The Atlantic

Where Do America’s Colleges Go From Here?

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

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

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

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

Read: A deal that would end universities’ independence

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

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

The following is a transcript of the episode:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s get to questions.

Jack, welcome to the show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harris: Wait, how so?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stripling: Absolutely, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s part of this larger merit conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harris: Incredible. I enjoyed it so much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harris: Yes, I have.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s all for today’s show.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli.

It was edited by Hadley Robinson.

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

Claudine Eibed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

If you like what you saw here, new episodes of Radio Atlantic drop every Monday and Thursday.

You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, on Apple or Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts.

And if you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener.

Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.

The Atlantic announces Jessica Goldstein as SVP of events

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

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

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

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

Below is Evan Smith’s announcement to staff:

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

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

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

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

Scenes From the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games

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

Lintao Zhang / Getty

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

Pedro Pardo / AFP / Getty

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

Pedro Pardo / AFP / Getty

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

Lintao Zhang / Getty

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

Qilai Shen / Bloomberg / Getty

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

VCG / Getty

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

Tingshu Wang / Reuters

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

Lintao Zhang / Getty

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

Tingshu Wang / Reuters

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

Pedro Pardo / AFP / Getty

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

Qilai Shen / Bloomberg / Getty

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

Lintao Zhang / Getty

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

Florence Lo / Reuters

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

Lintao Zhang / Getty

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

Pedro Pardo / AFP / Getty

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

Lintao Zhang / Getty

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

Achmad Ibrahim / AP

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

Lintao Zhang / Getty

Technicians guide robots during rehearsals on August 19, 2026.

Lintao Zhang / Getty

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

Lintao Zhang / Getty

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

Pedro Pardo / AFP / Getty

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

Tingshu Wang / Reuters

A robot falls during a 400m obstacle race.

Lintao Zhang / Getty

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

Lintao Zhang / Getty

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

A Reverse Ellis Island

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

Photographs by Lisette Poole

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

“Where are we?” Borrell asked.

“Tapachula,” a Mexican immigration agent answered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read: A planeload of informants

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

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

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

“You’re pretty,” he said.

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

“Maybe you should try,” he said.

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

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

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

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

Evening in Tapachula (Lisette Poole for The Atlantic)

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

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

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

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

A Freedom 250 Event That Actually Worked

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a Bicentennial Baby Knows

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Inside America’s ugly birthday battle]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Jerusalem Demsas: The end of Francis Fukuyama]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Trump Comedians Are Tired

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Jimmy Kimmel ran right at his critics]

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

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

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

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

The Gun Lobby’s Most Cynical Move Yet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What It Takes to Reclaim Your Attention Span

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

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

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beck: This is How to Touch Grass.

[Birds chirping]

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

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

Brennan: (Laughs.) Yes.

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

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

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

Brennan: And you don’t lock?

Beck: Then I guess I simply walk away.

Brennan: Huh!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beck: Mmm. Love stimuli.

[Music]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beck: Like, geologically.

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

Beck: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Beck: Yeah.

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

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

Odell: Yeah..

Beck: —and learn how to fix it.

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

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

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

Beck: (Laughs.)

Odell: Like, you wanna walk into a room and have people be like, Hey, it’s you. I know you.I’m happy to see you. This is just kind of like a really basic thing that we want. I kinda think that social media, especially early on, the evil genius of it was that it was hijacking that. And so I feel like these are in-person events. I feel incredibly recognized and acknowledged. And then it’s like, when you feel This is the real thing,

it becomes very obvious what is not the real thing. That’s a big part of it. And I think you’re there. You have a shared project. You’re getting some traction with something, right? Instead of just sort of constantly being washed over with information and not really having anything to grasp onto.

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

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

Beck: Mmm.

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

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

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

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

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

Beck: Mm.

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

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

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

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

Beck: Not always the case.

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

Beck: Yeah.

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

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

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

[Music]

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

Brennan: Okay.

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

Brennan: After two weeks?

Beck: After two weeks.

Brennan: That discrepancy feels huge.

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

Brennan: Huge among my friends.

Beck: Oh, your friends are all into it.

Brennan: Yes.

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

Brennan: Right.

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

Brennan: Okay.

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

Brennan: And how were you going to test this?

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

Brennan: How long was the test?

Beck: It felt like 1,000 hours.

Brennan: Totally. (Laughs.)

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beck: Yeah.

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

[Music]

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

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

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

Beck: Yeah.

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

Beck: Oh, yeah. Me too.

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

Beck: Oh. Not me.

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

[Music]

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

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

Beck: Like a portal to the underworld or something.

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

[Break]

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

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

I read 200 pages of my book yesterday.

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

Brennan: Julie, day 7 was midway through your experiment. What started to shift for you by that point? Did the way you think about your phone start to change?

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

Brennan: Yeah.

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

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

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

[Music]

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

Odell: Yeah.

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

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

Beck: Mmm.

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

Beck: Hmm.

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

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

Beck: Oh my God.

Beck: —which seems really huge.

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

Beck: Hmm.

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

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

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

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

Odell: (Laughs.) Hand jail.

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

Odell: I think that’s great.

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

Odell: Mm-hmm.

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

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

Beck: Mm-hmm.

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

Beck: Like a portal to the underworld or something.

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

Beck: Yeah. You skipped right ahead.

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

Beck: Mm.

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

Beck: You write a lot about nature.

Odell: Yeah.

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

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

Beck: And you’re touching them.

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

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

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

Beck: Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

Beck: Oh, man.

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

Beck: Yeah.

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

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

Odell: Yeah. And

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Phone ringing]

Kostadin Kushlev: Hello.

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

Kushlev: Hi, Natalie.

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

Kushlev: Pretty good. How are you doing?

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

Kushlev: Yes.

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

Kushlev: So your score was about three, 3.02.

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

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

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

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

Beck: Yes, let’s do it.

Kushlev: —things really change.

Beck: The big reveal.

Kushlev: Yes.

Beck: What changed?

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

Brennan: Go Julie!

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

Brennan: I’m taking notes.

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

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

Kushlev: You’re basically off the charts.

Beck: (Laughs.)

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

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

Kushlev: Right. Yeah.

Brennan: (Laughs.)

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

Beck: Yeah.

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

[Music]

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

Kushlev: Alright, thank you, bye.

Brennan: Bye!

Brennan: Julie?

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Brennan: How do you feel about that?

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

Brennan: Yeah.

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

Brennan: Right.

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

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

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

Brennan: (Laughs.)

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

Brennan: That sounds like how people describe their exes.

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

Brennan: Totally.

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

Brennan: Yeah.

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

[Music]

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

Brennan: That’s beautiful.

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

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

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

Brennan: Being intentional about where you give your attention.

[Music]

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

How To will be back with a new season soon.

Tallying

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

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

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

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

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

An American City, With Troops on Its Streets

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

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

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

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

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

Matt McClain for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Leyden / Getty

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Leyden / Getty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt McClain for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iran Unleashed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Arash Azizi: Tehran has to make a choice]

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

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

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

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

The Hatred That Broke American Politics

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

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

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

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

[David Frum: Anti-Semitism is becoming mainstream]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Lose a Trade War

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

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Relationships Can Change Your Personality

2026-08-22T10:26:00-04:00

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

A few years ago, my colleague Faith Hill reported on what psychologists call the “Michelangelo phenomenon”: the idea that over time, romantic partners mold each other. “Some researchers have found that when that happens, the art tends to look conspicuously like the artist,” she wrote.

Researchers aren’t in agreement about why exactly people in relationships become more alike as time goes on. Couples might also just imagine that they’re becoming alike, Faith notes; we’d prefer to think that a long-term partner is developing in the same ways that we are, even if that’s not entirely true.

Whatever the precise explanation, that fact that partners can begin to resemble each other is a reminder of the power of love to change us—not just to change our lives, but to actually alter who we are at our core. Today’s newsletter rounds up stories about how relationships of all kinds can influence your personality.

