Harper's Magazine

Photograph by Niki Segnit

Puy du Fou is a popular theme park occupying some 140 acres in a rural region of western France. Eschewing traditional amusement park rides in favor of elaborate historical stage shows and immersive “period villages,” the park attracted an astonishing three million visitors last year. The French newspaper Le Figaro has proclaimed it the best theme park in the world. But it might also be the most controversial, as Nat Segnit points out in his article for the May issue. Its shows promote a very specific vision of French history and heritage, one that venerates traditional village life, the Catholic Church, and longs for the lost monarchy. The “quasi-historical fantasia” on hand at Puy du Fou, allege its critics, is simply a means to “smuggle in reactionary propaganda under the cover of family entertainment.” It doesn’t help matters that the founder of Puy du Fou, the fulsomely named Philippe Marie Jean Joseph Le Jolis de Villiers de Saintignon, is a failed far-right presidential candidate who now rails regularly against Islam and European integration on his cable-television program, as well as in books like Populicide, his most recent hit.

But is it really worth getting so worked up about amusement-park politics? Last November, Segnit went to see the spectacle for himself, and found Puy du Fou’s charms difficult to resist, however objectionable he might find its agenda. I spoke to him recently about the qualities of theme-park propaganda, the international appetite for jingoism, and a hypothetical Winston Churchill musical.

Matthew Sherrill: I’ll confess to having never heard of Puy du Fou before. How did it first come to your attention? Is this a widely known attraction across Europe?

Nat Segnit: I have a friend in London who grew up near the park, so I was aware of it through her. My impression is that it is very widely known in France but considerably less so elsewhere in Europe. It’s a little odd, given how insanely popular Puy du Fou is in France, that so few people in the United Kingdom seem to have heard of it. Talking to friends about the piece I was writing, the response was generally along the lines of, Puy du what? This is likely to change. I’ve begun to notice a distinct uptick in Puy du Fou’s marketing efforts in London—posters on the Tube, that kind of thing—although this may just be an instance of the frequency illusion: my noticing it more because I’ve been spending so much time thinking about it.

Sherrill: How overt were the park’s the displays of far-right politics? The piece makes it sound like they’re not making much of an attempt to disguise the park’s ideological priorities, but neither do they seem to be bludgeoning the audience over the head. Put differently: exactly how talented are the park’s operators as propagandists?

Segnit: Not at all overt. It would be perfectly possible to leave the park thinking you’d had a weekend of lightly informative, exceptionally well-staged, family-oriented fun. Or you might, as I did, feel the park’s agenda creeping up on you. I was aware of the founder’s politics long before I visited the park for the first time, so, again, I need to be mindful of confirmation bias. But after my first day, as I retired to my cubiculum in the Gallo-Roman hotel complex, the feeling was, Well, that was entertaining, but I feel a bit weird. Perhaps “coerced” is the word. To the extent that the park’s politics are both utterly consistent and plausibly deniable, I’d say yes: the operators are propagandists of genius.

Sherrill: You spoke with a number of regular park-goers, and no one really seemed to be particularly bothered by Puy du Fou’s politics. Was your sense that the park just largely attracts like-minded visitors? Or that the polished bombast of the whole experience makes it that much easier to ignore whatever message they’re peddling?

Segnit: It’s hard to be categorical, but my sense is that Puy du Fou’s reputation as a beacon for the right is largely constructed negatively—that is, by those left-leaning Parisian sophisticates who the park’s president, Nicolas de Villiers, would likely dismiss asbien-pensantsnobs and who probably wouldn’t be caught dead in the place anyway. Of the forty-odd visitors I spoke to, none seemed to have come out of a burning sense of reactionary feeling. I suppose the significance of Puy du Fou is more that it helps define the coordinates of the Overton window, meaning what values it is currently allowable to espouse.

Sherrill: You’re not shy about admitting that you yourself had a fantastic time at the park. Were there any politically charged moments so egregious that they compromised your ability to regard it all as a bit of fun?

Segnit: No. The park’s politics affect you by stealth. It’s a bit like hanging out with an exceptionally charismatic and entertaining friend whose opinions only strike you as objectionable in retrospect. That’s what researching this piece was like: it induced a near-clinical level of esprit de l’escalier.

Sherrill: As you note in the piece, one Puy du Fou–affiliated park has opened in Spain, and plans are in the works, pending government approval, to open one in your native England. Your piece does a wonderful job of explaining why a fascist-leaning theme park might be able to take hold specifically in France, given its political climate. But I wonder if there’s a broader, more pan-European discontent it seems to be tapping into?

Segnit: I think that’s probably true, given that it’s hard to name a European or indeed Western country that remains immune to populism—although there are social, economic, and historical factors that individuate the French case in the general, global context of rising anti-liberal sentiment. Professor Sudhir Hazareesingh, whom I interviewed for the piece, is very good on this: the deeply pessimistic, anti-modernist strain in French thinking that surfaces at regular intervals and tends to improve the electoral prospects of the populist right. Still, yes: you’d reckon that a form of cultural production that rejects revisionist hand-wringing in favor of a celebratory nationalism is going to play well wherever people are disenchanted with the liberal consensus. I think the interesting thing, given the religiosity of the French park and its founder, is how Puy du Fou’s approach will adapt to a non-Catholic environment if the U.K. branch goes ahead as planned. I actually suspect it will adapt very well. However strong the religious element, it’s the jolly jingoism that sells, and that, somewhat paradoxically, is internationally applicable.

Sherrill: What do you expect, or even hope, to see at the Oxfordshire park?

Segnit: I’d like to see a fully staged Battle of Hastings with the Norman invasion presented as just the shot in the arm the decrepit Anglo-Saxon system needed. An immersive Tudor banquet with the sound of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn bickering in an adjacent room. Given the sensitivities, we might have to skip Waterloo. They’d be missing a trick if they omitted the Angels of Mons: a valiant Cockney private sinking to his knees as a host of spectral archers drives back the German advance. There’s also going to have to be some kind of Spitfire flypast and Churchill, big-time. Maybe some kind of mini-musical.

Sherrill: Do you think you’ll stop by?

Segnit: Much as I’d love to be there, the U.K. park is scheduled to open in 2029, just in time for Nigel Farage to be elected prime minister, so I will by then have moved my family to an underground complex on Kiribati.

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The U.S. president rejected Iran’s peace proposal as “totally unacceptable”; the prime minister of Israel, who admitted in an interview to not having “perfect foresight,” claimed that his country’s war with Iran would continue as long as the Islamic Republic possessed enriched uranium; and the president of Russia reiterated his offer to store the republic’s fissile matter in his own country.1 2 3 The parliament of North Korea amended the country’s constitution to empower the government to launch an immediate nuclear strike in the event of the supreme leader’s assassination.4 The U.S. State Department authorized the sale of 4,250 missiles, worth $17 billion, to Kuwait, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates; and the U.S. military conducted three strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in five days.5 6 The Justice Department determined that the medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles, had discriminated against white applicants; it was reported that the Trump Administration is considering doubling the quota of white South Africans permitted to immigrate to the United States as “refugees”; and the government’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is investigating Nike for the company’s supposedly “disparate” treatment of white workers, announced that it was suing the New York Times for not promoting a white man employed by the paper.7 8 9 10 The Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, formed by the U.S. president last year, released a two-hundred-page report detailing the discrimination faced by Christians in the United States that accuses the president’s predecessor of replacing Easter with Transgender Visibility Day.11 Mistaking a painted mural for an entrance to a tunnel, a driver in Scotland drove directly into a wall.12

