If you’re looking to understand the philosophy that underpins Silicon Valley’s latest gold rush, look no further than OpenAI’s Scarlett Johansson debacle. The story, according to Johansson’s lawyers, goes like this: Nine months ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman approached the actor with a request to license her voice for a new digital assistant; Johansson declined. She alleges that just two days before the company’s keynote event last week, in which that assistant was revealed as part of a new system called GPT-4o, Altman reached out to Johansson’s team, urging the actor to reconsider. Johansson and Altman allegedly never spoke, and Johansson allegedly never granted OpenAI permission to use her voice. Nevertheless, the company debuted Sky two days later—a program with a voice many believed was alarmingly similar to Johansson’s.Johansson told NPR that she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine.” In response, Altman issued a statement denying that the company had cloned her voice and saying that it had already cast a different voice actor before reaching out to Johansson. (I’d encourage you to listen for yourself.) Curiously, Altman said that OpenAI would take down Sky’s voice from its platform “out of respect” for Johansson. This is a messy situation for OpenAI, complicated by Altman’s own social-media posts. On the day that OpenAI released ChatGPT’s assistant, Altman posted a cheeky, one-word statement on X: “Her”—a reference to the 2013 film of the same name, in which Johansson is the voice of an AI assistant that a man falls in love with. Altman’s post is reasonably damning, implying that Altman was aware, even proud, of the similarities between Sky’s voice and Johansson’s.On its own, this seems to be yet another example of a tech company blowing past ethical concerns and operating with impunity. But the situation is also a tidy microcosm of the raw deal at the center of generative AI, a technology that is built off data scraped from the internet, generally without the consent of creators or copyright owners. Multiple artists and publishers, including The New York Times, have sued AI companies for this reason, but the tech firms remain unchastened, prevaricating when asked point-blank about the provenance of their training data. At the core of these deflections is an implication: The hypothetical superintelligence they are building is too big, too world-changing, too important for prosaic concerns such as copyright and attribution. The Johansson scandal is merely a reminder of AI’s manifest-destiny philosophy: This is happening, whether you like it or not. Altman and OpenAI have been candid on this front. The end goal of OpenAI has always been to build a so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that would, in their imagining, alter the course of human history forever, ushering in an unthinkable revolution of productivity and prosperity—a utopian world where jobs disappear, replaced by some form of universal basic income, and humanity experiences quantum leaps in science and medicine. (Or, the machines cause life on Earth as we know it to end.) The stakes, in this hypothetical, are unimaginably high—all the more reason for OpenAI to accelerate progress by any means necessary. Last summer, my colleague Ross Andersen described Altman’s ambitions thusly: As with other grand projects of the 20th century, the voting public had a voice in both the aims and the execution of the Apollo missions. Altman made it clear that we’re no longer in that world. Rather than waiting around for it to return, or devoting his energies to making sure that it does, he is going full throttle forward in our present reality. Part of Altman’s reasoning, he told Andersen, is that AI development is a geopolitical race against autocracies like China. “If you are a person of a liberal-democratic country, it is better for you to cheer on the success of OpenAI” rather than that of “authoritarian governments,” he said. He noted that, in an ideal world, AI should be a product of nations. But in this world, Altman seems to view his company as akin to its own nation-state. Altman, of course, has testified before Congress, urging lawmakers to regulate the technology while also stressing that “the benefits of the tools we have deployed so far vastly outweigh the risks.” Still, the message is clear: The future is coming, and you ought to let us be the ones to build it.Other OpenAI employees have offered a less gracious vision. In a video posted last fall on YouTube by a group of effective altruists in the Netherlands, three OpenAI employees answered questions about the future of the technology. In response to one question about AGI rendering jobs obsolete, Jeff Wu, an engineer for the company, confessed, “It’s kind of deeply unfair that, you know, a group of people can just build AI and take everyone’s jobs away, and in some sense, there’s nothing you can do to stop them right now.” He added, “I don’t know. Raise awareness, get governments to care, get other people to care. Yeah. Or join us and have one of the few remaining jobs. I don’t know; it’s rough.” Wu’s colleague Daniel Kokotajlo jumped in with the justification. “To add to that,” he said, “AGI is going to create tremendous wealth. And if that wealth is distributed—even if it’s not equitably distributed, but the closer it is to equitable distribution, it’s going to make everyone incredibly wealthy.” (There is no evidence to suggest that the wealth will be evenly distributed.)This is the unvarnished logic of OpenAI. It is cold, rationalist, and paternalistic. That such a small group of people should be anointed to build a civilization-changing technology is inherently unfair, they note. And yet they will carry on because they have both a vision for the future and the means to try to bring it to fruition. Wu’s proposition, which he offers with a resigned shrug in the video, is telling: You can try to fight this, but you can’t stop it. Your best bet is to get on board.You can see this dynamic playing out in OpenAI’s content-licensing agreements, which it has struck with platforms such as Reddit and news organizations such as Axel Springer and Dotdash Meredith. Recently, a tech executive I spoke with compared these types of agreements to a hostage situation, suggesting they believe that AI companies will find ways to scrape publishers’ websites anyhow, if they don’t comply. Best to get a paltry fee out of them while you can, the person argued.The Johansson accusations only compound (and, if true, validate) these suspicions. Altman’s alleged reasoning for commissioning Johansson’s voice was that her familiar timbre might be “comforting to people” who find AI assistants off-putting. Her likeness would have been less about a particular voice-bot aesthetic and more of an adoption hack or a recruitment tool for a technology that many people didn’t ask for, and seem uneasy about. Here, again, is the logic of OpenAI at work. It follows that the company would plow ahead, consent be damned, simply because it might believe the stakes are too high to pivot or wait. When your technology aims to rewrite the rules of society, it stands that society’s current rules need not apply.Hubris and entitlement are inherent in the development of any transformative technology. A small group of people needs to feel confident enough in its vision to bring it into the world and ask the rest of us to adapt. But generative AI stretches this dynamic to the point of absurdity. It is a technology that requires a mindset of manifest destiny, of dominion and conquest. It’s not stealing to build the future if you believe it has belonged to you all along.

Tennis is an elegant and simple sport. Players stand on opposite sides of a rectangle, divided by a net that can’t be crossed. The gameplay is full of invisible geometry: Viewers might trace parabolas, angles, and lines depending on how the players move and where they hit the ball. It’s an ideal representation of conflict, a perfect stage for pitting one competitor against another, so it’s no wonder that the game comes to stand in for all sorts of different things off the court. Google tennis metaphor and you’ll learn how marriage is like the call and response of a rally; how business is like trying to find the best angle on your opponent; how in life it’s sometimes important to “come to the net.”Naturally, the protagonists of Luca Guadagnino’s film Challengers, whose entire existence revolves around tennis, also make sense of themselves through the rules of the game. To hear them speak to one another is to experience their monomania: Everything they really mean is hidden beneath layers of tennis puns and analogies, and the lines between life and the game become as imperceptible as those on a well-used clay court. If this is a movie about love or desire or anything else, it’s only by way of tennis.The film’s story unfolds during the final of the fictional Phil’s Tire Town Challenger tennis tournament, held in New Rochelle, New York. Via flashbacks interspersed throughout the match, we learn about the rivalry between the prim champion Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and scruffy down-on-his-luck Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor)—as well as their relationships with Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a once-promising player whose career fell apart due to injury. Although Art and Tashi are now married, the film slowly reveals the evolution of these relationships. We see how they all met at a sponsor party during the U.S. Open Junior tournament, where Tashi promised her phone number to the winner of a match between the two boys, who at the time were best friends, declaring her desire to watch some “good fucking tennis.” We see how Patrick and Tashi were a short-lived couple and had an affair long after they broke up, and how Art’s irrepressible flirtation with Tashi led to a career-defining romantic and coaching partnership between the two of them. As we realize how much of their lives are tied up in the Phil’s Tire Town final, every glance, serve, and motion becomes fraught with meaning.The narrative progresses in a way that’s not unlike John McPhee’s 1969 book, Levels of the Game, which recounts a single match played between two American players, Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, in the semifinals of the 1968 U.S. Open. Between McPhee’s descriptions of various points played during the match, he travels back to key moments in each competitor’s life, narrating the personal and social conditions that shaped their respective playing styles and dispositions on the court—and how the two rivals see each other.For McPhee, “a person’s tennis game begins with his nature and background and comes out through his motor mechanisms into shot patterns and characteristics of play.” Graebner sees Ashe’s short strokes and risk taking as an extension of his “loose” lifestyle, equating his confidence on the court with the rising social position of Black Americans. To Ashe, Graebner’s cautious and predictable play style is indicative of his traditional values and conservative, family-oriented life: He calls it “Republican tennis.” Although in some ways it was just another meeting between two longtime rivals, the match comes to stand in for competing cultural currents in America, the civil-rights struggles of the ’50s and ’60s looming in the background.A few years later, another match took on post-1960s gender politics in a famously theatrical showdown. The “Battle of Sexes” match in 1973, between Billie Jean King and then-retired Bobby Riggs, has since been mythologized as a turning point for women’s sports. If the social allegory of the Ashe-Graeber match was subtextual, the one in this spectacle—which ended in a decisive victory for King over the cartoonishly chauvinistic Riggs—was glaringly explicit. At a time when women’s liberation was becoming a force that threw all sorts of conventions into question, and plenty of people were for or against the gains of the movement, seeing the debate represented by a game of tennis surely had a comforting appeal. For those with more regressive beliefs, rooting for Bobby was certainly easier than really articulating a justification for maintaining massive pay disparities between men and women, both within and outside of professional tennis.