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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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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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Accents Are Emotional How we speak reflects what we feel—especially when it comes to regional accents.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
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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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A Courtroom Parade of Trump’s Allies A jumbled cast of GOP characters have inserted themselves into the former president’s legal drama.theatlantic.com
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Photos From the 2024 Westminster Dog Show The 148th annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show took place in New York City over the past week, showcasing more than 3,000 dogs of 200 different breeds and varieties. This year’s Best in Show was awarded to a miniature poodle named Sage. Gathered below are images from this year’s competition, held at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.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
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China Has Only Itself to Blame for a Trade War A global trade war is starting, and China is at the center of it. A reckoning for Beijing’s economic model, which is designed to promote Chinese industry at the expense of the rest of the world, has long been coming. China’s trading partners have had enough. The result will be a wave of protectionism, with potentially dire consequences for both China and the global economy.The most obvious and dramatic evidence for this was unveiled yesterday by President Joe Biden, who announced that his administration would quadruple the existing tariffs on imported Chinese electric vehicles, to 100 percent. He will also hike tariffs on steel, aluminum, medical equipment, semiconductors, solar cells, and lithium batteries. The Chinese government instantly protested and threatened action of its own. “The United States should immediately correct its wrong practices,” the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said in a statement. “China will take resolute measures to defend its own rights and interests.”Yet China’s leaders have no one to blame but themselves. They joined a global trading system and then gamed that system. Biden’s tariffs are the natural response, though not an entirely positive one. Protectionism raises costs, hurts consumers, shields unworthy companies from competition, and punishes worthier ones. Disputes over trade will only intensify the rivalry between the world’s two great powers.This souring of trade relations wasn’t always foreordained—but it had become virtually unavoidable. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has failed to reform his economy in ways that would have made this trade war less likely. Facing this confrontation with the United States, he is even less likely to make reforms today. The result is trade conflict and heightened political tensions that benefit no one.[Derek Thompson: Trade wars are not good, or easy to win]Biden targeted EVs for a reason. Beijing’s leaders wanted to dominate that industry and threw the weight of the state behind Chinese companies. The program was undeniably successful. China is at the forefront of the EV industry, while the United States, with the exception of Tesla, has barely gotten out of the parking lot. But electrical automotive is also a sector in which China’s government has played such a heavy role, and created so much manufacturing capacity, that other governments believe their own industries are at risk.Both that prowess and that excess were on display recently at the Beijing Auto Show. The exhibition included no fewer than 278 EV models. That’s indicative of a market jammed with 139 EV brands. The already gridlocked Chinese car market didn’t dissuade the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi from jumping in, with its first EV offering in the show’s spotlight. China simply has too many car companies with too many factories making too many cars. Counting both EVs and internal-combustion-engine vehicles, China’s auto industry now has the capacity to produce almost twice as many vehicles as Chinese consumers are buying, according to the Shanghai-based consultancy Automobility Limited. Although oversupply in the EV sector, where demand is still growing, is not as severe as in the legacy business, Chinese automakers are still adding assembly lines. BYD, for instance, plans to more than double its EV production capacity by 2026.China now has the largest domestic car market in the world, but even Chinese consumers cannot sustain so many factories, especially as the country’s economy slows. So automakers are off-loading their surplus products into the global marketplace. China vied with Japan for the title of world’s largest car exporter last yearThis hefty outflow of Chinese cars has earned unwelcome attention from policy makers in the U.S. and Europe. They contend that the Chinese government unduly supports and promotes China’s bloated automobile sector; as a consequence, their own automakers are threatened by a deluge of cheap Chinese vehicles. During an official visit to China in late April, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the issue of China’s excess capacity was “front and center” for Washington. Chinese industry, he added, is “flooding markets, undermining competition, putting at risk livelihoods and businesses around the world.” While also visiting China in April, Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, expressed similar concerns.“The one thing that must always be clear is that competition must be fair,” Scholz said in a speech in Shanghai. China’s leaders think it already is. They retort that the success of Chinese automakers is due entirely to their competitive advantages. Premier Li Qiang told Scholz that greater supply “is conducive to full market competition and promoting the survival of the fittest.”[Michael Schuman: To China, all’s fair in love and trade wars]The state news agency Xinhua argued that China’s edge “has been honed through diligent efforts and genuine expertise, rooted in market competition, innovation, and entrepreneurship,” and went on to claim that “the world doesn’t want less of China’s capacity, but wants more.” Therefore, the criticism of China’s industry “may look like an economic discussion,” a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry said, but it “ignores more than 200 years of the basic concept of comparative advantage in Western economics.”The fact that some Chinese EV companies have developed highly competitive products and technology, and benefit from real cost advantages in a relatively low-wage economy, is certainly true. Yet the government’s role in building and sustaining that sector is undeniable as well. Chinese economic planners wished to accelerate the EV sector’s development, so, almost a decade ago, they targeted electric vehicles for special state assistance through their Made in China 2025 industrial program. The assistance was controversial from the start because American and European business leaders and policy makers feared—rightly, it now appears—that Beijing’s backing for its favored industries would distort global markets. Tax breaks, low-interest loans, subsidies to make EVs more affordable, and other aid followed.These interventions encouraged private capital to jump in as well. The result was an explosion of investment in start-ups, factories, and supply chains. As Bert Hofman, an expert on China’s economy at the National University of Singapore, told me: “If the central government says this is the new growth area, electric vehicles are the future, everybody and their grandmothers start something in electric vehicles.”All governments place their thumb on the scale to promote their national industries to some degree. China’s thumb simply weighs more heavily. A 2022 study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington conservatively estimated that China spent $248 billion supporting its industries in 2019. That’s twice as much as the United States did. “It’s the whole financial system, the whole economic system that is leveraged for industrial policy, which is very different than what’s been happening in market economies,” Camille Boullenois, an analyst of Chinese industry at the research firm Rhodium Group, told me. Where electric vehicles are concerned, “it’s very hard to imagine the industry growing as fast without government support.”The excess capacity, however, is not so much by design. As the automobile industry in China was revving up, the economy was slowing down. Bill Russo, Automobility’s founder, explained to me that automakers overestimated the growth of the Chinese car market and ended up building factories to churn out vehicles for customers that never materialized. Passenger-car sales are still below where they were in 2017 thanks to a stumbling economy, the ravages of the pandemic, and other factors. Such investment, he said, “has been the formula for cashing in on China’s growth, and you’re going to have a reckoning at one point in time—and that’s what we’re faced with right now.”This problem is not confined to cars. China’s steel industry has maintained its output even though demand at home has been declining. The Australian bank Westpac said recently that steel exports, which are approaching record levels, have become a “release valve” for this excess. Even as China’s leaders rebutted foreign criticism of its bloated industries, they released draft regulations in early May to rein in expansion of lithium-battery manufacturing. Chinese state-owned media are reporting that a glut of solar panels—another sector dominated by Chinese companies—is depressing prices and squeezing profits. A surge of Chinese investment into manufacturing “legacy” microchips (those using older technology) is sparking fears they could flood the global marketplace.