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The Airport-Lounge Arms Race Illustrations by Max GutherOn 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 or the bar’s signature cocktail—a gin concoction turned a vibrant shade of violet by macerated blueberries, served in a champagne coupe.Other loungers in the golden-lit, plant-lined, 21,800-square-foot space chatted over their breakfast, boozy or otherwise. At the elaborate main drink station that formed one wall of the lounge’s dining room, I chose the tap that promised cold brew, though spa water and a mysterious third spigot labeled only as “seasonal” beckoned. When I reached for what I thought was a straw, I pulled back a glistening tube of individually portioned honey, ready to be snapped into a hot cup of tea.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. In the context of air travel, nice has usually meant nice relative to the experience outside the lounge’s confines, where most of your choices for a meal are marked-up fast food eaten at a crowded gate, or the undignified menu truncation of a Chili’s Too.American Airlines opened the world’s first airport lounge, then an invite-only affair for VIPs, in 1939. By the end of the 20th century, lounges had cemented their reputation as the domain of road warriors—mostly solo travelers headed to, say, medical-device sales conventions or engineering-job-site visits. The experience was less brussels-sprout hash and champagne and more “cheese and crackers and $5 beers,” Brian Kelly, the titular guy behind the Points Guy website (and arguably the most influential person in the travel-status game), told me. But behind those generously staffed check-in desks, things have been changing. Private-lounge networks have rapidly expanded over the past decade, as scores of new travelers have begun demanding entry. What awaits inside is changing, too.Perhaps the most salient characteristic of the modern airport lounge is that it is busy. According to one estimate, the number of fliers visiting lounges hit an all-time high in the summer of 2023, and this year’s vacation season appears likely to top it. As Americans have rushed back into travel after a pandemic lull, they’ve also rushed to apply for new credit cards, the fanciest of which promise bounties of travel-related perks, including lounge access. Now a broader cohort of fliers is squeezing in alongside the usual business travelers. This new group might be described as work-from-home travelers: people tapping away on laptops, trying to wedge in a few more emails or Zoom meetings around pleasure travel.In the past year, for reasons both journalistic and personal, I’ve visited seven lounges across five cities. These rooms held the expected corporate types in company-issued quarter-zips, but also 20-something women in Taylor Swift tour merch, bros with tennis rackets protruding from their carry-on, and lots of young people with one AirPod in and their Zoom camera turned off.The lounge’s booming popularity complicates its premise. This expanding group of high-spending customers is valuable to airlines, which operate most lounges, and to credit-card issuers, who have joined the lounge market with their own club networks. (High-fee credit cards, Kelly told me, have become the most common way for airline-perk neophytes to access lounges, no matter whether they’re run by airlines or banks.) But to attract these customers, lounge operators need to uphold the impression that lounges are exclusive—a special place far from the airport cattle call, not one crammed with too many other valued customers. The operators’ solution to this dilemma has been to build fast and build big, putting up huge, extravagant new clubs as quickly as the vagaries of airport construction will allow. Globally, more than 3,000 airport lounges are now open, with most major operators promising to add at least a few new locations this year.Most of the existing lounges max out somewhere around the ambience of a Panera, with booze instead of lemonade. The food and drinks are free, and that’s usually their main selling point. With the new mega-lounges, though, airlines and credit cards alike talk a big game about their culinary acumen, cocktail programs, and spa amenities, which include massages, private showers, and manicures. In United Airlines’ new 35,000-square-foot, three-story lounge in Denver, one of its two bars evokes a brewery, complete with tasting flights from Colorado brewers. Delta is opening the first in a series of ultra-premium clubs in June: a 38,000-square-foot mega-lounge at New York’s JFK airport containing, among other things, a full-service French bistro. American Express’s largest-ever lounge, which opened recently in Atlanta, has a backroom whiskey bar, a menu designed by a celebrated local chef, and 4,000 square feet of outdoor space from which loungers can watch planes roll by.You could dismiss the amenities arms race as an absurd exercise in flattering wealth’s vanity—it is. But that flattery is so effective because lounges offer a solution to a real set of problems. In the past few decades, air travel in the United States has become notably worse. Airlines have shrunk seats, increased fees, and pushed a larger proportion of passengers toward expensive tickets that offer more room and better service. At the same time, tickets at the back of the plane have become much less expensive, which has increased overall demand. Americans took 665 million flights in 2000, and by 2019, that number had increased to more than 925 million. On top of this, American airports are pretty old, and many need serious upgrades to handle the passenger volume more comfortably.Airlines profit from these conditions, but they still have to keep their most profitable customers happy. Lounges go a long way toward placating frequent fliers. They are, on some level, a decent deal for all involved: Private companies shoulder the cost of building them. They cater to people who endure the indignities of air travel most often. For many of those people, the pricey fees probably do save money over time, relative to how often they’d otherwise buy astronomically marked-up food from airport vendors. And the clubs tend to get put in inconvenient spots, which should theoretically help ease overcrowding at the gate, or at least move some of the fussiest passengers to their own containment area.[Read: Flying is weird right now]More curious is the fact that credit-card companies are making the effort to launch entire lounges themselves, competing against airlines when they already partner with airlines to get cardholders into existing lounges. A lounge is, by all accounts, a huge money sink—even besides the cost and red tape of building within an airport, making people feel special requires an army of workers available 18 to 20 hours a day, seven days a week. Everyone I spoke with at companies that run lounge networks said some version of We do not view the lounges as revenue opportunities. Illustration by Max Guther Lounges are, however, a great incentive to sign up for credit cards. As people’s day-to-day financial lives become more cashless, credit-card issuers are battling one another to win over customers and encourage them to swipe as much as possible, Joseph Nunes, a marketing professor at the University of Southern California, told me. One big reason: interchange fees. Card issuers take a cut of the purchase price from sellers every time a card is used, and that cut tends to be larger for more premium cards. Frequent pleasure travelers are a creditor’s dream: They are wealthier than the average American, they do a lot of discretionary spending, and they pay their bills on time. Lounges have already succeeded at enticing this group to sign up for airline-specific credit cards, so card issuers have taken the next logical step: lounges for people who aren’t quite road warriors and who may not be devoted to any particular airline, but who want perks all the same.Controlling an entire lounge, stamped with an enormous company logo, is a play for what marketers call brand affinity. “It solidifies our relationship with our customers,” Audrey Hendley, the president of American Express Travel, told me. Those customers might visit a lounge only a few times a year. But if everything goes according to plan, those visits are one of the reasons they love their Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire card and use it for everything, even though they’ve got three or four others they could pull out of their wallet.Of course, the genuinely wealthy still need to be convinced that they’re more special than the rest of us. Credit-card companies have been ready to oblige with even more layers of exclusivity. Chase’s LaGuardia lounge is open to anyone who pays a $550 annual fee for the right credit card, but the private suites inside, which include a palatial bathroom and all the seafood towers you can eat, cost up to $3,000 for a three-hour visit. This is part of what Nunes called the further tiering of society, fueled by the incredibly granular financial-data profiles that companies can now make of their customers. “We really say, ‘Where are consumers spending, who are the consumers that are the most profitable for me, and how should I treat them?’” Nunes told me. “We’re going to see further and further discrimination by firms, I think, in treating their most profitable customers the best.”Credit-card perks have proved such an effective way to lure high-income customers that the airport lounge has begun to make its way outside the airport. Card issuers now commonly sponsor VIP areas at concerts and sporting events, especially those that appeal to high spenders. American Express and Chase offer members-only lounges at the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York. The Sundance Film Festival has had a Chase Sapphire lounge for years. And although it can seem silly to get excited about entry to a VIP area, few people are immune to the charms of more places to sit down, shorter lines for cleaner bathrooms, and a couple of free drinks.