This article was originally published in Knowable Magazine.Shrubbery, toolsheds, basements—these are places one might expect to find spiders. But what about the beach? Or in a stream? Some spiders make their homes near or, more rarely, in water: tucking into the base of kelp stalks, spinning watertight cocoons in ponds or lakes, hiding under pebbles at the seaside or along a creek bank.“Spiders are surprisingly adaptable, which is one of the reasons they can inhabit this environment,” says Ximena Nelson, a behavioral biologist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.Finding aquatic or semiaquatic spiders is difficult work, Nelson says: She and a student have spent four years chasing a jumping spider known as Marpissa marina around the pebbly seaside beaches it likes, but too often, as soon as they manage to find one, it disappears under rocks. And sadly, some aquatic spiders may disappear altogether before they come to scientists’ attention, as their watery habitats shrivel because of climate change and other human activities.What scientists do know is that dozens of described spider species spend at least some of their time in or near the water, and more are almost surely awaiting discovery, says Sarah Crews, an arachnologist at the California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco. It also appears that spiders evolved aquatic preferences on several distinct occasions throughout the history of this arthropod order. Crews and colleagues surveyed spiders and reported in 2019 that 21 taxonomic families are associated with aquatic habitats, suggesting that the evolutionary event occurred multiple independent times. Only a swashbuckling few—not even 0.3 percent of described spider species—are seashore spiders; many more have been found near fresh water, Nelson says.It’s not clear what would induce successful land-dwelling critters to move to watery habitats. Spiders, as a group, probably evolved about 400 million years ago from chunkier creatures that had recently left the water. These arthropods lacked the skinny waist sported by modern spiders. Presumably, the spiders that later returned to a life aquatic were strongly drawn by something to eat there, or driven by unsafe conditions on land, says Geerat Vermeij, a paleobiologist and distinguished professor at UC Davis—because water would have presented major survival challenges.“Since they depend on air so much, they are severely limited in whether they can do anything at all when they are submerged, other than just toughing it out,” Vermeij says. Newly aquatic spiders would have had to compete with predators better adapted to watery conditions, such as crustaceans, with competition particularly fierce in the oceans, Vermeij says. And if water floods a spider’s air-circulation system, it will die, so adaptations were obviously needed.But spiders as a group already possess several water-friendly features, Crews suggests. They have waxy, water-repellent exteriors, often covered in hairs that conveniently trap air bubbles. Even having eight legs is helpful, Nelson says: Spiders can distribute their weight nicely while they skitter across a water surface, or use their octet of appendages to row along.[Read: The spiders that choose death]Some spiders take their aquatic adaptations to the next level, though. Consider the diving-bell spider, Argyroneta aquatica, an overachieving arachnid that is the only one known to do it all underwater: breathe, hunt, dine on insects and their larvae, and make spiderlings. Found in fresh water in Europe and parts of Asia, it spins a silken underwater canopy and brings air bubbles from the surface to its submerged home via its body hairs. When it goes out, it carries a smaller air bubble, like a little scuba tank, on its back.Seashore spiders face particularly daunting conditions, says Nelson, who co-authored an article about adaptations of marine spiders for the 2024 Annual Review of Entomology. “There’s a splash zone,” she says. “It’s kind of a wild environment.” A spider might be baking in the hot sun one minute and drenched in chilly salt water the next. Some spiders migrate up and down their beaches with the tides; Nelson speculates that they monitor lunar cycles to anticipate when to move.Other seashore spiders spin watertight nests where they hide out for hours while the tide is in. M. marina, for example, seeks seashells with nice, concave spaces in which to spin safe tents. Another spider, Desis marina, hides in holdfasts where bull kelp attaches to rocks, lining the holdfast’s interior with silk to create an air-filled pocket and staying submerged for as long as 19 days. D. marina emerges only when the tide is going out, to hunt for invertebrates like shrimp.A spider that’s even occasionally submerged in salt water or that eats briny seafood will also have to maintain proper internal salt levels. “Presumably, they will be able to concentrate the salt somehow and then poo it out,” Nelson says. Scientists don’t know how marine spiders pull this off. And at least one intertidal-zone spider, Desis formidabilis of South Africa’s cape, comfortably maintains an interior salt concentration much like the crustaceans it eats, according to a 1984 study. (Freshwater species also probably require adaptations because their insides must stay saltier than their surroundings or food, Vermeij speculates.)When a spider hides out with a limited air supply for days or weeks at a time, oxygen levels also may become a crucial issue. Intriguingly, researchers have identified gene variants within the oxygen-guzzling, energy-making mitochondria of aquatic spiders that may help them cope with low-oxygen environments. These changes mirror beneficial changes to mitochondrial genes in birds that live in high-altitude, low-oxygen environments.In another study, researchers investigated the genes used in the silk glands of aquatic and land spiders. They found that water-spider silk seems to have a high proportion of water-repelling amino acids—which might also be an adaptation, they suggest.But all the adaptations in the world might not be enough to save some water spiders. Nelson’s M. marina, for example, seems to be very particular about the beaches it occupies. The pebbles must be just right, not too big or small. If sea-level rise inundates M. marina’s beaches, it’s possible the spiders will have nowhere else to go, Nelson says. “So those spiders will be lost.”Marco Isaia, an arachnologist at the University of Turin, in Italy, investigated the wetland habitats of the diving-bell spider and the fen raft spider, Dolomedes plantarius. As wetlands continue to disappear, the habitats available to each species will contract by more than 25 percent over a decade, and their ideal ranges will move northward, Isaia and colleagues predicted in a 2022 study. It would be difficult for the spiders to cross dry land for new wetlands, and Northern European winters might prove too cold anyway. “The loss and degradation of wetland habitats is expected to have serious impacts on their survival,” Isaia says, “and an increase in their extinction risk.”Given these risks, some aquatic spiders might go the way of the dodo before science gets a handle on them. “I suspect in every rocky bed of beach or river, there are probably spiders that we just don’t know exist there,” Nelson says. “Because they’re hiding.”

My voice was ready. I’d been waiting, compulsively checking my inbox. I opened the email and scrolled until I saw a button that said, plainly, “Use voice.” I considered saying something aloud to mark the occasion, but that felt wrong. The computer would now speak for me.I had thought it’d be fun, and uncanny, to clone my voice. I’d sought out the AI start-up ElevenLabs, paid $22 for a “creator” account, and uploaded some recordings of myself. A few hours later, I typed some words into a text box, hit “Enter,” and there I was: all the nasal lilts, hesitations, pauses, and mid-Atlantic-by-way-of-Ohio vowels that make my voice mine.It was me, only more pompous. My voice clone speaks with the cadence of a pundit, no matter the subject. I type I like to eat pickles, and the voice spits it out as if I’m on Meet the Press. That’s not my voice’s fault; it is trained on just a few hours of me speaking into a microphone for various podcast appearances. The model likes to insert ums and ahs: In the recordings I gave it, I’m thinking through answers in real time and choosing my words carefully. It’s uncanny, yes, but also quite convincing—a part of my essence that’s been stripped, decoded, and reassembled by a little algorithmic model so as to no longer need my pesky brain and body. Listen to the author's AI voice: Using ElevenLabs, you can clone your voice like I did, or type in some words and hear them spoken by “Freya,” “Giovanni,” “Domi,” or hundreds of other fake voices, each with a different accent or intonation. Or you can dub a clip into any one of 29 languages while preserving the speaker’s voice. In each case, the technology is unnervingly good. The voice bots don’t just sound far more human than voice assistants such as Siri; they also sound better than any other widely available AI audio software right now. What’s different about the best ElevenLabs voices, trained on far more audio than what I fed into the machine, isn’t so much the quality of the voice but the way the software uses context clues to modulate delivery. If you feed it a news report, it speaks in a serious, declarative tone. Paste in a few paragraphs of Hamlet, and an ElevenLabs voice reads it with a dramatic storybook flare. Listen to ElevenLabs read Hamlet: ElevenLabs launched an early version of its product a little over a year ago, but you might have listened to one of its voices without even knowing it. Nike used the software to create a clone of the NBA star Luka Dončić’s voice for a recent shoe campaign. New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s office cloned the politician’s voice so that it could deliver robocall messages in Spanish, Yiddish, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Haitian Creole. The technology has been used to re-create the voices of children killed in the Parkland school shooting, to lobby for gun reform. An ElevenLabs voice might be reading this article to you: The Atlantic uses the software to auto-generate audio versions of some stories, as does The Washington Post.It’s easy, when you play around with the ElevenLabs software, to envision a world in which you can listen to all the text on the internet in voices as rich as those in any audiobook. But it’s just as easy to imagine the potential carnage: scammers targeting parents by using their children’s voice to ask for money, a nefarious October surprise from a dirty political trickster. I tested the tool to see how convincingly it could replicate my voice saying outrageous things. Soon, I had high-quality audio of my voice clone urging people not to vote, blaming “the globalists” for COVID, and confessing to all kinds of journalistic malpractice. It was enough to make me check with my bank to make sure any potential voice-authentication features were disabled.I went to visit the ElevenLabs office and meet the people responsible for bringing this technology into the world. I wanted to better understand the AI revolution as it’s currently unfolding. But the more time I spent—with the company and the product—the less I found myself in the present. Perhaps more than any other AI company, ElevenLabs offers a window into the near future of this disruptive technology. The threat of deepfakes is real, but what ElevenLabs heralds may be far weirder. And nobody, not even its creators, seems ready for it.In mid-November, I buzzed into a brick building on a London side street and walked up to the second floor. The corporate headquarters of ElevenLabs—a $1 billion company—is a single room with a few tables. No ping-pong or beanbag chairs—just a sad mini fridge and the din of dutiful typing from seven employees packed shoulder to shoulder. Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs’ 29-year-old CEO, got up from his seat in the corner to greet me. He beckoned for me to follow him back down the stairs to a windowless conference room ElevenLabs shares with a company that, I presume, is not worth $1 billion.Staniszewski is tall, with a well-coiffed head of blond hair, and he speaks quickly in a Polish accent. Talking with him sometimes feels like trying to engage in conversation with an earnest chatbot trained on press releases. I started our conversation with a few broad questions: What is it like to work on AI during this moment of breathless hype, investor interest, and genuine technological progress? What’s it like to come in each day and try to manipulate such nascent technology? He said that it’s exciting.We moved on to what Staniszewski called his “investor story.” He and the company’s co-founder, Piotr Dabkowski, grew up together in Poland watching foreign movies that were all clumsily dubbed into a flat Polish voice. Man, woman, child—whoever was speaking, all of the dialogue was voiced in the same droning, affectless tone by male actors known as lektors.They both left Poland for university in the U.K. and then settled into tech jobs (Staniszewski at Palantir and Dabkowski at Google). Then, in 2021, Dabkowski was watching a film with his girlfriend and realized that Polish films were still dubbed in the same monotone lektor style. He and Staniszewski did some research and discovered that markets outside Poland were also relying on lektor-esque dubbing. Mati Staniszewski’s “investor story” as CEO of ElevenLabs begins in Poland, where he grew up watching foreign films clumsily dubbed into a flat voice. (Daniel Stier for The Atlantic) The next year, they founded ElevenLabs. AI voices were everywhere—think Alexa, or a car’s GPS—but actually good AI voices, they thought, would finally put an end to lektors. The tech giants have hundreds or thousands of employees working on AI, yet ElevenLabs, with a research team of just seven people, built a voice tool that’s arguably better than anything its competitors have released. The company poached researchers from top AI companies, yes, but it also hired a college dropout who’d won coding competitions, and another “who worked in call centers while exploring audio research as a side gig,” Staniszewski told me. “The audio space is still in its breakthrough stage,” Alex Holt, the company’s vice president of engineering, told me. “Having more people doesn’t necessarily help. You need those few people that are incredible.”ElevenLabs knew its model was special when it started spitting out audio that accurately represented the relationships between words, Staniszewski told me—pronunciation that changed based on the context (minute, the unit of time, instead of minute, the description of size) and emotion (an exclamatory phrase spoken with excitement or anger).Much of what the model produces is unexpected—sometimes delightfully so. Early on, ElevenLabs’ model began randomly inserting applause breaks after pauses in its speech: It had been training on audio clips from people giving presentations in front of live audiences. Quickly, the model began to improve, becoming capable of ums and ahs. “We started seeing some of those human elements being replicated,” Staniszewski said. The big leap was when the model began to laugh like a person. (My voice clone, I should note, struggles to laugh, offering a machine-gun burst of “haha”s that sound jarringly inhuman.)Compared with OpenAI and other major companies, which are trying to wrap their large language models around the entire world and ultimately build an artificial human intelligence, ElevenLabs has ambitions that are easier to grasp: a future in which ALS patients can still communicate in their voice after they lose their speech. Audiobooks that are ginned up in seconds by self-published authors, video games in which every character is capable of carrying on a dynamic conversation, movies and videos instantly dubbed into any language. A sort of Spotify of voices, where anyone can license clones of their voice for others to use—to the dismay of professional voice actors. The gig-ification of our vocal cords.What Staniszewski also described when talking about ElevenLabs is a company that wants to eliminate language barriers entirely. The dubbing tool, he argued, is its first step toward that goal. A user can upload a video, and the model will translate the speaker’s voice into a different language. When we spoke, Staniszewski twice referred to the Babel fish from the science-fiction book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—he described making a tool that immediately translates every sound around a person into a language they can understand.Every ElevenLabs employee I spoke with perked up at the mention of this moonshot idea. Although ElevenLabs’ current product might be exciting, the people building it view current dubbing and voice cloning as a prelude to something much bigger. I struggled to separate the scope of Staniszewski’s ambition from the modesty of our surroundings: a shared conference room one floor beneath the company’s sparse office space. ElevenLabs may not achieve its lofty goals, but I was still left unmoored by the reality that such a small collection of people could build something so genuinely powerful and release it into the world, where the rest of us have to make sense of it.ElevenLabs’ voice bots launched in beta in late January 2023. It took very little time for people to start abusing them. Trolls on 4chan used the tool to make deepfakes of celebrities saying awful things. They had Emma Watson reading Mein Kampf and the right-wing podcaster Ben Shapiro making racist comments about Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In the tool’s first days, there appeared to be virtually no guardrails. “Crazy weekend,” the company tweeted, promising to crack down on misuse.ElevenLabs added a verification process for cloning; when I uploaded recordings of my voice, I had to complete multiple voice CAPTCHAs, speaking phrases into my computer in a short window of time to confirm that the voice I was duplicating was my own. The company also decided to limit its voice cloning strictly to paid accounts and announced a tool that lets people upload audio to see if it is AI generated. But the safeguards from ElevenLabs were “half-assed,” Hany Farid, a deepfake expert at UC Berkeley, told me—an attempt to retroactively focus on safety only after the harm was done. And they left glaring holes. Over the past year, the deepfakes have not been rampant, but they also haven’t stopped.I first started reporting on deepfakes in 2017, after a researcher came to me with a warning of a terrifying future where AI-generated audio and video would bring about an “infocalypse” of impersonation, spam, nonconsensual sexual imagery, and political chaos, where we would all fall into what he called “reality apathy.” Voice cloning already existed, but it was crude: I used an AI voice tool to try to fool my mom, and it worked only because I had the halting, robotic voice pretend I was losing cell service. Since then, fears of an infocalypse have lagged behind the technology’s ability to distort reality. But ElevenLabs has closed the gap.The best deepfake I’ve seen was from the filmmaker Kenneth Lurt, who used ElevenLabs to clone Jill Biden’s voice for a fake advertisement where she’s made to look as if she’s criticizing her husband over his handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict. The footage, which deftly stitches video of the first lady giving a speech with an ElevenLabs voice-over, is incredibly convincing and has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. The ElevenLabs technology on its own isn’t perfect. “It’s the creative filmmaking that actually makes it feel believable,” Lurt said in an interview in October, noting that it took him a week to make the clip.“It will totally change how everyone interacts with the internet, and what is possible,” Nathan Lambert, a researcher at the Allen Institute for AI, told me in January. “It’s super easy to see how this will be used for nefarious purposes.” When I asked him if he was worried about the 2024 elections, he offered a warning: “People aren’t ready for how good this stuff is and what it could mean.” When I pressed him for hypothetical scenarios, he demurred, not wanting to give anyone ideas. Daniel Stier for The Atlantic A few days after Lambert and I spoke, his intuitions became reality. The Sunday before the New Hampshire presidential primary, a deepfaked, AI-generated robocall went out to registered Democrats in the state. “What a bunch of malarkey,” the robocall began. The voice was grainy, its cadence stilted, but it was still immediately recognizable as Joe Biden’s drawl. “Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again,” it said, telling voters to stay home. In terms of political sabotage, this particular deepfake was relatively low stakes, with limited potential to disrupt electoral outcomes (Biden still won in a landslide). But it was a trial run for an election season that could be flooded with reality-blurring synthetic information.Researchers and government officials scrambled to locate the origin of the call. Weeks later, a New Orleans–based magician confessed that he’d been paid by a Democratic operative to create the robocall. Using ElevenLabs, he claimed, it took him less than 20 minutes and cost $1.Afterward, ElevenLabs introduced a “no go”–voices policy, preventing users from uploading or cloning the voice of certain celebrities and politicians. But this safeguard, too, had holes. In March, a reporter for 404 Media managed to bypass the system and clone both Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s voices simply by adding a minute of silence to the beginning of the upload file. Last month, I tried to clone Biden’s voice, with varying results. ElevenLabs didn’t catch my first attempt, for which I uploaded low-quality sound files from YouTube videos of the president speaking. But the cloned voice sounded nothing like the president’s—more like a hoarse teenager’s. On my second attempt, ElevenLabs blocked the upload, suggesting that I was about to violate the company’s terms of service.For Farid, the UC Berkeley researcher, ElevenLabs’ inability to control how people might abuse its technology is proof that voice cloning causes more harm than good. “They were reckless in the way they deployed the technology,” Farid said, “and I think they could have done it much safer, but I think it would have been less effective for them.”The core problem of ElevenLabs—and the generative-AI revolution writ large—is that there is no way for this technology to exist and not be misused. Meta and OpenAI have built synthetic voice tools, too, but have so far declined to make them broadly available. Their rationale: They aren’t yet sure how to unleash their products responsibly. As a start-up, though, ElevenLabs doesn’t have the luxury of time. “The time that we have to get ahead of the big players is short,” Staniszewski said. “If we don’t do it in the next two to three years, it’s going to be very hard to compete.” Despite the new safeguards, ElevenLabs’ name is probably going to show up in the news again as the election season wears on. There are simply too many motivated people constantly searching for ways to use these tools in strange, unexpected, even dangerous ways.In the basement of a Sri Lankan restaurant on a soggy afternoon in London, I pressed Staniszewski about what I’d been obliquely referring to as “the bad stuff.” He didn’t avert his gaze as I rattled off the ways ElevenLabs’ technology could be and has been abused. When it was his time to speak, he did so thoughtfully, not dismissively; he appears to understand the risks of his products. “It’s going to be a cat-and-mouse game,” he said. “We need to be quick.”Later, over email, he cited the “no go”–voices initiative and told me that ElevenLabs is “testing new ways to counteract the creation of political content,” adding more human moderation and upgrading its detection software. The most important thing ElevenLabs is working on, Staniszewski said—what he called “the true solution”—is digitally watermarking synthetic voices at the point of creation so civilians can identify them. That will require cooperation across dozens of companies: ElevenLabs recently signed an accord with other AI companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, to combat deepfakes in the upcoming elections, but so far, the partnership is mostly theoretical.The uncomfortable reality is that there aren’t a lot of options to ensure bad actors don’t hijack these tools. “We need to brace the general public that the technology for this exists,” Staniszewski said. He’s right, yet my stomach sinks when I hear him say it. Mentioning media literacy, at a time when trolls on Telegram channels can flood social media with deepfakes, is a bit like showing up to an armed conflict in 2024 with only a musket.The conversation went on like this for a half hour, followed by another session a few weeks later over the phone. A hard question, a genuine answer, my own palpable feeling of dissatisfaction. I can’t look at ElevenLabs and see beyond the risk: How can you build toward this future? Staniszewski seems unable to see beyond the opportunities: How can’t you build toward this future? I left our conversations with a distinct sense that the people behind ElevenLabs don’t want to watch the world burn. The question is whether, in an industry where everyone is racing to build AI tools with similar potential for harm, intentions matter at all.To focus only on deepfakes elides how ElevenLabs and synthetic audio might reshape the internet in unpredictable ways. A few weeks before my visit, ElevenLabs held a hackathon, where programmers fused the company’s tech with hardware and other generative-AI tools. Staniszewski said that one team took an image-recognition AI model and connected it to both an Android device with a camera and ElevenLabs’ text-to-speech model. The result was a camera that could narrate what it was looking at. “If you’re a tourist, if you’re a blind person and want to see the world, you just find a camera,” Staniszewski said. “They deployed that in a weekend.”Repeatedly during my visit, ElevenLabs employees described these types of hybrid projects—enough that I began to see them as a helpful way to imagine the next few years of technology. Products that all hook into one another herald a future that’s a lot less recognizable. More machines talking to machines; an internet that writes itself; an exhausting, boundless comingling of human art and human speech with AI art and AI speech until, perhaps, the provenance ceases to matter.I came to London to try to wrap my mind around the AI revolution. By staring at one piece of it, I thought, I would get at least a sliver of certainty about what we’re barreling toward. Turns out, you can travel across the world, meet the people building the future, find them to be kind and introspective, ask them all of your questions, and still experience a profound sense of disorientation about this new technological frontier. Disorientation. That’s the main sense of this era—that something is looming just over the horizon, but you can’t see it. You can only feel the pit in your stomach. People build because they can. The rest of us are forced to adapt.

