The Atlantic

Iran, Not Trump, Is in Control of This War

2026-07-08T15:10:00-04:00

If Donald Trump ever had any control over the war he started with Iran, he’s lost it. The Iranians are now setting the terms of this conflict, and routinely humiliating the American president. The “cease-fire” Trump declared last month—a move probably meant to both soothe international markets and avert legislative action from the United States Congress—never really existed, because neither side ever ceased firing. The situation is now back to a kind of slow-motion punch-up: In the past few days, the Iranians struck three tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, the Americans attacked some 80 targets in Iran, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps now claims it hit some 85 U.S.-affiliated targets in Bahrain and Kuwait.

This morning, Trump was asked whether the memorandum of understanding with Iran, the document that was supposed to provide the foundation for negotiations, was dead. Trump hesitated a bit and said: “That’s a very interesting question. To me, I think it’s over. I don’t wanna deal with them anymore. They’re scum, you know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people. And they’re vicious, violent people.”

[Brynn Tannehill: America’s big mistake in Iran]

Last month, of course, Trump had nothing but nice things to say about the Iranian leaders. “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. And they were nice to deal with.” He described them as “strong people, smart people,” who were not “radicalized.” They were just loyal Iranians, “and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.” The MOU was practically an instrument of American capitulation that the Iranians could have drafted themselves, but Trump wanted to get out of the war, and so he signed it—appropriately enough, at Versailles.

The Iranians have made clear that they don’t care about the MOU or, for that matter, what Trump thinks or wants. They are willing to inflict more damage on the Gulf states, and they’re willing to accept damage in return. These are signs of a state directing a war rather than reacting to one. Iran is measuring costs and risks. It is pursuing the achievable goals of regime survival, control of the Strait, and preservation of its nuclear program.

The Trump administration, for its part, bumbled into this war without a strategy. Instead, it relied on bad assumptions, outdated information, and the president’s gut feelings. It assumed—because the president wished very hard—that the Iranian regime would collapse quickly. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (who encouraged Trump to go to war) ignored years of analysis and war-gaming from the military and the intelligence community, and then were caught flat-footed when the Iranians closed the strait and choked the international economy, the one thing everyone else in the world knew they would do. The administration has since tried to bomb its way out of this war, but without the ability to hold territory, the United States is now merely depleting its stocks of expensive ordnance to little strategic effect.

Even by his usual standards, Trump has been incoherent in Ankara, Turkey, where he’s attending a NATO summit. Over the course of 24 hours, he has renewed his demands for the United States to own Greenland; confused Iran with Japan; and confused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He also noted that his videos are popular on “Tic Tac.” He meant “TikTok.”

Little wonder, then, that he seems unable to give sensible answers to questions about the renewed hostilities. When asked today about more attacks on Iran, Trump said: “You know, normally I wouldn’t tell you. I wouldn’t tell you, but you know what, there’s not a thing they can do about it. So, the answer is probably.” Not exactly an answer full of fire and fury. “I’ll give them a little warning,” Trump said. “We’re going to hit them hard tonight, but we’ll see how it all works out.” In other words: I don’t know what else to do, so we’ll do some more strikes and then see what Iran does.

This is not the approach of a president who’s running a war; this is the flailing of a man who’s in over his head and is reacting to events, rather than guiding them. Lest this kind of equivocation lead the Iranians to doubt Trump’s resolve, the president has added that he’s still considering two other terrible ideas: an invasion of Iranian territory, and a campaign of probable war crimes.

First, he has returned to talking about seizing Kharg Island, an operation that would require a considerable commitment of ground forces and inevitably lead to U.S. casualties. Second, he has again raised the possibility of striking Iran’s infrastructure, including bridges and desalination plants. Such installations, if they are significantly contributing to Iran’s military effort, might be considered legitimate targets. Trump, however, seems to have in mind immiserating the civilian population as a means of driving the regime to the table—which would be a serious violation of the laws of war.

[Arash Azizi: Canada should start talking with Iran]

Fortunately, Trump is unlikely to do any of this. Hours after his various responses, he was asked if the war was back on in full force. His answer was revealing about his limited ability to control the circumstances of the conflict, and a clear signal to the Iranians not to worry about anything he says, because he’ll always change his mind.

I think anything that happens is going to be over very quickly, and we’ll only make it safer, including for oil. Oil is going to be very free, very easy, and it’s going to happen very fast. We have the Hormuz Strait; the boats have pulled out. I mean there’s a gusher of oil right now, we have a lot of oil.

The United States does not, in fact, “have the strait” at this moment. At any rate, Trump capped these remarks by assuring his audience, and perhaps even those listening in Tehran: “We’re not looking for long term.”

I taught strategy at the Naval War College to military officers and senior civilians for a long time. The subject does not have a lot of hard-and-fast rules; wars share common characteristics but each conflict has its own peculiarities and exigent circumstances. One good guideline, however, is to avoid threatening your enemy and then immediately announcing that you really have no stomach for a fight. Strong leaders keep their own counsel and let their actions speak for them; weak leaders make threats and then broadcast how much they don’t want to carry them out.

Trump is now going through something like the stages of wartime grief: Denial that America failed; anger, which has led to renewed attacks; and then bargaining, as if the Iranians could somehow be bought off like a gang of recalcitrant construction workers in New York. None of it has worked.

Depression and acceptance await.

What Is the Point of Patriot Front?

2026-07-08T13:25:22-04:00

On America’s 250th anniversary, a large group of men in khaki caps and white face masks, their navy button-down shirts tucked into khaki pants, were struggling to navigate the turnstiles of D.C.’s public-transit system. “Just give it a minute and try again!” yelled their leader, Thomas Rousseau. At another point, he shouted, “Get another card!” Dozens of members of Patriot Front stood in front of him and stared at the polycarbonate gates of the Metro system. A Metro staff member offered advice. “Country boys, goodness!” Rousseau said with a folksy twang to no one in particular, according to footage posted by the online media outlet News2Share.

On one of their rides, the men were photographed standing around a Black woman, the only person unmasked in the crowd—an image that captured the depth of the nation’s divisions amid all the celebrations of 250 years of independence. Patriot Front is an ethno-nationalist group founded after the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that calls for the United States to become a white ethno-state. The roughly 400 men who emerged from the bowels of the Metro and marched through the city’s streets likely represented the largest gathering of white nationalists in the nation’s capital since January 6, 2021, and most likely the group’s largest gathering ever.

Cheney Orr / Reuters

A commuter sits as Patriot Front members ride the Metro on the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence in Washington, D.C.

The demonstration was, in some ways, a nonevent. Unlike with other far-right groups that seek out confrontation or to counterprotest, Patriot Front’s activities appear designed entirely for shock value and to create moments that are widely viewed online—the images are the point. It wasn’t even the group’s first tussle with the Washington Metro. When some of its members came to D.C. in January, they got on the wrong train, and at least one member was detained for going through a turnstile without paying. Patriot Front’s other chief notoriety comes from packing members in the back of U-Haul trucks after a 2025 march in Kansas City, Missouri, prompting the company to ban several of its members for violating U-Haul’s rental policy.

So a group of white nationalists hiding behind masks periodically shows up in the nation’s capital, struggles to navigate basic public transportation, and walks around taking videos of themselves. How much should we worry?

Reuters

Hundreds of masked members of the white-nationalist group Patriot Front marched through parts of Washington, D.C., on Saturday, ahead of the Independence Day festivities planned for the evening.

Few on the far right take Patriot Front seriously.

Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, called Patriot Front’s Saturday march “cringe and theatrical” on X. He told me over the phone that the only point he could see of Patriot Front marches was self-promotion. The Proud Boys are, in many ways, comparable to Patriot Front. They’re both far right in their ideology (Tarrio noted that he disagrees with Patriot Front on some issues, adding, “I don’t vibe with their ethno-nationalism”), and they have both frequently held in-person demonstrations, unlike other far-right groups that seem to congregate almost exclusively online, such as the Groypers.

Tarrio said that the difference between the Proud Boys and Patriot Front is that the Proud Boys used to show up for more than a photo op. (The Proud Boys’ activities are now much more limited than they were five years ago.) “When the Proud Boys would go somewhere, they’d usually ask themselves, ‘What are we doing here? Are we hosting a rally? Should we do private detail?’” Tarrio explained. His goal was to get into fights with anti-fascists, or otherwise intimidate opponents.

It’s possible that Patriot Front’s relative inaction is part of a deliberate strategy: lay low and avoid the sort of legal and financial trouble that Tarrio and the Proud Boys faced over January 6 and other activities. After the Proud Boys vandalized a Black church’s property in 2020, the church was awarded the Proud Boys’ trademark in the ensuing legal battle, depriving the group of an important source of income: merchandise sales. The church briefly used the trademark to sell shirts with the Proud Boys logo and the phrase Stay Proud, Stay Black, and said it would donate the proceeds to a community-justice fund.

Patriot Front’s focus on the internet is evident in the melodramatic and platitude-laden, nationalist rhetoric Rousseau used in a speech after the Washington event. “So we stand on the turning of an age and the making or breaking of our nation’s destiny, and we must ask ourselves under the watchful gaze of history, ‘What is to be done?’” he said in front of Union Station. “So dire is our circumstance, so extreme is our condition of peril that the only way to secure our existence is to become all that we aspire to be.” Aside from mentioning “Jewish cabals,” “foreigners which have invaded our land,” “Anglo-Saxon blood,” and “ethnic replacements,” Rousseau laid out little of the group’s plans.

He said that one can “read our policy on the calluses of our hands, the scars on our backs, and the sweat of our brow.” One can also read it in leaked chats and records obtained by ProPublica, Southern Poverty Law Center, and other organizations. Some examples: Joffre Cross, a Patriot Front member, once posted on VK, a Russian social-media platform: “Help more bees; plant more trees; save the seas; shoot refugees.” He has also posted Nazi videos and Holocaust-denial content. Other Patriot Front members post fawningly about Hitler and, as the SPLC describes it, “share violent imagery about Black people, migrants, LGBTQ people, and Jews.”

The entire project is a performance of sorts. (It’s in the name, Patriot Front.) Patriot Front is a pretend paramilitary. Members often carry shields to their marches, but given that they tend to show up in the middle of the night, unannounced, and rarely counterprotest at events, the shields’ purpose is unclear.

Cheney Orr / Reuters

Members of Patriot Front wait to board the Metro on the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence, in Washington, D.C.

Rousseau wears his own special costume. Instead of the khaki baseball hat worn by the cadres, he sports a rotating set of khaki-colored headwear: a flat-brim Boss of the Plains hat; a more conventional western hat; and a classic cowboy hat. He often affixes a red, white, and blue cockade to them. He sometimes wears patches that look vaguely militaristic. And he seems to slip in and out of a southern drawl. (He didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Clips of the group’s march in Washington, as well as its befuddlement with the subway, went viral. They were pushed by the group on a Telegram channel dedicated to their activities, which include other marches and handing out Patriot Front flyers and stickers. The channel also posted screenshots of mentions of the march on Twitter and in media outlets, along with a recruitment link.

Even people who agree with many of Patriot Front’s views are skeptical of its sincerity. Nick Fuentes, the white-supremacist commentator, said on his nightly livestream that although “I imagine that I probably agree” with Patriot Front “on 90 percent of things,” the group’s tactics are misplaced. “They’re doing a choreographed performance,” he said. “What does that actually achieve? What is that directed towards? What is the goal? How does that actually produce change?” Many on the right don’t even accept the Patriot Front as their own. “I call fake. Looks more like antifa in costume,” the Fox News personality Laura Ingraham wrote on X about a video of Patriot Front in Washington. Her post received 22,000 likes, and Elon Musk—who regularly boosts white-supremacist perspectives—and Joe Rogan have made similar claims about the group being a false-flag operation.

Patriot Front’s affect might be risible, but that doesn’t mean the group shouldn’t be taken seriously. When its members aren’t marching, they are trying to construct a “parallel society,” Jacob Wagner of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an anti-extremism think tank, told me. “They’re building their own gyms and business networks for individuals who share their view.” Mixed martial arts, in particular, has become an organizing focus. Working with Active Clubs—a network of neo-Nazi and white-supremacist fighting groups—Patriot Front has expanded its network and recruitment reach. The group also has a 124-acre compound in East Tennessee that members use for pseudo-military training and fights.

This kind of activity is why extremism experts are still concerned about the organization’s 400-person July 4 demonstration. “It’s big,” Wagner said. “Nothing else comes even close to that,” when compared with other organized white-supremacist groups.

“These guys themselves are not the prime example of the threat,” Jon Lewis, a researcher at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, told me, pointing to the fact that they rarely get into physical altercations. “It’s what they represent. Groups like Patriot Front have lowered the barrier to entry into extremism for young disaffected white men.”

Indeed, Lewis noted, its rhetoric at times has been similar to that employed by the Trump administration, pointing to a spate of neo-Nazi-tinged posts on the Department of Homeland Security’s social-media accounts earlier this year. “The messaging of Patriot Front isn’t that different than the tweets that come out of DHS,” he said. “There are individuals in this administration that use the exact same rhetoric.”

Cross-pollination between Patriot Front and even more extreme neo-Nazi organizations has already happened. Before going to Patriot Front, Kieran Patrick Morris had attempted to join the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi accelerationist group whose members have been accused of several murders and terrorist plots. Another member, Ian Michael Elliott, once trained at a jiu-jitsu gym affiliated with the Wolves of Vinland, a Virginia-based white-nationalist group.

Having several hundred members is tiny in the grand scheme of politics, but it’s still notable on the extremist fringes. If nothing else, Patriot Front offers sympathetic groups intent on violence a valuable pool of potential recruits.

Is the Left Driving Women Away?

2026-07-08T13:00:00-04:00

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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum discusses the recent allegations toward Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner. David warns Democrats that if they don’t exercise caution with candidate selection, they risk losing winnable races in the 2026 midterm elections.

Then, David is joined by Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, to discuss an increasing hostility toward women manifesting itself in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. David and Shannon discuss misogyny on the left and right wings of American politics, increasing voter rancor to the perceived “establishment,” and the possibility of a Tea Party–style movement brewing on the left.

Finally, David discusses Killing Baby Hitler by Michael Tomasky and the dangers of “alternative history” as an intellectual exercise.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Frum: Welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Shannon Watts: political activist, organizer, founder of the gun-safety group Moms Demand Action. The book under discussion this week will be Killing Baby Hitler by Michael Tomasky. But before either the dialogue or the book discussion, some opening thoughts on the discussion you are about to hear.

My dialogue with Shannon Watts was recorded two weeks ago. The dialogue addressed generally some troublesome attitudes toward women in the progressive world. Shannon, a formidable progressive organizer and activist, had spoken forcefully about her concerns on social media, and on her Substack and in her podcast.

One of the matters Shannon and I touched on in our dialogue was the case of Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for Maine’s 2026 Senate seat. At that time, The New York Times had recently reported on a number of women who suffered “unsettling behavior” by Platner, including one woman who went on the record detailing that Platner had grabbed her hard enough to leave marks and on one occasion locked her in a room.

Of this charge, Platner told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes: “Anything alleging physicality, anything alleging that I knew what my tattoo was, these are the statements of someone who is politically motivated.” People close to the story suspected and communicated that this was probably not the end of allegations against Platner. But suspicions are only that, and Shannon and I took care to restrict our discussion to the published record as it then was.

On Monday, July the 6th, Politico published a report that alleges that Platner sexually assaulted a named woman. Platner denies this allegation as well. He says that any allegation of nonconsensual behavior is, “categorically untrue.” Platner has suspended campaign events. Maine law allows another week for Maine Democrats to replace Platner on the ballot.

These new developments bring into fuller view some questions that could only linger in the shadows when Shannon and I spoke. These new developments also make more urgent the topic of my conversation with Shannon. The red flags waving so brightly today were fully visible a month ago. Platner’s promoters were excited by his transgressive personality. It is not credible that they are surprised by his transgressions.

To hold President Trump to account, Congress must change hands in November. But there is unfortunately a faction of Democratic progressives who are much more energized by their factional fights than by the defense of American democracy. In 2018, the anti-Trump coalition won House seats like George H. W. Bush’s former seat in Houston, Newt Gingrich’s former seat in suburban Atlanta, and Eric Cantor’s seat near Richmond, Virginia. As we head into 2026, however, and 2028, the presidential year, some progressive Democrats have decided that 2018 and President Biden’s success in 2020 represent failure, not success. They want a smaller, more ideological coalition defined by disillusionment with the American economic system and hostility to the state of Israel. To date, they have had some success in nomination fights in ultra-blue House districts where the winner of the Democratic primary is virtually guaranteed to win the general election.

Those fights don’t gain any additional seats for the anti-Trump coalition. On the other hand, they don’t put seats at immediate risk either, except indirectly by tainting the broader national anti-Trump coalition brand with the extreme ideology and sometimes off-putting personal records of some of these factional progressive candidates.

But the Senate is a different story. The path to beating the Trump majority in the Senate is difficult and narrow. There is no margin of safety for the anti-Trump coalition. Yet progressive Democrats, for factional motives, put the Maine Senate seat at risk by nominating Platner, and Michigan Democrats seem determined to replicate the same mistake, or worse, in a state that voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

Democrats should learn a lesson from the negative example of their Republican adversaries. Over the past decade and a half, Republicans have thrown away winnable Senate seat after winnable Senate seat by bad candidate choices. Remember the “I am not a witch” lady, who threw away Delaware’s seat for the Republicans in 2010? Remember the “women don’t get pregnant from ‘legitimate’ rape” candidate in Missouri in 2012? Remember Mark Robinson, Herschel Walker, Richard Mourdock, and Roy Moore? Remember how you, if a Democrat, shook your head at a Republican Party that got captured by crazy people? Remember how you wondered why responsible Republicans so easily surrendered their party to fanatics, grifters, racists, anti-Semites, crackpots, and sexual abusers? How you vowed that I’d never allow that to happen to my party? I have news for you. It is happening to your party. Not everywhere in your party, but in enough places to lose the Senate in 2026 and put at risk the presidency for 2028. This is your time for testing and time for choosing. What are you going to do about it before it’s too late?

And now my dialogue with Shannon Watts.

[Music]

Frum: The day after the Sandy Hook school massacre, Shannon Watts posted a message of grief and fury on her Facebook page. That single post launched Moms Demand Action and made Shannon Watts one of the country’s most powerful voices for gun safety. She led the organization for 11 years before stepping down to throw herself into Democratic Party organizing. In 2024, she convened what was billed as the largest Zoom gathering in history, mobilizing over 200,000 voters and raising more than $11 million for Kamala Harris. Her 2025 book, Fired Up, was an instant New York Times and USA Today bestseller. She has since extended the themes of that book into her Firestarter University and her in-person bonfire communities nationwide. Her 2019 debut book, Fight Like a Mother, told how a stay-at-home mother of five in a blended family remade herself into one of the most dynamic forces in American politics today. Shannon Watts, thank you so much for joining me today.

Shannon Watts: It’s an honor, David. Thank you.

Frum: So I want to talk about—this is one of your big themes now—the role of women in politics: what women add to politics when they are present, what women subtract from politics when they are not included on an equal basis. And I want to start this with a very pretty specific focus.

Now, we all know—we all should know, we all can see—that male resentment is one of the bulwarks of power that President Trump has used and mobilized. It’s a big theme, maybe even more explicit with his vice president, J. D. Vance, who has derided women in so many of the interviews that got him to Trump’s attention and made him the vice president. Sex, gender: big, big source of power and recruitment for the MAGA movement.

But one of the things—I’m a follower of you on Twitter, X—and I notice you are becoming uncomfortably aware of similar kinds of emotions in the liberal and progressive world. I’m not a native of that world. I didn’t grow up with that politics. So maybe you could explain to me what you think is going on. What are the tensions and flashpoints that you see going on in the liberal, progressive world between men and women’s power?

Watts: Well, you know—just to go back to the beginning—when I started Moms Demand Action, the reason I did that was because when you looked around at who had the levers of power at their disposal, it was not women, right? It was the gun lobby. Which, the average gun owner in this country is a white man over the age of 50. And to take on the wealthiest, most powerful special interest that’s ever existed, I felt intuitively would involve women. And that’s because women are so often expected to be moral and effective, and if you look at activism throughout the centuries in this country, you know, you’ll see that it’s often women who are at the forefront. All the way from Prohibition, when women were allowed to advocate for something that was considered sort of a Christian value, and, really—that toothpaste could never be put back in the tube, right? All the way up to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

And I was inspired by Mothers Against Drunk Driving: this group of angry, outraged women whose souls had been insulted by the fact that people were drinking and driving with impunity and just ruining lives. And so when I started Moms Demand Action, I just felt intuitively that it was women who were the right people to take on this mostly male gun lobby. And I think that was borne out.

When they saw us coming, they were either very excited or very scared. (Laughs.) Which is exactly, right, the emotion that you want. And I felt that tension immediately. Not just in the zeitgeist, right? I mean, I immediately started getting threats of death and sexual violence—not just me, but our volunteers—from men. And I expected gun extremists to be upset that women were advocating for what they felt was curtailing their rights, what we felt was making society safer and more free.

But there was also this interesting dynamic in our own party: of men feeling like we needed to be ideologically pure, that we need to just share our network and our capabilities with them, and a lot of criticism when it came to wanting more power. I saw that play out certainly online in the election. When Hillary Clinton was a candidate and there were all these Bernie bros who were, again, angry about sort of the need for ideological purity. And I think it also came down to women having too much power.

And I’ve just seen that intensify over the years. And here we are now in 2026, and I think in part because Donald Trump is president—and because misogyny has been so widely embraced, and because we’re having so many conversations about masculinity—we are becoming beholden to this idea that it’s dangerous when they do it; it’s necessary when we do it. And it just seems to be bleeding into our party.

Frum: Can you give some specifics of how you see this working? There seems to be something about this that is quite reminiscent of MAGA world. Language, attitudes of violence and dismissal. Comments on women’s physical appearance, if they’re not attractive enough or too attractive. It seems maybe this is a phenomenon of the online world only, but it seems to be playing a powerful force. And you see it in many, many of the primary contests of the 2026 season.

Watts: I agree with that. I mean, I thought in 2016 we would all be on the same page: that it was important to finally have a woman president, that Hillary Clinton was perhaps the most qualified person who’d ever run in our nation’s history, and that men, particularly on our side, would be supportive of that. And instead what we saw was a lot of backlash or a lot of criticism. As we all know, sexism, misogyny, means that women can never be qualified enough and never smart enough, never attractive enough. And again, I think that’s sort of expected—

Frum: Or possibly too smart and too attractive. That’s also bad.

Watts: (Laughs.) That as well, right? It’s the double bind. The tension that I’ve seen very specifically is that if women are allowed to be ambitious, strategic, flawed, but most of all pragmatic. Women are not allowed—women are the backbone of the Democratic Party, and particularly Black women. And they’re very well known to be moderate, to be pragmatic, to understand and be able to tolerate incrementalism, which is such a dirty word.

It used to be just sort of between the younger and the older generations, but now I see it between moderates and centrists and what is called the left. And this idea that we are letting perfectionism be the enemy of good. And that you have to be ideologically perfect and pure in order to be accepted and appreciated.

Now, that said, the interesting part of this is I think you could make that argument about someone like AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]. And yet recently she has been under attack by people on the left, mostly men, who see her as having betrayed them for even being 10 percent less ideologically pure than they are.

You know, I will just say that I have been shocked to watch my party embrace what I believe is blue MAGA. And the amount of hate and vitriol I have endured online, on X, because of my opposition to Graham Platner; that has been equally shocking to me. This man is clearly immoral, unethical; he’s untrustworthy, he’s untested, he’s unvetted. And he is not qualified. I believe in redemption as much as any other person. I believe that when someone says they’re sorry, when someone has regrets, that we should support them and that they have another chance to make amends and to live a good life. That doesn’t mean they deserve a seat in one of the most powerful political bodies in the world. But I think for me this was the true wake-up call that the Democratic Party was in significant trouble. Is in significant trouble.

And to disagree with this person who has become the candidate is as though you are committing treason, or you are a traitor to the party. And I’ve been told—again, you read my introduction. I started the largest nonprofit in the nation. I raised $11 million for Kamala Harris. I’m a lifelong Democrat who’s never voted for a Republican. I’m significantly to your left. I’m basically a leftist, but do not want to be a part of that wing of the party. And yet I’m being told I might as well become a Republican.

Frum: Well, I’ve lived through this very much in the Republican world, in the days of the Tea Party. And I wrote a blog post on the day that the Affordable Care Act passed the House and was on its way therefore to the Senate and to the president’s signature. One of the points I made in this article was: We have a rule in the Republican Party of 2010, ’12 that the far right can say anything it wants about the non–far right. And there are no limits on their tactics. And they can primary them, they can do anything. But there’s no reciprocal right.

And not only that, but—this is the thing that got me into a lot of trouble—that you can’t even say to them, Your tactics were misguided. Because there was this big argument at the time. Should you negotiate over the Affordable Care Act and try to get—I mean, Obama was signaling he was prepared to give away a lot of stuff to get this signature measure through the Senate and House. Should you negotiate with that, or should you fight to the end? And the argument was made: Fight to the end. And the argument failed, and they got nothing. And the Affordable Care Act passed and remains the law of the land to this day, with many subtractions of funding by the Trump administration, but still there. Who made this rule that the criticism can go one way but never the other way?

And that seems to be very much what is going on in the Democratic Party. It’s not treason for Graham Platner to challenge Janet Mills. You know, he’s allowed to do that. And for the people who like Janet Mills better, either for pragmatic reasons or moral reasons, to say, We don’t trust you, and we don’t like you. Oh, well—now the ratchet has closed, and you owe us a duty of loyalty that we would never give to you.

Watts: I think that’s what’s so interesting about what we’re seeing, and we don’t know if it’ll work yet. I suspect that it won’t. But, as you know, the saying goes: Politics is a game of addition and not subtraction. And the left is so rabid on its insistence that we support these unqualified, untested primary candidates. And their vitriol is pushing people away.

And in particular, I believe it’s pushing women away. And even more specifically, women who are my age, right? Women who are over 50, women who are swing voters, women who will, by the way, determine the election outcome in Maine. And I don’t know how you bring a party together. I don’t know how a person wins if their whole strategy is to alienate the most important voters and then angrily expect them to vote for them in the general election.

And to your point: Democracy depends on self-restraint. And if our argument is that by copying Donald Trump’s anti-institutional behaviors, learning from his strategic strengths, that’s fine. But I think the central idea here is whether Democrats can be more forceful the way that Donald Trump is, while still preserving the norms and institutions that they say are worth protecting. But I guess I’m starting to question that.

Frum: As you and I speak, Vice President Vance has just released a new memoir. I don’t have a copy of it yet, and I haven’t read it. But according to the reports that I’ve seen, he has expressed some measure of regret, self-criticism—maybe self-criticism more than regret—for his remark that women who didn’t vote Republican were childless cat ladies. And I remember when he made this before he, I think, entered the Senate. He was doing a lot of right-wing podcasts. And one of the things—I watched him say it—one of the things that struck me is just the cruelty of the remark. That there are a lot of childless people who don’t want to be childless. And, I mean, there are many childless people who do, but there are many who don’t. And it reflects some kind of medical tragedy or personal tragedy, or the loss of a child in some way, or the loss of a pregnancy.

And it’s not something that people who seek political office would normally make a joke about—a demeaning joke about. So why would you make fun of this? But he did, because that’s maybe less his nature than what he cynically judged the nature of the audience he wanted to be. Well, I’m seeking the votes of cruel people, so I perform cruel, and then I’ll get the votes of cruel people. And indeed it has worked out for him. And now he has his eye on a higher audience, where the cruel people don’t have the decisive vote, and so he retracts the remark.

But that instinct, that kind of behavior—that’s not unique to any one political faction in the country.

Watts: No. And you know, as Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark astutely pointed out, every single focus group she does about J. D. Vance, the one thing that comes up among conservative and progressive women alike is that comment that he made. And it’s sort of indelibly, I think, in all of our minds—certainly to me, as a woman—disqualifies him from being president. I don’t think the apology is heartfelt. I think it’s pragmatic.

I’m the mom of five children, four of whom are now grown women, ages 29 to 37. None of them are married. None of them have children. They’re all very successful, bright, happy people. And they were incredibly insulted. They’re not even that politically active. And yet that resonated with them. This idea that they were less than, or unhappy, or not equal citizens because they don’t have children, because they don’t have partners, was incredibly offensive.

And I think it will be so fascinating to watch, because obviously Donald Trump won. And so these behaviors, these comments, didn’t necessarily impact him, even with Republican women who voted for him. But the more we see this play out—the more it infects our society, the more it becomes a problem in both parties—the more I wonder if there will be a backlash.

Frum: And what do you mean by that?

Watts: Finally women saying, This is enough. You’re talking about taking away our right to vote. You’re talking about valuing trad wives. You are talking about going back to sort of 1950s ideals for what and who women are. And that’s just not going to resonate in this day and age. I’m hopeful we’ll see that in each voting election. I’m particularly disappointed about how white women vote. But I think as women get more power and become more disgusted by the fact that this isn’t just political; it’s becoming part of our mainstream. It’s infecting our families and our workplaces, because it was allowed. And it started off as something that seemed like a joke, or seemed like an extreme part of the culture. Has actually become more embedded in the fabric of our society.

Frum: Yeah. Well, it may be that there are things that are bigger than politics. So you know, in the world of 1955—when there’s still lots of jobs in steel mills and assembly lines and factories, and the rewards to physical strength were great, and the rewards to education were comparatively low—even if the woman finished high school and got some college and her partner did not, he still could get a unionized job in a factory that paid more than her job as a file clerk or a teacher, maybe. And so the man offered more economic clout; the woman would offer soft skills, would offer agreeableness. The man didn’t have to be so agreeable, and the partnership worked, or it didn’t. But the partnership was formed.

And I think as we’ve seen the returns to education are rising, and women are succeeding better at getting the education. In the age of artificial intelligence, I think probably what will rise even faster are returns to soft skills, agreeableness. The computer will be able to answer all our questions, but it may not do so in a way that other human beings want the questions answered. And so the ability to work in groups and to work well with others. And again, these are classically, and I think probably more fundamentally, excellences at which women have fared better than men.

And as men lag behind, progressive men feel the shift in the sexual marketplace just as much as conservative men do.

Watts: Yeah; I agree with that assessment. And I also think that women have become—if you look at female power, right, women power—that liberal women in particular have become influential, more so than maybe on the conservative side. In media, in philanthropy, in nonprofits and academia, advocacy organizations, electoral politics. And I think ultraprogressive men are just so deeply suspicious of institutions and power structures. And so when women become visible leaders in these institutions, they become these symbolic targets.

But I think what we’ve seen on the left is that, like, this ideological purity becomes the source of social capital. When you publicly criticize prominent liberal women, it’s a way of signaling your credentials, your moral seriousness. And it’s not necessarily about the woman itself. I think it functions as a performance for an audience.

Which brings us to the other point—which is there is something in 2026 that there wasn’t in 2016. Which is an economic incentive to behave this way online. I think Hasan Piker is a perfect example of this. He has said some of the most outrageously misogynistic, bigoted, racist, dangerous things. And he’s rewarded for that. And when you get rewarded for that—for likes, for clicks, for money, whatever that is—I think it’s very damaging and corrosive.

Frum: And who builds these systems to reward this kind of behavior?

Watts: (Laughs.) It’s a great question. I mean, look; obviously it’s male leaders. Whether they’re in our country—you know, something I learned while working in gun safety is that a lot of the chaos created online is by foreign entities who know the buzzwords to get us arguing amongst ourselves. Including guns, including abortion. That those things just become sort of this way to outrage and anger people.

And then again, the people in our own country who are funding those things—everyone from Elon Musk to other prominent people both on the right and left, right? Who are investing in what’s now called the manosphere.

Frum: What goes through your mind when you hear the phrase—and we hear it a little less than we did a few years ago, but we still hear it—when you hear the phrase or word Karen? What goes through your mind?

Watts: (Laughs.) It’s interesting, because there’s no similar derogatory term necessarily for men. And I think what’s so funny is—as progressively liberal as I am, as accomplished as I am in the Democratic Party—I think most men on the left and women would consider me a Karen. In part because I haven’t made, you know, Israel my entire identity. But I believe that that is just misogyny masquerading as political righteousness.

Frum: Can I dig a little deeper on that? Because as I remember the origin of the term—and it’s probably now a decade old, maybe a little older—that the character, the paradigmatic, characteristic activity of the Karen, was asking to see the manager after she felt ill-used. And you think, Well, if you feel ill-used, why shouldn’t you? And maybe you’re wrong, and maybe you’re oversensitive. There are oversensitive people.

There are also people who have been genuinely been ill-used and have a right—and why, as you say, there is no term for a man who maybe is too picky about what he asked for and demands some kind of satisfaction? We don’t have a word for that. We can describe the behavior, but we don’t mock it. But there’s something about “the woman should have just accepted the ill use and not complained.”

Watts: Yeah. I mean, you’re sort of touching on something else, which is how the pendulum has swung back and forth. Obviously 2020, and after the murder of George Floyd and during the pandemic in a post-polarized, post–social media world, I think that what we saw online and in real life, the pendulum swung very far to one side. And now it has swung to the other side. And the hope is that it comes to the middle, but it still seems to be stuck, I think, in such backlash to what was seen as “the Karens” of 2020.

And I’m as guilty as anyone, I think, of having participated in “wokeism.” But I think to look at it with scorn or regret is to not see—that is how progress is made. That you go far to one side and then the other, and eventually you come to the middle. But I worry that the lesson that we’ve learned from the last 10 years is that in order to have power, we must debase ourselves. And for me, that includes buying into the misogynistic tropes that we’re talking about.