[From the April 2020 issue: It’s all so … premiocre]Even if you never have entered or never will enter an airport lounge, the perks arms race affects your daily life. More premium-card use means higher fees for retailers, and those fees then get baked into the prices everyone pays—an easier task for large sellers, who usually pay less for their goods than mom-and-pop stores. (A recent settlement in a class-action suit against Visa and Mastercard could lower and cap these fees while allowing retailers to charge customers with premium cards extra.) Meanwhile, many card issuers have also begun to experiment with opening places that target other tiers of customers too. Capital One now operates more than 50 cafés that are open to the public, which seem aimed at the kind of young, laptop-lugging workers who might someday be high earners but for now just need a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi. In addition to baristas, these spaces have “ambassadors” and “mentors” available to guide patrons through the bank’s range of services while they sip their lattes. These cafés, like the airport lounges, are money sinks. But Kelly told me that it’s a mistake to think about banks the way we think about other consumer-facing businesses. “Look at the earnings reports of any of the credit-card companies,” he said. “This is a drop in the bucket.”In February, I visited American Express’s Centurion New York club in Midtown Manhattan. The space, which uses the entire 55th floor (and one dedicated express elevator) of the new One Vanderbilt skyscraper on 42nd Street, is the first of its kind for the company. It is, in some sense, a Capital One café for people already very comfortable with the services offered by their preferred financial institutions. A few tables in some of its spaces can be reserved by the general public, but no one there will sell you a new credit card or recommend a loan for your small business. The club’s best nooks and crannies, including a large corner table with clear views of much of the city’s skyline, are reserved for those who carry the company’s invite-only Centurion Card, which is rumored to require at least $500,000 in annual charges for membership. One Centurion-exclusive bar gives you a view from heaven down onto the Art Deco curves of the Chrysler Building below, as though you are a god yourself.This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Airport-Lounge Arms Race.”theatlantic.com
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The Particular Melancholy of Visiting Your Childhood Home In a drawer in the living room of my childhood home, you can find the drumsticks I got in elementary school, the calculator I used in middle school, and a to-do list I wrote in high school. (“Shoes—tell mom,” it reads, and, in all caps: “CUT NAILS.”) In my bedroom are prom pictures, concert posters, a photo of my round-faced teen self printed for a fake ID I never got. In the bathroom: expired acne medication; crunchy, dried-up mascara; an old retainer. My mother, who still lives in the house, would like me to clear out my stuff. I keep stalling.The funny thing is, I’m not all that attached to these objects. I could throw most of them away after a few moments of bemused recollection; the pictures, I could take back with me to Brooklyn. But that would make it possible for my mom to sell the house, which she’s been trying to do for years. I can’t seem to stop standing in the way.Why? If home is “where the heart is” or “wherever I’m with you,” I should be fine with my mom moving anywhere—especially to a nearby apartment, as she plans to, where she’ll doubtless have a place for me to sleep whenever I want. Instead, any mention of a future sale prompts an ache akin to the homesickness I felt as a kid at summer camp—except that now I ache for my future self. I imagine her standing outside that suburban New Jersey house, pacing back and forth, insisting that some piece of her remains in this one edifice on a certain corner of a specific street, even though she hasn’t lived there for decades.[Read: What the suburb haters don’t understand]It’s a weird, anticipatory grief—but it’s not unfounded. For his 2011 book, Returning Home: Reconnecting With Our Childhoods, Jerry M. Burger, a Santa Clara University psychologist, interviewed hundreds of people and found that about a third had traveled as adults to visit a childhood home; another third hoped to. The subjects who’d made the trip largely no longer had parents in the house; in many cases, they arrived unannounced, ready to knock and ask the residing strangers to let them in. Others discovered that their old home physically no longer existed. Giving up such a formative space, Burger told me, is “like a dancer losing a leg. It’s a really important part of you. And now it’s gone.” So many people cried during interviews that Burger started arriving with tissues.You might think that only people with rosy childhood memories would feel compelled home, perhaps to relive their golden days or try to regain some of the comfort of being young. But that’s not true—some of Burger’s subjects had experienced such trauma at home that going back was probably a terrible idea; one person turned and ran out of the space immediately after setting foot inside it. Rather, Burger found, people with all kinds of relationships to where they grew up shared another motivation: They felt like a stranger to their old selves. And they wanted to reconnect.Attempting to pull a thread between past and present is a common human impulse, what the Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams calls a search for “narrative identity”—this life story we draft as we go, trying to make sense of who we are and why. Marya Schechtman, a philosopher at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me that humans are constantly negotiating a contradiction: On the one hand, “it’s just sort of taken as a given that you’re a single individual from roughly cradle to grave.” On the other hand, this isn’t really how we experience life. Certain parts of our history resonate more than others, and some former selves don’t feel like us at all. (“I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old,” Joan Didion wrote. “It would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford.”)Many of us actively try to “make our pasts and our futures real to us,” Shechtman said. So although we eagerly make plans and envision ourselves in new places, with new people, we also flip through photo albums and reread our old journals. (Didion on keeping a notebook: “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”) But sometimes, those methods aren’t enough to really take us back. Burger kept hearing a similar story: Subjects would find photos of themselves as kids, but “they’re feeling like they can’t relate to this person in the picture,” he told me. “And it’s important to kind of get that sense of wholeness, to keep that part of yourself alive.”Going home can be a much more effective way to time travel. Our past isn’t just preserved in knickknacks and memorabilia; it lingers in the spaces we once occupied. When we talk about our experiences, we often focus, understandably, on the people who’ve shaped us, and we “treat the physical environment like a backdrop,” Lynne Manzo, a landscape-architecture professor at the University of Washington, told me. But setting can be its own character; it colors our day-to-day, and we endow it with agency and meaning. If social interactions and relationships are the bricks constructing our identities, our surroundings are the scaffolding.Setting is also central to how we remember. Recalling events (as opposed to information) involves “episodic memory,” which is deeply tied to location. Many researchers, in fact, believe that episodic memory evolved to help us physically orient ourselves in the world. (One very sad study—partial title: “Implications for Strandings”—found that some sea lions with damage to the hippocampus, the hub of episodic memory, get lost and wander ashore.) When you’re in a given space, your brain tends to “pull up the relevant memories” that happened there—even ones that have long been dormant, Charan Ranganath, a neuroscientist and the author of Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold On to What Matters, told me. People remembering a specific moment can even demonstrate what Ranganath called a “reboot” of the brain-activity patterns they showed during the original event.But without the physical space to visit, it can be hard to mentally transport yourself back. When the 19th-century French writer Stendhal wrote his memoir The Life of Henry Brulard, detailing a difficult and lonely childhood, he drew the places of his youth again and again, in an obsessive attempt to spur his memory. “Winding staircase—Large, cheerless courtyard—Magnificent inlaid chest-of-drawers surmounted by a clock,” he scrawled under a sketch, as if the incantation might apparate him to his grandfather’s imposing Grenoble townhouse. Yet his recollection remained, as he put it, like a fresco, solid for stretches and elsewhere crumbling apart.[Read: Nostalgia is a shield against unhappiness]I can relate to the yearning for preservation: If my mom leaves my childhood home, I’ll lose the particular sweet smell—I can’t even describe it—that wafts through the living room on hot days. And the pinch of acorns under my bare feet in the yard. And the specific lilt of the birdsong in the early mornings, so different from what I hear now, just over 15 miles away. I’m scared that without those sensations, the filing cabinet deep in my mind, holding all these everyday snippets of memory, will get pushed just out of my reach.Visiting home doesn’t always clarify or heal; it won’t necessarily make the scattered fragments of your story click into place. Sometimes, it just leaves you confused. For most people, what comes up is thorny—not only because good and bad events alike occurred at home, but because as much as you might long for your old and current selves to collide, it’s strange when they do.Going back can highlight how faulty your recollections were in the first place—and how subjective your perceptions still are. Anne Wilson, a Wilfrid Laurier University psychologist who studies identity, gave me an example: You might remember your old bedroom as large, the hallway from it running on and on, not just because the memory is from a child’s perspective but also because you associate it with enchantment—or with powerlessness. If you return to the house and find a short hallway, a tiny bedroom, it can feel disturbing. That’s not to mention material changes that might have been made to the house, which Burger said his participants reliably hated. To encounter such a familiar space transformed, and without your consent—as if someone has snuck into your memories and moved things around—is an affront. Your version doesn’t exist anymore.Even if family still lives in your old home, returning can be unnerving. Several people have told me, in casual conversation, that they’ve felt themselves regressing on visits back—they let their mom do their laundry or address their parents like a bratty 15-year-old. That tendency has to do with relationships as much as with physical space; our habits of interaction can be stubborn. But the setting itself can cue you to act a certain way. Just think about it evolutionarily, Schechtman told me: “If you’re a bunny, and you’re in the location where the hawk was last time, you should start feeling scared”—and get out of there. When a place triggers a rush of episodic memories, you might feel the frustration, the helplessness, the loneliness you did when you were young, and lapse into old behaviors.