This weekend, more than 150,000 pastel-wrapped spectators and bettors will descend upon Louisville’s Churchill Downs complex to watch one of America’s greatest competitive spectacles. The 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, headlined by animals whose names (Resilience, Stronghold, Catching Freedom) sound more like Taylor Swift bonus tracks than living creatures, is expected to bring more revenue to the city and venue than ever, with resale tickets reportedly at record highs. If you count TV spectators, nearly 16 million people are expected to tune in to an event that awards major titles to athletes who may not know they’ve won and cannot be interviewed.The Derby and the two subsequent races that make up the U.S. Triple Crown are normally the year’s highlights for American enthusiasts, but this season will be even more packed with equestrian sports. The Paris Olympics this summer will feature international riders in dressage, show jumping, and the hybridized “eventing” discipline, and these competitions may generate more interest than usual because France is, as the Fédération Equestre Internationale puts it, “heaven for horse lovers.” Equestrian sports first made their Olympic debut in Paris more than 100 years ago.Equestrian activities such as racing, show jumping, dressage, and eventing are the only elite sports that feature pairs of athletes that are fundamentally unknowable to each other. No one can doubt that the horses are trained specialists. But it’s difficult not to wonder if they have any idea what’s going on.Deciphering the precise extent of any animal’s cognitive abilities is a tall order. The size and structure of other species’ brains can tell us plenty about how their bodies function, but not what degree of conscious thought or human-style intelligence they’re capable of. What we know about horse cognition in particular is limited, in part because “horses are big and expensive research animals,” says Sue McDonnell, an animal behaviorist and the founding head of the Equine Behavior Program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.Most of the questions researchers have asked about what it’s like to be a domestic horse are about how they understand humans, not how they understand their surroundings. Horses, for instance, have been found to recognize emotion on humans’ faces and recall them later on. Some recent work demonstrates that horses may be able to perceive basic goals of the humans working with them. They may even attach emotional memories to specific human voices. Cognition-wise, we know that horses possess enough intelligence for basic creative problem-solving and limited working memory. But attempts to understand their internal experiences have been mostly inconclusive, and the data that do exist come nowhere near confirming that horses are able to conceptualize competitive sports (let alone the state of Kentucky).[Read: Horses can read human facial expressions]The question of what horses are thinking and feeling during a race, if not a desire for bragging rights or a flowery cape, is hotly debated among the people who study, train, and compete with them. “I can only judge by their expression, but I can say for certain that for most of them, it’s terror,” McDonnell told me. The big, loud crowd; the tight space; and the close presence of unfamiliar animals they can smell but not see prime racehorses to react with adrenaline and fear when the starting bell sounds, she said. “You’d never see that speed in the wild horse unless they were threatened and stressed.” Their fear would be justified: Though the rate of fatal racehorse injury is at a near-15-year low, more than 300 died in 2023, and sport horses experience health issues such as gastric ulcers and pulmonary hemorrhage at rates of more than 70 percent.It’s quite likely that the horses we race, jump, and otherwise prance about with feel stress while competing: Multiple studies from the past several years have shown as much by testing cortisol levels and other physiological indicators of tension. And though stress isn’t always harmful, evidence suggests that the training racehorses in particular go through can alter, and perhaps damage, their immune health. And we have no way of quantitatively measuring their level of psychological distress, because emotions like anxiety and fear don’t always manifest uniformly.But horses have also learned to communicate how they’re doing in ways that don’t require laboratory analysis. Like us, they’re incredibly social animals, even with members of other species. (One growing trend in equestrian sports is to provide a lifelong travel companion for jet-setting horses in the form of a pony or goat, McDonnell said. “They’re just much more relaxed when they have their pony friend traveling with them.”) People who spend lots of time with horses can reasonably expect to be attuned to their emotional state. No assessment of a competition horse’s experience is complete without considering the horse-rider relationship, says Rachel Hogg, a psychology lecturer at Charles Sturt University, in Australia, whose Ph.D. work focused on that bond.[From the March 2019 issue: A journey into the animal mind]Many equestrian professionals do not believe that their animal colleagues are plagued by fear and anxiety. “Horses enjoy sports when it’s within their capabilities, when they’re treated with respect, and when training practices bring their personality and athleticism out,” says David O’Connor, the chief of sport for the United States Equestrian Federation, and a three-time Olympic medalist in eventing. But how we value a horse’s enjoyment depends on their level of intelligence. Horses might not be capable of realizing that some of their stablemates aren’t at the Olympics or careering around a racetrack. Would their happiness matter more to us if they were?Part of the reason O’Connor is so adamant that some horses enjoy sports is that he’s seen what happens when they don’t. In the nearly 30 years he spent riding for the United States, O’Connor told me, he regularly saw horses opt out of participating. “Sometimes you’ll get a horse in the starting gate, you’ll start the race, and one of them will just be like, I’m not doing it,” he said. “Or they go out there and take two or three steps and they’re done.” Recognizing a horse’s agency isn’t just good for morale—it can save a rider from potential embarrassment.Cultivating relationships with horses in which those signals are never missed is the foundation of O’Connor’s riding and teaching, he told me. But not everyone follows that ethos. Sometimes, genuine cruelty is involved: “There’s this tradition in the horse world that you have to dominate them,” McDonnell said. But more often, the barrier to a trusting relationship between horse and rider is logistical. Even at the highest levels of the sports, athletes can rarely afford their own horses, let alone the costs associated with getting them competition-ready.The Olympic disciplines, in particular, are not conducive to deep relationships between horse and rider. They’re dominated by a “speed dating” system where business-driven owners seek to optimize matches for specific competitions, rather than lifetimes, Hogg said. “Catch riding,” where a horse-rider pair will interact just one or two times before competing together, is more common than ever, she added; athletes can train with nearly two dozen horses in a single day. (At the U.S. collegiate level, catch riding is sometimes mandated to eliminate advantages.) As a result, Hogg told me, some riders see investing in emotional relationships with individual horses as a luxury they literally can’t afford with prizes on the line.[From the July 1925 issue: Inside the sordid world of horse racing]And yet the horses at international sporting events, which cannot open bank accounts, are probably more likely to enjoy themselves when paired with an athlete they know well, Hogg said. Research has found that horses prefer and can even be calmed by the presence of familiar humans, and evidence suggests that as a horse and rider get more familiar with each other, their patterns of brain activity begin to sync up during rides. “If a horse is motivated to be involved” in equestrian sports, Hogg said, “it’s because of their social connection with us.”Redesigning equestrian sports entirely around horses’ psychological welfare would be like redesigning the NFL to completely eliminate injuries: The product would be unrecognizable, and a lot of powerful people would stand to lose a lot of money. It’s also unlikely to be a top priority in a sport where horses are still regularly injured or killed. But maybe just once, instead of holding the Kentucky Derby, a crowd could gather to watch 20 horses simply hang out together at Churchill Downs on live television. They could even bet on which one becomes self-aware first.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Poetry is the art form that most expands my sense of what language can do. Today, so much daily English feels flat or distracted—politicians speak in clichés; friends are distracted in conversation by the tempting dinging of smartphones; TV dialogue and the sentences in books are frequently inelegant. This isn’t a disaster: Clichés endure because they convey ideas efficiently; not all small talk can be scintillating; a bad sentence here or there in a novel won’t necessarily condemn the whole work.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section: When your every decision feels torturous “Noon”: a poem by Li-Young Lee A prominent free-speech group is fighting for its life. The complicated ethics of rare-book collecting Poetry is different, however. We expect more from it. Not a single word should be misused, not a single syllable misplaced—and, as a result, studying language within the poetic form can be particularly rewarding. In March and April of this year, two of America’s great poetry critics, Helen Vendler and Marjorie Perloff, died. In reading Adam Kirsch’s tribute to both, I was struck by how different their respective approaches to language were. Vendler was a “traditionalist,” per Kirsch; she liked poets who “communicated intimate thoughts and emotions in beautiful, complex language.” She was a famous close reader, carefully picking over poems to draw out every sense of meaning. For Vendler, Kirsch writes, poetry made language “more meaningful.”Perloff wasn’t as interested in communicating meaning. Her favorite avant-garde poets used words in surprising and odd ways. As Kirsch writes, “At a time when television and advertising were making words smooth and empty, she argued that poets had a moral duty to resist by using language disruptively, forcing readers to sit up and pay attention.”I’d reckon that neither Perloff nor Vendler relished lines that were smooth and empty, even though their preferred artists and attitudes toward reading might have differed. Ben Lerner has said that poetry represents a desire to “do something with words that we can’t actually do.” In that sense, poems are a declaration of hope in language: Even if we can’t pull off something magnificent, we can at least try.Through poetry, we can perhaps come closest to capturing the events that feel so extreme as to exist beyond our capacity to describe them. In the February 8 issue of The New York Review of Books, Ann Lauterbach published a poem called “War Zone,” dedicated to Paul Auster, another literary great who died recently. The poem depicts not scenes of violence and gore but the hollow wordlessness many of us feel in the face of war or suffering—then it uses images of silence, blankness, and absence to fight against that unspeakability. The last line, which I won’t spoil here, points to this paradox: Words may not be able to capture everything—especially the worst things—but they can, and must, try. Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Alan Thomas; Lilian Kemp / Radcliffe College Archive / Harvard University. When Poetry Could Define a LifeBy Adam KirschThe close passing of the poetry critics Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler is a moment to recognize the end of an era.Read the full article.What to ReadThe Taste of Country Cooking, by Edna LewisLewis’s exemplary Southern cookbook is interspersed with essays on growing up in a farming community in Virginia; many of the recipes in the book unspool from these memories. Lewis, who worked as a chef in New York City as well as in North and South Carolina, writes with great sensual and emotional detail about growing up close to the land. Of springtime, she writes, “The quiet beauty in rebirth there was so enchanting it caused us to stand still in silence and absorb all we heard and saw. The palest liverwort, the elegant pink lady’s-slipper displayed against the velvety green path of moss leading endlessly through the woods.” Her book was ahead of its time in so many ways: It is a farm-to-table manifesto, a food memoir published decades before Ruth Reichl popularized the form, and an early, refined version of the cookbook-with-essays we’re now seeing from contemporary authors such as Eric Kim and Reem Assil. The recipes—ham biscuits, new cabbage with scallions, potted stuffed squab—are as alluring as the prose. — Marian BullFrom our list: eight cookbooks worth reading cover to coverOut Next Week