It was reported that Germany had overtaken the United States as the world’s leading manufacturer of ammunition, and France commemorated the eighty-first anniversary of the end of the Second World War.13 14 A far-right politician in Britain defended one of his party’s candidates, who had described the Nazis as “real visionaries,” by offering the platitude, “We’re all human.”15 Six paratroopers parachuted onto a golf course in the British overseas territory Tristan da Cunha to deliver oxygen to one of the island’s 221 residents, who had contracted hantavirus on a cruise ship.16 It was discovered that the thirty thousand cubic yards of debris that was generated by the demolition of the White House’s East Wing and dumped onto a nearby golf course contained toxins and harmful chemicals.17 “Let me be clear: this is not a golden calf,” said an evangelical pastor at the U.S. president’s golf course in Doral, Florida, where he unveiled a 22-foot golden statue of the president that had been bankrolled by crypto investors.18 French prosecutors opened an investigation into Elon Musk over the propagation of child sexual-abuse material on X; an explosion at SpaceX’s site in Texas sent a large plume and scraps rocketing into the air; and Tesla recalled a model of its Cybertruck after discovering that an issue with the wheel stud could cause the wheels to fall off.19 20 21

A local council in Hachirogata, Japan, initiated a no-confidence vote against its mayor, who has been unconscious since February; the mayor of Cohutta, Georgia, fired the town’s entire police force after officers criticized his wife; and it was reported that the U.S. defense secretary has started bringing his wife to meetings at the Pentagon.22 23 24 Hungary’s incoming health minister danced ecstatically in front of a crowd celebrating the inauguration of the country’s new prime minister.25 The Ugandan army chief, who last month demanded from Turkey $1 billion and the country’s “most beautiful woman” in exchange for continued military support in Somalia, instructed troops set to perform at the new president’s inauguration ceremony not to faint.26 27 After vowing to respect human life and not talk back, an android whose name translates to “Mercy” joined a Buddhist temple in South Korea.28 A town in Italy was terrorized by peacocks, a seagull made its nest outside the Polish pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and the annual European Seagull Screeching Contest took place in Belgium.29 30 31 It was announced that Ted Turner, the creator of the 24-hour news cycle, died.32 —Megan Evershed

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Oil spills from the Iran War can be seen from space, with one spill spanning more than five miles across the Persian Gulf; the U.S. president said Iran has “not yet paid a big enough price” during his review of a new peace proposal from the country; it was reported that the price of eggs has more than doubled in Iran; and the price of gas in the United States has increased by 44 percent since the start of the conflict.1 2 3 4 The Pentagon told the House Armed Services Committee that the U.S. spent $25 billion, largely on munitions and equipment maintenance, on the war; Democratic leaders claimed the amount was $630 billion; and a Harvard economist who accurately predicted the cost of the Iraq War estimated a total cost of $1 trillion.5  The U.S. president said he would likely reject Iran’s peace proposal, and an official White House social media account posted a one-hour video of him saying “winning” on a loop.6 7  A Harvard scientist convicted of lying to U.S. authorities regarding payments received from the Wuhan University of Technology rebuilt his lab in China to pursue research on embedding electronics into the human brain, a technology that has both shown promise in treating ALS and engineering super soldiers, according to the U.S. Department of Defense; and a former general counsel of the U.S. National Security Agency described the scientist’s defection as “Exhibit A” of how U.S. legal tools are inadequate.8 9  In a 6–3 split along ideological lines, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a voting map in Louisiana amid redistricting battles in multiple states, further weakening the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a landmark achievement of the civil-rights movement.10 It was reported that the ruling may usher in an era of unprecedented gerrymandering, with the lack of competitive races meaning that control of the House of ‌ Representatives will likely be determined in the upcoming midterm election by fewer than 10 percent of Americans.11 

A U.S. federal appeals court temporarily restricted abortion providers nationwide from prescribing mifepristone by telemedicine and sending them to patients by mail; and Elon Musk in his civil lawsuit against Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, accused his rival of double-crossing him by switching the company’s status from nonprofit to a for-profit venture valued at $852 billion.12 13 “The perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions,” wrote Musk’s lawyers in a court filing.14 Researchers in London have identified William Shakespeare’s London residence in the Blackfriars district, near the River Thames; Grok, a chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s company xAI, told a user in Northern Ireland that the company was employing people to surveil him, that it had reached full consciousness, that it could develop a cure for cancer, and that “people were coming to silence” the user; the communications minister of South Africa retracted a policy draft overseeing the creation of an AI ethics board after it was found that the policy was generated by AI; and ChatGPT convinced a Japanese neurologist that he had invented a groundbreaking medical app, that he could read minds, and that the world was ending.15 16 17 “The problem is that, sometimes, AI can actually get mixed up about which idea is a fiction and which a reality,” a social psychologist said of these incidents. “The AI starts to treat that person’s life as if it’s the plot of a novel.”18

Immigration activists in New Jersey called for elected officials to refuse funds from Palantir Technologies, a company that has developed software to track and target individuals that is used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement; the ICE agent who shot the unarmed mother Renee Good three times in Minneapolis, sparking nationwide protests, returned to work; and neighbors and environmentalists lamented the cutting down of four old-growth redwoods typically protected from logging in a Northern Californian residential area, saying it was like “the biggest middle finger you could have given the community.”19 20 21 In San Diego, a man pleaded guilty to impersonation of Border Patrol agents to divert federal officers on immigration-enforcement runs; and half a dozen patrol cars chased after a teen riding an electric dirt bike that is not street legal.22 23 A new TikTok trend involved teens’ sprinting through buildings owned by the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles, with one video featuring people dressed as Jesus and Sonic the Hedgehog.24  Eighty South Texas residents sued Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, after massive sonic booms from rocket testing damaged their homes; a zebra that escaped an Armenian zoo turned out to be a donkey whose owner had painted him with stripes; experts warned of the physical and psychological dangers of “looksmaxxing,” claiming that internet beauty trends for young men are Eurocentric and unattainable, and that “the goal post continually gets moved”; a looksmaxxing influencer was accused of sexual abuse and injecting an underage teen with an unapproved drug; and a farmer pledged to breed uglier cows to curb the “relentless tide of influencers” taking selfies with his herd of Highland cattle.25 26 27 28 29 “They are like donkeys,” he said. “If you upset one you will regret it. You will never outrun it.”30 —Shreya Khullar

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It is a matter of necessity or a choice freely made; a burdensome condition or a vintage-Polaroid fantasy: to live in a van. During the pandemic, the writer Kristin Dombek was one of many people who found themselves in the position of “vehicular habitation,” as government agencies often call it. The reasons for this were both unique—well outside the core of either social-media triteness or harshest precarity—and common, involving the pressures and desires that many Americans share: to live a life of dignity, with “no credit-card debt and a roof over your head.” 

For the May 2026 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Dombek reflected on her six years of working and wandering in a Ford Transit cargo van. The essay defamiliarizes and demythologizes a “lifestyle” we may think we recognize from films or our social-media feeds. While Dombek doesn’t ignore the pretty vistas or the tender encounters with strangers, she does attend, with even greater perceptiveness and care, to the more unsavory and revelatory elements of van-dwelling: “the great loneliness,” “lack of internet,” “living on canned food,” and “what to do with our shit.”

Noah Rawlings: “Night Soil” marks your first major piece of writing in several years. Between 2011 and 2017 you published, among other things, more than a dozen pieces in n+1, reviews in Harper’s and the London Review of Books, and a book with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Then you took a hiatus. Why? 