On Personality

The Mystery of Partner ‘Convergence’

By Faith Hill

Couples’ personalities can become more similar over time—but the causes are still enigmatic. (From 2024)

Read the article.

The Personality Trait That Makes People Feel Comfortable Around You

By Julie Beck

People with positive “affective presence” are easy to be around and oil the gears of social interactions. (From 2019)

Read the article.

People Seek Out a Certain Kind of Person When They Are Happy

By Olga Khazan

Your mood might have a big influence on the type of companionship you want. (From 2019)

Read the article.

Still Curious?

“I gave myself three months to change my personality”: The results were mixed, Olga Khazan wrote in 2022.
What your favorite personality test says about you: Are you a Myers-Briggs person, an Enneagram person, or something else? In 2023, The Atlantic made a quiz to help you find out.

Other Diversions

Courtesy of Maureen T.

I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “Every day for the last month this beautiful monarch butterfly has been visiting my balcony garden,” Maureen T., 76 , from Toronto, writes. “I sit and watch and wonder at its beauty. I even named him Fred.”

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

— Isabel

The President’s Focus

2026-08-22T09:40:43-04:00

The national debt reached $40 trillion this week, but the president’s attention seemed directed elsewhere. Last night on Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss Donald Trump’s recent focuses, and more.

At a rally for Darline Graham in South Carolina last night, Trump opened the event and spoke about the White House ballroom, devoting several minutes to his project. “Not a day really goes by that he doesn’t talk about the ballroom or the Reflecting Pool or the Kennedy Center or the gold statues,” Matt Viser, a staff writer at The Atlantic, argued last night. “I just don’t know that it resonates as deeply with voters across the country.”

Although residents in Washington, D.C., are watching changes to their city unfold, it’s not one of the “pocketbook issues that I think the midterms are probably going to be about,” Viser added.

Joining the guest moderator Atlantic staff writer Vivian Salama to discuss this and more: Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent at The New York Times; Mary Louise Kelly, the host of All Things Considered on NPR; Michelle Price, a White House reporter at the Associated Press; Viser.

Watch the full episode here.

So a C-List Celebrity Is Selling Your House?

2026-08-22T08:00:00-04:00

Kelly Killoren Bensimon is no stranger to a career pivot. In 2009, she joined the cast of the Real Housewives of New York after having worked as a model and jewelry designer. Two years later, she left the show and did what many people with a bit of fame and a lot of marketing savvy do: She wrote books. She launched a line of fragrances, then candles, then outerwear. But by 2017, she’d realized that her skills were suited to what might have once seemed like a more quotidian job. She could go into real estate.

The industry has always been a relationship-driven business, where agents are expected to bring in clients on their own. And in theory, this might be easier for, say, a former TV star with a lot of social-media followers and a group of socialite friends to do than for an average person. “I was like, Wait a minute; I have a massive social platform,” Bensimon told me. “I can get myself out there.” She had also recently completed an M.B.A. and knew how to negotiate, read a market, and brand a product. So she took two weeks of intensive classes (“from, like, 8 a.m. in the morning until 10 o’clock at night”) and acquired her real-estate license. In 2021, her third year at the brokerage Douglas Elliman, she said she sold $110 million worth of homes.

Lately, a whole new population of people has been getting into the real-estate business: sort-of-famous celebrities. New converts include the Catfish host Nēv Schulman, the rapper Vanilla Ice, the Dancing With the Stars pro Emma Slater, and various retired NFL and NBA players in need of an alternative career. Joseph Baena, a son of Arnold Schwarzenegger, has an Instagram bio that captures the lifestyle well: “Actor | Bodybuilder | Cook | Realtor.” Like Bensimon, some of these people might have traditional business experience. Others might not.

[Read: The unsettling rise of AI real-estate slop]

Nationally, the housing market has become oversaturated with agents, and not just with ones who used to be on TV. The membership of the National Association of Realtors, a trade group including agents and brokers that sets standards across the industry, more than doubled from 1995 to 2026. (Agents are lower-level real-estate salespeople who need to be sponsored by a broker; brokers are more advanced salespeople, who can work independently and hire their own agents—and only members of NAR can call themselves Realtors.) Currently, about 1.4 million people are in NAR, which means its membership now outnumbers homes for sale. These days, selling houses has become the well-connected person’s version of gig work, a flexible job that can require only a few weeks of schooling and that can be done without ditching other passions.

But for everybody else—renters, homebuyers, sellers—this surfeit has a cost. People want an agent who can get them the best deal possible on one of life’s biggest financial transactions. But with so many inexperienced agents flooding the industry, finding one who’s actually good has become a game of roulette.

This isn’t the first time the real-estate industry has had a population of potentially underqualified agents. In the early 1900s, newspaper readers encountered headlines like “Real Estate Man Swindles a Poor Widow!” Shoddy agents were nicknamed “curbstoners,” and Americans tended to think of them as scamsters who lurked at train stations and upsold homes to new arrivals in a city. Troubled by all the people besmirching the occupation, a group of agents formed a national trade group in 1908—the one eventually known as NAR. With a code of ethics and a membership requirement, the group raised professional standards, Chloe Thurston, a political-science professor at Northwestern University who researches the history of housing, told me. They “made it harder to call yourself a Realtor or to be a member of this small but trustworthy profession.”

But by the second half of the 20th century, NAR seemed to loosen up. From 1970 to 1980, its membership increased eightfold, to more than 700,000—bolstered by a push to include low-level sales associates in its membership and a rush of women joining. Popular brokerage firms, such as Century 21 and Coldwell Banker, also began embracing franchising, licensing their names to upstart brokers across the country and helping to drive recruitment of thousands of new salespeople.

Perhaps the primary reason for the influx of agents, however, was that it was no longer so expensive for brokerages to hire new ones. In the 1980s, many salespeople went from being full-time employees to independent contractors: Brokerages stopped paying them a salary, instead taking a cut of commissions. Agents, in some cases, even paid annual fees to their brokerage. Real-estate jobs became more popular, and less financially stable, than ever.

[Read: How private equity is changing housing]

Some agents thrust themselves into the spotlight. Elaine Young—the daughter of a Hollywood executive who was disappointed to discover, as she put it in her memoir, “I couldn’t sing or dance or act”—chose real estate as a way to keep the “glamor” of her childhood alive. She eventually sold homes to Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, and Frank Sinatra, and by the end of the 1970s, she was one of the first real-estate agents drawing public intrigue in her own right. Young’s six marriages, feud with Zsa Zsa Gabor, and penchant for draping herself in mink jackets made her as much of a tabloid fixture as some of her clients.

In the early 2000s, reality TV created a new class of real-estate celebrities—solo entrepreneurs who seemed to cobble together lucrative careers out of sheer force of will, all while attending luxe parties across Los Angeles and New York City. Million Dollar Listing debuted in 2006 and became a franchise. Ryan Serhant, a star of the New York edition starting in 2012, was struggling to earn a living as an actor when he turned to real estate. Less than a decade later, Chrishell Stause, a star of the Netflix hit Selling Sunset, detailed her youth growing up homeless; entering real estate, in part, allowed her to finally find financial stability. Among the successful agents, at least, the money really can be good. In exchange for selling a $1 million home, an agent might expect to earn about $20,000, after factoring in their commission to the brokerage. Closing a single home won’t make you rich, but selling more than a dozen each year can add up pretty quickly.

These TV agents helped make real estate aspirational for anyone wanting to change careers. A housing boom in the early 2000s led to more agents too, according to the NAR. For the stay-at-home parent trying to overcome the long employment gap on their résumé, or the laid-off worker or contractor who has watched job mobility in their chosen career stagnate, real estate might have looked like it could be a safety net—even if the reality is that most agents aren’t making huge salaries from it. “I think the shows made it seem like it was an easy career,” Alexander Ali, who runs the Society Group, a PR firm for high-end real-estate agents, told me. “It seemed like, Wow, you can do a little bit of work and make hundreds of thousands of dollars on one deal.”