[Read: Tennis temperament]In Challengers, the topic of tennis plays a similar orienting role for three players whose “only skill in life is hitting a ball with a racket,” according to Tashi. Talking with Patrick and Art after she meets them, Tashi describes tennis as a “relationship.” On the court, she understands her opponent—and the crowd understands them both, watching them almost fall in love as they battle back and forth. For Tashi who has nothing but tennis to talk about, the tennis metaphor works because seeing things as a game based on one-on-one competition, long-standing rivalries, and extended strategic play makes intuitive sense. Although pretty much everything else in her life might be complicated, tennis is not.But this assured confidence doesn’t follow the players off the court. Within their love triangle, tension arises with the dawning recognition that in a one-on-one sport, there’s always another person who doesn’t have a place on the court. Save for the night they meet, when Tashi induces Art and Patrick to kiss each other for her entertainment, the three of them rarely engage with one another at the same time: Someone is always watching from the stands, whether literally or metaphorically. Tashi’s solution to Patrick and Art’s competing interest—giving her number to the winner of their match—doesn’t stop the loser from wanting to continue play, of course. Life isn’t that simple.Nor are the boundaries between sport and play so neatly defined. During Patrick and Tashi’s brief romance, a post-coital conversation seamlessly transitions into a discussion about Patrick’s poor performance as a pro, and eventually becomes a referendum on why their relationship doesn’t work. Confused, and trying to make sense of it all as their banter swiftly changes definitions, Patrick asks: “Are we still talking about tennis?” “We’re always talking about tennis,” Tashi replies. Frustrated, Patrick tersely retorts: “Can we not?”What would it be for them to not talk about tennis? As the linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue in their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By, “Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” In other words, we’re always talking about things in terms of other things—even if it’s not always as obvious as it is in Challengers. Metaphors are more than just a poetic device; they’re fundamental to the way language is structured. Complex ideas almost always elude easy explanation, so we reach for metaphors, either consciously or not. When tennis represents these various concepts—love, gender, race—they become easier to discuss due to the sport’s inherent legibility. No matter what issue is at stake, or how grand it may be, it can always be reduced to an individual’s performance on the court.And as a sport, tennis is versatile enough to be a playful and rich metaphor in Challengers. While Patrick is still dating Tashi, and Art is transparently trying to steal his best friend’s girl, Patrick playfully accuses Art of playing “percentage tennis”—a patient strategy of hitting low-risk shots and waiting for your opponent to mess up. It’s something unique to the game, as it wouldn’t really make sense in the context of other individual sports like boxing, track, or bowling. As we learn, it’s also not a good strategy for love—because although Art does make his move once Patrick inevitably screws up, his unflagging commitment isn’t enough to make Tashi genuinely love him.On the night before the Phil’s Tire Town final, Art asks for Tashi’s permission to retire once the season is over. Art knows that this would be the end of their professional relationship—he would no longer be able to play dutiful pupil to Tashi. But it might also be the end of whatever spark animated their love in the first place, as you can’t play “good fucking tennis” in retirement. Tashi says she will leave Art if he doesn’t beat Patrick in the final. Tired of playing, but unable to escape the game, Art curls up in his wife’s lap and cries.The next day, as the final nears its conclusion, tensions run high. Art has just discovered the truth about Patrick and Tashi’s affair, and the match goes into a tiebreaker to decide the final set. After an intense rally, Art jumps for a smash and falls over the net, landing in Patrick’s arms. As she watches her two lovers embrace, Tashi stands up and screams “Come on!” with a passion not seen since early in her career. It doesn’t matter who wins. Lost in a moment of catharsis, they’re finally not talking about tennis anymore.

In the Martian lowlands, one rocky crater is dotted with small holes, winding from the floor to the rim like breadcrumbs. Their clean and cylindrical appearance is distinctly unnatural, suggesting the work of aliens—which it is. For three years, a robot from Earth has been collecting samples of rock and soil into six-inch-long tubes, whirring and crackling on the otherwise quiet planet. The robot, a rover named Perseverance, has deposited some of the samples on the Martian surface in sealed tubes. The others, about two dozen so far, remain stored inside the rover's belly.Perseverance will stay on Mars forever, but the majority of its carefully packaged samples are meant to return to Earth. The Mars Sample Return mission, known as MSR for short, is one of the boldest undertakings in NASA history, as consequential as it is complicated. The endeavor, which involves sending an extra spacecraft to the red planet to retrieve the samples, serves as a precursor to getting future astronauts home from Mars. It’s a test of whether the United States can keep up with China’s space program, which is scheduled to return its own Mars samples in the 2030s. It could uncover new information about our planetary neighbor’s history, and reveal a picture of the cosmic wilderness that was the early solar system. Some scientists hope the dusty fragments will contain tiny fossilized microbes that would prove life once existed on Mars. Those tiny life forms will have been dead for who knows how long—but still would be evidence of a second genesis in our own backyard. If, that is, the samples ever make it back to Earth. NASA officials recently announced that the sample-return effort has become too expensive and fallen worryingly behind schedule. The latest estimated cost of as much as $11 billion is nearly double what experts initially predicted, and the way things are going, the samples won't arrive home until 2040, seven years later than expected. At a press conference last month, NASA chief Bill Nelson repeatedly called the state of the Mars Sample Return mission "unacceptable," a striking chastisement of his own agency, considering that MSR is an in-house effort. Officials have put out a call—to NASA’s own ranks and to private space companies—for “quicker and cheaper” plans that don’t require “huge technological leaps” to bring the samples home.[Read: Scientists really, really want a piece of Mars]NASA officials say that they remain committed to the return effort, but researchers—including the agency’s collaborators who work on the project—are concerned. “The path forward is not clear,” Aileen Yingst, a geologist at the Planetary Science Institute who works on the Perseverance mission, told me. Scientists who study Mars are worried that the mission will be downsized. Scientists who don’t study Mars—and a few who do—are frustrated, because MSR consumes so much of NASA’s budget. Scientists can’t imagine NASA giving up on the mission entirely, but the debacle has even prompted some whispered jokes about China coming along and claiming the tubes on the surface before NASA can fly them home. Last year, an independent review ordered by NASA ominously warned that “by abandoning return of Mars samples to other nations, the U.S. abandons the preeminent role that [President John F. Kennedy] ascribed to the scientific exploration of space.”If and when the MSR tubes come home, their contents could dramatically shift our understanding of Mars. The first NASA spacecraft to land on Mars, in 1976, carried instruments designed to examine Martian soil for evidence of tiny, metabolizing life forms but didn’t find anything conclusive. Some bits of Martian rock, ejected by colliding asteroids, have made it to Earth as meteorites. (And scientists have tried to find proof of life in these, too). But such fragments arrive scorched by atmospheric reentry, their composition altered and contaminated from the journey. Pristine samples are far more tantalizing.MSR would deliver Martian dirt straight from an area that scientists believe holds a promising chance at containing signs of life from 3.5 billion years ago. The Perseverance rover is exploring the shores of what scientists believe was once a lake, at a crater called Jezero, where the sedimentary rock may bear signs of a once-habitable world, or preserved life itself. The samples might also offer hints about Earth’s origin story. The rocks that existed here 4 billion years ago, when the solar system was just getting started, have since been crushed, melted, and eroded away. But Mars, a world lacking plate tectonics and serious weather, still bears rocks from the time of its very formation.[Read: The most overhyped planet in the galaxy]The promise of such samples has been a top research priority for planetary scientists for over a decade. The original plan to do so, devised by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is accordingly ambitious, involving several different spacecraft to retrieve the capsules, launch them into Martian orbit, and fly them back to Earth. No astronauts are involved, but Mars scientists have likened the mission choreography to the Apollo program in terms of complexity.That plan was apparently destined to unravel from the start. NASA’s independent review found that MSR had “unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning" and was "organized under an unwieldy structure," with "unclear roles, accountability, and authority.” Technically ambitious missions always cost more, and MSR is arguably one of the most complicated that NASA has ever undertaken. But the scientists who help NASA set exploration priorities have no control over the budgets of the resulting programs—Congress does.Last summer, some congressional appropriators briefly threatened the entire MSR effort with cancellation. This February, facing uncertainty over the money that Congress would allocate for MSR in the next fiscal year, the JPL laid off more than 500 employees. (Congress has since allocated a fraction of what NASA spent on the mission last year.) Thanks to budget concerns, NASA has delayed the launch of a telescope that would monitor potentially hazardous asteroids near Earth, and put on hold a proposed mission to study Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field.Some scientists fear that MSR will draw resources away from other potential projects to search for life in places that they now believe to be far more promising than Mars. The search for alien life in the solar system has long been guided by water, and in the 1990s, when NASA kicked off a golden age of Mars missions, the red planet’s ice regions seemed appealing. But in the years since, other celestial bodies have become more compelling. A moon of Saturn, Titan, is the only body in the solar system besides Earth that has bodies of liquid on its surface, even if that liquid is methane. Two moons of Jupiter, Europa and Enceladus, are likely icy worlds with subsurface oceans; on the latter, cracks in the ice release plumes of salty water, hinting at something like deep-sea hydrothermal activity on Earth. NASA is launching an orbiting mission to Europa later this year, and the latest survey of planetary scientists advised NASA to start working on another to Enceladus. “If I could go anywhere, I would go to Enceladus,” Brook Nunn, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington, told me.[Read: Mars’s soundscape is strangely beautiful]Even some Mars scientists believe that Mars is no longer the top candidate. Darby Dyar, a planetary geologist at Mount Holyoke College, has spent decades studying Mars. “If anybody should be enthusiastic about the returned samples, it’s me, and I am,” she told me. But now she works on a NASA mission to Venus, a planet that might rival Mars as a candidate for extraterrestrial life, and she says she wouldn’t prioritize MSR over her current research.For scientists who support Mars exploration, MSR is a problem, siphoning funds away from other efforts to study it. “There’s so many aspects to studying a planet that do not involve analyzing small amounts of rocks in the lab,” says Catherine Neish, a planetary scientist at Western University, in Canada, who’s working on an international mission to map the ice deposits on Mars’s polar regions. NASA pulled its financial support from that project in 2022, citing MSR’s cost as part of its motivation. Planetary scientists have recommended prioritizing a mission to drill deep into the ice at the Martian poles, far from Perseverance’s domain, where conditions could be just comfortable enough to support small life forms now.NASA is well aware of the all-consuming nature of MSR. As the mission is redrawn, officials have said they are even willing to consider proposals that would bring home just 10 sample tubes, one-third of the amount initially planned. Lindsay Hays, a program scientist at NASA’s planetary-science division, told me that NASA will seek input from the science community about which sample tubes to return. “NASA has a responsibility to use taxpayer funds in the most effective and efficient way possible,” she said. “But it’s also part of our mandate to the nation to do things that have never been done before.”[Read: Too much of a good thing at NASA]Most planetary scientists aren’t happy with a potentially scaled-back approach either. “You’ve decimated the science, because now you’re not going to get the diversity that you could have if we brought back the full suite of samples,” Phil Christensen, a geologist at Arizona State University who co-chaired the community’s latest decadal survey, told me.A badly delayed sample-return mission would fracture NASA’s grand vision for its Martian future. By the 2040s, NASA intends to be focused not on the red planet’s soil, but on sending astronauts there and, crucially, bringing them back. That operation relies on having successfully practiced launching off from Mars, which NASA hasn’t yet managed with MSR. Instead, the agency is back at the drawing board, hoping to find a way out of an $11 billion pit. Officials expect to finish reviewing new proposals and come to a decision on the mission’s future in the fall. Meanwhile, Perseverance chugs along, excavating the mythical oasis of Jezero Crater with each curated tube.