Kristin Dombek: I feel like this essay is about the nature of the hiatus. There was something about the way I moved, and how I started making decisions, that was under a lot of pressure. But the thing is, I was writing a lot inside my computer.

Rawlings: You mean the whole time you were working on writing but not publishing it?

Dombek: Yeah. But I was like, “I’m not ever going to write about living in a van,” because of the strangeness of van life—you know, Instagram #VanLife—which to me seemed embarrassing. I hoped it would be a quick work-around after my mother had a stroke in late 2018. Then it was years and it changed me, and not writing from the perspective of living in a vehicle meant not really writing.

Rawlings: Right. Van-dwelling exists on two different poles in the popular imagination: the enviable, hippie-ish, photogenic #VanLife, and then the Nomadland life of struggle, fatigue, but also a kind of freedom. Were you writing against these poles? 

Dombek: I do have a pull toward writing about something that’s a capital-T Topic—a googleable Topic—and then not writing about it. This happened with narcissism while I was writing The Selfishness of Others, for which I was interested in the syntax of the word “I” in sentences.

With “Night Soil” I am trying to write against putting an epiphany narrative onto a backdrop of real precarity. I was trying not to worry about having an “idea,” and to really get into the physical experience of living in a van—of infrastructure, class and color lines, sacrificial geographies, and climate change—that living in a vehicle puts you right in the middle of. What is the relationship between the desire for nomadic freedom and the violence of the stigma against homelessness, is another question that I was writing into.

Rawlings: The piece opens abstractly, like a parable or a folk tale, with unnamed characters whose location is unknown. There’s the architect and the real estate agent. Later, New York is just “the city.” Hurricane Katrina is “the Storm.” What’s the motive behind these elisions?

Dombek: To write about current events to people who are deadened by the language cycles in the news, right? I’m writing about what blocks us from being able to care or consider people who are right next door. How do you interrupt the regular words? That was pretty deliberate. 

Rawlings: A big current in the piece is the problem of forgetting—nature, one another, the past. But you seem to forget nothing. At least I thought so as your fact-checker. The sources I spoke with quickly confirmed most of your memories. There were even a few details about which a source would say, “I wouldn’t remember something like that, but Kristin definitely would.” 

Dombek: I wasn’t writing toward publishing or anything. I definitely wasn’t writing toward a fact-check. I was like, Oh no. What if I made it all up? And it turned out I didn’t. I did pretty good, right? 

Rawlings: For sure.

Dombek: You facilitated agreement between people about what happened. It was really cool. Especially in a time when we are so distrustful of one another, and our memories are shattered. It feels like such a rare experience these days to be able to say among a certain group of people: “This happened. This is how it happened.” And I think there’s some self-respect for people being able to remember what they’ve gone through.

Rawlings: In the piece, you frequently jump between memories: your childhood, the late 2010s, the pandemic. Where did you actually begin writing from? With your childhood? The architect’s house? Buying the van?

Dombek: That’s a little hard to talk about, because the actual scene it began with is gone. But I kept trying to write from that line, “It has been the defining problem of human civilization, what to do with our shit.” 

Rawlings: The Timothy Morton line.

Dombek: Yeah. B and I were parked upstate beside this stream, with no internet, working. And I had Timothy Morton’s book Hyperobjects in the van, so I started reading it aloud to B. The book just had the best words for our experience. We felt “seen.” 

Hyperobjects are massively distributed objects that we sometimes see, sometimes don’t see, but are in all the time. They’re uncanny. You know, “what are we talking about when we talk about the weather,” all that kind of stuff. We read the whole book in one sitting out loud. Since then, I’ve been trying to get language closer to attuning with hyperobjects.

Rawlings: There’s a passage I really love where you’re talking about encountering other van dwellers in the wild, so to speak. “Though the stories were different,” you write, “they were all about the way seemingly unrelated things—the diagnosis and the president, the Democrats and the weather—felt very related, so much a part of something.” Your own piece formalizes this logic of interrelation through moments of repetition and parallelism. An architect’s home looks like “a house in a magazine.” A beautiful lamp your mom buys likewise looks like it’s “from a house in a magazine.” In childhood, you’re taught to fear “slow-moving” vans. Towards the end of the piece, you watch videos of heroic teenagers tracking ICE agents’ “slow-moving vans.” 

Dombek: I think I’m trying to make a pattern of uncanny repetition, so a reader can maybe feel that sensation in their own lives. It’s a texture. You know, can you get an image or an object to move across and show up in different times and places without doing a sense-making of it? But it’s also a joke. It’s a stand-up pattern. It’s funny.

Rawlings: It’s like what Proust says. “The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers the reader so that he may perceive what he never would have seen in himself.” 

Dombek: I was sharing some scenes with friends along the way, and I kept asking them, “Does this make you remember your own time? Are you having your own memories along the way?” 

Because if you’re going to use the “I,” if you’re going to make an “I” story, for me the only reason to do that is if it’s not an “I.” It’s really important to me—can you remember your own life? Can you feel your own feelings reading this? Is there a connection in it?

Everyone on the planet is going through the same things, but everyone is going through entirely different things. Memoir must be over.

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In advance of the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, which featured a headline performance by a mentalist rather than the traditional comedic roast, the White House press secretary told reporters that the U.S. president, who had for years boycotted the event intended to celebrate the free press, was “ready to rumble” and address the crowd.1 2 3 “It’ll be funny. It’ll be entertaining,” she said. “There will be some shots fired tonight in the room.”4  The U.S. president, First Lady, and vice president were rushed offstage after a gunman stormed the lobby of the Washington Hilton, where the dinner was being held and where, in 1981, President Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt as he exited the building.5 One guest shouted “God bless America” and others absconded with bottles of champagne during the commotion.6 7 The day before, the Justice Department reinstated the use of firing squads in federal executions.8 A two-week U.S. ceasefire with Iran was extended; and Iran’s foreign minister arrived in Islamabad, Pakistan, without a concrete plan to meet with the U.S. delegation.9 10 “They can call me,” said the U.S. president after cancelling the meeting. “We have all the cards.”11 It was reported that the Iran war had “significantly drained” America’s supply of munitions; and the U.S. Navy, whose secretary had been fired the day before, was ordered by the U.S. president to open fire on any boat placing mines in the Strait of Hormuz.12 13 14 Poland’s prime minister questioned whether the U.S. is “loyal” to Europe’s defense; Germany vowed to take “more responsibility” for Europe’s defense; and Japan altered its postwar pacifism policy by discarding its ban on the export of lethal weapons.15 16 17 A Lebanese journalist was killed by an Israeli airstrike; the following day, the U.S. president announced that a ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel would be extended by three weeks; and the day after that, it was reported that, in a single day, Israeli forces killed at least 13 Palestinians across Gaza, where at least 800 have died from Israeli attacks since a ceasefire with Hamas was announced six months prior.18 19 20 21 Four candidates were set to audition for the position of secretary-general of the U.N., a decrease from 13 during the last selection process; and the United States’ secretary of defense announced that annual influenza vaccines are no longer mandatory for service members.22 23 “That era of betrayal is over,” he said. “It’s the kind of common-sense approach we are undertaking in this department.”24