[Richard Fontaine: The China problem isn’t going away]Facing this Chinese onslaught, governments around the world are stepping in to protect their own industries. The European Commission is currently conducting an investigation into China’s subsidizing of electric vehicles with an eye to imposing its own tariffs on their import. Rhodium anticipates that the EU will apply a duty of 15 to 30 percent on EVs, but the group argues that even this may not be sufficient to deter Chinese automakers. The Biden administration’s move to a 100 percent EV tariff no doubt reflects similar thinking. Chile has already slapped tariffs on some Chinese steel products, while Brazil imposed quotas and duties to stave off an influx of cheap steel, mainly from China.Beijing could fend off these restrictions by reforming its domestic market. The flip side of China’s excessive supply is weak demand. This is caused not just by slowing growth, but also by its entire economic model. As Michael Pettis, a specialist in China’s economy at Peking University, recently pointed out, Beijing’s dirigiste policy has a side effect of subsidizing China’s industry even more than it appears, by both directly and indirectly transferring wealth from families to factories: Rather than encouraging spending on goods, all of the economic incentives are to make capital investment in manufacturing. China’s economic model favors producers over consumers, which holds down household incomes and limits their spending. Lacking customers at home, Chinese industry is forced to seek them abroad.New policies that nudge Chinese families to spend more and save less could alleviate the problem. One way to do this would be to strengthen the country’s feeble social safety net. But Chinese leaders have done little to encourage that transition, perhaps because the necessary liberalizing reforms could weaken the Communist Party’s control over the economy and society. That leaves China’s industrial giants little option but to spew their excess into the global marketplace, in an effort to sustain growth and employment. The outcome is that China sells to the world more goods than it buys from it. Hofman calculated that China recorded trade surpluses with 173 economies in 2023 and deficits with only 50. That added up to a merchandise trade surplus of more than $800 billion.Xi Jinping seems set on making matters worse. His principal economic goal of achieving “self-sufficiency” aims to reduce what China purchases from other countries and substitute goods made by foreign companies with Chinese alternatives—especially in industries, such as green energy, that other governments find strategic. In doing so, Xi is practically inviting more intense trade disputes.In Xi’s thinking, economic growth “is going to come from churning out a lot of this stuff and exporting it to the world,” Leland Miller, a co-founder of the research firm China Beige Book, told me. “Why they think they can get away with that when they are already running giant, politically charged trade surpluses with most of the world, including the United States, and they’re going to supercharge those surpluses and think that’s going to be successful … it doesn’t make much sense.”The big point is that China is not just exporting too much stuff; it’s also exporting its economic problems. Xi intends to maintain Chinese jobs and factories at the expense of other countries’ workers and companies, to avoid necessary but potentially disruptive reform at home. That means Xi is actually undermining the great hope of China’s rise. A wealthier China was supposed to be an engine of global prosperity. Xi’s version is promoting protectionism and confrontation that threaten that prosperity.Facing political pressure at home, politicians around the world are forced to defend their economies from Xi’s strategy, even if that leads to trade wars that sour relations with Beijing. This is not a good outcome for the global economy or for geopolitical stability. But Xi’s policies have made it inevitable.theatlantic.com
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The Baby Reindeer Mess Was Inevitable This story contains spoilers for the Netflix limited series Baby Reindeer.In the finale of Baby Reindeer, the comedian Donny Dunn (played by the show’s creator, Richard Gadd) achieves the kind of success he’d always wanted: He lands podcast interviews, performs before appreciative crowds inside big clubs, and scrolls through scores of online comments praising him for his bravery. He has transformed, as he puts it, “from a walking ghost to the center of a media storm”—all because a random audience member filmed and uploaded to YouTube a set during which Donny fell apart and delivered confessions instead of jokes. He’d told the room that he’d been groomed and abused years earlier by a man he’d considered his mentor, and that the resulting mix of self-hatred, humiliation, and guilt led him to indulge a stalker named Martha (Jessica Gunning).Donny is based on Gadd himself, and the British series—an expanded, episodic version of Gadd’s one-man show of the same name—opens with a card that reads “This is a true story.” Gadd has said that he was indeed stalked and harassed by a middle-aged woman who claimed to be a lawyer, and that he had been sexually abused by someone in the industry he’d greatly admired. The names of these people and certain details about the events were changed, but, as Gadd said in an interview, the show was “all emotionally 100 percent true.”[Read: We’ve lost the plot]The response to Baby Reindeer has been a lot more complicated than Donny’s brush with acclaim. Though the show has received glowing reviews since its April debut and became a hit on Netflix, topping the streamer’s English-language charts three weeks in a row, the fallout has been, to put it mildly, a mess. Some viewers tried to uncover the identity of Gadd’s entertainment-industry abuser and ended up targeting an innocent former co-worker of Gadd’s. As for Martha, internet sleuths found a woman who matched her description, leading tabloids such as the Daily Mail to track her down. The woman has said she believes that the character of Martha was based on her, and admitted to sending Gadd emails and tweets, but denied stalking him or committing criminal behavior during their interactions. She has since accused Gadd of stalking her, and, last week, she was interviewed by Piers Morgan, which led to a fresh wave of online commentary. Maybe that’s the last of it; Gadd himself has refused to “confirm or deny anything relating to the real life people who the characters are based on in the show.” Or maybe such a high-profile appearance will beget more headlines, which will beget even more discussion.None of this is really a surprise when you consider the show’s structure. Baby Reindeer spends most of its time dissecting Donny—and, by extension, Gadd himself—but the stalker story is its most seductive hook. The show’s thrillerlike twists offer a kind of voyeuristic accessibility into Donny’s staggering turmoil. But by branding itself as a true story, the series implicitly invites viewers to ponder what’s real and what’s been embellished—this intrigue is what helped turn the show into a word-of-mouth hit. As such, it’s become nearly impossible to see the story of Baby Reindeer on its own terms, separate from the conversation about Gadd’s ethics and whether he did enough to prevent the real people involved from being publicly identifiable. The show itself actually makes trenchant observations about obsession, shame, and abuse—all of which have been overshadowed by the frenzy it helped create.This apparently wasn’t Gadd’s intention. “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real-life people could be,” he wrote in an Instagram Story. “That’s not the point of our show.” The point, it seemed, had been catharsis—for Gadd, and for anyone who might resonate with his journey. The original stage show, he told The Guardian, became “a lifeline … The way people received the show, and received me, and accepted what happened to me: it saved my life.” In making the show, he sought to make sense of how his earlier abuse informed his behavior around his stalker: why he remained in contact with her for so long and why he failed to draw clear boundaries.The show succeeds in many ways at capturing Gadd’s cathartic self-reflection. Donny’s narration anchors the series in his queasy point of view, his voice-over repeatedly veering into critical takedowns of his own behavior. He tends to state how much he loathes himself, his need for relevancy, and his similarities to Martha. Baby Reindeer’s fourth and strongest episode, told in a visceral series of flashbacks, is especially uncomfortable: The disorienting camerawork places us inside Donny’s confused, blurry mind as he returns to his groomer’s apartment over and over, knowing each time that he’ll be drugged and raped. Even the title credits emphasize how trapped Donny is in his head: The words “created & written by Richard Gadd” are typed on-screen and then backspaced away, as if Gadd can’t fully say what he wants to express. The effect is overwhelming—Donny is so raw and honest about how he feels about himself that you immediately empathize with him. [Read: A grim new low for internet sleuthing]But Baby Reindeer also quietly, perhaps inadvertently, encourages prying into the people being depicted on-screen—to participate, in other words, in the very form of “toxic empathy” Gadd said he struggled with during the time he engaged with Martha. Netflix has maintained that it took “every reasonable precaution in disguising the real-life identities of the people involved,” yet the show seems to have kept plenty of other details intact: Netflix U.K.’s Instagram account declares that the misspelled emails depicted in the show were pulled from Gadd’s inbox. An in-joke about curtains is reproduced in the drama; the alleged real-life Martha referred to it in a public social-media post, which viewers easily found online. Donny’s emphasis on how much he couldn’t quit Martha often overshadows the richer parts of his story. The show spends several episodes exploring Donny’s budding romance with a trans woman, Teri (Nava Mau), and his evolving understanding of his parents, who have more in common with him than he thought. But Donny’s relationship with Martha bookends the series, affirming its importance over everything else. Viewers are left with Martha’s voice ringing in their ears. It’s no wonder that so many began hunting for her once they finished the show.I want to give Gadd the benefit of the doubt. Reliving his real-life trauma to play Donny can’t have been easy, and he said on a panel discussion recently that he had expected Baby Reindeer to “sit as maybe a little cult, artistic gem on the Netflix platform.” “If I wanted the real life people to be found, I would’ve made it a documentary,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in a conversation conducted before the Piers Morgan interview. “I’ve spoken publicly about how I don’t want people to do it and if I start playing a game of whack-a-mole, then I’m almost adding to it. I don’t think I’ll ever comment on it ever again.” (It’s unclear whether the woman who claims to be the real-life Martha was ever formally charged or investigated for alleged stalking.)For better or worse, the selling of the show as a true story positioned it to become the subject of internet sleuthing, and buried what’s really potent about it beyond the stalker storyline. Baby Reindeer examines the destructive nature of abuse, the way that a survivor can do seemingly irrational things—returning to the site of the abuse, obsessing over actions and inactions—just to be sure the whole ordeal wasn’t imagined. Donny found solace in the easy validation Martha provided and saw in her the same self-loathing and loneliness he had within him.During Donny’s unplanned confession onstage, he explains why he couldn’t let go of the possibility that his abusive mentor could actually make him famous. “When you’re famous, people see you as that,” he said. “They think, It’s the guy from that thing!” In reality, of course, fame can simply be the start of a cycle of exploitative empathy. At its core, Baby Reindeer understood this. But inevitably, too many of its viewers did not.theatlantic.com