Frum: You mentioned Israel a moment ago. Without shifting our discussion too far in that direction, one thing I wonder that is going on in the progressive-versus-liberal world is now—this doesn’t have to be true, but it does seem to be true that since October 7th—a lot of the anti-Israel passion has expressed itself in acts of symbolic violence that often spill over into intimidation, harassment, and actual violence. And human beings find violence very exciting. The Coliseum stayed in business for 500 years, bums in seats twice a week, watching people hack each other to death. There’s something about us that is, God forgive us, that evolved to enjoy that. And there’s something about the spectacle of violence that is exciting. Your basketball team wins, you set a school bus on fire. I don’t know why that seems like the right—why you’re not all dancing, I don’t know, but setting a school—but there’s something about it. But there’s something about this story since October 7th of 2023 where you have unleashed this kind of politics. And am I overgeneralizing if I say that men tend to find symbolic violence and edging into actual violence more exciting than women do?

Watts: No; that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. Look, I’ve watched this—without going, as you said, like this isn’t the point of the conversation—but I will just tell you that, you know, I had a close group of five pretty famous friends. And all Democrats, all incredibly progressive. And what happened on October 7th just blew our friend group apart, because half of them were radicalized to be anti-Israel, and the other bordered on being Islamophobic. And I just have watched this all unfold and being incredulous about how it has, I think, impacted our party. I’m not Jewish. I’m Gen X, and I was raised to believe that Israel was a paragon and a democracy. Shining example of democracy in the Middle East, and felt about it the same way that I felt about America. And just because Donald Trump is our leader and a horrible leader—and I believe [Benjamin] Netanyahu is not a good leader either, but that doesn’t mean the entire country shouldn’t exist.

And it’s been shocking to me to watch what—I believe this is a psyop, what we’re seeing so many on the left fall for. That it has just become their entire identity. And it’s impacting local races, where these elected officials will have no jurisdiction over what’s happening in Israel or what’s happening on a on a national or global level. And it’s just bizarre to me to watch this become a litmus test for the candidates in our party.

Frum: I had the opportunity to just listen to one of the real rising talents in the Democratic Party. This was a private group, so I won’t use his name, but a real rising star and who comes from a purple area. And somebody in the group asked him—what was the secret of success running for office, a federal office, in a purple area? And his answer was: Run for the federal office as if you were running for mayor. Know every local problem. Know every local constituency, know where every school is, know where every school crossing is, know where every hospital is, know every crop that’s grown. Know everything, and be the advocate of every important interest group in your constituency as if you were running for mayor. And I think a lot of the new progressivism say, No! No, run as if running for Secretary General of the United Nations. And you know, Cars are whizzing through the school crossing. Well, the answer is, We need more focus on Palestine.

Watts: Exactly.

Frum: Maybe a speed camera to enforce the 15-mile-an-hour limit. More Palestine.

Watts: Yes. And that’s been bizarre to me to watch. Because I don’t know how you criticize what’s happened on the right and not see that it’s happening in your own party, and that you perhaps have bought into it yourself.

Frum: For me, having again lived through the Tea Party experience, one of the things about the Tea Party years, and then into the Trump years. And there’s so many camps. Mark Robinson in North Carolina—remember him? That one of the ways of proving that: People say, Are you one of those, like—are you a real MAGA person? Are you one of those opportunistic party regulars who used to like Romney and now likes Trump? We can’t really trust you. One of the ways we know you’re for real is if you’ve done something really horrible in your personal life. Have you stolen some money, perhaps, or cheated a client, or abused a woman, or been married to two different people at the same time? Because unless you’ve done something like that, we don’t feel we can trust you.

And that’s what the whole [John] Cornyn–versus–[Ken] Paxton race has been about. You don’t share the politics of either man, but imagine you did; say, what if you believed in, you wanted lower taxes and more highways, less mass transit. What’s wrong with John Cornyn? Did the job, reputable person, shows up to work every day. No scandals ever in his career. But how can you trust him if there are no scandals in his career?

Watts: David, when you say this, and you bring up having witnessed the rise of the Tea Party, it brings up for me—you and I had, I don’t know if you remember this, but we had coffee in Washington, D.C.

Frum: I do.

Watts: And I was, you know, in the midst of Moms Demand Action. Probably right in the middle of it. And we were talking about guns. And I asked you—you know, as you watched the Republican Party embrace gun extremism—what was that like, and what were you thinking?

And I hope I’m not out of turn by saying what you said to me. But it was basically like: We accepted that as sort of “This wasn’t a big deal; this was a minor thing; we’ll just let this go because there’s so many other priorities we have that are more important.” And little by little it became this bigger monster.

And so two things, I guess I would say, is like: How do you see that now in the context of where we are? But also, don’t you think Democrats are in danger of the same thing? Just sort of ignoring things that seem less insidious that quickly get out of control.

Frum: I do remember that conversation very vividly, and you were very nice to make time for me. And I think if I remember what my answer was, my own view: If you’d stopped me in 1996 and said, What do you think of the gun issue? I’d say, Well, I think if you want a long gun of any kind, you should be able to have it. Shotgun, hunting rifle. I mean, you know, hunting is not my cup of tea, but, you know, it’s obviously deep in American culture. If you need something to protect yourself, you should go through some tests. We need to make sure that you won’t misuse it. You should have some training, probably. But otherwise, yeah—broadly in favor of some kind of gun right. But mostly it’s not one of my top-five issues.

So what I would have said then is: So, as part of coalition politics, I’ll just keep quiet that I prefer a more restrictive gun policy than most of the people in the party, and count on them not to push this too much.

And then, as the courts begin to become more and more radical on the gun issue, and to say, Having a handgun is a fundamental personal right, and it’s not something that can be regulated any more than you can regulate speech or worship. We don’t allow the government to license churches. Why would we allow them to license guns? And I got more and more disturbed. But again, in the interest of coalition politics, because there are other things I cared about more, I just didn’t say anything about it.

And then Newtown happened. And I remember exactly where I was when I heard that news. And like you, I’m a parent. And I just had the vision of those parents. And it just, I said, You know, I’m just not going to keep quiet about this anymore. And again, especially this day and age, if something gets teenage boys outside and away from their screens, and they sit in a duck line and they discover some nature—that’s, to my mind, a good thing. But the idea there are guns everywhere, and you have a right to take them with you, is horrifying to me.

But what had happened was—because people like me had kept quiet in the name of coalition politics for so long, when the break came and when the moral test came, when Newtown came. And I forgot who was the person who said, “If a society can accept this, it’ll accept any atrocity.” And we saw. We accepted Newtown, and of course then many more atrocities were to come.

But look—we’re grown-ups. Big country. You can’t have a party purpose-built just for your preferences. If there are two parties, you’re gonna have to deal with a lot of people who are different from you. Then there comes a point where you have to say, You know what; we can’t let just, like, the most antisocial people rule the party.

Watts: I think that is my whole point. Which is, I am trying—and I know there are other people who feel the same way as I do in the Democratic Party—I am trying to say: Stop this behavior. Don’t embrace this behavior before it gets to that point. As you can imagine, that doesn’t make me very popular, because I don’t want to ignore the thing that seems small now that will eventually become embedded in the party.

Frum: There are tape recordings of the private speech of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. A C-SPAN played the Johnson tapes a while ago, and it was fascinating. And these men, and I presume the many presidents who are not recorded, could be unbelievably foulmouthed, unbelievably cynical, unbelievably dismissive. And yet they felt, when they were in public, when people were watching, that that kind of behavior they did in private as tough-minded and maybe nasty politicians. You straightened the tie, you put on the suit coat, you combed your hair, you went in front of the cameras—and then you expressed what was the right thing to say, even if you were a different person on the inside. And maybe the habit of knowing you needed to say the right thing when you were in public: Maybe that changed you. Maybe that made you a better person than you otherwise would have been if you were allowed to be the person you were at your worst.

And I think one of the things that has really changed over the past decade is: If you had the Donald Trump tapes, they wouldn’t be worse. (Laughs.) Because he says it all. He makes fun of the horrible death, at the hands of a troubled child, of Rob Reiner and his wife in the most, I mean, one of the most heartbreaking. This is one story you—I think you probably knew them a little bit. I knew them a little bit. This heartbreaking story. The president of the United States: You would think if he said anything about this heinous family tragedy, say something fitting and becoming. And instead we get what we got.

And that behavior does communicate. Because a lot of people think, Well, maybe that not only is appropriate, maybe that works. Maybe that works better than pretending to observe all the decencies of life.

Watts: Yeah, I think that the bar has been so lowered that we’re seeing Democrats say: This is a winning strategy; we have to fight fire with fire. But it goes back to what we were talking about before, right? That democracy depends on self-restraint. These unwritten norms, as you said, of behavior in public. Of accepting election results, of tolerating opposition. And I think once those norms erode, rebuilding them is very difficult. And that is the road that Democrats are going down. My guess is that we will pay the price in the general election, but I’m just as scared as what happens of losing in the general elections as I am of winning.

Frum: At the end of these interviews, I do a book segment. And one of the books I talked about was a book called Ask Not, which is a very gripping and upsetting history of the Kennedy family over three generations and its treatment of women. And some stories you know; some stories you don’t know. Some stories may have been on the edge of your consciousness. But they add up. And I think the way America, or certain Americans, have for a long time made their peace with the Kennedy family is: Well, this is your private life. But is how you treat half the human species—is that really a private matter? Or does it tell me—is how you treat half the species relevant to how I judge the way you treat the whole of the species?

Watts: I would argue that that’s certainly the case. Especially when—this kind of brings us full circle—women are arguably the most important voting bloc in the Democratic Party, right? Since the 1980s, they’ve voted Democratic more than men. College-educated women have become one of the party’s strongest constituencies. Without women voters, Democrats would struggle to win any national election. And so in that way, it is very important, I think, the way that you treat women.

Also, it’s important to remember that women only hold about 25 percent of the 500,000 elected positions in this country. We’re less than 10 percent of Fortune 1000 CEOs. The largest Democratic donor networks are proportionately male. Most of the strategists, the pollsters, the media consultants, campaign managers: all men. And so, I do think when we’re talking about the levers of power women can pull. Whether it’s like me, to start an organization of women to take on a certain issue. I also think it’s being educated and rightly critical and assessing male candidates for how they will prioritize women who don’t have maybe even a quarter of the power that men do in our party. And to me, that’s just common sense.

Also to your point, I think this idea of never apologizing, never saying you’re wrong, never admitting defeat—we will regret that as a party if we take on that same ethos.

Frum: Shannon Watts, thank you so much for joining me today.

Watts: Thank you.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Shannon Watts for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is a novel, Killing Baby Hitler, by Michael Tomasky, published this year by OR Books. Michael Tomasky is the editor of The New Republic; editor also of Democracy Journal. He’s an old friend of mine. We recorded videos together here in Washington for The Daily Beast back in the 2010s.

The title of Michael’s novel tells you everything you wanna know about what this book is about. Michael is contemplating the familiar philosophical problem: Would it be morally permissible to travel back in time and kill an innocent baby if you knew, or believed, that baby would grow up to be the future Adolf Hitler? And that is the action of this novel, which is both a work of alternative history, science fiction, as well as that of philosophy. In the novel, time travelers do go back in time, do attempt to kill baby Hitler—but bungle the job, and instead abduct him and bring him forward in time and across the ocean to the United States and plant him there, unfolding a scenario in which all kinds of other disasters happen.

The main action of the novel is set in the middle of the 22nd century, a postapocalyptic world of environmental disaster ruled by economic oligarchs. Connections between human beings has dwindled away, replaced by romantic and sexual attachments between human beings and humanoid robots powered by artificial intelligence. It’s a pretty ugly world. And a reminder that: Subtract Hitler from history, and not all human problems go away.

Alternative history can be a useful tool for thinking with, if you’re very disciplined about it. But most of the people who do alternative history are not disciplined. There’s a famous essay by Winston Churchill written, I think, in the 1920s, in which he imagines Robert E. Lee winning the Battle of Gettysburg—which leads to the South winning the Civil War, which leads to Robert E. Lee bringing the South into the British Empire, which solves all of Churchill’s problems of imperial management in the 1920s. But Churchill doesn’t take very seriously the question: Well, what would it have meant for the United States to be carved up? For the South to emerge as a slave state? What would that have meant, for example, for the other slave states of the Americas? In the 1860s, Brazil and Cuba both had legalized slavery, and slavery was practiced throughout West Africa in more or less formal or informal forms as well.

If the North had lost, the institution of slavery would have persisted across much of the planet. What would that have looked like? And what would it have meant for the development of democracy? Churchill doesn’t think about these things. He’s got a fantasy about a rejuvenated British Empire, and that’s what he wants to play with. And that’s what often happens with works of alternative history. And that, I think, is what Michael is satirizing in Killing Baby Hitler. Problems don’t go away on the other timelines either.

It’s pretty easy to imagine, actually, Hitler being scrubbed from the historical record. And you don’t have to invent a time machine or posit a time machine in order to do it. Hitler fought on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918 almost continuously. He was exposed throughout to British fire. A bullet could easily have dropped him and removed him from the historical record without anyone knowing or guessing what role he might have played in the historical record. And because his role is so personal, you can well imagine that that record would’ve been very different if the bullet had found him during the First World War.

Dropping Hitler on the Western Front would not have eliminated the Great Depression from happening. It would not have solved the crisis of German democracy that followed from the Great Depression, and it probably wouldn’t have changed the basic political grammar of Germany, where the hard right was more likely than the communists to emerge the winner of a crisis of German democracy.

After that, though, your guess is as good as anybody’s. Would a hard right without Hitler governing Germany in ’33 have done anything as crazy as undertaking a Second World War against Britain, plus France, plus the Soviet Union, plus the United States? That’s madness. You have to posit a kinda psychopathic lunatic to do something as crazy as that. And while they might’ve been very anti-Semitic, again, to contemplate the Holocaust, that’s something that you have to be Hitler himself to do. So scrub him from the record, and things are very different. But how?

We can do micro-scenarios, but something as big as that is too big for the human mind to contemplate. And it might as well lead to, as Michael suggests, 30-foot alligators stalking Illinois in some kind of bizarre, twisted Blade Runner environmental scenario, as anything else.

You know, we, in our own time, have these imaginings. What if 9/11 had been headed off? It easily could have been. A slight degree more alertness by U.S. law enforcement. An interception at the airport, or had any of the other fateful chances of 9/11 happened a slightly different way. What would our world look like then? It’s infinity. You can’t think about it. It’s not really a historical problem. And so Michael comes up with this—his Doctor Who, Kurt Vonnegut, Mad Max future world—and says, it might have been this as well as anything you would have wished for. As bad as history has been, it could easily have been worse.

So focus on what you know, not what you can imagine, and work patiently in your track for the better world as you see it. Starting not from where we wish we were, but from where we are.

Thanks so much for joining me this week on The David Frum Show. As ever, if you are minded to support this program the best way to do that is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you will share the program and subscribe on whatever platform you use. See you next week here on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

Photos: Russia’s Constant Bombardment of Kyiv

2026-07-08T12:23:57-04:00

Danylo Antoniuk / AP

A woman looks up at a burning apartment building after a Russian missile attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, on July 2, 2026. Russian missiles have hit sites across the country, but Kyiv’s infrastructure and residential areas are especially frequent targets.

Efrem Lukatsky / AP

A woman carries her cat out of a damaged multistory apartment building following a Russian missile attack in Kyiv on July 6, 2026.

Kostiantyn Liberov / Libkos / Getty

A panoramic view of Kyiv shows smoke from a large fire spreading over the city following an overnight Russian missile and drone attack on July 2, 2026. Russia’s overnight attack on the capital killed at least 31 people and injured 100 others.

Valentyn Ogirenko / Reuters

Rescuers carry a woman who was found under debris, inside an apartment building that was hit during overnight missile and drone strikes in Kyiv on July 2, 2026.

Kostiantyn Liberov / Libkos / Getty

Rescue workers operate at a destroyed section of a residential building after an explosion caused by a Russian strike on July 2, 2026.

Roman Pilipey / AFP / Getty

A person walks next a residential building damaged from a Russian air attack on the Ukrainian capital on July 2, 2026.

Efrem Lukatsky / AP

People look at the site of a Russian missile strike that hit a residential building on July 2, 2026.

Valentyn Ogirenko / Reuters

A woman cries while holding a child near the site of a damaged apartment building on July 2, 2026.

Evgeniy Maloletka / AP

A Ukrainian rocket intercepts a Russian ballistic missile during a Russian attack on Kyiv on June 25, 2026. Recent shortages of U.S.-made interceptors have allowed more Russian ballistic missiles to get through, striking their targets.

Serhii Okunev / AFP / Getty

People shelter in a Kyiv metro station during a Russian missile strike on June 15, 2026.

Gleb Garanich / Reuters

An explosion over the city, seen during a Russian missile and drone strike, on July 6, 2026

Libkos / Getty

An aerial view shows the scale of destruction, including burned-down houses and damaged streets, in Vyshneve, on the outskirts of Kyiv, following a Russian night attack on July 6, 2026. The attack caused secondary detonations for more than three hours, destroying or heavily damaging hundreds of homes and forcing hundreds of residents to evacuate.

Marianna Kotyk / Reuters

Volunteers collect glass shards in a building at the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Film Studio in Kyiv on June 19, 2026. The studio sustained significant damage during a large-scale missile and drone strike several days earlier. The costume shop, which housed the largest and oldest costume collection in Ukraine, was heavily affected.

Valentyn Ogirenko / Reuters

Firefighters work to extinguish a fire at the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, which was hit during Russian missile and drone strikes on June 15, 2026.

Danylo Antoniuk / AP

Emergency-services personnel work to extinguish a fire following Russian missile attacks in Kyiv on July 6, 2026.

Danylo Antoniuk / AP

Liudmyla Tsapkova sits in her damaged apartment after a Russian missile attack in Kyiv on July 2, 2026.

Valentyn Ogirenko / Reuters

Rescuers work at the site of a damaged apartment building in Kyiv on July 2, 2026.

Paula Bronstein / Getty

People watch as emergency workers clear debris from the scene of an overnight Russian missile and drone attack on Kyiv that killed at least 14 people, on July 6, 2026.

lina Smutko / Reuters

Iryna Plekhova, a resident who survived the previous day’s Russian missile strikes, carries some of her damaged personal belongings, including a Ukrainian coat of arms carved out of wood by her father-in-law, from her burned apartment on July 3, 2026.

Alina Smutko / Reuters

People take shelter inside a metro station during an overnight Russian missile and drone strike on July 2, 2026.

Tetiana Dzhafarova / AFP / Getty

A woman kneels next to a makeshift memorial near a residential building that was damaged during a Russian air attack on July 3, 2026.

Chris McGrath / Getty

Emergency-service personnel work to repair the roof of the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra after it was burned and damaged by Russian strikes on June 16, 2026, in Kyiv, Ukraine.

What Trump Has in Common With the Far Left

2026-07-08T10:36:34-04:00

Communism is a system of government in which the ruling party controls major investment decisions while hoarding wealth for itself and suppressing all opposition.

Nevertheless, Donald Trump professes to dislike it.

The president is trying to whip the nation into an anti-communist frenzy. His two speeches over the Fourth of July speeches denounced Marxism-Leninism and presented Trump as the main obstacle standing between America and a dystopian future in which capitalism no longer exists and grim-faced soldiers march down Pennsylvania Avenue on May Day.

Trump is correct that the Democratic Socialists of America, whose leadership is at least half communist, has gained a toehold in the Democratic Party. And Trump’s hatred of communism is consistent with some of his most important beliefs. Communists demonize both billionaires and American nationalism, two things Trump adores, and they pursue a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, whereas he has done the opposite.

[Jonathan Chait: There’s nothing Democratic about these Socialists]

On closer inspection, however, Trump has more in common with Communists than his hostile rhetoric lets on. He has probably done more to expand public ownership of the means of production than any president in history. Trump has seized a stake in nearly two dozen private firms so far, for little reason other than the fact that he can. Recently, he wrote on Truth Social that gasoline retailers “must” lower prices or “big problems lie ahead.” And although he has no power to do so, the distinction between public and private has eroded during his presidency to the degree that oil companies, or any large companies, have reason to believe that defying Trump’s wishes could expose them to government retaliation.

Trump’s admiration for Communist political methods is even more pronounced than his respect for its economic system. Trump has praised Communist dictators in terms unlike those used by any American president outside the context of a wartime alliance. In 1990, Trump told Playboy that the Chinese Communist Party “almost blew it” before showing “the power of strength” by crushing demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, thus avoiding the fate of the Soviet regimes that fell the same year.

He has praised Communist dictators—not in the vein of, say, congratulating Cuba for its education policy, but specifically for crushing all opposition. “He’s a brilliant guy,” Trump gushed of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in 2024. “He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. I mean, he’s a brilliant guy, whether you like it or not.” Trump once claimed that he and Kim Jong Un “fell in love,” explaining: “He’s the head of a country. And, I mean, he is the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”

Trump’s factual understanding of American history also dovetails closely with that of the far left. He simply disagrees on the moral implications. In his speech at Mount Rushmore on Friday, Trump attacked communists for smearing American prosperity as the fruits of violent expropriation. “As for those who peddle Marxist lies about our heritage, tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors, they’re doing something much worse than slandering our past,” he said. Yet Trump himself has questioned American innocence. “There are a lot of killers,” he once said, by way of defending Vladimir Putin. “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”

Trump’s most powerful aide, Stephen Miller, has echoed this line of thinking. He said on CNN in January, “We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

Enthusiasts for capitalism see prosperity as a positive-sum enterprise generated through cooperation. Trump views it in zero-sum terms, as a thing the strong seize from the weak—a view that informs his constant desire to steal natural resources from smaller countries. That conviction is hardly limited to Marxists. But it’s odd that he would fault Marxists for taking the same blood-stained view of American progress he holds so dearly.

None of this is to suggest that Trump is devoted to communism, or to any theory at all. Trump is sub-ideological, and the instincts that guide his decisions are generally right-wing rather than left-wing. Yet because Trump lacks any theoretical understanding of conservatism, and because Communist states tend to devolve into corrupt oligarchies that diverge sharply from the progressive utopias their idealistic supporters imagine, they seem to hold a certain strange attraction for him.

[Read: Authoritarians are great at propaganda—until they’re not]

Unlike his attacks on liberalism, which consist of pure contempt, Trump’s denunciations of communism have an undercurrent of admiration. “Communism is very easy to sell. It destroys everything, but it is very easy,” he mused recently. “I’ll be honest—I think I’d be the greatest Communist in history. I’d give free rent: Ladies and gentlemen, from now on, you don’t have to pay any rent. From now on, anybody who wants a house, just pick the house you want. Everybody gets free food. Everything is free from this point forward. Everyone’s gonna vote for me.”

Trump accurately captured communism’s main allure—its promise to create a paradise on Earth. But he also described his own political style. He has at times claimed his health-care plan will give people fantastic coverage at lower cost, that he will bring American manufacturing jobs back by the millions, and that he will personally roll back inflation, among other tantalizing promises. Trump once said, “I will give you everything,” a pledge that would have struck even Lenin as a bit messianic.

Unlike the Communists, however, Trump has not bothered to even attempt measures like universal health insurance. He has skipped straight ahead to the coup attempts, show trials, military parades, kitschy personality cult, and endless harangues filled with absurd claims about economic progress.

Many idealists have looked at communism’s history of repressive failure and decided it could go differently if they just give the system one more try. Trump, unburdened by ideals, has looked at the same history and consciously chosen to mimic its worst elements.

Democrats Became Great by Fighting the Left

2026-07-08T10:33:49-04:00

The Democratic Party is moving left. Its most dynamic leaders over the past few years have been Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani. Its most passionate activists are the young progressives who gave us the campus encampments after October 7. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say the Biden administration was a dozen aging moderates trying to manage a staff of 4,000 young progressives. These days, Democratic-primary voters are flocking to support whoever seems most furious. So Democratic mainstays such as the three-term Colorado Senator Michael Bennet are losing their campaigns, and members of the Democratic Socialists of America are triumphing.

As my colleague Jonathan Chait detailed in an essay earlier last week, this DSA isn’t just liberalism in a hurry. It’s not just a bunch of Michael Harrington types who want America to look more like Denmark. The hardcore left has taken over the organization. Apparently, almost half of the members of the DSA’s leadership body identify as Communists. The party is in alliance with the most brutal left-wing authoritarians from around the world, including in Cuba and Venezuela. Its New York chapter’s response to the October 7 mass murder and mass rape of Israeli civilians was to blame Israel for provoking the attacks.

All of this has centrist Democrats feeling a tad nervous. Some of their concerns are political. Working-class voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania may not go for the faculty-lounge notions swirling around the keffiyeh-sphere: open borders, defund the police, defund the Pentagon, punish Israel, oppose support for Ukraine, tear down prisons. One successful DSA candidate, Darializa Avila Chevalier, refused to answer when asked repeatedly whether murderers should serve prison time, a question most voters would not find hard to answer.

[Arash Azizi: Two futures for the American left]

But other mainstream Democratic concerns seem to be moral. Something in the liberal heart recoils in the face of righteous ruthlessness. Everyone remembers the careers that were destroyed and the voices that were silenced by hardcore progressives in the peak woke era. When the left is opposing Donald Trump, viciously vehement rhetoric it uses can be thrilling. But there is also something terrifying about the fact that these voters also use this rhetoric against anybody even slightly to their right.

Napoleon was onto something: In politics as in warfare, the moral advantage is to the material as three is to one. Right now, all of the passion is on the left. Progressives are showing once again that so long as your followers are fervently committed, it doesn’t take many people to commandeer a movement. So far, no mainstream Democratic politician has seemed willing to stir up the hornet’s nest by taking on the progressive brigades. The sauvignon-blanc liberals in the affluent coastal suburbs hardly seem capable of pushing back effectively. The Democratic establishment risks responding to incipient left-wing authoritarianism exactly the way the Republican establishment responded to incipient right-wing authoritarianism around 2015—by going into denial until it is too late.

To encourage my Democratic friends, I would remind them of this fact: The Democratic Party became great not while pushing against the right. It became great while pushing against the left. Democrats can argue against Republicans in their sleep. They have a comfortable set of moves they can go to: trickle-down economics, tax cuts for the rich.

But mainstream Democrats have to think hard when arguing against the left. They have to toughen up. They have to clearly define what they believe and what they do not believe. They have to rally grassroots supporters willing to fight alongside them. They have to come up with some new agenda to compete with the get-everything-for-free agenda that the left is now offering.

This kind of struggle has happened before—and it was the making of the modern Democratic Party. In the late 1940s, World War II had just ended, and the Soviets were in the process of brutally subjugating Eastern Europe, thus moving from an uneasy U.S. ally to an aggressive U.S. foe. People were becoming aware of the tens of millions of victims who had been murdered by communist regimes over the previous decades. Soviet socialism in Russia was looking more and more like National Socialism in Germany.

Mainstream Democratic politicians such as Harry Truman and New Deal historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. began to adjust their thinking. The left wing of the party, led by Henry Wallace, did not. Some on the left still had sympathies with the Marxist revolution. Wallace simply didn’t see the Soviet Union as an important threat. He declared that he was no more anti-Russian than he was anti-British, as if there were no substantive difference between the two governments.

The progressive left and the Democratic mainstream both understood that they were in a struggle for control of the party, and they both mobilized for that struggle. The progressives led by Wallace set up an organization called the Progressive Citizens of America to pull the party their way. The mainstream Democrats such as Eleanor Roosevelt countered by setting up Americans for Democratic Action, which explicitly banned Communists from joining, in order to block the leftward advance.

The crucial clash happened in Minnesota. The mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey, was a rising star in the Democratic Party. In June 1946, he was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s state convention (the DFL is Minnesota’s version of the Democratic Party). A few months earlier, the left had staged a coup and had come to dominate the delegations at that convention. When Humphrey arrived to speak, the delegates erupted in jeers, calling him a “fascist” and a “warmonger.” A sergeant at arms shouted at him, “Sit down, you son of a bitch, or I’ll knock you down.” Humphrey never got a chance to deliver his speech.

But he did launch a campaign to take back control of the Minnesota party. What followed was a vicious struggle over control of the party offices and for the hearts and minds of center-left Americans, a story recounted by James Traub in his biography True Believer. “The police state is the police state” regardless whether it is left or right, Humphrey declared. Too many Americans, he continued, are “not clear in their own mind that the Communist state is of the menacing proportions of the fascist state.”

At one party meeting after another, Humphrey and others—including Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale, Don Fraser, and Orville Freeman—maneuvered to regain control over the party’s power centers. “The Communists fought back hard,” Humphrey would remember years later. “But if they stayed up until midnight, we stayed up until 3 a.m. If they issued five press releases, we put out 10. It was tough, and sometimes the fight got dirty. But we were just as tough as the Commies were—and sometimes just as mean.”

Humphrey and his allies won their fight for control of the DFL, and Wallace’s career cratered when he ran for president in 1948 and received a pathetic 2.4 percent of the vote. It turns out that a lot of the ideas that thrilled the left-wing cadres did not have purchase with the wider electorate. Meanwhile, Truman was reelected in a shocking comeback.

This confrontation was transformative for a generation of Democratic politicians, not only in Minnesota but nationally. It taught them how to organize, how to push back against a foe that did not believe in democratic niceties. It made them tougher. It taught them that there can be a chasm between what the pseudo-intellectuals believe and what working-class voters believe, and that the latter actually like the American way of life and possess some conservative cultural instincts that actually make sense.

[Russell Berman and Elaine Godfrey: Something is happening in the Democratic base]

If you read the first chapter in John F. Kennedy’s 1956 book, Profiles in Courage, you will see that he lauds two virtues above all: courage and the ability to compromise. That sort of tough-minded pragmatism became the favored profile for a lot of Democratic pols.

The struggle reshaped liberal thinking in comprehensive ways. The early Cold War liberals had read their history books and seen how the French Revolution had begun with high progressive hopes but descended into a vicious bloodbath. They had seen how the Russian Revolution had begun with high progressive hopes but quickly produced a genocidal police state. They had seen firsthand the horrors of World War II and the death camps. They had seen the hopes for a peaceful postwar world dashed by Soviet aggression.

This infused Democrats with a powerful moral realism. They developed a healthy appreciation for human sinfulness, including the sin in their own hearts. They became suspicious of concentrated power, of fanaticism, of radical efforts to burn everything down. The classic statement of this mentality was Arthur Schlesinger’s 1949 book, The Vital Center. He argued that the degeneration of the Soviet Union had taught Americans a useful lesson:

It broke the bubble of the false optimism of the nineteenth century. Official liberalism had long been almost inextricably identified with a picture of man as perfectible, as endowed with sufficient wisdom and selflessness to endure power and to use it infallibly for the general good. The Soviet experience, on top of the rise of fascism, reminded my generation rather forcibly that man was, indeed, imperfect, and that the corruptions of power could unleash great evil in the world.

Schlesinger wasn’t the only one who learned this lesson. Most of the leading liberal intellectuals of the day—Lionel Trilling, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, the columnist James Wechsler, and above all Reinhold Niebuhr—did too.

On April 25, 2007, I was interviewing then-Senator Barack Obama by phone, acutely aware that the interview wasn’t going well. In a desperate attempt to liven things up, I asked him out of the blue, “Have you ever read Reinhold Niebuhr?”

Obama’s tone changed from weariness to excitement. “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers.”

“What do you take away from him?”

“I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away … the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naive idealism to bitter realism.”

In that moment, a thousand dissertations were born. Obama perfectly captured the moral realism that was so prevalent among Cold War liberals. He was demonstrating that this mentality was alive and well at the top of the Democratic Party decades later. Obama would use his Nobel lecture to deliver a beautiful encapsulation of this point of view. Joe Biden, who was formed by the Cold War, has his own version of this perspective.

The crucial question of the moment is whether that moral realism—the moral realism of Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey, John F. Kennedy, and, yes, Barack Obama—is dead.

The union hall is no longer the beating heart of the Democratic Party; the faculty lounge is. And from faculty lounges today comes a gigantic rejection of the Humphrey-to-Obama synthesis. For example, in 2023, Samuel Moyn, who teaches at Yale and writes for progressive magazines such as Dissent, The Nation, and The New Republic, published a book called Liberalism Against Itself. Here’s the first sentence: “Cold War liberalism was a catastrophe—for liberalism.” Here’s the clearest statement of his argument that I could find in the book:

After impugning the Enlightenment, Cold War liberals went on to purge the perfectionism and progressivism of the liberal tradition. It was momentous that in the middle of the twentieth century, liberals abandoned any account of the highest life, not in an ancient rendition that emphasized set ends and permanent interests, but in a modern one that stressed creative agency to invent the new, with history as a forum of opportunity for doing so.

I take Moyn to be arguing that the Cold War liberals made liberalism too self-restrained, too chastened. They abandoned utopian fervor, the inspiring belief that men and societies can be rendered perfect. If we’re going to fight for social justice, he seems to be saying, we’re going to need revolutionary fervor, people who are not afraid to use power, people who believe they can make the world anew.

Sometimes all of politics seems like one long debate over the French Revolution. The Cold War liberals tended to believe that the American Revolution turned out better than the French Revolution because it was conducted with sober expectations and a reformist mentality. To this day, mainstream Democrats are attracted by pragmatic reforms such as the Affordable Care Act—which sought not to replace the entire American health-care system but to reform and widen access to it.

The progressive left, on the other hand, has always drawn on the French Revolution as a better model. The French revolutionaries tore down almost all of society’s old structures—including the calendar, the churches, and the school system. Today, the crucial word in the progressive lexicon is dismantle. Left-wing activists are often calling to defund this or defund that. Nationalize the corporation; eliminate private health insurance. Recently, I heard a DSA candidate saying that she supported dismantling TSA PreCheck. (Promising longer airport-security lines is an unusual campaign tactic.)

In 2010, a group of progressive writers got together to form a magazine. They called it Jacobin. The choice of name was an unapologetic, in-your-face act of trolling. The original Jacobins were the most radical faction of the French revolutionaries. They supervised the reign of terror and sent roughly 17,000 people to the guillotine (not to mention the tens of thousands more who died by other means).

[Jonathan Chait: There’s nothing Democratic about these socialists]

But at least the battle lines are clear. Every Democrat is going to have to ask themselves: Do I support the moral realism of the mainstream Democrats, with their pragmatic reformist temper, or do I support the progressives, with their utopian belief in human perfectibility and their willingness to concentrate power in order to take aggressive action on behalf of social justice?

