Some of Donald Trump’s favorite world leaders have been scoundrels, bullies, and dictators. He keeps a picture of himself with the Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin on the wall of the White House. He claims to have fallen “in love” with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. He publicly supported Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who has been chased from power, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who is now under house arrest for the next two decades. He just returned from China and gushed about how the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, is a “great leader” whom he’s honored to have as “a friend.”
The China summit also showed, yet again, that such men can both intimidate and flatter Trump into taking their side, even against the United States.
Trump’s own FBI calls China’s recent cyberattacks and influence operations against U.S. government agencies, businesses, and academic institutions “a grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States.” But when asked whether he had discussed these attacks with Xi, the president not only waved the question away but seemed almost eager to absolve China as a nation no better or worse than America: “I did. And he talked about attacks that we did in China. You know, what they do, we do too. It’s, like, the spying; they’re talking about, Oh, the spying. I said, ‘Well, we do it too.’”
When pressed for a clarification, Trump went on: “I’m talking about spying. The question was asked of me yesterday, I guess, ‘What about the fact that China is spying in the United States?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s one of those things because we spy like hell on them too.’”
Trump was then asked about concerns that China was inserting code in crucial systems that control various parts of American infrastructure, such as energy, communications, and water. “You don’t know that,” he answered. “I’d like to see it, but it’s very possible that they do. And we’re doing things to them. I told them, ‘We do a lot of stuff to you that you don’t know about, and you are doing stuff to us that we probably do know about.’ We do plenty. It’s a double-edged sword.”
Instead of saying that these cyberattacks were real threats and that the country’s national-security professionals were working to stop them, the president of the United States gave an answer that just as easily could have come from a Chinese official: Secret code in your power grid? You don’t know that. We’d like to see the proof. But you Americans do plenty of things to us that we probably don’t even know about.
This would be less startling if Trump had always been soft on China, but for years, he has preened as a China hawk. During his first two presidential campaigns, he pounded China as an existential threat to the U.S. economy, a rogue power stealing America’s intellectual property and sending its graduate students to the United States to infiltrate our universities. “China’s theft of American technology, intellectual property, and research,” read a White House statement in 2020, “threatens the safety, security, and economy of the United States.”
[Franklin Foer: Xi Jinping was only humoring Trump]
Trump, after getting a private talking-to from Xi, now wants to know why any of this is a big deal. After all, everyone does it. (Perhaps I take this somewhat personally because I was a federal employee when China hacked the Office of Personnel Management in 2015, and all of my personal data, including my security-clearance forms, are now likely sitting in a computer in Beijing.)
This isn’t the first time that Trump has cowered rather than admit a dictatorship is trying to harm the United States. Shortly after Trump took office in early 2017, the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly pressed the president about his professed respect for Putin. “He’s a killer,” O’Reilly protested. Trump nodded a bit and then said: “There’s a lot of killers. We got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”
Trump would top this appalling moral equivalence a year later at a summit with Putin in Helsinki. A hangdog Trump stood next to Putin and affirmed that he, as the president of the United States, took the word of a Russian dictator over the conclusions presented to him by loyal Americans that Russia tried to meddle in the 2016 elections, a well-substantiated charge that Trump has always hated because it implies that he won the presidency only with foreign help. “I have great confidence in my intelligence people,” he said, “but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”
Putin, for his part, smiled approvingly, and understandably so: Trump was singing lyrics Putin could easily have written. The American president made these remarks after meeting with the Russian president privately, a risky move that he repeated when he met with Xi privately in Beijing. (Aides can keep records, and even intervene if discussions go off the rails, which is why presidents and other top officials usually try to avoid meetings without them.) Likewise, when Putin came to Alaska at Trump’s invitation last summer, the presidents again met privately, and Trump again emerged parroting the Russian leader’s talking points.
This kind of behavior goes beyond mere apple-polishing. Almost any time Trump talks to a foreign strongman, he seems both charmed and intimidated, and ends up defending his autocratic friend rather than his country. These dictators appear to bring out a kind of neediness in Trump: In China, Xi took him on a tour of a private garden, and like a swooning teenager on a date in a nice restaurant, Trump asked whether the Chinese leader ever took other foreign guests to the same place.
[Tom Nichols: Trump keeps defending Russia]
The people around Trump support these equivocations because anyone who opposes Trump’s ideas in the White House will be shown the door; any Republican who speaks up in Congress will be primaried out of their seat. Trump, in his second term, will not change. He will never take a robust stand against America’s top-line enemies: He saves that kind of rancor for our allies. When he does take aim at hostile regimes, he chooses lesser powers such as Iran, whose leaders he does not know and whose military is no direct threat to the United States.
We do not know what Trump said to Xi behind closed doors. More important, we will likely never know what was said to him. But whatever it was, both Xi and Putin clearly know how to press the American president into taking their side, including making excuses for espionage against the United States and endangering American friends in Taiwan and Ukraine.
The president’s supporters defend this sort of fawning over dictators from time to time, saying that Trump is just making deals and playing multidimensional chess. But nearly a decade of this kind of embarrassing behavior suggests that Trump’s constant equivocations do not reflect strategy or realism. They are instead evidence of his lack of a moral compass—and his meekness in the presence of powerful autocrats.
A decade or so ago, pairing Everlane kick-crop jeans with the brand’s almond-toe Modern Loafer and a crewneck sweater was a quintessential Millennial city-girl uniform: minimalist, boring, and, most important, vaguely ethical. The San Francisco–based fashion start-up was founded in the early 2010s on the premise of “radical transparency.” It told consumers about the factory where their shirt was made and the cost to produce it, down to the labor and markup, which it said was a fraction of the markup of other retailers. It was a brand built on the belief that globalization could work for everyone, and that anybody could shop with their values.
But now Everlane is in bad shape. It’s $90 million in debt, behind on rent, and facing eviction at its headquarters. This week, Puck reported that the company has found a buyer that seems antithetical to the values it once said it held: Shein, the online fast-fashion behemoth synonymous with overconsumption and workplace abuses such as child labor. Shein, in response to allegations of poor conditions over the years, has made efforts to address critics, such as investing in carbon-reducing initiatives and ending orders at factories that have known problems. Still, the era of sustainable fashion that Everlane represents seems to be fading—as does the concept that ethical consumerism alone can eliminate the clothing industry’s worst practices. (Everlane declined to comment on reports of the sale, and Shein did not immediately respond to an interview request.)
Everlane was once a high-flying poster child of investor-backed sustainable-apparel companies. Venture-capital firms and private-equity investors poured millions into the business, helping turn it into a fast-growing direct-to-consumer brand. It was part of a cohort of buzzy companies that promised to ensure better working conditions and make products using more eco-friendly materials. Reformation, known for feminine dresses, launched in 2009 and pledged to make clothes from leftover fabrics and pay its workers a living wages. It was followed by Everlane, and in 2016 the footwear brand Allbirds, which sold merino-wool sneakers that claimed a lower carbon footprint than a typical running shoe and attracted celebrity investors, including Leonardo DiCaprio. The trifecta of brands gave sustainable fashion a palpable feeling of traction.
[Read: Fast fashion’s end has been greatly exaggerated]
As eco-friendly fashion started to boom, other brands sought to cash in, and so-called greenwashing became a problem in the fashion industry at large. Fast-fashion companies and luxury brands alike have been accused of misleading consumers. In 2022, H&M faced litigation for using dubious sustainability data. Last summer, Armani was fined $4 million for claiming to be sustainable while outsourcing some of its leather-goods production to sweatshops near Milan. Even Everlane, which watchdog groups consider to have good production practices, had blind spots. During the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, former and current employees criticized the company of anti-Black racism and union busting. Reformation’s founder was ousted following similar accusations at around the same time.
All of these companies have made efforts to regain consumer trust: H&M fought the litigation against it, and the case was dismissed; the company now claims that some 90 percent of its products are made from more sustainable materials. Armani denied the labor-abuse claims and said it planned to appeal. Everlane’s founder apologized and then was replaced amid a broader restructuring. And a third-party investigator ultimately dismissed the allegations at Reformation. But consumer cynicism seems to have spread anyway, and the allegations have added to a sense that even supposedly ethical brands can’t be trusted.
Some might argue that inflation was the death knell of sustainable fashion. It simply costs more to pay workers fairly, to use organic cotton instead of polyester, and to make a modest amount of clothing instead of a glut that ends up burning in Chilean deserts or washed up on the Ghanaian shoreline. Consumer prices are up a staggering 25 percent since 2020. Far fewer people can afford to be green. Last month, Allbirds announced that it’s moving away from footwear and experimenting with being an AI company. Mara Hoffman, a luxury sustainable line, shuttered two years ago.
But the Everlane sale seems to underscore how shallow the movement for sustainable fashion was all along: A few companies, on their own, were never going to be enough for substantial change in ethical fashion. Although Everlane was part of a nascent shift of buying better by buying less, American consumerism ultimately prevailed; per-capita clothing consumption has only risen in recent years. Reformation, for instance, has mostly rebounded from its earlier scandals, but it has largely focused on fresh design rather than bland sneakers and button-downs that were easily copied. Its clothes, for the most part, are based on trends to meet shoppers’ latest desires.
[Read: The mysterious, meteoric rise of Shein]
What sustainable fashion desperately needed and never got was an even playing field: standards, in other words, that clothing companies of all kinds would have to meet, such as a legally shared definition of sustainability, or requirements for labor transparency. Without them, brands that tried to genuinely invest in better-made clothes were constantly being undercut—not just by the Sheins of the world but also by other brands with vaguely ethical credentials. The relative newcomer Quince, which launched in 2018 and rebranded in 2020, touts sustainability credentials and makes products similar to Everlane’s and higher-end companies such as Loewe and Toteme, but at lower prices. Instead of traditional production methods, Quince uses a business model similar to Shein’s, where it produces in small batches and ships products from factories directly to consumers. According to some consumer-watchdog groups, there is scant evidence to back up many of Quince’s sustainability claims. (Quince has said in response to past accusations that it is committed to sustainability, and that answering more questions about its sourcing would divulge competitive advantages.)
If policy makers had passed laws to clearly define what counts as a sustainable textile and forced all brands to reveal information about their factories and wages, responsible companies could compete in earnest. But now whatever momentum existed for robust legislation to clean up fashion is largely gone. Recent political trends in the United States and the European Union have meant that most legislation associated with the environment has been weakened or is not moving forward. Last year, corporations pushed to change a landmark EU corporate-sustainability law that would have required more transparency and ethics in fashion; human-rights advocates say that what’s left “is a skeleton” of its previous form.
The Everlane playbook lulled many shoppers into thinking the market was fixing itself, and turned sustainability into a niche consumer product for those who could afford it. But the half truths and performative claims from the larger fashion industry may have ultimately crushed a lot of people’s faith that the field can do better.
This death of optimism may have contributed to Everlane’s downfall as much as anything else. Many of the upwardly mobile Millennials who once spent freely on ethical basics have abandoned all sorts of brands that used to symbolize thoughtful buying. Meanwhile, Shein’s rise may have cratered any beliefs that fast fashion could be contained—that spending more on those utilitarian, eco-friendly basics would lead to meaningful change. If people must live in a world where companies’ ethical claims are so often questionable, where money is tight, and where even a so-called responsible company will eventually sell to a fast-fashion giant, some may think that, at the very least, they might as well wear a fun print.
Yesterday in California, the physical world and the world of free-floating grievance and ideological bluster met once again, when two teenagers attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego, killing a security guard and two others, before taking their own lives. The attack is being investigated as a hate crime; according to police, the words hate speech had been scrawled on one of the weapons, and a suicide note left by one of the attackers contained discussions of racial pride.
The incident exemplifies an all-too-common form of terrorism: attacks by people who have easy access to weapons and a desire to use violence to make a statement. Some of these attacks come from the left, or from people with inscrutable worldviews. In recent years far-right extremism has proved more frequent and more deadly than the left-wing version. The killings in San Diego took place amid the documented increase in anti-Muslim incidents in the United States since October 7, 2023.
[Read: The Trump counterterrorism strategy makes America more vulnerable]
This reality is not reflected in the latest version of the United States Counterterrorism Strategy, which the Trump administration released earlier this month. The report, periodically updated, is meant to inform the American public about the current nature of the terrorist threats facing the country and to advise state and local officials about how to plan and train. This year’s document makes no mention of right-wing extremism or of victims who are targeted because they are not white Christians. Once a serious document written by serious people, the counterterrorism strategy has been hijacked by the Trump appointee Sebastian Gorka, who used the document to assert that the greatest challenges to the American homeland come from Islamist terrorists, drug cartels, and left-wing extremists. Each is a threat, of course, but the report is striking for overlooking the violence perpetuated by those on the ideological right.
Upon its release, the strategy was criticized for its slipshod quality and lack of strategy recommendations. It might have been quickly forgotten but for the tragic reality check in San Diego.
Many communities in America are far better attuned than Gorka and his colleagues are to the homegrown radicalization that surrounds us. Synagogues have been forced to ramp up their own security because of violence from the left and the right; major mosques must take greater precautions as well. The Islamic Center’s guard, identified by community members as Amin Abdullah, was killed trying to protect the facility, which includes a school. He is reportedly the father of eight children. Pictures from the scene show children being escorted out in the familiar pattern of post-mass-shooting evacuations, in a single line, hand to shoulder, to be reunited with family members far from the scene. The police response was described as fast and efficient after the first calls from the Islamic Center.
[Jake Tapper: Trump’s purge of terrorism prosecutors]
But those weren’t the first notifications that police received. In a press briefing, the authorities said that two hours before the shooting, the mother of Cain Clark called police. She described her 17-year-old son as suicidal, and reported that he and a friend had gone out dressed in camouflage and in possession of three guns and her car. A hate-filled note left behind didn’t target the Islamic Center but, according to San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl, covered a “wide gamut” of “general hate speech.” The mother understood the reality of what could occur and, perhaps, the danger of the ideologies that motivated her son.
Americans are gaining too much experience with this kind of violence. We deserve a counterterrorism strategy that responds thoughtfully to trends that endanger not only religious minorities but the country as a whole. “Houses of worship must always be sanctuaries of peace, safety, and prayer,” Bishop Michael Pham of the San Diego Roman Catholic Diocese said in the wake of the local tragedy. “An attack on one faith community is an attack on the sacred dignity of all human life.” This is America’s shared reality, even if it isn’t shared by the White House.
Quite abruptly, the world has jolted into another infectious-disease crisis. On Friday, Africa CDC confirmed a new Ebola outbreak, centered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; within two days, the World Health Organization declared the epidemic a public-health emergency of international concern. The virus, which has also spread to Uganda, is suspected to have sickened more than 500 people and killed more than 130—counts that suggest to experts that it has been spreading largely undetected in the region for several weeks, if not months.
Central and West Africa have weathered dozens of Ebola outbreaks before. But this new epidemic has already surpassed most others in size, and “my projection is that it will get worse before it gets better,” Nahid Bhadelia, the director of Boston University’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases, told us. The global-health backdrop is simply different in 2026, largely the result of a series of public-health decisions made by the United States in the past year and a half—among them, dismantling USAID, withdrawing from the WHO, and ousting infectious-disease experts en masse from the CDC, which remains without a permanent director. As things stand, the outbreak has already reached a point at which experts feel certain it will be very difficult to contain. The world’s fractured global-health community is now playing a lethal game of catch-up with an extremely dangerous virus.
Experts suspect that a number of epidemiological factors helped the crisis quickly swell in size, mostly under the radar. The outbreak so far centers on two mining towns—Mongbwalu and Rwampara—in a region of the DRC where access to health care is inconsistent and traffic in and out is high. During a press conference on Saturday, Jean Kaseya, the director general of Africa CDC, described the area as “very vulnerable and fragile.” Relatively remote regions with high mobility and porous borders can be ideal settings for viruses to spread unnoticed, especially for pathogens such as Ebola, whose early symptoms can resemble those of typhoid and malaria, also endemic to the region. Those parts of the DRC have been plagued by civil unrest and intense armed conflict, raising substantial barriers for sick people to seek care and access tests, Krutika Kuppalli, a Dallas-based infectious-disease physician who ran an Ebola treatment unit in 2014, told us.
The strain driving the outbreak, known as Bundibugyo, is hard to catch and challenging to fight. Rapid diagnostic tests for more common versions of Ebola—the ones most readily deployed—often miss it; early test results using these tools came back negative. The epidemic’s hot spot is also far from the main DRC-based microbiological laboratories that do more precise testing, prolonging the time from sampling to confirmation, Boghuma Titanji, an infectious-disease physician at Emory University, told us. To compound the challenges, Bundibugyo has no approved vaccines or treatments. According to The New York Times, the local response may have been lacking as well: Officials in Ituri province, at the center of the outbreak, were slow to report the first patients to show concerning symptoms, and didn’t immediately dispatch test samples to Kinshasa, the capital.
But a strong international response is a crucial partner to a domestic one. WhenEbola has sparked outbreaks in the past—including the recent, record-breaking one that began in 2014 and reached 28,000 cases—USAID and the CDC, in coordination with the WHO, played instrumental roles in the global response, including detection and early containment. “During the first Trump administration, when they were faced with a situation comparable to this, they did a pretty good job of it,” Jeremy Kondynk, who led the U.S. government’s humanitarian response to Ebola under President Obama during the 2014 outbreak, told us. In 2018, for instance, the Trump administration sent teams from USAID and the CDC to the DRC within days of an Ebola outbreak being declared. The CDC collaborated with the WHO to distribute experimental, single-dose Ebola vaccines.
But under the second Trump administration, which has disparaged public health, cut foreign aid, and demeaned vaccines and other crucial components of the infectious-disease tool kit, U.S. support for global health has been severely weakened, sapping surveillance networks, laboratories, and health-care response teams of resources and personnel. In 2024, some $1.4 billion of the DRC’s foreign aid—more than 70 percent—came from the U.S.; that number has since plummeted, a loss that has kneecapped local health delivery. (In a January 2025 executive order, the White House justified the U.S.’s withdrawal from the WHO by criticizing its “mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic” and failure to reform.)
The Trump administration’s early freezes on USAID funding compromised the DRC’s ability to deliver medicine to rural clinics, which are typically funneled through pharmacies via a USAID-supported pipeline, as the physician Céline Gounder wrote; those aid cuts also happened around the time that a local rebel group known as M23 took over a province that houses a major humanitarian operation for the eastern DRC, compounding aid groups’ difficulties. Local mortality rates have since skyrocketed, likely from infectious diseases, including ones that can resemble Ebola in symptoms—which, in the case of an outbreak, has made it that much more difficult “to identify the signal from the noise,” Bhadelia told us.
More recently, the U.S. delivered another blow to the DRC. This year, the State Department declined to renew funding for more than 100 foreign-aid programs that the department classified internally as lifesaving. One program under that umbrella, providing “vital emergency health” support in the region where the outbreak is occurring, had its U.S. funding end in March, according to an internal State Department document reviewed by The Atlantic.
In February, the U.S. did commit to supporting health in the DRC in some form: The two countries agreed on a strategic health partnership, to cover infectious disease and other expenditures—though that deal includes just $900 million of U.S. aid, spread over the next five years. This week, the State Department also announced that it would mobilize additional funds to support outbreak containment. (The White House, CDC, State Department, and WHO did not respond to requests for comment at the time of this story’s publication.)
Ultimately, though, the U.S.’s withdrawal from the WHO has still meant that the organization lost its largest funder and one of its most prominent partners in global health, shrinking its capacity to respond to any crisis. And the U.S.’s posture toward global health and foreign aid is now substantially more hostile. A senior State Department official told us that the WHO has been excluded from receiving humanitarian funding from State—which he described as “a major constraint for emergency health programming.” (The official requested anonymity out of fear of retribution for speaking publicly.)
Amid the U.S.’s pullback, other high-income countries have stepped in to help. The European Union, for instance, has announced that it has personal-protective-equipment stockpiles ready to deploy to the region. After decades of battling Ebola, West and Central Africa also have plenty of experience to leverage, including in the absence of typical American assistance: This past December, the DRC declared the end of a separate Ebola outbreak. But the U.S.’s absence from the WHO is especially apparent in conditions of crisis. Under an administration that was friendlier to global public health, “we may have quicker mobilization of resources,” simply because more of them would already be there, Bhadelia said.
In the days since the outbreak was declared, the U.S. government has indicated that it is willing to respond in some capacity. The CDC has held press conferences and announced a travel ban on people returning from the DRC, Uganda, and South Sudan; agency staff based in the DRC and Uganda are assisting with contact tracing and local border screening.
Experts also told us that the country’s ongoing participation in the recent hantavirus cruise-ship outbreak may bode well: At the very least, American public-health officials are still coordinating with international colleagues. Still, “CDC’s capacity to respond is substantially lower than it was a year and half ago,” Tom Frieden, a former CDC director and the president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, a global-health nonprofit, told us.
In the meantime, the Ebola outbreak already has spread to multiple countries, and the virus has been detected in regions separated by hundreds of miles; cases have also been reported in some densely populated regions, heightening the risk for further spread. Experts are still trying to suss out when and how, exactly, the virus moved from one place to the next. In all likelihood, the epidemic is even larger than what’s been reported, with many cases still transmitting without notice. Ebola is “very unforgiving,” Frieden told us. “The response has to be close to be perfect” to bring the virus to heel; missed cases mean missed contacts—and lead to more clusters, more deaths, and more chaos. To begin the response this belatedly only lengthens the road to resolution.
“The loss of the chains of transmission is what concerns me most,” Bhadelia said. Ideally, an outbreak would be contained in part through careful contact tracing of all individuals who might have been exposed to infectious people. But the larger an outbreak grows, the less possible that becomes—especially with fewer on-the-ground resources than usual. In recent memory, the U.S.’s leadership and coordination with the WHO was “absolutely essential” for managing the world’s largest Ebola outbreak to date, Frieden said; now the U.S. has “walked away, and that’s a real problem.” The clearest remedy to an outbreak like this is for the world to collaborate on limiting the damage. But that’s precisely the commitment that American leaders have reneged on.
Among the very first things Donald Trump did upon assuming the powers of the presidency for the second time was commute the sentences of, and grant pardons to, everybody involved in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Republican allies expressed moderate disappointment but vowed to move past this ugly blemish. Senator Susan Collins called it a “terrible day for our Justice Department.” Senator Tommy Tuberville admitted, “It’s a hard one, because we work with them up here,” referring to Capitol Police who were viciously beaten by Trump’s allies. Tuberville concluded, “At the end of the day, we’ve got to get Jan. 6 behind us.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that Republicans were “not looking backwards; we’re looking forward.”
It was not, however, just one terrible day. Trump’s loyalty to his most violent and criminal supporters was a signal of his highest priority and has been a reliable guide to his decisions ever since. The impulse to rewrite the history of January 6, 2021, appears to be the inspiration even for the establishment of a $1.8 billion Treasury Department slush fund for victims of so-called weaponization of government.
Last week, when the administration floated the notion of dispersing payments to alleged victims of government weaponization, cynics assumed that Trump meant to divert the money to himself. But this assessment may have turned out to be too naive. Trump already has ample ways to profit from office, including from stock trading with the benefit of inside knowledge and by accepting gifts from client states. The Justice Department told reporters yesterday that Trump, his sons, and his family business would not receive payments from the fund. The recipients will almost surely be insurrectionists and other allies.
[From the February 2026 issue: Donald Trump wants you to forget this happened]
How, exactly, can Trump hand out taxpayer dollars at his whim? The putative mechanism is a settlement with the Internal Revenue Service. In 2020, an IRS contractor leaked a few years of Trump’s tax records. (Before Trump, major presidential candidates had for decades voluntarily released their returns, an essential step in demonstrating that they had no conflicts of interest.)
The contractor was caught and sent to prison. Trump nevertheless sued for the offense of being subjected to a portion of the scrutiny his fellow candidates have voluntarily undergone. Because Trump runs the IRS, it is no longer in a position to place any limits on his demands. He has already exploited the loophole of suing his own government to pay a series of allies investigated for or convicted of committing crimes out of loyalty to him. The recipients include the family of Ashli Babbitt, an insurrectionist who was shot and killed on January 6 while smashing her way into a corridor behind which members of Congress had taken shelter from the mob.
Trump’s Justice Department describes the forthcoming payouts as a “systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare.” The process is, in fact, the opposite of systemic. It is designed to be controlled personally by Trump and sheltered from any judicial scrutiny.
If the government were actually compensating victims of lawfare, it would direct payments to James Comey, Mark Kelly, Adam Schiff, and other targets of Trump’s vindictive prosecutions. Trump has described his actions as turnabout—“I was hunted by some very bad people. Now I’m the hunter.”—which, given that he has called his own prosecutions political targeting, is tantamount to confessing that he is targeting his enemies.
But, of course, nobody entertains for a moment the thought that the fund could conceivably reward an actual victim of weaponization. To ensure that it will never be used for a deserving victim, the fund is scheduled for termination on December 15, 2028.
Asked by a reporter yesterday whether people who committed violence against police officers should receive payments, Trump replied, “It’ll all be dependent on a committee. A committee’s being set up of very talented people, very highly respected people.” The committee is being selected entirely by Trump, who retains the power to replace any member who displeases him, and who in any case has argued in multiple contexts that he is entitled to exert full control over any decision by the executive branch.
The most dystopian explanation for this scheme comes from sources who sketched it out to ABC News last week. As ABC’s reporters characterized it, the sources described the fund as “a hybrid between a victim compensation fund—similar to the civil claims process that followed the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill—and a truth-and-reconciliation-style commission.”
[Read: The evolution of Trump’s corruption]
Trump’s commission is deviously inverting the original and most famous truth-and-reconciliation commission. South Africa established its commission to document the crimes committed under its apartheid regime. Rather than uncovering the truth to facilitate the state’s transformation from authoritarianism into democracy, Trump is doing the reverse, inscribing his lies into the historical record in an effort to undermine democracy.
It is common to describe Trump’s steps as vengeance, but he has more in mind than merely settling old scores. This obsession drove Trump to support a successful primary challenge to Senator Bill Cassidy, whose offense was casting a symbolic vote to impeach him after January 6. Cassidy had long since surrendered any independent impulses, to the point of violating his own pro-vaccine convictions to cast a humiliating, decisive vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services. Yet Cassidy’s penitence did not satisfy Trump.
Trump considers it essential both to intimidate anybody who would stop him from carrying out illegal orders—hence his attempts to imprison Democrats who truthfully advised military members that they should not obey illegal orders—and to reward anybody who does follow them. He has reportedly promised mass pardons before he leaves office. Trump could have waited until after the 2028 elections to set up his slush fund, but he is doing it now in a high-profile way, presumably to communicate directly that loyal allies can expect lavish rewards.
The government’s operating ethos during Trump’s second term has followed the dictum that the president and his allies are immune from the law, while his enemies can expect to be hounded. As his party watches silently and cowers, his intentions grow only more naked.
In the summer of 2014, the new mayor of New York City had a problem. Bill de Blasio had campaigned against aggressive policing, particularly the city’s controversial policy of briefly detaining people and patting them down for weapons. Stop-and-frisk, which a federal court had ruled was discriminatory as practiced, had been touted as a form of crime prevention. Some New Yorkers feared that the progressive mayor, by dismissing the tactics of local police, would invite a rise in violence and disorder in the city. As if on cue, the warm months brought a surge in shootings in the city’s public-housing developments.
As the mayor’s criminal-justice adviser, I met with de Blasio and the police commissioner in the mayor’s corner office in city hall every week. We needed a plan to address the spate of shootings that didn’t rely on brute force. We also wanted a strategy for discouraging problems such as vandalism, dirty streets, and conspicuous drug use—low-level disorder that, if left unchecked, can create the conditions for more serious crime. And we wanted all of this without clogging the courts and jails.
What about better lighting in the dark areas where crime tended to concentrate? This idea had a certain appeal. The city’s Depression-era Mayor Fiorello La Guardia once insisted that “there is no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage.” Good street lighting also doesn’t take sides.
That summer, de Blasio launched a $210 million initiative that delivered brighter exterior lighting and more than 150 temporary light towers across 15 high-crime public-housing developments. This was part of an effort to tamp down violence through a range of civic services that included keeping community centers open late for the first time in 30 years. The police continued to play an important role, but instead of making broadscale arrests for low-level crimes, they started an approach that they later dubbed “precision policing,” which involved targeting the few people who were driving violence instead of their scores of hangers-on. Officers were also encouraged to attend community meetings to help address local concerns about safety.
[Henry Grabar: The great crime decline is happening all across the country]
The city studied the effect of the lights on crime and neighborhood life. Aaron Chalfin, a criminology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, ran a randomized controlled trial across 80 of the city’s 335 housing developments, half of which were outfitted with temporary lighting towers. He found that serious nighttime outdoor crime dropped by 35 percent without a rise in arrests. The crime didn’t move elsewhere; it simply disappeared. A follow-up three years later found that this drop in crime had persisted.
In the field of crime and justice, most policy making relies on the science of “everyone knows”: Everyone knows that kids with nothing to do get in trouble. Everyone knows that you get knifed in a dark alley. Sometimes this common sense aligns with reality. Sometimes it doesn’t. Over the past 15 years, researchers have made a big push to test these hunches in a systematic way, and the data on lighting proved significant. Darkness is indeed a good cover for crime, so better lighting can make streets safer, not just by deterring misdeeds but also by encouraging others to fill the streets with activity.
The lights that de Blasio began rolling out more than a decade ago weren’t ideal, to be sure. The temporary lamps—which have since been upgraded—were noisy and smelly because they ran on gas generators; their intensity evoked the no-man’s-land of the Berlin Wall rather than the warm glow of brownstone living rooms. But their effectiveness was plain. Within a few years, Chalfin studied a plan in Philadelphia to upgrade about 34,000 streetlights citywide with brighter LED bulbs, which he found correlated with a 15 percent drop in outdoor nighttime street crimes and a 21 percent drop in outdoor nighttime gun violence. Local residents told interviewers that the lights made them feel more comfortable inhabiting public spaces because their neighborhoods felt safer.
These lighting studies are all in keeping with one of the most consequential and least discussed social-policy findings of the past quarter century: Urban design helps shape behavior. A growing body of research has found that the greening of vacant lots in Philadelphia was associated with a reduction in gun violence by 29 percent and overall crime by 9 percent, and the fixing of derelict buildings there coincided with a drop in gun violence by 39 percent. A six-city study that included Baltimore and Washington, D.C., found that the planting of trees was associated with a fall in gun violence by 9 percent. The redesigning of public places aligned with a drop in robberies by anywhere from 30 percent to 84 percent, depending on the study, not because these places were put under lock and key, but because creating more hospitable public design raised the cost of anti-social behavior by encouraging more people to be out on the streets.
Decades of meticulous research, the most prominent by the Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson in Chicago, shows how the rhythms of city life and a web of loose connections—a familiar face on the bus, a neighbor at the laundromat—can spur a sense of mutual obligation and enforce social constraint. Knowing that you might see someone again and again might temper an impulse to shoplift, blast music, or even pull a gun.
These studies provide rigor to Jane Jacobs’s observation in 1961 that “eyes on the street” and the spontaneity of the city’s “sidewalk ballet” keep people safe as much as anything else. She ascribed this power to what she called an “intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.”
The role of the physical environment in shaping social behavior was also at the heart of one of the most famous essays published in this magazine: “Broken Windows,” by the criminologists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson. In their telling in 1982, the broken window wasn’t merely a small, fixable problem but a cue that the block in question had no steward, that the neighborhood had no guardian, that ordinary obligations of civility were no longer in play.
“If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken,” Kelling and Wilson wrote. “One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.” The destruction needn’t stop there. An unfixed broken window sent a message that the building could likely be stripped, that its apartments were probably squattable, that drug dealing and related violence might proceed with little consequence. This argument found a sympathetic audience when crime was rising across the country. Crime-weary New Yorkers certainly took note.
The problem was not the theory itself but how it came to be interpreted. Bill Bratton, who served as the chief of the New York City Transit Police and then as the city’s police commissioner during the crime peak in the 1990s, explicitly attributed his crackdown on petty crimes, such as graffiti and fare evasion, to Kelling and Wilson. Eventually, the concept of broken-windows policing evolved from an observation about physical disorder into a blundering strategy of stopping residents, sometimes on specious grounds (“furtive movements”), and arresting masses of people for relatively minor offenses, such as marijuana possession, on the assumption that these infractions create an atmosphere of disorder that invites more serious crimes. Misdemeanor arrests skyrocketed from about 56,000 annually in the late 1980s to a high of about 230,000 in 2010. By 2011, the New York City Police Department was stopping and frisking nearly 700,000 people a year, mostly in neighborhoods that were home to poor Black people and Latinos.
This approach was enormously costly and controversial. Instead of strengthening the invisible networks of controls and standards that encourage better behavior, these arrests undermined an already fragile sense of trust between poor neighborhoods and government. In 2013, a federal judge in New York found stop-and-frisks as practiced in New York City unconstitutional, in part because they were racially discriminatory, and put the city under a federal consent decree that’s still in place today. When Bratton was back as the city’s police commissioner under de Blasio from 2014 to 2016, he did not distance himself from what he called “quality-of-life policing,” but he struck a more conciliatory note: “Our challenge is how to respond to disorder in a way that our actions do no harm.”
[Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael Mangual: How to prevent random violence]
The irony was that had the policy of broken windows been implemented as written, with an emphasis on fixes to the city itself such as cleaning vacant lots and lighting dark places, New York might have tapped into a durable way to strengthen the organic connections that keep us safe. Instead, the city’s escalating campaign of stops and arrests triggered the cascade of cynicism and distrust that continues to bedevil New Yorkers’ connection to their government.
Although crime, both nationally and in New York City, has plummeted since the early 1990s and the country’s homicide rate is at an all-time low, this decline has been neither smooth nor uncomplicated. The pandemic years brought about a surge in violence and other crimes across the country, from which many cities have only recently recovered. New York City’s historically low crime rate from 2016 to 2019 gave way to an explosion in violence in 2020 and 2021. Although shootings and murders have now fallen to historic lows, overall major crime remained substantially higher in 2025 than it had been in 2019.
What’s plain is that the challenge of curbing crime to its lowest possible level and keeping it there demands all viable strategies, not just enforcement. The fiscal uncertainty of this moment for city managers—given fluctuations in the economy, the tax code, and federal funding—should also burnish the appeal of services that are already largely funded as part of a city’s budget, such as improvements to lighting and the planting of trees. The architect Jeanne Gang has observed that a city owns anywhere from 50 percent to 90 percent of a neighborhood, such as its streets, public-housing developments, libraries, and firehouses, and has many capital projects going at any one time. With just a bit more coordination, a project to add a new speed bump or median strip could also involve adding brighter streetlamps and some greenery, which can enhance the built environment and reinforce the informal connections and constraints that help keep people safe.
Police officers, of course, play an essential role in ensuring safety, not least because they have the power and training to do what other citizens can’t. But because reducing crime and disorder is about managing behavior and controlling risk, police are not the only—and are sometimes not the best—way to accomplish these goals in a durable way. The city’s investments in street lighting and civic services a decade ago helped lead to the lowest crime and incarceration rates in decades. As New York City becomes once again split over the best way to keep people safe, there is value in turning to the evidence, which shows that good urban design can have a lasting effect on public safety.
Decades ago, Ada Ferrer learned a lesson about what she’d later call the “misencounter between the history I was reading and the history of the people in my life.” During the late 1980s, while pursuing a master’s degree in history at the University of Texas, Ferrer asked her parents to share their memories of events covered in her coursework. Did Adela and Ramón, who had emigrated from Cuba in the early ’60s, remember the nation’s constitutional convention of 1940? They did not. Had they attended Fidel Castro’s massive rallies during the 1959 Cuban Revolution? They had not. Castro’s agrarian reforms hadn’t touched Ramón’s family farm, which was too small to be confiscated; neither parent watched the leader’s hourslong speeches, because they didn’t have a television.
Yet Ferrer’s mother and father were profoundly shaped by the history they hadn’t witnessed directly. So was Ferrer, who has devoted her life to studying the country where, as she writes, “I was born but could not remember.” Today, she is a professor of history at Princeton and the winner of a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Cuba: An American History, which documents five centuries of evolution and revolution. Her new book, Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter, is a far more intimate story. Recounting her family’s experiences after the revolution, it is about “utterly ordinary people,” she writes, “always on the margins, absent less as a matter of ideology than from an unconscious sense that history did not belong to them.”
The feeling of being buffeted by forces far outside one’s control may seem familiar today, both in Cuba and in the United States—two neighbors undergoing destabilizing change. The island’s economy is shattered (it recently ran out of oil), and months of United States pressure for political change has led to the pursuit of an indictment of Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old brother of the late leader. Someday, historians will write of this moment when, after decades of repression, Fidel Castro’s revolution collapsed under its own weight, and when President Trump said Cuba was his to “do anything I want with” as he pursued heedless regime change in Latin America and mass deportation in the United States. Any proper account of the current era will also need to reckon with how thousands of families were, as Ferrer writes of her own kin, “broken by history and made by it, too.”
Ferrer planted the seeds for her memoir by beginning Cuba with an account of her family’s immigration to the United States. Her mother had left her son from an earlier relationship—Ada’s half brother Poly, short for Hipolito—behind in Cuba. “Does a revolution change people?” Ferrer asked. “Does migration?” Her new memoir answers these questions with an emphatic yes, and focuses on key turning points including the Mariel Boatlift, the economic crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the brief detente under President Obama.
Extraordinary collections of letters made it possible for Ferrer to write her family’s story. After her parents died—her mother in 2020, and her father in 2022—she inherited the moving, often heartbreaking letters that her brother and mother sent back and forth during the years of their separation; anguished letters to Poly from Tía Niña, an aunt who had helped care for him in Cuba, sent after he eventually moved to the United States; the open letters that her father wrote to Castro and U.S. presidents, expressing his dissatisfaction with their leadership; and the correspondence that Ramón maintained with his own estranged son, Ada’s half brother Juan José, a teacher in Cuba.
The preservation of such a wealth of private material isn’t rare. Before Facebook Messenger, when phone calls across the Florida Straits were difficult, letters were the primary way that Cubans communicated with friends and relatives in the United States. Less often does such correspondence wind up in the hands of a historian who can curate and verify them, fill in their gaps with other sources and personal memories, and contextualize them within the sweep of Cuban history. Ferrer is the ideal keeper of her kin’s stories.
Each turn in Cuba’s postrevolutionary history changed the trajectory of Ferrer’s family, leading repeatedly to separations and reunions and reassessments of their relationship to the country. Ferrer’s father left Cuba first, in 1962, three years after Castro’s triumph. He had served in the Cuban army under Fulgencio Batista, the president ousted by the revolution. “Stridently anticommunist” like most Cubans, Ferrer writes, Ramón resolved to leave after being detained as a suspected counterrevolutionary. His departure as a political refugee marked the first time, but not the last, that the revolution had led to the separation of the family.
Adela and Ada followed a year later, in 1963. Poly would spend 17 years apart from the family, with devastating consequences, before joining them as one of thousands of Cubans who had left the island during the boatlift. Their reunion was a complicated one: Ferrer recalls Poly saying of his mother that “just as she had ruined his life by leaving him in Cuba, he was now here to ruin hers.” Only when Adela was in her 90s, in the hospital recovering from a surgery, did she tell Ada about the moment she left her boy behind. It was six in the evening, she recalled, and Poly, then 9 years old, was playing outside with friends. The next morning, she and baby Ada went to the airport. Poly was told that she’d gone to visit relatives in the countryside for a few days. His father wouldn’t allow him to leave Cuba; Adela had no choice but to leave without him.
In the early letters that Poly wrote to his mother, he said he was doing well, going to school every day, taking care of his grandmother, and helping her with errands. Ferrer describes young Poly as “a boy proud to behave, proud to be weathering the shock of his mother’s abrupt and unannounced disappearance,” though he sometimes cried himself to sleep. As he grew older, however, the letters darkened. In 1970, when Poly was a teenager, after he had forgotten to send his mom a Mother’s Day card, he apologized and wrote, “Deep inside me lives the name of my absent mother.” He became fixated on joining his family in the United States. “I will only be well when I have you at my side,” he wrote, and he began to describe his separation from his mother as “the great trauma that I have suffered.”
In 1978, Castro surprised Cuban exiles by inviting them to visit the island. Adela accepted the offer to see Poly, who was now in his 20s, for the first time since she had left Cuba. “In their separation,” Ferrer writes, “Poly had become a man. But my mother had changed as well; she became someone he didn’t know, someone who was mine in a way she might never again be his.” Poly, however, was even more profoundly changed. After he arrived in the U.S., he got a job, but he also drank and did drugs, and he was violent. He stabbed a man, and even attacked Ferrer. After being incarcerated and attempting suicide, he died of “hypertensive crisis,” according to a medical examiner, while sitting on the toilet, home alone in Hialeah, Florida.
Many of Ferrer’s recollections prompt her to reflect on how different her life might have been. When her mother visited Cuba, Ferrer was in high school and contemplating college. She asked her mom to take pictures of the University of Havana because she thought that’s where she would have gone to school if she had stayed in Cuba. In this alternate life, she might not have come to speak more English than Spanish. She might not have attended Vassar, an “elite American college” where she felt like she didn’t quite fit in; one student tells her mother that Ferrer reminds her of their family’s maid, adding that “she’s Hispanic, but not really Hispanic—she’s educated.” Ferrer doesn’t describe herself as a Latina even once in Keeper of My Kin—instead she prefers Cuban, or immigrant—but her expressions of loss and alienation echo the ways many Latinos describe their lives in this country.
These memories also lead Ferrer to wonder how Poly might have turned out differently, and how responsible the family was for his fate. Was there something she or her mother could have done to keep him out of trouble? Might Poly have made better decisions if he’d had better role models? Before she and Poly met, they had expressed tenderness toward each other in their letters. But after he joined the family in New York, Ferrer realized that she didn’t much like her brother, who brought chaos into the household and, she suspects, resented her success. Ferrer’s father was ambivalent about his stepson’s presence as well: He understood how important it was to his wife to be reunited with her son, but he saw that their reunion only intensified her stress and her guilt.