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The Death of the Corner Office If you walked into an office building during the second half of the 20th century, you could probably figure out who had power with a single glance: Just look for the person in the corner office. The corner offices of yore were big, with large windows offering city views and constant streams of light, plus unbeatable levels of privacy. Everyone wanted them, but only those at the top got them. Land in one, and you’d know you’d made it. Fast-forward to today, and that emblem of corporate success is dying off. The number of private offices along the side of a building, a category that includes those in the corner, has shrunk by about half since 2021, according to the real-estate company CBRE. But today’s workplace transformation goes beyond the corner. All assigned desks and offices are on the decline, comprising only 45 percent of the average office, compared with 56 percent in 2021. Employers of many kinds—law firms, oil companies, biotech businesses, railway operators—are doing without them. They’re being replaced with coffee areas, conference rooms, and other collaborative spaces, Janet Pogue, the global director of workplace research at Gensler, a design firm, told me. In 2023, communal areas constituted 20 percent of the average office floor, up from 14 percent in 2021, CBRE found. [Read: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults]Some take this shift as evidence of a revolution in egalitarianism. But tearing down the walls of the corner office hasn’t exactly made the workplace more democratic. Executives still claim many of the new shared spaces as their own, take the lead during team meetings, and enjoy other subtle privileges. They may no longer occupy a seat of such visible power, but they still exert sway over the rest of the office, using spaces as they please and influencing what others can do in them.The relationship between office geography and power has always been in flux. The earliest workplaces displayed a “total inversion of our image of the traditional office-space hierarchy,” Dale Bradley, a professor at Brock University who has researched the history of the office, told me. Take the Larkin Building, which was designed in 1904 for a soap company. There, executives sat in the center of the first floor. “These guys are on display all the time,” Bradley said. Lower-level employees, meanwhile, were pushed to the edges of the building.But as the years passed, bosses decided they’d rather not be so visible. Shortly before World War II, they started moving into the corners, where they could easily block themselves off, and the symbol of corporate power that we know today took root. By mid-century, developers were bragging about how many corner offices they could cram onto each floor. In 1966, The New York Times wrote about a Philadelphia office building that had eight corners—“twice the normal supply.” Toronto’s Scotia Plaza did even better, with as many as 22 on some floors. This influence seeped into literature too. Books with titles such as Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office and Winners Dream: A Journey From Corner Store to Corner Office made clear that attaining the corner office was the apex of capitalist triumph. Then, about two decades ago, office designers began phasing them out. Google’s open-plan office redesign in 2005 was one of the earlier and most high-profile signs of changing attitudes: Modern workplaces were emphasizing collaboration, and corner offices were seen as too siloed. In 2020, the office came under attack again. Especially during the early pandemic, fewer executives were showing up to work in person, and their palatial corner offices were going to waste. “Nobody else really feels comfortable going into somebody else’s space and sitting there,” Kay Sargent, a director at the design firm HOK, told me. Now new office leases are about 20 percent smaller than they were before COVID, and companies are reconfiguring their floor plans to include more communal areas so that more employees fit into less space.Without the corner office, status is conveyed in new ways. No matter the setup, “human beings will still find a way of creating hierarchy,” Lenny Beaudoin, CBRE’s global head of workplace design, explained. Bosses might have more computer monitors, bigger desks, or even just a permanent spot rather than a rotating one, Matthew Davis, a business professor at Leeds University Business School, told me. Power also manifests intangibly—for instance, only a select few might be able to not check Slack or come and go from the office without explanation. It’s the same benefit of having a far-flung corner office, re-created digitally: You know you’re important if you can escape surveillance.[Read: ‘Resimercial:’ the terrible word for today’s trendy office aesthetic]And even if they’re not in the corner, a lot of executives do still have offices. Those have largely slimmed down, but many are connected to conference rooms or other collaborative spaces, such as broadcast rooms in finance firms, recording studios at media companies, and labs in the life sciences. Many higher-ups essentially seize these for themselves whenever they come in, Pogue, at Gensler, told me. From there, they can shape any collaboration that takes place, ensuring it plays out in their space and under their supervision. Many modern companies “have as many conference rooms as there are executives,” Sargent said, and it’s become a “dirty little secret” that conference rooms are the new corner offices.A collaborative space doesn’t need to be directly attached to a boss’s office for this dynamic to play out. When a high-ranking executive parks themselves in a big conference room or spreads their stuff across the long table in the office coffee shop, no one is going to tell them to leave. The communal spaces are free to use only if the boss isn’t there. Across all iterations of the workplace, higher-ups have always found ways to get what they want. We may one day return to an older layout of explicit hierarchy: Beaudoin, the CBRE designer, told me that he recently worked with a bank that decided to reinstall corner offices for a group of senior leaders, hoping it would bring them back to the office. But even if recent changes prove lasting, with space designed to be up for grabs, there won’t be any illusions about who has the power to grab it.theatlantic.com
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A Gaza Protester Who’s Willing to Suffer The protesters on university campuses have an image problem: They look like they are having way too much fun. In tone, the demonstrations do not match the subject matter, which they allege is genocide, the least fun of all human activities. For 20-year-olds, some activities that would be miserable to a normal person—screaming hysterically, being arrested, living in ragged encampments—are in fact an exhilarating way to spend one’s time, and certainly preferable to studying for exams. Young people like to rough it, within reason. Earlier this month, the protesters at the University of Chicago begged to be resupplied with dwindling essentials such as Chapstick and dental dams.Most universities have delayed threats of serious punishment. Even students who are eventually arrested are likely to suffer only minor blemishes to their records. And many of these blemishes are desirable: What better way to prove you were young and alive in 2024 than to have a framed mug shot from the day you were zip-tied and booked? Such mementos will have an honored place on the desks of protesters who someday follow a square occupation, like corporate law or podiatry.Fun does not discredit a cause, but a protester who enjoys himself has a harder time demonstrating his commitment than one willing to suffer. This weekend I spoke with one of the latter. David Chmielewski, a Princeton English major from Torrington, Connecticut, along with 11 other Princeton community members, spent 10 days on a hunger strike to call for the university to divest from Israel. “We wanted to commit ourselves to making clear how dire the situation is, with the forced famine that’s happening in the Gaza Strip,” Chmielewski said. He and the others consumed nothing but water, electrolytes, and necessary medicine. “There’s something very powerful about being able to use your body to show that commitment.” He said the group stopped on Saturday after talks with Princeton administrators yielded promising results.