The Atlantic
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Free Trade Is Dead Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much, but for a long time, they agreed on this: the more free trade, the better. Now they agree on the opposite: Free trade has gone too far.On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced plans to impose steep new tariffs on certain products made in China, including a 100 percent tariff on electric cars. With that, he escalated a policy begun during the Trump administration, and marked the decisive rejection of an economic orthodoxy that had dominated American policy making for nearly half a century. The leaders of both major parties have now turned away from unfettered free trade, a fact that would have been unimaginable less than a decade ago.Since the 1980s, American economic policy has largely been guided by the belief that allowing money and goods to flow with as little friction as possible would make everyone better off. So overwhelming was the agreement on this point that it became known, along with a few other free-market dogmas, as the “Washington Consensus.” (You may know the Washington Consensus by its other names, including neoliberalism and Reaganomics.) According to this way of thinking, free trade wouldn’t just make countries rich; it would also make the world more peaceful, as nations linked by a shared economic fate wouldn’t dare wage war against one another. The world would become more democratic, too, as economic liberalization would lead to political freedom. That thinking guided the trade deals struck during the 1990s and 2000s, including the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the decision to allow China into the World Trade Organization in 2001.A few voices on both the left and the right had long criticized these theories, but they were outside the mainstream. The first major rupture took place in 2016, when Donald Trump ascended to the presidency in part by railing against NAFTA and attacking America’s leaders for shipping jobs overseas. The same year, a landmark paper was published showing that free trade with China had cost more than 1 million American manufacturing workers their jobs and plunged factory towns across the country into ruin—a phenomenon known as the “China shock.” The coronavirus pandemic further undermined the Washington Consensus as the United States, after decades of letting manufacturing capacity move overseas, found itself almost entirely dependent on other countries for supplies as basic as face masks and as crucial as semiconductors.[Michael Schuman: China has gotten the trade war it deserves]These shifts strengthened the position of critics of globalization and laissez-faire capitalism. The Biden administration, stocked with Elizabeth Warren disciples, entered office eager to challenge the free-market consensus in certain areas, notably antitrust. But on trade, the administration’s soul remained divided. In the early years of the Biden presidency, trade skeptics such as U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai frequently clashed with trade enthusiasts like Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Biden quietly kept in place the tariffs Trump had imposed on China (which Biden himself had denounced on the campaign trail), but he focused his economic agenda primarily on boosting the domestic clean-energy industry.Then China’s aggressive push into clean energy forced Biden’s hand. As recently as 2019, China barely built electric vehicles, let alone exported them. Today it is the world’s top producer of EVs, churning out millions of high-quality, super-cheap cars every year. An influx of Chinese EVs into the U.S. might seem like welcome news for an administration fighting to lower both inflation and emissions. But it could also devastate the American auto industry, destroying a vital source of well-paying jobs concentrated in key swing states. A glut of discounted solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, meanwhile—China currently produces the majority of the world’s supply of each—would undermine emerging American industries before they could even be built.To the administration, this presented a nightmare scenario. Already struggling parts of the country would experience a second China shock. The U.S. would become dependent on its biggest rival for some of the most important technologies in the world. Republicans would seize on the issue to win elections and potentially roll back the Biden administration’s progress on climate change. (Trump has made the threat of Chinese EVs central to his 2024 campaign, talking about the “bloodbath” that would ensue if they were allowed into the country.)Economics, political science, geopolitics, electoral math: Many of the administration’s incentives seemed to point in the same direction. Which brings us to the tariffs imposed this week. In addition to the 100 percent EV duty, the U.S. will apply 25 to 50 percent tariffs to a handful of “strategic sectors,” in the words of a White House fact sheet: solar cells, batteries, semiconductors, medical supplies, cranes, and certain steel and aluminum products.A president announcing a new policy does not mean that the political consensus has shifted. The proof that we are living in a new era comes instead from the reaction in Washington. Congressional Democrats, many of whom vocally opposed Trump’s tariffs, have been almost universally supportive of the increases, while Republicans have been largely silent about them. Rather than attacking the tariffs, Trump claimed credit for them, telling a crowd in New Jersey that “Biden finally listened to me,” and declaring that he, Trump, would raise tariffs to 200 percent. Most of the criticism from either side of the aisle has come from those arguing that Biden either took too long to raise tariffs or didn’t go far enough. What was recently considered beyond the pale is suddenly conventional wisdom.The old Washington Consensus was built on the premise that if leaders got the economics right, then politics would follow. Cheap consumer goods would keep voters happy at home, trade ties between nations would destroy the incentive to wage war, and the desire to compete in global markets would encourage authoritarian regimes to liberalize. Reality has not been kind to those predictions. Free trade upended American politics, helping to elect a spiteful kleptocrat initially opposed by his own party. The immense wealth Russia amassed by selling oil and gas to Europe may have actually emboldened it to invade Ukraine. Access to global markets didn’t stop China from doubling down on its authoritarian political model.The new consensus on trade taps into a much older understanding of economics, sometimes referred to as “political economy.” The basic idea is that economic policy can’t just be a matter of numbers on a spreadsheet; it must take political realities into account. Free trade does bring broadly shared benefits, but it also inflicts extremely concentrated costs in the form of closed factories, lost livelihoods, and destroyed communities. A political-economic approach to free trade recognizes that those two forces aren’t symmetrical: Concentrated economic loss can create the kind of simmering resentment that can be exploited by demagogues, as Trump long ago intuited. “Back in 2000, when cheap steel from China began to flood the market, U.S. steel towns across Pennsylvania and Ohio were hit hard,” Biden said in his speech announcing the new policy, pointing out that nearly 20,000 steelworkers lost their jobs in those two states alone. “I’m not going to let that happen again.”[Franklin Foer: Biden declares war on the cult of efficiency]A more cynical way to put this is that Biden’s tariffs are a form of pandering to a bloc of swing-state voters. There’s truth to that, but it isn’t the whole story. The political-economic approach also acknowledges that foreign adversaries behave in ways that bear little resemblance to the rational economic self-interest presupposed by mathematical models. They pursue their own geopolitical agendas, market forces be damned—and so America must do the same. China’s dominance in clean-energy technologies is not a product of free markets at work; it was carefully engineered by Beijing, which for decades has poured trillions of dollars of state money into building up industries that it sees as vital to its national strength. To simply accept cheap Chinese exports under the banner of free trade would solidify that dominance, giving Beijing effective control over the energy system of the future.The shift on trade is part of a broader realignment that Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has aspirationally called the “new Washington consensus.” What unites Biden’s tariffs with the other core elements of his agenda, including massive investments in manufacturing and increased antitrust enforcement, is the notion that the American government should no longer passively defer to market forces; instead, it should shape markets to achieve politically and socially beneficial goals. This view has taken hold most thoroughly among Democrats, but it is making inroads among Republicans too—especially when it comes to trade.The details of this new consensus, however, are still being worked out. Trump favors a blunt approach; he has proposed a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods and a 10 percent tariff on foreign goods from any country, including allies. Biden argues that Trump’s plan would sharply raise prices for American consumers without much benefit. His administration instead favors what officials call a “small yard and high fence”: major restrictions on a handful of essential technologies from particular countries.These are the terms on which the debate is now being waged: not whether to restrict free trade, but where, how, and how much. That is a very big change from the world we were living in not long ago. The precise consequences of that change will take years to reveal themselves. But they’re sure to be just as big.theatlantic.com