[Read: Welcome to kidulthood]All of this can feel odd, maybe even a little heartbreaking. Confronting change requires confronting loss. And confronting loss, of course, means acknowledging our mortality: If our old selves have slipped beyond our grasp, our current self will too. “The moment you stop to reflect, even on the present, that moment is gone,” Ranganath told me. “Everything is in the world of memory.”But if you can let the melancholy of that truth wash over you, you might find that it’s beautiful too. So often, I feel stranded in the present or the recent past—stricken by the dumb thing I said yesterday but unable to conjure what it felt like to be 6, or 12, or 20. It’s hard to really feel that right now is one point in a larger life trajectory, even if I know it on some level. Going home is one of the rare times I can glimpse the larger perspective. One of these days—after I’ve emptied the living-room drawer of the paper scraps and almost-spent gift cards—returning will be harder for me. But I can imagine my future self joining the ranks of Burger’s pilgrims, arriving on my old street looking for meaning, some story to tell about the past. That might sound sad, but such a visit isn’t just about holding on. It’s also about letting go—that thing I’ve been struggling to do.Manzo, the landscape-architecture professor, suggested that I enact a ritual to bid farewell to my mom’s house: walk through the rooms, take pictures, pocket a stone. I could sketch like Stendahl, try to capture all the angles. I will lose some memories, but maybe I’ll come away with some sense of the wholeness that Burger said so many people seek. I keep thinking about the woman who ran out of her old home—she wanted wholeness too. Eventually, her brother bought the place and bulldozed it to the ground. She had just one more request: Where the house once stood, she asked him to plant some flowers.When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.theatlantic.com
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Photos of the Week: Dock Diving, Buddha Cleaning, Vapor Falls Surgery at a teddy bear hospital in Germany, a performance at the Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden, coyote pups at an animal park in France, destructive flooding in Brazil and Indonesia, a fashion show in Saudi Arabia, the Northern Lights above England, and much moreTo receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.theatlantic.com
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The Funding Crisis Behind Teacher Layoffs A looming deadline is already causing cuts in school budgets.theatlantic.com
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Finally, Male Contraceptives Researchers have been hard at work on a number of male contraceptives, some of which could hit the market in the next couple of decades. Options include a hormone-free birth-control pill, an injection that accomplishes the same thing as a vasectomy but is easily reversible, and a topical gel men can rub on their shoulders with little in the way of side effects. There is a recurring theme in the research on male contraceptives: easy, convenient, minimal side effects.“From the get-go, the researchers involved in developing male contraception have paid extra- close attention to: Can we develop products for which there will be almost no side effects? And can we be extra vigilant about this, so that these products are going to be basically the most convenient, easy things ever, with almost zero risks?” says staff writer Katie Wu, our guest on this week’s Radio Atlantic. In fact, one trial was halted in 2011 because a safety committee decided the risks outweighed the benefits. The side effects included mood swings and depression, which, if you are a woman who has ever been on any form of hormonal birth control, will definitely shift your mood.What changes in a future in which male contraceptives are readily available, and a routine part of men’s health care? For one thing, the dreamy nature of these options might inspire researchers to innovate on women’s options as well. But a lot of cultural conversations could also shift: around whose job is it to be vigilant about pregnancy, who can have sex without consequences, and what we think of as traditionally masculine.Listen to the conversation here:Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsThe following is a transcript of the episode:Katherine J. Wu: It’s intuitive to think, you know, you need two people to conceive a child. And currently—Hanna Rosin: Wait, what?Wu: [Laughs.] And currently our contraception options are almost entirely limited to one biological sex: people with ovaries and a uterus.[Music]Rosin: That’s Atlantic staff writer Katie Wu—and when she puts it like that, yes, the math is so obvious. It takes two to make a baby. And yet when I say “birth control,” we mostly think of one: the one with the ovaries and the uterus.I mean sure: condoms, vasectomies. But the whole complicated apparatus of birth control—decades of hormones and doctors’ appointments and implants and worry, the costs—that’s something mostly women have to deal with.But of course it doesn’t have to be that way. Why didn’t I realize that sooner?I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And today—the rapidly advancing science of male birth control.As a science and health reporter, Katie’s followed this research for years. When we spoke, I was curious—maybe even hopeful—to see if the impetus for the research was to ease the burden on women. Here’s Katie.Wu: There’s a couple motivations, like certainly just having a little bit more equity in this whole world of family planning. If there are two people participating in the conception of a child, if the goal is to actually prevent that, why shouldn’t multiple parties participate? It would certainly ease the burden on women, who are the primary people having to deal with the logistics of contraception, the side effects of contraception, paying for contraception, accessing contraception—even stigma around certain contraception, especially in parts of the world where contraception is not necessarily widely socially accepted.But also to this idea that tackling something from two different vantage points— sperm and egg—is going to make the whole endeavor a little bit more successful, right? Combining two methods of contraception: that’s not a bad way to go about it if you really want to be sure that you are accomplishing your goal.Rosin: That’s interesting. And the scientists say this? Like, the scientists working on this say, Yes, we’re doing this partly for equity reasons?Wu: Oh, absolutely. I think there is this growing feeling that the burden of contraception, preventing pregnancy, and taking on the risks of doing that has really fallen unfairly on women. And it’s time that we spread that around a little bit more. There are actually male participants in trials for some of these birth-control methods—for male contraception—who say part of the reason that they want to participate is they watch their female partners go through the side effects and the hassle of taking birth control, and they feel guilty, they feel frustrated, they feel like, Why can’t I be doing more to help out?Rosin: I’m a little speechless and a little…I don’t know, I’m just heartened to hear that. It never occurred to me—maybe I’m just too cynical—but I’ve been so accustomed to thinking of birth control in the current political context that it just never occurred to me that in science there was this decades-long effort to make this whole process more equitable. It’s really nice to hear.Wu: It is, though of course I have to jump in here with a little bit of cynicism, right? It certainly has not been perfect culturally. And I think, as encouraging as it is to hear that a pretty decent contingent of people do feel this way, of course there’s been pushback on that idea—and there’s certainly reasons why it has taken so long to get to the point where we’re on the cusp of having widely available male contraception beyond condoms and vasectomies.Some of those reasons are definitely scientific, right? We’re dealing with a totally different reproductive system. But I think we also do have to acknowledge that people are just a lot cagier about asking men to take on extra risks, extra burden, when the viewpoint has been for decades: “We don’t have to. The women have that covered.”Rosin: Yeah. Okay. I really want to get into that, but before we do, let’s just have some basic understanding. What are the methods people are looking at? Like, what can we expect in our local pharmacy in the men’s contraception section soon, in our near future? What is it? What are they?Wu: Yeah, so I will caveat this to say that not all of the things I’m about to mention will necessarily be on pharmacy shelves. Some of them will have to be maybe sort of roughly akin to having an IUD placed. It will require you to go to a doctor’s office.But there are a bunch of different options. Probably the one that is furthest along is this topical gel that has been in trials for several years now, that men can basically smear on their shoulders. And it’s this hormonal concoction that really, really dramatically plummets their sperm counts.And if they apply it regularly, it’s a pretty great and almost side-effect-free way to control their own fertility—and totally reversible.Rosin: Wait. That sounds comically easy. Like, you put basically like a gel on your shoulders, and it has no side effects?Wu: Okay, it doesn’t have zero side effects, but I certainly am comparing this to a baseline of like, the typical side effects we see with female birth control. Mood swings and depression.There is almost none of that that is being reported in trials. Men actually sometimes experience increased libido, and the investigators have been really surprised to see like, Oh, you know, there’s really not much going on here in terms of the typical side effects we see with female birth control.Rosin: Mm hmm. Why is this irritating me? Okay. You know what—Wu: Oh, we’ll get to it. I promise.Rosin: Okay. All right. So keep going. What are some of the other methods?Wu: Yeah, so another that I think is super interesting is what I sort of liken to a really easy, reversible vasectomy. So, you know, traditional vasectomy: You have this quick surgery where you go in and you’re messing with the vas deferens, which is the conveyor belt for sperm.That is a surgery, but this new method that researchers are experimenting with, they’re basically plugging up a tube with a gel that can either dissolve or be removed at a later date. So that, you know, it’s pretty easy placement—it’s