[Read: The extras are tired]

Still, the downside to at least trying to become an agent is minimal. Almost anybody can get licensed within a few months. “It’s also very low-barrier-entry” compared with other professions, Sharon Cornelissen, the director of housing for the Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit that advocates for consumers, told me. Massachusetts, Vermont, and some other states require only 40 hours of real-estate schooling before licensure. In New York, real-estate agents need to complete 77 hours of education before they can take their licensing exam; by comparison, an aspiring cosmetologist must complete more than 1,000 hours of schooling before they can take an exam to do makeup and hair.

In fact, the hardest part about starting work as a real-estate agent is knowing enough people who might want you to sell their house. This may be why famous people—as well as less-than-famous people who have huge social networks—are flooding the market: Because they know more people, they have access to a bigger base of potential clients. After all, many people who hire real-estate agents choose somebody based on referrals from friends and family. “Oftentimes, there’s pressure to go with a real-estate agent just because they’re in your book club or something, or because your kids go to school together, or because they’re a family member,” Cornelissen said. A well-connected person is just going to start out with a lot more leads.

Yet being a successful agent requires more than just knowing a bunch of people. A good agent understands the local housing market (a ski town will have different seasonal sales trends than a beach town), a decent price to sell or buy for, and when to wait for a better price or to push ahead. They know what makes an appealing photo, which is perhaps an argument in favor of influencer agents (Cornelissen has encountered agents with very little awareness of how to market themselves online, and who take photos of homes at night, shrouded in darkness, with their iPhones). The best agents can handle the emotional work of buying a home—such as knowing whether somebody should heed or brush off their last-minute jitters.

[Read: Making America’s houses bigger may have been a mistake]

But before they actually work with someone, few homebuyers or sellers can tell the difference between a solid agent and a mediocre one. And the chances of hiring somebody subpar is higher than it used to be: Less experienced agents are now a significant part of the housing market. In 2023, the Consumer Federation of America studied three largely middle-class cities (Minneapolis; Jacksonville, Florida; and Albuquerque, New Mexico) and estimated that “marginal agents”—meaning those with fewer than five home sales a year—accounted for 25 to 30 percent of all commission money. Some of those agents might have been perfectly serviceable, but the likelihood of sellers getting less than they could, or buyers overpaying, goes up as more people hire novice agents. “If you work with an inexperienced agent,” Cornelissen said, “you may leave a lot of money on the table.”

When I asked NAR about all the influencer and semi-celebrity agents, the group’s chief economist, Lawrence Yun, said in a statement, “it’s natural that real estate professionals are highly visible.” The housing sector, he noted, is simply a significant part of the broader economy. (The organization did not respond to questions about quality control of agents.)

Consumers can, of course, do their own research on how to better choose an agent before selling or buying a home. But Cornelissen told me that states could have stricter licensing rules, and that she believes that brokerages should mandate continued supervision and training even after agents start their work. And the real-estate industry itself has raised the standards on agents in the past; in theory, it could do so again. Unlike the “curbstoners” of a century ago, today’s underqualified agents are at least probably less scammy than they are naive. Instead of lurking in railroad stations, they are touting their roster of homes on TikTok, making real estate look far more effortless than it actually is.

Why Do Rich Kids Love Socialism?

2026-08-22T07:00:00-04:00

When the news broke that a co-chair of New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter lives in a $1.5 million Brooklyn townhouse paid for by his father, critics of the DSA had a field day. The New York Post jabbed at Gustavo Gordillo, a 38-year-old former Yale student, for benefiting from his dad’s largesse “while railing against the rich and property ownership.” The condemnation got even louder when the Post reported that Gordillo had dropped out of an electrician apprenticeship and never become fully credentialed. “So, this commie failed out of his apprentice program for not doing the work required,” Katie Pavlich, a host for cable’s NewsNation, wrote on X. Gordillo told me that leaving his electrician training was “a difficult choice” that he’d made so he could devote more time to his DSA role.

Gordillo is only the most recent prominent leftist to be accused of being a silver-spooned elite masquerading as a working-class radical. Until Graham Platner’s Maine Senate campaign exploded in disgrace, Platner was routinely cast as a son of privilege playing Carhartt dress-up. His grandfather was a famous architect and interior designer, his mom’s restaurant was his oyster farm’s primary customer, and his dad helped set him up with a house, just as Gordillo’s father did. Zohran Mamdani was likewise criticized during his mayoral run for being a socialist despite having been born to Hollywood-film-producing, Ugandan-villa-owning parents.

These charges of hypocrisy have only gotten louder as DSA candidates have won a string of Democratic primaries across the country. Conservative and moderate organs of opinion have described these progressive successes as being driven by white, wealthy, college-educated youngsters.

This observation-slash-accusation is substantiated by both national polling and the DSA’s most recent membership survey, which found that 77 percent of members were white and that more than 80 percent of members 25 years or older held at least an undergraduate degree. If the Democrats are having a Tea Party moment, as The New York Times recently suggested, it is a revolution powered largely by disaffected, college-educated people, many of whom are comparatively well-off. The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang, with whom I co-host a podcast, has called these voters “Subaru socialists”: degree holders who have enough money to afford, say, mid-level cars and meals at nice restaurants but who may not own a home or feel fully secure. Republican Senator John Kennedy prefers the more biting moniker “Lulu Lenins.”

[Read: What Mamdani doesn’t know about tenants]

The aspersions cast at socialists such as Gordillo—who champion radical politics in public while contributing to the gentrification of Brooklyn in private, and whose commitments to being working-class seem dubious—are understandable and often amusing. But focusing on the many contradictions of rich-kid leftists is also a way of ignoring a more interesting and potentially more illuminating question: Why are so many “privileged” Americans drawn to a politics that seeks to dismantle the system that they have benefited from?

In a 1977 essay for the magazine Radical America, Barbara and John Ehrenreich coined a term for America’s growing population of college-educated knowledge workers: the “professional managerial class.” The authors noted that members of the PMC tend to have jobs that create and maintain capitalist culture and its associated values. They have jobs in industries—such as the arts, education, medicine, entertainment, law, advertising, and technology—that could be seen as offering proof of capitalism’s ability to provide Americans with lives that are culturally rich, physically healthy, intellectually stimulating, and filled with technologies that make things easier. (Being a staff writer at The Atlantic is a great example of one such job.)

According to the Ehrenreichs, the 20th-century professional class played a crucial role, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, in maintaining the public’s faith in the economic system. The present growing embrace of leftist politics among the professional class suggests that the PMC is no longer especially enthusiastic about that mission. A CBS News/YouGov poll released this month found that Democrats, who belong to a party dominated by the professional class, were almost twice as likely to view socialism favorably (58 percent) as they were to view capitalism favorably (32 percent). Among college-educated Democrats, support for socialism was 71 percent.

This is not entirely new. In 1977, the Ehrenreichs noted that radicalism and even anti-capitalism could be found among certain educated professionals, particularly those in academia. But the PMC’s current tilt toward the left is unprecedented in American history. Through the mid-2000s, college-educated voters were more likely to be Republicans than Democrats. Bachelor’s-degree holders broke for Ronald Reagan in 1984 at a margin that was higher than 2 to 1.

What is notable about the 21st-century PMC, then, is that the type of people who are tasked with championing capitalism to the public have lost their faith. Many members of today’s professional class are apostates, and this apostasy is worth taking seriously as a sign of an economic order that cannot seem to justify itself to its own public-relations arm. When a middle manager at a tobacco company refuses to smoke cigarettes, or a technology CEO sends his children to screen-free schools, or an employee in the meatpacking industry turns vegetarian, many people understand these choices to be the result not only of hypocrisy but also of insider insight.