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A Raunchy Comedy About … Pregnancy? Preparing a birth plan requires considering the many things that could go wrong during childbirth—or, in the best-case scenario of everything proceeding as normal, how you might attempt to mitigate earth-shattering pain. In Babes, a new comedy about two best friends navigating pregnancy and the delirium of postpartum life, one woman is determined to approach her birth plan differently. Early in her pregnancy, Eden (played by Ilana Glazer) announces that she’d like to bring a little joy into a process that’s otherwise unsettling and clinical. Wanting the day of delivery to feel more like a costume party, she decides to call it “Eden’s Prom Birth Extravaganza.”This scene, one of many that take place in her obstetrician’s office, captures the most compelling part of Babes: its attention to, and irreverence toward, the unglamorous specifics of pregnancy. The film throws the horrors, confusion, and wonders of pregnancy into a raunchy comedy that revels in gross-out bodily humor. There are no graphic Dead Ringers–like visuals, but discussions leave little to the imagination: At the start of the film, Eden’s best friend, Dawn (Michelle Buteau), is close to the end of her second pregnancy. Dawn asks Eden to check if she’s started dilating. Crouching to take a look under her friend’s dress, a wide-eyed Eden informs her, “Your vagina looks like it’s yawning.”Babes, which was directed by Pamela Adlon, is the product of an all-star team: Adlon co-created and starred in Better Things, a remarkable, offbeat FX series about a single mother trying to make it in Hollywood. The film’s screenplay comes from television heavyweights too—it was co-written by Glazer, who co-created Broad City, and Josh Rabinowitz, a consulting producer on that series who also worked on The Carmichael Show and Ramy. And Buteau, a comedian, recently starred in Survival of the Thickest, an endearing coming-of-age series she co-created. In theory, a pregnancy raunch-com coming from this crew should’ve been a riotous but poignant romp. Babes doesn’t quite get there. The film tries to balance its lighter fare with weightier themes—aging out of friendships once children come into play, the guilt that can accompany postpartum depression, the insularity of the nuclear family. That’s a tall order, and Babes never really reconciles the gravity of Dawn and Eden’s growing distance from each other with the comedic territory where its two stars are clearly more comfortable.The film’s surplus of toilet humor is admittedly not for me. (Neither was the much-discussed food-poisoning debacle in Bridesmaids.) Still, there’s something charming about how Babes exaggerates the indignity of losing control over one’s body: When Dawn is upset about being unable to produce milk after her daughter is born, she calls in a lactation consultant who ends up hawking “Her Majesty,” a terrifying contraption that looks disturbingly similar to an HVAC machine. There are mushroom trips, a gag involving Eden trying out multiple pregnancy tests, and a dreamlike sequence featuring projectile breast milk—and in these wacky scenes, Glazer and Buteau are a truly dynamic duo, leaning into the film’s over-the-top physical comedy without hesitation. [Read: American motherhood]Where Babes falters is the comedown. Eden’s pregnancy is the result of a one-night stand, and the father, for reasons I won’t spoil, isn’t in the picture. Faced with the prospect of raising a child alone in her fourth-floor walk-up, Eden chooses to go through with her pregnancy. This is a screwball comedy set in a version of New York City where she can afford a massive, light-filled apartment without family support, so maybe not everything needs to make sense. But Eden is notably flighty, and visibly horrified by the messiness of Dawn’s childbirth; still, she pitches headfirst into having a child without much thought. The unexplained decision ends up somehow feeling even less earned than the unplanned pregnancies of the Judd Apatow cinematic universe.Dawn, for her part, seems baffled by—and later resentful of—Eden’s decision, an early indication that the pregnancy will challenge the women’s already-changing relationship. Sustaining close friendships in adulthood, especially as a parent, can be incredibly challenging—and because the strain of motherhood doesn’t end with labor, Babes brings the reality of raising children in the United States into sharp focus. Through a series of calamitous events that unfold in Dawn’s household, the film portrays the effects of policy decisions that have made the U.S. a needlessly difficult place to have kids. Child-care woes keep Dawn away from work, and from the doctor’s appointments where Eden desperately wants her support. Nothing she does—for herself or for her family—ever feels like enough. “Exhausted actually doesn’t even cover it,” Dawn says in a fight with Eden, before comparing raising two youg children to “an endless loop of other people’s needs.” Through these bittersweet observations, Glazer and Buteau still bring plenty of charm. The actors are a playful pairing, building on each other’s comedic inclinations in a way that sometimes makes Babes feel like a more grown-up Broad City. Watching the moment when Dawn seems perplexed by Eden’s decision to go through with the pregnancy, I was immediately reminded of the classic Broad City scene in which Glazer’s 27-year-old character reacts to the idea of getting married by saying, “What am I, a child bride?” Dawn isn’t there to witness some of the shocking things that Eden later learns about pregnancy—like the size of the needle used in an amniocentesis, or the fact that some pregnancies stretch past the 40-week mark. But when the time finally comes for Eden’s Prom Birth Extravaganza, it’s Dawn who commiserates with her about the injustice of having to push her placenta out too: “They don’t tell you about this part.” It’s true—that detail tends to get left out of the storybook ending in which no one needs stitches. Babes isn’t perfect, but its refreshing candor still feels like an R-rated public service.theatlantic.com
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A Rat Purge Saved This Island This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.The last rat on Tromelin Island—a small teardrop of scrubby sand in the western Indian Ocean near Madagascar—was killed in 2005.Rats had lived on the island for hundreds of rat generations. The rodents likely arrived in the late 1700s, when a French ship—carrying Malagasy people kidnapped for the slave trade—wrecked there, says Matthieu Le Corre, an ecologist at the University of Reunion Island, a French overseas region off the coast of Madagascar. Tromelin Island was probably home to at least eight different seabird species, including hundreds of thousands of frigate birds, terns, and boobies, before the rodents arrived. But, like on countless other islands around the world, the rats ate their way through those birds’ eggs, eventually decimating the populations. By 2005, when researchers and French authorities finally began eradicating the rodents, only two bird species were left: a few hundred pairs of masked and red-footed boobies.Today, nearly two decades after authorities banished the rats, Tromelin Island is once again a thriving seabird paradise, home to thousands of breeding pairs belonging to seven different species. Even more encouraging, the island is one of a growing number of cases where seabirds have returned on their own once invasive predators were successfully eliminated.[Read: The mystery of the disappearing seabird]“In terms of conservation, it’s a wonderful success,” says Le Corre, one of the authors of a recent study documenting the recovery.Ridding a landscape of invaders is one of the main challenges to reestablishing seabird colonies worldwide. On big islands with complex terrain—or even those with numerous buildings and abundant food, like New York’s Manhattan island—it can be virtually impossible. Some rat-removal campaigns have involved spending many years and millions of dollars to eliminate every last rodent. But as a whole, exterminators have gotten pretty efficient. “We have the technology, and we’ve been doing this since 1950,” says Holly Jones, an ecologist at Northern Illinois University who was not involved with the new paper. According to a 2022 review, 88 percent of efforts to eliminate invasive vertebrates from islands succeeded from 1900 to 2020.On Tromelin Island, which is just one square kilometer and uninhabited save for a small scientific-research station, French authorities eradicated Norway rats in a month using poisoned bait.After the predators are gone, researchers may need to help seabird communities on some islands recover, including by restoring vegetation, placing life-size models of birds on the island, or playing recorded calls to lure birds in. But Le Corre says no such efforts have been made on Tromelin Island.As it turns out, the seabirds there didn’t need the help. By 2013, populations of both red-footed and masked boobies had more than doubled. Soon after, white terns, brown noddies, sooty terns, wedge-tailed shearwaters, and lesser noddies showed up in rapid succession. The terns and noddies hadn’t been documented breeding on Tromelin Island since 1856, and there were no records of wedge-tailed shearwaters reproducing there.Impressive as it was, the recovery didn’t surprise Jones. “We know that seabirds, in general, are going to do better once invasive mammals aren’t around,” she says.[Read: Give invasive species a job]Seabirds in other locations have bounced back independently in similar ways. On Burgess Island, New Zealand, for example, common diving petrels and little shearwaters returned within two decades after rats were removed.But not all colonies will recover in 20 or even 30 years, Jones notes. On remote islands, far from other thriving seabird populations, recovery can take much longer, because few birds are likely to fly past and decide to stay. Seabirds tend to return faster to islands close to existing colonies, yet even in the case of remote Tromelin Island, birds can eventually find their way back.Tromelin Island’s recovery was relatively quick, in part because the seabird community is mostly dominated by species, such as terns, that regularly disperse to new homes. But some species are particularly slow to bounce back. Albatrosses, petrels, and other seabirds that remain loyal to one breeding spot rarely try new locations, even if birds from the same species have lived there before. Communities of those seabirds might need coaxing to return.Despite the promising start, Tromelin Island’s seabirds still face the same threats that imperil seabirds worldwide: They can be caught accidentally in commercial fisheries, and overfishing and changing ocean conditions rob them of food. But small as it is, Tromelin Island shows that seabirds are resilient. If people can get rid of invasive predators, island restoration can work—sometimes stunningly.theatlantic.com