When Kathleen Walker-Meikle, a historian at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, ponders the Middle Ages, her mind tends to drift not to religious conquest or Viking raids, but to squirrels. Tawny-backed, white-bellied, tufted-eared red squirrels, to be exact. For hundreds of years, society’s elites stitched red-squirrel pelts into luxurious floor-length capes and made the animals pets, cradling them in their lap and commissioning gold collars festooned with pearls. Human lives were so intertwined with those of red squirrels that one of history’s most cursed diseases likely passed repeatedly between our species and theirs, according to new research that Walker-Meikle contributed to.Uncomfortable questions about medieval squirrels first came up about a decade ago, after another group of researchers stumbled upon three populations of red squirrels—one in Scotland, two on different English islands—with odd-looking features: swollen lips, warty noses, skin on their ears that had grown thick and crusty. A search for microbial DNA in some of those squirrels’ tissues revealed that they had leprosy. “What’s it doing in red squirrels?” John Spencer, a microbiologist at Colorado State University, recalled thinking at the time. Scientists had long thought that leprosy affected only humans, until the 1970s, when they began to find the bacterium that causes it in armadillos too, Daniel Romero-Alvarez, an infectious-disease ecologist and epidemiologist at Universidad Internacional SEK, in Ecuador, told me. But that was in the Americas; in Europe, dogma held that leprosy had essentially vanished by about the 16th century. The most plausible explanation for the pathogen’s presence in modern squirrels, Spencer told me, was that strains of it had been percolating in the rodents unnoticed for hundreds of years.Bacterial genomes extracted from several of the infected British squirrels suggested that this was the case: Those sequences bore a strong resemblance to others previously pulled out of medieval human remains. The next step was proving that medieval squirrels carried the bacterium too, Verena Schünemann, a paleogeneticist at the University of Zurich, in Switzerland, and one of the new study’s authors, told me. If those microbes were also genetically similar to ones found in medieval people, they’d show that leprosy had probably regularly jumped between rodents and humans.[Read: Tuberculosis got to South America through … seals?]Schünemann teamed up with Sarah Inskip, an archaeologist at the University of Leicester, in the U.K., and set out to find an archaeological site in Britain with both human and squirrel remains. They zeroed in on the medieval city of Winchester, once famous for its fur-obsessed market patrons, as well as a large leprosarium. After analyzing dozens of samples from around Winchester, the team was able to extract just four leprosy genomes—three from humans, one from the tiny foot bone of a squirrel. But those turned out to be enough. All four samples dated to about the High Middle Ages—the oldest detection so far of leprosy in a nonhuman animal, Inskip told me. The genomes also all budded from the same branch of the leprosy family tree, sharing enough genetic similarities that they strongly indicated that medieval humans and squirrels were swapping the disease-causing bugs, Schünemann told me.Still, Schünemann wasn’t sure exactly how that would have happened, given that transmitting a leprosy infection generally requires prolonged and close contact. So, hoping to fill in the blanks, she reached out to Walker-Meikle, who has extensively studied medieval pets.Walker-Meikle already had the exact type of evidence that Schünemann and her colleagues were looking for: medieval artwork depicting people cradling the animals, documents describing women taking them out for walks, financial accounts detailing purchases of flashy, rodent-size accessories and enclosures of the sort people today might buy for pet dogs, Walker-Meikle told me. Squirrels were so popular at the time that she found written references to the woes of a 13th-century archbishop who, despite years of pleading, couldn’t get the nuns in his district to stop doting on the creatures. They were essentially akin, she said, to tiny lapdogs. Fur processing, too, would have provided ample opportunity for spread. In the High and Late Middle Ages, squirrel fur was the most popular fur used to trim and line garments, and clothes made with it were considered as high fashion as a Prada bag now, Schünemann told me. In a single year in the 14th century, the English royal household purchased nearly 80,000 squirrel-belly skins. Contact between squirrels and humans was so intimate that, throughout much of the Middle Ages, leprosy likely ping-ponged back and forth between the two species, Inskip told me.[Read: Admit it, squirrels are just tree rats]But the team’s work doesn’t say anything about the origins of leprosy, which entered humans at least thousands of years ago. It also can’t prove whether leprosy infiltrated humans or red squirrels first. It does further dispel the notion that leprosy is a problem only for humans, Romero-Alvarez told me. Armadillos may have picked up leprosy from humans relatively recently, after Europeans imported the pathogen to South America. The scaly mammals are now “giving it back to humans,” Spencer told me, especially, it seems, in parts of South America and the southern United States, where some communities hunt and eat the animals or keep them as pets.Human-to-human transmission still accounts for the majority of leprosy spread, which remains uncommon overall. But Romero-Alvarez pointed out that the mere existence of the bacterium in another species, from which we and other creatures can catch it, makes the disease that much more difficult to control. “Everybody believes that leprosy is gone,” Claudio Guedes Salgado, an immunologist at Pará Federal University, in Brazil, told me. “But we have more leprosy than the world believes.” The barriers between species are porous. And once a pathogen crosses over, that jump is impossible to fully undo.