According to its own demographic survey, the DSA is filled with people who are employed in or training for traditional PMC labor: teachers and professors, social workers, health-care professionals, government employees. That some people in these industries, including those who are well paid, would look at our economy and seek out other ways of doing things is neither hypocritical nor surprising.

[Read: Two futures for the American left]

A teacher who has to buy his own school supplies, an adjunct professor who works at three universities to make ends meet, a social worker who assists the disadvantaged, a nurse whose hospital was bought by private equity, a federal employee who watches lobbying groups kneecap safety regulations, a data engineer who helps make a product that gives teens suicide advice, a student who takes out burdensome loans to get a degree that is no longer a guaranteed ticket to a middle-class life—what should these people think of capitalism as it currently exists? What do you expect them to think? And why is it considered hypocrisy, rather than a defensible moral position, when some members of the PMC decide that the ugliness they encounter in their workplace, corporate office, and daily life is symptomatic of a system that deserves significant, even systemic, reform?

Some “Subaru socialists,” of course, might be drawn to progressive political movements because that’s what their friends are doing, or because they are bored with their own privilege. But many professional-class socialists are no doubt making an earnest moral judgment, born of firsthand experience, that contemporary capitalism is deeply flawed. Explaining his own reasoning for being part of the DSA, Gordillo told me in a text: “I have experienced economic life in this country from many different vantages so I know that it is often luck that determines whether someone has financial stability. This is wrong.”

A political lesson could be learned from Mamdani, who, with his smart suits and easy eloquence, makes no effort to hide his social position or fancy liberal-arts degree. Rather than elevating leaders who pretend to be working-class, socialists and left-leaning populists might be better off unapologetically presenting themselves as what many of them are: worried, frustrated, and often justifiably angry members of the educated professional class.

Yet Another Purge in Washington

2026-08-21T20:09:14-04:00

Before becoming a regular travel companion of President Trump’s, the nation’s top housing-finance official and the nation’s top intelligence official for one summer, Bill Pulte was a meme-stock celebrity who was once honored in a livestream with a gag dinosaur trophy inscribed with the words Bill Pulte Fucks on the front and only the young on the back. “That looks pretty badass,” he said upon accepting the bizarro honor.

The 38-year-old heir to a developer dynasty has brought the same raw attitude to his time as a government servant. In his first months at the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, he oversaw hundreds of firings at the agency and at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and replaced both organizations’ chief executives. He boasted of overseeing five rounds of layoffs during his six-week stint as acting director of national intelligence that eliminated the staff by about 30 percent at an agency that Trump has long viewed as redundant and adversarial. Then, this week, just days after returning to his old job at FHFA, he fired about a dozen more senior executives at Fannie Mae, a government-sponsored company that guarantees $4.1 trillion in U.S. mortgages, two people familiar with the firings told me.

[Read: Trump has a Bill Pulte problem]

The bio pages of some of the company’s top executives—Senior Vice President of Capital Markets Devang Doshi, Multifamily Chief Financial Officer Brian Hensen, to name two—were redirecting to 404-error pages yesterday, after announcements were made on Wednesday that they would lose their jobs, according to people involved. The firings were first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Doshi, Hensen, and others who were dismissed did not respond to requests for comment.

One person involved in the effort told me that the firings had been carried out because of an evolution in the business at Fannie and not for any ideological reason. “Mostly it was operational. We just don’t need them anymore, especially in the D.C. office,” this person told me, after requesting anonymity to describe personnel matters. “With the advent of AI and stuff, we have gotten a lot of savings.” Spokespeople for Fannie Mae and FHFA did not respond to requests for comment.

But the lasting impact of the firings may have more to do with Pulte’s positioning of himself as a go-to disrupter in Trump’s senior team. It’s a position that has caused tensions with other White House officials, who see Pulte as a distracting and problematic troublemaker who appeals to Trump’s most reckless instincts. Last year, Pulte proposed a new standard 50-year mortgage, which Trump briefly embraced, prompting a bipartisan backlash from policy makers who worried that Americans would lose out on equity gains. During a single July day in 2025, Pulte posted 15 separate attacks on Jerome Powell, then the chair of the Federal Reserve. “As someone with deep experience in construction, I am requesting to tour the Fed building and the new, ridiculous ‘renovations’, which I believe are riddled with fraud,” read one.

The Government Accountability Office has opened an investigation into Pulte’s use of typically private mortgage data to accuse prominent Trump targets, such as Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, of mortgage fraud. Officials told me that Pulte had pushed Trump to replace the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, when he’d failed to indict a Trump foe on mortgage fraud. (The replacement, Lindsey Halligan, was later disqualified by a federal judge, and her major indictments have since been tossed.) When 61 former Fannie employees sued Pulte for defamation after he accused them without evidence of getting “kickbacks” for charitable donations, a judge tossed the case, finding that Pulte’s government position gave him legal immunity.

But Trump has long had a soft spot for the type of advisers he sometimes describes as “killers”—people defined by loyalty and a defiant focus on supporting the boss, even if they sometimes leave controversy in their wake. Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who recently left the administration, and his legal adviser Boris Epshteyn both fit that bill. In this way, Pulte continues to wield power, even if he is unlikely to receive another profane dinosaur trophy while serving U.S. taxpayers.

Isaac Stanley-Becker contributed reporting.

Thank You for Your Inattention to This Matter

2026-08-21T18:16:00-04:00

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

One of Donald Trump’s current favorite riffs is to contrast how (in his opinion) the United States was seen under his predecessor, Joe Biden, and how it’s seen now.

“They didn’t respect us two years ago. They laughed at us. NATO laughed at us. Everybody laughed at us,” Trump said at a summit in Turkey with allies last month. “They don’t laugh anymore. There’s no more laughing.”

He’s right. It’s worse than laughing—they’re ignoring the president of the United States altogether. Trump styles himself as an heir to Theodore Roosevelt, but where Roosevelt said that America should speak softly and carry a big stick, Trump speaks loudly and carries a small one. Roosevelt’s bully pulpit has been reduced to a bullshit pulpit.

This week, Trump made two announcements that, in the past, would have shaken the globe. Speaking to Fox News’s Trey Yingst about negotiations with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz, Trump said, “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.” In an ordinary world, such a threat would be a huge news event. Oman is not a hostile nation: It is one of the oldest U.S. allies in the Gulf region and has been a key intermediary in negotiations with Iran for years.

Yet the news drew little governmental response. Neither Oman nor other U.S. allies in the region issued official comments or took any other action that suggested that they found the threat realistic. One possible reason for their muted response is that Trump has actually made this threat before: He said in May that if Oman didn’t cooperate with Americans’ plans for the strait, “we’ll have to blow them up.”

Trump’s credibility has been undercut by his own capriciousness. Back then, he was threatening Oman over any negotiations that would imperil the neutrality of the Strait of Hormuz. On Tuesday, however, he posted a graphic on Truth Social that declared the strait a “NEW U.S. Territory.” (He’d previously said that he would soon declare it U.S. territory.) American annexation of an international waterway would represent a major shift in maritime legal precedent and require an enormous U.S.-military presence, but everyone knew that the pronouncement was nonsense. Trump has no means of controlling the strait, and The Washington Post reports that the Defense Department is actually considering a reduced regional footprint. Trump has also repeatedly promised that a deal with Iran is near completion, but after multiple false starts, these announcements fool only the markets.

This is a big shift. During his first term, Trump garnered outsized attention for outrageous statements. In August 2017, for example, he created an international incident by threatening North Korea with “fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.” Trump clearly delighted in how the press and global leaders would scramble to respond to these provocations, and some people argued that he was pursuing Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” of keeping adversaries off balance. One can draw a direct connection between the fire-and-fury threat in 2017 and Trump’s friendly statements about North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in the past week. But over time, the world has grown jaundiced about Trump’s threats.