At this point, Americans will believe almost any story about Donald Trump. That is both a strength and a weakness for him. On the one hand, it means that nearly nothing he says, including for example that he wants to be a dictator, penetrates too deeply. On the other hand, it means people rarely extend him the benefit of the doubt, even when it’s warranted.That’s what happened yesterday, when Trump’s Truth Social account posted a video featuring fake newspapers with celebratory imagined headlines about Trump (IT’S A LANDSLIDE! TRUMP WINS!!). Below, a sub-headline referred to “the creation of a unified Reich.” Naturally, the combination of Trump and a “unified Reich” was combustible. “This man is a stain, a Nazi, a pure a [sic] simple garbage of a human being,” fulminated Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican congressman. “Flush Trump down the toilet.” The controversy is illuminating about Trump and the presidential campaign, but perhaps not in the ways that it first appeared.Trump’s account has removed the video, and his campaign said it did not create the video but reposted it from another user. It also said the post was done not by Trump but by a staffer who hadn’t noticed the “Reich” reference. Although Trump has a long history of blaming staffers for foolish posts, the excuse here is plausible. The video appears to have been made using a stock video template available online. And the text that appears in the video—about the “unified Reich”—comes, as the Associated Press notes, from a Wikipedia entry about World War I (“German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich”) rather than anything about Nazis. It’s a safe bet that the gospel singer Candi Staton wasn’t aiming to boost Hitler when she used the same template for a video of a song about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.[David A. Graham: Trump says he’ll be a dictator “on day one”]This election cycle has seen a slew of stories about how the Trump campaign is far more professionally run and regimented than in 2016 and 2020. That appears to be true, but only in a limited sense. Any competent campaign would have vetted such a video before it reposted it in order to avoid just this kind of mess. But Trump and his team can’t or won’t bother to look carefully at what he (or his staff) reposts on social media, and never have. In 2016, he posted an anti-Semitic meme with a Star of David and then tried to convince people it was a “sheriff’s star.” In 2017, he posted a GIF that showed him body-slamming CNN, created by a Reddit user who, whaddya know, also posted lots of anti-Semitic material. Earlier this year, a brief controversy broke out when Trump posted a video of a convoy of trucks decked out in pro-Trump swag, including an image of a bound and tied Joe Biden on one truck’s tailgate.Despite having served as president for four years, and despite being a gifted political messenger, Trump has never grasped—or perhaps never cared—that sloppy words from someone in his position can be hugely consequential, and he resists guardrails that would protect him.[Read: If Trump wins]Trump’s problem here is that even though his excuse makes sense, he is also an authoritarian who has used anti-Semitic language. Believing that he might have posted subtle Nazi messaging doesn’t require much of a leap. Not only did he attempt to steal the last election and promise to be a dictator, but he has also consistently disregarded checks and balances and suggested “termination” of the Constitution. He called neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 “very fine people,” hobnobbed with white nationalists, and delivered menacing remarks about American Jews who do not support him—on Rosh Hashanah, no less. His former chief of staff says Trump once told him that “Hitler did some good things.” It’s no coincidence that so many of those past sloppy reposts came from supporters of his who hold hateful views. (It also doesn’t help that a staffer on the campaign of Ron DeSantis, a rival and would-be successor in the GOP presidential primary, was caught surreptitiously inserting Nazi imagery into social-media posts.)The Biden campaign quickly pounced on the situation. “Trump posts a new ad foreshadowing a second Trump term that says he will create a ‘UNIFIED REICH,’ echoing Nazi Germany,” its official account posted on X. The Biden campaign is not stupid, which means both that it should have figured out the real origin of the post (and may well have) and also that it was not going to let an opportunity to savage its opponent pass by.[Yair Rosenberg: Trump’s menacing Rosh Hashana message to American Jews]Biden’s team has been taking a more aggressive approach to Trump as the election nears. After years of elliptically referring to his “predecessor,” the president has begun naming Trump in attacks. The rest of his apparatus is also attacking Trump, trying to remind voters of the reasons they rejected him in 2020. In this case, the Biden campaign seems to have succeeded in manufacturing a controversy. Every major outlet has a headline this morning about the video (a representative example from The Washington Post: “Trump’s Truth Social Account Shares Video Referencing ‘Unified Reich’). These stories are not untruthful—he did share the video—but they are also a little misleading, though perhaps unintentionally so.Whether the backlash to the video helps Biden beat Trump in November is anybody’s guess. Trump’s critics debate whether it is more effective to attack Trump as a threat to democracy, criticize his unpopular policy ideas, paint him as corrupt, or focus on Biden’s positive accomplishments. The incident shows exactly why Trump was so bad at being president. It probably doesn’t tell us anything new about Trump’s feelings regarding Hitler that we didn’t already know. The bizarre thing is that many voters may hear about the controversy and assume that it reveals Trump’s sympathy for the Third Reich, and then vote for him anyway.