For writers living under an authoritarian regime, the price of intellectual independence is clear—censorship, prison, exile—but so is its value. They are compelled to understand inner freedom as the essential condition for doing their work. Their determination to say what the state doesn’t want to hear gives them a sense of connection with one another, a community of writers, even if it happens underground. But authoritarianism is not just a form of government where leaders jut out their chins, jackbooted police march around with batons, and jails fill up with dissidents. It’s also a habit of mind, marked by impatience with complexity, intolerance of dissent, readiness to coerce agreement. The authoritarian spirit can infect democracies that have long traditions of freedom, but it uses weapons other than state power. The main one is public opinion.Perversely, the same community that gives writers in repressive regimes the courage to say what the state doesn’t want to hear can, in a free society, become a tool of conformity and social coercion. In some ways, the threat of ostracism from your group is harder to resist than the threat of legal punishment from the state, because it undermines your sense of identity and belonging, your self-worth. Torture and prison are not the only ways to compel people to act against their own values and say what they don’t believe. The pressure to conform and the fear of being cast out have caused an entire political party to prostrate itself before Donald Trump. The authoritarian spirit seems capable of taking root in almost anyone, anywhere—at a MAGA rally, in a college classroom, even among a group of writers.The organization PEN was founded more than a century ago to provide an international community of support for embattled writers. Today PEN’s American chapter is in crisis, because a group of writers has chosen to turn their community against the organization.Last week a boycott forced PEN America to cancel its annual World Voices literary festival. The boycott’s leaders included authors of best-selling books and winners of prestigious fellowships and prizes—Naomi Klein, Lorrie Moore, Hari Kunzru, Michelle Alexander, and others. According to someone with intimate knowledge of the boycott, its pressure campaign, carried out strategically through online attacks and direct personal messages, was “merciless.” Invited panelists found themselves threatened with isolation by their colleagues or their communities. Some joined the boycott out of conviction. But others fell in line out of fear of harassment or concern for their careers, or they withdrew from the festival when they saw who else was withdrawing, or they worried about the “optics” of sitting on a depleted panel that lacked the requisite diversity. As the dominoes fell, there were more and more reasons not to be seen standing. After PEN America—on whose board I serve—announced the festival’s cancellation last week, a number of writers privately expressed their unhappiness, but almost nothing was said publicly.We like to think of writers as courageous individuals who believe in free expression without fetters. In practice, they turn out to be no more able to resist the authoritarian spirit than most other people—maybe less. In the Soviet Union, many writers denounced their imprisoned friends without being told to. Here, they check their social-media traffic first.The boycott succeeded in silencing 80 writers and artists who were scheduled to speak at the festival and did not join the boycott. They included a few from countries where the cost of free expression is more tangible than social scorn, such as the Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil, the Indian novelist Geetanjali Shree, the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa, and five young Afghan women from ArtLords, an international organization of street artists devoted to human rights. After the women fled Afghanistan and became refugees, the Taliban painted over or erased all 2,200 of their murals. Now they’ve been silenced twice—the second time in a democratic country and by their fellow artists.It isn’t a pretty sight when writers bully other writers into shutting down a celebration of world literature—especially when big names with the most expansive free-speech rights in the world take away a platform from lesser-known writers hoping to reach an audience outside their own repressive countries. Leyla Shukurova, an Azerbaijani German writer who just finished her first story collection and was planning to attend the festival, wrote after the event was canceled to thank PEN for “upholding the values that this festival, as well as PEN America as an organization, represents,” but she added: “The suppression of political discourse that we are witnessing right now in the US is very alarming and unsettling.”The cancellation of one literary festival by writers—a kind of man-bites-dog story—may seem small, but it is part of a much bigger thing. The cause of the boycott was Gaza. In many ways, it’s a compelling cause. PEN America, like so many other organizations, had fallen into the habit of releasing statements about issues tangential or unrelated to its essential purpose. After October 7, PEN was internally divided over the war between Israel and Hamas, and slow to report on the deaths of scores of Palestinian writers, artists, and journalists. This response was unfavorably compared with PEN America’s vigorous stand for Ukraine after the Russian invasion. When I joined the board at the end of last year, I found an organization under siege from inside and outside. A number of writers and staff members wanted a much stronger response from PEN—not just on behalf of Palestinian writers, but against Israel. They wanted the organization to call for an immediate and permanent cease-fire; they wanted it to denounce Israel’s “genocide.”These demands were political and geopolitical in a way that diverged from PEN’s charter and mission. They also threatened to tear the institution apart. When PEN balked, the writers found another way to impose their demands. Their boycott, like most protests, soon exceeded its original purpose of stating a position of individual conscience and turned into an organized campaign to shut down the festival, as well as PEN’s literary-awards ceremony. Criticizing PEN and Israel didn’t require silencing writers. Geetanjali Shree, the Indian novelist, wrote me afterward: “I hold strong views against Israel but I believe PEN stands for free dialogue and debate and in unequivocal defence of human rights.” But the writers’ disagreement with PEN had become a quest for power over PEN, even at the price of others’ right to free speech and the organization’s future. The boycott was an expression of the authoritarian spirit.This turn was perhaps inevitable, because authoritarianism is the spirit of the times, around the world and in this country, where it animates both the right and the left. The two sides have vastly different values and goals, and they use different language—the left’s is academic and specialized (decolonization, imperialism, marginalization) while the right’s is crude and abusive (libtard, groomer, hoax). But in both cases, the words aren’t meant to invite a reply or open a dialogue; they shut discussion down. The two sides reflect and require each other, driving each other to greater extremes, while between them the center of Never Trump conservatives and traditional liberals, with their creaky institutions and halting appeals to reason, collapses.This is how the authoritarian spirit plays out in a democracy. A party leader compels other politicians to defile their conscience and succumb to his dictates. A political rally turns into a violent effort to overturn an election. A student protest starts with calls for peace and ends in eliminationist chants, vandalism, closed campuses, and an invasion by police or state troopers. A group of writers bring an organization dedicated to their freedom to its knees.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.one afternoon in the mid-1980s, while on scholarship at the University of Oxford, Walter Kirn came upon a bulletin announcing that Jorge Luis Borges was visiting the campus and wished to meet students informally. Kirn, the future writer and critic, then in his early 20s and a recent Princeton graduate, glanced at his watch and realized that the event started in 10 minutes.He hurried down to one of those little rooms where Oxford students drank sherry with their dons. Borges, bent over an old-fashioned cane, leaning on a nurse’s arm, with wraparound sunglasses to shield his blind eyes, walked in. To Kirn, Borges had until then existed wholly outside space and time, less a human being than a synonym for capital-L Literature, like Kafka or Cervantes. Now the famous writer offered the cowed students an icebreaker. “I have a game I like to play,” he said. “I like to edit, or revise, Shakespeare.” On long flights or when he was bored, he would take Shakespeare’s speeches and try to improve them. He gave an example of a line he’d adjusted from King Lear. “Isn’t it plainly much better?” Borges asked.Whether it was better was not what interested Kirn. Borges was revising “some of the greatest pieces of oratory in the English language,” Kirn recently told me. He was still, 40 years later, amazed. The lesson he drew was that no authority was beyond question. Kirn went on to write for a long list of newspapers and magazines (including this one). He married and divorced the daughter of a famous actress. He wrote the novel Up in the Air, which was turned into a movie starring George Clooney (who, Kirn says, tried to swoop in on his own girlfriend—the writer Amanda Fortini—when she visited the set; Fortini is now his wife). In his hilarious 2009 memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy (which began as an Atlantic cover story), he described how he came to be a member of “the class that runs things,” the one that “writes the headlines, and the stories under them.” It was the account of a middle-class kid from Minnesota trying desperately to fit into the elite world—and then realizing that he didn’t want to fit in at all. Now 61, Kirn has a newsletter on Substack, co-hosts a lively podcast devoted in large part to critiquing establishment liberalism, writes the kind of provocative tweets that not everyone understands are jokes (in part because some aren’t), and appears on Fox’s late-night comedy show. Depending on one’s perspective, he is either a spokesperson for a forgotten America, a truth teller in a grim and timid time, or a recklessly contrarian apologist for Donald Trump and the more conspiratorially minded of his supporters.[From the January/February 2005 issue: Lost in the meritocracy]In March, I spent two days with him in Livingston, Montana, where he moved from New York City more than 30 years ago. Bronze-skinned even in winter, Kirn has thick white hair and a prankster’s smile. When he speaks, he’ll glance around the room and drop his voice before reestablishing eye contact, so you feel as though he’s letting you in on a secret. Then he tells you a story: the one about how he flipped his car into a creek while not wearing a seat belt; or how he ended up euthanizing his mother, who was comatose and dying of a brain infection; or when he drove his truck over his baby, who had crawled into the driveway and emerged from between the wheels miraculously unscathed.Even many of his sharpest political arguments take the shape of a yarn. Kirn’s father died in May 2020, but Kirn still maintains his house in Livingston; on a visit there he showed me, hanging in the garage, an American flag with a superimposed black-and-white photograph of a rifle-toting Geronimo. Kirn calls Geronimo an American hero for asserting his own inherent dignity and refusing to make peace with the United States. Geronimo was eventually imprisoned at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, until he died and was buried there. Then, in 1918, Kirn says, “fucking Prescott Bush comes in and fucking steals his skull. You know where his skull is? Skull and Bones. It’s their fucking little totem for their Yale secret society! They took his fucking skull, and it sits there.” The story might be apocryphal (there’s no hard evidence that Geronimo’s grave was looted, though some historians consider it plausible). But it captures something essential about Kirn, who can seem, like Trump himself, less concerned with the strict facticity of the claims he makes than with the sins of the people he’s attacking.Kirn would never describe himself as a Trump supporter, but he cares less about Trump’s rampage through American democracy, or even the lunacy and violence of January 6, than he does about the selfish and self-satisfied elites—all noblesse, no oblige—who sparked that anger and sustained it. Call him a counter-elite. As he said about Skull and Bones: “That’s our elite. Who wouldn’t want to be counter to it?”Kirn described the dominant politics of his Minnesota youth as “rural progressivism.” He spoke reverently of his grandfather, also named Walter Kirn, a local politician in Akron, Ohio, who, in the 1950s, ruined his career by defending the right of the Black thespian and suspected communist Paul Robeson to come to town. Family legend has it that he opened up a high-school auditorium for Robeson’s performance “purely on the basis of his right to express himself. It wasn’t out of empathy for his views.” Kirn sees that “as the right kind of politics.”Today he regards Trump’s supporters not as the proverbial basket of deplorables but as more or less reasonable citizens with valid concerns. The movement around Trump, Kirn told me, is “an expression of American frustration on the part of people who feel like they got a really raw deal.” He described himself as “anti-anti-Trump, in the sense that I don’t think that this is the unique challenge in American history for which we should throw away all sorts of liberties and prerogatives that we are going to want back.” One reason he doesn’t see the coming election as a state of emergency is he does not believe that previous American leaders, such as the Bushes, were particularly virtuous, even in comparison with Trump—a figure Kirn and his colleagues at that bastion of 1990s East Coast snobbism, Spy magazine, used to relentlessly mock. Here, Kirn’s personal evolution is telling: He is perhaps the most salient example of a mainstream writer rejecting his past to throw in with the populists.Kirn is right that, as the internet and social media have allowed us to peer inside our national institutions, there is no denying their stewards have suffered profoundly from the exposure. And yet, I kept asking myself a question and phrasing it to Kirn in different ways: Why can’t we do two things simultaneously? Why can’t we revise our estimation of a decadent and often deceitful ruling class and refuse to downplay the sui generis outrage that is Donald Trump? It is not an acquittal of George W. Bush’s grandfather to insist that a second Trump term would be a mistake.Whenever I tried this tack with Kirn, he didn’t dispute it. It just wasn’t an argument that excited him. Bryan Schutmaat for The Atlantic Kirn first came to Livingston to report on the Church Universal and Triumphant, an eschatological cult of about 2,000 members that built bomb shelters in preparation for Armageddon. “People were charging up their credit cards because they thought the bills would never come due,” he later wrote in a story about the movement for Slate. “They were buying ammunition by the crate load.” Kirn had flown out west to witness the end of the world and liked it so much that he stayed.Kirn’s own ex-father-in-law, the writer Thomas McGuane, coined the term flyover country. Kirn was drawn to the freedom and openness of the land, and on the drive from the airport, the jagged Rockies brushed orange by the sunset, I could easily see why. Livingston had once been a thriving railroad town, as well as the gateway to Yellowstone, America’s first national park. But by the time Kirn showed up, the Northern Pacific Railroad had shuttered its Italianate depot, and he could purchase an entire building with the money he made writing book reviews. The area was majestic; Tom Brokaw owned (and still owns) a sprawling ranch nearby. There weren’t even speed limits on the highways. And so, as he once put it, he became “a resident of Montana’s center (both geographically and politically).”Not everyone would describe Kirn as a centrist now, certainly not since the election of 2016.Reporting for Harper’s on the Republican convention, Kirn was immediately attuned to Trump’s appeal. He also saw an opportunity to showcase his own growing estrangement from mainstream liberal journalism: The media loungers with their gift for telepathic quasi plagiarism have reached their verdict, and many of them pronounce it in the same words. Dark. Dystopian. Negative. A turnoff. My pal in California, the conspiratorial libertarian who’ll probably write in Frank Zappa on his ballot, would likely say, “I guess they got the memo.” But I didn’t see the memo. I’ve never seen the memo, maybe because I don’t work for the large outfits. I’m not a joiner. Today, Kirn believes that the coverage of Trump’s presidency—followed by the public-health messaging and regulations during the pandemic—poses a much more significant threat than Trump to American democracy. He’s just “not that astonishing an American character,” Kirn told me. “America tries all kinds of types. It tries the pseudo-aristocrat”—John F. Kennedy. It tries “the smoothie”—Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. It tries “the adultish son, like George Bush.” Trump is “the rough salesman” archetype.The pandemic accelerated Kirn’s contrarian drift, or at least made him more vocal about his distrust of elite institutions. On X, he can evince a conspiracy-sympathetic persona, directing fury at an abstract, sometimes straw-manned establishment. “For years now, the answer, in every situation—‘Russiagate,’ COVID, Ukraine—has been more censorship, more silencing, more division, more scapegoating. It’s almost as if these are goals in themselves & the cascade of emergencies excuses for them. Hate is always the way,” he wrote in 2022. “The authorities and the incurious corporate press are belatedly acknowledging the truth about COVID so they can repair their reputations sufficiently to lie to us about new things,” he posted in 2023. Early in the pandemic, Kirn’s father was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease in Arizona, and Kirn defied multiple quarantine requirements to bring him in an RV to Montana so that he could tend to him. For Kirn, the heavy-handed restrictions were not just ill-advised. They were a pernicious assault on freedom that felt deeply personal.But Kirn insists that he’s stayed the same—that his ideological trajectory is actually defined by relative stasis. When I asked the journalist Matt Taibbi, Kirn’s friend and podcast partner on America This Week, how he would describe Kirn’s politics, he told me Kirn was an “old-school liberal,” reiterating that it was the other so-called liberals who had changed. “I’ve been told repeatedly in the last year that free speech is a right-wing issue,” Taibbi (another man of the left whom some view as having drifted rightward) said. “I wouldn’t call him conservative. I would just say he’s a free thinker, nonconformist, iconoclastic.”“I’m not quite a libertarian,” Kirn told me, as we whipped his John Deere Gator across the knee-deep Montana snow. The occasional melted patch splattered us with mud. “I believe we should organize to do all sorts of things for the common good.” He said he resented being coded conservative: “I was like, Dude, you guys are jumping off the ship. I’m staying on the ship. This is the same ship I’ve been on.”The first time I saw Walter Kirn in person, he seemed overcome by anger and hostility. Last fall, we both participated in a conference celebrating the pioneering theorist René Girard at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Kirn’s panel, “Free Speech, Censorship, and the New Media,” was the liveliest of the day and went sideways almost immediately. Kirn launched, seemingly out of nowhere, into a tirade, at one point heaping scorn on a fellow panelist, Renée DiResta, an expert on propaganda at the Stanford Internet Observatory. (DiResta is also a frequent contributor to The Atlantic.) He suggested that her group was connected to defense and intelligence agencies, calling it “the only observatory I know that has offensive capabilities to shoot down stars and planets.”He repeatedly compared the media to the Empire in The Empire Strikes Back. He asserted that news organizations like The New York Times and CBS News were serving “the corporate and state interests that don’t believe you are wanting the right things—you might want Donald Trump—or that you aren’t wanting the things you should want enough—the COVID vaccine.” The media dismissed, he said, stories about “countries having problems with the COVID vaccine” as “malinformation.” (He did not provide examples.) This revealed that the government’s attempts to manage the pandemic were a “behavioral-engineering enterprise, no longer having much to do with the truth, no longer having much to do with your right to desire what you wish or not desire what you don’t wish.”Everyone, he suggested, was in on the game. “This group of legacy media institutions, along with a whole array of academic—what is called ‘civil-society organizations’—and frankly, Homeland Security, clerks of the government, got together and … ganged up to preserve this preferential cartel status for those groups and start shooting down the rebel ships.”Kirn appeared genuinely livid; the panelists—and the audience—seemed baffled.One of Girard’s famous theories is called the “scapegoat mechanism.” Communities keep violence from rupturing them apart, he argued, by projecting their internal tensions onto an arbitrarily chosen individual. A startled-looking DiResta was referencing this when she broke in at one point to say she thought Kirn was “scapegoating, actually.” He said he couldn’t possibly scapegoat someone so powerful: “Little Walter Kirn to scapegoat Stanford University, Congress, and the State Department … places that take money from the Defense Department and Homeland Security?”“I don’t take money from either,” DiResta objected.That evening, Kirn and I were seated together at dinner, just a table away from one of the most controversial elites in America, the billionaire libertarian Peter Thiel. Kirn seemed not just unbothered by this but in terrific spirits—a mood I found hard to reconcile with the ferocity of his encounter with DiResta.[Read: Peter Thiel is taking a break from democracy]DiResta later told me that Kirn had privately apologized after the panel for, in her words, “turning me into a caricature.” Kirn told me that he doesn’t remember apologizing, but that the two of them spoke at length and “what drove the conversation for me was the desire to be cordial after a heated debate” and “to better understand her position.” I asked DiResta if there was any truth to the charge that she was working for the Defense Department or other agencies. She responded that she’d interned at the CIA as an undergraduate, but “the claim that my internship 20 years ago and my current work are in any way connected is bullshit.” She told me that the Stanford Internet Observatory had received a government grant in the past—from the National Science Foundation—but that “neither our 2020-election work” nor studies her organization published on vaccine rumors “were government-funded.”When I probed Kirn about these kinds of conspiratorial claims in our conversations over the past few months, he didn’t try to smooth them over. “I didn’t feel I was attacking her personally,” he said. “She didn’t come as an individual; she came as a résumé representing a field.” Then he reiterated his original position. “Bottom line is, I stand by what I said … But if some fact-check proves I got something wrong, then I did.”This last point seems emblematic of much larger difficulties in our national discourse as it becomes ever more fractured and cynical. There is really nothing DiResta can say to satisfactorily dispel the conspiracy, because it is impossible to prove a negative. And besides, if she were a government plant, she certainly wouldn’t tell me that. And so we are forever stuck in the purgatory of innuendo.“I believe in ferment,” Kirn told me in Livingston. “I believe that we should have a society in which the bubbles rise up and explode with little new thoughts.” The point seemed to be that an exaggerated criticism, even one that is performative or liable to miss its mark entirely, would always be preferable to deferential silence. Freedom alone is of the utmost importance: “Not just freedom in the sense of like, ‘I’m going to shoot my gun.’ But freedom in not having to repeat stale bromides, not having to please power with their production.”The fact of this defiant posture, Kirn suggests, is the real and lasting message. Such a line of thinking can be persuasive. “Sometimes paranoia just stands to reason,” Kirn argued in The New York Times after the very real enigma of the death of Jeffrey Epstein. Or, as he put it more bluntly on Twitter, “My only problem with ‘conspiracy theories’ is that they don’t go far enough.” Yet once you begin to punch at everything, you’re bound to strike the wrong target sometimes.I had not quite known what to make of Kirn after that panel in Washington. What became clear to me in Montana is that his resentment against the tastemakers and gatekeepers is so unrelenting because it’s fueled not simply by dislike but also by real affection—a sympathy for Americans in unimportant places, people without power or influence, whose opinions and lifestyles he believes are often dismissed as retrograde or irrelevant.On this point, I felt myself indicted. Though certainly not born into it, I have come to be ensconced within a privileged coastal “knowledge” class that, in my opinion, too often sees the rest of the country as either inscrutable or irredeemable. And so I found Kirn, the charismatic class traitor, a far more effective ventriloquist for working-class frustrations than the former, and possibly future, president.Earlier in his career, Kirn was sent to places like Livingston to write what he sees now as voyeuristic stories about the locals, the purpose of which was “to execute on all the prejudices that were behind the assignment.” GQ once flew him to Colorado to file a portrait of young men who reenact Vietnam War battles. He learned that all the men had poignant stories. “I wrote an incredibly sympathetic piece. It was not what [the editors] expected. It was not what they wanted. I was finally like, ‘I’m not going to be a fucking hit man for Madison Avenue,’ for Condé Nast, that goes out and finds quirky Americans and makes fun of them so we can have Absolut Vodka on the next page—yeah, Absolut—and, like, a report from Milan Fashion Week … I was just like, ‘This sucks.’”GQ never ran the story, but Kirn resolved to keep writing about people he believed institutions like Condé Nast ignored. In 2018, he spent two and a half months driving across the country for a book that he said should come out next year called The Last Road Trip. He said he found a variety of Americans from many races who just feel screwed: “I’m fucked. My neighborhood’s fucked; my town’s fucked. My region is fucked.”He described passing through “coal country”: “It’s so polluted down there, and they’re hanging on, and these are the people that everybody else hates. Everybody can agree, no matter where they’re from, that rednecks are the worst fucking people in America.”“We’re talking a big game about justice and advancement and the future and multicultural tolerance and so on,” he expanded. “Meanwhile, vast cities are just turning into fucking toxic Superfund sites, socially and chemically … and we’re just saying those people couldn’t adjust or those places aren’t important.“All we’re doing,” he continued, “is closing up rooms in the house that we can no longer heat.”Last year, Kirn began publishing a print-only broadsheet, along with the writer David Samuels, called County Highway, which bills itself playfully as “America’s Only Newspaper.” Its purpose is to treat the rest of the country with the interest that is directed at New York City and San Francisco. It’s a quixotic publication—with six issues a year and, Samuels told me, a print run of 22,500 copies. “Most of those copies sell,” he said. “The remainder goes to us, to contributors, and to our friends, who use them to make paper boats and funny hats.” They’ve run articles on euthanasia laws in Canada, professional wrestling in Puerto Rico, and “the best little Basque restaurant in Elko, Nevada.” The fact that County Highway is most likely to be found in record shops and cute general stores, and on the type of newsstands that stock The Paris Review and foreign editions of Vogue, might make you wonder how populist it can really be. (Samuels—a New Yorker with degrees from Harvard and Princeton—wrote for many years for The New York Times Magazine, among other places.)I asked Kirn: Is founding what is essentially a literary magazine really an effective way to strike a blow against American elitism?He told me that “American prose literature—the literature of Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac—has to be the least ‘elitist’ major cultural product in world history.” He sees County Highway as “firmly in that tradition, neither concerned with the high or the low, but only with the abiding American voice.” I don’t know that the effort can produce a contemporary Cather or Twain—let alone if non-elites would even care for such a thing. But the ethics of the gesture, its desire to expand the journalistic zone of interest, is serious, a defining characteristic of Kirn’s life project. What he’s against, he told me, is “blindness.”On a fundamental level, Kirn is right. This America that he wishes to dwell upon—and force us to acknowledge—is not what most of us who are invested with access or influence care to deal with. We may say the right things, but our notions of diversity, inclusivity, and justice are extremely narrowly defined. And as the polls keep showing in the run-up to November’s election, Kirn is correct to point out that a growing multiethnic assortment of citizens find themselves more repelled by the status quo than they are by Trump’s return.Kirn is under no delusions that, even as he positions himself as a contrarian, he remains wholly within the group he is critiquing. There is something compelling about a man who has gone to all the right schools and worked for all the right places and made a smashing success of himself who then turns and spits on all of it, insisting that it was never worth a damn to begin with.But even as I found myself swept up by his oratory about elite indifference, I knew he was at times overstating the case—fixating on just a part of the larger story. (It’s the same temptation the most stringent voices on the left give in to when they dismiss the history of Enlightenment values in American democracy to focus solely on white supremacy.) Of course, The New York Times has published reams of investigative reporting on the opioid crisis and suburban and rural squalor. Of course, elites have made attempts—even if sometimes cringe-inducing—to understand the politics of the working class and its consequential sense of betrayal. And, of course, it should be entirely possible to listen to the voices of struggling Americans, wherever we might find them, and still want more for them—and for us—than Donald Trump and his nihilistic rebellion.I left Montana certain that we need provocative contrarians like Walter Kirn, who are stubborn and capable enough to see through and question the powerful. We also need to remember the wisdom of Borges: No one is infallible. And so the counter-elites, too, must be questioned.