The good news is that few world leaders and observers feel the need to take Trump’s outbursts seriously anymore. Fire drills driven by Trump’s idle talk fatigue the media, the public, and geopolitical systems, and they distract from more important stories. But that’s also the bad news. First, some of the things that Trump says are very dangerous. His favoritism toward North Korea could destabilize the region and encourage South Korea and Japan—to say nothing of Iran and other rogue states—to pursue nuclear-weapons programs. Second, he does occasionally follow through; Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro may have thought that Trump was bluffing before he was arrested during an American incursion in January.

Third, Trump needs credibility to enact his agenda, including to try to end the quagmire in Iran. On Wednesday, he said that he was “announcing the MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY!” All-caps notwithstanding, this declaration didn’t receive a great deal of attention. (“They have no clear plan, unfortunately,” one Middle Eastern diplomat told NOTUS.) In order for the sanctions regime he envisions to have its greatest effect, Trump will need the cooperation of allies as well as rival powers such as China. But years of empty boasts and months of feints on Iran mean that other world leaders don’t really heed Trump’s statements. He’s failed to enlist key allies in the war effort, and China has declined to take any concrete action in the strait, despite Trump traveling to Beijing in May to pressure Xi Jinping.

This diminished respect given to presidential statements is self-evidently bad for Trump, and it does nothing to make America great again. But it’s also bad for the world. Even now, no other country has the power the U.S. has to maintain order, and the closest challengers, Russia and China, pursue systems that are repressive and dangerous. The U.S. can regain credibility only by using its rhetoric more carefully and matching its actions to its words—two things that are unlikely to happen under Trump. If he wants to be believed, the president needs to either surrender some American influence or show that his threats are real, and neither option is appealing. The costs of not being taken seriously are very serious indeed.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Iran’s lead negotiator with the United States said that Iran must plan to counter U.S. sanctions as the Trump administration prepares new economic measures against Tehran. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is expected to announce details of the measures on Monday, after Trump vowed an “economic D-Day” against Iran.
President Trump said that he will exempt 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef from tariffs and that the beef will be sold at 25 percent below current market prices. A White House official said that Trump is expected to sign an executive order implementing the plan within the next two weeks.
A charter plane crashed near a remote radar site in western Alaska yesterday afternoon, killing all eight people on board, including two pilots and six passengers; two of the passengers were members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The cause of the crash is still being investigated.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Why Is Everyone in Silicon Valley Talking Like That?

By Lila Shroff

Silicon Valley has long had its own dialect. Venture capitalists are always talking about the value of being “high agency” and making “orthogonal bets.” But lately, tech vernacular has taken a peculiar turn—people have started describing themselves as if they were chatbots. If you misspeak, maybe you’re “hallucinating.” Don’t know the answer to a question? That’s because it’s not in your “training data.” Feeling forgetful? Perhaps you have a case of “context rot,” a phrase that refers to the degradation of a bot’s responses over a long conversation. “I’ve been telling my wife I have context rot for months,” Conor Bronsdon, the host of an AI-focused podcast, told me.

Where I live, in San Francisco, such comparisons are inescapable. “I’ve described myself as high temperature,” a friend recently told me; in AI-speak, this means he is prone to randomness …

Such speech easily comes off as unsettling, if not aggressively bleak: Why describe beautiful, tender life in detached, algorithmic terms?

Read the full article.

It’s Low-Calorie and Packed With Protein. Is It Healthy?

2026-08-21T13:49:45-04:00

Ice cream is one of life’s simplest and most enduring culinary pleasures. The first published recipe, which dates back to the 17th century, combined milk, water, sugar, and candied citron or pumpkin. By the early 20th century, companies were regularly adding stabilizers to their ice creams to prevent them from getting freezer burn and artificial dyes to give them appealing hues. But the core essence of ice cream—sweetened, frozen dairy—remained largely unchanged into the 21st century. Even Halo Top, the diet ice cream that surpassed Ben & Jerry’s as the nation’s best-selling in 2017, simply subbed in skim milk and artificial sweeteners to keep the calories down.

Then came David. The protein-bar company has turned its attention to “frozen dessert,” which is, of course, more commonly known as ice cream, though the company can’t legally call their product that. Instead of being made with cream and milk, it comprises a “protein system,” a “structure system,” a “fat system,” and a “flavor system,” each of which is composed of ultra-processed ingredients such as whey protein isolate and “modified plant fat.” The only whole natural ingredients on the vanilla flavor’s label are water, salt, and vanilla bean. And yet, the treat’s basic nutritional stats are impressive: A pint has just 210 calories, less than 1 gram of sugar, and 30 grams of protein. Unlike diet ice creams of the past, it is rich and creamy. When the product launched on David’s website in June, it sold out in 28 minutes. (The company declined to tell me how many units it sold.)

David’s ice cream is perhaps the most outwardly refined of a whole category of frozen desserts that are being deliberately packed with protein. These protein-ice-cream companies and others processing their way to a palatable nutrition label are making a bet on what Americans truly want from food. We (and our government) might have grown more skeptical than ever of industrially produced foods, but we also expect quite a lot from every morsel we consume. When I recently spoke with Brendan Niemira, the chief science and technology officer of the Institute of Food Technologists, he spent nearly two minutes listing qualities that Americans now desire: that food be tasty and safe, sure, but also low-calorie, high-protein, probiotic, full of omega-3 fatty acids, and so on.

Last month, PepsiCo launched a powdered oatmeal drink, with 15 grams of protein, that dissolves in cold milk or water. It also makes a prebiotic version of Pepsi that contains 3 grams of fiber and does not taste like Metamucil. Kraft Heinz recently introduced a mac and cheese with 17 grams of protein and 6 grams of fiber, thanks largely to a “proprietary protein-and fiber-enriched pasta.” Nestlé offers a 45-calorie “pre-meal hunger support nutritional drink” that is composed almost entirely of industrially processed ingredients and that the company says helps people feel full sooner. At the Institute of Food Technologists’ annual conference earlier this summer, I feasted on “better-for-you BBQ pizza,” the crust of which was fortified with wheat-protein isolate, and watermelon-lime “satiety soda” that was spiked with corn fiber. I even ate frozen yogurt that starred a “network of cell-signaling peptides from the fava bean” and was supposed to help me recover from workouts.

On paper, Americans are generally wary of such products: In a June 2025 survey, more than 60 percent of respondents said they believe that ultra-processed foods are addictive. And some experts worry that the ingredients such products depend on—emulsifiers, preservatives, and sugar substitutes—are somehow messing with our metabolism, such that the impressive macros of these products don’t provide the full picture of their healthfulness. (The FDA approves the safety of such additives, but that review process historically has focused on toxicity and, say, cancer risk, not metabolic effects.) Many believe that the manipulation of ingredients causes our bodies to react in unforeseen ways to the food we eat—that a manufactured “protein system” might not be beneficial in the way that, say, lentils’ protein system is. Or they note the simple fact that many UPFs—even those that may be high-protein, probiotic, or high-omega-3—still contain a lot of fat, sugar, and salt, which are clearly bad for us.

Take PepsiCo’s SunChips Fiber, which launched in March. A 7-ounce bag of the chips—seven servings, according to the company, but honestly not that enormous of a snack—has 21 grams of fiber, most of what the FDA recommends an adult eat in a day. But it also has 910 calories. Even if these fiber-filled SunChips had fewer calories, UPF critics would point to the way they’re made—using an industrial process called extrusion, which essentially pulverizes grains into easily digestible morsels—as a potential danger. (Some researchers suspect that extruded grains spike insulin more than their unprocessed counterparts.)