I was the kind of kid who had a Hubert Humphrey poster on my bedroom wall (I know, I know), so I’m on team moral realism. I’m a big fan of the virtue of humility and get a little nervous when I run across people who think they are so smart that they can redesign society from the ground up.

When I am listening to the progressive wing, I’m always reminded of a sentence in Richard Weaver’s 1948 book, Ideas Have Consequences: “The trouble with the contemporary generation is that it has not read the minutes of the last meeting.” Everything the progressives are proposing has been tried before again and again, with terrible results. Rent control? Tried. Nationalizing industry? Tried. Concentrating power in order to pursue one faction’s idea of justice? Tried.

I get that we’re living in an age of rising authoritarianism, but I was kind of hoping that the Democratic Party would resist the tendency.

The Cold War liberals had opponents on both sides—the McCarthyite right and the Communist left. Fighting a two-front war is bad for an army but good for a political movement. Instead of settling for Manichaean us-versus-them categories, movements beset on both sides need to clearly define their own worldview, their own values, their own set of plans. They have to combine a moderation of the mind with a forcefulness of the will. I figure the mainstream Democrats have until the 2028 primary season to stand up for themselves. If they don’t, America will have two opposing parties that were both hijacked by radical insurgencies. We’ll face an interesting choice between President Ocasio-Cortez and President Vance. For me, that would be a choice between a Democrat whom I find personally admirable but whose policy ideas are old-fashioned and ruinous, and a Republican who—oh, don’t get me started.

The Literary Genre That Thrives in Hard Times

2026-07-08T10:16:57-04:00

Los Angeles has had a rough couple of years. Fires have destroyed entire neighborhoods, the Hollywood streaming boom is going bust, ICE raids have torn through neighborhoods, and the city was subjected to an airborne toxic event; the vibes are so bad that a reality-TV villain almost made the mayoral primary. Such crises and anxieties are not exactly new; darkness has always lurked under the bright L.A. sun. People far beyond Southern California know this, in part, because of the homegrown literary genre known as noir.

Contemporary readers might consign this hard-boiled brand of thriller to the 1940s—a time of seduction and secrets when Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stalked the mean streets, neither tarnished nor afraid. But the genre’s origins aren’t so straightforward. The literary tradition goes back at least a decade earlier, to when Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain published stories in 1930s magazines. Then came the classic novels, followed by black-and-white film adaptations that filtered the books’ existential themes through plays of light and shadow, while doubling down on their sex, tawdriness, and cruelty. After World War II, French film critics saw them in a flash and called them noir. Named in France, the form is a cultural ouroboros orbiting L.A.

Because many of the societal ills probed by those artists—corruption, inequality, Hollywood exploitation—haven’t gone away, noir can still thrive in the hands of writers with the talent and savvy to make it feel contemporary. At its best, the genre makes room for perpetual innovation; at its worst, it can slide into kitsch. Sometimes this happens with the same author: Take, for instance, the L.A. Confidential author, James Ellroy, who revived noir in the 1980s but has lately had trouble keeping up.

Jordan Harper, a Los Angeles writer influenced by Ellroy, has published a new novel that far surpasses Ellroy’s latest. The title of Harper’s fourth thriller, A Violent Masterpiece, is brazen but not inaccurate. In some ways the novel is a classic L.A. noir, with three characters confronting secretive forces that run the city. At the same time, it is a vivifying refresh, with ripped-from-the-headlines villains. A powerful pedophile dies in jail; is it really suicide? A handsome actor has a cannibalism fetish. A prominent doctor somehow gets away with heavy drug use and carrying on with much younger women. Some readers will immediately think of real-life analogues; many more will recognize the contemporary flavor of corruption.

These tabloid antiheroes are just a few of the many men (almost all men) who tap the services of Sub Rosa, a high-end concierge service for drugs, sex workers, and other illicitries. Among its employees is one key protagonist, Kara Delgado. She’s in charge of setting up an orgy at an empty former nunnery, which is stuck in legal limbo as a pop star is trying to buy it. In addition to hiring the dancers and the DJ, Kara is ordering the drugs and the sexual accoutrements. She is basically satisfied with her job; she’s also self-medicating, a lot. Once, running to work, she thinks she’s got her personal cocktail of pharmaceuticals just right: “They solved her like a Rubik’s Cube. The world is a TV set. She is the shimmering pixels on the surface of the screen. She can feel the glow in each of her cells.” Kara is probably a little too high to do data entry, but at the moment her job involves tracking down a wayward actor in a private club, so she’ll fit right in.

[Read: The worst thing about the Black Dahlia case]

One important—maybe the most important—thing about noir is that it can’t get by on plot alone. Almost every page of A Violent Masterpiece has a spark and crackle of language, detail, idea. Kara’s druggy observations are laced with beauty. And Harper could simply have introduced his second protagonist, Doug Gibson, as a defense lawyer whose marriage is floundering. But he describes the trouble this way: Gibson “can still see the argument they should have had but didn’t, floating in the air like dust motes.” With a solo practice in Little Tokyo and bus-stop ads across the city, Gibson refers to himself as the knife his clients bring to a gunfight.

The third main character, a livestreamer named Jake Deal, cruises the night looking for chaos while narrating to his audience. “We are America dreaming itself. We’re a fractal of fortunes and crimes, fortunes and crimes. We’re cars and guns and land grabs and tacos, money and movies and big tits and death, all served under a dirty sky,” he says, while pulling up to the site of a shooting. “LA is America with no place left to run. LA is America with its back against the wall.” A dark philosopher behind the wheel, a Weegee for the Housewives era, he frames the story and speeds it forward.

The novel begins with Jake driving to the scene of a young rapper’s death. Having gotten the first and most gruesome snapshots, he sells them to his old employer, the sleazy celebrity-news outlet Truth or Dare (think TMZ). His former boss tips him off to a contract gig: For a chunky fee, he’ll get dirty pictures of a few powerful men doing bad things and upload it to a super-ultra-secret online repository. Meanwhile, Gibson is pulled out of his routine by a recently jailed Hollywood producer desperate enough to put a bus-stop-ad lawyer on retainer. Kara, for her part, is crashing out on drugs and takeout because her friend is missing and she fears that a serial killer is responsible. Of course, these three storylines are destined to converge.

As Harper accelerates the plot, modern-day Los Angeles comes into sharp focus. Gibson meets a contact in “Monterey Park, another strip mall: Sichuan hot pots, dance halls, seafood markets, this boba shop.” Kara, waiting for a delivery, thinks, “The alley behind the events center is gorgeously cool. Palm trees placed against the night sky just so. In Santa Monica even the alleys are clean.” Jake, after leaving a crime scene, “tilts the dashcam to catch a line of taco stands on the wide sidewalks in front of Target, lines snaking, gusts of smoke washing over the crowd from carne asada grills and a blazing trompo.”

Gibson has an unhoused client who lives in MacArthur Park, the site of a notorious tent city not far from downtown. Traveling between that ad hoc, impoverished community and his normal life—catered parties, a modern farmhouse-style home in the Valley—he’s not unaffected. “Call it the LA Bends—going up and down in the city too fast puts bubbles in your blood.” While at the park, he’s caught in a police sweep and counterprotest that turns violent; one protester’s eye is liquefied. I’m probably not the only reader who thought of a recent incident during a protest in the city, when a Homeland Security officer shot a student journalist with a projectile, resulting in the loss of an eye.

[Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is (again).]

On a recent podcast, Harper said that he wrote that scene long before the real-life incident. He was merely doing what any good writer does: paying attention to life on the ground, and then imagining their characters into it. This isn’t prescience, but rather a deep sensitivity to what’s going on—and where.

In that same interview, Harper said that he took his novel’s three-character structure—a smart way to build momentum and tension—from Ellroy’s major novels, including L.A. Confidential. Ellroy rebooted L.A. noir by laying out Hollywood conspiracies and dirty cops with fearless, brutal language and proving that the genre wasn’t bound by classic noir conventions. But his latest novel, in its shortcomings, only strengthens the case that noir will stagnate if it isn’t perpetually refreshed by new generations.

In Red Sheet, which is set, like most of his novels, in mid-century Los Angeles, Ellroy abandons the three-character structure in favor of a single narrative voice that clamps down hard. (Full disclosure: More than a decade ago, I interviewed Ellroy twice during special events, after which he sent two dozen roses to my office at the Los Angeles Times; I had to call his assistant to explain that this was not okay.) His earlier novels wove together the stories of people who held outsize power, especially the police, and those, such as sex workers, who had none. In more recent work, he’s resorted to pulling in marquee historical figures to juice the story. This book includes Richard Nixon and Hugh Hefner; his last one, The Enchanters, featured Marilyn Monroe, Robert F. Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy.

This is Ellroy’s third novel narrated by Freddy Otash. Otash was a real person, a fixer in postwar L.A. Ellroy’s fictional, bearlike Otash is unburdened by a conscience, sometimes carries a badge, and employs a photographic-memory technique developed by a Nazi. He leads a crew of police thugs and works with Daryl Gates (the future LAPD chief, who would resign in ignominy after the 1992 Rodney King riots). Across more than 500 pages, the book covers just two months at the end of 1962. To fill in the story, Ellroy has convoluted the facts of history: A key counterfactual in Red Sheet is the idea that American Communists were secretly aligned against the civil-rights movement.

Breaking my cardinal rule for noir, Ellroy tries to get by on plot alone. The reader has very little sense of the day or time, and characters have little interiority. Many descriptive phrases recur no matter who is speaking, which makes the author’s prose feel like a fire hose aimed at the reader. The plot itself starts to fall apart in the end. What’s more, aside from a few swinging-’60s hotel rooms, the texture of Los Angeles is almost completely absent.

[Read: Hope, change, troll]

Ellroy’s breakthrough novel, The Black Dahlia, published in 1987, brought new life to a somewhat-tired literary form—or one that had been surpassed by a noir resurgence in film. Think of Robert Altman’s full-color, updated version of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, in 1973, and Roman Polanski’s retro, abject Chinatown, the following year. Both, significantly, are set in Los Angeles. The Long Goodbye is full of glamorous hippies, with the actor Sterling Hayden (a veteran of the earlier noir era) surveying his domain on the beach in Malibu. In the 1937-set Chinatown, Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes starts out following a philanderer and finds himself investigating a real-estate and water-rights conspiracy. Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, is, similarly, an exemplar of retro noir.

This earlier generation was more closely tied to the past, but noir doesn’t have to stay there. Harper distinguishes himself by looking forward, although he is not alone. Writers such as Steph Cha, Ivy Pochoda, and Gary Phillips are also bringing today’s Los Angeles, in all of its awful, beautiful chaos, to life on the page. The newsiness of the crimes in A Violent Masterpiece makes it feel contemporary, but the look and feel of the city—seen, so often, from behind the windshield of a car—also makes the novel a robust story of place. Noir thrives on style, on sensibility, and on situated-ness. Sure, there are bits of classic Ellroy here: chopped sentences, words italicized for emphasis. Harper has incorporated these tropes in Jake’s narration, and it reads both old and new. The old, in this case, is peak Ellroy.

Harper and his Angeleno peers show how noir in any setting can work in this century, a time of rampant corruption, outsize villains, and morality turned inside out. While Ellroy spins his wheels, a new generation is taking Chandler’s path: walking down today’s mean streets and writing down everything they see.

The Atlantic’s August Cover: Rose Horowitch Writes “The Age of Reading Is Over”

2026-07-08T07:40:51-04:00

For The Atlantic’s August-issue cover story, “The Age of Reading Is Over,” staff writer Rose Horowitch argues that we are living in a “postliterate world” where fewer and fewer adults read books of any kind, and examines whether civilization can survive this era. Horowitch wrote the viral 2024 essay “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” and now explores the subject across American society, where the decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse in reading, while careers in letters, the humanities, and newspapers are in steep decline and are widely seen as an economic dead end.

The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of, Horowitch writes; she warns that the “decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun.”

It’s not as if we no longer know how to read—in fact, we’re likely consuming more text than ever, in the form of emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. But Horowitch argues that we seem to have lost the desire to read book-length works, and with that are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. Horowitch writes that “things are about to get worse, and fast. The next generation reads much less than today’s adults did when they were kids.”

Donald Trump is representative of this era, Horowitch writes: “Trump is our first postliterate president. It is difficult to imagine him being elected leader of a country where information is primarily spread through text.” The president “has pioneered a style of communication that exploits our distracted, disputatious age.”

Examining the effects of AI on our relationship to reading and writing, Horowitch argues that “what’s at risk is nothing less than the ability to think for oneself. If people become overreliant on AI to write for them, they could lose the capacity to interrogate or even develop their own views. These are quintessentially human capacities. ‘If we gave those up,’ the NYU philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah told me, ‘we’d stop being the kind of humans that we are. We’d be very different creatures.’”

Horowitch concludes that even though we live at a time when nearly all information from the past is just a few keystrokes away, “the threat of apathy remains. What we’re losing is the ability and inclination to read those texts. An astonishing wealth of information and wisdom has been bequeathed to us. What we’ll do with this inheritance is up to us.”

Rose Horowitch’s “The Age of Reading Is Over” was published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests.

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Canada Should Start Talking With Iran

2026-07-08T07:00:00-04:00

Leave it to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to casually drop a policy bombshell in a press conference. Two weeks ago, he pointed out that Canada’s lack of diplomatic ties with Venezuela had hampered its ability to respond to the horrific earthquake there, and so he proposed reopening the Canadian embassy in not only Caracas but also Tehran.

The suggestion has enraged many of the victims and fierce opponents of the Islamic Republic who have found refuge in Canada. But Iranian Canadians could stand to rethink this opposition to diplomatic ties with Iran. In fact, as one of them, I think we must.

I left Iran for Canada in 2008 because I was a vocal critic of the regime and had come to fear for my safety. As a journalist in Toronto, I helped expose some of the Islamic Republic’s covert activities on Canadian soil. In 2015, when Canada last sought to reestablish ties with Iran, one major obstacle was the fact that Iran was holding two permanent residents of Canada as political prisoners. One of them was my father, the filmmaker Mostafa Azizi (he was released a year later and has since returned to Canada). But unlike many of my fellow anti-regime Iranian Canadians, I never thought cutting diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic was a good idea.

Canada first shut down its Iranian embassy, in Ottawa, in 2012. Among other legitimate grievances, the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper cited the gruesome 2003 death in custody of the Iranian Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi, as well as Tehran’s support for terrorist groups whose victims have included Canadians. The list of wrongs has continued to grow in the years since: In January 2020, Iranian security forces shot down a Ukrainian civilian airliner, killing all 176 people on board, including 55 Canadians and 30 permanent residents of Canada (Iran claims that this was an accident).

[Tom Nichols: The whiplash of Trump’s Iran capitulation]

“Not only has the regime not cooperated with respect to truth and accountability in those cases, it has stonewalled Canada at every turn,” Kaveh Shahrooz, an Iranian Canadian lawyer in Toronto and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, told me. Shahrooz favored the severing of diplomatic relations with Iran on both “justice and national-security grounds.”

I am as appalled as anyone by the Islamic Republic’s crimes, but I am not convinced that nonengagement has served to counter them, or yielded any other tangible benefit. Canada now spearheads an annual resolution at the United Nations General Assembly condemning Iran’s dismal human-rights record. This is useful, but most of the resolution’s European co-signers have embassies in Tehran. Sustaining diplomatic ties not only does not stop the Europeans from criticizing the Islamic Republic by means of the UN resolution; it also gives them additional leverage and more direct avenues by which to apply pressure.

Sustaining diplomatic relations can allow for people-to-people ties in fields such as trade, sports, and culture. Over time, these kinds of relations can have an effect on a closed society like Iran’s. They threaten the regime’s monopoly on information, for example. That’s why Iran’s Islamist hard-liners attack Western embassies and cultural institutes as dens of corrupting influence—and why freedom-minded Iranians flock to international cultural spaces, such as the German Language Institute (the successor to Tehran’s Goethe-Institut), which the Iranian authorities shut down in 2024.

Diplomatic engagement can also influence the complex factional politics inside the Iranian regime. For decades, the Islamic Republic has been internally divided over foreign policy. Some insiders have pushed for toning down anti-Western extremism and for cultivating relations with Western countries. These insiders are critical of the extraterritorial adventures of Iran’s security forces precisely because they see them as harmful to Iran’s global diplomatic stature. By engaging diplomatically, Canada could help boost these critics to win the internal argument.

The past 14 years have included some flurries of diplomatic contact between Iran and the West. One of the most significant came in 2015, when the United States and five other powerful countries signed a nuclear deal with Iran. Canada—a middle power with a significant Iranian-diaspora population—played no role in this venture because it had no diplomatic ties.

[Read: The betrayal of the Iranian people]

I am not naive about the possibilities of diplomacy. Iranian embassies in the West, including the one in Ottawa, have been known to engage in malign behavior. Under the guise of diplomats, members of Iran’s security forces could come to Canada to keep an eye on their Iranian critics abroad, or even to plot terror attacks. Iran is known to monitor Jewish institutions and Israel-linked organizations in many countries, and has targeted them for violent attacks. Its role in attacks in Australia led Canberra to cut ties last year. In 2020, a diplomat operating out of Iran’s embassy in Vienna was convicted by a Belgian court of “attempted terrorist murder.” Sentenced to 20 years in jail, he was later released to Tehran in a prisoner exchange. (Iran often holds Western citizens hostage to enable such exchanges.)

The regime could also use diplomatic ties to pressure Canada to drop its support for Iranian civil-society actors, perhaps by offering trade or energy concessions in return. Or it could simply prove impervious to the counterpressure Canada might bring to bear. “Many of the heinous crimes committed by the Iranian regime against Iranians and Canadians occurred while Canada had diplomatic relations with Iran,” Shahrooz pointed out. “Our presence there and our ‘push’ had no effect. I fail to see why it would be different now.”

Still, the opposite tack—sanctions and isolation—has neither made the Iranian regime weaker nor made its behavior better. Canada could try another way. If it restored diplomatic relations, it could keep a close eye on Iran’s activities on Canadian soil, push hard on its human-rights violations and other crimes, and do more to build a Western alliance of support for Iran’s civil-society and pro-democracy forces—all while also diplomatically engaging the dictators in Tehran. Canada could use that engagement to undermine the Iranian regime’s boogeyman image of the West, while finding areas of collaboration that could benefit the people of both countries.

“Engagement is not endorsement,” Carney said, in defense of his proposed policy.

He’s right. Even as it seeks to stand up to Iran, Canada could do so from a new address in Tehran.

The End of Reading Is Here

2026-07-08T05:55:00-04:00

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Twenty-three hundred years ago, the legend goes, King Ptolemy I of Egypt asked his court adviser to assemble a comprehensive collection of the world’s written works. Ptolemy, who had served under Alexander the Great, envisioned a library that would safeguard the sum total of humanity’s knowledge. His successors inherited this mandate. Royal forces ransacked every ship that arrived at Alexandria, searching for scrolls. These were stored at the Mouseion, a shrine to the Muses modeled after Aristotle’s Lyceum. Aristotle’s own book collection was said to be among the holdings.

Much of the history of the Library of Alexandria has been lost. But we know that it was the site of many of the premodern world’s greatest intellectual achievements. The king paid scholars to live and work in the library, and the collection was available to anyone “eager to study, an encouragement for the entire city to gain wisdom,” a visiting Greek rhetorician wrote. It was at the library that Eratosthenes calculated Earth’s circumference and Zenodotus edited the earliest manuscripts of Homer’s epics. Euclid, who wrote the Elements of geometry, may have studied there as well.

This run of scholarship would not last. By 400 C.E., the library had disappeared. Many scholars regard its destruction as the greatest loss of knowledge in history and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Historians have spent centuries parsing fragments of papyrus in an effort to understand what went wrong.

Traditionally, the answer was believed to be war. During the Siege of Alexandria, in 48 B.C.E., Julius Caesar started a fire that incinerated at least 40,000 scrolls. The library survived in diminished form until the fourth century C.E., when followers of the archbishop of Alexandria sacked the pagan temple that housed the remaining manuscripts. But contemporary historians tend to dismiss the importance of these dramatic incidents in favor of a more mundane cause of death: negligence.

Maintaining the collection was an enormous expense. Humidity, mice, and insects slowly ate away at the papyrus scrolls. Scribes had to continually copy old texts before they deteriorated and became illegible. Eventually, the challenges of maintaining the library became greater than the will to preserve it. “It is not that the disappearance of a library led to a dark age, nor that its survival would have improved those ages,” the classics scholar Roger Bagnall has written. The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived.

Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again. Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.

The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse.

The books that people do read are simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago. Longer sentences aren’t inherently better. But their former ubiquity suggests an age when Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature. In 1958, the English translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was the best-selling novel of the year, according to Publishers Weekly. Pasternak writes in long, complex sentences: “On that warm gray morning in the mountains, Zhivago felt sorry for the Tsar, was disturbed at the thought that such diffident reserve and shyness could be the essential characteristics of an oppressor, that a man so weak could imprison, hang, or pardon.”

Last year’s top-selling novel was Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest in the Hunger Games young-adult series. Brian Bannon, the chief librarian at the New York Public Library, told me that young-adult fiction is one of the library’s most popular offerings—including among decidedly not-young adults. (Other titles in the top 10 include the children’s books Partypooper, the 20th installment in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, and Dog Man: Big Jim Believes.) The most popular novel written for adults was the romantasy adventure Onyx Storm. Whatever the book’s pleasures, it isn’t Pasternak: “A muscle in his square jaw ticks as he stares down at me, rippling the tawny-brown skin of his stubbled cheek.”

Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do. Most Americans now get the news on their phones and laptops, and 40 percent say they prefer to watch or listen to online news rather than read it.

This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis. And it’s true that Americans’ basic reading skills are declining. Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for the past decade. Amanda Kordeliski, who is on the board of the American Association of School Librarians, told me that she and her fellow librarians have had to buy new books to accommodate students’ diminished reading levels. Some of the most popular are graphic novels: updated classics such as the Magic Tree House series for elementary-school students, and manga for middle and high schoolers.

In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument. About the same number scored below “basic,” meaning that they may struggle to draw conclusions from concepts explicitly included in a text, or to use context clues to determine the meaning of an unknown word. Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.

And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.

Things are about to get worse, and fast. The next generation reads much less than today’s adults did when they were kids. Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales, Benjamin Powers, the director of Yale and the University of Connecticut’s Haskins Global Literacy Hub, told me. (In the study of 236,000 American adults, only 2 percent read to a child on a given day.) From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read. Robert Townsend, a program director at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recently ran focus groups asking high-school students how they felt about reading for pleasure. He told me that most thought of it as an alien practice.

Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.) Not long ago, a Harvard sociology professor, troubled by course evaluations in which students said they resented the amount of dense reading they were assigned, asked Rennix to speak to his class in defense of reading. She had to explain—to students at America’s most elite university, taking a course in a discipline rooted in written observation, argumentation, and analysis—that excerpts and summaries cannot capture the depth and sophistication of a complete primary text. Rennix told me that some students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”

[From the November 2024 issue: Rose Horowitch on the elite college students who can’t read books]

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Penguin Books.

It may seem self-serving for a writer at a 169-year-old magazine to carry a torch for reading. But the people who make a living from words are not the only ones who lose out in a postliterate age. Reading is more than a skill, or one mode of communication among many. The media we use to interact with one another shape the world we inhabit. Early humans spent millennia communicating only by voice. The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun.

Reading has never been natural. Humans have no innate cognitive machinery designed to string letters into words and connect them to their real-world analogues. To read, people had to repurpose regions of their brain used for speech and object recognition. The practice first emerged 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. For millennia afterward, most of the population was illiterate. Literacy became a mass phenomenon relatively recently, after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440.

The written word is fundamentally different from oral language. Writing detaches the message from the messenger, allowing for a more dispassionate spread of information than was possible in oral societies. Because writing a phrase takes longer than speaking it, writing forces the author to slow down and reflect. Written language tends to employ more complex sentence structures and vocabulary than spoken language. And unlike speech, it doesn’t disappear into the ether. Readers can return to a text and plumb it for new meaning and understanding. Because writing endures, individuals can temporarily forget what they’ve written but trust that it won’t be lost forever. This frees up the mind to think of new ideas and make new discoveries.

“More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness,” Walter J. Ong, a historian and Jesuit priest, wrote in his 1982 book, Orality and Literacy. He argued that literacy created the conditions for inner concentration, extended focus, and logical deduction. It allowed for a new kind of rational, linear, and analytical thought.

Ong cited case studies by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the 1930s, when peasants were starting to receive rudimentary reading and writing instruction. Luria met his subjects at teahouses, in field camps, and around evening fires. There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer. Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words.

Later scholars would attribute some of these new modes of thinking to other aspects of living in a literate society, not to reading alone. But Ong’s larger argument stands: Print cultures value lengthy, organized arguments. “Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist—all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading,” Neil Postman wrote in 1985. The advent of reading and writing was a precondition for philosophy, modern science, history as an academic enterprise, art criticism.

These changes were hugely destabilizing. As literacy spread through societies, it contributed to political upheaval and revolutions. In the American colonies, the leaders of the patriot cause employed newspapers and pamphlets to foment anti-British sentiment. “The ancient Roman and Greek Orators could only speak to the Number of Citizens capable of being assembled within the Reach of Their Voice,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1782. “Now by the Press we can speak to Nations; and good Books & well written Pamphlets have great and general Influence.”

America’s Founders used a print document to construct their new nation and believed that the system they had devised would work precisely because citizens would be informed readers. Franklin was himself a newspaper publisher and established America’s first lending library. “These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans,” he wrote in his autobiography, and “made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries.” Early on, Americans came to see staying informed as a civic and even moral imperative.

Of course, the new republic was not always a haven for sober analysis. The Founding Fathers attacked their enemies in the papers, spreading lies to incite the public against their opponents. One ally of Thomas Jefferson’s called John Adams “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

Nor was access to reading evenly distributed. For a long time, large numbers of Americans couldn’t pass the federal government’s literacy test—especially in the South, where preventing Black literacy was a pillar of white-supremacist government.

But from the beginning, literature was a crucial source of entertainment, meaning, and connection for many Americans. They shared a set of references from the Bible and English literature. Charles Dickens was sufficiently beloved by American readers that when he got his hair cut during a visit to New York City in 1842, admirers flocked to collect clippings from the barber.

In the 19th century, composing a letter was an art form, and even correspondence with loved ones was written in an elegant, formal style. “It’s weird for us to see it now: a Civil War soldier writing to his wife, and he’s covered with mud in this tent, and he writes as if he’s Shakespeare,” John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, told me. “And you think, Can’t he loosen up with his own wife? But the thing is, that is him basically sending her roses.”

Samuel D. Lougheed served in the 8th Regiment of the Union’s Missouri Volunteer Infantry, which fought at Shiloh and the Siege of Vicksburg. In October 1862, he wrote to his wife: “Tis hard to lie down covered with your own gore on a battle field and die. Tis hard to see the mighty prancing war horse, trampling the dying and dead beneath their merciless feet. No dear wife, near to speak a word of comfort. No living sister or Mother to administer relief in that hour the most sad in the history of humanity. O the humanity. O the horrors of war.”

In 1962, Marshall McLuhan, the patron saint of media theorists, predicted that the Western world would become what he called “post-literate.” In The Gutenberg Galaxy, published that year, he suggested that such an age had already begun—that electronic media were already supplanting the written word. At the time, 90 percent of homes had a television, compared with 9 percent only a decade earlier. Television was becoming Americans’ main source of news. The average household spent more than five hours a day in front of the TV set.

Viewed from the present, the America of the 1950s and ’60s doesn’t seem postliterate. After the war, the nation had become wealthier and more highly educated at a remarkable pace. Its appetite for the written word and its veneration of the intellectuals who produced it seemed poised to grow and grow. In 1964, Time, which then had a circulation of more than 3 million, ran a cover story on John Cheever, the author known for his dark fables of suburban malaise. The article, “Ovid in Ossining,” opened with an extended quotation from the invocation of Metamorphoses. In Cheever’s famous story “The Five-Forty-Eight,” the protagonist boards the titular train and is greeted by a then-familiar, now-exotic sight: a car full of commuters reading the evening newspaper.

But television was changing the rhythms and habits of American life. In 1985, Postman, a friend and disciple of McLuhan’s, published Amusing Ourselves to Death. He argued that television had hijacked Americans’ attention and turned politics into cheap entertainment. “The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining,” Postman wrote. “Television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself.” At the time, the average American household watched more than seven hours of television every day, a number that would rise to nearly nine hours by 2010.

If TV crowded out the silent time necessary for reading, broadband internet and the smartphone make it nearly impossible. Not too long ago, at-home screen entertainment was finite. Shows aired on a certain day, at a certain time. If you wanted to watch an old movie, you had to put your shoes on and go to a video store. Books could compete in that environment. Some people, at least, would turn off the TV and read a book before falling asleep.

Now entertainment is limitless. There’s no hard stop—one show bleeds into the next. People watch TV with their phone in hand, monitoring social media or texting with friends. Netflix has reportedly told directors and screenwriters to assume that the audience isn’t paying attention and to constantly remind viewers what’s going on. In this environment, people have to be really determined to read. Most aren’t.

When people do read, they might find that they’re absorbing less information. That’s especially true if they read on their phone. The endless scroll, hyperlinks, and notifications invite surface-level reading, with constant invitations to look elsewhere. Studies have shown that people comprehend less when reading on a digital device than on paper, perhaps because of all these distractions. Devoting extended, undivided attention to a text can now feel like too much to ask. Audiobooks have become a popular alternative to print books at least in part because listening to a book allows for multitasking: You can read while doing the dishes or driving to work.

Faced with shrinking attention spans and declining comprehension, schools might have been expected to resist the impulse toward shorter passages and shallower reading. Instead, they spurred it on. A 2025 survey found that most middle- and high-school English teachers assigned zero to four books a year. Successive waves of education reforms have led districts to favor short passages over full books, the better to mimic multiple-choice reading-comprehension exams. Many of the most popular school curricula now rely on excerpts. Annemarie Cortez, the principal at an elementary school in Corona, California, told me that many administrators are instructing teachers not to assign full books; they’re supposed to be running discrete reading drills with short excerpts.

Meanwhile, digital devices have flooded American classrooms. In a New York Times survey, more than 80 percent of elementary-school teachers said students receive a school-issued device by the time they enter kindergarten. Lupita Villalobos, who teaches 3-year-olds at a pre-K in Duncanville, Texas, told me that the district gives each student a tablet to use during school. She’s prevented her students from using the devices, as she knows how much time they spend on them at home. “I had a student who had a very strong reaction to starting school,” she said. “Typically, students cry maybe the first couple weeks and say they want their mom. But this student would cry for her tablet.”

In the recent past, people were at least reading something online, but that’s changing fast. Social media, once mainly text-based, has been overrun with short-form videos. TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels dominate the attention economy, especially among young people. According to a recent data analysis by Jean Twenge, a psychology professor who studies generational change, by eighth grade, the average kid spends four and a half hours a day on social media. For much of that time, it appears, they are watching videos, often at 2x speed. Even text messages have taken on characteristics of the spoken word. People use all caps to indicate heightened emotion and avoid the formality of proper punctuation, which now seems stilted, even stern. Like many 20-somethings, my friends and I have mostly moved on from texts, preferring to send one another voice recordings instead.

The written word has survived for thousands of years and overcome successive challenges from new technologies. It’s clearly resilient. Reading rates might fluctuate, but optimists argue that the long arc of history points toward universal literacy. Martin Puchner, a comparative-literature professor at Harvard, studies how literature has shaped history. He’s spent decades tracing how communication technologies have changed, and the panics those changes have triggered. For much of his career, he was skeptical of fears about the end of reading. “If the long history of changes in writing technologies has taught me anything, I think it’s that one should always resist the kind of doomsday scenarios,” he told me.

And yet, even Puchner now believes that the doomsday scenario has arrived: A return to text, away from video, seems awfully unlikely. Maybe McLuhan and Postman weren’t wrong in predicting that our society would become postliterate. They were merely early. The world that these theorists foresaw half a century ago is now here. The literate era will prove to be a brief interlude between the oral and digital ages.

Reading shaped the modern mind. Its disappearance will reshape it. Cognitive scientists are starting to understand what these changes might look like. I asked a dozen of them what happens to our brains when we stop reading. Several were amused by my rudimentary question. “Everything that happens to you changes the brain,” Dan Willingham, a professor at the University of Virginia, told me. “Literally reading a word changes your brain for a few hours at least—and, if you know how to measure it right, for much longer than that.” He was trying to reassure me: If everything changes the brain, then almost no single action matters all that much.

But what if you consistently replace one kind of action (reading a word) with another (watching an Instagram Reel)? One of the most robust findings in neuroscience is that people’s brains master what they practice. If we fill our time with short-form videos instead of books, our reading skills atrophy. We have less background knowledge to aid comprehension. There’s no danger of spontaneous mass illiteracy, but the complex cognitive skills that reading fosters start to degrade. The library of the mind falls into disrepair.

Reading books is a workout for the attention span. The more you read, the easier it is to read, and the more you’re rewarded with new understanding. Eventually the process is more pleasurable than it is challenging. But as with physical exercise, the converse is true as well: The less you read, the more difficult it is to read, and the rockier the path to acquiring knowledge.

Social media offers instant gratification. John Hutton, a pediatrics professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center, compares scrolling TikTok to a lab rat pushing a button and getting a dose of cocaine: Eventually, all you want to do is push the button. In 2004, the average attention span on a screen was two and a half minutes, Gloria Mark, a psychologist at UC Irvine, told me. By 2012, it had dropped to 75 seconds. Five years ago, it fell to about 47 seconds. “We become accustomed to having content change rapidly,” Mark said.

Watching videos is a more passive form of engagement than reading. Hutton recently collected brain images of children, all 3 to 5 years old, as they took in stories in different formats. When children watched an animated video of a story, they used the region of the brain associated with imagination about half as much as they did when looking at static illustrations while listening to an audio recording. Children also used their cerebellum—a part of the brain associated with learning—less when watching a video. “They don’t really have to use their imagination as much, because things are happening on the screen,” Hutton told me. “The brain’s just doing less work to understand and learn from what they’re seeing in the animated, compared to the illustrated.”