just plugging a hole, like a stopper to a sink that you can remove.Basically capitalize on the convenience of having sperm so readily accessible, like right there in the testes, which hang outside the body. A lot harder to reach eggs that are hiding out in ovaries: deep in the abdominal cavity sometimes.Rosin: Wait, you’re saying it’s easier? Like, biologically, the male contraception is an easier proposition?Wu: Certain parts of it are. Others aren’t. As you can imagine, some of the more challenging things is there are so many sperm being produced constantly, and so many sperm in, you know, every attempt at conception that it can be hard to get them all. But on the flipside of that, we only have to reduce sperm counts to a certain degree, not to zero, to make someone effectively infertile, even if only temporarily.Rosin: Right. Okay. I’m seeing a theme here, which is: quick and easy.Wu: Absolutely. And I think about the diversity of options. I mean, I’ve only named two, but we’ve already covered something that is super long-acting and reversible—the set-it-and-forget-it kind of method. One is hormonal. One is non-hormonal. And there are others still that could be a pill that you may only have to take occasionally, rather than every day, to, like, stop your sperm from being motile.Rosin: And how plausible are these things? Definitely a train that’s coming into our station? Like, this is definitely going to happen at some point?Wu: I think some of these methods are far enough along—probably that topical cream, especially—that, you know, researchers, even ones who aren’t directly involved with the trials, are pretty optimistic that, yeah, maybe sometime in the 2030s, this will really become a reality.I think even just having a couple options for men on the market will be a big step toward equity. But there are also some kind of frustrating things about how exactly that’s going to manifest.Rosin: What do you mean? Why?Wu: Oh, right. So I think we have both noticed, as I’ve been talking through these options with you, that these sound pretty great. Obviously some unexpected hurdles could arise, some unexpected side effects could still crop up, but so far it really is looking like we’re fast approaching a reality in which men are going to have easy access to super-convenient, super-effective birth control that hardly gives them any side effects at all.While in the meantime, millions of women are like: Oh no, I have terrible acne again, or I have extreme pain because my IUD is doing weird stuff to my body. And that just seems like we could be doing better.And I mean, this is not an accident. And I think that is one of the most frustrating parts of this. From the get-go, the researchers involved in developing male contraception have paid extra-close attention to: Can we develop products for which there will be almost no side effects? And can we be extra vigilant about this, so that these products are going to be basically the most convenient, easy things ever, with almost zero risks?Rosin: Okay, now I’m speechlessly infuriated. So, okay, just to summarize: You’re just saying that what’s on the table, what they’ve been very vigilant about, is: Let’s make sure this is easy. Like, it doesn’t have side effects, and it’s easy. And they didn’t really worry about that too much with women.Now, what I was hoping you would say is that, scientifically, it’s just too difficult, too hard to devise birth control for women that is that free and easy. But you’re not saying that. You’re just saying it just wasn’t a priority—we don’t know if it’s easy or doable.Wu: Absolutely there have been different sets of standards for men and women. And the argument for this, over the years, has been one that—depending on who you are and how you feel about a bunch of different things—you may find reasonable or not. This idea that, yeah, it’s the woman who gets pregnant, the woman who must bear, literally, the risk of pregnancy.And so, she has more to lose if the contraception doesn’t work. And so she should be willing to take on more risks with contraception that she takes, because she’s weighing that against the risk of pregnancy. For men, you’re taking contraception inevitably to prevent pregnancy in someone else.And so, it’s not: Am I going to get this headache? versus—become pregnant.It’s: Am I going to get this headache? versus—nothing.Rosin: Right; the incentives have to be extra strong. Like, it has to be extra easy to get men to play along with this.Wu: Yeah, I think it’s both a marketability thing, but they also do have to contend with these kind of independent safety boards. And those safety boards have certainly been stricter about saying, “Well, if we really are doing the risk-benefit calculation of every step along this clinical trial, we’re going to do the math a little bit differently, because we know what the risks are in Scenario 1 and the risks are in Scenario 2.”And so, like, it’s kind of funny, because there have been trials for male contraception in the past that were paused by these independent safety boards because they were thinking, Oh my God, the math is not working out. The risks to men are so great. And meanwhile, participants in the trial that was paused were actually like, “Actually, I would have kept going with this if you’d let me,” so… [Laughs.]Rosin: Wait, but were those a question of safety? Or what was the challenge there?Wu: Right. So this was a trial that was stopped in 2011. Basically, this independent safety committee determined that the drug side effects outweighed the potential benefits. But the side effects were mainly mood swings and depression.They were experiencing side effects that I would certainly say a lot of women go through with their own birth control—even nowadays with our updated methods.I will freely admit that I was pretty frustrated when I learned about this. At the same time—and maybe this is the cynical part of my brain speaking up—it didn’t shock me.I think, at face value, this illustrates the double standard that is absolutely still going on with birth control. And at the same time, it also is almost sickly validating. Because for anyone who is sitting here wondering Why don’t we have these options yet?: This is it. This can help to explain a lot, and I think this illustrates what has to be overcome.Rosin: So we’re edging toward the scientific breakthroughs, but it sounds like we still have cultural barriers to overcome: notions about masculinity, responsibility, promiscuity—all that. After the break.[Music]Rosin: Alright, we’re back. Katie, we’ve been talking about equalizing this burden between men and women. What gets in the way of that? In the past, what’s stopped that from happening?Wu: I think we struggle to reconcile some of the common side effects we associate with birth control with our modern conceptions of masculinity. Is it especially not okay for a dude to take a drug and have his sex drive go down? To undergo mood swings and get really emotional? To break out with acne in his 30s? We have, for whatever reason, socialized that to be normal and acceptable for women, but this is not a norm that we’ve been taught to accept for men. And I think there may be an additional struggle there.Also, certainly anyone who has a problem with female contraception right now in today’s world is going to have some concerns about male contraception and, you know, the implications of that for promiscuity. How we think about sex for the purpose of, you know, not conceiving, but just having sex.I mean, God, I would love to see people re-conceptualize this as like, “Who’s allowed to have a sex drive?” Right? We’ve been so cagey about men losing their sex drive for x, y, and z reasons, to the point that this is a prominent concern in trials for male contraception. If that can help inspire more enlightened thinking about how important it is for women to maintain a sex drive—and for them to even have a sex drive to begin with, and for that to be culturally okay—that would be fantastic.Rosin: Yeah. Hear, hear. Okay. So, we understand now that the pill was a massive cultural revolution. We can see that now. From everything you’re saying, there is a possibility that we’re on the brink of another moment like that.Like, there could be—maybe you’re laughing inside—but, could we, if male contraception, if they figure out how to message it correctly, if it starts to show up slowly and then be accepted in the mainstream, is there a possibility that it helps build a sense of genuine shared risk and responsibility for sex and having a baby?Wu: I hope so. I mean, I certainly see this future playing out in gradients rather than a switch being flipped. And any step in the direction of more equity I will take it. I do fully anticipate that there is going to be pushback against male birth control. I mean, there already is. I think if you go into the darker corners of the internet, you will see that people are freaking out about the fact that these trials are even happening, and like—“Why bother? The women already have it fixed.” Blah, blah, blah, blah. You can imagine the sorts of things that people are already saying.Rosin: Because why? Because it destroys masculinity? Like, I don’t actually know what the cultural, even if it’s the dark cultural resistance…Wu: I will admit it’s hard for me to get into this space, as someone who has never felt this way. And I also, I am not a man. But I do think there are some concerns about masculinity. The production of a lot of sperm is very tied up in traditional notions of masculinity, and this is something that would directly imperil that. I also think there is just a lot of pushback against the newness of the notion that contraception should be a shared risk.For people who think that box was checked long ago by products being made available for women, this seems like an unnecessary additional risk for huge swaths of men to be taking on.Rosin: Got it. Right. Now, among the scientists, do you get the sense that the future they see is a possible replacement for the pill in lots of quarters? Because I can imagine a situation where: A couple sits down, they’re looking at a male contraception that has virtually no side effects. Most female contraceptives have some side effects—some very significant side effects. And they would choose the male contraceptive.Wu: Yeah, it’s a great question. And opinions about this are a little divided. I think a lot of researchers are curious to see what is going to happen. I can see on an individual-to-individual basis how, for a lot of couples where the woman has really struggled with the side effects of birth control, or not wanting to go through somewhat invasive procedures to have longer-acting methods placed.There are many good reasons to not be excited about women’s contraception right now. There may be a