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The Power of Hearing Family Stories This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.As I watch my friends grow older and enter new phases of life, I’ve noticed a common thread: Year after year, many of us happen upon questions we wish we’d asked the loved ones who are no longer with us. Some of these questions are capacious: What kind of friend were they in their youth? Others focus on the everyday: What was the one song they couldn’t live without? And what, exactly, was that famous chocolate-cake recipe?It’s not realistic, of course, to ask every single question while we can. But sometimes our loved ones need a nudge to share a bit more than they might’ve otherwise: “You may be surprised by how much your parents and grandparents haven’t told you, perhaps because they thought you wouldn’t be interested, or they weren’t sure how you’d judge them,” Elizabeth Keating wrote in 2022. Opening that door can lead to insight you never knew existed.On Oral HistoryThe Questions We Don’t Ask Our Families but ShouldBy Elizabeth KeatingMany people don’t know very much about their older relatives. But if we don’t ask, we risk never knowing our own history.Read the article.The Underestimated Reliability of Oral HistoriesBy Stephen E. Nash and SapiensNot only written narratives have stood the test of time.Read the article.What Ordinary Family Photos Teach Us About OurselvesBy Syreeta McFaddenA new book honors unsung figures who have for generations captured the most delicate moments of Black life. (From 2023)Read the article.Still Curious? Learn your family’s history: Ordinary photos and stories can connect you with your roots, Kate Cray wrote in 2023. What kids learn from hearing family stories: Reading to children has education benefits, of course—but so does sharing tales from the past, Elaine Reese wrote in 2013. Other Diversions The strange ritual of commencement speeches Six books that explore what’s out there The godfather of American comedy P.S. Courtesy of Antoine A. I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Antoine A., 28, from Versailles, France, sent a photo of Solalex, “a small hamlet in Switzerland, at the foot of the Diablerets mountains.”I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks. If you’d like to share, reply to this email with a photo and a short description so we can share your wonder with fellow readers in a future edition of this newsletter or on our website. Please include your name (initials are okay), age, and location. By doing so, you agree that The Atlantic has permission to publish your photo and publicly attribute the response to you, including your first name and last initial, age, and/or location that you share with your submission.— Isabeltheatlantic.com
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God’s Doctors Nearly 20 million people gained health-insurance coverage between 2010 and 2016 under the Affordable Care Act. But about half of insured adults worry about affording their monthly premiums, while roughly the same number worry about affording their deductibles. At least six states don’t include dental coverage in Medicaid, and 10 still refuse to expand Medicaid to low-income adults under the ACA. Many people with addiction never get treatment.Religious groups have stepped in to offer help—food, community support, medical and dental care—to the desperate.Over nine months last year, the photographer Matt Eich documented the efforts of five such organizations in his home state of Virginia. These groups operate out of trailers and formerly abandoned buildings; they are led by pastors, nuns, reverends and imams. In many cases, they are the most trusted members of their communities, and they fill care gaps others can’t or won’t. —Bryce CovertThe Health WagonWise, Virginia A doctor visits with a patient at the Health Wagon in Wise, Virginia. March 14, 2023. The Health Wagon is the oldest mobile free clinic in the country. It was founded in 1980 by Sister Bernie Kenny, a Catholic nun and nurse practitioner, who first offered care out of a Volkswagen Beetle. Today it has four mobile units that operate out of RVs, plus two buildings that offer medical and dental care. It plans to soon open the first nonprofit pharmacy in the region.This is Appalachia—the western tip of the state, near the Kentucky border. The place has been hit hard by the opioid crisis, and residents suffer from high rates of cardiovascular disease, mental-health problems, diabetes, asthma, and cancer. “We’re the Lung Belt, we’re the Heart Belt, we’re the Kidney-Stone Belt,” Teresa Owens Tyson, who has been with the clinic since its early days and is now its CEO, told me. Most of the people the Health Wagon serves either don’t have insurance or have such high copays and deductibles that they can’t afford to use their policies. Tyson said she’s seen lines of people 1,600 deep waiting at the clinic at 6 a.m. Dental services are in particularly high demand: A 12-year-old recently came in whose teeth were so decayed, the child already needed dentures. Dr. Robert Kilgore takes a dental impression for dentures. March 14, 2023. A conference room at the Health Wagon. March 14, 2023. The RecLuray, Virginia Audre King, Director of The REC in Luray, Virginia on Friday, June 16, 2023. Reverend Audre King grew up in Luray. He went away to college, got married, and was living hours away in Northern Virginia when he says God told him in a dream to go back home and begin a ministry there. He tried to buy a long-abandoned building on his childhood block, but no bank would give him a loan. Finally, the owner agreed to sell it to him for cheap if he used it to serve the community. Digging out all of the dirt and dead animals and hooking the place up to electricity and water took months, but in 2017, the Rec was up and running.It now serves hundreds of hot meals in area where many people live in motels without kitchens. It also provides mental-health programming, kids’ activities, a computer lab, and fitness classes. “Our goal is that anything, for whatever reason, the town or county can’t or won’t be able to fund—a resource they won’t provide—we want to be that help,” King told me.All of its services are provided almost entirely by volunteers; the only person who gets paid is a bus driver who transports kids from their schools and homes to the Rec and back. King doesn’t take a salary for either the Rec or at the Eternal Restoration Church of God in Christ, where he serves as minister; he works for a gas company.When he preaches at the church, he’s teaching the Gospel, he told me; but at the Rec, he’s “living the Gospel.” He pointed to Matthew 25:35–40: “For I was hungry and you gave me food … I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me.” Audre King guides kids across Main Street before a group outing to a playground on Friday, June 16, 2023. Audre King and Damon Mendez play basketball with participants from the REC. June 16, 2023 Left: Lunch time at the REC. Right: Damon Mendez carries a speaker into the REC. June 16, 2023 CrossOver Healthcare MinistryRichmond, Virginia Marilyn Metzler, a registered nurse who has volunteered for 27 years, speaks with Father Markorieos Ava Mina at CrossOver Healthcare Ministry in Richmond, Virginia. June 1, 2023. Last fiscal year, CrossOver treated more than 6,700 patients, over half of whom came from other countries as immigrants and refugees. Most undocumented immigrants can’t access Medicaid; those who can may still struggle to navigate the complex health-care system, especially if English isn’t their first language. The interdenominational group runs two free clinics offering primary care as well as cardiology and pulmonology, OB-GYN care, dental and vision care, behavioral-health services, pediatric care for children over 3, and a low-cost pharmacy. CrossOver relies on more than 400 volunteers to see patients, and still can’t open up enough appointments for everyone who comes seeking care: “We turn away about 30 to 35 people a week,” Julie Bilodeau, the group’s CEO, told me. Scenes from CrossOver Healthcare Ministry. June 1, 2023. Maria Santiago Morente receives an ultrasound from Laurel Wallace, D.O., a volunteer at CrossOver Healthcare Ministry on Thursday, June 1, 2023. Adams Compassionate Healthcare NetworkChantilly, VirginiaAbout 10 years ago, Yahya Alvi applied for a job at the Adams Compassionate Healthcare Network, half an hour from Washington, D.C. The organization’s president told him that his dream was to open a free clinic. “That is my passion,” Alvi responded. He started by securing empty space at a nearby mosque and taking free equipment from a clinic that was giving it away. At the beginning, he employed only one doctor and himself, and the clinic was open just one day a week.Today, it operates six days a week and has two paid nurse practitioners in addition to the two doctors. The clinic was founded by Muslims, but it accepts anyone without insurance or the money to pay for medical care, from anywhere in the country and practicing any religion. “Our religion says that all human beings are created by God almighty,” Alvi told me. “And all deserve equal treatment.” ADAMS Compassionate Healthcare Network in Chantilly, Virginia. November 13, 2023. A patient receives an eye examination from a volunteer doctor at Adams. August 12, 2023. Left: Tori Finney, a volunteer, measures a patient at Adams. August 12, 2023. Right: Dr. Fathiya Warsame helps a patient at Adams. November 13, 2023. Dr. Sadia Ali Aden, the executive