In March 2016, after Obama loosened travel restrictions, the whole family traveled together to Cuba. Like many Cubans in the United States, Ferrer’s father had vowed never to set foot there again while Castro’s party was in power, but he was persuaded to take what would likely be his last opportunity to return. They visited the house where Ramón and Adela had met, cemeteries where relatives were buried, and the house his son, Juan José, had lived in before he died in 2009.
The family trip coincided with Obama’s visit to Cuba. Ferrer watched his speech at her aunt’s house. “We share the same blood,” Obama said. “We both live in a new world, colonized by Europeans. Cuba, like the United States, was built in part by slaves brought here from Africa. Like the United States, the Cuban people can trace their heritage to both slaves and slave owners.” When Ada asked her father, who was no fan of Obama’s, what he thought about the speech, he said, “He killed it!” Back in the United States, he told her that he wanted to spend a year in Cuba. The country was a “disaster,” he said, “but it’s my disaster.”
[Read: Cuba doesn’t care about Marxism]
Ferrer’s father never did make it back. He died in 2022, and so he was spared from seeing Cuba’s descent into greater disaster. Given all of the letters he wrote about U.S.-Cuban relations, I reached out to Ferrer to ask her what she thought her father might have made of Cuba’s situation today. She believes that they would have disagreed about what the solution should be. She thinks that Cuba is stuck—caught between President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who uses the rhetoric of anti-imperialism to mask the ways that his government has failed its people, and Trump, who wants to bring down the Cuban system no matter the human cost because he cares, above all, about being acclaimed as a great man of history. Her father, she thinks, would have argued that the situation has become so bad that he would welcome change at any price, even if it meant increased U.S. control over the island.
Millions of Cubans, including those in exile, wait to see what will become of their island. One lesson Ferrer seeks to impart is that the outcome is sure to shape their lives in unexpected ways. Although historians are likely to focus their attention on government shake-ups, military moves, and diplomatic deals, the fallout of this moment, like all moments, will be seen in the smaller events that break and remake the people in our lives.
*Illustration Sources: Courtesy of Ada Ferrer; Sven Creutzmann / Hulton Archive / Getty; Kwangmoozaa / Getty.
Last month, the Supreme Court set fire to the remnants of the Voting Rights Act, the law that made America a true democracy. Now southern Republicans are annihilating Black political power.
In Louisiana, which has six congressional representatives, Republicans moved rapidly to eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black districts. Tennessee Republicans redrew the state’s congressional map to get rid of its only Black-majority district, in Memphis, then stripped Democrats who protested the move of their membership in state house committees. Governor Tate Reeves of Mississippi declared that the “reign of terror” of the state’s lone Black congressman, Bennie Thompson, would soon be over, and announced that he expected lawmakers to draw new districts before the 2027 elections. South Carolina legislators are hard at work to eliminate Representative Jim Clyburn’s plurality-Black district, the only one in the state. More than half of the United States’ Black population lives in the South, so this amounts to an all-out assault on Black political representation in Congress.
For many decades after Reconstruction, southern states deprived Black people of the right to vote while counting their bodies toward congressional seats. The 1965 Voting Rights Act effectively invalidated the superficially race-neutral schemes designed to deprive Black people of the vote. No longer able to directly deny the vote, racist lawmakers developed new methods of diminishing Black political power through schemes such as racial gerrymandering. Congress updated the VRA—repeatedly—to address these schemes. The law worked extraordinarily well, leading to dramatic increases in minority representation, a Congress that better reflected the diverse nation it represented, and, in 2008, a Black president.
And that was the last straw.
Since Barack Obama’s election, conservatives have argued that the VRA’s protections are no longer needed—indeed, that they are themselves racist. The backlash to the Obama presidency that swept Trump into office allowed him to appoint three justices—fully a third of the Court—who agree.
Writing on behalf of the majority in that April case, Louisiana v. Callais, Justice Samuel Alito argued that Louisiana’s creation of a second majority-Black congressional district, out of six, in a state whose population is one-third Black, was “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” Eliminating that district to disempower those voters was, apparently, not. The fact that “black voters have been aligned with the Democratic party,” Alito wrote, actually “undercut” any “showing of intentional racial discrimination because race and politics are so intertwined.” But this idea—that the more motivated partisans are to discriminate against Black voters, the less racist that discrimination is—is a perverse inversion of the Fifteenth Amendment. Thanks to this Supreme Court, so long as Republicans take care not to explicitly announce their intention to discriminate, they may discriminate as much as they like.
You can draw a line through American conservatism beginning with the argument that racism was necessary and proper, to the argument that laws meant to address racism were worse than racism, to the argument that those same laws were so effective that racism was eradicated and thus the laws were no longer necessary. More than a decade ago, the Supreme Court heard Shelby County v. Holder. At issue was Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to submit voting changes to the Justice Department in advance. Shelby County, Alabama, wanted to be free of such oversight, and during oral arguments, the attorney representing the county made the case that racial discrimination in voting was “an old disease, and that disease is cured.” If that were true, the VRA wasn’t necessary. But Justice Antonin Scalia went further, referring to the VRA as the “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” I was in the courtroom, and heard gasps from the gallery.
The Court decided in Shelby County’s favor; in her dissent, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that Section 5 had “worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes.” Nullifying it, she warned, is “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
The deluge is enough to refill America’s whites-only pools. The vaunted “progress” the justices cite at every opportunity to justify gutting the VRA was a result of the law effectively neutralizing racial discrimination, not an absence of the desire or intent to discriminate. Scalia’s remark that the VRA was a “racial entitlement” is illuminating in the way that statements from many ideologues are, in that they express their own motives rather than those of their targets. Until 1965, democracy itself was a “racial entitlement” in America. Much of the Republican Party is trying to make that true once again.
We’re now finding out exactly how far the Court will let them go.
In 2023, Alabama Republicans drew a map with just one majority-Black district (out of seven, in a state that’s a quarter Black), but a federal court blocked the map, concluding that “we cannot understand the 2023 Plan as anything other than an intentional effort to dilute Black Alabamians’ voting strength.” On Monday, the Supreme Court gave its blessing for Republicans to proceed with the map.
The Court has sometimes refused to order states to change maps close to an election—even when those maps have been found to discriminate against Black voters—on the theory that it would cause confusion (a doctrine known as the “Purcell principle,” after the 2006 case Purcell v. Gonzalez). And yet the Court is now allowing Alabama to apply this new map despite its primary elections being already under way. Some Alabamians, the writer Madiba K. Dennie points out, have even sent in their ballots: They “may have their votes thrown out so that Republicans can hold a do-over election, under a map that a federal court already determined is too racist to be legal.”
There appears to be no rule of constitutional or legal interpretation here beyond what will aid the Republican Party in retaining its congressional majorities—even if states have to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens to do so. As the attorney Stephen Vladeck writes, the Supreme Court has intervened in map disputes in Alabama, New York, and Louisiana, with “the remarkably coincidental effect of benefitting Republicans in all three contexts.” Excluding California’s redistricting effort, which benefited Democrats, and which the justices allowed to proceed, the Court has consistently decided that if a map is advantageous to Republicans, it is always too close to an election to change it; if a map is not advantageous enough, there is always time to replace it with a new map, even if voters have already started casting ballots.
The central question, William F. Buckley wrote in National Review in 1957, is “whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes.” He continued: “The White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” If a “majority wills what is socially atavistic,” he added, “then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened.”
This same sense of entitlement animates the attempts to obliterate Black representation in the South today. South Carolina Representative Ralph Norman explained the logic of eliminating Clyburn’s district clearly, saying that Clyburn “does not represent the rest of South Carolina, which is conservative. His district is close to 47 percent African American.” The implication is that Black people do not vote the right way, and so they are not entitled to equal representation. To thwart their will may be undemocratic, but, in Buckley’s worldview, it is “enlightened,” and the white community is entitled to do so.
“The majority straight-facedly holds that the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders,” Justice Elena Kagan observed in her dissent in Callais. “For how else, the majority reasons, can we preserve the authority of States to engage in this practice than by stripping minority citizens of their rights to an equal political process?”
Alito’s argument—that race and partisanship are too entangled for the Fifteenth Amendment to prevent almost all racial gerrymandering—would have sounded absurd to the authors of that amendment. Black suffrage was, at that time, an entirely partisan cause. Democrats opposed it; Republicans supported it. And they supported it for partisan reasons as well as ideological ones. They were blunt about it.
“You need votes in Connecticut, do you not?” the Republican Senator Charles Sumner declared in 1869. “There are three thousand fellow-citizens in that State ready at the call of Congress to take their place at the ballot-box. You need them also in Pennsylvania, do you not? There are at least fifteen thousand in that great State waiting for your summons. Wherever you most need them, there they are; and be assured they will all vote for those who stand by them in the assertion of Equal Rights.”
The Republican Party was then in a state of relative emergency—the Civil War had been won and slavery had been abolished, but Black Americans in the South were still subject to terrorism and intimidation, while whites in the North had shown resistance to the idea of Black suffrage. Northern Democrats were having some success with their—admittedly accurate—arguments that Black suffrage would lead inevitably to Black equality, which they and many other white northerners opposed. The Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, as Michael Waldman writes in The Fight to Vote, was even blunter than Sumner about the necessity of enfranchising Black men. “We must establish the doctrine of National jurisdiction over all the States in State matters of the Franchise”—by which he meant the right to vote for all men, regardless of race—or the Republicans “shall finally be ruined.”
Republicans, the historian John Hope Franklin wrote in Reconstruction After the Civil War, “knew that there was little chance of luring the former Confederates” into the party. One did not have to “belong to the Thaddeus Stevens–Charles Sumner wing of the party to reach the conclusion that suffrage for blacks was not only desirable but imperative.” Radicals such as Sumner also warned, presciently, that the Fifteenth Amendment did not go far enough, and that its flaws would ultimately allow anti-Black reactionaries to undermine its purpose.
Democrats, on the other hand, knowing that they would have little luck winning Black votes for a program hostile to Black rights, decided that it would be best if Black people did not vote at all. In Louisiana, Waldman writes, white “rifle clubs” marched through the streets chanting “A charge to keep I have, a God to glorify. If a nigger don’t vote with us, he shall forever die.”
“I do not recall the name of one man who favored emancipation as a policy and adhered to the Democratic Party,” wrote the Massachusetts Representative George Sewall Boutwell, one of the authors of the Fifteenth Amendment, in his 1902 memoir. “When a man reached the conclusion that the negroes should be free, he could not do otherwise than join the Republican Party.”
The Fifteenth Amendment, in other words, was never not partisan. If it had not been intended to prevent politically motivated racist disenfranchisement, it would have done nothing at all. The entire purpose was to ensure that neither party—not Democrats in the 19th century nor Republicans in the 21st—could ignore Black voters. Attacking or defending Black rights is not inherently partisan, except when the parties themselves make it so, and the point of inalienable rights is that politicians should not be able to take the shortcut of disenfranchising voters to whom they do not care to appeal.
The shadow of Jim Crow did not fall all at once. Black voters continued to cast ballots in some areas of the South, particularly where they managed to make common cause with white populists. The Democrats reacted fiercely to these alliances, breaking them with intimidation, terrorism, and, finally, disenfranchisement. “The plan set up certain barriers such as property or literacy qualifications for voting, and then cut certain loopholes in the barrier through which only white men could squeeze,” the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote in The Strange Career of Jim Crow. This disenfranchisement coincided with an increase in lynching and other forms of racist terrorism; “the more defenseless, disfranchised, and intimidated the Negro became the more prone he was to the ruthless aggression of mobs.” The purpose of this disenfranchisement was to limit democratic rights to those who were entitled to them.
What the Democrats of the era understood was that, by neutralizing Black power, they were also neutralizing the motivations of the Republican Party—and of the populists—in protecting Black rights. If there were no votes to win for defending civil rights, racial equality, or defending Black people from terrorism, politicians would be less likely to support those causes. They celebrated this outcome much as Reeves did, by declaring an end to the oppression symbolized by Black people being elected to office.
How did such measures survive court review? Well, in the aftermath of Reconstruction, a Supreme Court very much like the current one decided in case after case that the “barriers” Woodward described were superficially race-neutral and therefore constitutional. In the 1898 case Williams v Mississippi, considering a state constitution that the future Democratic Senator James K. Vardaman announced had been adopted “for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics,” the justices saw no constitutionally prohibited discrimination. “The Constitution of Mississippi and its statutes do not on their face discriminate between the races, and it has not been shown that their actual administration was evil; only that evil was possible under them,” Justice Joseph McKenna wrote.
The message of Williams is identical to the message of Callais: that disenfranchising Black people is acceptable as long as you do not announce that as your intention. (But if you do, it’s also fine; we’ll just pretend we didn’t notice.) Southern states got the message and implemented disenfranchisement provisions with the same enthusiasm that modern Republicans have shown since Callais, and with the same intention of establishing one-party rule in the parts of the country where they feel entitled to power—no matter what voters have to say about it.
One could argue that, by modern standards, the Redemption-era Court—redemption was how southern Democrats referred to the restoration of white rule, and it has held on as a historical term for the period following Reconstruction—was extremely racist. But, to be fair, that Court confronted the reality of a popular white terrorist movement in the South. Even if it had ruled in line with the Reconstruction Amendments instead of neutering them, those decisions might have been unenforceable.
The Roberts Court faces no such pressure, no such threat of violence, no such popular demand. Six justices dismantled the Voting Rights Act and hollowed out the Fifteenth Amendment solely because they could. Doing so was politically advantageous to the party of the leader who appointed them, the party to which they presumably belong.
These justices have shown no particular alarm or regret over the sweeping attack on Black voting power that has followed their erosion of the VRA, displaying instead a haughty indignation that anyone would criticize their decisions or rationale. Earlier this month, Alito told the audience at a judicial conference that “it would be consistent with my public image if I told you that I spent the summer catching flies so we could pull the wings off,” as though he were the true victim of the ruling in Callais. It is not surprising that the justice who wrote the opinion setting off a wave of racist voting changes across the South flew a flag outside his home that many have used to symbolize support for the January 6 insurrection.
A return to the petty apartheid of Jim Crow segregation is unlikely—modern conservatism seeks the illusion of meritocracy in a rigged system, and de jure segregation would ruin the illusion. What we are unquestionably seeing, however, is an evolution of Jim Crow–era disenfranchisement, the purpose of which is to shape the electorate into one where inequalities of wealth, race, and gender can be maintained with a veneer of democratic consent.
That is not to say that this plan will inevitably succeed—these schemes do not always work as intended. In close Republican contests, for example, appealing to Black voters may provide a margin of victory—and so lawmakers who sought to diminish those voters’ influence may find themselves relying on it. No Supreme Court decision, no matter how reactionary or ill-reasoned, will ever extinguish the desire of Black Americans to be free and equal.
Defending the enfranchisement of Black men, Sumner noted that what he called an “oligarchy of the skin” was a protean enemy, one that would alter its appearance as needed.
“I have warred with Slavery too long, in its different forms, not to be aroused when this old enemy shows its head under an alias. It was once Slavery; it is now Caste; and the same excuse is assigned now as then. In the name of State Rights, that Slavery, with all its brood of wrong, was upheld; and it is now in the name of State Rights, that Caste, fruitful also in wrong, is upheld,” Sumner observed. The danger, he warned, was that “citizens, whose only offense is a skin not colored like our own, may be shut out from political rights.”
In the Roberts Court, Sumner would have recognized his old enemy.
Donald Trump’s destruction of the civil service is a tragedy not just for the roughly 300,000 workers who have been discarded, but for an entire nation, Franklin Foer wrote in the February issue.
I read Franklin Foer’s “The Purged” in one held breath. This is how to weigh the stakes of our political moment—one life at a time. No statistic can adequately describe America’s losses. Each of the 50 people profiled in Foer’s essay is so gifted and generous, so essential to what the United States means—or at least to what it used to mean. I salute Foer’s courage to tell the story head-on. His narrative journalism is letting us see one another whole.
Rita Charon
New York, N.Y.
There but for the grace of God go I. I never worked directly for the federal government, but I did research and consulting as a contractor for the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. I am a meteorologist, an atmospheric physicist, and an environmental economist, now retired. I worked on significant problems, including air quality, acid deposition, and the safety of liquefied gases. I developed simulation techniques for the accidental release of toxic chemicals. I don’t know the people in the article personally, but I do know them—I know their value. Their individual loss is our national loss.
Daniel J. McNaughton
Newport, R.I.
I worked in state government for 29 years. Franklin Foer’s 50 profiles are an important reminder that we’ll feel the consequences of Donald Trump’s purge for decades. I tend to think of government work as that of quiet competence. When we travel on interstate highways, we do not think about the work done to locate an appropriate site for a road, to build it, and then to maintain it. When we fly, we hope that the plane meets safety standards but spare little thought for the federal staff who developed those standards and enforce them for our benefit.
I was reminded of the importance of federal expertise last year, when the remnants of Hurricane Helene roared through the mountains and left astounding damage to public and private infrastructure. The Mitchell News-Journal, the local paper in rural Mitchell County, North Carolina, has on multiple occasions reported on confusion among employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency over how to follow the agency’s own internal guidelines. I am sure that FEMA can and should be made more efficient. But destroying morale and stirring chaos with on-again, off-again layoffs is certainly not the way to do it.
John Dorney
Durham, N.C.
I am a retired federal civil servant and a disabled veteran. I worked for the U.S. Postal Service for many years. I always took great pride in my desire to go above and beyond to help others get what they wanted or needed. On behalf of the millions of current and former federal civil-service employees, I am truly grateful for Franklin Foer’s research and reporting in this article.
In my 32-year career, the other civil-service employees and members of the military I worked alongside were dedicated, honest, and hardworking professionals. When I started to hear claims that federal employees were overpaid poor performers, or that they supported a particular political agenda that undermined the administration’s, or that they amounted to an unelected, overly partisan bureaucracy, I was shocked. These claims were so the opposite of my own experience that I thought surely anyone hearing them would disregard them as false.
Nyleen Mullally
Rapid City, S.D.
I was very moved by the depth of reporting in Franklin Foer’s story on purged government employees. The profiles helped fill in the picture—that these are real people, and that their absence will be felt for a very long time. The damage to our culture and our progress as a nation is much larger than many people realize. Thank you for helping us keep that fact front of mind, now and into the future. I hope some of this strength can be rebuilt—but first we’ll need to rebuild the reputation of government.
Evelyn Luengas
Fort Worth, Texas
“I was holding myself together, but just barely,” Sherry Winfield confesses in “Dinah’s Hat,” a new short story by Stephen King. Sherry and her friend Morris have just ventured from their trailer park to a beach with Dinah, the mysterious child Morris cares for; there, they encounter a group of young bullies. “In time,” Sherry recalls thinking of the events that follow, “I’ll be able to convince myself that never happened.”
“Dinah’s Hat” isn’t the first work of fiction King has written for The Atlantic. In the magazine’s May 2011 issue, he published “Herman Wouk Is Still Alive,” a short story told from the perspective of two aging poets, Phil and Pauline, picnicking at a rest stop in Maine, and two mothers, Brenda and Jasmine, eager to take their children on a road trip up I-95. Compared with much of King’s other work, the horrors of “Herman Wouk Is Still Alive” are fairly quotidian—dead-end jobs and deadbeat dads, aging, depression. The story, nevertheless, builds to a haunting conclusion.
In a 2011 interview with The Atlantic’s James Parker, King explained that the story had emerged from a bet with his son Owen on that year’s NCAA basketball tournament: The winner would provide a title for a short story; the loser would have to write it. Owen, victorious, proffered the phrase “Herman Wouk Is Still Alive,” inspired by news coverage he’d read that Wouk, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of War and Remembrance and The Caine Mutiny, was still writing well into his 90s. In King’s eventual story, Phil and Pauline read a fictionalized New York Times article testifying to Wouk’s longevity. “The ideas don’t stop just because one is old,” Wouk tells his interviewer. “The body weakens, but the words never do.” His sentiment inspires the two poets, both in their 70s—until, moments later, tragedy renders language powerless.
Wouk himself was asked about King’s story in a Q&A published with his 2012 novel, The Lawgiver. “I read Mr. King’s short story and enjoyed it,” Wouk said. “As for the longevity, I share his evident puzzlement, with boundless gratitude to my forebears and my Maker.” He continued, “It helps to have work I love, with much work yet to do by His grace.” Wouk died in 2019, just 10 days before his 104th birthday.
— Andrew Aoyama, Deputy Managing Editor
In this month’s cover story, “The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote,” Helen Lewis argues that “masculinism”—a movement seeking to counter the advances of feminism and place men back at the center of public life—has become the most important uniting force on the American right. Many men are drawn to masculinism, Lewis writes, because they feel that they have lost status to women. For the cover, we depicted the fear that undergirds their resentment: A rough silhouette of a man runs toward the viewer, looking over his shoulder at an imagined threat.
— Liz Hart, Art Director
This article appears in the June 2026 print edition with the headline “The Commons.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
A pair of Air Force refueling planes were flying high over Iraq two weeks into the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran. The KC-135 Stratotankers, which carry up to 200,000 pounds of jet fuel, function as flying gas stations, extending the reach of United States and allied aircraft far from air bases. On March 12, the two tankers collided. One of the planes safely landed with a badly damaged tail; the other crashed, killing six service members, constituting almost half of U.S. military fatalities in the conflict. The same day, U.S. Central Command said that the crash over Iraq’s western Anbar province had occurred in “friendly airspace” and had not been caused by hostile fire.
Initial intelligence reports told a different story. They indicated that the U.S. government had detected anti-aircraft fire by Iran-backed militias in the area around the time of the collision and that the pilots may have been forced to take evasive actions. The reports, which haven’t been previously made public, were described to us by two current officials and one former official. But Centcom’s leaders, citing different, more highly classified information, were convinced that those initial reports were mistaken. Militias had never fired surface-to-air missiles that could have threatened the aircraft, according to their assessment. The initial reports may have picked up instead on launches of missiles aimed at ground targets. That’s why the Pentagon statement asserted that no hostile fire was involved and that the skies were friendly. An Air Force–led investigation is expected to conclude that the disaster was an “avoidable mishap” by pilots operating in congested airspace, military officials told us.
Centcom’s quick and definitive public assessment of the incident, despite intelligence suggesting a more complicated picture, fits a Trump-administration pattern of omitting from its public statements important details about the conduct of the war. Senior officials have trumpeted military successes—two days before the crash, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the U.S. had “total air dominance”—and have downplayed the resilience of Iranian forces and their armed proxy groups across the Middle East.
The contrasting accounts of what preceded the crash point to the confusion of a crowded battlefield, as well as to the serious threat that Iran’s proxies in neighboring Iraq pose to the U.S. and Israeli war effort 23 years after President George W. Bush ordered Iraq’s invasion in pursuit of Saddam Hussein. President Trump said within hours of the start of the Iran war that one of his goals was to “ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces.”
But those groups remain a potent force: Iran-sponsored militias have pounded U.S. facilities across Iraq with relentless rocket and drone attacks since the war began, forcing a near-total evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Iran’s proxies in Iraq also possess advanced arsenals, including ballistic missiles and anti-aircraft weapons. Early in the conflict, one official said, U.S. intelligence indicated that a refueling tanker narrowly avoided a militia missile in the same area of western Iraq where the deadly collision occurred. A Centcom spokesperson disputed that account, saying it had no indication of such an incident.
The war is now subject to a shaky cease-fire as the United States and Iran continue an extended standoff over control of the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway for global energy supplies that Iran has effectively closed.
Those killed in the March 12 crash include three active-duty airmen from the 6th Air Refueling Wing based in Tampa, Florida, and three National Guard airmen from the Ohio Air National Guard’s 121st Air Refueling Wing. A Pentagon official declined to comment, saying that providing details before the Air Force probe is complete would be premature. The official, like others we interviewed, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. A family member of one of the service members who was killed recently told us that the Pentagon relayed to him that the incident was under investigation but that it has not provided any more information since.
The Iraqi government is a U.S. security partner. Washington helped build up the country’s security forces in the more than two decades since the 2003 invasion. But the State Department says militias, which operate both within the state’s security apparatus and outside of it, have struck U.S. sites in Iraq more than 600 times with drone and missile attacks since the war began on the last day of February. Their targets have included bases, diplomatic facilities, and aircraft on the ground, Phillip Smyth, an independent analyst of Iraqi proxy groups, told us. Iraq is “definitely not a friendly airspace,” as the Pentagon asserted, Smyth said. The Iraqi militias have also claimed or carried out as many as 5,200 strikes on military and civilian targets in Persian Gulf countries as well as on Jordan and Syria.
Other Iranian proxies in the region include the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. But the militias in Iraq, many of whose members are on Iraqi-government payrolls as part of the paramilitary Popular Mobilization Forces, may be the most potent and the least discussed, Aaron Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who studies Mideastern extremist groups, told us.
Israel has devastated Gaza in its campaign against Hamas and, in recent weeks, has targeted Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon. Last year, the U.S. carried out a monthslong campaign against the Houthis to stop attacks on ships transiting around the Bab el-Mandeb, the strait that separates the Arabian Peninsula from the Horn of Africa. But Iran’s network of proxies in Iraq has faced comparatively fewer U.S. strikes since the Iran war began, reflecting a U.S. desire not to be seen as reengaging in Iraq two decades after its invasion. Neither the U.S. nor Israel has done much targeting of the groups’ top leadership in Iraq during that time, allowing the militias to preserve their command structures and maintain operations. “These guys have only consolidated more of the state,” Zelin said. “I suspect the same dynamics will continue unless the U.S. and its allies—or Iraqis themselves—decide they want to do something far more serious about it.”
[Read: Trump ditched hearts and minds in the Iran war]
Like the regime in Tehran, the Iraqi militias have sought to force the United States to expend costly air-defense munitions to protect personnel and facilities. U.S. officials, including Hegseth and General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have publicly minimized any concerns about the depletion of U.S. munitions. But not everyone in the administration trusts those assurances. In White House meetings, Vice President Vance has repeatedly questioned the Pentagon about the accuracy of such claims.
The U.S. military has been in intermittent conflict with Iraqi militias for more than 20 years. (Hegseth, who served in the Iraq war as a National Guardsman, has cited the hundreds of U.S. soldiers killed by those Iranian proxies as a justification for the current conflict.) In subsequent years, however, U.S. forces entered an awkward, arms-length alliance with the militias as both Washington and Baghdad battled the Islamic State. Today, the militias and their affiliated parties wield formidable political power, holding roughly one-third of the seats in Iraq’s 329-member Parliament, despite the United States’ role as Iraq’s chief Western ally.
The militias’ violence during the Iran war has intensified friction between Washington and Baghdad. In the past month, U.S. officials have suspended security aid to Iraq, halted the transfer of U.S. dollars generated by Iraqi oil sales, and thrown their support behind a new prime minister–elect in an effort to force the government to take on the militias.
The administration can apply that pressure because Trump is already inclined to pull remaining U.S. forces from Iraq and is willing to risk severing the relationship, Victoria Taylor, who served as a senior State Department official for Iraq and Iran during the Biden administration, told us. Trump recently withdrew U.S. forces from neighboring Syria, another center of what remains of the Islamist insurgency.
Kataib Hezbollah, which has been designated by the U.S. as a terrorist group since 2009, is the most powerful of the Iraqi militias equipped, trained, and funded by Iran. It’s the group that some of the early intelligence suggested had been targeting the U.S. tankers.
The group has a history of launching attacks on U.S. assets and allied targets across the Middle East. U.S. officials blamed it for the recent kidnapping of the American freelance journalist Shelly Kittleson in Baghdad. (She was released a week later.) Federal prosecutors also recently charged Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, an alleged senior member of Kataib Hezbollah, with involvement in at least 18 attacks or attempted attacks in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
Two senior Iraqi officials told us that Kataib Hezbollah has an arsenal of advanced weapons, including ballistic missiles, and has begun manufacturing its own missiles and drones, as do Iran-linked militia groups in Lebanon and Yemen.
[Read: The Pentagon may not be giving Trump the full picture of the war]
Among Iran-backed militias’ most powerful weapons is the 358, a surface-to-air missile that experts say can loiter before striking its target and reach an altitude of up to roughly 30,000 feet. Kataib Hezbollah is believed to have possessed the missile at one point in the past, though whether it still does is unclear. Iraqi officials do not believe that the group has used one so far in the war, and the militia does not appear to have successfully targeted any foreign aircraft.
Unlike in previous American wars, when the Pentagon allowed journalists to witness the wars alongside deployed forces, details about the Iran war have come almost exclusively from the top—and have been uniformly positive. Hegseth and Caine have held a number of Pentagon press briefings in which they have focused on the degradation of Iranian forces and missile capabilities as well as the overall number of targets hit—more than 13,000 inside Iran before the cease-fire kicked in.
Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of Centcom, has also participated, and last week he was on Capitol Hill, where he was pressed by lawmakers about the war’s civilian casualties. He said that Centcom was investigating one incident, the bombing of a school in southern Iran on the war’s first day, which killed about 170 people, in an apparently errant U.S. strike. But Airwars, a watchdog group that has worked closely with Centcom in the past, has identified some 300 incidents in the Iran war that involved civilian casualties that the group claims merit investigation. Whether those incidents involved U.S. or Israeli strikes is unclear. During his congressional testimony, Cooper said there were initial investigations into allegations of civilian casualties, but those have not yet found any U.S. involvement. Centcom declined to comment further.
Despite Hegseth’s claims about America’s air dominance, the war has thrust American pilots into dangerous airspace over Iran. Iranian forces have shot down an American F-15E Strike Eagle and an A-10 Warthog. They have also damaged a F-35 stealth fighter jet, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing. After mounting major rescue operations, the Pentagon was able to safely recover the F-15 and A-10 aircrews.
Much about the March 12 incident in which the refueling tanker went down remains unknown. Soon after the crash, a coalition of Iran-backed Iraqi-militia groups known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq—which includes Kataib Hezbollah—claimed responsibility, saying that it had used “appropriate weaponry” to shoot down the tanker “in defense of our country’s sovereignty and its airspace violated by the aircraft of the occupation forces.” The coalition also claimed responsibility for damaging the second aircraft. American officials have dismissed those assertions as disinformation.
One of the U.S. officials we spoke with said that the pair of tankers was on a mission that involved refueling Israeli aircraft. Both Centcom and the Israel Defense Forces declined to comment. Iraqi officials described the tanker crash as an accident. One said the U.S. government asked members of Iraq’s elite Counter Terrorism Service to help retrieve the fallen airmen. Centcom declined to comment on that too.
For now, the prospect of further U.S. casualties appears reduced after Trump said yesterday that he had held back a planned attack against Iran to give a new Iranian peace proposal a chance. The pause may also provide Iran’s proxy militias with the opportunity to regroup to harass U.S. forces anew.
Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isaac Stanley-Becker contributed reporting.
*Illustration sources: Michael Clevenger / USA TODAY / Reuters; Sapphire / Getty; Jen Golbeck / SOPA Images / Getty
Sam Altman did not seem to be having a good time. During the many days that he spent inside an Oakland courtroom, the normally cheery CEO of OpenAI—a guy who tends to be chipper even when declaring AI’s existential risks to humanity—appeared anxious, even distraught. When he listened to the proceedings in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against him, a weekslong trial that threatened to remove Altman from OpenAI’s board and functionally destroy the company, he frequently concealed his mouth with his palm, fidgeted with a water bottle, and leaned forward and stared at the floor. He kept looking back at the rows of reporters behind him. On the witness stand Tuesday, Altman repeatedly noted how Musk’s actions had “annoyed” him.
Musk, who helped form OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, alleged that Altman and OpenAI had violated the organization’s founding principles by seeking profits. He was requesting, among other remedies, more than $150 billion in damages, which Musk said he would donate to the OpenAI nonprofit. This morning, a nine-person jury delivered a unanimous verdict after less than two hours of deliberation: Whether or not OpenAI had done something wrong, Musk sued outside the statute of limitations, two to three years depending on the charge. And Musk could have known of any alleged wrongdoing, the jury found, well before. Altman has been granted some respite: OpenAI and the AI industry will continue along, unphased, at least until Musk appeals the decision. (A second portion of the case, related to claims that Musk made under antitrust law, remains unresolved, although the presiding judge has said that his are “not very good claims.” Neither Musk’s lawyers nor OpenAI immediately responded to a request for comment.)
OpenAI swept the legal argument. But in another sense, basically everybody involved in Musk v. Altman came away looking petty, short-sighted, deceptive, or ignorant. During the dozens of hours I spent in the courtroom, sometimes lining up as early as 5 a.m. to secure a seat, there wasn’t much substance to be found. Frankly, at the end of it all, everyone had good reason to be annoyed.
Musk came off the worst in this trial, by far. The question before the jury was whether OpenAI’s for-profit arm had somehow broken a legal promise the organization made to Musk at the organization’s founding: “It’s not okay to steal a charity,” as Musk told the jury on the first day. This was a farcical notion based on any number of pieces of evidence and testimony presented at trial, not least of which being that in 2017, Musk himself was involved in discussions for OpenAI to raise more money by making a parallel for-profit arm. Coming into the trial, this was already an uphill battle for Musk and his lawyers. But even by those low expectations, the entire affair was a debacle.
As a witness, Musk was impish. When asked simple questions by William Savitt, one of the attorneys representing OpenAI, Musk rambled and avoided the issue at hand. When the lawyers asked for a yes or no, he bristled: “The classic reason why you cannot always answer a yes-or-no question,” Musk said from the witness stand, “is if you ask a question, ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’” (“We’re not going to go there,” U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers interjected.) Later, Musk accused Savitt of asking improper questions, after which Gonzalez Rogers sharply cut in, telling the world’s richest man, “You’re not a lawyer.” Musk conceded but, after a pause, grinned and added, “Well, technically I did take Law 101.”
When Musk answered questions, he argued that OpenAI had sacrificed safe and responsible AI development by prioritizing profits. But when cross-examined about AI safety, Musk was unable to articulate any coherent arguments. Savitt noted that Musk’s xAI, a competitor to OpenAI, is a for-profit company, and asked if xAI presents identical dangers. “Yes,” Musk said, “I think it creates some safety risk.” Savitt then asked about basic AI-safety measures. Musk, who earlier had testified that he wants to avoid an AI “Terminator outcome,” was clueless. Asked about safety cards, for instance, Musk responded, “Safety card? Why would it be a card?” These are years-old, widely used, industry-standard documents that anybody who has worked at an AI company in the past five years should be intimately familiar with.
The following day, in a particularly withering exchange, Savitt went down the list of Musk’s other enterprises. Did he think that Tesla was making the world better? “Yes,” Musk said. And is Tesla a for-profit company? “Yes.” Savitt then asked these two questions about SpaceX, Neuralink, and X. For each of his businesses, Musk responded yes and yes. The same man who has a trillion-dollar compensation package from Tesla and may receive another from SpaceX was suing OpenAI for trying to make a lot of money. I wondered to myself, What are we doing in this courtroom again?
Despite winning in court, Altman didn’t come off all that much better. The first question from Steven Molo, one of Musk’s lawyers, to Altman was “Are you completely trustworthy?” With a puzzled look, the OpenAI CEO responded, “I believe so.” Molo asked if he had misled business partners, and Altman, after a pause, said, “I believe I am an honest and trustworthy business person.”
Altman’s evasive answers were significant because he has a long history of being accused by colleagues and business partners of being deceptive. Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, testified that during his time at the company, he had felt that Altman created an “environment where executives don’t have the correct information,” which is not conducive to AI safety. Multiple former OpenAI board members testified to similar effect in explaining why, in late 2023, they briefly fired Altman. (For his part, Altman wrote in a recent blog post that he is “not proud of handling myself badly in a conflict with our previous board that led to a huge mess for the company.”) When the judge excoriated OpenAI’s legal team for making contradictory arguments in separate lawsuits that she is hearing, Musk smiled and nodded. Musk’s legal team essentially hung its case on impugning Altman’s integrity, and Molo told the jury in his closing argument to imagine that they were walking over a bridge: “The bridge is built on Sam Altman’s version of the truth,” he said. “Would you walk across that bridge?”
The many texts, emails, and internal documents released because of the lawsuit, and the sworn testimony of current and former OpenAI executives, were hardly flattering for the firm— depicting a treacherous company culture that has nonetheless made its staff fantastically rich. Sutskever said that his stake in the company is worth some $7 billion, and Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and another defendant in the lawsuit, said that his equity is worth some $30 billion. Altman, who previously told the Senate that he has no direct equity in OpenAI, testified that through an investment fund run by the start-up incubator Y Combinator (which Altman used to be president of), he has an indirect financial stake in the firm.
The trial surfaced and produced countless other shenanigans: Musk apparently called an OpenAI employee a “jackass” for wanting to prioritize safety over speed, after which that employee was given a satirical trophy depicting a donkey’s butt. (During his own testimony, Musk denied yelling at someone and said he would have used such a word only in jest.) In a diary entry, Brockman had written that it would be “wrong to steal the nonprofit from” Musk and that doing so would “be pretty morally bankrupt, and he’s really not an idiot.” Sutskever, a Yoda-like figure in the AI world, described AI progress from 2018 to now as “the difference between an ant and a cat.” At the beginning of the trial, the judge had asked Musk to refrain from posting on social media about the trial as it unfolded, and he did show restraint. Immediately after the verdict, though, Musk posted on X: “The ruling by the terrible activist Oakland judge, who simply used the jury as a fig leaf, creates such a terrible precedent.”
To the extent that the trial could have actually been about the best way to develop AI for the benefit of humanity, and about whether OpenAI is honoring its founding pledge to do so—well, it simply wasn’t. For the most part, Musk and Altman—billionaires who are perhaps the two most influential tech CEOs in the world—were in essence asking their attorneys to debate whether making ungodly sums of money was acceptable. In a remarkable exchange during closing arguments, Gonzalez Rogers excoriated one of Musk’s lawyers for misleading the jury: Molo, after attacking the bridge “built on Sam Altman’s version of the truth,” said that Musk is not asking for money from OpenAI. The district judge pointed out that he, in fact, was asking for money. “You need to retract that statement, or you need to drop your claim for billions of dollars,” the judge said. Musk’s lawyers did not drop the demand.
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Local election officials are the lifeblood of American democracy. They, and not the president or Congress, are most important for functional elections, and that’s what made Tina Peters’s crimes especially egregious.
Peters was the county clerk in Mesa County, Colorado, during the 2020 election. Following the election, she signed documents affirming that all results in her county were in order. Later, however, she became convinced of claims by Donald Trump and others that the election was tainted by fraud. Peters ordered security cameras turned off, then allowed an election-denial activist access to voting data from her county. She lied to staffers, obtaining him a badge under another person’s name. When the data leaked, she falsely claimed ignorance. (The county eventually had to replace all of its voting machines.)
In 2024, Peters was convicted of four felonies and three misdemeanors related to the case, and was sentenced to almost nine years in prison. (She pleaded not guilty.) On Friday, Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, announced that he had commuted Peters’s sentence, setting her to be released from prison on June 1. This is a serious mistake. Perhaps Polis succumbed to threats and pressure from Trump to subvert justice, but he insists he did not. Whatever the motivation, clemency for Peters weakens the rule of law, and it will encourage those who wish to undermine elections.
Peters became a cause célèbre for Trump and his backers—“the most prominent MAGA prisoner still behind bars,” as my colleague Yvonne Wingett Sanchez wrote last year. Peters was so prominent mainly because she was one of the very few people involved in post-2020 election denial to face a serious consequence. Trump himself had escaped trial or conviction, and he had granted clemency to others, but because Peters was convicted in state court, he couldn’t pardon her.
Instead, Trump spent months lambasting Polis and punishing Colorado, including moving U.S. Space Command to Alabama, killing a water project, and closing down a climate-research center. This is an appalling abuse of federal power: a president, for his own political purposes, attempting to force a sovereign state to release a duly convicted prisoner, using public money. It is very similar, in fact, to how Trump tried to extort Ukraine, leading to his first impeachment.
Polis claims not that he was strong-armed but that he reached the decision of his own avail, which might be even worse. He suggested that Peters was being penalized for casting doubt on the election. “It’s not a crime in our country to believe the earth is flat,” Polis told The New York Times. “It’s not a crime to believe voting machines are flawed.” Just so—but acting on those beliefs can be a crime. Peters didn’t just tell people the election was rigged; she took actions that violated the law based on that mistaken idea.
Fraud and abuse by election officials such as Peters are, ironically, much greater threats to election integrity than the bogus claims that she has backed. Because her position gave her an imprimatur of authority, her claims have also made the work of election officials who are trying to do the right thing much harder. A group representing Colorado county clerks opposed granting Peters clemency, citing violent threats from her supporters. The Republican district attorney who prosecuted Peters told the Times that he opposed the move and urged the governor to speak with the Republican county commissioners who had to clean up her mess.
Polis granted Peters clemency at a time when many prominent Democrats are emphasizing the need for harsher accountability for Trump and people around him. (Polis’s decision drew widespread condemnation from high-ranking Democrats in Colorado and elsewhere.) Clemency and leniency can be virtues, but only when the offender has shown a willingness to change or is part of some disadvantaged group. Peters doesn’t appear especially remorseful. In her clemency application, she said that her actions were “wrong” and added, “Going forward, I will make sure that my actions always follow the law, and I will avoid the mistakes of the past.” This apology didn’t convince the governor’s clemency advisory board, according to the Times, and it doesn’t mesh well with her social-media presence, where she has continued to portray herself as a persecuted whistleblower. Peters also ran for secretary of state in 2022. When she lost the GOP primary, she blamed—you guessed it—fraud.