scenario in which male birth control replaces female birth control within those couples. But I also have heard from a lot of people that they don’t expect overall-population or community-wide enthusiasm for female contraception to really diminish all that much.There are going to be a lot of couples who want to team up and use multiple methods at once. You know, why not? That will that much more decrease the chances of pregnancy.It’s almost like using both an IUD and a condom, but splitting that even more equitably between men and women at this point.And then I think this is a slightly more cynical reason, but there are going to be plenty of women who don’t trust their male partners to fully take on the responsibility, even if that does become pharmaceutically an option.Is the male partner in the scenario going to apply that cream regularly enough?Rosin: Right. Like, it definitely opens up the question of shared responsibility. It doesn’t necessarily explode it, so that we’re all of a sudden living in a different world. But I do feel like it inches closer. And I am thinking about what changes in society if we start to think of preventing the birth of the child as also the responsibility of a man. We kind of vaguely do now—like a condom, very vaguely. But when a man has many, many options, it becomes harder to duck, you know?Wu: Right.Rosin: It shifts the burden of vigilance.Wu: I would hope so. I’m sure there will still be a lot of lingering sentiment that women’s contraception should be the biggest safety net here, because unfortunately some men will continue to see this as a still very low-stakes endeavor for themselves. But we’ll see. I think another thing that I am excited about that could shift things culturally, and just make all of this feel easier for women in a kind of indirect way, is maybe this could inspire female contraception to be less riddled with side effects, to be more convenient, you know, to take some inspiration from the male side of things.Why can’t we revamp female contraception at the same time?Not just by saying, “Hey, there are more options for your partner to take,” but “There are also better options for you to take, too.”Rosin: So, just to end here: An equitable world for you, given where you know the science is going and what’s possible, what would it look like?Wu: Well, it would certainly go beyond contraception. Probably.Rosin: We can go there if you want. I was mostly thinking about like, let’s limit it to the pharmacy aisle. Like, if we’re talking about contraception, and I’m going to a doctor or walking down the aisle, what is equitable?Wu: I mean, I think there are a lot of ways to imagine how that future would be different. Certainly pharmacy shelves would look different. But also would we have, you know, a revolution in medicine? Would we train a huge contingent of doctors to be a larger counterpart to what we currently see as the realm of OBGYNs?And, you know, would those conversations start to happen with men? Would we, like, regularly check in with men about their sperm counts, their fertility, how they’re participating in their partner’s health? That sort of thing.And I would certainly hope that there would be expanded thinking about how to access these options. Like, how are we going to think about who is able to access them, how insurance is going to cover them? You know, what is going to require a prescription versus what can just be grabbed off the counter.If there’s going to be a huge disparity in the methods that are available, can we at least think about, like, making several options freely accessible to men and several options being freely accessible to women, so that it’s not creating or reinforcing the sort of gender disparity that we’ve been talking about?There are just so many things. And like, gosh, even how sex ed is taught in schools. That could really start to change young people’s minds about gender and sexual freedom and just the culture around all of this, from really early.Rosin: Oh, wow. Okay. I hadn’t thought of this. You’re blowing my mind now. So basically what you’re talking about is all of the complications and variations and the whole idiom we’re used to around women’s health. That same equivalent starts to develop for men—not just male contraception, but at every step.Like they’re taught in schools. Not just “wear a condom” but that it’s their responsibility to take contraceptions, and how contraceptions affect them. They talk to the doctors about what the contraception will do to them. You know, they talk to their partners, and on and on. And that’s where you get a sense of equal investment, price paid and joy, in the whole process of family planning.Wu: Totally. And I think what’s fascinating about this is: You can even think about the tale of these interventions being different for men and women. Women go through menopause. Men don’t. You know, there’s a universe in which men and women, young men and women, maybe start to think about contraception, use contraception around the same time. But maybe because men might end up using it for several more decades than women in this utopian future that we’re imagining, you know, maybe that actually helps push things, again, in the direction of, “Yeah, this is actually something that should really be a normal, natural, sustained part of how we envision male health, and what it means to be a man alive for multiple decades in this world.”Rosin: Wow. Yes. Okay. My thinking on this has been so limited, and you’ve just thoroughly expanded it. So thank you so much for that.Wu: Happy to help.[Music]Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend, edited by Claudine Ebeid, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.theatlantic.com
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The Israeli Defense Establishment Revolts Against Netanyahu On Tuesday, Daniel Hagari, the chief spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, did something extraordinary: He criticized the Israeli government. In recent days, Israeli troops have battled Hamas in parts of northern Gaza that had previously been cleared of enemy combatants. A reporter asked Hagari if the terrorist group had been able to reassert itself because the Israeli government had not set up any non-Hamas Palestinian administration for those areas.The spokesman could have dodged the question. He did not. “There is no doubt that a governmental alternative to Hamas will create pressure on Hamas,” he replied, “but that is a question for the political echelon.”Hagari’s polite but pointed critique of Israel’s leadership was a pebble. The avalanche came the next day. In a televised address on Wednesday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—a former general and current member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party—publicly rebuked the government for failing to establish a postwar plan for Gaza. He then demanded that Netanyahu personally commit to Palestinian governance for the enclave, as opposed to Israeli settlement or occupation.“Since October, I have been raising this issue consistently in the cabinet, and have received no response,” Gallant said. “The end of the military campaign must come together with political action. The ‘day after Hamas’ will only be achieved with Palestinian entities taking control of Gaza, accompanied by international actors, establishing a governing alternative to Hamas’s rule.”Without such a political strategy, Gallant argued, no military strategy can succeed, and Israel will be left occupying Gaza and fighting a never-ending counterinsurgency against Hamas that saps the country’s military, economic, and diplomatic resources. “Indecision is, in essence, a decision,” he said. “This leads to a dangerous course, which promotes the idea of Israeli military and civilian governance in Gaza. This is a negative and dangerous option for the state of Israel.”The defense minister closed with an ultimatum: “I call on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make a decision and declare that Israel will not establish civilian control over the Gaza Strip, that Israel will not establish military governance in the Gaza Strip, and that a governing alternative to Hamas in the Gaza Strip will be raised immediately.” With these words, the Israeli defense establishment effectively launched a revolt against the Netanyahu government—and the dreams of its far-right flank to flood Gaza with Israeli settlers.Gallant is far from the only person to press Netanyahu on this matter. For months, President Joe Biden and his administration have called for Israel to work with the Palestinian Authority—the Hamas rival that governs the West Bank—to establish a new administration in Gaza. Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, two former IDF chiefs turned opposition politicians, joined Netanyahu’s government after October 7 on the condition that a committee be created to formulate a Gaza exit strategy. But despite all of this external and internal pressure, no such plan has materialized—for a very straightforward reason: Netanyahu cannot publicly commit to a postwar plan for Gaza that includes Palestinians, because the day-after plan of his far-right partners is to get rid of those Palestinians.Yesterday, standing at a lectern emblazoned with the words settlement in Gaza will bring security, the far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir told a rally of thousands that the only way to defeat Hamas is to “return home” to Gaza and encourage “voluntary emigration” of its Palestinian population—a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. “Tell them,” Ben-Gvir declared, “‘Go to your homes, go to your countries. This is ours now and forever.’” Shlomo Karhi, a hard-right member of Netanyahu’s faction, offered similar sentiments. “In order to preserve the security achievements for which so many of our troops gave up their lives,” he said, “we must settle Gaza, with security forces and with settlers.”