director of Adams Compassionate Healthcare Network. November 13, 2023. Adams Compassionate Healthcare Network. November 13, 2023. Madam Russell United MethodistSaltville, Virginia Pastor Lisa Bryant at Madam Russell Memorial United Methodist Church in Saltville, Virginia. March 13, 2023. One day in 2021, Steve Hunt was on the side of the road, trying to hitchhike to a grocery store about seven miles from his home in Saltville, Virginia. Hunt had lost his sight a few years earlier, after an infection in his leg went septic and he fell and knocked his retinas loose. Lisa Bryant saw him when she pulled up at a stop sign. She’s a pastor, and she had just finished a service at one church and had to be at another in an hour. She was in a hurry. But just the week before, she had preached about Jesus calling his followers to bring the blind and suffering to him. She gave Hunt a ride. The interaction came at a crucial time for Hunt. “I was at bottom at that point,” he told me. His house was strewn with glass shards because he kept breaking things. He was struggling with addiction. “Everything was falling down around me, mentally and emotionally,” he said. “I was asking God to kill me that day she picked me up.”Instead, Hunt started going to the new 12-step program Bryant had started at her main church, Madam Russell United Methodist. “They just kind of pulled around me, supported me,” he said of the congregation. He’s helped Bryant expand that program, the only one in a town where opioid use is rife but all the addiction-recovery programs are oversubscribed. Bryant has also set up community-service opportunities at her church for people convicted of drug offenses, and is working to secure transitional housing for people dealing with addiction. Bryant doesn’t think the point of being a Christian is just to get to heaven after death, but to see the kingdom of heaven on Earth, too. She’s realized that “giving these people a new community, a healthy community, is one of the best things we can do for them,” she said. “We all need each other. That’s just how we’re created.” People gather before a meeting of the Saltville 12 Step Recovery Group in the basement of Madam Russell Memorial United Methodist Church. March 13, 2023. Saltville, Virginia. March 13, 2023. Support for this story was provided by the Magnum Foundation, in partnership with the Commonwealth Fund.theatlantic.com
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Taylor Swift Is a Skeleton Key to the Internet It is nighttime in Paris. We are more than a year into Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and tonight, her fans are once again trying to figure out what her clothes mean.The star is in a glittering yellow-and-red two-piece set, a possible reference to the colors of the Kansas City Chiefs, the football team Swift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce, plays on. This is also the 87th performance in the tour, and—aha!—Kelce wears jersey number 87. The hundreds of thousands of fans watching along through bootlegged livestreams on TikTok and YouTube have solved another mystery.This is the beginning of the European leg of Eras, which will stretch on and on until Swift returns to North America this fall and plays the final show of the tour on December 8 (that is, assuming she doesn’t extend it, as she has multiple times already). You’d think people would have lost interest by now. But Taylor Swift has kept fans’ attention by tapping into an algorithmic machine unlike anyone has before her.Swift is savvy, and leverages social-media culture to her advantage. Over her 18-year career, she has trained her fandom to inspect everything she does for Easter eggs; she knows that even a small reveal can send people into a frenzy. She likes to leave clues about upcoming music in her outfits, in music videos, even in commercials she films with brands. She knows people are interested in her personal life—her romances, her feuds—and capitalizes on that, leaving them hints in her liner notes or in song titles.In response, fans analyze dates and look for numbers that add up to 13, her favorite number. They create spreadsheets of every single outfit she’s worn on tour, methodically tracking each surprise song she’s played. They chat nonstop across platforms, swapping elaborate theories to try to decode when the next album is coming or whom each song is about. For more than half a decade, they’ve been convinced that there’s a lost album called Karma, which was shelved in the mid-2010s amid Swift’s feud with Kanye West (now known as Ye) and Kim Kardashian. According to one theory, the orange outfits she’s been wearing in Paris are a sign that she’ll release music from Karma. It’s like QAnon, if QAnon involved a lot of DIY rhinestone boots.[Read: The real Taylor Swift would never]Swifties don’t storm the Capitol, but they will flood Kardashian’s Instagram with snake emoji in response to Swift talking about the pain their fight brought her, just as they will fight Ticketmaster when the company botches her concert-ticket rollout. Their thinking is often conspiratorial. In one recent TikTok, a fan argued that Swift would be releasing something on May 3, according to this logic: A recent screenshot of a music-video still posted to Swift’s team’s Instagram included the letter-and-number combination 14.3V—Swift’s latest music video was for “Fortnight,” and a fortnight is two weeks; two weeks is 14 days. One plus four equals five. The three rounds it out: Something’s happening on the 3rd. The V is actually the Roman numeral for five. (May 3 came and went without a release.)Extreme cliques might be one side effect of our digital culture. “Our algorithms and media are designed to produce fandoms around consumption goods,” Petter Törnberg, a professor of computational social science at the University of Amsterdam, told me over email. “There is hence a fundamental similarity between Swifties, Apple-fans and MAGA Republicans: our current era has the tendency of turning our preferences into identities, and shaping a form of postmodern tribes around both consumption goods and political leaders.” (See also: fans of Beyoncé and BTS.)In other words: Social platforms can have a radicalizing effect on fandoms. When we study algorithmic radicalization, we tend to do so in the context of politics, but the same systems might also calcify our beliefs about cultural products. Yet we still have a fairly limited understanding of how all of this works. “The very best studies we have are still really struggling to detect effects, because there’s so many challenges when you try to study this stuff,” Chris Bail, the founding director of the Polarization Lab at Duke University, told me.No one single algorithm powers this fandom. It operates across platforms; in a single day, a Swift fan might stream her music on Spotify, watch her music videos on YouTube, and consume posts about her on TikTok. All of these sites have distinct recommendation systems. Companies also tend to keep these systems a secret, making them hard to research.But we can say this: Algorithms tend to reinforce what’s already popular, because attention attracts more attention. Growth begets growth, as Törnberg put it. In this way, Swift also demonstrates how platforms that supposedly target content based on an individual’s interests can, in fact, end up clustering around one monolithic force. “It just seems like, Oh, that’s sort of weird, I thought everybody was supposed to have their own algorithmic niche now,” Nick Seaver, the author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation, told me. “And instead—I mean, maybe in addition to that—we also all have Taylor Swift.”[Read: Nobody knows what’s happening online anymore]Our modern Swiftocracy is a reminder that we are still subject to strange algorithmic forces, even as the web is supposedly fractured. Yet the consequences of this can be as hard to decode as an Easter egg dropped by Swift. On her final show in Paris, she opted for a “berry”-red dress for the Folklore section of her set. It may be a sign of something to come. Or not.theatlantic.com
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Why the Internet Is Boring Now 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.Ian Bogost has lived through more than a few hype cycles on the internet. The Atlantic contributing writer has been online, and building websites, since the early days of the World Wide Web. I spoke with him about what happens when new technologies age into the mainstream, how the web has in some ways been a victim of its own success, and the parts of the internet that still delight him.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: The spat that made Congress even worse The “America First” chaos caucus is forcing a moment of truth. Your childhood home might never stop haunting you. The Web Is FineLora Kelley: Is it fair to say everything online is deteriorating? Or is that too dramatic?Ian Bogost: It’s easy to focus on the stuff that seems bad or broken, because it is noticeable and also because the internet is built for complaining about things. And it’s natural that one of the things we like to complain about the most on the internet is the internet itself. But there’s a lot of stuff online that’s really amazing, and we should be careful to keep that in mind.The things that feel like deterioration are the result of a saturated market. There’s no longer any incentive for tech products to be as good for consumers as they once were. That’s in part a cost issue—a lot of tech was effectively subsidized for years. But also, the delightful or even just straightforwardly functional services created years ago don’t have to be quite so friendly and usable. Because of their success, there’s not as much of a need to satisfy people anymore.These products are now like a lot of other things in our offline lives—fine. When you go to buy a car or a mattress or whatever, it’s just kind of the way it is. We’ve reached that level of cultural ubiquity with computers.Lora: Is it inevitable that products will become boring once they become the mainstream? Is there any way around that, or are we stuck in a cycle of novelty to boredom?Ian: That’s the cycle, and it’s good. Boredom means