I’ve spent more than five decades making difficult decisions in finance, government, business, and politics. Looking back, what most prepared me for the life I’ve led was the open exchange of ideas that I experienced in college and law school, supported by a society-wide understanding that universities and their faculty should be allowed to pursue areas of study as they see fit, without undue political or financial pressure. More broadly, throughout my career, I have seen firsthand the way America’s higher-education system strengthens our nation.I cannot recall a time when the country’s colleges and universities, and the wide range of benefits they bring, have faced such numerous or serious threats. Protests over Gaza, Israel, Hamas, and anti-Semitism—and the attempt by certain elected officials and donors to capitalize on these protests and push a broader anti-higher-education agenda—have been the stuff of daily headlines for months. But the challenges facing colleges and universities have been building for years, revealed in conflicts over everything from climate change and curriculum to ideological diversity and academic governance.But there is a threat that is being ignored, one that goes beyond any single issue or political controversy. Transfixed by images of colleges and universities in turmoil, we risk overlooking the foundational role that higher education plays in American life. With its underlying principles of free expression and academic freedom, the university system is one of the nation’s great strengths. It is not to be taken for granted. Undermining higher education would harm all Americans, weakening our country and making us less able to confront the many challenges we face.The most recent upheavals on American campuses—and the threat posed to the underlying principles of higher education—have been well documented.In some cases, individuals have been silenced or suppressed, not because they were threatening anyone’s physical safety or disrupting the functioning of the university environment, but rather, it seems, because of their opinions. The University of Southern California, for example, recently canceled its valedictorian’s speech at graduation. Although administrators cited safety concerns, many on campus, including the student herself, said they believe that the true cause lay in the speaker’s pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel views. One does not have to agree with the sentiments being expressed by a speaker in order to be troubled by the idea that they would be suppressed because of their content.[Conor Friedersdorf: Columbia University’s impossible position]In other cases, it is the demonstrators themselves who have sought to force their views on others—by breaking university policies regarding shared spaces, occupying buildings, and reportedly imposing ideological litmus tests on students seeking to enter public areas of campus. Some activists have advocated violence against those with whom they disagree. Even before the unrest of recent weeks, I had heard for many years from students and professors that they felt a chilling effect on campuses that rendered true discussion—including exchanges of ideas that might make others uncomfortable—very difficult.Even as free speech faces serious threats from inside the campus, academic freedom is under assault from outside. To an unprecedented degree, donors have involved themselves in pressure campaigns, explicitly linking financial support to views expressed on campus and the scholarship undertaken by students and faculty. At the University of Pennsylvania, one such effort pressed donors to reduce their annual contribution to $1 to protest the university’s decision to host a Palestinian literary conference. At Yale, Beverly Gage, the head of the prestigious Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, felt compelled to resign after the program came under increasing pressure from its donors. Among other things, the donors objected to an op-ed by an instructor in the program headlined “How to Protect America From the Next Donald Trump.”It’s not just donors. Elected officials and candidates for office are also attacking academic freedom. On a Zoom call whose content was subsequently leaked, a Republican member of Congress, Jim Banks of Indiana, characterized recent hearings with the presidents of Harvard, MIT, Penn, and Columbia—along with upcoming ones with the presidents of Rutgers, UCLA, and Northwestern—as part of a strategy to “defund these universities.” In a recent campaign video, former President Trump asserted that colleges are “turning our students into Communists and terrorists and sympathizers,” and promised to retaliate by taxing, fining, and suing private universities if he wins a second term. Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, a close ally of Trump’s, has introduced a bill that would punish schools that don’t crack down on demonstrators. The bill would tax the endowment of such schools heavily and curb their access to federal funds.The methods of these donors and politicians—politically motivated subpoenas and hearings, social-media pressure campaigns, campaign-trail threats—may not violate the First Amendment. They do, however, seek to produce a chilling effect on free speech. The goal of these efforts is to force universities to bow to outside pressure and curtail the range of ideas they allow—not because scholars at universities believe those ideas lack merit, but because the ideas are at odds with the political views of those bringing the pressure. All of this needs to be seen against a foreboding backdrop. At a time when trust in many American institutions is at an all-time low, skepticism about higher education is on the rise. Earlier this year, a noteworthy essay by Douglas Belkin in The Wall Street Journal explored “Why Americans Have Lost Faith in the Value of College.” The New York Times wondered last fall whether college might be a “risky bet.” According to Gallup, confidence in higher education has fallen dramatically—from 57 percent in 2015 to 36 percent in 2023. The attacks on free expression and academic freedom on campus are both causes and symptoms of this declining confidence.It is ironic that, at a moment when higher education faces unprecedented assaults, more Americans than ever have a college diploma. When I graduated from college, in 1960, only 8 percent of Americans held a four-year degree. Today, that number has increased almost fivefold, to 38 percent. Even so, I suspect that many Americans don’t realize just how exceptional the country’s university system actually is. Although the United States can claim less than 5 percent of the world’s population, it is home to 65 percent of the world’s 20 highest-ranked universities (and 28 percent of the world’s top-200 universities). Americans can get a quality education at thousands of academic institutions throughout the country.Despite the skepticism in some quarters about whether a college degree is really worth it, the financial benefits of obtaining a degree remain clear. At 25, college graduates may earn only about 27 percent more than high-school-diploma holders. However, the college wage premium doubles over the course of their lifetime, jumping to 60 percent by the time they reach age 55. Looking solely at an individual’s financial prospects, the case for attending college remains strong.[David Deming: The college backlash is going too far]But the societal benefits we gain from higher education are far greater—and that’s the larger point. Colleges and universities don’t receive tax exemptions and public funds because of the help they give to specific individuals. We invest in higher education because there’s a broad public purpose.Our colleges and universities are seen, rightly, as centers of learning, but they are also engines of economic growth. Higher graduation rates among our young people lead to a better-educated workforce for businesses and a larger tax base for the country as a whole. Institutions of higher education spur early-stage research of all kinds, create environments for commercializing that research, provide a base for start-up and technology hubs, and serve as a mentoring incubator for new generations of entrepreneurs and business leaders. In many communities, especially smaller towns and rural areas, campuses also create jobs that would be difficult to replace.The importance of colleges and universities to the American economy will grow in the coming decades. As the list of industries that can be automated with AI becomes longer, the liberal-arts values and critical-thinking skills taught by colleges and universities will become only more valuable. Machine learning can aid in decision making. It cannot fully replace thoughtfulness and judgment.Colleges and universities also help the United States maintain a geopolitical edge. We continue to attract the best and brightest from around the world to study here. Although many of these students stay and strengthen the country, many more return home, bringing with them a lifelong positive association with the United States. When I served as Treasury secretary, I found it extremely advantageous that so many of my foreign counterparts had spent their formative years in the U.S. That’s just as true today. In many instances, even the leadership class in unfriendly countries aspires to send its children to study here. In a multipolar world, this kind of soft-power advantage matters more than ever.At home, higher education helps create the kind of citizenry that is central to a democracy’s ability to function and perhaps even to survive. This impact may be hard to quantify, but that doesn’t make it any less real.It is not just lawmakers and executives who must make difficult decisions in the face of uncertainty. All of us—from those running civil-society groups that seek to influence policy to the voters who put elected leaders in office in the first place—are called upon to make hard choices as we live our civic lives. All of us are aware that the country is not in its best condition—this is hardly news. Imagine what that condition might be if we set out to undermine the very institutions that nurture rigorous and disciplined thinking and the free exchange of ideas.Of course, there is much about higher education that needs fixing. Precisely because colleges and universities are so valuable to society, they should do more to engage with it. Bringing down costs can help ensure that talented, qualified young people are not denied higher education for financial reasons. Being clear about the principles and policies regarding the open expression of views—even as we recognize that applying them may require judgment calls, and that it is crucial to protect student safety and maintain an environment where learning and research can be conducted—would help blunt the criticism, not always made in good faith, that universities have an ideological agenda. Communicating more effectively with the public would help more Americans understand what is truly at stake.But the fact that universities can do more does not change a basic fact: It is harmful to society to put constraints on open discussion or to attack universities for purposes of short-term political gain. Perhaps some of those trying to discourage the open exchange of ideas at universities believe that we can maintain their quality while attacking the culture of academic independence. I disagree. Unfettered discussion and freedom of thought and expression are the foundation upon which the greatness of our higher-education system is built. You cannot undermine the former without damaging the latter. To take one recent example: After Governor Ron DeSantis reshaped Florida’s New College along ideological lines, one-third of the faculty left within a year. This included scholars not only in fields such as gender studies, which many conservatives view with distaste, but in areas such as neuroscience as well.We can have the world’s greatest higher-education system, with all of the benefits it brings to our country, or we can have colleges and universities in which the open exchange of views is undermined by pressure campaigns from many directions. We can’t have both.