Instead, clemency seems only to have convinced many 2020 election deniers that they were right all along. I have reported on the pardon-to-prison pipeline for people involved in the January 6 riot who were sprung free by Trump and then committed more crimes, and new examples keep popping up. Election deniers have taken top positions across government, including overseeing election security at the Department of Homeland Security, and some could even be elected as governor this year.
The most glaring example, of course, is the president himself. Trump repeatedly escaped serious consequences: He was impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate because Republicans who loathed him were unwilling to cast a tough vote. A state case against him in Georgia fell apart because of misconduct by the Fulton County district attorney. The Justice Department brought charges, but the Supreme Court both bestowed broad immunity on former presidents for official actions and ran out the clock on a chance to bring him to trial.
Emboldened by getting off without serious consequences, Trump has not only abused his power to press for clemency for Peters. He has also picked up right where he left off in 2020, embarking on a broad effort to subvert the 2026 midterms and spreading false claims of fraud.
Two months ago, the political scientist Seth Masket, an expert on national politics at the University of Denver, called Peters’s continued imprisonment “a one-person measure of democratic health,” writing that “if Trump can degrade democracy in a solidly blue state with Democratic trifecta control and one of the best election systems and highest turnout rates in the country, he can do it anywhere.” Polis’s decision on Friday makes the patient much sicker.
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The Great Gen Z Dividing Line
By Faith Hill
A little less than two years ago, Gen Z underwent a rebrand. Donald Trump had just been reelected. Exit polls suggested that young voters—especially young men—had helped deliver the Republican victory. Rather suddenly, a generation associated with climate activism and trigger warnings became known for manosphere podcasts, fiscal conservatism, and gender relations so icy that they’ve contributed to the national panic about fertility rates.
But a lot has changed since 2024. Trump has begun a (thus far ineffectual) war with Iran, something he said wouldn’t happen. His administration’s handling of the Epstein files, where his name appears abundantly, has been criticized by Democrats and Republicans alike. He vowed to lower gas and grocery prices; instead, they keep rising. His approval ratings have hit record lows, and he’s losing favor among crucial voting blocs such as independents and Latinos. Journalists and political commentators keep speculating and debating: Will the young men who moved rightward crawl back in the other direction?
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Explore. Did Karl Lagerfeld really leave millions to his blue-cream Birman, Choupette? Chris Heath writes about what may be the richest cat in the world.
Reminisce. Jake Lundberg on how America celebrated its 100th birthday
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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In 1971, Richard Nixon announced his plan to visit Beijing—marking a geopolitical turning point, as the trip would be the first for a U.S. president in 25 years. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield offered an observation that has since become a Washington commonplace. “Only a Republican, perhaps only a Nixon,” he told U.S. News & World Report, “could have made this break and gotten away with it.”
This notion entered the political lexicon to denote a particular kind of calculation: that on certain issues, only a hard-liner has the credibility to pursue a softer line and survive politically.
Last week in Beijing, Donald Trump had his Nixon moment. He scrapped a policy that combined hardheaded diplomacy with action to protect U.S. interests and check Chinese power. In its place, he embraced the notion that a personal bond with Chinese leader Xi Jinping can ensure stability.
Trump is getting away with this move politically. Geopolitically, he will not. His new stance imperils Americans and emboldens China, which makes a future crisis likelier than ever.
[Read: A checkers player meets a three-dimensional-chess master]
In recent decades, Republicans and Democrats have largely agreed to treat China as a strategic competitor. The United States has tightened export controls on advanced technology, reduced its economic exposure to China, and thickened its web of alliances across the Indo-Pacific. That shift began during the first Trump administration; the Biden administration intensified it.
Trump has long been a vocal critic of China. He began his second term with a trade war that pushed tariffs on Chinese goods to 145 percent. He reversed course after China retaliated and demonstrated, through its grip on rare earth processing, that it could inflict real pain in return. Then he began speaking of his great personal relationship with Xi and of the advent of a U.S.-China G2.
In Beijing last week, he praised Xi in terms he seldom uses for America’s democratic allies: “a great leader,” straight out of “central casting.” Trump took with him an extraordinary delegation of American CEOs, including Apple’s Tim Cook, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, whose company has spent the past year lobbying to keep its most advanced chips flowing to the Chinese market.
China announced that the two countries had agreed to establish a “constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability.” Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, framed the new concept as one of “respecting each other’s core interests and major concerns.” Beijing is almost certainly suggesting, with this language, that it expects the U.S. to limit its competitive measures. Trump, for his part, announced modest trade deals on aircraft and agriculture.
Were a Democratic president doing any of this, Republican hawks would be unsparing in their criticism. Cowed by Trump, they are largely silent. Trump’s shift raises deceptively simple questions that may define the coming China debate and even reshape American policy: Why are we competing with China at all? What’s wrong with a little peace and quiet?
Some experts see an opportunity to persuade Democrats to soften their position on China. Jessica Chen Weiss, a former Biden State Department official who broke with that administration over what she viewed as excessive hawkishness, used the occasion of the summit to write in the Financial Times that Trump had “created real breathing room in U.S.-China relations,” and to argue for a posture that embraces interdependence and cooperation and abandons strategic competition altogether. Hers will not be the last such argument.
The trouble with this posture is that it fails to account for the Chinese actions that threaten the livelihood and security of the United States and its allies. Consider trade. Beijing uses the full weight of the Chinese state—subsidies, financing, regulatory protection, industrial policy at a scale that no Western country can match—to dominate the high-end industries of the future. It has reduced its imports to make itself less dependent on other states, and increased its exports to gain leverage over them. China’s trade surplus in manufacturing goods is now more than $2 trillion. As Robin Harding of the Financial Times has put it, Beijing is “making trade impossible.” It has effectively given Western countries a choice between deindustrialization and protectionism.
Trump’s tariffs reduced China’s surplus with the United States, but the excess goods simply rerouted to Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, where they are now hollowing out the manufacturing bases of America’s allies. A serious U.S. response would involve coordinating with Europe, Japan, and Korea on common tariffs and pressing Beijing on the underlying imbalance. Trump is doing the opposite. He treats the European Union, which is on the brink of a trade war with China, as a rival rather than a partner, and he has signaled that he sees America’s economic relationship with allies as no more privileged than its relationship with its rivals.
The most striking signal of last week, though, was on cybersecurity. For several years, a Chinese state-affiliated group that U.S. intelligence calls Volt Typhoon has been pre-positioning itself inside the IT networks of American water utilities, transportation systems, electric grids, and the like. Should the U.S. and China come into conflict—say, over Taiwan—Volt Typhoon could unleash destructive attacks on American infrastructure. China has similar capabilities in states allied with the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific.
Asked aboard Air Force One whether he had raised China’s cyber campaign with Xi, Trump offered something close to a shrug. “What they do, we do too,” he said. “We spy like hell on them too. I told him, ‘We do a lot of stuff to you that you don’t know about.’” Pressed on the specific question of pre-positioning for attacks on civilian infrastructure, he allowed: “Well, you don’t know that. I mean, I’d like to see it, but it’s very possible that they do, and we’re doing things to them.”
Espionage—intrusions for the purpose of intelligence collection—is ubiquitous and, within limits, accepted. The pre-positioning of cyber weapons inside the civilian infrastructure of a country with which one is not at war is something else entirely. To conflate the two in public, alongside Xi, is to tell Beijing that one of the most aggressive components of its peacetime posture against the United States carries no political price.
The cyber-penetration also signals a larger problem: China is building the military capability to make a war over Taiwan winnable. John Culver, a former CIA analyst of China’s military, recently told The Washington Post that “it’s hard to point to an area other than submarines and undersea warfare and say the United States still has an advantage,” and that China is leading in “air-to-air missiles, surface-to-air missiles, counter-space capabilities and electronic warfare.”
China’s engagement with U.S. companies has helped it build the industrial and technological base that underwrites these military advances. In his book, Apple in China, the journalist Patrick McGee notes that Apple’s annual investment in China’s technology sector exceeded the Biden administration’s once-in-a-generation investment in domestic chips manufacturing. The high-tech China of today, he writes, would not be what it is without Apple. This “transfer of technology and know-how” was “so consequential as to constitute a geopolitical event, like the fall of the Berlin Wall.” Apple’s CEO was, of course, on the plane to Beijing last week.
China needs advanced U.S. chips to power artificial intelligence. Restricting Beijing’s access to these has been one way for the U.S. to interfere with China’s growing military capability in recent years. But Trump has systematically relaxed those controls over the past year, for example by approving sales of Nvidia’s H200 to several major Chinese tech firms.
With regard to Taiwan, Trump said, rightly, that the United States just seeks to maintain the status quo. But he also needlessly raised doubts about the U.S. commitment to helping Taiwan defend against a Chinese attack, and he seems to have bought into Xi’s narrative that the problem is that Taiwan is seeking independence.
In the past, the U.S. has sought to deter a Chinese assault on Taiwan by strengthening the island’s defenses. Since 1982, the U.S. has made an explicit policy of selling arms to Taiwan without consulting Beijing on the timing or content of the shipments. But last week’s meeting suggested a weakening of this American posture: Trump dismissed America’s long-standing assurances to Taiwan in this regard as something from “a very long time ago” and accused Taiwan of stealing America’s chip industry. He acknowledged that Taiwan had been Xi’s most important issue and said that an American arms package authorized in December and not yet delivered was “a significant bargaining chip” with Beijing.
[Read: The Hippocratic summit]
To watch some of the coverage of Trump’s visit to China, or to listen to the administration, one could be forgiven for thinking that he inherited a relationship on the brink of war. He did not. The Biden administration, in which I served, had a strategy of managed competition. That blended close and frank diplomatic contact among senior officials with “competitive actions” to strengthen America’s strategic advantage over China.
Relaxing the competitive policies toward China in favor of warmer leader-to-leader engagement reflects a fundamental misreading of Xi’s intentions. Xi’s preferred strategy toward the United States is exactly the one on offer in Beijing last week: engage Washington to buy a period of stability, then use that time to pursue longer-term objectives in relative comfort. China hopes to emerge with decisive advantages that will allow it to finish its harder business at a moment of its choosing.
Jon Czin, a former CIA analyst of Xi and now my colleague at the Brookings Institution, said in a podcast interview that the key thing to know about the Chinese leader is that “he is not a dealmaker”; nor is he “sentimental about his personal relationships.” He’s “a jack-in-the-box,” Czin said, “who will wind up for years, sometimes for decades, and then pop when he thinks the moment is right, startling everyone around him.”
The Beijing summit was the first of as many as four meetings between the two leaders set to take place this year. Xi is scheduled to visit the United States on September 24, and the leaders may meet again at conferences scheduled for November and December. That frequency gives Trump every incentive to seek to maintain good terms with Xi, even if it means suppressing impulses inside his own administration toward a more competitive approach to China.
Nixon went to China because he understood that relations with Beijing would help the United States in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Trump went there to abandon the strategy of managed competition and replace it with a leader-to-leader bond. His new posture is one that strengthens America’s top rival, leaves its vulnerabilities unaddressed, and makes a U.S.-China crisis more likely rather than less.
By 10 a.m. yesterday, the line of people wishing to dedicate America to God was more than three hours long. They came ready with prayer flags to wave the Holy Spirit into action, and shofars to scatter demonic forces. They wore T-shirts declaring the sort of Christians they were. A muscular man wore one that read Prayer Warrior. A woman in cargo shorts announced that she was an Intercessor for America. An elderly woman wore one that read I Am the Weapon.
“You understand you’re not going to be able to get in with that,” a security guard told a man wheeling a huge cross toward the entrance to the National Mall, as thousands of people began spreading out across a swath of grass that many of them now considered a kind of occupied territory in a cosmic spiritual war.
“We are here to bring the Earth into alignment with God,” a man named Joel Balin, who had come with a friend from Atlanta, told me. “To bring the kingdom of heaven to Earth.”
The rally, called Rededicate 250, was billed as a “jubilee of prayer, praise and Thanksgiving” for “God’s presence” in American history. It was part of a series of events celebrating the nation’s anniversary put together by a Donald Trump–aligned nonprofit called Freedom 250, which is being funded by a public-private partnership that includes corporate donors such as Exxon Mobil, Lockheed Martin, and Palantir and for which Congress has allocated $150 million. Critics of the event denounced the reliance on government funds, the participation of administration officials, and the near-total lack of religious diversity as an attempt to make a certain version of Christianity a national religion. A minor protest went on outside the barricades—a small group of people holding signs supporting LGBTQ people, immigrants, and all of the other Americans they believed to be under threat from the Trump administration. They blasted metal music, and a woman with pink hair screamed into a bullhorn.
The people in line paid them little mind. The event was a long-sought triumph for those who came and for millions more grassroots believers who helped elect Trump twice, embracing prophecies that God anointed him for the great spiritual battle against demonic forces that they understand to be animating current events. This idea was the work of the apostles and prophets of the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic movement that began gathering momentum in the 1990s and is now the leading edge of the Christian right. Sunday was a clear display of the influence of the movement, whose leaders were instrumental in mobilizing voters to turn out in recent elections and to take part in the January 6 insurrection, when many people believed that they were taking the U.S. Capitol for God’s kingdom.
[Peter Wehner: The evangelicals who see Trump’s viciousness as virtue]
Speakers yesterday included Paula White-Cain, an apostle who now leads the White House Faith Office; Lou Engle, an apostle and prophet who is known for organizing the kind of mass-prayer gatherings that characterize the movement; and Guillermo Maldonado, an apostle who leads one of the largest Latino churches in the country, El Rey Jesús, in Florida. Administration officials including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose own theologies do not exactly align with the movement, told stories about God deploying miracles at key moments in the nation’s history, leveraging these anecdotes to argue that the United States was founded to be a Christian nation. Historians say this is a clear misunderstanding of the American Revolution. Trump, just back from China, appeared in a prerecorded video in which he reads from the Old Testament, which seemed to be the same video that he had recorded for a marathon reading of the Bible last month. More revealing than any of these speakers, though, were the thousands of people willing to stand in line for three hours and then roast for seven more in the hot sun.
Balin, who leads a men’s ministry called Wednesday Warriors, told me that by enabling the event, Trump was “opening up a door for us to do spiritual warfare,” and that the very presence of so many believers gathered in the nation’s capital was scattering demonic forces and advancing the kingdom. He said that church-state separation is a “myth” and that, really, any separation from God is a foolish denial of the cosmic reality of the spiritual battle under way. He said that people he knows are tired of “materialism” and “dualism” and “an Enlightenment mindset” that fails to account for how supernatural forces affect earthly life. “There are so many things happening in the supernatural realm, and in the ancient world and other cultures, they recognized this—there was no separation,” he said. “I think we are rediscovering that as Americans.”
It was past 11 a.m., and people were spreading out blankets on the green grass, taking selfies, and livestreaming to congregations back home. “This is Pastor John!” a man in a blue suit said into his cellphone. The crowd was mostly white, but many people I spoke with emphasized that their movement is international and multiethnic, even as some expressed skepticism about accepting Muslim and other non-Christian immigrants into the country. MAGA hats abounded.
[Tim Alberta: My father, my faith, and Donald Trump]
On the stage, the first of many praise bands blasted the surging worship music common in charismatic churches these days. People mouthed the words. A screen displayed what appeared to be two church windows, which sometimes were filled with images of stained glass, and sometimes with an American flag, and sometimes with swirling clouds and stars. In the crowd, several women danced free-form with prayer flags, and other people periodically blew a shofar, the hollowed-out ram’s horn used in traditional Jewish services and considered in charismatic circles to be a tool of spiritual warfare. Two women from the central coast of California looked around.
“This is what we’ve been praying for, for our country to turn back to God,” Debbie Cloud, a retiree, told me as she began to cry.
She and her friend Susan Fraze said that they are working on the long-shot campaign of an influential apostle named Ché Ahn, who is running for governor of California as a write-in candidate. Cloud said that she attends a nondenominational church called Calvary Chapel. Fraze goes to a nondenominational church called the Bridge. Almost everyone I spoke with had some story about how they used to be Baptist, or Pentecostal, or Methodist but had found their way to churches with names such as Oasis and Free Chapel and Anchor and Abundant Harvest, the kind of nondenominational congregations that are growing as most denominations continue to decline. At least 15 percent of all American adults now identify as nondenominational, and most of them are embracing charismatic ideas about signs and wonders and spiritual warfare. Many people told me about their involvement with prayer groups, prayer rooms, prayer closets, and so-called prayer furnaces, spaces dedicated to intense, dayslong prayer sessions that people believe can shape the spiritual destiny of the country.
Under the shade of a tree, a man named Adriel Lam told me that he’d flown in from Hawaii, where he works for Capitol Ministries, an organization that seeks to bring prayer into state capitols. Lam is also running for Congress. He said that yesterday’s gathering was more evidence that an outpouring of the Holy Spirit is under way across America, a moment that he described as “post-postmodernism.”
“Modernism told us, Let’s know our chemistry. Let’s know our physics. Science can explain the world,” he said. “Then postmodernism said, Let’s question the foundations of everything. Post-postmodernism is people saying, Let’s go back to zero. Let’s go back to the first century, when Jesus united the physical and the spiritual. God is moving our generation for renewal.”
On a blue towel in the grass, David Hitt, an accountant from Atlanta, huddled and kneeled with several friends. He told me afterward that they were submitting themselves to Jesus and aligning their spiritual posture with God.
“We underestimate what’s going on in the invisible realm,” he said. “Our assembly, our worship, our prayer is creating openings for God to do his will.” He elaborated that he meant actual openings, portals where the Holy Spirit could enter into battle against actual demonic forces. He estimated that the prayer of just one person could put 1,000 demons in flight, and the prayer of two people could eject 10,000.
[Stephanie McCrummen: The army of God comes out of the shadows]
“So here we’ve got how many people focused on God?” he said, envisioning legions of demons fleeing the capital.
“Praise Jesus,” someone said. A man walked by in a T-shirt that read Jesus is King, Repent or Die. Another wore one that read Blessed are those persecuted for righteousness.
Outside the metal barricades, the capital was quiet. People jogged and went to the Smithsonian, and beyond a block or so, you couldn’t hear the music or the loud cheers when House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “We hereby rededicate the United States of America as one nation under God.” Inside, though, the message was clear.
“We are the kingdom,” a woman named Robin Noll, who’d come to Washington, D.C., on a bus with 29 others from western Pennsylvania, told me. “God is driving us into the battlefield.”
Earlier this month, to celebrate a Spotify-streaming milestone, the singer Olivia Rodrigo held an intimate concert in Barcelona while wearing a certain outfit: a floral baby-doll dress, pink bloomers, and knee-high leather boots. The getup almost immediately set off an online maelstrom. Some commenters accused her of dressing like a “sexy baby” and promoting “pedo core” (short for “pedophilia core”); others defended her right to dress however she pleases.
Rodrigo, though, appeared to have specific references in mind: In a recent interview, she noted that she’s currently inspired by artists such as Kat Bjelland and Courtney Love, who paired baby-doll dresses with punk rock in the 1990s to repudiate the fetishization of girlhood. But those artists, too, were disparaged for the look back then—one reviewer in 1994 called Love’s style that of a “raddled Baby Jane whose notion of clothes-shopping is to lie in a skip outside a paedophile brothel.” And critiques of the style reached into the world of fashion more broadly. After Giorgio Armani and Anna Sui featured baby-doll dresses and pleated skirts in ’90s runway shows, one New York Times writer remarked, “Is there anything more perverse and weird than grown women wearing kiddie clothes?”
Baby-doll dresses have clearly been a magnet for moral panic for decades. But though some people might associate them squarely with girlhood, the history of the billowy dress is far more convoluted: It has traveled, over the centuries, between kid and adult closets. This fluidity reflects how “kiddie” and “grown” clothes have never had strictly differentiated styles, fashion historians told me, and how the line between the two has constantly shifted—even if the policing of how these garments are worn, especially by women, has remained constant.
[Read: Olivia Rodrigo’s big, bloody return]
For much of history, people mostly made kids’ clothes at home, and they sometimes dressed their children like adults; in the Victorian era, some children wore corsets. Kids’ clothing as a separate, mass-produced consumer category didn’t even really take off in the United States until the early 20th century, thus launching fresh concerns about what was appropriate to wear at each age. In the 1920s, some people viewed the era’s adult shift dresses as childlike; when men wore shorts in public in the 1970s and ’80s, it was also sometimes deemed a kiddish regression.
Short, flowy garments—the classic baby-doll silhouette—actually started out as a practical choice that a child of any gender could play in: One American boy’s garment, from 1855, looks roughly like a baby-doll dress Rodrigo or Sabrina Carpenter might wear on tour. Adults started wearing a version of this garb around the 1860s, Aude Le Guennec, a design anthropologist at the Glasgow School of Art, told me. At the time, many women were transitioning from riding horses sidesaddle to commuting by bicycle, and shorter dresses and bottoms were simply more functional. The outfit was highly controversial at the time, Le Guennec said, with people claiming that it looked as if women were showing their underwear. (Eventually, many women switched to wearing culottes.)
Later in the 19th century, similar bottoms—varying from knee- to ankle-length—would be called “bloomers” after the suffragist Amelia Bloomer, who advocated for less-restrictive women’s clothing. Bloomers became a symbol within the women’s-rights movement—though even Bloomer eventually felt pressure to abandon the garment, after critics loudly accused her of trying to be too “masculine.”
In the 1950s and ’60s, short, loose-fitting dresses and bloomers were reconceptualized again, this time as lingerie. The designer Sylvia Pedlar, in response to World War II fabric shortages, had in the 1940s chopped nightgowns in half, creating dresses that people might now link with the baby-doll look. But the style gained its contemporary moniker after it became associated with the 1956 movie Baby Doll, about a 19-year-old girl forced to marry an older man. Old ideas about the silhouette’s functionality waned, and the dress started to be seen as a sexual symbol, a messy one that played into the over-sexualization of young women.
Fashion tends to be a Rorschach test reflecting the concerns of its time. And the line between kid and adult clothes has been drawn largely based on ideas about which clothing was age-appropriate for girls to wear, Daniel Cook, a childhood-studies professor at Rutgers University at Camden, told me. After the rise of mass manufacturing, whole new vocabularies emerged to cater to different age groups (and to get people buying more clothes): “teenager,” “subteen,” “preteen,” “junior miss.” By the 1990s, the “tween” was a full-blown consumer category, catered to by new retailers such as Limited Too. And with each new demarcation, the clothing industry and the broader public seemed to negotiate the age at which it was okay for a girl’s body to be put on display. A “preteen” dress, for example, might be less revealing than a “teen” dress, or have a less “sophisticated” (read: tight) shape.
Nowadays, the distinction between child and adult fashion is largely disappearing again, especially as social media consolidates clothing into a more age-agnostic, algorithmic aesthetic. Stores such as Lululemon and Zara, associated with adult styles, are popular with girls; Limited Too recently released pleated skirts and polos in adult sizes.
Still, even as fashion evolves, the same cultural habit of scrutinizing women’s wardrobes persists. But so does a spirit of defiance. Amid the frenzy surrounding Rodrigo’s dress, Courtney Love reposted a series of reels to her Instagram Story, in support of the singer. “You can pry my babydoll dress,” one of the posts read, “from my cold dead hands.”
A little less than two years ago, Gen Z underwent a rebrand. Donald Trump had just been reelected. Exit polls suggested that young voters—especially young men—had helped deliver the Republican victory. Rather suddenly, a generation associated with climate activism and trigger warnings became known for manosphere podcasts, fiscal conservatism, and gender relations so icy that they’ve contributed to the national panic about fertility rates.
But a lot has changed since 2024. Trump has begun a (thus far ineffectual) war with Iran, something he said wouldn’t happen. His administration’s handling of the Epstein files, where his name appears abundantly, has been criticized by Democrats and Republicans alike. He vowed to lower gas and grocery prices; instead, they keep rising. His approval ratings have hit record lows, and he’s losing favor among crucial voting blocs such as independents and Latinos. Journalists and political commentators keep speculating and debating: Will the young men who moved rightward crawl back in the other direction?
[Read: The not-so-woke Generation Z]
That may depend, it turns out, on whether you’re talking about young men—or even younger men. The spring 2026 Yale Youth Poll, released last month, found that a majority of respondents—and roughly 70 percent of the young adults—disapproved of Trump. Even with men under 30, the president lost ground compared with Yale’s fall 2025 poll. But the data also revealed a dividing line: Among 23-to-29-year-old men, support for Democrats increased by 14 percentage points. Among 18-to-22-year-old men, it fell by a percentage point—even while their approval of Trump declined somewhat. The women in that youngest age group, meanwhile, make up the single most liberal population: further left than the slightly older Gen Z women.
Of course, you can splice and dice any cohort differently and come up with what’s called a “microgeneration.” But this poll echoed something I’ve heard in my reporting before: Gen Z, which encompasses people born from 1997 to 2012, splinters into an older and a younger group that tend to behave quite differently. Rachel Janfaza, who researches and writes about this age group, has referred to them as Gen Z 1.0 and 2.0. The generational researcher Meghan Grace described them to me as “Big Zs” and “Little Zs.” Whatever you call them, the split seems like a meaningful one. You might think of Little Zs as the angstier siblings to their Big Z counterparts: more divided, less trusting, and even readier to shatter the status quo.
When you’re young, everything around you might shape your still-nascent beliefs: your family, your neighborhood, but also the state of the world in that chapter in time, Patrick Egan, a public-policy professor at NYU, told me. Your politics, in adolescence and early adulthood, are in the process of “crystalizing.” Just look at Gen Xers, he said, who came of age when Ronald Reagan was enjoying a popular presidency in the mid-to-late 1980s; perhaps partly for that reason, the group leans Republican compared with other generations.
Little Zs and Big Zs grew up nearly at the same time—but in different worlds. Big Zs might’ve texted their friends on flip phones; Little Zs grew up with smartphones, herded toward content by TikTok algorithms. Big Zs might have looked up assigned reading on SparkNotes, but Little Zs could use AI to write a high-school paper. Perhaps most important, Big Zs were already in college, or had even graduated, by the time COVID hit. That doesn’t mean the pandemic wasn’t difficult for many of them. But they’d done some real maturing—and gained some real self-understanding—before that blow. Little Zs were in middle or high school in 2020. They were at home when they should’ve been making new friends, breaking rules and getting grounded, falling in goofy early love.
The Little Zs who resented attending Zoom class and missing prom might have appreciated that many Republicans were criticizing school shutdowns, scorning mask mandates, and talking about personal freedom. More broadly, their anger with decision makers might have fed the anti-establishment impulse that researchers have noticed especially among younger Zoomers, who are “a lot less tethered,” Egan said, “to the traditional ways that people even a little bit older than them have been thinking about politics for a long time.” Many of them, he told me, like that Trump positions himself as a norm-flouting outsider to politics—despite the fact that he’s a second-term president.
[Read: 20-somethings are in trouble]
Clearly the MAGA mentality has spoken to the men of Little Z in particular. Perhaps that’s because many Republicans put a particular brand of masculinity on a pedestal at a time when these men were still developing a sense of self. They might have heard GOP leaders on “bro podcasts,” Grace said, or seen them partner with the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and understood those efforts as an invitation: “Yes, your voice does matter. And we want it to be on our side.” Now these men have graduated from high school. They’re thinking about how they’ll make a living. They’re seeing that job growth is happening largely in traditionally female-dominated fields—health care, retail, social services—rather than in, say, manufacturing, Egan told me. And they’re still hearing Trump claim he’ll fix the economy.
Republicans might have spoken to Little Z women, too—to their money anxiety, their COVID trauma, their frustration with the status quo. But in other ways they’ve been turning those young women away. The 2021 Dobbs decision that struck down abortion protections may have been a particular blow for the women who are now in their early 20s. Grace and her colleague Corey Seemiller have been studying Zoomers’ political ideology for years, and in 2021, they identified that Little Z men were starting to shift rightward compared with Big Z men. But they didn’t see much of a shift at all among women. Then Dobbs happened, and young women lurched left. They were perhaps old enough to be having sex but young enough to be especially terrified of pregnancy, and of the thought that men would be telling them what to do about it.
Much has been written about the gender gap in Gen Z politics. But that split seems to be especially dramatic among Little Zs. Judging, in part, by the Yale poll results, “it may be more pronounced than anyone’s really anticipated,” Egan said. That divergence could have profound implications for not only future elections but also how Little Zs continue to relate to one another. Grace and Seemiller surveyed young women and found that, of the respondents who didn’t plan to marry, a third said that was because they fear losing their independence. A lot of them, she said, feel like the men around them have already voted to take away their freedom.
[Read: Young men aren’t the only ones struggling]
But the beliefs of Little Z, as much as they might be crystallizing, are not set in stone. Little Zs are different from Big Zs because they’ve been through different formative experiences—but also simply because they’re younger. And many kinds of political figures, regardless of party, could still respond to their sense of disempowerment, their skepticism of elites, their hunger for authenticity. Egan has heard young voters talk glowingly not just of Trump but of Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “There’s just tremendous choice,” Egan told me—far more than when he, a member of Gen X, was younger. In his day, a 20-year-old didn’t have nearly as many disparate voices—on TikTok, CNN, or Fox News, or in the halls of Congress—acknowledging their particular struggles. Now, he said, one “can find messages that really speak to that sense of precarity, that sense of upheaval.”
If Trump keeps breaking his campaign promises, even Little Z men might turn toward other leaders. The midterms are around the corner. Young people don’t tend to show up in great numbers, historically, but Grace reminded me that in 2018 and 2022, Zoomers had notably high midterm-election turnout for their age group. They’re not like other generations; they’re not even like one another. Someday, Little Zs won’t be so little anymore—and their elders might be surprised by who they grow into.
Anthony “Bingy” Arillotta waited years to become a made man in the Genovese crime family, and when at last the call came in August 2003, he followed directions to the letter. According to sworn testimony, Arillotta was summoned to a steak house in the Bronx, where he was made to hand over his cellphone, beeper, and jewelry before being driven to an apartment building. When he got there, he was taken to a small bathroom and strip-searched for electronic devices. For his big meeting with the boss, he was given a bathrobe to wear.
Until recently, only spies and criminals had to worry this obsessively about their private statements being picked up by electronic equipment. But soon, the average person might need to deploy surveillance countermeasures. The next time you conduct a delicate bit of office diplomacy or share a romantic or financial secret with a friend over drinks, a sensor built into someone’s glasses, necklace, or lapel pin might be watching you and listening.
In March, the tech start-up Deveillance announced the development of Spectre I, a hockey-puck-shaped device that purports to prevent others from recording you (no strip search required). The company was founded by Aida Baradari, a recent college graduate who was worried by the surge in people wearing AI-enabled recorders. These wearables can be used as a silent notetaker, a personal assistant, or even a therapist of sorts. That technology isn’t yet mainstream, but it may be soon. Apple—the company with the largest personal-tech ecosystem in the world—is rumored to be developing an AI pin or pendant that would serve as an iPhone’s constant eyes and ears; many other products of this type are on the way. AI accessories could one day be as widespread as AirPods.
New surveillance technologies tend to breed new countermeasures, which lead, in turn, to more sophisticated surveillance. During the Second World War, after Germany operationalized radar, the Royal Air Force began dropping thin strips of metallized paper cut to a specific size that resonated with the radar, swamping German screens with phantom echoes that were indistinguishable from real aircraft. Some historians have argued that the ensuing radar arms race was more consequential to the war’s outcome than the Manhattan Project.
For decades, crude jammers have been sold to people who hope to avoid being recorded. Early versions blasted loud, unpleasant white noise to conceal voices. More recently, companies have made models that emit a steady stream of ultrasonic sound at inaudible frequencies, exploiting a quirk of microphone hardware that converts those high frequencies into noise. In 2020, a team at the University of Chicago led by Yuxin Chen reported that it had mounted 23 ultrasonic transducers on a single bracelet, such that jamming signals could be sent in all directions instead of being focused on a single target.
[Read: The most reviled tech CEO in New York confronts his haters]
But even high-tech jammers have a hard time fending off today’s AI wearables. The most advanced pins, pendants, and glasses use speech-recovery algorithms to strip away unwanted noise, whether it originates from everyday sources—such as the clinking of glasses in a crowded bar—or from an ultrasonic jammer. This task the algorithms perform is quite difficult: In that crowded bar, a microphone on a person’s lapel will intercept sound vibrations from many different sources at once. It will pick up a bartender calling out a drink order, music emanating from a speaker, bursts of laughter coming from nearby tables—and all of these sounds ricochet off of walls and other objects, creating yet more noise. The human body solves this “cocktail party problem” without us noticing: Our ears serve as dual microphones, and our brain can use the timing and intensity differences between them, along with layered processing in the auditory cortex, to isolate the voice of a person who is sitting across from us.
DeLiang Wang, a computer scientist at Ohio State University, has spent decades training neural networks to accomplish that same goal, for the purpose of improving hearing aids. By feeding the networks hundreds of hours of recorded human voices, he has taught them to recognize the frequencies and rhythms of speech. The models build an internal representation of “speech-ness,” and when they encounter a noisy recording, they focus on the parts that match the patterns they have learned and then suppress everything else. The most advanced technologies can now infer missing syllables in the way that a reader fills in a redacted word from context, allowing them to reconstruct speech that wasn’t cleanly captured in the first place.
Big tech companies are trying to do this too. Microsoft has been running an annual Deep Noise Suppression Challenge since 2020 to advance the field. (Their in-house team is trying to make Teams meetings less excruciating.) Other companies are working on noise cancellation for cellphone calls and podcast software. This sort of research is meant to improve the lives of normal users of technology—assuming that we podcast listeners count as normal—but every advance in de-noising can also be used to help an AI assistant recover speech from a jammed recording.
Defeating these algorithms may require a different countersurveillance approach altogether. Finn Brunton, a historian at UC Davis and the co-author of Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest, told me that one of the best ways is to identify the data that a device is trying to collect, and then supply it with a junk version. The Berlin-based artist Adam Harvey used this strategy when he developed makeup and clothing that frustrate facial-recognition algorithms. Daniel Howe and Helen Nissenbaum did something similar with a browser plug-in called TrackMeNot: Rather than concealing a user’s Google searches, the extension continually runs its own randomized decoy queries in the background, so that whatever a user actually searched for becomes lost in a sea of false leads.
People have tried this technique in the realm of audio too. Woodrow Hartzog, a law professor at Boston University who studies privacy and surveillance, told me that early in his legal career, he worked with defense attorneys who worried that their jailhouse conversations with clients would be recorded. To fight back, they played “babble tapes”—audio files layered with 40 tracks of voices in different accents—in the background.
In 2023, a team led by Ming Gao, now a researcher at Nanjing University, used human voices to defeat speech-recovery algorithms in a different way. Its jammer, called MicFrozen, is worn by a speaker who doesn’t want to be recorded. It listens as they talk and then generates a real-time stream of ultrasonic “anti-speech” tuned to the speaker’s voice, much like the noise-cancellation technology in your headphones. The device then sends out another layer of counterfeit speech-shaped sound to mislead any algorithm that tries to reconstruct what was lost.
Baradari, whose company is working on the Spectre I device, wouldn’t tell me exactly how her jammer’s signals work, but she said that they, too, resemble speech. The launch video for Spectre I claims that the device will also be able to detect the presence of nearby microphones. When I asked Baradari how it will do that, she clarified that her team is still “working on that part right now.”
However effective Spectre I turns out to be, it won’t be the end of the recording arms race. More capable AI models may eventually deploy some new listening tricks of their own. They may bypass recorded audio altogether. In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, when two astronauts retreat to a soundproofed pod to discuss disconnecting HAL 9000, the ship’s computer simply reads their lips through the porthole. A wearable powered by a model that’s been trained on enough conversation footage could, in principle, do the same. In theory, it could also stare at a glass of water between two people and recover their speech from vibrations on the liquid’s surface.
AI wearables may always have an edge over countermeasures. After all, they’re using a technology that is a product of the entire speech-processing industry, which takes in billions of dollars in investments—not just for AI assistants but also for hearing aids, smart speakers, and teleconferencing tools. Meanwhile, only a few academics and small companies are defending us from these technologies. “The thing about cat-and-mouse games is that we know how they usually end up for the mouse,” Hartzog said. “And in this case, the cat includes some of the most powerful corporations to ever exist.”
The Mafia knows what it’s like to be a mouse. By the time Arillotta, the aspiring made man, was told to put on the bathrobe, criminal organizations had been engaged in surveillance arms races of their own for decades. After law enforcement started bugging their phones, bosses would conduct business in person. Sometimes, they’d use a safe house or a vehicle, but those could be bugged, too, and so sensitive information might have been communicated only during a walk-and-talk. Eventually, crime families turned to burner phones, and then devices with encryption. But here, again, they fell prey to the cat.
In 2018, the FBI began secretly running Anom, its own encrypted-phone company. Through informants, it sold 12,000 devices with a special Anom messaging app. Members of Mafia families, motorcycle gangs, and other criminal organizations treated the phones as a status symbol, and used them to negotiate drug deals, launder money, and participate in all manner of other illegal activity. But the security that they offered was a ruse: Every message that they sent was being intercepted by the feds.
William Dean Howells, the editor of The Atlantic, wandered through Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition of 1876 trying to make sense of a spectacle that defied description. Two wheels, one small, one large, seemed to tell the story of the great transformation on display. The small one was made of wood—an old spinning wheel set up in a rude log cabin meant to conjure colonial Plymouth. As Howells related, a reenactor playing the Mayflower pilgrim Priscilla Alden paused in her work to give an old Quaker woman a turn. At first, the woman’s “long-unwonted fingers” seemed rusty. She struggled to splice the thread, then got it tangled while Howells and others watched in breathless silence. Finally, though, her dexterity revived, and the wheel came to life “with a soft triumphant burr, while the crowd heaved a sigh of relief.” It was, Howells reflected, “altogether the prettiest thing I saw at the Centennial.”
But Howells and millions of other Americans went to Philadelphia as much to look forward as to look back. Far more thrilling than the wooden spinning wheel was the huge cast-iron wheel—30 feet in diameter and 122,000 pounds—turning almost noiselessly at the center of the complex works of the Corliss Engine in Machinery Hall, driven by steam pumped in from a separate building. Howells sat, stunned, before the engine’s “infinitely varied machinery” working “with unerring intelligence.” No Priscilla Alden or old Quaker was necessary here—just a single, mostly idle attendant whose only job was to occasionally put down his newspaper and administer a few drops of oil.
[From the July 1876 issue: William Dean Howells on a sennight of the Centennial]
In Centennial: The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America’s Future, the historian Fergus M. Bordewich takes a tour of the exhibition—and, venturing beyond it, takes the measure of America on its 100th birthday. At not quite 200 pages of text, the book is brisk and tightly constructed, filled with vivid characters and finely wrought, often-wrenching scenes. Along the way, Bordewich finds a country caught between the marvel of its material progress—what he calls a “phantasmagorical theater of national glory”—and the fragility of its ideals and institutions. While the fair celebrated a confident industrial future, the nation outside its gates seethed with violence, corruption, and social inequality.
Writing in our own anniversary moment, when historical narratives are themselves the stuff of cultural and political conflict, Bordewich largely lets the discord speak for itself. But taken together, the dizzying disorientations of 1876 can’t help fueling grim conclusions. Bordewich, who has written forceful histories of the Underground Railroad, the radicalism of the Republican Congress during the Civil War, and Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan violence, presents a country turning its back on two revolutions—those of 1776 and 1865. In their place, Americans embraced a third: an industrial revolution that rendered the spinning wheel a quaint relic of the past and the iron wheel an object of faith for the future.
The centennial commenced on the morning of May 10, 1876, with a seemingly providential break in the rain. The program—which included lengthy speeches on the marvels of American growth, and an orchestra playing an array of national anthems from around the world in addition to Richard Wagner’s made-to-order “American Centennial March”—had swelled to fit the exhibition’s hybrid nature. What had originally been intended as a national birthday celebration had been joined to a World’s Fair displaying the material wonders of the Industrial Age. The ensuing event, which ran for the next six months, was designed to show how happily material progress and national glory could be made to blend. Financed through a mix of public and private money and enabled in no small part by the backroom maneuvering of the Pennsylvania Railroad boss Thomas Scott—whose lines stood to benefit from the traffic—it was a perfect Gilded Age confection.
The massive glass-and-iron main building was the largest man-made structure on the planet at the time, encompassing more than 21 acres of floor space. It was just one of some 200 buildings across the site, many of them sparkling architectural showpieces dedicated to, among other things, pomology, photography, brewing, dairy processing, and glassmaking. Nations and states commissioned their own buildings—a Tudor mansion for England, a residence and “bazaar” for Japan, a “cottage” for Connecticut, a Spanish-moss-fringed log cabin for Mississippi. Fairgoers could see some of the first mechanical typewriters in action, sample Charles E. Hires’s root beer, hear the ear-splitting “annunciator” of Western Electric’s new heat-sensitive fire alarm.
When the exhibition closed in November, at least 9,799,392 people—about 20 percent of the U.S. population—had visited, including a 79‑year‑old man who walked from New Albany, Indiana, with the aid of a stick cut and carved in the 1810s. Most of those who went were delightfully overwhelmed. In a letter home, a young woman from Providence, Rhode Island, struggled to find words for what she saw: “Dear Mother, Oh! Oh!! Oh!!! Oh!!!! Oh!!!!! O-o-o-o o-o-o-h!!!!!! Your affectionate daughter, Mary.” Even Alexander Graham Bell, whose newly invented telephone was one of the fair’s sensations, said that it was all “so prodigious and wonderful that it absolutely staggers one.”
Behind the unspeakable wonders of Machinery Hall stood a world of labor—dirty, dangerous, and low-paid—that constituted a grave threat to the values of the republic. Such toil clashed with Jeffersonian ideals that equated independent proprietorship of farms and shops with the moral virtue necessary for honest citizenship. Just before the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had said that men performing wage labor for more than a short stint suffered from “either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.”