[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]Many have ridiculed the hunger strikers for the short duration of their fast, and for not emerging from the ordeal sallow and hollow-cheeked. (“PROTESTER WHINES OVER SELF-IMPOSED HUNGER STRIKE,” read the chyron on a Fox News broadcast.) Ten days isn’t long, but it is nine days longer than I’ve ever gone without food, so I am not inclined to downplay the unpleasantness of the experience. In fact, I respect Chmielewski. And just as it is important to ridicule protesters who have no idea what they are protesting, or who infringe on the rights of others, or who hate Jews, one should acknowledge when others press their cause, whatever its merit, in a morally faultless way.Chmielewski said his group was inspired by hunger strikers earlier this year at Brown (where the strike lasted eight days), at Dartmouth (where it lasted 12 days), and at Harvard (half a day). “We’re also drawing on a longer tradition of the hunger strike as a nonviolent-resistance tactic,” he told me, citing the Irish-republican hunger strikes of the 1920s and those of Gandhi and others in the movement for Indian independence. The Princeton protesters, he said, have had weeks to evolve in their tactics, without having been wiped out by clashes with police. “Other student groups may not have been afforded that luxury of time,” Chmielewski said. “We’ve had a lot of time to sit and reflect on what we can do to pressure the university but also to center Palestinians.”The language of “centering”—borrowed from the feminist theory of bell hooks and others—refers to the practice of giving credence and priority to the views of those historically ignored or victimized. It is in my opinion misguided, insofar as history’s victims are like history’s oppressors: human, and therefore flawed to the core and wrong about most things. And in the case of the Palestinians, the practice of “centering” seems to introduce a contradiction. Was it not odd, I asked Chmielewski, that centering the Palestinian perspective would lead him to adopt tactics that have never attracted a significant following among Palestinians?Chmielewski countered that Palestinian political prisoners have gone on hunger strikes by the thousands at various points in the past few decades. That’s true, but many of those striking were doing so only because they were in prison for violent crimes, and nonviolence had become the only option available. Nonviolent resistance as a preferred tactic remains rare—and rejected completely by Hamas—even though a growing literature in political science (particularly the work of Erica Chenoweth and the late Gene Sharp) has demonstrated that it is often very effective. It is less effective when allied with organized armed resistance. Chmielewski’s peers seem content with such an alliance. “Glory to the martyrs,” his Princeton group declared in a recent social-media post. “The empire will burn.”The question of why Palestinians have shown conspicuously little interest in the tactic that he himself has adopted is, Chmielewski told me, “better asked of a Palestinian.” “I don’t necessarily feel qualified to speak to the exact reasons for the dynamics of what tactics Palestinians have adopted historically,” he said. He was, I should add, smart and articulate, and one reason I liked him was his willingness to admit ignorance. Another was that unlike many other protesters, he did not hide behind a mask and committed himself to his cause by name.His conclusion from the experience was not narrowly about hunger in Gaza at all. “I’m not sure I know the right word” for what he experienced by not eating, he told me. “Spiritual? Poetic? Imaginative?” He said the hunger strike, although nominally about his university’s divestment, gave him a sense that “another world is possible, because you’re refraining from material needs. Everyone tells you you need these material things. But then stepping away from them gives you this permission to imagine other possibilities for existing in the world. It gives you permission to imagine a better world, because it’s taking you a step back from this world of … raw materiality.”I sensed that he was getting what one should get from one’s time at university: an education. Maybe it was the ketosis talking. (Several days of not eating can leave one giddy, even energetic.) I came away persuaded less by his cause than by his dedication and the worthiness of nonviolence as a tactic of first resort. I hope there will be more who practice it—in Princeton, Gaza, and Israel.theatlantic.com
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The Art of Survival Photographs by Heather Sten for The Atlantic The first time I met Suleika Jaouad, I fell in love with her a little. This, I would soon learn, is a fairly common reaction to Suleika: Everyone who meets her falls in love with her a little. It was 2015, and Suleika was just 26 years old—buoyant, finally off maintenance chemo, and radiant on account of it, her thick brown hair arranged in a boop-a-doop pixie cut. We were attending the same conference, and her boyfriend, a young New Orleans musician named Jon Batiste, was there too. The couple had an irresistible backstory: They first met at band camp as teenagers (she in Birkenstocks, he with a mouthful of train-track orthodonture), and then reconnected romantically as adults. They made for a captivating pair, though the weather systems surrounding them couldn’t have been more different: She was enveloping and collected people; he was shy and abstracted, as if involved in a long, vigorous conversation with himself.At some point, I was told that Jon was going to be the new bandleader on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. I remember thinking, Cool, but not much more, having no idea what kind of genius he was. Yet one knew from just looking at them that Jon and Suleika were destined for an unusual life. They were sophisticated and great-looking, ambitious and disciplined, adoring and mutually invested in each other’s success. Suleika had written a column for The New York Times called “Life, Interrupted” about the brutal challenges of living with acute myeloid leukemia, had beaten the disease, and was now doing advocacy work and writing a memoir. Jon would soon be appearing nightly on our television sets and continuing to make music of his own.They are married now. He’s the more famous of the two, with an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and five Grammys; he’s also the focus of the documentary American Symphony, which earned him a 2024 Oscar nomination for Best Original Song. (Additionally, Jon is The Atlantic’s first music director.)But Suleika has her own passionate following. I recently told a friend that I was writing about her, and she started burbling with envy, saying how much she loved The Isolation Journals, Suleika’s Substack newsletter; how much she loved her memoir, Between Two Kingdoms; how certain she was that the two of them would be fast friends if only they could meet in real life. I didn’t have the heart to say: Well, yes, I’m sure that’s true, you guys probably would be friends, but I’m also fairly certain that her hundreds of thousands of readers and quarter-million-plus Instagram followers feel the exact same way.[Suleika Jaouad: I survived cancer, and then I needed to remember how to live]That’s the thing about Suleika: She’s like O-negative blood, compatible with any type. The awful irony is that almost no one’s lifeblood is compatible with Suleika’s, at least not in the most meaningful sense. Because Suleika had not, in fact, left her cancer behind her. In 2021, she spun out of remission, requiring a second bone-marrow transplant. But her only compatible donor was her brother, Adam, and it was his bone marrow that her cancer cells had managed to outfox in the first place. That means she’ll very likely need a third transplant in the years ahead, ideally from someone else. But there is no one else. Yet.When Suleika was first diagnosed, in 2011, her doctors put her odds of survival at 35 percent. I asked her in October what her odds are now. “Less than that,” she said slowly, though she added that her prognosis could change if the science does, or if a new suitable donor materializes.Suleika likes to say that “survival is a creative act,” which has a slightly peculiar ring to it, at once too tidy and too obscure. But what she means, really, is: Living with the implicit or explicit threat of cancer for your entire adulthood forces you to strain the limits of your imagination to find life’s fulfillments. She has surrounded herself with loyal, loving friends. She has made her environments warm and stylish. (Her Brooklyn brownstone was recently featured in Architectural Digest.) But most important, she has made a daily practice of converting pain into art. (She’s fond of quoting the poet Louise Glück: “Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance.”) Between Two Kingdoms spent 22 weeks as a New York Times best seller. This summer, she will have her first art exhibition, inspired by the watercolors she did in the hospital during her second transplant. She has a contract for two more books, one a compendium of writing prompts and meditations on journaling, the other a collection of her paintings and essays.The self-help aisles are heaving with advice about how to be happy. But it’s one thing to read such guidance; it’s another to actually live it. Yet at 35, Suleika is sharing with her readers how she’s trying to do the hardest thing, even if it’s the most basic thing: wrench meaning from our short time here.A brief confession before we go any further. I had a meta-motive for wanting to sit down with Suleika: When our interviews began, I was on month 16 of long COVID. There’d be days when I was too dizzy to sit, let alone stand, and my head would judder and vibrate like a lawn mower if I started to walk. Suleika was the one person I knew I could interview while lying down.I was all too aware that there was an existential gap in our suffering, but I still wondered if, from observing her, I’d learn something about how to cope, just as thousands of other physically and spiritually broken people had. She’d figured out how to stop resisting her illness, spending many productive hours from bed, hadn’t she? Whereas I was still in an iron mode of resistance, braying at the gods. During an extended hospital stay for her second bone-marrow transplant, in February 2022, Suleika took up painting. (Kate Sterlin) It’s easy to miss Jon and Suleika’s home in the Delaware River Valley. It is also easy, once you find it, to mistakenly believe that it is inhabited by hobbits. They live in a compact, cheery farmhouse, the walkway lined with solar-powered lanterns, the grounds checkered with wild shrubs and pyramids of gourds. This is where the couple retreated during the pandemic, and it is where I went the first night I had dinner with Jon and Suleika, along with four of their friends. The atmosphere at the table was relaxed and festive, and everyone was almost unnaturally attractive, like castoffs from a rom-com that never went into production. After dinner, Jon took a seat at the piano in the living room, and one of his friends, the saxophonist and mathematician Marcus Miller, joined him. Their improvising was exactly as great as you’d imagine. Crazier still? Everyone acted like it was no big deal. To me, it was a penthouse scene in a Noël Coward play; to them, it was a Monday.The next morning, I opened my phone to reexperience my favorite moment of the evening. We are all still eating dinner. Jon has called up a song on his phone from the gospel artist JJ Hairston’s Not Holding Back, one of two featuring Pastor David Wilford. Jon is not just luxuriating in it; he’s doing that thing, that Aeolian-harp thing, where he lets the music ripple through him, practically becoming it. He’s involved in some dialogue with Marcus about it too, one that’s primarily gestural, marveling at all the choices Hairston and Wilford made, chuckling at them, nodding, pointing, and exuberantly mugging: Jon fans himself as if he’s an overheated lady at church; he mock-plays along on an imaginary piano; he stomps his foot; he jumps and hops; he opens his eyes wide and punctuates every few bars with “Ohhhhh!”“We gotta start it back from the beginning!” Jon cries, holding his hand up. And he replays the song.