that something is successful. When things are new, they feel wild and exciting. We don’t know what they mean yet, and there’s a lot of promise—maybe even fear.But for something to truly become successful at a massive scale—for millions or billions of people to develop a relationship with a product or service—the product has to recede into the background again and become ordinary. And once it reaches that point, you stop thinking about it quite so much. You take it for granted.Lora: You have written about your experience using, and building websites on, the internet in the ’90s. What parallels do you see between the early web and this current moment of generative AI?Ian: I remember living through the early days of the web, and we never had any idea that millions and billions of people would be using these data-extraction services. None of that occurred to us at the time. I don’t think there’s a very strong cultural memory of the early days of the web. We have a lot of stories about the excesses of the dot-com era, but the more ordinary stuff didn’t get recorded in the same way.Everything that we did, we had to convince some old-world business that it was worth doing. It was a process of bringing the offline world online. In the decades since, technologists have started disrupting the legacy businesses and sectors through innovation. And that worked really well from the perspective of building markets and building wealth. But it didn’t necessarily make the world better.Generative AI feels more like those early days of the web than social media or the Web 2.0 era did. It’s my hope that maybe we’ll go about this in a way that draws from the lessons learned over the past 30 years—which, of course, we probably won’t. Technologists shouldn’t be trying to blow things up; rather, they should make use of what technology allows in order to do things better, more equitably, and more effectively.Lora: In 2024, do you still find the web to be a site of wonder?Ian: Being able to talk to family and friends as much as I want, for free, is still historically unusual and delightful. The fundamental feature of the internet still exists: I can look out and get a little buzz of delight just from seeing something new.Related: The web became a strip mall. Social media is not what killed the web. Today’s News A New York Times report found that an upside-down flag, a “Stop the Steal” symbol, flew at Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house in January 2021, when the Supreme Court was considering whether to hear a 2020 election case. The man who bludgeoned Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022 was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison. He is awaiting a state trial later this month. Daniel Perry, a former Army sergeant who was convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020, was released from prison yesterday after Texas Governor Greg Abbott granted him a pardon. Dispatches The Books Briefing: Alice Munro’s death was an occasion to praise her life as a writer as much as her actual work, Gal Beckerman writes. Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Illustration by Max Guther The One Place in Airports People Actually Want to BeBy Amanda Mull On a bright, chilly Thursday in February, most of the people inside the Chase Sapphire Lounge at LaGuardia Airport appeared to be doing something largely absent from modern air travel: They were having fun. I arrived at Terminal B before 9:30 a.m., but the lounge had already been in full swing for hours. Most of the velvet-upholstered stools surrounding the circular, marble-topped bar were filled. Travelers who looked like they were heading to couples’ getaways or girls’ weekends clustered in twos or threes, waiting for their mimosas or Bloody Marys … While I ate my breakfast—a brussels-sprout-and-potato hash with bacon and a poached egg ordered using a QR code, which also offered me the opportunity to book a gratis half-hour mini-facial in the lounge’s wellness area—I listened to the 30-somethings at the next table marveling about how nice this whole thing was. That’s not a sentiment you’d necessarily expect to hear about the contrived luxury of an airport lounge. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic Graeme Wood: The UN’s Gaza statistics make no sense. Many Indians don’t trust their elections anymore. Giant heaps of plastic are helping vegetables grow. Culture Break Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. RIP. The dream of streaming is dead, Jacob Stern writes. The bundles are back.Pick apart. The sad desk salad, a meal that is synonymous with young, overworked white-collar professionals, is getting sadder, Yasmin Tayag writes.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.theatlantic.com
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The Spat That Made Congress Even Worse Three high-profile women in Congress got into it last night during a meeting of the House Oversight Committee, in what some outlets have described as a “heated exchange.” But that label feels too dignified. Instead, the whole scene played out like a Saturday Night Live sketch: a cringeworthy five-minute commentary on the miserable state of American politics.Unless you are perpetually online, you may have missed the drama. I’ll recap: The scene unfolded during a meeting held to consider a Republican motion to—what else?—hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to release audio from President Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur. So things were already off to a wild start. Then, after her line of questioning went off the rails, Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene took a jab at Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas: “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”The personal remark was rude and certainly lacked decorum, which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rightly pointed out: “How dare you attack the appearance of another person?” And she demanded that the words be struck from the record. Greene, of course, was not chastened.“Aww, are your feelings hurt?” the Georgia Republican shot back at Ocasio-Cortez, in a pitch-perfect impression of a schoolyard bully.“Oh, girl. Baby girl, you do not want to play,” Ocasio-Cortez replied, letting decorum slip on her side. It looked as if the committee was about to witness fisticuffs. Moments later, Crockett chimed in with a question for the committee’s Republican chairman, Jim Comer of Kentucky, that was actually an idiosyncratic barb directed toward Greene. “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling, if someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”Comer was clearly confused, “A what now?”The exchange felt like a bizarro session of British Parliament’s famously combative, point-scoring Prime Minister’s Questions, only the accents were worse, the insults were at least 50 percent less clever, and instead of congressional business as usual, it felt like watching business fall apart.At first, admittedly, seeing people stand up to Greene’s bullying was heartening. An unabashed troll, she pulled the stunt of wearing a MAGA cap and heckling President Joe Biden at his State of the Union address. And mocking the eyelashes of a colleague at a congressional hearing? That’s next-level mean-girl garbage.Unfortunately, the unedifying display in the House Oversight Committee only produced more incentives for bad political behavior. Progressive posters on X praised Crockett’s alliterative insult. Even LeVar Burton, the former host of the children’s TV series Reading Rainbow, applauded her: “Words of the day; bleach, blond, bad, built, butch and body …” Burton wrote on X.Really, no one comes off looking good here. This may sound sanctimonious, but: Members of Congress should be better than personal insults and body-shaming commentary. And both Ocasio-Cortez and Crockett have to know by now that, as the idiom goes, wrestling with pigs makes everyone look sloppy. What would Michelle Obama—patron saint of Democrats, who famously instructed Democrats to high when Republicans go low—think about Crockett’s response?Zoomed out, this unseemly episode is just one more sad example of partisanship and performance politics, two forces that continue to rile Americans up and drive us apart. Our politicians are not exactly covering themselves in glory right now. Back in 2009, Joe Wilson shocked the country when he yelled “You lie!” at President Barack Obama during his State of the Union address. Cut to January of this year, when Republicans heckled Biden, and he swapped jibes with them like a comedian at a low-rent comedy club.While the leader of the Republican Party is on trial in New York, GOP lawmakers have been on a weeklong prostration tour, flying from all corners of the country to gather like eager groupies outside the courtroom, desperate for a chance to impress the boss. In addition, a Senate Democrat from New Jersey is on trial for taking bribes and acting as a foreign agent, and a Democratic congressman from Texas is facing his own charges of corruption.Biden, an institutionalist, likes to appeal to our better angels and assure Americans, This is not who we are. Maybe not. But this is definitely who we elected.Illustration Sources: Nathan Howard / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; Samuel Corum / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty.theatlantic.com