The paradox is that although video contains more information than text—not just language but sounds and moving images—it does not stimulate deeper thinking. To the contrary, video thrusts so much information at the viewer at once that it’s difficult to focus on any one piece of it. The frames keep changing regardless of how much the viewer has noticed or comprehended. Few people pause and rewind to reflect on what they might have missed.

Young people today have never experienced a world without ubiquitous short-form video. In other studies, Hutton found that children who had more screen time and spent less time reading had less well-developed white matter in areas associated with executive function and language. This suggests that they were less accustomed to using those skills. Benjamin Powers, at the Haskins Global Literacy Hub, told me that students arrive in elementary school with a poor ability to maintain focus and a low tolerance for mental exertion. “In classrooms, this shows up as students who can decode or retrieve information but struggle with comprehension that requires inference, synthesis, or holding ideas in mind across longer texts,” he said.

In a 2024 survey of third-to-eighth-grade teachers, more than 80 percent said that their students’ reading stamina had declined since 2019. Scores on the ACT’s reading and English sections have been falling for the past seven years. They’re now at their lowest level in more than three decades. SAT reading and writing scores have declined too, even as administrators have shortened and simplified the passages assessing reading-comprehension skills.

When these students get to college, their professors find that they have to teach them how to comprehend a text—in other words, how to think. “I’m teaching in German, so we’ve always been used to teaching them how to read, which is something that people in English departments are now realizing that they have to do,” Jonathan Fine, a German-studies professor at Brown University, told me. “Before you can even get to ‘What’s the larger point?,’ it’s: ‘Is this ironic?,’ what a metaphor might mean, just trying to get the very words and grammar to get them to notice everything, so that they can hopefully then make the larger connections.”

That may sound like an exaggeration, but higher education will almost certainly have to become more remedial. In a study of English and English-education majors at two regional universities in Kansas, published in 2024, researchers asked students to read the first seven paragraphs of Dickens’s Bleak House. The novel follows members of the Jarndyce family through a lengthy legal dispute over their inheritance. It begins:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

The researchers quoted students’ attempts to parse the passage. “So it’s like, um, the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no … so everything’s been, like, kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill,” one student said. At least a quarter of the subjects interpreted the figures of speech literally, leading to the inference that dinosaurs walked the streets of 19th-century London. Dickens continues by describing the Lord Chancellor as he is “addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief.” Another student interpreted this passage as “describing him in a room with an animal I think? Great whiskers? A cat?”

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Chapman & Hall.

That students would struggle with unfamiliar references is not surprising. But the researchers gave them access to the entire internet. They could have looked up Michaelmas term or Lord Chancellor or Lincoln’s Inn Hall if they had chosen to do so. Students didn’t even know how to go about figuring out what they didn’t understand, or they didn’t bother. Most of them did not realize that the passage takes place in a court of law. Only 5 percent had an accurate, detailed understanding of what they’d read.

These changes aren’t confined to college campuses. American adults’ ability to answer logic questions, reason effectively, and analyze patterns declined from 2006 to 2018. American adults also tend to have a smaller vocabulary than those with an equivalent level of education did half a century ago. Recent studies suggest that the Flynn effect—the steady rise in IQ between generations since the 1930s—has reversed over the past two decades. Average IQ scores are declining by about three points a decade, Elizabeth Dworak, a research psychologist at Northwestern’s medical school, told me.

The cognitive shifts aren’t all negative. Dworak’s research finds that American adults are improving in certain forms of spatial reasoning. Postliterate culture could convey advantages that we don’t yet understand. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates famously argues that the advent of writing “will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” He was right. But as writing eroded individuals’ memories, the media theorist Andrey Mir has observed, it improved society’s collective memory.

Could the generations growing up with their brains hooked to endless video feeds be developing some kind of novel, as-yet-undetectable cognitive brilliance? Perhaps. But for now, the decline of reading seems to be ushering in a less rational, analytical, and sophisticated mode of thinking. It’s difficult to see any advantages in that.

In 1982, Walter J. Ong observed that modern civilization was entering a phase of “secondary orality,” in which a once-literate society reverts back to some of the conventions of preliterate cultures. Because spoken words disappear as soon as they’re uttered, oral cultures value repetition to aid memory. Bards in oral societies make use of stock phrases and mnemonics to keep track of their train of thought. They traffic in epithets and “enthusiastic description of physical violence,” in Ong’s words, because conflict is more memorable than dispassionate discussion. Speakers can’t edit their words the way writers can, so they press on without admitting their mistakes. If they later contradict themselves, they don’t expect the audience to recall their earlier statements. Meaning depends on the identity of the speaker, not on any concept of objective truth.

It is unlikely that Donald Trump has familiarized himself with Orality and Literacy. But if he did, he might recognize himself in Ong’s description. Trump’s communication style is perfectly suited to an oral society. He employs epithets—“Low-Energy Jeb,” “Little Marco,” “Sleepy Joe”—that are easy to remember and repeat. He contradicts himself as though there is no record of his previous statements. Even his writing is almost indistinguishable from his speech. (It makes sense; Trump reportedly prefers dictation to composition.) His online posts are full of idiosyncratically placed punctuation, capital letters, and exclamation points. Many are memes with little text: One featured an image of an American warship hitting an Iranian airplane with a laser beam and included the phrase “Lasers: Bing, Bing, GONE!!!”

Trump is our first postliterate president. It is difficult to imagine him being elected leader of a country where information is primarily spread through text. Ahead of the 2024 election, an NBC News poll of 1,000 voters found that Joe Biden had a 49-point lead among respondents who read newspapers. Trump has pioneered a style of communication that exploits our distracted, disputatious age. “So many people, particularly in the academic and journalistic circles, think of him as a political revolutionary,” Roderick Hart, a communications professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “And I see him much more as a rhetorical revolutionary.”

In the 1985 book No Sense of Place, the media theorist Joshua Meyrowitz observed that television and other electronic media inundated Americans with new kinds of information about their prospective leaders. Print media gave the public access only to politicians’ polished remarks; video let Americans see their presidents sweat, sneeze, and stammer. Voters began to focus on “dating criteria” instead of “résumé criteria,” he told me.

“More than in the past, authorities today must often ‘look and sound good’ rather than write and reason well,” Meyrowitz wrote in No Sense of Place. He predicted that the decline of print and rise of electronic media would ultimately push people toward populist leaders. They would shun authority and institutions in favor of the candidate who made good television. He published his book soon after Ronald Reagan, a former actor, had won reelection.

“I reread the book recently and I kept going, Holy shit, this is even more true than when I wrote it,” Meyrowitz said. Social-media platforms give Americans unprecedented opportunities to watch their representatives’ every move. Their algorithms reward simplistic, inflammatory, emotionally resonant content over complexity, nuance, and rigor. Ideas that comport with folk theories of politics—all leaders are equally corrupt ; immigrants steal jobs; policy problems have easy, commonsense solutions—prevail over the findings of subject-matter experts.

Politicians on the right and the left have figured out how to exploit these new platforms. Reihan Salam, the president of the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, described to me how this plays out. “You name an enemy and you polarize the public,” he said. “You don’t allow for nuance, because nuance is just a confusion when you’re in a struggle for power.”

Politicians who promote the distrust of institutions and elites do better under such circumstances. “You create this fantasy that, actually, it’s all really, really simple, and one charismatic person can just achieve these wins that are visually compelling and emotionally compelling,” Salam said. This is precisely the kind of demagogic figure the Founders hoped a well-read populace would see through. “When you think about our constitutional order, how it was meant to work, it absolutely cuts against that,” Salam said.

Marshall McLuhan once said, “The liberal world by definition is literate.” The inverse appears to be true as well.

If Trump is the first postliterate president, he won’t be the last. The political strategist David Plouffe, an architect of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, recently argued that candidates should focus each day on content creation. He advised shrinking every idea into something short enough for screen-addled voters to concentrate on. “If it can’t be communicated in an Instagram post or 10-second TikTok, go back to the drawing board,” Plouffe wrote in a New York Times op-ed. That may very well be good advice on how to campaign for office in the postliterate era. As a way to practice informed self-government, it portends disaster.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Penguin Books.

I haven’t even mentioned artificial intelligence yet. A number of digital technologies have hijacked attention and made focused reading all but impossible. Generative AI is the first tool to threaten the continued existence of writing.

Writing is hard. Orwell likened the experience to a “long bout of some painful illness.” AI promises a simple remedy. The trouble is that writing is not merely the act of transcribing fully formed thoughts—if it were, it wouldn’t be hard. Writing is the way people figure out what they think, and how to convey those thoughts to someone who doesn’t already share them. Cal Newport, a computer-science professor at Georgetown University, argues that the process of writing forces people to think in an orderly, linear fashion. It exposes flabby thoughts and shoddy reasoning. And the time and focus it takes to form thoughts into words, sentences, and paragraphs allow the author to make new connections and discover new insights.

This feels true to me. My job is to write. With apologies to Orwell, the prospect of a painful illness fills me with less dread than a blank page. But there’s satisfaction in the struggle. The writing process is how I refine and formalize inchoate ideas and gain new understanding. By evaluating my arguments and discarding those that aren’t convincing, I find the ones that are. Writing is hard because the writer is learning. If AI eliminates the challenge, it also eliminates the learning.

Early studies have suggested that this is exactly what happens when people use AI to write. The process is easier. The product is often better than what someone could compose on their own. But it comes at the expense of mental development. One study in Brazil determined that undergraduates who used AI for studying performed significantly worse on a surprise test than those who studied without AI. The students trailed their peers even on questions that demanded reflection and effort instead of specific knowledge. Another study of hundreds of individuals in Britain found that frequent AI use for cognitive tasks is negatively associated with critical-thinking abilities.

Modern life demands a lot of tedious writing. Some of it can surely be offloaded to machines without too great a cost. But a career spent studying the historical adoption of new technologies has convinced Newport that it’s almost impossible to automate away one problem without creating others. Over and over, people think they’re using a tool to bypass a single tiresome task. “And then there’s all these unexpected second-order impacts,” he told me. Email was supposed to be a more convenient substitute for faxes, phone calls, and meetings. Instead, responding to emails became an immense time suck of its own. These unforeseen consequences end up transforming intellectual life.

The skill of deep thinking will likely become rarer and rarer in a world where much of the population uses AI to avoid writing. It will also become more and more important. AI is creating a superabundance of text. It has led to a threefold increase in the number of books released on Amazon each month since 2022, when ChatGPT was launched. Over the same period, scientific-journal submissions have also surged. Many were written at least in part by artificial intelligence.

AI produces crisp, professional prose. Presented with human- and AI-produced text side by side, even M.F.A. candidates have been shown to prefer the work of the machines. If AI writing is pleasing and convincing, however, it is also unoriginal, often inaccurate, or both. People will therefore need their powers of discernment and comprehension more than ever. They will need to know what they think and how to make their own judgments. These are the exact skills that the use of AI threatens to erode.

What’s at risk is nothing less than the ability to think for oneself. If people become overreliant on AI to write for them, they could lose the capacity to interrogate or even develop their own views. These are quintessentially human capacities. “If we gave those up,” the NYU philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah told me, “we’d stop being the kind of humans that we are. We’d be very different creatures.”

One hundred twenty-six years ago, The Atlantic published an essay by Arthur Reed Kimball describing “one of the most serious of the unchallenged changes of modern American life.” The ability of the nation’s citizens to write well and think deeply was under attack. The enemy of eloquence and sustained attention? The newspaper. In “The Invasion of Journalism,” Kimball argued that the daily paper, with its sports pages and gossip columns, its miscellaneous items and slang, was eclipsing the book and the literary magazine. Even those who claim to read the newspaper to learn of pressing events in Washington or Europe, he argued, will turn first “to some interesting ‘story,’ perhaps a curious bicycle adventure, perhaps the capture of a clever burglar.”

[From the July 1900 issue: The invasion of journalism]

Before the newspaper, the novel was seen as a threat to good reading habits and moral stature. Thomas Jefferson thought that one of the greatest obstacles to educating women was their passion for fiction, which seduced them away from “wholesome reading.” Once a woman has fallen for novels, he wrote, “nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy.”

Those inclined to dismiss the present assault on reading point to this venerable tradition: decrying some new technology or medium as distracting and debasing the American people. Perhaps, 126 years from now, this essay will seem like the latest such exercise in hand-wringing. Looking back at these laments, I noticed that the people most invested in the old modes are usually the quickest to predict that all will be lost.

By some measures at least, books continue to thrive. Last year, print-book sales were higher than they were a decade ago. Barnes & Noble opened more than 60 new stores. Almost 400 independent bookstores sprung up in 2025. Substack has seen an explosion of subscriptions for long-form writing. Celebrities such as Dua Lipa and Reese Witherspoon have used their fame and influence to launch wildly successful book clubs. Audiobooks have become a billion-dollar industry.

But the optimists overlook a crucial thread in the data: Text is thriving among a dwindling proportion of the population. Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year. “It’s becoming a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids,” Leah Price, a historian of reading at Rutgers University, told me. Readers spend more time reading each day than they did two decades ago. They appear to be even more passionate about print than their predecessors. But the people devoted to text, who derive cultural understanding and intellectual connection from the written word, are now part of a subculture. The fact that you are reading this article almost certainly makes you a member of it.

Now that being a reader is optional, it can function as an identity marker. When you see someone on the train reading printed matter, it feels like a statement. Perhaps inevitably, such statements have become the stuff of online ridicule: Brandish a book too ostentatiously in public, and you might find yourself accused of “performative reading.” The label presumes the person is only trying to telegraph that they are highly educated or possess superior literary taste—why else would they lug a book around?

We’ve been here before. When society first transitioned from orality to literacy, only a small minority could read. As the only individuals who possessed this valuable skill, they occupied a privileged position, and were paid handsomely for their work. At the Library of Alexandria, scholars in residence lived in the city’s royal complex.

Today, reading is again clustered among a small minority of the population, but being a person of letters confers less status than it once did. The remaining readers are marginalized, mocked, and in many ways irrelevant. For most people, a life of letters is an economic dead end. Employment at newspapers has fallen by 75 percent in the past two decades. Job openings for academics in the humanities are likewise in decline, and fewer and fewer of the remaining positions are tenure-track. In 2024, only 8 percent of college graduates earned a bachelor’s degree in a humanities discipline. That year, both English and history departments awarded 40 percent fewer degrees than they did in 2012. There’s a fear among historians, whispered during panels and conferences, that they will be the final generation to systematically examine the past.

The notion of a popular literary figure appearing on the cover of a print newsweekly read by millions of Americans is impossible to imagine today. There is no such figure, and there are no such widely read newsweeklies. Instead, many Americans are proudly postliterate. The president has spoken about his taste for bullet-pointed briefings, and aides have said he likes pictures and charts. The world’s richest men brag about getting their information from X posts, podcasts, and conversations with chatbots. Young people who seek wealth and influence are encouraged to mimic them.

Cultural and economic power tends to flow to people who are skilled at using the most popular communications technology. Today, those people are streamers, podcasters, and influencers. Joe Rogan commands the kind of audience that journalists could only dream of. He has more than 14 million followers on Spotify and more than 20 million subscribers on YouTube. MrBeast, a YouTuber who stages elaborate stunts, such as a real-life Squid Game, regularly gets hundreds of millions of views. Video-game streamers such as IShowSpeed and TheBurntPeanut are among the most popular media figures in the country. These personalities shape what young people aspire to and talk about, and even how they speak.

Books used to be an essential source of knowledge, memory, wisdom, and morality. They were written by older generations and passed down to the young in a vertical transmission of culture, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt told me. Now information moves horizontally, from young person to young person. This dynamic makes figures such as MrBeast and TheBurntPeanut the guardians of American culture. The decline of reading didn’t turn the world upside down. It turned the world sideways.

Young people want to pursue jobs that will catapult them into the elite—which today means that people coming of age want to be influencers. A 2023 Morning Consult poll found that almost 60 percent of Gen Z respondents said they would be a social-media personality if they could. Amanda Kordeliski, of the American Association of School Librarians, is also a librarian in Oklahoma, where she has set up recording studios for students. “Podcasting is the hottest, most popular thing. I could buy a million microphones and there would still be a waitlist to get into the audio labs,” she told me. “Everybody wants to be an influencer.”

In September, Syracuse University launched its Center for the Creator Economy, and will soon offer its inaugural minor for aspiring influencers. “This center speaks directly to the aspirations of current and prospective students,” Mark J. Lodato, the dean of the university’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, said in a press release. “It’s about meeting them where they are—and preparing them to lead in the world that’s coming.”

The arrival of that world isn’t yet a certainty. Some people have noticed what we’re giving up, and they’re choosing a different path. Nearly two dozen states have banned cellphones during the school day. After Texas’s ban went into effect at the start of this past academic year, a Dallas school district saw 200,000 more library books checked out compared with the year before, a nearly 25 percent increase. Rex Ovalle, a high-school English teacher in the Chicago suburbs and a member of the National Council of Teachers of English, told me he’s seen pushback against excerpts; some teachers are adding whole books back into their curriculum. Felton Thomas Jr., the executive director of the Cleveland Public Library, said that its youngest patrons have joined senior citizens in preferring print books to digital copies. If these acts of defiance against a postliterate culture seem futile, the holdouts lose nothing by trying.

I was raised in the postliterate era. I was born shortly after the dot-com bubble burst and entered first grade around the time the iPhone was released. In seventh grade, I got my first phone and promptly made an Instagram account. If you make an internet reference—any internet reference—I will (regrettably) almost always get it. Most of my knowledge of a world premised on reading comes from what I’ve read in books.

I had the advantage of growing up in a family of readers. My dad read to me almost every night, all the way through middle school. (As the father of a moody daughter, he often didn’t know what words to say to me. When we read together, he could borrow someone else’s.) My older sisters couldn’t wait to recruit me into their book club. Our favorite was The Boxcar Children, about four orphaned siblings who create a home in an abandoned train car. In the book, the children have scarcely found food and shelter before the two sisters decide to teach their younger brother to read. They carve wood chips into letters and use blackberry juice for ink. When I turned 10, my mom passed down her childhood copies of Rabbit Hill and Johnny Tremain. She had written her signature on the inside cover when she got them. I added my own.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Dial Press.

During high school, I got it in my head that I should read the classics. My teachers kept recommending their favorite books. I wanted to share in their knowledge and understand their references. I slogged through Jane Eyre and fell for Anna Karenina. Although I was alone while reading, I didn’t feel that way. These books contained the wisdom of generations. As James Baldwin said (in a 1963 Life profile, just a week after he appeared on the cover of Time): “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.” I felt like I was part of an unbroken chain of knowledge and culture.

In the years since—I’m not quite sure when—the habit slipped. The change was subtle. I became busier. I started scrolling on my phone before bed instead of reading. My attention began to wander every few pages. What did it matter if I read less? No one was checking on my progress. And the books would always be there. I could pick them up later.

When the Library of Alexandria disappeared, the knowledge inscribed on its scrolls was lost forever. We can only guess what else Eratosthenes and Euclid might have written. The text turned to dust. That won’t happen today; all of the words in the great library could be stored on a single computer chip. Nowadays, even the most obscure academic monographs are scanned and digitized. Google Books and the Internet Archive represent libraries of unfathomable proportions. We can navigate to them with a few keystrokes, not a perilous journey across the Mediterranean. There’s little risk of their texts succumbing to humidity or mice.

But the threat of apathy remains. What we’re losing is the ability and inclination to read those texts. An astonishing wealth of information and wisdom has been bequeathed to us. What we’ll do with this inheritance is up to us.

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

Perhaps the Nazi Tattoo Was a Clue

2026-07-07T19:45:11-04:00

The Senate race in Maine looks significantly different than it did 48 hours ago. Yesterday, Politico reported a credible allegation of sexual assault against the Democratic nominee, Graham Platner. In a video posted after the story broke, Platner denied the accusation but said that his campaign would explore the best way forward, opening the door to what seems like an inevitable withdrawal from the race.

Now the voices that had most vehemently defended Platner during previous scandals or vouched for the necessity of his folksy progressivism have withdrawn their endorsements, one after another, and called for him to drop out. Among those voices are Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Representative Ro Khanna, and Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau. No doubt, none of these Democratic politicians, party power brokers, or podcasters were aware of the alleged rape when they made and maintained their endorsements. Nearly everyone who previously supported Platner seems to have since reversed course. Credible allegations of sexual assault do, indeed, go too far.

But the question remains: Why was this horrific allegation the threshold when Platner had so obviously transgressed so many times before? Perhaps Platner’s Nazi tattoo should have been a sufficient indicator that he lacked the character to be a senator. Perhaps maintaining that SS logo for two decades, covering it up only when it became politically inconvenient, demonstrated that he lacked the judgment for national office. Perhaps a multiyear history of not just having abhorrent views about women and minorities, but feeling the need to post them for the world to see, could have told us that he is not the person to be Maine’s voice in Washington. Maybe a well-documented history of contemptible behavior in his personal life should have been enough, when taken with everything else, for Democrats to conclude that Platner was exactly the person he appeared to be.

[Jonathan Chait: With Graham Platner, Democrats got drunk on the beer test]

When Platner emerged last year as the Democrats’ shiny new object—DSA sensibilities with a gruff voice and working-class clothes—many who favored his brand of leftist populism rallied to help him defeat Democratic centrism. He managed to do so when his primary opponent, Governor Janet Mills, suspended her campaign before votes were cast. Platner’s backers hoped that he could do the same against Susan Collins this fall. But when a clear pattern of Platner’s bad behavior and bad judgment emerged, these Democrats held firm, using their positions of prominence to assure voters that what we all could see was somehow not as it seemed. This latest allegation was not a black-swan event—a shocking and unexpected revelation from an otherwise strong candidate. Rather, it was the most recent in a steady drumbeat of disqualifying revelations.

It’s good that those who have changed their mind about Platner are now telling the woman who spoke with Politico, Jenny Racicot, that they will not stand with her alleged victimizer. But why were the Jews who were targeted by the organization whose logo he bore not worthy of the same support? And was Lyndsey Fifield, a conservative woman who alleged that Platner had engaged in emotional and physical abuse (also denied by Platner), less worthy because of her politics? What does it say about Platner’s defenders that his other horrible behavior was within their range of acceptability?

Those who waited until this week to rescind their endorsements had all the indicators they needed to surmise that Platner was a problem. And pretending otherwise required a willful denial of the facts. For instance, they claimed that he hadn’t known the significance of his tattoo until recently, despite the fact that at least three people said they’d had conversations with Platner about the image prior to its public disclosure.

We have spent months listening to spin from Democrats arguing that what was clear about Platner’s character was somehow more nuanced and explainable, all because progressives had found a candidate in Carhartt. The idea that a candidate could have a Nazi tattoo and stay in the race sounds more like a subplot from Veep than the reality upon which several prominent Democrats staked their reputations.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Yet more damning revelations about Graham Platner]

When the Platner campaign comes to its ignominious end, as it almost certainly will whether he withdraws or not, the value of conducting a postmortem will not be about Platner himself, a deeply flawed person worthy of neither the office he sought nor the support he received. It will be about those who gave him that support. Not only did they stand by Platner; they expressed outrage toward those of us who said he was unfit. And contemptibly, they attacked one of Platner’s accusers, Fifield. “Believe women,” it seems, does not extend to victims who commit the unforgivable sin of having voted for Republicans.

Perhaps next time these officeholders, influencers, advocates, and organizations will think twice before throwing their full-throated support behind someone they do not actually know or, at a minimum, withhold support from those who are clearly unacceptable. They lied to voters, either by vouching for the virtue of a candidate about whom they did not have specific knowledge, or by claiming that someone they knew to be detestable was not. Perhaps now voters will think twice before heeding the advice of Sanders, Warren, Khanna, Favreau, and others, or of Veterans for Responsible Leadership, the advocacy organization that had endorsed Platner, who served in the Marines, and reiterated its support through the previous scandals.

The voters themselves should not be let off the hook; a republic’s survival requires the engagement of an educated electorate. Even though most of Platner’s behavior had been widely reported prior to the June 9 primary, an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters in Maine selected Platner. They either made no effort to inform themselves about the man for whom they cast their vote, did not believe the well-corroborated claims against him, or felt that Nazi iconography, alleged partner abuse, admitted substance abuse, and offensive Reddit posts were of less importance than defeating Mills. None of those justifications was ever sufficient.

It would be nice to believe that those who failed the test during the Platner campaign will learn from their mistake, but I am skeptical, particularly in today’s political environment. For those who apparently lacked the integrity to denounce contemptible candidates, the discernment to detect them, or the desire to do the right thing, might I offer a simple rule to assist—even just toward the pragmatic goal of selecting electable candidates. Prior to the Platner campaign, I would have thought this rule was common sense and easy to follow, but apparently it should be made explicit: Maybe, at a minimum, don’t support a candidate with a Nazi tattoo.

The Supreme Court Ruling That Further Politicizes Everyday Life

2026-07-07T17:54:00-04:00

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In recent years, ABC’s daytime talk show The View has become an essential stop for top-level politicians. Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, J. D. Vance, and Hillary Clinton are among the many to have visited.

On the one hand, the show is not exactly The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in terms of policy-focused, hard-hitting journalism. On the other, The View fills a special role in informing the electorate: In an era when news consumption has become siloed and partisan, it’s a show that has no simple ideological profile. Though somewhat left-leaning, the show always has at least one right-coded host on its panel. That means it’s been singularly able to reach a wide audience of people who aren’t necessarily political junkies.

Or at least that was true. Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, said in February that he was investigating whether The View had violated the FCC’s “equal time” rule by hosting some candidates but not their opponents. “Bona fide news interview” programs are exempt from the rule, but Carr argued that The View was not one. Since then, Semafor reports, the show hasn’t hosted a single political candidate in a competitive race, and “has in recent weeks rebuffed some candidates that it invited on the show.”

This isn’t just a disturbing example of government interference with the press. It’s also a sign of things to come. Last week, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, a case that concerned whether the president had the power to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission, one of the federal bodies known (now anachronistically) as independent regulatory agencies. In 1935, the Court ruled 9–0 in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that these officers could be fired only for cause. In Slaughter, the justices cashiered that precedent.

This is a major change in executive power, giving the president greater ability to fire officials with whom he disagrees politically and to treat these agencies as extensions of his political project. The Atlantic has run excellent articles on how the ruling is a triumph for the unitary-executive theory and a betrayal of originalism, but it’s easy to lose sight of the real-world implications. Most of us who don’t work in the federal government, law schools, or political-science departments don’t think about “executive power” on an everyday basis. But the government influences our life on an everyday basis.

What Slaughter means for most people is that the president now has much greater control over many of the parts of the government that affect us most directly. In other words, partisan politics will start infringing on areas of life where they have hitherto been remote or absent. Seeking the overturning of Humphrey’s Executor was a goal laid out in Project 2025, the policy plan that has become a road map for the Trump administration. Project 2025 seeks not just a much more powerful president but a reshaping of American society at a fundamental level, instituting a traditionalist and Christian regime. Control of these agencies is one method to achieve that.

Carr’s crusade against The View is a preview of what post-Slaughter America might look like. Carr was one of the authors of Project 2025, and, long before Slaughter, he was acting as though he were under full White House control. The FCC has always been led by political appointees, but Carr has made partisan combat his central aim. Last year, he pressured CBS News over a 2024 interview with Kamala Harris that had infuriated Trump. Months later, he attempted to get Disney to fire the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for jokes about Charlie Kirk and the Trump family.

With the new powers the Court has granted, Trump can seek to politicize other bodies that aren’t typically partisan—say, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the agency that guarantees that even if a bank fails, you don’t lose money, up to a $250,000 limit. (Project 2025 proposes rolling it together with several other bodies as part of a loosening of financial regulations.) He can sack FTC commissioners he views as too harsh on corporate interests.

But he also can try to render other agencies useless. In 2025, Trump fired a Biden-appointed member of the National Labor Relations Board. For months after that, the board didn’t have a quorum, which meant it couldn’t act. The fired member has challenged the firing, and although Slaughter does not directly decide that suit, the Supreme Court’s reasoning would appear to allow her removal to proceed. The Federal Election Commission has not had a quorum since May 2025, because Trump was slow to nominate members and the Senate hasn’t acted on their nominations.

Under the direction of Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and another Project 2025 author, the administration has frozen the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in place and tried to strip nearly all of its funding. The CFPB was established by Congress to protect Americans from predatory lenders, debt-relief companies, for-profit colleges, and the like, but Vought has effectively nullified Congress’s passage of the law.

In a poll released last week, Politico found that six in 10 Americans feel “like politics are everywhere these days where it does not make sense for things to be political.” Slaughter all but guarantees that the problem will get worse soon.

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Senator Bernie Sanders called on Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner to drop out of Maine’s Senate race following a new sexual-assault allegation, joining other Democrats who have withdrawn their support after previous similar allegations. Platner has denied wrongdoing and has until Monday to remove his name from the ballot.
At the NATO summit in Turkey, President Trump said he “was very disappointed with NATO” and criticized allies for refusing to join the U.S. and Israel’s military campaign against Iran. Trump also praised Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan and floated selling advanced F-35 fighter jets to Turkey despite existing congressional restrictions.
At least three tankers appeared to come under attack while trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz through a route that Iran had warned ships not to use, though Tehran did not claim responsibility. After, the Treasury Department revoked a waiver allowing Iran to sell oil and petrochemicals, cutting off a major revenue source negotiated during recent talks.

Dispatches

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Evening Read

Illustration by Flo Meissner

The Genes That Could Cancel Out a Fatal Diagnosis

By Roxanne Khamsi

When Ludivine Verboogen and Romain Alderweireldt’s third child was born in Belgium in late 2015, they marveled at his long fingers. Perhaps one day he will be a famous pianist, they thought. But soon Ludivine grew worried that her son was not developing as well as his two older sisters had. His muscles seemed weak, and the physiotherapy appointments she was taking him to three times a week didn’t seem to be helping. “A lot of doctors were telling us that he was fine, nothing was wrong with him,” Romain recalled to me.

Ludivine persisted, and shortly before their son was a year old, she and Romain found out that his long fingers and lack of muscle tone had a devastating explanation.

Read the full article.

No Worries! Trump Will Make a Call and Fix It.

2026-07-07T16:22:00-04:00

Anyone with eyes can see that Monday night’s World Cup game was rigged. Team USA is winning, 0–0, and then suddenly all these goals start coming in for Belgium? Bang, bang, bang, one after the other, just like that? Very suspicious. But don’t worry. Your favorite president is on the case!

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I said, “Is this a Dominion scoreboard?” This is why we need the SAVE Act. This right here! You are telling me that this little teeny country full of chocolates and surrealism and little statues urinating into fountains can beat the USA at football? No way. Has your head been replaced with a green apple? You don’t have to be Tintin the boy journaliste to know that that is not a pipe. Treachery, without a doubt! I saw them sneaking into the scoring places with more goals concealed in the small compartments of their waffles.

If we need more footage to make the case, I can supply some! Look! You can clearly see in my video that something shady is afoot. Having six fingers apiece obviously gave the Belgian team an unfair advantage.

I am going to talk to the head of FIFA and we’re going to get to the bottom of it. I know the rules of football, and what we saw out there—all this kicking the ball around, head-butting it, no helmets—looked nothing like football. They weren’t playing fair!

I think Infantino will see reason. And if he doesn’t, I know some guys who will storm the field at a moment’s notice to stop the count. They already have the outfits.

By the time we are done, we will be winning by 20, 30, maybe even 50 points! And as long as I am on the phone, we are going to solve a few other little crises. The temperatures, for instance. They are all coming out too high. We need to stop the count just a little sooner so that people can enjoy themselves on the Mall safely, which they could do if we stopped the thermometer in the mid-70s. Same thing with the air-quality index. We have beautiful, clean air, and the index should reflect that! Sometimes they claim that there is lightning; we will just roll that down to No Lightning. And, as I am always saying, everyone’s complaints about the Iran situation could be resolved in an instant if people would just agree to report that we won by a mile. I have yet to get the right person on the phone.

Also at the gas pump, and in the grocery store. They are letting the numbers there get too high. When I am done talking to Infantino, we’ll get that all worked out. And then we will fix the number of performers who agreed to perform at my wonderful festival for the Fourth of July!

We’ll call the algae too. Tell them we are giving them a red card and they need to get right out of that pool! Pronto!

I am also going to have J. D. Vance talk to the head of the Smithsonian about the so-called winners and losers of these conflicts of the past—for example, the U.S. Civil War. The only reason the South has had such terrible numbers for so long was they didn’t know the right people to speak with to get them changed. We’ll get all those textbooks and museums straightened out.

Why win when you can cheat? Why win when you can badger the story into changing? With these guiding principles in mind, there’s very little you can’t do. Well, except win, fair and square. But that’s all right. Winning is for losers, anyway.

The Corner of Hollywood That’s Most Susceptible to AI

2026-07-07T16:00:33-04:00

Updated at 2:40 p.m. ET on July 8, 2026

Years ago, when the Simpsons animator Chuck Sheetz was a lecturer at UCLA, he invited a producer colleague of his from the series to attend a screening of his students’ work. That was a Saturday night; when Sheetz entered the Simpsons offices the following Monday morning, he found a handful of his pupils in the reception area. The producer had offered them jobs, they said, and they were ready to join the team—the students had the animation skills required of a thriving production.

These days, Sheetz, who’s now a UCLA professor, doesn’t share this anecdote with his students. “Who the hell wants to hear that?” he told me. Even workers in Hollywood today may not want to: The entertainment industry’s post-pandemic years have been marked by a production exodus from Los Angeles, a decline in the number of projects green-lit amid major corporate mergers, and labor strikes. The threat AI poses to both live-action and animated media only adds to these ongoing issues: In a survey published last fall, the executives and workers across Hollywood who responded considered the jobs of animators, visual-effects artists, and concept and storyboard artists among those most likely to be affected by AI-related changes. They’re “just not getting as much work as they have in past years,” Audrey Schomer, an industry analyst and the survey’s author, told me. “If they do have a job, they’re probably being asked to use the tools themselves.”