“OHHHH!” Jon whoops. You’re gonna live … You’re gonna live … You’re gonna live … You’re gonna live … You’re gonna live … to see it happen. (Jon fans himself.) You’re gonna live … to seeeeeeeeee it happen. I said live live live live live! (Jubilant piano riff here, which Jon pantomimes with a flourish.)Live live live live live!Jon is now singing to everyone at the table, pointing at us, serenading us with: “You’re gonna live … to seeeeeeeeee it happen.”“I don’t know what you’re going through,” Pastor Wilford sings.“But whatever it is—” Marcus’s fiancée says, spontaneously.“—I’m gonna live,” Suleika replies.Only then did I notice the lyrics.I’d heard them at the time, but they hadn’t really registered.She’s going to live: a prediction, a command, a dearly held wish. Suleika in her Brooklyn studio, with some recent works in progress (Heather Sten for The Atlantic) A chilly Monday morning in Brooklyn this past October. I meet Suleika at her brownstone at 7 a.m. Her left eyelid has been drooping for months, and her doctors want an MRI of her brain to rule out anything ominous. As we head off to the brand-new Brooklyn arm of Memorial Sloan Kettering, she pulls on a giant overcoat with a Basquiat design. “My hospital jacket,” she explains. She especially loved wearing it after her hair and eyebrows had fallen out. “Instead of looking at me, people would look at my coat.”Our Uber pulls up in front of Sloan Kettering, and I sit in the waiting room. After about 45 minutes, Suleika emerges. I ask how it went. The usual clanging and banging, she says. “The story I told myself this morning is that I was in an avant-garde nightclub, and the band playing was called the Woodpecker Collective.”Suleika’s cancer started, as she wrote in Between Two Kingdoms, with an itch. It was a tenacious itch, one that originated on the tops of her feet and gradually coiled up her legs. Then came the naps. Naps begetting naps begetting more naps. But this was 2010, Suleika’s senior year at Princeton, and everyone was tired their senior year, right? She powered her way through with energy drinks, Adderall, and the occasional line of coke.That fall, Suleika got a tiny furnished apartment in Paris, went to work as a paralegal, and was soon joined by her then-boyfriend. For a few months, life was grand. But she was still tired, so tired, and she kept getting infections that drove her to the local health clinic. On the day she finally dragged herself to the American Hospital of Paris, she fainted on the sidewalk. The doctors tested her for everything “from HIV to lupus to cat scratch fever,” she wrote. But never leukemia.Suleika stayed in the American Hospital of Paris for a week, buoyed by fresh croissants and steroids. But shortly after being discharged, she was back, her mouth covered in sores, her complexion “blue-gray, like dead meat.” The doctor told her that if her red-blood-cell count got any lower, she wouldn’t be allowed to board an airplane. She flew home. Two weeks later, she received her diagnosis.In 2021, when she feared she had relapsed, Suleika’s medical team didn’t recommend doing a bone-marrow biopsy, even though her blood counts had been dropping for two straight years and she’d been feeling depleted. There were plausible explanations, of course: She’d had Lyme disease and a host of infections; she was, as always, working without cease. But ultimately, Suleika had to demand a biopsy, and she likely wouldn’t have gone through with it if her friend, the writer Elizabeth Gilbert, hadn’t cleared her schedule to accompany her.“I get there, and they’re like, ‘We don’t have to do this. We’re just doing this to ease your anxiety,’ ” Suleika tells me. “And I felt so embarrassed, like I was being melodramatic.” Women: so high-strung, so fluttery.Suleika could go on about the tar pit of biases that lurks beneath her medical encounters. At 22, for instance, she wasn’t told by a single doctor that her treatments would likely leave her infertile; she found out on the internet (and quickly harvested her eggs). Nor did she know that her leukemia protocols would shunt her into menopause; her fellow female patients had to tell her. And certainly no one told her that she had multiple options for mitigating her pain; she had to learn about that from her younger friends in the pediatrics ward.“Why can’t we apply the same principles that we do in pediatrics to adult care?” she asks me. “Small things, like putting on numbing gel for accessing ports.” Or big things, like biopsies. They’re positively medieval procedures, with a long, wide needle boring deep into the core of your pelvis. Kids get them under sedation. Adults typically receive only a local anesthetic. During her 2021 biopsy, it took the doctor four tries to get what she needed. Suleika bit down so hard on her hand that it bled.“It was the grisliest thing I’ve ever seen,” Gilbert told me. “It was like a paper punch going through bone.”Now, for her biopsies, Suleika asks to be knocked out.It is tempting to look at Suleika’s illness as an origin story, the thing that forced her to live an exceptional life. But another way to think about it is that Suleika is an exceptional person to whom illness happened. Speak with her friends, and you get the sense that she has always lived her life like the rest of us, but in a much larger font.When Suleika falls in love, she falls ferociously in love; with female friends, she’s the queen of the grown-up sleepover and intimate discussion. Her intensity revealed itself early. In fourth grade, she started the double bass, and by the time she was 14, she was practicing five hours a day. In 11th grade, she was rising at 4 a.m. each Saturday to commute to Juilliard from her home in upstate New York. At Princeton, she also played in the orchestra, but almost no one knew about it, because her life already looked so full. Lizzie Presser, her closest friend, remembers being at a costume party when Suleika abruptly turned to her and said, “Shit, I’m late.”Late?She had to be onstage with the Princeton University Orchestra in a matter of minutes.“She never talked about playing,” Presser told me. But they left the party, and Presser went to the balcony of the main campus auditorium. “The curtain comes up, and there’s Suleika in the center, in a white flapper dress that barely covered her thighs, and she’s in the role of principal bass—flanked by men in tuxes! Surrounded by them like a flock of birds.”After Suleika was finally diagnosed with cancer, roughly a year after graduation, she got very, very sick, and to make her better, her doctors had to make her sicker, poisoning her with what they hoped would be enough chemotherapy to drive her leukemic blasts below 5 percent, a requirement for receiving a bone-marrow transplant. The process took nearly a year.For a few months, she stared bleakly at the television, watching episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. She tried reading cancer memoirs, but most of them disgusted her, with their tyrannical emphasis on grit and story arcs ending in triumph. “At that point, I was going into bone-marrow failure,” she says. “I frankly didn’t think I was going to make it to transplant. So reading those stories sort of felt like a middle finger.”Yet she always kept a journal. Eventually, that journal became a blog, and one of her blog entries became a story in HuffPost and earned her a call from an editor at The New York Times. Sensing that her time was now limited, Suleika found herself asking, at 23, if she could have her own weekly column about what it was like to be a young person with cancer—oh, and could it have an accompanying video component too?The series would win her an Emmy.Suleika’s column became a phenomenon, speaking to a far greater range of people than she ever imagined. She heard from a senator’s wife who was struggling with fertility issues, a high-school teacher in California who’d lost a son, a prisoner in Texas who was trapped on death row. Everyone seemed to have a shame-and-pain part of themselves, or an unreconciled sadness, a private perdition.In April 2012, she underwent a bone-marrow transplant, and a few months later, her doctors told her it seemed to be working, but cautioned that it would be many months more before they knew for certain. She spent the next two years mainlining a toxic slurry of maintenance chemo, which left her feeling wretched, exhausted, seasick. When the treatments were finished, she realized that she no longer had any idea how to live among the well. So she cooked up an ambitious project for herself, deciding that she and her dog would make a 15,000-mile, 33-state loop around America, with the aim of visiting many of the correspondents who’d moved or inspired her.It should be noted at this point that Suleika did not yet have a driver’s license.That trip became the second half of her memoir, which became one of the best modern chronicles of cancer and its aftermath, a broad-spectrum rendering of illness’s many physical and psychological hues. (Especially the fury. God, how I loved the parts about the fury.) In a review on Instagram, the author Ann Patchett went so far as to say that she might not have had to write Truth & Beauty, her stunning book about her friend Lucy Grealy, had Suleika’s book already existed. Jon and Suleika at an artists’ residency in 2018. They first met as teenagers at band camp, then reconnected years later. (Lise-Anne Marsal / Trunk Archive) In the years since, Suleika has continued to write, both essays and reportage. (An article she did for The New York Times Magazine about prison hospice was especially good.) She made dogged but unsuccessful efforts to get her Texas prison correspondent off death row. And she has built a variety of communities, both virtual and embodied.She originally purchased her home in the Delaware River Valley, for example, to be among an enclave of artists and writers who had already settled there, but she has also since befriended the locals, including her neighbor Jody, a building-trades guy with four missing fingers (childhood accident) and a business card that says I’m 60. I know shit. Call me. In Brooklyn, Suleika lives within a couple blocks of Lizzie Presser, but she also socializes with Presser’s mother, sometimes independently, and she’s become so close to the couple next door that she now plans to build a walkway between her back terrace and theirs.And Suleika has magicked an entire community into existence with The Isolation Journals, a virtual salon designed to help readers access their own creativity when the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have punctured their lives. Hatched during the third week of the pandemic (Suleika reckoned she knew a thing or two about the unnatural rationing of human contact), the newsletter offers writing prompts, video discussions with artists about the creative process, and reflections on how to focus on the good while acknowledging the terrible.Suleika discovered that she’d tapped into a deep human need. Her Substack now has more than 160,000 subscribers. When she informed them in December 2021 that her cancer had returned, she received hundreds of care packages and old-fashioned letters in the first week alone.During her relapse, Suleika startled everyone with yet another reinvention, declaring, after completing her first watercolor, that she was going to be a painter. “It seemed,” her friend Carmen Radley told me, “like it came out of nowhere.”But it both did and didn’t. Suleika tends to live in generative mode; that’s her reflex. Part of the reason she took up painting was because she was on such a potent drip of psychoactive medication to subdue her pain that it blurred her vision too much to write. (A combination of ketamine and fentanyl. At one point, she hallucinated a menacing French child named George.) Her paintings from Sloan Kettering have a visceral, fantastical quality, usually featuring some colorful mix of animals and her ravaged body threaded with tubes. She likes how wild and imprecise watercolor is, how improvisational, so different from the careful calibration of writing. It’s an adventure in “happy accidents.”In the late fall, during an event at Princeton, she was asked by an audience member what advice she’d give to someone who was hesitant to mine their emotional reserves to create something.