[Read: The right-wing Isreali plan to resettle Gaza]Polls show that most Israelis do not want to resettle the Gaza Strip. But Netanyahu and his coalition are uniquely beholden to the radical minority that does. Back in January, 15 of the coalition’s 64 members of Parliament attended a Jerusalem conference in support of Gaza resettlement. The parties that make up Netanyahu’s government received just 48.4 percent of the vote in Israel’s most recent election in November 2022. Without the far right, not only would the Israeli leader’s coalition collapse, but he would lack sufficient allies to form one in the future after another election. Alienating the extremists wouldn’t just finish Netanyahu’s government; it could end his political career.This has placed the prime minister in a political vise. If he commits to postwar Palestinian rule in Gaza and begins acting seriously to establish it, he loses the far right. But if he commits to resettling Gaza, he loses the Israeli majority and the international community. And so, as he has often done in the past, Netanyahu has chosen not to choose, kicking the moment of decision down the road. But as Gallant said yesterday, indecision is also a decision—and it has consequences.This month, Israel’s soldiers have been fighting pitched battles with Hamas in places such as Zeitun and Jabaliya that had previously been cleared by the IDF. Without any plan to govern these areas, Israel’s army has achieved many tactical victories in Gaza but suffered a strategic defeat, as Hamas has returned to fill the vacuum the IDF left behind. Faced with rising Israeli casualties in Gaza, far-right resettlement rallies in Israel, sharp criticism of Israel’s open-ended campaign abroad, and Netanyahu’s refusal to act, Gallant clearly felt compelled to speak out. In doing so, he made public the arguments he had previously been making in private.Contrary to misquotes and mistranslations attributed to the Israeli defense minister in some international media outlets, Gallant has not called for genocide in Gaza, but rather for the territory to be handed back to Gazans. He has also consistently worked to align the Israeli campaign with the preferences of the Biden administration rather than the Israeli far right. In January, he called for Gaza to be governed by Palestinians in conjunction with the United States and moderate Arab states, without any Jewish settlements. In March, Gallant reportedly told the Israeli security cabinet that Gazans affiliated with the Palestinian Authority were the least bad option to administer the enclave.Read: [What did top Israeli war officials really say about Gaza?]Gallant believes that he is working both to protect Israel’s long-term security by saving it from a ruinous quagmire, and to coordinate its policy with its strongest ally, the United States. It is no coincidence that the defense minister’s dramatic address yesterday came shortly after U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told the White House press pool that “if Israel’s military efforts are not accompanied by a political plan for the future of Gaza and the Palestinian people, the terrorists will keep coming back … So we [are] talking to Israel about how to connect their military operations to a clear strategic endgame … to ensure the lasting defeat of Hamas and a better alternative future for Gaza and for the Palestinian people.”Gallant is only one man, and he serves at Netanyahu’s discretion. He alone cannot alter national policy—but he has galvanized such change before. The last time the defense minister delivered a broadside against Netanyahu’s governance, it was in March 2023 to oppose a far-right effort to hobble Israel’s judicial system. At the time, Gallant warned that internal Israeli division over the legislation “poses a clear, immediate, and tangible threat to the security of the state.” That speech led to Gallant’s firing, which was reversed after hundreds of thousands of Israelis poured into the streets in protest.Today, once again, Gallant has been pushed to the point of public dissent by his perception that Netanyahu is privileging his own coalition and political interest over the national interest. In his address to the Israeli public, Gallant declared that “we must make tough decisions for the future of our country, favoring national priorities above all other possible considerations, even with the possibility of personal or political costs.”The right’s response to this call has not been kind. Netanyahu issued a brief video rejecting Gallant’s arguments without naming him. Ben-Gvir, the far-right minister, demanded that Gallant be fired, while other hard-line lawmakers assailed him in personal terms. Getting rid of Gallant, however, will not be easy. According to recent polling, he is the most popular politician in Israel, far outpacing Netanyahu and his far-right partners. The defense minister’s speech was also quickly praised by Benny Gantz, the opposition leader in Israel’s war cabinet, who is leading Netanyahu in the polls and could leave the government if the prime minister acts rashly. And Netanyahu will have to contend with the United States—Sullivan is set to visit Israel this weekend, where he will undoubtedly press Gallant’s case. (By Wednesday night, a Biden official was already telling reporters that “we share the defense minister’s concern.”)Back in 2023, Gallant’s speech against the judicial overhaul ultimately doomed the effort after months of political upheaval. The success or failure of his latest intervention may determine not just the endgame for this conflict, but the trajectory of Israel in the decades to come.theatlantic.com
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How to Have a 60s Revolution With No Backlash Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.A weird thing is happening to me this week: I am turning 60.I enter a seventh decade with no small amount of apprehension. This decade proved lethal to my father, and many people whom I admire have written about reaching this milestone with distaste. “I just swallowed it down to my hiatal hernia where it stayed, like a golf ball of peanut butter,” wrote the legendary sportswriter Robert Lipsyte about his 60th birthday. Or as my colleague Caitlin Flanagan noted in The Atlantic as she entered her 60s, “I feel vaguely embarrassed about it, like I’ve somehow let myself go, like I’ve been bingeing on decades and wound up in this unappealing condition.”Turning 60, of course, is not a uniquely grim anniversary—marking our birthdays negatively is a commonplace of growing older. The experience can even be seen in pathological terms. The website Medical News Today lists symptoms of “birthday depression” that sound like a bad drug trip: paranoia, obsessive thinking, and avoiding contact with people.Even youth itself is not immune from the condition: You might be half my age and still feeling plenty of discomfort about turning 30. In fact, I remember my 30th very well—it doesn’t seem so long ago. I was a professional musician in those days, and although my birthday depression did not lead me to act like a paranoid recluse, I was worrying about whether the best days of my performing career were behind me and whether I was going bald. They were, and I was.What I should have been doing on my 30th birthday was looking ahead with hope and setting specific, positive goals. And that’s the way I intend to spend my 60th. Here’s how you can look forward, too, no matter what your age.[Joe Pinsker: The strange origins of American birthday celebrations]People pay a lot of attention to landmark birthdays because many of us tend to endow round numbers with special psychological significance. In 2011, two psychologists showed this in the cases of baseball batting averages and SAT scores. In the former instance, they demonstrated that baseball players on their last plate appearance of the season were more likely to get a base hit if their batting average was .298 or .299 than if it was .300 or .301. In the latter example, they showed that students were more likely to retake the SATs if their previous score was just short of a round number.In baseball and SAT scores, we see being able to round up as a positive, motivating goal. But the significance of closing in on a round number can also be negative, as in the case of milestone birthdays. One way to understand this is by looking at how people behave in the run-up to a big anniversary—the so-called 9-enders (29, 59, etc.). One study from 2014 found that 9-enders tend to be preoccupied by the vicissitudes of aging and a sense of meaningfulness, and may make dramatic changes to their lives in a seeming effort to disrupt an unsatisfactory status quo before reaching the milestone. For example, although the chance that they will embrace a positive aspiration, such as running a marathon, rises significantly in this last year, they are also more likely to act in a drastic, self-destructive way—like dying by suicide or seeking an extramarital affair.Health issues become markedly more salient at milestone birthdays. Researchers in 2015 found a higher correlation between overall health and life satisfaction at the turn of each decade, whereas simply feeling good at the moment was more important to people on ordinary birthdays.[Arthur C. Brooks: The happy art of grandparenting]In an Atlantic article that arguably anticipated this finding a century ago, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Edward Bok wrote an essay on turning 50 with an ominous title: “The Worst Birthday in a Man’s Life.” The predicament of entering his sixth decade led him to undertake strange exercise regimes in which he had to “kick in various directions or to fan the air wildly with your arms,” and adopt some drastic changes to his diet. The unfortunate faced with such a midlife crisis would, Bok went on, “cry either that you are ‘springing new-fangled notions’ on him, that the doctor is ‘a nut,’ or that his wife is starving him.”Even doctors themselves treat us differently on birthdays—and not just by dispensing “nutty” advice to eat more healthfully. A 2022 study in the journal Health Economics showed that, when faced with new patients, Israeli primary-care physicians scheduled more diagnostic tests for those who had just attained a decadal birthday than for those who were merely approaching one. Even doctors’ own performance is correlated with their birthday: Scholars in 2020 found that the likelihood of a patient dying in the 30 days after a surgery is 1.3 percent higher if the operation occurs on the surgeon’s birthday than if it occurs on another day. (You might especially want to avoid surgery on your surgeon’s 60th birthday.)