By 1876, industrial wage labor was the permanent misfortune of a growing class of people. Their absence from the spectacle in Machinery Hall was telling. The ingenuity of those who’d designed and displayed the machines fit easily on the trajectory of national greatness; the drudgery of those who did the grunt work off-site did not. The old ethos that Lincoln had believed in still had enough purchase that workers themselves bore the blame for their own miseries. “Had an unfortunate accident this morning,” a Pittsburgh plant manager working for Andrew Carnegie reported (one of Bordewich’s many well-chosen quotes).
Rope on cupola hoist broke and cage fell catching the Hoist Boy in the act of crossing under, crushing him to a jelly. It was caused by the boy’s carelessness, and disobedience of order and the poor fellow paid the penalty with his life. Delayed works slightly.
Events unfolding that summer in Pennsylvania coal country, about 100 miles away from the exhibition, showed how little hope there was to at least improve working conditions through unions and other forms of labor organizing. As Bordewich narrates in an astonishing set piece, the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company had seen to that. When it sought retribution against Irish miners who had gone on strike the previous year, it didn’t merely have the backing of public authority in Schuylkill County; it was the public authority. With the help of a private police force, the company’s president took on the powers of a district attorney and personally prosecuted a set of cases against the miners, most of whom were labor activists. In a series of show trials, the men were charged with murder and assorted acts of terror, and 20 were sent to the gallows.
If industrial workers were largely absent from the centennial, Bordewich shows how Native Americans turned into a different kind of disappearing act. Assumed for decades to be “vanishing” before the tide of Anglo-American civilization, they had become objects of ethnological interest, their “primitive” cultures underscoring the marvels of the present age. Taking the lead on the event’s many Native American exhibits, the Smithsonian’s director, Joseph Henry, first planned to stage a living display of several hundred Native Americans—a Museum of Natural History diorama brought to life. But ongoing hostilities in the West got in the way. Instead, Henry sent expeditions to gather as many Native American artifacts as possible, in order to “present savage life and conditions in all grades and places.” For fairgoers, the juxtaposition with mechanical developments was powerful.
Beyond the exhibition, of course, the “vanishing” of Native Americans was not an abstraction but a policy. Writing on “the Indian question” in 1873, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis A. Walker had asked, “What shall be done with the Indian as an obstacle to the national progress?” The answer, he hoped, would involve peaceful means, albeit with extant Western Indians coerced onto reservations, where they would be subject to a “rigid reformatory control” while learning to adopt Anglo-American culture and practices. More often, the putative “Peace Policy” devolved into war, as was the case with the American campaign against the Lakotas happening during the centennial.
That campaign—provoked by America’s violation of an existing treaty after the discovery of gold in the Black Hills—produced a great shock at the fair. Just three days after the triumphant Fourth of July celebrations in Philadelphia, news arrived that the Lakotas had routed American forces under the command of General George Armstrong Custer near the Little Bighorn River, in the Montana territory. Custer, who was killed along with more than 260 of his men, had confidently predicted that “civilization in its advancing tread” would “roll mercilessly over” the Plains Indians. Only weeks before, he’d been at the centennial—to take in the wonders of civilization in its advancing tread.
For Black Americans, the centennial posed a pressing question: What place would they have in the national future it claimed to celebrate? Some, such as Representative Josiah Walls of Florida, anticipated that the fair would blot out “all questions of minor differences and all hurtful recollections of past disagreements.” Walls was mostly right, just not in the way he hoped. Bordewich describes how, at a moment when political support for Reconstruction was ebbing, the exhibition staged a reconciliation not between races, but between regions. White northerners and white southerners restored their old bonds of friendship through symbolic gestures—Union and Confederate generals seated together; a relative of Robert E. Lee reading the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July.
[Read: Jake Lundberg on an unsettling anti-slavery memorial]
Still, claiming their place in both the exhibition and the nation at large remained a goal of Black Americans. Members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church commissioned a monument to Richard Allen, a prominent Black Philadelphian of the early republic and the founder of the denomination. “We intend to leave Philadelphia in 1876 as did the heroes in 1776, with a fixed resolve to achieve noble results,” the group announced. “And in 1976, we expect our progeny to gather around the Monument in question, shed tears of gratitude for the example we have left them, and call us blessed.” Delayed first by a missed deadline and then by a train accident, the monument was installed just a week before the exhibition closed.
In Allen’s absence, the most prominent “memorialization” for Black Americans was a restaurant, not a monument or a pavilion. When a white Atlanta businessman proposed to open a “Restaurant of the South,” centennial commissioners welcomed the prospect. The waitstaff would be among the only Black employees on the fairgrounds (Black workers were mostly excluded from the centennial), and their job would include playing enslaved people on a plantation, singing “quaint melodies,” and strumming the banjo. Northern fetishization of southern slavery was nothing new; the minstrel show had become popular in northern cities in the decades before the Civil War. But the success of the restaurant and its apparent nostalgia for slavery seemed to complete a notable shift in national sentiment since Appomattox.
[From the November 2025 issue: Clint Smith on telling the full story of Colonial Williamsburg]
Many northerners (Republicans, at least) had linked Black freedom to national progress immediately after the Civil War. That connection had all but faded by 1876, amid violent campaigns to “redeem” southern states from Republican rule and Black voters. As Bordewich relates in a harrowing account, those efforts had turned to South Carolina in the summer of 1876. Well aware that they were in the minority in their state, South Carolina’s redeemers had been waiting for a chance to “provoke a riot and teach the negroes a lesson,” as the future governor and senator Ben Tillman recalled. “It was generally believed,” Tillman wrote, “that nothing but bloodshed and a good deal of it could so well answer the purpose of redeeming the state from negro and carpetbag rule.”
The redeemers had their opening when two white men in a carriage confronted a Black militia marching in a Fourth of July parade in the town of Hamburg. When the two men returned for a court date four days later, they came with a mob and a cannon. The militiamen did not appear at the courthouse, but took shelter instead in a nearby building that housed their weapons and ammunition. In the ensuing standoff, the mob (including Tillman and his rifle club) began shelling the building. When the militiamen were driven from the building, the mob killed six of the men, as well as the town’s Black marshal, cutting out his tongue. The massacre was just a piece of what became a successful campaign to oust the Republican governor and legislature. The following month, a Black South Carolina Republican wrote to President Ulysses S. Grant begging for federal protection after another armed white group attacked a party meeting and demanded that the men “give up the flag” or be shot.
At the centennial’s closing, on November 10, 1876, there was no providential break in the rain. Those on hand for the ceremonies packed into Judges’ Hall for valedictory reflections and final rounds of Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus, Wagner’s march, and a rendition of “America.” Grant declared the exhibition over, and a telegrapher tapped out instructions to the Corliss Engine’s operator to halt the great machine.
Three days earlier, on Election Day, the great machine of American self-government had also come to a halt. That year’s presidential contest pitted New York’s Democratic governor, Samuel J. Tilden, against Ohio’s Republican governor, Rutherford B. Hayes. Neither was a man of great charisma—Tilden shy; Hayes upright, teetotal, and vague—but everyone knew what was at least nominally at stake in the election. In addition to taking on the widespread corruption with which the Republicans had become associated, Tilden promised an end to Reconstruction. Hayes paid lip service to the rights of former slaves, while also voicing his commitment to reconciliation between the North and the South.
[From the April 1877 issue: James A. Garfield on a century of Congress]
Though the choice was not exactly stark, the outcome was opaque. Bordewich offers a concise account of the tangled mess that followed. Tilden won the popular vote and stood on the precipice of claiming the Electoral College, but given rampant problems and irregularities, the nation “teetered on the edge of a constitutional abyss,” as Bordewich writes. The result came down to three southern states—Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana—in which both parties claimed victories in state and national races.
Absent the violence and intimidation visited upon Black voters, the Republicans would likely have won each state, but winners were impossible to determine. Florida ended up with three separate vote counts. In South Carolina, where the number of votes exceeded the number of eligible voters, two legislatures and two governors vied for control and haggled over the presidency. Louisiana’s electoral commissioner put the state’s returns up for sale to the highest bidder, while a monitoring commission tossed out the results from 15 parishes in which the fraud and violence had been particularly egregious.
Another civil war loomed. While the White League in Louisiana threatened to attack the statehouse, and representatives of rival governments, all heavily armed, faced off in South Carolina, former Union General George B. McClellan, a Tilden supporter, talked of marching on Washington at the head of an army. Resolution came only through shadowy negotiations and political compromises. Congress created a special Electoral Commission—composed of senators, representatives, and Supreme Court justices—to determine the outcome, but its deliberations quickly broke along partisan lines. In a series of backroom dealings, Democrats agreed to accept Hayes’s election if federal troops were withdrawn from the South. Reconstruction, already heading toward a violent end in places like Hamburg, came to an official close as Hayes removed the last federal troops from the South, seven weeks after his inauguration.
Not long before the Centennial Exhibition ended, a Massachusetts man published a poem in a Washington, D.C., newspaper telling “The Story of Hamburg,” just a few columns over from a grim run of headlines leading an article on continuing violence associated with the election. The poem isn’t in Bordewich’s book, but, like the stark contrasts in its pages, the lines speak to our moment. “Let others tell of the nation’s glory,” the poet began; his attention would be elsewhere:
I sound no paeans of valor and fame—
My song is shadowed by strains of sadness;
I tell the tale of the nation’s shame.
On the 250th anniversary, we are no less caught between the glory and the shame than our forebears were on the 100th. Since the 1960s, the writing of American history has largely been a project of recovering and reckoning with conquest and its legacies, racism and the limits of democratic practice, and horrific events like the Hamburg Massacre. The aim of the official anniversary proceedings embodied in President Trump’s 2025 executive order has been to “restore truth and sanity to American history”—and, in the process, to recover the glory and forget the shame. That effort was vividly realized in Philadelphia earlier this year, when the National Park Service removed a slavery exhibit from the President’s House in Independence National Historical Park. A federal judge’s order to restore the exhibit is now being appealed, and the fight over where to look—and how to look—at our past remains the crux of our commemorations.
Though we’ll mostly be looking back at 1776 this year, Bordewich has done a great service in calling our attention to 1876. The soundness of our democratic machinery is again in doubt; we, too, wonder at the power of new technology, and what it means for work; race remains a source of conflict and a tool of power. Bordewich is as cautious in drawing such parallels as he is in spelling out the lessons that might lie in the juxtapositions of fairground and background. It’s up to us to hear the echoes, and to make sense of the glory and the shame.
This article appears in the June 2026 print edition with the headline “How America Celebrated Its 100th Birthday.”
AI has ascended to the role of main character. When Donald Trump traveled to Beijing for a historic summit last week, AI was one of the central topics of his discussions with Xi Jinping. As the two nations remain locked in a technological arms race, the president brought along some of the United States’ most powerful AI executives, including Elon Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. A continent away, the European Union has been unsuccessfully petitioning Anthropic to grant access to its advanced cybersecurity model, Mythos. Back in the United States, millions of students and teachers are dealing with the fallout of a devastating ransomware attack on the software platform Canvas—a hack that was likely aided by AI tools. And on Thursday, Cisco became the latest major company to justify layoffs by pointing to AI.
The past six months have marked a sea change in the reach and influence of AI. For most of 2024 and 2025, there was talk of AI progress slowing down or even stopping altogether. Even as the technology began to infiltrate schools and reshape financial markets, AI was relatively easy to compartmentalize from other major, more pressing issues in American life.
No longer. Now the technology has become regarded as a matter of the greatest economic, political, and global consequence. The most important issues in U.S.-China relations? Tariffs, Taiwan, and AI, apparently. Political leaders and pundits including Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon have put AI center stage, and the backlash against data centers is loud and inescapable. The specter of AI-driven layoffs hangs heavy—as does the threat of advanced hacking bots capable of taking down electrical grids and breaking into banks. All manner of once-speculative concerns about AI have become pressing matters. There is no longer a distant AI future so much as the mess we are all forced to confront today.
The newly chaotic and inescapable state of AI is the result of two inflection points. The first came at the start of the year, when AI agents exploded in popularity. Products such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex don’t just talk to you; they can do things on your behalf—code, trade stocks, analyze spreadsheets, generate slide decks, and even create Amazon listings. The technology’s once-questionable economic value became very clear, very quickly, to a large number of businesses, which have clamored to incorporate agents alongside, or in lieu of, their human employees. As agents have swarmed the workplace, nearly three-quarters of employed Americans think AI will decrease overall job opportunities and 30 percent of Americans are concerned that AI will make their own job obsolete.
The second shift began in late February. First, a high-profile contract dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon revealed how essential AI has become to national security. Then, in early April, Anthropic announced Mythos, a model with the ability to rapidly find and exploit bugs throughout the internet. (Shortly after, OpenAI came out with an analogous model.) In tandem, these events suggest that some of the most catastrophic fears about AI could come true: Several independent cybersecurity experts have told me that these models are approaching the abilities of the most elite human hackers. Anthropic and OpenAI have not released these cybersecurity models to the public, out of fear they will be used by criminals or terrorists; meanwhile, companies and government bodies alike are hungering for access so they can use the tools to patch any bugs. As a result, AI labs have become major geopolitical actors in their own right.
Spurred by the threat of massive AI cyberattacks, the Trump administration is now reportedly weighing the possibility of testing or even licensing the most powerful AI models before their public release—moves the White House once called “dangerous” and “onerous.” White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is said to be spearheading Trump’s AI policy and has written a rare post on X vowing to keep Americans safe from AI cyberattacks by ensuring “the best and safest tech is deployed rapidly to defeat any and all threats.” (A White House official told me that “any policy announcement will come directly from the President.”) This month alone, dozens of members of Congress have signed letters to the White House on AI regulation.
It’s hard to overstate the extent to which AI has crept into contemporary life, even for people who aren’t commonly using the technology. A poll this spring showed that, for Americans, AI is growing in importance faster than any other issue. AI wasn’t a focus for campaigns in 2024, but several races coming up this year are poised to involve heated debates over the technology. Data centers in particular have gone from basically invisible to a divisive issue that cuts across party lines: 70 percent of Americans oppose the construction of an AI data center in their community. These centers’ voracious demand for natural resources might be showing up in your electrical or water bill or your receipt at the gas pump. Data centers have also become objects of military and political violence. Last month, the home of an Indianapolis city councilman was shot up after he voted to approve a data center. And these buildings have been targeted or threatened by Iranian, U.S., and Israeli forces during the war in the Middle East.
There will never again be a graduating class that experienced even a year of college without ChatGPT. On Instagram, Facebook, and X, influencers preach about how to use Claude and ChatGPT to make your life easier. Recent leaps in deepfake tools make it harder than ever to assume that any given post on social media is human-made. As if AI had not already eaten the economy, Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to be listed on stock markets in what will likely be two of the largest public offerings in history. This will dramatically warp the public-investing landscape and affect, for better and worse, basically anybody with any sort of savings—a college fund, a 401(k), a pension.
All of which is to say, basically anything that is American seems tangled up with AI: the war in Iran, gun violence, the midterms, NIMBYism, falling test scores, class inequality, the stock market, housing, gas prices. None of these issues are necessarily determined or superseded by AI—far from it—but rather, this technology and industry are now directly, unavoidably implicated in them all. And the experience of this AI-saturated present is a bewildering one. Partisan lines on AI are scrambled and confused. The influx of cash into data centers has propped up the U.S. economy, making it impossible for economists and policy makers to fully understand the effects of tariffs and the war with Iran. More and more companies are citing AI for mass layoffs, but whether this is a genuine justification or a convenient excuse to downsize is anybody’s guess. Whether AI is going to empower or rot all our brains, too, will only become evident many years from now. All these questions and tensions are hard to make sense of, let alone resolve, but they can no longer be deferred.
The path here was not the inevitable result of some technological, scientific, or economic law. Nor is continuing down it. To the extent we are already living in the AI future, it is the result of a series of calculated decisions by the biggest tech firms and their investors. Silicon Valley has spent ungodly sums on AI and data centers: Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google alone have already spent more on data centers since the launch of ChatGPT than the federal government spent to build the entire interstate highway system. Those expenditures are set to grow, even as consensus opinions on whether all this spending constitutes an economic bubble fluctuate every few months. Meanwhile, AI companies have been hard at work partnering with local and federal government agencies, major colleges and research universities, Fortune 500 companies, and media organizations to weave their products into everyday life.
All of this spending and all of these partnerships were set in motion years before the technology was actually capable or reliable enough for widespread usage. Now these same companies are barreling forward to consummate their technological revolution. For everyone else, the AI future is beginning to feel less like something you participate in and more like something that happens to you.
Karl Lagerfeld, the great German fashion designer, lived in a surreal kind of grandeur. The creative director of both Chanel and Fendi, he owned apartments in Paris, Rome, and the Côte d’Azur, as well as villas in Biarritz and his native Hamburg; enormous collections of Art Deco furniture, antique jewelry, and couture garments; a personal library of some 300,000 books, by his own estimation; paintings and sculptures by Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, and John Baldessari; three Rolls-Royces; a curious assemblage of 509 iPods; and hundreds of pairs of his trademark wraparound sunglasses and fingerless biker gloves. According to a conversation that his biographer, William Middleton, had with the Parisian florist Lachaume, his annual flower budget appears to have been about 1.5 million euros. Lagerfeld never married or had children, and when he died of cancer, in 2019, the press quickly began to speculate about the immense fortune he’d supposedly left behind, which a number of outlets, including Bloomberg, Forbes, and The Guardian, ballparked at more than $200 million. Speculation also swirled about where these riches would end up.
More than seven years later, here is what is known for certain about the details of Lagerfeld’s will and estate: nothing. (Under French law, such matters are not made public.) But plenty has been rumored. Various figures close to Lagerfeld have been suggested as beneficiaries, including several male models and fashion executives, his bodyguard, his housekeeper, and the princess of Monaco. Even so, from the start, one improbable name has stood out: Choupette, Lagerfeld’s blue-cream Birman cat.
In the years before he died, Lagerfeld often spoke in extraordinary ways about the role Choupette played in his life. Listen to just a fraction of his avowals: “I never thought that I could fall in love with an animal like this.” “She is the center of the world. If you saw her, you would understand. She is kind of Greta Garbo.” “She has lunch and dinner with me, on the table, with her own dishes. She never touches my food. She would never eat on the floor.” “I have only one great love, my cat, Choupette.” And, ruefully, “There is no marriage, yet, for human beings and animals.”
Choupette came into Lagerfeld’s life over the 2011 Christmas holiday. A young model with whom Lagerfeld had a close friendship, Baptiste Giabiconi, asked whether he might leave his four-month-old kitten at Lagerfeld’s home while he visited family in Marseille. Somewhat reluctantly, Lagerfeld, who had previously had little time or affection for cats, agreed and found himself besotted. When the kitten was reclaimed by Giabiconi, Lagerfeld moped, and beseeched that Choupette be returned to him for good, a wish soon granted.
The first public window into this change in Lagerfeld’s life came not long afterward, when a friend of his posted a picture of Choupette sitting wistfully in Lagerfeld’s apartment, next to what appears to be a full bathtub, an arrangement of several dozen roses arching over her. By that summer, Lagerfeld was explaining in interviews that Choupette was “like a kept woman”; that she had “two personal maids, for both night and day—she is beyond spoiled”; and that these maids, aside from their other duties, were charged with writing down every detail of Choupette’s behavior when he wasn’t around so that he might know what he had missed: “Everything she did, from what she ate, to how she behaved, if she was tired, and if she wasn’t sleeping.” Already, Lagerfeld declared, there were 600 pages of such documentation.
Choupette’s fame swiftly grew, and Lagerfeld routinely extolled the extravagance of his cat’s day-to-day life: how she ate chef-prepared meals off the best china, traveled by private jet, appeared with models on magazine covers, and starred in advertising campaigns. Lagerfeld proclaimed her the most famous cat in the world, and declared that her advertising work had made her independently wealthy. “She has her own fortune from things she did,” he stated. “She’s a rich girl!”
According to Lagerfeld, in 2014 alone, Choupette earned more than $3 million from campaigns for Opel Corsa cars and Shu Uemura’s Shupette makeup line. That same year came a book, Choupette: The Private Life of a High-Flying Fashion Cat, including photos, biographical tidbits, and details of Choupette’s beauty regimen. A second book, Choupette by Karl Lagerfeld, 53 photos of Choupette taken by the designer on his iPhone, followed in 2018.
Once he adopted her, few Lagerfeld interviews failed to include testimony to Choupette’s outsize role in his life, albeit clearly one that reflected his own particular tastes and needs. “She’s peaceful, funny, fun, graceful, she’s pretty to look at, and she has a great gait,” he’d explain, “but her main quality is that she doesn’t speak. It was love at first sight.”
[Read: There was no one like Karl Lagerfeld]
In his later years, Lagerfeld had intense attachments to select younger men he adopted as muses, but he is not believed to have had conventional romantic relationships. (As a younger man, he had a partner of nearly 20 years, Jacques de Bascher, who died from AIDS in 1989.) Lagerfeld often spoke as though his was a life that sidestepped sex entirely, though he once told Vice magazine: “I personally only like high-class escorts. I don’t like sleeping with people I really love.” Either way, if the manner in which he chose to live could be considered to have left a void, Choupette seems to have filled it. In a period when the designer was no longer close-shaven, he observed, “With this facial hair, I am really starting to look like Choupette. We are like an old couple. She even grooms the beard—we sleep on the same pillow and she spends her time licking it.”
Then reality intervened. Lagerfeld had learned he had cancer several years before his death in a Paris hospital on February 19, 2019, but this was information he had shared with almost no one. To ensure that Choupette was properly taken care of after he was gone, he designated his housemaid Françoise Caçote, who had long been the cat’s primary lady-in-waiting (and diarist), as her ongoing caretaker. During Lagerfeld’s last days, she surreptitiously brought Choupette to his hospital room. Once, not long before Lagerfeld’s death, Choupette caused great panic by disappearing, feared lost in the wider hospital, until her tail was spotted sticking out from her hiding place in Lagerfeld’s en suite bathroom.
As the post-death arrangements were made (Lagerfeld would be cremated with a piece of aquamarine jewelry bearing Choupette’s likeness), the media speculation about Lagerfeld’s estate began. The narrative that this involved Choupette had been primed by Lagerfeld himself, who had referred to how, should he die first, Choupette would be lavishly provided for. Although some reports that week allowed that any bequest to Choupette was, as yet, unconfirmed, a fair few were more absolute—led, as many such narratives are, by the British press, even its supposedly more respectable sectors. Their cumulative message was clear: “A cat belonging to the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who died on Tuesday, is reportedly in line to receive up to $300m (£230m) of his estate” (The Telegraph); “Karl Lagerfeld’s cat, Choupette, may be set to inherit some of his £150 million fortune” (the Daily Express); “Karl Lagerfeld’s cat Choupette is reportedly set to inherit some of the formidable fashion designer’s £150m fortune” (the Independent).
The swirl of scuttlebutt about other beneficiaries, totals, tax liabilities, and relative shares has continued ever since, and there are consistent reports that, even now, no one has received any money. Nonetheless, it has been printed as established fact that, separate from his will, Lagerfeld had arranged a sizable sum, generally said to be about $1.5 million (though sometimes as much as $4 million), to ensure that Choupette would live on in the style to which she had become accustomed. She was, it was sometimes claimed, the richest cat in the world.
A little over seven years after Lagerfeld’s death, I’m sitting in an office building that towers above the Parisian suburb of Courbevoie with a man named Lucas Bérullier. Bérullier is Choupette’s agent.
Bérullier never met Lagerfeld, but he is fluent in the lore. “There’s a story,” he recalls, “when he adopted Choupette, at early stages and she was still young, everything was white in his apartment, and she was like a white fur ball. And he was so scared of someone or himself sitting on her or hurting her that he had every piece of furniture changed into black.”
Bérullier runs a company called My Pet Agency, one he started nearly a decade ago after seeing an unfilled opportunity for representing pets with potent social-media engagement. My Pet Agency’s menagerie is dominated by dogs, which Bérullier says are generally more obliging than cats. One of the dogs he has represented is Messi, the French border collie prominently featured in the film Anatomy of a Fall, though Bérullier points out that the company handled only Messi’s “social-media and special campaigns,” not his acting work. (Yes, this is a world where an animal might have more than one agent.) Most of the rest are cats, though along the way there has also been Buckley the cow, Cheepy the Australian cockatoo, Jiro the otter, Spike the beetle, and Mr. Pokee the smiling hedgehog.
[From the November 2022 issue: The improbable rise and savage fall of Siegfried & Roy]
As the business grew, Bérullier was aware that there was one megafamous pet living nearby in Paris that he would love to bring into his stable. While Lagerfeld was alive, Bérullier never found a way to make contact, but the summer after his death, an initial connection was finally made. Bérullier’s wife, a makeup artist, was doing a job in Lagerfeld’s studio, and she got to talking with Lagerfeld’s former bodyguard and confidant Sébastien Jondeau about Choupette. Bérullier soon went to visit Françoise Caçote and Choupette, and everything was agreed. “She needed someone to help harmonizing and structuring the communication,” he says. “Someone on her side defending what was best for her and what was best for Choupette.”
These days, Choupette lives in an apartment with Caçote somewhere in Paris, but I’m told that neither cat nor caregiver is receiving visitors right now. Bérullier says that a large part of his job, when it comes to matters relating to this particular client, involves turning people down.
He says that commercial opportunities are screened according to a number of criteria: Beyond financial considerations, there are questions as to whether such offers are suitable for Choupette and for Lagerfeld’s legacy. There are moral considerations, too. “We believe that Choupette only works with animal-cruelty-free brands,” he explains. “A brand that uses fur, we would have to decline a collaboration.”
Other practicalities must also be accommodated. Cats, in general, can be tricky, and Choupette sounds a little tricky even for a cat. Bérullier has to prepare clients for the possibility that Choupette won’t even turn up. “And people understand, because you call them, you’re like, ‘Sorry—for the cat welfare and well-being.’ And they all say, ‘Oh, it’s fine. Okay. You told me. I get it.’ Then we have to either reschedule or just not do the job.”
Jobs that are not rescheduled, and that require Choupette to leave her home, are generally done at a studio that Choupette is accustomed to, just a few minutes away. Clients are told that there is a two-hour maximum, that everything must be ready before Choupette’s arrival, and that she requires her own private room. There must be no noise on set, and no one may take photographs aside from the photographer. Also, Choupette must not be shot from above. Shooting from human height, Bérullier explains, is the classic amateur pet-owner blunder. “That’s not engaging. But if you start laying and going like this—” Bérullier mimes getting on the floor in front of an animal. “And even sometimes going under them, it makes the impression that they’re giants! And that will engage.”
Bérullier shares one more practical accommodation made for the most important shoots: Whenever prudent, there will be a cat double on set, ready to do whatever Choupette might not. They don’t use just one regular stand-in—it depends on what might be required that day: “We know the one that is very human-friendly, the other one that is playful, the one that has the eyes that look the same or the tail that looks the same.” It’s clear that he does not consider this duplicity, more the reality of dealing with animal actors—and one, he points out, that is routine in moviemaking. He notes that the Choupette camp doesn’t go out of its way to disguise footage from a double, and that eagle-eyed Choupette fans can often tell.
Bérullier also demystifies some other assumptions that lie at the very core of how Choupette is commonly perceived. The multimillion-dollar fees that Lagerfeld alluded to Choupette commanding were for campaigns where the clients were largely paying for Lagerfeld’s name, and also for Lagerfeld being the photographer, designer, and art director. Bérullier doesn’t share Choupette’s current rate card but suggests that the numbers involved are substantially more modest. “Let’s be honest, we can’t ask millions for a post or a shoot,” he says.
Likewise, he punctures the notion—one that Lagerfeld sometimes explicitly stated—that Choupette has her own seven-figure bank account. “The law is the law,” he says. “A cat can’t own a bank account.” (When I ask whether there couldn’t be some kind of corporation holding the money, he says that if this were so, it would be a matter of public record.) Furthermore, he suggests that we should be skeptical of stories that Caçote has already received a million-plus sum on Choupette’s behalf. The one printed story of this kind that Bérullier verifies is that Lagerfeld did, before his death, give Caçote the apartment in which she and Choupette live, but he notes that even this came with substantial unaddressed French tax liabilities.
There is no suggestion at all, in what he is saying, that Choupette wants for anything. Revenue is clearly coming in, though maybe not as much as one might assume. “It’s really hard for me because on one hand, you do want to keep the myth up,” Bérullier says. “But it’s not what I want people to be interested in. I mean, for me, she’s the most beautiful cat in the world; she’s the most fascinating—and culture and iconic and heritage. But not in a money way.”
As for the will itself, here are some more details of what has been rumored. The will was apparently written in April 2016, and there are commonly said to be a number of beneficiaries. Many accounts suggest the former bodyguard Sébastien Jondeau and two of Lagerfeld’s male-model muses, Baptiste Giabiconi and Brad Kroenig. It is generally agreed that the Lagerfeld executive Caroline Lebar is also named. Sometimes, but not always, mentioned are the former Chanel creative director Virginie Viard; the writer and style consultant Amanda Harlech; a second Lagerfeld executive, Sophie de Langlade; Kroenig’s son Hudson (Lagerfeld’s godson, who started modeling for Lagerfeld on the runway at age 2); another model friend and protégé, Jake Davies; Princess Caroline of Monaco; and Caçote. (Animals may not inherit directly under French law.)
[From the January 1984 issue: Quoting Chanel]
It is said that a key reason for the delay in settling Lagerfeld’s estate is a long-standing legal fight with the French tax authorities. One area of dispute may stem from the repercussions of the belated discovery that Lagerfeld’s home in Monaco, where the tax regime is famously gentler, was technically in France. But there may well be more than that. There is talk of a complicated web of international corporations potentially structured to reduce tax liability, and it was reported several years before Lagerfeld’s death that he was under investigation for tax evasion. An added layer of intrigue was the apparent disappearance of Lucien Frydlender, Lagerfeld’s accountant of 30 years and the estate’s putative executor, who reportedly died in Israel in 2024.
The closest anyone has come to capturing what those supposedly involved say about any of this is Michael Waldman, who made a remarkable documentary, The Mysterious Mr Lagerfeld, for British TV in 2023, in which he interviews a range of Lagerfeld associates, including all three men—Giabiconi, Kroenig, and Jondeau—who are most often identified as the principal beneficiaries. Jondeau describes Lagerfeld handwriting the will and confirms that he was one of the beneficiaries, and appears to confirm that Kroenig and Giabiconi are included too. And Giabiconi says this: “He named me top of the list. Well, I got a big percentage.”
But a percentage of what, exactly? Although the Lagerfeld estate’s value was widely assumed to be in the low hundreds of millions, there seems to be no solid basis for this number. And although Lagerfeld was evidently very rich, he was also famously generous and profligate: In the documentary, the manager of Lagerfeld’s favorite bookshop says that he was the store’s best client, spending 500,000 to 700,000 euros each year. Various sales have liquefied assets in the years since—a Paris apartment was sold for $10.8 million, a villa outside the city for about $5 million—but nothing yet approaching the totals that have been widely touted.
In Waldman’s film, one interviewee, Lagerfeld’s estranged friend Patrick Hourcade, raises another rumor, the most dramatic of all—that the remaining money will go to the French finance ministry. Waldman tells me he got the sense from other interviews that expectations had certainly been lowered—that, for instance, Jondeau “thinks and hopes that something will come, but he doesn’t know how much, and he knows that it’s possible that there’ll be very little or nothing.”
Waldman also spent time with Choupette at Caçote’s home, which he reports is a nice-enough apartment, where she lives with her husband and teenage son. “The husband was quite funny,” Waldman says. “He was like a salt-of-the-earth plumber—he might even have been a plumber, I can’t even now remember. But he was a working man. And he was obviously bemused by this mad world that his wife had got herself into and more than tolerant of this extraordinarily beautiful cat.”
Filming Choupette, Waldman says, required patience. “She didn’t like strangers,” he says. “That was understood.” But, he adds, “there was also something in the way that Choupette moved that said, I am more important than you. I am more important than anybody or anything. And I sort of saw that. And in terms of trying to seduce Choupette into my lens and, as it were, communicate in an unprecedentedly intimate way, she refused.”
The latest rumored turn in the seemingly never-ending drama of the Lagerfeld estate came earlier this year. It had been reported in 2024 that the beneficiaries had agreed on terms to settle with the tax authorities. According to the German magazine Bunte, in December 2025 the will had at last been finalized, but then had apparently been challenged by an unknown party. This had come to light, Bunte asserted, because Lagerfeld’s surviving blood relatives had received a letter informing them of this development. These relatives, who are not believed to be in the will, had apparently been notified because, should it be ruled that Lagerfeld had no valid will, his estate would then be divided among them.
Lagerfeld was born in Hamburg in 1933. (For many years, he would claim to have been born in 1938, something he would later attribute to his discomfort at having been born in the year of the Nazis’ rise to power.) Lagerfeld’s father—who, incidentally, was a member of the Nazi party—had been married before, and Lagerfeld had an older half-sister, Thea. It is from that line of the family that his surviving German niece, Thoma Theodora Friederike, the countess von der Schulenburg, comes. She is quoted in the Bunte article as saying that she would “emphatically reject” any inheritance.
But Lagerfeld also had a full sister, Martha Christiane, who was two years older than him. When she was in her mid-20s, she took a job in Seattle as an au pair. There she met a tax inspector named Robert Johnson; they married and moved back to his hometown of Portland, Connecticut, where they raised three boys and one girl.
I reach Caroline Wilcox in the records department of a municipal agency in rural Connecticut, where she has worked for more than 40 years. She is Karl Lagerfeld’s niece.
She first met Lagerfeld when she was a baby, when her mother took a ship back to Germany for a visit in 1961, about a year after her birth. Later, Caroline and her younger brother Karl—named after his uncle—would wear the clothes that Lagerfeld and Lagerfeld’s mother sent them; her brother Karl was the only kid in the neighborhood in lederhosen. (Two more boys, Roger and Paul, would follow later.) Still, she notes, her mother’s world and her uncle’s were far apart. “I was raised a little feral with three brothers,” she says. “I had a pet goose.”
In the fall of 1974, Lagerfeld, who was in New York, drove up to see his sister for the first time in years, and invited Caroline and her brother Karl to visit him in Paris the following summer. “We had a wonderful time,” she says. “He took me to a salon for a full day. I came out not even looking like myself. Took us shopping for clothes, reoutfitted us. I had never been to a restaurant.”
Lagerfeld met up with his sister one final time, in the 1980s, and after that, none of Lagerfeld’s American family ever saw him again, but they never fell out of touch. “We weren’t close,” Wilcox says, “but we had contact.” Lagerfeld would send presents, and sometimes money, to his sister, and also a Fendi fur for her 50th birthday, and he and his sister would talk by phone. In 1992, when he found out that Wilcox was getting married, he told her to forget about the dress she had already picked out. He, Karl Lagerfeld, would be making his niece’s dress. Faxes went back and forth, Lagerfeld sending his hand-drawn sketches and handwritten thoughts. The day before the wedding, a courier arrived in the snow carrying Lagerfeld’s creation, flown in that same day with its own seat on the Concorde.
In 2015, Wilcox’s mother died after a short illness. Lagerfeld had been getting updates, and once she was gone, Wilcox let her uncle know. “I texted with him throughout the day,” she says. “He was upset and talked about how different their lives were. I recall he was on an elevator to take a moment of privacy because he was at a show or working. That day was very busy for him, but he did take the time out to make me feel better.”
Wilcox says that her close friends know of this family connection, but few people beyond that. “If you said ‘Lagerfeld’ to most people here,” she points out, “they would not know who that was.” Her brother Roger lives nearby, and drives heavy vehicles. Her other brother Paul moved to Texas, where he is a government contractor. (Her oldest brother, Karl, died in a motorcycle accident when he was 18.) “We’re just ordinary people,” she says. “He has American relatives that live quite, quite differently than what his world was like. We’re very proud, but also unassuming.”
She declines to say whether she has recently received a letter regarding the will, but emphasizes that she certainly has laid no claim to it. “He was a generous, kind person to us,” she says. “My uncle was so unique. A once-in-a-century person.”
She mentions that in his later years, Lagerfeld would text her pictures of Choupette. “He loved that cat,” she says. Sometimes she would send back photos of her dog, a Chihuahua-corgi mix: distant relatives finding common ground.
“A picture of my dog, Poppy, on my couch,” she says, “is a lot different than a picture of Choupette on a pillow.”
One more strange wrinkle in the Choupette story relates to her online history. The Instagram page @choupetteofficiel was launched on August 15, 2019, Choupette’s eighth birthday, nearly six months after Lagerfeld’s death.
But, as I’ve previously alluded, by then Choupette’s virtual celebrity was already long established. Lagerfeld often referred approvingly to her online popularity; the 2014 Choupette book boasted of “her own Twitter account and a vast following” and reprinted the first tweet, on June 6, 2012, from the account @ChoupettesDiary, posted less than six months after Lagerfeld had taken Choupette as his own: “Baptiste may think he is a muse but only I, Choupette, am Lagerfeld’s true muse. Everything from my whiskers 2 my meows inspire.”
Given the way that these social-media accounts were regularly referenced in the conversation surrounding Lagerfeld, it was natural to assume that they were part of Lagerfeld’s wider conception of Choupette. But the odd truth is this: They had nothing to do with Lagerfeld, or with anyone around him. On that day in June 2012 when the very first tweet appeared, Ashley Tschudin, a 23-year-old who held a low-level job at a New York company that managed booking software for modeling agencies but who had no inside track to the world of fashion or of Lagerfeld, had just read an interview with the designer published that morning in Women’s Wear Daily, in which he rhapsodized about Choupette and her obsessively documented two-maid luxury life. A character popped into Tschudin’s head—“a sassy, satirical, high-fashioned feline,” she tells me, “who had a lot of opinions about humans, about her lifestyle, the fashion industry, pop culture, and the beauty industry”—and, right there and then, she opened a Twitter account with the name @ChoupettesDiary, composed a bio (“I’m a famous beauty who refuses to eat on the floor & my maids pamper my every need. I am Choupette Lagerfeld and I am a spoiled pussy”), and started tweeting.
By the end of the same day, @ChoupettesDiary had gathered so much attention that Tschudin had done two anonymous interviews as Choupette by direct message—one with WWD, whose Lagerfeld interview had inspired all of this just hours before, and a second with Fashionista (“I felt it was time to show the fashion world the REAL Choupette,” the cat pronounced).
After that, Tschudin says that Lagerfeld’s team soon reached out to ask who she was. She told them her name and that was that. “It was never that they would step in and say, ‘Oh, no, you can’t say this,’ ” she says. “There was no control or approvals or communication as to overseeing the brand that I was building, except for that first introduction.” In the Twitter feed, and on the Instagram account and the more discursive blog that shortly appeared in tandem, she would freely use whatever photos were out there, including anything available from Lagerfeld and those around him. “Never once did I receive an email that said, ‘Hey, you can’t use these anymore.’ Why would they do that? I was building a brand for them for free.”
[Read: The wealth of Grumpy Cat]
Meanwhile, Tschudin was able to monetize the social-media accounts for herself, though she says only to modest effect: “Not in a consistent-paycheck way,” she notes. “Not enough to pay for my groceries.” She most benefited, she acknowledges, in more indirect ways: “Choupette became my voice and opened a lot of doors in my career for me within digital marketing, within the fashion industry, the beauty industry.”
Though Tschudin always had full-time jobs unrelated to impersonating a cat, she would typically spend hours each day on Choupette-related posting. “I loved it,” she says. “It was my creative outlet. It was my voice. I could say things that I, a human, couldn’t say, because it was humorous coming from a high-fashion feline.” When Lagerfeld died, at first she simply carried on. “Thank you everyone for your words of condolence,” Choupette swiftly announced. “With a once cold but now simply broken heart, I am going into mourning.”
She knew that there was going to be a problem when she saw Caçote’s first @choupetteofficiel post that August. Bérullier had touched on this situation when I met with him, mentioning that when he first came on board, “there was a bit of a dispute—we can call it that—with the person who had fans’ accounts. We had a conversation with the people behind, but we didn’t find an agreement that was okay.” Tschudin’s version is rather more blunt. She says that her lawyer made contact offering “a variety of options”: Choupette’s representatives could buy the brand and its audience; they could collaborate with her; they could hire her. “They were not interested in any of those,” she says. “They did not come in a collaborative way to the table.” It became clear that they preferred a fourth option. Tschudin was never formally shut down, but she could no longer easily use photos, and all of the fashion-world invitations she’d become accustomed to simply evaporated. She took the hint. “It was heartbreaking,” she says. “It was as if my voice was taken away.”
Not all of her memories of her time as Choupette are sour ones: “The brand as a whole is something I’m extremely proud of. I’m proud of a voice that I gave to an animal that did not have a voice. I’m proud to have gotten the opportunity to be one of the world’s first pet influencers when that was not a career path.”
During all of those years when she was assuming Choupette’s voice, Tschudin and her subject never met. Truth is, she’s not an evangelical cat person. Back then, she did have a pet, but it was a Chihuahua called Roscoe. Now, living in California, where she works for a company that does hiring for Google, she has seven rescue dogs and a rescue pig.
In 2023, it was decided that the theme of the year’s Met Gala, to be held on May 1, would be a tribute to Karl Lagerfeld. The first that Choupette’s people knew of this was when a request came to participate in an Annie Leibovitz Vogue photo shoot that would feature a dozen supermodels. Choupette’s part in this went well enough. Bérullier says that when the cat and her team turned up on the day, all of the models gathered at Paris’s Grand Palais were cooing, “Choupette! Choupette!” The cat’s designated model was Naomi Campbell, and Leibovitz duly photographed the two of them together on Pont Alexandre III, Choupette in Campbell’s arms.