Smartphones and social media are melting our children’s brains and making them depressed, or so goes the story we are being told. The headlines are constant; it’s enough to make any parent want to shut off every smart device in their home. Fortunately for my kids, who enjoy a good “cat attacks dog” video on TikTok, I go to work each day and see what adolescents are really up to on their devices. And it turns out that the story behind teen social-media use is much different from what most adults think.I am a developmental psychologist, and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.Many other researchers have found the same. In fact, a recent study and a review of research on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”[Read: No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teens]This is why other researchers and I are not buying the stories being told about adolescents and social media. The most recent wave of fear was unleashed by Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, an excerpt of which appeared in this magazine. Haidt claims that a “phone-based childhood” in the 2010s rewired our children’s brains and caused an epidemic of mental illness, especially among young girls; he’s written about this theme for years. Of course, Haidt is not alone in asserting that these apps cause such problems. Social media has been compared to heroin use in terms of its impact and has been blamed for things such as declining test scores and young people having less sex.These stories possess an intuitive appeal—social media is relatively new and makes for an easy scapegoat. But adolescence has always been a time of concern: It is the peak age for the onset of a number of serious mental disorders, and there are many alarming statistics about adolescents’ mental health right now. Caregivers are frightened, and people are just trying to do the right thing for young people. No one wants their children exploited online, or to be fed misinformation or sexually explicit and violent content. Pointing a finger squarely at smartphones and social media offers people common and unlikable enemies. But we simply do not know that these are the right targets. The reality is that correlational studies to date have generated a mix of small, conflicting, and often confounded associations between social-media use and adolescents’ mental health. The overwhelming majority of them offer no way to sort out cause and effect. When associations are found, things seem to work in the opposite direction from what we’ve been told: Recent research among adolescents—including among young-adolescent girls, along with a large review of 24 studies that followed people over time—suggests that early mental-health symptoms may predict later social-media use, but not the other way around.Shockingly few experimental studies have specifically tried to test whether reducing social-media use improves mental health. In contrast with the correlational studies above, experimental studies randomize people’s social-media exposure. If done well, they can directly address cause-and-effect questions. I get excited every time one of these studies comes out, hoping I’ll learn something new about social media’s potential impact. But I have also learned to ask a few basic questions of this research before I start to draw conclusions. They’re worth keeping in mind whenever you see a story reporting on these findings: Does the study include young adolescents? Most of these studies do not. Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University recently analyzed 27 experimental studies on the effects of social media on mental health conducted since 2013; surprisingly, this was all of the experimental work that could be identified to date. The majority were conducted with adults or college students; only two had participants with an average age of 18, and one small study included adolescents with an average age of 16. None included girls ages 10 to 14—a group that has been at the center of recent debates on this topic. If we are going to make causal claims about social media’s effect on adolescent girls’ mental health, then we need well-designed experimental studies that actually include them. Does the study focus on the social-media platforms that young people use today? If not, can we assume that the study’s findings are relevant to the spaces where adolescents spend their time? These studies have tended to observe college students or middle-aged volunteers, many of whom were asked to give up Facebook specifically, and then asked how they felt a few weeks later. (These days, teenagers tend to be on Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.) What is the outcome that was measured? The conversation right now is about serious mental-health disorders, such as depression and anxiety, as well as suicide. Most studies do not come close to using clinically meaningful measures of these outcomes. A major problem is that participants are not blind to their condition, and are responding against a backdrop of messaging that social media is bad for them and that taking a break is good. Surprisingly, even given these issues, Ferguson reports that the evidence for causal effects across these experimental studies was statistically no different from zero. In other words, even this research, which was arguably primed to find a maximal link between social media and poor effects on mental health, does not reliably do so.[Listen: The problem with comparing social media to Big Tobacco]These results do not negate the very real fears that people—including the young people that we study—have about social media, nor do they negate the reality that many young people struggle with mental-health problems. Taking a safety-first approach to kids and social media is perfectly reasonable. I certainly believe that Big Tech companies can and should be doing a lot more to design platforms with the needs and best interests of adolescents in mind; I co-authored a report last year saying as much. The surgeon general’s office has also weighed in along these lines. Last May, it released an advisory, “Social Media and Youth Mental Health,” acknowledging that more research is needed in this area, but because “we cannot conclude social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents,” we should mitigate risks by requiring tech companies to emphasize health and safety, supporting digital literacy, developing Family Media Plans, and prioritizing research on social media’s potential impact. These are reasonable interventions designed to help people without causing undue alarm.But the problem with the extreme position presented in Haidt’s book and in recent headlines—that digital technology use is directly causing a large-scale mental-health crisis in teenagers—is that it can stoke panic and leave us without the tools we need to actually navigate these complex issues. Two things can be true: first, that the online spaces where young people spend so much time require massive reform, and second, that social media is not rewiring our children’s brains or causing an epidemic of mental illness. Focusing solely on social media may mean that the real causes of mental disorder and distress among our children go unaddressed.Offline risk—at the community, family, and child levels—continues to be the best predictor of whether children are exposed to negative content and experiences online. Children growing up in families with the fewest resources offline are also less likely to be actively supported by adults as they learn to navigate the online world. If we react to these problems based on fear alone, rather than considering what adolescents actually need, we may only widen this opportunity gap. We should not send the message to families—and to teens—that social-media use, which is common among adolescents and helpful in many cases, is inherently damaging, shameful, and harmful. It’s not. What my fellow researchers and I see when we connect with adolescents is young people going online to do regular adolescent stuff. They connect with peers from their offline life, consume music and media, and play games with friends. Spending time on YouTube remains the most frequent online activity for U.S. adolescents. Adolescents also go online to seek information about health, and this is especially true if they also report experiencing psychological distress themselves or encounter barriers to finding help offline. Many adolescents report finding spaces of refuge online, especially when they have marginalized identities or lack support in their family and school. Adolescents also report wanting, but often not being able to access, online mental-health services and supports.All adolescents will eventually need to know how to safely navigate online spaces, so shutting off or restricting access to smartphones and social media is unlikely to work in the long term. In many instances, doing so could backfire: Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces, and we should not give them additional reasons to feel alienated from the adults in their lives.

In 1970, the American painter and conceptual artist Lee Lozano began planning her final project, a large-scale work of performance art called Dropout Piece. It entailed Lozano’s leaving her successful career, withdrawing from the New York City art scene, and eventually moving to Dallas, where she lived until her death, in 1999. As a multiyear, lived action, Dropout Piece is ephemeral, impossible to display in a gallery. The only record of its inception is found in 11 notebooks full of Lozano’s neat, all-caps handwriting, in which she included ideas for the work as well as for other ambitious projects: “Investment Piece,” “‘No Movies’ Piece,” “Dialogue Piece.” One of these notes, from April 1970, serves as the epigraph to Hari Kunzru’s new novel, Blue Ruin: “Poverty Piece: Remain poor until the war ends.”When we meet Jason Gates, known as Jay, the middle-aged narrator of Blue Ruin, he is living like Lozano might have in Poverty Piece. He’s been sleeping in his car during the coronavirus pandemic and working as a grocery-delivery driver. He is also undocumented and, after catching COVID, was evicted from his shared apartment in New York City; he’s still suffering from long COVID. One afternoon, he pulls into the driveway of a gated upstate property and begins to wearily unload a trunkful of groceries, only to find that the woman waiting on the porch is Alice, an ex-girlfriend from his art-school days in London. Alice sees how ill Jay is and offers him a place to recover: a vacant barn on the other side of the estate where she’s been quarantining with her husband, a painter named Rob (another former art-school friend of Jay’s), and Marshal, a gallerist who has been renting the home from a millionaire acquaintance.[Read: What the gig economy does to a human]After Alice leaves Jay in the barn, imploring him to remain hidden because guests are forbidden on the property, he reflects that her “familiarity was a small miracle. It changed time’s straight line into a plane, a landscape across which, for a while, I could move in any direction.” Jay’s convalescence gives him time to trudge into the past. Twenty years ago, as a couple, Jay and Alice enmeshed themselves in the avant-garde art world of London, running a collaborative warehouse gallery space with Rob. When the gallery was sold, Alice sank into a depression and eventually left Jay, running away to Greece with Rob. One day, Jay returned from a lecture to find himself evicted from Alice’s apartment, unable to contact her, and stonewalled by his friends. Reeling from betrayal, he had no choice but to move on.Kunzru’s attention to how history haunts the present, on scales both personal and political, animated his previous two books, White Tears and Red Pill. Together with Blue Ruin, the three novels make up his own version of the Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1990s Three Colors trilogy. Kieślowski named his three films Blue, White, and Red, after the colors of the French flag; they represent, respectively, the French Revolution’s ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. Kunzru’s trilogy, meanwhile, is attuned to the history of the U.S. (and, to some extent, the U.K.). In White Tears, two white men accidentally reanimate the voice of a long-dead blues singer and become haunted by him, illuminating a wealthy family’s legacy of exploiting Black people in the South. In Red Pill, the unnamed narrator becomes obsessed with a cop show called Blue Lives, growing convinced that the program’s creator is “red-pilling” the American public by inserting alt-right propaganda into the show. In Blue Ruin, Kunzru turns his attention to visual and performance art, examining its intersections with issues of labor and consumerism. Through Jay, who has lived both as an artist and as an undocumented gig worker, Kunzru shows that these two lifestyles are perhaps not as different as they might seem, deflating the idea of art as a noble pursuit: Being an artist is just another job, and art is just another commodity.Much of this indictment of the art world occurs through Jay’s reflections on his past, present, and future as an artist. He is rigidly principled, even ascetic, bound by commitments to aesthetic ideas over material success. Jay loves painting, but he gave it up in art school because he felt that there was something “rotten” about the final product. He hated the medium’s “aura of luxury consumption, the knowledge that whatever you did, however confrontational you tried to be, you were—if you were lucky—just making another chip or token for collectors to gamble with.” Trying to resist the commodification of his art, Jay started to make performance pieces. These culminated in a three-part series called THE DRIFTWORK, which explored the idea of his own disappearance from the art world, perhaps in homage to Lozano’s Dropout Piece.THE DRIFTWORK’s first piece, No Trace, had Jay obsessively cleaning his apartment and erasing his presence from the internet. In the second part, Return, Jay gave his ID, passport, and credit cards to three “artworld authorities” in Paris. He then sailed, covertly, across the English Channel, hid on a train to London, and met the authorities at an appointed time in the city to collect his belongings—a reference to the “clandestine crossings” of migrants. The third piece, Fugue, began with Jay burning his official documents, his belongings, and even the clothes on his own body, while standing in front of a gallery audience. He left the building naked and began a total withdrawal from the art world: After he walked out the door, the audience was told that “the performance was ongoing.”When we meet Jay, 20 years later, he has remained completely removed from the art scene—he has not entered a gallery or museum, does not seem to have even looked himself up online, since Fugue. He’s been living without ID or papers, joining autonomist communes, sailing on yacht crews, entering the U.S. without documentation, and, until the pandemic, driving for a ride-share service in New York City. So it comes as a surprise to Jay that, in his absence, Fugue has made him famous. He learns this when, having ignored Alice’s warnings, he goes on a walk around the property and is found by Marshal, the dealer who has been renting the property, who zip-ties him and holds him at gunpoint. Marshal sees Jay as a Black man trespassing on the valuable estate. But when Marshal realizes that he is holding Jason Gates, the creator of THE DRIFTWORK, the dynamic shifts, and he starts apologizing.Later that week, Jay comes to the main house for dinner and gets the chance to tell his story to willing listeners, filling in the gaps of his past two decades. He reflects that “someone or other once said that art is purposeful purposelessness. I was trying to make something less defined even than that, a kind of artwork without form or function except to cross its own border, to cross out of itself and make a successful exit.” With THE DRIFTWORK, Jay tried to undermine the borders not just between nations but also between life and art. But he has changed in his 20 years away, his exposure to precarity as an undocumented gig worker making his past reflections seem naive. “When I thought of my past as an artist,” Jay muses after dinner, “the person I saw didn’t seem outrageous or bohemian. Just the opposite. I’d believed that by making art I was swimming out to sea … Actually, I’d just been on my way to work, ready to spend another day at the office.”[Read: Six books that will change how you look at art]In Blue Ruin, the art world and its inhabitants are unmasked. Artists don’t live la vie bohème; theirs is a job like any other. Even work that promises to resist commodification still manages to uphold the status quo. Jay sees how art circulates as a product; he believes that a piece’s social critique is dulled when it is bought and sold. In response to these conditions, he refuses to be a part of the system. This stands in stark contrast to Rob, who has enjoyed enormous commercial success but only at a great cost to his artistic vision and integrity. The novel’s title, Blue Ruin, comes from a painting of Rob’s that was passed off as the work of a much more famous painter. This painter had hired Rob as an assistant and invited him onto the glamorous art scene. The price for this access? Rob’s silence when the painter took a canvas from Rob’s easel and sold it as his own. This is the consequence of material success in the art world, Blue Ruin seems to say: You can gain the whole world but lose your artistic soul.Even Jay’s withdrawal from the art world was, in a way, commodified by others—his absence was, after all, what made him famous. But Kunzru ends by imagining the artist’s ultimate power: refusal. Jay’s stay at the estate comes to an abrupt conclusion when Marshal calls the cops about an incident on the property. As an undocumented person in the United States, Jay is at risk. He packs up his car, says goodbye to Alice, and drives away. Is Jay leaving to start anew, to reenter the art world with a new piece? Maybe. But he reflects that his time upstate felt like “no more than a dream,” suggesting that his disappearance will remain ongoing. Jay has seen the smallness of the art world, the obsession with selling pieces, making money, getting famous. When he turns out of the driveway, the reader hopes he’s on his way to something more than just another day at work.