[Read: Making aging positive]The key to a good milestone birthday is to change the experience from being an affliction to an opportunity, using the “fresh start” effect. Scholars have demonstrated that people are more likely to undertake a self-improvement goal (such as losing weight or exercising) on days they endow with a special significance. Thus, milestone birthdays are opportunities to make desired changes to your life. But you do have to pick the right goals. Researchers have found that happiness is highest when your objectives have two characteristics: They are intrinsic and positive, as opposed to extrinsic and negative.First, intrinsic goals are those in which the rewards come from within, not from the outside world. Typical extrinsic goals include money, recognition, and beauty, whereas intrinsic goals valorize relationship quality and spiritual depth. To underline this priority, scholars have shown that, unlike intrinsic goals, extrinsic ones are actually correlated with lower well-being over time. In my own research, I have found that such external rewards are inherently unsatisfying, despite their seemingly intuitive appeal. (I always think of the famous cartoon of an old man on his deathbed confessing, “I should have bought more crap.”)Second, the best goals have “approach” rather than “avoidance” motivations. In the first bucket are objectives such as “Spend more time enjoying nature on long walks” or “Practice loving-kindness meditation.” The second bucket would include such goals as “Quit my crummy job” or “Stop complaining all the time.” The avoidant goals are not necessarily useless or silly, but they are interestingly associated with poorer health in the long run—so, for that reason, they don’t work as good milestone aspirations to make the future happier.In sum, as you approach a landmark birthday, take time to envision how you would like your life to look at the next milestone. Then, create a list of five to 10 goals that are both positive and intrinsic. Finally, spend some time thinking about how you can practically achieve these aims—the small and medium-size changes to your habits that you can adopt, starting the morning of your birthday. Making this simple resolution has the power to turn dread about the passing of time into excitement for all you can do in the future.[Beth Nguyen: I grew up not knowing my birthday]One productive way to think about a decadal birthday is to consider your next stage as a novel of which you are the author. Fictions typically start in the middle of their characters’ story. You may get some backstory, but the action is nearly always about what happens after that point in time. The novelist cooks up a compelling series of events and then has her characters navigate their way through them. The script may change in the writing, but the shape of events broadly follows the writer’s vision.So, on your next major birthday, think of your life as an autobiographical novel that starts that day. You get to write the story. Take this imaginative exercise seriously and make your plot about hope and opportunity.Here goes: Once upon a time, a bald former French horn player was turning 60. That’s when the real adventure began.theatlantic.com
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In the Game of Spy vs. Spy, Israel Keeps Getting the Better of Iran I am a member of a strange club that nobody wants to belong to, but whose numbers are steadily growing: innocent people convicted in Iran of espionage for what Iranian officials call the “tyrannical Zionist entity” (in other words, Israel). Many among us are foreigners—businesspeople, journalists, tourists, and academics like myself, who traveled to Iran for what they thought would be a brief visit, only to find themselves thrown in prison on dubious charges.The European Union diplomat Johan Floderus, a Swedish citizen, is but the latest high-profile victim of Iranian hysteria over Israeli spies on its territory. Currently awaiting sentencing from a revolutionary court in Tehran, Floderus faces allegations of “very extensive intelligence cooperation with the Zionist occupation regime” and a charge of “corruption on earth,” which carries the death penalty. Sweden’s foreign minister has stated publicly that the accusations against Floderus are “completely baseless and false,” and the head of the EU foreign service has labeled him “illegally detained.”I was convicted of espionage for Israel under similarly spurious pretenses in 2019. I had been invited to an academic conference in Iran as the guest of a local university, and was arrested by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport as I was about to fly home to Australia. I was handed a 10-year prison sentence, of which I served more than two years at the mercy of the IRGC before I was freed in a prisoner swap.[Read: I was a hostage in Iran. The deals are part of the problem.]During my time in the Iranian prison system, I learned Farsi and used every opportunity possible to study my captors. In addition to IRGC interrogators and prison guards, I encountered a number of influential regime figures, including the head of IRGC intelligence, the deputy foreign minister, and even Iran’s current chief nuclear negotiator. At various junctures, these men came to the prison to meet and speak with me, or agreed to do so while visiting for seemingly other purposes.The fact that someone who had been convicted of espionage, however unjustly, was given access to such people is testament to the chaotic way in which intelligence work is conducted in the Islamic Republic. Indeed, although Iran’s authorities talk tough and cast an extremely wide net in their quest to capture the Mossad agents they believe are in their midst, a prevailing lack of competence has meant that very few actual spies ever seem to get caught.Not only does the Islamic Republic arrest a large number of innocent people domestically, but the agents of its two intelligence bodies, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the IRGC’s intelligence unit, have a long history of bungling operations overseas. Many operatives get caught: Just last month, a suspected member of the IRGC Quds Force was arrested in Peru for plotting to kill Israelis living in the country. Indeed the three IRGC members who were released in exchange for me had been convicted in Thailand of targeting Israeli diplomats in a failed bomb plot. Rather than making final preparations in the days before their operation, these hapless agents had been photographed drinking alcohol and partying with local prostitutes. In the course of resisting arrest, one of them had even blown off his own leg with the bombs they’d assembled.Of course, not every overseas Iranian-intelligence operation fails, and the consequences are devastating when they do not. In 1994, 85 people were killed at a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, in a bombing that Argentine courts later ruled was carried out on the orders of the Islamic Republic. Just last week, Argentina issued an Interpol red notice for Iran’s interior minister, Ahmad Vahidi, accusing him of having been behind the attack. The Islamic Republic is also apparently implicated in a string of assassinations and kidnappings of dissidents across Europe and the Middle East, as well as plots targeting Iranian opposition journalists in London and New York.[Read: Iran’s deadly message to journalists abroad]The incompetence and lack of professionalism of much of the Iranian intelligence apparatus stands in stark contrast to the efficiency of Israel’s, which is alleged to have carried out sophisticated sabotage and assassination plots on Iranian territory. Beginning in 2007, Israel is thought to have targeted scientists working on Iran’s nuclear program for assassination. At least six have been killed inside the country. In 2022 alone, seven officials affiliated with Iran’s missile or drone programs died under suspicious circumstances. Israel is also thought to have been behind two mysterious blasts at the Natanz nuclear facility, as well the theft of an enormous archive of documents relating to the nuclear program from a warehouse in Tehran. In 2023, Mossad even announced that it had kidnapped an IRGC hit man inside Iran; the Israeli agency released footage from his interrogation outside the country.Somewhat bizarrely, my exchange for three blundering IRGC operatives wasn’t the only connection between my wrongful imprisonment and the high-stakes war of espionage that has long been playing out between Tehran and Tel Aviv. Less than 48 hours after I was freed from prison—and likely not unrelated to the deal that freed me—Israel carried out one of its most audacious missions on Iranian soil.Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was an IRGC commander and the shadowy mastermind of Iran’s covert nuclear-weapons program. While the regime was busy welcoming the three convicted terrorists home with garlands of flowers and sleek propaganda reels, agents acting for Israel parked a blue Nissan pickup truck on a highway intersection near the hamlet of Absard, north of Tehran. Hidden on the truck bed beneath a tarpaulin was a remote-controlled, AI-programmed machine gun. As Fakhrizadeh’s motorcade crossed the intersection, the sniper, watching via satellite from thousands of kilometers away, opened fire. Fakhrizadeh was killed in a hail of bullets. The truck then blew itself up.The Israelis had clearly been surveilling Fakhrizadeh for months, if not years, prior to the attack. Yet they held their fire until after I had departed Iranian airspace, a move that was much to my benefit, as such a brazen operation would undoubtedly have scuppered the deal for my release. That the attack so closely coincided with my prisoner swap, however, was unlikely to be an accident, and had less to do with me than with the three IRGC terrorists exchanged for my freedom. Australia probably had to secure Israel’s consent for trading them, as they had been caught targeting Israeli diplomats. The IRGC, of course, would have known that. And so the Israelis opted to send Tehran a message by allowing the deal to go through but killing Fakhrizadeh at nearly the same time: They would go after a bigger target, and on Iranian soil besides. Unlike the IRGC’s three amateurish agents in Thailand, they didn’t fail.The Iranian regime has shown itself to be supremely adept at surveilling, arresting, and interrogating political dissidents, social-media activists, members of armed separatist groups, and even underground terror cells from organizations such as the MEK. As the unprecedented crackdown on the Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrations shows, the regime retains a fierce grip on the country and runs it like a police state. All of which leaves one to wonder: Why does Iran do such a poor job of countering Israel’s operations inside its territory?One clue lies in the fact that many, if not most, of the assassinations and other plots attributed to Israel, including the killing of Fakhrizadeh, are conducted with the participation of local Iranian recruits. Interestingly, the quadcopter drones thought to have been used in Israel’s April 19 attack on a military facility in Isfahan province were also most likely assembled and launched from inside Iran.The Islamic Republic’s security apparatus has long assumed that Israel is sending foreign tourists and other visitors to Iran to spy on its behalf. But this supposition seems more and more like a costly distraction from the real issue at hand: A not-insignificant number of Iranian citizens inside Iran appear willing to risk torture, imprisonment, and execution in order to assist enemies of their own government.Iranian security agencies have had little success in thwarting Israeli activities