Seconds into talking about their new movie, Jane Schoenbrun cannot help but bring up Freddy Got Fingered. Back in 2001, the comedian Tom Green’s sole directorial effort—a work of avant-garde grossness meant to capitalize on his unlikely fame as an MTV talk-show host—was so universally despised that it essentially killed his career. “As a child of irony-poisoned internet culture, it’s a personal favorite,” Schoenbrun, who uses they/them pronouns, told me. They joked that Green’s mindset while making the film must have been “My stock is really good right now, so I’m going to spend it all.”Right now Schoenbrun’s stock is also really good. I Saw the TV Glow, their second feature, is being released by A24—a big step up from their micro-budgeted debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. “It’s like I’m aware of what the sellout options are, and then I’m also aware of what the Tom Green–suicide-mission options are—and I feel like I’m constantly trying to do both at the same time,” they said.I predict there will be no Golden Raspberry trophies (Green won five for Freddy Got Fingered) in Schoenbrun’s future. I Saw the TV Glow is a major work—a frightening and complex exploration of childhood nostalgia, adult regret, and the ways our identity is shaped by pop culture. But it retains all of the creepy specificity that made Schoenbrun’s debut so electrifying, with uncommon human tenderness bumping right up against mutated, half-formed monstrousness. Scale has not smoothed out Schoenbrun’s idiosyncratic wrinkles—and whatever the future holds for them, “selling out” does not seem to be part of it. “Mattel asked me for a meeting at Sundance, and I was like, ‘I value my life and dignity,’” Schoenbrun said with a laugh, remarking on the toy giant’s post-Barbie expansion into cinema, which includes planned movies based on toys such as Polly Pocket and Hot Wheels. (“I don’t think they’d make my Candy Land,” they added, referring to the popular board game, which is actually owned by Hasbro. “My Candy Land has a lot of milky, creamy fluids.”)In an era when every buzzy indie director could be a meeting or two away from making a superhero movie, this disdain for modern Hollywood blockbusters is refreshing. Though Schoenbrun’s style can be challenging, their films feel alive and contemporary; We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, for instance, taps into the disquieting world of online “creepypasta” communities and manages to viscerally capture the experience of late-night YouTube browsing. It’s no wonder a company such as Mattel might be intrigued; for all the distancing strangeness of Schoenbrun’s films, they’re current in the exact way that would perk up an executive’s ears.I Saw the TV Glow is perhaps a little more accessible and straightforward—a tale about Owen (played by Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), disaffected teens who bond over their obsession with a ’90s genre TV show called The Pink Opaque. Slowly, their reality begins to blur as villains and metaphysical concepts from the program seep into the real world. The dreamy narrative was directly influenced by Schoenbrun’s own experiences. World’s Fair, which is about a character seeking to transform her body through a strange online game, was written before Schoenbrun came out as trans. I Saw the TV Glow was written during their early months on hormones, and is powered by those specific, unsettled feelings. Spencer Pazer / Courtesy of A24 “By the time I made [I Saw the TV Glow] … I was in love for the first time in my real body,” Schoenbrun said. “That’s the thing about transition … and I mean this quite literally: I wrote [the movie] as a child, I made it as a teenager, and I’m releasing it as not-quite-a-grown-up.” Schoenbrun is in their late 30s, but transition often means going through a second coming-of-age, and they joked that their current mental age is around 24: “I’m trying to figure out how to be an adult.”In the film, Owen has a tenuous grasp of his own identity—a sense that’s further stirred up by The Pink Opaque. But I Saw the TV Glow is not the kind of perfunctory narrative of self-actualization that Schoenbrun might get pitched in a studio meeting. “Owen’s arc in the movie is one of deterioration, [to] a point where maybe he can start to become a thing that he briefly noticed in childhood but then lost for half of his life,” Schoenbrun said. Owen’s narrative isn’t digestible or triumphant, and his investment in The Pink Opaque is more disturbing than empowering. Though Schoenbrun knows they’re considered part of what they called “the LGBTQ umbrella,” they still don’t want to forget that trans people often face an unwelcoming reality in America. “I’m very cautious of assimilation,” they said, acknowledging the tensions that artists must navigate in the industry.[Read: Weirdly, Taylor Swift is extremely close to creating a true metaverse]Schoenbrun is working outside the kinds of traditional structures that define so much of Hollywood storytelling; at the same time, it’s hard to avoid the external influences that come knocking with any bigger production. So how does someone like Schoenbrun make something particularly radical on the scale demanded by mainstream moviemaking? “The narrative of the sellout looms,” Schoenbrun said. “Having to be in some way a shill for a system is expected of any level of artist.”That balancing act feeds into the story within the film, where a show airing on network TV (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and many other cult shows from the ’90s) is parsed for secret, perhaps unintended messages by its most devoted fans. I Saw the TV Glow adds further layers of wink-wink self-awareness. It features a Buffy actor (Amber Benson) in a small role, as well as the Limp Bizkit singer Fred Durst—an early-aughts musical star and an avatar of that era’s gendered toxicity—as Owen’s disdainful father, Frank. “I’m always thinking about the era of popular culture that … I was first exposed to—that post-Tarantino Scream era,” Schoenbrun said. “Even Buffy is incredibly self-referential; it’s genre that’s aware of itself as genre.”“I don’t want to say that TV Glow is watered down or speaking in a commercial vernacular that I’m uncomfortable with,” Schoenbrun continued. “But I definitely was like, I’m making this teen-angst thing; I’m looking at the Donnie Darkos of the world for reference.” At the turn of the millennium, Donnie Darko managed to be an instant cult hit, arriving as a small studio release in an era of Hollywood bombast. Still, for a moment, as they calibrated the tone of their movie, they wondered if they were pushing too far into the territory of a show such as Stranger Things, which is almost excessively reverential of the 1980s. To Schoenbrun, I Saw the TV Glow embodies a sort of “identity crisis”; it uses the narrative language of more commercial film and TV shows while striving to avoid formulaic conclusions.Though I Saw the TV Glow was inspired by Schoenbrun’s life, they believe it’ll speak to viewers in unpredictable ways. And for all their suspicion of Hollywood’s more corporate side, Schoenbrun can’t help but fantasize about new ways to mess with audiences’ expectations. “I said no to the Mattel meeting, but then I was like, ‘Wait, actually, if you give me Barbie 2, I'll consider it,’” they said. They brought up the end of Greta Gerwig’s film, where the title character, having transformed from doll to human, makes her first appointment at the gynecologist’s: “That is a deeply trans place to be; let’s talk about what that looks like. Mattel, I’m open to it.”

Earlier this week, news leaked of the biggest change in federal drug policy in more than half a century. The Associated Press reported—and the Department of Justice later confirmed—that the Drug Enforcement Administration plans to recategorize marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act. Since the 1970s, it’s been placed in Schedule I, a highly controlled group that includes drugs like heroin, with a high potential for abuse and no medical use. But cannabis will soon be moved to the much less restrictive Schedule III, which includes prescription drugs such as ketamine and Tylenol with codeine that have a moderate-to-low risk of addiction.Currently, recreational cannabis is legal for adults over the age of 21 in 24 states, which are home to more than half of the U.S. population. According to a recent Harris poll, about 40 percent of Americans use cannabis, and a quarter do so on at least a weekly basis. And yet, researchers and physicians told me, scientific consensus on the drug’s precise effects—especially on the heart and lungs, mental health, and developing adolescent brains—is still lacking. Rescheduling marijuana will broaden access further still, which makes finding better answers to those questions even more crucial.Conveniently, rescheduling marijuana is also likely to spur in-depth study, in part by expanding research opportunities that were previously limited or nonexistent. Easing restrictions will ultimately mean learning a lot more about the potential harms and benefits of a drug that for decades has been both popular and demonized.Historically, the scope of cannabis research has been fairly limited. The National Institute on Drug Abuse, a major federal research funder, has a directive to study the harms of cannabis use rather than any potential benefits, says Amanda Reiman, the chief knowledge officer of New Frontier Data. (New Frontier is an analytics firm focused on the legal cannabis industry.) In 2018, research on the potential harms of cannabis use received more than double the funding that research on its medicinal or therapeutic use did in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. In 2020, a spokesperson for NIDA told Science that although the agency’s traditional focus was on marijuana addiction, it has started exploring the therapeutic potential of compounds in cannabis to treat addiction to other substances.U.S. policy has also made marijuana research of any sort very difficult. Until recently, scientists had to obtain their supply from NIDA’s high-security Mississippi facility. (Six more sources were approved last year.) Researchers regularly complained that the marijuana was moldy, and far from the quality that regular consumers could purchase legally at their local dispensary, with less THC and CBD.[Read: The government’s weed is terrible]Most existing research on how cannabis affects our hearts, our brains, and our society at large is based on self-reported survey data, Peter Grinspoon, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and a medical-cannabis expert, told me. Such data are “notoriously inaccurate,” he said. But researchers have been forced to rely on these methods because cannabis is a Schedule I drug, so no studies that receive federal funding can simply give marijuana from state-approved dispensaries to people and record what happens.As a result, the field lacks the number of high-quality studies necessary for researchers to agree on their implications, says Nick Cioe, an associate professor at Assumption University in Massachusetts who has studied the effects of marijuana on traumatic brain injuries. Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of determining a given drug’s harms and benefits, but for weed, they’ve been nearly impossible. The FDA has approved a handful of cannabis-derived products to treat conditions such as seizures and chemotherapy-induced nausea, but that’s not the same as understanding the effects of recreational weed.After marijuana is officially rescheduled, researchers will have a far easier time studying the drug’s effects. Researching any federally controlled substance is difficult, but obtaining the proper licenses for using Schedule III drugs in the lab is much less arduous than for Schedule I. Scientists will also have far more opportunities to obtain federal grant funding from all sorts of governmental bodies—the National Institutes of Health, the EPA, even the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration—as policy makers rush to understand the implications of legalization.Human trials won’t start the second that the DEA makes marijuana’s new status official. Researchers will have to wait for guidance from federal agencies like the FDA and the NIH, says R. Lorraine Collins, the director of the University at Buffalo’s Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research. And given the limitations around Schedule III drugs, scientists still won’t be able to simply purchase the same cannabis that millions of Americans are consuming from their local dispensary.[Read: Almost no one is happy with legal weed]Schedule III won’t “magically alleviate the bureaucratic headaches” associated with researching cannabis, Grinspoon said. But “it’s going to be a lot easier to say, ‘Let’s give this person cannabis and see what happens to their blood pressure.’”

Courtesy of Donald Trump, America continues its journey into the political twilight zone.At an April 25 Supreme Court hearing, Trump’s lawyer D. John Sauer was asked by Justice Sonya Sotomayor, “If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?” To which Sauer responded, “It would depend on the hypothetical. We can see that could well be an official act.”Sotomayor emphasized that this hypothetical act would be done for personal reasons, not in furtherance of an official responsibility, nor to protect the country from a terrorist. “Immunity says even if you did it for personal gain, we won’t hold you responsible,” she said. And that is precisely what Trump’s legal team is arguing for: immunity even for acts of personal gain, including assassinating a political opponent. (For good measure, Sauer argued that a president would have immunity if he ordered the military to stage a coup or sold military secrets to a foreign adversary.)That is no surprise. In January, Sauer argued at an appeals-court hearing that a president could order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival and not face prosecution unless he were impeached and convicted first. (Trump lost the appeal unanimously.)[David Hume Kennerly: The danger of a small act of cowardice]“If someone with those kinds of powers, the most powerful person in the world, with the greatest amount of authority, could go into office knowing that there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes, I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is for turning the Oval Office into the seat of criminal activity in this country,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said during the April 25 hearing.This raises the question: Would Trump ever actually try such a thing? And if he did, would the Republican Party stand with him?The answer to the first question is of course unknowable today, probably even to Trump, whose mental state seems more and more capricious and deranged. He is no Vladimir Putin, capable of coldly organizing hit jobs.All the same, in his 2:24 p.m. tweet on January 6, 2021, Trump spurred on an already violent mob that sought to hang Vice President Mike Pence. (Immediately after his tweet, the crowds both inside and outside the Capitol violently surged forward.)The former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified under oath that she recalls former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone saying to then–Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, “Mark, we need to do something more. They’re literally calling for the vice president to be effing hung.” And Meadows responded with something to the effect of, “You heard him, Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”According to the January 6 committee’s report, several other White House aides also believed Trump’s tweet was an effort to inflame the mob. “It was essentially giving the green light to these people,” according to then–Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews.Additionally, in a recent CNN interview, former Attorney General Bill Barr—who’d previously said that Trump has gone “off the rails,” is“manic and unreasonable,” and has demonstrated “erratic personal behavior”—admitted that Trump would “lose his temper” and talk about people who should be executed. “I doubt he would have actually carried it out,” Barr said with a nervous laugh. “But he would say that on other occasions?” the anchor Kaitlan Collins asked. “The president, I think people sometimes took him too literally,” Barr responded.Perhaps Barr had the January 6 mob in mind.So why would we assume that Trump—a man of sociopathic tendencies, who appears unable to even think in moral terms, who inflamed a violent mob to try to hang his vice president—would automatically recoil from having a political opponent assassinated if the opportunity presented itself?In other words, although it may not be likely that Trump would order a political assassination—particularly if the Supreme Court rules that, as president, Trump would not have immunity—it is still possible. And that, in turn, raises another possibility, and maybe even a probability: Much of the Republican Party, including white evangelicals and fundamentalists, would line up in support of Trump even if he did order the assassination of a political opponent. If you don’t think so, you’re simply not familiar enough with the MAGA mind. You’re not listening closely enough to what Trump is saying to his supporters, and what they’re saying to one another.It’s easy to anticipate just how their argument would unfold: first, deny that any amount of evidence could be amassed to prove that Trump tried to assassinate anyone; second, dismiss the allegations because they are being made by “haters” who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome; third, point the finger at the “Biden crime family,” whose corruptions far exceed what we see from Trump and his kin; and fourth, insist that even if the former president did order the assassination of a political opponent, it’s essential that Trump retain the presidency, because his absence would lead to dystopia. Unfortunately, for the sake of America, some people must perish. Or so Trump supporters would say.[Isaac Arnsdorf: Trump has transformed the GOP all the way down]Context is important here. MAGA world has stood with Trump—in fact, its support for him has deepened—through everything he has done, including encouraging the January 6 mob to kill his vice president and being found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming a woman. And those are just a fraction of his legal and moral transgressions. Yet Republicans have never been close to taking the exit ramp away from the former president. The closer we get to November’s election, the more emphatically they will defend him. The identity of MAGA world has fused with Trump’s; to turn on him would be to turn on themselves. They won’t admit to themselves, and they certainly won’t admit to others, the sheer expanse of Trump’s degeneracy. To do so would be self-indicting; it would cause enormous cognitive dissonance. They made a Faustian bargain, and they’re not about to break it. They will follow him anywhere he goes.Where Trump might go in a second term is of course a matter of speculation. But if his actions track at all with his last months in office, with his rhetoric since his defeat, and with the actions his lawyers are saying their client might be legally immune for committing, we are heading to an exceedingly dark and dangerous place. We can’t say we haven’t been warned.