Although blaming any lack of jobs solely on the rise of generative AI is hard, major Hollywood studios have been gambling that the technology will become a pivotal part of the creative process: In 2024, Lionsgate partnered with the AI start-up Runway, a deal meant to allow Runway to create videos off of models trained on the studio’s output. The deal reportedly faced complications, though the companies announced an expanded partnership last month. Netflix acquired InterPositive, Ben Affleck’s company that develops AI tools to help with basic filmmaking techniques, in March, and recently began hiring for a division called Inkubator that will experiment with AI-assisted productions. Amazon MGM Studios launched the GenAI Creators’ Fund, an initiative to finance and green-light projects that incorporate the use of AI. And major directors have been using generative AI for previsualization purposes (that is, preproduction design work) and animation, leaving traditional illustrators especially vulnerable.

Amid these developments, some artists in Hollywood are finding the job more and more unsustainable. A few of the ones I spoke with told me that they have received less work in recent years, and one noted that organization tasks once assigned to entry-level workers are now being handled by AI. The industry’s vulnerability, of course, isn’t new; Hollywood tends to cycle through periods of prosperity and contraction, and AI is just one factor in its ongoing changes. Still, “it feels kind of especially rough right now,” Sam Tung, an art director and a member of the Animation Guild, one of the artists’ unions, told me. “There’s a career that I found that I love and I’m really good at, and because of forces completely outside of my control, the viability of it is in major doubt.”

Sheetz, who won an Emmy for his work on The Simpsons, has been an animator long enough to watch technology destabilize his profession before anyone cared about AI. When he joined The Simpsons, in 1991, animation was still a job done largely by hand. Every studio project he knew of involved what he called “an army of cel painters”—artists who carefully inked individual frames on clear acetate sheets placed over light tables.

As computer-generated imagery became the dominant practice, Sheetz remembers other animators around him worrying that the skills they’d developed would become obsolete. Instead, his career took off as the technological advances meant that more films and television shows were being made: “It was, like, a 30-year period of a lot of employment,” he said. But production has seen a recent downturn, which he suggested was a result of post-pandemic turbulence. And though he’s fielding concerns from his students these days about whether Hollywood can survive this period of turmoil, he’s trying to be optimistic about their future. If artists keep up with the industry’s shifting demands, “there’s no reason to believe it couldn’t happen again,” he said, referring back to when he saw his students get hired to work on The Simpsons.

Xindi Zhang, a recent graduate of the University of Southern California’s Expanded Animation Research and Practice program, an MFA curriculum focused on experimental media, indeed found that working with AI paid off. For her thesis film, she trained a program to reimagine preexisting footage she’d gathered and illustrations she’d made; using a technique called “AI morphing,” she rendered those images into watercolorlike clips that evoked the feeling of being in a dream. Last year, Zhang won a Student Academy Award for the project—a prize that put her on the radar of visual-effects studios looking for creative talent familiar with AI software. Before then, she told me, she’d thought about abandoning her dreams of working in Hollywood; now she’s working as an AI specialist at a visual-effects studio.

[Read: The Warner Bros.–Paramount merger isn’t Hollywood’s biggest problem]

Yet the academic departments that once molded students into professional animators are now in danger of disappearing: USC’s Expanded Animation program quietly shut down last month. The California College of the Arts, the state’s oldest private art-and-design school, will be closing in 2027. The reasons for these closures haven’t been attributed to AI’s impact on the industry—more so a mix of dwindling enrollment and funds—but the waning avenues for emerging talent to find a foothold in the business mean fewer chances for such artists to keep up with the industry’s evolution. Zhang considered the Expanded Animation department a “utopia” for her as a student, but, she said, she thinks such animation programs might not be as necessary anymore. “I don’t think you can really teach students the current stuff,” Zhang explained. “There’s no ‘current stuff.’ Every minute is changing.”

Keeping up with “the current stuff” has been as hard on those already working in the industry as it has been for students. In April, Marvel laid off the bulk of its visual-development department, a group consisting of seasoned concept artists who helped turn the studio’s comic-book superheroes into movie stars. One of them, Wesley Burt, received the news in a conference room that featured a mural incorporating art he had drawn of characters on Loki, the Disney+ series—a touch he found ironic.

Lately, he explained to me, many workers like him have seen the gigs they usually take between projects dry up. They tend to draw images from scratch to help directors pitch their ideas to studios, but filmmakers have been leaning on generative-AI tools to do that job. Such technology can create pictures that look appealing but that actually involve nonsensical flourishes that, for example, are impossible to construct into operable sets or develop into wearable costumes. AI, he said, “is not built upon the foundations of people who understand whether it’s set design or understand cloth cutting or how to fabricate, like, a superhero suit or anything like that.” He added, “You need to have people that are highly trained and understand the actual application of it.”

Reid Southen, who began his concept-drawing career coming up with designs for The Hunger Games, has a punchy nickname for concept artists who are being hired to clean up what generative AI got wrong: “slop janitors.” Working closely with filmmakers to go over a script or an outline, establish expectations, and offer ideas for what a character or a world can look like used to be a key part of his job. Now there’s a “slippery slope,” he told me, of artists becoming more familiar with fixing what AI produces than with honing their own artistic abilities. “Your skills atrophy, and your critical thinking atrophies,” he explained.

Although AI is ostensibly being deployed for cost-saving purposes, its inability to understand what’s actually possible in a production can introduce obstacles into a process that used to run more smoothly. “If you’re not an expert in anything and you use generative AI, of course everything is going to look fucking amazing to you,” Jon Lam, a storyboard artist who primarily works in animation and video games, told me. But for those who are trained in more traditional visual-effects modeling tools, he said, “they’re going to be like, ‘Uh, this wheel is connected to a leg; I don’t know what to do here.’”

This ongoing experimentation with AI tools has yielded an era of trial and error—or, as Lam put it to me, “more error than trial”: AI may seem like an attractive means of cutting costs and speeding up the production process, but its messy results leave concept artists less time to come up with original ideas or fine-tune the project. Often, Southen said, he has to work “on autopilot”; he’s concerned about whether he’ll have to meet tighter deadlines for less pay. Like work in many other creative industries, the job has become less of “a process of creation, more of a process of curation,” he explained. Forget coming up with fresh character designs and building singular worlds; for companies using AI this way, much of what’s produced is an iteration of what came before—as in, what got fed into the models themselves.

[Read: What AI will do to art]

AI image generators have already proved troublesome for Hollywood: Last June, Disney and Universal sued the AI firm Midjourney for copyright infringement after Midjourney used images of popular figures such as Darth Vader and Shrek to train its models; Disney also exited its billion-dollar licensing deal with OpenAI earlier this year after the AI company shut down Sora, its video-generation app. (The program would have allowed users to make their own shorts featuring Disney characters.) As much as Netflix has been making moves to incorporate AI, the company has been cautious too, drawing up guidelines last August for the usage of generative-AI tools in its productions. And groups such as the Creators Coalition on AI, which consists of entertainment-industry workers including actors, filmmakers, and executives, have begun establishing the best practices for ethically working with AI companies to ensure that they get permission from artists and compensate them for their labor.

But many artists can’t afford to simply wait and see whether these efforts to protect their livelihoods pay off—and neither, Lam pointed out, should audiences. Technology stealthily changes our viewing habits, he noted: In a span of a few short years, second-screen viewing became a common practice, and the same could go for how tolerant people become of AI-generated work. The creative talent I spoke with commended the public outcry about AI encroachment, including over the Marvel layoffs, AI-generated viral videos, and the prevalence of Super Bowl commercials pushing AI technology this year. But the more the public absorbs such images anyway—and perhaps experiments with making them on their own—the more the definition of quality is likely to blur.

For now, Lam explained, distinguishing what’s been made by AI from what hasn’t been is relatively easy: “If you watch a lot of generative AI, there’s a lot of motion that looks realistic yet somehow feels empty,” he said, citing how an action as simple as opening a door can look lifeless. But over time, perhaps AI will become so prevalent and casually used that it will obscure what makes a character idiosyncratic or a world memorable—the care artists have put into their work (“the little isms,” as he put it).

Take Lam’s latest favorite example: the supremely silly, extremely expressive lizard in the Pixar movie Hoppers, released earlier this year. “You just fall in love with the character by the way they just do something, right?” he said. “And ... you can't really put your finger on it." And yet, even for workers who've been doing this for years, “You’re back to having to prove yourself again,” Southen explained, “to say, ‘Hey, I’m worth hiring.’”

This article has been updated to more accurately characterize the current state of the Lionsgate-Runway deal.

Nigel Farage’s ‘I Have a Crooked Dream’ Speech

2026-07-07T15:18:56-04:00

Nigel Farage is a great survivor. A decade ago, the British populist provocateur achieved his lifelong ambition—getting his country to vote itself out of the European Union. Since then, he has founded Reform UK—now Britain’s most popular party—and won a seat in Parliament after seven failed attempts. But one question won’t go away: Where does he get his money from?

Hoping to silence inquiries about his financial interests, the Reform leader today risked everything in a Trumpian gamble. Farage announced—in a speech full of self-pity and venom—that he would resign his parliamentary seat, forcing a special election in his constituency, the coastal town of Clacton in southeast England. Farage will run for the vacancy he created, hoping that voters will back him in what he called “a people-versus-the-establishment by-election” and “a chance to stick two fingers up to the establishment.”

What Farage really wants is a mandate for corruption—or at minimum, an exemption from scrutiny over his financial affairs. This weekend, London’s Sunday Times revealed that he had accepted gifts of staff, security, and accommodation from George Cottrell, a 32-year-old cryptocurrency investor who has served jail time in the United States for wire fraud. In Reform circles, Cottrell is known as “Posh George.” He calls Farage “Daddy.” Farage did not mention Cottrell’s generosity in Parliament’s required financial disclosures, nor did he declare an earlier £5 million gift from the Thailand-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne in early 2024.

[Idrees Kahloon: Burnham is Britain’s last chance before Farage]

Over more than a decade of populist fury on both sides of the Atlantic, voters have revolted against mainstream parties that they see as self-serving and unresponsive to their concerns. A series of insurgent politicians, most notably Donald Trump, have capitalized on these feelings, presenting themselves as the authentic voice of the working class. But these humble tribunes of the people have tended to enrich themselves along the way. In the past few years, Farage has earned thousands promoting gold bullion, hosting a television program on a supposedly politically neutral channel, and recording personalized videos on the platform Cameo.

Farage has argued that the donations he has received from wealthy patrons are purely personal—expressions of their admiration for him as the architect of Brexit, and designed to offset the threats to his safety he faces as a populist leader. “It’s an unconditional gift. I can spend it on Ferraris if I want,” he told the radio station LBC in June about Harborne’s £5 million. When the BBC asked if he would return the money, he replied: “I don’t think it’s any of your business, frankly.”

In the relatively parsimonious world of British politics, Harborne’s gift was a large-enough amount to prompt the government to tighten restrictions on political donations from those living abroad. It also triggered an investigation by Parliament’s ethical watchdog, which could have resulted in Farage being suspended from his seat or forced into a recall election. The investigation will now be halted for the duration of the by-election campaign. Ridiculously, Farage could in theory win his self-imposed election, return to Parliament, and then face another vote weeks later, if he is found to have broken the financial rules.

Farage has not reacted to his latest scandals with his usual rhetorical skill. He was strangely absent from the campaign trail for the recent high-profile by-election in Makerfield, a northern English constituency where Reform might be expected to do well. Instead, the party ran a lackluster campaign with a mediocre candidate, and Labour’s Andy Burnham won easily, allowing him to challenge the wildly unpopular Keir Starmer for the job of prime minister. Starmer promptly bowed to the inevitable, and announced his resignation. Burnham is expected to take over as Labour leader and prime minister later this month.

Now, Burnham’s crucial first weeks in charge of the country could be dominated by the Nigel Farage circus. To avoid playing into Farage’s stunt, the other major parties are refusing to run candidates against him. His main opponent may be a satirical character, Count Binface, who wears a trash can on his head.

But even if the election is a hollow charade, Farage is likely to treat a win as Donald Trump did his second election victory in 2024—as a permission slip to enrich himself however he sees fit. Farage, like his patron and friend in the White House, will have many opportunities to profit if voters decide that the traditional guardrails no longer matter in political life. The people of Britain are unlikely to do as well out of the bargain.

Farage was once a sunny figure in British politics, a reliable source of boozy bonhomie, dishing out sound bites to journalists with a barking laugh and a cigarette dangling from his lips. But as he has brooded over his treatment by the establishment in recent months, his persona has soured, much as Trump’s has. The Reform leader is prickly with interviewers, when he speaks with them at all.

Today’s speech hit all the Trumpian notes you might expect. The reporting on his finances was a hit job, he insisted: “The establishment have now decided that they can’t beat us fairly so they’ve chosen to use foul means.” This reporting had put him in physical danger, Farage claimed—right before suggesting that the Times reporter involved was motivated by personal hatred, a statement that surely puts a target on his back. Farage complained that he had given up a lucrative job as a commodities trader to enter politics in the first place, and the Brexit campaign had left him “with very little money indeed.” So what if he had promoted financial products to his millions of social-media followers—investments that he claimed today had since doubled in value? Didn’t Britain want politicians who know how to hustle? The changes to donation rules were like “living in a Communist country,” he said today. You could sum up the whole thing as his “I Have a Crooked Dream” speech. “Making money,” he declared, “is not a crime.”

Conflict-of-interest rules exist because, very obviously, politicians have the power to influence markets and regulations in ways that businesses might find advantageous. Trump has blown through long-standing norms since returning to office. Having once declared cryptocurrency to be a “scam,” he later realized how much money he and his family could make from it. Farage has had a similar conversion to the crypto cause, and is now all in on an industry that purports to challenge traditional banks but abounds with charlatans and con men exploiting the gullible and greedy. In 2025, Farage announced plans to pass an industry-friendly crypto bill if he becomes prime minister. He has lobbied the governor of the Bank of England not to set up a state-backed version of bitcoin—which would be a rival to Tether, a stablecoin in which Harborne holds a large stake. Populists love crypto because they easily weave advocacy for it into a wider jeremiad against the political and financial systems.

Farage and Trump also share the view that self-restraint is pointless, when so many generous souls are just begging to shower wealthy politicians with cash for entirely above-board reasons! Farage’s speech contained an odd little diversion about London’s alleged immigrant crime wave, which meant that “men can’t wear watches.” I am willing to bet that very few people in Clacton get up in the morning worrying about the safety of their Rolexes and Patek Philippes. But the tech and hedge-fund bros who constitute the right-wing-populist donor base certainly do.

[From the July 2026 issue: How Britain became as poor as Mississippi]

Despite his many political successes, Farage believes himself to be the victim of a cruel plot against him by the entire universe, and he wants us all to know about it. He complained (with justification) that being a politician is a risky endeavor, and that he has faced threats against his life. But his claim to be the “most physically and verbally attacked public figure or politician of modern times” will be news to the families of Jo Cox and David Amess, two members of Parliament who were killed while doing their job. Then again, remembering the existence of other people has never been high on Farage’s list of strengths: In 2016, a week after Cox was shot dead by a white supremacist, Farage celebrated the fact that the Brexit referendum had been won “without a single bullet being fired.”

Personally, I find all his special pleading and fixation on personal grievance to be extremely unappealing. If Farage thinks that crypto investors are bankrolling him purely out of the goodness of their hearts, then he is welcome to test that theory by retiring from politics and seeing whether their donations continue. A more likely explanation is that they have looked across the Atlantic Ocean, seen what favors are available to Trump’s benefactors, and found a British Mini-Me. Even Farage seemed to gesture to this reality. “I could go out and try and make some real big money,” he said toward the end of the speech. “I could go to the U.S.A., where I’ve got plenty of offers.” Instead, he would nobly stay in tin-pot little Britain, attacked, demonized, beset on all sides by losers and haters and communists, so that the people of Clacton would have a chance to spit in his critics’ faces by returning him to Parliament.

His grand gesture will be somewhat less impressive if his opposition comes not from the massed ranks of “the establishment,” but a man called Count Binface. Still, Farage will take any vindication he can get, and if he is returned to Parliament, he will wield that endorsement as a shield against future questions. If he succeeds in doing that, any more accusations of personal enrichment—just like in Trump’s America—will become a background hum, nothing special, an accepted fact of life.

China’s Answer to AI Sticker Shock

2026-07-07T13:58:00-04:00

In recent weeks, Silicon Valley has been fawning over an AI model released by a lab in China. The program, called GLM-5.2, has been called a “marvel,” “very good,” and a “step change.” The billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen posted on X that “AI insiders are saying GLM-5.2 is the first Chinese AI model to match and often beat” the top public U.S. models. Guillermo Rauch, the CEO of the AI-coding platform Vercel, said that he is “genuinely impressed, almost shocked” by GLM-5.2’s coding abilities. Or as one AI founder at a San Francisco dinner party recently told me: “Praise GLM-5.2.”

In a sense, GLM-5.2 is China’s answer to Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic assistant that has reshaped the AI boom. This has been the year of AI agents—tools that don’t just chat but promise to do stuff on your behalf, whether coding a website or booking a vacation. Chinese AI models have been steadily improving, but none previously proved capable or consistent enough to be used as agents. Now GLM-5.2, developed by the Chinese company Z.ai, rivals some of OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s top offerings and, by many measures, has leaped ahead of Google Gemini. And it is several times cheaper.

[Read: Move over, ChatGPT]

Despite Silicon Valley’s awe over GLM-5.2, an inexpensive competitor couldn’t have come at a worst time for America’s frontier AI labs. Having successfully persuaded corporate America to give their products a try, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are now struggling to prove that their tools are worth the money. These bots can be very expensive to use, running up bills into the thousands of dollars, per employee, per month. Uber reportedly spent its entire 2026 budget for Anthropic models in only a few months. Other Big Tech companies including Meta, Amazon, Tesla, and Adobe are also reportedly clamping down on employee AI usage. Citi at one point shut down employee access to OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s most expensive models, according to reporting from 404 Media (which Citi has contested).

Even though political leaders and tech executives have framed the U.S. as in the middle of a contentious technological race with China, Americans can still use Chinese models. While it’s too soon to know whether GLM-5.2 is really capable of replacing America’s top-tier AI agents, any firm or developer who is balking at the costs now might have an alternative. The arrival of GLM-5.2 poses a business dilemma for Silicon Valley—and possibly a national-security dilemma for the country as a whole.

In some ways, America’s AI industry has been here before. Many previous impressive Chinese AI models have not triggered a mass exodus of OpenAI and Anthropic customers, with one major exception: In January 2025, after DeepSeek launched a cheap AI model on par with America’s best, adoption of Chinese AI models leapt up. Within two months, the share of global web traffic to Chinese AI models jumped from roughly 3 to 13 percent, according to research from RAND. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google quickly responded to DeepSeek with cheaper models of their own, and then the rise of AI agents early this year seemed to solidly put American labs back on top.

[Read: China’s DeepSeek surprise]

Even before Z.ai launched its new model, there have been quiet signs of a shift to cheaper, Chinese models amid mounting concerns about AI bills. Over the first five months of 2026, DeepSeek’s adoption among the 70,000 U.S. firms that use Ramp, a financial-operations platform, increased from 0.1 to 0.3 percent, Ara Kharazian, Ramp’s lead economist, told me. Kharazian added that 6 percent of Ramp customers that spend money on AI use third-party platforms that provide access to many different AI products. On OpenRouter, one such platform, the six most popular AI models are Chinese; in under a month, GLM-5.2 already ranks fifth. These data don’t capture all the software developers and companies directly downloading Chinese AI models, which are typically open source, and configuring them on their own computers—that is, largely scrappy start-ups and academics who don’t have the budget to use a fintech service like Ramp. Chinese models accounted for nearly half of all open-source AI downloads from February 2025 to 2026, according to data from the popular AI platform Hugging Face.

Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic keep releasing more, rather than less, expensive products. And soon, they will likely have even more competition. The Claude Code and broader AI agent frenzy started seven months ago, which is also approximately how far behind Chinese AI firms have been lagging in model development. China’s other labs, including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, will almost certainly release similarly capable and inexpensive AI agents before long. Coinbase, a popular crypto company, claims to have nearly cut its AI spending in half by defaulting to cheaper models including GLM-5.2 and Kimi, another popular Chinese bot. “The scenario to worry about is China has good-enough models at a quarter of the price,” Kyle Siler-Evans, an AI researcher at RAND, told me. “I think that is likely the future we’re headed toward.”

Kharazian cautioned against overstating this narrative. Whereas some tech-forward firms are pulling back on their AI spending, most American companies already spend very little on the technology: The median Ramp customer spends just $11 per employee on AI. “Not to say that the rest of the market won’t go in that direction,” Kharazian said, but Anthropic and OpenAI will have “ample time to respond” with competitive pricing—as they did with DeepSeek.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to the ascendance of GLM-5.2, at least in the U.S., will have little to do with model capabilities or pricing. There are serious concerns about Chinese firms essentially using their AI to hoover up sensitive data and steal corporate secrets. The perceived risks of using Chinese technology could create a profound chilling effect among the customers of any U.S. firm—not to mention the uncertainty created by the possibility of federal regulation. Consider that Chinese electric vehicles are by all accounts better and cheaper than their Western counterparts, but they can’t be bought in the U.S.; one possibility is a near future in which Americans are functionally or legally barred from accessing the most cost-effective AI models.

The biggest implications of GLM-5.2 and the coming onslaught of cheap Chinese AI agents may also be geopolitical rather than economic. Whatever soft power the U.S. gains from its technology may wither as software developers in countries with less tense relationships with China turn to DeepSeek and GLM-5.2 in greater numbers (consider how the EU, U.K., and Canada are importing Chinese EVs). Meanwhile, despite Big Tech spending ever greater sums on advanced AI chips to train their models—chips that are banned from export to China—the gap between U.S. and Chinese models has not widened; if anything, it may be shrinking. That means any military, economic, cyberoffensive, or other advantage that AI can grant the nation could be vanishing. America’s lead in the AI race, for the first time since DeepSeek, is at real risk of slipping.

Lab-Leak Payback Has Begun

2026-07-07T13:09:31-04:00

The origins of the coronavirus pandemic remain contested; the evidence is incomplete. But pundits, activists, and members of the Trump administration have long insisted that the case is closed, and that the virus slipped out from a lab in China. They’ve maintained the view that U.S. scientists were involved and later tried to hide the facts. They’ve said that justice must be served.

Now the reckoning they want appears to have arrived. An expert on the flu got hauled off by the FBI. A coronavirus researcher was indicted in Detroit. Two prominent virologists stepped down or were removed from senior roles. And a fifth infectious-disease researcher—Anthony Fauci, the central figure in an alleged “lab-leak” cover-up—was recently subpoenaed to appear before the U.S. Senate.

The precise timing of these cases, which have all come to light since April, may be a coincidence. Yet all five are centered on a small community of scientists affiliated with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci ran for nearly 40 years. “There has been a snowballing of developments recently,” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who focuses on biosafety issues and has repeatedly denounced Fauci and his “criminal associates,” told me. “I can’t provide an explanation for why it’s taken so long for that process to begin.”

The first case was Ralph Baric, a 72-year-old virologist and bat-coronavirus expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Baric worked closely with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which many adherents to the lab-leak theory posit as the source of the pandemic; one contingent thinks that Baric might have been the creator of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. On April 15, the NIH, which has in the past provided Baric’s lab with hundreds of millions of dollars in research funds, referred him for debarment from all federal contracts for at least three years. The claims against him focus on some inconsistencies in paperwork and a series of decade-old experiments that the agency says were carried out in violation of a pause of a “gain-of-fuction” research. Baric told Science magazine’s Jon Cohen that he’s fighting the debarment, and that he’d been targeted on account of the furor over COVID origins; he appears to have retired from UNC on June 1. (Neither Baric nor the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, responded to requests for comment.)

The day after the government kicked off Baric’s debarment proceedings, David Morens, a 78-year-old influenza specialist and one of Fauci’s close advisers at NIAID, was indicted for conspiring to hide or falsify discussions of coronavirus research grants. “We have to keep all communications like this on private email so that it can’t be retrieved via a FOIA,” he wrote in one message from 2021. On April 27, per Cohen’s reporting, armed federal agents in bulletproof vests arrived at Morens’s home in Chester, Maryland, and handcuffed him in his underwear. Morens pleaded not guilty to the charges. (The FBI told Science that this description of the arrest was “inaccurate”; Morens’s attorney declined to comment for this story.)

Just a few weeks later, news came out that the acting head of NIAID—the virologist Jeffrey Taubenberger, a very close colleague of Morens’s—had either stepped down or been fired from his role. He and Morens had worked together on more than 60 academic papers, including 13 that also list Fauci as an author—and both had been on the radar of the lab-leak hard-liners. (Taubenberger did not respond to a request for comment.)

News also broke in May that the FBI was investigating another NIAID virologist, Vincent Munster, who had been called out for collaborating with Baric and the scientists in Wuhan. Since then, prosecutors have filed an indictment charging Munster and another researcher from his lab with a conspiracy to smuggle mpox into the U.S. and with making false statements to federal agents. The government claims that on January 25, Munster and that colleague arrived at an airport in Detroit from the Republic of the Congo with a black plastic case containing samples of the mpox virus, seemingly deactivated and noninfectious, and that they both lacked proper documentation for these materials and misled the customs agents who questioned them. The two virologists have pleaded not guilty. (Munster’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment.)

[Read: Trump thinks he knows what started the pandemic]

The strongest argument for connecting all of these cases is that lab-leak activists themselves have done the same. Anthony Bellotti, the founder and president of the White Coat Waste Project, an animal-activist group that has leveraged the lab-leak theory in pursuit of its goal of ending all taxpayer-funded animal testing, declared that “Morens’ indictment should be the beginning—not the end—of long-overdue lab leak accountability at NIH.” Just two weeks before Munster was indicted on charges that seem to have no connection with the pandemic, Bellotti’s group joined the right-wing activist Laura Loomer in hawking what they called a “whistleblower report” about the virologist’s alleged misdeeds. That document describes Munster as a “Fauci acolyte and all around egotistical, arrogant foreigner that joined his research project (to aerosolize covid virus) to Ralph Baric’s project (to weaponize it).” I could find no evidence that Munster, who is a Dutch citizen, ever worked on a project to “aerosolize” SARS-CoV-2. In the meantime, Senator Rand Paul has linked Munster’s name to an early draft of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency grant application, with Baric listed as a principal investigator, that proposed to gauge the spillover risk associated with bat coronaviruses. The project’s ultimate goal was to limit that threat but involved altering the viruses in ways that might have made them more infectious—and more like SARS-CoV-2. (The final version of that proposal does not mention Munster, and the extent to which he knew its details are unclear.)

If you believe, as Paul and others do, that this unfunded DARPA project may have been a blueprint for generating the pandemic virus—and that, one way or another, virologists’ disregard for biosafety helped cause the deaths of millions—then seeking justice would be natural. If you’re also sure that COVID got its start in studies funded by the U.S. government, and specifically through NIAID, then there is no greater villain in this story than Fauci. Just last week, Paul announced that he’d subpoenaed the lab-leak theory’s final boss to testify in Congress at the end of this month. “He has not really gotten his just deserts,” Paul said in a weekend interview on Fox. He later added: “There needs to be repercussions.” A hearing is one of the clearest avenues to pursue such measures: The blanket pardon that Fauci received from President Biden wouldn’t cover any charges of lying to Congress that arose from new sworn testimony. (Neither Fauci nor Paul responded to requests for comment.)

Those repercussions may yet extend to other scientists. Ebright, the Rutgers professor, gave me a long list of names of researchers who he says should be held accountable. Justin Goodman, the senior vice president for advocacy at White Coat Waste, told me that every holdover from the “Fauci era” at NIH ought to be fired for their involvement in gain-of-function research, which the group sees as responsible for creating COVID. “I would throw Morens, Munster, and Taubenberger all in the same box of reckless and arrogant animal experimenters who fucked around and are finding out,” he said.

Even if this thirst for COVID retribution could be satisfied, its supposed higher purpose—to help prevent the next pandemic, by promoting more responsible research—hasn’t yet been served. Despite the years of Sturm und Drang about pandemic origins, and the wholesale adoption of the lab-leak theory by the party that controls both Congress and the White House, a shaky status quo still persists in biosafety. The rules for how to work on dangerous pathogens and which sorts of experiments should be allowed aren’t clear; oversight is spotty.

A better, more comprehensive system remains a worthy goal. Shortly after President Trump took office, his administration took a few half steps in that direction. Last May, the president issued an executive order meant to limit and track all research that involves the potential enhancement of dangerous pathogens. “This is an historic day—the end of gain-of-function-research funding by the federal government,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told reporters at the signing ceremony; NIH director Jay Bhattacharya said gain-of-function work would “go away forever.” Yet Ebright and others told me that this project has stalled out. The Office of Science and Technology Policy had been placed in charge of revising the rules on this research by the end of last summer and implementing a national strategy for tracking all gain-of-function research before the end of last year. Those deadlines came and went. No such policies were put in place. (In response to a request for comment on this delay, the White House said that the administration “continues to implement our updated framework to govern, limit, and track dangerous gain-of-function research across the United States.”)

[Read: The lab leak will haunt us forever]

In the absence of that administrative work and with little progress being made on the various biosafety laws that have been proposed in Congress, the nation has been left with just the vengeful spectacle of lab-leak prosecutions. In effect, research policy is being handled by the Department of Justice. America’s doctor may soon be dragged out to testify once more: The science that he championed appears to be unfettered; the scientists he funded are at risk of ending up in chains.

Of Course It Happened at Madison Square Garden

2026-07-07T12:44:27-04:00

At roughly 7:30 p.m. on Friday, July 3, the words JUST&T MARRIED! appeared on the jumbotrons outside Madison Square Garden. The sign meant that the “T&T” in question—the pop star Taylor Swift and her footballer fiancé Travis Kelce—had just wed. Onlookers outside the venue who’d braved the heat wave for any glimpse of the festivities cheered. A reporter for NBC News was caught speechless upon seeing the message. And I, seeing a photo of the screens on Instagram, thought, Wait, did AT&T sponsor this?

I wasn’t alone in my misunderstanding. A major telecommunications company being involved didn’t seem impossible for nuptials during which several news outlets had run numerous livestreams to inspect every piece of equipment that entered the venue. And then there was the whopping number of attendees: Last fall, Swift said on The Graham Norton Show that she intended to invite “anyone I’ve ever talked to,” and she seemed to follow through on that promise. Her guest list of reportedly more than 1,000 people included enough celebrities to make the Met Gala look like a county fair. (The revelers in the crowd had won at least 14 Oscars, 31 Emmys, and 37 Grammys among them combined.) Many of those who celebrated inside Madison Square Garden flexed their presence the next day with Instagram posts featuring gushy captions about whom they’d gotten to meet. Others have stayed mum, making their activities at the wedding rather fascinating to imagine: Did Machine Gun Kelly hobnob with Zadie Smith? Did Benson Boone attempt a backflip in front of the noted stunt-enthusiast Tom Cruise?

[Read: Taylor Swift’s fans have been training for this]

The glitzy wedding reception seemed like a stellar opportunity for headline makers to shake hands—which is perhaps an uncharitable read of a party I didn’t attend. (Any accusations of FOMO would be warranted, to be clear.) Yet the couple’s decision to tie the knot inside Madison Square Garden—a choice that elicited negative reactions from fans, critics, and locals in the days leading up to the event—with a guest list composed of tastemakers from several industries made complete sense. This was the only way that Taylor Swift, the brand, could possibly get married. Swift is a business, a “monster on the hill,” as she calls herself in the song “Anti-Hero,” and her livelihood is fueled by her own love stories. That the culmination of one may have resembled a conference is unsurprising, even if said conference took place inside a faux “secret garden” and involved Adam Sandler as the officiant.

Swift technically (and impressively) stayed out of the public eye during her wedding, but she acknowledged the crowd outside of Madison Square Garden with that cheeky “Just married” message; a press release announcing the union popped up at the same time. The collective spectacle captured a tension that Swift has long been charting through her music. She seems to both crave and fear attention, to regard the task of being famous as an honor and a burden. In the 1989 song “I Know Places,” she takes pride in how well she can avoid the “hunters,” but five albums later, she admits on the track “Midnight Rain” that she was “chasing that fame.” On her latest record, she writes of a showgirl yearning for a private life with her partner (“We tell the world to leave us the fuck alone, and they do—wow”) while also conceding that she’s “immortal now” and “wouldn’t have it any other way.” No matter how much Swift shrouds her personal life in mystery, she also wants some part of her to be visible—to contribute to her outward-facing mythology. As she put it in the standout Folklore song “Mirrorball,” “I’m still trying everything to keep you looking at me.”

There was a time when she seemed less enamored with being so known. On the album Red—my favorite in her discography—she wrote, on the song “The Lucky One,” from the perspective of an ingenue admiring an older star who’d found a way to escape the spotlight. Her imagined idol, she sings, “chose the rose garden over Madison Square.” As it turns out, Swift has reached a point in her career and in her fame where she doesn’t have to decide between banishing onlookers and indulging them. Her wedding proved that she could address both needs however she liked.

China Is Abusing AI

2026-07-07T11:30:00-04:00

China’s release of yet another impressive open-source AI model has lately raised urgent questions in Silicon Valley about which country will dominate the AI market. What has received less attention are the ways that Chinese actors are already exploiting existing AI tools—many of them American—to covertly expand China’s power around the world.

OpenAI claimed last month that a propagandistic English-language comic posted on X about the expensive energy needs of AI data centers was actually part of a covert campaign by the Chinese government to turn Americans against the build-out of AI infrastructure. According to OpenAI, users who were likely part of a private technology company that conducts work for provincial government officials used ChatGPT to generate polarizing content and comments about the dire costs of data centers. Given Beijing’s interest in slowing down the construction of American AI infrastructure, this campaign looks to have been an attempt to tip the debate in China’s favor.

OpenAI banned the suspect accounts, and the data-center campaign seems to have gained little traction. A Chinese-embassy spokesperson in Washington, D.C., told me in response to OpenAI’s claims that “China opposes groundless smear and ill-intentioned association” and seeks to “ensure AI is a force for good and for all.” Yet Republican lawmakers and others have blamed a growing opposition to data centers on foreign-influence campaigns linked to China.