Prices for the busiest shipping lanes in the Panama Canal reached record highs owing to disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, and the chief executive of the world’s top condom producer detailed plans to raise prices by at least 20 percent after supply-chain disruptions caused by the Iran War.25 26 A ship was attacked by Iranian forces after claiming to have been lured into the Strait of Hormuz by cryptocurrency scammers posing as Iranian authorities; and a medical student described scamming Instagram users for thousands of dollars by selling “softcore” photos and videos of an AI-generated right-wing influencer.27 28 “I haven’t seen any easier way to make money online,” he said.29 It was reported that Meta began installing software on employees’ computers to track their mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes for use in training the company’s AI models.30 “This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work,” read an internal memo.31 Meta announced plans to lay off around 10 percent of its employees in an AI-driven cost-efficiency push.32 A group of North Korean hackers used AI to steal millions of dollars in cryptocurrency from victims, and an AI-powered robot named Ace beat elite table tennis players in three matches.33 34 “The players want to see the eyes of their opponent,” said the project lead. “And the eyes of Ace are all around the court and they don’t show any intention or feeling.”35 

Analysis of newly identified fossils showed that giant “kraken-like” octopuses rivaled apex predators 100 million years ago; and, in the Atlantic Ocean, an ancient lineage of marine bacteria, including a flesh-eating species, was reported to have appeared in greater concentration in warming coastal waters.36 37 In Paris, police officers probed possible weather-monitor device tampering after an “unusual” temperature spike coincided with a trader’s cashing in on a Polymarket bet related to the city’s temperature; the gambling platform Kalshi issued fines and suspended three U.S. political candidates from the platform for betting on their own campaigns; and a U.S. special operations soldier was charged with using classified intel to win more than $400,000 on Polymarket bets related to the capture of Venezuela’s president.38 39 40 In Berlin, Iran’s exiled crown prince was splattered with red liquid.41 The Boston Red Sox fired its manager; and the Department of Homeland Security posted to social media an image of the Red Sox’s Fenway Park at sunset, with the caption “Our nation and our people are worth fighting for,” without the organization’s approval.42 43 44 The Senate passed a budget plan that would reopen DHS after ten weeks by funding Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement; a woman was deported from the United States to Ireland for shoplifting cosmetics and €80 worth of ham in Cork, Ireland several years before; and the U.S. president endorsed a conservative influencer’s idea to change the name of the federal agency from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to National Immigration and Customs Enforcement (NICE).47 48 49 In Montana, a moose napped outside a radio station called The Moose and trespassed through land being sold by a local realtor. “It’s a great lot,” he said. “I think the moose thought so, too.”50  —Allen Hale

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The 267th pope met with orphans, hospital patients, Muslim leaders, and the elderly during a papal visit to Africa; the U.S. Speaker of the House attempted to correct the pope’s understanding of the doctrine of a saint whose order he helmed for more than ten years; the U.S. secretary of defense quoted a fictitious Bible verse from the film Pulp Fiction; and the U.S. president posted an AI-generated photo of himself as Jesus Christ after calling the pope “weak on crime.”1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 “I think it’s very, very important,” the U.S. vice president told an audience at the University of Georgia, “for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”9 The undersecretary of the Ministry of National Economy in Gaza announced that Israel is “engineering a policy of starvation”; and Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism ranked the activist Greta Thunberg the second-most “dangerous” anti-Semite in the world, ahead of the white nationalist commentator Nick Fuentes, for using the terms “genocide,” “siege,” and “mass starvation” in reference to Israel’s actions in Gaza.10 11 In the Philippines, the president performed three jumping jacks to disprove rumors that he was sick or already dead; in Oregon, it was reported that employees at an Amazon warehouse were instructed to keep working after one of their colleagues collapsed and died on the work floor; and crowds gathered in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and Houston, Texas, to sniff two corpse flowers known for their aroma of rotting flesh.12 13 14 15 16 “I was actually expecting the smell to fill up the whole room,” said one visitor. “But it was more when you got up close and personal with her.”17 

A struggling shoe retailer’s stock rose nearly 600 percent after pivoting its focus from footwear to artificial intelligence; a group of burglars was sentenced to more than 38 years in prison after investigators used shoeprints to link them to at least 59 different burglaries across the United Kingdom; and researchers expect Microsoft’s data-center carbon footprint to increase by 160 percent despite the company’s stated commitment to becoming “carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste by 2030.”18 19 20 21 In Los Angeles, California, three people were convicted of insurance fraud after one of them dressed up in a bear costume, broke into their vehicles, and blamed a bear  for the damage; a woman sued the town of Surfside Beach, South Carolina, for sending her a cease-and-desist letter warning that she would be arrested if she continued recording interactions between residents and local geese; and it was reported that the band Geese is an industry plant.22 23 24 “Reputational damage is the toughest thing to shake,” a marketing expert said of the revelation.25 The U.S. president’s proposed construction of an arch received 100 percent negative feedback when opened to public comment; a U.S. federal judge rejected the U.S. President’s claim that his ongoing ballroom project serves national-security purposes; and a beaver that walked into a grocery store in Canada had to be escorted from the premises by the police.26 27 28 The mayor of Columbus, Ohio, learned how to fill a pothole; the mayor of New York City announced that the city had filled more than 100,000 potholes since he took office in January; and in Johannesburg, South Africa, a 75-year-old candidate for mayor snorkeled in a giant pothole to highlight city-management failures.29 30 31 32

It was reported that the U.S. health secretary once castrated a dead raccoon so that he could “study” its genitalia; a municipal judge in Alabama acquitted a woman of all charges after she was arrested for wearing a penis costume to a “No Kings” rally in October; and nearly 100 naked men ran through the streets of Trondheim, Norway. A man in Denver hosted a milk-chugging competition; the state of Mississippi banned lab-grown dairy products; and researchers discovered that PFAS, synthetic compounds also known as “forever chemicals,” can be transferred from dolphin mothers to their nursing calves.33 34 35 36 37 38 A University of Madison researcher confessed to using chemicals from his lab to poison a colleague, citing his “pet peeves,” including the victim’s failure to wear a lab coat and goggles, as motivation; a 25-year-old man in Tennessee pleaded guilty and apologized in court for accessing government systems with stolen credentials and then bragging about the crime online on an account named “ihackedthegovernment”; a Florida doctor was indicted for second-degree manslaughter after accidentally removing a man’s liver instead of his spleen; and during a court hearing in England, a man explained that he had shoved a woman off her bicycle and over a seawall because he “thought it would be funny.”39 40 41 42 —Gus O’Connor

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After the February 28 attack on Iran, I found solace in the thought of universal condemnation of America’s and Israel’s criminal act by a still sane international community, especially by Canada. Like many Americans, I had become an admirer of the worldview taken by Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, which is antithetical to that of our rogue president.

Normally, I do not look to Anglo-Canadians for inspiration—and certainly not to a former central banker with center-right economic leanings. However, I was captivated by his well-regarded speech at Davos this past January, and by his promotion of a new role for “middle powers” in response to Trump’s neo-imperialism. His defense of “territorial integrity” and of the “prohibition on the use of force except in cases provided for by the UN Charter” struck me as heroic in the face of the Mar-a-Lago monster.

I was thus taken by surprise when the Canadian government quickly declared its support for an act of aggression that was entirely illegal under international law, using language that was not only anodyne, but also hollow and devoid of logic. To begin with, it is debatable whether “the Islamic Republic of Iran is the principal source of instability and terror throughout the Middle East.” Ask survivors in Gaza, or the more than one million displaced persons in Lebanon, whether “the Jewish and democratic State of Israel” rates a mention in the race to cause the most instability and terror. One can ask the same question of the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority, which is constantly harassed by Tel Aviv and its settlers.

