered talks in Washington today, continuing rare direct discussions following last week’s cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon. The talks come as both governments say they want Hezbollah disarmed, though the Iranian-backed militant group has vowed to resist those efforts.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: The story of the Freedman’s Memorial shows just how quickly a nation’s ideals can erode, Jake Lundberg writes.

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Evening Read

Angelo Mastrascusa / Anadolu / Getty

Cubans’ Despair

By Gisela Salim-Peyer

Cubans for decades have been buffeted by great powers, repressed by their own government, crushed by economic crises, and paraded as the victims of a succession of sanctions imposed by the White House. Glimmers of a better life came and went, either because the regime in Havana briefly allowed a sliver of greater liberty or the U.S. government tried a new tack to overthrow the communist ideology that has reigned over the island for almost 70 years. So it is perhaps not surprising that Cubanos by now have had it up to here with pretty much everyone.

Read the full article.

Theft Is Now Progressive Chic

2026-04-23T17:35:00-04:00

In 1785, Immanuel Kant introduced his famous “categorical imperative.” Put simply: Act the way you want others to behave. This dictate, a version of the Golden Rule, has been a bedrock of moral philosophy for centuries. But for the New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino, Kant’s “categorical-imperative-type thing” no longer applies. Moral rectitude, in some left-wing corners of the commentariat, is out; flagrant disregard of the social contract is in.

Yesterday, The New York Times posted a video of a conversation featuring Tolentino, the pro-communist streamer Hasan Piker, and the Times opinion editor Nadja Spiegelman, under the headline: “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?” It began with Tolentino, a highly successful author, admitting to shoplifting lemons from Whole Foods. “I think that stealing from a big box store—I’ll just state my platform—it’s neither very significant as a moral wrong, nor is it significant in any way as protest or direct action.”

“But what about the argument that if everyone just starts stealing wantonly,” Spiegelman replies, “Whole Foods will eventually raise the prices?”

“Yeah, chaos,” Piker says. “Full chaos. Let’s go.”

“I kind of am inclined toward this,” Tolentino adds. “Everyone, try it. See what happens.”

[Marc Fisher: Shoplifters gone wild]

It is difficult to know where to begin with such moral reasoning, if it can be called reasoning. At a time of kleptocratic governance and corporate oligarchy, Tolentino and Piker resort to a game of jaded whataboutism. For them, theft is a kind of perverse virtue signaling. Societal problems do not just excuse personal wrongdoing; they ennoble it.

Both Tolentino and Piker seem to justify stealing from large companies such as Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, because those corporations exploit workers and already budget for theft. Why wring our hands about shoplifting when it’s been accounted for? Such an attempt to normalize petty crime makes Vicky Osterweil’s 2020 manifesto, In Defense of Looting, look high-minded.

As with Osterweil, who argued that white supremacy can render even violent looting a legitimate act, Piker and Tolentino suggest that certain crimes become not just morally justifiable but even admirable when coupled with a claim against structural injustice. Spiegelman uses the term micro-looting, dressing up petty theft in political pretensions.

Piker, who has 3 million followers on the streaming platform Twitch, and is sometimes described as the left’s answer to Joe Rogan, states that he is “pro-piracy all the way, like, across the board,” adding that were it technologically possible, he would even pirate a car, whatever that means. Both Piker and Tolentino brag about IP theft. Tolentino encourages readers to skirt The New Yorker’s paywalls and read her articles for free. “I say, go off, use the Wayback Machine.”

“Would you steal from the Louvre?” Spiegelman asks.

“Yes,” Piker says.

“I would not be logistically capable of executing” such a theft, Tolentino adds. “But would I cheer on every news story of people that I see doing it? Absolutely.”

“I think it’s cool,” Piker says. “We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature.”

These remarks are manifestly silly, but the conversation ranges into darker territory. Toward the end of the discussion, Spiegelman asks for an example of something that is not considered acceptable to do but should be. Tolentino responds, “Maybe things like blowing up a pipeline.”

“I can relate to what you were saying, Jia,” Spiegelman replies. “It is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society.” She’s right. Rather than lead a discussion about the difficulties of maintaining personal integrity in an immoral age, however, she wound up convening a celebration of vice.

Tolentino’s treatment of sabotage is emblematic of the discussion’s overall irresponsibility. She continues, “Some sort of fire could hypothetically be framed within a collective action that is tactically useful.” Piker concurs: “Sabotage has played a formative role in labor unions.”

During the Kenosha, Wisconsin, uprising in the summer of 2020, as fires raged nearby, a masked rioter screamed into a camera, “It’s Black Lives Matter, not building lives matter!” The implication, which was widely accepted at that time on the left, was that property destruction is trivial but human life is sacrosanct.

[Graeme Wood: The pinnacle of looting apologia]

Yet both Piker and Tolentino move from discussing nonlethal crimes of nuisance and destruction to making excuses for murder. When the conversation turns to Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Piker asserts that the executive had been engaged in “a tremendous amount of social murder.” Both he and Tolentino frame the at-times-gleeful public reaction to the killing as understandable because the health-care industry is structurally oppressive.

Watching the video, and not merely reading the transcript, is worthwhile here. Asked whether one should murder a health-care executive, all three dutifully say no, even as they refuse to treat the extrajudicial killing of a man with anything approaching gravity. In fact, the way they exchange smirks about it, you could be forgiven for thinking they were still on the subject of shoplifting produce.

And so a very silly conversation leads to a series of positions that are far from frivolous. Its overarching premise is that the law loses its legitimacy when political and economic elites violate—or are merely perceived to violate—the social contract. In such a world, ordinary people become entitled to ignore rules as they see fit. Neither Piker nor Tolentino explicitly endorses violence. But it is a short conceptual bridge from where they sit behind microphones to political murder.