Milk is defined by its percentages: nonfat, 2 percent, whole. Now there is a different kind of milk percentage to keep in mind. Last week, the FDA reported that 20 percent of the milk it had sampled from retailers across the country contained fragments of bird flu, raising concerns that the virus, which is spreading among animals, might be on its way to sickening humans too. The agency reassured the public that milk is still safe to drink because the pasteurization process inactivates the bird-flu virus. Still, the mere association with bird flu has left some people uneasy and led others to avoid milk altogether.That is, if they weren’t already avoiding it. Milk can’t seem to catch a break: For more than 70 years, consumption of the white liquid has steadily declined. It is no longer a staple of balanced breakfasts and bedtime routines, and milk alternatives offer the same creaminess in a latte or an iced coffee as the original stuff does. Milk was once seen as so integral to health that Americans viewed it as “almost sacred,” but much of that mythos is gone, Melanie Dupuis, an environmental-studies professor at Pace University and the author of Nature’s Perfect Food, a history of milk, told me. In 2022, the previous time the Department of Agriculture measured average milk consumption, it had reached an all-time low of 15 gallons a person.If concerns around bird flu persist, milk’s relevance may continue to slide. Even the slightest bit of consumer apprehension could cause already-struggling dairy farms to shut down. “An additional contributing factor really doesn’t bode well,” Leonard Polzin, a dairy expert at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Division of Extension, told me. For the rest of us, there is now yet another reason to avoid milk—and even less left to the belief that milk is special.The risks of bird flu in milk can be simplified to this: Thank God for pasteurization. Straight from the udder, in its raw form, milk is “a substance that’s very much open to contamination if not managed well,” Dupuis said. Milk is like a petri dish of microorganisms, and before pasteurization became the norm, milk regularly caused deadly diseases such as tuberculosis, scarlet fever, and typhoid fever. The pasteurization process, which involves blasting milk with high temperatures and then rapidly cooling it, is “intended to kill just about anything a cow could have,” Meghan Schaeffer, an epidemiologist and a bird-flu expert who now works at the analytics firm SAS, told me.That includes the bird flu. Yesterday, the FDA reported new results from ongoing studies reaffirming that the bird-flu fragments it found in milk and other dairy products aren’t active, meaning they can’t spread disease. The agency confirmed this using a gold-standard test that involved injecting samples into chicken eggs to see if any active virus would grow. None was detected afterward. “That process really saves us,” Schaeffer said.There is never a good time to drink unpasteurized milk, but now is an especially bad one. A number of states have legalized the sale of raw milk in recent years, part of a right-wing embrace of the beverage. Raw milk from sick cows contains bird-flu virus in high concentrations, and the FDA has warned against drinking it. There are no reports of people getting bird flu from drinking unpasteurized milk, but “it is possible” to become infected from it, Schaeffer said. Already, this has been shown in animals: This week, researchers reported that cats who drank raw milk from sick cows got bird flu and died within days.But much about bird flu and milk is unknown, because the virus has never been found in cattle before now. That one in five milk samples tested by the FDA had remnants of bird flu doesn’t mean one in five cows tested positive; milk sold in stores is pooled from many different animals. Rather, it suggests that many cows may be infected beyond those currently accounted for. It may also mean that asymptomatic cows, which are not being tested, shed virus in their milk. (Milk from symptomatic cows, which can be yellow and viscous, is routinely discarded.) Although it isn’t clear how the virus is circulating among cows, a leading explanation is that it’s transmitted via contact with surfaces that have touched raw milk, including milking equipment, vehicles, and other animals.Bird flu is widespread among poultry, but it isn’t clear how long it will keep circulating among cattle. The USDA is doing only limited testing of cows and has not shared all of its data publicly, making the full extent of the outbreak impossible to know. Even if milk is still safe to drink, the thought of bird-flu fragments swimming around in it is unappetizing for a country that has already turned away from milk.Just how much milk Americans used to drink can be hard to grasp. Consumption peaked in 1945 at 45 gallons a person annually, enough to overfill a standard-size bathtub. Americans believed that “more milk makes us healthier” and drank accordingly, DuPuis said. Government marketing pushed milk as a necessary, perfect food that could solve virtually all nutrition problems, especially in children; milk-derived healthiness eventually became associated with strength, affluence, and patriotism. Holes in the health narrative have since appeared: Consuming too much milk and other dairy products is now considered unhealthy because of the fat content. And long-standing myths about milk, such as that its calcium is required for strengthening bones and growing taller, have largely been debunked.Today, drinking milk can get you “milk-shamed” by people who think it’s disgusting. It’s particularly unpopular with younger people, who are grossed out by the milk served in schools. Where dairy once reigned supreme, milk alternatives made of oats, almonds, soy, peas, and countless other things have found a foothold. The FDA even lets plant-based milk call itself “milk,” as I wrote last year.Less demand for milk would have consequences. “I suspect the dairy industry is on the edge of their seat,” DuPuis said. Outbreaks are expected to take a financial toll on farmers, who will not only sell less milk but also have to care for sick animals, and the costs may be passed on to consumers. In rural areas that once thrived on milk production, such as upstate New York, abandoned small farms are now overgrown with trees, DuPuis observed. “Are we going to end up with fewer farms and more trees because of this latest problem? I can imagine so,” she said.The myth of milk has been eroded from many fronts: nutrition research, shifting societal norms, an abundance of new beverages. With bird flu, it has never seemed less like the magic health elixir it was once thought to be. But the turn against milk might have gone too far. Pasteurization was invented in the 19th century, yet it works to kill modern-day pathogens. Dairy has a great track record when it comes to safety, Polzin said. And it is still a decently healthy choice, with some significant advantages over plant-based alternatives, such as having more vitamins and minerals, less sugar, and more protein. Even during the bird-flu outbreak, milk may still have some magic to it.

What it’s like to groove on Earth’s only LED moon.

The notion that Donald Trump’s supporters believe that he should be able to overthrow the government and get away with it sounds like hyperbole, an absurd and uncharitable caricature of conservative thought. Except that is exactly what Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court yesterday, taking the position that former presidents have “absolute immunity” for so-called official acts they take in office.“How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup?” Justice Elena Kagan asked Sauer. “I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act,” Sauer said after a brief exchange. “If it were an official act … he would have to be impeached and convicted.”“That sure sounds bad, doesn’t it?” Kagan replied later.The Democratic appointees on the bench sought to illustrate the inherent absurdity of this argument with other scenarios as well—Kagan got Sauer to admit that the president could share nuclear secrets, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented a scenario in which a president orders the military to assassinate a political rival. Sauer said that might qualify as an official act too. It was the only way to maintain the logic of his argument, which is that Trump is above the law.[David A. Graham: The cases against Trump: A guide]“Trying to overthrow the Constitution and subvert the peaceful transfer of power is not an official act, even if you conspire with other government employees to do it and you make phone calls from the Oval Office,” Michael Waldman, a legal expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal public-policy organization, told me. Trump’s legal argument is a path to dictatorship. That is not an exaggeration: His legal theory is that presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for official acts. Under this theory, a sitting president could violate the law with impunity, whether that is serving unlimited terms or assassinating any potential political opponents, unless the Senate impeaches and convicts the president. Yet a legislature would be strongly disinclined to impeach, much less convict, a president who could murder all of them with total immunity because he did so as an official act. The same scenario applies to the Supreme Court, which would probably not rule against a chief executive who could assassinate them and get away with it.The conservative justices have, over the years, seen harbingers of tyranny in union organizing, environmental regulations, civil-rights laws, and universal-health-care plans. When confronted with a legal theory that establishes actual tyranny, they were simply intrigued. As long as Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republicans, every institution they control will contort itself in his image in an effort to protect him.The Supreme Court, however, does not need to accept Trump’s absurdly broad claim of immunity for him to prevail in his broader legal battle. Such a ruling might damage the image of the Court, which has already been battered by a parade of hard-right ideological rulings. But if Trump can prevail in November, delay is as good as immunity. The former president’s best chance at defeating the federal criminal charges against him is to win the election and then order the Justice Department to dump the cases. The Court could superficially rule against Trump’s immunity claim, but stall things enough to give him that more fundamental victory.If they wanted, the justices could rule expeditiously as well as narrowly, focusing on the central claim in the case and rejecting the argument that former presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president, without getting into which acts might qualify as official or not. Sauer also acknowledged under questioning by Justice Amy Coney Barrett that some of the allegations against Trump do not involve official acts but private ones, and so theoretically the prosecution could move ahead with those charges and not others. But that wouldn’t necessarily delay the trial sufficiently for Trump’s purposes.“On big cases, it’s entirely appropriate for the Supreme Court to really limit what they are doing to the facts of the case in front of it, rather than needing to take the time to write an epic poem on the limits of presidential immunity,” Waldman said. “If they write a grant opinion, saying no president is above the law, but it comes out too late in the year, they will have effectively immunized Trump from prosecution before the election while pretending not to.”Trump’s own attorneys argued in 2021, during his second impeachment trial, that the fact that he could be criminally prosecuted later was a reason not to impeach him. As The New York Times reported, Trump’s attorney Bruce Castor told Congress that “after he is out of office,” then “you go and arrest him.” Trump was acquitted in the Senate for his attempted coup after only a few Republicans voted for conviction; some of those who voted to acquit did so reasoning that Trump was subject to criminal prosecution as a private citizen. The catch-22 here reveals that the actual position being taken is that the president is a king, or that he is entitled to make himself one. At least if his name is Donald Trump.[David A. Graham: The Supreme Courts goes through the looking glass of presidential immunity]Democracy relies on the rule of law and the consent of the governed—neither of which is possible in a system where the president can commit crimes or order them committed if he feels like it. “We can’t possibly have an executive branch that is cloaked in immunity and still expect them to act in the best interests of the people in a functioning democracy,” Praveen Fernandes, the vice president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a liberal legal organization, told me.The only part of Trump’s case that contains anything resembling a reasonable argument is the idea that without some kind of immunity for official acts, presidents could be prosecuted on a flimsy basis by political rivals. But this argument is stretched beyond credibility when it comes to what Trump did, which was to try repeatedly and in multiple ways to unlawfully seize power after losing an election. Even if the prospect of presidents being prosecuted for official acts could undermine the peaceful transfer of power, actually trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power is a much more direct threat—especially because it has already happened. But the Republican-appointed justices seemed much more concerned about the hypothetical than the reality.“If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent,” Justice Samuel Alito asked, “will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”Trump has the conservative justices arguing that you cannot prosecute a former president for trying to overthrow the country, because then they might try to overthrow the country, something Trump already attempted and is demanding immunity for doing. The incentive for an incumbent to execute a coup is simply much greater if the Supreme Court decides that the incumbent cannot be held accountable if he fails. And not just a coup, but any kind of brazen criminal behavior. “The Framers did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution. They knew how to,” Kagan pointed out during oral arguments. “And, you know, not so surprising, they were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law. Wasn’t the whole point that the president was not a monarch and the president was not supposed to be above the law?”At least a few of the right-wing justices seemed inclined to if not accept Trump’s immunity claim, then delay the trial, which would likely improve his reelection prospects. As with the Colorado ballot-access case earlier this year, in which the justices prevented Trump from being thrown off the ballot in accordance with the Constitution’s ban on insurrectionists holding office, the justices’ positions rest on a denial of the singularity of Trump’s actions.No previous president has sought to overthrow the Constitution by staying in power after losing an election. Trump is the only one, which is why these questions are being raised now. Pretending that these matters concern the powers of the presidency more broadly is merely the path the justices sympathetic to Trump have chosen to take in order to rationalize protecting the man they would prefer to be the next president. What the justices—and other Republican loyalists—are loath to acknowledge is that Trump is not being uniquely persecuted; he is uniquely criminal.This case—even more than the Colorado ballot-eligibility case—unites the right-wing justices’ political and ideological interests with Trump’s own. One way or another, they will have to choose between Trumpism and democracy. They’ve given the public little reason to believe that they will choose any differently than the majority of their colleagues in the Republican Party.

To access the full benefits of literature, you have to share it out loud.

The Supreme Court seems to be endorsing his views on presidential power.