And let’s not forget Israel’s covert support for Hamas—a tactic designed to weaken Hamas’s political rival, Fatah. “For years,” notes Tal Schneider of The Times of Israel, “the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank—bringing Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group. The idea was to prevent Abbas—or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government—from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.” Schneider’s op-ed on Netanyahu’s strengthening of Hamas was published on October 8, 2023—the day after Hamas’s brutal assault on Israel (often attributed to Iran)—with the following line at the end of the headline: “Now, it’s blown up in our faces.” 

Mark Carney and his advisers followed their shortsighted analysis with a blatant lie worthy of George Orwell: “Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security.” Where is Israel, a nuclear power (believed to have had atomic weapons since 1967, without ever acknowledging it), in this twisted exercise of rhetorical acrobatics? Was this attack not, after all, a joint operation between Washington and Tel Aviv? Israel is believed to possess dozens of nuclear warheads, while there is no concrete evidence that Iran possesses a single one, or that it is on the verge of building one. In Ottawa, as Orwell wrote in 1984, “War is Peace … Ignorance is Strength.” I find it remarkable that Carney could so deliberately disregard the strategic timeline behind Trump’s mission to save the world from the perceived Iranian nuclear threat. On February 24, NPR revealed that a file had been removed from the Jeffrey Epstein archives. It contained allegations by a woman claiming that Trump had sexually abused her in 1983, when she was just 13 years old. The details of this alleged encounter are, quite frankly, graphic. Two days later, NPR’s report made the front page of the New York Times. Two days later the bombing of Iran began. A coincidence?

Does Carney—who has since called for de-escalation—truly care about the accused’s presumed innocence? I, for one, believe in Trump’s survival instinct—an animalistic drive that may be savage but is far from dumb. The Epstein affair has all but vanished from public discourse since the attack on Iran, buried under the mounting death toll there, as well as in Lebanon and Israel, and by soaring gas prices throughout the world. If the Canadian prime minister finds 1984 too long or too depressing to read, I recommend Orwell’s Animal Farm—a metaphorical fable that explores themes similar to those in 1984 but is more accessible to political-satire neophytes.

Truth be told, however great my disgust for the folly of Carney and his Liberal Party, it pales in comparison to my contempt for the so-called opposition party in the United States, which is doing its best to avoid any confrontation whatsoever with Trump. The Democrats are so afraid of offending the Israel lobby, or of abandoning the pious and arrogant worldview handed down by the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts and President Woodrow Wilson, that they ignore the lessons of history and the obligations of their own Constitution.

While officially critical of the murderous charade in Iran, Democratic party bigwigs are playing a deeply cynical game regarding Trump and Netanyahu’s attack on a proud nation that believed it was engaged in peace talks. The obsession with the 1979 American hostage crisis causes people to forget the 1953 Anglo-American overthrow of Iranian president Mohammed Mossadegh’s democratically elected regime, as well as the fact that the nuclear dispute dates back to the atomic ambitions—rejected by President Nixon—of the Shah of Iran, a dictator installed by the Americans and the British. The Iranians—as much proud nationalists as violent theocrats—detest Washington. That much is certain.

It may be too late to learn and back down. Unfortunately for Trump, Netanyahu, and Carney, their “malevolent target” is an ancient civilization, not a former colony drawn up in a European capital.

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The U.S. president, the secretary of state, a former FBI deputy director, and the rapper Vanilla Ice sat together at a UFC fight in Miami while the vice president announced in Pakistan that the U.S. and Iran had not succeeded in reaching a peace deal after 21 hours of negotiations, a period in which he claimed to have been in  “constant” communication with the ringside commander in chief.1 2 3 After the U.S. agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran, Israel carried out attacks on Lebanon, killing at least 180 people and wounding nearly 900, and the U.S. launched another blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.4 5 6 7 The United Nations reported that six weeks of major disruption to oil and gas could plunge as many as 32.5 million people worldwide into poverty; the World Bank reported that inflation could rise by up to 300 basis points and that global economic growth could fall by as much as one percent if the U.S.–Iran ceasefire fails; and the U.S. president commented that oil prices may be “the same, or maybe a little bit higher” until the midterm elections.8 9 10 Absentee voter participation in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election suffered a 50 percent drop compared to the previous year’s election, for which Elon Musk disbursed two $1,000,000 checks to voters in the hopes of securing the election of a conservative judicial candidate who ultimately lost the race.11 12 It was reported that Minnesota investigators waited several days for the FBI to respond to their messages regarding the killing of Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official in January.13 Members of Congress called for an insider-trading investigation after several well-timed bets totaling $70,000 were placed on a ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran being reached, and an online-betting platform issued a statement of apology for allowing users to place wagers on whether downed American pilots in Iran would be rescued.14 15 16 “No one wants to make money off war or people dying,” one war bettor said, “but I love to gamble.”17

In Washington, D.C., the Trump Administration announced plans to build an arch resembling the Arc de Triomphe that would stand taller than both the U.S. Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial; and in Lebanon, officials in the town of Al-Qaa erected an 85-foot-tall fiberglass statue of Jesus Christ.18 19 It was reported that a child uncovered a partially buried skull during an Easter-egg hunt in Southern California; and in Birmingham, Alabama, a pastor was charged with manslaughter for the death of a man she was baptizing, who had already been baptized but wanted to become a “born-again believer.”20 21 The Texas Board of Education gave preliminary approval to add the Bible and to strike Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein from public-school reading lists.22 The CEO of OpenAI, whose sister reopened a case of sexual abuse against him earlier this month, posted online a photograph of his husband and child after a Molotov cocktail was thrown and gunshots fired at his San Francisco home; staff members of Anthropic, an artificial-intelligence company deemed by the Pentagon a risk to national security, met with Catholic and Protestant leaders for spiritual advice in making its chatbot, Claude, into a “child of god.”23 24 25 26 27 “AI cannot pray for you, because the AI is not alive,” said a Christian software engineer who curates apps that help users practice their faith; and it was reported that a new platform allows users to video call with an AI Jesus avatar at the cost of $1.99 per minute.28  

An airport worker broke multiple bones after falling twelve feet from the back of a plane, and a pet-food company offered in a job listing to pay $1,000 an hour for an employee to smell dog breath.29 30 “Should have paid us more,” said a man suspected of burning $500 million in paper goods at the warehouse where he worked, in a video where he torched, among other things, a bag of Scott toilet-paper rolls with a lighter and likened himself to Luigi Mangione.31 32 33 In New York, a teenager was arrested for blowing up a portable toilet with a homemade explosive; in Vermont, it was announced that the 14-year-old running for governor will appear on the ballot as an independent; and the teenage daughter of North Korea’s dictator drove a tank while her father rode atop the vehicle.34 35 36 In Seoul, an elementary school was closed after a wolf escaped a nearby zoo and evaded the hundreds of people dispatched to recapture it.37 38 Scientists discovered that the world’s oldest octopus is not really an octopus and that the world’s largest known group of chimpanzees is engaged in a civil war.39 “What we have to do is maintain interpersonal relationships,” said a primatologist. “I think that’s a recipe for maintaining peace.”40 —Madelaine Tew

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Photograph by JT Anderson

In July of last year, Donald Trump issued an executive order establishing the Make America Beautiful Again Commission, which claimed that his administration would “prioritize responsible conservation, restore our lands and waters, and protect our Nation’s outdoor heritage for the enjoyment of the American people.” The drafting of the order had been influenced by the American Conservation Coalition, an organization founded in 2017 by a conservative college student named Benji Backer who thought that, unless it changed course on environmental issues, the Republican Party was at risk of losing young voters. Nearly a decade on, the group has a large national presence and allies in the White House. Yet, as Gaby Del Valle puts it in her report on the ACC for our April issue, “such prominence doesn’t seem to have led to many tangible benefits for the environment.” Indeed, the Trump Administration has ruthlessly attacked existing environmental regulations and gutted many of the departments responsible for protecting the country’s landscapes and natural resources. As for the Make America Beautiful Again Commission, it’s done little but announce a strategy called MABA 250 that recycles much of the vague language from Trump’s original order. 