Photographs by Jennifer EmerlingBy the time Jennifer Emerling was 12, she had been to 22 national parks. In an interview with her local newspaper that year, the California middle schooler said that in addition to collecting shirts and stuffed animals from the parks, “I take lots of pictures.” Asked what she would do when she’d exhausted the list of parks to visit, Emerling answered, “Go see them again.” Top: Norris Geyser Basin, in Yellow­stone National Park. Bottom: A bear-safety demonstration at Yellowstone. (Jennifer Emerling) Emerling, now a professional photographer, never stopped taking pictures of national parks. For her series “See America First!” she retraced her family’s summer road trips. The resulting images convey a spirit of adventure and childlike wonder. Emerling’s compositions juxtapose the ordinariness of smartphones and sun hats with the majesty of the natural landscape. In one photo, visitors pause on the Old Faithful boardwalk, in Yellowstone, to capture the geyser’s eruption; in another, a woman holds a camera, but her gaze is fixed on the view across a crystal lake in Grand Teton National Park. Top: Jenny Lake, in Grand Teton National Park. Bottom: Glacier Point, in Yosemite National Park. (Jennifer Emerling) For all their whimsy and nostalgia, the photographs also invite serious reflection on the complexities of American tourism and its fantasies of an unspoiled West. The series takes its title from an early-20th-century marketing campaign to promote domestic travel among the wealthy via the railroads (the original, longer slogan was “See Europe if you will, but see America first”). “See America First!” can be read straight, as intended by the railroad boosters—or with an ironic twist, through the hindsight of history. To acknowledge the many contradictions of our national parks—­areas that were touted as examples of “undisturbed creation” at the expense of Native American territorial sovereignty; places that cultivate an appreciation of nature even though they have long been commercialized—is not to negate their beauty or power.This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “American Beauty.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The End of the Golden AgeAnti-Semitism on the right and the left threatens to end an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans—and demolish the liberal order they helped establish, Franklin Foer wrote in the April 2024 issue.Franklin Foer’s article on the end of the Golden Age for American Jews makes an excellent and painful connection between the rise of anti-Semitism and the decline of democratic institutions throughout history. I was a child in Communist Romania in 1973 at the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War. Some of my teachers made my life miserable in school simply because I was Jewish. My parents had to bribe them with American cigarettes to stop them from tormenting me. Three years later, my family and I defected to the United States. The U.S. was known around the world for its democratic institutions, and we wanted to get away from a country where anti-Semitism ran rampant.No one born here can imagine what it was like to be free, to be Jewish and dare to admit it. But that was America in the 1970s and ’80s. Today’s America frightens me: I’ve lived in an authoritarian state before; I understand viscerally what’s at stake in this year’s election. For the first time in 48 years, I think twice before telling people I’m Jewish.Monica FriedlanderCambria, Calif.I am a 96-year-old Holocaust survivor. I was born in Berlin in 1928 and observed the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany. There is a world of difference between those days and the United States today. In Germany, anti-Semitism was sanctioned, even encouraged, by the authorities. Police officers stood by laughing when boys beat us on our way to school. The government passed laws forbidding us from owning radios, newspapers, telephones, even pets. The world knows how that ended: I was liberated from Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945. I think Franklin Foer’s article is a bit over the top.Walter L. LachmanLaguna Niguel, Calif.Although an interesting review of 20th-century Jewish entertainers and intellectuals, Franklin Foer’s assessment ignores the street reality.I was born and raised during the Franklin D. Roosevelt years. Growing up, I was given a bloody nose by other kids more than once on my way home from school. They shouted anti-Semitic slurs and attacked me for “killing their God.” When I served in the military, my roommate asked whether I had horns, and if it “had hurt when they took them off.” When I applied for a job at a prestigious law firm, I was told, “We do not hire your kind.”I went on to enjoy a successful career. But the underlying prejudice has always been present. The fact that we Jews have been entertaining and creative does nothing to eliminate the basic prejudice against us as “the other.”Benjamin LevineRoseland, N.J.The night before I read Franklin Foer’s article, a stranger tore my mezuzah off my doorframe. I was upset—but so was my non-Jewish roommate. In that, he was part of a broader American tradition: At the founding of our country, George Washington promised the Jews of Rhode Island, “To bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”The Jewish American Golden Age predates the 20th century, and has outlasted it. Not only has America been the best place in the diaspora to be a Jew, but the scale of Jewish participation and inclusion is larger than many realize. The highest-ranking American armor officer to die in combat was the legendary Maurice Rose—a Jewish major general who died fighting the Nazis in Germany. Foer quotes Thomas Friedman saying that the Six-Day War made American Jews realize they could be tank commanders—but Jews have been tank commanders as long as America has had tanks.In Columbus, Georgia, where I live, shortly after the October 7 attacks, the mayor and city-council members attended my synagogue. People from all over the country reached out to express their sympathy and support. A friend stationed in Syria checked in after Iran launched missiles toward Israel, concerned about my Israeli family and how I was dealing with American anti-Semitism. America’s continuing warm welcome isn’t just anecdotal: The Pew Research Center recently found that Jews are viewed more positively than any other U.S. religious group.Anti-Semitism may be on the rise, but it is and remains un-American. My great-great-grandfather, a Jewish refugee, arrived in New York on the Fourth of July. According to family lore, he saw the fireworks and thought they were for him. In a way, they were. This July, I look forward to celebrating the Golden Age’s 248th anniversary.Jacob FosterColumbus, Ga.I was disappointed reading “The End of the Golden Age.” I think the Golden Age is now, as so many American Jews rise up to say “Not in our name.” We are recognizing the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. It’s time for everyone to recognize it too. Criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza is not anti-Semitism. American Jews and Israeli Jews will be safe when we can recognize the resilience and survival of both Palestinians and Jews and see how our struggles are interconnected.R. Toran AilishevaOakland, Calif.Franklin Foer interprets a survey—“nearly one in five non-Jewish students said they ‘wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who supports the existence of Israel as a Jewish state’ ”—to mean that they were saying they wouldn’t be friends with most Jews. I would challenge this interpretation.As a Columbia graduate, and as someone who can actually read the Yiddish on The Atlantic’s cover, I do not question the Zionist dream of a haven for Jews. But I question the need for a predominantly religious state, which I fear will inevitably lead to a theocracy, intolerant even of Jews deemed insufficiently Orthodox. Israel is headed in that direction.Elliott B. UrdangProvidence, R.I.We were surprised and dismayed that The Atlantic would publish Franklin Foer’s article about the rise of anti-Semitism without any accompanying articles discussing the concurrent rise in anti-Palestinian racism. Students who protest the brutal war crimes committed in Gaza or advocate for the freedom and dignity of the Palestinian people are being silenced and persecuted. We hope The Atlantic will publish stories that highlight efforts seeking peace and justice for all. Right now, we need solutions. We need voices supportive of our shared humanity, not inflammatory rhetoric that will lead to further polarization and alienation.Samar SalmanAnn Arbor, Mich.Christina KappazEvanston, Ill.Franklin Foer replies:A writer’s deeply ingrained instinct is to want their stories to prove prophetic. In this instance, I desperately hope that I will be proved wrong. Sadly, in the aftermath of publishing this article, I have heard too many stories like Jacob Foster’s, of mezuzahs ripped from doors in the night. One of the most ubiquitous critiques of my story, echoed in R. Toran Ailisheva’s letter, is that my argument equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Many mainstream Jewish groups take that stance, but it is not my contention. I explicitly stated that there are strains of anti-Zionism that paint a vision of life in a binational state, where Palestinians and Jews peacefully coexist. That vision strikes me as hopelessly quixotic, but it isn’t anti-Semitic. Unfortunately, criticisms of Zionism are rarely so idealistic. They are usually cast in ugly terms, depicting a dangerous Jewish cabal guilty of dual loyalties, betraying the hallmarks of classical anti-Semitism.Behind the CoverIn this month’s cover story, “Democracy Is Losing the Propaganda War,” Anne Applebaum examines how autocrats in China, Russia, and other places have sought to discredit liberal democracy—and how they’ve found unlikely allies on the American far right. Our cover draws inspiration from constructivist propaganda artists such as Alexander Rodchenko and Gustav Klutsis. The angled imagery and ascending lines evoke the style of a Soviet propaganda poster, updated with liberalism’s new rivals.— Paul Spella, Senior Art DirectorThis article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