“Give yourself permission to be a bad artist,” she said.I’m back at Suleika’s house in the Delaware River Valley. She greets me at the door and shows me into the kitchen, where on the counter I see a rainbow box of pills. Inside is a monster’s miscellany of antivirals and antiemetics, antibiotics and immunosuppressants—and she’s not even doing chemotherapy, in defiance of her doctors’ wishes. This is the minimum that a transplant patient like Suleika requires.Suleika and I start chatting on her couch in the living room. At some point, Jon, who’s been fussing in his music studio, pads into the room carrying three books, one so corpulent, it looks like it might bust its own spine. It’s David J. Garrow’s 1,472-page volume about Barack Obama.“What do you think?” he asks me.I tell him I haven’t read it and therefore cannot offer an opinion.He gives a sly smile. “Oh yes, you can.”What to make of Jon? At first, he terrifies me. He plays 12 instruments, the bulk of which he taught himself. He’s a man of unflagging Christian faith, pure and indivisible: You sense that he’s living for a higher and more serious purpose, faithfully reading scripture, never indulging in caffeine or drugs or alcohol. But most striking is his magpie creativity, his hungry and wayfaring brain. For a while, I worried I was boring him.Beyond that, Jon is often hard to read, and he’s a person who tests a writer’s descriptive powers. What you really long for when you’re near him is the accompaniment of sound effects, audiotape, videotape; without them, it’s almost impossible to give the full measure of the man. He talks to you slightly sideways, his body angled away from you at 45 degrees. When he’s energized, he doesn’t jump so much as boing. He’s a mesmerizing combination of gnomic insights and probing questions, of silences and sudden joyous yowls (“Yeaaaaaaaahhhhhh,” “Woooooooo,” etc.).[Read: Jon Batiste on the powerful tune that drives “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”]Suleika mentions that Jon spent forever lugging around a box set of Stephen Sondheim lyrics. I ask if he knew Sondheim. Turns out that he not only knew him, but also corresponded with him until he died—and did a special arrangement of two pieces from Assassins for him for his birthday.“Is there a recording of it somewhere?” I ask.“Yeah.”“Where?”“On my phone!” Sure. Because we all keep private birthday gifts to Stephen Sondheim on our phone. “You want to hear it?”Not long after that, I become relaxed around Jon. The turning point arrives when Suleika briefly steps outside with their dogs. I confess that in the face of other people’s suffering, I sometimes become a stammering stumblebum. How does he always seem to know the right thing to say to Suleika?“It’s like music, to say the right thing,” he says. Then a long pause, even by Jon standards. “It requires”—another pause—“being attuned to the moment. And the person. And yourself all at once.” A third pause. “It’s really less about the right or wrong thing to say—or to play. Because people feel what you’re saying more than hear what you’re saying.”His phone rings. He goes outside to take the call.In that moment, it dawned on me: Jon and Suleika are both emotional seismographs, keenly aware of other people’s sensitivities and vulnerabilities. They’re just outfitted with different drums.“That’s a common misconception about Jon—that he’s in his own world, that he’s lost in the music in his mind,” Suleika says. “But Jon sees, notices, everything. Everything. He can sense when I’m anxious even when I don’t realize I’m anxious.”And honestly, I should have known this before, based on Matthew Heineman’s American Symphony. It’s a beautiful film, following a co-occurring high and low in the couple’s life in 2022, with Jon reaching the pinnacle of his career—nominated for 11 Grammy awards, hard at work on an original piece of music to be performed at Carnegie Hall—at just the same moment that Suleika is vividly relapsing. You see Jon tenderly shaving Suleika’s head; you see the two of them playing a version of Simon Says, with him mirroring her every movement as she makes her way down a hospital hallway, yoked to an IV pole.He takes the “in sickness and in health” part of his job extremely seriously. Jon proposed 24 hours after Suleika discovered that she’d relapsed.But when Suleika is well, she’s the one who makes Jon’s life possible. Until he began dating Suleika, Jon lived like a nomad, touring with his band around Europe and the U.S., usually in a rented van, and staying in run-down hotels. His apartment was a dragon’s nest of, in Jon’s words, “papers, music, manuscripts, gifts, awards, clothes, pawn-shop instruments, laptops.” The first time Suleika spent the night, a spider bit her on the eye.Whereas Suleika has an abiding urge to nest, having lived on three continents with her Swiss mother and Tunisian father by the time she was 12 years old. (And she always lived modestly—her mother came from a tiny village and her father’s parents could not read or write.) Her focus on home and friendship has provided Jon a bulwark against the devouring demands of fame. If it weren’t for Suleika, it’s also possible that he’d work until he expired. He has the nocturnal rhythms of a bat.Jon wanders back inside again. The call has clearly keyed him up. He beelines for the couch and climbs on top of Suleika, planting himself face down in her lap. “Mmmmmmmm,” he moans. “I’m an overstimulated introvert.”“I think one of my roles in Jon’s life is to soothe his nervous system.”If you hadn’t met Suleika, I ask, what would your life look like?“I don’t know,” he says. He thinks. “I’d be going too fast for the machine.”So she’s a brake pedal?“More elegant than that. A brake pedal ? No.”Sorry, I say. I can’t do machine metaphors.“She’s the software that calibrates the machine,” he explains, his face still buried in her lap.Whenever Suleika is at her lowest, she always manages, somehow, to make her most creative leaps. During her last transplant, even when she was at her most despairing, even when she was as close to death as she thinks she’s ever come—her throat too scorched to speak, her body simmering with three different infections—she summoned the strength to prop herself up and paint at 2 a.m., when she was seized by an image of a marionette being borne away by birds. She kept paper and watercolors right next to her bed.But me? Even with a far more benign illness, I do no such thing. I have not taken up knitting, or making collages, or writing fiction or doing macramé or conjuring an online haven for long-haulers. Instead, I’m just sad and stuck. How, I ask her one day, has she managed to make such a productive life for herself, in spite of all the shit? It requires so much energy.“It takes a lot more energy to do battle with demons,” she points out. Meaning one’s own depression.Yes, I say, but that’s a rational answer. Demons aren’t rational. Some of us feel like we’re made of those demons. I would currently say I am 86 percent demons.“I think I had to get to a place where my sense of despair—and boredom, honestly—was so great, I had to do something,” she says. “That sent me on this research project about all the different bedridden artists and writers and musicians throughout history who’d figured out creative work-arounds.” Like Frida Kahlo. “Her mom gifted her a sort of lap easel and attached a mirror to the canopy of her bed.” Or Henri Matisse, she adds, who, when he was old and infirm, affixed a bit of charcoal to the end of a long stick and drew studies for the Chapel of the Rosary on the walls of his apartment, all while lying in bed.But Suleika recognizes she’s had many years of practice when it comes to living horizontally. “I can also understand,” she tells me, “as I’m saying all this, if your response is a bit like, Fuck you. Nothing about this feels good or will ever feel good or can ever be useful. I’ve been in that place too.”Like binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy, for instance. Which is about where I’m at, I tell her.“I sometimes worry that I’ve become the kind of person who makes people who are not ‘suffering well’ feel like shit,” she confesses.Suleika makes her living in the first person, actively writing about her life and pressing “Send” each week. But at some point, I begin to wonder whether there’s another Suleika, a more private Suleika, tucked inside the public one. Her readers now expect her to be a certain kind of inspirational person. Does she even have the freedom to maneuver through the world without being that woman?It took time for me to realize that Suleika is sometimes selective about what she shares.Here is one part that we do not always see, for instance: how much she suffers. Those high-gigawatt drugs she takes can have brutal side effects, and she’s routinely subjected to torturous procedures.“Suleika is who she is on the page,” Elizabeth Gilbert said. “But that identity is flanked by two characteristics that I’m not sure anyone understands the extent of.” One is that she’s got a punk, rebellious streak. But the other “is how fucking tough she is,” Gilbert said. “How fucking stoic. She’s a Marine.” After that excruciating biopsy, she and Suleika went out to dinner. “If that had been me, you wouldn’t have seen me for a week.”Some discomfort is so routine for Suleika that she never bothers to discuss it. In January, shortly after she appeared on the Today show with Jon to promote American Symphony, I told her she did great.