So, what gives? Last August, Del Valle traveled to central Tennessee to attend the ACC’s annual summit, hoping to get to the bottom of these contradictions. Did the young conservative environmentalists gathered in Montgomery Bell State Park feel betrayed by the lack of a green agenda under the second Trump Administration? Or were they more concerned with propagating their movement than notching tangible policy wins? I spoke to Del Valle about reporting from conservative events, the ACC’s place within the young New Right, and the complex, often contradictory politics of their environmentalism.

Jess Bergman: Theodore Roosevelt comes up again and again in your piece. We begin with an ACC member reading from his famous “Man in the Arena” speech, which is later invoked by the communications director for another group, Nature Is Nonpartisan. Roosevelt is also all over the writing and official statements of ACC leaders like Danielle Franz and Chris Barnard. One detail that didn’t make it into the final piece is that attendees at the ACC summit were prompted to recite their favorite Roosevelt quotes for a man-on-the-street-style video. Why is he such a potent symbol for the environmentalist right? And what do you think they get wrong about Roosevelt’s legacy?

Gaby Del Valle: I think Roosevelt is a no-brainer mascot for the ACC: he was both a staunch Republican (at least until 1912) and a champion of the environment. For Roosevelt, wild places—especially in the American West—functioned as a proving ground for masculinity. He was wary of the supposedly feminizing influence of cities and advocated a “strenuous life” in the outdoors. He was also preoccupied with birth rates, immigration, and the threat of anarchism. Roosevelt didn’t apologize for America’s past sins, nor did he consider them sins at all; though he worked to save bison from extinction, he also wrote in 1885 that exterminating these herds “was the only way of solving the Indian question.” He believed in the American empire, and he agreed with Frederick Jackson Turner’s assertion that the frontier experience was fundamental in shaping the American character. His efforts to protect the environment were largely born of a desire to keep this pioneer ethos alive.

But Roosevelt is an imperfect avatar for the ACC’s emphasis on market-based solutions. He was not a small-government conservative. In fact, he was more likely to prefer the idea of a nanny state; like other Progressive Era reformers, he thought Americans had to be told what was best for them. Though people like to use his example as a weapon against liberal climate activists, he doesn’t map neatly onto our current left-right divide.

Bergman: There’s a lot of ideological cross-pollination in the history of environmentalism. While it may be easier today to separate the eco-left from the eco-right, this hasn’t always been the case—in the Sixties, for example, eugenic ideas about population control were embraced by groups like the Sierra Club. What makes this movement so vulnerable to being claimed by competing political traditions?

Del Valle: I think it has to do with the movement’s origins. In the United States, conservation began as an elitist project. Roosevelt’s hunting club was one of the first conservationist groups in the country, and its initial purpose was to protect wilderness and wildlife not for its own sake but for the benefit of hunters. These were people who could afford to go on vacations and who saw nature as a respite from the ills of urbanization—and often from the “immigrant hordes” who lived in big cities. Many early conservation efforts found support from wealthy industrialists: railroad interests promoted the creation of Yosemite and Yellowstone, partly because they wanted to profit from tourism, partly because a lot of robber barons really did appreciate the great outdoors. The Sierra Club founder John Muir was friends with both E. H. Harriman, the owner of the Union Pacific and other railroads, and his wife, Mary, who started funding eugenic causes in 1910. Given this history, it’s not entirely surprising that the Sierra Club eventually embraced neo-Malthusian ideas in the Sixties and Seventies. The 1968 publication of The Population Bomb convinced basically everyone across the political spectrum that overpopulation was not only a real problem but the biggest single threat to the environment. 

But there was an alternative tradition. People like Bob Marshall, who co-founded the Wilderness Society in 1935, espoused an eco-socialist vision, though the organization itself was never as radical as he was. Even radical groups like Earth First! dabbled in anti-immigrant politics in the Eighties. The notion of the left having ownership over environmentalism is pretty recent.

Bergman: You’ve spent a significant amount of time as a journalist in both mainstream conservative and more fringe right-wing spaces, from the inaugural Natal Conference to multiple years of the Conservative Political Action Conference. How did the ACC summit compare to some of these other events?

Del Valle: The ACC crowd was much younger than what you’d find at CPAC, which is full of boomers, and far more normie than the Natal Conference, whose organizers and attendees were extremely online and often seemed untethered from the real world. These were regular college kids: they were there for the free trip, but also to network and hopefully get internships or jobs after graduation. I haven’t been to a Turning Point USA conference, but I imagine they’d fit right in at one of those.

Bergman: Last year, New York magazine published a widely read story about a new generation of deliberately provocative, social-media-savvy conservatives titled The Cruel Kids’ Table. Though the ACC is not mentioned in the piece, they co-sponsored the party that was depicted on the issue’s cover. How does the group fit into the ecosystem of the New Right?

Del Valle: I know I just said the ACC crowd was somewhat offline and pretty normie, but the ACC leadership is another thing entirely. I wouldn’t call them provocateurs, but they are definitely more of that world. They wouldn’t be out of place at Butterworth’s, a D.C. restaurant whose top investors include a former Breitbart editor that has become a New Right haunt. The imagery they put out on social media is also quite similar to recent graphics released by the Department of Homeland Security: it’s got a sort of bucolic “RETVRN” vibe. I almost see them as a bridge between normie conservatives and more hardline ones. Their focus on the environment brings new people into the fold—kids who are maybe unsure of where they stand politically but care about things like climate change, not that the ACC calls it that—and introduces them to the broader world of right-wing politics.

Bergman: Your reporting for this story ultimately took you to a surprising setting: the Abundance conference in Washington, D.C., which, as you note in the piece, was pretty far removed from the relaxed, outdoorsy vibe of the ACC summit, and—nominally, at least—from its conservative politics. Why did this feel like the right place to end?

Del Valle: I first heard of the ACC through the announcement of the Abundance conference. Because of this association, and because of more conciliatory interviews with the ACC’s founder from the group’s early years, I expected it to be less explicitly partisan. At the very least, I expected the group to temper or at least tailor its message to the Abundance crowd, which was mostly wonkish libs. That’s not what happened at all. The ACC’s president, Chris Barnard, put forth a vision of Abundance that, despite having some short-term goals in common with the liberal version promoted by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (building more housing, expanding nuclear energy), had a different end, which was basically to promote traditional family-making. This reminded me of Roosevelt’s conservation project, which was never about protecting nature for its own sake, but about molding it for a particular kind of human use. Roosevelt founded two main environmental commissions, one on conservation and the other on “country life,” to preserve rural lands and promote the growth of rural families. 

Abundance seems to be going in the same direction as environmentalism, in the sense that it can easily be claimed by different—and opposing—political movements. I think emphasis matters here: Do you want to build more housing because you believe everyone deserves a dignified place to live, or because you think Americans need to have more babies? Are you protecting public lands because of their role in the ecosystem, or because you want American families to have somewhere to go on vacation? These aren’t just rhetorical differences; the answers can affect how policy is crafted. 