“Our focus with AI is to help create more healthy and equitable relationships.” Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and executive chair of the dating app Bumble, leans in toward her Bloomberg Live interviewer. “How can we actually teach you how to date?”When her interviewer, apparently bemused, asks for an example of what this means, Herd launches into a mind-bending disquisition on the future of AI-abetted dating: “Okay, so for example, you could in the near future be talking to your AI dating concierge, and you could share your insecurities. ‘I just came out of a breakup. I have commitment issues.’ And it could help you train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself. And then it could give you productive tips for communicating with other people. If you want to get really out there, there is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierges.” When her audience lets out a peal of uneasy laughter, the CEO continues undeterred, heart-shape earrings bouncing with each sweep of her hands. “No, no, truly. And then you don’t have to talk to 600 people. It will then scan all of San Francisco for you and say, These are the three people you really ought to meet.”What Herd provides here is much more than a darkly whimsical peek into a dystopian future of online dating. It’s a window into a future in which people require layer upon layer of algorithmic mediation between them in order to carry out the most basic of human interactions: those involving romance, sex, friendship, comfort, food. Implicit in Herd’s proclamation—that her app will “teach you how to date”—is the assumption that AI will soon understand proper human behavior in ways that human beings do not. Despite Herd’s insistence that such a service would empower us, what she’s actually describing is the replacement of human courtship rituals: Your digital proxy will go on innumerable dates for you, so you don’t have to practice anything so pesky as flirting and socializing.[Read: America is sick of swiping]Hypothetical AI dating concierges sound silly, and they are not exactly humanity’s greatest threat. But we might do well to think of the Bumble founder’s bubbly sales pitch as a canary in the coal mine, a harbinger of a world of algorithms that leave people struggling to be people without assistance. The new AI products coming to market are gate-crashing spheres of activity that were previously the sole province of human beings. Responding to these often disturbing developments requires a principled way of disentangling uses of AI that are legitimately beneficial and prosocial from those that threaten to atrophy our life skills and independence. And that requires us to have a clear idea of what makes human beings human in the first place.In 1977, Ivan Illich, an Austrian-born philosopher, vagabond priest, and ruthless critic of metastatic bureaucracies, declared that we had entered “the age of Disabling Professions.” Modernity was characterized, in Illich’s view, by the standardization and professionalization of everyday life. Activities that were once understood to be within the competencies of laypeople—say, raising children or bandaging the wounded—were suddenly brought under the purview of technical experts who claimed to possess “secret knowledge,” bestowed by training and elite education, that was beyond the ken of the untutored masses. The licensed physician displaced the local healer. Child psychologists and their “cutting edge” research superseded parents and their instincts. Data-grubbing nutritionists replaced the culinary wisdom of grandmothers.Illich’s singular insight was that the march of professional reason—the transformation of Western civilization into a technocratic enterprise ruled by what we now call “best practices”—promised to empower us but actually made us incompetent, dependent on certified experts to make decisions that were once the jurisdiction of the common man. “In any area where a human need can be imagined,” Illich wrote, “these new professions, dominant, authoritative, monopolistic, legalized—and, at the same time, debilitating and effectively disabling the individual—have become exclusive experts of the public good.” Modern professions inculcate the belief not only that their credentialed representatives can solve your problems for you, but also that you are incapable of solving said problems for yourself. In the case of some industries, like medicine, this is plainly a positive development. Other examples, like the ballooning wellness industry, are far more dubious.If the entrenchment of specialists in science, schooling, child-rearing, and so on is among the pivotal developments of the 20th century, the rise of online dating is among the most significant of the 21st. But one key difference between this more recent advancement and those of yesteryear is that websites such as Tinder and Hinge are defined not by disabling professionals with fancy degrees, but by disabling algorithms. The white-coated expert has been replaced by digital services that cut out the human middleman and replace him with an (allegedly) even smarter machine, one that promises to know you better than you know yourself.[Faith Hill: ‘Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had’]And it’s not just dating apps. Supposed innovations including machine-learning-enhanced meal-kit companies such as HelloFresh, Spotify recommendations, and ChatGPT suggest that we have entered the Age of Disabling Algorithms as tech companies simultaneously sell us on our existing anxieties and help nurture new ones. At the heart of it all is the kind of AI bait-and-switch peddled by the Bumble CEO. Algorithms are now tooled to help you develop basic life skills that decades ago might have been taken as a given: How to date. How to cook a meal. How to appreciate new music. How to write and reflect. Like an episode out of Black Mirror, the machines have arrived to teach us how to be human even as they strip us of our humanity. We have reason to be worried.As conversations over the dangers of artificial intelligence have heated up over the past 18 months—largely thanks to the meteoric rise of large language models like ChatGPT—the focus of both the media and Silicon Valley has been on Skynet scenarios. The primary fear is that chat models may experience an “intelligence explosion” as they are scaled up, meaning that LLMs might proceed rapidly from artificial intelligence to artificial general intelligence to artificial superintelligence (ASI) that is both smarter and more powerful than even the smartest human beings. This is often called the “fast takeoff” scenario, and the concern is that if ASI slips out of humanity’s control—and how could it not—it might choose to wipe out our species, or even enslave us.These AI “existential risk” debates—at least the ones being waged in public—have taken on a zero-sum quality: They are almost exclusively between those who believe that the aforementioned Terminator-style dangers are real, and others who believe that these are Hollywood-esque fantasies that distract the public from more sublunar AI-related problems, like algorithmic discrimination, autonomous weapons systems, or ChatGPT-facilitated cheating. But this is a false binary, one that excludes another possibility: Artificial intelligence could significantly diminish humanity, even if machines never ascend to superintelligence, by sapping the ability of human beings to do human things.The epochal impact of online dating is there for all to see in a simple line graph from a 2019 study. It shows the explosive growth of online dating since 1995, the year that Match.com, the world’s first online-dating site, was launched. That year, only 2 percent of heterosexual couples reported meeting online. By 2017, that figure had jumped to 39 percent as other ways of meeting—through friends or family, at work or in church—declined precipitously.Besides online dating, the only way of meeting that increased during this period was meeting at a bar or restaurant. However, the authors of the study noted that this ostensible increase was a mirage: The “apparent post-2010 rise in meeting through bars and restaurants for heterosexual couples is due entirely to couples who met online and subsequently had a first in-person meeting at a bar or restaurant or other establishment where people gather and socialize. If we exclude the couples who first met online from the bar/restaurant category, the bar/restaurant category was significantly declining after 1995 as a venue for heterosexual couples to meet.” In other words, online dating has become hegemonic. The wingman is out. Digital matchmaking is in.But even those selling online-dating services seem to know there’s something unsettling about the idea that algorithms, rather than human beings, are now spearheading human romance. A bizarre Tinder ad from last fall featured the rapper Coi Leray playing the role of Cupid, perched on an ominously pink stage, tasked with finding a date for a young woman. A coterie of associates, dressed in Hunger Games chic, grilled a series of potential suitors as Cupid swiped left until the perfect match was found. These characters put human faces on an inhuman process.Leif Weatherby, an expert on the history of AI development and the author of a forthcoming book on large language models, told me that ads like this are a neat distillation of Silicon Valley’s marketing playbook. “We’re seeing a general trend of selling AI as ‘empowering,’ a way to extend your ability to do something, whether that’s writing, making investments, or dating,” Weatherby explained. “But what really happens is that we become so reliant on algorithmic decisions that we lose oversight over our own thought processes and even social relationships. The rhetoric of AI empowerment is sheep’s clothing for Silicon Valley wolves who are deliberately nurturing the public’s dependence on their platforms.” Curtailing human independence, then, is not a bug, but a feature of the AI gold rush.Of course, there is an extent to which this nurtured dependence isn’t unique to AI, but is an inevitable by-product of innovation. The broad uptake of any new technology generally atrophies the human skills for the processes that said technology makes more efficient or replaces outright. The advent of the vacuum was no doubt accompanied by a corresponding decline in the average American’s deftness with a broom. The difference between technologies of convenience, like the vacuum or the washing machine, and platforms like Tinder or ChatGPT is that the latter are concerned with atrophying competencies, like romantic socializing or thinking and reflection, that are fundamental to what it is to be a human being.[Read: AI has lost its magic]The response to our algorithmically remade world can’t simply be that algorithms are bad, sensu stricto. Such a stance isn’t just untenable at a practical level—algorithms aren’t going anywhere—but it also undermines unimpeachably positive use cases, such as the employment of AI in cancer diagnosis. Instead, we need to adopt a more sophisticated approach to artificial intelligence, one that allows us to distinguish between uses of AI that legitimately empower human beings and those—like hypothetical AI dating concierges—that wrest core human activities from human control. But making these distinctions requires us to re-embrace an old idea that tends to leave those of us on the left rather squeamish: human nature.Both Western intellectuals and the progressive public tend to be hostile to the idea that there is a universal “human nature,” a phrase that now has right-wing echoes. Instead, those on the left prefer to emphasize the diversity, and equality, of varying human cultural traditions. But this discomfort with adopting a strong definition of human nature compromises our ability to draw red lines in a world where AI encroaches on human territory. If human nature doesn’t exist, and if there is no core set of fundamental human activities, desires, or traits, on what basis can we argue against the outsourcing of those once-human endeavors to machines? We can’t take a stand against the infiltration of algorithms into the human estate if we don’t have a well-developed sense of which activities make humans human, and which activities—like sweeping the floor or detecting pancreatic cancer—can be outsourced to nonhuman surrogates without diminishing our agency. One potential way out of this impasse is offered by the so-called capability approach to human flourishing developed by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum and others. In rejection of the kind of knee-jerk cultural relativism that often prevails in progressive political thought, Nussbaum’s work insists that advocating for the poor or marginalized, at home or