“I projectile-vomited in broad daylight in the streets of New York City afterwards,” she replies, with startling matter-of-factness. “Right before my next thing on Park Avenue.”She … what? I try to imagine Suleika, made up for television and in a blazer of elegant blue velvet, vomiting on the Upper East Side.“I have vomited in public more times than I can count,” she says. “I’m always trying to find a private spot between two parked cars or behind a tree. Often I don’t get there.”So: Chronic nausea barely rates a mention in her work. Also underdiscussed: Suleika is always and forever tired. But how many times can you write that you are always and forever tired? Yet she is, with only a few good hours a day, usually. Nor does Suleika dwell on the fact that she’s a regular stewpot of respiratory infections. She’s been sick all winter with one thing or another.“Every dinner since you’ve been to my house,” she says, “I’ve left either halfway through or shortly after while everyone’s hanging out and having fun. I go straight to bed and I don’t say a word. I call it my ‘Tunisian exit.’ ”Her relentless fatigue and nausea and infections have an ancillary consequence: anxiety about making plans. “Like, will I be well enough?” she explains. “Should I just cancel now so that I don’t mess up anybody else’s schedule? Or will I feel well that day and regret that I canceled? I have that conversation with myself about every single preplanned social activity or work commitment.”On December 24, Suleika’s Isolation Journals newsletter talked about her first experience hosting Christmas, for which her mother, father, and brother flew in from Tunis. She described the “obnoxiously” large tree she purchased, the two-hour meeting her family had about their dinner feast, the old-school paper snowflakes her mom pasted to the windows.What she didn’t write about was how she felt, which was terrible, or how many holiday plans with her family came undone. “Since pretty much mid-December, I’ve barely been able to function,” she tells me. “I spent all of Christmas in bed. We were going to go ice-skating. We were going to go Christmas shopping in the city. We were going to do all the things, and I didn’t do a single one.”Suleika often writes about trying “to hold the beauty and cruelty of life in the same palm.” But one wonders if writing so publicly and so frequently—if being an inspiration to so many—makes her feel some unconscious obligation to focus more on the former. When Between Two Kingdoms came out in February 2021, Suleika already suspected something was amiss. Her blood counts were dropping, she was always tired, and she had blistering migraines. But she was so elated that her memoir was finally out there in the world that the joy energized her. On her publicity tour, she told interviewers that yes, she was cured.“I would hear all the time from people with similar illnesses,” Suleika says. “People who’d write to me and say, ‘You give me hope that this can be my life too, 10 years out.’ ” When her doctors finally confirmed she’d relapsed, in the fall of 2021, it spooked her so much that she didn’t share the news in The Isolation Journals for three weeks. “I felt awful,” she says. “The very particular weirdness of having a public platform related not just to illness but to survival …” She trails off.“Because Suleika has the exuberance that she has, the force of will that she has, I sometimes forget that she has gone through what she’s gone through,” her friend Carmen Radley said. “Superhuman people aren’t afraid of getting sick again, are they? But I think she was terrified of it.”That’s really the thing her readers don’t always see: the fear.And it’s not because Suleika is dishonest. It’s because she is, as Gilbert says, so fucking stoic. It’s because her quotidian nausea is relative to the pain of, let’s say, vomiting up the entire lining of her esophagus, which she has done more than once. It’s because she doesn’t want to cause a fuss over every upset when there may come a day when she needs the cavalry to come charging in at full gallop. It’s because she doesn’t want her relationship with Jon to be defined as that of a patient and caregiver. “I don’t want people to view me first and foremost as a sick person,” she says.But fear is what she is now experiencing, during our phone conversation in January: the prospect of a second relapse and a third transplant. Why is she getting so many respiratory infections? Why is she always so tired? Why, when she went back on Adderall recently (common for post-transplant patients, to boost their energy), did it do absolutely nothing? “I’m like, Did I get some dud pills? ”She has not written about this anxiety. “To say it out loud,” she says, “is to make it real.”She is bracing herself for another biopsy next week. If the cancer has returned, her brother remains her only donor option. The bone-marrow registry tilts very heavily toward white people, because the bulk of the donors are white—a problem so personally relevant and galling to Suleika that she’s become involved with an organization called NMDP, formerly called Be the Match, to encourage more people to donate.Ever since her second transplant, in 2022, Suleika has had night terrors. Once, while fast asleep, she hit Jon with a closed fist. “And then I did it again the next night,” she says. “I was so scared of doing it again, I wanted to sleep in the guest room, and Jon said, ‘No, we have to sleep in the same bed.’ ” For six weeks, she saw a sleep therapist.Suleika both writes and talks, with surprising clarity, about the philosophical problem of living with uncertainty. But there’s a reason that liminal places are often depicted as more hellish than hell. The betwixt and between is where the tortured ghost of Hamlet’s father rattles around, boiling with rage and sorrow. It’s where Hamlet himself dwells—trapped between childhood and adulthood, uncertain whether he wants to live or die.It’s the time between biopsy and results. Which in some larger sense is every day if you’re Suleika—not knowing, with the recurring specter of acute myeloid leukemia, if you have months left on this planet or 50 years.“I do feel like I’m living my own double life sometimes,” Suleika says, “in terms of how I’m feeling and what I’m sharing and showing—not just to the world, but even to the people closest to me. And to myself.”Jon is playing a concert at Carnegie Hall in the run-up to his 2022 appearance at the Grammys. He’s seated at the piano.“I want to dedicate this last one to Suleika,” he tells the audience.Then there’s silence. And more silence. And more and more silence. Jon is staring intently at the keys. This is perhaps the most spellbinding moment in American Symphony. The camera becomes so uncomfortable with Jon’s stillness that it pans slowly down to Jon’s fingers, still lingering on those keys, and then slowly back up to his face.The live audience, even the viewing audience, doesn’t know it, but Suleika’s hospital bracelet is in his pocket. World Music Radio, Jon’s 2023 record, rests on the piano in Suleika and Jon’s Brooklyn home. (Heather Sten for The Atlantic) He finally begins to play. Tunefully and deliberately at first, but soon frenetically and repetitively, and then dissonantly and angrily, a blur of hydraulics, until out of this chaos emerges something utterly freaking majestic.I later ask Jon what was running through his head in that long moment of quiet.“Mmmmmmm,” he says. “Don’t force life.”“I understood you to be in prayer,” Suleika says.“That’s what it is,” he says, looking appreciatively at her. “Psalm 46: ‘Be still and know I am God.’ The most natural state is in a state of prayer. Stillness. Knowing. Connected to the love. And then you can send it to the person.”He turns back to me. “That whole concert—the concept was to sit at the piano for two hours straight with no music and no preparation,” he says. “It was called ‘Streams,’ like stream of consciousness. The divine stream, where all things creative come from. You can always dip into it if you have access to that.”Suleika’s. Latest. Biopsy. Is. Negative! When we speak on the phone again in late January, I can hear her relief.But I still hear anxiety, even fear. As if she’d received dreadful news. In fact, she had.Just before her biopsy, two of her young friends with acute myeloid leukemia had relapsed. One is in her mid-30s and has two young children. The other had been doing great, jetting off to weddings and resuming her day job. Then, one week after receiving perfect labs, she went into cardiac arrest. Her doctors told her she was likely out of options.The day before her biopsy, Suleika and her father went to visit this friend in the hospital. “It was just heartbreaking,” she says, “and, selfishly, terrifying.” The experience was like staring at a green-gray hologram of the potential future. When she saw her own nurse, she asked for one, just one, reassuring anecdote. “And she was like, ‘Well, we have one guy who just had a second bone-marrow transplant, and he’s doing great.’ And I was like, ‘That’s not helpful to me. I want stories of people who are 20 years out and thriving.’ ”Suleika’s case is practically without analogy. Her team likes to call her “a medical unicorn”: Almost no one relapses as far into remission as Suleika did.“When you have a recurrence, the tenor shifts,” Suleika says. “People are no longer saying, ‘You’re going to beat this; everything’s going to be okay.’ ”Seeing her friend reminded Suleika, for the umpteenth time, that the membrane between health and illness is thin. And Suleika had just enough reason to remain nervous about her present state. Her “chimerism”—the percentage of her brother’s donor cells versus her own—had recently slipped down to 99 percent. The doctors had assured her that small fluctuations were normal. But she wasn’t going to exhale, clearly, until she learned she wasn’t continuing her descent. “I’ve gone from being in a mode of recovering from this most recent transplant and trying to get my life together,” she says, “to shifting into a place of being afraid of relapse.”I wonder whether forgoing maintenance chemo this time around has also compounded her anxiety. After her second transplant, Suleika’s doctors urged her to continue it in perpetuity. She lasted less than a year. There was no life in her life, just intolerable nausea and listlessness. On one of the rare evenings that she rallied to leave her home—a state dinner at the White House in December 2022; Jon was performing—she felt queasy throughout, terrified that at any moment she’d throw up in front of the Bidens. She decided to stop chemo.But Suleika says she has no regrets about having stopped, given that she was never especially convinced that chemo would even extend her life. Rather, what frightens her is that remission is a fragile state—something she learned firsthand in 2021. “I have a ticking clock in the back of my head,” she says. “Now I’m thinking I’ll be lucky if I get to five years before relapse.”So here we are, back where we started: How does one live with an everyday, every-hour awareness of how much healthy time might remain—perhaps all the time that might remain—as a very specific math equation? How does this translate into creative habits, a modus vivendi, a philosophy of life?