In the pandemic winter of 2020, Katie, my family’s 14-year-old miniature poodle, began coughing uncontrollably. After multiple vet visits, and more than $1,000 in bills, a veterinary cardiologist diagnosed her with heart failure. Our girl, a dog I loved so much that I wrote an essay about how I called her my “daughter,” would likely die within nine months.Katie survived for almost two years. My younger son joked that Katie wasn’t going to let advanced heart failure get in the way of her life goal of never leaving my side, but the truth was that I was the one who wouldn’t let her go. Katie’s extended life didn’t come cheap. There were repeated scans, echocardiograms, and blood work, and several trips to veterinary emergency rooms. One drug alone cost $300 a month, and that was after I shopped aggressively for discounts online.People like me have fueled the growth of what you might call Big Vet. As household pets have risen in status—from mere animals to bona fide family members—so, too, has owners’ willingness to spend money to ensure their well-being. Big-money investors have noticed. According to data provided to me by PitchBook, private equity poured $51.6 billion into the veterinary sector from 2017 to 2023, and another $9.3 billion in the first four months of this year, seemingly convinced that it had discovered a foolproof investment. Industry cheerleaders pointed to surveys showing that people would go into debt to keep their four-legged friends healthy. The field was viewed as “low-risk, high-reward,” as a 2022 report issued by Capstone Partners put it, singling out the industry for its higher-than-average rate of return on investment.[From the December 2022 issue: How much would you pay to save your pet’s life?]In the United States, corporations and private-equity funds have been rolling up smaller chains and previously independent practices. Mars Inc., of Skittles and Snickers fame, is, oddly, the largest owner of stand-alone veterinary clinics in the United States, operating more than 2,000 practices under the names Banfield, VCA, and BluePearl. JAB Holding Company, the owner of National Veterinary Associates’ 1,000-plus hospitals (not to mention Panera and Espresso House), also holds multiple pet-insurance lines in its portfolio. Shore Capital Partners, which owns several human health-care companies, controls Mission Veterinary Partners and Southern Veterinary Partners.As a result, your local vet may well be directed by a multinational shop that views caring for your fur baby as a healthy component of a diversified revenue stream. Veterinary-industry insiders now estimate that 25 to 30 percent of practices in the United States are under large corporate umbrellas, up from 8 percent a little more than a decade ago. For specialty clinics, the number is closer to three out of four. And as this happened, veterinary prices began to rise—a lot. Americans spent an estimated $38 billion on health care and related services for companion animals in 2023, up from about $29 billion in 2019. Even as overall inflation got back under control last year, the cost of veterinary care did not. In March 2024, the Consumer Price Index for urban consumers was up 3.5 percent year over year. The veterinary-services category was up 9.6 percent. If you have ever wondered why keeping your pet healthy has gotten so out-of-control expensive, Big Vet just might be your answer.To get a sense of what might happen when the profit-seeking dial gets turned up too high in veterinary medicine, we need look no further than human health care. An extensive body of research shows that when private equity takes over a hospital or physician practice, prices and the number of expensive procedures tend to go up. A study found serious medical errors occur more frequently after private equity buys the hospital. Another study found that costs to patients rise, too, sometimes substantially. And that’s in a tougher regulatory environment. In veterinary medicine, there is no giant entity like Medicare capable of pushing back on prices. There is no requirement, in fact, to provide care at all, no matter how dire the animal’s condition. Payment is due at the time of service or there is no service. Whenever I told people I was working on this article, I was inundated with Big Vet complaints. Catherine Liu, a professor at UC Irvine, took her elderly pit-bull mix, Buster, to a local VCA when he became lethargic and began drooling excessively. More than $8,000 in charges later, there was still no diagnosis. “Sonograms, endoscopy—what about just a hypothesis of what the symptoms could be? Nothing like that at all was forthcoming,” Liu told me. Shortly before Buster died, a vet in private practice diagnosed him with cancer. The disease, Liu said, had not once been mentioned by the vets at VCA. (Mars Petcare, VCA’s parent company, declined to comment on the episode.)I don’t mean to single out VCA here—in fact, I should note that a VCA vet’s medical protocol was almost certainly responsible for my dog’s longer-than-expected life. One reason Mars-owned chains attract outsized attention for their high costs and customer-service failures is that the company actually brands its acquisitions. That’s unusual. A study conducted by the Arizona consumer advocate Todd Nemet found that fewer than 15 percent of corporate-owned practices in the state slap their own brand identity on their vets; most keep the original practice name, leaving customers with the illusion of local ownership. (When I asked Thrive Pet Healthcare, a chain majority-owned by TSG Consumer Partners, about why the company doesn’t brand its clinics, a spokesperson replied, “We realize the value of local hospital brands and are committed to preserving and supporting them.”) Indeed, some pet owners told me that they realized that ownership of their vet had changed only after what they thought was a routine visit resulted in recommendations for mounds of tests, which turned out to have shot up in price. Paul Cerro, the CEO of Cedar Grove Capital, which invests in the pet industry, says this issue is frequent in online reviews. “People will say, ‘I’ve been coming here for four years, and all of a sudden I’m getting charged for things I’ve never been charged for,’ and they give it one star.”[Read: The great veterinary shortage]Big Vet denies charging excessive prices. VCA Canada, for instance, recently told The Globe and Mail that prices can increase after an acquisition because “the quality of the care, the quality of everything we offer to them, goes up as well.” A spokesperson for Mars told me, “We invest heavily in our associates, hospitals, state-of-the-art equipment, technology, and other resources.” NVA, which is planning an initial public offering in 2025 or 2026, did not directly answer a question about why veterinary prices were rising so rapidly, instead sending me a statement saying, in part, “Our vision is to build a community of hospitals that pet owners trust, are easy to access, and provide the best possible value for care.” Do rising prices really just reflect higher-quality care? There may be some truth to this, but there is also evidence to the contrary. A study published last year in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, for example, found that vets working for large corporations reported more pressure to generate revenue, whereas veterinarians working for independent practices reported higher levels of satisfaction for such things as the “ability to acquire new large equipment” and the “ability to get new/different drugs.” Preliminary research by Emma Harris, the vice president of Vetster, a veterinary telehealth start-up, found significant differences in pricing between corporate and privately owned veterinary clinics in the same geographic region. Usually, she told me, the increases “occurred immediately after the sale to a private-equity-owned group.”All of this doesn’t sit well with many in the sector. Vets tend to be idealistic, which makes sense given that many of them rack up six figures in student-loan debt to pursue a profession that pays significantly less than human medicine. One vet, who worked for an emergency-services practice that, they said, raised prices by 20 percent in 2022, told me, “I almost got to the point where I was ashamed to tell people what the estimate was for things because it was so insanely high.” (The vet asked for anonymity because they feared legal repercussions.) Others described mounting pressure to upsell customers following acquisition by private equity. “You don’t always need to take X-rays on an animal that’s vomited just one time,” Kathy Lewis, a veterinarian who formerly worked at a Tennessee practice purchased in 2021 by Mission Veterinary Partners, told me. “But there was more of that going on.” Prices increased rapidly as well, she said, leading to customer complaints. (Mission Veterinary Partners did not respond to requests for comment.)The combination of wheeling-and-dealing and price increases in the veterinary sector is beginning to attract the government’s attention. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission required, in 2022 consent decree, that JAB seek prior approval before purchasing any emergency or specialty clinic within 25 miles of one it already owns in California and Texas for the next decade. In her written comments, FTC Chair Lina Khan said she feared these one-by-one purchases could lead to the development of a stealth monopoly. (JAB denied any wrongdoing.) And in the United Kingdom, where corporate ownership is higher than in the United States (even the practice originally owned by the author of the classic veterinary novel All Creatures Great and Small has been rolled up), government authorities are moving forward with an investigation into high prices and market concentration after an initial inquiry drew what regulators called an “unprecedented” response from the public.Pet owners used to have an easier time accepting the short lives of domestic animals. Few people were taking the barnyard cat or junkyard dog in for chemotherapy or ACL surgery, to say nothing of post-op aquatic physical therapy. “When we started out over 20 years ago, you had to live near a veterinary teaching hospital to have access to something like an MRI,” Karen Leslie, the executive director of the Pet Fund, a charity that aids people with vet bills, told me. “Now it’s the standard of care. It’s available basically everywhere—but that starts at $2,000.”Big Vet, in Leslie’s view, helped fuel an increase in expensive services. The same medical progress that’s helped humans beat back once-fatal diseases is doing the same for cats and dogs, extending their life spans to record lengths. But only if you have the money to pay for it. Some pets—my late Katie, Liu’s late Buster—receive one expensive test or treatment after another, sometimes helpful, sometimes not. Other equally loved pets may go without basic care altogether, or even fall victim to what the industry calls “economic euthanasia,” where they are put down because their owners can’t afford their medical bills. (Pet insurance, widely promoted by the industry, is unlikely to help much. Uptake rates are in the low single digits, a result of relatively high costs and often-limited benefits.)[Watch: Volunteer veterinarians in Ukraine]The American Veterinary Medical Association’s tracker shows that vet visits and purchases of heartworm and flea-and-tick medications are down compared with this month last year, even as practice revenues are up, suggesting that some owners are having trouble affording routine, preventative care. The market researcher Packaged Facts found that a full third of pet owners say that they would take their animal to the vet more often if it were less expensive. Shelter Animals Count, an animal-advocacy group, reports that the number of pets surrendered to shelters rose in the past two years. Carol Mithers, the author of the upcoming book Rethinking Rescue, told me that some people give up pets because they believe the shelter system will provide them with necessary medical treatment—something that is, heartbreakingly, not true.The veterinary past is easy to romanticize. The truth is that pets have never received all the needed care, and that wealthy pet owners have always had access to more care. But the emergence of Big Vet and the injection of cutthroat incentives into a traditionally idealistic, local industry threatens to make these problems far worse. It portends a future in which some pet owners get shaken down, their love for their pets exploited financially, while others must forego even basic care for their pets. I don’t think Katie, who loved all animals, would approve. I certainly don’t.

Fifty-six years ago this week, at the height of the Vietnam War, Columbia University students occupied half a dozen campus buildings and made two principal demands of the university: stop funding military research, and cancel plans to build a gym in a nearby Black neighborhood. After a week of futile negotiations, Columbia called in New York City police to clear the occupation.The physical details of that crisis were much rougher than anything happening today. The students barricaded doors and ransacked President Grayson Kirk’s office. “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up,” Mark Rudd, the student leader and future member of the terrorist Weather Underground, wrote in an open letter to Kirk, who resigned a few months later. The cops arrested more than 700 students and injured at least 100, while one of their own was permanently disabled by a student.In other ways, the current crisis brings a strong sense of déjà vu: the chants, the teach-ins, the nonnegotiable demands, the self-conscious building of separate communities, the revolutionary costumes, the embrace of oppressed identities by elite students, the tactic of escalating to incite a reaction that mobilizes a critical mass of students. It’s as if campus-protest politics has been stuck in an era of prolonged stagnation since the late 1960s. Why can’t students imagine doing it some other way?Perhaps because the structure of protest reflects the nature of universities. They make good targets because of their abiding vulnerability: They can’t deal with coercion, including nonviolent disobedience. Either they overreact, giving the protesters a new cause and more allies (this happened in 1968, and again last week at Columbia), or they yield, giving the protesters a victory and inviting the next round of disruption. This is why Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, no matter what she does, finds herself hammered from the right by Republican politicians and from the left by her own faculty and students, unable to move without losing more ground. Her detractors know that they have her trapped by their willingness to make coercive demands: Do what we say or else we’ll destroy you and your university. They aren’t interested in a debate.[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]A university isn’t a state—it can’t simply impose its rules with force. It’s a special kind of community whose legitimacy depends on mutual recognition in a spirit of reason, openness, and tolerance. At the heart of this spirit is free speech, which means more than just chanting, but free speech can’t thrive in an atmosphere of constant harassment. When one faction or another violates this spirit, the whole university is weakened as if stricken with an illness. The sociologist Daniel Bell, who tried and failed to mediate a peaceful end to the Columbia occupation, wrote afterward: In a community one cannot regain authority simply by asserting it, or by using force to suppress dissidents. Authority in this case is like respect. One can only earn the authority—the loyalty of one’s students—by going in and arguing with them, by engaging in full debate and, when the merits of proposed change are recognized, taking the necessary steps quickly enough to be convincing. The crackdown at Columbia in 1968 was so harsh that a backlash on the part of faculty and the public obliged the university to accept the students’ demands: a loss, then a win. The war in Vietnam ground on for years before it ended and history vindicated the protesters: another loss, another win. But the really important consequence of the 1968 revolt took decades to emerge. We’re seeing it now on Columbia’s quad and the campuses of elite universities around the country. The most lasting victory of the ’68ers was an intellectual one. The idea underlying their protests wasn’t just to stop the war or end injustice in America. Its aim was the university itself—the liberal university of the postwar years, which no longer exists.That university claimed a special role in democratic society. A few weeks after the 1968 takeover, the Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter gave the commencement address to a wounded institution. “A university is a community, but it is a community of a special kind,” Hofstadter said—“a community devoted to inquiry. It exists so that its members may inquire into truths of all sorts. Its presence marks our commitment to the idea that somewhere in society there must be an organization in which anything can be studied or questioned—not merely safe and established things but difficult and inflammatory things, the most troublesome questions of politics and war, of sex and morals, of property and national loyalty.” This mission rendered the community fragile, dependent on the self-restraint of its members.The lofty claims of the liberal university exposed it to charges of all kinds of hypocrisy, not least its entanglement with the American war machine. The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who became a guru to the New Left, coined the phrase repressive tolerance for the veil that hid liberal society’s mechanisms of violence and injustice. In this scheme, no institution, including the university, remained neutral, and radical students embraced their status as an oppressed group.[Charles Sykes: The new rules of political journalism]At Stanford (where my father was an administrator in the late ’60s, and where students took over a campus building the week after the Columbia revolt), white students compared themselves to Black American slaves. To them, the university was not a community dedicated to independent inquiry but a nexus of competing interest groups where power, not ideas, ruled. They rejected the very possibility of a disinterested pursuit of truth. In an imaginary dialogue between a student and a professor, a member of the Stanford chapter of Students for a Democratic Society wrote: “Rights and privacy and these kinds of freedom are irrelevant—you old guys got to get it through your heads that to fight the whole corrupt System POWER is the only answer.”A long, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors–the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the “long march through the institutions”—bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend. One leader of the Columbia takeover returned to chair the School of the Arts film program. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.The post-liberal university is defined by a combination of moneymaking and activism. Perhaps the biggest difference between 1968 and 2024 is that the ideas of a radical vanguard are now the instincts of entire universities—administrators, faculty, students. They’re enshrined in reading lists and codes of conduct and ubiquitous clichés. Last week an editorial in the Daily Spectator, the Columbia student newspaper, highlighted the irony of a university frantically trying to extricate itself from the implications of its own dogmas: “Why is the same university that capitalizes on the legacy of Edward Said and enshrines The Wretched of the Earth into its Core Curriculum so scared to speak about decolonization in practice?”A Columbia student, writing to one of his professors in a letter that the student shared with me, explained the dynamic so sharply that it’s worth quoting him at length: I think [the protests] do speak to a certain failing on Columbia’s part, but it’s a failing that’s much more widespread and further upstream. That is, I think universities have essentially stopped minding the store, stopped engaging in any kind of debate or even conversation with the ideologies which have slowly crept in to every bit of university life, without enough people of good conscience brave enough to question all the orthodoxies. So if you come to Columbia believing in “decolonization” or what have you, it’s genuinely not clear to me that you will ever have to reflect on this belief. And after all this, one day the university wakes up to these protests, panics under scrutiny, and calls the cops on students who are practicing exactly what they’ve been taught to do from the second they walked through those gates as freshmen. The muscle of independent thinking and open debate, the ability to earn authority that Daniel Bell described as essential to a university’s survival, has long since atrophied. So when, after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Jewish students found themselves subjected to the kind of hostile atmosphere that, if directed at any other minority group, would have brought down high-level rebukes, online cancellations, and maybe administrative punishments, they fell back on the obvious defense available under the new orthodoxy. They said that they felt “unsafe.” They accused pro-Palestinian students of anti-Semitism—sometimes fairly, sometimes not. They asked for protections that other groups already enjoyed. Who could blame them? They were doing what their leaders and teachers had instructed them was the right, the only, way to respond to a hurt.[Adam Serwer: The Republicans who want American carnage]And when the shrewd and unscrupulous Representative Elise Stefanik demanded of the presidents of Harvard and Penn whether calls for genocide violated their universities’ code of conduct, they had no good way to answer. If they said yes, they would have faced the obvious comeback: “Why has no one been punished?” So they said that it depended on the “context,” which was technically correct but sounded so hopelessly legalistic that it led to the loss of their jobs. The response also made nonsense of their careers as censors of unpopular speech. Shafik, of Columbia, having watched her colleagues’ debacle, told the congresswoman what she wanted to hear, then backed it up by calling the cops onto campus—only to find herself denounced on all sides, including by Senator Tom Cotton, who demanded that President Joe Biden deploy the United States military to Columbia, and by her own faculty senate, which threatened a vote of censure.The right always knows how to exploit the excesses of the left. It happened in 1968, when the campus takeovers and the street battles between anti-war activists and cops at the Democratic convention in Chicago helped elect Richard Nixon. Republican politicians are already exploiting the chaos on campuses. This summer, the Democrats will gather again in Chicago, and the activists are promising a big show. Donald Trump will be watching.Elite universities are caught in a trap of their own making, one that has been a long time coming. They’ve trained pro-Palestinian students to believe that, on the oppressor-oppressed axis, Jews are white and therefore dominant, not “marginalized,” while Israel is a settler-colonialist state and therefore illegitimate. They’ve trained pro-Israel students to believe that unwelcome and even offensive speech makes them so unsafe that they should stay away from campus. What the universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another.