That, though, was just the prequel. As news of the Met Gala theme became public, My Pet Agency was bombarded with endless versions of the same question: Would Choupette be attending the Met Gala? There are two stories to tell here. One is the story that was told at the time. The second is the one that appears to be closer to the truth.
This is the first narrative: Choupette’s people were besieged with requests for her to attend the Met Gala, but were stretching out a will she or won’t she? dynamic. A little over a week before the event, Choupette was photographed on Instagram lazing on a bed, paws over her face: “Me while everyone is wondering whether I’m going to the Met Gala.” A few days later, Kim Kardashian posted a photo of herself, lips pouting, next to Choupette on a bed: “Had a date with @choupetteofficiel in Paris. We then spent some time at @karllagerfeld’s office to get a little inspiration for the Met.” The implication seemed to be that because Choupette wouldn’t be mingling with the famous and beautiful in New York, one of their representatives had paid a visit beforehand.
The day of the Met Gala, when the cat’s nonattendance was revealed in a @choupetteofficiel post, it was presented as how things were always going to be: “Many people invited me to walk the red carpet of the #METGALA2023 in tribute to Daddy, but we preferred to stay peacefully & cozy at home.” Attention instead pivoted to the way Choupette was represented in New York on the night—Jared Leto walking down the red carpet in a full-body Choupette costume. This, presumably, had been the plan all along.
Except that a second narrative, significantly different, became apparent later that year, during an episode of The Kardashians. It turned out that Kim Kardashian’s meeting with Choupette had actually happened in the middle of March, about six weeks before her Instagram post. Ahead of the meeting, Kardashian explained to her show’s cameras exactly why she was there. “I am going to the Met with Karl Lagerfeld’s cat as my date,” she said, “and I’m so excited.” Later she further spelled out the mindset she was bringing to that day’s meeting: “Choupette is really key to my whole vibe for the Met this year.”
When I ask Bérullier, he concedes that this was provisionally the case. “We received about half a dozen requests of people who wanted to take her,” he says. “And first you’re like, Oh, yeah, cool. Of course. We’ll be there.” Then they started thinking about the reality of traveling there, and of taking Choupette down “the busiest, loudest, craziest carpet,” and wondering whether it was a good idea after all. Still, once Kardashian emerged as a likely escort, plans began to form. “It made the most sense: the most famous cat with the most famous person on the planet.”
That was why it had been arranged that Choupette and Kardashian would meet in a suite at the Paris Ritz. “I’m nervous,” Kardashian said beforehand. “I literally feel like I’m going on a blind date.” I’m pretty sure, watching this, that Kardashian is just mugging for the camera, creating a frothy reality-show narrative. But genuine trepidation might have been wise.
The cat and the Kardashian met for the first time when Caçote placed Choupette next to Kardashian on a plush hotel sofa. (Bérullier was there, too, taking a video on his phone.) Choupette initially appeared somewhat tolerant of Kardashian’s close presence, but not for long. Kardashian was wearing a black jacket—“some sort of plastic leather,” says Bérullier, who believes that Choupette was scared of the sound that this outfit made. Soon Choupette hissed, then jerked toward Kardashian, snarling. Kardashian swiftly withdrew her hand.
“Don’t worry, she pretends—she won’t do anything,” Bérullier reassured her.
“Oh, it’s okay—I act like that sometimes too,” Kardashian replied. “She is feisty.”
But then there was more hissing. Bérullier says that the two of them were together on the sofa for nearly an hour. At one point, when Kardashian tried to hold Choupette, Choupette lashed toward her face, and Caçote quickly stepped in to take the cat.
Later on, Kardashian and Choupette did successfully pose for photos together on a bed. By then, Kardashian had removed her jacket, and Bérullier says that this part of the encounter went much better. But the conclusion had become obvious. As she would summarize it on The Kardashians: “I think I realized really quickly that Choupette, we’re not a match. So I am not bringing her to the Met.”
“It would have been just not right for the cat,” Bérullier says. “You know, sometimes you need a bit of distance to understand that.”
Most of Choupette’s public life in the years since Lagerfeld’s death has been rather more low-key. Her most regular client is a high-end German cat-accessories-and-toys brand called LucyBalu. Just before Christmas, she did a shoot for a Maisons du Monde home-decor range. Last year, she was announced as the French voice of the mischievous cat Azraël in the French version of the Smurfs movie (Les Schtroumpfs ), though that was more clever marketing than anything else. She filmed some promotional footage but, cat being a universal language, no French-cat noises were overdubbed in place of the original sounds.
One more unusual recent collaboration was with a German painter, Max Renneisen, who has a particular interest in the great French 18th-century animal portraitists Jean-Baptiste Oudry and Alexandre-François Desportes.
“There are so many depictions of the favorite dogs of Louis XV, Louis XIV, and I thought that Choupette is a perfect match,” he explains to me. “It’s the equivalent of today to these royal pets. I want to present Choupette in the same way as these royal pets in the 18th century were presented.” Initially, he sourced some photos of Choupette and got to work. The first painting he did, of Choupette in a spectrally lit forest clearing, was directly styled after Oudry’s 1726 portrait of Polydore, one of Louis XV’s hunting dogs. But Renneisen felt dissatisfied with what he had created. “It is not really Choupette,” he adjudges, “but more an invention of a white cat supposed to be Choupette.”
To do better, he felt like he needed Choupette herself, so in 2024, he tracked down Bérullier and secured permission from Bérullier and Caçote to photograph her, in order to capture images he could use for paintings.
In truth, Renneisen tells me, the ensuing photo session wasn’t that successful. He would like to have seen Choupette in certain poses, but it became apparent that his expectations were unrealistic. “When she realizes that you want something,” he says, “she doesn’t want to do it.”
No matter. He was also given lots of photos he hadn’t seen, and these guided him. Choupette was difficult to paint—“because of the texture, this fur, all the shades of her color”—but bit by bit, a portfolio came together.
Renneisen returned to Paris this February to photograph Choupette a second time, now alongside some of the paintings he had made. I ask him whether he got the sense that Choupette recognized herself in his paintings.
“No, I don’t think so,” he replies. “All the fuss we do about her, all this concept of celebrity, giving a meaning to her, everything—this is us, for the humans.” He further notes: “Choupette is not a diva. She’s a cat, and we want to see the diva in her.” I point out that a lot of people fixate on Choupette’s character, and on what she’s thinking. I ask him whether he does that too.
“No,” he says. “No, no, no. I accept her as a cat. She’s a cat.”
And that is where I believed my grand Choupette quest—often surreal and delightfully absurd—had reached its natural end. But I was wrong.
Long after my return from Paris, as this article is going to press, I receive a message that Caçote might answer some questions in writing. I send some, and wait. Eventually, answers arrive.
One thing I ask Caçote about are those day-to-day diaries of Choupette’s life written between 2012 and 2019, of which she was the primary author. Most of the 100 or so volumes that she believes exist are no longer in her possession. “I miss them,” she writes. “I’d like to pick one at random and reread it. Karl loved to do that too.” And, she adds, “It’s very frustrating, especially since I asked for them after Monsieur’s death and was told they were part of the estate, so they weren’t given to me. I was told they might be given to me later, but I’m still waiting. I’d like to know what happened to them!!”
But of all Caçote’s answers to my questions, the following three are the ones that tell me the most about what I want to know:
Is taking care of Choupette—with everything that entails—a heavy responsibility for you?
“Yes, of course!! I’m always afraid of being judged. What I do know is that Choupette is happy at home, and that’s the main thing.”
Choupette is often called “the richest cat in the world,” and newspapers frequently report that you’ve received huge sums of money to take care of her. I understand that this isn’t true. What do you think of this misconception, and what would you like people to know about it?
“I want to be completely transparent: today, we have received absolutely nothing. Given the situation’s complexity, I have had to hire expensive lawyers to claim the inheritance in my name and ensure that Karl’s wishes are properly respected.
“While things are being sorted out, I’m doing my best to honor his wishes, especially that Choupette wants for nothing. That’s my top priority. In addition to caring for her, I work part-time to support her. She receives all the love, attention, and care she needs.
“The most important thing is that she’s happy, surrounded by love and affection, and protected as Karl would have wanted. We remain hopeful that the situation will one day be resolved peacefully.”
What is Choupette doing right now?
“She’s taking a quiet nap.”
This article appears in the June 2026 print edition with the headline “Cat Heir.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
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When Donald Trump took the oath of office last January, he was the oldest president to begin a term, clocking in at 78 years and 220 days. He replaced the man who formerly held that title, Joe Biden, who had dropped out of the race after it became quite obvious to the entire country that he had aged too much, too quickly. But as Trump himself grows older—traveling less, switching to more comfortable shoes, and seeming to nod off during meetings—his age isn’t getting the same kind of scrutiny.
I have long thought that a reason for that is the president’s sheer size. Trump stands 6 foot 3 and, according to his most recent physical, weighs 224 pounds (yes, questioning that number is a legitimate thing to do). He is a big presence in any room, as opposed to Biden, who grew visibly thinner as he got older, adding to the appearance of frailty. Trump is also LOUD; Biden’s voice was frequently reduced to a gentle whisper. And Trump has the gift of omnipresence. His genius is in capturing attention. Biden’s public schedule grew sparse, and he actively avoided generating news; Trump holds multiple events in front of the press nearly every day. He fills Americans’ TV screens and social-media feeds seemingly nonstop, with an almost-unspoken message: How could he be fading if he’s everywhere?
But as Trump turns 80 next month, his recent behavior should prompt even more questions than usual about his stability, judgment, and mental sharpness. Among the points of concern: a late-night social-media storm a few days ago featuring more than 50 messages, many strewn with dangerous or nonsensical misinformation, which followed a similar Truth Social broadside weeks earlier; an apocalyptic threat to wipe out a civilization; more and more insults (“nasty,” “stupid,” “ugly,” “treasonous”) hurled at reporters; appearing to fall asleep in public, sometimes twice in one week; deep bruises on his hands, which are covered in makeup and accompanied by confusing explanations; and long, odd tangents in speeches that seem longer and odder than his usual tangents. Never known for his ability to self-censor, Trump seems to have completely abandoned any sort of filter, tossing out messages from one extreme (He’s glad that Robert Mueller is dead!) to the other (actually, Trump is Jesus and shall heal the sick).
Biden’s team relentlessly pushed back against worried murmurings about his age and ability to handle the responsibilities of the presidency, and, for a while, the storyline was mostly relegated to the background. Democrats who had concerns bit their tongue. The president had enough good days to allow his aides to try to dismiss the narrative as a right-wing talking point, while encouraging allies—and some in the media—to look the other way. But then Biden’s deficiencies burst into the open with his faltering, confused performance in a general-election debate that was followed by a wave of recriminations and finger-pointing that continues among Democrats and journalists to this day.
Trump’s White House, as you’d expect, has also vehemently brushed away concerns about having another octogenarian in the White House. Those close to him say that, yes, Trump moves a little slower these days, but that he’s still a commanding, charismatic force. That’s just it: Whereas Biden noticeably changed, Trump appears in many ways to be the same. He’s always been erratic; he’s always been bombastic. But as Trump has aged, he’s becoming a purer, less filtered version of himself. Because the changes are less obvious, they’ve drawn less attention. For now, at least.
The differences between first-term Trump and second-term Trump are numerous. One of the biggest: He has dramatically scaled back his travel. Though he has taken several foreign trips, including one last week to China, his domestic travel schedule is nowhere near as busy as it was in his first term, and months of White House promises that it would ramp up have gone unfulfilled. Trump has long prized what his staff deems “executive time”—unstructured hours in the morning usually filled by watching cable TV and using his phone—and he rarely has a public event before late morning.
Once in public, Trump’s remarks continue to feature many of his longtime hallmarks—disdain for scripts, a disregard for time, mixing up names and facts, and an impulse to say whatever pops into his head. But these days the displays of disinhibition are more pronounced, and many include seemingly aimless stories and distracted observations. (Take, as just one example, a White House Christmas reception five months ago when Trump spent nearly 10 minutes telling a story that involved a White House doctor—actually two White House doctors—and Barack Obama’s daughters and a poisonous snake in Peru. He interrupted himself to mention his own brush with death and to claim that his health is better than that of Obama or George W. Bush. “Trump is in the best health of all,” he said.)
A White House spokesperson ignored my long list of questions about Trump’s behavior and changes to his schedule and quickly sent me a personalized statement. “Here’s where you’re wrong, Jonathan,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told me. “President Trump has done more public events and has engaged with the press more than any other president in history.”
Republican lawmakers have, for years, given Trump notoriously wide latitude for his behavior. (“I haven’t seen the tweet” became an entire meme of deflection.) But some have quietly begun to wonder about the president’s judgment, particularly when it comes to political priorities. Gone is the promised attention to the economy and lowering prices. Instead, Trump’s focus is often on grandiose ways to burnish his own legacy, including trying to seize foreign lands and build over-the-top monuments to himself (“No one wants an arch when people can’t afford to buy gas,” one Republican lawmaker told me about Trump’s plans for a 250-foot monument, inevitably dubbed the Arc de Trump, between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery). When the president departed Beijing on Friday, one of his first China-related social-media posts from Air Force One was not about any deal struck in the summit but rather on the host nation’s grand ballroom and how the U.S. should have one too.
Trump has also switched to more comfortable shoes, tossing aside the dressier pairs he used to wear for $145 Florsheims, and then giving them to aides, an act of generosity that—call me cynical here—also makes his own pair stand out less. Then there are his hands: Throughout this term, Trump has sported a deep bruise on his right hand, which at times is covered up (poorly) with makeup. When asked about it, he has said he takes a lot of aspirin to have “thin blood,” perhaps to ward off clots, strokes, or heart attacks. White House aides have said that leads to bruising after handshakes. But in recent weeks, the bruising has also been spotted on his left, non-shaking hand.
Trump now notably delivers far more of his remarks while seated. In his first term, he typically spoke behind a podium either in the Oval Office or elsewhere in the White House. Now the standard configuration is Trump sitting behind the Resolute Desk, while officials and aides fan out behind him. And sometimes, while sitting in that chair, Trump’s eyes … begin … to … close. In what has become fodder for late-night comics and liberals on social media, Trump has had his eyes shut for a suspiciously long time, as if he might be sleeping, at a number of events lately. Trump aides have strenuously denied this, suggesting that the president is simply listening intently. Last Monday, when a reporter observed on X that Trump’s eyes were closed during an Oval Office event on maternal health care, the official White House Rapid Response account retorted, “He was blinking, you absolute moron.” If true, this blink lasted for at least 10 seconds.
Maybe Trump is tired because he’s up late. He has long boasted about how little sleep he needs, and reporters covering his two terms have grown accustomed to news made by social media both early in the morning and late at night. But even the wild Twitter sprees of his first term have been eclipsed by some of the Truth Social barrages of late. Aides long ago stopped trying to curb Trump’s social-media habits, even if they sometimes create political problems. The posts are normally created (or found to repost) by longtime aide Dan Scavino, other times by Trump’s executive assistant, Natalie Harp. They will bring printouts of the posts to Trump, who signs off on every one. But sometimes he just posts on his own. The White House wouldn’t tell me whether that is the case during these late-night spewfests.
Trump’s audience on Truth Social (which he owns) is far smaller than the one he had on Twitter—12.6 million versus 111.4 million—and that, at times, has seemed to limit awareness of his posting. (Trump was kicked off of Twitter after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riots; he was reinstated after Elon Musk bought the site two years later, but the president now prefers his own platform.) One night in December, he posted nearly 160 times, the most in one go during his second term. In February, he posted a racist video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys. Early last month, he threatened Iran by saying “a whole civilization will die tonight.” A few days later, he decreed Pope Leo “WEAK on Crime.” And then overnight into the early morning hours of April 13, Trump amplified dozens of posts, including one that depicted him as Jesus. In just a few days, Trump had offended adherents of multiple religions and drew criticism from even some of his most loyal supporters. He eventually deleted the post that depicted him as the son of God, but only after absurdly claiming that he thought it showed him as a doctor, not Jesus. Last Monday night, his account posted 55 messages between 10:14 p.m. and 1:12 a.m., including a mix of his own thoughts and a slew of reposts of multiple messages that falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen and called for Obama’s arrest.
[Read: Trump voters are over it]
The strain on the president is obvious: The nation he leads is at war; the economy he promised to revive is teetering; and his approval ratings are falling. His behavior has renewed Democrats’ calls to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove the president from power for not being able to serve. (That would require the Cabinet to act and is a nonstarter.) Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has called Trump “an extremely sick person,” and his counterpart in the House, Hakeem Jefferies, deemed the president “unhinged” and “out of control.”
But it’s not just Democrats. Some former Trump allies have also questioned his psychological fitness, and a poll released last week found that 59 percent of Americans believe that Trump does not have the mental sharpness it takes to lead the country. But Republicans in Congress have defended Trump, and the White House, which always touts the president’s stamina, has mocked any suggestion that he was not up for the job.
That defensiveness reminds me of just how aggressively Biden’s aides would push back at journalists who dared to ask questions about his age. It’s worth revisiting how Biden’s declining health was shielded by those around him.
Biden’s age had been front and center during his 2020 campaign, and even some of his Democratic primary opponents wondered whether he was “declining” or “forgetting” things. He never formally vowed to serve only one term, but it was the expectation among many Democrats, and some in Biden’s inner circle, that he would act as a transitional figure, one who would vanquish Trump and steer the nation out of the coronavirus pandemic before stepping aside. He took the oath of office at age 78, the oldest man ever to serve as president. (He was 78 days older at the start of his term than Ronald Reagan was when he ended his.) But Biden enjoyed remarkable legislative success in his first two years, and then Democrats fared surprisingly well in the 2022 midterms.
With hindsight, many Democrats believe that had Biden announced then that he would step down after four years, he would have been remembered as one of the more accomplished recent presidents. Of course, he did not. Trump’s comeback on the Republican side fueled the belief among those close to Biden that he had to stay in the fight; he had beaten Trump once, and only he could do it again. But Biden’s decline, which was already the source of Washington whispers, seemed to accelerate in full public view. White House aides furiously fought any suggestion that Biden, then 81, was too old to run again, too old to serve another four years (he’d have been 86 when he left office in January 2029), and pushed back against any Democrats who suggested that their party needed a new, younger standard-bearer. They chided reporters who wrote about it.
[Read: How Biden destroyed his legacy ]
Stories came anyway. Then came the disastrous debate in Atlanta, and the three-plus weeks of calls for Biden to drop out of the race, a rancorous fight that nearly tore the Democratic Party apart. Trump, in private, boasted to aides that his “Sleepy Joe” nickname for Biden was spot-on, even as his own advanced age received less attention. “It was fair to ask about Trump’s health in 2024, but Democrats were afraid to do it because it would boomerang on Biden,” Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, told me. Veterans of Biden’s White House have expressed regret that their West Wing did not fully understand the groundswell of reservations about the president’s age, and some believe it grew too insular and overly protective of the president. Andrew Bates, who was the senior deputy press secretary for Biden, told me that their “outdated approach to media undercut Joe Biden’s superpower—his connection with working people.”
In Bates’s view, Trump has a different problem, one that exposes the president for who he really is. “The most obvious impact of age on him is that he has lost the capacity to pretend he cares about other people,” Bates said.
The White House announced this week that Trump will undergo a medical and dental checkup on May 26, which will be his fourth publicly disclosed doctor’s visit in his second term. (He has also had two dental visits in Florida.) Last year he had an annual physical in April 2025, and then what the White House described as a “routine yearly checkup” in October. Across his terms, Trump has bragged repeatedly about acing multiple cognitive tests, a boast that only raises more questions.
Many presidents have faced inquiries about their physical and mental health. Reagan seemed to slip late in his presidency in the years before he announced that he had Alzheimer’s. Franklin D. Roosevelt was in poor health before dying just a few months into his fourth term. Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke. Abraham Lincoln battled depression. Dwight Eisenhower had a major heart attack. And some of Richard Nixon’s own aides privately worried about his drinking and his mental stability.
Nixon often utilized the “madman theory,” in which he would act unstable to intimidate foes and achieve better results. Trump’s aides say he does the same, including in his genocidal threats toward Iran; they are comfortable with that comparison to Nixon. But they may soon face more similarities with Biden.
Even by the standards of shocking Michael Jackson jokes, it was a shocking joke. “Michael Jackson did nothing wrong,” Michael Che, a co-anchor of Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” said during last night’s episode. “He was right to molest all those kids.” This was delivered with palpable surprise at the words coming out of his mouth, but Che kept going: “They were lucky. I would have paid him to do it. And I did! That’s right, when I was 10 years old, Michael Jackson molested me, and the only thing it gave me was a fetish for middle-aged white women.” He then smiled and said, almost as an aside, “That is not why I have that.”
Che, of course, wasn’t saying what he actually thinks about the late pop star or his own personal sexual preferences. He was participating in a tradition where he and co-anchor Colin Jost each write “Weekend Update” material that the other man has to deliver cold, without seeing the joke ahead of time. The goal is to make their co-anchor look as crass, offensive, and stupid as possible, and Jost had crafted a real doozy for Che to read. But the joke wasn’t just about shocking the audience or innovating in the seemingly spent arena of Michael Jackson jokes—it also demonstrated how the right context can make grotesque humor sing, by turning the discomfort of the joke teller into the real gag.
In an interview with the comedian Mike Birbiglia, Che said that the stunt was inspired by the “Update” jokes they’d written that had bombed during dress rehearsal. (Che recalled how one groaner was greeted with a woman loudly saying “no.”) But for one episode, Che and Jost decided to recycle those same jokes for the other man to say. To Che’s surprise, the act of telling the audience that they were aware that these jokes were in bad taste “made them laugh hysterically.” Jost pushed for them to do it again, but without knowing the jokes ahead of time; Che admitted that he became worried that Jost was going to surprise him, “so I wrote new ones that were horrific.”
This has since evolved into a biannual tradition—and one of the best parts of the past decade of SNL. Highlights have included Jost getting Che to call Kendrick Lamar “the biggest bitch of them all” during the height of his feud with Drake, and Che writing a joke about Jost’s wife, Scarlett Johansson, that was so beyond the pale he later apologized to her on air.
The tradition has endured partly because of the sheer shock value of the jokes, which almost guarantees they go viral, but also because it’s very sweet, in a very strange way. After working together for a decade, the two men understand each other on an artistic and personal level. For Che, writing his jokes means leaning into Jost’s straight-laced vibe and the idea that he seems like a guy who would enjoy racist material, such as this line he was made to recite about the Oscar-winning film Sinners: “A Black vampire is just like a white vampire, except the only thing it sucks dry is the welfare state.” In contrast, Jost loves to make Che look like some sort of louche sexual deviant, as seen with the Jackson joke.
[Read: Time comes for Colin Jost—and for all of us]
It all comes down to the two men’s anguished delivery, which itself becomes the joke. In the interview with Birbiglia, Che noted that people worry they will “get in trouble” for laughing at jokes they know are wrong, so the secret is to give them permission. This is how jokes that on paper read as merely sexist and racist really become about two friends trying to make each other really, really uncomfortable.
The latest joke swap arrived just after Netflix’s recent roast of Kevin Hart, which was filled with nasty, not-all-that-winky exchanges between the featured comedians. Take one particularly vicious back-and-forth between Shane Gillis and Chelsea Handler, where Gillis cracked about Handler partying with Jeffrey Epstein and Handler returned fire by bringing up Gillis’s history of telling racist jokes. The environment wasn’t that fraternal. Maybe everyone was in on the joke, but the event certainly seemed like it was filled with people who despised one another, and who wanted to demonstrate that they were the edgiest and most callous person in the room.
In comparison, Jost and Che’s one-upmanship clearly comes from a place of deep affection. At one point, Jost was made to joke about a new album by Ye (formerly Kanye West): “Please try to separate the art from the artist, and remember that Ye can make awful music and still be right about Hitler.” At the end of “Weekend Update,” he said that to atone for this particular bit, “I’d like to sacrifice the most important thing in my life: my beautiful, award-winning, world-famous hair.” A barber entered the set from behind, pulled out his clippers, and draped Jost in a black cape.
But right before the clippers made contact, Che intervened with a passionate No! “You was really gonna do it?” he asked in seemingly genuine disbelief. “Man, you are the greatest comedian of all time,” he added, dropping the bit for a second and simply telling his friend how much he loved him.
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Roosevelt Montás grew up in a small mountain village in the Dominican Republic. Two days before his 12th birthday, his mother flew him up to New York, where she had found a minimum-wage job in a garment factory. A few years later, when he was a sophomore in high school, some neighbors in his apartment building threw out a bunch of books. One of them was a finely bound volume of Socratic dialogues. Montás snagged it—and Socrates changed his life.
A high-school mentor helped him get into Columbia, where students confront the great books of Western civilization in the school’s Core Curriculum. There, Montás encountered the writings of St. Augustine. “In plumbing the depths of his own psyche, Augustine gave me a language with which to approach my own interiority,” he recalled in his memoir, “he gave me a model and a set of questions with which to explore the emotional wilderness, full of doubt and confusion, that was my own coming-to-adulthood, in America.”
Augustine paradoxically caused Montás to lose his Christian faith, but led him to gain a faith in philosophy. Montás went on to lead Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and he is now starting a center on citizenship and civic thought at Bard College.
I get to visit about two dozen campuses every year, and I meet at least a few teachers like Montás at each of them. I can generally spot the ones with the pure disease, the ones with that raw teacher-fire. Usually, they had some experience early in life when they fell in love with learning. This love then became a ruling passion, and now they fervently seek to share it with their students in the classroom. You can find them at Ivies and at community colleges, at big state schools and small liberal-arts colleges. They are a part of what’s going right in American higher education, the part that critics (like me) don’t write about enough.
These teachers talk of their vocation in lofty terms. They are not there merely to download information into students’ brains, or to steer them toward that job at McKinsey. True humanistic study, they believe, has the power to change lives. They want to walk with students through the biggest questions: Who am I? What might I become? What is this world I find myself in? If you don’t ask yourself these questions, these teachers say, you risk wasting your life on trivial pursuits, following the conventional path, doing what others want you to do instead of what is truly in your nature. If society doesn’t offer this kind of deep humanistic education, where people learn to seek truth and cultivate a capacity for citizenship, then democracy begins to crumble. “What I’m giving the students is tools for a life of freedom,” Montás says.
These great teachers are the latest inheritors of the humanist tradition. Humanism is a worldview based on an accurate conception of human nature—that we are both deeply broken and wonderfully made. At our worst, humans are capable of cruelty, fascism, and barbarism that no other mammal can match. On the other hand, deep inside of us we possess fundamental longings for beauty, justice, love, and truth, which, when cultivated, can produce spiritual values and human accomplishments breathtaking in their scope.
Life is essentially a battle between our noblest aspirations and our natural egotism. Humanistic education prepares people for this struggle. Yes, schooling also has a practical purpose—to help students make a living and contribute to the economy. But that practical training works best when it is enmeshed within the larger process of forming a fully functioning grown-up—a person armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, force of character, and a thorough familiarity with the spiritual heritage of our civilization. Preprofessional education treats people solely as economic animals; humanistic education also treats them as social and moral animals.
Humanistic teachers do this by ushering students into the Great Conversation—the debate, stretching back centuries, that constitutes the best of what wise people have thought and expressed. These teachers help students encounter real human beings facing the vital challenges of life: Socrates confronting death, Sun Tzu on how to manage conflict, Dante in love, Zadie Smith on living in the boundary between different identities. The Great Conversation represents each generation’s attempt to navigate the dialectics of life, the tension between autonomy and belonging, freedom and order, intimacy and solitude, diversity and cohesion, achievement and equality. The Great Conversation never ends, because there are no final answers to these tensions, just a temporary balance that works for a particular person or culture in a particular context.
By introducing students to rival traditions of thought—Stoicism, Catholic social teaching, conservatism, critical race theory—colleges help students cultivate the beliefs, worldviews, and philosophies that will help them answer the elemental question of adulthood: What should I do next? By introducing them to history and literature, colleges arm students with wisdom about how humans operate, which is handy knowledge to have. They offer them not only life options but also, more importantly, the ability to choose among them. “Any serious human problem is a hard problem,” Andrew Delbanco, who teaches at Columbia, told me. “The fundamental obligation of a humanities teacher is to try to develop in students an allergy to ideology and certainty. To acknowledge self-doubt.”
But humanistic education is no mere intellectual enterprise. Its primary purpose is not to produce learned people but good people. When teachers do their job, they arouse in their students not only a passion for learning but also a passion to lead a life of generosity and purpose. “The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting—no more—and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth,” Plutarch observed many centuries ago.
Teachers do this by making excellence attractive to the young—excellent lives, excellent ideas, excellent works of art, commerce, and science, and, above all, excellent ideals. The students who are captivated by these ideals find some cause to advance, some social problem to address, some business to start. When confronted by inspiring ideals, many students say: I care intensely about this, I want to orient my life around this. It’s not only their minds that have been refined but also their desires and ambitions. In a true humanistic education, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain wrote, “the shaping of the will is thoroughly more important to man than the shaping of the intellect.”
Preprofessional education is individualistic and selfish. Such students learn to ask: How can I outcompete my peers and beat them up the ladder to success? In a humanistic program, by contrast, groups of people gather to form communities of truth, to reason together, to explore life together, to pool their desires and seek the common good.
I find that students flock to humanistic teachers who radiate a sense of urgency. They tell students: We are doing something important here. College is not just frat parties and internships; it’s potentially the most important four years of your life. You can emerge either an anesthetized drone or a person fully curious, fully committed, and fully alive.
I know this kind of education can have this effect because it is the education I got decades ago at the University of Chicago. I knew I could never be as learned as the professors I encountered, but their passion for large topics and great books seemed so impressive to me. I yearned with all my soul to understand the world as best I could, to embark on a lifelong journey of growth. Whatever my ample failings, that yearning, kindled in those classrooms with those books and those teachers, has never gone away. I stumbled unknowingly into a humanistic education, because it was the only college I got into, but I can tell you, it totally worked on me.
Today, the teachers I’m talking about tend to feel like dissidents within the academy, like they are doing something countercultural. That’s because at most schools, humanistic education has been pushed into the remote corners of academic life. It’s not that people woke up one morning and decided to renounce the humanistic ideal, it’s just that other goals popped up. It was easier to fundraise for them, easier to sell them to tuition-paying parents. The idea of forming students into the best version of themselves sort of got left behind.
Meghan Sullivan grew up in a working-class family in Florida, with her parents running through a series of jobs, punctuated by periods of unemployment. She went through grade school thinking she wanted to be a teacher, because she admired her teachers. Then in high school she joined the debate team and decided she was put on this earth to become a lawyer. She had a friend whose father taught philosophy. She was struck by what a dumb profession that was. As she told an interviewer, Tom Burnett, she decided that “there’s no universe where being a philosophy professor is more important than being a lawyer.”
Sullivan went to college fully intending to major in prelaw. But one semester, she didn’t get into the classes she wanted, and her adviser suggested she take a philosophy class. She rolled her eyes but signed up. Her first assigned paper asked her to consider whether it is ever morally permissible to commit suicide. She went to her teaching assistant and asked, “Am I allowed to, like, answer this? Like, are we allowed to talk about this?” He told her that not only was she allowed to do so, but it was a course requirement. “I found it just totally exhilarating,” she recalled. Now she teaches philosophy at Notre Dame.
Mark Edmundson also grew up in a working-class family, in Medford, Massachusetts. He got into college, something no one else in his family had done, and told his father that he might study prelaw, because you could make a decent living as a lawyer. His father, who had barely graduated high school, “detonated,” Edmundson later recalled. You only go to college once, his father roared, you better study what genuinely interests you. The rich kids get to study what they want, and you are just as good as any rich kids.
Edmundson soon encountered Sigmund Freud and Ralph Waldo Emerson. “They gave words to thoughts and feelings that I had never been able to render myself,” he wrote in his book, Why Teach? “They shone a light onto the world, and what they saw, suddenly I saw, too.” Edmundson now teaches poetry and literature at the University of Virginia.
“To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it might be,” Edmundson once told an audience of students. “In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.”
The forces arrayed against humanistic learning are many:
Specialization. Aside from educating the young, universities have another perfectly noble mission—the advancement of knowledge. This goal requires that academics be trained to specialize in a single narrow discipline. They are often given jobs and awarded tenure because of their contribution to that narrow discipline.
The resulting system often values research instead of teaching. Sullivan observes that in graduate school “the message you get overwhelmingly is that you need to be a narrow research specialist, you need to impress the grand poohbahs of your discipline. Teaching is something you do to pay the bills.” And, as Anthony Kronman of Yale has argued, when academics specialize, it starts to seem downright unprofessional even to ask the big general questions of life. Specialization, even for a noble purpose, is a dehumanizing force, one that induces universities to turn their back on the formation of the young.
Preprofessionalism. Every year, UCLA surveys freshmen about what they hope to get out of college. Back in the 1960s, more than 80 percent—the top answer—said they hoped to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life.” Over the ensuing decades, that priority has plummeted. Now, more than 80 percent of freshmen say the purpose of college is to help them become “very well off financially.” Going to college has become a consumer experience—you pay huge tuition and in return you get rewarded with a pleasant time, career prep, a network of connections, and some fancy credentials. Interest in subjects like history and humanities has plummeted. More subtle is the effect preprofessionalism has had on the student mindset. A tone of cynical calculation prevails as students learn to manipulate the game. Many read just enough to get by, optimizing time management in the general frenzy for merit badges. An ethos of detached knowingness displaces an ethos of passionate inquiry. Humanistic education says: You need to elevate your desires! The consumer mindset says: Tell us what you want, and we will give it to you.
Politicization. The humanistic ideal has been replaced in some departments by the activist ideal. The purpose of the professor is to indoctrinate students so they can resist the structures of oppression. The activists naturally focus more on power and social systems than on the subjective inner experience of an individual heart, an individual soul. Politics, rather than the pursuit of truth, goodness, culture, or beauty, becomes the cause that gives life meaning.
Political radicalism once seemed exciting, but now it just makes parts of academic culture dreary. I used to love going into the Seminary Co-op bookstore at the University of Chicago or the Harvard Coop bookstore in Cambridge, both of which feature the latest academic books. Now there’s much less on those sales tables I’d want to buy. It’s the same ideological story, the same jargon, applied to different subject areas: oppressor/oppressed, transgression, deconstruction, intersectionality—the aging Foucault-inspired monoculture. Students have learned to manipulate this hustle. You don’t have to work on your soul in order to be counted as a good person, you just parrot the approved progressive attitudes on your way to Goldman Sachs. Roughly 88 percent of students at the University of Michigan and Northwestern admit to researchers that they lie in their papers and pretend to be more progressive than they really are in order to get a better grade.
The crumbling of humanistic self-confidence. Many people who work in the humanities have lost faith in the idea that a book or a course can transform a life, or even that literature is a repository of great wisdom to which one must humbly submit. The old humanistic ideal seems to many archaic, outmoded, reactionary. Thus, passionate attempts to transform students have been replaced by a dispassionate application of theory on behalf of some geriatric race, class, and gender ideology. Why would anybody major in English if the stakes involved are really so trivial?
The loss of national purpose. In his 1996 book, The University in Ruins, Bill Readings wrote that universities once saw themselves as the defenders, creators, and transmitters of the national culture. That is, they served the same function as the cathedrals of the Middle Ages: cultural and intellectual furnaces whose influence radiates outward and elevates the broader society. Earlier generations of university leaders like Charles William Eliot, Vannevar Bush, and Robert Maynard Hutchins saw themselves as public figures with national roles. But, Readings argued, universities have lost any notion of serving the national culture, replacing it with the pursuit of excellence. Like any corporation, they seek to provide excellent services to consumers in order to move up the ranking systems.
We’re never going to go back to the humanistic ideal as it existed in the 19th century or even the 1950s—nor should we—but the failure to come up with a new version for the 21st century has been devastating for universities. They’ve lost a core piece of their identity. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, 70 percent of Americans say universities are heading in the wrong direction. Public trust in universities is in such steep decline that President Donald Trump gets cheered on for trying to dismantle them.
It has also been devastating for students. In a Harvard survey, 58 percent of college students said they had experienced no sense of “purpose or meaning” in their life in the month before being polled. “Ideals are psychological goals necessary to the health of the mind,” the literary critic Alfred Kazin once wrote. Today’s students, whose educations are seldom oriented around ideals, are not in a healthy state of mind.
And it’s been devastating for America’s leadership class. Universities are supposed to make the great good—to train the nation’s leaders in virtue so they can live up to their responsibilities as privileged members of the elite. But today’s leadership class, which has not been trained to serve or even understand those who are less fortunate, has forfeited the trust of the populace. Because universities have left a cultural void, the nation as a whole has lost its humanistic core, its sense of shared morals, its shared humanity. Simultaneous technological advance and humanistic decay have left us both objectively better off and subjectively worse. Loss of faith leads to nihilism. Might makes right. Brutality reigns. Welcome to American politics in 2026.
The good news is that things are changing. There is an interesting pattern in the history of higher education: Universities reform after confrontations with barbarism. Columbia formed its Core Curriculum program just after the horrors of World War I. It was, as the literary critic Jacques Barzun put it, a curriculum “born of trauma.” During and after World War II, a slew of writers like Maritain, Hutchins, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Hannah Arendt, and Karl Jaspers published books on how to reform education. People took a look at the civilization-threatening brutality unleashed by the war and concluded: We’ve got to cultivate better human beings! In 1942, the German dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer took a look at the way fascism had devoured his country and argued that the most important question for any responsible person was not just how to behave honorably during the war; it also concerned “how the coming generation is to live.”
The cruelty of the Trump era has aroused a similar response. Wide swaths of Americans can suddenly see the importance of character and character formation. As public norms crumble, more and more people come to appreciate the importance of teaching citizenship. As the public culture grows more savage, people can see what catastrophes result when the nation abandons its humanistic core. Moreover, Trump is never totally wrong. His assaults on the universities, and especially on research funding, have been monstrous, but it is true that universities got a bit too ideological, a bit too preprofessional, a bit too exclusive and elite. For higher ed, these have been the worst of times but, paradoxically, also the best of times.
I’ve met with several dozen university presidents over the past year, and nearly every one of them is initiating some sort of new program or reform. They understand, as Rajiv Vinnakota of the Institute for Citizens & Scholars put it to me, that universities have spent so much time serving the private good of students and faculty that they have neglected their role as stewards of the public good. We are living through the greatest period of university innovation of our lifetimes.
I would lump these changes into three buckets:
Moral formation. Some colleges never got out of the character-building business, including the service academies, the Christian colleges, and the HBCUs. But over the past decade a raft of schools have introduced programs to help students become better versions of themselves. Some of these programs resemble the kind of great-books education I got at Chicago. For example, several years ago the historian Melinda Zook realized that only a tiny percentage of Purdue students had ever taken a literature or history course. She introduced the Cornerstone program, offering students the chance to study “transformative texts.” In 2017, about 100 students enrolled. Now, nearly 5,500 Purdue students are reading transformative texts.
Ted Hadzi-Antich Jr., who teaches at Austin Community College, decided that big ideas shouldn’t be just for rich kids, and began teaching a seminar called “The Great Questions.” He then formed the Great Questions Foundation, which has trained more than 140 faculty at community colleges across the nation on the art of leading big-ideas seminars.
Wake Forest decided to put character formation at the center of its mission about a decade ago. Since 2020, it has trained 140 faculty across various departments on how to do character education, and 160 faculty on how to think about their own moral growth. The university also formed the Educating Character Initiative, which has so far dispersed more than $35 million impacting 146 institutions that are developing their own programs.
These days, I find that almost every school I visit has at least one course that directly addresses the great moral challenges students will face. At Wesleyan, there’s a course called “Living a Good Life,” where students try on different moral philosophies and participate in experiences like “Live Like a Daoist Week.” At Harvard, Richard Weissbourd leads a course called “Becoming a Good Person and Leading a Good Life.” He covers subjects like how to raise a moral child; how to care for people across cultural, racial, and economic differences; how to cultivate romantic relationships; and how to find your purpose. He’s learned that Shel Silverstein’s book The Giving Tree particularly resonates with female students. The book is about a tree who gives and gives and gives to a self-centered boy until she is a stump and has nothing left to give. Some of the women say their romantic relationships are kind of like that.
There’s a tremendous variety to these programs. Some teach character formation by holding up moral exemplars, some through the exploration of moral philosophies, some by discussing good commencement addresses. At Valparaiso University, students discuss great ideas and then have to write, produce, and perform a musical about those ideas, an exercise that requires cooperation and self-sacrifice. The University of Pennsylvania art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw taught a course in Washington, D.C., called “Memorials, Models, and Portraits of Leadership,” on exploring character through the arts. Francis Su of Harvey Mudd College turned his approach into a book called Mathematics for Human Flourishing.
Civic thought. If democracy is not to degenerate into disorder, citizens must learn to exercise their freedom responsibly, deliberate together, and make sensible judgments about the choices before them. This requires training, and lately, a raft of citizenship programs have sprung up to provide it.
At Yale, where I also work, my colleague Bryan Garsten recently launched the Center for Civic Thought, which hosts conversations on political theory, constitutional principles, and how to disagree well. I recently sat in on Garsten’s class “The Common Good.” The course is structured around questions such as how much we owe to others and how political authority should be distributed. Students are asked to design their own society, with its own system of government. It’s an exercise that causes them to think about power and fairness, and that challenges them to understand their own values.
In one class, Garsten showed two brief videos, one from the Trump aide Stephen Miller saying that international relations is about nothing more than raw power, and one from the former Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttegieg saying that international relations is about building a rules-based order. Then students read the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, in which the Athenians make the Milleresque claim that international affairs have nothing to do with justice or the right, that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Garsten asked students to decide if they agree.