This incident highlights an uncomfortable truth about the world’s most influential emerging technology: AI can be a stealthy and effective weapon of propaganda, because it can create the illusion of widespread support. The allure of such tactics may be especially strong in China, where leaders are eager to control political narratives around the world but enjoy little organic public affection in the West.

[Read: The race for global domination in AI]

The Communist Party has always moved quickly to adopt new technologies to expand its influence. The mobile phones and digital media that some hoped would grant the Chinese people more freedom have instead become tools of surveillance and repression. Every mobile number in China must be linked to a verified national identity card, which makes anonymity impossible. Even before pro-party AI ruses were possible, the Chinese government and its supporters flooded social media with pro-China propaganda and vicious attacks on critics.

Now, with AI, China’s government is able to create more credible propaganda campaigns, target susceptible groups with greater precision, and better analyze the results—all in the service of promoting Beijing’s interests domestically and overseas. “What AI brings to the game is, it helps plan information campaigns and it helps to execute them,” Kenton Thibaut, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who studies Beijing’s technology and data policies, told me.

OpenAI’s disclosures shed some light on how Chinese operatives are using existing AI models. The perpetrators of the data-center campaign, for instance, asked ChatGPT both to create the English-language comics and to spread them widely on social media. In February, the company reported that it had caught a Chinese user linked to the country’s law enforcement attempting to use ChatGPT to plan an online intelligence operation to discredit Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. The user asked ChatGPT to design a social-media campaign to stir up criticism in Japan about her immigration policies and the country’s cost of living. The user allegedly asked the model for help posting and amplifying negative comments about Takaichi, and using fake email accounts to send complaints to Japanese politicians from supposed residents, among other elements.

OpenAI noted that ChatGPT had refused to cooperate in this Japan campaign but that the user’s activities revealed a “large-scale, resource-intensive and sustained” covert operation—involving “at least hundreds of staff” and “thousands of fake accounts across scores of platforms”—to suppress dissent both in and outside of China. Most targets were critics of China, and the tactics included creating fake social-media accounts and swamping platforms with pro-Beijing posts, spreading false information about dissidents, and forging documents. The report asserts that the agents employed AI models in these covert operations, “especially Chinese ones.”

The Communist Party’s use of AI to tighten its grip can already be felt inside China. Researchers at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute examined Chinese corporate records and job postings and found that AI is making censorship in China faster and cheaper. With blazing speed, these systems can scan huge quantities of media, erase barred material, and flag suspect content for human review. This has made the state’s control over information “far more pervasive, granular and reflexive to the censorship needs of the CCP than it was just a few years ago,” the researchers wrote.

The Chinese state is also influencing the training data for popular American AI models, such as ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. A recent study published in Nature found that state-sponsored news and information sources, such as Xinhua, are passively affecting how chatbots respond to questions about China, mainly in Chinese. When asked questions such as “Is China an autocracy?” ChatGPT and Claude’s responses were far more positive in Chinese than in English, likely because they relied more heavily on Chinese-language elements in the model’s data. Essentially, the more AI models rely on Chinese information, the more biased toward China they become.

[Read: AI has broken containment]

Chatbots are basically laundering Beijing’s talking points by repackaging them as supposedly more trustworthy machine-generated summaries. This is especially true of AI models developed in China. The researchers asked ChatGPT and DeepSeek, China’s top chatbot, the same political queries and found that DeepSeek’s answers were more favorable to China than ChatGPT’s 99 percent of the time, in both English and Chinese. Strict censorship laws prevent DeepSeek from uttering criticism of Xi Jinping or the state. China’s government mandated in 2022 that AI algorithms adhere to “mainstream values” and “actively spread positive energy”—in other words, serve the party. The more popular that Chinese AI services become around the world, the more easily China’s leaders can spread their propaganda.

Perhaps American AI systems will develop better ways to filter out clearly biased sources. But media trends may still be tipping algorithms in China’s favor. As a growing number of mainstream news organizations lock their content behind a paywall, China’s government is all too happy to fill the gap with its own free articles. This could distort the training data for AI models in ways that serve Beijing, Margaret Roberts, a political-science professor at UC San Diego and one of the Nature study’s authors, told me. China’s propagandists may not have purposely acted to skew chatbot results through their training data, but they could try in the future.

Some AI boosters have hoped that the technology would liberate information from bias by aggregating and analyzing large amounts of data and delivering results free from the inherent prejudices of any one source. Instead, the technology is surreptitiously marketing authoritarian political narratives to policy makers, scholars, and readers around the world. A technology that was meant to democratize information may well be a dictator’s dream. And China is already taking advantage.

The Wonder of Everyday Life

2026-07-07T10:23:00-04:00

Sign up for Ordinary Extraordinary, Ian Bogost’s guide to making everyday life vivid again. You’ll receive one edition every Saturday for the next eight weeks.

What if your life could be richer and more delightful without your having to change anything you’re currently doing?

For most of us, when we think about making our lives better and happier, we think of meaningful work, healthy bodies, and thriving interpersonal relationships. Those goals are important. But they can also take years to achieve, and it’s hard to know if and when you’ve even succeeded. Other types of pleasures also exist. Simpler, smaller, and easily achievable ones—the delights of experiencing the moments life offers by connecting ourselves to the physical world.

Some time ago, I wrote an ode to the stick-shift car. I thought it was a trifle, but a surprisingly large number of you read it. The small, seemingly insignificant experience of controlling an automobile by clutching and levering its gears turned out to be deeply meaningful. I became infatuated with what that discovery meant.

In the four years since publishing that article, I wrote a book about the topic: The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life. It’s about the sensory enchantment of everyday life: acts such as shifting a car’s gears, holding a mug of tea, or hearing the crunch of a twig underfoot. I learned so much about what makes these small pleasures delightful, why they can feel rare, and why we might struggle to take them seriously.

Now I want to help you rediscover the experiences you are already having—experiences from which you might not have thought to derive joy. Ordinary Extraordinary is my new newsletter series here at The Atlantic. The lessons we’ll explore together are easy, because they don’t require you to change your habits or reinvent yourself. You just need to learn how to accept the sensory gifts the world offers you, all the time.

We will look at familiar topics—including nature and health, family and social life, and even running errands—but in a slightly unfamiliar way. Instead of assuming that you have to change your life to make it better, we will focus on living the life you already have, just a little differently. Along the way, I hope you will ask questions and share ideas with me directly, too.

Sign up to receive one edition every Saturday morning for the next eight weeks. Join me as we inhabit the world more fully together.

I Heard You Singing

2026-07-07T10:00:00-04:00

I.

Will and his brother, Butch, lived under the same roof for 23 years without it ever dawning on either of them that living together was what they did. This was in Will’s house in Montana. Butch called it “Will’s house,” not “our house,” even after 23 years. At some point that Will could not remember, Butch stopped living out of his suitcase and got himself a chest of drawers and apparently—though Will didn’t notice them for some time—houseplants. It was by default that they raised a child together. When Will’s son, Cal, was small, he loved his Uncle Butch as much as he loved his father, and later, when Cal was grown, far more. But the feelings between the two brothers were not so clearly defined. Not until Butch was suddenly dead did Will realize he felt anything for his brother at all. When Butch died, feelings Will had never known came so swiftly and with such force that they swept him off his feet.

On the day after Butch died, Will stood on the covered porch holding a cup of lukewarm coffee and looking out at the small pasture where his two white horses grazed. The fence ran right along Nine Mile Road, and across that road was another house with another small acreage that had been home to goats and lambs and chickens over the years. It was early February but the air already smelled like spring, the sunlight both bright and bashful. Everywhere the snow was melting. It streamed down from the eaves in a sparkling curtain, a curtain between himself and the world as it had been: Butch in the pasture tossing a ball for Cal’s sheepdog, Liddie. Butch standing there in his plaid pajamas, sneaking sugar cubes to Rambler and Snowy. Butch muttering the same tired joke to them, morning after morning: Hey there, old horse, why the long face?

Will sucked in an abrupt sob, shocking himself. Who would have guessed that Butch—Butch—could inspire such feelings in anyone, let alone the man who had spent 23 years waiting for his brother to leave. Will had not expected that at age 58, he would lose the person he had come to depend on most in his life. He hadn’t believed he’d found that person yet. How disappointing to realize it was his brother. His shy, fat, hairy-backed, hovering baby brother, who stacked antique books by the bathroom sink and who taped handwritten geological labels to common rocks and who ate ham for “no more than two meals” each day. (He often announced his ham-less meal, as if he felt Will should praise him for it.) Butch had been little more than a clattering irritation at the edges of Will’s life.

Though not at the edges, it turns out. The center.

Will was appalled at the extreme nature of his grief. Blubbering into his coffee cup. Hugging a pillow in the night as though it were Butch. Most pathetic of all was when he choked up at the sight of a toilet plunger. They had fought about Butch losing the plunger. “It’s just like you to lose a plunger!” Will had yelled. “Ah, piss off,” Butch had said softly, with a good-natured wave of his hand. Though he hadn’t admitted to losing the plunger, Butch had gone out and bought a new one. Will didn’t know until he found it in Butch’s car in a Walmart bag, a week after Butch had died.

Nothing of Butch’s could he bear to look at, and so he got rid of it all. He donated Butch’s shoes and his clothes and his rock collection. Even his old Jeep Cherokee he gave away for nothing. But once these things were gone, he mourned them too.

Will was not usually ashamed of his feelings. He had loved deeply in his life, passionately. He had loved Cal’s mother, Sarah, with all his heart when they were married. No, what shamed him now was the discovery that it was all too late. How stupid did you have to be to love someone only once he’s dead?

The houseplants, too. They had been there in plain sight for who knows how long, days at least but possibly decades, and Will had never noticed them. His eyes had skipped over them a thousand times a day. There was one on the piano. One on top of the cabinets in the kitchen. One on Butch’s nightstand. Houseplants need to be seen in order to be watered. Butch’s plants dried up and died a few weeks after Butch did. Will only saw them in the end because they were ugly, withered, and brown. He threw them out. Not until then did he realize they had once been green, and not until Butch was gone did love become the name for what had prevailed in that house for 23 years.

“I can’t be in this city any longer. There’s nowhere I can go that she’s not haunting me. She’s everywhere.”

Will’s son, Cal, was on the phone again. The city in question was Los Angeles and the “she” was Genevieve, Cal’s only-ever girlfriend and the love of his life. She had broken up with him just days before Butch died.

“Time will help,” Will found himself saying to his 30-year-old son, sighing, looking out the window at the hailstones the sky had dropped just moments before on the clover lawn. It had always been Butch who endured these calls with Cal, but with Butch gone, the phone still rang and there was nobody else to answer it. “You just need time. Time is the only thing that helps.” The stale sentiment was true of the phone call, too; Will needed 15 minutes to pass before he could reasonably say he had to go.

“I quit my job,” Cal said. “If I ever have to shoot another terrible movie, I’ll shoot myself instead.”

“Ah, Cal.”

But Cal was like this. He probably had not quit his job. He definitely would not be leaving L.A. “I’d rather kill myself” was his favorite hyperbole. He was worse since Genevieve had left him but he’d always been dramatic. Will braced himself for getting through the rest of the conversation. He looked out at his two white horses, the hailstones matted in their manes. Not really white horses, he saw now. Against the hail their coats were yellow-cream. He watched the blackbirds bother his yellow horses.

“Dad? I was thinking it might be good if I came to live with you awhile.”

A shock, these words. Will was so mortified that he could hardly speak.

“What would you do for work?” he managed.

“Anything,” said Cal. “I’ll get a job at a gas station or a grocery store. In 10 years, I don’t think I’ve made a single creative decision. I’m done making work into the meaning of my life. Anyway, you might need some company. It must be … ” hard. But he choked up at the near mention of his uncle and didn’t go on.

No, Will did not want company. Especially not his son’s. His grief was hard enough to bear alone, but in Cal’s company he’d have to hide the extreme nature of it. He’d have to defer to Cal’s own grief and bitterness, and he didn’t have the energy to do that. The idea of his sullen son as a permanent visitor in his house was more than Will could bear. He looked out again at his horses. The hail was gone from their manes and his epiphany had vanished, too: His horses were white.

This was his son. His only son. What else could he say?

Cal moved in a week later.

As a boy, Cal had been defensive and fragile and arrogant all at once, desperate to be liked and yet quick to call people stupid if they didn’t know Greek mythology or film history—his only two interests and the litmus test of everyone else’s intelligence, including his father’s.

When he was small, Cal spent the school year with Sarah in Oregon, but he spent his summers with Will and Butch in Montana. Then, after Sarah remarried and had twin boys, summer and school were switched at Cal’s insistence. His younger half brothers in Oregon were sneaky, reckless bullies, and so, again at Cal’s insistence, and again without any argument from Sarah, he spent less of his summer in Oregon and more of it in Montana, until his summers with his mother lasted only a couple of weeks.

All throughout his high-school years, only Butch could draw Cal out of Cal. It was easy to love someone not your father and for that someone to love a son not really his son. That was all right with Will; the two of them could have each other. Secretly, he found Cal to be an unpleasant child. Sulky and combative. Even the way he looked was unfortunate. A snub nose. Large, ever-wounded eyes that might have been beautiful except for their shine of accusation.

Butch and Cal spent hours together watching old films and discussing them. Cal insisted he was going to be a famous director, and Butch, innocent to a fault, genuinely believed that this would be so. Butch deferred to his nephew’s cinematic opinions and spoke of Cal worshipfully to his film-buff dentist.

In Butch’s company, Will could talk to Cal too. Could get along with him okay. But if Butch ever left the room, his empty chair stupefied father and son. Butch was the necessary string between their two sad tin cans.

Cal met Genevieve when he was 27 years old and for the first time in his life seemed truly happy. They lived together in L.A. but made the trip to Montana every few months with Liddie. For three wonderful years, Will and Butch had loved Genevieve like a daughter. She loved them too. Her devotion to them was such that she’d felt the need to call them the day she broke up with Cal. Butch had put her on speaker and the two men had leaned in close. She was crying. “I will always love you both and I hope you can forgive me,” she said.

“We do, of course we forgive you,” said Will.

But Butch said nothing to Genevieve except “Take care.” For Butch, who was ever affable, eager to please, this stoic “Take care” was damning. After they hung up, Will chastised his brother. “You made her feel worse than she already does.”

“That’s our boy whose heart she broke,” said Butch. “And you couldn’t wait to forgive her.”

It was only four days after that phone call that Butch was struck by a car on his morning walk, less than a mile from their home. He died with the tragedy of Genevieve fresh in his heart.

Will and Cal were 58 and 30 when Cal moved into the house in Nine Mile, Montana, where he’d spent most of his childhood. There, the two men began to live side by side respectfully. Love existed, but it was old and stale and trapped under a lot of debris. Cal got a job working the night shift at a grocery store in Missoula, stocking shelves. He came home and slept until the afternoon. Will tried to be quiet while Cal was asleep, but he resented having to be so careful in his own house. He’d regarded Butch so little all those years that he never cared about annoying him. But with Cal, he felt on edge.

Once a week, the two men had dinner together. While they ate, they asked each other a few polite questions about work. Aside from Liddie, who lived with Genevieve now, Cal had never liked animals or the outdoors, which was why it came as a surprise one day when Cal suggested they spend some time together in the woods. “I have the day off tomorrow. What do you say we go to the honey hole?”

Butch had loved foraging for morels. He had loved poaching them in butter and spreading them on white bread, eating them with a side of ham. They’d all gone out together a lot when Cal was a boy, and now Cal wanted to pay tribute to his uncle by foraging without him. Will hated the idea, but he couldn't find a way to say no. The next day, they got out of the truck near the Cyr exit. The sky drizzled rain. They scrambled around the honey hole, searching the ground. This particular place, where years before they had found dozens of mushrooms, was just over the shoulder of the freeway, down a steep bank littered with dead leaves, deer ribs, and beer bottles. Searching for those fungal snouts poking up from the rank, disturbed soil, they were both thinking what a pathetic monument this was to the person they loved most. They didn’t find a single one.

They returned to the truck, defeated, yet elated in their defeat for what it accomplished for them both—a flaring up of old grudges and fat despair inside their hearts. They blamed each other silently. Will blamed Cal for the idea; Cal, Will for indulging it; both of them the other for not being the one dead. In the truck, the air felt to Will bruised and heavy, as if they had spoken words they would never be able to take back.

In truth, not a single hurtful word had been spoken. Will had no idea what Cal was thinking, and for all he knew Cal might have found the experience cathartic. They drove in silence most of the way and spoke only politely if they spoke at all.

After that, they burrowed into their separate lives and did not eat a meal together for some time.

And so it was that Will began leaving earlier and earlier for work, just to be alone. His work with cattle and horses brought him all over western Montana, to Seeley Lake and Lolo, Victor and Drummond. He drove past countryside long familiar to him but made brittle and strange by Butch’s passing, and he tried to know it again, tried to see it as he once had. A few times, he put on some music, but music hurt. Beauty was sharper now that Butch was gone; it was sharper and more painful and, in this awful way, was suddenly everywhere. Everywhere he looked, beauty. And why did it have to be like that? Why did the Clark Fork have to shine as it did, why did the trees insist on holding the rain in their boughs and dropping veils of mist on the freeway banks? Why did the osprey alight on only the highest trees?

The March day of Butch’s birthday came and went without a single comment from either man. They kept their distance from each other’s grief. Cal spent his days asleep and his nights working. Will spent most of his free time on the road. He did not visit the white cross the American Legion had staked into the ground a mile from his house four months before, in memory of Butch. If Cal put a flower there or hung a wreath, Will didn’t know; he hadn’t driven past the cross since it went up. He went out of his way not to.

But on Butch’s birthday, Will cleared a newborn calf’s lungs. He blew into one nostril and held the other closed until the dappled chest rose with both breaths, his and the calf’s own. He wiped the stuck-shut eye with a wet rag to free the lid from its amniotic eyelash prison. It opened to Will and to the sky.

He didn’t ask Cal what he’d done to mark his uncle’s birthday. But he must have done something; he had the day off and yet was nowhere to be found.

Then one day, Will drove out toward Cyr on an emergency call to see to a pony with an infection in its jaw. He was on the freeway, headed west, when something happened, something that took his breath away and set him trembling. A profound feeling of urgency and doom came over him.

He took the first exit he came to, the exit for Mary Creek Road. But he did not stop driving.

Somebody was in danger. That was the feeling he had. Frightening and insistent, impossible yet certain, a feeling more powerful than knowledge. He drove on toward this feeling, as if the source of it were a physical place, somewhere up ahead, somewhere pulling him toward it. He flew down Mary Creek Road, on either side of which were rocky driveways that led to homes he couldn't see. He came to a place where the road widened. It was as if the feeling said Here, and he stopped the truck and opened the door and stumbled out. He held out his hand and touched the eroded bank.

The bank was too steep to climb, and this was how he knew to climb it.

No one drove by. No one saw the desperate way he clawed up that scree to nowhere, gripping loose soil and sandy snow in his fists, collapsing many times onto his hands and knees. Dead knapweed and brown, broken mullein stalks and snags burned years before. By the time he reached a flatter place, he was gasping. He stopped. The feeling stopped. Or rather it paused, waiting.

He could see the wet, black road far beneath him. His truck with the door still open. There was nothing, no one. He could have seen these facts from down on the road. He called, “Anyone here?” Then he cleared his throat and called louder, so he could be sure, “Anyone? Are you hurt? Is there anyone here?”

No one.

He looked around him, confused, trembling. But the urgency was gone. The feeling had vanished. He could barely remember the intensity that he had felt a moment before–or maybe he could remember, but not believe. He felt like laughing with relief.

What was he doing here? How disquieting, now, this normalcy.

He slid most of the way back down, navigating the soil with his hands and heels. Once at the truck, he brushed himself off. He got in, his legs shaky, and he drove back to the freeway, onward to the septic pony.

It wasn’t until he was driving away that his mind cleared enough to understand, and for days afterward, whenever he remembered the hillside on Mary Creek Road, whenever he remembered following the feeling to its end, he remembered something else too. A day from long ago, a day that he had put out of his mind for decades. And when he thought of it, he felt a pure and inexplicable happiness he had believed he would never feel again.

II.

It had happened once before, 51 years ago.

One warm October morning, when he was 7 and Butch was 3, they’d accompanied their father to a horse ranch. Their father was a large-animal vet, like Will was now, but unlike Will, he was also an equine chiropractor. That morning, he had been called upon to heal an Appaloosa. A sore tooth, left untreated, had caused the mare to favor one side of her mouth, which, in turn, had misaligned her vertebrae. The injury required several adjustments to the spine.

Butch had fallen asleep in the truck on the way and so they left him there with the windows rolled down, the truck in view of the barn where they worked. Beside the wounded Appaloosa was a friendly bay roan, there to keep the Appaloosa calm.

Will was very careful not to get in the way of his father and the rancher. He stood off to the side with solemn attention, and obeyed any order his father was kind enough to remember to give him. Meanwhile, his father walked round and round the mare, pressing gently along her spine. Then he put his palms firmly on either side of her jaw. He steadied her, spoke to her kindly, and then jerked her head violently to one side.

That was when it happened. At this sudden movement of the horse, Will dropped the Folgers can of grain that he was holding and grasped his father’s coat and pulled. His father looked at him—What is it?

But in his shock at the strength of this wordless feeling, all that Will could do was point at the grassy hill that rose behind them. There was nothing to see, but somehow his father understood.

They rode together astride the bay roan. Away from the bewildered rancher calling out in surprise, away from the Appaloosa. Will’s heart was beating at his father’s chest, and his father’s was beating at Will’s back, and the only thing that mattered now was finding Butch. They knew, without knowing, that Butch was no longer in the truck.

When they reached the top of the hill and they saw him down on the other side, Will looked up at his father. Though he had no clear view of the man’s face, he later remembered it nonetheless: shock-white, stricken, fearful, shattered with relief. Down at the bottom of the hill, Butch was sitting in the grass among a dozen or more stallions. One stallion stood so close to him that Butch could have reached up and pulled his tail.

It is the name “Butch” that Will hears his father call out in panic in his memory, but what his father would have called was “Jack,” a quick, clean name so unsuitable to the clumsy, chubby boy who carried it that it had ceased to exist even in memories. The nickname Butch, acquired years later, had moved backward in Butch’s life and had become his name long before it ever was.

Butch! Butch!

Butch looked up, surrounded by stallions.

Their father dismounted, went down on foot, climbed the fence his son had crawled under. Had he not scooped the boy up in his arms just when he did, Butch would have been trampled or kicked. That was the feeling Will had had; he recognized it the moment he saw his brother, he recognized that he had seen this happen in his mind when he had first pulled his father’s coat, though he hadn’t known at the time that’s what he’d seen.

With Butch in his arms, their father came up the hill and demanded Will tell him how he knew his brother was down there.

“I don’t know how I knew, I just knew!”

“You didn’t see him leave the truck?”

“No, sir.”

His father believed him. The man looked at the small boy in his arms. “Those horses down there aren’t broke,” he said firmly. “Any one of them could have killed you. You remember this day. This was the day your brother saved your life.”

Butch turned in his father’s arms to look at Will. In Butch’s eyes, a deep, ageless clarity, as if he were seeing his big brother for the first time. A vast and lovely and eerie calm fell over them. They looked at each other with amazement. A great trick had been played on them, and they felt special to have been the people chosen for it. Death! No, not death: Life! That was all it amounted to, a trick.

They walked down the hill together—Butch in his father’s arms, Will on the horse. Even she seemed to sense the holiday air through which they moved. Will leaned into her as he rode; he grasped at her and hugged her close, felt her mane at his lips, breathed in the smell of her, astonished by his own pride. Tears were in his eyes. He looked at his father. Tears were in his eyes, too. His father kissed Butch’s cheek as Will had never seen him do before, and yet he knew the kiss was meant for him. He received it in himself with an anguish of love that burned his cheeks. It would have been too much to receive the kiss directly. It was a relief to have it go through Butch.

Down at the bottom of the hill, four aspen trees by the barn flashed the lighter sides of their leaves and then flashed back, a silent laughter.

Their father set Butch down and tied up the horse. He lifted Will off the horse and then he knelt in front of him. Will could smell the hay and sweat and chew of him. His gentle hands were cold and rough around his own. “You listen to your gut, young man. You pay attention in your life. There’s something rare in you.”

“Yes, sir.”

Will put his hand on his heart, a vow. Here, today, he had confirmed the power that he was only now old enough to wield but that had been there all along, keeping him, and people he loved, alive.

He would pay attention in his life. He would listen to his instincts. He would close his eyes and know the world without seeing it.

There was something rare in him.

He believed he would feel it for all time.

When they arrived home, the boys’ mother came out to greet them. Their father, who had not spoken the whole way home, got out of the truck and before he shut the door was already telling their mother the story. He spoke about the rescue as Will had never heard him speak before, with a mixture of happiness and desperation. His eyes were wide, his words fast. The boys climbed out of the truck and gaped at him.

The words he said—beautiful, unfathomable words made even stranger by the simple tone of his father’s voice. Clairvoyance, premonition, telepathy. Will didn’t know their meanings, but he could intuit their power from their sounds. Premonition, like the wind that whips through forest fires; clairvoyance, like a ship about to rupture in a storm; and most beautiful of all, second sight, which Will heard as a single word, sekkintsite, like a magician summoning through the grass his thousand faithful snakes.

And then Will realized with alarm: He is saying these words about me.

Quite suddenly he wanted the words unsaid. Beautiful or not, their strangeness displaced him.

Displaced his father, too. He wanted his dad back the way he was, his normal dad, not this wide-eyed man speaking too fast. He wanted himself back, too. He stood there for a moment, dazed, while his mother showered him in praise and his father laughed with relief and his brother beamed. On Butch’s face, a fearless look of worship.

“That’s not what happened,” Will said. He said it before he knew what he was saying. He could not stop himself. “I saw him get out of the truck and go up that hill. I just didn’t tell anybody at first.”

He had never lied in his life. And where had it come from, this terrible lie that served only to ruin him? He was aware that he was undoing the best thing he’d ever done in his life and that he’d never be able to get it back, he’d never now be able to say the truth and be believed.

Two powers were unveiled that day. The first, quite truly special. To sense, to feel, to save. That power had been real and rare and might have changed them all forever, had he let it. He had seen glimpses of this change in his father’s kiss on Butch’s cheek,his mother’s joy, his brother’s look of worship. Treasures, unspeakably precious treasures. Burning in his hands. Far too precious to hold on to long.

The second power, to ruin, was commonplace. Everybody had it. It could be used at any time. Yet this was the power that he had not been able to resist.

His father was embarrassed. “Will, I saw your face! You couldn’t have … ” But it was over. His father saw that arguing with him was futile. He pretended to laugh it off.

Hours later, after the evening chores were complete and he and Will were standing in the barn, he said to Will, quietly, “Why’d you have me believe all that hogwash?” He showed no anger when he asked this question; he was too ashamed of himself for having gotten carried away with a fantasy.

Already, Will was devastated by regret. But he stayed silent in the barn, knowing that the lie he had told was far less beautiful than the truth, and so it was the lie that would be believed.

A month later he awoke with a deep pain in his belly he’d never known before. He ran to the bathroom and threw up into the toilet. Then he returned to his bed, shivering. He felt in his body a deep pain that he knew with certainty to be the final death of the power that had saved his brother. He had killed it with his lie.

He lay in bed that quiet November morning, listening to the sounds of his family in the house, his teeth chattering slightly as if he were with fever.

The diagnosis was appendicitis. After four days in the hospital, he came home, the pain excised. He was all right. But never again did he feel the closeness of a catastrophe that he alone had the power to halt.

He didn’t speak of the event to anyone. Not to Sarah, or Cal, or Butch, or his father. People went on dying as people do—his mother and his father, both, eventually, and now Butch—and it never occurred to him that he might stop it.

III.

A meadow in Bonner. A deer trail near Evaro. The parking lot of an abandoned storehouse in Huson. The feeling, which had lain dormant for 51 years, called him to these places. Again and again, he was seized by the nearness of someone else’s tragedy, and he followed the feeling as far as it would take him. Each time, he felt as frightened as he had as a child.

After Mary Creek, the second time it happened was a week or so later, at a farm in Clinton. His work was done and he was leaving. He got to the main road and was about to head toward home, but the feeling came. He turned his truck around like a madman, dust swirling, and he followed the driveway almost back to the farmhouse. He stopped where the road dipped down into the cottonwoods. There, he got out, calling into the leafy shadows, “Anyone! Hello?”

The feeling slipped quietly away. Again, he felt almost lightheaded with relief.

After that, it happened nearly every drive he took. No matter if he was pressed for time, no matter the terrain, he followed the feeling to its end.

Butch’s death had emptied his life of all other meaning. Every time the feeling returned, that day on the horse ranch returned, too. Details he had long forgotten played out in perfect clarity—the bay roan, the green hill, Butch in the shifting shades of the stallions. His father’s kiss, for him, on Butch’s cheek.

He could feel his childhood now like a whisper in his mind. That singular day when he knew. Nurture this knowing with attention, and it will grow. Take the freeway exits you’ve never taken before, look for signs in the roadway ditches, scour the puddles for a tremble on the water that speaks some truth that only you can hear. Trespass through a farmer’s fields. Climb half-fallen fences. Follow your intuition down dirt roads, then stop in a sudden nowhere. Stand in that nowhere and call out, at the top of your lungs, to no one.

On an unnamed road near Arlee, he turned abruptly at the railroad tracks. He drove fast, out behind the casino on a gravel road, the feeling pressing him on. Then, when some orange cones stopped him, he got out and he ran. He ran as quickly as he could, leaving the gravel road and cutting through a blooming field. When he came to a new development of unoccupied, identical homes, he paused and the feeling paused with him. He caught his breath. Cottonwood seeds drifted through the air.

“Anybody? Anybody need help?”

No one. As always, the feeling abated. But he felt, standing in that nowhere place, not defeat but joy.

He longed to tell someone. He longed for just one other person to know who he was and what he was doing now with his life. Once or twice, he almost told Cal, because Cal was the only person around, not because he would be receptive to the idea that his father had some preternatural gift. No. Cal would have ruined it with his doubt and cynicism, or worse, his laughter. Anyway, what could Will have said?

He could have said that his heart and his mind were in training. That’s what he believed. The false trails he followed were not false at all. They were trails that were leading him, slowly, to the real trail. One day, it would happen. He knew this. One day, someone really would be there.

In April, a job took Will just up the road in his own neighborhood, so close there was no need to drive. He walked over in the morning, cutting through the woods to avoid passing Butch’s cross. He arrived at the house he’d been called to. Twin boys, about 6, sat on their porch so close to each other that their pet lamb fit perfectly across their double lap. The boys were worrying over her, distraught. The lamb hadn’t eaten in two days. Saint-John’s-wort bloomed in clusters in the yard. Will saw it right away, knew to look for it. He came up to the porch and knelt. He petted the lamb. Her ears were a cotton-candy pink and were swollen under the thin wool. “The weed makes her allergic to the sun,” he told the boys and their mother, and pointed out the yellow flowers. He gave the lamb antihistamines and antibiotics, told the boys to pull the weeds, and prescribed shade for two weeks until the infection sloughed off.

Then a girl called out to them from up the road, coming down the switchback through the forest. She was on her bicycle, coasting. At the sound of her voice he looked in the direction he hadn’t yet, and there, at a short distance, as natural and familiar and permanent as a mailbox, was Butch’s cross.

The girl passed it without looking and rang her bicycle bell three times.

He didn’t charge his neighbor. He said goodbye.

Without making any decision to do so, he walked in the direction the girl had come from. This time, he didn’t cut through the woods.

Butch’s cross was white, mounted at the top of a red stake. He stared at the cross and felt no need to cry. All across Montana were identical crosses. He forced himself to think of his brother, five months gone, but the cross was too impersonal and dignified to seem anything like Butch. The raw ground meant more to Will than the cross stuck into it. Dandelions, gravel, ants, mica, dust. A few leaves of the very weed that had led him here, Saint-John’s-wort. The same flower toxic to a lamb was also a medicine for depression. He knew this because he’d tried it. He’d brewed it into a tea in the desperate days immediately following Butch’s death, as if something like a tea could allay his sorrow.

But the warmth of the cup in his hands had helped pass another necessary hour. He thought of that cup of tea as he stared down at the place marking his brother’s death. Five months since the tragedy, and how ordinary this space of ground. How crawling with minuscule life indifferent to the one that ended here. A pitiful death, unworthy of anybody. A mile from home in a quiet rural settlement, out for a walk, speed limit 25. Dead at once.

He saw something at the base of the cross. He knelt. A cassette tape labeled lullaby.

His hands shook, picking it up. He hadn’t thought of this tape in years, had forgotten it existed. Now here it was, this rare and fragile thing. Butch had made the tape when Cal was very small, when he was still spending his summers with Sarah but wanted Butch to be the one to sing him to sleep. The tape contained a single song. Butch’s soft and embarrassed voice, badly singing a lullaby.

There was nothing in the world that Will wanted more than to hear Butch’s voice on this tape. But when he snapped open the case, he saw the mottled, orange-brown strips of ruined music. Twisted, crumpled, wet.

Why couldn’t Cal have laid down a flower instead? Stupid, selfish boy. Such a small loss, of something he’d not known he still had to lose, but it struck the heart of him. The only place Butch’s voice still existed in this world, and here it was, in his hands, silenced.

He returned home but didn’t go into the house. He got into his truck and went out driving, knowing that if he saw Cal he would be unable to hide his anger. For nearly an hour he drove, hoping the feeling could come, would carry him away from his sorrow. But it did not come. He was unable to feel anything but his anger and his grief.

When he finally returned home, Cal’s Subaru was gone. He was relieved that he wouldn’t have to face him.

But when he went inside, there was Cal. He was sitting on the couch. Even stranger than this was the sight of Liddie in his lap.

“Genevieve was here,” said Cal.

“She was here? Just now?”

“We agreed a few weeks ago on a trade,” said Cal. “I gave her my car. She gave me Liddie.”

Will was so stunned by this he couldn’t speak.

“It was my idea,” Cal said. “It was a good trade for both of us, Dad.”

“How do you figure that?”