The scrolls lay inside glass cases. On one, the writing was jagged; on others, swirling or steady. I was at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, admiring centuries-old Chinese calligraphy that, the wall text told me, was meant to contain the life force—qi—of the calligrapher expressed through each brushstroke. Though I couldn’t read the language, I was moved to see the work of writers who lived hundreds of years ago, whose marks still seemed to say something about the creators long after they’d passed.I’m using my fingers to type this now, but every letter is perfectly legible and well spaced. Today, the human body behind the written word is less apparent. When I’m composing an email, Gmail makes suggestions I can deploy in one click: “Awesome!” “Sounds great!” “Yes, I can do that.” Artificial intelligence can produce instantaneous sentences. That a person is responsible for text is no longer a given.Last year, Alex Reisner reported in The Atlantic that more than 191,000 books had been absorbed into a data set called Books3, which was then used to train generative-AI large language models that may someday threaten to take the place of human writers. Among the books in question was my debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, which took me five years to complete. My new novel, Real Americans, took even longer: I began working on it in December 2016, and it’s being released at the end of April, seven years and four months later. Those numbers don’t even account for the years of reading, practice, and education (both formal and self-directed) that preceded the writing itself. Now ChatGPT and other LLMs, trained on a wide store of human-generated literature, stand on the cusp of writing novels in no time at all.[Read: What ChatGPT can’t teach my writing students]This seems, initially, discouraging. Here is an entity that can seemingly do what I do, but faster. At present, it “hallucinates” and gets basic facts wrong, but it may soon be able to generate text that can seamlessly imitate people. Unlike me, it won’t need sleep, or bathroom breaks, or patience, or life experience; it won’t get the flu. In fact, AI embodies hypotheticals I can just imagine for myself: If only I could write all day and night. If only I were smarter and more talented. If only I had endless knowledge. If only I could read whole libraries. What could I create if I had no needs? What might this development mean for writing?Considering limitlessness has led me to believe that the impediments of human writers are what lead us to create meaningful art. And they are various: limits of our body, limits of our perspectives, limits of our skills. But the constraints of an artist’s process are, in the language of software, a feature, not a bug.Writing is a blood-and-guts business, literally as well as figuratively. As I type with my hands, my lungs oxygenate the blood that my heart pumps; my brain sends and receives signals. Each of these functions results in the words on this page. In the Middle Ages, monks in the scriptoria wrote: “Two fingers hold the pen, but the whole body toils.” Typing this now, my upper back hurts. I am governed by pesky physical needs: I have to drink water and eat; my mind can’t focus indefinitely. My hands are too cold, and because I haven’t moved it, one foot is going numb. On other occasions, illnesses or injuries have affected my ability to write.The sensitivities of our fragile human bodies require that our labor takes time. Nothing is more discouraging when I am trying to complete a draft. But this exchange—my finite hours for this creative endeavor—imports meaning: It benefits the work, and makes it richer. Over weeks, months, and years, characters emerge and plots take surprising turns. A thought can be considered day after day and deepened.While revising my forthcoming book, one of my thighs erupted into a mysterious rash. Sparing gruesome details, let’s just say it disturbed and distracted me. But it also led me to a realization: I’d been approaching the creation of my novel as though it could be perfectible. In reducing my entire self to my cognition alone, akin to a computer, I’d forgotten the truth that I am inseparable from my imperfect body, with its afflictions and ailments. My books emerge from this body.In his book How to Write One Song, the musician Jeff Tweedy writes: “I aspire to make trees instead of tables.” He was talking about songs, but the concept was revelatory to me as a novelist. Unlike a table, the point of a novel isn’t to be useful or stable or uniform. Instead, it is as singular and particular as its creator, shaped by numerous forces and conditions. In spite of its limits and because of them, a tree is an exuberant organic expression. Though costumed in typeset words, a novel is an exuberant organic expression too.[Read: My books were used to train meta’s generative AI. Good.]AI is creating tables out of our trees. Its infinite iterations are pure veneer: bloodless and gutless, serviceable furniture made of the deforested expanse of human experience. A large language model doesn’t require experience, because it has consumed ours. It appears limitless in its perspective because it writes from an extensive data set of our own. Though writing comes out of these experiences and perspectives, it does not follow that unlimited quantities of each beget maximally substantial work. I believe that the opposite is true.Compared with AI, we might seem like pitiful creatures. Our lives will end; our memory is faulty; we can’t absorb 191,000 books; our frames of reference are circumscribed. One day, I will die. I foreclose on certain opportunities by pursuing others. Typing this now means I cannot fold my laundry or have lunch with a friend. Yet I believe writing is worth doing, and this sacrifice of time makes it consequential. When we write, we are picking and choosing—consciously or otherwise—what is most substantial to us. Behind human writing is a human being calling for attention and saying, Here is what is important to me. I’m able to move through only my one life, from my narrow point of view; this outlook creates and yet constrains my work. Good writing is born of mortality: the limits of our body and perspectives—the limits of our very lives.I can imagine a future in which ChatGPT works more convincingly than it does now. Would I exchange the hours that I spent working on each of my two books for finished documents spat out by ChatGPT? That would have saved me years of attempts and failures. But all of that frustration, difficult as it was in the moment, changed me. It wasn’t a job I clocked in and out of, contained within a tidy sum of hours. I carried the story with me while I showered, drove—even dreamed. My mind was changed by the writing, and the writing changed by my mind.[Read: Prepare for the textpocalypse]Working on a novel, I strain against my limits as a bounded, single body by imagining characters outside of myself. I test the limits of my skill when I wonder, Can I pull this off? And though it feels grandiose to say, writing is an attempt to use my short supply of hours to create a work that outlasts me. These exertions in the face of my constraints strike me as moving, and worthy, and beautiful.Writing itself is a technology, and it will shift with the introduction of new tools, as it always has. I’m not worried that AI novelists will replace human novelists. But I am afraid that we’ll lose sight of what makes human writing worthwhile: its efforts, its inquiries, its bids for connection—all bounded and shaped by its imperfections—and its attempts to say, This is what it’s like for me. Is it like this for you? If we forget what makes our human work valuable, we might forget what makes our human lives valuable too. Novels are one of the best means we have for really seeing one another, because behind each effort is a mortal person, expressing and transmuting their realities to the best of their ability. Reading and writing are vital means by which we bridge our separate consciousnesses. In understanding these limits, we can understand one another’s lives. At least, we can try.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.For the past couple of years, scientists have watched with growing concern as a massive outbreak of avian flu, also known as H5N1 bird flu, has swept through bird populations. Recently in the U.S., a farm worker and some cattle herds have been infected. I spoke with my colleague Katherine J. Wu, who covered the virus’s spread in North America, about the risk of human infection and how, for animals, this has already been “a pandemic many times over.”First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Welcome to the TikTok meltdown. The Republicans who want American carnage Columbia has resorted to pedagogy theater. Not a Five-Alarm FireLora Kelley: How does this bird-flu outbreak compare with previous ones?Katherine J. Wu: When we’re considering the toll on nonhuman animals, this is the largest, most deadly H5N1 outbreak that has been recorded in North America. It has been unfolding slowly for about two and a half years now, but it’s become a gargantuan wave at this point.Lora: Wow—how alarmed are you by that?Katherine: I’m medium concerned—and I have been medium concerned for a couple of years now. It’s difficult to gauge the amount of alarm to feel, because it’s so unprecedented. Still, most H5N1 outbreaks in the past have totally fizzled without much consequence, especially in this part of the world.I am worried because so many species have been getting sick. A huge number of wild birds have been infected, including species that haven’t been affected in the past. And we’ve seen these massive outbreaks in domesticated chickens, which are packed together in farms.Avian flu is known to be a bird problem. Beyond that, we’ve been seeing these outbreaks in mammals for a couple of years now, which is more concerning because, of course, we are also mammals. Humans seem to be potentially susceptible to infection, but at the same time, it would take quite a lot for this to become another big human-flu pandemic.Lora: Should we be concerned about getting sick?Katherine: People should be vigilant and paying attention to the news. But right now, as you and I are talking, there is still not a huge risk to people. You don’t get a pandemic unless you have a pathogen that spreads very, very easily among people, and there’s no evidence so far that this virus has mutated to that point.There have been some human cases globally so far, but it’s a very small number. They seem to have been cases where someone was highly exposed to the virus in domesticated animals. People got sick, but they didn’t pass it to someone else.I’m definitely not saying that person-to-person transmission can’t happen eventually, but there’s a pretty big chasm between someone getting infected and someone being able to efficiently pass the virus on. It is concerning that we continue to see more mammal species affected by H5N1, including species that have a lot of close contact with humans. But this is not a five-alarm fire so far.Lora: How will people’s lives be affected?Katherine: The virus has already affected our lives. Egg prices went completely bonkers in 2022 and early 2023, and over the course of this outbreak, more than 90 million domestic poultry have died. It’s not that all of those birds got sick—when this virus breaks out on chicken farms, it’s generally considered good practice to cull the chickens to halt the spread. Still, when you have that many chickens dying, egg prices are going to go up.We’re probably not on track to see that with cows anytime soon. Even though this virus has now been detected in dairy cows, they aren’t getting wildly sick, and transmission doesn’t seem as efficient. I don’t think we’re going to be in a situation where we’re killing all of our dairy cows and no one can get milk.Lora: The FDA announced yesterday that genetic evidence of this bird-flu virus had been found in samples of pasteurized milk. Is it still safe to drink milk?Katherine: So far, the answer is: generally, yes, if it’s been pasteurized. Pasteurization is a process by which milk is treated with heat so that it will kill a whole bunch of pathogens, including bacteria and viruses, and H5N1 is thought to be vulnerable to this. Also, researchers have been working to test cows so they can figure out which ones are sick. Only milk from healthy cows is authorized to enter the general food supply, though the trick will be finding all the cows that are actually infected. For now, the main ways that this virus will affect us will be indirect.Lora: Is there anything that can be done to curb the spread among wild animals?Katherine: For the animal world, this has already been a “pandemic” many times over. It has been truly devastating in that respect. So many wild birds, sea lions, seals, and other creatures have died, and it’s difficult to see how people can effectively intervene out in nature. There have been very few cases in which endangered animals have received vaccines because there’s a real possibility that their populations could be 100 percent wiped out by this virus.For most other animals in the wild, there’s not a lot that can be done, except for people to pay attention to where the virus is spreading. The hope is that most animal populations will be resilient enough to get through this and develop some form of immunity.Lora: Responses to COVID became very politicized. How might the aftermath of those mitigation measures shape how people respond to this virus, especially if it becomes a greater threat to humans?Katherine: We’re so fresh off the worst days of COVID that if people were asked to buckle down or get a new vaccine, I suspect that a lot of them would be like, Not again. There is still a lot of mitigation fatigue, and many people are sick of thinking about respiratory viruses and taking measures to prevent outbreaks. And, certainly, people have lost a lot of trust in public health over the past four years.That said, H5N1 is still a flu, and people are familiar with that type of virus. We have a long history of using flu vaccines, and the government has experience making a pandemic vaccine, keeping that stockpile, and getting it out to the public. That gives me hope that at least some people will be amenable to taking the necessary preventative measures, so any potential bird-flu outbreak among humans would not turn into COVID 2.0.Related: Bird flu leaves the world with an existential choice. Bird flu has never done this before. Today’s News President Joe Biden signed into law a bipartisan foreign-aid package that includes aid for Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, and a measure that forces TikTok’s parent company to sell the social-media app or face an outright ban. The U.S. Supreme Court seems divided over whether a federal law can require hospitals to provide access to emergency abortions and override state-level abortion bans. George Santos, the embattled former New York representative facing multiple charges of fraud, ended his independent bid for a U.S. House seat on Long Island. Dispatches The Weekly Planet: Tesla is not the next Ford, Matteo Wong writes. It’s the next Con Ed. Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani Why Did Cars Get So Expensive?By Annie Lowrey Inflation, finally, has cooled off. Prices have increased 2.5 percent over the past year, down from increases as high as 7 percent during the early pandemic. Rents are high but stabilizing. The cost of groceries is ticking up, not surging, and some goods, such as eggs, are actually getting cheaper. But American consumers are still stretching to afford one big-ticket item: their cars. The painful cost of vehicle ownership doesn’t just reflect strong demand driven by low unemployment, pandemic-related supply-chain weirdness, and high interest rates. It reflects how awful cars are for American households and American society as a whole. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic A Democrat’s case for saving Mike Johnson How baseball explains the limits of AI Culture Break Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Ashok Kumar / Getty. Listen. Taylor Swift’s music often returns to the same motifs: pathetic fallacy, the passing of time, the mythology of love. Her latest album shows how these themes have calcified in her work, Sophie Gilbert writes.Look. Take a photo tour of several of Chile’s national parks, which protect many endangered species, wild landscapes, and natural wonders.Play our daily crossword.Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.