I have found, over the past few decades of teaching, that it has become harder and harder to get students to argue in public. They are afraid of being judged by their peers and of the harsh social penalties that might follow. Gradually, the skills required to disagree well have atrophied. The new college civics programs are designed to give students and faculty the tools to do that. For example, Vinnakota has organized a coalition of more than 70 university presidents, who are launching programs to educate students for democracy, to prepare them to argue well, and to protect free speech. I recently visited the University of Michigan, where there is a new $50 million initiative designed to do this. The Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley offers an eight-month online course that discusses the latest science on the art of bridging differences.
These programs are especially vibrant in red states, where legislatures have funded a series of initiatives to widen intellectual diversity on campus. The University of Tennessee, for example, now has the Institute of American Civics; Ohio State boasts the Chase Center. These programs face intense pressure from the left-wing academics in other departments who want their scholars deplatformed—and from the right-wing state legislators who funded them (who can get a little nutty, and demand, for example, that you shouldn’t teach Socrates, because he was gay).
The University of Florida now hosts the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education. It offers courses like “Capitalism and Its Critics,” “What Is Statecraft?,” and “What Is the Common Good?” More than 3,000 students enrolled in Hamilton School classes in its first two years of operation.
I visited the University of Texas at Austin’s version of these programs, the School of Civic Leadership. It offers courses like “Excellence of Character: The Virtues,” “Great Thinkers in Realism and Geopolitics,” and “Truth and Persuasion.” I met faculty who had left other universities from across the country to do the sort of teaching that had inspired them to go into the profession in the first place. I was impressed by how hard they were trying to prevent this program from becoming a conservative ghetto. The students I met were all over the political map. They said they got involved in the program because they wanted to find a space on campus where they can argue things out. Some of them came from Classical Christian schools where they’ve been debating Aristotle since they were 11, and others came from normal public high schools where they had never heard of Aristotle, but they were mixing it up together now. One freshman told me, “This week alone two separate professors accused me of being a Neoplatonist.” I don’t know exactly what they meant by that, but it sounds like he’s getting a good education.
How to do life. The third big area of change involves basic life skills—how students can lead not just a successful life but also a flourishing one. Several years ago, Lori Santos’s happiness course, “Psychology and the Good Life,” took Yale’s campus by storm, attracting at one point a quarter of the student body. At Stanford, “Design for Living & Learning,” a course based on engineering and design thinking, was also astoundingly popular.
Miroslav Volf and others designed the “Life Worth Living” course at Yale to use classic theological wisdom from the Buddha to Augustine to address fundamental questions like who we answer to and what we should hope for. In the book that grew out of the course, Volf and his co-authors Matthew Croasmun and Ryan McAnnally-Linz write, “Life isn’t a series of crises calling for Heroic Moral Deeds. Most of the time, it’s a series of small, seemingly insignificant decisions and nondecisions.”
Meghan Sullivan’s “God and the Good Life” is perhaps the most popular course at Notre Dame. She walks students through the large life topics: how to live generously with your money, how to take responsibility in your community, how to manage suffering, how to prepare for death. Over the course of the semester students compose an “apology,” which is a statement in the Socratic tradition “about your beliefs and how they fit into the ongoing story of your life.” Once completed, the apologies are frequently shared with family and friends.
Courses like these cut through the over-intellectualized nature of academic culture—the idea that all inquiry should be depersonalized, dispassionate, data-driven, objective. Being a good person is more about having the right emotions, perceptions, and intentions toward others in the concrete circumstances of life than it is about logic-chopping games and dry dissertations. “For Aquinas,” Sullivan and her co-author Paul Blaschko wrote in the book that accompanies their course, “faith is a different sort of knowledge, closely related to the virtue of love. Love is a deeply intellectual virtue, requiring attention and understanding.” By the spring of 2025, 142 classes at 35 institutions explored how to make a life-worth-living course, and more than 14,000 students had taken one of them.
Anna B. Moreland leads the Shaping Initiative at Villanova. Freshmen take a course about how to get the most out of college, and seniors can take a seminar on how to shape an adult life. Students often arrive on campus, Moreland says, underprepared to face the identity questions that meet them. She started a seminar as a sort of experiment to help them figure out who they are. “The student response was almost visceral, like I had put my finger on a raw nerve of their lives.”
Students, for example, are powerfully struck by the distinction Aristotle makes between different kinds of friends—friends of utility, friends for pleasure, friends for virtue. In the highest form of friendship, each person values the other for who she fundamentally is—for her character—not just as a means to have a good time or to secure some practical advantage.
In the fall of 2025, after I visited some classrooms at Villanova, I gave a talk in a larger hall. When I finished, a young man carrying an iPad came up to me. He was a bit pimply, a freshman all of two months into his college life. He showed me what looked like an electrical-wiring diagram, with my main points structured across the screen. He’d drawn elaborate connections between them. Then he told me that a quotation from an obscure Simone de Beauvoir book was relevant to my argument, and proceeded to read it to me. It was a brilliant quote, directly relevant, making a point that had never occurred to me. I wanted to grab this kid by the shoulders and ask him, “Who the hell are you?!”
On every campus there are students who haven’t yet gotten the memo that they’re only supposed to deconstruct, critique, dismantle. These students are willing to honor their longing to bring their lives to point. They display a willingness to be transformed.
All through history, in civilizations all over the world, peoples have sought to pass down the best of their own way of life from generation to generation, to orient those around them toward the good life, to inculcate virtue, and to aim each other toward some ultimate purpose. That our culture dropped the ball on all of that is just plain weird. Now I constantly meet people who are unfamiliar with the humanist tradition. Sometimes when I ask professors how they help their students find meaning, they admit bluntly: I wasn’t trained for that; I would have no clue how to do it.
The student hunger never went away. The social need never went away. And now, the tide is turning. If you are a Fox News watcher who thinks that the universities are simply woke hothouses filled with Maoists plotting revolution, your views—which were always exaggerated—are out of date. Leaders are adapting. Professors are rediscovering their sense of mission. There’s a ton of good stuff happening on campus these days, if you’re only willing to see it.
Barney Frank might not draw a connection between his coming out as gay nearly four decades ago and his coming out against left-wing dogmatism in the Democratic Party today. But the parallel is unmistakable: The 86-year-old former Democratic representative from Massachusetts is shining a light on a sensitive subject that many people wish he would keep quiet about.
In his forthcoming book, The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy, Frank contends that left-wingers have saddled his party with a “vote-repelling platform” of open borders, defunded police departments, and “the rule of the pronoun police.” By voicing his criticism of these stances, Frank hopes to give cover to fellow liberals who share his political concerns, if not his courage. “I know most Democrats agree with me,” Frank told me via Zoom from his home in Ogunquit, Maine, where he recently began hospice care. “But they’ve been intimidated out of saying so.” Frank’s physical infirmity had no apparent effect on his mental acuity and, if anything, made his message more urgent. By refusing to repudiate far-left ideas, he said, Democrats “allowed the impression that we agree with them.”
With its allusions to personal integrity, the importance of setting an example, and the ignominy of silence, Frank’s explanation for speaking up now echoes his comments in 1987 when, in an interview with The Boston Globe, he became the first elected federal officeholder to voluntarily disclose that he was gay. Now, as then, his candor has prompted a certain amount of discomfort and even hostility.
On CNN earlier this month, the host Jake Tapper asked a frail and visibly gaunt Frank why he believes his own side needs fixing. “As we succeeded in bringing the mainstream of the left into a concern with inequality,” he told Tapper, “we also enabled people who wanted to use that as a platform for a wide range of social and cultural changes, some of which the public isn’t ready for.” Frank lamented that by subjecting Democrats to litmus tests on highly controversial issues—such as “male-to-female transsexuals playing sports designated for women,” as he put it—progressives set their causes up for defeat.
[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The left’s new moralism will backfire]
The response on the left proved Frank’s point. An X post that commented “Barney Frank literally dying on CNN while denouncing trans kids in sports is all time peak for the Dem brand” earned 41,000 likes. “Having the argument be made by someone clearly in the last months of his life does not do much to counteract the impression that the left wing of the party represents its future,” Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs gloated.
During his 32-year congressional career that ended in 2013, Frank developed a reputation as one of the House’s most prominent progressives. In addition to helping lead the movement for gay and lesbian equality, he was a crucial defender of President Bill Clinton during his impeachment, and Frank’s name graces a major piece of progressive banking legislation. Frank has more than earned the credibility to criticize his own side for its failings. Indeed, the fact that a figure with such sterling progressive bona fides is so concerned about those failings that he wrote an entire book about them indicates how serious the problem has become. His political valedictory deserves a fair hearing, not catty rejoinders.
The growing popularity of economic populism on both sides of the ideological divide, Frank argues, has vindicated the left’s economic program. But just when the “mainstream left” had the opportunity to capitalize on the public’s embrace of economic populism, the cultural left sabotaged the opportunity by forcing a suite of far-out ideas into public discussion. “Instead of accepting victory” for having convinced Americans of their economic views, Frank told me, the left “took it as a sign that they were right about a broader range of things.”
Frank’s last name captures his personality. Friends and foes alike frequently describe his temperament as “brusque.” Speaking his mind is a trait Frank developed early in his career, when he showed the sort of moxie necessary for a Harvard-educated Jewish New Jerseyan to gain prominence in Boston, a city whose politics were long dominated by ward-heeling Irish Catholics.
Frank came of age politically between the end of World War II and the Vietnam War, when liberalism was the country’s reigning creed. The opening pages of Smahtguy, a cartoon biography by Frank’s former staffer Eric Orner, describe how Frank’s parents revered Franklin D. Roosevelt, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. One panel depicts the Franks reading an installment of Eleanor Roosevelt’s daily syndicated column, “My Day,” in which the former first lady lambastes the British authorities for refusing Jewish refugee boats permission to dock in Palestine. In his early 20s, Frank unknowingly participated in a CIA-funded trip to a youth festival in Helsinki with Gloria Steinem (a program aimed at buttressing the non-Communist left, which, along with funding a smattering of highbrow anti-Communist literary magazines, counts among the greatest things the agency ever did).
Although liberal interest groups gave him consistently high scores throughout his career, Frank has long had an independent streak. In 1978, as a Democratic member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Frank crossed party lines to endorse Republican Senator Edward Brooke, the first Black candidate to win a Senate seat by popular vote. Brooke, the only Black senator to serve between 1881 and 1993, was a prominent member of what is now an extinct species: the liberal Republican. Frank, who served as a co-chair of Democrats for Brooke, thought Brooke’s reelection was crucial not only for racial representation but also for political moderation. “Brooke’s loss in 1978 was a prime example of the negative impact of people with strong ideological passions demanding rhetorical militancy from their candidates,” Frank wrote in a 2015 appreciation.
In Congress, Frank supported higher taxes on the rich and opposed Bill Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement and welfare-reform package. His support for economic populism has not waned. Well-intentioned mistakes made by liberals, he writes in The Hard Road to Unity, “are largely responsible for the political strength that xenophobic populism has come to enjoy in the developed world.” He attacks, at length, the neoliberal policies pursued by Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and other followers of the post–Cold War, center-left “third way” philosophy that sought a path between social democracy and the free-market orthodoxy of President Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. These leaders were so single-mindedly devoted to economic growth, Frank argues, that they ignored the massive gulf emerging between the super wealthy and everyone else. A process of what he calls “globalization without amelioration”—that is, the passing of international free-trade agreements without measures to address the economic displacement they would cause the working class—“reinforced the identification of liberal governance with economic hardship.”
Both wings of the left, Frank believes, are to blame for its sorry predicament: The moderate left’s “complacent confidence in the calming effect of a steadily rising GDP” has alienated working-class voters while the progressive left’s immoderation on social issues keeps them away.
Especially divisive, Frank believes, is immigration, which he described to me as “one of the exacerbating factors but not one of the original causes” of America’s current populist moment. The mainstream right, which once welcomed more immigrants, has entirely shifted its stance. “My barometer is weasel-in-chief Lindsey Graham,” Frank said. The South Carolina Republican senator co-sponsored a comprehensive immigration-reform package two decades ago only to turn toward restrictionism once Donald Trump made immigration the centerpiece of the GOP’s agenda. But Frank also faults his own party for its refusal to adapt to growing misgivings about immigration within the electorate. Instead, Democrats lurched in the opposite direction. Frank recalls a debate in which nearly all of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates raised their hand in agreement with a statement that border crossings should be decriminalized. That image, Frank writes, “should have been captioned ‘We who are about to die politically salute you.’”
On transgender issues, Frank has personal experience with how the left defeats itself. In 2007, he introduced the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill that would have banned employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Frank was excoriated by left-wing activists for not including gender identity as a protected category. Doing so would have made the measure impossible to pass; even Frank’s more narrowly scoped bill drew a veto threat before being defeated in the Senate. Every subsequent effort to pass federal anti-discrimination legislation that included a gender-identity provision failed. (The need for such legislation was largely obviated by a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects individuals from discrimination on the basis of both characteristics.)
Today’s LGBTQ activists, he says, could learn something from their predecessors, who would not have forced elected officials to face a litmus test on whether transgender women should be allowed to participate in women’s sports. He points to Barack Obama, who was widely viewed as an ally of the gay community in 2008 despite opposing its signature issue at the time, marriage equality. Contrast that politically savvy and ultimately successful approach with the left’s treatment of Democratic Representative Seth Moulton, who was widely denounced after the 2024 election for expressing discomfort at the idea of his daughters “getting run over” by biological males on a playing field.
To Frank, the greatest internal difficulty that people on the left face is an unwillingness to recognize that they live in a moderate country. A liberal incrementalist, he all but accuses his intra-party opponents of delusion. After Republican Barry Goldwater and Democrat George McGovern suffered landslide defeats in their campaigns for the presidency in 1964 and 1972, respectively, some supporters of each nominee, Frank told me, had the same reaction: The candidate “didn’t do enough to bring out the true believers.” The real problem, Frank contended, was the opposite: an abundance of partisans who scared away moderates. Making matters worse, the left truly believes that its radical views are embraced by the public. They’re “not advocating that we take consciously unpopular stands,” Frank says. “They think they’re popular. They’ve convinced themselves of that.”
Such righteousness exacerbates the intra-left squabbling over the Democratic Party’s future. Many progressives believe their own hearts to be pure but cannot conceive that anyone to their right might have sincere reasons for opposing them on borders, crime, foreign policy, or any other issue. “Many of these zealots,” Frank writes, “are convinced that the source of their abandonment is some form of corruption.” One can see this motivated reasoning in the current attempts to blame Kamala Harris’s election loss on her not taking a stronger position against Israel during the war in Gaza. Of those who refused to vote for Harris on such grounds, Frank is unsparing. “If there were to be a competition for the dumbest, most counterproductive voting behavior in American history since secession,” he writes, “this would be in the running.”
[Read: The left’s self-defeating Israel obsession]
The title of Frank’s book calls for party unity. He gives the impression that his definition of the term is broad, and it essentially means whatever it takes for Democrats to win elections. Strangely, he has little to say about the issue that, more than any other, is making that unity so elusive: Israel-Palestine. When I asked Frank what he makes of the rampant anti-Semitism on the activist left, he responded by blaming not its purveyors but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who “wins the prize for achieving the biggest political movement I can think of, which is moving Israel from being an untouchable, third-rail issue in America to making it so unpopular.” He cited the disproportionate representation of Jews in Congress as evidence that anti-Semitism is “not a broad political issue” but “a problem at the individual level, a personal-safety issue.” Frank seems oblivious to the ways in which the progressive ideologues he correctly faults for repelling voters are, by and large, the same people pushing the party in an extreme anti-Israel direction. They will not be satiated by a change in the ideological composition of the Israeli government.
In contemplating how the American left should advance its goals, Frank distinguishes between “swords,” which he describes as interventionist policies “into the behavioral patterns of others” favored by progressives, and “shields,” or protective measures “less likely to provoke a backlash.” The 1968 Fair Housing Act, which prohibited discrimination in the sale, renting, or financing of housing, was a shield. Busing children as a means of desegregating schools was a deeply unpopular sword. Frank says that the gay-rights movement wisely chose to advance the shield of local antidiscrimination measures long before pushing for marriage equality—a lesson, he believes, that the transgender movement should follow.
Striking the right balance on these divisive issues will not be easy. On affirmative action, climate change, immigration, and other matters, a significant distance separates progressive activists and the white working class whom the Democratic Party needs to attract. When I asked Frank whom he likes as a 2028 presidential nominee, the only name he mentioned was Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. “My fear is not that we will nominate someone from the far left but that whoever is nominated will be tempted to move too far in that direction to win,” he said.
It took nerve for Barney Frank to come out as gay four decades ago, at a time when homosexuality was still grounds for denying someone a security clearance. And it takes nerve to stand up to a bullying, intolerant left today. As he nears the end of his life, Frank is offering his fellow Democrats a message they would be wise to heed. The future of the country may very well depend on their ability to listen.
George Washington has long been something of an American visual cliché. When the Russian diplomat and artist Pavel Svinin visited the United States in the early 19th century, he found it “noteworthy that every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his house, just as we have images of God’s Saints.”
Today, the country is no less prone to canonizing versions of patriotism, though they go well beyond art. As the nation’s 250th anniversary nears, the Trump administration has come up with observances that show a limited image of American history, as in its visually conventional The Story of America video series, full of yellowed parchment and tricorn hats. Other commemorations are essentially celebrations of the current president: The U.S. Mint is set to issue a commemorative gold Donald Trump coin, and one of the administration’s first observances of the anniversary year was a military parade that coincided with the president’s birthday. Such decisions, like the “sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington” on the wall, obscure the line between the nation and its leader—which, in turn, seems connected to Trump’s tendency to suggest that criticizing him is unpatriotic.
But in the context of the 250th, it’s worth remembering that patriotism doesn’t have to be uncomplicated or exuberant or even easy. In a 2018 remembrance of Philip Roth, Zadie Smith recalled that after the great writer retired, he devoted himself to reading, especially about slavery: “His coffee table was piled high with books on the subject—canonical, specialist, and obscure—and many slave narratives.” For Smith, this investigation was coherent with Roth’s body of work: “He always wanted to know America,” she writes, “and to see it in the round.”
[Read: The real fight for the Smithsonian]
A similar spirit of understanding as patriotism animates the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’s show “Titus Kaphar and Junius Brutus Stearns: Pictures More Famous Than the Truth,” which is part of Virginia’s state commemoration of the semiquincentennial. It juxtaposes the 19th-century artist Junius Brutus Stearns’s paintings of George Washington—not portraits, but imagined scenes of the president’s life that circulated widely in their time and remain canonical enough to appear in those Story of America videos—with six works by the contemporary painter and sculptor Titus Kaphar. Both artists show Washington as a slaveholder, a choice that’s noteworthy in Stearns’s work and central to Kaphar’s.
Kaphar is married to a descendant of Washington’s, and his works in the show approach the Founding Father with the seriousness and respect one might give an older relative. Kaphar seems less interested in criticizing Washington than in bringing two often-fragmented narratives about him together—that is, in inviting viewers to see him both as a once-in-a-nation’s-lifetime hero and as a flawed human being who enslaved many others. As Kaphar unites these ideas, he also combines wildly varied artistic techniques. The show includes two of his sculptures, and paintings that are done not only in conventional oil on linen but also in uncommon materials such as torn fabric and sculpted tar. This mixing of media does not divert attention from Kaphar’s abundant traditional skill. In fact, his oil painting is so gorgeous, and his canvases so strikingly colorful, that they eclipse all of Stearns’s work.
I wasn’t surprised that Stearns couldn’t compete with Kaphar. Mark Thistlethwaite, an art historian who has written about Stearns extensively, described him to me as a “very competent painter,” someone who’s remembered largely because he was good at creating clear, accessible images. Still, it’s fun to see contemporary works outshine older ones. It also creates an excellent model for honoring America’s 250th; because Kaphar’s art is so exciting, the show celebrates his work—and therefore the present—at least as much as it engages with the past. This slight elevation of new over old is its own vision of progress, one in which serious contemplation of art history leads to visually stunning and, at least in Rothian terms, meaningfully patriotic art.
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is in Richmond, not far from Monument Avenue. Outside the museum is Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War, an enormous sculpture of a young Black man on horseback that Wiley conceived in 2016 as a response to the five statues of Confederate leaders then lining that street. (As of 2021, all of them had been removed.) According to the historian Lydia Brandt, those Confederate monuments, all erected decades after the Civil War, were connected by style, ideology, and sightline to the two Washington statues in Richmond’s Capitol Square. At that time, Brandt writes, Virginia’s Lost Cause apologists were eager to suggest that “just as Washington was great, so too were these sons of the Confederacy”—and they were keen to resurrect “the idea that the Confederacy’s mission had been squarely in line with the ideals of the founding fathers.”
Stearns’s Washington series holds echoes of this idea. Done in the 1840s and 1850s, around the time that the Fugitive Slave Act became law, Stearns’s images were unusual in explicitly depicting Washington not just as a slave owner but as a plantation master—and, in representing his enslaved subjects as healthy and content, the art historian and Yale University President Maurie D. McInnis writes, they contributed to the myth that “slavery was a benevolent and natural institution.”
Washington as a Farmer at Mount Vernon, one of the Stearns paintings included in the VMFA show, is a scene of the president managing his fields. Much of the composition is devoted to enslaved workers, and yet your eye goes directly to Washington. His face is so bright that it seems illuminated from within. Stearns used this technique in the other works that are on view too: Though they’re full of people, and though his skill at portraiture wasn’t great enough to make Washington’s face immediately recognizable, you can always spot the president by his glow.
Kaphar uses light to even greater effect than Stearns did. All four of his paintings in the VMFA show have luminous backgrounds—gold, lapis, candy pink—and even brighter subjects. Asma Naeem, the director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, who previously curated a show of Kaphar’s work at the National Portrait Gallery, described him to me as “incredibly erudite when it comes to the history of portraiture.” His knowledge manifests in part in his ability to replicate, riff on, and sometimes—as in this case—exceed the styles of the era he’s reacting to.
By subjects, I don’t mean only Washington. The VMFA show includes two of Kaphar’s paintings of the Founding Father; one of his enslaved chef Hercules Posey; and one of his enslaved valet Christopher Sheels. Sheels also appears in Stearns’s painting Washington on His Deathbed, hovering at the very edge of a crowded scene; he’s cast in such deep shadow that his expression is hard to read.
Kaphar’s All That We Carry (Christopher Sheels), in contrast, places Sheels alone in front of an acid-trip sky, wearing white clothes that match the ones the president wears in Deathbed. While Stearns’s fabrics are laboriously draped and bunched, Kaphar uses thick black strokes to give Sheels’s clothes folds, creating dimension while also demonstrating ease. Rough streaks of white paint crackle around Sheels’s body like electricity, and a white dot in each of his irises makes it seem as if he is staring directly into bright light. His face is young, resolute, and full of blue glints that match the sky behind him.
In interviews, Kaphar often speaks of “amending” art history “in the same way as we do to the constitution”—adding and changing, but never erasing. By transforming Stearns’s cramped, overshadowed Sheels into a near-celestial figure, Kaphar creates a companion image to Washington on His Deathbed that is not a replacement or rebuttal but a demonstration of how much more humanity—how much more America—there is to see.
A more muted version of this additive ethos is visible in another Kaphar painting, George Washington’s Chef. Posey’s gorgeously draped, golden-white clothing is painted with a skill that Stearns might well have envied. His face is made of carefully molded tar. Only his mouth is discernible—a logical feature to highlight on a cook. Choosing to call attention to Posey’s mouth, and therefore his work, chimes with the painting’s title, which puts the focus on Posey’s enslaver. The presentation of the chef in this context may seem at odds with Kaphar’s almost joyous approach to Sheels, but Posey is rendered with a dignity that keeps this painting grounded in the legacy that it’s rectifying.
Washington himself appears in two of the Kaphar paintings in the VMFA show—but not all of him. In Shadows of Liberty, Washington appears on his horse, his body and the bottom half of his face—which Kaphar paints with pink-cheeked 19th-century perfection—covered in shredded pieces of yellow-white canvas that bear the names of people Washington enslaved. They’re nailed on, echoing Kongo power objects called minkisi that are used in spiritual practice; in that tradition, the nails can signify either curses or binding contracts. In Kaphar’s version, the many nails and the canvas strips they hold in place work to obscure Washington. The president becomes a slaveholder on horseback, his identity swallowed up the way Stearns’s shadows eat up Sheels.
Another painting, In the Name of God Amen, uses a similar concept, but its tone and mood are distinct. In it, the president glows against a gorgeously blue background. He gazes levelly into nothingness—death, perhaps, or the future. The lower part of his face is hidden by golden-yellow ribbons of canvas that contain some of the text of Washington’s will, which freed everyone he’d enslaved, pending the death of his wife, Martha. Here, instead of letting the strips hang loose, Kaphar sculpts them into an elaborate, beautiful ruff that gives Washington a regal air. It is as if his decision, this time, has elevated him.
Writing about Kaphar for the Gagosian gallery’s magazine, the philosophy professor Jason Stanley, who studies fascism, observes that the nails in Kaphar’s paintings of Washington and other presidents, in their reference to Kongo practice, are a “manifestation of Black agency in both material and technique; they are also, well, rusty nails driven into a president’s face.” This is technically true for In the Name of God Amen too—but it has fewer nails, and they suggest much less violence than Stanley implies, such that they seem to represent a contract, not a curse.
Stanley views Kaphar’s work as a challenge to “‘patriotic’ art,” but the transition between these two paintings—and these two renditions of Washington—strikes me as intensely patriotic. In one, the heroic image of Washington on horseback is buried under symbols of his commitment to slaveholding. In the other, his decision to manumit those he’d enslaved gives him—to use a canonically un-American word—nobility. The latter painting makes clear that the show is celebrating as well as contemplating Washington.
[Read: What it means to tell the truth about America]
Such a nuanced approach to the Founding Father is a form of progress, especially compared with the canonizing images of Washington that Svinin observed. Of course, it’s also artistically exciting. Stearns’s work has the appeal of transforming the past into a clear visual story. Kaphar’s, meanwhile, sucks viewers in with its combination of beauty and intellectual complexity. It asks its audience not to change their idea of how important Washington was and remains to the country but rather to expand their notion of how many of his choices mattered.
I left the VMFA convinced that Washington’s greatest step toward liberty was the one—manumission—that he chose to delay until after the death of his wife, Martha. (Likely fearing for her life, given how many people’s freedom hinged on her dying, she ultimately chose not to wait.) What’s more, it struck me that without understanding the reluctance that this order of events indicates, it’s impossible to consider the courage of his decision. By asking viewers to consider Washington as a slaveholder, Kaphar proposes a kind of patriotism that comes with a full—and ever growing—understanding of history. By presenting his work alongside Stearns’s, the VMFA underscores this vision. It reminds visitors that taking pride in one’s country requires memory.
A few years ago, Magic Johnson told a story about Michael Jackson that seems almost unimaginable today. In the 1980s, the former Los Angeles Lakers superstar invited Jackson to a Lakers game, an invitation the singer was initially hesitant to accept because he was worried that his presence would create too much of a frenzy. As it turned out, those fears were justified. “He sat down; people went crazy,” Johnson recalled to Variety. “They were running from upstairs, the sides. We had to stop the game to get him out.”
As popular as Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Drake are, all have attended sporting events without causing a stoppage in play. But Michael Jackson, after he became famous, was different. He existed on a truly singular plane of stardom—and nearly 20 years after his death, he still inspires a unique level of obsession, devotion, and curiosity from fans, even those who weren’t alive to see him in the flesh. The enormous success of Michael, the recently released biopic about Jackson’s life, is a testament to that staying power. Already, the movie is the second-highest-grossing biopic of all time, and there’s serious speculation that a sequel will be produced, given that the movie’s timeline stops in the late 1980s.
Audiences haven’t been deterred by the critics largely panning the film for being shallow and offensively commercial. The flurry of headlines about what was left out of the film—most obviously, the 1993 lawsuit that accused Jackson of molesting a 13-year-old, and subsequent lawsuits alleging similar abuse—also haven’t mattered. (Jackson settled the 1993 lawsuit and denied wrongdoing; in 2005, he was acquitted in a lawsuit brought by a different accuser. Jackson, who died in 2009, was accused of sexually assaulting four children in a new lawsuit filed against his estate in February. The estate has denied the allegations.) Regardless of any prior negative buzz, the Michael filmmakers were counting on nostalgia overpowering the controversy about the movie’s moral footing—and they were right.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I fell for it too. As I watched Michael in the theater, I was flooded by my own memories of Jackson. One of the movie’s core plot points revolves around the tensions that cropped up during the planning of the Jacksons’ Victory Tour in 1984, where the adult Michael reunited with all of his brothers in the Jackson family. I was 9 years old when my mother took me to one of these dates; tickets were almost impossible to get, but my stepfather at the time won a pair from a radio promotion. Our seats were so high up in the Pontiac Silverdome, which is just outside of my hometown of Detroit, that it was a wonder my ears didn’t pop. Not that I would have cared. Although I can’t remember every song the Jacksons sang that night, I still vividly remember how electric it felt to be in that audience.
This is the exact emotional manipulation the Michael filmmakers seem to have been going for. They wanted me to remember how I’d kissed the poster of Jackson on my wall every day before school; the soap-opera-esque love triangle I’d manufactured between my Barbie, Ken, and Jackson dolls; the way I’d treated the debut of the “Thriller” video like it was the moon landing; how I’d prayed fervently for Jackson after his hair had caught on fire during a video shoot for a Pepsi commercial. In fact, a friend of mine from Los Angeles recently shared that she and her mother drove down to the hospital that treated Jackson for his burns to hold vigil. Even though those are specific memories, the millions of people around the world who’ve watched the movie may very well relate; for better or worse, it seems that many of them have chosen to take a trip down memory lane rather than deal with the complicated reality of Jackson’s life.
[Read: The glaring omission of the Michael Jackson movie]
It probably doesn’t help that, today, the famous are no longer that famous. Modern superstars certainly seem much more accessible than Jackson ever did, because of social media and the demand from fans and business partners for more visibility. But even younger fans who never got to experience Jackson the way I did enjoy his music and imitate his dance moves; his mythology never lessened over time. It’s more than just nostalgia driving people to the theaters. Jackson has existed as a foundational piece in music history, and no fan wants to feel as if they’re missing out on understanding one of the most consequential figures the industry has ever produced.
This isn’t to dismiss concerns about the movie’s quality or the complete elimination of the child-sex-abuse allegations. (Scenes about the 1993 lawsuit were filmed, but legal issues led to millions being spent on reshoots.) But the gulf between what Michael delivers and what some people think it ought to be couldn’t be wider. Fans don’t want to feel uneasy about Michael Jackson. They want to see the poster on their bedroom wall. It’s worth thinking about why that is.
*Illustration sources: Zak Hussein / PA Images / Getty; Sonia Moskowitz / Getty; Ron Galella / Ron Galella Collection / Getty; John MacDougall / AFP / Getty; Lynn Goldsmith / Corbis / VCG / Getty; Toshifumi Kitamura / AFP / Getty; Bettmann / Getty
The forced excitement accompanying each new iteration of the Venice Biennale, I’ve heard it said, is akin to a faked orgasm—at some point, it’s probably better to stop. Yet among this magical city’s spells, as the novelist Mary McCarthy once wrote, is “one of peculiar potency: the power to awaken the philistine dozing in the sceptic’s breast.” McCarthy had in mind “dry, prose people” who object to “feeling what they are supposed to feel, in the presence of marvels.” This, then, is the art lover’s dilemma whenever the Biennale comes around: Do you marshal skepticism or let the feelings flow?
Whatever your preference, you’ll get a lot of practice. The Biennale, which opened last week and will remain up through November, has frequently and misleadingly been called “the Olympics of the art world”—and it’s certainly a competition of sorts (primarily for attention), but no one seems to care much about who’s winning. More accurate, it’s an everywhere-all-at-once phenomenon. You try to account for it all, but it’s virtually impossible to tell a clean story about it.
This year, the buildup to the Biennale was dominated by responses to the decision by its president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, to allow the Russian and Israeli Pavilions to mount exhibitions. Accusations of complicity with pariah states and counteraccusations of censorship flared during the festival’s early days. In other corners, opinions ran hot about rampant nudity in the Austrian Pavilion. Yet the fervor, whether consequential or minor, in some ways has little to do with the actual physical experience of being in Venice, scouring the city for art.
There is so much of it. I saw thousands of artworks in dozens of locations for five straight days and still missed a good deal of what was on offer. The whole thing is frankly preposterous. But what reliably happens at the Biennale is that you, at some point, see something unexpected that slows you down—that makes you conscious of tiny changes in your breathing, maybe even draws a tear. It might happen in a church: in the Frari, for instance, home to Titian’s Pesaro Madonna altarpiece, the first painting I seek out every time I visit Venice. Or in a darkened room along the Grand Canal, while watching Arthur Jafa’s devastating collage of mostly found footage, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. You don’t, in other words, know when it might happen. But if you want it to happen, you have to remain susceptible.
On the morning of the opening day, I set off early so I could duck into the Scuola Dalmata, a small 15th-century building only minutes from the Biennale’s main entrance, to see a cycle of paintings by the great Venetian Renaissance painter Vittore Carpaccio. The most famous of these shows Saint George slaying a dragon whose human victims—reduced to skulls, amputated limbs, and severed heads—litter the ground beneath them. The dragon’s jewellike, fanned-out wing, the colonnade of receding palm trees, and the architectural backdrop are all sublime. But when you get up close, the painting is shockingly macabre.
Another painting in the cycle had been replaced by a yellowing photographic reproduction. The original was only yards away in a small room, illuminated by studio lights. Standing in attendance, like doctors in a teaching hospital, was a team of conservators funded by Save Venice, an American organization that works with local experts and authorities to preserve Venice’s artistic heritage. They welcomed me in, suggesting only that I mind my umbrella. Scuffed and pockmarked, the painting looked stoic but stripped of dignity, like an old aristocrat in a hospital gown.
A short walk away in the Giardini are the pavilions of the Biennale. As I was inspecting Carpaccios, diplomats, collectors, and press were mentally preparing for an art-viewing marathon punctuated by endless dreary speeches about the importance of art in a turbulent world. When I arrived at the Russian Pavilion, Aleksei Paramonov, the Russian ambassador to Italy, was being led through the building by the exhibit’s commissioner, Anastasia Karneeva. (Karneeva, I learned later, is the daughter of Nikolay Volobuyev, the deputy chief executive of Rostec, the state-owned Russian defense corporation.) Suddenly, all hell broke loose.
Dozens of women dressed in black clothes and pink balaclavas had gathered outside the pavilion. It was raining. They began setting off smoke flares—pink, blue, yellow. They chanted slogans (“Blood is Russia’s art!”; “Disobey! Disobey! Disobey!”), danced to loud music, climbed the pavilion’s external structures, and bared their chests to reveal more slogans. This, of course, was Pussy Riot, the performance artists and anti–Vladimir Putin activists who, since 2012, have disrupted a World Cup final, a Winter Olympics, and—most famous and at great cost—a Russian Orthodox cathedral in Moscow. For 20 minutes, they basically tore the place up. The Russian ambassador cowered inside the pavilion. A helicopter hovered overhead.
Important people speaking at exhibition openings will tell you that art is about communication. They’re not wrong. But because some crucial part of artistic expression is always slipping toward the incommunicable, the most powerful art is sometimes less a dialogue than a soliloquy. Pussy Riot’s performance felt this way: They crave justice, they’re willing to risk blacklists and prison, and they’re creative. They know how to communicate. But look past those pink balaclavas and into their eyes, and it’s clear that their hearts are broken in ways that they’ll never truly communicate to us in the crowd, clutching our cellphones.
The performance represented a rare vital moment at the center of the otherwise-lackluster exhibitions in the Giardini and the adjacent Arsenale. But the satellite exhibits spread across the city have, in recent years, become the best reason to visit the Biennale. These are high-quality, reputation-making shows, and they’re installed in some of the city’s most beautiful churches, palazzi, and museums.
Many of this year’s exhibits address war and suffering. Michael Armitage, a British painter born in Kenya, updates old-style history painting with fresher, journalistic impulses to produce compositions—of chicken thieves, migrants crammed on rafts, crowds facing COVID-era curfews—that feel strangely dreamlike. All reveal his extraordinary flair for color: lilac and dull greens undergirding local outbreaks of yellow, turquoise, and red.
Armitage’s show, at the Palazzo Grassi, contains allusions to the etchings of Francisco Goya, so it complements Nalini Malani’s dazzling, large-scale animations projected in darkness at the Magazzini del Sale. Malani, an Indian artist in her 80s, uses a fast-paced collage aesthetic, layering her own imagery over appropriated artworks, including Goya’s Disasters of War etchings, all accompanied by her own anti-war voice-over. Her sequence of animations forms a colonnade of colored light in this narrow, high-ceilinged former salt warehouse. Both the Malani and Armitage shows left Jenny Saville, the British painter of magnified bodies and faces, with a solo show at the prestigious Ca’ Pesaro, looking mannered and lost. (If competition is not the point in Venice, comparisons are nevertheless inevitable.)
Another superb show featured Matthew Wong, a painter of intimate, hauntingly lovely figurative works inspired by van Gogh and Matisse. Wong died by suicide at the age of 35, in 2019. Seeing his smaller, brightly colored, sometimes heavily patterned works in the rooms of the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, their walls painted tomato red or pale green, with shafts of light coming through the pale-curtained windows, was my favorite experience of the Biennale. While I was there, everything seemed to rhyme, both within and beyond the paintings: the patterns, the colored light, the interiority, the intimacy.
The Biennale is best understood as a massive, citywide festival of art in three parts: the national pavilions, in which countries choose their own artists to show; the main exhibition (a curator, with a vague theme in mind, selects work by international artists—110 of them this year); and, finally, those satellite exhibitions staged all across Venice.
The national pavilions and main curated exhibition have been steadily getting worse over the more than two decades I’ve been attending. “In Minor Keys,” the main exhibition this year, was to have been organized by Koyo Kouoh, an admired and beloved curator who was born in Cameroon and educated in Switzerland. Kouoh died a year ago, days after being diagnosed with liver cancer. Several tributes to her are visible in Venice—most notably a giant mural by the American artist Derrick Adams on the facade of a palazzo near the Arsenale.
Kouoh was only months into the job, but she had come up with an outline, and after a meeting in Dakar, Senegal, shortly before she died, a five-person committee was charged with carrying out her vision. Sad to say, but perhaps unsurprising under the circumstances, it’s a flop—an avalanche of slapdash assemblages, clumsy painting, human figures morphing “surreally” into bouquets of found objects, and random-looking installations. Elaborate wall labels drum relentlessly on themes of identity politics, the ecological crisis, colonialism, and wellness. No artist, it seems, can stick to a single medium. One, we are told, “has developed an interdisciplinary practice that spans painting, drawing, sculpture, tattoo, poetry and sound.” Throughout the show, wall labels repeatedly refer to each artist’s “practice,” cant designed seemingly to encourage an endless unspooling of arbitrary-looking art “product” and to repress a basic reality of art making—the struggle to create objects with their own unique resonance and autonomy.
A few works did stand out. I loved a giant embroidery by Thania Petersen, a South African of Afro Asian Creole descent. A fantastical map tracing the migration of Sufi music in Africa, it superimposes Sufi iconography over a 17th-century South African coastal landscape, features a rich array of plant life, and is populated by whirling dervishes riding on flying fish. I was seduced, too, by a four-channel video installation by Cauleen Smith, a Los Angeles–based artist. Her work is a very private-feeling meditation on what it’s like to live in that city. It includes footage of softly lapping ocean waves, wheeling birds, the Watts Towers, freeways, protests, and the city center at night. It’s all set to gorgeous music that Smith commissioned, and keyed to the writing of the great L.A. poet Wanda Coleman.
Meanwhile, the national pavilions this year tended toward the embarrassing, the way that only committee-driven, compromise-riddled projects can be. One exception (it’s embarrassing precisely because the artist didn’t compromise) was the aforementioned Austrian Pavilion, converted into what the artist, Florentina Holzinger, calls “Seaworld Venice.”
Holzinger is a performance artist working in the taboo-breaking tradition of the Vienna Actionists, who used blood, meat, and naked bodies to incite disgust and test the endurance of the audience. Visitors enter the pavilion beneath a giant bell into which a naked woman climbs via a rope before flipping upside down and turning herself into a living, swinging clapper. Inside, another naked woman on a Jet Ski does circles in a turbulent body of water. Out back, a small sewage-treatment plant converts bodily waste from two flanking portable toilets into purified water, which is piped into a large tank in which yet another unclothed woman, wearing a scuba mouthpiece, floats for four hours at a time. All of this is presented as a critique of mass tourism and ecological devastation. But it’s exactly what it looks like: a desperate bid for attention.
[Read: A very pretentious form of propaganda]
By comparison, the United States Pavilion, displaying abstract sculptures by Alma Allen, a Utah-born artist living in Mexico, seemed refreshingly modest. Unfortunately, Allen’s work is frictionless, and so polite that it’s hard to distinguish from interior decoration. It’s the sort of work you see in commercial galleries on the manicured main streets of Palm Beach and Santa Barbara. Allen’s last-minute selection came after another artist, Robert Lazzarini, was chosen and then summarily dropped. The U.S. Pavilion has always been one of the most hotly discussed shows in the Giardini, but at this year’s opening, people were leaving the building with blank expressions.
The Biennale has been presenting art in national pavilions for more than a century, and although I can recall great exceptions, there’s something dismal about most of them. The tradition endures even as most people quietly agree that art probably shouldn’t be co-opted by the agendas of nation-states. In this day and age, soft power is no joke: It can help you get away with murder, as the Saudis have demonstrated. Their pavilion, created by the Saudi Palestinian artist Dana Awartani, re-creates beautiful floor mosaics from sites in Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon, all destroyed over the past 15 years. The tiles are designed to crack over time, a reminder that everything is fragile and fleeting, including Venice.