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The Sad Desk Salad Is Getting Sadder Every day, the blogger Alex Lyons orders the same salad from the same New York City bodega and eats it in the same place: her desk. She eats it while working so that she can publish a story before “prime time”—the midday lunch window when her audience of office workers scrolls mindlessly on their computers while gobbling down their own salad. Lyons is the protagonist of Sad Desk Salad, the 2012 novel by Jessica Grose that gave a name to not just a type of meal but a common experience: attempting to simultaneously maximize both health and productivity because—and this is the sad part—there’s never enough time to devote to either.The sad desk salad has become synonymous with people like Lyons: young, overworked white-collar professionals contemplating how salad can help them self-optimize. Chains such as Sweetgreen and Chopt have thrived in big coastal cities, slinging “guacamole greens” and “spicy Sonoma Caesars” in to-go bowls that can be picked up between meetings. The prices can creep toward $20, reinforcing their fancy reputation.But fast salad has gone mainstream. Sweetgreen and similar salad chains have expanded out of city centers into the suburbs, where they are reaching a whole new population of hungry workers. Other salad joints are selling salad faster than ever—in some cases, at fast-food prices. Along the way, the sad desk salad has become even sadder.Anything can make for a sad desk lunch, but there’s something unique about salads. Don’t get me wrong: They can be delicious. I have spent embarrassing amounts of money on sad desk salads, including one I picked at while writing this article. Yet unlike, say, a burrito or sushi, which at least feel like little indulgences, the main reason to eat a salad is because it’s nutritious. It’s fuel—not fun. Even when there isn’t time for a lunch break, there is always time for arugula.[Read: Don’t believe the salad millionaire]During the early pandemic, the sad desk salad seemed doomed. Workers sitting at a desk at home rather than in the office could fish out greens from the refrigerator crisper drawer instead of paying $16. Even if they wanted to, most of the locations were in downtown cores, not residential neighborhoods.But the sad desk salad has not just returned—it’s thriving. Take Sweetgreen, maybe the most well-known purveyor. It bet that Americans would still want its salads no matter where they are working, and so far, that has paid off. The company has been expanding to the suburbs since at least 2020 and has been spreading ever since. In 2023, it opened stores in Milwaukee, Tampa, and Rhode Island; last week, when Sweetgreen reported that its revenue jumped 26 percent over the previous year, executives attributed that growth to expansion into smaller cities. Most of its locations are in the suburbs, and most of its future stores would be too.Sweetgreen is not the only company to have made that gamble. Chopt previously announced that it would open 80 percent of its new stores in the suburbs; the Minnesota-based brand Crisp & Green is eyeing the fringes of midwestern cities. Salad has become so entrenched as a lunch option that even traditional fast-food giants such as Wendy’s and Dairy Queen have introduced salad bowls in recent years. Maybe the most novel of all is Salad and Go, an entirely drive-through chain that sells salads for less than $7. It opened a new store roughly every week last year, and now has more than 100 locations across Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Texas, with plans to expand to Southern California and the Southeast. Its CEO, Charlie Morrison, has positioned it as a cheap and convenient alternative to unhealthy options: a rival not to Sweetgreen, but to McDonald’s.Indeed, sad desk salads can be made with shocking speed. According to Morrison, you can drive off with your salad in less than four minutes. Other chains including Just Salad and Chopt are opening up drive-through lanes to boost convenience. Sweetgreen, which has also dabbled with the drive-through, has installed salad-assembling robots in several locations, which can reportedly make 500 salads an hour.[Read: Your fast food is already automated]Greater accessibility to salad, in general, is a good thing. America could stand to eat a lot more of it. No doubt some salads will be consumed outside of work: on a park bench with friends, perhaps, or on a blanket at the beach—a girl can dream! But surely many of them will be packed, ordered, and picked up with frightening speed, only to maximize the time spent working in the glow of a computer screen, the crunching of lettuce punctuated by the chirping of notifications.As I lunched on kale and brussels sprouts while writing this story, my silent hope was that they might offset all the bad that I was doing to my body by sitting at my desk for almost eight hours straight. Dining while distracted makes overeating more likely; sitting for long stretches raises the risk of diabetes and heart disease. People who take proper lunch breaks, in contrast, have improved mental health, less burnout, and more energy. No kind of cheap, fast salad can make up for working so fervidly that taking a few minutes off to enjoy a salad is not possible or even desirable.Earlier this month, Sweetgreen introduced a new menu item you can add to its bowls: steak. The company’s CEO said that, during testing, it was a “dinnertime favorite.” That the sad desk salad could soon creep into other mealtimes may be the saddest thing yet.theatlantic.com
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The Dream of Streaming Is Dead Remember when streaming was supposed to let us watch whatever we want, whenever we want, for a sliver of the cost of cable? Well, so much for that. In recent years, streaming has gotten confusing and expensive as more services than ever are vying for eyeballs. It has done the impossible: made people miss the good old-fashioned cable bundle.Now the bundles are back. Last week, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery announced that, starting this summer, they will offer a streaming bundle of Disney+, Hulu, and Max. Then, on Tuesday, Comcast said that next month it will introduce a streaming bundle of its own, packaging Peacock, Apple TV+, and Netflix. This bundle, called StreamSaver, will be available only to Comcast’s broadband, mobile, and TV customers. Some smaller mini-bundles already exist, but for the most part, the streaming wars had become a battle royale—no alliances, everyone for themselves. Now the combatants have aligned in two blocs, sort of like the Avengers versus the Justice League—except that, confusingly, Marvel movies (Disney) and DC movies (Max) are now part of the same bloc.It’s not cable, but it’s not not cable either. Streaming hasn’t quite come full circle, but it’s three-quarters of the way around. These bundles are ending an entire era of streaming, with its unsatisfying free-for-all of services. This new era may well be better than the one before it. But the dream of streaming as a cheaper, better version of cable is dead.For a while, it did actually exist. When Netflix launched its streaming service back in 2007, the company pretty much dominated the market without much serious competition. You could watch basically everything with no ads, and for less than $10 a month. Then, beginning at the tail end of the 2010s, all of the big legacy entertainment companies tried to get in on the action. “For much of the past four years, the entertainment industry spent money like drunken sailors to fight the first salvos of the streaming wars,” the media-industry analyst Michael Nathanson wrote in November. The current streaming landscape, despite offering unprecedented abundance, is a nightmare to navigate. To watch entertainment now requires wading through a frustrating array of streaming services: Netflix, Prime Video, and Hulu, yes, but also Peacock, Paramount+, AMC+, and others.But this hasn’t brought in the types of profits that companies hoped for. Last year, Disney, Comcast, and Paramount collectively lost several billion dollars on streaming. Making and licensing shows and movies, it turns out, is not cheap. And people are willing to pay for only so many streaming subscriptions. Even when the new services managed to attract subscribers, they weren’t able to hold on to them; in industry parlance, churn was too high. Streaming services have tried to recoup their losses by raising prices, creating ad tiers, and cracking down on password sharing.Going it alone hasn’t worked, so now they’re teaming up. Neither mega-bundle has announced details about costs, but Comcast’s StreamSaver will be sold “at a vastly reduced price” relative to individually subscribing to all three services, the company’s CEO, Brian Roberts, said during the announcement this week. Packaged together and sold at a discount, each streaming service will make less per subscription, but perhaps collectively they will be more competitive and hold on to more of their subscribers. That’s the idea, anyway.For consumers, these bundles are probably a good thing. There’s a reason so many people rejoiced at the prospect of cutting the cord—but cable was simple. With streaming, keeping track of all your accounts and all your passwords and where to watch whatever you want to watch—that is not simple. And then, just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, one of the services you subscribe to informs you that you’ll have to shell out for the premium tier if you want to watch a certain show or movie. If you can convert three separate subscriptions into a single cheaper one, as the new deals will seemingly allow some people to do, that’s a win.The new bundles don’t exactly restore order and sanity. The array of overlapping options is itself confusing. In addition to the Disney+/Hulu/Max bundle, there is also a Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ bundle, which does not include Max. But if you really want to watch sports, you’ll presumably go for the ESPN/Fox/Warner Bros. Discovery bundle, named Venu Sports. And if you’re a Verizon myPlan customer, you can subscribe to a Netflix/Max bundle—even though those two services are part of opposing three-service bundles, as announced over the past two weeks. Making matters even more complicated, some of the bundlers are already themselves bundles. Disney owns Hulu and ESPN. Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN and Max. Bundles are bundling with bundles.Even more bundles are likely in the works, and they may save people some money. But they will not resolve the fundamental tension in what people want out of cable, or streaming, or whatever it is that serves them up stuff to watch. On the one hand, we like having everything in one place. On the other, we don’t like paying a lot of money for things we don’t use. Cable satisfied the former desire but not the latter. Streaming, after the fleeting honeymoon period when you could find almost anything on Netflix, satisfied the latter but not the former. With the new bundles, the streamers are trying to strike a balance between the total consolidation of cable and the total chaos of streaming. That new balance may well be superior to the status quo, but the trade-off between having things in one place and paying for things you don’t need will remain. As long as it does, we’ll never feel totally satisfied.theatlantic.com