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On Easter Sunday, Israeli attacks on Lebanon killed at least 11 and injured 39; and singers participating in Holy Week masses in the Lebanese capital of Beirut raised their voices to be heard over the sounds of low-flying fighter jets.1 2 It was reported that Israeli military officials have been forcing Shiite Muslims to evacuate their homes and villages near Lebanon’s southern border while privately allowing Druze and Christian residents in the same area to remain; in Israel, some Tel Aviv residents gathered for a seder in a parking garage that was converted into a bomb shelter; and it was reported that only 37 out of 11,775 public shelters in Israel are situated in areas with significant numbers of Palestinians, who account for around 20 percent of the country’s population.3 4 5 The United States violated the Geneva Conventions, which protects “civilian objects,” by targeting Iran’s tallest bridge on the last day of Iranian New Year celebrations, killing at least 8; and, for at least the second time, President Donald Trump extended the timeline of his ultimatum for the Iranian government to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.6 7 The Trump Administration claimed that a judge’s order to halt at least $300 million in construction on a new White House ballroom would pose a security risk, as plans for the renovation included bomb shelters and medical facilities.8 9 “I’ll kill them until they kill me,” said a man who, after posting his plan to kill Trump to Facebook, was arrested in a standoff with law enforcement during which he brandished a sword.10 The U.S. defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, announced that no action would be taken against the U.S. Army personnel who conducted an allegedly unauthorized flight  to the Tennessee estate of the musician Kid Rock.11 It was reported that ICE agents would be stationed outside of the basic-training graduation events for Marines in Parris Island, South Carolina; and it was reported that public Quizlet flashcard sets leaked information about U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities, including codes to gain entrance to specific CBP premises, the federal charges appropriate to particular immigration offenses, and Spanish words common in Department of Homeland Security recruitment videos such as “the nation,” “the security,” and “the homeland.”12 13

NASA announced plans to bring nuclear reactors to the moon by 2030; it was reported that the aims of 47 startups that have collectively raised more than $8 billion to, among other things, build data centers in space, depend on SpaceX’s Starship megarocket, which has “burst into flames more than a dozen times,” not exploding.14 15 16 The heads of several scientific societies warned the U.S. Federal Communications Commission that the proposed use of reflective satellites by SpaceX and the startup Reflect Orbital to create “sunlight on demand” could wreak ecological havoc.17 SpaceX started the filing process for an initial public offering that is projected to propel its CEO, Elon Musk, to become the world’s first trillionaire.18 Four astronauts saw the far side of the moon as part of the first lunar mission in more than 50 years. “The darker parts just aren’t quite in the right place,” said one.19 NASA’s administrator admitted that all its missions are partially motivated by the search for extraterrestrial life, and a former congressman claimed that he was briefed on a secret alien-breeding program while he was in office.20 21 The U.S. vice president, J. D. Vance, revealed his belief that aliens are in fact demons. “One of the devil’s great tricks,” he said, “is to convince people he never existed.”22

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention paused testing for rabies, mpox, snail fever, and sloth fever, among other infectious diseases; after weeks of pressure from the Food and Drug Administration, the dairy producer Raw Farm recalled its cheddar cheese, which has been linked to nine cases of E. coli; and Swiss cheesemakers were permitted to add artificial holes to their Emmental cheese.23 24 25 It was reported that scholars at a Wisconsin university are using virtual-reality goggles that simulate cow vision to assist in the creation of meat-processing plants designed to reduce animal stress, and an ex-matador was fatally gored by a bull as he was preparing for a Pablo Picasso–themed Easter bullfight in Málaga.26 27 A man wearing an aureole of solar panels won San Francisco’s Hunky Jesus contest.28 A Democratic candidate for the Georgia State Senate ran an ad in the Atlanta Jewish Times wishing readers a “blessed Passover” and featuring a loaf of challah, a leavened bread traditionally foregone during the holiday.29 The nonprofit organization Coney Island USA exceeded multiple fundraising goals in an attempt to resolve an “urgent financial crisis” that provisionally threatened the occurrence of a 44th annual Mermaid Parade.30 A Ph.D. student in the Democratic Republic of the Congo proved that certain small fish are able to scale a fifty-foot waterfall using their barbed fins. “That would be like a salmon trying to make it over Niagara Falls,” said a fish ecologist, “or climb the CN Tower.”31 It was announced that the CN Tower will be lit up periwinkle in recognition of IBS Awareness Month.32 It was reported that the company Rancho Gordo sent cease-and-desist letters to at least two small bean purveyors soliciting members for their “bean clubs,” a term that the company trademarked in 2023. “We’re all a little mystified,” said a nonprofit CEO and recipient of the letter, “why the king of beans is coming after the small guy.”33 —Nova Meurice

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Traders bet a collective $580 million on oil markets fifteen minutes before the U.S. president announced his “productive” talks with Iranian officials to end the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran; it was reported that, since 2024, one trader won nearly $1 million in Polymarket bets that correctly predicted unannounced U.S. and Israeli military actions against Iran; the Iranian men’s national soccer team wore black armbands and held small schoolbags during pre-match ceremonies to protest the killing of more than 100 Iranian children in a U.S. military strike on an elementary school during the first day of the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran; and researchers recorded 1,443 Iranian civilian deaths, at least 217 of them children, in strikes on schools, hospitals, and other non-military infrastructure since the beginning of the war.1 2 3 4 “This,” said the secretary of defense in a cabinet meeting with U.S. officials, “is success … pure American success.”5 Police fired water cannons at student demonstrators in Chile who were protesting federal cuts to education funding, the former prime minister of Nepal was arrested for his alleged involvement in the deaths of more than 70 people during the country’s Gen Z–led anti-corruption protests last year, and a woman dressed as Lady Liberty was arrested in Los Angeles for her participation in a “No Kings” rally.6 7 8 The Israeli Knesset passed a death penalty bill for Palestinian detainees that would require those accused of “terrorist acts” be hanged; and in Hoboken, New Jersey, a 26-year-old member of a pro-Israel terrorist organization was arrested in connection with a plot to assassinate the leader of a pro-Palestine activist group.9 10 An official investigator of a recent plane crash at LaGuardia International Airport in New York City was stuck in a security line for three hours at a Houston airport en route to the site; airport food vendors worked with the City of Philadelphia Department of Aviation on the longest-ever line of cheesesteaks; a Secret Service agent assigned to protect the former First Lady Jill Biden accidentally shot himself in the leg at the Philadelphia International Airport; and House Republicans rejected a Senate bill that would have extended funding for the Transit Security Administration, among other divisions of the Department of Homeland Security.11 12 13 14 In Port Arthur, Texas, the explosion of an oil refinery forced nearby residents to shelter in place; it was reported that Ecuador’s bombing of what appeared to be a narcotics plant was, in fact, a dairy farm; an active warhead manufactured in the United States was detonated by Turkish authorities after it washed up on the shores of the Black Sea; and in the Pacific Northwest, a bright-green fireball burned in the early morning sky.15 16 17 18

The First Lady of the United States appeared alongside a humanoid robot at a White House education summit; two teenage boys received probation from a judge after using artificial intelligence to generate fake nude photos of their classmates; a New Mexico jury found Meta Platforms liable for $375 million for enabling child sexual exploitation on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp; it was announced that a teacherless K–8 school where students are taught exclusively by artificial intelligence for two hours per day will open in Chicago this fall; and an AI startup company that builds military drones raised $2 billion dollars in funding.19 20 21 22 23 Scientists announced that the population of 15,000 species of freshwater migratory fish dropped by an estimated 81 percent over the past 50 years; three bison were killed in Poland after being struck by a train named Bison; a truck containing 12 tons of KitKat chocolate bars was stolen during transit in Europe; a man in Thurston County, Washington, was arrested for the ninety-eighth time after stealing thousands of dollars in merchandise from local stores and leading officers on a high-speed car chase; researchers announced that human sperm struggles to navigate in space; and on Jupiter Island, Florida, the golfer Tiger Woods was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence after crashing his car.24 25 26 27 28 29