Back on the Grand Canal, Christie’s International Real Estate was trying to gin up interest in a 15th-century palazzo (asking price: more than $20 million). The Ca’ Dario, as it’s called, was painted by Claude Monet; praised by John Ruskin in his three-volume architectural study, The Stones of Venice; and likened by Henry James to “a house of cards that hold together by a tenure it would be fatal to touch.” In Venice, the Ca’ Dario is legendary. It has remained unsold, its interior rarely seen, for more than two decades because it is thought to be cursed: At least seven past owners and guests have died, sometimes violently.
During the Biennale’s opening week, however, invited guests were able to enter, and for thus risking our lives, we were rewarded with a display that was, on the one hand, shameless marketing—a classic auction-house flex—but on the other, pretty dazzling. It included a stunning portrait by Titian, a rare Édouard Manet painting of Venice, and works by, among others, J. M. W. Turner, John Singer Sargent, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol. Prices range from $500,000 to $50 million.
Great art can be attached to stupid sums of money; it can also be political in nature. But it is above all about inner life. It allows you to escape the trap of your self, enabling you to absorb what is unknown and incommensurable. Some works achieve this through untrammeled beauty; others, very often, do so through expressions of acute pain.
On my final afternoon in Venice, I went to see The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, a Titian painting I’ve been trying to view for years. Every time I try, the church is closed. But this time, I got lucky. Titian painted Saint Lawrence—a third-century church deacon who was slow-roasted for defying Roman authorities—bound to a palette over a sizzling fire, while a man thrusts a long, forked skewer into his torso. The painting, surrounded by scaffolding while the church undergoes repairs, is full of thrusting diagonals and shadowy figures, a meditation on both extreme suffering and pointed indifference to it.
Art that’s anchored in real pain almost always leaves open a channel to beauty—or at least some more richly humane response to life. I realized this in “Still Joy,” a vital show about the experiences of young Ukrainians since the Russian invasion, and I sensed it again in the abstract, technically masterful art of Hans Hartung, a German artist who lived through two world wars, lost his leg fighting in the French Foreign Legion, and had much of his early work destroyed in the bombing of Dresden.
Hartung hated silence. He couldn’t tolerate sudden loud noises and couldn’t create without music. The Hartung show at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia is about Hartung’s relation to music, and it includes the most beautiful modern painting I saw all week: an abstract arrangement of hovering fields of dark and light blue, a large patch of black, and a lozenge of light seemingly stolen from the middle of a Venetian cloud an hour before dusk. In his work, the unfathomable is what most powerfully involves us—some private kernel of feeling that resists interpretation, and always remains out of reach.
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.
Growing up has become associated with outgrowing certain pleasures: picture books, fairy tales, stories that speak openly about wonder and fear, villains and heroes. But adulthood does not actually require abandoning the things that first shaped how we experience the world.
Recently, Anna Holmes wrote about moving across the country in 2020 and donating boxes of adult literary classics but refusing to part with the children’s books she owned. Those stories were not just sentimental objects; they preserved a way of engaging with the world that adulthood often trains out of us.
The children’s author Mac Barnett argues that “when we dismiss children’s books, what we’re really doing is failing to recognize the potential of children.” Holmes extends the thought: “In dismissing children’s books, adults fail to recognize the potential of people.”
Children approach stories with a flexibility that many adults lose: They tolerate nonsense and accept strange rules, as long as the story can delight them. As adults, we often replace that openness with efficiency and skepticism, flattening delight into something more practical.
Maybe rereading children’s books is not really about returning to childhood. It is about recovering a way of moving through the world with a little more curiosity, a little less certainty, and a greater willingness to be surprised.
On Children’s Books
What Adults Lose When They Put Down Children’s Books
By Anna Holmes
Grown-ups who dismiss literature for kids aren’t just snobbish—they’re missing out.
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)
65 Essential Children’s Books
Illustrated titles that teach kids to love literature
Still Curious?
Other Diversions
PS
My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “Tulip Time in Holland, Michigan, is pure magic. I live on a Tulip Lane (which means there are thousands of planted tulips for all to enjoy) and I literally never get over the beauty of it all. I constantly find myself saying, ‘Oh, WOW!’” Vanessa H., from Michigan, writes.
We’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
— Rafaela
One afternoon earlier this year, my 11-year-old son was sitting at his laptop and working quietly on his math homework. At least, that’s what he was supposed to be doing. When I glanced at his screen, equations were nowhere to be seen. He was controlling a monster in the midst of battle, casting magic spells to outduel an opposing player.
“That’s not your math homework!” I told him. But it was. His fifth-grade-math teacher had told her students to spend time on Prodigy, a site that looks and feels like a video game. As my son indignantly showed me, Prodigy surfaces multiple-choice questions in between cartoon-monster attacks. Correctly identify an isosceles triangle or the square root of 49, and your “Aquadile” or “Bonasaur”—barely veiled rip-offs of Pokémon characters—gets a health boost that will help it fend off your opponent’s next salvo.
Prodigy is among a bevy of gamified tools that have gained a foothold in classrooms across the country by promising to make learning fun. (As Prodigy’s website puts it: “Kids no longer have to choose between homework and playtime.”) These platforms—which also include Blooket, Gimkit, and Kahoot—can seem like a win-win. Students’ eyes light up at math-and-vocabulary-review sessions that once induced groans. Teachers, meanwhile, can use the games to track which questions kids get right and wrong, helping them triage trouble spots.
But as I watched my son play Prodigy, it became clear there wasn’t much learning happening. In about 10 minutes of gameplay, he spent less than 30 seconds answering math questions. When he got one wrong, the game didn’t pause to diagnose where he went wrong or guide him to the correct answer. The only time he slowed down, grudgingly, was when Prodigy forced him to watch videos advertising its paid-membership plans. (Prodigy did not respond to a request for comment.)
Other popular ed-tech games also lean into gaming more than learning. Gimkit lobs occasional multiple-choice questions in the middle of live, multiplayer games that closely resemble popular commercial titles such as Among Us and Only Up. Blooket offers a single-player game similar to Plants vs. Zombies that can be used as a homework assignment and others, such as Gold Quest, that are designed to be played live by a whole classroom. While parents and teachers fret over students’ watching MrBeast videos during social-studies class, schools have embraced education software that has become hard to distinguish from Candy Crush.
Educational games have been around for decades; Millennials may remember playing Math Blaster and Oregon Trail in computer lab. Only recently have web-based, free-to-play platforms become a staple of daily lesson plans and homework assignments. Their rise has been abetted by the prevalence of school-issued Chromebooks and an incursion of technology into almost every aspect of education since the pandemic. For kids the age of my son, who attended kindergarten on Zoom, a school experience mediated by ed tech is all they’ve ever known.
Some of these platforms are now so compelling that students want to play them in their spare time. Blooket, for example, has a gambling-like feature that has proved popular throughout the gaming industry: Players earn an in-game currency they can spend on packs that offer a slim chance at rare prizes—in this case, special avatars, or “Blooks.” The site has spawned a cottage industry of YouTube streamers who share hacks for obtaining more currency and post screen recordings of their luckiest “pulls” from reward packs. “Oh my God, we pulled it,” one popular YouTuber raves in a video that has nearly half a million views. “One of, if not the, rarest Blooks in the game. And if this video gets 10,000 likes, I’ll give it away to one of you guys.”
Ben Stewart, who co-founded Blooket as a high-school student in 2018, told me that the company now has about 20 employees, millions of active users (he wouldn’t say exactly how many), and 23 game modes. He understands that some teachers and parents might have qualms with education software that mimics the addictive mechanics of mobile games. Blooket is designed not to supplant lectures or project-based learning, he argued, but rather to replace flash cards and worksheets as a way of reviewing facts that students have already absorbed. “In our mind, if you’re using Blooket for an hour in a class, something has gone wrong,” he said. Blooket aims to surface questions at least once every 20 seconds, he added, and limits the amount of rewards players can earn in a day (though they can spend money to unlock more).
Several teachers I spoke with agreed that Blooket and its ilk are best deployed in small doses and for defined purposes. Mashfiq Ahmed, a high-school-chemistry teacher in New York City, told me that he uses Blooket and Kahoot for review sessions at the end of a unit, and as filler for a substitute teacher when he’s out sick. Ed-tech games also allow kids who finish their in-class assignments early to work ahead on their laptop, keeping them quiet and out of trouble until the bell rings. And if nothing else, they can provide “a quick blast of competitive entertainment,” Jason Saiter, a high-school teacher in Dublin, Ohio, told me. “Sometimes teachers need things like this to get through the day. Sometimes certain types of students do too.”
But things can sometimes get out of hand. On Blooket and several other platforms, students can create their own quizzes from existing templates. Some have cleverly learned to design them so that any answer is designated as correct—they simply mash the first answer to each question as soon as it appears to maximize their in-game rewards. The internet is full of hacks for Blooket, Gimkit, Prodigy, and others—such as browser extensions that automatically answer every question correctly. When I ran this by Stewart, he flashed something between a smile and a grimace. “Kids are creative,” he said. “They try to cheat our games as many ways as they possibly can.” If there’s one thing that all of these years of tech-centered education has taught schoolkids, it’s how to game the system.
Over the past few years, districts across the country have enacted phone bans or restrictions in a bid to limit distractions. Schools have also blocked students from using their laptop to access sites such as YouTube and Roblox. But those measures don’t solve the deeper problem: Software has eaten the American school, and unwinding that will require more than a content filter or a Yondr Pouch.
Some parents now want to go further. Jodi Carreon, a mother based in San Marcos, California, told me that her younger child was in second grade when he began coming home begging her to pay for Prodigy’s premium service so he could get more rewards. Then she started getting notes from teachers that her son was getting distracted playing Prodigy in class. “I’m like, ‘You literally handed them this,’” she said. Carreon is now the national-expansion director for Schools Beyond Screens, a parent group that recently successfully pushed Los Angeles to become the first major U.S. school district to adopt sweeping restrictions on laptop and tablet use in classrooms.
Other experts argue that the problem isn’t games or technology per se—it’s the thoughtless way that schools are using them. A well-designed game “can be extremely effective in not just getting kids interested in the subject matter, but to help them understand why they’re doing it in the first place,” Jan Plass, a professor of digital media and learning sciences at NYU, told me. He cited a 2008 game called Immune Attack, developed in part by scientists, in which players must navigate a nanobot through a patient’s bloodstream to spur their immune system to fight off infections. He contrasted that with gamified tools such as Prodigy, which simply bolt multiple-choice questions onto unrelated game templates. It’s a lazy approach, but it’s cheap and accessible, and it dovetails with an education system geared toward standardized tests.
In other words, the status quo of ed tech is bleak. Screen time has become a default rather than an intentional choice for harried teachers and distracted students. That day I first encountered my son playing Prodigy, I noticed something odd after several minutes of watching him. He was learning how to divide fractions in math class, but the screen kept flashing addition problems. “Oops,” he said when I pointed that out. “I must have clicked the wrong lesson.”
Spare a moment, please, for the lame-duck superpower. It calls itself the leader of the free world, but the free world no longer believes it. When it extends its hand, nobody rushes to accept. When it threatens, nobody trembles.
After President Trump arrived in Beijing this week, Xi Jinping showered him with pomp befitting a summit of great powers. Yet the Chinese leader permitted potshots at his guest to go viral on his country’s internet rather than suppressing them, as some observers expected he would during a state visit. Xi answered Trump’s lavish praise by sternly lecturing him about meddling with Taiwan. In the end, Xi offered nothing of great substance—no solutions to the war in Iran, no sweeping trade deals, no promises of access to rare earth minerals. Xi used the visit to humor the lame-duck president, waiting for his time to pass.
[Michael Schuman: A checkers player meets a three-dimensional-chess master]
During the first Trump administration, foreign leaders flattered and accommodated the president out of deference to American power. They feared it; they relied on it. During the second administration, and especially since the beginning of the Iran war, their calculus has quietly shifted—not because the strategy of obsequiousness has failed, but because it’s no longer worth the trouble. Like many of his counterparts around the world, Xi has begun to assume that it’s not just Trump who is term-limited; it’s also his nation.
Trump’s war in Iran was meant to showcase American power. It did the opposite. In the course of failing to remove a much weaker regime or eliminate its nuclear threat, the United States blew through its arsenal—so much so that allies in the Pacific reasonably wonder whether enough munitions remain to protect them. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon is now worried that it lacks the firepower to execute contingency plans for defending Taiwan.
Supporters of the war argued that it would deal China a severe blow by eliminating one of its most potent allies. But the Gulf nations most threatened by Iran have actually turned to China. As first reported by The Washington Post, an intelligence assessment prepared for the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned that those countries have begun acquiring from Beijing the systems needed to protect their oil infrastructure and bases. Trump didn’t just fail to weaken China’s position in the Middle East. He strengthened it.
Without exerting itself much, Beijing has profited from America’s self-immolation. China’s petroleum reserves and its investments in renewable energy have allowed it to offer Thailand, the Philippines, and Australia relief from the energy crisis that the United States instigated. Instead of applying diplomatic pressure on Iran to cut a deal, China has let the conflict linger, so that the United States continues to bear the blame for the disruptions to shipping. Meanwhile, China poses as the faithful steward of the rules-based order—the cooler head, the power on which even the U.S. must now rely.
By patiently waiting out this moment, by letting the United States exhaust itself, China has bought time to pursue what Xi calls “national self-reliance”—time to catch up with the West technologically and to fortify itself for the point when competition takes a harsher turn.
That very same strategy is guiding Iran. Trump repeatedly signals his desire for a deal to end the war, by wishfully exaggerating how close he is to reaching one. But Iran keeps responding to his offers with outrageous demands, including for reparations for the destruction the United States wrought.
[Robert Kagan: America is now a rogue superpower]
In the meantime, Iran has been able to dig out weapons systems buried in the rubble caused by American strikes on bunkers and caves. According to intelligence assessments, The New York Times reports, the Iranians have restored access to 30 out of 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz. Across the whole of the country, Iran has regained roughly 90 percent of its underground missile storage. Without having to purchase a rocket or launcher, it has bounced back.
American history is rife with the perils of lame-duck leaders. As their time in office grinds to a close, presidents grow eager to write a final chapter worthy of their saga. They reach for the grand gesture; they attempt to solve the intractable problem. But in their mad dash to assert their relevance, they manage merely to prove how little they matter to the rest of the world. Trump is now living that fate, and the consequences extend far beyond his presidency. Every failed deal, every summit that yields nothing, every boast that goes unfulfilled, confirms what adversaries already suspect. A lame-duck superpower exhausts itself in full view of the world, and the world moves on.
When Paramount CEO David Ellison wanted to throw a Washington dinner party last month “honoring the Trump White House,” he got a helping hand from Katie Miller, the MAGA podcaster and onetime White House strategist. She sent follow-up invites to top Trump aides to encourage attendance for the “intimate gathering” at the U.S. Institute of Peace ahead of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25.
The party turned a traditional celebration of the CBS News White House team into a high-profile corporate flex. Ellison, who is seeking federal approval for his company’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, ended up sitting at the same table as President Trump and in the same room as Miller’s husband, the Trump adviser Stephen Miller, and other senior administration officials, including acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whose department is currently reviewing the deal.
Katie Miller’s involvement was not entirely unexpected. For months before, she had been talking informally with Paramount brass about selling her media property, The Katie Miller Podcast, to the news-media giant as it expands its offerings, according to two people familiar with the plans who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the nonpublic information. Those talks, which were first reported by Axios, have yet to result in a finalized sale, the people familiar with the matter said.
But the conversations were serious enough that months earlier, Stephen Miller—who has a near-boundless role overseeing policy as deputy chief of staff—told the White House that he would recuse himself from all issues around Paramount’s efforts to win control of Warner, which he had not previously worked on, the White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told us.
Stephen also recused himself last year from matters involving artificial intelligence because Katie, a longtime adviser to Elon Musk, had maintained a part-time consulting contract with xAI, the owner of the Grok chatbot and the social-media company X. When SpaceX purchased xAI in February, Miller also recused himself from space issues, Jackson added.
“Katie Miller is an accomplished professional in her own right with over a decade of senior government and media experience—Stephen is incredibly proud of what his wife has achieved through her own hard work,” Jackson told us in a statement. “He fully complies with all ethics recommendations and rules and regularly consults with White House ethics officials to address any potential conflicts of interest.”
Stephen Miller has not recused himself from matters related to sponsors of Katie’s podcast, however, because the White House counsel has concluded that sponsorships differ from consulting arrangements. A White House official told us, when we inquired about this, that Stephen nonetheless makes a point not to interact with the sponsors of his wife’s podcast, including companies and trade groups that have been actively seeking favor from Trump and his team.
[Read: Stephen Miller in retreat]
Several people familiar with the operation, who spoke with us on the condition of anonymity, criticized Katie Miller, saying that her pitch to guests—who have included Cabinet secretaries and corporate leaders with interests before the White House—is inextricably tied to her marriage to Stephen, one of Trump’s most senior advisers. Some also charged that advertisers are coming to the show for similar reasons. People familiar with her pitch told us they felt like Miller was explicitly selling access.
Allies of Katie Miller contest this characterization. No evidence has surfaced that either of the Millers has done anything to help a podcast sponsor outside of the show. Another person involved in some partnerships told us that the podcast sponsorships reflected standard industry practices and terms, and did not include any services out of the norm.
Katie Miller, who launched the lucrative podcast in August after leaving work at the White House, has built her audience around unusually intimate conversations with top Trump administrations officials and their spouses, whom she knows socially and professionally. The podcast sponsors include the Southern Company, a major utility; the American Beverage Association, which represents the makers of sugary soda; Polymarket, an online prediction market; and the Merchants Payments Coalition, a group pushing for legislation to reduce credit-card swipe fees.
A purchase by Paramount would be a major win for Miller. She has made no secret of her affection for the company or her dislike of one of its major rivals, Netflix. When Netflix appeared to have an upper hand in acquiring Warner this spring, Miller took to X to accuse the Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings of overseeing “the push of sexualized & trans content to minors” on the streaming service; she also attacked the Netflix board member Susan Rice, a former adviser to President Biden, charging that the left is “hellbent on destroying our country and corrupting our kids.” (Paramount’s corporate team did not pay or ask for her social-media posts, a company insider told us.)
An acquisition would also bring Paramount’s growing network of news properties even closer to the inner sanctum of the Trump administration. Last year, Ellison appointed new leadership at CBS News that has revamped programming in ways that some insiders view as more sympathetic to Trump and his movement. CBS employees told The New York Times in April that they were taken aback by the existence of the “intimate gathering” honoring the Trump administration, which used the CBS logo on its invitation.
Ellison has met repeatedly with Trump, as has his father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who is a major Republican donor and a financial backer of the media company. In July, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million, largely to the president’s future library, to settle a civil lawsuit by Trump over a 2024 60 Minutes segment that had been edited in a way he believed to be unfair. The settlement was widely seen as an effort to secure approval from the Trump administration for Paramount’s 2025 merger with Ellison’s company, Skydance.
The Ellisons’ vision for media has become a shorthand for the kind of coverage that the people inside Trump’s inner circle believe they deserve—and some have voiced their support for Ellison directly controlling CNN if regulators approve the pending merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said earlier this year at a Pentagon briefing in which he criticized CNN’s coverage.
[Listen: Rupert Murdoch gets his Succession finale ]
Katie Miller, a veteran of the first Trump administration who once worked for Vice President Pence, began working again for Trump after the 2024 election, when she helped sherpa Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. through the Senate confirmation process. In the first months of Trump’s second term, she worked as a special government employee, primarily as an adviser to Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. She stopped working for Musk full-time in August but maintained a part-time consulting relationship with his company.
Miller launched her podcast by nabbing an interview with Vice President Vance, then had extended conversations with then–Attorney General Pam Bondi, then–Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and Kennedy. She has also persuaded leaders such as FBI Director Kash Patel, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Hegseth to make appearances with their partners. New York Stock Exchange President Lynn Martin, UFC boss Dana White, the Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby have made appearances, as have celebrities such as the former NBA player Tristan Thompson and the actor Jenny McCarthy.
As summer draws nearer and the temperature creeps up, many kinds of leisure beckon: swinging in a shaded hammock; tending a smoky grill; swimming in cold, clear water on a hot, humid day. None, to our minds, surpasses the pleasure of reading just the right book in just the right spot. And while in just the right mood: Yours might call for an engrossing vacation page-turner, for instance, or a book that teaches you something completely new. You may crave a cult classic, vetted by generations of fans, or perhaps something that will make you lose yourself in your emotions. And because it’s only May, you have plenty of time to start that one great book you’ll be reading all summer long. Below are 25 recommendations to enjoy while the weather is balmy and spirits are high.
Bring a Page-Turner on Vacation
Adora Hazzard, Go Gentle’s heroine, lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan among a carefully selected group of female friends who plan to “grow old in curated company,” the kind of dreamy setup that one character describes irreverently as a coven with a waitlist. But that’s just the prelude to this crackling mystery-romance: Adora is a former TV writer and a professional Stoic philosopher who gets drawn into both spirited art-world intrigue and an amorous entanglement with an enigmatic man named Digby. Semple’s writing is warm and absurdly funny but also occasionally devastating—as when, roughly midway through the book, Adora digresses into recalling her experiences writing for a comedy show in the 1990s. The interlude is a sharp account of gender dynamics in a boys’-club environment. But Go Gentle remains dedicated, like Adora, to positivity and joy, and Semple makes it hard to resist either quality. — Sophie Gilbert
How to End a Love Story
The cover may look like it was colored with Barbie’s nail-polish stash, but Kuang’s debut novel is far from predictable, chipper romance fare. It starts with a tragedy: A high-school girl ends her life by stepping out onto a highway, and the school’s homecoming king, Grant Shepard, is driving the car that hits her. The story begins in earnest years later, when Grant and the girl’s older sister, the dorky Helen Zhang, coincidentally end up in the same TV-writer’s room. They fall in love, of course, but the shadows of Helen’s grief and Grant’s self-loathing loom over every step. Still, Kuang, who has also written for the film adaptations of Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation and Beach Read, knows the hallmarks of romance well. Her book never dips into trauma for shock value alone. Sharply drawn side characters and punchy dialogue imbue the characters’ world with warmth and lightness, and the many sexy moments are tender and, well, sexy. This is ultimately a love story about the challenges of expressing vulnerability after loss, and the possibility of moving forward by confronting the past. — Serena Dai
The Silver Bone
This historical detective novel introduces readers to 1919 Kyiv with a hard-to-forget scene: Cossack bandits lop off our hero’s right ear. Thanks to the anarchic Russian civil war, no one is entirely clear on who really controls the city, and the only constant is the threat of violence. Against this backdrop, the slightly pathetic detective Samson Kolechko stumbles into his new police job armed with a strange superpower: He can hear out of his severed ear. This new ability to eavesdrop on criminal activity helps him investigate his first case, a double murder involving soldiers and a strangely tailored suit. If Nikolai Gogol and Raymond Chandler had collaborated, this might have been the result—absurdist Slavic magical realism grafted onto an entertaining whodunit. Beyond its pleasures as a noir, the chronicle of Kolechko’s fight against nascent Soviet power easily reminds one of present-day Ukraine’s struggle to preserve its dignity in the face of oppressive forces. — Gal Beckerman
Magic’s Pawn
Magic’s Pawn is widely considered one of the best of Lackey’s many novels set in Valdemar, a kingdom where Heralds with magical gifts serve the crown and protect the country. Vanyel Ashkevron is not one of the gifted—not when the book starts, anyway. He doesn’t fit in on his cruel father’s rural estate, so he’s sent away to live in Valdemar’s capital, where Heralds live and train. After he arrives, his life changes dramatically: He realizes he’s gay (this is the rare 1980s fantasy novel with an LGBTQ protagonist), falls in love, and suffers a tremendous loss, which awakens within him a dormant store of Herald magic that he doesn’t know how to control. Lackey’s characters are intricately wrought and deeply human; their emotions propel the book as strongly as any of its many plot twists do. Magic’s Pawn explores the depths of grief and love while offering all the pleasures of the very best fantasy: epic magic, dangerous politics, fated romance, found family, and superintelligent magical-horse companions that can read your mind. What more could you possibly want? Another book, you say? Well, you’re in luck, because this is just the first of an excellent trilogy. — Julie Beck
Reading Lolita in Tehran
When I first plucked Nafisi’s memoir from a Little Free Library, I was feeling buried by new motherhood and alienated from my intellectual life—perhaps perfectly primed to be riveted by a story of women willing their way to liberation through literature. As this memoir opens, Iran’s morality police stalk the university where Nafisi works, censuring her female students. Exasperated, Nafisi resigns, but she does not give up on teaching. Instead, she invites a select group of girls to meet at her home and discuss the great works that the mullahs have deemed repugnant. As the women pore over these books, they find release in small acts—shaking their hair free of scarves, listening to banned music—as well as in allegories that help them make sense of their world. In Vladimir Nabokov’s scandalous novel, Nafisi sees the predatory narrator Humbert Humbert’s “confiscation of Lolita’s life” as an analogue to the oppressions of the real-life men who brutalize, jail, and trap women, denying them their humanity. The clandestine nature of Nafisi’s gatherings evokes an ever-present peril. But most engrossing is Nafisi’s narration of her students’ political and moral awakening, as they discover the passion, humor, and strength required to persevere under totalitarianism. — Jen Balderama
Learn Something Completely New
My dog was smarter than me: He was halfway to certification as a service animal when he flunked out of training because he puked too much in cars, which is why I got to take him home. He didn’t boss me around too much. He just had to train me to make my commands clearer and more consistent. Then we got along so well that when a friend recommended this classic work on dog psychology, I didn’t read it. That was a mistake. I wasted a great deal of time not knowing the difference between a Let’s play bark, a Warning! Stranger! bark, and a high-pitched, lonely bark. I hovered unnecessarily over his dog-park romping, oblivious to the subtleties of the canine pas de deux—the fake aggression, the well-timed hop backward. In personable prose free of scientific jargon, Horowitz makes it possible to imagine the richness of an inner life full of information gleaned from attentive ears and hundreds of millions more olfactory receptors than we have. Dogs are miracles in fur, and Inside of a Dog is the gospel. — Judith Shulevitz
Dad Brain
Saxbe, a clinical psychologist and professor, has been “endlessly curious about how fathers tick” since she was in elementary school, when her parents’ divorce—and equal custody split—turned her detached dad into a terrific parent. Now she’s one of the only scientists in the world who researches the neurological effects of fatherhood. Some of her collaborators have already shown that pregnancy alters a mom’s hormones and brain structure in ways that are good for bonding and child-rearing. Saxbe’s work demonstrates that tending to infants triggers similar neurological changes in other parents—and that the more time they spend on child care, the larger these shifts tend to be. She explains her discoveries in chatty, accessible language, mixing in social science that often contains useful tips; for example, greater paternal involvement at bedtime is correlated with better baby and toddler sleep. (Maybe that’s why my 2-year-old always demands, “Go with Daddy tonight?”) But the most thrilling part of Dad Brain is its overall conclusion: that “great parents are made, not born.” — Lily Meyer
The Zorg
Kara’s investigation of a 1781 atrocity on a British slave ship begins by correcting the most basic information: Contrary to public records, the ship was not called the Zong. The fateful trip of the Zorg, one of more than 35,000 voyages that carried enslaved Africans to the New World, is remembered for a massacre that was exposed in a public trial. The abysmal conditions of this and every other journey on the Middle Passage stemmed from brutal cost-benefit calculations, which tolerated, say, a 15 percent death rate among the tightly packed humans shipped as cargo. These incentives led the Zorg’s commanders to toss at least 120 captives into the shark-infested Caribbean, likely in a scheme to maximize profit. After the ship’s owner sued for insurance money, the resulting case—hinging on whether a water shortage onboard justified the murders—gave English citizens an idea of what was being done in their name. Through indefatigable research, Kara fixes poorly remembered facts and makes a decent case that the publicity galvanized the movement to abolish British slavery a half century later. The barbarity of the institution, meanwhile, is self-evident—but rarely does an author present its abuses so powerfully and vividly. — Boris Kachka
The War Within a War
Although I am an avid fan of books about history, I admit that reading even a well-researched, breakthrough work can sometimes feel a bit like eating your vegetables. Not so with Haygood’s The War Within a War, an account of the Black American experience during the Vietnam War, both on the front lines and at home. His telling of the conflict as a companion to the country’s civil-rights era is stocked with a cast whose stories and recollections are compelling in themselves: We meet Elbert Nelson, a trained physician who is drafted out of Meharry Medical School, and Philippa Schuyler, a piano prodigy turned journalist whose mission to save children and combat racism ends in a tragic helicopter crash. Even for the readers who know roughly where the history is going, the context and analysis that Haygood packs in, and the tautness of his prose, offer new depths of understanding. — Vann R. Newkirk II
Silk Roads: A Flavor Odyssey With Recipes From Baku to Beijing
Maybe you love to cook and want a bigger challenge than what is found in The New York Times’ Cooking app, where every night is Wednesday night and all recipes fit on a sheet pan. Or maybe you just like to page through pictures of lush Central Asian spice markets, which is one way I deal with insomnia. In either case, Silk Roads is for you. Its premise—that you are cooking and eating along the legendary trading routes that once linked Europe and East Asia—takes you through dozens of cuisines. Ansari, whose father is Iranian, has childhood memories of many of the dishes and recounts her dad’s; she also did years of research, which she serves up in knowledgeable essays. Given the elaborate literary apparatus, the surprise is that the recipes mostly work, yielding cumin-y plovs with crispy-rice bottoms and rich Uyghur lamb noodles. My husband and I are eager to try the Azeri warm-yogurt soup and watermelon-rind jam. Warning: Ansari’s cooking times can seem a little optimistic, especially when it comes to meat. There is nothing fast about this food. — Judith Shulevitz
Obsess Over a Cult Classic
What would happen if humanity received a signal from outer space? In science fiction, the answer is usually something spectacularly bad, such as an alien invasion—or, more rarely, spectacularly good, such as a technological quantum leap. But when the scientists in Lem’s strange and thought-provoking novel detect a constantly repeating cosmic message, they’re left to solve a baffling mystery. Reading like a hybrid of Nabokov and Asimov, this book takes the form of a memoir by a mathematician who is recruited for a Manhattan Project–scale effort to decipher the signal. The premise allows Lem, the Polish sci-fi master, to reflect on questions that are just as challenging today as they were when the novel was published, in 1968: Are we alone in the universe? Would we recognize nonhuman minds even if we found them? And could any alien be more dangerous to humanity than we are to ourselves? — Adam Kirsch
The Three Christs of Ypsilanti
Lovers of Oliver Sacks will be enthralled by this early example of the literature of psychoanalysis, originally released in 1964. In the book, Rokeach, a social psychologist, describes his efforts to cure three long-term residents at Michigan psychiatric institutions, each of whom thought that he was Jesus Christ, by bringing them together at Ypsilanti State Hospital. Rokeach’s motives in “confronting the three Christs with one another” were undeniably good: He thought that the resultant conflict would help them. Yet he was also, as one of the Christs put it, “using one patient against another, trying to brainwash” them out of ideas that he eventually realized they’d developed “for good reasons,” whether he understood them or not. Over the course of this detailed, empathetic book, Rokeach’s respect for his patients—palpable from the beginning—grows and grows. By the end, he has not only given up the experiment but also come to align himself with its subjects. In a remarkably humble afterword published 17 years later, he writes that he, too, had delusions of grandeur, of which the three Christs healed him: “I was cured,” Rokeach admits, “when I was able to leave them in peace.” — Lily Meyer
Wicked Enchantment
Coleman has the sterling reputation of being a poet’s poet—admired and imitated by those in the loop—but her status shouldn’t lead you to think that her concerns are narrow or obscure. The poems collected in this posthumous volume are aimed at anyone who has grieved, loved, lusted, worked, or sat down at the end of the day after “carrying groceries home in the rain in shoes / twice resoled and feverish with flu.” Coleman was deeply concerned with contemporary life and frequently inspired by her home in Los Angeles: Turn to her sequence of American sonnets to see how she tailors this renaissance form to fit her “ruined curbless urban psyche”; flip to “The First Day of Spring 1985” or “February 11th 1990” for poems that respond directly to events in apartheid-era South Africa. Some of the works I like best are those that speak to irrevocable losses: of her departed older sister, to whom she writes a sequence of letters, or her son Anthony, who died from AIDS complications. In “Thiefheart,” Coleman makes a song out of her losses and imagines taking the sting from them: “were I the queen of sleight of hand / i’d steal the poison from this muthaland.” — Walt Hunter
The Suicides
The plot of Di Benedetto’s 1969 novel sounds like a classic hard-boiled mystery: A reporter attempts to find the connection among three seemingly unrelated suicides. But his slipshod investigation yields no tidy conclusions. This book is preoccupied with self-inquiry; its protagonist takes plenty of procedural detours to cross-examine his fascination with death and his troubled relationships with women. I realize that “moody narrator obsesses over own mortality and the opposite sex” may not seem so original to some people, but the prose here—exacting, unsentimental, and ideas-rich—is worth the dip into familiar waters. Di Benedetto’s writing lingers in the brain; to a receptive reader, it can feel like a secret handshake between dryly mordant minds. Years later, in Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives, the Chilean writer would name an obscure, unforgettable brand of mezcal after The Suicides—the ultimate “if you know, you know” for those familiar with the value of loving a book that nobody else does. — Jeremy Gordon
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
This acid-tongued parable of what consumerism does to us (to our brains, our outsides, our insides) hit a nerve when it was first published, in 2015. Its heightened portrayal of suburbia—big-box stores with constantly shifting layouts, sinister cartoon ads for wholly synthetic confections—wryly captures the fake thrills and gaping disaffection of modern life. The central characters are unnamed (the narrator is merely A, her roommate is B, and her boyfriend is C), and their aimless existence seethes with unease: A is obsessed with an ultra-processed snack called Kandy Kakes; C seems benumbed from too much TV and porn; B mirrors A’s grooming and eating habits and appears to be, slowly, turning herself into A’s doppelgänger. The novel’s main concern, illustrated brilliantly, is the eroding sense of self that occurs in a world that’s becoming more artificial and spiritually hollow by the moment. — Jane Yong Kim
Lose Yourself in Your Feelings
In the story that gives this collection its title, 8-year-old Alice watches a band of women gather to swim at a Philadelphia community pool. The bathers, resplendent in colorful swimsuits and fashionable vests, are listening to music and dancing together. And they are fat: “Slight rolls of flesh puff out just below the elastic of their bras and gather on their backs like wings,” she notices. “If they ease themselves in, their breasts are the first to float.” Alice wants to know them, maybe be them, maybe possess them. Mostly she thinks, They are like me. Few other people in this book have such an uncomplicated, straightforward relationship with flesh. But for all of them, physical sensations provoke intense emotions of many kinds, so Eisenberg packs her stories with eating, drinking, sweating, performing, and hooking up. Each of her characters, no matter how alienated or hedonistic, is made to reconsider the ways their body touches the outside world—and they learn to focus less on how that looks and more on how it feels. — Emma Sarappo
Philoctetes
One of the most moving moments in Sophocles’s Philoctetes—among his last plays, first produced in 409 B.C.E.—happens early in the tragedy. After nine years of seclusion on a deserted island, the titular soldier, destined to help the Greeks secure victory at Troy, meets a group of his fellow countrymen. But the first thing Philoctetes asks them for isn’t food or drink or shelter or rescue. He asks them for words. “May I hear your voice?” he pleads. “Take pity on me; speak to me, if indeed you come as friends.” Like all encounters with antiquity, reading Philoctetes can feel familiar and foreign at once. War is ubiquitous, honor imperative. Yet the play also meditates on the relatable experience of loneliness and makes tangible the aspects of company that we long for in its absence: the timbre of a voice, the recognition of a common tongue. For Philoctetes, storytelling fosters a bond that can unveil true friends. — Luis Parrales
In the Body of the World
As a child, V evacuated her body, she writes; after her father sexually abused her, she lost the “reference point” for her own flesh. This led her to ask women about how they felt inside their own skin—work that culminated in the play she’s best known for, The Vagina Monologues. In this book, V returns to the subject of her body while writing in moving detail about receiving a late-stage-uterine-cancer diagnosis in her 50s. She zooms in to examine the infections, surgeries, and leaks that come with her treatment plan, then toggles to a broader view, reflecting on what she describes as our carcinogenic culture of “formaldehydeasbestospesticideshairdyecigarettescellphonesnow.” In its rousing final chapters, the book becomes a quasi-manifesto about the human species’ self-destructive violence that urges readers to “step off the wheel of winning and losing.” This memoir is written with the clarity and compassion won by touching death’s door and turning back. — Valerie Trapp
Bliss
When Virginia Woolf had dinner with the New Zealand–born writer Mansfield in 1917, the Bloomsbury doyenne pronounced her guest “intelligent and inscrutable.” This would also neatly describe Mansfield’s addictive 1920 collection, originally released as Bliss and Other Stories, which is filled with startlingly realistic descriptions and populated by elusive, near-impenetrable characters. I wouldn’t describe these bourgeois family dramas as page-turners, but the tales hide a little pulp pleasure within their high art, as in the title story’s perfectly devastating account of a marital affair, or the late reveal of a shocking flirtation in “Prelude.” The stories take unexpected turns because their characters, like us, have painfully incomplete views of their own world—yet they all exhibit the exquisite, thwarted desire to accurately describe what they cannot understand. — Walt Hunter
No God but Us
After Delbar, a luckless college graduate and wannabe drag queen, is outed in front of his mother and every Afghan auntie he knows, he makes a split-second decision to leave his life in America behind. An ocean away in Istanbul, he plans mostly to lick his wounds and sulk, but his aunt Yosra insists that he do something useful. Volunteering with an aid group for queer and transgender refugees, Delbar is naive and out of his element; he puts his foot in his mouth in ways both funny and frustrating. Then he meets another gay Afghan, Mansur. Delbar is immediately drawn to him, in part because of their shared background. But Mansur was born in (and driven out of) Afghanistan, not America; he and the other refugees dream of the kind of stability—and the kind of passport—that Delbar takes for granted. As Delbar gets to know Mansur and his boyfriend better, the reader comes to understand Mansur’s caution in opening his heart; when it cracks wide, the emotional effect is stunning. No life is ever perfect, the book acknowledges, but much can be made from what we already have. — Emma Sarappo
Start the Book You’ll Read All Summer
My first thought when I started Hazzard’s 1980 novel was: I am too brain rotted for this. It follows two sisters, Caro and Grace, as well as Caro’s friend and romantic pursuer, Ted Tice, through decades of marriages, affairs, and misunderstandings. But Hazzard’s prose demands that you move through her paragraphs slowly, like a traveler with one hand on the wall of a labyrinth, following a winding and intricate path to some essential truth. Key plot details are revealed in clauses so brief that a TikTok-addled mind could miss them; the end of the book hinges on the reader remembering a single sentence many chapters earlier. But I hear people are friction-maxxing now, and this is a friction-maxxing sort of book. It helped me think in a slower, deeper register, and it repaid patience with revelations. “What an atrocious sustained effort is required, I find, to learn or do anything thoroughly—especially if it’s what you love,” Hazzard writes in this book, which is itself a reward for such loving effort. — Julie Beck
The Complex
As the axiom goes, the Chopras are unhappy in their own way. In Mahajan’s third novel, the many children and grandchildren of S. P. Chopra, a (fictional) forefather of the Indian state, live crammed into two multistory buildings in suburban Delhi. All of them exist under the patriarch’s long, stifling shadow, but none embodies its atmosphere of moral decay more than Laxman, a brutish opportunist and budding politician whom one relative calls “the worst person in the family.” Mahajan’s homage to the Russian masters extends beyond the family tree that he includes; he finely depicts tragic flaws and doomed relationships while espousing the occasional aphorism—as when a niece wonders why “power accrued to the person with the most energy, regardless of whether that energy was good or evil.” Yet this update of Tolstoy and Chekhov is firmly rooted in India, where family obligations and religious divisions set the novel’s course as fatefully as S.P.’s cold paternalism does. Mahajan packs 19th-century pleasures into a very contemporary tale about the rise of ethno-nationalism and the insidious damage of corruption, and includes one enduring truth: A gun introduced in the first act will eventually come in handy. — Boris Kachka
London Falling
I admit, the story of Rachelle and Matthew Brettler’s search to uncover the truth about their son Zac’s mysterious death may not take “all summer” to finish. As the president of my local PRK fan club, I find his latest to be the most propulsive, quick-reading book that he has written; you might find yourself willing to forgo scrolling, eating, or sleeping to race to its end. With zero distractions, a devoted reader could finish in a day or two. But London Falling is a book that rewards steady attention and sustained consideration. For any parent, including myself, Zac’s sudden adolescent transformation into a fast-talking, wealth-chasing bro—and the Brettlers’ struggle to come to grips with those rapid changes—will be unsettlingly relevant. The alternately seedy and posh vistas of the United Kingdom’s capital, the slow building of suspense, and the weaving together of coming-of-age, post-Soviet, and true-crime storylines give the book a novelistic sense. In the Brettlers, who grow steeled and skeptical as a result of their dogged inquiry, Keefe offers us two protagonists whose brush with the criminal underworld feels like a parable for our age of corruption. — Vann R. Newkirk II
The Circle
I sense that Eggers’s 2013 novel, about an altruistic-seeming social-media company that turns out to be profoundly evil, might hit differently in 2026 than it did on publication. Over more than 500 pages, The Circle follows an idealistic young graduate named Mae who takes a job at a technology behemoth that wants to make the whole world “transparent,” encouraging the total eradication of privacy. Back in the 2010s, Eggers was criticized for acknowledging how little practical research he’d done on the tech world, but he seems to have anticipated something more crucial—namely the moral rot among the boy-kings of the internet, and how quickly their utopian promises would dissolve when they were granted unprecedented power. What’s most brought The Circle to mind over the past few months is the rise of wearable AI-powered devices that turn daily life into reams of data for their parent companies to harvest—a futuristic horror right out of Eggers’s imagination. — Sophie Gilbert
Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics
The West Side elevated highway was a miracle: lanes snaking down the edge of Manhattan, a symbol of New Deal–era infrastructure investment in the United States’ biggest city. In 1973, it collapsed. The cause was not a natural disaster or an act of God but simple rust and erosion, unaddressed by a city government that was itself close to disaster. The resulting hole covered 2,000 square feet. New York would soon come close to bankruptcy, embrace austerity, dismantle social programs, and enter an era of inequality from which Phillips-Fein, an NYU historian, argues it never emerged. Crises are clarifying events, and New York’s fiscal emergency forced questions about what cities are for and what they owe their residents. Phillips-Fein is deeply interested in these questions, but the book isn’t a polemic so much as a coroner’s report—a careful, almost forensic work of historical scholarship that earned her a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 2018. Fear City is not an incredibly long book, but it is a dense one, thick with proper nouns and big ideas, full of prospective Wikipedia rabbit holes and eminently ponderable ethical riddles. — Ellen Cushing
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Douglas Wilson has a modest proposal to improve American life: He wants to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. In his ideal system, “we would do it in our politics the same way we do it in our church structure,” he told me recently. “And that is, we vote by household.”