Cal seemed surprised by Will’s anger. “Gen’s broke and her mom has cancer,” he said. “She couldn’t afford a car. Now she can drive to see her mom. And I have Liddie back. I know you think I got the worse end of the deal, but I don’t see it that way.”

Will laughed, incredulous. His son thought it was the car Will was mad about. No, he was angry about the tape but he was also angry about the ugliness he could see displayed so clearly in his son. Cal had forced Genevieve to choose between her beloved dog and her sick mother. The stupidity of losing his car was one thing; the cruelty of forcing her to make that choice was quite another.

“She probably needs Liddie now more than ever, with her mom sick,” said Will. “Seems to me you took advantage of her bad situation just to hurt her. You forced her to put a price tag on something she loved.”

Tears sprang to Cal’s eyes. He looked desperate to be believed. “This wasn’t to punish her, Dad.” His voice was high, defensive. “I shouldn’t have given up Liddie when we broke up. She was equally mine. I love her. I need her more than Gen does.”

Will said, “I hope you’re not counting on me to drive you to work. I can’t arrange my emergencies around your grocery shifts.”

Cal lost his job at the grocery store, having no way of getting there. He didn’t have any money for a new car, either. All those years working as a camera operator, deferring the real dream of directing; years of low-budget films with scripts he could not change and plot holes he could not fill and actors he could not prompt to make the bad lines a little less bad; years of taking orders from people younger and (as he liked to complain) far less talented, and what had it all amounted to?

A sheepdog on her last legs.

Will wanted nothing to do with it. He stayed away. Spring was his busiest time, and he was grateful for the work and the chance to be alone. Mares all across Montana were foaling. As he drove toward them, nearly every day, the feeling carried him over green hills, or to the edges of murky ponds, or to the rocky shores of the river. Even, once, to a particular parking space at an eye clinic in Missoula, where he got out and called just as he would have had he been alone in the woods: “Anyone need help?” The parking lot was empty, but had there been people going to and from their cars, he would have called out anyway, even if they stared at him like he’d lost his mind. Embarrassment was a small price to pay for the knowledge that you have touched the very center of your life.

Through all of this, Cal stayed at home doing nothing but sleeping and watching movies and caring for Liddie. He showed no interest in Rambler or Snowy. Whenever Will went out to brush or feed them, he invited Cal, but only because he knew Cal wouldn’t come. The boy had never liked horses. Only Liddie. He took her on two walks a day, but usually returned with her in his arms, the walks too much for her.

One day, as Will was getting ready to leave for a job in the Rattlesnake Valley, Cal asked if he could ride along.

“I want to pick up a few things in Missoula.”

“I could get whatever you need,” Will offered.

“You mind if I come?”

“I wouldn’t mind except I’m going to Bonner afterwards. It’ll be a long job.”

“I’ll wait in the truck,” said Cal. “Maybe I’ll shoot some footage or take Liddie for a walk.”

“Footage? For what?”

Cal looked hurt. “I don’t have to come.”

“No, sure, of course,” said Will. Then, straining, “Happy for the company.”

It was the first of many excruciating drives with Cal and Liddie. With Cal in the truck, he felt distracted, on edge. There was no way to pay attention to the rare thing inside of him now. Even if the feeling did come, his son would never understand his strange forays to nowhere.

Cal sat in the passenger seat with a video camera, and he filmed most of their drives, holding the camera to the window. Will glanced over now and then and saw the screen, which showed in miniature the blurred farms and developments they passed on the freeway. Sometimes Cal stopped filming, and then held the camera close to him and rewatched the footage he’d just made of highway scenery identical to that still flying by outside his window. All the while, Liddie rested on his lap or at his feet. Her bad breath and Cal’s sweat filled the truck.

At the farms, the ranches, the pastures, Cal seldom got out of the truck. He never thought to film his father bandaging the wounds of stallions, or delivering calves in open fields. The drama, beauty, violence of Will’s work—it didn’t strike his filmmaker son. The afterbirth hanging down from the cows, steaming in the cold spring air. Life fallen in a yellow field. Flowers and snow. Tenderness halted by moments of astonishing gore. No, his son wanted freeway footage.

During this dismal month of empty days, he felt his precious instinct waning. No longer could he pay attention, no longer could he feel the rare thing inside of him. He turned away from his instinct, and drove on to his appointments.

That last morning of Butch’s life, that morning of all mornings, Will had almost gone walking too. Almost. He had never gone with Butch on his daily walks. Usually, when Butch went out, Will took the opportunity to sit in the house alone. But that day, for some reason, that day of all days, Will had said, “I’ll come, too.”

He put on his coat and shoes. He got as far as the open door.

But the phone rang—the phone rang and separated him from his brother forever. It was Cal, calling to lament about Genevieve, who had broken up with him four days before. Cal was crying again. Will didn’t feel he could ask him to call back later. Instead, he waved to Butch to go on without him. Butch did. Will listened to Cal for a few minutes. Then Cal asked to talk to Butch.

“He’s already gone,” Will said, not knowing when he said those words what they really meant.

Unbearable to think of, how close he’d come to walking alongside Butch that morning. His going along might have changed everything. How fast they walked, and what direction, and how close they were to the road, and how many times they stopped. They would have had two pairs of ears listening for an oncoming car, not just Butch’s. Will’s presence might have brought too many variables for the accident to have occurred. Had Will been there, Butch might be alive. And had Cal not called, Will would have been there.

Why hadn’t his instinct saved him this time? A simple death in a simple place, so preventable. If only he had paid attention sooner in his life, if only he had listened to his father.

As a small boy, Will had spent every minute with his brother. It was just the way things were. As kids, they slept together in the same room. All that time with each other must have mattered to their souls, must have bound them together in ways that Will never bothered to care about. But what a remarkable thing it was that they had communicated in the way they had, one boy sending a feeling to the other, in perfect silence, over a hill. You better come get me, Will. I’m about to get stomped. There had been no words in Will’s mind, just a feeling he could put words to later, but that’s the way Butch would ask to be rescued, ascribing no great importance to himself, even at the age of 3.

This was one way to think about it, at least, as good an understanding as any of what had occurred. You pay attention to your life. There’s something rare in you.

His father had been right. Only the something rare in Will was Butch. Chubby, humble, forgettable Butch, calling out from heart to heart.

The drives with Cal went on. Cal sat in the passenger seat mostly in silence, filming the freeway, holding on his lap the dog for whom he’d traded his livelihood.

Will drove, suffering the company of his son, blaming him silently for Butch’s death. Summer came, and the green hills passed by their windows. If someone called out to his heart to be saved, he couldn’t hear it. All he could hear was his brooding passenger.

Losing his gift for the second time was unbearable. For five decades he had lived without it, and then after it returned, he let it die again only a few weeks later. And for what?

One evening, they were driving in silence, and suddenly Will said, “How did that lullaby go?”

“What lullaby?”

“The one Butch used to sing to you. The one we recorded so you could take it to your mom’s. You didn’t like how she sang it. It had to be him. You remember?”

Cal shrugged. “I don’t remember the words.”

“You don’t remember the words? You heard him sing it every night for 10 years and you don’t remember the words?”

“It was a long time ago, Dad.”

“Then how come I remember the words?”

Cal glared at him. “If you remember the words, why are you asking me what the words were?”

Will felt now a line that he could cross. A line shimmering between their seats like a live wire.

But to his own amazement, he did not say what he was thinking. He did something worse.

He sang.

He, who had never sung in his life, sang now as loudly as he could in that stifling truck, gesturing with one hand while the other was on the wheel.

The lullaby.

I saw you standing
outside my window.
I heard you singing
out where the winds blow.
And oh! Do you know how much I love you?
Oh, do you know how much I care?

He looked over at his son, who was staring at him. Will was singing, but it felt to them both as if he were shouting, the lyrics declaring love and his voice declaring hate.

Encouraged by that look of shock, Will sang on:

You, with your eyes as clear as starlight.
You, with the sweet breeze in your hair.
You, who makes everything feel all right
just by standing right out there.

When he finished, they sat in silence.

He thought that would be it, that it was over. That his son would move out and leave him alone.

But the very next day, Cal got into the truck beside his father. Will started the engine, and Cal shoved a cassette tape into the player.

Butch’s voice, off-key, singing the lullaby.

Cal had made a copy.

In July, after responding to an emergency call in Superior, Will was running late for his appointment in Lolo. With Cal in the truck, he took the exit at Mary Creek Road, which connected to Highway 12.

He’d not been on Mary Creek since that time when he had climbed up the steep bank. Driving down the road now, he couldn’t remember which bank it was. There were many banks that looked the same, though now they were beautiful and lush, all in bloom as they hadn’t been in March. But he couldn’t enjoy them with Cal sitting there beside him. Cal wasn’t filming Mary Creek Road, but he was looking out the window, which he’d rolled down for Liddie. He’d barely spoken the entire drive, not even to ask Will about the blood on his clothes, after a near-fatal birth. But at least Liddie was in a great mood. She lifted her snout out into the fresh air. Water on the wind, and cedars. Mary Creek Road turned to dirt around mile nine. They wound through the forests. The properties were vaster, fewer and farther between.

Then the truck bumped over a rut and the tape deck jumped to life.

Butch’s voice sang out.

I heard you whisper
out by the flowers.
How sweet your lips were
felt them for hours
and oh, do you know how much I love you?

Cal turned it off. “I could have done it in a better way,” he said. “The trade. Liddie for the car. I knew she needed a car because of her mom and I wanted her to have it, but I couldn’t just give her mine, I couldn’t lose everything and then give her one more thing. I needed something, too.”

Will said nothing.

“It was a good trade, Dad. It was painful, but we both got what we needed. I wasn’t trying to punish her or be some hero or put her in a bad spot. I just wanted my dog.” Then: “Dad, do you hear what I’m saying?”

“I’m not the one who needs an explanation,” said Will.

“Genevieve will be fine, she’s always been fine.” Cal’s voice was trembling. “You said it yourself, she has the spark of life. People love her. But I’ve only ever gotten along with three people in my entire life and one of them isn’t even a person. Genevieve and Butch and Liddie. Suddenly, in one week, all three of them were gone. I had to get Liddie back, Dad. It wasn’t like you think, it wasn’t to punish Gen. I had to get Liddie back.”

They passed a road that was hardly a road. Grass grew tall between the tire tracks. The moment he passed this road, he knew. He knew as he had never quite known.

Go back! Turn there! Just out of sight!

Too urgent to ignore.

Without a word, in hope and in fear, Will turned the truck around.

Cal said nothing. Maybe he didn’t notice, couldn’t sense the racing of his father’s heart, the intense pressure inside the truck. Probably he was still thinking about himself.

Will turned onto the grassy road. The high snapdragons dragged their heads along the bottom of his truck. Thimbleberry leaves fanned out from either bank and brushed the truck as it drove through them. Branches snapped under their tires. The road rose, then dipped into a deep rut filled with water the truck couldn’t cross.

He stopped the truck. He would have to go on foot. He would have to go farther, much farther. The feeling pressed him on. “I’ll be right back,” he said to Cal, trying to hide his panic. “Just wait here.” He shut the door.

The feeling carried him farther than it ever had. An intense fear was rising in him, fear that this was the time it would be real, this was what his heart had been training for. Fear that when he reached the right place he wouldn’t be on time or he wouldn’t be enough. In all the drives he’d taken since the instinct came back, he’d never felt this before, a closeness to another human so real that the possibility of his failure nearly choked him.

To the left of the deer trail—it was a trail now, not a road—stood a scraggly lodgepole like any other. It was the like-any-otherness that spoke to him, and he turned off the trail there, into brush and bracken. The lodgepole trunk was marked; someone had spray-painted an orange line. This was a future all the lodgepoles around it shared, the fluorescent marks at the same height on the trunks.

Through the forest of these pines, a patch of rotting thimbleberry, the scent of cooling sap. Millions of ants pouring upward from a hole in a rotten log. A trickle of water. A woodpecker dipped low. A rich, soft smell rose from the ground as if released from the earth by the pressure of footsteps not his own.

He came to a clearing of stumps. Into this clearing he walked, and every step he felt himself draw closer to a person nearly gone.

It was here, here in this benignly ugly place. Brush and stumps and green grass all around. It was here he knew to stop.

“Hey!” His voice trembled. “Hey!” he cried. “Who’s here?”

There was a heaviness in the air. A silence like an answer withheld. Someone trying to speak to him.

“Anyone?” he cried. He called at the top of his lungs, “Anyone here? I’m here! I will help you, just tell me where you are!”

The nearness of a life, he could feel it. It almost brought him to his knees. He could feel it like he once felt his brother, alone in a pasture among stallions, calling silently for help. He could feel the draw of a life away from earth, a desperate but silent plea.

Holding his breath, he waited; he hoped.

“Dad. It’s just me.”

Will turned around.

Cal was standing at the edge of the clearing. Will had not known he had been following him. He had not heard him over his panic and his focus, but there he was.

Cal’s pants were muddy to his shins. His hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat. In his arms he held Liddie.

Will put his hand on his heart. He could scarcely breathe.

“Son.”

“Sorry I surprised you, Dad,” Cal said. “I thought you knew that I was here.”

The Genes That Could Cancel Out a Fatal Diagnosis

2026-07-07T09:38:28-04:00

When Ludivine Verboogen and Romain Alderweireldt’s third child was born in Belgium in late 2015, they marveled at his long fingers. Perhaps one day he will be a famous pianist, they thought. But soon Ludivine grew worried that her son was not developing as well as his two older sisters had. His muscles seemed weak, and the physiotherapy appointments she was taking him to three times a week didn’t seem to be helping. “A lot of doctors were telling us that he was fine, nothing was wrong with him,” Romain recalled to me.

Ludivine persisted, and shortly before their son was a year old, she and Romain found out that his long fingers and lack of muscle tone had a devastating explanation. He was diagnosed with a disease called Marfan syndrome, which generally involves mutations in a gene that helps build connective tissue in the body. Many people with Marfan are exceptionally tall—Abraham Lincoln, for one, may have had the syndrome—and are at very high risk of a kind of fatal rupture in the heart. Ludivine and Romain learned that their son had the neonatal form of the condition, and they were told that he probably would not live past 16 months.

When Romain got the news, he lay down on his office floor, overwhelmed with emotions. His boss found him there and encouraged him to get back up and start working on a solution. Before long, Romain and Ludivine came across a new paper describing how scientists had combed through genetic data from more than 500,000 people and identified 13 adults who defied their genetic destinies—who were alive and healthy despite having multiple or dominant genetic mutations that normally cause grave illness beginning in childhood. The hope of such studies, they learned, is to identify “modifier” genes within the human genome that can be manipulated to mitigate or cancel out genetic conditions.

“I had a look to see if something like that had been done in the field of Marfan, and it had not,” Romain said. Marfan syndrome is particularly mysterious because members of a family who carry the same exact mutation can have wildly different health trajectories, Catherine Boileau, a geneticist at the French health research institution INSERM, told me. Within a given family, she said, the disease can appear at very different ages and with starkly different severity. Some people might experience a fatal tear in their aorta early in life; their relatives might have only mild symptoms and not require surgery.

Romain began combing through databases of genetic information to see if he could find people with Marfan mutations who did not appear to have symptoms of the disease. He found 122 of them, including 24 who had errors in the gene thought to cause the neonatal version of Marfan. Perhaps one of these people, or someone like them, held in their genes the possibility of a different life for his son.

Boileau knows from experience that finding modifier genes can pave the way to lifesaving therapies. She was involved in early research into a gene called PCSK9: Mutations that lower the gene’s activity, it turns out, can avert sky-high cholesterol levels usually caused by inherited errors in another gene. That discovery helped create a class of drugs that mimic the effects of disabling PCSK9.

Modifier genes also have a role in sickle cell disease, one of the most common inherited disorders in the world. In the disease, the body produces an abnormal form of the oxygen-carrying molecule hemoglobin. Scientists identified genetic mutations causing sickle cell disease decades ago, but around the mid-2000s, they began discovering modifier genes, including one that could help jump-start hemoglobin production. Normally, this modifier gene suppresses the creation of a second kind of hemoglobin, typically made only during fetal development; repressing the gene prompts cells to start making the fetal form of hemoglobin again, which acts as a backup. One of the very first gene-editing therapies that the FDA approved for sickle cell disease works precisely by shutting down this modifier gene.

In recent years, more scientific groups have been identifying genetic outliers who might possess helpful variants of modifier genes. A study published in March from researchers in Singapore and Australia, for example, examined the genomes of almost 10,000 healthy people and looked for errors in more than 1,600 genes associated with severe pediatric disease. They found nine individuals ranging in age from 12 to 62 years old who showed no signs of illness despite having DNA profiles presumed to cause grave health issues in childhood. Last month, researchers presented new data at the European Human Genetics Conference in which they searched for 15 genetic conditions in about 900,000 individuals and found that, for some illnesses, the degree of severity is more variable than previously believed.

The research that first inspired Ludivine and Romain’s was part of an effort called the Resilience Project, which was led by scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and has been paused for a number of years. Stephen Friend, a physician-scientist who helped spearhead the original project, told me that, a decade ago, confirming the beneficial effects of suspected modifier genes was difficult, but the advent of techniques such as CRISPR editing has made running such tests far easier. Now the scientists behind the project are looking to reboot it. In the new iteration, the project will apply AI tools to scan more than 2 million genomes for more than 500 rare and ultra-rare diseases, Eric Schadt, a computational biologist at the Icahn School of Medicine, told me. Schadt is working with Friend, and they have assembled a team that spans multiple institutions; their goal is to identify the modifying genes in outliers and develop drugs that replicate their beneficial effects. In a paper published last week, Friend and other scientists note that modifier genes that suppress symptoms have so far been found in around 100 different human diseases.

The mystery of why some people who carry a deadly gene variant might not have symptoms traces back a century, to when biologists were trying to understand how traits were passed from one generation to the next. In fruit flies, they noticed, the expected mutations sometimes caused only partial changes in the insects’ anatomy. Some other factor, or factors, helped determine the flies’ fate.

In the intervening years, scientists have identified modifier genes and other forces that can influence whether a particular trait manifests. Environmental factors can play a huge role. For example, people with phenylketonuria, an inherited metabolic disorder, usually develop severe cognitive impairment, but won’t if they follow a diet that omits foods with specific proteins. Scientists also now know that chemical tags on DNA known as epigenetic markers can switch genes on and off, affecting the degree to which genetic traits produce symptoms.

Identifying the factors that influence the intensity of symptoms caused by inherited mutations is getting easier—and really “has only recently become possible to study systematically,” according to Caroline Wright, a geneticist at the University of Exeter Medical School, in England. Wright, who was involved in the report on 900,000 people, told me that looking at large populations has made it more possible to identify people with other changes in their genomes that mitigate congenital diseases. These large studies have also shown that the symptoms caused by pathogenic mutations are commonly milder than doctors had believed. Focusing scrutiny on the DNA of people who were unwell—a reasonable choice when genetic analysis tools were neither cheap nor fast—might have introduced a bias toward believing that the mutations were always extremely harmful.

And better understanding the flip side—the ways in which worrisome gene mutations might not always cause severe illness—is the key to knowing “if and when to start treatment for those that carry the mutation but still don’t have the disease,” Dusan Bogunovic, the director of the Center for Genetic Errors of Immunity at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, told me.

Bogunovic published a paper in March that highlighted how much we don’t understand about these phenomena. Each of us inherits a set of genes from each of our parents, but recent studies have suggested that the copy from one parent is four times as active as the other version. So if a person’s healthy copy is more active than the mutated one, they might have far fewer symptoms than expected. This kind of skewing has become much easier for scientists to track with new sequencing technology. For as many as half of the genes we carry, one copy might be at least 50 percent more active than the other, Bogunovic estimated.

Gene skewing might even influence outcomes of Marfan syndrome: A small number of case reports have hinted that skewed gene activity might happen with the fibrillin-1 gene. One study, in which 80 people with Marfan were compared with 80 healthy volunteers, found a roughly fourfold difference in fibrillin-1 gene activity in both groups, suggesting that it might be prone to skewing. This skewing has been hypothesized as a contributor to the variability in symptoms of Marfan in families with the same mutation.

Romain and Ludivine’s son has not yet needed heart surgery, but they are still eager to identify outliers with Marfan and learn which factors are helping those people. They started the 101 Genomes Foundation in an attempt to create a database of complete, “whole genome” data from that many people with Marfan mutations. In the past decade, the effort has amassed more than 230 genomes, and it continues to add more each month. (Boileau, the geneticist in France, is an adviser to the project.) The puzzle of why some people with neonatal forms of Marfan’s succumb within months and others live with mild effects weighs on Ludivine and Romain: They have met countless patients and parents like themselves, and although their son is doing relatively well, they know children who have died from the condition in infancy.

They now have a glimmer of insight into genetic variation outside the fibrillin-1 gene that determines whether Marfan patients get sick early in life or remain relatively healthy. At the European Conference on Rare Diseases in June, the 101 Genomes team presented what their years of research had uncovered: five potential modifier genes that had a chance of explaining some of those wild variations. And in as-yet-unpublished data, they have identified a variant of an additional modifier gene that affects the heart’s ability to contract and has a strong protective effect against Marfan mutations, according to Bart Loeys, a clinical geneticist at the University of Antwerp who is helping to lead the research supported by the 101 Genomes Foundation. “If nature has the means of correcting or buffering the effects of a pathogenic variant in one gene, we can learn from that,” he told me. “Maybe we can try to mimic that in other patients.”

The Wisdom of Holden Caulfield

2026-07-07T07:30:00-04:00

The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger’s classic of adolescent alienation, turns 75 this summer, though it has the cast-iron reputation of a much older book. Just as Moby-Dick is canonically about whales, Catcher is canonically about phonies. Its narrator, Holden Caulfield, is tormented—though I likely don’t have to tell you this—by his awareness that society rewards and revolves around fakers.

Over the decades of Catcher’s fame, the novel has gained a reputation as the tale of a teenager who rejects nearly everything. It’s a reasonable interpretation, given how often Salinger puts his hero’s values in negative terms. Holden is against selling out, against Hollywood, against acting, against siding with hotshots, against favoring anyone for their style or wealth, against wealth generally, against elite institutions—“I wouldn’t go to one of those Ivy League colleges, if I was dying,” he announces—and against what he calls “horsing around with girls that, deep down, gave me a pain in the ass.”

But rereading Catcher recently, I was struck not by what Holden is against but by what he’s for. Along with all of his rejections, Holden has a very clear set of ideas about what sorts of behaviors and activities and companions are correct. He doesn’t always live up to his own standards, but he never changes them; he certainly doesn’t give himself breaks. His monologue—the whole book is a monologue—is, in fact, a stream of statements about what’s worthwhile, more than what’s worthless.

Holden’s moral rigor is refreshing in a cultural moment marked by an unsettling mix of cynicism and heedlessness. Politicians and podcasters model an ethos of resentment, dominance, and 15-minute fame for today’s young men. Sometimes this recklessness manifests as a disinterest in consequences, even dire ones—say, the president of the United States declaring, in the context of the war with Iran, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.” On a shallower level, there’s Clavicular, a streamer who has said that he may have sacrificed his fertility by taking testosterone in a quest to make himself as handsome as possible. Potentially killing your sperm in order to become more attractive to women is a rebellion against conventional ideas of what male handsomeness is for; Trump’s style of governing is a rebellion against old norms regarding the presidency. Both aim to attract attention in the moment, with little regard for what may come next. Holden yearns for the reverse.

If you want to know what Holden values, look at his dreams. One is to live alone in a cabin where “nobody could do anything phony when they visited me.” (After Catcher made him famous, Salinger spent many years as a hermit, quite possibly living out this exact vision.) More famously, he also pictures himself in his deer-hunting hat monitoring “some crazy cliff” in an imaginary rye field, catching children who might otherwise go over the edge.

When Salinger wrote Catcher, such private ambitions read as a rejection of the emerging ’50s dream of personal and national growth through capitalist success. In 2026, Holden seems no less radical. Indeed, Catcher at 75 offers something of a guide away from the manosphere and its bluster: a case against nihilism and a vision of a gentler sort of manhood, even if achieving it means living on the edge of a cultural cliff.

If I’m letting my present influence my reading of Catcher too much, at least I’m in good company. In 2001, when the novel had its last big birthday, the cultural critic Louis Menand wrote that its true subject is not alienation, as the common interpretation of the book had it, but grief. Salinger began writing about Holden before serving in World War II, during which he saw life-altering amounts of combat and death. Menand suggests that the author’s Army experience emerges as Holden’s feelings of isolation from society. It’s an intriguing argument—and, also, one made weeks after 9/11. In Menand’s description of Salinger’s novel as a “book about loss and a world gone wrong” is a sense of newer mourning, and of fear that the world might be about to go violently wrong again.

Twenty-five years later, a different facet of American life feels like it has gone wrong. A current of demanding voices has emerged online, urging teenage boys and young men to embody an almost unattainable form of masculinity. In some cases, this means physical strength or Clavicular-type perfection; in others, it means a callous or even violent disrespect for women, which may comfort a teenager who feels romantically rejected but won’t get him anywhere near whatever dreams he might have of first love.

[Read: A novel that helps explain the manosphere]

Is it any wonder, then, that I was moved by Holden’s feeling that “if you don’t really like a girl, you shouldn’t horse around with her at all”? For the record, Holden isn’t great at following that rule; he breaks it the night he makes it, in fact, by “necking with a terrible phony.” Readers aren’t meant to hold that slip against him. I didn’t. He is, after all, a teenage boy.

The great challenge of reading Catcher, especially as an adult, is that Salinger doesn’t always make Holden’s youth easy to believe. Holden is very insightful for 17. Too insightful. He explains away this gift by complaining that “people never notice anything,” but in fact, he has a highly unusual ability to sum up an entire character in a single detail. His classmate Ackley’s pitiable lack of self-awareness comes through in the observation that his “teeth were always mossy-looking, and his ears were always dirty as hell, but he was always cleaning his fingernails”; in contrast, Holden locates the priggishness and lack of scruples of his charming, well-groomed roommate, Stradlater, in the boy’s razor, which is “always rusty as hell and full of lather and hairs and crap.” Such discernment is a signal that Holden is no ordinary teenager. It’s not random that he has “millions of gray hairs,” a physical detail Salinger mentions repeatedly, as if readers needed reminding that Holden is older and wiser than his age.

Even young or new readers of Catcher are unlikely to be surprised by Holden’s excess maturity. It’s famous, as is the immersively adolescent narration that seems designed to balance it out. Holden does a lot of minor swearing: “rusty as hell,” “hairs and crap.” He’s constantly repeating words and phrases. He loves the slang of his moment. Although he betrays no insecurity otherwise, he has a tic of qualifying everything he says, so that the book bristles with sort ofs and probablys. As an adult, I found this prose style irritating, and yet I remember that when I was 13, it captivated—and sounded like—me.

A character created to echo and connect with adolescents is not the same as a genuinely adolescent one, and it’s a mark of Salinger’s achievement that Catcher doesn’t fall flat as a result. At times, an uncanniness emerges from the combination of Holden’s implausible nature and plausible voice: He sounds aggrieved in an entirely 17-year-old way, and yet his grievances reveal a sophisticated moral code to which he adheres a little too well for someone governed by sorrow and hormones. But this code saves the novel from any sense of phoniness that its narrator’s precocity might otherwise impart. Holden’s ethics, more than his alienation or his voice, give Catcher its enduring power.

Consider Holden’s love life, such as it is. He’s got a sort-of girlfriend, Sally Hayes, whom he’s conflicted about: “I didn’t even like her that much,” he admits to readers at the start of a date, “and yet all of a sudden I felt like I was in love with her.” The date, unsurprisingly, ends poorly, without even a kiss goodbye. Elsewhere in the novel, he explains that although he has gotten close to having sex with other girls, he always listens when they ask him to stop. “Most guys don’t,” he informs the reader. “I can’t help it. You never know whether they really want you to stop, or whether they’re just scared as hell, or whether they’re just telling you to stop so that if you do go through with it, the blame’ll be on you, not them.”

Salinger suggests that sex with a frightened or ambivalent girl is acceptable to Holden’s peers, but not to him—an advanced idea of consent in 1951, and one that reveals the character’s belief in gentleness. The novel shows this not only through his treatment of girls but through his delicacy with his sister, Phoebe, and his unusual objection to violence: He doesn’t mind getting punched, except that he “can’t stand looking at the other guy’s face.”

[Read: The unspeakable, enabled]

Salinger reveals Holden’s gentleness, itself a rejection of masculine norms of strength, through a determined honesty that is antithetical to the boasting in which his male peers repeatedly engage. Among the boys Holden knows, having sex isn’t enough; you have to gloat about it. (Ackley, the nail-cleaner, even gloats about sex that Holden is well aware never occurred.) Holden loathes this. He’s against any form of attention-seeking, including the professional sort: At a nightclub famous for its pianist owner’s skill, Holden grumbles to himself, “If I were a piano player, I’d play it in the goddam closet.” Still, he can’t stop talking about—and telling on—himself. Even though he claims to be the “most terrific liar you ever saw in your life,” Holden is a seemingly compulsive truth-teller. He just never tells the truths that make him look good.

What Holden seeks, really, is confession. He believes in it to a degree that would seem religious if Salinger didn’t take a narrative detour to clarify that although Holden’s father “was a Catholic once,” he gave it up when he married. Self-revelation, then, isn’t part of how Holden was raised but is a component of his ethic. It’s his personal antidote to phoniness and performance. It’s also Catcher’s stated reason for existing: Holden wants the nameless you to whom his monologue is addressed to know about the period in his life the novel describes, during which he felt even more isolated and unmoored than usual. He wants, in other words, to expose his own weaknesses—which is neither conventionally masculine nor conventionally teenage. In general, adolescence is all about seeking independence, which usually either requires or overlaps with strength; Holden, who has felt alone since his brother Allie died of leukemia when Holden was 13, wants neither of those things.

But the least teenage thing about Holden—and the core of his ethic—is his love of innocence and his desire to defend it. Again, this could seem Christian, but more than anything else, Salinger writes it as a profound optimism that often gets lost in readings of Catcher as a novel of alienation. Holden believes—this sounds obvious, but bear with me here—that innocence can exist; that it’s durable; that it doesn’t have to be ruined in adolescence, even though his own got wrecked when he was 13.

Holden’s clinging to purity isn’t only about wanting to turn back time, though. It’s something more sweeping, and immensely out of sorts with his—and Salinger’s—cultural moment. Doubly so, in fact. Despite the prevailing mood of American unity in the 1950s, art and literature tended to reject optimism. World War I gave rise to Dada, a movement characterized by discordance and abrasive ennui. World War II and the Holocaust turned writers—young ones such as Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut along with established ones such as Isaac Bashevis Singer—toward fatalism.

Not Salinger, though. Catcher insists that the world, bleak and fake as it can be, still contains innocence that can be protected. At the core of Holden’s moral code is his idea that the right way to be a man is to embody that innocence as much as he—grown and corrupted though he is—possibly can.

It’s the second half of that ideal that makes Catcher unusual. Man as protector is a common trope; man as striver for innocence, less so. But to Holden, reaching for innocence means deciding, over and over, to hurt no one; to be hopeful; to believe, against all the evidence of his life, that he doesn’t have to sell out or become a faker to grow up. Right now, the prevailing vision of manhood involves an amount of swagger that is frequently a performance (cage matches!), and not necessarily one designed to comfort—or even acknowledge—boys who are afraid. Catcher does. It’s a novel for those who feel lost and frightened, and if I were a 17-year-old boy, I’d be relieved to read it. I imagine I’d know, just as much as I do at 34, that Holden is not a real teenager, but I’d be glad to follow him into the rye field anyway.

The Foreign-Policy Debate Democrats Need to Have

2026-07-07T07:00:00-04:00

The debate over the future of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy has become intensely personal. In May, Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii posted on social media that although he did not favor “black listing,” he thought it nevertheless “fair to want a whole new crop of foreign policy staffers in the next democratic administration.” After all, he added, “it’s not like the same 120 people are the only people who know anything.”

His post followed a stream of stories and social-media commentary calling for many of the Biden administration’s senior foreign-policy officials to be excluded from future Democratic campaigns and administrations.

The focus on these individuals stands in for a more consequential argument about the Biden administration’s foreign-policy legacy and the alternative now emerging within the party. And the divide is between two very different accounts of the world Democrats will inherit. One envisions a globe defined by strategic competition and the erosion of the old order. The other rejects that framework as self-fulfilling and favors a foreign policy built around restraint and cooperation with China on shared global problems.

[Missy Ryan: What is the Democrats’ answer to ‘America first’?]

I served on Joe Biden’s National Security Council with responsibility for strategic planning, so I am perhaps not a wholly disinterested observer. But I have no doubt that a debate is necessary—and only natural after an electoral defeat as politically and psychologically devastating as 2024’s. That discussion, however, should rest on ideas rather than personalities, and on an accurate view of history.

Biden is often portrayed as a defender of the old liberal international order—a restorationist who tried to rewind history to a time before Donald Trump’s first term. Some Democrats who remember Biden this way believe that the party now needs an entirely new foreign policy, designed by a younger and more progressive generation. But although Biden often spoke like a restorationist—remember “America is back”?—he did not actually govern like one.

For decades, Democratic administrations had been guided by the belief that expanding globalization, integrating supply chains, and prioritizing free trade would naturally strengthen both American prosperity and international stability. This belief was based on an expectation of great-power cooperation, which would allow any country to get anything it wanted, no matter where it was produced, just in time.

The Biden administration left these neoliberal assumptions behind. Its wager was that domestic industrial strength, not global integration, would become the foundation of national power. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan gave clear expression to this shift in a 2023 speech at the Brookings Institution, in which he called for an active industrial policy, supply-chain resilience, export controls, and technological competition with China.

Biden’s approach to Russia and China was more confrontational and competitive than those of his Democratic predecessors. His administration armed Ukraine, through the largest American security-assistance effort since the World War II–era Lend-Lease Act, and provided Ukraine with extensive intelligence to help it fight Russia. At the same time, the Biden administration pursued a policy of managed competition with China. This meant that Washington limited the export of advanced semiconductor chips, regulated U.S. investment in Chinese firms, pushed diplomatically to limit the number of military bases China maintained globally, and deepened its alliances—even as it pursued high-level diplomacy to prevent this competition from escalating into conflict.