abroad, requires us to agree on universal “basic human capabilities” that citizens should be able to develop. Nussbaum includes among these basic capabilities “being able to imagine, to think, and to reason” and “to engage in various forms of familial and social interaction.” A good society, according to the capability approach, is one in which human beings are not just theoretically free to engage in these basic human endeavors, but are actually capable of doing so.As AI is built into an ever-expanding roster of products and services, covering dating, essay writing, and music and recipe recommendations, we need to be able to make granular, rational decisions about which uses of artificial intelligence expand our basic human capabilities, and which cultivate incompetence and incapacity under the guise of empowerment. Disabling algorithms are disabling precisely because they leave us less capable of, and more anxious about, carrying out essential human behaviors.Of course, some will object to the idea that there is any such thing as fundamental human activities. They may even argue that describing behaviors like dating and making friends, critical thinking, or cooking as central to the human condition is ableist or otherwise bigoted. After all, some people are asexual or introverted. Others with mental disabilities might not be adept at reflection, or written or oral communication. Some folks simply do not want to cook, an activity which is historically gendered besides. But this objection relies on a sleight of hand. Identifying certain activities as fundamental to the human enterprise does not require you to believe that those who don’t or can’t engage in them are inhuman, just as embracing the idea that the human species is bipedal does not require you to believe that people born without legs lack full personhood. It only asks that you acknowledge that there are some endeavors that are vital aspects of the human condition, taken in the aggregate, and that a society where people broadly lack these capacities is not a good one.Without some minimal agreement as to what those basic human capabilities are—what activities belong to the jurisdiction of our species, not to be usurped by machines—it becomes difficult to pin down why some uses of artificial intelligence delight and excite, while others leave many of us feeling queasy.What makes many applications of artificial intelligence so disturbing is that they don’t expand our mind’s capacity to think, but outsource it. AI dating concierges would not enhance our ability to make romantic connections with other humans, but obviate it. In this case, technology diminishes us, and that diminishment may well become permanent if left unchecked. Over the long term, human beings in a world suffused with AI-enablers will likely prove less capable of engaging in fundamental human activities: analyzing ideas and communicating them, forging spontaneous connections with others, and the like. While this may not be the terrifying, robot-warring future imagined by the Terminator movies, it would represent another kind of existential catastrophe for humanity.Whether or not the Bumble founder’s dream of artificial-intelligence-induced dalliances ever comes to fruition is an open question, but it is also somewhat beside the point. What should give us real pause is the understanding of AI, now ubiquitous in Big Tech, that underlies her dystopian prognostications. Silicon Valley leaders have helped make a world in which people feel that everyday social interactions, whether dating or making simple phone calls, require expert advice and algorithmic assistance. AI threatens to turbocharge this process. Even if your personalized dating concierge is not here yet, the sales pitch for them has already arrived, and that sales pitch is almost as dangerous as the technology itself: AI will teach you how to be a human.

Joe Biden is, at the moment, losing his reelection campaign. And he is doing so while presiding over the strongest economy the United States has ever experienced.The jobless rate is below 4 percent, as it has been for nearly two and a half years. Wage growth is moderating, but it is higher than it was at any point during the Obama administration; overall, Biden has overseen stronger pay increases than any president since Richard Nixon. Inflation has cooled off considerably, meaning that consumers’ purchasing power is strong.Yet Biden’s approval rating is below 40 percent. His disapproval rating is 56 percent. Donald Trump is beating him handily in most key swing states. And there’s a chance that Trump might edge out Biden in the popular vote, particularly if he continues to expand his popularity with Black and Latino voters in blue and purple states.This reality has engendered panic among many Democratic campaign operatives, and no small degree of dismay too. What does it mean if Biden can’t win a campaign as an incumbent in an economy like this—during an election in which most Americans say the economy is the most important issue to them?Voters’ dissatisfaction with Biden and Biden’s economy seems to have two central components: Americans think less of the economy than the headline numbers suggest, and they are thinking less about the economy at all.Indeed, the sunny numbers about the economy—the low jobless rate, strong wage growth, soaring wealth accumulation, and falling inequality—fail to account for some cloudier elements. Americans remain stressed by, and ticked off about, high interest rates and high prices. Homes and cars, in particular, are unaffordable, given the cost of borrowing and insurance. And inflation has moderated, but groceries and other household staples remain far more expensive than they were during the Trump administration.The majority of Americans are better off because their incomes have grown faster than prices. But most people, understandably, think of their swelling bank account as a product of their own labor and price increases as a result of someone else’s greed. People want prices to come down. That’s not happening.Americans also tend to say that even though they are personally doing well, the overall economy is doing poorly. Political scientists think this has to do with the news they are consuming, which tends to focus on the negative or to caveat good trends: Wage growth poses challenge for the Federal Reserve! Holding economic conditions constant, financial reporting has gotten more negative over the past four decades. This negativity gap was big during the end of the Trump administration, and it’s even bigger during the Biden administration. Social media puts a gloomy filter on the news too. Folks click on and share dire stories more than they do upbeat ones.At the same time, American voters’ perception of the state of the economy has become heavily mediated by their partisan biases: Republicans tend to think the economy is a wreck if Democrats are in charge, and Democrats tend to think the economy is a disaster when Republicans are in the White House. That is dampening voters’ overall assessment of the economy right now. “The size of the partisan divide in expectations has completely dominated rational assessments of ongoing economic trends,” Joanne Hsu, the director of the University of Michigan’s surveys of consumers, has concluded.Yet even many Democrats are not convinced that this is a good economy. In one recent poll, just 22 percent of self-identified liberals said they were better off now than they were a year ago. That’s perhaps because they’re all reading and watching those glum news reports. And it is perhaps because Democrats are clustered in coastal states battered by the cost-of-living crisis.The direction of the economy seems to be a factor as well. At least some leading indicators are declining, pointing to a “fragile—even if not recessionary—outlook,” according to the Conference Board, a nonprofit think tank. Debt is rising; fewer building permits are being issued; in some states, unemployment is up. (California’s jobless rate has increased 0.8 percentage points in the past year.) “Economic indicators are not speaking with one voice,” John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, told me. “Given the salience of inflation relative to other factors, it’s easy for the public to feel bad. It’s easy for reporters to write stories about bad things.”Still, the stock market is booming. Millennials are catching up to Baby Boomers in wealth accumulation and homeownership rates. Low-wage workers are making huge income gains. In terms of growth, the United States is trouncing its high-income peers around the world. There’s a massive boom in new-business formation. Consumers, their grumbling about high prices aside, keep spending.Yet voters don’t seem to care. The public’s perception of Biden’s economy has proved remarkably stable—even as prices have moderated, even as stocks have taken off, even as the unemployment rate has remained at historically low levels. That fits with research showing that voters pay more attention to downturns than to upturns: They seem more apt to punish a party in power if there is a recession than they are to reward a party in power for overseeing a boom. The economy might be less salient for voters when it is good than when it is bad.The trend also fits with emerging political-science and polling literature showing that economic factors are weighing less heavily on voters’ assessment of the president. Gas prices used to be a good proxy for the public’s feelings about the performance of the White House. But there has been “hardly any association” for the past decade, Kyle Kondik at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics has found. Similarly, presidential approval used to be strongly correlated with the consumer-sentiment index, the political scientist Lee Drutman has shown, but that stopped being the case back in 2004.Why is the link between the economy and political sentiment fraying? Ironically, the dramatic improvement in material well-being over the past 50 years might be part of the answer: As countries get richer, voters have more latitude to vote their values, putting topics such as environmental protection, LGBTQ rights, and racial equality ahead of issues such as taxes, jobs, and wealth redistribution. This election cycle, voters might cite the economy as being the most important issue to them when talking to pollsters and journalists, but they may ultimately show up to vote (or change their vote) on the basis of another issue—abortion, say, or immigration.Plus, American voters have become more partisan in recent decades—more likely to be immovably aligned with one party or another, and to see their political affiliation as a major component of their personal identity. Polarization “attenuates” the effect that the economy has on elections: Reliable Republicans just aren’t going to vote for Biden, and reliable Democrats just aren’t going to vote for Trump.That leaves a sliver of persuadable voters. Drutman describes these folks as “disaffected from both parties, and mostly disengaged. They skew less wealthy, and younger, than the rest of the electorate. They defy easy ideological categorization. They vote sometimes, if they can be convinced the stakes are high enough to pay attention, or a new candidate breaks through and energizes them.” At the moment, neither candidate seems to be doing a great job of engaging those pivotal voters, many of whom don’t seem to like either of them.A strong economy did not save Trump from becoming a one-term president. It might not save Biden either.