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Back to Bland Watching Back to Black, the new Amy Winehouse biopic, made me want to look up footage of the late British singer to be reminded of her originality and her liveliness, which no work of fiction could hope to ever fully capture. But in the search process, I ended up staring, for an inordinate amount of time, at Funko Pop dolls. Winehouse has been sold in three versions of the ubiquitous collectible figurines. Each affixes her trademark Cleopatra makeup to the same blank, black eyes that grace the Funkos of superheroes, sports mascots, and various other figures who did not sing songs about oblivion and then die of alcohol poisoning at age 27.To say that Back to Black gives Winehouse the Funko treatment on the big screen would not quite be fair; the movie renders her life with some intelligence, mercy, and painterly craft. But it certainly partakes in the tradition of turning a complex human being into a generic image, defined by superficial traits and tics, for other people to project their feelings upon. No great entertainer ever escapes this fate, but Back to Black should be an occasion to ask why cultural canonization requires such a relentless sanitizing process, and who is served by this sugarcoating.Back to Black begins with the adolescent Winehouse (played by Marisa Abela) at home with her boisterous, working-class Jewish family, singing jazz standards together. The spicy and sad songs she writes in her bedroom soon earn her international stardom—though she’s far less interested in the fame game than in her romance with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), whom the film portrays as a pub-dwelling bad boy who snorts cocaine before breakfast. Her cabbie father, Mitch (Eddie Marsan); her flinty grandmother, Cynthia (Lesley Manville); and her manager Nick (Sam Buchanan) try to steer her toward stability, while paparazzi, industry pressures, and drugs tip her toward destruction. Winehouse’s real-life trajectory was chaotic, but Sam Taylor-Johnson’s filmmaking relays the emotional beats in appealingly direct ways. During Winehouse’s exciting come-up, London’s graffiti pops colorfully in the background; later, as she sinks into drugs and isolation, the city feels dead and desaturated.Abela is a remarkable actor best known for her role on the HBO and BBC banking drama Industry. That show subverts her pageant-worthy poise and winsomeness; she plays a devil disguised as an ingenue. But in Back to Black, she’s playing an ingenue disguised as one of the most caustic and willful pop stars ever. Abela nails many of Winehouse’s mannerisms, though the mouth movements she makes while singing scat vocals do look like something Kristen Wiig would do on Saturday Night Live. The bigger problem is that her version of Winehouse is unshakably sweet and hapless, a puppy dog in smeared eyeliner. Each defiant or self-destructive choice she makes therefore feels oddly under-motivated, even arbitrary.[Read: Is old music killing new music?]This is more the fault of the script than the acting. The film does not really attempt a coherent argument about what forces created such a sui generis artist, or about the ones that drove her to doom. It touches lightly upon various themes of her story—such as the U.K. tabloid industry’s savagery—without saying much about them. The one point of emphasis is Winehouse’s pivotal and intense relationship with Fielder-Civil. Their temporary breakup inspired the lyrics of her breakthrough album, Back to Black, and the best sequence of the film depicts her recording that masterpiece while stunned numb from heartbreak. But the film fails to conjure an on-screen version of Fielder-Civil with any charm, much less a perspective. The viewer is left feeling, as many onlookers at the time were, baffled by the romance.Back to Black’s cast and crew have talked proudly about not portraying anyone as a “villain,” cutting against media narratives blaming Fielder-Civil, Mitch, or anyone else for Winehouse’s struggles. The film wants to be a counterweight to the 2015 documentary Amy, which collaged material from throughout Winehouse’s life to disturbing effect. Some viewers condemned that film for using lurid paparazzi footage of Winehouse at her lowest, and Mitch has said he was portrayed unfairly. But whatever the validity of such critiques, Amy did attempt to place Winehouse’s life within a complex web of cause and effect, personal and cultural. After all, if we are going to re-create a tragedy, should we not try to understand it?Back to Black, by contrast, just makes entertainment out of a saga that was, and should be, excruciating to witness. Winehouse is reduced to a list of traits—beehive hair, jazz inflections, inexorable addiction—that can be easily reproduced in merchandise and licensing for many more years to come. What’s especially jarring is that the film romanticizes Winehouse’s distaste for stardom, careerism, and money itself (“I ain’t no Spice Girl,” she says early on). The image of the iconoclastic, pure artist remains broadly marketable; the ideals behind that image, less so.theatlantic.com
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Winners of the GDT Nature Photographer of the Year 2024 The German Society for Nature Photography (GDT) just announced the winning images in its annual members-only photo competition, selected from more than 8,000 entries in seven categories, including Birds, Mammals, Other Animals, Plants & Fungi, Landscapes, and Nature’s Studio. Contest organizers were kind enough to share some of the winning and honored photographs with us below.To receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.theatlantic.com
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The Sadistic History of Reality Television More than a decade after watching it, I still get twitchy thinking about “White Bear,” an early episode of Black Mirror that stands as one of the most discomfiting installments of television I’ve seen. A woman (played by Lenora Crichlow) groggily wakes up in a strange house whose television sets are broadcasting the same mysterious symbol. When she goes outside, the people she encounters silently film her on their phones or menacingly wield shotguns and chainsaws. Eventually, trapped in a deserted building, the woman seizes a gun and shoots one of her tormentors, but the weapon surprises her by firing confetti instead of bullets. The walls around her suddenly swing open; she’s revealed to be the star of a sadistic live event devised to punish her repeatedly for a crime she once committed but can’t remember. “In case you haven’t guessed … you aren’t very popular,” the show’s host tells the terrified woman, as the audience roars its approval. “But I’ll tell you what you are, though. You’re famous.”“White Bear” indelibly digs into a number of troublesome 21st-century media phenomena: a populace numbed into passive consumption of cruel spectacle, the fetishistic rituals of public shaming, the punitive nature of many “reality” shows. The episode’s grand reveal, a television staple by the time it premiered in 2013, is its own kind of punishment: The extravagant theatrics serve as a reminder that everything that’s happened to the woman has been a deliberate construction—a series of manipulations in service of other people’s entertainment.The contrast between the aghast subject and the gleeful audience, clapping like seals, is almost too jarring to bear. And yet a version of this moment really happened, as seen about an hour into The Contestant, Hulu’s dumbfounding documentary about a late-’90s Japanese TV experiment. For 15 months, a wannabe comedian called Tomoaki Hamatsu (nicknamed “Nasubi,” or “eggplant,” in reference to the length of his head) has been confined, naked, to a single room filled with magazines, and tasked with surviving—and winning his way out, if he could hit a certain monetary target—by entering competitions to win prizes. The entire time, without his knowledge or consent, he’s also been broadcast on a variety show called Susunu! Denpa Shōnen.Before he’s freed, Nasubi is blindfolded, dressed for travel, transported to a new location, and led into a small room that resembles the one he’s been living in. Wearily, accepting that he’s not being freed but merely moved, he takes off his clothes as if to return to his status quo. Then, the walls collapse around him to reveal the studio, the audience, the stage, the cameras. Confetti flutters through the air. Nasubi immediately grabs a pillow to conceal his genitals. “My house fell down,” he says, in shock. The audience cackles at his confusion. “Why are they laughing?” he asks. They laugh even harder.Since The Contestant debuted earlier this month, reviews and responses have homed in on how outlandish its subject matter is, dubbing it a study of the “most evil reality show ever” and “a terrifying and bizarre true story.” The documentary focuses intently on Nasubi’s experience, contrasting his innocence and sweetness with the producer who tormented him, a Machiavellian trickster named Toshio Tsuchiya. Left unstudied, though, is the era the series emerged from. The late ’90s embodied an anything-goes age of television: In the United States, series such as Totally Hidden Video and Shocking Behavior Caught on Tape drew millions of viewers by humiliating people caught doing dastardly things on camera. But Tsuchiya explains that he had a more anthropological mission in mind. “We were trying to show the most basic primitive form of human being,” he tells The Contestant’s director. Nasubi was Tsuchiya’s grand human experiment.The cruelty with which Nasubi was treated seems horrifying now, and outrageously unethical. Before he started winning contests, he got by on a handful of crackers fed to him by the producers, then fiber jelly (one of his first successful prizes), then dog food. His frame whittles down in front of our eyes. “If he hadn’t won rice, he would have died,” a producer says, casually. The question of why Nasubi didn’t just leave the room hangs in the air, urgent and mostly unexamined. “Staying put, not causing trouble is the safest option,” Nasubi explains in the documentary. “It’s a strange psychological state. You lose the will to escape.”But the timing of his confinement also offers a clue about why he might have stayed. 