[Read: What to read when you need to start over]“For me,” Suleika says, “it means building a world in my home right now. It means gathering the people I love most and spending as much time as I can with them. It means bringing home foster dogs every month, practically, even though nothing about that makes sense for our lives right now.” During her spells of insomnia, when the cancer goblins are rapping at her consciousness, Suleika scours Petfinder.com for underloved runts. “It means drilling into projects I’m most excited about,” she continues, “but it also means creating unstructured time for reading and exploring and painting.”She’s doing, as she likes to say, “all the things.” Or as Anthony Burgess wrote in Little Wilson and Big God: “Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.”A few months earlier, while we were lying on the couch in her Brooklyn brownstone, I had screwed up the courage to ask Suleika how often she thinks about her own mortality.“I think about it,” she told me. “I’m not afraid of death. I’ve now witnessed enough people die and been with them in those moments.”How about Jon?“Jon is deeply afraid of death.”His or yours?“Everyone’s. But very afraid of his own death.”Has he talked with you about how he’d do—or what he’d do—if you weren’t there?“He won’t talk about that with me.”Do you want him to?“No. Because I don’t think he can. It’s too painful for him.”He is carrying a lot. And he’s more vulnerable, more sensitive, than his iridescent shell would suggest.“I know Jon is not my child,” she said. “But I also worry about—I was going to say orphaning him, but that’s a little too Freudian.”Actually, I said, I think it’s pretty common for spouses to fear abandoning each other.“I think I feel that way in particular about Jon because …” She spoke carefully, thoughtfully. “I know him so deeply and I know how unknown he is to most.”Yet it is also Jon, powered by his faith and his bottomless drive, who helps keep Suleika moving toward that future he’s determined to have.“Daydreaming can feel really dangerous when you don’t know if you’re going to exist in the future,” she told me. “It becomes an act of willful defiance. So I force myself to have a five-year plan.”And part of that plan, she now informs me, isn’t just completing two books, but a very different sort of birth.She and Jon would like to take concrete steps toward having a child in the near future.In spite of the uncertainty.In spite of what Suleika calls her “survival math.”“Jon is really helpful to me here,” she says. “It’s the same logic he applied to getting married the night before the bone-marrow transplant, which is: We had a plan, and we are not going to let this get in the way of our plan. This is how Jon operates in his life in general. He dreams as big as he can dream and lets nothing hold him back until he’s done absolutely everything in his power.”Suleika has written about how she doesn’t want to have a baby only to abandon the child. She still has those concerns.“But I’ve talked about it with the Miles family.” She’s referring to dear friends with three kids of their own. “I’ve talked about it with Lizzie G. and Lizzie P.” Meaning Gilbert, Presser. “And they were like, If that were to happen, your kid will be surrounded by so much love.” From Jon above all, but also from them, from many others. “What Jon has ultimately said to me,” she says, “is that the most important thing is for a child to know how deeply loved they are. And whatever future child we have—whether it’s biologically our own or adopted or we become foster parents or just really doting aunties and uncles to the other people’s kids—there are many ways to do this.”Two days after we speak, I get a text from Suleika: “Some good news just rolled in!!! Back to 100, baby.” Her chimerism is no longer at 99 percent. With this news, her mood improves; the familiar buoyancy returns.Yet even before she knew this, Suleika was forging ahead, refusing to let her past define her future. How many of us can do that? The past is the ragged territory from which we take our cues, make our most basic assumptions. But planning for a child: That is a rejection of a life interrupted. That’s an insistence on continuity.Continuity is the implicit subject in one of her most striking paintings. It’s a colorful oceanscape of jellyfish, a life form that fascinates Suleika, particularly the Turritopsis dohrnii, considered in some sense to be immortal. Whenever it’s injured, it reverts back into a polyp, eventually releasing tiny jellyfish genetically identical to its previous adult self. It’s a creature that reincarnates, continues on, in response to—and in spite of—mortal threat.Children and art: the two most meaningful things, Stephen Sondheim famously wrote, we mortals can leave behind. Suleika’s life’s emphasis, always, has been on the act of creation—and communicating to others how essential it is to who we are. Children and art, children or art, the courage to create: Those will be her legacy, no matter what.This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Art of Survival.”theatlantic.com
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The Writer Who Leaves Behind a Pounding Heart Because of my reverence for Alice Munro’s work, I was often asked if I’d ever met her. I felt that I had totally met her in her books and said as much. I never desired to meet her in person, for what I loved would not necessarily be there. The one time I was scheduled actually to meet her—at a reading and ceremony in her honor—she canceled. Stupidly, I was relieved. Because what could one possibly say to this human, Alice Munro, who was also a genius but would probably turn out to resemble a nice, ordinary, once-beautiful-now-forever-middle-aged woman with an Ontario accent (though perhaps also a sparkle in her eyes)? Reality was too full of annoying disguises—one of her many themes. Would she appear to lack something?Throughout her stories, there is admiration for skills of every sort—piloting an airplane, horseback riding, plucking turkeys—but she did not drive a car. This boggled my mind! Yet it also caused me to think that maybe marriages could be held together this way. The husband would have to drop you off and pick you up so he always knew where you were, even if you didn’t always know where he was (or deeply care). Perhaps this was an essentially literary—Munrovian—condition. Also, in the plus column, I could see in her work that she did not admire rich people but also did not sentimentalize the poor, though her sympathies and interests were more deeply located there. The way a hired girl in “Hired Girl” sweeps the floor and then hides the dirt behind the broom propped in the corner was exactly how I swept when young. A metaphor for secrets, but also an actual (poor) way of sweeping. I was always thinking about her in one way or another, so actually meeting her seemed beside the point. I loved her forensic plots and her gothic gruesomeness. In one collection, she has two decapitations. What would be the point of actually meeting her?Her stories were radically structured—built like avant-garde sculpture. In this way, she completely revolutionized the short story, pulling it away from conventional form altogether. She understood that life was layered, that stretches of time did not neaten themselves out into a convenient linear shape but piled themselves up in layers that were sometimes translucent and contained revisions of thought and opinion, like a palimpsest. These layers seemed to have access to one another. This nonlinear way of course mimics the mind and memory and how life is bewilderingly lived and then recalled. She embraced Chekhov’s movement away from the judgmental finish and built on it, supplying similar narrative oxygen to the lives of North American girls and women. Because the story genre is end-oriented—one must stick the landing—she brought this power to her open endings as well, which were sometimes torn from the middle of the story and thrown down like a beating heart on an altar.One wonders whether she felt that all of her artistic devotion and productivity had been worth it. I hope so. I do not want to pity her; I want only to treasure her. Munro’s career seemed to involve an entire life handed over to art, so, from a distance, it is hard to know whether she felt she’d missed out on some other, easier, sweeter life. (Though, I suppose, for a writer there is no other kind of life.) She is one of those women writers who took a rebel’s stance toward motherhood and partially (not completely) left their children in order to get the literary work done and be free of conventional and gendered expectations. (Literary men, of course, leave their children all the time.) To turn one’s life inside out in order to make short stories for people you’ve never met is a kind of contortion and sacrifice one cannot stop to measure, or the gift may flee. Such hesitation, I suppose, would be like a magician stopping to feed and then cage the tiresome rabbit, who then will not go back into the hat.When someone of Munro’s stature passes away, the world feels a little empty for a while and may never completely get back to its ever-elusive purpose. Still, there remains her great, great work. Even if, like all literature, it wrestled un-victoriously with the meaning of the world, even if, like all interesting characters, hers were not always at their most admirable, her writing kept its eye on the dramas of power in human relations and communities. She explored the upset and consequences of love, hate, desire, devotion, despair, illness, social class, gender—and, most of all, time, its magical uses in art and its sly surprises in life. And so, at the culminating close, there is a still-pounding heart. May she reside in pages forever.theatlantic.com
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New Google Has a Lot in Common With Old Google The company is rebuilding its search engine with new generative-AI features.theatlantic.com
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The Battleground States That Will Shape the Election New polling shows Biden falling behind Trump in key swing states. What issues matter most to voters there?theatlantic.com