The problem is that the science around which processing steps and industrial ingredients might actually be harmful is still in its infancy. And it will struggle to catch up with the food industry’s innovation. Major food companies are regularly creating new processes for spiking foods with nutrients without making them taste like health foods. Nestlé’s “hunger support” drink, for example, uses something the company calls “whey protein microgels,” which help prevent the drink from getting too thick in the manufacturing process. David’s frozen dessert is so low-calorie and yet so indulgent because of that “modified plant fat,” a chemical called esterified propoxylated glycerol that is not absorbed by the digestive tract and was cleared for use in food by the FDA in 2015. (An earlier nondigestible fat, olestra, infamously flopped after people began reporting that it was causing them “anal leakage” in the ’90s; safety studies of EPG indicate that such leakage could occur with very high doses.) Scientists might be convinced that extrusion can make an otherwise healthy product like whole grains metabolically harmful. But what about “supercritical fluid extrusion” that—according to Frito-Lay, which patented the technology—uses less heat and thus can “deliver high levels of fruits or vegetables” in a still-crispy snack?

Until experts can articulate precisely why ultra-processed health foods are a problem, we’ll all be stuck in limbo. Companies will continue offering ever more processed and refined health foods, made with shiny new ingredients and methods; meanwhile, some experts will continue warning Americans that we should not eat them, without being able to back those warnings up with data on the latest foods. Every time a new processed health food hits the shelves, anyone who visits a grocery store will have to guess whether this one will be truly healthy. In the face of some uncertainty, at least some Americans are, so far, turning to products such as David’s: The company sold $131 million worth of its protein bars in their first year on the market.

Most Americans don’t actually need more protein in their diet, and certainly they could get it without spending about $9 on a pint of David. “This so-called ice cream looks to me a boondoggle for all concerned, save those selling it at, no doubt, extremely high profit margins,” David Katz, the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, told me via email. But David’s CEO, Peter Rahal, told me his detractors are luddites. He argued that people need more protein than the daily recommended amount to “thrive,” and that having the option of a new diet ice cream on the shelf shouldn’t be controversial. “You want the full-fat, full-cream, full-sugar thing that has this amazing heritage, go for it. But if you want something that’s really close to taste and texture, that’s more advanced and more sophisticated, it should be there for you,” he said. (David’s product is so expensive, Rahal said, because of the cost of whey protein.)

Clearly, some Americans see the world like Rahal does. When the craving for ice cream hits, a pint under 300 calories has its own appeal—even if it’s not ice cream at all.

America’s Gerontocracy Needs a Public Physician

2026-08-21T13:04:58-04:00

Aside from some brief written statements, the public has not heard directly from 84-year-old Senator Mitch McConnell since he fell at his home in Washington, D.C., and was taken away by an ambulance two months ago. Why he fell, what has happened since, and how he’s doing now remain unclear. His absence has inspired conspiracy theories, memes, and morbid speculation that a couple of awkwardly staged proof-of-life photos have done little to assuage.

If Americans are doubtful that McConnell will ever return to the Senate floor, it’s understandable: This is not the country’s first encounter with a frail or ailing representative. Six elderly members of Congress have died just this term, and others have demonstrated mental decline. Younger members have also had episodes of incapacity, as when Representative Tom Kean of New Jersey missed months of work this past spring while hospitalized for depression. Our previous president suffered obvious but under-disclosed deterioration while in office; our current leader, who will leave office the oldest president we’ve ever had, is under constant scrutiny for signs of impairment.

Historically, our elected leaders have argued, for plenty of good reasons, that they are entitled to privacy regarding their health and discretion about when they leave. Congressional norms tie power to seniority, which discourages early retirement; airing the health status of our leaders risks creating national-security concerns. But letting politicians judge their own capacity to serve has simply not worked in the public’s interest. I’m a physician—a geriatrician, in fact—and I know from countless encounters with frail, aging patients that many have difficulty admitting when their capacity has started to slip. Many people struggle to recognize, too, when a new impairment means a permanent change in conditions, not just a temporary setback.

The United States needs a system to oversee its leaders’ fitness to serve. Currently, no independent entity assesses and publicly reports on the health of the president or members of Congress. Congress should make one. Let’s call it the Office of the Medical Adviser: an office of medical personnel designated to routinely evaluate whether our highest-ranking public servants can reliably fulfill their duties.

The OMA would serve a distinct function from the Office of the Attending Physician, which responds to emergencies at the Capitol, handles occupational-health concerns for Congress and the Supreme Court, and provides many members with primary care. Brian Monahan has held the role of attending physician of the U.S. Congress since 2009. On occasion, Dr. Monahan has provided information to the public about a representative’s health; in McConnell’s case, for instance, he has twice recently provided letters that offered few details about the senator’s condition, other than to imply that McConnell’s health was not as bad as the speculation surrounding it. (The OAP did not respond to a request for comment.)

This is the dilemma of both the OAP and the president’s physician: Their charge is to provide clinical services, not to represent the interests of the public. Their loyalty, correctly, is primarily to their patients. I would never lie if one of my patients asked me to offer documentation of their health, but I might agree to downplay areas of uncertainty or to keep some things private. My obligation to disclose would be secondary to my patient’s wishes and privacy.

The OMA, crucially, would not provide elected officials with care or medical advice. Rather, the office would periodically—say, once every two years—evaluate officials’ health and cognitive well-being. Congressionally appointed physicians would be empowered to request medical records, refer officials to specialists for additional input, and arrange additional testing. Their charge would be to determine whether an individual is cognitively and physically capable of carrying out the responsibilities of their office until their next evaluation, two years down the line.

The OMA would then publicly release brief, structured documentation attesting to a congressional member’s functional capacity. These letters would provide insight into a member’s health status without revealing details immaterial to their ability to meet the demands of their position. The public doesn’t need to know about every blood-pressure medicine someone is prescribed or every mole they have removed. Many members can and do ably perform their role while living with a disability, a chronic disease, or a treated mental illness; the OMA would enumerate only issues relevant to someone’s ability to meet the terms of their job, and would summarize all else as “additional health issues reviewed.”

But were a member to show signs of decline, whether from age or illness progression, the OMA would assess whether that person’s ability to fulfill their responsibilities was in jeopardy. And if an official suffered an acute event that might change their circumstances, as McConnell may have this summer, the office would automatically conduct additional evaluations of their health after a two-week absence.

Other high-stakes professions require their practitioners to submit to this kind of evaluation. Hospitals, the military, and the Federal Aviation Administration all conduct periodic, proactive health assessments to determine fitness for duty. Pilots get evaluated for risk of sudden incapacitation during flight; soldiers get evaluated for “force readiness.” I am tested each year for various communicable diseases and have agreed to random drug testing in order to be staffed at the clinic where I work. If a pilot is found to have a health condition that might put them at risk midair, or a soldier is found to have developed a new impairment, or I am found to have tuberculosis, our employer can compel us to resolve those conditions before returning to duty, or put limitations on what work we can do.

In a situation in which an OMA physician had concerns about a member’s capacity, those concerns would be evaluated by a second physician. If both doctors agreed, they would then communicate their findings to the patient, to allow the person time to consider and adjust their plans—they might take a medical leave, or decide not to run for office again, or, in extreme cases, resign. Within a month, the OMA would provide the documentation to the relevant bipartisan ethics committee for review. In cases of member misconduct, the House and Senate ethics committees can recommend censure, expulsion, or, in the case of the president, impeachment; their mandate should be expanded to consider cases of medical incapacity, with the same recourses to action. Whatever decisions the committees or the officials themselves come to, the OMA would release its findings into the public record after an additional period, barring significant security concerns.

The OMA, in other words, would not have the authority to remove anyone from office; it would be empowered only to provide expert input to the committees already charged with maintaining the integrity of our government and to inform the public of its findings.

The U.S. would not require such an office if elected officials were willing to step aside when their health demanded it or if the people closest to them—their doctors, staff, and family—were willing to confront them in cases of decline. But recent years have provided too many examples of this kind of self-policing failing. In her memoir, Jill Biden confessed that she’d become concerned after President Biden’s disastrous 2024 debate performance that he’d had a stroke; Hunter Biden, on a recent podcast, suggested that perhaps the president’s undiagnosed-at-the-time prostate cancer was already causing impairment. These reports only affirm suspicions that people around the former president knew that he wasn’t well, even as he insisted on another presidential run.