Wilson is a co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, based in Moscow, Idaho. Over the past five decades, he has built a small empire there, dedicated to disseminating his theocratic vision for the United States: a publishing house, a school, a liberal-arts college, and a video-streaming service. His denomination, which has about 170 affiliated churches, counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a member, and Wilson was invited to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon in February. So when the pastor casually suggests disenfranchising half of America, people listen.
When I asked him about this position, Wilson said it wasn’t his top priority—“We have bigger fish to fry”—but something he sees happening in perhaps 200 years’ time. I found this intellectual footsie maddening. “If I said to you, ‘I think all white men should be put in cages—but not now; it’s not my aspiration for now,’ ” I suggested, “then you wouldn’t be interested in a single other thing that I had to say at that point.”
Wilson chuckled. “Oh, I know you’d probably have all my attention.”
This is twinkly, avuncular Douglas Wilson, the guy who joined a hippie congregation fresh out of the Navy because he liked to play guitar, and ended up leading services once the regular pastor moved on. The same guy who once went on a multicity debating tour with the New Atheist Christopher Hitchens, and bonded with him over their shared love of P. G. Wodehouse. But the 72-year-old shows a different side on his website, Blog & Mablog. For more than two decades, Wilson has been airing piquant opinions on unruly women—or, as he calls them, “small-breasted biddies,” “harridans,” “lumberjack dykes,” and “Jezebels.” He once referred to Gloria Steinem and another feminist as “a couple of cunts.” And this is the polite version. Every year he celebrates “No Quarter November,” when he promises to tell readers what he really thinks.
Wilson believes that women should “not ordinarily” hold political office, and should never serve in combat roles in the military. Husbands should have dominion over misbehaving wives’ weight, spending habits, and choice of television programs. His uncompromising vision for America was once considered marginal, the conservative writer Karen Swallow Prior told me. Since his elevation by Hegseth, however, “no one can credibly say that Doug Wilson is fringe anymore.”
Wilson is a prominent voice in what is sometimes called “masculinism”: a movement to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men. His version is religious, influenced by the notion of male “headship” of the family and Saint Paul’s belief that godly women should “be quiet.” There are also plenty of secular masculinists, as well as nominally Muslim ones, such as the streamer Sneako, the self-proclaimed pimp Andrew Tate, and the podcaster Myron Gaines. Woman-bashing plays well on social media and sells lots of ads for crypto, sports betting, and supplements. You can make good money telling men that they’re the truly oppressed sex.
But this isn’t just a movement of grifters exploiting a quirk of the algorithm. In the past decade, one of the New Right’s major challenges has been to retrofit a consistent ideology onto the electoral power of Donald Trump. Masculinism has been a great gift, because factions with different views on, say, protectionism or Israel or Big Tech can all agree on the overreach of feminism and the need for a return to traditional gender roles. Far from being a fringe belief system, masculinism has become the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys.
The MAGA movement is often framed as a reaction to the first Black president, and to a growing Latino population. But the multiracial appeal of the manosphere and Trump’s 2024 inroads with young minority men point in a different direction. “People ask me what the New Right is furious about,” the author Laura Field, whose book, Furious Minds, describes the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism, told me. “And I think a good shorthand for that is they’re furious about their own loss of status in society over the last few years and the elites who made that happen, and I think that the pithiest short version of that is that it’s the women. It’s the women who took their status.”
Wilson’s approach to public life clearly has an element of what professional wrestlers call kayfabe—the winking, performative trollishness that now characterizes the online right. He wants feminists like me to get angry with his most outlandish proposals, making ourselves look like scolds or Chicken Littles in the process. But Wilson and a growing number of powerful allies are sincere in these beliefs, and would want to enact them if given the chance.
One of masculinism’s central claims is that no one is talking about men. So true! Men’s issues are not being discussed in Senator Josh Hawley’s 2023 book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. They aren’t being discussed in Tucker Carlson’s documentary The End of Men. They aren’t being discussed in the panoply of Christian books available on Amazon with titles such as Man for the Job, Masculine Christianity, and It’s Good to Be a Man, or in their secular counterparts, such as Why Women Deserve Less. They aren’t being talked about on social-media feeds (which can be highly segregated by sex) or on some of America’s most popular independent podcasts, such as Modern Wisdom, Huberman Lab, and The Diary of a CEO.
For decades, each feminist advance in American public life has prompted an equally strong backlash. The first wave of women’s-rights activists won suffrage for women, against ferocious and sometimes violent opposition. After the second wave secured Title IX and other legal victories against sex discrimination, Phyllis Schlafly successfully fought back against the full ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. By the identity-obsessed 2010s, the full weight of corporate America had swung behind glib slogans such as “The future is female.” This commercial blitzkrieg inevitably convinced some people that women’s advancement had come at men’s expense. A refrain I kept hearing over the past few years was that boys were being made to feel ashamed of themselves, as if they were stained by some kind of original sin. These years have seen a counterreaction, with the total abandonment of the #MeToo movement, conservative gloating over the fall of Roe v. Wade, and the return of straightforwardly sexist put-downs—“Quiet, piggy”—to public life.
Like most popular movements, masculinism has many entry points, and both defensible and alarming forms. At one end of the spectrum are legitimate concerns about male loneliness, the declining share of men in higher education, stagnant wages for non-college-educated men, and the deadening effects of day-trading, gaming, and porn. At the other end of masculinism are a misogynist vocabulary about AWFULs and the longhouse (terms that we’ll come back to) and a political agenda close to that in The Handmaid’s Tale, whereby women are denied the right to work, vote, and control their own bodies.
On the internet, masculinism is presented as a rebellion—a transgressive middle finger to the liberal establishment, expressed in all the words a corporate HR department would order you not to say. In the past few years, leaked group chats have shown Young Republicans and college conservatives using sexism, infused with racism, as a bonding mechanism. “If your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there. Scream the no no word,” read a message in a Telegram thread used by the leaders of Young Republican chapters in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont. (Several members of the chat were women.) Richard Hanania, who describes himself as a former white nationalist, calls this kind of in-group signaling “the Based Ritual,” a way for younger MAGA enthusiasts to prove their bona fides to one another.
Among Gen Zers, Douglas Wilson’s intellectual heir is Nick Fuentes, who leads a loose collection of trolls known as Groypers. A self-professed Christian nationalist, anti-Semite, and virgin, Fuentes has built a fan base in part by deploying vividly misogynistic language. “Our No. 1 political enemy is women, because women constrain everything, every conversation, every man—everything,” Fuentes said on a livestream earlier this year. He added: “Just like Hitler imprisoned Gypsies, Jews, Communists—all of his political rivals—we have to do the same thing with women.” He suggested that they be sent to “breeding gulags. The good ones will be liberated. The bad ones will toil in the mines forever.”
Fuentes’s rhetoric shows how this gendered view of the world can easily be interlaced with other prejudices. Gay men? Effeminate, uninterested in sports, therefore unmanly. Jews? Clever rather than athletic; also unmanly. University lecturers? Pencil-necked postmodernists; also unmanly. Trans people? Inevitably degenerate. Muslims? An invasion force of rapists. Black men? Thugs from whom white women should be protected (if only they would submit to patriarchy). Almost every facet of contemporary online rightism can be refracted through the prism of gender. Multiple people affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, perhaps the most influential MAGA policy organization, cut ties with the group after its president refused to condemn Fuentes’s anti-Semitism last year. But his view that women belong in forced-breeding camps has produced no such fuss.
Wilson told me he considers this sort of rhetoric unforgivably gauche. “The Bible says that a godly woman is a husband’s crown,” he said. “I’ve never seen a king talk about his crown the way Fuentes talks about women. It’s absurd.” I wanted to ask whether “small-breasted biddies” came from the Gospel of Mark or Luke, but Wilson was on a roll. He thought Fuentes was so extreme that he might even be an undercover federal agent sent to discredit the movement. “He is, as far as I’m concerned, on the other team.”
In theological terms, that might be true. But both men benefit from a shock-and-awe rhetorical strategy. In 2014, it was a minor scandal when the megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll was revealed to be “William Wallace II,” the author of dozens of pages of message-board rants about how America was a “pussified nation” where men are “raised by bitter penis envying burned feministed single mothers who make sure that Johnny grows up to be a very nice woman who sits down to pee.” Now such language would barely raise an eyebrow.
Writers who used to hide their masculinist impulses behind a pen name now write and say outrageous things under their real name. Take the manosphere provocateur known as Raw Egg Nationalist, whose handle on X, where he has more than 300,000 followers, is @Babygravy9. He combines lifestyle and nutritional advice—“slonking” raw egg yolks—with hard-right, anti-immigration politics. He writes for Infowars, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s media outlet. He posts about antiwhiteness and has his own line of microplastic-free herbal-tea bags, Kindred Harvest.
In 2024, a left-wing activist group outed him as Charles Cornish-Dale, a religious historian who has studied at both Oxford and Cambridge, and whose Ph.D. thesis was titled Migrations of the Holy: The Devotional Culture of Wimborne Minster, c.1400–1640. When his name became public, Cornish-Dale, now 38, concluded that being doxxed has “only made me stronger and more committed to what I’m doing.”
He did not use a pseudonym for his new book, The Last Men, in which he questions whether it is “possible to be men fully in a liberal democracy.” His political prescriptions, like Wilson’s, might be described as uncompromising. “Someone asked me the other day—I think it was a girl, actually—she was like: ‘So would you take away the vote from women?’” he told me. “I was like, ‘I would take away the vote from the vast majority of men as well.’ ”
His book, published by the venerable conservative imprint Regnery, suggests that men with high testosterone levels voted for Trump because high T is correlated with an acceptance of hierarchy, status, and inequality. Liberalism, by contrast, suppresses men’s life force: “Leftists have now openly embraced emasculation and having low testosterone as part of their identity.” He also revisits an argument he first made in an article titled “Ecce Homos,” that the left had robbed straight men of their heroes by recasting them as gay. He wants to reclaim the male bonding of “Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, the Spartan last stand at Thermopylae, cowboys, pirates, gang members.”
The Last Men is a confounding book because it seems equally perturbed by falling birth rates and Brokeback Mountain winning three Oscars. Cornish-Dale identifies potentially worrisome phenomena, such as a reported decline in sperm counts around the world, and gestures toward genuine feelings of ennui experienced by many young American men, who are stuck in unrewarding jobs, searching for greater meaning in their lives. He lays the blame at the feet of the elites: They are keeping you fat; they are unhappy with risk taking and hierarchy; they are calling masculinity toxic.
In conversation, Cornish-Dale is cocky but likable, with a languorous way of speaking that reminded me of Simon Cowell. Our Zoom took place at 6 a.m. his time, and he appeared to be talking to me from his bed, wearing striped pajamas. His current aesthetic is shaved head and swole, though back in 2012, he gave up doing fieldwork in a Buddhist monastery when he was asked to cut off his man bun. “I was going through a hipster phase,” he told me. “They wanted me to wear a robe instead of skinny jeans, and I just wouldn’t do it.”
Cornish-Dale is essentially an influencer—albeit one who knows a lot of $10 words. But masculinism is not merely an outgrowth of the attention economy. Other figures with similar ideas have strong connections to conservative policy circles.
One of these is Scott Yenor, who has declared that modern women are “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” Since 2000, Yenor has taught political philosophy at Boise State University, in Idaho, 300 miles south of Douglas Wilson’s stronghold in Moscow. He has also worked with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on rolling back DEI programs, which conservatives see as a de facto racial and gender quota system that is harmful to white men. “The core of what we oppose is ‘anti-discrimination,’ ” Yenor wrote in a 2021 email, released to The New York Times under a public-records request.
Yenor now fancies doing a little discrimination of his own. As he wrote in an essay for the Claremont Institute last fall, he believes that the law should change to allow businesses “to support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage”—that is, compensating men more so that their wives do not need to work. (Currently, this would be straightforwardly unconstitutional sex-based discrimination.) In 2021, he argued that colleges should not try to recruit more women to become engineers, but instead should “recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school and the law and every trade.”
Like J. D. Vance, he reserves particular scorn for women who do not have children. Heaven help the “childless media scold” or “barren bureaucratic apparatchik”—Yenor’s terms—who decides she would prefer having a career to having babies. His rhetoric is unpleasant and extreme enough that he could not get confirmed to a university board in Florida. As for repealing the Nineteenth Amendment, Yenor told me via email that “when America had household voting or some rough equivalent, it was not a tyranny, the country was well governed, and the family was supported. The country is different today, and the same voting system would be uncongenial to our conditions.” (Although he responded to my question about the Nineteenth Amendment, Yenor did not make time for an interview with me.)
[From the May 2023 issue: Helen Lewis on how freedom-loving Florida fell for Ron DeSantis]
Yenor recently became the chair of the American Citizenship Initiative at the Heritage Foundation. A January report from the foundation called for a “culture-wide Manhattan Project” to promote family building through generous tax giveaways to married couples in which one parent is employed. At the same time, abortion, birth control, single-parent benefits, day care, dating apps, and no-fault divorce would be discouraged. The report contains one of the least romantic sentences I have ever read: “Marriage also opens unique retirement planning opportunities.”
All of this is a continuation of themes found in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for Trump’s second term. The document, in the words of my colleague David Graham, offers a vision of America where “men are breadwinners and women are mothers.”
[David A. Graham: The top goal of Project 2025 is still to come]
Yenor’s suggestion that feminism—with its attendant horrors of work outside the home, birth control, and financial independence—has made women neurotic and dependent on pharmaceuticals is now an article of faith on the right. Anonymous online posters frequently bring up data suggesting that liberal women are most likely to report suffering from anxiety. But to attribute female unhappiness to feminism seems wildly ahistorical. Have these people never read, say, The Feminine Mystique, which exhaustively cataloged the despair of mid-century stay-at-home mothers? (“Many suburban housewives were taking tranquilizers like cough drops,” the author, Betty Friedan, wrote.) Across the manosphere, however, young people are told that before feminism ruined everything, women used to be cherished and pampered by their husbands. Now women are supposedly subsidized by government handouts or earning six figures in pointless “email jobs.” In the masculinist paradigm, every woman does HR for cats and every man is a plumber or merchant seaman.
I asked Wilson about his allies’ nostalgic distortion of history. “Just a simple question,” he responded. “If you went back to 1850 and said: Out of all these women who had to get husbands’ permission to travel, to visit a sick cousin or whatever, how many—take 10,000 of those women—how many of them were on antidepressants? And how many of them today are on antidepressants?”
That wasn’t a fair comparison, I said, because today everyone is on antidepressants. Also, in the 1850s, SSRIs hadn’t been invented. You just got told to take some laudanum and go to the baths.
How popular are masculinist ideas? Last year, research by King’s College London and Ipsos found that Gen Z men in 30 nations were far more likely than male Baby Boomers to say that the fight for women’s equality had gone so far that men were now disadvantaged. They were also more than twice as likely to say that a father who stayed home with his children was “less of a man.” Meanwhile, 83 percent of Republican men younger than 50 think society is too feminized, according to a survey by the conservative Manhattan Institute. Intriguingly, this survey did not replicate the usual trope of working-class men revolting against snooty female elites: It found that “college-educated Republicans are more likely than their non-college counterparts to endorse the view that society has become too feminine.”
The most recent presidential election, pitting Trump against Kamala Harris, was a gift to masculinists. After all, the movement’s villains include female bosses, feminists, and women who don’t bear children—and Harris was the embodiment of all three. The male podcasters who got behind Trump in 2024 now host outright misogynists: Consider the career of the Christian debater Andrew Wilson, who in January appeared on arguably the most popular podcast in America, The Joe Rogan Experience—the manosphere-influencer equivalent of singing the national anthem at the Super Bowl.
[From the October 2024 issue: Helen Lewis on how Joe Rogan remade Austin]
Rogan’s choice of guests is a useful bellwether of the American political mood; he himself drifted from 2020 Bernie bro to 2024 Trump endorser via anti-wokeness, annoyance at COVID lockdowns, and a deep investment in conspiracy theories. He has lately begun to take an interest in Christianity, and has attended a nondenominational church.
Wilson, who appeared on Rogan’s show to promote his online debating courses, originally became famous for appearing repeatedly on Whatever, a dating podcast with 4.6 million YouTube subscribers. The show’s specialty is goading models and OnlyFans girls into delivering ragebait, such as one recent guest’s suggestion that she deserves a millionaire husband. Women are never supposed to win in the Whatever bear pit, but sometimes they do, just by remaining calm while the men try to trip them up.
In one episode, Wilson told a female fellow guest that she was too stupid to understand him, so she raised the fact that Wilson’s wife, Rachel, has children with three different men. He went thermonuclear. “You lick snizz,” he barked. “You’re a fucking dyke. Don’t talk shit about my wife, you stupid bitch.” He added, “I’m better than you.” It was an extraordinary display of uncontrolled aggression. In another clip, he mocked a female guest for being unable to open a pickle jar. She handed it to him, and he failed too. “Your hand greased the whole top of it,” he complained. Wilson has one of the most unpleasant internet personas I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve been on Bluesky. (He did not reply to my request for an interview, which was a relief.)
Unsurprisingly, Wilson treated Rogan, a high-status man, with far more respect than he showed the models of Whatever. In full bro-ing-out mode, he told Rogan that “feminists would immediately stop being feminist if they just had a taste of, like, well, you know, people actually did have to shut themselves up at night from wolves.” (How a chain-smoking middle-aged man who podcasts for a living would fare against a wolf is an open question.) The difference between this Andrew Wilson and the one from Whatever was remarkable—as was the fact that Rogan was prepared to host the benevolent version without any apparent concern for the malevolent one.
Wilson also took the opportunity to plug his wife’s book, Occult Feminism, which argues that feminism is “born of occult belief, because at its core, feminism seeks to make women gods over men, or at the very least to deify women.” I’ve read it (spoiler alert: The suffragists loved séances; Miley Cyrus’s tongue is pagan) and can say that the experience is eerily reminiscent of a friend recounting half a dozen Wikipedia pages that they read while drunk.
Wilson, however, promoted his wife so successfully that a few weeks later, Rachel Wilson made her own appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. “I didn’t really have much of an opinion on feminism,” Rogan told her—except that he’d noticed that some feminists hated men. But listening to her book had made him realize that its origins were “bonkers.”
What followed was a greatest hits of anti-feminism—which, as Phyllis Schlafly learned, is the one subject where women’s contributions are always welcome. “Nobody wants to talk about this,” Rachel Wilson told Rogan. “This is the conversation no one’s ready for. Women’s access to higher education is the No. 1 correlate around the world—regardless of economics, race, culture, status, anything—to falling birth rates.”
In fact, observing a link between education and birth rates would be considered utterly banal in policy circles: The United Nations was publishing research on the phenomenon back in the 1990s. But everything in the manosphere has to be presented as allegedly forbidden knowledge. A few weeks later, the podcaster Katie Miller—wife of the Trump White House adviser Stephen—was making the exact same point to Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, also with the air of someone breaking a taboo. Feminism was destroying the family, she told Ingraham, because it “pushed women into the workplace.” As the writer Jill Filipovic noted, “These two women are having this conversation at their jobs.”
In fact, the challenge of falling birth rates is so well-known that many countries have implemented pronatalist policies in response: Singapore offers $11,000 “baby bonuses,” while Hungary exempts mothers of three or more children from income taxes. So far, though, none of the carrots has worked. The actually unspeakable bit is whether women’s access to education and the job market should be restricted, in the name of producing more babies and saving civilization. I wish people like Rachel Wilson would just come out and say that they favor this, so we can have a proper argument about it.
Instead they deploy a classic masculinist tactic: Tiptoe up to the edge of a policy that would poll as well as mandatory Ebola, then pirouette away at the last minute. Joel Webbon, a hard-right pastor based in Austin who has built a large social-media following by opposing feminism and the “LGBT Mafia,” is one of those prepared to say openly that he would like to restrict women’s participation in public life. “I know a lot of people, and I’m obviously not going to name them, but a lot of people and names that you would recognize are much further to the right than they are willing to publicly say,” he told me. However, he did not mind their bait-and-switch style, because the left has used it for decades. A small group of people argued that “love is love” to pass gay marriage, “and then, you know, it’s like: Oh, actually, Drag Queen Story Hour.” Masculinists were only turning lefties’ own strategy against them.
Like Douglas Wilson, Webbon is regularly described as a hate preacher; he told me that his services in Austin attract protesters who photograph his congregation. And as with Wilson, and Cornish-Dale, there is an enormous gulf between Webbon’s combative online persona and the person I interviewed. On his podcast, he talks trollishly about “the fake sin of raaaycism,” but one-on-one, he was scrupulously polite, calling me “ma’am” and listening without interruption as I told him that the system he advocates for is closer to Saudi Arabian guardianship than anything from the Christian tradition. He sees his internet presence, he told me, “like the Apostle Paul arguing and lecturing in the hall of Tyrannus,” an important period of evangelism for the early Church. When I checked his X feed later, he was talking about “Jewish sodomites” and reposting an account called @IfindRetards.
The Phyllis Schlafly of today is the writer Helen Andrews, with whom I am sometimes confused by liberals with Helen blindness. In a viral 2025 essay for Compact magazine called “The Great Feminization,” Andrews asked whether greater female participation in the workforce was “a threat to civilization.” (Honestly, women can be so overwrought.)
[Hillary Rodham Clinton: MAGA’s war on empathy]
She was building on an influential thesis on the right known as “the longhouse,” which argues that modern, feminized society resembles the communal living halls of the past, which were dominated by “den mothers” who ruled by passive aggression, offense-taking, and ostracizing their enemies—all classically feminine modes of behavior. The most famous outlining of the longhouse thesis came from a writer calling himself L0m3z in the religious magazine First Things. He declined to cite any specific historical examples and added that one could not really define the longhouse, anyway, because “its definition must remain elastic, lest it lose its power to lampoon the vast constellation of social forces it reviles.” How convenient! Instead, the longhouse was “a metonym for the disequilibrium afflicting the contemporary social imaginary.” Let me shock you: L0m3z was eventually outed as a humanities academic.
Andrews took this thesis further, arguing that “everything you think of as ‘wokeness’ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.” To translate that into English, the claim is that women don’t settle arguments like characters in a Guy Ritchie film, with fisticuffs outside the smoking shed and no hard feelings two hours later. Instead, Andrews writes, they “covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.” Therefore, “all cancellations are feminine.” Again, a quick glance at the history books presents a few challenges: The backstabbing in the Roman Senate was both literal and figurative, and the Vatican has always been a nest of scheming cardinals. And who pressured ABC to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air after Charlie Kirk’s assassination? Brendan Carr, who is Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair—and the possessor of a Y chromosome.
[Read: The ‘easy way’ to crush the mainstream media]
Later in the essay, Andrews offered a testable proposition: “If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?” As it happens, the labor economist Revana Sharfuddin has crunched the data on factories in the Second World War—one of the greatest periods of “demographic feminization” in American history—and found no evidence that they became paralyzed by cancel culture and petty HR disputes. When I asked Andrews about this, she noted that wartime automobile and electrical factories were still essentially segregated by sex, and that even so, some managers hired counselors to help them deal with their new workforce. “For what it’s worth, the counterargument that most landed with me was the example of communism,” she wrote in an email. “Women were well represented in medicine and science in the Soviet Bloc, and their society didn’t collapse—well, it did, but probably not because of the women.”
Andrews’s essay comes to the defense of former Harvard President Larry Summers, who resigned under pressure in 2006 after arguing that women might be underrepresented in the hard sciences because of their innate lack of interest in those fields and their inability to perform at the highest levels. It later emerged in the Epstein files that this was a sanitized version of his private view, which was that women have lower IQs than men. (Out of curiosity, I hunted down the diversity stats for 2006, the year Summers resigned. At the time, four-fifths of Harvard’s tenured professors were men.) In retrospect, Summers’s ouster doesn’t look like the product of feminist hysteria; rather, his colleagues may have seen him as an embarrassing liability and seized on the opportunity to offload him.
To my surprise, when I put this to Andrews, she partially agreed. “Saying Larry Summers was fired because of the controversy is like saying America entered World War II because of Pearl Harbor,” she said. “It’s a simplification: good enough for the one-sentence version, but definitely omitting important factors.” In our communication, she was wry and self-deprecating, apologizing for any inconvenience I’d experienced by being mistaken for her—“the bad Helen.” I reflected that this version of Andrews wouldn’t have gone viral in the way that the one warning that working women are a “threat to civilization” did.
[Read: Renee Nicole Good, Grok, and the punishing of women]
On the right, creeping feminization has become an all-purpose explanation for many recent events: Women pity the underdog, pander to self-proclaimed victims, and care about hurt feelings more than the truth—all of which are exploited by undocumented immigrants and violent criminals. In this analysis, Renee Good—the woman shot by an immigration-enforcement officer in Minneapolis—was killed because she’d adopted left-wing values. “An AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) is dead after running her car into an ICE agent who opened fire on her,” the right-wing pundit Erick Erickson posted immediately after her death. Women are childlike, naive, immature; they simply do not understand the real world.
Many MAGA figures have identified the surfeit of feminine empathy as a political issue. The first episode of Douglas Wilson’s Man Rampant podcast was called “The Sin of Empathy.” The Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad issues regular condemnations of “suicidal empathy” between posts complaining that women “no longer wear any real clothes and instead are always in athleisure.”
[Elizabeth Bruenig: The conservative attack on empathy]
This disdain for empathy often leads to the conclusion that women’s political participation is a problem, because the little ladies will insist on voting for the wrong candidates and policies. “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics,” Peter Thiel, an early advocate for Trump in Silicon Valley, wrote in a 2009 essay for a Cato Institute journal. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” In this view, the gender split in American politics—55 percent of men but only 46 percent of women voted for Trump in 2024—is not merely a reflection of differing priorities but a problem to be solved.
At the same time that people like Wilson are saying out loud that they want to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, the suggestion that anyone seriously wants to end female suffrage is often dismissed by mainstream conservatives as lib hysteria. After all, changing the Constitution would require the assent of three-quarters of the 50 states. “I’ll be concerned about the 19th thing the day a single state—just one out of 38—passes a repeal,” Inez Stepman, a former fellow at the Claremont Institute, posted in March. Liberals were “humorlessly chasing fumes of jokes and bar chatter, and dishonestly using it to silence real policy and cultural debate.” Personally, I would feel better about this line of argument had I not sat opposite the conservative intellectual Jordan Peterson in 2018 while he sneered at my suggestion that Trump-appointed justices would overturn Roe v. Wade. Or if the Trump administration had not taken the issue of birthright citizenship all the way to the Supreme Court. Or if Pete Hegseth had not already blocked the promotion of female (and Black) military officers, and frequently expressed his opposition to women serving in combat.
Masculinism is now approaching its imperial-overreach phase, like the Roman empire that many of its leaders so admire. For some of its most ardent adherents, if someone on the left is doing anything, regardless of their sex, it’s feminized and bad. Meanwhile, when Trump sends out a bitchy Truth Social post about a petty grievance, that is a display of manly vigor. Tucker Carlson’s perfectly buoyant coiffure? Rugged—butch, even. Ben Shapiro’s heartwarming enjoyment of musical theater? In the best tradition of the Vikings or Spartans, probably. This reductive view of the world—women things bad, men things good—is the mirror image of the worst excesses of 2010s Tumblr feminism, when introverted teenage girls posted hashtags like #KillAllMen and drank from mugs that read MALE TEARS.
In March, the anti-DEI activist Christopher Rufo had to fend off a horde of anonymous right-wing posters claiming, apparently seriously, that white men “are very easily the most oppressed group in history.” When he described this view as “brain damaged” and invoked a little-known American phenomenon called slavery, he was besieged with complaints.
For me, this episode gets to the core of MAGA masculinism. Which of its faces is the real one—the conservative think-tankers seeking to undo antidiscrimination laws, or the soap opera of influencers railing against “small-breasted biddies” and AWFULs, wallowing in self-pity, and labeling everything they dislike as feminine?
But of course, the sober thinkers and the shock troops feed off each other. Sometimes, as with Wilson, they coexist in a single person. This is a movement with real policy goals: the rollback of no-fault divorce. Tax breaks to reward male breadwinners and female homemakers. An end to anything with a whiff of DEI, even leadership programs for women in the military, like one cut by Hegseth. A return to the workplace culture of the 1970s, where sexual harassment was normalized. An open preference for male employees in hiring, promotion, and pay awards—in other words, affirmative action for men.
Yet masculinism also functions as a perpetual-motion machine of grievance, an inarticulate howl of anguish at the status quo—whatever that currently is. Masculinism is both serious and silly, sometimes camp and sometimes chilling, an attention-grabbing performance and a genuine proposition. No wonder it has become the cornerstone of Trumpism.
This article appears in the June 2026 print edition with the headline “The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
Updated at 9:25 a.m. ET on July 15, 2025
Perhaps you’ve heard: Americans are having fewer children, on average, than they used to, and that has some people concerned. In the future, the elderly could outnumber the young, leaving not enough workers to pay taxes and fill jobs. Kids already have fewer siblings to grow up with, and parents have fewer kids to care for them as they age.
Oh, and people also have fewer cousins. But who’s talking about that?
Within many families—and I’m sorry to have to say this—cousins occupy a weird place. Some people are deeply close to theirs, but others see them as strangers. Some cousins live on the same block; some live on opposite sides of the world. That can all be true about any family relationship, but when it comes to this one, the spectrum stretches especially far. Despite being related by blood and commonly in the same generation, cousins can end up with completely different upbringings, class backgrounds, values, and interests. And yet, they share something rare and invaluable: They know what it’s like to be part of the same particular family.
Going forward, not as many people will be in that peculiar position. The average number of cousins is declining in the U.S. and much of Europe, and the same trend is predicted to hit other parts of the world in the coming decades. American families are shrinking in general, but with cousins, that drop happens at a dramatic scale. Sha Jiang, a UC Berkeley demographer, put it to me this way: If everyone hypothetically went from having five kids to having four kids, that would mean one less sibling for each child. But it would yield a much bigger decrease in first cousins: Instead of a child having eight aunts or uncles who each have five kids—40 cousins—they would have six aunts or uncles who each have four kids, for a total of 24.
Maybe you don’t find this alarming, given how oddly indeterminate the cousin role can feel. But cousin connections can be lovely because they exist in that strange gray area between closeness and distance—because they don’t follow a strict playbook. That tenuousness means you often need to opt in to cousin relationships, especially as an adult. And the bond that forms when you do might not be easy to replace.
Cousins have historically had a vital family role. For centuries, extended kin depended on one another—for example, to run a farm or a business, or, as Jiang told me, to relay information. But the typical family experience is changing. Some researchers say that American family trees are turning into beanstalks—tall and narrow. People are more likely to have multiple generations of relatives alive at the same time (because of longer life expectancy) but fewer “lateral” relationships, like cousins and siblings (because of a decreased fertility rate). Although the average number of lateral relatives varies across race and class groups in the U.S., the cousin decline is either imminent or already happening across all of them.
Your “vertical,” intergenerational bonds can be tight and tremendously meaningful, but they also tend to come with care duties, and a clear hierarchy: Think of a grandparent babysitting their child’s toddler, or an adult tending to their aging parent. At the same time, siblings can easily develop fraught dynamics because of their intense familiarity: Perhaps in childhood you fight over toys, and in adulthood, you argue over an inheritance or your parents’ eldercare.
[Read: The longest relationships of our lives]
The classic cousin relationship, relative to that, is amazingly uncomplicated. Cousins tend to have more distance in age than siblings, even if they’re in the same generation. They also typically have more geographic space between them; less affluent families are more likely than wealthier ones to live in close proximity, but even so, sharing a house with a cousin isn’t the norm. Neither is giving the kind of material support, such as financial assistance, you’d be likelier to give to nuclear-family members, Megan N. Reed, an Emory University sociologist, told me. And there’s not much societal expectation for what the dynamic has to look like. Pop culture is full of sibling antics: bickering, pranking, sticking up for one another in school. Fewer models demonstrate how cousins are supposed to interact.
Without a clear answer, some cousins just … don’t interact often. Only about 6 percent of adult cousins live in the same census tract (typically about the size of a neighborhood); the rest live an average of 237 miles apart. Jonathan Daw, a Penn State sociologist, told me that the rate at which adults donate a kidney to a cousin is quite low: While siblings make up 25 percent of living kidney-donor relationships, cousins constitute less than 4 percent. That’s likely not because they’d decline to give up a kidney, but because many people wouldn’t ask a cousin for something that significant in the first place. Organ donations, he told me, raise the question “What do we owe to each other?” For cousins, the answer might be “Not much.”
Still, a bond that’s light on responsibility doesn’t need to be weak. Researchers told me that cousins can be deeply important—perhaps because of the potential distance in the relationship, not in spite of it.
Compared with siblings, cousins tend to have larger gaps in socioeconomic status, and might grow up in different home environments. In childhood, that can make them good role models—more likely to differ from you and your siblings in ways that could be eye-opening. And in adulthood, given that many people find friends who are similar to them, extended family can provide a rare opportunity to have your opinions challenged, Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, who studies kinship dynamics at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, in Germany, told me. Cousins are essentially peers who can stretch your assumptions—without as much fear of the relationship ending if debates get heated.
They might also play a specific role in your larger support network (even if you wouldn’t ask them for a kidney). In one study, Reed and her colleagues found that in the fall of 2020, in the midst of pandemic isolation, about 14 percent of participants reported increasing communication with at least one cousin. The relationship, she said, seemed to be “activated in this time of crisis.” She thinks the fact that cousins are less likely to depend on one another for material help might actually make them well suited to give emotional solace. That can be especially relevant when family difficulties come up; a cousin might be one of the few people who understand your relatives’ eccentricities, virtues, and role within the clan. When a parent dies, Ashton Verdery, a Pennsylvania State University sociologist, told me, many people bond with their cousins, who just get it in a way others don’t.
That’s the funny thing about cousins: In all other areas of your life, you might not be alike at all. But knowing the nuances of your family ties through decades of exposure—however sporadic—is a form of closeness in itself. The low stakes of your own relationship can make you perfect allies—but the potential for detachment also means you have to work for it. You can intentionally insert yourselves into each other’s lives, or you can slowly fade out of them.
[Read: Why U.S. population growth is collapsing]
The latter scenario can be understandable. A lot of people, when they’re kids, might run around with their cousins on special occasions—and then go months without seeing them. Perhaps they start to realize that their bonds are somewhat arbitrary; they grow less and less relevant, and ever more awkward. Consider this, though: In middle age and older, the cohesion of a whole family can begin to depend on the bonds between cousins. Along with siblings, cousins become the ones organizing the reunions and the Thanksgiving meals. The slightly random houseguests in your younger years become the stewards of the family in your older ones—as do you.
A cousin-sparse future, then, could be a greater loss than people might recognize. It might also make the relationship that much more important: With fewer of them around, cousins may need to depend on one another even more. Families are shrinking—but that doesn’t mean they need to come apart.
This article originally stated that in a hypothetical world in which every person has five children, a given person would have four blood-related aunts or uncles. In fact, they would have eight aunts or uncles, counting both sides of the family.
Heterosexual women of a progressive bent often say they want equal partnerships with men. But dating is a different story entirely. The women I interviewed for a research project and book expected men to ask for, plan, and pay for dates; initiate sex; confirm the exclusivity of a relationship; and propose marriage. After setting all of those precedents, these women then wanted a marriage in which they shared the financial responsibilities, housework, and child care relatively equally. Almost none of my interviewees saw these dating practices as a threat to their feminist credentials or to their desire for egalitarian marriages. But they were wrong.
As a feminist sociologist, I’ve long been interested in how gender influences our behavior in romantic relationships. I was aware of the research that showed greater gains in gender equality at work than at home. Curious to explore some of the reasons behind these numbers, I spent the past several years talking with people about their dating lives and what they wanted from their marriages and partnerships. The heterosexual and LGBTQ people I interviewed—more than 100 in total—were highly educated, professional-track young adults who lived in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. This was not a cross section of America, for certain, but I did expect to hear progressive views. Most wanted equal partnerships where they could share both financial and family responsibilities. Almost everyone I interviewed was quite vocal in their support of gender equality and didn’t shy away from the feminist label.
[Read: What I learned about equal-partnerships by studying dual-income couples]
However, I noticed a glaring disconnect between the straight women’s views on marriage and their thoughts on dating. Once these women were married, it was difficult to right the ship, so to speak. The same gender stereotypes that they adopted while dating played out in their long-term partnerships.
Three-quarters of Millennials in America support gender equality at work and home and agree that the ideal marriage is an equitable one. Consequently, I expected the young women I interviewed to epitomize feminist liberation. Yet, when they thought of equality among men and women, they focused more on professional opportunities than interpersonal dynamics. Americans with a college education now get married in their early 30s on average, as young adults put their love life on hold while they invest in their education and establish a career. Given the significant time, money, and effort they put into building this career, the women I spoke with expected to partner with people who would support their ambitious professional goals. The men said they desired and respected these independent, high-achieving women and actually saw them as more compatible partners as a result.
And yet in a throwback to an earlier era, many women I spoke with enacted strict dating rules. “It’s a deal breaker if a man doesn’t pay for a date,” one woman, aged 29, told me. A 31-year-old said that if a man doesn’t pay, “they just probably don’t like you very much.” A lot of men, they assumed, were looking for nothing more than a quick hookup, so some of these dating rituals were tests to see whether the man was truly interested in a commitment. A third woman, also 31, told me, “I feel like men need to feel like they are in control, and if you ask them out, you end up looking desperate and it’s a turnoff to them.”
On dates, the women talked about acting demure, and allowing men to do more of the talking. Women, they said, were more attractive to men when they appeared unattainable, so women preferred for the men to follow up after a date. None of the women considered proposing marriage; that was the man’s job. “I know it feels counterintuitive … I’m a feminist,” the first woman said. “But I like to have a guy be chivalrous.”
Not all of the heterosexual women I spoke with felt strongly about these dating rules. “Getting married and having kids were probably, if they were even on the list, like number 99 and 100 on the list of 100,” one told me. “I think the men I was with knew. It would just be ridiculous if they were on a bended knee offering me a ring.” Yet even the few women who fell into this category tended to go along with traditional dating rituals anyway, arguing that the men they dated wanted them and the women “just didn’t care enough” to challenge the status quo.
The heterosexual men I interviewed claimed that a woman’s assertiveness took the pressure off them. While some liked paying for dates, feeling that the gesture was a nice way to show they cared, others were more resistant. One man told me he splits the cost of a date “Fifty-fifty. That goes right in line with my theory of the person I consider my equal. Just because I carry the penis does not mean that I need to buy your food for you. You’re a woman, you’re educated or want to be educated, you want to be independent—take your stance.”
But as the relationship progressed, the men I spoke with held persistent double standards. They expected women to walk a fine line between enough and too much sexual experience. They admitted to running into conflicts with “strong-willed” women. Men also wanted to be taller, stronger, and more masculine than their partners. And many of the men expected women to take their last names after marriage.
[Read: Even breadwinning wives don’t get equality at home ]
When men and women endorsed these traditional gender roles early in a relationship, undoing those views in marriage was difficult. The married men I interviewed often left caregiving and housework to the women, while the husbands considered themselves breadwinners and decision makers. This behavior fell in line with national trends. As American time-use surveys show, women still do about twice as much unpaid labor in the home as men.
One woman said of her husband, “He’ll take our son on bike rides with him. But in the middle of the night, I’m the one getting up. Like for me to be out like this on this interview, I had to make sure there was dinner stuff for him.”
A man expressed his resentment at not having an egalitarian relationship, saying, “That’s not the relationship I want for myself.” Yet he later added that his partner should do more of the household labor, because she was more invested in a clean house.
The LGBTQ people I interviewed offered a different partnership model. They wanted no part of the dating scripts they saw as connected to gender inequality. “We have explicitly said we’re not normal or traditional, so we can write the script ourselves. We don’t have to buy into this belief that the guy is gonna be kinda dopey, but well meaning, and enjoy sports, and the woman is gonna withhold sex and demand to have things paid for,” one woman told me.
[Read: The five years that changed dating]
Because many LGBTQ relationships do not rely on well-established ideologies, norms are often considered, questioned, and then rejected, with the aim of making space for egalitarian practices instead. In the process, many of the couples I spoke with incorporated the elements they felt were important to a successful relationship, emphasizing constant communication, evaluation, and negotiation. The goal was greater individuality and equality, and they actively worked to balance their own needs with the needs of their partners. As the woman above said, “Let’s craft our own relationship.”
Just as noteworthy, the LGBTQ interviewees set up the expectations of equality from the outset of dating, not after it. This approach shifted their understanding of what was possible for intimate relationships, and they, for the most part, had more equal, long-term relationships as a result.