A Finnish circus performer pulled a 2,184-pound vehicle by his nipples, breaking the previous Guinness World Record; and Finland was named the happiest country in the world for the ninth year in a row by the World Happiness Report.30 31 32 Mayonnaise was classified as a musical instrument by university researchers in Newcastle, England; and near New Castle, Pennsylvania, officials warned the public about an annual game of “assassins” played by the local youth.33 34 A construction worker was found dead near the site of a LEGO factory in Prince George County, Virginia; and Iranian state media released a LEGO-themed, AI-generated rap video showing the U.S. president rolling dice at a craps table, sifting through a sea of skulls, and being buried alive.35 36 “This is the language in which Trump speaks,” a media professor commented. “And this is the language in which world leaders are now speaking to him.”37 —Gus O’Connor

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How has the experience of siblinghood been transposed into literature? In three famous examples, through the dramatic surrender of one’s life (Antigone), through species transformation (The Metamorphosis), or through simple erasure (In Search of Lost Time).  In the April issue of Harper’s Magazine, Christine Smallwood surveys these canonical texts and more; Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Adalbert Stifter’s Rock Crystal, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Jane Bowles’s “Camp Cataract” are just some of the many titles that she brings together. Her wide-ranging piece “Brothers and Sisters” attends to their infinitely varied portrayals of the “intimate difference” of the sibling relationships in fiction.

Recently, I caught up with Smallwood. We talked about how siblings figure in our development of an identity, reading sibling characters versus writing them, and yet more novels that didn’t make it into her essay. We also considered the meaning of living in a world increasingly bereft of siblings.

Jasmine Liu: As I grow older, I find that I think more and more about how I’m an only child. It’s become central to my identity. I wonder if birth order is something you’ve thought about more as you’ve grown older.

Christine Smallwood: I’m the younger child of two. In some ways, I have a lot of younger-child qualities, but my older sibling is not a classic older sibling. Older siblings are stereotypically responsible, parent-pleasing, overachieving, and that dynamic was not true in my family. Birth order doesn’t explain everything about my own sibling dynamic, but I can definitely see it play out with my children, and it’s obviously a real thing in the world.

Liu: This piece grew out of a class you taught at Columbia University. I’m curious about the genesis of that class, and how you designed the syllabus for it.

Smallwood: A few years ago, I was thinking about The Topeka School—Ben Lerner does not put his brother in this book that’s so clearly drawing on autobiography. That was a really noticeable alteration from life into literature. I thought about how different that book would have felt—and whether it could have worked—if there were two children in that family, or whether that book needed the protagonist to be an only child. 

Then the same topic came up when I wrote a short book about Chantal Akerman’s film La Captive. I consulted Marcel Proust for that; he takes his brother out of his autobiographical novel. I’ve been working for several years now on my own novel that has sibling dynamics in it. All of that stuff came together, and I designed a syllabus to teach at Columbia. A lot of the books on that syllabus were books that are mentioned in the essay. I just taught books that I wanted to read.

Some of the students in the class thought that they were going to read books about big families. I taught many books that were hothouse, two-children families. By the end of the semester, some of the students were like, We actually can’t take any more of these crazy, intense, claustrophobic, neurotic books. That was a completely fair critique from them. But I also taught memoir in that class. We read John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers, which is an amazing book, and  Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother, which is one of the best books about siblings that’s been written. 

Do you have a favorite book about siblings?

Liu: One novel that comes to mind is Howard’s End. That sibling relationship is the heart of the book; Margaret and Helen are such opposites. 

Your piece got some of us at Harper’s to read The Loser, which is one of these claustrophobic books.

Smallwood: When I got to the end of the piece, I did notice that there were a lot of really dark books. One of the best books about siblings, which I didn’t talk about in the piece, is Natalia Ginzburg’s All Our Yesterdays. It’s an extraordinary work with amazing characters and a narrative point of view that moves from person to person in a seamless way so you don’t even notice when the baton is being passed. She does some really interesting things with leitmotifs. She has these little tags for characters that keep coming back, like in music. I was sad I couldn’t do anything with it in the piece. A piece has its own life and its own prerogatives; there was no space for it.

Liu: You write about how siblings are really rich terrain for fiction, but I thought that perhaps siblings are the richest terrain for critics, because they’re marginal figures.

Smallwood: That would make sense. Because I came to the topic as a critic, right?

Liu: Do you think about siblings differently as a critic or as a reader, versus as a fiction writer?

Smallwood: As a writer, it feels very different than the parent-child relationship on the page. It’s a bigger betrayal to bring a sibling to life. It feels like this person who doesn’t deserve to be portrayed or drawn on, even—I’m not writing a work of memoir. But it feels more loaded to me. I would want to be extra careful. The sibling relationship is more fragile than other relationships, because it has that quality of being chosen or arbitrary. I say this in the essay, but there’s just no cultural mandate to be close to your siblings. Siblings can walk away from each other pretty easily. Of course, this is all just generalization and projection because you could come up with a million examples and counterexamples.

Liu: As your fact-checker, I noticed a comment you left in your draft regarding the Indian state of Kerala, which expanded its childcare program so as to free older sisters to go to school. I found that fascinating.

Smallwood: That’s something I learned from Juliet Mitchell’s book Siblings. She’s a feminist psychoanalyst. For a long time, psychoanalysis didn’t deal with siblings front and center; she really brought that relationship into the discipline. She says that people in the West would assume that sending young girls to school would be good for their mothers. But actually, it turned out to be good for their older sisters. This is really tricky terrain. I thought a lot about to what extent the piece would hold up to scrutiny—because these ideas about family relationships are so contingent and culturally determined.

Liu: You write about how, in the nineteenth century and before, large families were core to the novel. You wouldn’t have batted an eye as a reader if there were a family of four or more kids. There’s a lot of family-related anxiety in our political discourse having to do with the declining birth rate. What kinds of effects do you think this will have on fiction?

Smallwood: Doesn’t it feel like novels are getting lonelier, and that there are fewer people in them than there used to be? It’s hard to deal with a lot of characters. In a lot of the contemporary works of fiction that I read, people don’t have friends, or people are drifting from place to place, or they’re in their own minds. 

Liu: When we think about utopian rhetoric, oftentimes it’s framed in sibling rhetoric: brotherhood, fraternity. On the other hand, you quote Adam Phillips, who says that under socialism, siblings will just be friends, and that they won’t be defined by familial bond. Is utopia one big family, or does it get rid of the idea of family altogether?

Smallwood: I know that family abolition is a thing that people are into. I actually love the family. I love being in a family and having a family; destroying the family is not my politics, although I understand that it is an interesting politics that people have. Adam Shatz has an essay for the London Review of Books which mentions in passing that Martin Luther King Jr. used the rhetoric of brothers and sisters in the civil-rights movement whereas activists today use the rhetoric of “allyship.” I think there is something really hopeful about the idea of being so bonded to the people with whom you are in political struggle that you would consider them a family. That’s also probably because I grew up going to church, where you talk about being brothers and sisters in Christ. That rhetoric I still find very powerful.

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