1998, when the comedian was first confined, was a moment in flux, caught between the technological innovations that were rapidly changing mass culture and the historical atrocities of the 20th century. Enabled by the internet, lifecasters such as Jennifer Ringley were exposing their unfiltered lives online as a kind of immersive sociological experiment. Webcams allowed exhibitionists and curious early adopters to present themselves up for observation as novel subjects in a human zoo. Even before the release of The Truman Show, which came out in the U.S. a few months after Nasubi was first put on camera, a handful of provocateur producers were brainstorming new formats for unscripted television, egged on by the uninhibited bravado and excess of ’90s media. These creators acted as all-seeing, all-knowing authorities whose word was absolute. And their subjects, not yet familiar with the “rules” of an emerging genre, often didn’t know what they were allowed to contest. Of Tsuchiya, Nasubi remembers, “It was almost like I was worshiping a god.”In his manipulation of Nasubi, Tsuchiya was helping pioneer a new kind of art form, one that would lead to the voyeurism of 2000s series such as Big Brother and Survivor, not to mention more recent shows such Married at First Sight and Love Is Blind. But the spectacle of Nasubi’s confinement also represented a hypothesis that had long preoccupied creators and psychologists alike, and that reality television has never really moved on from. If you manufacture absurd, monstrous situations with which to torment unwitting dupes, what will they do? What will we learn? And, most vital to the people in charge, how many viewers will be compelled to watch?Some popular-culture historians consider the first reality show to be MTV’s The Real World, a 1992 series that deliberately provoked conflict by putting strangers together in an unfamiliar environment. Others cite PBS’s 1973 documentary series An American Family, which filmed a supposedly prototypical California household over several months, in a conceit that the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called the “dissolution of TV in life, dissolution of life in TV.”But the origins of what happened to Nasubi seem to lie most directly in a series that ran on and off from 1948 to 2014: Candid Camera. Its creator, Allen Funt, was a radio operator in the Army Signal Corps during World War II; while stationed in Oklahoma, he set up a “gripe booth” for soldiers to record their complaints about military service. Knowing they were being taped, the subjects held back, which led Funt to record people secretly in hopes of capturing more honest reactions. His first creative effort was The Candid Microphone, a radio show. The series put its subjects in perplexing situations to see how they’d respond: Funt gave strangers exploding cigarettes, asked a baker to make a “disgusting” birthday cake, and even chained his secretary to his desk and hired a locksmith to “free” her for her lunch break. “With the candid microphone, we are at the beginning of the Age of the Involuntary Amateur,” one critic wrote in 1947. “The possibilities are limitless; the prospect is horrifying.” Sure enough, a TV series soon followed.For all that critic’s revulsion, Funt was earnest about the potentially revelatory power of his shows. He was seemingly influenced by two parallel trends. One was a sociological school of thought that was trying urgently to analyze human nature following a wave of real barbarities: the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin’s great purges. The other was an interest in art that captured the contours of real life, in an outgrowth of the naturalist movement that had come out of the late 19th century. Émile Zola, one of its practitioners, argued in The Experimental Novel that fiction writers were essentially omnipotent forces dropping characters into realistic situations to consider how they might respond. Literature, he argued, was “a real experiment that a novelist makes on man.”The invention of television, as the academic Tony E. Jackson has argued, offered a more literal and scientific medium within which creators could manipulate real human subjects. This was where Candid Camera came into play. Funt’s practical jokes—setting up a subject in an elevator in which every other person suddenly turns their back to him—tended to consider the nature of compliance, and what humans will go along with rather than be outliers. Candid Camera was considered so rich a work that Funt was asked to donate episodes to Cornell University’s psychology department for further study.Funt was also highly influential to Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist who turned his Yale studies on conformity into a documentary titled Obedience. The Milgram experiment, conducted in 1961, asked members of the public to inflict fellow subjects with electric shocks—faked, unknown to them—when ordered to do so by an authority figure. Inspired by the 1961 trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, and the experience of his own family members who’d survived concentration camps, Milgram tweaked the Candid Camera model to more explicitly study how far people would follow orders before they objected. As the film professor Anna McCarthy has written, Milgram paid particular attention to the theatrical elements of his work. He even considered using recordings of humans screaming in real, rather than simulated, pain to maximize the authenticity of the subject’s experience. “It is possible that the kind of understanding of man I seek is an amalgam of science and art,” Milgram wrote in 1962. “It is sure to be rejected by the scientists as well as the artists, but for me it carries significance.”This studied interest in human nature continued in PBS’s An American Family; its presentation of ordinary life up close, the anthropologist Margaret Mead once argued, was “as important for our time as were the invention of the drama and the novel for earlier generations—a new way for people to understand themselves.” Throughout the later decades of the 20th century, television was similarly fixated on exposure, although shock value quickly took priority over genuine curiosity and analysis. During the ’90s, on talk shows such as The Jerry Springer Show and Maury, people confessed their most damning secrets to anyone who cared to watch. Series including Cops and America’s Most Wanted offered a more lurid, voyeuristic look at crime and the darkness of human nature.[Read: The paranoid style in American entertainment]By the time Tsuchiya had the idea to confine a man to a single apartment to see whether he could survive the ordeal, the concept of humiliation-as-revelation was well established. “I told [Nasubi] that most of it would never be aired,” the producer explains in The Contestant. “When someone hears that, they stop paying attention to the camera. That’s when you can really capture a lot.” As an organizing principle for how to get the most interesting footage, it seems to stem right from Funt’s secret recordings of people in the 1940s. Tsuchiya appeared to be motivated by his desire to observe behavior that had never been seen before on film—“to capture something amazing … an aspect of humanity that only I, only this show, could capture.” And extremity, to him, was necessary, because it was the only way to provoke responses that would be new, and thus thrilling to witness.The reality-show boom of the early 2000s was intimately informed by this same intention. When Big Brother debuted in Holland in 1999, it was broadly advertised as a social experiment in which audiences could observe contestants under constant surveillance like rats in a lab; the show was compared by one Dutch psychologist to the Stanford prison experiment. (Another called the show’s design “the wet dream of a psychological researcher.”) The 2002 British show The Experiment even directly imitated both the Stanford setup and Milgram’s work on obedience. But although such early series may have had honest intentions, their willingness to find dramatic fodder in moments of human calamity was exploited by a barrage of crueler series that would follow. The 2004 series There’s Something About Miriam had six men compete for the affections of a 21-year-old model from Mexico, who was revealed in the finale to be transgender—an obscene gotcha moment that mimics the structure of Candid Camera. Without a dramatic conclusion, a nonfiction series is just a filmed record of events. But with a last-act revelation, it’s a drama.Contemporary audiences, blessedly, have a more informed understanding of ethics, of entrapment, and of the duty of care TV creators have to their subjects. In 2018, the British show Love Island spawned a national debate about gaslighting after one contestant was deemed to be manipulating another. There’s no question that what happened to Nasubi would trigger a mass outcry today. But reality TV is still built on the same ideological imperatives—the desire to see people set up in manifestly absurd scenarios for our entertainment. The Emmy-nominated 2023 series Jury Duty is essentially a kinder episode of Candid Camera extended into a whole season, and the internet creator known as MrBeast, the purveyor of ridiculous challenges and stunts, has the second most-subscribed channel on all of YouTube. What’s most remarkable about The Contestant now is how its subject managed to regain his faith in human nature, despite everything he endured. But the ultimate goal of so many contemporary shows is still largely the same as it was 25 years ago: to manufacture a novel kind of social conflict, sit back, and watch what happens.theatlantic.com