Most Americans resent such lack of transparency. More than 60 percent believe that Biden was not forthcoming regarding his health, and approximately the same percentage agree that presidents ought to be required to release all medical information to the public. In another national survey, a proposal to remove officials when they show signs of mental decline achieved 87 percent approval. Age limits for office, which I support wholeheartedly, are also extremely popular.

Some younger elected officials recognize this. This year, Democratic representatives have put forward three separate proposals that would increase transparency about the health of public officials, whether by empowering a newly created commission to remove a president, creating a standard for “significant irreversible cognitive impairment,” or requiring members to file a public disclosure regarding any absence longer than 21 days. But none of these proposals can account for the uncertainty inherent in so many clinical scenarios, and they rely too much on civilians to make sense of complex medical situations. The proposals also become relevant only once an official shows signs that they are unable to do the job. Creation of an OMA would proactively offer assurance that they could.

Aging representatives may balk at increased medical scrutiny, but an OMA would also protect them. Structured disclosures should help prevent prying and skepticism. The public would be provided with enough information that leaders could then demand their privacy in good faith. An official process for determining whether and for how long someone needs to be out of work when ill would also mean that sick officials can take time and space to convalesce without feeling furtive.

The mere existence of medical oversight would also help nudge American elected leaders to confront their own frailties before they were faced with real censure. The body is a rate-limiting factor that many of us choose to ignore until we can’t; the requirement to disclose some health information might serve as a deterrent to older members considering running again, or to younger ones struggling to balance health issues with the job. Our leaders, after all, are only human, and most people don’t readily give up the keys when it’s time to stop driving. Sometimes, the right decision is to take the keys away.

The Road to Nowhere

2026-08-21T12:26:16-04:00

If there’s one thing young moviegoers seem to fear these days, it’s the idea of the in-between. The term liminal horror has gone from niche internet speak to Hollywood trend, thanks to the acclaimed TV show Severance and the recent smash-hit movie Backrooms. Stories like these mine the unsettling feeling of nondescript office corridors and basement halls that seem to self-replicate into infinity; this spring also saw the U.S. release of the excellent Japanese film Exit 8, a video-game adaptation about someone getting trapped in a subway station with seemingly no way out. Now there’s It Ends, a low-budget bit of creepy cleverness with a punchy pitch: What if you got lost driving down a road that never ends?

That this type of premise has grown more commonplace makes sense. Such a film typically needs only one set (for example, a long, lonely road, flanked by trees), a small cast of characters, and a spare, intentionally circular script. It Ends uses that scrappy charm to its advantage, the lack of frills dialing up a sense of realism. The film, written and directed by the newcomer Alexander Ullom, follows James (played by Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Tyler (Mitchell Cole), four friends who are headed on a celebratory graduation road trip. Their drive is occupied by the sort of nonsensical, wandering conversations young people love to have; there’s no real sign of anything being wrong until Tyler notices that he’s missed his turn.

The horror builds gradually, spikes, then slows to an existentially brutal crawl. The group realizes that there’s no way off the road, but when they get out of the car to look around, swarms of people emerge from the woods and fight to enter their vehicle. As the friends continue on in search of safety, they notice that the gas tank never goes empty, they never feel hungry, and nobody needs to sleep. They’re in a sort of limbo, condemned to keep moving despite having no destination. It’s essentially a Gen Z take on Sartre’s No Exit, a gentle riff on hell being other people, with a few jump scares tossed in for fun.

[Read: The eerie comfort of liminal spaces]

But while prior small-scale horror movies such as The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity had an unseen villain guiding the scares, It Ends thrives on an utter lack of information about what is happening and why. The terror of liminality is how effortlessly it evokes the creepiness of a bad dream, the kind that begins in the middle of the story and seems just off. There’s no monster around the corner, no demonic puzzle to be solved. The characters of It Ends initially debate what’s going on, keeping track of patterns occurring around them in search of some explanation. While James keeps doing so as a way of staying sane, the others start to accept their frozen existence; the strangers in the woods, it seems, are also confined to the road’s environs.

That Ullom manages to squeeze a feature-length movie out of such a mundane premise is impressive; it helps that his cast is charming enough to carry it off. As the film plods on, it starts to skip further and further ahead in time, warping the viewer’s sense of chronology. It Ends is more aggressively aimless than other recent entries in the genre: Exit 8 sees its heroes try to figure a way out of their infinite subway station (it was based on a video game, so some resolution is built into the plot); the protagonists of Backrooms discovered a world of non-Euclidean corridors and lobbies in a basement, then found out that opportunistic corporate villains were plundering it; such a revelation hints at sequels that could expand its lore.

The simplicity of It Ends, by comparison, is wonderful and jarring, as is the total inability for future properties to spill out of it. Part of the dread that liminal horror mines is the drudgery of the never-ending scroll, a familiar feeling for anyone who’s been on social media; no matter how much you look, you’ll never hit bottom, only summon more of whatever the algorithm wants to serve you. It Ends is set entirely outdoors but captures that same fear of being stuck without any touchstones to distinguish simulation from reality.

Liberal Families Are Looking Pretty Traditional

2026-08-21T10:37:11-04:00

Picture an old-fashioned, idealized American scene. Young kids walk to and from a redbrick public schoolhouse; almost every kid’s commute is less than 10 minutes. On warm weekend days, the children run lemonade stands, doing brisk business. Their parents host a Christmas-tree-and-baked-goods sale on the school field every December, which draws a boisterous crowd. And about those parents: They’re almost all married. Divorce and single parenthood are rare. The whole tableau is, at first glance, a social conservative’s dream come true.

This scene exists in the real world. The neighborhood is my own; the elementary school is my kids’ school. But this is no conservative small town. It’s an urban neighborhood in Washington, D.C., a city where Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump 90 percent to 6 percent in the most recent election. Virtually all of the parents in this neighborhood are highly educated Democrats. Judging from what I see in my community here, these deep-blue Washington families are the kinds of families that so many conservatives value.

The strong marriages of elite blue America—families whose lives are, in a way, pretty darn conservative—offer a useful counterpoint to the simplistic culture-war narrative. Elite blue Americans are an attractive boogeyman for pundits on the right, who regularly write articles about how such people are pushing outré sexual and family values. But when you actually look at these people, you see a lot of folks who get married, have kids, stay married, and live lives that almost seem ripped from a Norman Rockwell painting. As the cultural commentator Aaron Renn put it, “If you want to see conservative values in practice, you’ll often find them among people who vote Democrat and align on the cultural left.” Conservatives might benefit from closely observing what’s going on here—liberal Americans achieving what seems to be the conservative goal of stable families.

Some social scientists have, in fact, argued that blue values such as egalitarianism and secularism tend to produce stronger marriages than red values such as religiosity and traditional gender roles. A few data points support their thesis. For example, highly educated Americans are trending blue in their politics, and highly educated Americans are also more likely to be married. As couples move up the educational ladder from high-school degree to associate’s degree to bachelor’s degree to master’s degree, the marriage rate keeps climbing.

[From the July 2026 issue: How to save marriage]

But other data paint a different picture. Liberals and Democrats lag behind conservatives and Republicans in marrying and having children, and the gap is growing. As of 2024, among adults aged 30 to 50, Republicans are 18 points more likely than Democrats to be married, and Republican women aged 25 to 35 are 31 points more likely to be mothers. Although delayed marriage and childbearing by Democrats is part of the story, some of the gap is undoubtedly Democrats opting out of marriage and parenthood altogether. Blue values alone don’t seem to directly produce stable families.

I’d offer this hypothesis instead: At least among many highly educated Democrats, stable families display a mixture of blue and red traits. That’s what you see in my neighborhood, as I recently wrote about for the Institute for Family Studies.

On the blue, egalitarian side, almost every family has two working parents. Stay-at-home moms are scarce. Educational attainment tends to be pretty equal between spouses. And some of the more symbolic lifestyle markers also trend egalitarian. For example, based on the parent lists for my kids’ classrooms, only nine kids out of 50 (18 percent) have two parents who share a last name.