inside their country in part because authoritarian regimes prioritize loyalty over competence. IRGC intelligence officials tend to owe their positions to either ideological conformity or to strong family or personal ties within the organization. If you weren’t a true believer (or at least good at pretending to be one) and didn’t have other IRGC members to vouch for you, you didn’t have a hope of becoming even a lowly prison official in a Revolutionary Guard detention facility. As one guard boasted to me, “Our positions aren’t advertised.” In such a system, aptitude, skill, and even security training are much lower priorities. The least suitable people can attain high ranks, while better-qualified candidates who are deemed insufficiently ideologically committed miss out.The result is a lack of professionalism, which I observed firsthand during the 804 days I spent in IRGC custody. For example, I was once able to text the Australian embassy in the middle of an interrogation, because my interrogator had made the rookie error of leaving my confiscated phone in the room after he stepped out. On another occasion, I was able to trick one of my captors into revealing details of the diplomatic negotiations surrounding my release. And although I’m unable to go into specifics, female prisoners are routinely able to take advantage of the IRGC guards’ squeamishness about women’s bodies to smuggle information outside the prison.Selected for ideological orthodoxy, the Revolutionary Guards I interacted with bought into all manner of conspiracy theories, which undoubtedly distorted their understanding of geopolitics and hamstrung their ability to interrogate suspects. I was regularly forced to listen to lengthy tirades about secretive Zionists pulling the levers of the global economy, or Israeli plots to poison the sperm counts of Muslim men in a scheme to achieve demographic supremacy. My handlers admitted to watching spy shows involving the Middle East, such as Fauda, Tehran, and Homeland. These seemed to reinforce their tendency to see the hand of Mossad behind every calamity that befell Iran, man-made or otherwise. Such paranoia helps explain the shockingly high numbers of innocent people, most of them Iranian, imprisoned on charges of working for Israel. Sadly, many of these people make false confessions under duress, which in turn gives the authorities the impression that they are catching real spies.Institutional incompetence is not the sole reason Iran’s agencies have been losing the shadow intelligence war with Israel. Like all brutal authoritarian regimes, the Islamic Republic knows no language other than intimidation and the threat of violence. It has proved unable to offer positive incentives or rewards to those who might be in a position to assist it. The population, including the Islamic Republic’s traditional religious constituency, broadly loathes the regime; even the most disinterested and self-serving opportunist is reluctant to gather information on its behalf. The IRGC in turn distrusts the people it rules over and believes that cooperation can only be forcibly coerced.[Read: How fake spies ruin real intelligence]I experienced this approach myself in Evin Prison. Before I was put on trial, Revolutionary Guard interrogators accosted me with an offer of recruitment. Would I agree to travel to London to collect information on the Iranian dissident community? Would I use my status as an academic to visit Israel, effectively as an Iranian agent? Then, after the trial, they used the absurd 10-year sentence I was dealt as a lever of blackmail. The IRGC would only enter into negotiations over my freedom, I was told, if I agreed to work for them; if I did agree, I would be beholden to them in every way once freed.“How do you know I won’t just run away after I’m allowed to leave Iran?” I asked the recruiters.The answer was sobering. The IRGC had operatives on Australian soil, they told me, just as they did in Europe and North America. If I reneged, they would kill me. For more than 18 months, I resisted this pressure. It relented only after I leaked to the international press that I was a recruitment target.The IRGC are better placed to blackmail Iranian or dual-national prisoners than they were with me. Anyone who has family members living in Iran faces an impossible choice: Agree to spy for the regime, or see your loved ones jailed and tortured alongside you. And because unwilling recruits can’t be fully trusted, they are then subjected to near-constant surveillance and threats to prevent them from escaping. During the years I spent in IRGC custody, I encountered several such people, three of whom were ultimately sent abroad on behalf of the IRGC.Iran’s heavy-handed approach contrasts sharply with the methods that Israel is rumored to employ inside Iran. In prison I met several Iranian Muslims convicted of activities that linked them to Israel, and I heard stories of numerous others. Some were shown to have been calling Israel over Skype, or chatting with Israelis in internet message forums. Of course, many such people are innocent of any crime, and were likely just curious about a neighboring country whose name they had been encouraged to curse since primary school. There appeared to be slightly more substance to the allegations against a small number of others.From what I came to understand, Israel has been able to capitalize on the Islamic Republic’s record of poor governance, economic mismanagement, poverty, and political repression to offer would-be collaborators valuable ways out. These could take the form of bundles of cash or offers of permanent residency, not only for Iranians who assist their operations, but for their family members as well. In this respect as in many others, the Islamic Republic has become its own greatest adversary: Having shown itself over the decades to be impervious to ideological moderation or reform from within, it has become so hated that its own people—its biggest victims—are willing to embrace the possibility that the enemy of their enemy is their friend. I lost track of the number of Iranians in prison who advocated for heavier economic sanctions and openly welcomed American or Israeli air strikes on Iran.These sentiments have translated into robust support for Israel on social media, including from inside Iran, much of it making no reference to the horrors currently unfolding in Gaza. Some Iranians condemned the IRGC’s April 13 missile and drone attacks on Israel and cheered on Israel’s retaliation. Somewhat embarrassingly, the regime was forced to issue an official notice threatening to arrest anyone expressing these sentiments online. It followed through by arresting Mobina Rostami, a member of the national volleyball team, after she posted on social media: “As an Iranian, I am truly ashamed of the authorities’ attack on Israel, but you need to know that the people in Iran love Israel and hate the Islamic Republic.”Israel and Iran’s tit-for-tat military strikes on each other’s territory will likely lead to a further intensification of their long-standing clandestine activities. As a result, Iran will likely throw more innocent people in prison; it will bungle more overseas operations; and ultra-hard-liners in its security establishment will double down on repressing a population that despises them. Such authoritarian tactics have already benefited Iran’s enemies and will continue to do so, offering Israel the upper hand in the covert war of espionage within Iran’s borders and abroad.theatlantic.com
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Google and OpenAI Are Battling for AI Supremacy This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.This week has felt like the early days of the generative-AI boom, filled with dazzling events concerning the future of the technology.On Monday, OpenAI held a last-minute “Spring Update” event in which the company announced its newest AI model, GPT-4o, in an impressive live demo. Running on the iPhone’s ChatGPT app, the model appeared able to understand live camera footage, help solve a math problem, and translate a live conversation between English and Italian speakers. Every previous smartphone assistant, including Apple’s Siri, now appears obsolete—and the smartphone itself might be reimagined as the device most “perfectly positioned to run generative-AI programs,” as I wrote on Monday.Not to be outdone, Google followed suit yesterday during its annual developer conference, which focused almost exclusively on generative AI. Alongside various technological advances, the company laid out its vision for search in the AI era: “Google will do the Googling for you,” Liz Reid, the company’s head of search, declared. In other words, chatbots will take the work out of finding information online. Lurking beneath the announcements was an acknowledgment that AI is better suited at synthesizing existing information and formatting it into an accessible format than providing clear, definitive answers. “That’s not omniscience; it’s the ability to tap into Google’s preexisting index of the web,” I noted yesterday.OpenAI’s and Google’s announcements are a duel over not just which product is best, but which kind of generative AI will be most useful to people. The ChatGPT app promises to do everything, all in one place; AI-powered Google search promises to be more of an open-ended guide. Whether users will embrace either vision of a remade web remains to be seen.— Matteo Wong, associate editorWhat to Read Next The live translation exhibited in OpenAI’s demo gestures toward a world in which people no longer feel compelled to learn foreign languages. Louise Matsakis explored this potential AI-induced death of bilingualism in March, writing, “We may find that we’ve allowed deep human connections to be replaced by communication that’s technically proficient but ultimately hollow.” Another, perhaps even more alarming future for the world’s languages: Generative AI, which is most proficient in the handful of languages with plentiful training data, may push thousands of other tongues into extinction. “If generative AI indeed becomes the portal through which the internet is accessed,” I wrote in March, “then billions of people may in fact be worse off than they are today.” P.S.The buzz over AI image generators and deepfakes was preceded, decades ago, by similar excitement and hand-wringing over Adobe’s Photoshop, then “the primary battlefield for debates around fake imagery,” my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote last week. In the age of AI, Photoshop is struggling to adjust to being just one player in a crowded field.— Matteotheatlantic.com
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The 8 Dynamics That Will Shape the Election And that will decide the outcome in Novembertheatlantic.com