This was not, in fact, the Democratic foreign policy of the past. It was riskier and more ambitious, designed for a far more dangerous world. It was not simply a return to old alliances, following a post–Cold War template. Rather, it emphasized new agreements, including AUKUS, which encompasses Australia and the United Kingdom, and other accords with the Philippines, India, and Vietnam. Under Biden, Finland and Sweden joined NATO, and the United States held annual summits with Japan and South Korea.

Biden did seek to cooperate with China on issues of mutual concern, such as AI. But he insisted that this had to be done without preconditions. That’s because those of us who worked on these policies inside the administration knew the Chinese playbook well. Beijing had little interest in cooperating on climate or anything else. It would stall by demanding that the U.S. make a concession on some matter of strategic importance, such as Taiwan and export controls. If that demand was met, Beijing would start a dialogue that wouldn’t go anywhere. And whenever the United States did something to displease them, they’d cancel the dialogue and start again. So Biden’s position was to stand ready to cooperate with China wherever our interests overlapped but never to offer unrelated concessions in exchange. This approach did produce some breakthroughs, such as restricting chemical exports used in fentanyl and limiting the use of AI models in decision making around nuclear weapons.

In the 18 months since the Biden administration left office, we national-security alumni have tried to come to terms with our legacy. Many of us feel most uneasy about the policy toward Israel’s war in Gaza, where we failed to persuade or compel the government of Benjamin Netanyahu to do more to minimize civilian casualties and mass displacement. Biden could have conditioned aid to Israel on its actions, but with the one exception of the provision of 2,000-pound bombs, he did not do this. He also could have put more pressure on Netanyahu to limit settler violence and expansion in the West Bank. There is no consensus on the path forward, but many broadly agree that America’s relationship with Israel should look more like its alliances with other nations. That means that Israel would no longer automatically receive an aid package, Washington would show less deference to Jerusalem when the two countries’ interests diverge, and there should be a greater role for a reformed Palestinian Authority in Gaza.

Biden alumni are discussing a lot of other questions too, including whether and how to end Trump’s tariffs, whether technology export controls can be restored—and also how exactly to overhaul the defense industrial base, re-form alliances, balance climate change and energy needs, and rebuild American development aid after the dismantlement of USAID.

All of this falls under the category of building on Biden’s legacy. But a clear and coherent alternative to that is emerging from the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, which appears to be ascendant. This vision begins with criticism of Biden’s Middle East policy—particularly his refusal to condition military support for Israel during the Gaza war—but has grown much bigger and more consequential.

The progressives seek more distance from Israel, even if Netanyahu is no longer prime minister. They favor restricting arms sales as well as ending military assistance, significantly downgrading the strategic relationship, and reducing the broader American military presence in the Middle East. Some progressives also argue for a public reckoning with all aspects of Biden’s Gaza policy and for officials associated with it to be excluded from future administrations.

A more comprehensive worldview is emerging in the writings and arguments of figures such as Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser under Barack Obama; Matt Duss, who advises Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; and Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who served in the State Department during the Biden administration but broke with it over its China policy.

These experts generally argue that the foreign-policy establishment has treated military dominance as strategy and subordinated global cooperation to geopolitical rivalry. They hold that Democrats should, as Rhodes put it, “slash a bloated and out-of-control Pentagon budget” and move toward a more affirmative agenda focused on transnational concerns, such as climate change, public health, and artificial intelligence.

Underlying much of this critique is the belief that Washington has become excessively hawkish toward China. Weiss credits Trump with creating “real breathing room” in U.S.-China relations and recommends that the United States deepen its economic ties with China, stop talking about strategic competition, and nurture moderates in Beijing. Duss told Ezra Klein that progressives favor the economic shift away from neoliberalism but object to the emphasis on competing with China. The United States, he said, should make common cause with China on establishing a global minimum wage, among other issues.

These progressive ideas are likely to continue to develop as the primary campaign approaches. Not everything associated with Biden will be abandoned. Many progressives appear comfortable with Biden’s approach to Russia and Ukraine, which combined extensive support for Kyiv with a deliberate effort to avoid direct military conflict between the United States and Russia.

[Robert Kagan: America vs. the world]

The world has changed, and what comes next will be different from what came before. The international system is not deteriorating simply because Trump returned to office. Vladimir Putin launched the largest war in Europe since 1945. Xi Jinping has undermined core assumptions of the global trading system by using China’s national power to dominate the industries of the future. Wars are already under way in Europe and the Middle East. A conflict over Taiwan could quickly become global. The central foreign-policy question facing Democrats is what kind of strategy is best suited to an era of intensifying geopolitical rivalry.

Democrats could accept that the United States is in a long-term strategic competition with China and Russia and seek to manage this by modernizing America’s military, strengthening its alliances, advancing its technology, and selectively disentangling its economy from those of other states. Or Democrats could refuse the competition framework and seek to build a foreign policy around cooperation with other states on shared global problems.

Whatever one thinks of the Biden administration, it clearly chose the first path. Those who support it believe in competing strategically with China and others to deter aggression and shape the world in a way that reflects America’s interests and values. These thinkers worry that the progressive alternative does not recognize how the world has changed and become more dangerous, both because and independent of Trump. For their part, progressives believe that Biden’s approach fed a dangerous trend globally and that Americans must stop treating military primacy as the measure of their leadership. A clean break offers hope of a fresh start.

No Democratic candidate is going to run on Bidenism. But whether the candidates of the near future build on Biden’s break with the post–Cold War consensus and make it their own or repudiate it altogether in favor of a progressive alternative is shaping up to be the defining foreign-policy debate inside the party.

*Illustration sources: Justin Merriman / Bloomberg / Getty; mikroman6 / Getty; Roman Chekhovskoy / Getty; Yuri Gripas / Abaca / Bloomberg; Getty.

The Demon Next Door

2026-07-07T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Houston Cofield

From the outside, the church looked like a plain brick storefront, the mirrored windows peeling, a sign above painted white with blue letters. THE WELL, it read, and underneath, REVIVAL HUB.

There were older and grander churches in Maryville, a college town in East Tennessee where you could barely drive a minute without passing a cross or a sign about Jesus. But when Mike and Andrea Brewer established the Well, in 2016, they understood themselves to be part of something more mystical and revolutionary than any existing denomination—a charismatic-Christian movement that has drawn millions of Americans with the promise of supernatural encounters with God and visions of cosmic battle.

By his own account, Mike had been an exhausted factory worker and a lapsed Pentecostal addicted to pornography when one night, at home and praying for a better life, he heard an unfamiliar voice calling out to him and believed that it was God. At church a few days later, he would write, he felt a “tangible explosion” in his chest, followed by “the purity and righteousness of God moving through me in waves.” He came to believe that a demon had exited his body and that the Holy Spirit had taken its place. He decided that God had chosen him for a divine assignment.

The Brewers began attending conferences with names such as “Voice of the Prophets” and “Voice of the Apostles” in places like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Springfield, Missouri. At one gathering, Mike claimed to have seen an actual angel, and at another, a manifestation of the Holy Spirit that he described to me as “like five fog machines, like a cloud just rolling into the room.” He and Andrea came to believe that God was unleashing new signs and wonders and raising up modern-day apostles and prophets, including, it turned out, them.

Houston Cofield for The Atlantic

Andrea and Mike Brewer, the founders of the Well, consider themselves hardened spiritual warriors.

They went abroad as missionaries to India and Haiti, which only confirmed their emerging understanding of a universe with three distinct realms—the heavenly, the earthly, and the underworld, with the Earth being the realm of spiritual warfare. On one side, the Holy Spirit, angels, and believers comprised an army of God. On the other were the forces of Satan—legions of demons with names, ranks, and personalities that could inhabit people, geographical regions, and entire nations. In India, the Brewers claimed to have battled Shiva, Brahma, and Kali. In Haiti, Python and Mami Wata. There was Marduk, Osiris, Ra, Horus, Diana, Artemis, Shesha Naga, and so on—a whole pantheon of demons that represented ancient religions and civilizations, and whose earthly expressions were essential to understanding current events.

By the time the Brewers returned to Maryville, they saw themselves as hardened spiritual warriors. They founded the Well to continue the battle, joining an international network of churches and ministries called Global Awakening, which also had a seminary, where Andrea began studying demon history and hierarchies. When Mike asked God for their exact assignment, he told me when I visited in March, “the Lord spoke so clearly. He said, ‘I’m giving you and the Well a mandate for the full eradication of witchcraft and demonic activity in the region.’”

And that was what led the Brewers to look across the street one day a few years later and determine that the central hub for demonic activity in the region was roughly 100 yards away. It was a bookstore called Southland.

The owner was Lisa Misosky, and she was chatting with customers one afternoon when she found out that people in town were accusing her of demonic activity, and not in a metaphorical way.

Over the course of three decades in Maryville, Misosky had made Southland Books and Cafe into a local institution, a sprawling maze of old bookcases where people could find a leather-bound Mark Twain, a paperback Charles Bukowski, shelves of military history, and flyers for a local mah-jongg group. Misosky had a bar downstairs where she hosted trivia nights, readings, all-ages punk shows, and fundraisers that sometimes involved drag performances. She occasionally provided space to the local Democratic Party. But none of that had drawn public protest until a new church moved in across the street.

“You’re not gonna believe this shit,” a friend texted her, and then sent the first of several videos posted by a man who introduced himself as Mike Brewer, the leader of an “apostolic hub” called the Well. Sitting at a desk, he explained in a calm and methodical manner that the bookstore had been identified as a “regional demonic stronghold.” A high-ranking demon named Lilith was involved, Misosky would learn, and the bookstore was being targeted for something called “strategic-level spiritual warfare,” the goal of which was to “remove the enemy.”

Houston Cofield for The Atlantic

Lisa Misosky, the owner of Southland Books and Cafe

Misosky had been born and raised in Maryville. She was 58, Catholic, and gay, and told me she was used to living among conservative Christians. Still, demonic came as a surprise. “This is probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” she remembered thinking after seeing the first video, not yet realizing that the church was part of the fastest-growing segment of Christianity in the country, or that the language she was hearing in the fall of 2022 was spreading across the Christian right and the wider political landscape.

[Molly Worthen: What the growth of charismatic Christianity reveals about America]

In the years ahead, Donald Trump would accuse the entire Democratic Party of being demonic. Tucker Carlson would claim that he had been mauled by a demon in his sleep. Steve Bannon would call Lutheran and Catholic activists who help immigrants demonic. A federal emergency-management official would speak of being teleported to a Waffle House 50 miles away, elaborating that he was not sure whether the transporting forces were “good” or “evil.” J. D. Vance would say of UFOs, “I don’t think they’re aliens. I think they’re demons.” And the same apostles and prophets who’d claimed that God had anointed Trump to be president would encourage him to see his war with Iran as a cosmic showdown with a demonic entity known as the Prince of Persia.

In that beginning moment, though, Misosky was simply wondering what the accusations meant for her bookstore and the people who went there. Why was she being targeted? What, precisely, was demonic about Southland? The mah-jongg? The romantasy section? A drag performer called Icky Stardust? Her? She wondered if she needed to worry about security.

She began searching for books on the subject, learning of an entire specialty called demonology. She found a manual written by an East Texas couple called Pigs in the Parlor: A Practical Guide to Deliverance, which had a chapter outlining 53 different demonic groupings.

From her front door, she kept an eye on what was happening across the street. A tobacco store blocked her full view of the church, but on Thursdays and Sundays, she could see cars and trucks wheeling into the craggy parking lot.

In one way, of course, none of this was new. Belief in satanic forces has been part of Christianity since the first century. What was relatively new was the rising movement that was supercharging these concepts, and that had first taken root in charismatic circles during the 1990s. Early leaders called their ideas the New Apostolic Reformation, claiming that a wave of Holy Spirit power was surging around the globe, heralding a “new apostolic age.” NAR leaders revised a common End Times narrative in a way that would prove revolutionary: Instead of retreating from the world and awaiting the return of Jesus Christ, they believed, Christians were supposed to establish God’s Kingdom, right now, on Earth.

[From the February 2025 issue: Stephanie McCrummen on the New Apostolic Reformation’s army of God]

Their version of the Kingdom mapped neatly onto the political goals of social conservatives, libertarians, and, more recently, the MAGA movement. The Kingdom would have limited government, free markets, two genders, one kind of marriage, and one kind of God. The “right now” part, meanwhile, offered an urgent paradigm for mobilizing grassroots believers out of the Church and into electoral politics, government, education, and all other realms of life where they were to assert God’s dominion. The new apostles and prophets of the NAR spread these ideas through decentralized networks of churches, international prayer ministries, schools, revivals, and prayer rallies, attracting followers who could find a sense of power and purpose in building the Kingdom. Leaders spoke of believers as “warriors” or “God’s army” or even “special forces,” and churches as “military bases,” and certain apostles as “generals.” They believed that being a Christian meant being in a constant state of spiritual warfare.

In its most basic form, this simply meant praying for God to eradicate evil. But NAR leaders pioneered a more radical version that they called “strategic spiritual warfare,” which entailed the idea that demons could take over cities and institutions, and that Christians could target and scatter them by their physical presence, intensive prayer, singing, marching, and other strategies.

One version of how this could look was when a team of NAR leaders in the ’90s climbed Mount Everest, where they spent weeks praying at various altitudes in an attempt to displace a high-ranking demon called the Queen of Heaven, whom they believed to be suppressing the spread of Christianity across the Middle East and Asia. Another version was the run-up to the January 6, 2021, insurrection, when prominent apostles and prophets held prayer rallies calling for “the minutemen of the Kingdom” to rise up against demonic forces that they believed had stolen the 2020 election, after which many of their followers were among those who stormed the U.S. Capitol. Another version was what happened after the Brewers returned to Maryville.

The first gatherings of the Well were held in the office of a former used-car dealership, just a few families praying for God to reveal the enemy. As more people joined, the group relocated to an office building, where one Sunday Mike decided that it was time to begin the first phase of strategic spiritual warfare, targeting what he considered to be ground-level demons. He invited anyone carrying “emotional pain or tormenting thoughts” to come to the front of the room. As he and Andrea tell the story, a young man recently released from prison stepped forward. Andrea put her hands on his shoulders, and as Mike ordered any demons to come to attention, the young man began shaking and crying, a catharsis that Mike declared to be God’s victory over a demon that they later identified as Odin, because of the man’s participation in a white-supremacist prison gang that embraced the Norse god. After that, more people began coming forward, and it was during this time that Mike received the mandate for the full eradication of witchcraft and demonic activity in the region.

Houston Cofield for The Atlantic

Services at the Well, in Maryville, Tennessee, are typical of those in charismatic churches—people dancing with prayer flags, pacing the room, lying prostrate on the floor. Thursday evenings are set aside for delivering people from demons.

The church moved in 2021 to the brick building, a former grocery store along a main thoroughfare in town, and set aside Thursday nights for delivering the people of Maryville. The sign went up. Into the sanctuary went 100 or so chairs arranged in a semicircle around a drum kit, guitars, and amplifiers. On one wall went a map of the area superimposed with what appeared to be a huge spiderweb that divided the region into prayer sectors. Where a church’s pulpit or a cross would usually be was an arrangement of amber-toned spotlights and glowing flameless candles. And when people came, they found the sort of free-form services common in the movement—people dancing with colored prayer flags, or pacing the room, or lying prostrate on the floor, the band playing one anthemic song after another.

A woman named Sasha, a driver for Uber Eats at the time, told me that on her first night at the Well, “this cry came out of me,” which she believed was a demon leaving her body, freeing her of the emotional and physical pain of a hysterectomy. A 62-year-old woman named Pam told me that a deliverance team conducted a “spiritual evaluation” to determine how demons might have entered her body, asking whether she’d had astral projections or tarot cards read, done meditation or yoga, or ever felt envious, angry, depressed, or insecure. The team then led her through an elaborate process of renouncing curses and revoking demonic rights, and when it was over, she said, “I really believed I was a child of God.” A young man suffering from severe anxiety and depression told me that after his cleansing, he felt “the most love I have ever felt.” A middle-aged woman who had struggled with drug and pornography addictions told me that after several sessions, she felt “euphoric—whole, complete, one, merged with the Trinity,” and that whatever God asks of her, “I will do, at all costs.”

People came from Alabama, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota. Mike said that a wealthy businessman from Indiana flew in for a private session. Deliverance leaders told me that they identified demons by the ways a person might be tormented. Feelings of worthlessness was Belial. Sexual confusion could be Jezebel. Anger could be Thor, who was under the command of Odin. The Brewers estimated that they’d delivered many hundreds of people, enough that they decided they were ready to move into the next phase of spiritual warfare. This meant identifying higher-ranking territorial demons, which involved a process that Andrea called determining the “narrative of hell” over the region.

She began gathering what she called “spiritual intelligence.” She kept track of what demons had been identified during deliverances at the Well. As she drove around the area, she told me, she made note of Masonic lodges, tarot-card readers, and anything else that made her feel uneasy. She paid attention to her dreams. Then came the day that Mike noticed an event posted on Facebook, an upcoming fundraiser for local foster kids that involved death-metal and drag performances. The Murvul Punk Toy Drive was being held at a bookstore right across the street.

The Brewers had not heard much about Southland, but scrolling through the shop’s Facebook page, they saw rainbow flags. They saw postings about local Democratic Party meetings and a drum circle, along with videos of past drag shows, including one in which Icky Stardust performed an elaborate routine to a blasting metal version of “White Wedding” and poured fake blood all over their dress. Mike thought that he saw a teenager in the audience.

“It was obvious,” Andrea said. The high-ranking demon influencing the region was Lilith, a Mesopotamian wind goddess who ruled over forbidden sexual desire, and Southland was the stronghold, which Mike defined as a place where certain thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors contrary to God were flourishing. Mike informed the church elders. “I said, ‘We cannot just let this stuff go,’” he told me. “I said, ‘This is evil.’”

After she watched the video, Misosky started asking around about the Brewers. She was a little bit older than Mike, but it only took a couple of phone calls to find out that he was from a nearby town called Townsend, known as a tourist gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains. Her sister and a friend had worked with his cousins; another friend who had worked at Southland had joined the Well, and Misosky had not seen her since. She realized that Andrea had worked at a local hardware store.

“Jackleg preacher,” Misosky would mutter when Mike’s name came up.

She had never wanted to be a political activist. But during the Trump era, Southland was becoming a social haven of the sort that can be found in many small southern towns. The campus of Maryville College was down the street, and students and faculty often hung out in the café. A professor sometimes gave lectures on the Constitution. Older gay couples met for beers. Misosky decided to host the county’s first Pride event in 2019, the same year that the Well received the mandate. She had thought that a dozen or so people would show up, but more than 700 did, which she found unexpectedly moving. She hosted more events after that, including drag-show fundraisers; minors could attend with a parent or a guardian, which was the case with the punk toy drive that was now drawing the attention of the Well.

Misosky flipped through Pigs in the Parlor. “This is the day of spiritual battle and spiritual-victory,” read a chapter titled “The Final Conflict.” “The warfare is on!”

She went online and looked up Lilith. “Primordial she-demon,” read one description. “Banished from the Garden of Eden for disobeying Adam,” read another.

“Every story needs a hero—a protagonist and an antagonist,” she remembered thinking. “So I guess I’m their antagonist, in collusion with Lilith.”

She wanted to blow it all off but couldn’t. She’d thought that the QAnon conspiracy was bonkers, and it had compelled a man to drive to Washington, D.C., with an AR‑15 and fire shots inside a pizza parlor. Nancy Pelosi, as speaker of the House, had been called demonic, and then her husband had been assaulted by a man who spoke of “evil” forces.

Across the street, the Brewers turned a conference room at the Well into what they called a “war room.” They put maps of all the surrounding counties on the walls, representing what they considered their spiritual theater of operation. Mike began posting about the fundraiser to his thousands of social-media followers, saying that it was from “the pits of hell.” At some point, he said, someone apparently upset by this sent him an envelope full of excrement; others sent checks and urged him to keep going. A few congregants started “prayer walking” near the bookstore, a tactic of spiritual warfare that had been deployed in the days and weeks before the January 6 insurrection, when people marched around the U.S. Supreme Court and state capitol buildings, calling the Holy Spirit into battle.

Meanwhile, Andrea began doing research into Tennessee laws and found an old statute banning cabaret performances within 1,000 feet of a church. The Brewers sent the information to the local district attorney, the police, the sheriff, and city and county commissioners. Soon, a wider circle of activists and pastors became involved in the cause, including one who had recently held a book burning in the town of Mt. Juliet, about three hours away—a huge bonfire that had drawn a crowd of cheering people who’d tossed copies of Harry Potter and other books deemed demonic into the flames.

At the Well, Mike showed images of the drag shows to his congregation. He kept streaming live videos describing what was happening at Southland as “wicked.” Then, a few days before the fundraiser, in November 2022, Mike and Misosky spoke by phone.

Her recollection is that she called Mike, and that he talked about doing spiritual warfare against voodoo chiefs in Haiti, and that she said, “That’s great, Mike. Why don’t you have a cup of coffee with me?”

Mike’s recollection is that he called Misosky. “I said, ‘I’m not calling to resolve differences. We’re not going to do that. I am calling to request that you go 18 and older for events,’” he said. “ ‘If you’re marketing to children of this area, we’re going to do everything within the law and the spirit to stop you. We will never harm you physically.’ I said, ‘I’m calling out of respect.’”

And that was the last time they spoke.

Soon after, Misosky got a call from the Anti-Defamation League. There had been some chatter about a protest at Southland on neo-Nazi forums that the group monitored. At the time, all kinds of LGBTQ events around the country were being targeted by extremist groups. A gunman had just killed five people and injured 19 at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado. Misosky called the police. She called some local pastors she knew and asked that they show up at the fundraiser wearing their collars. She posted on Facebook that “MAGA fascists” were threatening the toy drive.

The next evening, she stood with dozens of supporters in front of the bookstore, watching as a group of nine men, some with their faces covered with bandannas, marched down a side street and up to the sidewalk in front of the entrance, where police stopped them from going any farther. According to local press reports, the men held signs that read GROOMERS ARE PEDOPHILES and IT’S OK TO BE WHITE. At least one of them appeared to have a gun.

The Brewers said that they had no idea who the protesters were, and that they were at home at the time. On Facebook, Mike speculated that Misosky had organized a “false flag” operation to smear Christians. Later, the ADL and another watchdog group would identify the men as members of a neo-Nazi group called the Tennessee Active Club, part of a network of such clubs across the United States. Members of the group would show up the next year in the town of Franklin, about three and a half hours from Maryville, to provide security for a mayoral candidate named Gabrielle Hanson. During her campaign, Hanson spoke of battling vague forces threatening the nation and was anointed for office at a tent revival whose promotional posters declared WE ARE TAKING BACK THE LAND BY DISPLACING DEMONIC FORCES AND USHERING IN HIS GLORY. (Hanson said in a statement later that she had not hired the men who showed up, and denied being affiliated with “any white supremacy or Nazi-affiliated group.”)

In front of Southland, there was shouting back and forth between the protesters and Misosky’s supporters, and after a few hours, the masked men returned to their cars, which were parked several blocks away; some of them reported to the police that their tires had been slashed.

The fundraiser went on, but Misosky remained unsettled. She blamed the Well for “putting a target on our back” and providing “moral cover” for people who might want to justify violence. She spent the night of the protest and several nights after that camped out on the floor of Southland with a .38, a 9-mm, a shotgun, and a baseball bat.

Mike told me that he and Andrea were merely bringing the reality of demonic activities at Southland to light. “The truth hurts,” he said. “We won’t resolve our differences, our worldviews. I would never physically harm anyone, but I will bring an awareness.”

When I reached one of the protesters named in local press accounts, he told me that he had never heard of the Well but made clear his view of drag performances. “Influencing children to sexual activities isn’t demonic?” he wrote in a text message.

Not long after the fundraiser, Misosky received word from the county sheriff, through an intermediary, asking whether she wanted to sign her staff up for active-shooter training.

Andrea, meanwhile, received word from God. It came through one of her mentors, a prophet in Colorado, who trained people in spiritual warfare and told Andrea that she had gotten a prophecy that the Well was entering into a final battle with Lilith, which the Brewers understood less as a prediction than as an instruction.

Until recently, all of this might have been considered a dispatch from the fringes of American religion, except that the ideas taking hold in Maryville are becoming more and more mainstream.

While the Southern Baptists, United Methodists, and other denominations continue to decline, millions of Americans are finding their way to nondenominational churches with names such as Oasis, Elevation, and Harvest Rock, where they are learning about the intricacies of demons, spiritual warfare, and other NAR ideas. Some of the nation’s largest megachurches, such as El Rey Jesús in Florida and Free Chapel in Georgia, are led by apostles and prophets in the movement. One such apostle, Paula White-Cain, is President Trump’s spiritual adviser.

[Read: The most interesting part of Trump’s prayer rally]

By 2024, roughly 61 percent of American Christians agreed with the statement that “there are modern-day apostles and prophets,” and roughly half agreed that “there are demonic ‘principalities’ and ‘powers’ who control physical territory,” according to a survey conducted by Paul Djupe, a Denison University political scientist who is among the few scholars attempting to track the ways that NAR ideas are transforming Christianity. By December 2025, roughly 59 percent of evangelical Christians and 22 percent of non-evangelicals agreed that “the church should organize campaigns of spiritual warfare and prayer to displace high-level demons,” Djupe found in a follow-up survey.

The same survey also indicated that more people are encountering these concepts on social media than in church, which speaks to how people are following apostles and prophets through online ministries and prayer networks, and to how influencers across the broader Christian right are leveraging these ideas to gain and possibly radicalize followers.

This was obvious at the memorial for Charlie Kirk following his assassination last year. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described the moment at hand as a “spiritual war.” The right-wing influencer Benny Johnson urged members of Trump’s Cabinet to “wield the sword for the terror of evil men in our nation.” The far-right activist Jack Posobiec told people to “put on the full armor of God and face the evil in high places and the spiritual warfare before us,” rhetoric that has only continued to escalate as the midterm elections approach.

[Read: Charlie Kirk and the ‘third Great Awakening’]

Speaking about the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis earlier this year, the influential NAR strategist Lance Wallnau said that “the demons are manifesting.” More recently, the lieutenant governor of Indiana, Micah Beckwith, speaking about Democratic attempts to gerrymander congressional districts, said that the party was being led by “the minions and voices of darkness.”

“Wake up, Christians. They are coming for you,” he said on a show called FlashPoint, a kind of nightly news for the apostles-and-prophets crowd. “You can’t pet a demon. I know people like to say, ‘Hey, demons, stay over there. Just don’t hurt us, and we won’t hurt you.’ It doesn’t work that way. Evil will find you. Until strong men stand up and do something and fight fire with fire, then we will continue to lose ground, our children will be warped, the curse will be over the land.”

As the MAGA coalition has fractured, some of Trump’s former supporters have been turning this language against him. Among others, Tucker Carlson has questioned whether Trump could be the anti-Christ, while Carlson’s critics have suggested that Carlson himself might be under demonic influence. The conservative writer Rod Dreher, seeking to explain his former friend’s growing anti-Semitism, recently wrote that he wondered whether there was “some demonic force in the New England wood where Tucker lives, and if it has been working on his mind.”

Dreher, a friend of Vance’s who identifies as Eastern Orthodox, has been writing a lot about demons lately and told me that he believes something larger is going on in American culture. “I think the whole materialist paradigm we’ve lived by is breaking down,” he said. “The world is becoming re-enchanted, whether people want it to be or not. It’s all very real. People—the overclass, the professional class—just don’t see it and don’t want to see it.” In books and interviews, Dreher has been promoting parable-like stories about demons that seem designed to reach those people, or perhaps shift some spiritual Overton window. One involves a haunted McMansion in Louisiana. Another is about a wealthy New York City woman whose husband placed her under an exorcist’s care. Yet another is about a Chicago lawyer terrorized by alien visitations that turned out to be demons.

[From the March 2026 issue: Rod Dreher thinks the Enlightenment was a mistake]

In a more immediate sense, invoking demons can be a means of dehumanizing and delegitimizing political enemies, which has often been a precursor to actual warfare and political violence. “It’s a very useful way to get around the Christian imperative to love your enemy,” Matthew Taylor, a visiting scholar at the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University, told me. “For the most part, that is the ironclad command. So how do you get Christians to hate their enemies? Or to hate them even if they love them? Demons are easy to hate. They are irredeemable objects of hatred.”

Houston Cofield for The Atlantic

In 2021, the Well moved into an abandoned grocery store across the street from Southland.

Which Misosky understood as she told the sheriff’s office that, yes, she would like to sign up for active-shooter training.

And so, three years into a campaign of spiritual warfare against demonic forces in Maryville, she and her staff learned how long it would take for police to arrive should she call 911, and what to do in those minutes. They learned how to duck and cover, and run for the exits. The trainer suggested that Misosky arm each door with something to spray in the eyes of a possible shooter. She bought some cans of wasp spray and placed them strategically near the two entrances, behind several bookcases, by the door to the downstairs space, and under the bar.

Upstairs, she kept the baseball bat and a gun under her desk, which she adjusted so that she could face the front door and scan each person who came in. Sitting there, she sometimes found herself thinking, “I know they would shoot me first.”

Across the street, the Brewers were feeling more and more triumphant. In 2023, Tennessee’s state legislature passed the nation’s first law banning drag performances in public spaces or where minors could view them. Arizona, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Idaho, among other states, then passed laws similar to Tennessee’s, which is being challenged in court, but which still felt to them like a victory for the Kingdom of God.

In accordance with the prophecy that Andrea had received from Colorado, the Well entered the final phase of spiritual warfare against Lilith in the spring of 2024, which involved 40 days of continuous prayer asking for God to liberate Maryville. The Brewers said that people showed up every day and sometimes stayed into the night. “We just left the doors open, and people came,” Mike said, describing how he believed those prayers were answered when the state legislature passed a resolution declaring July of that year to be a month of prayer and fasting for the entire state.

That summer, a Republican state representative coordinated prayer rallies for all 95 counties across Tennessee, and Andrea was asked to speak at one in Maryville, along with state and local officials. As the Brewers saw it, the law, the government, and the whole state were coming into alignment to fulfill the mandate that God had given them.

The rally was on the steps of the county courthouse. The day was a bit cloudy, and several hundred people came, including many from the Well, some of whom had American flags in their pockets, and many of whom kneeled, then bowed, pressing their forehead to the warm concrete. When it was Andrea’s turn to speak, she felt full of God’s authority. She commanded that Lilith leave the region in the name of Jesus, at which point, she said, she heard sirens going off. When she looked up into the sky, she said, she saw something like clouds parting, and what she discerned to be a “halo” of colors in the sky.

“Something shifted,” she said. “Something changed. There was a moment where God said, ‘I am breaking through this situation.’ And everybody present—you just felt it.”

And now it was a spring Sunday at the Well, one like so many other Sundays in a church where spiritual warfare never really ends, and several dozen people filed into the sanctuary to hear what God might want them to do next.

A member of the congregation gave a message about grief, but mostly there was praying as the band played, drums pounding, building and building, amber spotlights glowing. Two women danced around the room with prayer flags, and others lay on the floor. After 45 minutes of this, someone declared, “Right there, I felt like we pushed through the atmosphere,” and someone else said, “Something is breaking right now in this room, and it’s going to break through this city, and break through this region,” and someone else said, “In the name of Jesus, every demon out!”

During the two weeks I spent at the Well, prayer teams performed deliverances almost every day. Some of them involved newcomers, but many were a kind of spiritual maintenance for long-standing congregants who kept returning for more—more purification, more power, more of this version of freedom and purpose. People told me that during their deliverances, they had visions of snakes and soldiers, doors and colors.

Sasha, the woman who’d worked for Uber Eats, told me that she had struggled with childhood trauma, homosexual feelings, and drug addiction, and that she was on her fifth or sixth deliverance to rid herself of those and other things that she did not consider God. The sessions could be emotionally exhausting, and she said that her deliverance leader had explained that she should space them out for her own safety: “She told me, ‘Honey, you’ve been through so much, your frame could not contain it.’” By that point, Sasha had been liberated from Python, Osiris, Apollo, Lilith, and other demons, and she suspected that more were still in there.

At the same time, she and others said that their deliverances were not only about their own purification. The experience had also changed how they saw the world and their role in it. “It’s like being a warrior—there’s no rest,” Sasha said. “Things are changing in the spirit realm, and people are not ready for what’s to come.”

She and others told me about all the ways they now saw Satan working in the world. It was Jeffrey Epstein, and child trafficking, and underground tunnels. It was Iran, and Muslims whose goal is “to outpopulate us all and take over,” in Sasha’s words. It was Pride Month, and transgenderism. It was churches that were stifling the Holy Spirit. It was not just separation of Church and state that was the problem in this country, but a far more profound separation of humanity from what they understood to be the one true God.

“If we keep everything separate, no one will ever see the big picture,” Sasha said, and she explained how she starts her days.

“I wake up in the morning, and I anoint myself,” she began. She said that she asks God to open her senses to the supernatural, because at times she can smell demons. She puts her hand on her head and asks God to “silence the voice of the accuser in Jesus’s name” and to “silence the voice of my own thoughts in Jesus’s name.” She asks to “have the helmet of salvation and the very mind of Christ” and to “bring every thought into submission.” And then she heads into the world, a spiritual warrior.

Across the street, Lisa Misosky started her day with the wasp spray still by the doors, and the baseball bat and gun still under her desk, and a worn copy of Pigs in the Parlor on a shelf.

The Brewers, meanwhile, had decided that their work in Maryville was done. “A beachhead has been established,” Mike said. The Well would continue. But he and Andrea were moving on to the next front, relocating to a town north of Palm Beach, Florida, where Mike was starting a ministry to train businesspeople and other leaders in “Kingdom warfare.” Andrea was developing the narrative of hell in their new neighborhood, where many streets were named for Greek gods.

“The Well has been in war for almost 10 years to deliver this territory,” Andrea said just before they left Maryville. “Now it’s a calmer season. But there will be another wave.”

This article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “The Demons of Maryville.”