But these families also display some more stereotypically red traits—including income hypergamy, meaning that fathers outearn mothers. In terms of income, there are three main career tiers among these well-educated D.C. parents. At the top of the income scale are the private-sector for-profit workers. In the middle are the government bureaucrats. And at the bottom are the nonprofit NGO workers. Most fathers are in the top or middle tier, while most mothers are in the middle or bottom one. (The small number of families with same-sex parents obviously don’t show this gendered division of income, but they also have two married parents who both work.)

[Read: The return of the Democratic manly man]

Why do these couples gravitate toward this gendered income division? Every couple is different, but for many families, this arrangement allows women to pursue career goals beyond remuneration. For example, one of my female colleagues (married, two young kids, separate last names) is working her self-described “dream job” prosecuting international money launderers in federal court. Her husband is a law-firm partner who makes most of the family’s income. My own household is similar: My wife has her dream job as an immunologist at the National Institutes of Health. It’s a career path that required several years as a poorly paid postdoc, during which I far outearned her. In Jane Austen novels, financially advantageous marriages helped women secure their social station. But in educated blue America, such marriages help women pursue their career goals—while maintaining a household income that can cover the cost of raising kids.

Many of these families also have other traditionalist or red-coded markers. For example, many are surprisingly religious. I’d estimate that almost a third of my kids’ friends go to church on a weekly basis, mostly in mainline Protestant or Catholic denominations. This might not reach the churchgoing levels of devout Bible Belt communities, and the mix of churches is definitely different, with evangelical options notably few. But these elite liberals go to church at a higher rate than Americans as a whole.

Elite liberals should be proud of their families—and they should preach what they practice. The conservative family scholar Brad Wilcox wasn’t wrong when he called it “hypocrisy” for liberals to publicly promote freewheeling family diversity even while they themselves follow traditional family patterns. Fortunately, some liberals are starting to speak up for the traditional family values generally out of fashion among liberals. In the past few years, for example, liberal writers such as Nicholas Kristof and center-left scholars such as Melissa Kearney have written about how a stable marriage is the best foundation for raising kids. The preaching, in other words, may be catching up to the practice. Let’s hope more people hear it.

Photos of the Week: Robot Training, Straw Chickens, Blessed Dogs

2026-08-21T09:00:00-04:00

Omar Ashtawy / Getty

Children swim at a pool in Khan Younis, Gaza, on August 19, 2026. Palestinian children, including amputees, some of whom have lost limbs during the war, and orphans participate in swimming training as part of the “Waves of Hope” project carried out by HEAL Palestine.

Luisa Gonzalez / Reuters

A drone image of a church damaged by a recent earthquake in Quimbaya, Colombia, seen on August 18, 2026

Jeff J Mitchell / Getty

A young boy herds a flock into the ring at the Lairg auction on August 18, 2026, in Scotland.

Petras Malukas / AFP / Getty

Corgis take part in a 50-meter race in Vingis Park in Vilnius on August 15, 2026. This is the fifth time Vilnius has hosted a corgi race and costume contest, inviting corgis from across Europe.

CFoto / Future Publishing / Getty

Tourists visit a giant Dachshund installation that is 13 meters long, inside the Haus Nowhare store on Huaihai Middle Road in Shanghai, China, on August 17, 2026.

Chanakarn Laosarakham / AFP / Getty

A man jogs past a dinosaur statue at Bueng Kaen Nakhon Public Park in Khon Kaen, Thailand, on August 20, 2026.

Tom Dubravec / AP

A wildfire approaches a beach on the Adriatic coast near Omis, southern Croatia, on August 14, 2026.

Lindsey Wasson / AP

A woman is silhouetted against the setting sun while holding up her phone at Pocket Beach in Myrtle Edwards Park, overlooking Elliott Bay in Seattle on August 18, 2026.

Fabrizio Villa / Getty

Luigi Renna, the metropolitan archbishop of Catania, places the skull of Saint Agatha inside the head of the saint’s reliquary bust before it is sealed on August 17, 2026, in Catania, Italy.

Xiao Benxiang / VCG / Getty

A data collector conducts robot skill training in a real-life-simulation scenario to collect high-quality real-machine data in Wuhu, Anhui Province, China, on August 17, 2026.

Luis Acosta / AFP / Getty

A kitten sleeps at a provisional shelter at the Coliseo Menor, after a 7.4-magnitude earthquake in Pereira, Colombia, on August 16, 2026.

Firdia Lisnawati / AP

A man walks past a collapsed mosque after an earthquake in Lamba Leda, East Nusa Tenggara province, Indonesia, on August 18, 2026.

Stephen Lam / San Francisco Chronicle / Getty

A woman and child walk past a debris-strewn street after Hurricane Lala struck Naalehu, Hawaii, on August 17, 2026. The Category 1 hurricane brought heavy rain and strong winds to the island of Hawaii before moving away without making landfall, causing extensive damage to towns along the island’s southern end.

Waseem Andrabi / Hindustan Times / Getty

An aerial view of Muslim devotees gathered outside the historic Khanqah-e-Naqshband Sahib shrine in Khwaja Bazar to offer special congregational afternoon prayers on August 17, 2026, in Srinagar, India.

Zeljko Stevanic / Xinhua / Getty

A participant jumps into the River Soča from a 17-meter-high bridge during a traditional jumping event in Kanal ob Soči, Slovenia, on August 16, 2026.

Tobias Schwarz / AFP / Getty

A lion is pictured in its enclosure at the Berlin Zoo on August 18, 2026.

Alex Martin / AFP / Getty

A male red-panda cub, born on June 17, 2026, nestles in its den at the Safari de Peaugres Zoo near Peaugres, France, on August 19, 2026.

Juan Karita / AP

The Catholic priest Saul Mamani blesses dogs with holy water during Mass at the Gran Poder parish, marking the feast day of San Roque, the patron saint of dogs, in La Paz, Bolivia, on August 16, 2026.

Mahmoud Issa / Reuters

A Palestinian girl fills water containers outside the wall of a zoo that was damaged during the war, in Gaza City, on August 15, 2026.

Karl-Josef Hildenbrand / DPA / Getty

Anglers row a boat across Lake Hopfensee as it glistens at sunset, in Füssen, Germany, on August 16, 2026.

Ismail Aslandag / Anadolu / Getty

An aerial view shows Lake Tuz displaying vibrant pink and red hues caused by increased salinity, high temperatures, and microalgae that produce beta-carotene, in Ankara, Turkey, on August 18, 2026.

Bloomberg / Getty

Solar panels stretch to the horizon at the Tengger Desert New Energy Base in Zhongwei, Ningxia, China, on August 16, 2026. Solar power will soon surpass coal as China’s largest source of generation capacity, marking a major milestone in the country’s rapid renewable-energy build-out.

VCG / Getty

Tea farmers prune tea gardens on August 16, 2026, in Yanwu Village in China’s Zhejiang Province.

Miguel Medina / AFP / Getty

A grape harvester at work in the vineyards of the Correns winegrowers’ cooperative, in the Var department of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, France, on August 17, 2026

Thomas Kienzle / AFP / Getty

People observe a figure of a Lego man made of pumpkins at a pumpkin exhibition in the garden of Ludwigsburg Castle in Ludwigsburg, Germany, on August 20, 2026.

Andrew Harnik / Getty

The Arts of War statues, newly covered in gold leaf, are visible at Arlington Memorial Bridge near the Lincoln Memorial on August 14, 2026, in Washington, D.C.

Joel Saget / AFP / Getty

A dromedary camel stands next to the Crone Circus Big Top set up in the parking lot of a Carrefour Market in Pont-Audemer, France, on August 17, 2026.

Jens Büttner / DPA / Getty

Two oversize chickens made from straw bales advertise the harvest festival in the village of Bahlen, Germany, on August 18, 2026.